BEWARE OF THE BASTARD!

In March of 1566, David Riccio, a courtier at the court of Mary Queen of Scots, visited the court astrologer, Damiot, in Hollyrood castle, where Mary was then residing.

“Beware of the bastard,” Damiot told Riccio, warning him that he would meet his end at the hands of an individual of illegitimate parentage.Riccio laughed off the warning.“The Scots will boast but rarely perform their brags!”He continued, “Even if you were accurate, there are so many bastards in Scotland that I could never be sure where to turn my back!”

Riccio would soon be laughing out of the other side of his mouth.A dinner party thrown by the queen was interrupted by a party of Scottish nobles led by Patrick Lord Ruthven, which seized Riccio and stabbed him 57 times, leaving his mangled corpse on the castle’s main staircase.The first knife wound was inflicted by George Douglas, an illegitimate royal, fulfilling the prophecy of the astrologer.

It’s a cruel world, and sixteenth-century Scotland was colder still.Where do you think Shakespeare got the idea for Macbeth?For Marie de Guise, the young dowager queen of France, who was juked out of the French throne when her husband Francois II died at age seventeen, to assume the throne of her departed father’s kingdom of Scotland was like Lindsay Lohan taking over the Hell’s Angels.No way, McBride!The Scots were a bunch of rampaging animals, and the French queen was lucky to escape with her life – right into the hands of her neurotic cousin, Elizabeth I of England, who locked her in the Tower of London and ultimately beheaded her.

But we are all bastards under the skin, and that is what makes the world such a dangerous place.It’s interesting to note that in our modern world of liberation, when people are crusading to save Darfur and running marathons to help AIDS victims, nobody is raising his voice in defense of people who have been born out lf wedlock, who have historically been the largest group of oppressed individuals in humanity.

How could it be otherwise, given the sexual proclivities of living creatures?DNA testing of birds that mate for life has established that 25% of eggs delivered by females have been fertilized by males other than the male partner.Any watcher of nature shows has seen instances of female monkeys lured into sexual liaisons with solitary males that don’t belong to the pack.

The response of the animal kingdom has been shown to be immediate.Lions and gorillas immediately murder any infant they sense not to spring from their own bloodline.In human beings the instinct is the same, and countless babies have been dispatched under much the same circumstances.But in human societies, with all their inhibitions and prohibitions against the taking of human life, many many issues of illicit liaisons have been permitted to survive and, indeed, thrive.

Nevertheless, the instincts of human society have taken over the exterminating role of the offended patriarch, and the illegitimate offspring has seen his options severely circumscribed.Illegitimate children have been barred from inheritance and social recognition.Even President Clinton, who is himself of dubious patrimony, has ever remained silent concerning the rights of children born without the benefit of wedlock, though, in fairness, he was the first American leader to step up in defense of enforcing fair child support payments by offending fathers (which has been a boon for mercenary women).But he never put a name to it.

Recognition of children born out of wedlock is the last frontier of American liberation, though no writer or intellectual has put his name on it.So let me be the first.And nobody is more suited to it than I, because of all the creepy little bastards to be born into ignominy in this country, I am the first to thread his way into the pantheon of classical world literature.

My father was a brother of Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow.When Bellow was living in Paris and casting about for a decent ending for his first big novel, “The Adventures of Augie March,” he seized on the illicit love affair between his brother, my father, and my mother, who was at that time a greedy, grasping middle-class Jewish beauty who had seized upon him because of his money.My mother left her New Jersey husband for Chicago and seduced my father into producing me in the hopes of getting her hooks into his money.

After an unbelievable scandal involving a financial settlement for my care and upbringing, she was enticed into leaving Chicago.Saul Bellow, in Paris, thought that this story would constitute a dénouement of irony and pathos for his novel and, like a true artist, threw to the wind any consideration of the future consequences of his actions.He wrote the story exactly as it happened and lived a merry life forever after.

I did not have such a merry life.After squandering the initial financial settlement that she had obtained from my father, my mother was hard-pressed to obtain any more from him.His attitude was best expressed in the George Thorogood blus song about his landlady” “She ain’t gonna get nothin’!”And remember, there wasn’t any President Clinton around at that time to take away my father’s drivers license if he didn’t pay up!

So I was stuck between a greedy, vindictive mother and a greedy vindictive father, both of whom had decided that the best way to get at each other was to make me suffer.

All right, I’m not here to inflect my problems on the reader.The purpose of this little story is not for me to resolve an issue which I long ago satisfactorily came to grips with, but to serve the broader purpose of illuminating a larger issue, which is at least the equivalent of women’s liberation or black liberation.The time is long past due for speaking to an issue that impacts vast numbers of people in world culture, and which nobody is addressing.

