Dear Gerry,

Shalom and Shazam, you motherfucker, you. I hardly know what in heaven or hell is above or below anymore but I gotta say it's been a bit of a witchy-titted bitch getting in touch with you lately and far too long since we actually touched one another. If you know what I'm saying.

(Strictly Platonic adjacency and agency, is what I'm saying, of course. You're a swell fella and all, Gerry, but don't get it twisted.)

I miss your Ashkenazi ass is the gist of it, I guess; and can only hope you're still the same fat and fatuous, fabulously-wealthy, well-met fellow I left stranded in a drunken abject stupor in that derelict, dysyntery-inducing Mexican bordertown bordello lo so many moons ago.

(Six serious moons ago, to be precise.)

Seriously, though. How you been holding up there, bro? Because, you know, I all-of-a-suddenly kinda/sorta regret abandoning you like that because, let's face it, that was one helluva hard day's hamstrung night, yo. I had to walk away and wash my hands of your sorry ass --you my cruelest-to-be-kind confidant, boldest sycophant, and most intrepid emissary-- because I could no longer grin, bear, or disguise my disgust watching you fence with your coke mirror, do-se-do with your inner demons, and roll around on that filthy black-lit linoleum floor like a sub-equatorial World Cup soccer player looking to invoke a yellow-carded respite from the catholic scrutiny of less athletic sheeple.

For the love of Obama, Gerry; I'm sitting here absolutely terrified that I won't be able to adequately elucidate what an execrable display of wanton profligacy that was. Then again... You know me. So you know damn well that I'm gonna give it the ol' college try, right?

Like this: 

A) Did you know that when I finally located your rotten and besotted, bespoke but asinine, candy ass... You were speaking in regressive tongues and batshit Esperanto like Dutch Schultz in his death throes trying to incite a riotous fight for the right to party with every tons-a-fun Hispanic harlot who politely dismissed your abominable popinjay before wisely sashaying their precious cargo out of your shit-eating shitake Sumo circle?

B) Do you have even the foggiest idea of how your romantic failure to fornicate that night compelled you to recall so many repressed and melodramatic memories of emotional rejection and physical defeat that it floored you to the point you wound up in the fetal position suckling a bottle of knock-off Robitussin as if it were another man's mother's milk?

C) Perchance, in your darker moments of solemn contemplation, you quietly remember beating the band to broadcast your American Idiocy whilst sweating dumdum bullets like an undercover Trump-supporter on Cinco de Mayo as you desperately endeavored to stick your shrimpy limp dick through a half-depleted roll of globalized toilet tissue in a futile effort to make your ersatz erection look like a tightly wound bundle of transcendent American manhood threatening to burst the seams of your gabardine dungarees and blow up the goddamned North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement all at once?

I dunno, dude. In a word, your unmanned deliverance unto evil was so feckless and unbecoming (just like you, mate, and yet so un-like you at the same time!) that it became an almost euphoric, albeit despicable, vicarious epiphany for me to stand back and behold.

Thereafter and now, however; and like I've already kinda/sorta said already, I think I'm kinda/sorta rueing the day I said, "Ven conmigo o vaya con dios," only to Irish-Goodbye your drunk and drug-addled, rigadoon-dancing, living corpse a few minutes later. I probably should've stuck around and saw you through your woebegone doldrums and degenerate misadventures, Gerry, and prevented you from shredding and shedding the remaining remnants of your once distinguished and redeemable reputation like a consecrated cowl of Benedictine austerity, but...

What's done is done, I'm afraid. So lemme put it this way:

I can totally understand if you're still nursing a sore butt about that series of unfortunate events, but... Come on, dude. You don't seriously still wanna blame or shame me for high-tailing it the hell outta that farcical, filled-to-the-brim with forensic evidence, fakakta fucking fiasco, do you? Trust me, you shmuck. If you could've turned around and known thyself in thine self-inflicted contretemps; misbehaving yourself, forgetting yourself, and disgracing yourself like the proverbially prodigal, provincial, and deplorable gringo? Well, I'm pretty sure you would've shown yourself the goddamned door and got on with your life and career and, more importantly, the business of facilitating my life and career. 

Need I say more, Gerry? Must I really sit here, tapping my fingerprints off and perspiring to aspire to find new and alliterative ways to demean and debase you? Only to inevitably suffer some more of your reckless and supercilious foolishness before receiving a sincere apology to call my own? To say I'm on tenterhooks awaiting your troglodytic ressurection would have to be the understatement of all overstatements, so...

