the Last Buffoon Read online

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “I’m sorry,” he says loudly to embarrass me, “but you can’t sit at a table unless you order something.”

  What he hasn’t reckoned with is the fact that Alexander Frapkin has no shame. I merely stand up and lean against a wall painted dark red like bull blood. Beneath the blue neon light I finish my science-affliction notes destined to be filed alongside other notes on which I must get to work as soon as possible.

  I put the notebook in my shirt pocket as fatigue falls like a light cloak over my shoulders. I’m coming down and it’s too early for that. I want to dance some more and come on with beautiful young girls who might have father complexes which I shall help them resolve.

  I launch myself from the wall and head toward the men’s room where I’ll smoke some more dope. I must call Jake tomorrow and tell him how pleased I am with this stuff, not that he’ll give a shit. No, I can’t call him tomorrow anyway, I’m going for a marriage license and blood tests. Soon I shall step ’neath the nuptial bower once again. Oh God.

  Sometimes I think I should kill myself rather than continue these degrading compromises. A handful of sleeping pills and goodbye, Charlie. Many great artists took that route, and so can I.

  How can I be morbid with all these beautiful young girls around me shaking their tits and asses? Snap out of it, Frapkin — the force of your talent is irresistible. One day you’ll be on top and beautiful young girls will fall at your feet. Greatness flows in your veins and you fucking well know it. These thoughts are unworthy of you.

  The men’s room smells like a horse stall and is packed with young guys smoking joints, popping pills, sniffing cocaine, and shooting shit. I squeeze into four square inches of vacant floor, pull out my half-smoked joint, and light up. The room begins to spin like the carousel on Coney Island, where I spent my shiftless youth.

  “That smells pretty good, man,” says a young black cat beside me, his obsidian skin glistening.

  “Have one.” I pass him a joint. When the blacks take over he might remember and give me an easy job.

  He takes it, inhales, goggles his eyes, and passes the butt to his buddy, and thus my Colombian buds begin to travel around the toilet.

  “Have one of these,” the black cat says, offering me a little white pill.

  “What is it?”

  “A quaalude.”

  Eagerly I open my mouth, and the Archbishop of Nigeria places the pill on my tongue.

  “Wash it down with this.” He hands me a bottle of wine.

  I take two gulps. It’s sweet and fiery. I smack my lips and return the bottle.

  A miracle is happening — someone is handing the tip of my joint back. I take another toke and pass it to the black cat, who tosses the burning roar into his mouth and washes it down with the wine.

  “This is really good,” he says with a dreamy smile. “Where can I buy some?”

  It’s seldom that things go so cordially between me and my black brothers. “I’m not a dealer, but here.” I take one of the rolled joints from my pocket and hand it to him.

  “Thanks a lot, mah man.”

  It takes me hours to get to the stinking urinals and more hours to drain my vein. It feels like my whole being is squirting out my dick and all that’ll be left is a dried-out parchment Frapkin. I’m hallucinating wildly — a black minstrel show is performing on top of the white porcelain urinal, and Al Jolson is on one knee singing:

  Ah’d walk a million mahles

  fo’ one of your smahles

  mah maaaaaaammmmmmmmmy

  I weasel out of the men’s room and pirouette to the dance floor, where I see a blonde Juno bouncing her tits and wiggling her ass five feet in front of me. She’s wearing a short orange dress and no brassiere. Overhead lights glint on her eyes and teeth, and I can feel her big fat wet cunt rubbing against my face.

  A robust erection throbs to life in my white jockey shorts, its head itching like a poison ivy rash. I shouldn’t have taken that quaalude because they make one excessively horny and now I must have coitus immediately or perish from flaming lust, and I have no wife, no girlfriend, not even a pet cat. Breathing like a long distance runner, I scour my brain for a solution to the problem. I could jump on top of Juno, but that’d lead to a long-term prison sentence. I could engage the services of a whore, but can’t afford the fifty-dollar investment right now. So it looks like I’ll have to go to a porno movie and jerk off in the back row. Every cell in my body is crying out for cunt, and, oh my God, I’m turning into oil and oozing into this post I’m leaning against.

