Before the Rain Part 25

Lyndsey Pattison wept, not as profoundly as the Virgin Mary over the Crucifixion, but Lyndsey’s weeping was moving. She had waited the proper amount of time in the Dew Inn, near Houston Truckway, and had managed to whip up some fantastically impressive journalism credentials in order to join the Sports Illustrated cavalcade to New York.
The old crone with the turban had mumbled an imprecation against the Akashic records for fast-forwarding a Mister Duda to the New York Mets.
Duda’s ascendancy was more than five years off; Shea Stadium hadn’t yet been dynamited to make way for Citi Field. But the Gita and the Akashas were definitely on the money about Loomis—he was already on Houston Street in lower Manhattan.
Don Strabonamus, a slightly tipsy sportswriter who wanted to initiate the comely Miss Pattison into the “Mile-High Club,” pointed out ever so graciously that unlike the pitcher street, the New York locale was pronounced “HOWS-TON” Street! “Oh-ho-ho,” Lyndsey sighed, “thanks for that, Mister Strabonious.” She then drank part of a Pink Lady, muttered, “I have reserved all of my heart for Loomis Reader,” and, after some sudden turbulence and a drop of thirty-or-so feet of altitude, passed out until the abrupt arrival at JFK.
Meanwhile, or as Chuck Berry likes to say meanWHILE, Loomis was dithering over Ovetta Rheems, who was laying before him. Earlier, the two alleged lovebirds were seen browsing the display windows further uptown on Fifth Avenue, of Tiffany’s and Harry Winston’s. They headed for Mott Street because Ovetta and Chang, her impassive chauffeur, had a hankering for some opium and wontons. As Loomis put it so eloquently, “Who am I to stand in your way?”
Problem was, overcome by the ambient poppy fumes in the doss house, Loomis began to re-evaluate. Maybe this wasn’t the best setting for his rediscovery of self. And, he was missing Lyndsey’s unvarnished niceness. Luckily for him, it appeared the Chinatown narks were about to pounce. A quick flash-glance from Chang and the party of three were out a side exit and down a rusty fire escape into the waiting black SUV, a Cadillac Escalade they’d now ‘escalated’ to. Off they fled to Kelly Joe’s on Houston near Delancey, a true ‘hole’ which was so prized by the hip NEW YORKER crowd, especially due to their lack of a house phone. Ovetta was flying high in her spindizzy coif, and produced from her decolletage a bona fide $1000 bill—a real Grover Cleveland, for goodness’ sakes.
Even as they spoke, Ovetta’s clique was fully unaware of a knot of boisterous sports scribes, crashing thru the swingin’ doors of Kelly Joe’s on Houston, led by a flushed-cheeked lass in lavender evening wear–none other than the mother hen social worker, Miss Lyndsey Pattison.
(to be continued)