Claude and the Little People
Café Calvin, Northhampton
Dear Henry, The heat up here, recently, in remittance-land, has been unforgivable. Though my name (mangled at Ellis Island by some tipsy, sinecured Mick in a circular pasteboard hat) would suggest origination in Africas clime (in fact, in predynastic Egypt–by way of France), the La Badarian gene pool gathers no tributary rivulets from anyplace south of Amiens (where there is an excellent cathedral), and I am as suited as an Inuit, or a walrus for that matter, for humidity and strong sunlight. Since being fired from my bookstore job I have lain torpid through the days, sipping gin and stengah, when I am not at the movies, drinking Coke by the gallon, desperate as a man eating human flesh in the hull of a plane crashed on an Alp. Not for us, the "wifebeater," Henry, nor the cheap barbaric rubber sandals sticking to the pavements–much less the savage, erotic exultation in life-threatening humidity. In New York City, as you well remember, Henry, I could not walk half a block without looking as if I had been dunked for hours in cheap cooking grease. At this time of year my sneakers (or "trainers," as Malcolm Gladwell would have them–up his ass, if he likes) begin to smell like some other mans shoes–a corpses. If there were a way to go into a state of refrigerated hibernation for the duration of the summer, I would do precisely that, for any amount of money, until the weather turns cool enough for a genius to walk to the liquor store in Western Massachusetts without wearing a kaffiyeh and a bedsheet.
The days are long gone when La Badarian could fuck off to the Vineyard at this time of year, to lie bathed with cool air in a genius-hammock on the third floor porch, to sleep with a blanket at night. I do not know if I reported to you, Henry, that my grandfather, the Senator, is dead. He is. It happened 19 years ago. He was struck by lightning and incinerated while guiding his gasoline-powered Scamp between the eighth and ninth holes at some sinister, scrubby links on what people call The Island. (It was the same lightning strike that cured Bill Styron of his "depression"–in other ages called the DTs.) Gram was fuddled for a few days after the Senator was planted, which allowed her daughter-in-law Delores, matriarch of the low-rent South Shore La Badarians, to evict the old lady from her 18-room cottage near Gay Head (now Aquinnah, as the previous appellation was never going to be anything but uncomfortably literal to Town Fathers, not to mention humiliated aborigines who could barely sell a hot dog without feeling funny), and slam her, apologetically catheterized (she didnt need a catheter, except that she did have to have one if they were going to keep her there),