"Blood Red"

 

Harry had come to the end of the page, and he turned it over.

"So?" said Livingston.

"Yes?" said Harry.

"You've now read two pages," said Livingston. "What's the verdict?"

"My verdict?"

"Yes."

"Um."

"Your considered opinion."

Harry found himself taking another deep drag on the marijuana cigarette.

"Take your time," said Livingston. 

Harry exhaled the thick smoke, a smoke full of dreams. 

"I think," he said.

"Yes?" said Livingston.

"I think –"

"Yes. You think?"

"I think this is unlike anything I've ever read," said Harry.

"Well, that's good, I suppose," said Livingston, "but, more to the point, is it rubbish?"

Harry took pause again.

"Take another toke," said Livingston.

"Toke?" said Harry.

"That's hepcat talk for a drag of tea. Go ahead, take another hit."

"Hit?"

"Boy, you really are a square, ain't you, Harry?"

"A square?"

"I mean you're not hep to the jive."

"Um, no, no, I suppose I'm not," said Harry.

"We need to take you out to some 'happening' jazz joints."

"Maybe," said Harry. 

"No two ways about it, man. Now take another good toke."

Harry took another good toke.

"Now hold it in," said Livingston.

Harry held it in. He looked out the window on the other side of the desk. The snow continued to fall and swirl in the light of a street lamp, and the world outside rumbled and whooshed. What was the meaning of it all? He had no idea, and if he had ever thought he knew the meaning, he had been wrong, horribly wrong, there was no meaning…

"Okay, you can let it out now," said Livingston.

And Harry let the smoke escape from his lungs, up through his throat and out of his mouth.

"So?" said Livingston.

"Yes?" said Harry.

"Is it rubbish?" said Livingston. "My book. Or would you say garbage. Or, if you will, complete and utter shite?"

Harry turned to look at the little fellow sitting next to him, with his thick horn-rimmed glasses and his carefully trimmed moustache on his red, somewhat bloated face. It only dawned on Harry now that Livingston no longer wore the billed mackinaw cap with the buttoned-up earflaps, and he saw that the man's hair was curly and slick with some sort of pomade. The magnified eyes behind the lenses of his glasses were blue and bloodshot and somehow pathetic and pleading, but in them also was the undeniable spark of sentient life.

"I think," said Harry, speaking slowly, as if the words had to be squeezed from his brain, and trying to be truthful, or at least not to, to – to tergiversate? "I think that what I've read thus far is, in its own unique way, excellent."

"Oh wow," said Livingston. "Really?"

"Yes," said Harry. There was more that he could say, much more, the words swirling in his brain like the snow outside the window, but he left them all unsaid.

"You know what you have just done, Harry?" said Livingston, after a brief but intense pause.

"What's that?" said Harry.

"You have justified my existence."

"Well," said Harry, not knowing what else to say.

"One moment I was just another, what, a clown," said Livingston. "An unemployed drunkard, wasting both his days and nights, but now, now I am a – dare I say – a writer?"

"Yes," said Harry, glancing again at the enormous stack of pages before him. "No one can say you are not a writer, Livingston."

"Do you want to read another page?"

"Um –" said Harry.

"Just one more page, just to make sure."

"All right."

"Take another toke first."

"Okay," said Harry, and he took another toke, then picked up the page at the top of the pile and read.

Which brings me to my major habit in life, to wit: boozing. 

In my days of boyhood I looked on the world with bewilderment. What was it all in aid of, all these people coming and going, doing things? I think I was about thirteen when it occurred to me that people did things so that they could eat, and have a roof over their heads. But what if you didn't need to do anything in order to eat and have a roof? What was the purpose of life then? It had no purpose that I could see. But then at Yale I discovered booze, glorious booze, in all its varieties. Now everything was different, because after a few drinks it all began to make sense. The purpose of life was to be drunk.

To have a drink, and then another. To have the unprepossessing fellow sitting next to you at the bar gradually become interesting, or at least not crashingly boring. To have one's own thoughts become steeped in significance, even if that significance disappeared or transmuted utterly by the time the next drink was drunk. To tumble out of the bar and down the street to another bar, and to the next stranger sitting on the neighboring stool, with his own unique wisdom and insights. And so on, ad infinitum. 

Let's see, what other habits? 

Oh, yes, my club. Because so often I just don't have the energy to go wandering the island in search of alcoholic adventure, no, so much easier just to go up the block to the club and spend the afternoon and sometimes the evening there, sitting in the lounge with the movers and shakers, the men who rule the world, these men who somehow accepted me even though I neither toiled nor spun, but simply because I was my father's son and my grandfather's grandson and my great-grandfather's great-grandson, the progeny of these hardworking industrialists who had built and maintained the fortune I now enjoyed. It wasn't fair, none of it was, but even a fool like myself had learned at an early age (I think I was six or seven) that nothing about life was fair.

