View all notes
She’s relieved in a way to see it isn’t going to be the Hamptons of legend, at least. She has spent more time there than it was worth. This is more like Fringehampton, where the working population are often angry to the point of homicide because their livelihoods depend on servicing the richer and more famous, up to whom they must never miss a chance to suck. Time-battered houses, scrub pine, roadside businesses. No lights or decorations up, so the winter here must be in the deep and dateless vacancy after the holiday season.
[...] as they decelerate down the last stretch of Route 27, she can only feel the narrowing of options—it’s all converging here, all Long Island, the defense factories, the homicidal traffic, the history of Republican sin forever unremitted, the relentless suburbanizing, miles of mowed yards, contractor hardpan, beaverboard and asphalt shingling, treeless acres, all concentrating, all collapsing, into this terminal toehold before the long Atlantic wilderness.
Maxine doesn’t think of herself as especially timid, she’s walked into fund-raisers wearing the wrong accessories, driven overseas in rental cars with alien gearshifts, prevailed in beefs with bill collectors, arms dealers, and barking-mad Republicans without much hesitation bodily or spiritual. But now as she steps through the door, the interesting question arises, Maxine, are you out of your fucking mind? [...]
Odor what? Turns out Conkling is a freelance professional Nose, having been born with a sense of smell far more calibrated than the rest of us normals enjoy. He’s been known to follow an intriguing sillage for dozens of city blocks before finding the source is a dentist’s wife from Valley Stream. He believes in a dedicated circle of hell for anybody who shows up at dinner or for that matter enters an elevator wearing an inappropriate scent. Dogs he hasn’t met formally come up to him with inquiring looks. “A negotiable talent, sometimes a curse.”
the dogs line killed me
[...] a buffer space constantly under the threat of inundation from above if the pool—concrete, state of the art back then, grandfathered exempt from what today would be a number of code violations—should God forbid ever spring a leak. For now it’s the outward and structural form of a secret history of payoffs to contractors and inspectors and signers of permits, dishonest stewards long gone who expected the deluge after them to take place well after any statute of limitations has run. Creaking underframe, early-20th-century trusswork and bracing. A range of animal life in which mice could be the least of one’s worries [...]
Fuck here we go, Maxine half-subvocalizes, having only herself recently learned of Conkling’s longtime obsession with, not so much Hitler in general as the even more focused question of, what did Hitler smell like? Exactly? “I mean obviously like a vegetarian, like a nonsmoker, but . . . what was Hitler’s cologne, for example?”
“I always figured it was 4711,” Heidi taking her beat a little faster than a normal person might.
Conkling is instantly mesmerized. The sort of thing you see in older Disney cartoons. “Me too! Where did you—”
“Only a wild guess, JFK used it, right? and both men, mutatis mutandis, had the same kind of, you know, charisma?”
“Exactly, and if young Jack borrowed his father’s cologne—in the literature we often find a father-to-son transmission model—we know the elder Kennedy admired Hitler, even plausibly enough to want to smell like him, add to that that every U-boat in Admiral Dönitz’s fleet got spritzed continuously with 4711, barrels full of it every voyage, and furthermore Dönitz was personally named by Hitler as his successor—”
idk why but this killed me
Considering Leopoldo’s history this does seem like a good moment to bring up the topic of Windust. “Does your shrink ever talk about the economy down there?”
“Not much, it’s a painful subject. Worst insult he can think of is to call somebody’s mother a neoliberal. Those policies destroyed the Argentine middle class, fucked with more lives than anybody’s counted so far. Maybe not as bad as getting disappeared, but totally sucks loquesea. Why do you ask?”
Brooke and Avi finally show up back in the States looking like they’ve spent the year at some strange anti-kibbutz dedicated to screen-staring, keeping out of the sun, and not missing too many meals, Elaine taking one look at Brooke promptly conveys her over to Megareps, a neighborhood health club, and negotiates a trial membership while Brooke loiters at the snack bar on the ground floor, contemplating muffins, bagels, and smoothies in a less than objective way.
[...] The cabdriver, whose problem this has become, thinks it might be a police exercise, based on a scenario where terrorists take over Javits Center.
“Why,” Maxine wonders, “would anybody want to?”
“Well, spoze it happened during the Auto Show. Then they’d have all those cars and trucks. They could sell off some of that for money to buy bombs and AKs and shit,” the driver clearly with a scenario of his own here, “keep the cool units like the Ferraris and Panozes, use the trucks for military vehicles, oh, and they’d also need to hijack a fleet of car carriers, Peterbilt 378s, somethin like that. And . . . and the really good vintage stuff, Hispano-Suizas, Aston Martins, they could hold them for ransom.”
why is this so funny
HAVING LATELY DISCOVERED in the yuppie collectors’ market a credulity that may be limitless, a gang of cigar forgers have been working out of a smoke shop on West 30th, offering “smuggled” Cuban cigars for $20 a pop, an attractive price for the time, along with a line of “rare antique” cigars, including alleged selections from J. P. Morgan’s private stock, original chewed-on props from Groucho Marx movies, and cigar incunabula such as Christopher Columbus’s first Cuban, mentioned by de las Casas in Historia de las Indias. Incredibly, these fakes are all fetching their asking prices, and a boutique hedge fund in town has been paying these knockoff artists huge sums, writing it off to travel and entertainment, then taking what when the media get hold of it will be called Lavish Kickbacks. [...]
damn i love how full his sentences are