I miss the Bohemian Banker. I met her at a quarter to four, um not in the afternoon. 4:00am has significance in NYC cuz it’s when the bars close. Yes, there is afterhours stuff. Seems like any “Irish” bar on third avenue just shuts strange shudder-like things over their windows, and people drink and smoke all night. But bars with some style, routinely hassled by the authorities, for underage drinking, (“gasp”) do close.

I’d stepped in for one last drink to a place I generally don’t step into. I recommend this, BTW, yes it is the opposite of conservatism, and the cult of experience, but sometimes doing something you didn’t do before, is yeah, you know, fun. It was dark in there. Surprise! I know that if I ever bothered climbing the frozen mountain and killed the dreaded poisonous spider-yak to get to the guru who had THE answer. I know what he/she’d say.

 “Lighting.”

So even tho in the bar’s dimness I had the foresight of a neocon, meaning none, inotherwords I couldn’t see anything, there was one thing I did know. There was a beautiful woman present. It’s a feeling like no other. They turn you into x-ray machines, their beauty is phosphorous. She was arguing, complaining, moaning, about, about, about ... Paris. Paris, the city, not the Hilton.

Paris? In all the world, of any town, to be complaining about in any gin joint, why would she be picking on Paris. Well she had a good reason, I found out later, but that’s not for this blog. I defended the city where beauty never sleeps, and we walked out of the bar together at the clank of 4am locked in a verbally dueling embrace. Oh yeah there was somebody else coming out with us, the guy she was complaining about Paris to.

It was lighter in the street. We could really see each other for the first time. Her eyes were the color of the eggs of a robin.

The guy she was complaining about Paris to drove us in his car to his house, not that far away. A big lofty place kinda near where the World Trade Center used to be. It was filled with Western gear, including a wall hung with very pricey cowboy hats. He was somehow in this business. Seeing this wall, the Bohemian Banker, took a stroll, a very long stroll, a very long long stroll, to that wall, and bending ever so slightly to reach up picked off a cowboy hat and plopped it on her head.

“Can I have a hat.”

After that very very long stroll, I’m surprised the guy didn’t give over the deed to his loft, but yeah, he said, (of course he said yeah) yeah. Soon after he took a pill and went to sleep with his head on his desk.

“Can I keep the hat,” she asked me as we tiptoed out.

I remember her the next day. We were in a Korea town restaurant close to where I was living at the time. She was still wearing her night clothes from the night before, not exactly appropriate it seemed to the waiters of the restaurant. They couldn’t keep from staring at her. Neither could I. Of course, it might have just been the cowboy hat.