After I sneaked from the house to Waynesville without alerting my servants, I discovered the “bar” where Wolverine and Snarlson had installed themselves in a comfortable room at city hall, a building that was on the north side of a section of old Route 66 that passed through Waynesville.  Wolverine was smoking a Sherman cigarillo and wearing a bespoke suit and his coke hat, whilst clean-living Snarlson was enjoying a martini and had declined invites to smoke. To my astonished eyes, Wolverine had turned this civic office into a scene from Petronius’s Satyricon.  Naked young men and women were carrying drinks, cigarettes, foodstuffs, and other goodies.  People I did not know wandered booze-buzzed about the room.  I noticed that everybody was using the naked staff’s bodies as their napkins.  Greasy, dirtied fingers got wiped off on the young, naked giggling bodies.  It made a Pasolini or Fellini movie look staid.

A naked boy asked me what I wanted to drink.  I asked for an amaretto and cream that was extra heavy on the cream.  When I asked Wolverine about the naked waiters and waitresses, he had a ready answer.  The funder of the event thought it best if we ran it so that nobody sane would ever wish to admit that he had attended.  Nor would they be glad guests, I guessed, if the funder had photographic evidence of it, as more than a few of the guests looked rather like senior officers.  I asked Wolverine how he explained this debauched soiree to the guests.  “Please, Crockett, I tell them that Etonians are trained in the classics.  These doings help us feel at home wherever we might travel.  And, we even have a vomitorium.  It’s so totally Petronius.”

Snarlson seemed to be having a whale of time.  He had a naked, richly tattooed waitress sequestered in the corner of the room. He had the chutzpah to deliver her a sermon, as he dried his left hand on her backside, on how trashy a tattoo was on a woman.  I can still recall his silly screed.  It was unoriginal stuff.  What must her poor mother and father think of her tattoos?  Tucker would be so ashamed if he had a daughter with tattoos.  Ignoring that she was very working class, he wailed that people would never think she had any money or attended Mount Holyoke.  I had to control my desire to tell him he had Holyoke women all wrong.  These LUG (Lesbians Until Graduated) splatter tatts over their bodies to avenge themselves on their fathers and mothers for shipping them out to Holyoke after high school.  Snarlson’s sadism was being gratified, so he wasn’t too attentive to anything he was saying.  It was the usual stuff about the evils of abortion, the importance of traditional values, and (quite incredibly) the need to attend to the opinions of working people in West Virginia.  Again, I wondered how Tucker kept it out of his head that his beloved workers in WVA had lost their jobs.  The upside of unemployment was that it made it easier to attend militia meetings or join the Guard. 

When I went over to say hello to Snarlson and to rescue the waitress from him, he swayed a bit, then commented that I was even shorter than he remembered me being.  I told him his bow tie was lovely, which made him soften a bit.

We then walked over to Wolverine’s table.  Wolverine waved away the naked waiters and waitresses after using their hair to wipe off his paws.  He told me that he was so glad to see me and Snarlson.  It had been too long.  I wondered what Wolverine would want from us.