Lou Reed, New York, Track 7
I said holly hey
Only her name wasn’t Holly, it was just a greeting. My name’s not Holly either, it’s Louis van Buren. Yes actually, before you ask, I am related to that van Buren, but only very distantly. I think he was a fourth great uncle. And her name was Flo. Good god, I mean what a name! The great crazy romances always seem to have a girl with a stand out name and a matching body and mine’s no different. Flo Vale, the ebony blonde occasional redhead. Flo Emerson Vale, the tiger of the Jungle nightclub down on Walker street. Fucking crazy Flo Emerson Vale, the girl who laughed like the morning and bit like a hyena, the girl whose calves were as well formed and enticing as her breasts, the girl who was always in the right dress, the girl I loved. And probably still do.
She said hey sugar
I felt like I had to be sweet enough to live up to the name. Maybe if I’d been drinking mixers all night instead of straight fast Jack’s and cool gradual beers I would have had the sweetness in me. It was a real old shanty of a bar, the kind you wanna write about and sing about in simple rolling songs played in bars of its ilk. It was thankfully smoky, protected from the whining of the law, and thankfully cheap, which is probably why we made it ours despite how far it was to stumble and how full it was of sagging AC/DC fans. We were there to celebrate someone’s birthday, but I don’t recall whose, I think it was John Wilkes Booth’s. We did that most nights, when we needed a reason to drink at what we called the Tattooed Arms, celebrate the birthday of whoever had been born on that day. And we really did increase the trivia bank of dates and people both for us and a lot of bearded barflies. So I wasn’t feeling as sweet as I could have been, which was good in a way because it let me surprise her by raising the bar later.
Please allow me to introduce myself
Getting to know a complete stranger who is so stomach-crampingly attractive you want to burst, without at all bringing up the obvious point that you’re only speaking as a means to a very carnal end, is like trying to stop a headache by thinking really hard about it. I always try to get the hints and important information in as subtle stowaways in my innocent life-story introductions. For instance, if asked what music I like I’ll always say “mostly the slow and sexy stuff, but sometimes the kind that thumps and pounds all night”. Which is a pretty honest and accurate summation of what music I do like, among other things.
I’m now taking over
It was roughly here that I lost whatever fumbling striving grasp I had on the conversation, and let her do what she did best and talk about her opinions. I learnt her name was Flo, which was short for nothing-thank-you-very-much-why-did-you-just-assume-everyone-just-assumes. I agreed, Flo is much easier to pronounce. I learnt she’d been spending the last few weeks on a fact-finding expedition in South America, and that she was a sometime freelance journalist. Just how ‘sometime’ and what those facts were (hint: Cocaine counts as a fact) I didn’t find out until a little later. She told me how she weighed exactly 54.4 kilograms that afternoon and how she was on a record streak of five weeks without more than a 0.4 variation of that. Then she looked surprised at herself for saying that, apologized, and bought me a weird blue cocktail I’d never heard of and that the bartender had to look up. I guess that said a lot about her too.
Go Johnny go
Anyway, some nights you just feel the world in the air, and the universe in the room, and live it. With this wild blue cocktail in one hand and this wild red girl in the other I stood on tables and danced. The whole lot of us were there – Mikey, Maya, Johnny, Soho, Sleepy and all the periphery. We ruled that Booth’s Birthday like madmen writhing between ringing bells, in tortured ecstasy, in blind living. These are rare nights, and sometimes lately I’ve been realizing just how much of those nights was in her. It wasn’t just Flo that made us dance hard and yelp for sheer joy, it was just that when we did and she was around… well it felt like we were doing it all for her. We felt like we needed to reach that high, that example. And that was how I met Flo.
