the Last Buffoon Read online

  “I know that, but I want to own as much of this movie as I can because it’s going to be the porn Gone with the Wind!”

  “What’s the book about?” Geoffrey asks.

  I adjust my ass on the chair, cross my legs, and try to behave with professional decorum. “It’s about a girl’s honeymoon at one of those wild honeymoon resorts in the Pocono Mountains. She loses her virginity to her husband, learns how to blow him, and then proceeds to fuck the hotel manager, the hotel manager’s wife, the Chinese cook, the Russian waiter, and various other combinations of people, building to a huge jubilant orgy at the end. I think you’ll find it rather witty.”

  “I’ll read it and we’ll see.”

  The room becomes silent except for background music, and I realize that the high point of the discussion has been passed. The time has come for me to make my graceful exit. I stand, adjust my Borsalino, and bow to the ladies. They think I’m a disgusting human being. Beautiful young women are superficial and have no taste, but I’m crazy about them anyway.

  I leave Geoffrey’s building and head for the subway, exhaustion deep in my bones. My eyes are drooping, a headache is coming on, and I must get to sleep, for on the morrow I must be alert and cautious when the next and last Mrs. Frapkin arrives.

  Chapter Four

  I awake on my second-hand waterbed at quarter to ten in the morning, my mouth foul as a pig’s ass. I stagger to the window and peer through the venetian blinds for the weather report, which is disheartening. It’s another dark, rainy, windy day of the type that causes me to entertain serious thoughts of self-destruction.

  About twenty feet away directly across the alley is the apartment of a Japanese girl whom I often watch from behind my bookcase, and I can see her now; she’s elfin and attired in a blue and gold robe, walking around in her kitchen. In the evenings she frequently entertains assorted men and I think she’s a real geisha girl who’s set up shop in New York City. I’d like to go over there someday and borrow a cup of sugar from between her legs.

  The next and last Mrs. Frapkin is arriving in thirteen minutes and I’d better get percolating. I clomp to the bathroom, which is coffin-sized and equipped only with a toilet bowl and shower curtains inside a small bathtub, and take a painful scorching piss. Urinary complaints aren’t uncommon for single men my age, but my overall health is still pretty good and in a few days, after this marriage is out of the way, I’ll lock myself in my office and finish my new Triggerman. Then I’ll start my exposé novel of the public relations industry, or the science-fiction book, or the story about the pizza man who gets stabbed, or maybe something about a Japanese geisha girl in New York, or another idea from my voluminous file of notes.

  I shower in lukewarm water because the boiler in the basement is always on the fritz — the landlord likes to make us uncomfortable so we’ll move and thereby permit him to double the rent. Landlords are the lowest form of life on this planet, along with automobile salesmen, politicians, lawyers, and editors. In my last Triggerman the villain was a landlord and he wound up getting his head crushed in a trash compacter. At this point I decide to sing that great old Bob Dylan classic:

  Hey there, landlord, don’t put a price on my soul

  The doorbell goes off — gad, it’s the new Mrs. Frapkin I’ll bet and here I am with soapy balls in the shower. I yank my white terrycloth robe off the hook, put it on quickly, shuffle wet-footed to the door, and look out the peephole.

  Standing in the murky hallway is a young witch with black hair down to her bosom, eyes like emeralds, and thin curvaceous lips that I’d like to kiss. I open the door, smile, and say, “Good morning.”

  “My name is Mabra Valente,” she says formally. “Mr. Warmflash told you about me, I believe.”

  “Yes — please come in.” I hold the door and beckon for her to enter my humble shithole.

  She’s about five-foot-two with a figure made for sexual gratification. “Why are you not ready?” She consults her watch. “It is exactly ten o’clock.” Her accent is Spanish mixed with Nazi stormtrooper.

  “I had an important business meeting last night, and I’m afraid I overslept.”

  Her face is granite. “I expect people who deal with me to be punctual.”

