Excuse Me for Living

by Ric Klass

  After seeing his supposed rival’s rear lashed by a dominatrix, Albert moved back home last night. He had to buy Harriet’s explanation that her relationship with Castillia could only be platonic. And the pictures on the walls. “Holy moly! Did you get a load of them?” Albert asked his wife on their hurried way out of the professor’s apartment.

  She forgave him when he told her he had never loved anyone but her. He only began his monkeyshines with Elaine because of his LFOD-diagnosed depression. They spent the night making up – frolic usually reserved for younger couples. “How is Daniel doing?” she also asked Albert. “Did he ever find a job?” understandably forgetting her son’s predicament due to her pressing daily routine of women’s luncheons and rounds at the golf club.

  “Tonight’s the Grand Finale

  for the summer,” Langford junior tells Pirot, who’s not happy to hear the bad news. Bruce’s merger and acquisition business at Morgan Stanley has picked up, and dad must pop up here sooner or later with his latest wife. “And it must be smashing,” Bruce continues. “We have some VIP guests this evening.”

  Brucie sent out special invitations for the costume ball tonight to the LA-LA movie studio and record company executives who have their own palatial digs nearby. He hopes to generate some film financing deals on the investment banking side by schmoozing with the execs. They’ll show up, he feels sure. He’s turned down dozens of pleading requests for an invite to the number-one sublimely-low event in the Hamptons. Only the devil himself can drag it further down.

  As for Pirot, he’s piled up some real dough-ray-me from this customer by arranging all the details for the parties. He’s going to miss garnering more. Pirot final-checks to see that the three bands have set up – hard rock in the ballroom, jazz on the pool patio deck, and new wave Asian in the upstairs theater. He hired four additional bouncers, oversaw the catered food with hot Latin overtones and personally interviewed each waiter. And the female talent. Due to overwhelming popular demand, he brought the Dutch platinum blondes back, a spicy new routine he discovered at the Kit Kat Club, and of course many models (they call themselves) to mingle with the crowd. Finally, the booze and drugs set back his client Brucie one hundred Gs alone. Understandably, Pirot’s damned proud of this devil’s bash.

  Pirot checks to see that the front gate security is covered. No one gets in without either an invitation or his personal imprimatur. By now he knows most of the regulars by sight. A limo pulls up with the third sister of the trapeze act from Holland. Surprise. He was told she couldn’t make it. He waves her in with what must be some sugar daddy of hers. Then three Hollywood types show up in a rat-pack white-stretch caddie. Pirot climbs in to give them a personal tour.

  “Nice duds, man,” Thom Tremont, a young and yet powerful Warner Brothers production chief, says to Pirot. Thom takes in his guide’s very cool, faded tuxedo and stained blood-red cummerbund. He looks down at his all-too-yesterday’s Armani hung over a blue-black T-shirt. My wardrobe assistant has her head up her ass, he thinks. She’s got to get with it. “What’s your handle, dude?”

  “Pirot.”

  “Just Pirot?”

  “Yes,” the offbeat cicerone nods.

  “One name? Like Sting or Gandhi, huh? Cool.” Then Thom sees the partially clad dolls, the costumes, the klieg lights. “Who put this gig together?”

  “I did,” says Pirot.

  On the jaunt through the mansion, Arnie Bratsworth (“He’s a macher from the Bertelsmann Music Group,” Thom whispers to Pirot) instantly grasps the diverse musical talent of groups he’s never heard of before. He takes a sip of the raw goat’s milk with paprika and vodka from one of the wandering servers. “What a kick, guy. Who arranged the food and the music?”

  “Me,” says Pirot simply.

  The three execs look at each other. They each know what the other two guys are thinking.

  Shitskies. Why did I come here with these putzes? This is going to jack up the bidding, computes Yamada Takahishi, U.S. Head of Sony Pictures Entertainment. I’ll have to offer him a two-picture deal, at least. But if I don’t hire this pisher first, I’ll lose face and it’ll be my toochis. Yamada’s a native-born Japanese, but Daily Variety and lunches at Spago in Beverly Hills have taught the Stanford Business School grad to become well-versed in Hollywood lingo.

  “Excuse me,” Pirot says to the tour. He spots a guest – one of Bruce’s dodo sidekicks putting his hands on Carrie. “I can’t let the talent be disturbed,” he tells the Hollywood honchos to their considerable approbation and hurries to stop the intrusion. Nobody puts his claws on his girls unless they – and he – get paid for it – in advance.

