Naturally, once Caligula found out Manhattan had an “Olympic Tower,” he simply had to have one of its converted condos on the 51st floor. Even the fact that a filthy Greek like Aristotle (and I was never one for scholastics, either) Onassis was one of the driving forces behind this behemoth’s construction could not stanch my gliterati greed for a perch in the opulent roost. That I could shit out my window onto St. Patrick’s cathedral was too much to pass up: feces-flavored icing on the anti-monotheistic fungus cake!

Worship in my ugly, modernist shadow, Christ-humping Irish scum!

Of course, I did have to suffer a shade of buyer’s remorse. For where in my unit was the vomitorium whereupon we purge between meal courses? Surely no hedonist’s home is complete without it. The landlord calmly explained that no such vomitorium as I described it ever really existed, not even when I was Caesar of Rome—the idea was nothing but pure misconception, he said. I took the opportunity of his open mouth to deliberately regurgitate a half-digested duck confit entree into his face to make a point, and bid him to clean up the resulting mess, for as Seneca writes: Cum ad cenandum discubuimus, alius sputa deterget, alius reliquias temulentorum [toro] subditus colligit — “When we recline at a banquet, one [slave] wipes up the spittle; another, situated beneath [the table], collects the leavings of the drunks.”

And though I did not drool, I was supremely hammered at the time, and most of my “leavings” did end up under a Mies van de Rohe glass coffee table. Luckily or not, my landlord happened to be a rare emetophiliac, which meant he found the whole barfing display erotic and arousing.

I can’t say I found the sight of duck goo and bile in his mustache quite as enticing, even after licking some off.

—Caligula

Dear Crazy, Infection-Ridden, Dog-Infatuated, Probably Homeless Lady Who Roams Central Park West:

Whoever you are under that low-quality wig of dreadlocks, thank you.

You’d think New Yorkers would be used to anything, and not glance twice when they see an emotionally warped man of my chiseled looks walk out of his luxury condo in a toga and laurels.  I guess we never live in a society as progressive as we’d like—I’ve certainly tried to put pressure on what constitutes “normal” in my lifetime, but maybe I’d given up trying to push it there, defiantly eschewing the need to fit in, even to my own detriment.

But then along you came, wearing those plastic vampire teeth that I can only assume are your cheap replacements for the genuine article, showing off that bed bug-infested inside-out fur coat, and suddenly exploding from inaudible mutters into an incoherent scream of “Time was to get busy, PLEASE!!”  Which never fails to speed up the gait of passersby.  

Also, your tendency to act as though you’re about to kidnap people’s shi tzus makes them visibly panicked.

I’m like 80% sure our neighborhood’s crazy dog lady

isn’t the ghost of Leona Helmsley

I’m not a man prone to hyperbole, but you are quite literally America’s greatest hero, nay, doused in godliness.  Because of your wrestling matches with park benches, nobody even seems to notice a harmless eccentric like yours truly these days.  It seems that after an estimable tenure, I’ve passed the torch on to another challenger of the status quo.  Oh, sure, you can’t take the twisted decadence out of me—I’m the same soulless void I always was. But a new generation is ready to follow in my footsteps, helming the ship en route to an oblivion of the cruelly absurd and absurd cruelty.

Dog-licking: why didn’t I think of that!

With rapturous admiration,

Caligula

So…sluggish…heat killing off brain cells ten at a time…losing subtleties of thought…same high temperature today in New York City as Middle East…the terrorists win…saw leaf wilt and fall off tree…vanished in puff of smoke when it touched asphalt…can’t even make it to bank…to cash economic stimulus check…was gonna get an XBox…terrorists win…feathers sticking to keyboard…becoming more racist for some reason…sudden horrible empathy with the south…unfounded suspicion of Barack Obama…

New York City (courtesy of NASA)

…stream of consciousness dwindling to a trickle…capacity for figurative thought shutting down like an aardvark stalks sex predators…I mean, like coma fruit takes a ride on…nevermind…terrorists win…choking on humidity…oxygen depleted…sudden urge to buy lotto tickets…just a lil bit of luck…need to bash my head on something to pass out…don’t have the strength to injure myself…God please blow up the sun…foot melting onto dirt…total swamp-ass right now…thirsty….hot…is someone gonna crack this fire hydrant or what…yes!…fuck they’re just using it to put out an apartment fire…go Mets…but terrorists win.

—Nero

The emptiness of this city.  You feel it with every issue of the New Yorker—that piece of fiction about a family trip to the beach in 1973 simply too boring to finish, the glossily eroticized spreads of Swiss watches that are unfashionable by the time you’ve caught a glimpse.  In every Sotheby’s auction where they theorize that Rembrandt himself probably painted only the nose on this particular portrait, apprentices responsible for the rest.  At the seal show in the Central Park Zoo, these pathetic creatures squirming about for the amusement of mentally stifling families with no grasp of contraception—

Wait a minute.

Those seals are kissing!!  

That is SO FUCKING CUTE!!  

