Claude La Badarian

I lived in New York City for a few years at the beginning of the millennium and one of my fondest memories is of a mysterious pseudonymous column that ran in the free weekly pulp newspaper The New York Press entitled “Dining Late with Claude La Badarian.”

Twenty years later, I still laugh when I think about it.

The author was William Monahan (announced only in the first letter); the full serial of 13 letters was published weekly in volume 14, issues 25 to 37, between June and September 2001. 

Finding copies online was not easy. It took a lot of digging on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. So, to help preserve this absolute gem of ephemeral literature, I’ve assembled all the letters here, presented in the original order. Enjoy! Pirates ahoy!

Dining Late with Claude La Badarian – by Claude La Badarian

The Last Supper

Being eventually a PROPOSAL for a column called DINING LATE WITH CLAUDE LA BADARIAN, By Claude La Badarian

EXCLUSIVE TO THE ARISTOCRAT MAGAZINE UNTIL 6 PM

Dear Henry,

Thank you for your great decency to me at lunch and for your invitation to “pitch some ideas.” You know that I have been feeling quite marginal these days, and to feel still wanted is a great blessing even if nothing comes of it and one is not, in fact, wanted at all. I have been feeling unsocialized lately. I spit a bit when I talk, I am deaf in restaurants, unable to distinguish between voices and the clatter of cutlery, and since I refused to stop smoking after my wisdom teeth were pulled (things were very tense at home) I now have at least one case of “dry socket” which gives me breath like something emitted from a gangrenous wound.

Please don’t say that I do not have bad breath: I saw you recoil. Several times. Also, I’ve gotten, as you noticed, hugely, hugely, overweight during my “exile” from New York City–an exile I used to classify as Petrarchan, Machiavellian even, as if I had fallen afoul of a faction. Now is not the time, as we have before, to discuss your concept of “paranoia” versus my concept of “hyperconsciousness” (in Vendler’s sense) as the thing that makes us writers: I will accept your suggestion that I am, or have been, slightly “paranoid,” insofar as that term applies to Geniuses who are actually hyperconscious as well as, rounding to the point, quite broke.

I suggested at lunch, laughing halitotically, that I would be spending the summer “barging in France.” This is not the case. Today it turned out that SECOND NOVEL, which, as you know, was extremely well reviewed, has presented the worst balance sheet since the entire first edition of At Swim Two-Birds was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. This is no time to go into what excrement my publishers happen to be–the cover which would scare a cat off a fishwagon, the misapprehension that the book was a space-opera, the publicist who was sending out her resume as we “launched,” etc.–I must deal, and deal frankly, with the fact that unless I have a job “soonest,” as the agents say, at the bottoms of their communiques (also thanking you in advance for something you’re not going to do, and which they have no power to make you do), I am very likely going to lose my wife, to whom I had suggested for six months (possibly disingenuously: I am not fucking perfect: we must take domestic tranquillity where we can, especially in the La Badarian house) that we’d be seeing at least $57,000 in the first royalty period.

Despite despair and body-image problems I find that I must spring into action and prostitute myself instantly, or, as an agent would say, instanter, and I have to tell you frankly, Henry, that a vaporous promise of freelance work is not going to save the La Badarian marriage at this particular juncture, especially considering the bills that I have run up while expecting $57,000–only to find myself in the hole for $34,296.23. My wife is a very innocent woman with no time for Art, having very little understanding of it, nor its occasional difficulties, and you could show her genius-class reviews all day and she would still think that you were, say, a common, flatulent drunkard who was destroying your family.

Things are not going well. I am poor, obese, quite shitfaced most of the time, my doctor has stopped my Valium on the ridiculous excuse that I was “abusing” them rather than constantly knocking them down the drain and needing refills, and despite my early sexual career, with its Errol Flynn proportions (have I showed you my college ID? I used to do that to show people that there was still a human being in this flagrant deathsuit of obscene flesh), my libido, so central to my sense of well-being and thus the Creative Process (I am like Picasso in this), has flagged disastrously. When able to sleep in the same bed with a naked woman on birth control pills (none of these things are happening these days, Henry) I am open to gusts of opportunity, but I am incapable of arranging sex (much less getting on a condom before I think of money again) and thus have had no sex at all. Mei-Mei’s ex-husband, a dry-cleaner, has been circling around making displays of solvency. Things are desperate here.

I know I told you the other day that I would be barging in France (probably without the barge, you thought, as I crammed the cheesecake into my face at Pastis) and was likely to be unavailable for so much as a book review until September, and though I know you weren’t even serious about the book review, the La Badarian stock being as low as it is these days, I am pleading to you, before God, to give me a contributing editorship before sundown. I’ll do anything. I’ll give you half the money back, under the table. This must happen in the industry. If it doesn’t, it’s almost our job to bring corruption to the surface where it belongs. I’ll do anything, Henry. I’ll work in the office, I’ll work out of the office, I’ll do heds and deks as fucking piecework, but I need a contract by today and a business card by Monday or I’m a dead man.

Not least among my concerns is that I certainly can’t find myself without a wife (even this one) just before Luther publishes his memoir, not only revealing that I was once as gay as French springtime, but undoubtedly featuring the scene in which I crawled on the floor begging him to not let me die alone. You see my concerns. Call these concerns “paranoid” if you will. There comes a time in every writer’s life when he realizes that he has a biography rather than a life. Some of us can delay this disastrous cognition until the Pulitzer, or the Lethe of senility; but I’ve been worried since the age of sixteen about unborn people wondering about what “lay behind” my poems, and where I was living, and whose purse I was taking pills out of, and so forth. Paranoids, Henry, have real biographers–especially when, like me, Claude La Badarian, they’re massive polymathic geniuses.

You have to understand, as you probably do, that despite my two Ivy degrees, the reading-glasses I wear on a chain in tasteful acceptance of middle age, and my accent, which, like yours, shapes its course toward the Mid-Atlantic when I’m loaded, that I come from a respectable family. There were no drunkards falling off sailboats in the La Badarian genepool, Henry, nor anybody writing novels. Olives and autonomy are hard for me, Henry: the minute I washed up on the seacoast of Bohemia and realized that people were looking at me, I wished I was a small-town lawyer, or dead: I get hives when I’m in the paper for any reason and I had, rather famously, a complete breakdown when the publisher of SECOND NOVEL (still the best debut-novel title I’ve ever heard of) asked me to write a thing called “In His Own Words” for the publicity packet. Writing about myself without saying “genius” was like having fifteen minutes to appeal my own death penalty without using vowels. I couldn’t do it. I ended up in the hospital.

Let us turn to practicals. I am well aware that our lunch was a “mercy lunch”–in better days I gave them myself–but we did have a lunch and we did pretend that you had money and were going to give it to me…so let us continue our pretense. Let us pretend that your Question, What could you do for the magazine? was serious. Well, I will tell you what I could do for the magazine. That is, apart from making it fucking readable. What you need at the magazine–what you need–from my position as the shrewd, consummate magazine professional I have been, as you know, in my spare time–is a dining column. I don’t know how to “pitch” it except as a dining column written by me. Me, Claude La Badarian, with my special insights, waspish yet fair, into the human heart. I will go to a restaurant, Henry, and sitting there, across from me, will be a Famous Person, up close and personal, tete a tete… DINING LATE WITH CLAUDE LA BADARIAN. That’s all we need: that and (as you are perhaps, Henry, beginning to realize) a tremendously large expense account: Talent takes care of the rest–as I once tried to tell you while slamming your head into a curbstone outside the Royalton that night, early in your rise to power, when you bought all that bad coke from your usual dealer and were impotent with a transsexual prostitute. Strangely enough, Henry, “LaDonna”’s beeper number is still active after two years, and her career has not been prospering, possibly owing to open sores which would look fantastic on the cover of the Post. She is completely psychotic and still looking for a break as an actress.

Dining Late with Claude La Badarian. Imagine it, Henry: I’ll have a dinner with famous actresses and describe the oceanic sexual tensions after I show them my old college ID… We will have film stars, world leaders, the movers and shakers, with food on their faces saying stupid shit after a number of cocktails. Newsbreaks? Rely on them. That’s what alcohol is for, as you know better than anyone. What people want to know about celebrities are the normal things, the things that humanize them. How they eat, what they eat, what they say while they are eating…that’s what The Reader wants. And what The Reader wants more than anything, insofar as we, at this point, give a fuck what the reader wants, are my special insights into the human character, insights made while breaking bread, and written out (among my books, after my return to Saugerties with a paycheck) with that Renaissance exuberance which I have so famously, yet so unrequitedly, brought to 21st Century Prose… You know that Coleridge isn’t the last man to have read everything. I am. It doesn’t cut much ice at home these days, I have to tell you. Whatever possessed me to marry an illiterate with “security issues” even well beyond the first-generation Cantonese norm I have no idea, but I did, and now it’s all this.

If you can’t help me out, Henry, the next time you break bread–do it in memory of me, for I will be gone. Remember, though, that before I go, before I accept martyrdom’s exquisite crown and have my wife throwing the rest of my shit at me in a grand finale transacted in full view of the neighbors in the trailerpark, I’ll tell everybody in the fucking world that it was you that shopped out the boss of your magazine group to Newsweek as a “downmarket whore” while she was still on the “editorial side,” as we say, “helming” British Essentia.

This is hardball, I know, and the mercy lunch was supposed to fix me, like a parking ticket. But I have four children, only one of them mine (if that), I have nowhere else to go, and two weeks ago the wife’s ex pulled up in a new Lexus (leased, but you can do such things if you have a job) to take his daughters to the fucking Vineyard at the same time as I was clumsily concealing a delinquent telephone bill. If you were man you would have job! Why I sleep with you if you have no money? Oh big famous man all you are is fat pig. I should sleep with garbageman. And so forth. I came in from the bar two nights ago to find my clothes neatly packed in trash bags, after having been thoughtfully cut into strips. I slept in a small shed outside the house and in the early hours, wandering out to take a piss, was sprayed by a skunk, a member–as I am, very nearly–of the animal kingdom. When I banged piteously on the door my wife threw chili sauce into my eyes. I spent last night under an overturned toddler pool, without cigarettes. Tonight I am back at home, but only because I came through a window, terrifying the babysitter, after the wife went to Bingo with her ex.

There is a less-than-relaxing piece by Dowland on the NPR station; the moon rides high over the Catskills, where I have lived, Henry, in an aluminum hut set on cinder blocks; I have just tapped myself a refreshing glass of boxed Chablis; it’s just past two in the morning, one of the babies is screaming, possibly from meningitis for all I fucking know; you have child porn on your hard drive; I want a company card, a contributing editorship, a column called DINING LATE WITH CLAUDE LA BADARIAN, a Town Car to run me into Manhattan for my appointments with the Great, and an advance of $25,000 against a salary which should not be less than $175,000; you will send a bouquet to my wife with a card on it saying “Congratulations on your husband’s new job”; you will explain to the press that you were very lucky to get me before The New Yorker did; and you have until the close of fucking business tomorrow. “Editor at Large” would be nice, but I can accept no duties that would interfere with my attempt to reconstitute my ongoing novel from the shreds which I found blowing around the neighborhood the other day.

With congratulations on your assumption of the “helm” at The Aristocrat, and expecting to hear from you soonest,

Yours,

Claude La Badarian

Future Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Dear Henry,

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. “$500 a week, no title, take it or leave it” is not precisely the reaction I had in mind, but $500 a week is good–positively ducal–money up here in the hinterlands, the land of clove and kaat, where Claude La Badarian, Unrequited Genius, has been spending his days. If one rules out certain antique dealers beaten savagely by rent-boys (on quiet nights you can hear the cries of Take my wallet and Please don’t kill me echoing across Ulster County), I am the best catch in Saugerties. In better days, which you well remember, Henry, I have incinerated as much as $2000 a day in New York City without buying anything tangible. Up here, five large a week is as good as a Guggenheim, and I am already making headway on Hyperconsciousness: A Memoir, which I must begin (because it is the way La Badarian began) with a recollection of a yellow kitchen, although Henry Adams (you don’t know who that is, Henry–for that matter neither did Henry Adams–that’s the whole point of the fucking document) had the discourtesy to begin his own backbreaking load of personal garbage with precisely the same recollection. I have toyed, confrontationally, with The Education of Claude La Badarian (my agent doesn’t like it). Anyway, I thank you very much for striking this deal. You have, against your will, done a great service to Art.

Mei-Mei is too much of a newcomer to these shores to trust any piece of paper without having it read, first, by another grasping, paranoid immigrant–she certainly doesn’t trust me to construe any document–on being summonsed by the student loan people, I told her, waving the blue flimsy, that I had yet again won a major literary award–she took The Aristocrat contract (which I thank you for) over to her contract-magus and America-expert, the local Asian grocer, an inscrutable noodle-selling swindler wearing a papa-san hat. Koreans are the closest she can come to her own people here in Saugerties: the usual boundaries one finds among Orientals have come down: no tickee no fuckee is screamed, from 4WD vehicles predating the bourgeois vogue for them, at anyone hailing from east of Suez. My incredibly bigoted wife, in these stressful circumstances, finds herself embracing Koreans, the unspeakables of the East. This fiscal wizard and dealer in contraband sexual tonics (bear paws, gorilla prostate, phials of unicorn sperm, powdered midget, you name it) quizzed at the pages for three hours and finally pronounced the contract, however he phrased it (which defeats the imagination), kosher. Mei returned looking guardedly ready to let me stay in the house.