  Just as well, they all consider silently. Each in his own way and own jargon has the same plan: I’ll sign up this dude privately later tonight before these bozos know who they’re messing with.

  “I Can’t Just Call

  to give the guys the news, can I?” Ronnie begs his sweet betrothed.

  “That’s right. They can just wait until they get the wedding announcement like everybody else,” Coco tells him in no uncertain terms on that fateful Friday evening. On her fiancé’s desk she saw the Devil-Takes-All masquerade ball announcement from Ronnie’s lowlife Bexley Academy friend, Bruce Langford. There’ll be alcohol, women, drugs – followed by drunk women, more alcohol, and drunk naked women. No way in hell will she permit her Ronnie to go to the Hamptons’ most notorious bacchanal.

  “But, darling. . . .”

  “OK. If it’s so important to you, we’ll go together.”

  “What a horrible idea! I can’t let my fiancée go to one of Brucie’s parties.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “You don’t trust me. Is that it?” demands Ronnie, raising his voice for the first time to Coco.

  “I don’t trust your idiot friends,” pitching to a rage herself.

  “I’m going alone and that’s that,” Ronnie replies and stomps out of their – mostly – purple palace on the Upper West Side. It’s their first fight. Had to come sometime, the future groom gloomily decides. Someone has to be the boss of this family . . . and it can’t always be her, he fumes.

  As Ronnie pulls slowly though the crowded Midtown Tunnel toward the Long Island Expressway, he tries to convince himself that he has no interest in one final debauched party. I’ll just stop in and say, “Hi guys. I’m getting married to Coco,” to his pals, collect the good wishes from all around, and leave. He has no intention – he tells himself – of one last time to ever put his hands on a little grass, a little booze, and a little flirtatious hottie all at the same time. I’ll show Coco she can trust me, he repeats to himself over and over.

  Until he nearly believes it.

  His chance to prove his good intentions will come later tonight. An hour after her beloved leaves, Coco decides to go to Brucie’s party, too. She knows all of Ronnie’s dumb friends – they’re the same nincompoops as her jerk brother’s – and will garner her own congrats from them. She can’t wait to see their faces. Who’d have guessed? – she and Ronnie together. She has the invite in hand – not that the Marines could conceivably stop the determined woman – and takes off for the Langford East Hampton house in her new silver BMW Series 3 convertible. Daddy made good on his promise.

  “Brucie Will Be So Surprised

  to see us, Gisela,” says Skipper Langford, Brucie’s father, as he cuddles with his young platinum-blonde Dutch wife. The long flight from Holland exhausted them both. He couldn’t reach Bertrand to fetch them in the new custom-pink Rolls he bought for his new bride – the line’s been tied up the whole day – so they’re taking a limo service from JFK. “I still think it’s a pity I didn’t get to meet your two sisters, Tiffin and Adelle, while we were in Amsterdam. I’ve never met triplets.”

  The senior Bruce Langford got his nickname from his number-one hobby. As Commodore of the prestigious New York Yacht Club, Skipper had thought it his duty to attend the annual Watersportvereniging – the Amsterdam boating club �
� party celebrating its auspicious beginning in 1918. Of course they’re johnny-come-latelys compared to the grand year of 1844 when we started, he sniffed as he read the invitation. He met Gisela, his fourth wife, at the shindig. Skipper named his 150-foot schooner The Velis, after his club’s motto: Nos agimur tumidis velis – We go with swelling sails. It was Gisela’s own voluminous sails that first caught his monocled eye at the celebration and which, she took note, immediately rigged his mast below. That she spoke of the champagne they drank together that night in terms of its aromatic intensity, crisp acidity, and well-delineated woven texture only added to his intoxication over her silvery aura. Oenology is his second and only other hobby. They married six days and two-dozen magnums of Dom Perignon later – 1996, his favorite vintage, of course.

