THE PUTZMEISTER (2)

Shel Silverstein forever barefoot on his front porch on Jane Street, Key West, Florida, by himself, strumming his guitar singing softly to himself, A Boy Named Sue:

My daddy left me when I was three

And he didn't leave much to mom & me.

Just this guitar and an empty bottle of booze

Shel was good because he gave to his friends.

Legendary blues composer Bob Gibson in Shel's backyard, singing, playing. There wasn't a script, who felt like singing when, sang. Nino sat with with his lover Smoky Cohen & listened, watched. Bob Gibson did not look well. It was 1986. Most impressive was that after Bob Gibson died, Shel said, shaking his head,"He should have told me if he needed money."

Nino did not know whether Bob Gibson had needed money. But that's what Shel Silverstein said.

He'd had a child who died when he was very young. Only Shel's closest friends knew.

"Better to give than receive," Shel had told Nino Agliolio in the Caffe Sha-Sha on Hudson Street, and, throughout his adult lifetime, Nino could not understand how some men desired fellatio but shunned cunnilingus. Countless women told Nino:

"He wants it but won't give it!" infuriating Nino Agliolio, not over the flagrant injustice but over the lack of seriousness over sex in the first place, refuting the opportunity to taste, to please, to message and stimulate, to abandon all civility and let the woman know that man in all his strength & conviviality was willing to grovel between her legs, the very place of each & every man's entrance into the mortal world. Dante in his hell would have relegated such men to a deep rung for failing to realize their full potential as mortal men, as animals, for refusing to grant a woman her pleasure. Such men deprived of seeing God's face for all eternity. The contrapasso, the punishement suited to the crime--such men's faces between a woman's legs their tongues flickering, eyes open, saliva pouring, drowning in their reluctant saliva.

Shel lived alone--"because we know too much about women," John Dante told Nino Agliolio. John was a great friend of Shel's, fellow Playboy Mansion cronie, Hugh Hefner's Personal Assistant. Give plentifully as long as they were fucking Playboy Bunnies & Centerfolds. Less-than-beautiful women, Nino thinks--time for children & hearth, menopause, menstruals, which Nino savored for the deep, sharp flavor. A woman's needs, her dreams feel so indescribably sublime, so profound, s0--that Nino explodes! Except for the Goddess of New York, who required sex as a vampire blood or else would return to eternal nebula, sex was not primary to the women who loved Nino Agliolio. One & then another asked him for so little, gave him so much. Thinking once again about Shel Silverstein's assertion that the orgasms of an active male's lifetime amount to one weekend, Nino considered that memories of all of his lovers, if he had to call them up, their respective beauty, particular dreams, amounted also to one weekend! Right before he died, he planned to parade their smiling faces across the screen of his mind. He would have so little time, hardly a hiccup, and so Nino resurrected the calvalcade practically every day.