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
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Week: Claude Converts on a Mercy Lunch
