A Gigolo's Tale

In my previous post, about the fake names used to spam me, I mentioned liking the name Tad Bacon, and thinking it sounded like the name of a gigolo, or a character from a John Water's movie. Imagine my surprise then, when I got an email from a real Tad Bacon, a scientist, not the hoped-for gigolo, but that's probably just as well.

There is a back-story to my affection for the name Tad, and since it's Saturday, and I'm avoiding the inevitable school work, I don't mind spinning a tale.

Several years ago I moved back to California after years spent on the East coast. While essentially rebuilding my life from the ground up, I went through a series of mishaps and tragedies that would have made me an excellent candidate for that old '50s TV show, Queen for a Day, where the woman with the most compelling sob story wins a washing machine, and is wrapped in an ermine-lined red robe with trailing train, seated on a throne and crowned with a lopsided tiara, sobbing all the while.

There was cancer in the family, a hellish control-freak boss who re-named me to his liking on my first day at work, breaking up with a sweet-but-hopelessly-prodigal boyfriend, renting a room from a pathologically needy, soul-sucking egotist I dubbed 'Worm-Woman', plus many, many other pranks on the part of what seemed like my personal demon, culminating in my car, on long-term loan from a step-sister, being stolen, then found driven into a telephone pole and inexplicably filled with thousands of used golf balls.

All through this series of plagues, I was emailing my best friend in Boston, and when she got news of the stolen car, she sent me back something roughly like this:

"OK, I get it now. You're sitting under a palm tree, nightingales singing in the branches, soft tropical breezes wafting by. A scantily-clad, painfully buff waiter appears, to offer you, oh so solicitously, on a silver tray, a capsule of ecstasy. You brush him away. You have no time for this now. You need to write another chapter in the story of your life, 'CAUSE YOU MUST BE MAKING THIS SHIT UP! GIRL, NO ONE GETS THEIR CAR STOLEN AND THEN GETS THE F***ER BACK BEFORE THEY BURN IT AND YOU COLLECT THE INSURANCE MONEY!"

Taken with the imagery, I quickly wrote back:

"You clever thing. You've seen through my little ruse. (Oh Tad, dear, bring me a little drinkie, there's a good boy.) Such a dear. I don't know what I'd do without him. He used to be one of my bearers, right front position, but the sedan chair was terribly heavy, and he was such a sensitive boy, so when he developed that horrible allergy to nightingales, I thought he'd be so much more useful around the house anyway. He's now my social secretary and I've come to rely on him for so many little details of everyday life, you see. "

Thus Tad the gigolo was born. Email mentions of him and my enviable lifestyle got more and more elaborate, and began to spread, as my sister and other friends were brought into the collective fantasy. One family friend, a very stylish, dandified gay man who makes his living as a society jeweler, began inviting Tad to visit him, and got so insistent, even after I protested that I simply couldn't spare him, that he actually broke off communication with me. I felt bad, but as I had explained to him, Tad was just so busy closing up the house for the season, wrapping linens in tissue, polishing silver, putting the dust covers over all the furniture and chandeliers, leaving instructions for the groundsmen and grooms, and similar tasks that just must be seen to. You'd think he would have been more understanding under the circumstances. Oh well, que sera, sera, as they say.

Eventually my friends tired of hearing about my little domestic arrangements, and who can blame them? I think there may have been a hint of envy, but I like to keep a positive outlook so I don't dwell on such unpleasant thoughts, preferring an attitude of noblesse obligee. (Tad, be a darling and fetch me my riding crop, would you? And have the chair brought to the front gate. I'm going to pay some morning visits. Thank you dear, dear boy.)