They no have to print you article and they pay you 500 dollar,said Mei, paraphrasing information downloaded from Univac the Swindler, with his bird-cage hat. That is precisely the case, I replied, seigneurially, with that manner, and, when loaded, accent, that I share with cinema’s Peter O’Toole. Upon a further La Badarian promise of sobriety (right) and an intensification of my remunerative freelancing for The New Yorker under my pseudonyms Adam Gopnik & etc., Mei not only had sex with me (La Badarian, at first stunned, rose to the occasion and administered a pounding which nearly knocked the trailer home off its bricks, alerting neighbors to yet another earnings-related Reconciliation), but broke into her ogre’s hoard of cash (funny that I never thought of the loose board in the bathroom) and within three days moved the La Badarian menage, with suspect efficiency (it is fairly obvious that had I not “come through” as a “man,” rather she had intended to make this move with her now doleful monoglot “ex,” to whom I joyously gave the finger this morning) into a small ranch house of repellent green color, with a scurfy lawn behind a chain-fence, in what one might call a “wigga” neighborhood near the Saugerties funpark. Children in incredibly large pants loaf in the streets, pretending to be insolvent Negroes. The insectile whizzing of miniature Formula One cars and the crackle of rimfire cartridges (it sounds like fucking Isandlhwana over there, Henry) has proved, strangely, to be an invaluable aid to literary composition. Claude La Badarian, in his new “office” in the basement, is working like never before.

The medici created and destroyed me, wrote Art’s Leonardo. Usually, Henry, this is parsed as the Medici–that is, Lorenzo, Cosimo, etc.–but Leonardo, in addition to writing backwards, like the self-concealing old asspilot he was (I’m sure, Henry, that you can sympathize: the rest of us sympathize with the droughty Gretchen, in her catastrophic hats), was shifty in his use of Capitals, and some lunatics consider it possible that he meant that “the doctors,” rather than his Medici patrons, had both created and destroyed him. No man in the 15th century would think he had been created by “doctors”: doctors then, even more than they do today (in our time and in this country merely because the Hippocratic Oath is viewed as inconsonant with proper resource-management), specialized in killing people. Leonardo was talking, Henry, about Patronage, a thing of which I find myself, finally, after one burst of desperation, in possession. The brass ring is finally in the hand of Claude La Badarian.

Do I feel guilty? Do I worry that you think that blackmailing asshole and search your philosophy for a justification for murder? No, Henry. As all the world has known (except for shy, decent Claude La Badarian, attempting for so many years to operate as a gentleman on the Manhattan Serengeti), we must take what we can where we can and as we can. From now on, Henry, the man who stands between me and what I want had better grab his hairpiece if he wants anything left of him when Claude La Badarian is finished fucking him. The only good thing that happened to me in six years in Manhattan is that I didn’t manage to start a “webzine.” Call me the canary in the coal mine, Henry–many do–but when I looked at that office in the Flatiron Building, in the company of a golf-pantsed, coke-snorting investor who was perfectly prepared to give me 200 a year to edit a “startup” (though, owing to calumnies, I was his second choice), I was aware of something shouting, “Get out!” like Jody the Pig in The Amityville Horror. Call it a cogent decision not to enmesh myself in a doomed business–call it a nervous breakdown–call it both, and I’ll call you unusually perceptive–but in either case, the La Badarian name swerved clear of disaster in that case. That, and the successful blackmailing, are the only two good things that have happened to me in two decades of being the greatest American Writer, apart from accidentally winning the Entwhistle Prize for Translation (and how ironic that was) when I was doing the Front of the Book for Media’s Penny, at Rogue. God, why was I ever in Magazines? A man like you has nowhere else to go. Personally I must have been on drugs. And I was, when I could get them.

The La Badarian day has been excellent. The office is dampish, and contains dangling spiders, who appear to be under the (fatal) impression that I have violated their space. There is a possibility of mice. Yet all my books are in place for once: I am the sovereign of my realm: I have ritually unloaded the revolver I so recently crammed against my palate (you cannot revise a 1780-page book whilst living in a church shelter, with Franciscans barking at you about “substance abuse” and so forth), and got on with my masterpiece. I must sign off: Mei-Mei, just home from her part-time job at the DMV (she cannot speak English–where else would she work?), wishes to send me out for “some beers.” This is always a good sign at the La Badarian household: it means I’m going to get some. After two beers, my wife is anybody’s, even mine.

Yours,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: Disaster, As Is Usual in Cases of Hubris

Marital Crisis In Saugerties

[TO MR. ELMORE CHONG, 1101 DUKE ELLINGTON BLVD, KINGSTON, NY]

A rest area in Connecticut

Sir–I have received your letter. To the vague & general charge contained in it I must naturally be at a loss how to answer–I shall therefore confine myself to the tangible act which you are pleased to allege as one of the motives for your present proposition. Lady La Badarian received no “dismissal” from my house in the sense your unsavory, slopehead amanuensis has attached to the word–she left Saugerties by medical advice, after the house became infested by Fleas to which she is highly allergic–she parted from me in apparent–and on my part–real harmony. It was only after this period that I suggested to her the expedience of residence with you and Mrs. Chong–owing to the embarrassment of my present circumstances–viz–the seizure of my bank account by the IRS–an organization with which you have some knowledge, having swindled them for years in your capacity as proprietor of the Luau Dragon. I am in a Circumstance in which I am forced contractually to continue my Work for The Aristocrat Magazine, irrespective of being paid for it–I cannot afford a lawyer–the property not spirited to your house by my wife’s brothers–one of whom assaulted me, screaming something in Chinese–when I answered the door in my least-attractive bathrobe–has been seized by persons whom I can only think–owing to a thorough grounding in genius-Biography–to call bailiffs. Your calling me a “round-eye,” “son of a bitch,” “drunk,” & etc is not going to help us think our way out of this disastrous Situation–even if we were disposed to view it as a disaster–and–beyond that–as one which we entirely wished to Repair.–I am ignorant of any “Maltreatment” of your daughter on my part–indeed–to any observer–it is I who have been maltreated–often physically–the police have come twice–for no other reason than not being able to–as I admit–support–indulge–ratify–much less enhance–her Materiality–which I must–and you will forgive me for this–characterize as grotesque. It is true that women with children become Beasts–and forgivably so–and it is much in Nature that they should begin to view men as Wallets, Dromedaries, & etc, which may be exchanged for Another should the opportunity present itself before the loss of Sexual Desirability. We accept this, being Men of the World–I have met your wife–and we must do the best we can with the Tools with which we are left at the moment of Disaster. As to your question as to what money I can send to support “my” children–only one of whom is mine–as you, for your part, shell out possibly a dollar a day for rice and fish-paste to feed the five of them–a dollar which–I remind you–you have probably concealed from the authorities–I can send no money–I have none–and as for the Camper you have demanded on behalf of my wife–that vehicle would have long since been Impounded had it not–as it happened–been in the shop–owing to a transmission problem–and had I not used an extra Key to recover this vehicle from the Yard where it was being held against payment of the Bill I should at present have no Residence whatsoever–much less one with a Stove which allows me sometimes to have hot food.–I will not send my wife–or you–this vehicle–in which I am endeavouring to make my escape–to Canada–and in which I am obligated to live. To be perfectly honest–though you raise, in your old-world way, the frightful specter of eventual Reconciliation–I have been down that road before–& realized this morning–waking up in a Camper–and urinating into a Jug–before going into a McDonald’s (staffed by loafing exotics not so crafty as the people of the Celestial Empire) to buy a coffee with some of the $116 dollars I realized from the sale of what I salvaged from my library–that I have never been happier in my life.–This is something we–or I–must Consider. Your gift of a flea-ridden Shar Pei–on one of your barbarous holidays–and then the subsequent deluge of Events–has Liberated me–in a Heraclitan way–which is to say–via Hazard–from a situation–and a marriage–which I can only describe as Monstrous. Though Capable of guilt–I have always tried to do my best–and to add to my lustre as a Husband–and I think this must be Biological, for I can think of no reason why I should endeavour to please your Daughter–much less live with her–nor for that matter can I understand why I have not had her Arrested–for acts of Violence against my person–many of them occurring–as in the case of her “boxer’s fracture” of the hand–when I was asleep–I must confess myself well pleased to be rid of your Daughter. As for the children–the three spawned by the dry cleaner are Bitches–and my own daughter–this is not determined–has been trained to regard me–and doubtless shall always regard me–Claude La Badarian–as a farting Masterpiece of Sloth. I will miss none of them–and I will not weep for the lost chance of a Paradisiacal Marriage–when it is obvious that the only Component lacking–to keep your daughter in a state of Philosophy–let alone ecstasy–is–and has always been–Money. She thinks that a penis is a lever one grabs when one wants Money. I have been to your house, Sir: the rose does not blow, to be poetical, too far from the trellice. I am an Artist–you do not know what one is–and I must shape my own Course through the world. I will in no way reveal to you my Location–you have promised to “help me” before–and the result has been in one instance public Embarrassment–the removal to the Hospital–when I was merely having trouble with a section of SECOND NOVEL and hadn’t slept in six days–and in the other case–a Beating. Nor, Sir, will I under any circumstance return to New York State, as I am Wanted there–not only for the things you are aware of–but also for beheading–in a delusion of Universe-mastery–an animal which had ravaged my Adirondack chair with its stinking Excrements–and which happened to belong to the Saugerties Chief of Police. I can not “come and get” my wife–I do not wish to–and as for your promise to “punish” me I can only say “Do your worst”–failing to add–more because of haste than for any lingering respect–several Racist epithets. My Property is seized–even my copyrights may shortly belong, I have no doubt–to the Government–I am a Renegade in a Camper–which I bought with my own money–and to which my Wife has no claim–except in law–and there has never been a happier man. I do not, as you suggest, question the “propriety” of your interference–I merely point out that there is nothing to interfere with–for I have transformed–as the Modern Artist must–into a Vapor. Unless I run a Stop Light–which I am very unlikely to do, since I am an excellent driver–especially on lorazepam–none of you sons of bitches will ever see me again–and as for my Wife–she may be your problem–it is possible she is God’s problem–but she is not my problem. Had things gone differently–from Birth–had I not been a Genius–had I not met your daughter while “antiquing”–which is not to say that she is an Antique–(she may well make a good life with the excellent “Kermit” Chen–whatever his original name was–and he a good death with her–so long as he is heavily Insured–otherwise she will hurl him into the Gutter)–we should all have been spared Pain & Vexation–no one more than the man now liberated to his Artistic destiny & who has the honour to be

yr. Most obedt. & very humble Sert.

LA BADARIAN

Next Week: Art’s Many Difficulties

Silence, Exile, and Claude La Badarian

Somewhere in Massachusetts

Dear Henry,

Thank you for agreeing to make my payments “under the table,” as well as, I suspect, out of your own pocket. As “William Monahan” (that fucker) I will remain at my present location until further notice. Your inaugural FedEx (of which I am, sir, in grateful receipt) caused some initial confusion in the mind of the supreme being of this hotel, a mangle-haired drunkie & cretin named Ed. He had never received a FedEx before (this says a lot about my present place of residence, which essentially selected me in that I fell on my face in the downstairs bar after chasing the last of Mei-Mei’s lorazepam with 16 or 17 cocktails). In his illiteracy Ed mangled the admonition not to send “blood products” in the envelope into the idea that the envelope contained blood products, to a certainty. “Here is your blood,” he said, after knocking like the entire fucking police department on my door. For two days, Henry, I thought that Ed understood that the envelope contained money—which he was threatening to steal—unless I gave him some. The La Badarian mind sorted out the situation after two days of extremely heavy drinking, as well as attacks of hyperconsciousness which I would not wish upon the Archfiend.

In Guatemala, as you helpfully suggest, your money would go a great deal further than it does in this bijou college town in Massachusetts, but if I desired to live among incomprehensible savages, constantly on the lookout for a knife in the back, I would return to Manhattan, or my marriage. As destroyed as I am I do have “lifestyle considerations.” I know that our “agreement” will continue until one or the other of us is dead, but I do not delude myself into thinking that $500 a week, though it is very serious money in the Genius Trade, will satisfy me forever. At any rate, Claude La Badarian is not going to fuck off to Morocco so he can squirt diarrhea all over the place while you eat caviar tartlets at Apocalypse with Candace Bushnell giving you handjobs. Neither am I the sort of man to remain content smoking Best Buys and pounding a nightly “doll house” of sub-premium beer in a welfare hotel. (Faced with that sort of lifestyle, I would be in danger of giving up drinking and smoking entirely, leaving Art bereft of Claude La Badarian, and thus all interest of any kind.) I may have to supplement my remittance and I certainly cannot do it while dying of dysentery among cannibals. Then the world would be as naked of Improvements as you are of that divine spark called Talent—unless we can consider your capacity to knife and toady your way to the middle without ever saying an original thing—a quality conferred by a respectable deity. This thesis would render your most sympathetic friends omnino taciturnos.

