Silence, Exile, and Claude La Badarian

Dear Henry, Thank you for agreeing to make my payments "under the table," as well as, I suspect, out of your own pocket. As "William Monahan" (that fucker) I will remain at my present location until further notice. Your inaugural FedEx (of which I am, sir, in grateful receipt) caused some initial confusion in the mind of the supreme being of this hotel, a mangle-haired drunkie & cretin named Ed. He had never received a FedEx before (this says a lot about my present place of residence, which essentially selected me in that I fell on my face in the downstairs bar after chasing the last of Mei-Mei’s lorazepam with 16 or 17 cocktails). In his illiteracy Ed mangled the admonition not to send "blood products" in the envelope into the idea that the envelope contained blood products, to a certainty. "Here is your blood," he said, after knocking like the entire fucking police department on my door. For two days, Henry, I thought that Ed understood that the envelope contained money—which he was threatening to steal—unless I gave him some. The La Badarian mind sorted out the situation after two days of extremely heavy drinking, as well as attacks of hyperconsciousness which I would not wish upon the Archfiend.

In Guatemala, as you helpfully suggest, your money would go a great deal further than it does in this bijou college town in Massachusetts, but if I desired to live among incomprehensible savages, constantly on the lookout for a knife in the back, I would return to Manhattan, or my marriage. As destroyed as I am I do have "lifestyle considerations." I know that our "agreement" will continue until one or the other of us is dead, but I do not delude myself into thinking that $500 a week, though it is very serious money in the Genius Trade, will satisfy me forever. At any rate, Claude La Badarian is not going to fuck off to Morocco so he can squirt diarrhea all over the place while you eat caviar tartlets at Apocalypse with Candace Bushnell giving you handjobs. Neither am I the sort of man to remain content smoking Best Buys and pounding a nightly "doll house" of sub-premium beer in a welfare hotel. (Faced with that sort of lifestyle, I would be in danger of giving up drinking and smoking entirely, leaving Art bereft of Claude La Badarian, and thus all interest of any kind.) I may have to supplement my remittance and I certainly cannot do it while dying of dysentery among cannibals. Then the world would be as naked of Improvements as you are of that divine spark called Talent—unless we can consider your capacity to knife and toady your way to the middle without ever saying an original thing—a quality conferred by a respectable deity. This thesis would render your most sympathetic friends omnino taciturnos.

Today at the bar conveniently located beneath my residence (I live among mumbling "veterans"—and of a lot more than the fucking Army, I can tell you that), moodily converting your "blood products" into mammoth brandies, I realized that my essential problem now is what to do with my freedom. I am not the first man to have had this problem (Frenchmen have it pretty considerable). There are many who would say it’s no problem at all—yet it’s more of a problem than you think. The La Badarian Condition has always been: say you wake up in the morning and have every talent in the world (you cannot imagine this, Henry—but bear with me): what the fuck do you do with yourself? Create Art, you say, obviously, or "make" it, as the potters say, doing the opposite—yet La Badarian has to retool as an Artist, and, again, is wondering if it’s worth it. If God gives you something you can do, asks Stephen King, in his extra-popular On Writing, why wouldn’t you do it? Answer, you fucking hammerhead, Because Genius is different from, and possibly more problematic than, getting millions of dollars to rewrite old monster movies—you cunt.

Claude La Badarian, from earliest youth (photograph exists of the young Claude in a badged blazer, emerging from a basilica with his palms pressed together and his eyes turned skyward), has been besieged by gratuitous integrity. Anti-success training is the specialty of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. Sell out! people used to say to Claude La Badarian. Did Claude sell out? No. And then later, when he asked to sell out, he didn’t then, either, and not in every case because no one would let him. For a while there, with Mei, I nearly acceded to the view that writing is merely the way you make your living, so perhaps you should view it as a business—you asshole. And bang went the teapot off the La Badarian head. Fuck that, Henry. That’s why the world is excrement. Claude La Badarian is like Lancelot: the greatest knight, chucking his arms into a stream because to employ them for Vanity is hubris, and to employ them except in right cause (do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Are you reading this in Sagaponack with your buttplug in?) is unworthy of a human being. Is writing, these days, a right cause? You fucking tell me. I don’t think it is.

At any rate, I have abandoned Hyper-Consciousness: