Mere Anarchy Read online

  “That’s my suit,” Peplum confessed. “Our new line offers a wide variety of odors. Night-blooming jasmine, attar of roses, balsam of Mecca. Come here, Ramsbottom.” Another salesman darted over as if waiting to be cued. “Ramsbottom is wearing freshly baked rolls—the aroma, that is.”

  I leaned in to sample the delicious smell of oven-baked bread. “Very tasty suit. I mean it’s a lovely mohair,” I said.

  “We can imbue your raiments with any fragrance from patchouli to twice-cooked pork. That will be all, Ramsbottom.”

  “I just want a simple blue suit. Although I’ve toyed with gray flannel,” I chuckled with an impish grin.

  “Here at Bandersnatch and Bushelman we’re not about simple fabrics,” Peplum said, leaning in to me conspiratorially. “I beg you, don’t hang back with the brutes.” Taking down a natty pin-striped jacket from the store dummy, Peplum offered it up to me.

  “Look here, try and stain it,” he said.

  “Stain the jacket?” I asked.

  “Yes. I’m sure, even knowing you so little as I do, you’re a man who deposits a vast amount of ichor on your clothing. You know, butterfat, Elmer’s glue, chocolate creams, cheap red wine, ketchup. Have I captured you accurately?”

  “I guess I’m as prone to soiling a garment as the next man,” I stammered.

  “Depends how slovenly the next man is,” chirped Peplum. “Let me provide some samples for you to try.” He handed me a combination plate with assorted sauces and ointments, each life-threatening to fabric.

  “You really want me to?”

  “Yes, yes—spread some blackberry currant on the jacket, or the Fox’s U-Bet syrup.” Summoning the courage to defy years of social conditioning, I ladled on a dollop of axle grease only to find that it could not be made to stick or leave its trace. This held true for soot and tomato juice, toothpaste and India ink.

  “See the difference when I apply these same substances to your clothing,” Peplum said, shaking a generous portion of A.1. sauce on my trousers. “Note how it actually discolors the material permanently.”

  “I see, I see, yes, it’s horrendous,” I said, stricken.

  “Good choice of words,” Peplum chortled. “Ruined forever, and yet for a few hundred quid extra, you’ll never have to think bib or consort with common dry cleaners again. Or let’s say the wee ones finger paint on your vicuña sports coat.”

  “I don’t want a vicuña sports coat,” I explained, “and rather than get too pricey, I prefer to take my chances with a little naphtha.”

  “By the way,” Peplum noted, “we also have a fabric that will reject any odor. I mean, I don’t know what your wife’s like, but I can just imagine.”

  “She’s a very handsome woman,” I quickly said.

  “Well, you know, it’s all relative. I might look at the same face and see something you’d find for sale in a live-bait store.”

  “Now, just a minute,” I protested.

  “I’m just theorizing. I mean, let’s say you have a receptionist with a rear end you can’t keep your eyes off, long, tan legs, ample cleavage, and a pout—plus she’s always running her tongue over her lips. Get the picture, friend?”

  “Perhaps I’m obtuse,” I said weakly.

  “Perhaps? Let me limn it more graphically, pilgrim. Let’s just say you’re bouncing this little slab of cheesecake at every motel in the tristate area.”

  “I’d never—”

  “Please. Your secret’s safe with me. Now, you come home and the ball and chain perceives the subtlest trace of Quelques Fleurs on your tattersall vest. Starting to have the epiphany? Next thing you know, either you’re sweating to keep out of alimony jail or the immortal beloved goes ballistic and you wind up like one of those old Weegee photos with a suppurating excavation between the orbs.”

  “This is not a real problem for me,” I said. “I just want something relaxed but elegant to wear on special occasions.”

  “Sure you do—but with an eye to the future. We don’t just make suits, we clothe our customers in a postmodern environment. What do you do, Mr.—?”

  “Duckworth, Benno Duckworth. Perhaps you’ve read my volume on anapestic dimeter.”

  “Can’t say I have,” Peplum said. “But you impress me as the mercurial type. Moody. I’d venture even bipolar. Silly to deny it. I can see even in the brief time we’ve spent together how your psyche oscillates from benign and avuncular to frazzled or, if the right buttons were pushed, homicidal.”

