But wait…there’s more. By which I mean more about heiresses and aristocrats, per yesterday’s dispatch re: the scorned LA academic bride. I was in London and I happened to have an appointment to have dinner with said academic and bride-to-be the next week. In the meantime, as was my habit, I went to the pub every Friday to consume two pints (autism, you see—only drink on Friday, only drink two pints).
On that particular Friday, I stopped off in the tube station where there was a book exchange filled with paperbacks from the 1970s. This time I felt a force or will guide me to pick up a particular book. There was no voice, just a force that compelled me to pick up Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying—a 1970s bestseller that coined the phrase “zipless fuck”. I picked it up and took it to the pub, it was already late evening.
I had hardly read the book for three pages when a girl, a little highland terrier in her arms, surprised me. “What are you reading?” she asked in her absurdly upper-class accent—I mean, I happen to be so posh that people from public schools mock me for my posh elocution, but her accent was something else; and that was because she came from a world where your uncle owns the New Forest and you talk about “visiting our people”. She had read Fear of Flying too—and she did, I can assure you, know all about the “zipless fuck”.
We sat at her table and she showed me a few coin tricks learned from croupiers in casinos—and pretty soon I knew all about her family, her family being related to the Churchills through Winston’s grandmother. I knew she liked me when she sank her teeth into my hand and kept them clamped down until the blood ran. As my mother said later, “Don’t get involved with the aristocracy, they’ll grind you under foot.” Back we went to her friend’s flat—pausing occasionally for her to sink her teeth into me—where we ended up in bed. “If you guys are going to bone, close the door,” snapped her friend. I am so innocent, reader, I was only going to kiss her.
However, the will seized me—perhaps it envisaged my penis bitten off by a psycho aristo in mid fellatio—and I fled the apartment. She texted me all night, ready to jump into a cab at a moment’s notice—insatiable creature. We did bone in the end and it is mighty strange as you pump away to look down and see Winston’s eyes stare back at you; just like how sometimes you see your father-in-law’s face in your lover. I know why she liked me, when I was a little boy the school photographer said: “You look like Churchill.” Yes, true—the same melancholy and linguistic ability. Aristo incest.
So I went to dinner with my German friend and his Jewish academic gurl the next week—and would you apple and eve it but the girl’s PhD was all about the collateral Churchill line that my new gf belonged to. So she had the academic scoop on the family history that had been relayed to me only the week before. You see, this is what happens when you follow the will or the force that compels you to pick up the book. (Statistical probabilities blah blah). The girl was a handful—an ex-model who drank like Winston—she would flirt with other men non-stop. One time she let this slimy fellow in a pub schmooze her about how he was a lawyer who helped all the poor African refugees cross the Channel. “I save black babies, plz f*ck me” was essentially his line. I just stood up and left the pub; and, within a few minutes, she chased me down Saville Row because, you see, you can never let a woman dictate terms (She’s not going to f*ck you, bro).