HASHISH BEETLES

Excerpt from a book I am writing called Apricocks & Aphrodisiacs, with a subtitle of “Sexual Eating.” Apricocks is an old English word for apricots, themselves curiously suggestive when looked at from the right angle.

Beetles

Whenever my father got together with his parents, I would hear snatches of hushed conversation about the scandalous actions of a member who was dead to the family but very much alive in New Orleans’s French Quarter. I was intrigued and determined to find out more. Finally, one year my father gave in to my constant nagging and we went to visit my great uncle Billy.

He received us in a huge darkened living room of a vast French Quarter apartment.

An elegant old man dressed in a white suit, holding an ebony and silver cane, and wearing the thin white leather gloves in which he had once been presented at the Court of St. James. I immediately, even at the age of ten, understood: a rather Robert de Montesquieu with white hair.

We adored each other at first sight.