Today at the bar conveniently located beneath my residence (I live among mumbling “veterans”—and of a lot more than the fucking Army, I can tell you that), moodily converting your “blood products” into mammoth brandies, I realized that my essential problem now is what to do with my freedom. I am not the first man to have had this problem (Frenchmen have it pretty considerable). There are many who would say it’s no problem at all—yet it’s more of a problem than you think. The La Badarian Condition has always been: say you wake up in the morning and have every talent in the world (you cannot imagine this, Henry—but bear with me): what the fuck do you do with yourself? Create Art, you say, obviously, or “make” it, as the potters say, doing the opposite—yet La Badarian has to retool as an Artist, and, again, is wondering if it’s worth it. If God gives you something you can do, asks Stephen King, in his extra-popular On Writing, why wouldn’t you do it? Answer, you fucking hammerhead, Because Genius is different from, and possibly more problematic than, getting millions of dollars to rewrite old monster movies—you cunt.

Claude La Badarian, from earliest youth (photograph exists of the young Claude in a badged blazer, emerging from a basilica with his palms pressed together and his eyes turned skyward), has been besieged by gratuitous integrity. Anti-success training is the specialty of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Sell out! people used to say to Claude La Badarian. Did Claude sell out? No. And then later, when he asked to sell out, he didn’t then, either, and not in every case because no one would let him. For a while there, with Mei, I nearly acceded to the view that writing is merely the way you make your living, so perhaps you should view it as a business—you asshole. And bang went the teapot off the La Badarian head. Fuck that, Henry. That’s why the world is excrement. Claude La Badarian is like Lancelot: the greatest knight, chucking his arms into a stream because to employ them for Vanity is hubris, and to employ them except in right cause (do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Are you reading this in Sagaponack with your buttplug in?) is unworthy of a human being. Is writing, these days, a right cause? You fucking tell me. I don’t think it is.

At any rate, I have abandoned Hyper-Consciousness:AMemoir. While lying in a foetal position in my barricaded room after Ed’s assault on my reason I realized that I could not go on with the book. True the MSS has some immortal scenes (the young Claude trying to smash a mailbox after posting a letter asking an Author for help, the young, scarved Claude standing on a crag in an Atlantic gale, vowing like Scarlett O’Hara to be Famous, etc.). But as fascinating as the story of my life may be, I—even I—find myself constantly tempted to change defeats into victories, victories into triumphs, reinterpreting and readvantaging everything that ever happened to me. The autobiographical form musters lies like a medium generates ectoplasm. Not five men in human history—neither the Apostles, Augustine, Dick Cavett nor Casanova—has ever written a memoir any more reliable than the crap he tells women when he’s drunk, and the women if anything are worse.

There is a reason that the confession-box has a screen between you and your “public”: Holy Church knows that no one is to be trusted where “personal narrative” “intersects” with an audience. After all, Jesus himself claimed that he had no money intentionally and that his father was God. He’s neither the first nor last to try that one on, either. Even I, Claude La Badarian, a permanent resident of the Castle of Knowledge, cannot always defeat the impulse to start lying like a wizard the minute I draw a crowd. Truth? Well, you have to go to literary fabrication for that, like Shakespeare did. No author has ever made a reliable self-portrait until he has managed to vaporize the self and, instead, created a vast number of characters who are nothing like each other and are all, precisely, him—and not him at all. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? No. You are not a Genius.

After one realises that one’s Memoir is a stack of prevarications, it is possible to convert the mass of text into a perfectly serviceable coming-of-age novel, but alas, Henry, what you’re left with then is the ordinary First Novel (a pitfall Claude La Badarian tried to avoid by calling his first novel Second Novel), in which a person resembling yourself in every detail ends up doing roughly the same shit you did but doing it (precisely as in Memoir) better than in the original. At this point in literature this obscenity (which is to say all of American Literature) must be avoided at all costs. The first things to avoid in novel-writing are the usual, primitive, mistakes in protagonist-creation. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a kicked-at little man, incapable of doing one chin-up, necessarily reinvents himself as Tarzan, and then sends himself to Mars, where he is able to leap phenomenal distances into the air, lay princesses, and kill six-armed giants with a sword. Tom Clancy, powerless realtor, creates, of all people, “Jack Ryan,” who gets to hang around with sailors before becoming president. I realized yesterday, my jaw dropping open, that there is no difference whatsoever in essence between Stephen Dedalus and Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan never missed a branch specifically because his creator missed them all the time, crashing cocklessly through the socioeconomic canopy of what the French, so aptly, call le jungle. That is, until he became Edgar, primate of Tarzana, signing himself simply “Tarzana” at the bar. Perhaps I am projecting.

A thief and liar named Paco, at the local “Mac” store, has sold me an ancient PowerBook 520, and though he lied and told me that it could “recognize” its modem (it certainly can fucking not: and a rather good thing, too: La Badarian, pill-crazed late-night epistolarian—omnia transformans sese in miracula rerum—operating on the Rimbaudian principle that the “I” is someone else, enhanced by insomnia, financial peril, and extensive media connections, is definitely not something we need to resurrect), I have set myself up a small office here in my SRO, which is actually quite a nice place—I have lived in worse—I have longed for worse—though the whiff of colostomy in the hall would knock down a grenadier, and the man next door talks to himself continually, as I might as well have been doing for twenty years. At any rate I have a machine on which to work. I do not know what it might be honorable to write with it. A long narrative poem in Italian? What does the world need? Certainly not a memoir, not little Claude running around as Mighty Mouse, nor yet the Claude who was jumped and wedgied at his own book party trying to tell you that it was arranged by Claude himself, in one of those involitional volitionisms which are the portals of discovery.

Yet though the lamp of genius flickers low amidst the fumes of incipient melancholia (However wisely one writes, one will be judged by fools), I am still here. Still here. Can the problems of Literature be solved? Oh yes. They are solved continually, and usually by me. To be sure, the idea that the “I” is someone else is not original to Claude La Badarian, but it was the La Badarian mind which converted the principle into the grand fact of the Universe. No one’s “I” has been more someone else’s than Claude La Badarian’s—especially when he has an active e-mail account, and has realized that his friends will one day be making themselves all-too available to biographers. Proteus hath not more shape than your friend. I leave you with wisdom. As anyone au courant in Literature knows—which is to say that I know it—contradictory statements are the new Silence, whereas Ambiguous Presence is the new Exile, like brown used to be the new black. Cunning is what it always was, if you have any. Your thought for today is: There’s nothing true which also isn’t. That belongs in Bartlett’s. Will it get there? I fear not. Genius is a bittersweet business, Henry. It is bitter, bitter, sweet.

I must close. A graduate student from sunnier climes, here at the café where I “scrible,” as Voltaire wrote an English correspondent, has discovered that I am that Claude La Badarian. I am going to sign her book, chat about the meaning of life until 4 am, and then fail sexually.

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: The Time Candace Bushnell Seemed to Be Asking Claude if He Had Any Coke & Other Missed Opportunities

Living Independently

Planet Earth

Dear Jesus Christ,

The hotel where I live, for reasons obvious to anyone if one listens to the cries in the night (or in the daylight for that matter: at the moment it sounds like mankind’s Adversary is upstairs, treating an LSD overdose with amphetamines), is frequently visited by social workers of the most disagreeable kind. They (at first collectively, and then singularly: Initially, I thought that my “caseworker” was one of a yoke of extra-judgmental Jehovah’s Witnesses) have mistaken me for the man who used to live in my room, a mental defective named Alfred S. Longwood who vanished from the earth after filling in some forms requesting privatized public assistance. My immediate thought was to renovate the understanding of the social workers, but when I realized that their services came with Meals on Wheels (after all, my Lord, I write a dining column) and various other perks (coupons for haircuts, legal assistance, ice cream, pedicures, government cheese, gym memberships, and the Social Security number of a retarded alcoholic) I decided to keep my mouth shut, and two days a week, for two weeks, I have been, so far as Society is concerned, an Imbecile–an official one, with papers to prove it.

How, you ask, and well you might, can Claude La Badarian, with an I.Q. at John Stuart Mill level, pose as a simpleton named Alfred S. Longwood? The answer, Savior, is easier than you think. It was not necessary for me to do a retard “act” after my instructor asked, in the course of my personal assessment, if I could make a nutritious meal for myself, or take a shower without destroying the bathroom. I could not in conscience answer “yes.” It has been pointed out to me by persons almost without number (usually as they pack their things, or mine) that the domestical effects of genius are indistinguishable from those of mental retardation. After my “personal assessment” I was flung into an at-home training course called “Living Independently.” My personal trainer, a fruitarian spinster prone to “empathy” (which is to say presumption, which yet has its uses), has tutored me in Counting Money, Doing Laundry, Going Shopping, Making A Bed, Paying Bills, Switching Off Lights, Bathroom Courtesy, Ordinary Decency, and so forth–some of which arts are fascinatingly refined, and some of which I never knew existed.

I would heartily recommend the “Living Independently” course to any Genius alive.

Even if Genius and Retardation did not “intersect” at several important points, an imposture of feeblemindedness would be unnecessary in the circumstances: Pamela is a true Social Worker, which is to say a religious maniac and cosmogogue who sees nothing that she does not wish to see, hears nothing that she does not wish to hear, and, since she regards herself as the only person in the world who knows anything, she is oblivious to any information contrary to her primary theses, which are, 1), that she is the only person in the world who knows anything, and, 2, that, of all the people in the world, she is the only person who knows anything. (There may be a third presumption, but if so it is identical to the first two, and so we will leave it out of this History.) She is a great and saintly “helper” of everyone–perhaps the only truly compassionate person in the world. In a previous century she would have been the most annoying “Christian” in the Universe–and you, better than anyone, Savior, know what these quotation marks mean. Pamela’s glorified spirit descends (via climbing the stairs), biweekly, and teaches me, in my character as The Longwood Retard (I am tempted to write a Holmes & Watson story for the “Baker Street Irregulars”), how to be a Functioning Member of Society, and nothing will derail her from her idée fixe that I am a Moron. I use advanced vocabulary freely; I am six foot two rather than Longwood’s five foot eight; I have a room full of books (including two with my picture on the flap); yet this data simply does not register–except possibly in typed-at-home side-notes citing delusion. Pamela’s saintliness knows no bounds and it was inevitable that my exploitation of this quality would begin to have few limits.

On the second Tuesday, my counselor presented me with a Library Card as if it were the Order of the Garter, or The Scarecrow’s Diploma in The Wizard of Oz, and off we went to the biblio, where, after dragging me away from the New Arrivals section, she walked me through Taking Out a Video, and then with a strange smile she sat me down at a table, and after asking me how I “felt” about my “progress” (all right, I answered honestly: I had, indeed, learned to Switch Off a Light) she taught me Checkbook Balancing. You’ll never guess what happened next. Perhaps you do guess. At the bank she walked me through Getting a Bank Account, vouching, with the full (subcontracted) authority of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts behind her, for my identity as a 36-year-old mental defective originally “hailing,” as they used to say on TV’s Candlepins for Cash, from Agawam, Mass.

Pamela gripped my hand at the moment I was approved, and in the street she cried and hugged me. Physical Contact is one of her methods of Establishing Trust, and though you’d hardly think it possible, I was able, on Thursday, by mentioning at exactly the right moment my insect-like admiration of her spiritual development, her concern even for retards and Pygmies, etc., to convert a neighborly backrub into a handjob. “This can never be repeated,” she said, after her pottery bracelets stopped clattering, “but I want you to know that I Care. Not just about you, but about everybody. I care, honey. This is about people caring for each other.” On Thursday, however, she was wearing eye-liner, and seemed irritated when I did not attempt to have an Inappropriate Relationship the instant she came through the door.

Sullenly, she showed me how to Address, Stamp, and Actually Mail something, be it whatever you like: payment, or a thank-you note, or some other mystery–and then we continued our walk to the City Hall steps (a retard perch of the first order), where she repeated to me, to make sure that I knew it, that a Relationship was impossible. I said that was all right by me, and she said that a Relationship was impossible. I said, Fair enough, and she told me that on the contrary, no matter how hurt I might be, a Relationship was impossible because of the great differences between us mentally and socially. I was not to obsess about her, and so forth. I said, again, that this was fine by me (no man alive has not had a scene like this, Savior, but I had not known that Imbeciles got them, too), and I tried to go and buy cigarettes, at which point she seized my arm and said, again, perfectly out of her mind, that a Relationship was impossible. At this point, and you would have done no differently, my Lord, I had no choice but to tell her that unless she gave me 1000 dollars I would tell her bosses at Helping Hand (imagine how that would look in the newspapers), her Not For Profit (that is except for salaries) organization, that she had molested me sexually.

I settled for 500 bucks, with a promise of 100 a week for the rest of the year. Her check turned out to be good, and I have added the funds to the “A.S. Longwood” war chest at Northampton Savings. Longwood, being a lifelong Moron, has, like most Morons, a clean credit sheet, and I intend to keep it that way. On an outing to the mall with some other retards I applied for a Sears card. My intention is to buy a small item and then do something called “paying,” which I learned about, at some length, in the “Living Independently” course. Although I consider good citizenship to be a waste of time personally, and possibly immoral, I find that in the character of A.S. Longwood I can do many things I cannot do as Claude La Badarian. For example, I put some money in the bank, and this morning, feeling fragile, had two pints of water rather than a bloody mary. NB: I have written to Agawam for A.S. Longwood’s birth certificate and should shortly have a passport in his name. I expect Pamela as usual on Tuesday, for further lessons in Independent Living, which is to say a “massage,” unless of course what she called “other things” remain “only for Phil”–Phil being her “partner”–and I hope they do. It turns out that she gives Tantric handjobs to all her male clients, to cement therapeutic intimacy. Helping Hand indeed, my Lord. Before you do anything on this fucking earth you have to think about how it would look in the newspapers. You can imagine how bad this is for victims of hyperconsciousness; yet the fruits of insight may be turned against others. This is nature’s therapy.

