Koko, one of the Senegalese musicians, winks my way. Brother. Miz Punk caught the signal.
“Where are you from?”
“Harlem.”
“Harlem! I love Harlem.”
“Do you?”
Miz Punk is totally wired.
“Is there a lot of crime?”
“You do what you can.”
“I heard no one makes it past seventeen. You die first. Is that true?”
“Sure. I’m fifteen myself.”
Miz Punk is seventeen. She gives me a strange look, trying to ferret out the famous Harlem beat in me. The killer instinct. I shake my head gently with my best Malcolm X look.
THE SENEGALESE finish their show in a burst of frenzied rhythm. They gather up their instruments (drums, congas, kora), wave goodbye and go headlong down the suicide stairway, followed by a cluster of dashiki-clad groupies. Colonialized white girls. The priestesses of the Temple of Race. High on Negro.
THE DJ puts on hard rock. Miz Punk leaps onto the dance floor. Tina Turner. She starts jumping up and down. Madness. Dervish. Hard face, upper lip split by a razor slash, deep-set eyes, her body dislocated, disjointed, off-center, fragmented. She dances a half-hour with no reprieve. Miz Punk lasts longer than the copper-top battery. (“You, as well as they, are doomed to die.” Sura XXXIX, 31.)
We don’t waste time getting out of there, Miz Literature and I, leaving Miz Punk, alias Miz Clockwork Orange, to crash through the floor of the Clochards Célèstes. It’s raining. We take shelter under the marquee of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. Miz Literature kisses me on the mouth in front of the Death of a Salesman poster. We take the 129. Miz Literature has wet hair, which only adds to her charm.
“I don’t want any unpleasant surprises.”
“I’m telling you for the hundredth time, my parents are in Europe. I got a telegram this morning. Here’s the proof.”
She rummages through her bag and pulls out a balled-up piece of paper. Then wipes off her lipstick with it and throws it away, into the rain.
HER ROOM is upstairs, across from her younger sister’s (a Roy Orbison groupie). Posters of Roy everywhere. Roy at the National Arts Centre. She pinned a tiny photo on the picture of Roy that covers the whole left side of the room: two suntanned girls hitch-hiking with their tops off. Roy at the Peterborough Memorial Centre, with a certain Vicky. Roy at the Lord Beaverbrook (this time she wrote “Roy Roy Roy” on the poster in black felt-tip pen). Roy at Toronto’s Massey Hall and the Winnipeg Concert Hall (consumption in the hall that night: one ton of marijuana). The last concert was on Vicky’s sixteenth birthday. On a Roy poster she scrawled in eyebrow pencil, “I just feel like killing myself.”
“Those are Penny’s things, she’s my younger sister. She’s really crazy. She’s on tour now with Men at Work.”
Miz Literature puts on a Simon and Garfunkel record and runs off to the bathroom to dry her hair. I stay in her room. Cushions everywhere. All kinds of colors. Left-over from the sit-in days of the seventies. Books piled up on the floor next to an old Telefunken record player. To the left, facing the door, a large walnut wardrobe. Reproductions: a beautiful Brueghel. An Utamaro by the window. A splendid Piranese, two Hokusai prints and in the corner by the library (made of bricks and boards) a precious Holbein. By her bedside, against the pink wall, Miz Literature placed a large photo of Virginia Woolf taken in 1939 by Gisèle Freund at Monk House, Rodwell, Sussex.
I CAN hear the water running in the bathroom sink. Private sounds. A wet body. The luxury of soft Anglo-Saxon intimacy. Big red-brick house with walls scaled by ivy. English lawn. Victorian calm. Deep armchairs. Old daguerreotypes. The patina of antiques. Shiny black piano. Engravings from another age. Group portrait with corgis. Bankers (double chin and monocle) playing cricket. Portraits of young girls with long, fine, sickly features. Diplomat in pith helmet posted to New Delhi. Odor of Calcutta. This house breathes calm, tranquility, order. The order of the pillagers of Africa. Britannia rules the waves. Everything here has its place — except me. I’m here for the sole purpose of fucking the daughter. Therefore, I too have my place. I’m here to fuck the daughter of these haughty diplomats who once whacked us with their sticks. I wasn’t there at the time of course, but what do you want, history hasn’t been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac.
MIZ LITERATURE walks into the room. Tired but still smiling. I’m lucky to have found her.
“Sherry?”
“Sherry.”
“What would you like to hear?”
“Furey.”
“Sherry with Furey.”
A Description of My Room at 3670 Rue St-Denis
BESSIE SMITH (1894–1937), Chattanooga, Tennessee. Poor Bessie. I’m so down-hearted, heart-broken too. I’m stretched out on the river bottom (“Mississippi Floods”), with the songs of the cotton pickers for a lullaby. The Mississippi invented the blues. Every note holds a drop of water. A drop of Bessie’s blood. “When it rained five days and the sky turned black as night / When it thundered and lightninged and the wind began to blow. ”
Poor Bessie. Poor Mississippi. Poor muddy-water girl. Poor Bessie with her lynched heart. Black bodies running with sweat, bent over the snowy grace of the cotton. Black bodies shining sensual, beaten by the cruel wind of the Deep South. Two hundred years of desire thrown together, boxed in, piled up and sent down the Mississippi in the hold of a riverboat. Black desire obsessed with pubescent white flesh. Desire reined in like a mad dog. Desire flaming up. Desire for the white woman.
“What’s happening to you, man?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’re afraid?”
“Afraid of what?”
“Afraid of the goddamn blank page?”
“That’s it.”
“Squeeze it, man, grab it and make it cry for mercy, humanize your goddamn blank page.”
A DESCRIPTION of my room at 3670 rue St-Denis (done in cooperation with my old Remington 22).
I write: bed.
I see: dank mattress, dirty sheet, pounded-out pillow, corrugated couch.
I think: sleep (Bouba sleeps twelve hours straight), make love (Miz Sophisticated Lady), daydream in bed (with Miz Literature), write in bed (Black Cruiser’s Paradise), read in bed (Miller, Cendrars, Bukowski).
MILLER, Cendrars, Bukowski.
I must be dreaming.
I’m sitting by myself on a bench in the Carré St. Louis. There’s a guy sitting across from me; I look without really seeing him. Something about him catches my eye. I know that guy. I’m sure I’ve seen his face somewhere. Where the hell could it have been? That long, full, refined face — I know it. I don’t know why I can’t place him. Slightly hooded eyes, completely bald, face like a bonze monk — holy shit, it’s Miller. Henry Miller. Henry Miller in the Carré St. Louis! I can’t believe my eyes. Miller sitting sipping on a Molson. Just like that. Henry Miller. Miller, the old sod. Incredible. I must be dreaming. A hallucination. The effects of hunger. I pinch myself. He’s still there. Miller himself. That hungry mouth ready for the finest morsels. He’s talking to a guy next to him. A bum. Maybe not. Shit. it’s Cendrars. Blaise Cendrars. The one-armed man. I must be completely nuts. Miller and Cendrars in the Carré St. Louis. Right next to me. I move closer. They’ll disappear in a puff of smoke. The genie back in its bottle. They’re still there, talking away, minding their own business. I can actually touch them.
“Slide over, Miller,” I tell him.