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
