Lean pale Flouzianian native and former featherweight
NP may be seen performing various duties as a puny blond slave at many of Glamporium’s myriad functions and fêtes. At the peal of noon, for instance,
NP will commence despining nopal for the midday salad which so many of our inmates and adepts enjoy as a refreshing, salubrious, loin-girding, and thigh-slimming breakfast! But lest you mistake our sex logur’s slim factotum for a plain penal peon, regard the impish élan with which he leaps to every task! Regard how nobly he blends into the cherrywood panelling and pretends not to spy when a customer bundles a bevy of lovely budding molls down the hall and into the capacious sunbed of one of our novel neon-lit Play Bunds! Regard how astutely he mops up the blenny-like puddles of our robuster clients’ virulent salvos or with what alacrity he annuls with deft palls of bleach the savage puke from the dove-white blouse of a bonny chum! Regard how he refuses to be duped when some of our more
particular clients beg, in Español to boot, to be unbound and allowed use of a bedpan! Regard with what loping patience he lingers at grooming the nape of his favorite playtoy,
Gasa Albiano! And regard, anon, towards gloaming at neap tide, how, dining alone at his “home” on Poon Lane, he leans his wan flaxen forelock against his dim cubby’s oval pane and envies the opalescent plumage of a virile loon on loan for the riggish summer from the amber heights of Mount Spitmarkx! For, alas, Glamporium’s professional ploy commands a nightly polyploid discharge of his sable-maned mate’s albino body, which, on our Playground of Taboo, in our ATD Den, in AGSAD or elsewhere, is splayed, laved, lubed, valsed, spanned, and volubly played with from belly to bullpen, from bland navel to pale bald mound of Venus, from soapy divil-bead to downy bunny bone by way of a bendy ogive-tipped double-luv pylon sloppily linking sapphic sepoy to puppyish paphian while he, too sapped, too spent, too bone-wearily blue from slavey moil and toil to pony up for any mercenary love’s half-pound of spry gristle, too unlovedly dunned to feel anything but venally snubbed, plods home to nap for a blond moment of respite only to unbed his dream to such unpaid-for bonds as compell him to pander to his invidious lust by nebulously pawing at a slovenly shelf of puny bald novels while he gums his evening meal of pone, spuds, and veal, and davens punchdrunk at the open window beyond which the full moon is shining in the valley and a satisfied loon is moaning in the cove, while he, once champion featherweight but now just plain old dyspneal
NP, repinedly sobs into an acrid pond of dawn soaking and chilling his aching swollen feet on which he must now trudge back to Glamporium, crossing paths, perhaps, with his favorite consort efficiently servicing nonplussed nocturnal nonuplets from Gabon on the fly in our itinerant Play Bus (the prehensile salop informs us that by duply mouthing a daring pair, snugging a third between dug and dug, and taking unabashed recourse to the fey notches of fetlock, hamstring, and axillæ, the rest fall into place so naturally that even double-digited herds of the randiest of sibs and pals may be tossed off quite breezily). Perhaps
NP wouldn’t condone this portrait of him and her — but it’s not as if he has any choice in the matter! Would you rather we recount the vain bully he was as a boy? Or the pub-star status he enjoyed as a bandy-legged sparring cub, when his pedalo endplay, his unladen bob and pivot, his bony bouncy fly bops and volleys so ably spun as to seem unplanned could make lapsed snobs plead for more paddlings, more pain? There is a kind of duplicitous voodoo, we think, in deigning to ban the truth of his current frailty, in failing to deploy our descriptive savvy (that pustulant nevus on his subnodal spondyl, for instance, at which he spastically dabs with bee pollen salve, while his dissipated reflection contorts and grimaces back at him) so as to lend piquant urgency to the unsolved pity of his impotent, too often solitary synod. Besides, it’s all grist for us sociophysiologists. No more will he encumber his sleek banana sling with baggy fighting trunks, not only so as better to belay a dumb waiter or push a broom, but so as not to mock the past glory he so rightfully cherishes. Alas, he too often mournfully disdains or even sourly disavows it! So let us not gloat on his bloodless piebald wounds, but, like a navy moored spellbound in a tropical bay from the glittering shores of which bare-bosomed Amazons swim arm over arm to scramble aboard and bejewel the yearning decks with their profligate tussle and tang, let us describe, like the schizomythologists we are, at least one of his victories! Why not two, or even three? Something like i) boy bully; ii) bantam pub ollam of the pugilistic arts; and iii) twee fair titlist? Yes, we think three will do. And then we shall recount in iv) his fall — but have we not done so already (vid. our entry on