I LOVE SEALS! I LOVE ALL GOD’S CREATURES WE ARE MEANT TO LIVE IN HARMONY AND ONLY AT THIS MOMENT HAVE I REALIZED ALL THIS PERVADING MELANCHOLY WAS A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND THAT I NEED NOT

Hold on.

What the hell is that?  Did that thing get all its face skin torn off somehow?  UG. LEE.  And it’s eating a twig it just pulled off its own butt.  

What?  How dare you!  I didn’t evolve from this piece of shit!  He’s crass! He’s a slave to his appetites! He—oh, well, that temper tantrum is something I might—and using a rock to masturbate…OK, fine!  I’m no different from this brute.  Are you happy?  

Because I could not be more depressed.  Again.

—Caligula 

Bleed the bride, of course, with dagger or leeches: her choice. It’s a little ritual I made up and hope will catch on soon—symbolizing the virginal blood, getting the lady of the hour good and dizzy for the fuckfest to follow that night—my invented spiritual exercises have got it all.

I had just come out of the glass box with the giant glowing apple on 59th street (and who exactly is supposed to have taken a bite of that apple? the customer? would I really be stupid enough to eat a luminous white food, other than, say, Renoir’s weightless onions?). Just one of those days, really. The so-called “Genius Bar” was utterly ignorant of how I might alter my iPhone to periodically emit the scent of a concubine’s tears. And it was in the resulting foul mood that I found myself outside the Metropolitan Club, a lavish wedding reception taking place inside…in dire need of enlivening.

The applause for my penis tricks was tepid at best.

When all is said and arrested on multiple counts of indecency and assault, these people just didn’t want to celebrate. I should have known what I was getting into when the doorman refused to believe my toga was formal wear. I mean, really, if a wedding crasher can’t appoint himself MC and force-feed the kid’s table sperm-coated cake without bringing the full wrath of the authorities down on himself, what hope does that poor couple really have?

—Caligula

]]> http://caligulaversusnero.wordpress.com/2008/05/30/weddings-always-make-me-bleed/feed/ 0 caligulacaesar http://caligulaversusnero.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/vintage-verbiage/ http://caligulaversusnero.wordpress.com/2008/05/28/vintage-verbiage/#comments Wed, 28 May 2008 17:23:17 +0000 caligulacaesar http://caligulaversusnero.wordpress.com/?p=108 ]]>

Q. What’s worse than a plagarist?

A. A time-traveling plagarist.

Close friends have been reading countless drafts of my nearly-complete debut novel, American Emperor, a pseudo-pornographic odyssey through the last years of the 20th century with an effortlessly awesome Manhattanite postmodern Caesar, Baligula (too obvious?  constructive criticism welcome), at its center.  And well they should re-read this manuscript in its myriad incarnations: it’s a burgeoning, blood-spattered masterpiece. The deposed and down-on-his-luck emperor resurrects himself as high society’s most divine pillar by establishing cutthroat professional “friendships,” ensconcing himself in über-expensive fashions to the point of obsession and gruesomely torturing those who may or may not have slighted him in the past, recording every tedious detail along the way.

Intellectual thievery, thy name is Bret.

All this work only to have the hacks at Random House tell me they see unmistakable echoes of a book published 17 years ago and want no part of the inevitable legal hoopla I’m inviting.  I suppose they mean my pending lawsuit against Mr. Ellis, who is recklessly abusing his apparent ability to hopscotch through history and, frankly, flattering himself by passing off my fictions as his.  I say: “fine!”  I will take this cad on by my lonesome.  How dare he re-write my happy ending!

Just the same, I have the feeling we might hit it off. 

—Caligula

What up bipeds.  I’m actually in a bit of a good mood today.  My mange has really cleared up, and I snagged a date as a result!  As you may or may not know, geese mate for life because monogamy is what God intended.  Ha!  Not really, it’s just easier.  Fuck, if I could organize a harem, you bet your naked baboon asses I would.  

Anyhoo, this total babe—let’s call her “Roscoe”—I picked her up at the dog run.  We were both taunting the mutts on the inside of the fence, honking, waggling our tail feathers just out of reach, and the next thing you know, we’re daring each other to take flying shits on traffic cops in Times Square.

Then Roscoe had the saucy idea of going to Manhattan’s “Sex Museum.”  I liked where her head was at but grumbled over the ticket price.  Still, I couldn’t very well ask my new lady friend to sneak in through an open second floor window or help me bully the front desk peon into a comp entrance as I normally do in these situations.  I was even more distraught when I realized what I’d shelled out cash for.

Um.

Roscoe wasn’t too shaken.  We ended up having a good laugh.  I’m just lucky I didn’t spring for the audio tour.

Also, normally I never preen and tell, but she did totally let me preen her.

—Nero

But hear me out.  It’s all true.  A goose has been following me.