  As for Gisela, it’s just as well that Skipper didn’t meet her sisters. It could slip out she’s not truly the curator for the Netherlands’ cultural center, the Amsterdam Public Library. During a rare sober moment they had together before tying the knot, the Skipper dragged her into a massive edifice on the Oosterdokskade – she had no idea that it even was the library. He wanted to invite her boss in person to their private wedding ceremony that night at the InterContinental Amstel hotel. She ended the emergency by asking the receptionist in her native language if her father could take a leak on the floor. Absent Skipper’s knowledge of Dutch, the universally understood vigorous-head-swiveling-left-and-right sign for no assured him that Gisela’s employer, a Mr. Rembrandt van Rijn she told him, wasn’t in that day.

  Also, her siblings live only for today. They’re still into parties, weed, and making Euros – and they do make sizable dough for pretty Dutch girls from the hinterlands. Gisela, on the other hand, thinks long-term and very big money. Bruce Sr. seems an all-right Jozef, and not bad looking for an alte mann, but still he might not have tied the knot with a woman who the night before they met was balancing upside-down on a single dance pole with her triplet sisters at the Blue Bell Nightclub on the Thorbeckeplein.

  “You’ll like Brucie, Gisela. He’s at the country house. Haven’t been there for months myself. Very conservative and serious young man. I don’t know where he got those genes,” the elder Langford chuckles. “Probably in bed hours ago. We’ll have to tiptoe in quietly so we don’t wake him. I hope you two meet in the morning before he goes off to work in the city.”

  The summer traffic to the Hamptons moves haltingly even on weekdays, and it takes hours for them to reach the pond house. Rave-loud music blares from the mansion and dozens of luxury cars fill the driveway, spilling onto the grass. The jetlagged Skipper has fallen asleep in the arms of his newlywed when the driver is stopped at the gate. Skipper wakes up enough to see a peculiar-looking mustachioed man in a tuxedo peer inside the limo.

  “I thought you couldn’t make it, Gisela. You can change in the Chinese bedroom upstairs. Who’s the john?”

  Langford senior hears the stranger ask Gisela in an unidentifiable accent.

  “We’re not staying,” says Gisela, trying not to panic.

  “Of course we’re staying, my dear,” pipes up Langford, wondering who the odd fellow is. “Let us in, my good man.”

  Pirot allows the car onto the grounds.

  Partially clad couples lying on the flagstone pavers litter the patio just ahead of the limo. Suddenly, Gisela hears several men shouting. Then loud tinkling of breaking glass. A young man wearing a black-devil-rhinestoned shirt and headband horns of red-velvet – but missing his pants and jockey shorts – hurtles headfirst out the front door. Skipper now completely awakens just before Gisela can ask the driver to turn around and go back to Manhattan. She knows trouble’s brewing right here in River City.

  “Time to Say Goodbye

  to Brucie’s raucous parties,” The Chipster tells Frederick, finally dragging himself home after thirty-six hours straight with Karen. He wants to stay true to his new sweetheart and not get involved with some trollop he might come across at one of the pond house carousals – though despite his best efforts it’s never happened before. She had to work tonight and booted him out of her apartment at last. He thought it peculiar that a limousine waited for her outside when he left. Must remember to give Freddy a tidy Christmas bonus this year, he thought. Good help sure must be hard to find.

  “Sorry to hear of it. I know you find them amusing. Can’t blame you after your fall from grace – and the second-story window there. But how did it go with Karen, Sir?” Freddy asks with a hint of an upward curve to his lips. He stifles a smile. If the lad didn’t get some this time, I’m going to seek other employment, he resolves. I can’t bear a wallflower.

  “Beat her pants.”

  “Oh did you, Sir?” Frederick perks up upon hearing about his employer’s frivolity – a House of Lords practice, both in giving and receiving – so thoroughly covered in the London tabloids.

  “In squash.”

  “Oh.”

  “I can’t say more. We’re gentlemen, aren’t we?”

  “So glad to hear it, Chip, Sir.” Thank God he finally screwed her, Frederick surmises. Maybe he’ll stop interfering with my duties now.

  “About the ball tonight . . . I can’t just not show up after accepting the invitation, can I?”

  “Of course not, Sir. That would be rude.”

  Chip’s too exhausted after last night’s amorous workout to drive and asks Frederick to take him to East Hampton in the Bentley. He’ll only stay a few minutes to say farewells. Frederick’s happy for the occasion. He’s always wanted to see the goings-on at the pond house. Bertrand Jenkins, co-chairman with Frederick of the International Guild of Professional Butlers, serves as the Langford’s major domo there. Bertie often spoke of the amusing hijinks that went on at the mansion when the senior Langford left for vacation or one of his frequent extended honeymoons. This might be his last chance to witness the satyr gaiety himself. Besides, Frederick’s been in deep contemplation. Perhaps now’s the time to change the association’s name. Something more up-to-date and fashionable might be in order. Maybe something like The American Live-In Professional Household Organizers – ALIPHO – has a bit more zip to it for these modern times. I’ll run it up the flagpole with Bertie while I’m at the pond house, he decides.