That is all for today, except that the box lunch brought by Helping Hand (this service continues: it’s like Yaddo, really) contained an excellent “seafood salad” sandwich, a carton of milk, and a small “individual” bag of potato chips which, feeling strangely hostile to my starch enemy, I dispensed moodily to pigeons, reflecting on the curiosity of the Universe, before going off to use one of my retard-coupons at the gym, where, believe it or not, I work out daily on the stationary bike while reading. As I told someone the other week, Proteus hath not more shape than Claude La Badarian. You know what I’m talking about, Jesus, and you know what it’s worth. Of course I feel horrible about fucking people, but what is done is done, and I have no intention of ending up like you.

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: A Letter to a Very Famous Magazine Person

A Job Becomes Necessary

France

Dear Tina Brown,

It is now almost two years since I received a phone call from your assistant saying that “We need your address: Tina Brown wants to invite you to something.” I have to tell you that I have been on tenterhooks ever since, waiting to see to what, exactly, I might be invited. The lead time seems extraordinary for any run-of-the-mill social function and I cannot think what the saturnalia you have in mind might be. It has passed through my mind that perhaps the occasion–unless it has passed–perhaps it was the one at the Statue of Liberty a few years ago–requires recondite apparel or the acquisition of a new language. If so, I wish you would update me on these matters, before, if, in fact, the party comes off, I am wrestled to the ground in the mystery-location for not speaking adequate Tagalog or deaf-signs, or for not wearing Restoration court finery. I hope that you will write me on this matter and save me social embarrassment, of which, between you and me, I have a very great deal on my own account, owing to a “battle with the bottle” which generally results in a La Badarian victory, mum, in that the cork comes out, and the contents are rendered subject to my whim–whereas La Badarian becomes subject to the world’s caprice–and sometimes to its candor. One must win somewhere, though, if only in a fight with a beverage container. Having no wife to beat or children to terrorize at the moment, which is what a man in my state of professional development would usually do (like Karl Marx, for example, or Melville, 20 years after he wrote Moby-Dick), I have decided, naturally, to concentrate on successful drinking, and at present am having a refreshing vodka sour made with the worst possible store-brands in North America. Despite a busy schedule with my Beller-esque and hopefully therefore “hot” new novel, Coming of Age in New York City, I still find time to drink liquor and fall on the floor. I hope you and your husband are well. Please keep me advised on this party. After two years of planning, it ought to be a corker.

I am doing very well. Earlier this evening I attended a “kegger,” and was evicted bloodily from the house after I objected to someone saying, “Who’s the weird old guy?” So I have a social life. Though I continue to have a problem with your including William Monahan’s piece of excrement in the “Talk10” (he lives up here, you know, in France: I saw him stuffing his fat face with “Italian Ice” the other day, chatting with worshipful MFA students) while leaving Second Novel securely in the gutter, I feel very warmly toward you and I have always thought you were the most attractive woman on earth, not to mention, excitingly equipped with money. I’d have sex with you any day of the week–and I’m serious about that. Whatever people say about you in the newspapers–or in this recent hideousness in book form–just let it go. I’m sure you do already. “Let it go, Tina,” you say to yourself–and I know you say it, no matter what Michael Wolff says about you being the Lucrezia Borgia of clippings. Had I remained in Magazines I should have come to the same restful disdain of calumny, but lacking diplomacy I was still prone to grab editors by the throat and pour drinks slowly over their heads while saying, You going to fucking do that again? In most cases, like the pint-sized former literary sensation Norman Mailer, I got my ass kicked.

There was a massive drug bust at the SRO here in France last night, and I thought you would be interested. Luckily, I was elsewhere when it happened, perfectly destroyed with drink and listening to a 19-year-old tell me that she has seen my dining column–though not in The Aristocrat–she could not remember where–she had what appeared to be a “false memory” of having seen my dining column in a New York weekly–but little matter–what she was trying to do was to get me to drop my scruples about the “age thing”–which, of course, I did. I accompanied her to her tragically batik-draped attic room, survived the lighting of “incense,” said nice things about her Art (drawings of raccoons, mice, clowns & etc), listened to her crap for a sufficiency of time, and then she pulled her smock boldly over her head, revealing a universe of teenaged flesh. That’s right: quick as you could snap your fingers, Tina, she had nothing but the radio on. I put down my drink and essentially lost consciousness. For almost 13 seconds it sounded like a rhinoceros was destroying a primary school.

The sound of heterosexual congress, however brief, is not usual in that house, where, incidentally, my new friend is not paying rent, in money, anyway, and I was still trying futilely to catch my breath when a giant lesbian with well-justified “trust issues” kicked in the door and started making Bantu threat-gestures, trying to pump herself up for attack with a table lamp, meanwhile screaming, “This is what I get? This is what I get?” “Yes,” replied my new friend, coldly, smoking a cigarette. On being asked, “Why?” by the male-identified intruder, who was wearing nothing but overalls and a wispy beard (and actually walks to CVS like that), she replied: “Because you don’t have a penis. And that’s not a beard, and I’m not a lesbian, and get the fuck out of my room.”

At this point I didn’t have much of one myself (penis, not beard) and was scrambling around looking for my glasses, but as an unearthly scream split the night and the lamp smashed against the wall, I decided to dispense with the eyeglasses and, grabbing my clothes, exited the house from a second-story bathroom window giving on to a “shed porch.” There was a day when La Badarian accomplished these manoeuvers like Fairbanks pere and fils: this time, I hit the ground like a china cabinet dropped from a helicopter, and was able to rise only after a quarter-hour spent lying weeping among my clothes. The great question about sex continues to be Is it worth it? And the answer is At the time, yes.

I finally limped home, only to find the entire police force, plus ambulances (one of the Veterans had assumed he was being overrun by the Viet Cong), surrounding my hotel. I thought for a moment that I was wanted for upsetting a lesbian, which in Northampton is a very grave charge, but what was going on was–as mentioned above–a drug bust. The bust was so general (several “Veterans”–of the attack on the baggage at Agincourt, some of them–were arrested for possession of their own prescriptions) that nasty questions are being asked about the “income streams” of every resident of the hotel. Obviously, things could get hot for one Claude La Badarian, who receives regular cash-containing FedExes from Manhattan, doesn’t have a job, and also receives Meals on Wheels under a false identity as A.S. Longwood, a retarded man. While things are calming down, a job is not a bad idea.

I spent the night in some bushes near the train tracks, and the next day, upon seeing an advertisement in a used bookstore (which has two copies of Second Novel, myself scowling from the jacket photo), I went in, displayed my own photograph on my own novel, and said that certain researches for my ongoing novel required that I inhabit the situation of a bookstore clerk. I was hired on the spot, to do nothing more than write all day, read, and ignore people, after displaying the sign “We are not buying books today,” disappointing box-lugging young Literary Persons who are, unlike your friend, short cigarettes. Shoplifters come and go as they please, and some of them are me. If asked a question I am friendly enough: I may not know where it is, but as you might imagine, I know what it is.

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: An Address on the State of Letters

Claude and the Little People

Café Calvin, Northampton

Dear Henry,

The heat up here, recently, in remittance-land, has been unforgivable. Though my name (mangled at Ellis Island by some tipsy, sinecured Mick in a circular pasteboard hat) would suggest origination in Africa’s clime (in fact, in predynastic Egypt–by way of France), the La Badarian gene pool gathers no tributary rivulets from anyplace south of Amiens (where there is an excellent cathedral), and I am as suited as an Inuit, or a walrus for that matter, for humidity and strong sunlight. Since being fired from my bookstore job I have lain torpid through the days, sipping gin and stengah, when I am not at the movies, drinking Coke by the gallon, desperate as a man eating human flesh in the hull of a plane crashed on an Alp. Not for us, the “wifebeater,” Henry, nor the cheap barbaric rubber sandals sticking to the pavements–much less the savage, erotic exultation in life-threatening humidity. In New York City, as you well remember, Henry, I could not walk half a block without looking as if I had been dunked for hours in cheap cooking grease. At this time of year my sneakers (or “trainers,” as Malcolm Gladwell would have them–up his ass, if he likes) begin to smell like some other man’s shoes–a corpse’s. If there were a way to go into a state of refrigerated hibernation for the duration of the summer, I would do precisely that, for any amount of money, until the weather turns cool enough for a genius to walk to the liquor store in Western Massachusetts without wearing a kaffiyeh and a bedsheet.

The days are long gone when La Badarian could fuck off to the Vineyard at this time of year, to lie bathed with cool air in a genius-hammock on the third floor porch, to sleep with a blanket at night. I do not know if I reported to you, Henry, that my grandfather, the Senator, is dead. He is. It happened 19 years ago. He was struck by lightning and incinerated while guiding his gasoline-powered Scamp between the eighth and ninth holes at some sinister, scrubby links on what people call The Island. (It was the same lightning strike that cured Bill Styron of his “depression”–in other ages called the DTs.) Gram was fuddled for a few days after the Senator was planted, which allowed her daughter-in-law Delores, matriarch of the low-rent South Shore La Badarians, to evict the old lady from her 18-room cottage near Gay Head (now Aquinnah, as the previous appellation was never going to be anything but uncomfortably literal to Town Fathers, not to mention humiliated aborigines who could barely sell a hot dog without feeling funny), and slam her, apologetically catheterized (she didn’t need a catheter, except that she did have to have one if they were going to keep her there), into The Home. Her protestations that she wanted to die in her own house were ignored for her own good. Her bank accounts were made “joint” for her convenience, and then emptied so that the money would not show up in her estate upon her death.

Once Gram was tied to a chair in the Home, intubated and separated from her cash and the World, the hideous Medford La Badarians started living in the house and not letting anyone else go there–while not informing Gram of this change–and my near-mongoloid cousin Phil, who had fought his way into what he conceives to be the middle classes via good Credit and a degree in criminology, ended up, owing to the capsize of a cheap kayak off a stretch of private beach, marrying the insane, solicitous daughter of a Belgian industrialist. Phil now lives in the French Alps and stays in contact with the two restaurants he “owns” in Boston by satellite phone. Location is everything.

The last time I went to the Vineyard to visit the “family’s” house I found that my key did not work. Upon entering through a window I found that my room–my room from childhood’s hour, Henry–had been converted into a “gentleman’s day spa” by one of the less employable Medfordites, a community-college graduate named Rosanne who had thought that she might meet JFK Jr. by littering his hedge with leaflets advertising cucumber “facials.” After having been on the receiving end for so many years I imagine she thought she would be adequate at dispensing them. At any rate, after the police came (I wrecked the day spa with a five-iron and threw all the shit out the window), it turned out that the house, a perfectly ordinary large clapboard house now worth $7 million, had been “sold” to the vile Medford La Badarians for $215,000, exactly the price they had gotten for their aluminum-sided dump in Medford. When I explained to my grandmother that I had been disinherited, she wrote me a check for five dollars, the sum she put in my Christmas cards until I was 40. It bounced. If I am going to get a summerhouse of the sort to which I am accustomed, Henry, I am going to have to do it myself–a daunting prospect.

But enough of my difficulties. Let me move on to my triumphs. “A.S. Longwood” has used his Sears card to buy–and then pay for–a small toaster oven. I have proved myself capable, in an insect-like way (is there any other way?) of Citizenship, and I find it strangely satisfying, even restful. I suppose that surrendering to normal behavior is a bit like being committed to an institution, or being in the Army. You do a handful of things they want you to do, at the right time–and you do these things irrespective of their foolishness–and you are not only left alone but granted further privileges. This is an amazing breakthrough for me, even at the “ironic distance” of pseudonym and pretended retardation. I have been developing a fondness for the little people, an appreciation for all the mysterious little things they do, and from time to time I even find myself possessed of a gentle desire to be like them. Today I saw one of these saints doing beer deliveries, in a neat suit of brown “work” clothes and steel-toed shoes. His hair was cut neatly and you could tell that he accepted his status, or lack of it, with philosophy, and didn’t owe anyone a nickel. For a moment of hallucinatory intensity I wished that I was him. It was like one’s first exposure, via a cheap microscope, to the beautiful world of mold spores.

It is to be wished for, Henry, relief from one’s own complexity. After gaining the world in the way that is inevitable when a genius finds himself in circumstances which will emancipate his inner carnival fraud, T.E. Lawrence, world-famous as Lawrence of Arabia and in danger of being Lawrence of everywhere else, sought refuge as a private in the Tank Corps–for relief, Henry, from his own implications. What if Jesus had said the hell with this, and joined the Roman Army? My mind strays in that direction, Henry. I think about a job in a factory, a regular routine, a part in my hair, a pin-neat trailer home, just like that beer-delivery guy. Or perhaps I could go live off the land in Alaska, like that guy who died in a bus with a bellyful of potato seeds. Why? Because novels are bunk, written by damaged frauds, and published boringly by idiots. Shall I be a novelist, Henry, or shall I instead be a lifer deli clerk, or a latenight Chinaman on a one-speed bicycle? I prefer the latter options, Henry. I prefer them. For what does it profit a man… You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? God, I wish there were still some fucking monasteries. I had a terrible time making do with the University. Do you have any idea how hard it is for a man with my mind to remain an undergraduate for eight years? It nearly killed me.

