Madame de Gaulle's Penis

by Herbie Brennan

  The stirring strengthened. “You found her? What’s her address?”

  “Listen,” Bormann said, “I can give it to you, but it won’t do you any good. She ain’t there at the minute.”

  The stirring died away abruptly. For some reason I thought of Beth’s story on the plane about her uncle’s rabbits. They had everything they needed in the way of material comfort. They even had the excitement of the whimsical touches Beth’s uncle had dreamed up for them. But they ignored it all and got on with doing the one thing they most wanted to do in the whole world. Which, rabbits being rabbits, was perpetual screwing.

  Maybe Beth had been trying to tell me something with that story. But if so, the meaning had dawned, on me too late. In the last few days, fate had presented me with some prime opportunities to root like a rabbit, but I’d been too busy with my asshole Mission to take advantage of them. Now, like my former life, my Mission had crumbled into dust and the golden opportunity to bang a woman like Beth had gone down the drain since she was no longer at her old address. I toyed with the butter knife, wondering whether to plunge it into my own throat.

  “She’s here in Washington,” Bormann said.

  I stopped toying with the knife. “Here?” I asked.

  “Yeah”

  “In Washington?”

  “Yeah.”

  The waiter appeared with Bormann’s liver and took my empty plate away.

  “Listen,” Bormann said, “I talked to this broad. She told me you and she had a nice little thing going and you were having a meal together when you suddenly jumped up and called her a bastard and ran out.”

  My mouth, now unsupported by bandages, dropped open. “But I didn’t mean her! I meant...” I could hardly tell him I had been intent on slaughtering Van Rindt. “...somebody else,” I finished lamely.

  “That’s what my mother figured,” Bormann told me through a mouthful of chopped liver.

  “Your mother?”

  “Yeah, you met her -remember? She insists on coming with me when I do any field work. In case it rains, or I get hungry or something. I try to tell her I’m a grown man now, but she won’t listen so what the hell? Anyway, she’s decided you’re a nice boy and nice boys don’t call women bastards, so you had to be shouting at somebody else. It makes sense to her, so she convinces this Philippe broad that’s the way it was.”

  “She did?”

  “Sure. So now she’s in Washington looking to meet you.”

  “Your mother?”

  “No, the broad!”

  The stirring in my loins turned to a limited inferno. “Where’s she staying?”

  “At your motel - where else?”

  “What’s the chalet number?” I almost reached across and grabbed him in my impatience.

  “Two zero,” Bormann said, solidly chewing chopped liver.

  “Two zero -” I started to make a mental note, then stopped. “That’s my chalet number.”

  “That’s right. She talked the desk clerk into giving her the key - said she was your wife.”

  I was on my feet in a state of high excitement. I dropped my wallet on his bread plate. “Here, pay for the meal and take your fee out of that, Mr Bormann.” There was more than $500 in it at my last count, but I figured he deserved every penny. I turned and headed for the door.

  “Listen,” Bormann said. “That psychiatrist friend of yours - you think he could cure me of an Oedipus Complex?”

  Washington is exactly like London in that there is never a taxi about when you need one, so I ran all the way to the motel. I reached my chalet breathless to discover my key was in the little pouch compartment of my wallet and my wallet was with Bormann in the kosher restaurant.

  Feeling foolish, excited, apprehensive, disbelieving and randy, I rang the bell.

  For a moment, nothing happened. Then the door opened and Beth was standing there in a translucent negligee. I stared. It was touch and go whether she had anything at all on underneath, but what there might have been had to be tiny.

  “Don’t say anything, John. Your nice little detective explained everything to me. At least his mother did.”

  I opened and closed my mouth like a fish, not saying anything. Beth smiled a little as she watched me. “Aren’t you going to come in, John. It’s your chalet after all.”

  The best I could do was croak a little. I’d never felt so excited in my entire life. I wondered if she had brought along any costumes.

  As I stepped through the door, Beth said, “I want you to meet my little sister. I’ve brought her along to help me entertain you.”

  And it was, by God, none other than Marian, the nymphomaniac student from the chalet next door. She was sitting in a chair beside the bed, no longer wearing her jeans and sweater or anything much else for that matter. I noticed a blackboard pointer on the floor beside her.

  “You’re - you’re sisters?” I gasped.

  “Hello, Father,” Marian said. Her eyes, I noticed were as glazed as they had been the last time she turned on. “I told you both my sisters were as bad as me.”

  “Both?” I said. My head was swimming, the direct result of blood rushing to another area of my body.

  The bathroom door opened behind me and a familiar voice said, “I’m the other one, Mr Trench.”

  “She pretends to be a nun,” Beth told me grinning, “but she never lost the habit.”

  And I turned to see Sister Martha with her abba hitched, adjusting one suspender of her long, black nylon stocking. I looked from Martha to Marian to Beth and back to Martha, who was now slowly divesting herself of the black nun’s clothing. All three smiled at me.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted, John?” Beth asked. “Isn’t this what you really wanted?”

  It was! It was! It was all I really wanted. More than security and fame. More than the bloody BBC More than travel and adventure. More than handguns, knives, garrottes and rifles. More than de Gaulle and his damn silly wife.