  When they arrive at the gate, an odd-tuxedoed man recognizes Chip and hands Frederick feathered burgundy masks for them to wear. “Keep the hat on, Jack. It’s wicked,” the bizarre gent tells him. Frederick has never really thought about his chauffeur’s cap in just that light before. As the two men enter the house, they’re warmly greeted by Bertie, who offers his colleague a grand tour of the premises.

  “They Sail Through the Air

  with the greatest of ease, the braless young girls on the flying trapeze,” boisterously sings the drunken costumed crowd. They wildly applaud Tiffin and Adelle’s obscene antics on the bar swinging above them, just below the tall ballroom ceiling. During her intermission, a masked, stunning, nude, auburnhaired woman climbs down from an elevated, glass-floored, red-lit Amsterdam room situated in front of the long mirrored wall. Carrie Blade demonstrates what an exercise pole can do for an audience’s libido. Pirot finagled to get her out of the Kit Kat Club for tonight’s assignment that’s paying her five thousand smackers in cash – enough to quit her summer job and focus on her new relationship with Chip.

  During her gyrations she fantasizes that her performance is for him alone and consequently nearly literally brings down the house. Men start howling and throwing full wine glasses until the bouncers step in. The bruisers have trouble safely escorting Carrie on her way upstairs when an inebriated Ronnie Schwartz steps up and throws his arms around her to ask for a spin around the crowded floor. When he pulls off his mask for a kiss, he’s stopped by another guest.

  “Just a minute, my dear Ronnie. What crust. Very ungentlemanly to accost one of the performers,” says an indignant Chipster to him. He comes between Carrie Blade and the would-be ballroom dancer. The masked Chipster’s also been dazz
led by the disguised cage dancer – particularly her familiar-looking asymmetrical bouncing bosoms.

  Chivalry’s not dead, thinks Carrie. I think my own Chip would do the same.

  Coco has by now caught up with her future hubby. She grabs Ronnie’s shirt collar and tugs him away from Karen just in time for him to miss a roundhouse punch from Pirot who won’t stand for anybody molesting his talent. The shot almost lands on poor Ronnie but instead connects with the dazed elderly john Pirot saw earlier with Gisela. Down to the floor poor Langford Sr. drops, alarming the guests in the packed ballroom. The startled mob starts to stampede and fight among themselves to reach the nearest exit. No milquetoast himself, Skipper manages to stand to defend himself and mistakenly pokes a nearby bouncer in the eye, missing Pirot – the intended target. A panic-stricken Brucie spots his father in the melee and rushes to his side.

  “Brucie, is that you? This won’t do. What if the admissions committee to the Knight’s Templar were to hear of these goings-on? You know how much entrance to the order means to me.” They’re both about to be pulverized by the enraged bouncer when guests fleeing the house trample all three. At this point, an alerted police enforcement enters the mêlée.

  The foregoing’s the best account of how the ensuing brawl started and nearly demolished the pond house ballroom and foyer, according to the East Hampton Village Police Blotter that night. After he’s bailed out with the others in the early AM, Yamada Takahishi feels he has no choice but to pony up 500 thou on the spot to Pirot for the rights to a Devil-Takes-All Sony Entertainment TV special. And a three-picture deal.

  In the confusion, no doubt Frederick’s stature, uniform, and his chauffeur cap must have made the real cops think him a policeman. The misconception allows the dutiful servant to pull his master to the kitchen as the cops pile in. His polite nature also causes him to include a partially dressed performer. “Would you like a lift home, Miss?” and “Please borrow my coat.” In the din of the donnybrook, the confused contortionist knows these disguised gentlemen from somewhere. But where? Bertie shows them a path down the basement, then up the back steps through a Bilco steel door to the backyard. From there the three depart posthaste to the Bentley. They’ve left without her belongings, and now, in the quiet of the night, chilly, skimpily dressed, kitten-masked Karen Bladner realizes the men’s identities.