I am now “beating the heat” by sipping an icy margarita expertly made by “Jeff” at the Café Calvin. A fetchingly bucktoothed brunette in a white “top” and a watermelon-colored linen skirt has sat down beside me. I have no idea why I still get women, Henry: none. I am not famous, I have no money and I am presently as fat as shit, but there’s something about me, apparently: I could get laid in a convent full of lesbians. This is as much of a mystery to me as it has always been to my friends. That fucking Monahan, who is, I think, happier than me, is across the room drinking a rum and Coke (he comes in at night, has one, and goes home: always working, that motherfucker: of course, he isn’t a genius: he doesn’t have my problems) and making notes in a copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy, probably for review in some low journal. He is wearing a claddagh ring, unironically. He doesn’t appear to have any problems, and I have had, more than once (I had it the other day, when I saw him in the stationers), the strange, strange sensation that I am having his problems for him. It is possible that via the practice of some voodoo he has found peace at my expense. He looks (now packing away his books and papers into his backpack, having the career I ought to be having, on point of genius) rather like that happy insect, the beer-delivery man. Off Monahan goes, serenely, into the humid college-town night, pretending to manage to be an artist as if it were as simple as being an electrician. Never mind him. Tomorrow I’ll embark on my course to a summer house, one way or another. If you think I left my pistol in Saugerties you are very much mistaken. Why do you think I’ve been growing this beard?

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: An Incident Among Infidels

DEAR HENRY,

Let me tell you after the fashion of Our Savior a story about a man, a woman and some money. There was once a Samaritan (Claude La Badarian) who came across a woman in straitened circumstances. The woman’s husband (like Claude La Badarian a “young” novelist, meaning he was under the age at which people commonly expire of maturity in what Literature’s Dr. Larch calls “other parts of the world”), was on one of those “literary retreats” which so frequently signify dull and wordless divorce after return from New Hampshire, where one invariably ends up involved with a mixed media expert with a navel ring and a slightly chipped front tooth–which is what happened in this case, too, but as this material is being worked into a screenplay (please make sure you’re not “sharing” this Henry: the law protects only expression of ideas, not ideas themselves: fucking thieves’ paradise when you think about it), I will discontinue this part of my Paper and continue with the Claude-centric story, which is more interesting, anyway.

Anyway, at the time Claude La Badarian met this giant-assed literary grass-widow at the Artists’ and Writers’ Softball Game (Claude, gut hanging over a pair of borrowed shorts, was playing “shortstop” as if it were the character of Hamlet), he was significantly in funds and therefore in the grip of a massive alcoholic breakdown of the sort which happens two weeks after any true genius receives any major check. In Claude’s delirium tremens (this was the only time in his life, since every Sunday brunch in college, anyway, when he found that he could not pick up a coffee cup without using two hands), there was no bat coming out of a hole in the wall and biting him, but obviously some quiet time was in order, and as it happens the absent novelist’s wife had a large house in Amagansett which had on the grounds a cottage with a cold-water sink and a single gas ring. Claude likes that sort of primitivity (which reminds him of his first “apartment” in an arked seine loft in an art colony), and he took the cottage to “decompress”–self-restricted to Jane Austen, a typewriter and white wines.

Ironically, considering the circumstances, it was in this cottage that Claude, while paying $700 a week for a hovel, composed much of a novel which made money, while the master of the house, a better-connected writer on charity exhibition in New Hampshire, was meanwhile somberly creating at other people’s expense a novel which sold 237 copies domestically and 3 copies in Canada. No fucking idea of making an entertainment, Henry: never occurred to him. AND it wasn’t literary. I have no idea how you manage that, but most of your “young novelists” do that these days.

One night there was a feminine sound of weeping from the main house, and La Badarian investigated, knightly (as opposed to nightly, though the latter has been alleged), moving bathrobed (and, despite the above paragraph, intoxicated) through mazy French gardens previously, casually and falsely suggested to be ancestral. The minor novelist’s wife presented drunk as a boiled goat, and precariously bathrobed among the equally precarious hanging copper pots in the “country” kitchen. She revealed to Claude that her finances were temporarily in desperate state owing to the malfeasance of her family’s lawyers, and that despite his $700 a week (which she was spending on Vicodin sold by the local tennis pro), she basically fucking needed money before the lights, phone, etc. were shut off. Claude La Badarian, like most gentlemen, was used to handing women money to shut them the fuck up and on this occasion, being flush with cash owing to a “scale” screenplay fee (less Federal, New York, New York City, California and Massachusetts taxes), he wordlessly, the next morning, handed the novelist’s wife a plain white envelope containing $5000. This is not unusual when Claude is in funds, which is why he is so often out of them. The La Badarian technique with money, when he has it, used to be to simply hand it secretly to people who appeared to need it, yet as life went on Claude began to notice that people to whom he gave money began to act funny when Claude appeared to need it, as Claude, being a Genius, eventually always did. There is a lesson in this.

The novelist’s wife spent enough on the bills to keep the house operating for another five minutes (the lights went off before Labor Day), hopped on the Jitney, and, for all Claude knew, spent the rest on vegetarian lunches and heroin, for she was not seen again for the remaining weeks of the summer. As summer ended and the crowds of scumbags diminished voluntarily outside Conscience Point, Claude, finding himself shipshape and re-infused with the La Badarian passion to create, returned to the city, where he sublet an inexpensive apartment in the West Village. He made a careful, cheeseparer’s budget so that he could afford six months of literary composition on the depleted capital he had left, and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral glanced around and lit a candle to St. Brigid, patroness of the Arts. What happened next? Well, the Manhattan version of Claude took about two months to run through what in other men’s hands would be two years of decent middle-class pay. (I’m not criticizing anyone else’s financial abilities: I’m just telling you the story.) In the West Village Claude entered a familiar condition of extremity in which he barely had cigarettes and was being tormented by the apartment’s lessor, who was teaching a course in Autobiographical Writing (known around campus as Prevarication for Pinheads, Prostitutes, and Paraprofessionals) at the University of Iowa. When he couldn’t find a book party or gallery opening or a birthday bash, Claude was very nearly eating cardboard (the good kind, obviously), when one day on 7th Ave. of all places, Claude, who was only partially on drugs, came across his Amagansett savior (long since separated from the novelist and, in her words, “fucking chicks,” which literally meant, Claude supposed, not fucking them, unless one was specifically talking about using an instrument).

After an air-kiss the false Kotex heiress took Claude to another district of the city and treated him to a stinging, tepid, liver-cleansing frappe of ginseng and beets which tasted like dirt. She unexpectedly (while Claude was watching for an opening) asked if he needed anything. Well since you ask, said Claude, I could really use some fucking money if you have any these days. Instantly and astonishingly the woman whipped out a checkbook and wrote Claude a check for a fraction of what he had invested in her debts and household expenses the year previously. Before handing the desperate genius what he naturally and gratefully assumed was a partial good-faith loan-repayment she asked him when she could have the money back. Claude, geniusly, recognized that if he pointed out to this insane person that she was actually, and only in part, repaying money, he would definitely not get that quivering Chase Manhattan check. So, affably pretending that he was accepting a loan, he said what he usually says when people ask him questions about money: “Two weeks.” That was almost seven years ago.

For seven years, therefore, the novelist’s widow (real this time: the novelist was killed by a runaway SUV while catching a smoke on the car deck of the Vineyard ferry) has been assholing Claude all over New York, or the Eastern Seaboard for that matter. It is not unlikely that the La Badarian “default” has been mentioned in Goa. Recently, meeting his memory-challenged benefactress at a birthday dinner at Milon, Claude, who had recently heard again what an asshole he was for not paying back the larcenous, boo-hooing fake heiress, turned to her and said, “You know, even among friends, you have to be careful to record every nickel.” This statement fell like a sword into our broadly misinformed midst, as if one had said “Damascus” in the tent of Arabia’s Feisal.

Since everyone at the table had been informed, untruthfully, and repeatedly, that Claude owed this person, the brazen woman, flushing purple in fear that Claude would redefine, or re-advantage the situation while in company, said: “I know! That’s why I’ve written down everything I’ve loaned you!” She slyly smiled, as if in victory. Women, Henry, are different from us: they are just fucking different. Claude La Badarian, genius, treated the serial life-re-advantager to an elevated eyebrow of the 007 variety, folded his Hindoo serviette, stood up from the table and (as if someone else was saying it, Henry, the way it is on these occasions) said: “All right. Then write down my part of this dinner, double the figure, and stuff it up your ass.” Screams, struggles, someone at the table saying, “Oh, man.” While attempting as an afterthought to apologize to the birthday boy, a dripping idiot from The Paris Review, Claude was seized by three or four pungent subcontinentals (the guy at the door at Milon, not comprehending the Yankee vowel system, thinks that Claude, with his specs and diffidence, is an Englishman of the especially ruined variety and treats him with a special causticity reserved for members of the empire who fall under his hilarious supremacy) and hurled through the door. Out on the avenue, despite a pissing, inconvenient rain and torn trousers, Claude (who had thrown several ineffective punches) found himself feeling pretty refreshed and revenged, despite the broken nose, the curry all over his jacket. Claude had done what the memoirists do, you see: instead of sitting around listening to weird shit about himself, he had taken control of his narrative. And when C-Lo takes control of a narrative… Well. I don’t want to blow my own horn, Henry.

That was the beginning, I think, of the new Claude La Badarian–an evolution in his genius. That was the point at which Claude La Badarian, the nicely brought up little boy who, not understanding Evil, once tried again to play with neighbor boys in Peckham, or was it Mannheim or Kansas (the La Badarian upbringing was various–more various in present remembrance than what I used to recollect about it), who dropped a full beer can of water on his head from a height of three stories (Claude, then only four, can still remember the bang of pain), stopped taking shit off people, especially lying bijou junkies with an interest in maintaining appearances at the expense of other people. Is there Art in revenge you might ask, innocently? One could ask Oliver St. John Gogarty if art were “revenge,” if he had not been made, artistically, deader as himself (and he was once a man, rather than a footnote in Joyce) than any man in the history of the world. Art’s not only revenge, Henry: it’s the best revenge. As the monarchy and the guy in The Cask of Amontillado say…well, you supply the Latin. You can find it in a “book.” That’s one of those things you “read” at “Brown,” when you weren’t date-raping troubled young women from Salve Regina. Do you know that the plural of “oaf” is “oaves”? I must use it in something. Too bad there’s only one of you. I am not so sure about me. I am beginning to feel strange.

Yours truly,

Claude Baladarian

Aristocrat Critic

Restaurant Magazine

Next Week: A Letter of Confession to His Holiness the Pope, Containing Also an Argument that Fictional Characters Have Souls.

That Asshole, Monahan

DEAR HENRY,

An obscenity has come to my attention. William Monahan’s Light House: A Trifle has gone into trade paperback. After all the work I did–all the letters I wrote, telling Riverhead Books what an unreliable, ridiculous clown and megalomaniac viper they had taken to their multinational breast–after all the lack-of-character-demonstrating e-mails many mediums have received from various “hotmail” addresses, as well as the mindspring account Monahan claimed dubiously was password-hacked a few years ago (Monahan, usually indisposed in other states, as well as rather various, personality-wise, is unusually open to calumny)–I cannot believe that this book has again been put into print. Yet indeed it is in print. Not only is it in print, Henry, it is absolutely plastered with baselessly positive reviews: “Delightful echoes,” it says on the cover, “of Vladimir Nabokov, Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Flann O’Brien, and other modern masters of drollery. But mostly there’s the original, very funny voice of William Monahan. More, please.” On the cover: “Hilarious,” “Brilliant,” etc. Opening the packed “front sales” section (as we call it in the trade, or as we call it if one’s book ever actually makes it to paperback), one may read, “Monahan is a latter day ‘English bad boy’ author, a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis.”

At this point, unable to help myself–after a bleak, piteous look over at Mr. McEnery, a “quad” smoking a Pall Mall through a kind of wheelchair-attached hookah–I vomited all over the “tv lounge.” Reaching for a newspaper to clean up the unpleasantness (though excrements are no stranger to the tv lounge, which gets only the Springfield UHF station), I discovered in my hand, as if by evil magic, a copy of the Hartford Courant dated July 15, 2001, which identified Monahan (among other enemies of Claude La Badarian) as an heir to Pynchon, Barth, Joyce, Beckett, Swift, Sterne & etc. The effect was terrible: I walked as if zombified to my room. At exactly the point at which things could not get worse (the “hyperconsciousness” coming on pretty good), “Ed,” the moron concierge, pounded on my door like, as usual, the police department, and when I opened the portal of horror handed the shattered Claude La Badarian a package containing the offending novel in German (“Wie bitte?” fragte Tim), sent me as a “kindness” (it was like a fucking brain operation with a hedge-trimmer) by a Kraut “friend” at Wittenberg, who included an essay on how fucking good the novel was. Had I seen this “exciting work of art in the Amerikanischen”? Well yes, Herr Doktor, you cunt, I have seen this masterpiece in the “Amerikanischen,” and in fact tried to torpedo it on sight in one of the less-influential trades, through assigning to the auctorial voice the opinions of the protagonist, a juvenile sociopath. A base trick, yet an effective one, and unusually useful in a literary culture where it is utterly unknown (especially, alas, at the moment of composition) that author and protagonist are, or can be, different people.