  “I assure you, Mr. Peplum, I’m stable. My hands may be shaking now, but it’s because all I want is a blue suit—not an environment. Just something that suggests accomplishment yet is understated.”

  “And here I have exactly the item. A fine Scotch wool. But loomed with our own secret cocktail of mood elevators to provide you with a constant sense of well-being.”

  “Unmotivated well-being,” I snapped with emerging sarcasm in my voice.

  “Well, it’s motivated by the suit. Let’s say you lost your wallet with all your credit cards and you get home and the little kumquat’s totaled the Lamborghini plus you find a ransom note demanding eight times your net worth if you ever want to lay eyes on your kids again. With this garment on your back you never lose your good humor or affable manner. The truth is, you actually enjoy your plight.”

  “And the children?” I asked, terrified. “Where are they? Bound and gagged in some basement?”

  “It won’t be as it appears now—not while you’re caressed by one of our antidepressant textiles.”

  “Right,” I parried, “but when I take off the suit, won’t I experience withdrawal symptoms?”

  “Er, well, there are some weak sisters who tend to become more introverted once the jacket’s been removed. Why? Would you ever contemplate ending it all?”

  “Yes, well,” I said, backing toward the fire exit, “speaking of ending it all, I must go. I have a pet raccoon home that needs milking.” As the fingers in my pocket closed around my pepper spray should any attempt to hamper egress be made, my attention was caught by a stunning navy swatch that Peplum had not yet presented.

  “Oh, this,” Peplum described when I queried him on it. “The threads are interwoven with thousands of conductive wires. The garment not only drapes beautifully but will recharge your cellular phone when you rub the instrument on your sleeve before placing a call.”

  “Now, that’s more like it,” I said, envisioning the finished product to be at once stylish yet practical while announcing indirectly to my peers that I was indeed a member of the avant-garde. Peplum, seeing that he had hit pay dirt, pulled out a purchase order and moved in on me to close the deal with the lethal economy of Philidor’s mate. As I pulled out a check and accepted his Mont Blanc, my heart racing with the promise of this sartorial coup, it was none other than Ramsbottom, his face drained of all color, who came bolting in from the other room.

  “Problems, Binky,” he whispered.

  “You’re ashen,” Peplum said.

  “Our cellular recharging suit,” Ramsbottom bleated, “the one we sold yesterday—remember?—cashmere with microscopic conductive wires. You know, the kind you can just rub your cell phone on to get it juiced.”

  “Not now,” Peplum said, coughing. “I’ve a, you know,” he said, rolling his eyes toward me.

  “Huh?” Ramsbottom murmured.

  “You know, there’s one born every minute,” Peplum shot back.

  “Oh, yes, sure,” the nervous cohort chattered. “It’s just that the bloke who put on the cell-phone-charging suit stepped out of our showroom, touched the handle of his car, and ricocheted off Buckingham Palace. He’s in intensive care.”

  “Hmm,” Peplum mused, rapidly computing every possible liability. “Probably didn’t realize it’s fatal to make contact with metal while you’re thusly clad. Oh, well, you notify his family, I’ll give a heads-up to legal. That’s the fourth time this month a conductive-suit customer has had to go on life support. Now, where was I? Oh yes, Duck
sauce? Duckbill? Where’d he go?”

  Let him try and find me. High voltage in a pair of pants is exactly the kind of thing that sends me ricocheting directly to Barneys, where I bought a marked-down three-button job off the peg, and it doesn’t do anything postmodern unless you count picking up lint.

  THIS NIB FOR HIRE

  IT IS SAID Dostoyevsky wrote for money to sponsor his lust for the roulette tables of St. Petersburg. Faulkner and Fitzgerald too leased their gifts to ex-schmatte moguls who stacked the Garden of Allah with scriveners brought west to spitball box-office reveries. Apocryphal or not, the mollifying lore of geniuses who temporarily mortgaged their integrity gamboled around my cortex some months ago when the phone rang as I was adrift in my apartment trying to tickle from my muse a worthy theme for that big book I must one day write.

  “Mealworm?” the voice on the other end barked through lips clearly enveloping a panatela.

  “Yes, this is Flanders Mealworm. Who’s calling?”