Lemme have it, my long lost friend. Gimme a righteous update, for chrissakes. And then honestly answer me a few pointed questions.

Like these:

A) Have you been minding your disheveled soul and soma whilst keeping your bloodshot eyes peeled and your pricked ear to the ground in order to decipher, comprehend, and exploit the dissonent, incessant, and yet existentially-essential/trendsetting audiovisual static of the internet since we last parted; micro-fiching the farrago fabric of social-media for potent political propaganda?

B) Have you been planking and tongue-scraping and intermittently fasting like a salty and savvy 21st century muckraker; ingesting nutritious and salient information while steering clear of FoxNews and staying out of trouble with all the sudorific sweet stuff readily available on the Silk Road/Darknet marketplace?

C) Have you been imploring the Lord Almighty for mercy and forgiveness and then responsibly tip-toeing the long-and-winding, long-winded, twelve-stepped road of cold rolled away stone that could possibly and providentially lead your unholy spirit from glory-holed temptation and thus slalom your everlasting soul towards solemn redemption, holistic benevolence, and elegant relevance?

Because I sure as Hell is for Children hope not.

For if the Abrahamic God of fine wine, capricious brimstone, and unhinged jealousy avenged sevenfold truly helps the man who helps himself? Well, then I mustly trust you've been spending our time estranged busking with a Jew's Harp (just to be obnoxious) preaching the prosperity gospel (just to be unctuous) and deep-dicking the peons (to keep up with the Kardashians) while spinning facts to spread memes that spurn the recent Black Lives Matter/#MeToo/LGBTQ/Socialized Economy movements as unmerited heaven-sent manna for all the listless and disenfranchised ne'er-do-wells walking around with mastigated sticks of sugarcoated alms stuck and gumming up their hellbent/fag-haggity poop chutes.

That's right. I'm really gonna need you to ease my writer's-blocked mind here, Gerry. For instance; pray tell me you've been keeping your kept wife and disenchanted children chained under solid rock and thrown-away key while managing to surreptitiously keep your insatiable May-December mistress in furs and heels and champagne cocktails under mirrored chandeliers. Because that would show me you're still capable of multi-tasking ingenuity under pressure, you see.

Say, say, say you've been practicing to demonstrate all of your unseemly but silver-tongued powers of hard-bargaining arbitrage, skullduggery, and shuttle diplomacy in order to establish a phallocentric/psychosexual corn maze for everyone Left Behind, shaken, stirred, and bedraggled by your perverted and unslakable wake; ROFLYAOOL as they struggle, in vain, to navigate your ergonomically turbulent and morally degenerate hellscape with no hope of escape. Because that would show me you're still capable of some ruthless, none-fucks-given, capitalist demagoguery, you see. 

Of course, you have. Seeing that I've already seen how far you're willing to go for a little bit of cola in your nose (and a whole lotta cola parada in your lap) I'm dreadfully excited to witness what you're willing to do for suborn power, pecuniary prestige, and political influence. Now that the book is finally finished, and esthetic immortality is just within our brass ring reach... Don't you think it's time we fully explored the interstitial space between God and Man's Sistine fingertips?

Of course, you do. Because you're my goddamned literary agent, bro. Because you're a thoroughly un-talented/ego-stroking/gun-toting/ire-stoking/double-dealing sycophant. A maladjusted malefactor, habitual prevaricator, and incorrigible goddamned parasite. A dark prince of a douchebag with bedbugs for blood who's utterly incapable of empathy while eminently capable of perpetrating any and all crimes and misdemeanors --from petty treason to murder-most-foul-- against the public's pleasure. As long as it's all on behalf of your personal clientele's impertinent impatience.

There are no limits to your chicanery and everybody who knows you knows this about you, Gerry. And yet nobody you know really gives a sharing Care Bear shit in the woods about how you go about skinning the cats, fleecing the sheep, and gelding the top bananas, you see. So long as you're sending the clowns, bringing the noise, and beseeching the ethics-breaching Beau Monde to open the Elysian beaches and endorse the chickity-checks before they bounce and wrickity-wreck us all to an impoverished fate worse than death itself.

So I need you to step up and step in before the homeward-bound bacon, as they say, goes from the vulture-capitalist frying pan, as it will, into the all-consuming dumpster fire we vainglorious artists and liberal lickspittles eminently, but mostly erroneously, importune as social egality and freedom.

Or some shit like that. Because "some shit-like-that" is who you are and what you get paid to do, Gerry. Profusely, profanely, and profoundly. If not professionally. Am I right?