Well there I was, anyway, holding the book in German. I took to my bed, Henry, hyperconsciousness in full hideous bloom, clutching the admittedly excellent Ulrike Seeberger translation of Light House. (Of course I can read it: I know all modern languages.) I began to think auctorial thoughts of the most cosmic magnitude. Do you know that fucking huge cemetery you see in Queens on the way to JFK? It always gives me the “library fidgets.” No author alive does not know what the library fidgets are, but since you are not an author I must explain that the library fidgets are, or result in, the vertiginous, dreadful sensation of nonentity that comes from looking through endless library stacks of horrible, dead, forgotten novels, by horrible, dead, forgotten egomaniacs. Whenever I pass the Queens deathyards, I imagine that each of those untended, untendable, uncountable graves contains a novelist–most of them NYC-based “coming of agers” but many of them once on Oprah’s list. None of them contains Monahan at the moment, and I’m getting a little worried. He’s like Dracula who (we shall weather the Freudian complication: the world did) eluded my Van Helsing’s stake, possibly because he doesn’t give a shit. He sent me an e-mail once, saying that public life was an afterlife.

Monahan is not staying entirely “under the radar” as I had hoped. According to Mortlake (Eugenio, not Max) over at Mediaslag.com, Light House turned a royalty despite less–far less than ferocious–or even appropriate–promotion. I got my breathing problem, followed by an attack of diarrhea, as I usually do when a contemporary gets public notice, or a check in any amount. You witnessed what happened to me at Scythian Bar, or was it “Jade of Asia,” when X got the “genius grant.” It is not enough to succeed, Vidal said, famously: others must fail. God knows how true that is: viz his relation to the Devil. Monahan is not failing. He’s not exactly like that fucking rabbit on tv, but no matter what I do (and I never stop short of defamation unless paid), the son of a bitch keeps ticking. If I don’t do something, obviously, he’s going to end up with a readership. He may even be on Charlie Rose, quietly correcting misapprehensions about Fiction. I almost got diarrhea even thinking about it.

Naturally, I have tried, and several times, to put Monahan into Fiction. That is the classic way to consume and neutralize the competition. Yet he is not pissed. I met Monahan at the Haymarket Cafe the other day, and instead of smashing me to the ground with a chair he complimented me cordially on Second Novel, and told me that he was so impressed with the title that he was using it as a “working” title (dare he use it in reality? titles may not be copyrighted) for his next piece of shit, which confronts the “second novel” issue head-on–something I forgot to do. He seemed to have no idea that Second Novel contained a potshot, or seven, at him. I chuckled for a while, thinking how true it is that Satire is a Glass & etc. (Swift, Henry), in which we see every face but our own. Then afterwards I got worried that maybe he had detected that an attempt had been made at his lineaments but considered–or had decided to pretend–that the La Badarian attempt at “contemporaricide” (I really thought this, Henry, and must say what I feel) to be too pathetic or clumsy to even mention, as if the thunderbolt had been seen a mile off and he had been standing somewhere else when it struck…or, say, it had been less than Jovian. His manner with me when discussing Second Novel was, in fact, the manner of a man who distantly (and honestly, compassionately) regrets that circumstances do not allow him to take you tactfully aside to point out that your fly is open. A hot flush of shame came over me: I was purple to the roots of my hair. He knows I tried to fuck him, I thought, and he doesn’t care. I was immediately translated to the insect-world. Obviously, I felt the hyperconsciousness coming on. To my horror, Monahan said that his next plan was to do a blackmailed dining column written by a delusional media scumbag. It would be a small yet integral part of what, with apologies to me, he was calling Second Novel. He gave me a wry smile, complimented me on having moved out of Manhattan and getting out of “media” (he did me the courtesy of pretending that the first was volitional and the second to be desired), and then left the establishment, remarking that it smelt of hippies.

Honestly, Henry, I don’t know if any of this happened, including the plan to get a drink at Monahan’s “office” in Easthampton two evenings hence. As I said, I have the hyperconsciousness pretty bad today: I don’t know whether to shit or wind my watch, and drinking two pots of coffee on top of three straight days of insomnia was not the best idea. Things could be a lot more metafictional than they are. Fortunately, Mr. Murphy, a “veteran” with post-traumatic stress disorder dating from the terrible three months he spent as a salad chef in Vietnam, has a tremendous supply of tranquilizers. Beside his snoring form, I crammed half a bottle into my mouth. As they take effect I am almost convinced that I never met Monahan at all except in an hallucination and, also, that he never said, in parting, “Hit what you aim at.” Obviously, obviously. (I leave out the prefatory remark: If you have to aim at someone other than yourself: I’m sick of his theory that a writer is all his characters and none of them.) This is such an important part of Satire-writing that I must have thought of it personally. Eureka. Or whatever it was that Marat said in the bath.

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: In Which William Monahan Disappears Entirely from the Narrative and Claude Has an Interview at a Very Major University.

Home Again

Dear Henry,

I have been vicious, in the past, about the Gramercy Park Hotel, but it’s really one of my favorite places on earth. Where else could one get a bottle of Seagram’s VO sent to one’s room (Large Bucket of Ice and One Split of Soda included with each Bottle of Liquor–I find the Capitalization precious) as if it were the Eisenhower administration and one were waiting, in sock-garters and porkpie hat, for that never very desirable-sounding thing called a “loose” woman. Where else can you get a clean room with kitchenette for $135 a night? Where else does the room service menu still feature Mateus Rose, Melon in Season ($3.95: one can only imagine the presentation), “Tri-Colore Salad,” Broiled Filet of Lemon Sole? Or “Fruit Compote”? You don’t see much of that, these days, much less a staff of glum dedicated lifers in cheap livery. The Gramercy is time travel, including Morlocks (the Chandlerian “House Detective” who sits in the chair “reading” USA Today), and–note to management–the fossil waft of marijuana smoke that assailed your narrator when he came out of the elevator. Who smokes marijuana anymore? No one. Marijuana ended with Frye boots, large belt buckles, “Spencer Gifts,” the novelty of the “mall” and Aerosmith’s classic Toys in the Attic. I am surprised that I never stayed here at the Gramercy with my grandfather on those putatively Bronx Zoo/Statue of Liberty-oriented trips of my youth, but the Twenties, let alone “downtown,” did not exist in those days, the same as, say, the East Fifties do not exist these days, and midtown never has existed, except as open sewers existed in the days of a strong Papacy, and as blackflies exist in Maine. Those trips to New York with the Senator tended to center not-so-mysteriously, in retrospect, around Times Square. By the Sixties, sex was free, but not for men who had served at Chateau Thierry, and who still thought that one had to hide liquor bottles, Tom Buchanan-like, in towels, as if no one could guess why you were upending a rye-emitting cylinder of terrycloth over a tumbler of ice, thought that there was such a thing as an “American” language, and that putting a pillow under one’s wife’s bottom (that is, whenever one could tear a moment away from sportfishing or “hooking” other men in the head–when’s the last time anyone “hooked” anyone in USA fiction? War-vet protagonists used to do it all the time) constituted acutely advanced sexual technique. At any rate, I adore the Gramercy.

Yes, I am in Manhattan. I arrived here yesterday afternoon, for a series of “meetings” intended to elevate the La Badarian profile in Manhattan. I’ll take any meeting I can get these days, Henry. I have even contemplated having a lunch with Jason Binn, who calls me continually at the SRO. Frankly, Henry, I’m bored with the country, and yesterday, on a whim, having noted that the A.S. Longwood business was thriving, and, forgetting that no one was in town, I decided to treat myself to a few days of La Badarian Manhattan style. (I should note, also, that I saw two of Mei’s brothers sitting in a van and looking at a map and decided that Northampton was a bit hot at the moment.) I took a car service to Springfield, MA, got on a train operated by the troubled Amtrak line (that mystical car of the La Badarian youth, depositing one at fraught Christmases, Providence pregnancy-scares). Amtrak is time-travel in itself. At Stamford I thought I saw my old girlfriend, the “passionate,” yogurt-throwing Teresa, gliding, posed like classical statuary, gliding down the escalator behind the glary plexiglas, wearing the black knit “little” dress that she wore to see The Neats at Storyville in 1982. It turned out to be no muse or goddess, nor Teresa (who, Christ, must be 38 these days), but instead–I had to blink and guzzle brandy–an attitudinal Connecticut person with a bad complexion extending into her second decade. As we barreled through Old Greenwich station, I saw a guy sitting on the platform in full-on Eighties Goofball Outfit: neat belted shorts, lavender polo, boatshoes, sunglasses on an idiot-string. It was like seeing a guy in a suit of chain mail (and armor, socioeconomically, that outfit always was: and how many times worn hilariously over horrid Continental underwear in colors unknown to nature?), with, over it, a tunic emblazoned with the ensign of the Hospitallers. Time flies, Henry: Time flies. The world is not young anymore, and neither am I. But still the train has its old narcosis, its old eroticism (perhaps it is the movement), depositing you wherever you are going in a state of refreshed sexual desperation.

Do you remember the Eighties, Henry? For some reason, the young Claude La Badarian was always going out with runners, triathletes, sincere gymnasts, headband-wearing free-weight aficionados. There I’d be, all cigarettes, insomnia, liquor, and velour jacket, pretending that exactly what I wanted after seeing a fucking idiotic French film was an “ice cream.” This went on for years. I had no taste for the sort of bohemian, talented, intelligent women who could deal with my special brand of bullshit: no, I had (apart from resisting the implications of the artistic vocation: I was really clinging to middle-class verities, even as I became more and more like that Frenchman who used to walk his lobster from cafe to cafe) to go for prime market value as it was back in the days when the sky was dark with pterodactyls, which meant that I always, always, ended up getting lectures on the vanished importance of carbohydrates. Toward the end of any relationship there was always a tragic, self-disaffirming scene in which La Badarian attempted “crunches” while a future suburban mom who dreamed only of tennis bracelets held my ankles, trying to turn me into god knows what–a lawyer, an ophthalmologist, the President of the United States–or any of the things for which I distinctly looked the part, and had no capacity whatsoever.

Once when I was twenty, or so, I spent a summer on an island off the coast of Massachusetts. Ostensibly I went there to paint houses (I had a weird idea that physical labor was compatible with literary composition), but one thing led to another and I ended up knocking up a Cheeverian psychotic from Grosse Pointe, Michigan. I was fired from my simple college job, moved into her house (called “Sea Grape”) with my Olivetti and notebooks (my friends at the doss above the grocery store considered my motivations to be entirely pecuniary), and spent the July and August trying to practice my profession while trying to keep the girlfriend from practicing her own profession: drinking an entire wifebeater of bourbon, slashing her wrists, vomiting up an entire week’s worth of groceries (which I’d paid for with my dad-supplied $150 a week from home, the La Badarian sustenance at the time: he wearily accepted certain negative consequences of having taught me to read at two years of age) or walking into a riptide during a green-black Reagan-administration gale while wearing a havishamic bridesmaid’s gown.

It was one of those times when, basically, you don’t get much writing done. She used to wake me up, sometimes holding a knife, and tell me how fucking talented and handsome I was, how extraordinary in my person–she plotted out exactly how I was going to be President of the United States–gesturing with a cleaver she planned the seating arrangements at my Inauguration–but she never actually let me do any work. Nothing much was done about my political career, and I was in serious trouble with my thesis. Being Catholic, I was going to marry her–not despite the situation being unpleasant, but because it was–do you understand this, you Protestant filth?–no, you don’t–but in August her family descended and after a brief, realistic confab between me and her pretty okay dad–a well-known titan of American manufacturing–”Do you want to marry my daughter?” he asked, dubiously, “Your daughter, sir, has been trying to take her own life since June.” (That is, in between trying to make me a six-packed young senator from Massachusetts: Jesus, how close I came to being a shorter, fatter John “F” Kerry, when you think about it.) She had an abortion in New York City and after a few glum weeks back on the island (and a scene in which I was nearly strangled with a lamp cord after I was noncommital about a watercolor) went off to take advanced clarinet lessons in Switzerland.

I saw her off on the ferry (Clarise had a phobia about flying), sunglassed like an Italian starlet and making a theatrical attempt to disembark after the boat had pulled away. But she did not disembark, and the boat steamed toward Hyannis with its freight of ruined vacationers, leaving me with nothing much to do but wait for my father’s money to arrive by wire at the IGA, and a vague sense that the Eighties had ended rather violently (even though I am quite sure that Bright Lights, Big City was still heavily under discussion). Here at the Gramercy, I still smell the end of the Eighties, Henry, like the tang of decaying apples, like the death of romance, like the taste of coke and magazine paper it was wrapped in, when you don’t have any more, and neither does anyone else. Speaking of magazines, I have some meetings today, and must close. I think I’m in New York for a while, Henry: this doesn’t change our little, as the French say, arrangement.