  “E. Coli Biggs. Name mean anything to you?”

  “Er, can’t say it actually—”

  “No matter. I’m a film producer—and a big one. Christ, don’t you read Variety? I got the number one grosser in Guinea-Bissau.”

  “The truth is I’m more conversant with the literary landscape,” I confessed.

  “Yeah, I know. I read The Hockfleisch Chronicles. That’s on account of why I want we have a sit-down. Be at the Carlyle Hotel three-thirty today. Royal Suite. I’m staying under the name of Ozymandias Hoon to stave off the local wannabes from inundating me with scripts.”

  “How did you get my number?” I inquired. “It’s unlisted.”

  “From the Internet. It’s there alongside the X-rays of your colonoscopy. Just materialize on cue, skeezix, and pretty soon we’ll both be able to ladle beaucoup skins into our respective Marmites.” With that he slammed the receiver into its cradle with sufficient velocity to buckle my eustachian tube.

  It was not unthinkable that the name E. Coli Biggs would mean zilch to me. As I had made clear, my existence was not the glitzy whirlwind of film festivals and starlets but the Spartan regimen of the dedicated bard. Over the years I had churned out several unpublished novels on lofty philosophical themes before finally being given a first printing by Shlock House. My book, in which a man travels back in time and hides King George’s wig, thus hastening the Stamp Act, obviously ruffled establishment feathers with its bite. Still, I regarded myself as an emerging and uncompromising talent, and mulling over Biggs’s command to heel at the Carlyle made me chary of selling out to some philistine Hollywood platypus. The idea that he might fantasize renting my inspiration to pen a screenplay at once disgusted me and piqued my ego. After all, if the progenitors of The Great Gatsby and The Sound and the Fury could warm their stoves courtesy of some prestige-hungry West Coast suits, why not Mrs. Mealworm’s little bunting? I was supremely confident my flair for atmosphere and characterization would sparkle alongside the numbing mulch ground out by studio hacks. Certainly the space atop my mantel might be better festooned by a gold statuette than by the plastic dipping bird that now bobbed there ad infinitum. The notion of taking a brief hiatus from my serious writing to amass a nest egg that could subsidize my War and Peace or Madame Bovary was not an unreasonable one to contend with.

  And so, clad in author’s tweeds with elbow patches and Connemara cap, I ascended to the Royal Suite of the Carlyle Hotel to rendezvous with the self-proclaimed titan E. Coli Biggs.

  Biggs was a fubsy pudding of a character with a hairpiece that could only have been ordered by dialing 1-800-Toupees. A farrago of tics animated his face in unpredictable dots and dashes like Morse code. Clad in pajamas and the Carlyle’s terrycloth robe, he was accompanied by a miraculously fabricated blonde who doubled as secretary and masseuse, having apparently perfected some foolproof procedure to clear his chronically stuffed sinuses.

  “I’ll come right to the point, Mealworm,” he said nodding toward the bedroom, where his zaftig protégée rose and weaved off to, pausing a mere two minutes to align the meridians of her garter belt.

  “I know,” I said, descending from Venusburg. “You read my book, you’re taken with how visual my prose is, and you’d like me to create a scenario. Of course you realize even if we got copacetic on the math, I would have to insist on total artistic control.”

  “Sure, sure,” Biggs mumbled, waving aside my ultimatum. “You know what a novelization is?” he asked, popping a Tums.

  “Not really,” I replied.

  “It’s when a movie does good numbers. The producer hires some zombie to make a book out of it. Y’know, an exploitation paperback—strictly for lowbrows. You’ve seen the chozzerai you find in the racks at airports or shopping malls.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said, beginning to sense a lethal tightness making its deceptively benign introduction into my lumbar region.

  “But me, I’m to the manor born. I don’t hondle with mere craftsmen. I meld exclusively with bona fides. Hence I’m here to report your latest tome caught my baby blues last week at a little country store. Actually I’d never seen a book remaindered in the kindling section before. Not that I got through it, but the three pages I managed before narcolepsy set in told me I was in the presence of one of the most egregious wordsmiths since Papa Hemingway.”

