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
