Living Independently: A Case of Mistaken Identity
Dear Jesus Christ, The hotel where I live, for reasons obvious to anyone if one listens to the cries in the night (or in the daylight for that matter: at the moment it sounds like mankinds Adversary is upstairs, treating an LSD overdose with amphetamines), is frequently visited by social workers of the most disagreeable kind. They (at first collectively, and then singularly: Initially, I thought that my "caseworker" was one of a yoke of extra-judgmental Jehovahs Witnesses) have mistaken me for the man who used to live in my room, a mental defective named Alfred S. Longwood who vanished from the earth after filling in some forms requesting privatized public assistance. My immediate thought was to renovate the understanding of the social workers, but when I realized that their services came with Meals on Wheels (after all, my Lord, I write a dining column) and various other perks (coupons for haircuts, legal assistance, ice cream, pedicures, government cheese, gym memberships, and the Social Security number of a retarded alcoholic) I decided to keep my mouth shut, and two days a week, for two weeks, I have been, so far as Society is concerned, an Imbecile–an official one, with papers to prove it.
How, you ask, and well you might, can Claude La Badarian, with an I.Q. at John Stuart Mill level, pose as a simpleton named Alfred S. Longwood? The answer, Savior, is easier than you think. It was not necessary for me to do a retard "act" after my instructor asked, in the course of my personal assessment, if I could make a nutritious meal for myself, or take a shower without destroying the bathroom. I could not in conscience answer "yes." It has been pointed out to me by persons almost without number (usually as they pack their things, or mine) that the domestical effects of genius are indistinguishable from those of mental retardation. After my "personal assessment" I was flung into an at-home training course called "Living Independently." My personal trainer, a fruitarian spinster prone to "empathy" (which is to say presumption, which yet has its uses), has tutored me in Counting Money, Doing Laundry, Going Shopping, Making A Bed, Paying Bills, Switching Off Lights, Bathroom Courtesy, Ordinary Decency, and so forth–some of which arts are fascinatingly refined, and some of which I never knew existed.
I would heartily recommend the "Living Independently" course to any Genius alive.
Even if Genius and Retardation did not "intersect" at several important points, an imposture of feeblemindedness would be unnecessary in the circumstances: Pamela is a true Social Worker, which is to say a religious maniac and cosmogogue who sees nothing that she does not wish to see, hears nothing that she does not wish to hear, and, since she regards herself as the only person in the world who knows anything, she is oblivious to any information contrary to her primary theses, which are, 1), that she is the only person in the world who knows anything, and, 2, that, of all the people in the world, she is the only person who knows anything. (There may be a third presumption, but if so it is identical to the first two, and so we will leave it out of this History.) She is a great and saintly "helper" of everyone–perhaps the only truly compassionate person in the world. In a previous century she would have been the most annoying "Christian" in the Universe–and you, better than anyone, Savior, know what these quotation marks mean. Pamelas glorified spirit descends (via climbing the stairs), biweekly, and teaches me, in my character as The Longwood Retard (I am tempted to write a Holmes & Watson story for the "Baker Street Irregulars"), how to be a Functioning Member of Society, and nothing will derail her from her idée fixe that I am a Moron. I use advanced vocabulary freely; I am