Palm Beach is the fountain of youth. Anyone in their 50s is the youngest person in the room this side of the grandchildren. Nowhere in that enclave of the filthy rich is reincarnation of youth more miraculous than the Leopard Lounge in the Chesterfield Hotel on Poinsetta Avenue. Palm Beach has trails, vias, lanes, roads, avenue, drives, ways, parks, and boulevards, but not a single street to avoid anyone accusing upward striving women and men of street walking.
Palm Beach looks so good that a visitor might think that the beach resort was heaven on Earth, however hell is simply of question of handing the keys of a rental car to the valet at several salubrious bars. The stools are filled with the hunted and the hunters. The age of these sinners is well beyond the realm of decency. 60s and 70s and 80s. Their libidos on fire. Fine liquor fuled the illusion of youth in the mirrors. It's a lively scene evoking the sentiment of Oscar Wilde's quote about fox hunting.
"The unspeakable chasing the uneatable."
I'm down here on business. A jewelry show. Our hotel is the Chesterfield and its Leopard Lounge is renown as a rendezvous for these historic harpies and pussy hounds. My second-floor room is above the bar. At night the music from the two-piece band faintly seeped through the floor as a siren call and the other night I descended via the stairs to the patio, where my boss, Richie Boy, was sitting with his wife and our co-worker. They had been dancing in the lounge.
"It's a crazy scene in there." Richie Boy loved the night life. His wife loved her Richie Boy happy. He ordered wine, but started to explain about a fat woman in her 80s trying to pick him up. Before he could fully describe her, the automatic doors opened and an aged couple exited from the bar.
"There she is," Richie Boy's wife whispered with discretion. The denizens of the bar had big ears.
The man was in his 70s. His tie was askew. Sweat soiled his jacket. The blonde octogenarian wore a silk sheath over her fireplug body. They were headed for the valet, however the man had second thoughts watching his conquest waddle across the patio.
"I'm out." His thin pate of hair was dyed the color of persimmon. "You need to call a cab."
"Taxi." The woman's eyes swam in their sockets like stoned goldfish and she slurred, "I thought we were going to have a good time."
"Not tonight." The man was drunk but not a fool, however his rejection sapped the wobbly woman of her last reserves and she swooned from the forces of gravity. Her obese body crashed through the tables and hit the bricks like a hippo losing its balance. pulling on her obese body. Richie Boy and I helped her to her feet only to have her rerun the collapse with an increasingly danger trajectory across the patio. The third time I lifted her by myself and said the same thing her date had said two minutes earlier.
"I'm out and you're on your own."
Richie Boy, his wife, our co-worker and I fled the patio for our rooms. It had been a long day. Up in my room I took a shower and then looked for my wallet. I couldn't find it and remembered the blonde woman's arms around my back.
"That bitch." I suspected her of faking the drunkenness to rip off a good Samaritan. I ran downstairs. She was gone. I said nothing to the desk clerk, thinking that a fool I had been to help a stranger.
"Serves you right."
I entered my room and spotted my wallet on the floor.
The woman was no thief and I was no fool, although any man around the Leopard Lounge is a fool past midnight and happy to be a fool too.
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