Only her name wasn’t Holly, it was just a greeting. My name’s not Holly either, it’s Louis van Buren. Yes actually, before you ask, I am related to that van Buren, but only very distantly. I think he was a fourth great uncle. And her name was Flo. Good god, I mean what a name! The great crazy romances always seem to have a girl with a stand out name and a matching body and mine’s no different. Flo Vale, the ebony blonde occasional redhead. Flo Emerson Vale, the tiger of the Jungle nightclub down on Walker street. Fucking crazy Flo Emerson Vale, the girl who laughed like the morning and bit like a hyena, the girl whose calves were as well formed and enticing as her breasts, the girl who was always in the right dress, the girl I loved. And probably still do.
She said hey sugar
I felt like I had to be sweet enough to live up to the name. Maybe if I’d been drinking mixers all night instead of straight fast Jack’s and cool gradual beers I would have had the sweetness in me. It was a real old shanty of a bar, the kind you wanna write about and sing about in simple rolling songs played in bars of its ilk. It was thankfully smoky, protected from the whining of the law, and thankfully cheap, which is probably why we made it ours despite how far it was to stumble and how full it was of sagging AC/DC fans. We were there to celebrate someone’s birthday, but I don’t recall whose, I think it was John Wilkes Booth’s. We did that most nights, when we needed a reason to drink at what we called the Tattooed Arms, celebrate the birthday of whoever had been born on that day. And we really did increase the trivia bank of dates and people both for us and a lot of bearded barflies. So I wasn’t feeling as sweet as I could have been, which was good in a way because it let me surprise her by raising the bar later.
Please allow me to introduce myself
Getting to know a complete stranger who is so stomach-crampingly attractive you want to burst, without at all bringing up the obvious point that you’re only speaking as a means to a very carnal end, is like trying to stop a headache by thinking really hard about it. I always try to get the hints and important information in as subtle stowaways in my innocent life-story introductions. For instance, if asked what music I like I’ll always say “mostly the slow and sexy stuff, but sometimes the kind that thumps and pounds all night”. Which is a pretty honest and accurate summation of what music I do like, among other things.
I’m now taking over
It was roughly here that I lost whatever fumbling striving grasp I had on the conversation, and let her do what she did best and talk about her opinions. I learnt her name was Flo, which was short for nothing-thank-you-very-much-why-did-you-just-assume-everyone-just-assumes. I agreed, Flo is much easier to pronounce. I learnt she’d been spending the last few weeks on a fact-finding expedition in South America, and that she was a sometime freelance journalist. Just how ‘sometime’ and what those facts were (hint: Cocaine counts as a fact) I didn’t find out until a little later. She told me how she weighed exactly 54.4 kilograms that afternoon and how she was on a record streak of five weeks without more than a 0.4 variation of that. Then she looked surprised at herself for saying that, apologized, and bought me a weird blue cocktail I’d never heard of and that the bartender had to look up. I guess that said a lot about her too.
Go Johnny go
Anyway, some nights you just feel the world in the air, and the universe in the room, and live it. With this wild blue cocktail in one hand and this wild red girl in the other I stood on tables and danced. The whole lot of us were there – Mikey, Maya, Johnny, Soho, Sleepy and all the periphery. We ruled that Booth’s Birthday like madmen writhing between ringing bells, in tortured ecstasy, in blind living. These are rare nights, and sometimes lately I’ve been realizing just how much of those nights was in her. It wasn’t just Flo that made us dance hard and yelp for sheer joy, it was just that when we did and she was around… well it felt like we were doing it all for her. We felt like we needed to reach that high, that example. And that was how I met Flo.
posted by Cal Samson at 9:09 PM
2 Comments:
i wanna see a book outta that, boy.
You know, I'm liking your music taste here. New York is my favourite Lou Reed album - everyone likes Transformer, but New York tops it, in my book at least. I get 'Beginning of a Great Adventure' as track 7, and I'm just listening to it now - the man oozes cool. "Take it, Lou."
You know, I like the writing too. I won't try and describe it to you because it annoys me when people try and describe my writing to me - they're usually wrong. Suffice to say, I enjoyed reading it - thanks.
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