  I must get moving before I pass out. The mad fiend races to the coatroom and picks up his Burberry and Borsalino, then fights his way out of the Highroller Disco to the sidewalk, where young men and women flirt with each other, doing mating dances to the sounds of their hormones. It’s so easy for young people — they just go off and fuck. When you get long in the tooth you first must hold discussions to determine whether you agree on a solution to the energy crisis, which liar should be next President of the United States, and various other pressing issues. If you agree on 85% of the issues, then it’s okay to fuck.

  I’m on the uptown Seventh Avenue Local. I don’t know how I got on board, but here I am. I’m going to get racked up someday walking around zonked like this, but when it happens I’ll hold fast to the Dharma and muddle through somehow.

  The subway car is nearly full and its racial composition is sixty-forty in favor of the dark-skinned peoples. They speak Spanish, French, and peculiar English dialects, and their clothing didn’t come from Abercrombie and Fitch. They’re loud and ignorant and crazy as us, maybe even crazier, but they’re the future and we’re the past.

  Sitting opposite me is a strange Caucasian character in his sixties. Morsels of his last meal can be seen in his long, scraggly dark-gray beard, and he wears a banker’s pinstripe suit in which he’s been sleeping and eating for at least a year. The tops of his wingtip shoes are worn through to his greasy black stockings and the knot in his garbage-can necktie looks like a sailor’s nightmare, but the most arresting thing about him are his blue eyes, which are intelligent and alert, studying everything on the subway car.

  He’s obviously one of America’s great starving poets. See his sensitive hands, like two doves sleeping in his baggy lap; note his little red nose, with which he sniffs out rhymes. Now he’s looking at me unaware that I’m looking at him, for my sly eyes are hidden behind genuine imported French aviator sunglasses from Sex Fifth Avenue.

  I can hear his dream songs, miraculous and childlike. His beard is made of flowers. Oh beautiful sir, kindly bard, I’d like to impart a great secret to you, but I lack the courage to approach your magnificence. I’d like to tell you that you needn’t starve, wear the same suit for ten years, sleep in fleabag hotels. You should write trash fiction for fun and profit. But you’d never do it — you’d think it beneath you. What you don’t know is that the great poetry of our time is being written in trashy books. Take for instance the line, “He shot him through the room,” which I once read in a trashy book written by one of my colleagues. So deep and reverberating. “He shot him through the room.”

  But you wouldn’t do it, oh great master of verse. And you wouldn’t teach at a university either, and for that I wouldn’t blame you. Writers on university payroll are gutless frauds. They wouldn’t know an original idea if one hit them between the eyes.

  Oh tender poet, I can see very clearly that you were once Plato, and I, Aristotle, and you taught me sublime philosophy. To show my everlasting gratitude, I’d like to walk to you on my knees and lead you to my publishers, but the train is pulling into my station stop and I must go and jerk off in a porno theatre, for I too have fallen on hard times.

  The Cinema Follies is my favorite porno theatre because they charge five dollars admission and thereby attract a higher class of pervert. They’re located right on Broadway near 50th Street, nearly on top of the subway station, and tonight they’re pre
senting Suburban Sex Kittens.

  Tipping my Borsalino low to disguise my features, I slink toward the ticket booth and slip a fin to the dour fat lady inside. She’s seen me before. She grunts in distaste and pushes forward my purple ticket to the wonderful world of pussy.

  I enter the plush blue lobby and hand my ticket to a uniformed black guy whose demeanor suggests he might be one of Elijah Muhammad’s hit men. He tears the ticket in half, perhaps wishing it were on my esophagus, and I enter the dark theatre, where on a panoramic screen, in living color, a redheaded young lady is slurping up a blonde cunt.

  It’s the Wednesday night early show and there are only about twenty solitary men in the audience, and one couple who’ll doubtless go home and fuck like wild animals when they’ve seen enough. I take my customary seat in the far right corner of the back row, place my Burberry on my lap, reach under it, unzip my fly, take out my handkerchief, cover my cockadoodledoo with it, and wait for the inevitable.

