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
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