Mere Anarchy Read Online Free PDF

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 Over the years I had churned out several unpublished novels on lofty philosophical themes before finally being given a first printing by Shlock House.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