My mother never told me that I was in “The Adventures of Augie March.”Keeping me in the dark about my own life story was one of her myriad ways of hurting me.Or maybe she thought she was helping me by shielding me from the ghastly effects of literature, who knows?All I know is that I didn’t need this little tidbit of culture to propel me into a life of scandal.That was the only road open to me anyway.I was thrown out of college for radical agitation, traveled around Europe and eventually found myself running a leather boutique in Montreal, where I specialized in bikers’ and strippers’ costumes and whips and other sex toys.Around this time I was also doing a comedy act, which eventually culminated in my producing a Halloween comedy fashion show at Yuk Yuk’s Komedy Kabaret featuring leather-clad strippers whipping a male prostitute.This little show got the place padlocked by the cops.

What were you expecting, the Young Republicans For Bush?

Now around this time, recalling a conversation I had heard between my mother and one of her girlfriends when I was a kid, wherein she had told her friend that she was written into “The Adventures of Augie March,” I picked up a copy of the book at a used book store near my boutique and started to read it.The tedium of this little homeboy story of Chicago Jews was only somewhat mitigated by knowing that it was my uncle who was narrating it.Until I got to the end and I realized that I was the baby they were fighting over.As Nipsey Russel used to exclaim, “Step on my dick!”

Not giving a fuck about Saul Bellow or any kind of sentimental reconciliation with the pricks who had made me into such a tortured specimen of humanity, I immediately began to calculate: What’s in it for me?But I didn’t have the proof.All I could do was write a fan letter to Bellow and say, “Hey, man, I’m the baby in that book, which I did, though I figured that no sane person would admit to that fact, whether it was true or not.I wouldn’t.Well, maybe…

Anyway, if Saul Bellow would have known what I was like, he never would have responded in the affirmative, leaving himself open to all kinds of scandal.But he did, unbelievably.He wrote me back a letter admitting that I was his nephew.Un-fucking-believable!

Now I had the proof that I was Saul Bellow’s bastard nephew, and that my birth and early life were engraved upon would literature and American classical culture the same as if my face had been engraved on Mount Rushmore.This made me a MONSTER.No living person can lay claim to this notable achievement, and so long as there are books and scholars to study American culture, I shall live, even when the current overblown idiots on the best-seller list are turned to dust.Choke on it, suckers!

The thing was, what to do with this delectable little morsel of information.I tried peddling it to The Montreal Gazette, a useless, flea-bitten shit-rag of reactionary conformity if there ever was one, but they hated me already because of my stage act which, in all fairness, was never calculated to flatter the windbags of middle-class respectability.

Naturally, when it finally dawned on Saul Bellow where I was coming from, he bowed out of the picture completely.But fuck him, I had his letter, written in his own hand, admitting the whole sordid truth.

Soon after I moved to New York where I got work in the fashion business.I tried to get some traction out of the “Augie March” story when I had time, but after a while, I sort of crapped out.I tried to peddle the story to The New York Times, but all I got was a resounding silence.Not even a rejection.Nothing!Meantime, Bellow’s son, Adam Bellow, was all over the Times for being a reactionary knucklehead, and for publishing a book called “In Praise of Nepotism”, which immediately laid an egg.

“In Praise of Nepotism”!Is that a movie marquee, or what?Watta fuckin’ dog!All right, don’t make me laugh.Back in the days when publishing held all the strings, and freakin’ hard-ons like the Sulzburger family determined what got published and what didn’t, I was shut out.But today, with Internet, it’s a whole new world, and I can go directly to the mass audience.

Fuck The New York Times, and fuck Adam Bellow and his crew of harelipped bowtie retrograde wimps.The truth will out, and no reactionary morons can keep a lid on it.

A short list of people who were born out of wedlock would have to start with William the Conquerer, who was originally called William the Bastard in his home province of Normandy until he conquered Saxon England and made it speak French.Then, of course, there’s our old friend Fidel Castro, who ripped Latin American from the clutches of the yanqui imperialistas and changed the face of it forever.The Argentine tango crooner Carlos Gardel was born in a whorehouse in Bordeaux, France, and comedian Richard Pryor was likewise born in a sporting house in Peoria, Illinois, and grew up surrounded by hot pussy.

We have vitality because we were not born out of bourgeois considerations, but usually out of carnal lust.Not to say that some bastards are not engendered out of incest (I met one once and, boy, was he a mess), but most of us are extremely robust because our parents hardly knew each other at all.If we get our rights and due recognition, we will trample all over the bourgeois class.I know I will.But first I want the inheritance money that the Bellow family stole from me.



Don't Cry for www.200motels.net! Tune in for the wildest stories and jokes. You'll never see anything as
crazy as this anywhere else on the Internet

Tags:   None

© All rights reserved.

Posted on 9/12/2007 ( Permanent Link )
Read 272 Times
 Send to Friend