GA)? On second thought, concerns of space compel us to settle for just one. Here goes. Poon Lane, as you know, is situated just over the Hump (as locals are wont to call Mount Gimmor) from the Vieux Port, on a charming bight of the Olnziiankta River known as Loup’s Bend. Built in an era before ocular tourism and visual gastronomy had conspired to rob the poor of one of the few aesthetic consolations their straitened circumstances granted them — in this instance, a spectactular lane-ending scarp informally known as “The Spoon Leap” from which season-changing vistas of river, bay, chalky city skyline, and distant wooded mountain flanks may be glommed — the quaint cedar and tile cottages of Poon Lane were, for a handful of generations dating back to the time when then Deputy Chief Minister Messalina first spayed the hymen of the flinty plot and, hefting a ponderous pavé, ritually put paid to the lane’s unkempt indigenous pucelage, inhabited largely by families of subvulpine strumpets and unskilled slag hounds of the Messalina Methuen Ironworks. As a boy,
NP, like so many of his downtrodden brethren, took a perverse pride in ignorance and intimidation, and so, being a child of, let us say, seven, no, eight, no, nine, imposingly large, in any case, for his age, took charge of a band of unulpaned street voles in defense of his neighborhood against the onslaughts of the up and coming and ever intrusive class of those just out for a stroll and a view and an edifying encounter with a sylvan lobe of the city previously unknown to them. One day, emboldened by curiosity, a debonair trinity of suave domesticity, recent transplants, no doubt, from a realm more tolerant of leisurely divastigation, crossed Halfox Road Bridge and turned the corner off of Bolland Street to find, in the foreground,
NP and his unwashed blades doing layups with a spall of chert against a resonant cerulean wall ablush with dogwood blossom, and, in the background, a narrow bucolic lane receding in perfect two-point perspective toward the view as previously described. Whilst thirty-something Pater and twenty-something Mater (herself in the matriline of the van Selby-Dunlops) enthused sotto voce about the artistic license their stroll had earned them, their Fils of five had the temerity to approach what he mistakenly took for a playful crew of sympathetic coevals. Their hackles, however, bristled at the alien’s presence, and
NP, taking matters in hand, employed his bulk in a manner meant definitively to prove to the vulnerable bold pansy just who in this domain was dominant. A textile hush followed by a whimper, a crack, a yelp, and the hasty patter of guilty feet drew P and M from their panoramic revery to find their son supine against the cobbles, blood spilling profusely from a parietal gash, a stain of fear flooding his unsnapped crotch. We are pleased to report that the wound was fatal to neither body nor spirit, and that the owner of Poon Lane’s eponymous culinary gem,
Nat “Chulo” Utressa, though still bearing a scar any recidivist blueblood would proudly proffer as witness to the democratic penchants of a more adventurous past, bears no ill will toward
NP or his former abettors (not a few of whom — we see Pablo, and Pavel, and Paul, and Paolo, and Nolan, and Onan, and Apo, and, oh yes, there’s Ansel poking his head out from behind a hedge — have found regular employ as bouncers and groundskeepers and errand boys for the local eateries, boutique B and Bs, and high-class whatnot now liberally uplifting the once benighted quartier). Needless to say, it was not this childish incident that changed the tone of his bluster, but rather the pubescent growth spurt that finally caught up with his cronies and, alas, passed
NP by, leaving him spindly and glandular despite avid resentful shuttling between the precariously perched Spoon Leap Sparring Pen (now Bistro Utressa) and the pint-sized comforts of the Bolland Street Pub (now Taverna), but that is another story.