  “I feel the same way, but sometimes there are unavoidable delays. Please forgive me. I’ll be ready in just a few minutes. Take off your coat, sit down, play the stereo, take anything you like from the refrigerator.”

  “Thank you very much.” She unbuttons her suede topcoat and sits on my creaking sofa. She’s a good-looking number but there are two thousand clams involved here and I’d better not try anything cute.

  I return to the shower and wash my hairy body, shave my neck, and brush my fangs. Maybe when she gets her green card she’ll be so grateful she’ll blow me. Drying myself quickly, I splash lotions and deodorants on my body, becoming aromatic as a passionflower. I comb my beard and remaining hair and notice with dismay there’s a new gray hair on my chin.

  In my robe, on my way to the bedroom, I pass her sitting on the sofa. She’s wearing plum slacks, a green sweater, and a leather belt with huge silver buckle. On one hand she has four rings, on the other, six. A necklace of tiny orange stones is wound three times around her neck, and her ears are punctuated with silver earrings.

  “How’re you doing?” I ask.

  She stops combing her hair and looks at her watch. “It is fifteen minutes after ten,” she says coldly.

  “If you can’t wait a few minutes without being a pain in the ass, go find yourself another husband.”

  Before she can reply I march into the bedroom and close the door behind me. I dress in antelope corduroy slacks, a tan cowboy shirt, my usual Harris Tweed sport jacket, and nut-brown jodhpur shoes of the sort worn by international airline pilots, or so the salesman told me. I put on my shades and carry my Burberry and Borsalino into the living room. “Let’s go,” I tell the future Mrs. Frapkin.

  She looks at her watch.

  “Want to know something?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Shove that watch up your ass.”

  She stands stiff as a soldier, balling her fists at her sides. “I am not accustomed to being spoken to that way!”

  “I’m not accustomed to living by clocks. Cut that out while I’m around.”

  “All normal people try to do things on time.”

  “I’m not normal. Do you want to go and get a marriage license, or would you rather find a husband who looks at his watch all the time?”

  Her eyes become pellets of hate. “I’m ready.”

  We descend the steps of my tenement, and on the second floor the old Italian ladies in black dresses give us a good going-over, because they usually don’t see me with women.

  “Good morning,” I tell them, tipping my Borsalino.

  They mumble and narrow their eyes for they know I’m not Italian. They’d treat me differently if they knew I was creator of the successful Triggerman series, but I’m not going to tell them because they might treat me worse.

  On the ground floor of my building is The Corral, a notorious homosexual bar, and already at this time of the morning gay men are there, giggling and goosing each other. Two of them are actually dry-fucking on the fender of a blue Mercedes-Benz sedan parked at the cub, a sedan toward which Mabra is walking.

  “Is this your car?” I ask as she takes keys out of her leather shoulder bag.

  “It’s my boyfriend’s.”

  “He must be doing okay.” Then I notice the doctor’s parking permit on the visor, from the New York University Hospital. He’s doing okay.

  She inserts the key in the door and the two lovers glance up. “Oh I’m sorry,” one of them says, as if he’s just been caught fucking on the fender of somebody’s car in broad daylight.

  The other one is hostile. “We were just getting into something,” he growls.

  I shrug like Triggerman. “Well we’re driving away whether you’re getting into something or not.”<
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  Mabra gets in behind the wheel, bends to the side, and opens the passenger door. I slide onto the supple white leather as she starts the engine. She looks very cosmopolitan, very Sex Fifth Avenue. The faggots leap off the car and screech as if it’s the Titanic going down. She maneuvers away from the curb and into the traffic.

  “Where should I go?”

  “Do you know where City Hall is?”

  “If I knew I would not ask you.”

  “Take your first right.”

  She makes the turn onto Hudson Street, and at my instruction turns again onto Tenth. We drive through the center of the village; a light rain has begun to fall. People scurry over wet sidewalks, around banana peels and wine bottles, holding umbrellas and newspapers over their heads. Dark wet days make me melancholy and turn my blood into sludge. If I don’t get to California soon I’m afraid this climate will kill me.

