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.
