My Own Olympus

Naturally, once Caligula found out Manhattan had an “Olympic Tower,” he simply had to have one of its converted condos on the 51st floor. Even the fact that a filthy Greek like Aristotle (and I was never one for scholastics, either) Onassis was one of the driving forces behind this behemoth’s construction could not stanch my gliterati greed for a perch in the opulent roost. That I could shit out my window onto St. Patrick’s cathedral was too much to pass up: feces-flavored icing on the anti-monotheistic fungus cake!

Worship in my ugly, modernist shadow, Christ-humping Irish scum!

Of course, I did have to suffer a shade of buyer’s remorse. For where in my unit was the vomitorium whereupon we purge between meal courses? Surely no hedonist’s home is complete without it. The landlord calmly explained that no such vomitorium as I described it ever really existed, not even when I was Caesar of Rome—the idea was nothing but pure misconception, he said. I took the opportunity of his open mouth to deliberately regurgitate a half-digested duck confit entree into his face to make a point, and bid him to clean up the resulting mess, for as Seneca writes: Cum ad cenandum discubuimus, alius sputa deterget, alius reliquias temulentorum [toro] subditus colligit — “When we recline at a banquet, one [slave] wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath [the table], collects the leavings of the drunks.”

And though I did not drool, I was supremely hammered at the time, and most of my “leavings” did end up under a Mies van de Rohe glass coffee table. Luckily or not, my landlord happened to be a rare emetophiliac, which meant he found the whole barfing display erotic and arousing.

I can’t say I found the sight of duck goo and bile in his mustache quite as enticing, even after licking some off.

—Caligula