Saloon Society: The diary of a year Beyond Aspirin

The Permanent Residents of Saloon Society live three martinis closer to the moon than the rest of us. They arrive on the scene like bursts of laughter —Lou the Ladies Man, Maggie Singleton, Perlman Pace, Big Mary, horn-rimmed men, pretty girls like showers of confetti, poets, Spanish waiters, sexual engineers, bustups, runaways, Ben Benton, A. E. Kugelman, Bill Manville. Theirs is an almost possible world, an Up world, the world of Greenwich Village—that seacoast of Bohemia which remains a sun-battered, open, inviting strip despite the invasion, generation after generation, of do-gooders, little theaters, espresso drinkers, tourists, nuts, sandal wearers, and, most recently, the poor Beats. Saloon Society still stages eight-day parties, uses kitchens for ash trays, fights the Sunday neurosis, and pokes fun at psychoanalysts, crusaders, rent payers, and citizens. The members of Saloon Society live in a world where there is no tomorrow, where the jugs of bourbon pour like sunshine, where the cigarette smoke is thick as dreams, where one rockets through the heightened moments of life.