The Putzmeister

The Putzmeister (5)

2008-08-23T12:20:00.002-04:00

Life in the Playbody Mansion was so idyllic, an earthly paradise of comforts & carnality, that Hugh Hefner could have easily, without distraction, built a chapel, an unassuming one, beside the basement washhouse, with eight pews & nonsectarian altar, the door always closed, so that permanent staffs Security & Kitchen & John Dante & Shel Silverstein & visiting celebrities & Bunnies & Bunny Mothers returning home...

The Putzmeister 4

2008-08-20T13:37:00.001-04:00

At first light, a Sunday, Mary of Magdala hurried to the tomb in order to be near Jesus. Since she’d become chaste, since her transformation from a prostitute to a follower of Jesus, all of her enmity toward men transferred to fervent love for one, Jesus. A low fog rose to her knees and caste a gray hue on the stony path ahead. Tombs with large rocks hewn out of Mt. Golgotha stood near to the height so that horse-drawn carts did not have far to travel. She wore her robe of pure white, hood up. Pebbles kicked in between her soles and leather of her sandals, which were fine but not so fine, soft yet durable, as Jesus’ sandals had been, for the artisans of Galillee & Judea traveled to the various towns & knew & created for one another. Beads of sweat surfaced on Mary’s dark face on which, since the transformation, abundant black hair grew, sideburns, mustache, singular straight black pubic-like hairs on the chin—just like the zealous renegade nun of Nino Agliolio’s old neighborhood of Brooklyn, she’d entered the nunnery but then left before final vows but continued to love & serve Jesus, moved in with her parents and, in a theatrical costume shop, purchased the white habit & black veil of the Dominican order, & gigantic round wooden rosary beads that wrapped round her thick waist, descended along her right inner thigh, and over the knee to the ankle, the large crucifix coming to rest atop her shiny thick black shoe. Every summer morning around ten-thirty this nun-like woman passed Nino’s hedges on her way to Our Lady of Guadalupe church. Asweat, his knees dirty, Nino stopped his play and went by his hedges. He was a strapping boy, with broad shoulders, sinewy beautiful legs, wild crop of brown hair, eyes that turned hazel & green, and the longest lashes the women of that neighborhood had ever seen. But it was the combination of his full cheeks and his goodness and the fact that he never smiled that had prompted his adoptive mother Sofia Agliolio to name him Nino. To be a Nino meant to be good. To be a Nino meant to have full cheeks & be good & never smile. Goodness was embodied in the full cheeks. Full cheeks was the consequence of the goodness of a Nino’s soul. For Nino Agliolio was always at your disposal. He simonized cars, shoveled snow, tossed everyone’s refuse, carried heavy appliances such as refrigerators & ovens &dough mixers, high above garage roofs like an acrobat & strung clothes lines from bedroom windows to the tall metals poles rising from garages. Here's comes the nun! Nino’s beautiful eyes looked unblinkingly into the passing veiled woman’s hairy, sullen face, eyes turned down, thin hairy lips moving rapidly in silent prayer, forefinger & thumb working the looping hanging rosary beads. Nino looked so intently into this woman’s face that he left his eyes there. And these disembodied seeinging eyes had a way of hovering inches off the side of the cheek of all the characters Nino Agliolio would ever seek to resurrect. In this way he envisioned Mary Magdala that particular Sunday morning, and, now & then, Jesus too, whose faces were dark & hairy, eyes with deep shadows beneath. Jn 11:1-5 indicates that Mary of Magdala was not Mary sister of Lazarus, and, at the dinner in Bethany in Jesus’s honor following Lazarus’ resurrection, this Mary brought in a pound of pure nard, a costly ointment, and, while Jesus, Lazarus as well as Judas Iscariot sat a table, knelt at Jesus’ feet & anointed them. The nard’s pungent odor filled the adobe & mingled with the steaming spices, those at table smelling but not seeing, all the more powerful the negotiation of senses. Nor was Mary of Magdala the Mary of Jn 7:35-50, Mary the Sinner, who’d heard through her reliable network of information, horny men whom she abhorred, that a Pharisee had invited Jesus to a meal. She waited till the men were at table then entered carrying an alabaster jar of nard. Doors were always open to women of easy virtue, and once again the ointment’s ascerbic odor permeated th house. Then Mary the Sinner knelt behind Jesus, sobbing quietly to herself so that the men above could not hear, and her tears fell upon Jesus’ sandaled feet. Though he sensed that she was down around his his precious pale feet, they not stir, and Mary the Sinner watched her tears closely, how then lingered and played around each separate straight toe, in the crevices. Mary the Sinner wiped the tears with her long tangled black hair, then planted brief hard kisses on Jesus’ feet, tasting the salt & the sand, then anointed them with the nard.