  With my one good hand I started to undo the buttons of my shirt.

  Chapter Twenty

  Somebody once told me that when workers join the Cadbury factories, they’re encouraged to eat vast quantities of chocolate. It’s the management’s way of minimising waste. After a day or two, you never want to look another Milk Tray in the mouth again.

  That says it all. Sex is only the most important thing in the universe when you aren’t getting any. I was getting more than I knew what to do with from three delightful women - at the same time - and the result was as inevitable as chocolate.

  It didn’t happen right away. I have to tell you the first encounter was incredible. Brief, but incredible. The girls forgave my shortcomings and teased me back to a state of interest. After that, with the help of time and a little liquor, I acquitted myself quite well.

  The trouble is, you can’t make it a lifestyle. I know the old joke about the perfect woman being a nymphomaniac who owns an off-licence, but frankly it’s crap. The biological incompatibilities would kill you. Once you get a woman wound up, she can keep running more or less indefinitely. A man’s different. Even in my twenties I could only manage three or four orgasms a night. By the time I took my shirt off for Martha, Marian and Beth, I was nudging middle age.

  The first night was okay. I’d lived like a monk for so long I’d accumulated enough semen to float the Titanic. But by dawn those reserves were gone - spent, as the Victorians put it. The girls were still keen and I used a certain ingenuity to keep them happy, but even then I knew I’d never stand the pace. Give them another forty-eight hours and I’d be terminal with exhaustion.

  They were extraordinarily understanding when I explained the problem - I suspect they hadn’t exactly been daydreaming of a permanent menage-a-quatre anyway. They transformed from lovers into friends and I began to face up to my future.
/>
  It was a sorry enough prospect. With my sexual tension relieved, it seemed likely I would stop hallucinating. But that about concluded the list of positive developments. Now the pressure had gone from my gonads, I felt as if I were waking from a long, strange sleep. Or rather from a long, strange dream.

  The dream analogy sums it up perfectly. While you’re dreaming, the most astonishing things seem perfectly normal. It’s only after you wake up that you start to think a talking Mars bar was a little odd. My talking Mars bar was just about everything I’d thought and done since Barclay told me I was fired. I had actually planned to assassinate Charles de Gaulle, for God’s sake! I’d behaved like a character in a bad novel. Well, in quite a good novel, actually, since I’ve always believed Freddie Forsythe writes well, but you take my point.

  And it hadn’t stopped there. I’d planned to top this lunacy by doing in his wife as well. In the process I’d lied, cheated, stolen, committed assault, trespass and breaches of U.S. state security. It was all seriously cookoo and the fact I’d been hallucinating throughout most of it was a shockingly poor excuse. But the question was, what next?

  I quickly realised there’s a point where the dream analogy breaks down. When you wake from a dream, however vivid, what you’ve been dreaming doesn’t really matter. You could have been unfaithful to your wife with Her Majesty the Queen Mother and neither of them would ever be the wiser if you kept your mouth shut. But my dream really happened. Although I’d failed, thank God, to bump off the de Gaulles, everything else was stacked up there awaiting payment.

  What to do about it? I couldn’t go back to London. I had no job, no source of income and I doubted my former bank would accept that a branch manager bonking a customer’s wife constituted good reason for defecting on a loan - or lying in order to get it for that matter. It was questionable if I could ever safely go back to Britain. I wasn’t flat broke yet , but I’d certainly blown far more of the money than I could reasonably manage to return. I was all too aware of the old American adage, He who takes what isn’t hissen, must pay it back or go to prison. I’d taken what wasn’t mine and I could no longer pay it back. The prisons weren’t quite so crowded in 1969 as they are today, but otherwise they had precious little to commend them.

  But if I couldn’t return to Britain, I couldn’t stay in America either. I’d entered the country on a tourist visa secure in the fantasy that my only goal in life was to slaughter Mon General and his bonne femme, something I hadn’t expected to take very long. I hadn’t even bothered to look beyond the consummation of the act. I couldn’t go home and, without a work permit, I couldn’t find gainful employment in the United States. I thought briefly of trying somewhere like Argentina or even Ireland, where the chances of extradition were close to zero, but for a man of my sophisticated tastes, the Third World had little appeal. I began to sink into fugue.

  It was Beth who suggested I go on TV.

  “You really don’t understand America,” she told me when I stared at her blankly. “The only people who are truly above the law here are millionaires and celebrities. You’re not a millionaire, are you?”

  “Not even slightly.”

  “And how would you rate your chances of becoming one before you have to leave the States?”

  “About nil.”

  “Then your only chance is to become a celeb.”

  I was still staring at her, trying to make up my mind whether she was pulling my leg, but she looked serious enough. “I’m sorry,” I said at length. “You’re not talking about my getting a job in television are you? I mean, first of all my previous experience has been in radio and secondly I’m here on a tourist visa, which is the problem I have about staying let alone looking for work.”

  “No, I’m not talking about you getting a job. I’m talking about you making a television appearance. Once your face becomes a household word, you can apply for a work visa or permanent residency and they’ll be delighted to give it to you. We haven’t thrown a celebrity out of this country since the McCarthy Era.”