  As I watch the tongue job, it occurs to me that I’m seeing one of the greatest all-time cinematic erotic scenes. Usually porno stars do it mechanically, but this redhead is eating pussy like it’s filet mignon and she’s starving, and her oral skills are dazzling. The blonde is gleefully kicking her legs in the air and squealing uncontrollably, and I’m learning wonderful new techniques which I’d like to try out — right now! Oh how I wish I could be up there partaking of that gazoo, and lo, through the miracle of chemistry I am there, pubic hairs in my teeth and my tongue caressing a blazing clitoris.

  I’m whacking my carrot with firm fast motions hidden from public view, and as the blonde comes in my beard, I have a yaaaahhhhhhhhhhh kabooooooooommm out my ears, through my eyes, and into my handkerchief, exploding again and again, my skin drenched with ecstasy and my tongue hanging out. The blonde is quivering and biting her lips, the redhead is licking the blonde’s cupcake, and when it’s all over they snuggle into each other’s arms, and I wring out my cock.

  The scene dissolves to the outside of a suburban home, and I have a problem. I’ve come so much I’ve soaked through my handkerchief and wet my expensive Burberry trenchcoat. At that moment, the human mind being an odd unpredictable instrument, I am reminded of an old forgotten limerick:

  There was once a magician named Rawls

  who played the finest of halls

  his favorite trick

  was to stand on his prick

  and then glide cross the stage on his balls.

  I throw my handkerchief on the floor, zip up my fly, and hand my Burberry over a seat to dry. My genitals feel immersed in the Everglades swamp. Life ain’t easy for dirty old men.

  The movie continues. A group of housewives are sitting around a kitchen table, drinking coffee and talking about extramarital sex. The dialogue is stupid and the acting horrendous, but the production values are comparable to Hollywood, and the broads are knockouts. Then the housewives go home, and soon thereafter one of them is fucking the paperboy. My cock roars to life and wants some, so I cover my lap with my still-wet Burberry, remove my necktie, wrap it around my member, and soon I myself am fucking that horny housewife in the mouth while she rocks up and down atop the supine paperboy. She gives great head let me tell you — her mouth feels tight and smooth as my fist, and for variation I ram it down her throat for some of that sexy lung. Bazang hisseroony yaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!

  In the midst of my copious ejaculation I have the most brilliant idea of my career. It’s so overwhelming that erotic considerations are pushed out of my mind by visions of great wealth.

  I zip up, stuff my soaking necktie in my back pocket, grab my coat, hat, and sunglasses, and run out the theatre to the street, where I stop a taxicab and ell the driver to take me at top speed to that big porno book emporium on 42nd street.

  A half-hour later I’m standing in the lobby of a stone castle on Riverside Drive, pressing the button of Geoffrey Ames, a British guy who directs and edits television commercials and industrial films. I’m about to offer him fame and fortune on a silver platter.

  “Who is it?” he asks through the intercom.

  “Alexander Frapkin, and I have to speak to you.”

  “I’m busy right now.”

  “I’ll be right up.” I follow an old couple into the lobby and onto the elevator. They get off at the fifth floor and I the eighth. Finding the stairs, I climb the final two floors slowly with Colombian bud joint in hand. When I reach the tenth floor where Geoffrey lives I’m completely out of my mind, which is the only way to be when approaching an important business deal.

  I hit the button beside his door and he opens up, a tall swarthy fellow with curly hair, strange Oriental eyes, and a black beard like Satan’s. He obviously descended from the great race of Druids who once ruled England, and now he’s annoyed at being disturbed by me.

  I grab his hand and pump energetically. “So good to see you again, Geoffrey.”

  He mutters something and leads me into a large living room in which are seated a young man in thick glasses and a wispy blond mustache, and two beautiful girls, one resembling the young Ava Gardner, the other, Goldie Hawn. On the coffee table is a jug of wine and a wooden bowl half-full of grass. I’ll bet they were about to have an orgy, the degenerate pigs. The stereo system is making funky rock and roll, and in the dimness beyond his expensive modern furniture are film editing tables, for Geoffrey’s apartment is also his workshop, not to mention his riding academy.

