My name (and don't we all have one?) is Livingston P. Lovechild. I ask you, dear reader, if you exist, what was I to do with my life, cursed with such an appellation? Let's face it, you hear a name like Livingston P. Lovechild, and the first thing you think is, "He must be a cunt." And pardon my language, but I am only trying to be truthful here. No one with a name like Livingston P. Lovechild could be anything less or more than a cunt. His parents have already damned him to cunthood for all eternity. And I know what you're thinking, "If it bothers you that much, why not just change your name?" And I admit that this maneuver has occurred to me. Oh the gloriously resonant names I considered: Jack Jackson.
Nick Harper. Joe McCool. I even considered some Jewish names: Barry Rothenberg. Jake Cohen. Barry "Buck" Blitztein. Nor did I ignore the Italians: Lou Santone. "Big Mike" Dallesandro. Al "the Pal" Dellarossa. For a while there I wanted to go French: Jean-Claude Chagrin. Louis St. Louis. Marc Le Parc. Yes, so many names I considered, but in the end I kept the name I had been anointed with at baptism. Because, in the end, who would be kidding whom? No matter what I tried to call myself, the truth was bound to come out, that I was Livingston P. Lovechild and no one else, and that I was an obvious cunt.
Harry had come to the end of the page, and he turned the sheet over.
"Well, what do you think, buddy?" said Livingston.
Unbeknownst to Harry, Livingston had pulled an armchair over and had sat himself to Harry's right. Harry's keen novelist's eye perceived that Livingston was now also apparently smoking one of the marijuana cigarettes from the wooden box.
"It's uh," said Harry. "Um."
"Yes, but does it breathe?" said Livingston. "Does it have the touch of life to it?"
"Yes," said Harry. "It does. But."
"Oh. I know. It sucks, right? Enormous donkey dick. You can level with me, Harry. I can take it."
"No," said Harry. "In fact I think it's rather good so far."
"Oh, wow, thank you, pal, that's all I wanted to hear. And from you, my favorite writer. Even more than James Branch Cabell. Even more than Edgar Rice Burroughs or Earl Derr Biggers."
"Thanks, Livingston," said Harry, "but."
"But? But what?" said Livingston.
"You can't write the word cunt."
"What do you mean?"
"No publisher will publish anything with the word cunt in it. Especially five or six times on the very first page."
"Hey, there's a lot more cunts coming in the next fifteen hundred pages or so, believe you me, Harry."
"But you can't write that word," said Harry.
"Why not? It's a perfectly good word."
"That well may be," said Harry. "But no publisher will publish a book with that word in it."
"Well, fuck them then," said Livingston.
"Fuck them?"
"Yeah," said Livingston. "And the horses they rode in on. Who needs them?"
"But, but, um, but," said Harry.
"Know what I'll do?" said Livingston. "I'll start my own publishing company. I'll publish this book myself if I want to, and peddle it from door to door. All I need to know from you, Harry, is, 'Is it good?' And don't worry about a few cunts here and there. Is it good, that's all I want to know."
"Well, I've only read the first page."
"And you sort of liked that, right?"
"I actually did, yes," said Harry. And he took another puff on his marijuana cigarette, which he now noticed was almost halfway smoked down.
"How do you like the reefer, by the way?" said Livingston.
"The reefer?"
"What you're smoking there," said Livingston. "The reefer. The muggles, the doobie, daddy-o."
"I –" Harry paused. "I think I like it."
"It's good stuff," said Livingston. "And you know what the best part is? No hangover. Smoke as much as you want, and, unlike with the lush, no ill effects the next day."
"Really?"
"Yeah, like, you take tomorrow, if there is a tomorrow, if the Russians don't drop an A-bomb on us, or if I don't kick off from a stroke in my sleep, but tomorrow what I'll probably do is just lie in bed and smoke weed and drink tea and munch wholegrain rusks and oatmeal cookies all day. Nothing better for the health of the old corporeal host, not to mention one's mental and spiritual salubrity. I call these days my recovery days. Take a day or two off from the bars, maybe even three, possibly four, and then I'm ready to hit the streets and make it real all over again. The call of the wild, y'know?"
"Yes, I suppose so," said Harry, taking another deep draw on the reefer.
"The sacred primeval call," said Livingston. "The call of so many bars, bars and saloons and taprooms and cocktail lounges, all of them beckoning, saying, 'Come, my son, heaven awaits you here. Come. You are welcome.'"
"You should put that in your book," said Harry.
"Oh, I'm sure I have," said Livingston. "Do you want to read some more?"
"Okay," said Harry, and he picked up the fresh page and read.
Perhaps I am wrong to title these pages the Follies of a Flâneur. Would it not be better, more truthful, to call them Confessions of a Cunt? Or, perhaps, The Memoirs of a Moron? Oh, well, no need to decide now.
Let's go back to the beginning, to where I choose to begin, my return to the old house on Bleecker Street after getting kicked so unceremoniously out of Yale. This was a dark time for the world at large. War, as they say, was looming on the horizon. But what did I care? Men had always fought wars, and they would continue to do so. But my father had died the previous year, leaving the family quite well off, and with a steady stream of revenue from "our" electric toaster factory. The point is, I didn't "need" to work. I had never set foot in the factory, and never would, and yet its existence provided me with an income more than suitable for my humble habits. And what were these habits? I shall enumerate them:
Sleeping late, every day. What luxury to lie abed, comfortably, while the world churns obliviously outside my window?
My "strolls". Days when I feel properly rested and full of the jumping beans of life and insanity, after a good lunch to set forth down the steps to Bleecker Street, and to turn right, or left, as the mood strikes me, and to walk on, turning left or right at random, until I see a sign: Joe's Bar. Sam's Bar. Chuck's Bar. Whatever, a bar, and to go into that cave of twinkling dimness and climb a stool, and the barman comes over and says, "Yes, sir?"
And I look behind him at all the glittering bottles, and I gaze down the bar at the gleaming polished tap handles, and I say, "Ah, yes, where to begin?"
A cunty sort of thing to say to a bartender who only wants to know what you want to drink, but, hey, that's me, I told you I was a cunt, and this is just the sort of thing I tend to say.
I can't help it if I'm a cunt. That's just what I am.
"Look, mister," the bartender might say, and has said, "I just want to know what you want to fucking drink…"
"I'll take a beer," I say.
"Great," says the bartender. "What kind?"
"The cold kind," I say, and the bartender, after a brief pause, turns away to get the beer, presumably a cold one, and I can't help but hear him mutter, under his breath, the single word:
"Cunt."