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: Claude Converts on a Mercy Lunch

New Voices Under Ninety

Dear Henry,

I only get two channels on the black and white tv I have in Northampton–a rustic PBS outfit perpetually crying for funds to cover its competitive salaries (rather than the programming, which they would have you believe) and a Springfield, MA, UHF station. I don’t view much tv unless it looks like I ought to get an update on the weather–which means that I’ve already smelled hail, and want to confirm it–but occasionally I switch it on, and the other night the latter channel presented a stone abomination: the Prism Awards. Did you see this? Saved “addicts” from the entertainment biz (Kelsey Grammer, etc.) came on tv and cried and gave awards to shows which were most in line with AA “addiction” theory (the heinous, capitulatory “smoking is bad” episode of Sex and the City won a special award). The recently famous junkie idiot from Three Dog Night, or possibly Chicago, wearing ill-advised leather pants and a sympathy-eliciting terminal Freddie Mercury kinda look, came on and sang a tuneless dud comeback song about, apparently, the importance of “knowing yourself” (fucking Socrates never pulled that one off, don’t think Kelsey Grammer’s managed it just because he talks like, well, I do, and stopped doing all the blow he could get his hands on), and also how people put him down because of his devotion to social justice and so forth. The Prism Awards might as well have been titled “I Never Could Handle My Liquor–with your host, Mr. Crybaby.” A goddamned man controls his narcotics habit simply by never paying for any, and his drinking by running periodically out of money.

Here at the Gramercy I have been watching–nothing. The clicker is not working and no one knows anything about it. Unable to surf the universe from bed (there is no point to crossing the air-conditioned room only to find yourself at a television with nothing on it, though with a clicker the vibe is different) I have been forced to go out into what people keep telling me is the Greatest City on the Face of the Fucking Earth, merely, I think, because (apart from all the women you definitely need to have sex with–theoretical La Badarian walks the streets thinking Yes, that one, and that one, Yes, Yes, only occasionally arriving at a No)–there is always a guy–the same guy?–pushing a gig-bagged bass on a darling little wheel. That’s what Manhattan means. That guy, that instrument, that enigmatic crosstown intent. I’m sure it’s the same guy, always, and that he’s being shot for a 1960s-style credit sequence. Perhaps that is a film. Of course it is. I will write it. Where is the man going? He is going home early, having broken a string at his lesson, to catch his wife fucking someone. Then he will move to the Catskills and meet…a Chinese woman with security issues? And then he goes on the lam. You see how a real writer works, Henry. We make everything up.

Lunches are keeping me pretty busy. The other day I was at Cafe Loup (the “p” is silent, Henry, for future reference), quickly ordering two shots at the bar while my host, an earnest young editor possibly lunching his first author, was outside taking a call on his cell. I went in to take a leak. Your colleague Greg, possessor of the lit desk at the Aristo which properly belongs to me (as do all jobs, all the coke, all women, the bit of food left on your plate), came into the bathroom and slapped me on the back crying Claude! Thinking that it was one of Mei’s brothers (because Greg had food in his mouth and could not pronounce “l”), or someone to whom I really owe money, I, hearing “Crawde!,” spun around, seized him by the adam’s apple and screwed it to the left as if I were a two-year-old trying to get into a locked bathroom with Mommy. It is far from the first time that one man, much less an Aristocrat editor, has fallen to his knees, gagging, in front of another one in the bathroom at Cafe Loup, so the Mexican who opened the door in hopeless pursuit of a quiet dump ended up beating an urbane retreat, muttering Pardon, before it could be laughingly explained to him that this was an editorial meeting–and not a particularly unusual one, either. Upon learning that the man I’d corkscrewed to the floor was an assignment-capable editor, I obviously helped him to his feet and dusted him off. Coughing, he said he had been thinking about me (they never are, but this is why it’s worth showing your face in town once in a while), and would FedEx to the Gramercy a book for me to review. “Two bucks a word,” he said, staggering back out to his adulterous lunch. (Later, he was kind enough to mention that I “looked good” and have “lost weight,” etc., dreadful lies, but if you have nearly torn out a man’s adam apple at Cafe Loup under the coke-crazed impression that he is a Chinaman with a baseball bat, he tends to be civil to you afterwards).

The “editorial lunch,” Henry, was inconclusive. As for the book, it arrived in hideous MSS at the Gramercy that afternoon. Oh my God.

You know Tom Beller, obviously. Contract at The New Yorker awhile back? No one knew why? Website called Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood? Well, Beller’s latest project–getting 14 writers to “respond” to the work of the JD Salinger–just leafed through on the La Badarian bed, is an attempt to remove JD Salinger from his area of operations as an inconvenience, as if The Catcher in the Rye were the Cherokee Nation. You see, Henry, it’s damned hard to write Salingeresque stuff and all while Salinger is still lurking around Manhattan and stuff, and it’s still sort of Mr. Salinger’s Neighborhood around here, no matter what you try to call it on the web, so in an attempt to create a post-Salinger climate, in which someone might start saying “Belleresque” without giggling, Beller and some other bozo have assembled the usual New Voices Under Ninety and presented a collection titled DIE ALREADY AND LET ME HAVE A CAREER, YOU URINE-DRINKING FUCK. No, it’s actually titled With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the work of JD Salinger.

For some reason whenever Beller says “writer” I get the heebie-jeebies: I don’t think he really knows what one is. I think he thinks writers mainly ride bicycles and have floating hair and edit collections which are actually defensive laagers of talent constructed around a lame contribution by young Tom Beller.

“At some point,” writes Beller, “you have to kill Daddy. Or Love him. Or both.” He nakedly admits of Salinger, “there are so many of the man’s virtuous [sic] that I aspire to in my own writing–the way he sets the scene, his faith in the importance of the small details of human interactions, his enthusiasm for using New York City as a stage-set…” Oh, fuck yourself, and get to your dissatisfactions: only through vatermord can the writer get on with business. Yet Salinger is a special case: After 50 years of trustfund hacks trying to write privilege-novels there is still only one Manhattan privilege-novel which happens to be a work of art, and that happens, continually, to be Catcher in the Rye, and there is no room in Manhattan, or U.S. letters, for your piece of shit about the kid based on yourself.

There are some good things in this collection, Henry: Walter Kirn’s essay “Goodbye Holden Caulfield…” is a useful essay, so destructive to the conceit of the book that Beller had to put it up front and get the damage over with, and establishes that what you get, when you ask people to write about JD Salinger, are (viz., With Love and Squalor) “self-centered memories,” and this book has them, along with the attempts to run Salinger out of literature on a rail so that Manhattan is safe for Bozo the MFA Clown, in profusion. JD Salinger? Why that reminds me of the year my cat died/nobody fucking understood me/I got the job writing about teenagers. On and on. Emma Forrest notes, to at least one grateful reader (though one hates to see the Bellerian banners advance), that JD Salinger simply isn’t all that good. She also, remarking, “I don’t think that people who are phony are necessarily a bad thing,” gets toward–are you with me, Henry?–the essence of Salinger’s popularity. I, Claude La Badarian, will take over and make her point.

The Catcher in the Rye’s trick, the secret of its eternal popularity, is that Salinger shows teenagers a glass in which they are the only authentic people in the world–the only people who have thought, felt, dreamed, etc.–when in fact they, teenagers, are frauds of the first water, who know fucking shit about anything, and won’t know shit about anything for another 10 years, and ought to be kicked in the ass and given some yard work and a copy of Montaigne. It is not unlikely that Salinger concealed himself in New Hampshire because his mind snapped–as it should have–after he realized his masterpiece about “phonies” was the phoniest, most pathetic thing in the universe. Imagine if your worst, most psychotic, adolescent mistake became a world masterpiece. (That’s where you get your urine drinkers, Henry, right there.)

What sort of mistake? Why, try realizing that you were publicly beating off over the Northeast WASP lifestyle when you were actually, come to think of it, a Jew. “If you were to try and come up with a parody of a Salinger name,” writes Beller, referring to an at-some-point-Salinger-involved reporter for the Times, “you probably couldn’t do better than ‘Lacey Fosburgh.’” Nice. Then Beller falls into a hole. “[T]here is something about Salinger that lends itself very well to WASP fantasies.” Well, Tom Beller, it may “lend itself” because the book is a WASP fucking fantasy, which is why the mortified author of it is up in the Granite State quaffing his own urine and watching Pro Wrestling and wondering if the men in the toaster will let him go to the Post Office today. “I wonder if J.D. belongs,” writes Beller, “to a sub-phylum of WASP-loving Jewish writers and I’m not talking about the Rothian shiksa goddess. It’s a love that transmutes itself, in which the writer himself becomes, somehow, an emblematic Brooks Brothers man.” Christ, Tom! Think! Think! It comes during writing, for writers, the thinking thing. The word is not “emblematic.” The word is “false.” Salinger’s masterpiece of alienation is actually (despite Salinger’s attempt to make his Glass family Jewish-Catholic deracinee: add some money and you’ve got a WASP good enough for government work–don’t you? don’t you? No, not even if you used two Catholics, mate, ask Joe Kennedy) a masterpiece of wistful longing for assimilation. Holden may be fucked up, but on the bright side he’s got kickass luggage and is drinking underage in Manhattan, so you tell me Catcher in the Rye is a masterpiece, rather than an autonomy-fantasy and spank-book for the future Social Climbers of America and every bit as disgusting and subliterary as a massmarket paperback about powerful, sexy women written for powerless masturbating housewives, or a Tom Clancy book for fat closet cases with no military experience who like to shoot guns and hang around with sailors. That’s not literature, giving psychos the reflection of themselves that they need. What you have to give the people, in what we call “literature,” is what they don’t know they want, because no one’s ever fucking said it before, capisce?

Broadway Books had arranged (in further “celebration” of the 50th anniversary of The Catcher in the Rye) a “point of sale” package. You could also buy posters, and–I’m not kidding about this–a reproduction of Holden Caulfield’s hat. Broadway dropped the ball. A smart businessman (like Claude La Badarian) would not only reproduce those hats but instantly generate a line of Ignatius J. Reilly deerstalkers and hot-dog cart smocks, and the wearers could maybe fight it out this fall, like Mods and Rockers. As for the attempted eviction of Salinger from his own domain, literary real estate, like the real stuff, belongs to the person who can keep it, and Salinger’s not giving up a scrap of ground anytime soon to anyone else’s teenager-greasing spank-book. Whenever it snows in Manhattan and puts you in that red hunting cap state of mind–or “Salinger weather,” if you prefer–Holden Caulfield gets out of whatever coffin you try to put him in and goes abroad–immortal in his fraudulence–fucking up, and making permanently gratuitous, permanently ridiculous, your novel about New York City, and yourself. The point being, all ye coming-of-agers: stop it. Just stop it. Stop. You talk of nothing. Seriously. Go to Java on a shrimp boat. Get a job. I’ll take care of the literature.

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: Claude Finally Finds Out What a “Table Shower” Is

Je Suis Un Genius, Baby

France

DEAR GRAYDON CARTER,

Let me tell you a story about France. A few years ago, Claude La Badarian found himself in Paris, the foremost city of the good-looking nation of France. Unaware that Paris cabs waited at “stands,” Claude, in France, sporting a first-edition gut and an ass you could land a plane on (both developed in motel-locused typhoons of pizza boxes and tariffy bottles during the well-compensated writing of an unproduced film about revenants–still in Spanish “development hell”), spent about two hours in a fierce downpour, attempting, springtime in Parisly, to flag cabs as if he were on Hudson Street. Claude was not only miserable but ridiculous. No cabs stopped, obviously. The drivers of many cabs and many civilian cars blew their French horns as it were, and made gestures (some rude, some possibly intended to be helpful) at the bewildered, miserable, rain-soaked prodigy. All Claude wanted to do, if he did nothing else in his life, was to get to the Gare de Lyon and go to Italy. Finally Claude gave up and staggered a few blocks, entering, finally, a tourist trap called the Café Arc de Triomphe–for some reason filled with midges–it is still there–so are the midges–I am in Paris now, at the George V, waiting for Elizabeth Jagger to come out of the bathroom–where he ignited a cigarette, dragged open his “bicycle bag” and examined his wet, condition-unknown laptop.

“I don’t speak French,” said Claude, not looking at the waiter, forgetting for the moment that he knew all modern languages.

“I don’t speak English!” said the waiter, but, to his credit, not as if it were a recommendation.

“Good,” said Claude, “let me have a coffee then.”

“With cream?”

“Certainly,” said Claude.

That is how you deal with fucking waiters in France. The Senator, desperate for two eggs, used to order “dix oeuvres” (which sounds like half of what his grandson serves in Café La Badarian) in the morning and finally gave up and took his meals over at American Legion Post Number One. The coffee was brought, in a Frog micro-mug, and when that was demolished like a shot of tequila on Cuervo night at a North Shore bar owned jointly by the Mafia and a DWI’d Boston Bruin, ca. 1980 (that was the great era of child-slaughtering right-wingers, Graydon, and, face it, for drunk driving generally: there was no “recovery” in those days, it being before Jonathan Edwards again took the pulpit and the congregation shrieked as the Archfiend flew away with its more cosmopolitan members), Claude had another one, this one accompanied by a large brandy, little bits of paper recording the purchase of these items being stuck under the ashtray in the famous French way.

