Cendrars looks over at me.
“How’re you doing, Blaise?”
Police sirens. The cops pick up a guy who’s all bloody. It’s Bukowski.
Bukowski in deep shit again!
“WAKE UP, man. You’ve been sleeping on the machine for an hour. You won’t be able to straighten out your neck.”
“An hour!”
“My watch never lies, man.”
“You mean it was just a dream?”
“What dream?”
“It was totally crazy. I dreamed I was talking with — you’ll never guess who.”
“Miller, Cendrars and Bukowski.”
“Shit! How’d you know?”
“What do you mean how’d I know? It’s all written right here in black and white. Who else would have written that?”
“Written what?”
“Written this passage. There’s two of us here, right? You and me. So who wrote it? Your Remington?”
“Could be. It could have been my Remington, Bouba. Don’t forget the machine belonged to Chester Himes.”
“You need a little rest, man.”
NEW DESCRIPTION of my room at 3670 rue St-Denis (done in cooperation with my Reming-ton 22).
I write: toilet.
I see: two dirty towels, three bars of soap, one after-shave, two bandages, two toothbrushes, one deodorant stick (English Leather), two tubes of Colgate toothpaste, one jar of Alka-Seltzer, one electric razor (gift from Miz Literature), two bottles of Astring-o-Sol, one box of Q-tips, a dozen Shields condoms (extra sensitive, contoured for better fit, lubricated), one box of Kotex (left behind by a Toronto girl, Miz Security), a bottle of cologne and a jar of aspirin.
I think: read Salinger in a steambath with Miz Literature and make love in the shower with Miz Sophisticated Lady.
I write: refrigerator.
I see: one bottle of water, one half-empty can of tomato paste, one three-quarters-empty jar of relish, a big hunk of oka cheese, two bottles of beer and a bag of carrots.
I write: window.
I see that lousy cross framed in my window.
I write: alcohol lamp.
I see Miz Suicide and Bouba talking in hushed voices, drinking Shanghai tea.
I write: couch.
I see the old couch where Bouba reads Freud as he listens to jazz all day.
I write: jazz.
I listen to Coltrane, Parker, Ellington, Fitzgerald, Smith, Holiday, Art Tatum, Miles Davis, B.B. King, Bix Beiderbecke, Jelly Roll Morton, Armstrong, T.S. Monk, Fats Waller, Lester Young, John Lee Hooker, Coleman Hawkins and Cozy Cole.
I write: box of books.
I read: Hemingway, Miller, Cendrars, Bukowski, Freud, Proust, Cervantes, Borges, Cortazar, Dos Passos, Mishima, Apollinaire, Ducharme, Cohen, Villon, Lévy Beaulieu, Fennario, Himes, Baldwin, Wright, Pavese, Aquin, Quevedo, Ousmane, J.-S. Alexis, Roumain, G. Roy, De Quincey, Marquez, Jong, Alejo Carpentier, Atwood, Asturias, Amado, Fuentes, Kerouac, Corso, Handke, Limonov, Yourcenar.
I write: typewriter.
I see my old Remington 22 typing this.
Miz Snob Plays a Tune from India Song
I’M SITTING outside at the Faubourg St-Denis, sipping a glass of cheap wine and watching the girls go by. A girl to my right is reading something by Miller. I lean over to see which one. One of my favorites: Quiet Days in Clichy. Miller’s summer in Paris. You have to read Miller in the summer and Ducharme in the winter, alone in a cottage. Wouldn’t you know it: here comes a girl carrying Ducharme’s L’hiver de force, that’s just come out with Gallimard. It’s the hottest book around. It’s like the summer when Capote published Breakfast at Tiffany’s; every waiter in Manhattan had a copy.
MIZ LITERATURE is waiting for me at the Beaux Esprits, a dim bar decorated with exotic plants. Rhododendrons (black foliage with pink flares), saxifrag-aceae, cacti, agapanthus, zingiberaceae, cactaceae. Uproarious growth. You practically need a machete to cut your way through.
I take a look around. The bar is almost deserted. A pair of eccentric girls smoking Egyptian cigarettes are chatting away near the entrance.
“Where do you come from?” the girl with Miz Literature wants to know.
Every time I’m asked that question, flat out like that, without any previous National Geographic references, an irresistible desire to kill fills me. The girl is wearing a tweed skirt complemented by a white blouse in some refined material. No doubt about it, she’s a snob. Miz Snob.
“What country do you come from?” she asks me again.
“On Thursday evenings I come from Madagascar.”
The waiter appears. Blond hair and Botticelli face.
“A sherry for me,” Miz Snob announces.
A kir for Miz Literature.
“I’ll have a screwdriver.”
If you want to be treated with a minimum of respect in a place like this, avoid ordering a beer at all costs.
The barman is done up in the latest fashion. He paces from one end of the bar to the other, a good seven meters at least. His pale face in continual movement like a mechanical doll against a redbrick background. Mechanical Doll dives below the bar like an oyster fisherman, brings up the orange juice and pours it into a tall glass (with one-quarter vodka), the entire process taking eight and three-tenths seconds. As two Benin masks look on impassively.
Marguerite Duras is at the Cinemathèque this week. Miz Snob took in two films this afternoon.
“Have you seen India Song?” Miz Literature asks me.
“A superb film,” Miz Snob answers for me.
We gaze into our respective glasses. Five minutes later, Miz Literature stages a comeback. She wants to show Miz Snob that her boyfriend is not a cultural wash-out.
“Have you seen Hiroshima, Mon Amour?” she asks me pointedly.
“No,” I tell her.
There you go. This Negro is a cultural wash-out.
“Just some of the rushes,” I add out of pity for Miz Literature.
“You saw the rushes?” Miz Snob bellows.
With a mixture of 48 % ex-hippie, 12 % Black Panther, 9.5 % blasé and 0.5 % sexy, I let on, “Patrick Straram le bison ravi organized a private screening the last time M.D. was in town.”
“You spoke to her?”
“To whom?”
“You spoke to Marguerite Duras?”
These McGill girls are totally lacking in tact.
“Not really. We chatted about India Song a little.”
“What did she say?”
“What you’d expect her to say in a case like that.”
“What did she tell you about India Song?”
“Well. it’s hard to remember what you said and what people said to you at a party.”
“You spoke to Marguerite Duras! You must remember what she said to you.”
“If you really must know, we talked about the problems she was having with the editing.”
“What type of problems?”
“If I remember right — I’d had a little bit to drink, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to a party at Straram’s — anyway, I think she was having problems with the soundtrack. In the end she took the soundtrack from another film and edited it onto India Song. I think it was from a documentary, that’s right, a documentary on Hokusai.”
And when you consider that these girls were sent to a serious institution like McGill to learn clarity of thought, analytical capacity and scientific doubt! But they’re so full of Judeo-Christian propaganda that when they get around a Negro, they immediately start thinking like primitives. For them, a Negro is too naïve to lie. But they didn’t start the ball rolling; before them was the Bible, Rousseau, the blues, Hollywood and all the rest.
MIZ SNOB invites us back for tea at her house. Miz Literature doesn’t have a car; Miz Snob has an MG. She lives next to the Outremont Cinema. Tree-lined streets. Near St. Viateur. French butcher shop. Greek pastry shop. Bookstore close by.