  “Let me introduce you to my guests,” he says, his tone indicating he really doesn’t want to. “This is Jim my partner, that’s Ann, and that’s Stephanie.”

  I smile, shake hands, exchange bogus pleasantries, reflecting that filmmakers and rock musicians are the artists who attract the pretty girls in this era. I was born seventy-five years too late, but I can’t let that stop me.

  “Would you like us to be alone?” Geoffrey asks.

  “I’m here on business and I don’t care where we talk.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “The movie business — what else?”

  “Then you won’t mind if Jim sits in.”

  “On the contrary.”

  “How about the girls?”

  “That’s up to them.”

  Ava throws her hands in the air as if she doesn’t care if the Russians are on Canal Street. Goldie says, “I love to listen to business,” which strikes me as a warped attitude.

  “Sit down, Alex,” Geoffrey says, resigned to having me on his hands. “Let me take your coat and hat.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll only be a few minutes.” I begin pacing back and forth on the yellow rug, my Borsalino at its customary angle, sunglasses hiding my eyes, opened Burberry flapping behind me, and large sperm stain no doubt inspiring conjecture. “I just had a terrific idea while watching a porno film on Times Square and — ”

  “Which one?” interrupts the sensual Geoffrey, leaning against the fireplace.

  “Suburban Sex Kittens.”

  “Was it any good?”

  I point my forefinger at the ceiling. “That’s what I’m here to talk to you about.” From the corners of my eyes I espy the two girls looking at me as if I’m a geek. “The flick was very good from a production point of view” — I’m pacing faster now — “and its photography was splendid, but the problem, as with all porno films, was that the script was insipid. As I sat there watching” — I crouch to imitate sitting — “it suddenly occurred to me that if a porno film was ever made with a good script, it would immediately become a great landmark film, a fucking classic if you will, and earn perhaps ten million dollars in the United States alone!”

  “Porno films don’t make that much,” says Jim knowingly, his pasty neck being stroked by Ava.

  “That’s because, as I just explained, porno films are usually stupid. Now listen carefully. Both of you guys have a little film production company and therefore the capability to make a porno film, and I have here” — with a flourish I reach into my Burberry pocket
and whip out Patti’s Honeymoon — “one of the most popular and successful porno books of recent times, written by Lancelot Wimbledon, who in real life is none other than me.”

  Ava smiles. “Let me see it.”

  I toss it to her. “Now this is a hard-core porno book with a great story” — my voice is stronger now as I hit the home stretch of my spiel — “and could provide the basis for an incredible pornographic film, the very first to have the participation of a real writer, the very first to be made from one of the most popular and successful dirty books of recent times.” I’m gesticulating frenetically. “Let me point out that this very book is presently required reading in a lit course at a prominent Canadian university. I pause to let that impress them, but it doesn’t. “Now listen — we can all be millionaires in a year. All you have to do is make a movie out of this book, for which I’ll sell you screen rights for a percentage of the profits. You don’t have to give me anything up front, and then, with this huge financial success behind you, you’ll be free to make the serious artsy movie you’ve always wanted to make, and I can move to California and continue writing without ever suffering again the nagging horror of my imminent financial disaster.” I’m finished, and drop onto a stuffed chair.

  Geoffrey looks at Jim. “What do you think?”

  Jim shrugs, looks at me, and points to the book Ava is reading avidly. “Can you get us some more of these?”

  “How many do you need?”

  “About ten.”

  “I’ll call my publisher tomorrow and have him send them to you. Shall I have my lawyer call you about the contract, or will yours call mine?”

  Jim smiles wryly, showing crooked horsey teeth. “Let’s see if we can raise some money first.”

  I lean forward and slap my palm on the arm of the chair. “In a few months I’ll be able to invest about five thousand dollars of my own money.”

  “You don’t understand the main point of this business, which is to get somebody else to put up the money.”