Did these men at the club think me, at bottom, nothing more than a wastrel? I'm sure they did, and do. But what did I care what they thought? Did I tell them how to run their law and brokerage firms, how to run their factories, how to lead their regiments into battle? Of course not. They did what they felt they should do, and I did what I did. Which was nothing. Except to drink, and to talk nonsense. Hey, don't knock it until you've tried it. Being a lazy idle drunken loafer is not a bad way to live, and it is the life I've chosen. When I lie on my deathbed I shall have no regrets, except perhaps the single regret of having lived at all.

Harry had come to the end of yet another page, and he turned it over.

"Well?" said Livingston. 

"Yes?" said Harry.

"Has it gotten boring yet?"

"No," said Harry.

"There's only about fourteen hundred more pages to go."

"I see."

"But you don't have to read them all now."

"Yes, uh –"

"Maybe we've read enough for one night," said Livingston.

"Maybe," said Harry.

"Because, you know, reading is fine, but it's no substitute for real life."

"Maybe," said Harry.

"I think so," said Livingston. "And even now I feel that call. The call to life. I suggest that we set forth once again. Out there." He pointed with his chubby little finger to the window and to the blizzard raging implacably outside it. "The night is yet young, and we, if not quite young, are yet not quite old. Let us go and find the madness."

"I should really go home," said Harry, knowing of course he had no intention of going home.

"Nonsense," said Livingston. "We have the rest of our lives to go 'home'." He gave Harry a light slap on the shoulder. "Get up, old buddy. We are going to paint this town red. Blood red."

"Um," said Harry.

"We might regret it, tomorrow," said Livingston. "But tomorrow is tomorrow, and now is now."

"Uh," said Harry.

"And tomorrow may never come. Someday, indeed, it won't come. Now let us go."

"Okay," said Harry. 

It was too late to turn back now. The only way to go was forward, forward with this madman. Harry took one last drag on the reefer, now burnt down to its last quarter-inch, and he let it drop into the ashtray before him, the ashtray full of the butts of a dozen or so other reefers, the ashtray emblazoned on its rim in chipped golden paint with the legend

The St Crispian Hotel Where the Service Is Swell

{Please click here to read the unexpurgated "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious rhoda penmarq…}

"Memoirs of a Moron"

 

My name (and don't we all have one?) is Livingston P. Lovechild. I ask you, dear reader, if you exist, what was I to do with my life, cursed with such an appellation? Let's face it, you hear a name like Livingston P. Lovechild, and the first thing you think is, "He must be a cunt." And pardon my language, but I am only trying to be truthful here. No one with a name like Livingston P. Lovechild could be anything less or more than a cunt. His parents have already damned him to cunthood for all eternity. And I know what you're thinking, "If it bothers you that much, why not just change your name?" And I admit that this maneuver has occurred to me. Oh the gloriously resonant names I considered: Jack Jackson. Nick Harper. Joe McCool. I even considered some Jewish names: Barry Rothenberg. Jake Cohen. Barry "Buck" Blitztein. Nor did I ignore the Italians: Lou Santone. "Big Mike" Dallesandro. Al "the Pal" Dellarossa. For a while there I wanted to go French: Jean-Claude Chagrin. Louis St. Louis. Marc Le Parc. Yes, so many names I considered, but in the end I kept the name I had been anointed with at baptism. Because, in the end, who would be kidding whom? No matter what I tried to call myself, the truth was bound to come out, that I was Livingston P. Lovechild and no one else, and that I was an obvious cunt.

Harry had come to the end of the page, and he turned the sheet over.

"Well, what do you think, buddy?" said Livingston.

Unbeknownst to Harry, Livingston had pulled an armchair over and had sat himself to Harry's right. Harry's keen novelist's eye perceived that Livingston was now also apparently smoking one of the marijuana cigarettes from the wooden box.

"It's uh," said Harry. "Um."

"Yes, but does it breathe?" said Livingston. "Does it have the touch of life to it?"

"Yes," said Harry. "It does, but."

"Oh. I know. It sucks, right? Enormous donkey dick. You can level with me, Harry. I can take it."

"No," said Harry. "In fact I think it's rather good so far."

"Oh, wow, thank you, pal, that's all I wanted to hear. And from you, my favorite writer. Even more than James Branch Cabell. Even more than Edgar Rice Burroughs or Earl Derr Biggers."

