Interview: Edgar Part 1

Cas: Hey kids, Cas here running this interview of my good pal Edgar. Here’s hopping I do as good of a job as Andy did. Ready Edgar?

Edgar: Absolutely. Ready and willing like the concubines of yesteryear.

C: sounds like my kind of party, have you had any experience with them?

E: when I was young, oh much younger than now, my family lived in Paris. This was before the turn of the century of course, my father had enlisted a courtesan for when mama was away with relatives. She wore the most beautiful gowns, stunning hats and gloriously applied makeup. She taught me how to kiss, do my hair, and dress with style and grace and of course how to make a man happy.

C: (sputters) wait, what was that?

E: she taught me how to please a man, if I wasn’t with Allan I might have shown you a thing or two.

C: well how do you know he isn’t up for it… no before that, you said turn of the century? As in 1900?

E: yes.

C: how?

E: time machine.

C: (blank expression)

E: ask Allan or Solace later. Should we continue?

C: alright, (shuffles notes) tell me more about… er… your youth.

E: well I was around ten when my family moved to Paris from Ireland, my father was a banker and my mother was, well a mother. The only work I saw that woman do was gallivant with her friends till the wee hours of the morning. No wonder my father invited Florence to stay with us.

Anyway we moved and life in Paris was, as you know, spectacular. The food was divine, the fashion was to die for and the boys ran rampant and for the most part naked, or at least they did when I chased them. I remember a boy named Armando, from Spain, his accent sent me into the clouds with ecstasy. We would sneak onto the roof of his father’s bakery and have the time of our lives while the croissants were being paid for.

Some times I would walk around Luxembourg Garden for the entire day, occasionally stopping to dip my feet in the water. As I always did, I carried a small leather journal and a scribbled about all the wonderful creatures that could be living in the trees that surrounded me. I wrote of their rich cultures and rigid authority, I was the pen that kept their history alive even though years of defiance and war savaged them. Whenever I found a fallen or rotten tree I knew the darker of the sects won the battles and destroyed themselves in their frivolous journey to purge their world of the undesirable ones. But when I came across a tree of mighty size, of magnificent smell and color, I knew instantly the glory of the beautiful ones. Honestly Cas, do I have to run this entire interview?

C: I’m sorry, I just love the way you speak. Please tell me more about your writing.

E: (blushing) well I have never been good at describing a singer person, it is much too personal and pseudo voyeuristic for my liking. No I always reveled in telling the story of the whole, the masses. Which is why I took a job as a journalist. Une Petite Revue, that is what I called my entertainment articles. I was already a staple in all of the bistros, cafes and most of the brothels Paris had to offer, and I knew them back to front. I could focus my talents on telling the stories on the kinds of people who came to these places.

C: wouldn’t that be talking about a single person?

E: are you daft, in that day no one would be caught dead in a bistro all by themselves. No you went in a group and if yours was the smallest you had better hope another would take you in, least you be associated with the lame and degenerates. Though by the end of the night we would all be one or the other. And this is what I reported on, the mass, the hierarchy, the secrets and the glue that held it together. I felt like a little spy, witnessing the tremendous and reporting on it the very next day. It goes without saying I wrote under a pseudonym, I would be dragged through the streets naked, and not in the good way, if my peers ever found out of my treachery.

C: it doesn’t sound like a bad thing, giving the nightlife a boost.

E: Oh Cas, you are such a twit. My era was nothing like today. My lovely friend Armando was gutted by his own father when he found him in bed with the neighbor’s husband. How easy it would have been for a nutter to take care of a problem if they knew where we congregated. Now think, what would they do to the writer with the inside information? If I were a woman, they would have simply scolded me and gone on about how a husband would straighten this out. But as a man, they would have strung me up for all to see and torn me limb from limb. Good news is all of those fuck heads are dead while I carry on being gorgeous.

C: what was your pen name?

E: Shakesqueer.

C: and on that marvelous bit of information we will end for now and take a break.

E: thank goodness, another minute and I’d have pissed myself.

C: you are such a lady, Edgar.