  “Are we getting close to City Hall?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Do I keep going straight?”

  “You’ll turn right on Broadway?”

  “How far is that?”

  “About eight more blocks.”

  A cabdriver thunderbolts by on the right and cuts her off, forcing her to stop behind a parked truck. Furious, she rolls down her window. “Watch where you are going — you stupid!”

  The cabdriver gives her the finger and keeps on hauling ass. Oh how I love those rotten bastards. Mabra gets going again, grumbling about New York City traffic. She’s sexy as a gypsy. I wonder how old she was when she first got fucked and what was the nature of the seduction. Perhaps a blanket on the pampas, some Argentine wine, and a little sticky-finger first. Did she blow him or learn that from someone else? Maybe she’s never blown anybody. There are girls who think it’s dirty. I wonder if she’s ever been eaten properly. If not, I’d be happy to accommodate her.

  She steers the Mercedes right onto lower Broadway, a grungy district where Puerto Rican women slave in sweatshops and trucks rumble into congested traffic.

  “Mr. Warmflash said you are a writer,” she gambits.

  “That’s one time he told the truth.”

  “What do you write?”

  “Fiction.”

  “What kind of fiction?”

  “All kinds.”

  “You have had books published?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you are not very successful?”

  “I get along.”

  “You are Jewish, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You do not have Jewish brains, I do not think. A man your age should be someplace by now.”

  “I’m someplace.”

  “If you were someplace you would have a nice apartment and a good job.”

  “I’d rather write books.”

  “You must be very immature.”

  “I guess you think it’s mature to look down people’s throats and up their assholes all day, like your boyfriend.”

  She stiffens behind the wheel. “You have not been around nice people very much — I can see that.”

  “How come he doesn’t marry you?”

  “That’s none of your business! You have very bad manners.”

  “I’m sorry — I guess I don’t know how to act with people from Argentina.”

  “I am Jewish too, you know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  She raises her chin. “My parents emigrated to Argentina from Rumania. My grandfather was a rabbi.”

  “Were you born in Argentina or Rumania?”

  “Argentina.”

  I scrutinize her features again, and she looks typically Spanish to me. There must have been a gaucho in the woodpile. “Why do you want to live in America?”

  “Do you read the papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what is going on in Argentina?”

  “You mean the political stuff?”

  She nods her head. “Exactly.”

  “You mean you’re some kind of revolutionary?”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I was only asking.”

  “I am not a revolutionary. The problem with my country is that there are too many revolutionaries, and the government is very — how you say — unstable. Also, the Catholics set fire to the synagogue all the time. Also, my mother wanted me to marry somebody who I did not love.”

  “Make your next left.”

  She turns left onto Chambers Street, and black clouds speed across the heavens. She has nice legs spread out for operating the foot controls of her boyfriend’s Mercedes.

  “Do you see that big building up ahead in the middle of the street?” I ask.

  “Of course I see it. How could I not see it?”

  “That’s City Hall. Park anywhere you can.”

  She pulls into the first parking garage. Money is no object to her; I should have asked for three grand.

  “Listen,” I tell her as we walk toward City Hall, “I’ve been through this before and I think I’d better tell you that whenever we’re around government officials we should act like we’re in love, so nobody will get suspicious. That means I’ll have my arm around you and you’ll have your arm around me. You must try to act affectionately towards me at all times.”

  She shakes her head and looks at the ground as we walk along. “I am afraid I cannot be that way with someone I do not love.”

  “You’ll have to act a little.”

  “I cannot do what I do not feel.”

  “They’ll get suspicious.”

  “Old men like you worry too much.”

  We walk through the colonnade in front of City Hall and push the revolving doors that lead to the lobby. Inside, we undo our coats and remove my Borsalino. She has nice tits, about thirty-six C’s, I’d wager.