No, you shut up.  I’m not insane.  Well, of course the encyclopedia is going to say that, but look at the facts! What?  I don’t have encephalitis, or schizophrenia.  Epilepsy?  I don’t even know what that is, but you can bet I’m free of it.  Do I look like an invalid to you?  Once in a very, very long while, I’ll have a spell and faint, yes, but that’s just the Falling Sickness, my Uncle Gaius says.  I don’t expect you to understand—it’s part of the regal temperament.

If I were crazy, would I mind being called crazy this much?  Would I protest so much against that characterization, or so strenuously?

Think about this: I don’t live in a psychiatric asylum of any kind.  Show me a schizo who has his own luxury condo on 105th and Central Park West!  Fine, alright, that’s true: the chateau style building I live in was once an insane asylum, but that doesn’t mean anything.  Straitjackets were bound to get left behind in the conversion!  I’m not necessarily forced to wear them whenever I foam at the mouth!

When have you known a mentally unstable person to be holed up in a Gothic castle like this?

Please, just listen.  I was walking in Morningside Park, which I can do alone, without assistants, thank you very much, and without raving so loudly to myself that people take pains to get out of my way.  I was blending in just fine, not that I have to make a conscious effort to “blend.”  I was feeding whatever you normally feed the birds (it certainly wasn’t sharp metal can lids or gravel or anything like that), when I noticed a goose bullying the smaller sparrows and ducks around and snapping up every tasty morsel of the very edible stuff I was tossing out.  I shooed it away politely, because only a whacko would use something as drastic as firearm to scare it off.  

AND NOW IT WON’T LEAVE ME ALONE.  All he does is stare.  But it’s horrifying.  He’s at the window right now.  Oh, God, if only the doctors—er, tenant association—would let me have curtains and drawstrings.  It’s not as though I’d use them to hang myself, if you can even do that with curtains and drawstrings, which I never even wonder about.

I fear I’ve made a powerful enemy. 

—Caligula (Sane)

How quaint! I dreamed I was a man of moderately less power and stature, which is to say, some obscenely wealthy and naïve fauxhemian metro with a Gucci axe to grind. It was an odyssey of Homeric—er, maybe Spielbergian—uh, small quirky Sundance film proportions. Who knew how perfectly ridiculous it was to see the world through the reductive psyche of the modern aristocrat wannabe?

The Dream:

Steve Forbes had lodged one too many hasty wagers at the Hampton Classic, and I grew altogether weary of his delinquency in tendering the final—and rightfully beloved—Fabergé egg. This was no slight tiff: my Segway had been sitting sans worthwhile hood ornament in my spare closet since I first finagled a prototype of the awkward thing, waiting patiently in a cocoon for the embellishment that would transform it from gauche scooter into chariot-fit-for-Apollo.

The price of Forbes’ weakness for long-odds horses

Setting out towards Steve’s on that gyroscopic claptrap, my valet Bernard driving, I gripping his pelvis for dear life, I was suddenly struck with a profound craving for vitals, i.e., bourbon, in some unfamiliar ghetto or other. A Xanadu of Oriental delights awaited: We wandered into an establishment staffed by the largest and most muscled women one could care to gaze upon, who, after plying us with saccharine libations and cuisine apparently fused in Asia, went about joshing and lightly embarrassing various patrons in the middle of their meals, occasionally bursting into inspired song. All this was executed with a wit so barbed and bawdy Oscar Wilde’s pallid cheeks would burn. I assumed these mercurial hosts had absorbed rumors that suggested this tastemaker’s penchant for entertainment of the decadent and bacchanalian sort until one turned to Bernard and inquired whether I was his boyfriend, sending my poor manservant into a dreadful stutter, which only served to magnify his discomfiture and mine. The rest of the ride to Steve’s and all the pelvic contact there entailed came bundled with a silent tension I won’t soon forget.

Analysis:

Apparently my nocturnal alter-ego had never been to a drag restaurant. Oh! The innocence of it all! Which reminds me, I haven’t been to Lucky Cheng’s in ages.

Taking a stroll from Broadway to Central Park West yesterday afternoon, I was struck by something out of a clear spring sky. I mean that quite literally: a heavy green chunk of something landed on and promptly broke my collarbone. I wondered, in that stumbling, shambling state of shock, whether the policemen shouting to me from the street had indeed been trying to warn me off this obviously treacherous path rather than ridiculing my gold toga, as is their custom. More greenish stone rained down, sending the cops scrambling for cover—why, I can’t imagine. It was just the cornice of an apartment building falling off. I would think New Yorkers had gotten used to such a routine inconvenience!

Local firefighters argue over whose turn it is to be brave

I suppose when one has lived among the crumbling infrastructure of ancient Rome as I have, these crane accidents and bridge collapses barely excite the senses anymore. Still, you people have no excuse for such rampant fear-mongering: do you really think your shoddy engineering standards are what’s bringing these structures down? As anyone who’s read Gibbon’s masterly “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” knows, a disintegrating infrastructure is but one symptom of the loss of the “civic virtue” (a.k.a. “manliness”) that keeps imperial regimes airborne. Amend your effeminate lifestyles, and maybe your tenement will stand the test of time.

Also, what are you, too good for paganism?

—Caligula