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Monday 11 August 2014

PEPITA BUONAPITTA RIDES THE SOUL-TRAIN

"Shit! Shit! SHIT!" she screamed, and slammed the taxi's door behind her.


This is how we meet the Right Honourable May Huffingdon-Smythe. You must forgive her. 
May is usually very polite. Painfully correct and polite, in fact, but this night we really must forgive her, because this was a watershed evening, one of those moments that transform a life.


The evening that May Huffingdon-Smythe's life changed she was dead drunk. "Drunk as a skunk", she might have rhymed, if she'd been halfway sober. May was that rare and precious creature: a usually sober poet,which may have been why, she was also a failed poet.

May staggered into her genteelly dilapidated Boston brownstone and up the charmingly rickety stairs, and kicked open her bedroom door. She tottered in, switched on her desk-lamp and stepped off the dizzy silver gilt-sandals that had been burning welts into her narrow feet for the last four hours.

"My mouth tastes like shit." May was surprised to hear her own voice. "SHIT!" Actually she said "sheeeth".

"I feel like shit." she paused with a drunks devotion to sincerity, "Because...My life IS shit." She walked to the gilt-edged mirror off the door to her bathroom and peered into the murky depths.

"And tonight, I even look like shit. Drunken shit. Pissed manure. Urine-soaked ordure."
She grabbed at the door of the wall-closet to steady herself against the onslaught of so much honesty.

"Listen to yourself! Do you see why you don't sell one single fucking book? Who wants to read that pretentious pompous pedantic poetic CRAP?" She sobbed a hic. "Only equally pretentious pompous pedantic academic PRICKS." Tears coursed down her delicately patrician features.

"SHIT! I am drunk. I am also a disgusting envious SHIT. Repulsive. I am consumed by jealousy because some stupid talentless bitch wrote a SHITTY novel about fucking and is selling MILLIONS. And hey! I can write shit too! I can write better shit than anyone I know. I am the Queen of Shit!" She paused. "I think i may be overdoing this honesty thing."

May faced herself in the mirror, wiped at the tears spreading a tidal mark of Kohl down her porcelain cheeks, and essayed her elegant trademark-smile. Someone had once told her she looked like a young Grace Kelly. And she did. A Grace Kelly with the faint traces of that unfortunate Irish-peasant ancestry bred out of her DNA. Grace Kelly without a hint of that warm sensuality...

"I cannot write sexy because I am not sexy." A fresh wash of tears welled up from her amber-brown eyes, and an unfortunate drip of liquid glistened on the end of her elegantly sculpted nose. "I am just not sexy. But I can write SHIT."

And so, of course, May decided there and then that she was going to write the all-time Great American Cross-Over Porn Novel of all time. And she was going to do it that very night.

MC

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