"Thanks, Livingston," said Harry, "but."

"But? But what?" said Livingston.

"You can't write the word cunt."

"What do you mean?"

"No publisher will publish anything with the word cunt in it. Especially five or six times on the very first page."

"Hey, there's a lot more cunts coming in the next fifteen hundred pages or so, believe you me, Harry."

"But you can't write that word," said Harry.

"Why not? It's a perfectly good word."

"That well may be," said Harry. "But no publisher will publish a book with that word in it."

"Well, fuck them then," said Livingston.

"Fuck them?"

"Yeah," said Livingston. "And the horses they rode in on. Who needs them?"

"But, but, um, but," said Harry.

"Know what I'll do?" said Livingston. "I'll start my own publishing company. I'll publish this book myself if I want to, and peddle it from door to door. All I need to know from you, Harry, is, 'Is it good?' And don't worry about a few cunts here and there. Is it good, that's all I want to know."

"Well, I've only read the first page."

"And you sort of liked that, right?"

"I actually did, yes," said Harry. And he took another puff on his marijuana cigarette, which he now noticed was almost halfway smoked down. 

"How do you like the reefer, by the way?" said Livingston.

"The reefer?"

"What you're smoking there," said Livingston. "The reefer. The muggles, the doobie, daddy-o."

"I –" Harry paused. "I think I like it."

"It's good stuff," said Livingston. "And you know what the best part is? No hangover. Smoke as much as you want, and, unlike with the lush, no ill effects the next day."

"Really?"

"Yeah, like, you take tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow, if the Russians don't drop an A-bomb on us, or if I don't kick off from a stroke in my sleep, but tomorrow what I'll probably do is just lie in bed and smoke weed and drink tea and munch wholegrain rusks and oatmeal cookies all day. Nothing better for the health of the old corporeal host, not to mention one's mental and spiritual salubrity. I call these days my recovery days. Take a day or two off from the bars, maybe even three, possibly four, and then I'm ready to hit the streets and make it real all over again. The call of the wild, y'know?"

"Yes, I suppose so," said Harry, taking another deep draw on the reefer.

"The sacred primeval call," said Livingston. "The call of so many bars, bars and saloons and taprooms and cocktail lounges, all of them beckoning, saying, 'Come, my son, heaven awaits you here. Come. You are welcome.'"

"You should put that in your book," said Harry.

"Oh, I'm sure I have," said Livingston. "Do you want to read some more?"

"Okay," said Harry, and he picked up the fresh page and read.

Perhaps I am wrong to title these pages the Follies of a Flâneur. Would it not be better, more truthful, to call them Confessions of a Cunt? Or, perhaps, The Memoirs of a Moron? Oh, well, no need to decide now.

Let's go back to the beginning, to where I choose to begin, my return to the old house on Bleecker Street after getting kicked so unceremoniously out of Yale. This was a dark time for the world at large. War, as they say, was looming on the horizon. But what did I care? Men had always fought wars, and they would continue to do so. But my father had died the previous year, leaving the family quite well off, and with a steady stream of revenue from "our" electric toaster factory. The point is, I didn't "need" to work. I had never set foot in the factory, and never would, and yet its existence provided me with an income more than suitable for my humble habits. And what were these habits? I shall enumerate them:

Sleeping late, every day. What luxury to lie abed, comfortably, while the world churns obliviously outside my window?

My "strolls". Days when I feel properly rested and full of the jumping beans of life and insanity, after a good lunch to set forth down the steps to Bleecker Street, and to turn right, or left, as the mood strikes me, and to walk on, turning left or right at random, until I see a sign: Joe's Bar. Sam's Bar. Chuck's Bar. Whatever, a bar, and to go into that cave of twinkling dimness and climb a stool, and the barman comes over and says, "Yes, sir?"

And I look behind him at all the glittering bottles, and I gaze down the bar at the gleaming polished tap handles, and I say, "Ah, yes, where to begin?"

A cunty sort of thing to say to a bartender who only wants to know what you want to drink, but, hey, that's me, I told you I was a cunt, and this is just the sort of thing I tend to say. 

I can't help it if I'm a cunt. That's just what I am.

"Look, mister," the bartender might say, and has said, "I just want to know what you want to fucking drink…"

"I'll take a beer," I say.

"Great," says the bartender. "What kind?"

"The cold kind," I say, and the bartender, after a brief pause, turns away to get the beer, presumably a cold one, and I can't help but hear him mutter, under his breath, the single word:

"Cunt."

{Kindly go here to read the even more unexpurgated "adult comix" version in A Flophouse Is Not a Home, profusely illustrated by the illustrious Rhoda Penmarq…}