The Putzmeister (3)

2008-08-18T10:36:00.001-04:00

Staccato cries of joy as long as her ecstasy endured, slow, and long, every time.
Nino Agliolio saw tears well up then begin to stream down her yourthful golden skin. He hovered above her in the missionary position because her leg was bent in a forty-five-degree angle and once, when she tried up there, she toppled over, slowly, like a tree cut down, and they laughed.
How much more communitymindedness than orgasming for one’s race as well as for oneself.
In the end he would hear her voice, smooth, velvety, deeply intoned, its timbre like the finest wine itself, and she overarticulated slightly and pressed into her words in compensation for her poor upbringing in Harlem 1930s.
“Amerrrrica…”
“America” was difficult for her to say.
Toni Cade Bambara who is one with the old trees of Fairmont Park & Nino Agliolio were together for one year and made love at least 364 times, and every time TCB got into bed first, naked, she smiled and opened her arms beckoning to him standing beside the bed to come into her youthful graceful arms, and he undressed and got in, and she embraced him. That one off night he lay still, unmoving, for some time, looking up at the ceiling.
She raised onto an elbow turned toward him.
“Is anything wrong?”

With her slender youthful back to her apartment door, wearing a T-shirt, TCB sits at her piano, practicing.
She from Harlem, he from Brooklyn—siblings.
She was a titan of her race, of its literature, film, society.
“I just want to live the life of an artist with some dignity,” she told Nino Agliolio, walking up Germantown Avenue.

He does not know where her ashes were scattered. She gained entrance to immortality from a hospice in the Philadelphia environs. Nino was not at her bedside, so, as a consequence, pictures himself walking to it, smiling. Her good friends helped her through to the end, one of her closest friend's sexual preference had baffled her, of no great importance.
He relaxes when he dances and has had a few.”
Nino saw streetcorner preachers descrying scriptures that condemned homosexuality more so than promiscuity.
Lev 20:13—“If there is a male who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman—”
Nino hurried by.
Featured amid the panoply of black stereotypes, he'd discovered, was more the giant male package.
Wilt Chamberlain's measured 20 inches.
It was Nino Agliolio's great Argentine lover Elsa Domingues who'd told him:
“Whatever the size, you still have to know what to do with it.”

THE PUTZMEISTER (2)

2008-08-17T11:33:00.002-04:00

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.

THE PUTZMEISTER MAN OF YEAR (1)

2008-08-16T11:39:00.000-04:00

P: Congratulations, Mr. Agliolio on being selected THE PUTZMEISTER Man of the Year. In the wake of Giacomo Casanova, Hugh Hefner & Wilt Chamberlain, you certainly have big shoes to fill.

What's in the air today of young Johnny Keats? asks Nino Agliolio of Middletown at the outset of each day, looking out from his second storey window or bounding outside and looking up and around at the old trees of Pike's Ravine in the hope that this particular day will produce something beautiful, some image, some idea, some personage that is supremely beautiful. 187 years of days since the passage of John Keats who was beautiful and, at the same time, tragic in himself, one with Nature, walking the English Lakes and Scottish Highlands with his knapsack over his shoulder, the silk lining that his betrothed Fanny Brawne sewed into his traveling cap scalding his head;spot of blood on his white sheet, standing bewildered in the middle of the room holding Blackwood Magazine's trashing of his poems, he went to Rome for his lungs, and languished in a room beside The Spanish Steps on which Nino Agliolio sits and watches young lovers and feels John Keats through the ancient mortar, attended by his faithful friend Joseph Severn, and died at the age of 26, and buried in The Protestant Cemetery with Fanny's last unopened letter on his great stilled breast.

P: Communitymindedness under dire straits may be that something beautiful today, the great tennis star Arthur Ashe dying of AIDS found the wherewithal to criticize sexually promiscuous athletes such as Wilt Chamberlain for reinforcing sexual stereotypes, recalling that, in his autobiography, Mr. Chamberlain claimed that he had sex with 20,000 women.

What's the difference between fucking the same person 20,000 times and, like Wilt Chamberlain, fucking 20,000 different persons once?

N.A.: Well. the wisest of us, given the opportunity, die for quite some time.

Penis as noose, cock-as-rope wound around some nondescript guy's neck, an everyman hung by the neck by his own cock--a drawing that the great Shel Silverstein gave to a cronie of the Playboy Mansion. Shel came and went from his Red Room til the day he died.

"O, gramps, you knew Shel Silverstein! Tell me about Shel Silverstein! I love Shel Silverstein!"