  “To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’ve never heard of novelizations. My métier is serious literature. Joyce, Kafka, Proust. As for my first book, I’ll have you know the cultural editor of The Barber’s Journal—”

  “Sure, sure, meanwhile every Shakespeare’s gotta eat lest he croak ere he mints his magnum opus.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “I wonder if I might have just a little water. I’ve become rather dependent on these Xanax.”

  “Believe me, kid,” Biggs said, raising his voice and intoning slowly. “All the Nobel laureates work for me. It’s how they set their table.” Poised in the wings, his stacked amanuensis pushed her head in and trilled, “E. Coli, García Márquez is on the phone. Claims his larder is bereft of all provender. Wants to know if you can possibly throw any more novelizations his way.”

  “Tell Gabo I’ll get back to him, cupcake,” snapped the producer.

  “And just what movie are you asking me to novelize?” I piped, gagging on the word. “Are we talking about a love story? Gangsters? Or is it action-adventure? I’m known as a facile man with description, particularly bucolic material à la Turgenev.”

  “Tell me about the Russkies,” Biggs yelped. “I tried to make Stavrogin’s confession into a musical for Broadway last year, but all the backers suddenly got swine flu. Here’s the scam, tatellah. I happen to own the rights to a cinema classic starring the Three Stooges. Won it years ago playing tonk with Ray Stark at Cannes. It’s a real zany vehicle for our three most irrepressible meshoogs. I’ve fressed all the protein I can out of the print—movie houses, foreign and domestic TV—but I suspicion there’s still a little lagniappe to be bled from a novel.”

  “Of the Three Stooges?” I asked, incredulous, my voice glissandoing directly into a fife’s octave.

  “I don’t have to ask if you love ’em. They’re only an institution,” Biggs pitched.

  “When I was eight,” I said, rising from my chair and slapping at my pockets to locate my emergency Fiorinal.

  “Hold it, hold it. You didn’t hear the plot yet. It’s all about spending the night in a haunted house.”

  “It’s OK,” I said, dollying toward the door. “I’m a little late—some friends are raising a barn—”

  “I booked a projection room so I could screen it for you,” Biggs said, ignoring my resistance, which by now had morphed into sheer panic.

  “No thanks. I may be down to my last can of StarKist,” I sputtered as the great man cut me off.

  “Emmes, kid. If this is as lucrative as my proboscis signals, there’s copious zuzim to be stockpiled. Those three ditsy vilda chayas cut a million shorts. One e-mail could secure the novelizati
on rights to the whole shooting match. And you’d be my main scribe. You could salt away enough mad money in six months to spend the rest of your days sausaging out art. Just give me a few sample pages to confirm my faith in your brilliance. Who knows, maybe in your hands novelization will finally come of age as an art form.”

  That night I clashed fiercely with my self-image and required the emollient waters of the Cutty Sark distillery to beat back a waxing depression. Still, I would be disingenuous if I did not admit that I was palpated by the notion of vacuuming up enough scratch to allow the writing of another masterpiece without the onset of malnutrition. But it was not just Mammon crooning in my cochlea. There was also the chance Biggs’s nasal compass had located true north. Perhaps I was the Mahdi chosen to legitimize with depth and dignity this runt of the literary litter, the novelization.

  In a frenzy of sudden euphoria I bolted to my processor, and irrigated with gallons of black coffee, I had by dawn broken the back of the challenging assignment and was champing at the bit to show it to my new benefactor.

  Irritatingly, his Do Not Disturb did not come unglued till noon, when I finally rang through as he was masticating his morning fiber.

  “Be here at three,” he bade. “And ask for Murray Zangwill. Word leaked of my quondam alias, and the joint’s awash with frenzied centerfolds panting for screen tests.” Pitying the man’s beleaguered existence, I spent the next hours honing several sentences to diamond perfection and at three entered his posh digs with my work retyped on a stylish vellum.

  “Read it to me,” he commanded, biting off the tip of a contraband Cuban cigar and spitting it in the direction of the fake Utrillo.

  “Read it to you?” I asked, taken aback over the prospect of presenting my writing orally. “Wouldn’t you rather read it yourself? That way the subtle verbal rhythms can resonate in your mind’s ear.”

  “Naw, I’ll get a better feel this way. Plus I lost my reading glasses last night at Hooters. Commence,” ordered Biggs, putting his feet up on the coffee table.