time, getting the lay of the land-not that old Marley doesn't know Schwartz's, 'cause she does like the back of her own hand. Every year Marley goes up to Schwartz's to buy a tennis racket before she goes out to the island. Old Marley's place has got bats, man, does old Marley's place have bats! The only thing for bats, says Marley, is a good tennis racket. By the end of the summer the racket needs restringing in the worst... but after the first year, the square violet that restrings rackets wouldn't touch the job. That's why every year in April old Marley goes up to Schwartz's and buys a new tennis racket.

This year, the year that old Marley found the old Spider up in Schwartz's the usual cat wasn't pushing tennis rackets. I mean every year this tennis racket peddling cat would keep a sharp blue eye peeled for old Marley gliding through the electric train department-and by the time that old Marley had arrived, he would have dug out the heaviest, I mean the heaviest, Doris Hart signature racket in the store. The year that old Marley found the Spider, she had stopped to cruise the frail who sells doll houses. Old Marley's great for blank stares, but interested. By the time old Marley came to and realized that she wasn't going to score and that it was mistake number eleven of the day, she was in full possession of an imitation red brick Georgian doll house. It was complete with a family of porcelain dolls and a nursemaid that were the smallest .. I mean the smallest. The frail had only delayed long enough to make the sale before cutting off to the manager's office in a practically genuine lesbian snit. The only trouble was that she wasn't. Old Marley drifted toward the tennis rackets. Man, I mean old Marley knows, just intuitively knows when to fade.

The Spider was standing in the middle of the tennis rackets. He was wearing dark glasses and a suit the color of pistachio ice cream . . . his hair was the color of champagne . . . his nails were the most rose. He was the sharpest, the quite ace. It was the dark glasses, I mean they were the most, the darkest dark glasses that old Marley had ever seen. Right then and there old Marley knew that this cat was more with it than all the rest of us put together. That this cat in the dark glasses had got the message. . .he was it man, he was the word.

Without bothering to pick up the Doris Hart signature racket or to look for her old blue-eyed pal, old Marley grabbed the dark glasses' hand and blew right down the stairs and out of the door in less time than no time. Even when she had dumped him into a cab, the Spider wasn't thrown, 'cause he had snatched a peep at himself in his compact mirror. then, man, he knew that he and the dark glasses were it. Just what he couldn't think, but he knew that he had some message . . . the message. It was only a matter of time..

Old Marley took the Spider up to the Vermouth Bottle's. She'd never seen the Vermouth Bottle, none of us had ever seen the Vermouth Bottle, but we all went to parties up at the Vermouth Bottle's quite a lot. The Vermouth Bottle always had sardines in the icebox and chocolate milk, old Marley had that lunchtime feeling that always seizes her at about eleven-thirty in the A.M. It turned out that all that the Spider ate was peanuts, fortunately when old Marley made off with him, the Spider had been carrying a briefcase full of peanuts and back issues of Charm... he was quite prepared, the most boy scout in every emergency. Marley had lunch and began getting the group together.

From that day, dark glasses were the thing . . . I mean we lived dark glasses, thought dark glasses, breathed dark glasses, MAN, we wore dark glasses until Garbo was nothing to the least of our multitude. In this early period, which lasted for six months, two members of the group were struck down on Fifth Avenue. One by a sightseeing bus . . . the other by a bagel truck. Another cat, Silly Bill, was