A Column Debuts

Special to The Aristocrat

Dear Henry, Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. "$500 a week, no title, take it or leave it" is not precisely the reaction I had in mind, but $500 a week is good–positively ducal–money up here in the hinterlands, the land of clove and kaat, where Claude La Badarian, Unrequited Genius, has been spending his days. If one rules out certain antique dealers beaten savagely by rent-boys (on quiet nights you can hear the cries of Take my wallet and Please don’t kill me echoing across Ulster County), I am the best catch in Saugerties. In better days, which you well remember, Henry, I have incinerated as much as $2000 a day in New York City without buying anything tangible. Up here, five large a week is as good as a Guggenheim, and I am already making headway on Hyperconsciousness: A Memoir, which I must begin (because it is the way La Badarian began) with a recollection of a yellow kitchen, although Henry Adams (you don’t know who that is, Henry–for that matter neither did Henry Adams–that’s the whole point of the fucking document) had the discourtesy to begin his own backbreaking load of personal garbage with precisely the same recollection. I have toyed, confrontationally, with The Education of Claude La Badarian (my agent doesn’t like it). Anyway, I thank you very much for striking this deal. You have, against your will, done a great service to Art.

Mei-Mei is too much of a newcomer to these shores to trust any piece of paper without having it read, first, by another grasping, paranoid immigrant–she certainly doesn’t trust me to construe any document–on being summonsed by the student loan people, I told her, waving the blue flimsy, that I had yet again won a major literary award–she took The Aristocrat contract (which I thank you for) over to her contract-magus and America-expert, the local Asian grocer, an inscrutable noodle-selling swindler wearing a papa-san hat. Koreans are the closest she can come to her own people here in Saugerties: the usual boundaries one finds among Orientals have come down: no tickee no fuckee is screamed, from 4WD vehicles predating the bourgeois vogue for them, at anyone hailing from east of Suez. My incredibly bigoted wife, in these stressful circumstances, finds herself embracing Koreans, the unspeakables of the East. This fiscal wizard and dealer in contraband sexual tonics (bear paws, gorilla prostate, phials of unicorn sperm, powdered midget, you name it) quizzed at the pages for three hours and finally pronounced the contract, however he phrased it (which defeats the imagination), kosher. Mei returned looking guardedly ready to let me stay in the house.

They no have to print you article and they pay you 500 dollar, said Mei, paraphrasing information downloaded from Univac the Swindler, with his bird-cage hat. That is precisely the case, I replied, seigneurially, with that manner, and, when loaded, accent, that I share with cinema’s Peter O’Toole. Upon a further La Badarian promise of sobriety (right) and an intensification of my remunerative freelancing for The New Yorker under my pseudonyms Adam Gopnik & etc., Mei not only had sex with me (La Badarian, at first stunned, rose to the occasion and administered a pounding which nearly knocked the trailer home off its bricks, alerting neighbors to yet another earnings-related Reconciliation), but broke into her ogre’s hoard of cash (funny that I never thought of the loose board in the bathroom) and within three days moved the La Badarian menage, with suspect efficiency (it is fairly obvious that had I not "come through" as a "man," rather she had intended to make this move with her now doleful monoglot "ex," to whom I joyously gave the finger this morning) into a small ranch house of repellent green color, with a scurfy lawn behind a chain-fence, in what one might call a "wigga" neighborhood near the Saugerties funpark. Children in incredibly large pants loaf in the streets, pretending to be insolvent Negroes. The insectile whizzing of miniature Formula One cars and the crackle of rimfire cartridges (it sounds like fucking Isandlhwana over there, Henry) has proved, strangely, to be an invaluable aid to literary composition. Claude La Badarian, in his new "office" in the basement, is working like never before.

The medici created and destroyed me, wrote Art’s Leonardo. Usually, Henry, this is parsed as the Medici–that is, Lorenzo, Cosimo, etc.–but Leonardo, in addition to writing backwards, like the self-concealing old asspilot he was (I’m sure, Henry, that you can sympathize: the rest of us sympathize with the droughty Gretchen, in her catastrophic hats), was shifty in his use of Capitals, and some lunatics consider it possible that he meant that "the doctors," rather than his Medici patrons, had both created and destroyed him. No man in the 15th century would think he had been created by "doctors": doctors then, even more than they do today (in our time and in this country merely because the Hippocratic Oath is viewed as inconsonant with proper resource-management), specialized in killing people. Leonardo was talking, Henry, about Patronage, a thing of which I find myself, finally, after one burst of desperation, in possession. The brass ring is finally in the hand of Claude La Badarian.

Do I feel guilty? Do I worry that you think that blackmailing asshole and search your philosophy for a justification for murder? No, Henry. As all the world has known (except for shy, decent Claude La Badarian, attempting for so many years to operate as a gentleman on the Manhattan Serengeti), we must take what we can where we can and as we can. From now on, Henry, the man who stands between me and what I want had better grab his hairpiece if he wants anything left of him when Claude La Badarian is finished fucking him. The only good thing that happened to me in six years in Manhattan is that I didn’t manage to start a "webzine." Call me the canary in the coal mine, Henry–many do–but when I looked at that office in the Flatiron Building, in the company of a golf-pantsed, coke-snorting investor who was perfectly prepared to give me 200 a year to edit a "startup" (though, owing to calumnies, I was his second choice), I was aware of something shouting, "Get out!" like Jody the Pig in The Amityville Horror. Call it a cogent decision not to enmesh myself in a doomed business–call it a nervous breakdown–call it both, and I’ll call you unusually perceptive–but in either case, the La Badarian name swerved clear of disaster in that case. That, and the successful blackmailing, are the only two good things that have happened to me in two decades of being the greatest American Writer, apart from accidentally winning the Entwhistle Prize for Translation (and how ironic that was) when I was doing the Front of the Book for Media’s Penny, at Rogue. God, why was I ever in Magazines? A man like you has nowhere else to go. Personally I must have been on drugs. And I was, when I could get them.

The La Badarian day has been excellent. The office is dampish, and contains dangling spiders, who appear to be under the (fatal) impression that I have violated their space. There is a possibility of mice. Yet all my books are in place for once: I am the sovereign of my realm: I have ritually unloaded the revolver I so recently crammed against my palate (you cannot revise a 1780-page book whilst living in a church shelter, with Franciscans barking at you about "substance abuse" and so forth), and got on with my masterpiece. I must sign off: Mei-Mei, just home from her part-time job at the DMV (she cannot speak English–where else would she work?), wishes to send me out for "some beers." This is always a good sign at the La Badarian household: it means I’m going to get some. After two beers, my wife is anybody’s, even mine.

Yours, Claude La Badarian Restaurant Critic The Aristocrat Magazine

Next Week: Disaster, As Is Usual in Cases of Hubris

[LaBadarian@mindspring.com](mailto:LaBadarian@mindspring.com)