"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…}