Of course, I am. You're a man renowned and recognized (if not respected) far and wide as a cum-swallowing catspaw and diabolically devout dogsbody for a whole assortment of sordid reasons. Not least of which is your fastidious and uncompromising ability to gaslight and/or shmooze a room full of tableau-vivant suckups and claptrapping attention whores until you've got what you've come for. Fussing over to hustle these cultural elites and financial magisters until they lose their goddamned wits, ungird their dilapidated loins, and give up their determined grips upon the self-loathing fiscal and emotional autonomy they insist on carrying, like sacks of rotten potatoes, to their pre-determined graves is what you do, you motherfucker, you!

For example; even as you're raising Cain and rattling sabers and burning bridges with your latent sociopathy and legendarily lame fashion faux pas; you always manage to double down on all the decadent debauchery that was only tacitly afoot prior to your arrival and then seldom fail to wrangle the essential support and elicit the fundamental subsidies we need to proceed.

It's a beautiful thing, Gerry; watching you do the fickle and perfidious things you were born to do. For I can always count on you to unceremoniously stomp into a hoity-toity social gathering with your retro-ridiculous guayabera/bowling-shirt strategically unbuttoned --exposing the stomach-churning, yet mesmerizing, grotesquery of your hirsute gynecomastia; your pale and utterly repugnant physique literally blaspheming the already vulgar 18 karat Star of David medallion dangling to be mangled between your sudorific bitch tits-- as you flap your chapped and thoroughly unkissable lips in order to bewitch, bewilder, and bankrupt the bilious billfolds of all the unaccounted-for/one-percenting billionaire benefactors by deliberately diverting scrutiny and common sense away from one altruistic cause or dother in order to con the potentially volcanic pecuniary resources of the higher and mightier pilots and connoisseurs of our cultural zeitgeist into funding and facilitating your own unfit egocentricity by way of superintending the likes of my own Philistine and Righteous causa sui.

Indeed. Your inadmissable, yet animal-magnetizing, personality is precisely why I want and need you to affirm this epistolary petition o' mine, see? You got me by the short hairs here, cuz, and this radio-silent sabbatical of yours has gone on so long it's beginning to rattle my godforsaken coin purse. In fact, Gerry, this prolonged absence of your love and devotion and faith (gotta have it) is probably the reason why I'm so goddamned fond of you right now. I'm not only infatuated and yearning but, dare I say it, head over heels in love with you, too?

(Take it easy there, Gerry. Love might be stretching it a bit. But don't fret. As the great and terrible Meatloaf once so bombastically sang: Two out of three ain't bad.)

Am I right?

Of course, I am. Nevertheless, and enough with the pep-talk politesse, already. This is the dawning of the rest of our lives, Gerry, so I think it's high time we came together (dark and light in tyrannical tandem once again!) and focused our respective powers of persuasion upon the crucial task at hand.

That task being:

To namely, gamely, and shamelessly plug ANTAGONY, of course; as if the tome were both a scholastic textbook and a Ten Commandment/Council of Trent-esque covenant capable of reaching out to imbue all the people whilst covering to cure all the acute and obtuse illmatic angles that have been corrupting every last and blasted corner of our contintental divide. If you know what I'm saying.

Of course, you do. So, really, the only question is... Are you with me, Gerry, or against me? Because that's the bottom line I'm towing. Are you ready to put the hermetic seal on your greatness --or-- are you already content with your relatively meager but hedonistic obscurity? Do you wanna be a Good Person --or-- do you wanna become a Great Man? Do you wanna chase the cancerous dragon of imperial insouciance and stop the passenger pigeon of misinformed compliance --or-- do you wanna give up the go-getter ghost and go full Jeremiah Johnson after Forrest Fenn's aggrandized gravy train of Rocky Mountain buried treasure?

Semantics aside, all of these existential notions and courses of expedient pageantry are pretty much one in the same. And yet, mutually exclusive all at once. Would you not agree?

Doesn't matter, of course. Not at this point. Whether you agree or disagree, our itinerary has already been set by the publishing house (see you in Seattle in a fortnight, sucka) and you'll either consent to do me this one last kindness --or-- you'll die trying not to. For all I fucking care you can go ahead and crawl under your rotten termite-infested porch, dig yourself an unplatted grave, and stink up your hoity-toity Long Island hamlet to highest-heaven for years to come and go, you cunt motherfucker, you.

On the other hand, the right hand? Read it and weep because, ready or not, my indelible gut and inimitable groin got something in mind for a kickass prelude to our baby-kissing presidential roadshow presentation already.

Goes a little something like this:

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