  “Where do we go?”

  “On the elevator.” I put my arm around her shoulder.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Pretending that I’m going to marry you.”

  “Take your hands off me this second!”

  I get in front of her and bring my nose to within a few inches of hers. “Listen, lady — you’re paying me to marry you so you can become a resident of this country, and that happens to be against the law. If the authorities ever get wise they’ll deport you and prosecute me for fraud and perjury, and I might wind up in a federal penitentiary someplace. Now either you start acting like my bride-to-be or I’ll walk out of here right now and Warmflash can find you another stooge.”

  Her face reddens and seethes with hate. “You have an awful personality,” she hisses. “You ought to see a psychiatrist.”

  “Fuck you, lady.”

  She stamps her foot. “I am not accustomed to being spoken to that way!”

  “Do you want to go through with this or don’t you.”

  She looks at the floor and stutters in Spanish. Then she looks at me. “I have to go through with it.”

  I put my arm around her shoulder again. “Then let’s go.”

  Her shoulder is soft and warm, her fragrance like tropical flowers. And I have an excuse to cop cheap feels. I wish she were really mine even though she’s a little bitch. You have to make compromises when you meet someone who turns you on.

  We enter an elevator, ride up a few floors, get off, and walk down a green corridor to the marriage license room, full of loving couples about to enter the holy estate of matrimony. The room is dilapidated and smells like a rotting sponge, but the lovers don’t care because they have eyes only for each other. Half of them will wind up in divorce courts like Muriel and me. Muriel was my first wife. We were mad about each other and thought our love would endure even beyond the grave. Two years later she was fucking her old boyfriends and I was considering hiring a punk to put a bullet between her eyes.

  I know my way around this room. Taking a form from a pile, I lead Number Three to a table and start filing in the blanks. I learn that her father owns a plant that manufactures heavy machinery, her mother is a hous
ewife who manages a platoon of maids and cooks, and that Mabra lived in Paris for two years.

  I hand in the form at the desk, pay four dollars, and am directed to an adjacent room where marriage licenses are typed by civil servants who work at the rate of six words an hour and give dirty looks to whoever crosses their path.

  Mabra and I sit on chairs amid twenty other couples, and I put my arm around her shoulders again. “You’re very pretty,” I whisper in her ear. “I almost wish I were marrying you for real.”

  She laughs. “That’s funny.”

  I lean back in the uncomfortable wooden chair and reflect upon my catastrophic romantic career. There was Alison when I was in college. She was beautiful, intelligent, a sex maniac, and she loved me, but I got tired of her. Now she’s fucking someone else and I’m pulling my pud. Thelma had money and wouldn’t have minded supporting my literary endeavors, but I had to screw her sister. Remember Vivian who liked to read Fanny Hill while I balled her? I made her so miserable she moved back to Philadelphia.

  I never realized I’d be bald, old, and alone.

  After a half-hour of depressing reminiscence, Mabra and I are called to the counter and given our marriage license. “You gotta wait forty-eight hours before you get married,” says the black lady.

  “What for?” asks Mabra.

  “In case you change your mind.”

  “We are not changing our minds.”

  “You never can tell, honey.”

  Mabra and I walk arm in arm down the corridor to the chapel office, where we make an appointment to be married in two days. The office is also the waiting room for the couples about to tie the knot in the chapel next door. They’re sitting nervously on benches and already have lost the enthusiasm displayed in the marriage license room. On the wall is a big sign that says brides must wear dresses and grooms must wear neckties if they want to get married in the chapel. After Ichabod Crane writes down our information in his ledger, Mabra and I head for the elevator.

  I’m having the eerie feeling that I’ve been through this before with her. Perhaps we were married in a previous life in the temple in old Jerusalem, or a humble prayer house in a tiny schtetle, or perhaps I was once Caesar and she, Calpurnia. I close my eyes and try to focus more sharply on the images.