  She had to be serious. The mixed metaphor of my face becoming a household word was proof of that. I frowned. “Making one appearance isn’t going to turn me into a celebrity.”

  “Depends on the show,” Beth said soberly, then added as an afterthought, “and what you do on it.” She smiled suddenly. “Martha has some influence with Johnny Carson.”

  Johnny Carson was almost unknown to the general public on my side of the Atlantic, but anyone who worked in communications knew his chat show was an institution in America. He had the power to turn politicians into winners, authors into best-sellers, interior decorators into millionaires. But you needed to be doing something that would benefit from Johnny’s brand of publicity. I wasn’t doing anything - that was the whole point. I couldn’t even think what excuse there was for my making an appearance. I dreaded to think what influence Martha might have with the great man, but even if he felt disposed to do her a favour, there still needed to be a story, an angle. Quite clearly, there could be no question of talking about my abortive attempt on de Gaulle’s life. Yet apart from that I couldn’t think of a single thing about me that might interest the great viewing public.

  But when I put this to Beth, she simply smiled benignly and said, “Leave that to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The NBC building was hauntingly familiar even though I’d never seen it before.

  I thought for a while and decided it was a cross between the Independent Television Authority headquarters which I’d visited and the BBC where I’d worked. It was an eerie combination. The ITA was all money. It looked as if millions had been spent on trendy decor and the whole buzz was about how popular shows could earn more advertising revenue. The BBC was about... well, to be honest, I never really found out what the BBC was about. Everybody in BBC Radio looked down their noses at BBC Television, so naturally I did the same. But salaries were better in television, so everybody in BBC Radio was surreptitiously applying for transfers, myself included in the halcyon days before Madame de Gaulle told the great listening public she was looking forward to a penis. The really arrogant (again myself included) surreptitiously applied for Independent Television. The salaries there were reputed to be higher than the National Debt.

  Those already established in television had no opinion whatsoever about those employed in radio. We were beneath notice, let alone contempt. So, strangely enough, was money. BBC Television, according to those who worked there, had to do with quality and public service and dramatisations of Dickens or Emily Bronte. There were quiz shows with minuscule prizes, of course, but they were produced as an indulgence to those viewers who, God bless them, were working class and couldn’t be expected to aspire to anything better.

  Television or radio, the BBC I knew was stuffy as a Victorian sofa. It smelled of the Establishment. It functioned exclusively from a conservative ethic.

  NBC was like that. It had Establishment written all over it and conservatism oozing out of every pore. But the conservatism was related to money and nothing else. One glance and you knew there was an aristocracy of wealth, a hierarchy of earners. Quality was measured in terms of audience ratings. Faceless managers lived in terror of approving anything remotely novel. Only the tried and tested could be relied on to make money. Creativity was anathema.

  I was well aware the King of the tried and tested, until the day his ratings might begin to slip, was Johnny Carson.

  If you watch television today, it’s almost impossible to comprehend the popularity of Johnny Carson in 1969. In our present permissive era, chat shows routinely feature transvestite bisexuals who beat each other to a pulp after they’ve confessed to sleeping with their mothers. Johnny, by contrast, simply questioned his guests with gentle good humour and punctuated their answers with tasteful, if unmemorable, variety acts. But what you tend to forget is that Johnny was an archetype. He set the m
ould. Besides, he was quite capable of pulling a spectacular stunt from time to time, as I was to discover.

  I gave my name at the reception desk and a highly polished black girl called upstairs for my P.A. minder. This turned out to be a plump, harassed child in her twenties wearing the sort of dress that looks like a Catholic penance. She gave me an exhausted smile and ticked off something - presumably my name - on a yellow clipboard.

  “So glad you could make it, Mr Sinclair,” she told me in a soft Southern accent. “Mr Carson’s in Make Up, but he asked me to tell you how much, how very much, he’s looking forward to meeting you. And he’s specifically instructed me to look after you until it’s time for your spot.”

  It seemed a bit over the top, but I supposed it might just be the sort of courtesy one professional would extend to another, however lowly, in the same line of business. Alternatively, it may have been that things English were flavour of the month: you never could tell with American fads.

  “My name is Lauren,” the child was saying. “If you’d like to come this way, we can get the formalities over and then you can relax.”

  The formalities turned out to be the signing of a Release that specified a fee of $100 for appearing and small percentages in the event of rebroadcasts. “It’s just a token,” Lauren told me smiling tiredly, even though it was a substantial sum by British standards. I signed at once.

  “I don’t suppose you know what Mr Carson will be asking me?” I asked as she shepherded me towards the make-up studio. Martha had flatly refused to let me know what angle she’d sold Carson to get me on the show.

  “Even if I did I couldn’t tell you.” The tired smile never faltered. “Johnny has a strict no-rehearsal policy. It’s the only way to ensure spontaneity.”

  If I expected an early glimpse of Johnny Carson in Make Up, I was disappointed. Almost certainly he had his own make-up people, but even if not, the make-up studio was big enough to swallow a thousand celebrities. I sat down in a barber’s chair before an enormous mirror and was covered with a sheet by a gum-chewer who told me her name was Avril.