A Love Story

Gonna tell a love story now, 'cause you have background material on me. Ah, this occurred before I was married, a long time ago, out in Manhattan, I was in Manhattan. I was at City Center, this was ages ago, I was watching a ballet at City Center, and I'm not a ballet fan at all, but they were doing the dying swan, and there was a rumour, that some bookmakers had drifted into town from upstate New York, and that they had fixed the ballet. Apparently there was a lot of money bet on the swan to live. And I look at the box, and I see a girl, and my weak spot is women, ah, so I always think someday they're gonna make me a birthday party, and wheel out a tremendous birthday cake, and a giant, naked woman is gonna leap out of the cake and hurt me and leap back in the cake. So I pick up this girl, I was very glib, and she was a brilliant girl, she was a Bennington girl, studying at Bennington to be a woman male nurse at a four-year program, working on a term paper on the increasing incidents of heterosexuality amongst homosexuals. The girl was a swinger, however, I must....The girl was brought up in Darien, Conneticut, and when she was younger, she had a little brother about six years old, eight years...his parents sent the kid to military school. And while he was there, he stole jam or something, and they caught him, and they wanted to do things right, 'cause it was military school, so they held a court martial there. They found the kid guilty. They shot him. They returned to his parents half the tuition. Meanwhile, I was running amok with his sister, his sister was fabulous, she was a great, great, blonde, and she had tatooed on the inner surface of her thigh, the words 'Bird lives', which, unfortunately, I was never privileged to see in the relationship, but had it been printed in Braille, I would have had a great thing going with her. We used to go up to her apartment late at night, and all her beatnik friends would be sitting crosslegged on each other there, and they would be trying to make opium out of the poppies given out by veterans on street corners. She used to plug in her twelve and a half dollar hi-fi set, y'know, with the teakwood needle, and put on the record albums on of Marcel Marceau, y'know, just.... She crushed me, I...Every time I tell the story, I'm reminded...I was what you would call, not a intellectual, up to her...she was...I was thrown out of college, and when I was thrown out of college I got a job on Madison Avenue in New york, a real dyed-in-the-wool advertising agency on Madison Avenue, wanted a man to come in, and they pay him ninetyfive dollars a week, and to sit in their office, and to look jewish. They wanted to prove to the outside world, that they would hire minority groups, y'know. So I was the one they hired, y'know. I was the show jew at the agency. I tried to look jewish desperately, y'know. I used to read my memos from right to left all the time. They fired me finally, 'cause I took off too many jewish holidays.