It was while Claude was feebly gesturing for a second novel, I mean brandy, that the only other customer in the establishment, a fucking gorgeous–knock-down gorgeous–blonde about 24 years of age, sitting in front of a smudged parfait glass with a spoon sticking out of it, interceded on Claude’s behalf, saying, in French, something, warmheartedly, like, Hey, that very wet fat guy who can’t speak French needs an effing drink. Then she smiled at Claude, biting her lower lip, as if something really good was happening between her and the baffled genius. The waiter came: Claude smiled and nodded gratefully at his savior. Unbelievably, she (the savioress) came instantly over to his table and sat down eagerly. Claude still does get women, but this was totally out of control and Claude, homard de tout le monde if nothing else, realized he was probably dealing with a case of professionalism, or psychosis.

You are American? she asked. Got that right, answered Claude, though the term “American” is a fiction for simpletons, foreigners and federals: the USA is a lot of countries unnaturally related. Claude is a member of the New England civilization. Poor Claude, literate little boy, fond of drawing, diffidence, solitude, beans on toast, “r” unknown in the La Badarian household, never saw himself on tv–not on Gilligan, not in cowboy films–until he saw David Hemmings in the cheapo early-60s seaside musical comedy Be My Guest. Don’t fucking tell me about America. And don’t tell me I’m an Anglophile either or I’ll kick your ass. Anyway, the French girl said that she had been two years in New York one year previously, where she “had her studies” at FIT.

“Coals to Newcastle” was not the thing to say, but Claude, after dismissing “coals to Newcastle,” which was utterly wrong, algebraically, in a way he couldn’t put his finger on, but he had to say something, so he finally opted for, “Surely, you’re not serious.” She assured him, nodding solemnly, that she was very serious indeed about having gone from France to study at FIT, which raised obvious questions about her intelligence. Yet there is only one thing to do with women, as Oscar Wilde, of all people, noticed: make love to them if they are pretty and ignore them if they are plain. In Claude’s case one could say that his general rule of thumb is say something stupid to them if they are nice and go home with them if they are completely fucking psychotic.

Being at the time incompletely made of money Claude waved for the waiter to bring the girl something, the something turning out to be a glass of vino. One thing led to another, some features of Paris were inspected, and 745 minutes later Claude, having missed the last Milan train, was in a different district of Paris (as far away from, and it wasn’t just the alcohol, where he had been as Bar Harbor is from 5th Ave.), sitting in a peeling apartment dating from the St. Bartholomew’s massacre and resembling D’Artagnan’s first digs in the French Big Apple, being shown pastel sketches of…pocketbooks. That’s right, pocketbooks. The woman was a French pocketbook designer, and evidently employed in this unimaginable profession. Someone has to design pocketbooks–Christ, there are even probably turbulent pocketbook freelancers–but you never think you’ll meet them. Claude admired the drawings and then (having long since admitted to being a famous American writer) tackled her in the lounge. In the morning, Claude loaned his new friend some money to cover emergency household expenses of the kind that pop up suddenly after consensual intercourse in the Frog metropolis, and departed for Milan, where he panicked and went to Holland. In the Gelderland, Claude realized he had the clap, and after some sort of revolting, semi-explosive discharge while pissing in the shower retired crying to his bed. It seemed so cliched to have caught a dose in Paris; and it seemed hideous to have gonorrhea in godly rural Holland. Claude probably wasn’t the first man to look at a tidy Dutch church, with children coming out of it, and think, Yes but I have gonorrhea, but he felt like it.

Ah well. What are you going to do.

Anyway, Graydon, si Claude n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer. About Wolcott’s job, yes, he’s very good, and yes, he’s more “reliable” than me, and yes, I fucking “attacked” Elizabeth Hurley when sent to do a profile, and YES, I never paid you back the advance against expenses, but

Fuck. Hang on. Oh shit.

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: A Police Report on the Dreadful Demise of Claude La Badarian

The Grapes Of Claude

DEAR GOD,

Father O’_____, my confessor, as you are aware, back in the third grade, used to tell me that everything happened for a reason. Everything fit together. Because the priesthood existed, for example, you had made him a homosexual. Father O’_____ insisted that it all added up in the end. When it didn’t, and you noticed, it still added up, except you didn’t see it, because you lacked that divine article called faith. Yet I am beginning to think that Fr. Presently Incarcerated might have been right. Things have been adding up lately. When the police arrived, their warrant was not only made out in the name of CLAUDE LE BANDARIAN (a good lawyer, not that I have one, would have made hash of any arrest) but it was also lacking that crucial AKA ALFRED LONGWOOD which would have meant serious, climacteric trouble for your narrator.

The omission was obviously divine. Since in your wisdom Lord you have also made me a master of many dialects (a great actor was lost in Claude: all good novelists are actors, as you know, having made us, down to the hyperconsciousness, the cigarette ash all over the desk) I was able to convince the police, after a few minutes difficulty on the landing (I was coming back from the shower, inconvenienced by precarious towel, soap-on-a-rope in the form of Sneezy the Dwarf), that I was not “Claude Le Bandarian,” blackmailer, but a paperless German anthropologist named Andreas Kluth. Of course the police came back upstairs, later, but by then I was off like a cheap suit. Where to go? That was the question. Increasingly it is always the question. Mounting the autoscooter I recently purchased, I buzzed quietly off into the night, deciding that the airport was definitely out of the question and that it was time to take Monahan up on his (recently reiterated: you see how everything works out) offer of a drink. Doubtless there was an “APB” out for me but if you are looking for one Claude La Badarian you don’t assume he was the helmeted fat guy in a poncho who just buzzed past your cruiser on a go-ped. A 15-minute ride brought me into the deep, dinner-hour mysteries of the Polack mill town where Monahan has his studio or atelier. The scooter farted out in front of a looming building where women in long dresses once made Army boots, neither left nor right foot distinguished, for the Civil War. The building in which Monahan has his office, as you know very well, having put it there, and having put him in it, stood castellate and blackened over a road which ran past the mill pond. It showed one light on its second floor: Monahan.

Bats whirled around a once-fancy cupola whose copper roof was stained with moonlight. The heavy front door was locked. Like Huck Finn I chucked small rocks at the lighted window until a pumpkin-sized head and fridge-shaped torso appeared in the window. Monahan held up a hand, and then came downstairs (lights coming on sequentially in the landing) and opened the door. The non-genius was wearing socks, a pair of destroyed shorts and a shirt covered with deck paint advertising a brand of Bermuda rum. No velour smoking jacket and hair tucked behind the ears like the old days. The fucker now looks like a thyroidal South Boston union boss. “Claude,” he said, neutrally, neither welcoming or whatever the opposite thing is (I am having trouble thinking of words: ungood for a literary person), and took me upstairs, climbing the squeaking brass-hatched stairs to the 3000 sq. ft. office for which he claims to pay $150 dollars a month.

I have dreamed of an office like this. The building stands on the edge of dereliction. That’s important. In the hallway a “bubbler,” the masterpiece of that slow anti-plumber, Time, shoots water a full three feet beyond the stained rim of the basin. You could rollerskate in the huge, well-mopped hallways, pausing occasionally to have dinner off the floor. In Monahan’s studio, he has a couch, an armchair, an emergency futon laid on against the possibilities of journalistic all-nighters and/or domestic upheavals, an electric kettle, all books extant, and three desks. He’s set up like Sir Richard Francis fucking Burton in the old photographs, lacking only hookah and camel saddle. The ceilings are almost 20 feet high. Like all 19th-century buildings, this mill seems to have been built for a race of giants: The oak wainscoting, smelling of a recent application of Murphy’s oil soap, is as high as a Watusi’s ribcage.

I was quite impressed by Monahan’s workspace. Of course you’ve got your usual genius-litter of overflowing ashtrays and so forth, but he looks like he makes an effort finally, and frankly, Henry, you couldn’t come across a better studio or atelier anywhere at any price. Plus it has a dartboard. A man with one of these things could leave his wife at any time: no spending a night under a kiddie pool for Monahan if things go south back at the ranch. There’s no “working on the relationship,” boyo, when you’ve got an office like this. With an office like this I could rule the world. Actually, no: it would be filled with bottles, forgotten brassieres, unfinished novels of every possible type.

Still: A man could write in a place like this. Dorm-fridge, hotplate, small basin to wash in. Easy enough: Christ, with A.S. Longwood’s extensive cash-advance ability, fused brilliantly with his non-existence, I could take the whole third floor of this place and turn it into my personal empire. If things ever got tight I could fish in the mill pond like the hispanics (why is it always hispanics fishing, wherever you go?) are doing right now, going mira mira mira, and dragging tiny cancerous fishes out of the purling oak-brown water where the millrace plunges beneath the road. Well, at any rate Monahan gave me a brandy. I conveyed my recent personal history and more recent random thought about more or less permanent sanctuary in an office like this one. See how everything works out? It all adds up.

“You could do that,” he said. “Why not?”

Indeed why not? Why wander the earth, or the ether, the La Badarian firmament, unfirm as it is, when one can have a room like this? Obviously, Monahan was not thrilled by the idea of another genius inhabiting the building, but he was civil, and said that at any rate he wouldn’t be around–he was going out “on tour” until Christmas with that other massive asshole Bruno Maddox. In my position, he said, he would move in and exercise my only remaining option, which is to be the best and most productive hermit in history.

At the appropriate moment I mentioned that I had been up for three days and felt like clawing my own face off and Monahan very kindly handed me a bottle of Valium which had been given him a year previously when he went to the doctor and said he felt weird, “manic,” couldn’t sleep, etc., omitting to mention that he had four jobs and drank no liquid other than coffee. These days–well, put it this way. There are plenty of Valium left and this is Monahan we’re talking about. He has a yoga mat, which he tried to hide like a filthy magazine, but I saw it. He said little about himself, incidentally, except that he’d been having the usual problems with people he hadn’t thought about in a million years confusing themselves hopefully with completely fictional creations.

Unfortunately that’s not how genius works. As you, God, are in each blade of grass, so The Novelist hangs out in each small stone, each neon tetra, the CEO creeping away from a sleeping waitress, the sky, the tuna sandwich Dora made when feeling low, the motorcycle’s misfiring cylinder, every molecule of the Dominican in childbirth in a warm bath. Sorry, that’s the way it is. What sort of fully functioning narcissist would put your ass in something? My God the world is sad. All the lonely, crazy people, and not one of them without narcissistic personality disorder. It’s only the novelist who makes hay with NPD which incidentally also means Northampton Police Department, which is what I should have been thinking about anyway.

“All right, Claude,” Monahan said. “Look. If you take the floor as A.S. Longwood, someone’s going to find you out. I’d recommend using cash. That’s always best, in the hermit business. Plus of course you never want your biographers to know where you were.” He, Signor Post Restante, was getting into it like Tom Sawyer. He had it all down to a science, this how to be productive, and it made me nervous. All the bitching I do about not being able to write. What if this were all solved and I produced nothing? We went up to the third floor. I have to say it looked good to me. The top floor had a small kitchen with two gas-rings, and a bathtub dating from the early days of the Cleveland Administration. “That’s what I’m saying,” said Monahan. Anyway, we got drunk, and your narrator crapped it on the futon at about 4 a.m. The next morning, Monahan, fresh as a daisy, woke me up and said: “It’s done. The ladies went for it.” (I have no idea who the “ladies” were supposed to be.) “I rented the whole floor. You’re now Mr. Packwood, of Montresor Creative Services, Inc. You owe me two thousand dollars.”

“For the year?” I asked, grabbing my checkbook, and missing the critical word “Montresor.”

“For two years,” said Monahan.

I gave him a check against a credit card. He gave me a key. He gave me his Staples charge account information and said, “Go nuts, I’ll write it off.” Then he said he never wanted to see me again as long as he lived because I was merely a “summer column,” whatever that meant (I imagined a wicker thing, lit on fire with a man inside it, culpable of all sins–it’s not as if the Jesus-thing was a new idea) and closed the door of his office.

Well anyway, God, you of all people know what happened next. I got a few massive deliveries–everything needed to support life, write prose, and remain intoxicated for two years–and after a few days of sweeping and shoving furniture around in a totally artistic way I found myself set up splendidly. It was like moving-in day at school: I was excited, as if I had, once again, though ultimately disastrously, turned over a new leaf. I have seven rooms “of my own,” all with thick, chickenwired windows which I can’t actually open. Things went swimmingly for a week–I have been doing about 4000 words a day–and then I went down to the door which previously opened onto the stairwell and found that it opened not onto the stairwell but a wall of raw brick. I thought I’d heard something.

I’ve put it together: there are no “ladies.” Monahan owns the building. Occasionally, I communicate with Monahan through an air vent. Sample conversation: “I can’t write about regular people.” “That’s because you don’t know you are one.” Etc. Then he turns up the early Stones.

So I pass from the world’s stage. But I’m around. Wherever there’s an editorial meeting that doesn’t really go anywhere, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a guy killing a piece too late for it to be sold to another monthly, I’ll be there. I’ll be there in the way guys order a negroni when they’re mad. And whenever a man is living by honest labor, buckling to his artistic destiny and going at a heartfelt novel like the hammers of hell, I’ll be there, too.

Oh bullshit, no I won’t. There has to be a way out of here. The last thing a genius of my type needs is two years in a room with nothing more than a typewriter. I’m “post-novel,” God, really. So is the world. So is the Novel. That’s what people don’t realize and now it’s all this.

Sincerely,

Claude La Badarian

Restaurant Critic

The Aristocrat Magazine

A map of the travels of Claude La Badarian.