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!