Chickens frying on sizzling grates attended by black men wearing white chef hats in a Sixth Avenue Manhattan window, Shel Silverstein & Nino Agliolio hustled up to Chicken Fried. Shel may have liked such a place because you carried your food yourself to your own table. No servers. Nor did he like banks and supermarkets.
"I'll take you to my personal banker, she works in an enclosed cubicle no one will see you, a heavy Italo-American woman married to an Arabian man."
Often the two friends sat at an outdoor table at the Caffe Sha-Sha on Hudson Street. Nino gestured toward the bank, transporting it right outside the caffe.
Shel hesitated but ultimately refused. When he arrived in a town, he cashed a check with a friend. He had good flush friends in major towns.
"I'll take you to the Banana Xpress over there on Carmine & Seventh, a cozy supermarket run by diligent, discreet---"
In addition to the Red Room, and a houseboat in Sausalito, and a house on Martha's Vineyard, Shel kept a railroad-type apartment in an attached house on Hudson Street, New York City, with a gray facade and white window trim upon whose doorstep in an unobtrusive corner Nino Agliolio laid a bouquet of flowers toward sundown of May 11, 1999, and a house on Jane Street in Key West, Florida, where, that morning, he had suffered a heart attack, as had Wilt Chamberlain, the impression is the two men had slept through their last night alone, upon awakening Shel grabbed his chest and attempted to breathe and then fell and, before hitting the ground, banged his beautiful head bald as a cue ball.
At Chicken Fried, eating their $6.95 fried chicken, this is what Shel Silverstein told Nino Agliolio. Shel spoke with a raspy voice, thick Chicago accent of open a's.
"I don't get all the hoopla--"
"What's that?"
Shel Silverstein said: "If you add up the orgasms an active male has throughout his entire lifetime, from first to last, do you know what it amounts to?"
"No."
"One weekend. That's it. An entire lifetime. One weekend."

THE PUTZMEISTER BOOK OF THE MONTH

2008-08-16T10:53:00.000-04:00

The Little Sailor
By Anthony Valerio

· Paperback: 81 pages
· Publisher: Bordighera Press
· ISBN-10: 1884419941
· $9
· amazon.com

“The Little Sailor is a literary gem from one of our foremost writers. Anthony Valerio’s evocative prose woos the characters across the page and into the hearts of its readers. His charming, eccentric, deeply moving women emerge from a world of distant memories with extraordinary force and passion—sensual, enticing, unforgettable—and the reader is mesmerized.”
--Edvige Giunta, author of Writing with an Accent: Contemporary Italian American Women Authors

About The Little Sailor, Anthony Valerio writes:

“I enjoyed writing The Little Sailor more than any of my other books. I had never recalled so early, with such pleasure. These are the beautiful women who raised me. Who taught me. Happy women and sad. Sainted women and scorned. Lovers appearing in the guise of goddess and sibyl. It’s a sensual, picaresque odyssey in which Antonio known as The Little Sailor seeks to hold onto his openness, his innocence, and thereby his ladies and their beauty. I have never loved anyone as much as the grocer’s daughter, Frances Palermo. To revisit and sustain this pure love, I believe I had to morph into the reformed arch criminal Kasper Gutman, known in elite crime circles as the Fat Man, and resume the hunt for the notorious statuette of a bird filled from beak to claw with fantastic riches—the Maltese Falcon.”

Anthony Valerio is the author of five books, including Lefty and the Button Men, Valentino and the Great Italians, and The Mediterranean Runs Through Brooklyn.
He resides in Connecticut and Rome.

“He’s just crazy enough. He knows characters. He gets in, tells his story and gets out. It’s what good writing should be.”
--Shel Silverstein

EXCERPT

Mrs. Tanzi

“Who is she?” Antonio asked his mother in her yellow kitchen after describing a big woman down on the street with a massive, rounded back, knotty calves and a small black hat with veil draped halfway down her round face with full cheeks. Every afternoon this woman crossed Bay Ridge Parkway and Sixteenth Avenue, cars and buses going in opposite directions, and then stepped over the sewer and onto the corner.
The Little Sailor happened to be standing by the hedges in front of the dentist’s office.
His slightly downcast eyes and the woman’s smiling eyes locked, and she said with a broad smile, continuing to walk, her eyes shining:
“Hi, Antonio. I’m Mrs. Tanzi.”
It could have been a chance meeting, so the next afternoon around the same time, from wherever Antonio was in the world on the street, he broke and went and stood by the hedges.
Here she comes! Crossing with the light, over the sewer and onto the corner.
No matter how hard the Little Sailor tried not to look up and meet her eyes and see her wide smiling face in the open beneath her veil, when she was about to pass, he looked up. She saw right through him.
“Hi, Antonio. I’m Mrs. Tanzi.”
Their encounters repeated day after day, with no one else around.
“That’s Mrs. Tanzi,” Margherita answered.
“I know. But who is she?”
“Mrs. Tanzi!”
Only Margherita and the flirtatious woman herself called her Mrs. Tanzi. And no one had ever seen Mr. Tanzi. Mrs. Tanzi was not married, there was no Mr. Tanzi. Her entire adult life only she and Margherita knew that she longed to have a handsome husband, Mr. Tanzi, and, in the boy she passed at the hedges, she saw the husband she would have, the child they could have. Margherita and Mrs. Tanzi consummated her desire by bestowing a husband upon her solely in name.