Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Fleas, etc.



Reginald Hardcourt has fleas. He moved to South Korea to meet his gay guru lover and drink snake oil to get clear. He's lost most his teeth. He sent me a picture--he looks like a deranged baby. "Those won't grow back," I texted him. (He thought they would).

I spent my best years in darkness, collecting and stealing, piecing together a starry identity, fetishizing corduroy. But for the occasional predawn drunkenness and experiments in automatic writing, rarely was I lucid. I felt it was a sin--an act of desperation--to join the outside world. So I waited for a knock upon the door, an invitation in the post. I pretended to be someone else and eventually I became him. Then, after a horrific game of tennis and too many anti-anxiety pills, I decided to kill him off only to discover I was no one else.

As a wolf I would go rambling on full-moon nights hoping to recognize a soul but the best I found were the young women joggers in their tights. I cackled at desire. Jack and Coke in my flask, I diddled butterfaces in the park--it was more fulfilling than a glass of wine with the missus. I went skinny-dipping in a puddle. I continued to collect and steal, becoming a private museum dying to be robbed. The animals poked their noses at my deadbolt, but their wet-nosed efforts annoyed me and I told them to shoo. The intellectuals tried their tired psychotherapies with with their strange faith in sanitary big words, too chicken-shit and linear to be effective in tidying up the messy adolescent room of my mind (there are maggots in the closet from when I first lost my appetite!). I told them to fuck off and tried reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead on a Saturday night--a real yawner, that one.


After a night of revelations that would be forgotten in the morning, she entered me like a ghost--insubstantial, not much to her, but somehow beautiful and strange. With her lonely sad kiss she made it past my guard dogs and I showed her my exotic collection of garbage. I showed her how to laugh at the darkness and I showed her my perfect ass. We had some good times and she pissed in the cat's litter box.


"Baby we're a riot now let's set this world on fire!"


She had that strange mixture of sadness and eroticism I so adore in a chick. She was no filthy animal. Quickly I knew I loved her and quickly I told her so. It seemed so simple but she turned it into a big to-do with her trail of ex-loves who had poisoned her brain. It broke my ashy little aesthete's heart. So one morning I sent her out into the rain and locked the door behind her. I went back to my old ways only to find my automatic writing had gone to shit.

That was that, and after that, a few weeks of intense loneliness, the odd bit of salt-water in my eye, etc., etc. Once that was done, I thought, I will live my life as though the world were a series of parties begging for me to crash them. Laughter, birds, running in the street, etc., etc. And in the ballroom at the Ritz I saw my baby--the only girl I've ever sort of loved--drinking gin and flirting with a rich old drunk. It hit me like a brick: he's nothing but a bum and she's nothing but a whore. And here am I, bold and cool, crashing parties and, though generally hated and perhaps a bit of a loser in this game of love, well, hey, I'm having a pretty good time!


4 comments:

Hoffmann said...

You may have noticed, but there are 3 men on Facebook who call themselves Nigel Tewksbury. Two brandish alcohol in their photos.

Nigel Tewksbury said...

Indeed, my dear Hoffman, I have seen that. The one in black-and-white is the real Tewksbury--the others are imposters and/or insignificant human beings.

Are you the legitimate Dustin or Philip Seymour? I am a fan of both.

Hoffmann said...

I'm both, of course.

Anonymous said...

AHA! I knew a part of your spirit died with each thunderous overhead smash that day! How could you expect anything less on my namesake surface? Thus, the root of your scurrilous defamation is uncovered. You, Sir, are a hellion.