Bruce had always perceived his as a charmed life. While everybody around him was dropping like flies in the eighties, for example, and though he visited the Rude Dude Bathhouse (not six blocks from The Trucks) weekly, he had emerged unscathed. He told people it was genetic, he told people it was because he didn’t eat right, he told people it was because he was careful: he told himself that his was a charmed existence.
The half-million inheritance, out of the blue from a man he barely knew, served to confirm this de factor analysis.
That, and he judged the men he allowed himself to sleep with by their Facial Index. To wit:
as measured in an anterior/posterior vertical plane bisecting the sagital crest through the occiput, and, trust Bruce, it’s much more interesting than a man’s score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The less acute the angle, the wilder the sex, or, as Bruce could also put it, copping W.C. Handy’s line from St Louis Blues, the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. Hence the truth of Virgil’s dictum, facils descensus Averno, the descent to hell is easy - especially if you know the way. Remind me to look up Averno, he would say to whatever bar bait in whatever bait bar he was quoting Virgil, as he dissolved into peals of the histrionic laughter he’d learned from Regis Capone, who in his heyday had the most un-acute facial index to be seen on network television.
In English, one man in one bar, out of the hundreds of men he’d met in dozens of bars, had once helpfully pointed out to him, it’s Avernus.
Bruce didn’t go home and look it up. Are you kidding? He just never went to that bar again.
Cast in the glare of all that money, the Village suddenly looked tawdry, When he pointed this out to some guy in some bar the guy said, if you think this is tawdry, you should visit the Castro District in San Francisco, where they have bars that cater to big fuzzy guys who want to hook up with little sleek ones, and vice versa.
That’s disgusting, Bruce said, scrolling through his cellphone directory for his travel agent’s number. Everybody else books online, but, since Bruce could afford it, he preferred to pay others to do the grunt work. After all, what’s money for?
His acquaintance was right about San Francisco. Bruce was back in a week. He ran into his friend almost immediately.
They’re called bears and otters.
I beg your pardon?
That’s what they call them.
Oh, please, the man said, as he palpated his ascot. Do you think I was born yesterday?
Still, the Village looked tawdry.
OK, Bruce thought, there’s only one answer to this problem.
Paris.
* * * *
He’d taken plenty of French in school, and had lived a semester in Bordeaux. He’d read all of Genet of course, worked at the obscurities of Villon and Baudelaire and Verlaine and Rimbaud, perused and found boring Pagnol, plunged back into the existentialists and whatnot, but found himself gravitating towards the English of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Jr, John Rechy, Dennis Cooper and Bruce Benderson, writers prejudiced towards an edgy milieu, more towards his taste in the daring and the experimental - and, in short, unapologetically queer. This was before he quit reading novels altogether. Whether or not such work would hold up until such time as he troubled to reread them, Bruce simply didn’t care, for he could always stick with pornography.
He traded apartments with a French couple who wanted to spend a school year, nine months, in New York City. An agency handled the details, he didn’t even have to meet the people. And why should Bruce have told them that since his was a rent-controlled apartment he’d tenanted for seven years he paid only $275 a month for it? What business was it of theirs? Value is value. Location location location.
He found himself in the ninth arrondissement on a fifth floor - sixth by gringo accounting, and since there was no elevator, he was counting. A plus of the staircase was its age, which must have been 200 years. Each tread had been dished by hundreds of thousands of footfalls and the banister was a continuous piece of naturally finished French oak that whipped up the six floors with nothing less than a magnificent sinuosity. The apartment’s entire north wall consisted of a pitch of wire-glass lites, waist-high up to the six-metre ceiling, through which he could see the zweible-based spires of Sacré-Coeur high atop the butte of Montmartre, and he readily became accustomed to hearing the legendary 19-ton Savoyarde, whenever they chose to ring it. There was a working fireplace, with a quintal of cordwood in the cave which was eight flights down, and the concierge kept the wooden staircase so thoroughly waxed that the first time Bruce ventured down into the stone vaults of the cave in his stocking feet was the last time. He busted his tailbone not once but twice on those slick treads; his feet shot out from under him as if they had encountered black ice.
The very first piece of rough trade - he said his name was Étienne - he brought home with him immediately put the value of the apartment at 3,000 euros per month, and stole, of all things, a pair of books. Pretty tony rough trade, Bruce was thinking, maybe two weeks later, when he noticed them missing. But that was until he figured out from careful comparison with the inventory manifest, that the nicked items could only have been a two-volume edition of Anti-Justine, ou, les Délicieux d’Amour dans Les Nuits de Paris, by Restif de la Bretonne. Though less than perfect, they were valued at 750 euros, and Bruce was entirely responsible for this value - along with that of everything else in the apartment. He himself fervently hoped that his French tenants in New York would manage to lose or misplace damn near everything in his apartment, which he had absurdly overvalued in his own manifest. Still, why the stupid breeders had left such valuable items in plain sight seemed beyond reason. How irresponsible could they be?
He told himself to calm down. At the present differential between their rent and his:
(2,000 euros * 1.2758 $/euro) - $250 - $750 - (agency commission = 10% = 200 euros @ 1.2758 =) $255.16 = $1,296.45.
Therefore, at the end of only one month and despite this one fuckup, Bruce would still be way ahead of the game.
See? A charmed existence.
From then on, however, Bruce took them to a hotel in Pigalle.
And despite this almost nightly additional expense he remained ahead of the game.
He liked Pigalle. Pigalle reminded him of Bruce Benderson’s novel The United Nations of Times Square. Not that he had read it. But he had his own version of Times Square and, in the same airy rooms of Bruce’s mind, Bruce Benderson was known as ‘the other Bruce’. He was charmed by the fact that he and that distinguished author shared a given name. People will always, some guy in some bar had once observed to him, elicit the slightest pretext to hold in common with a celebrity, no matter how minor. The pretext? Bruce had asked. The celebrity, had come the reply.
Bruce soon discovered that, in a narrow, cobbled, unlit, dead-end street, parallel to and just down the hill from the rue des Abbesses, he could get anything he wanted. The menu was varied, the prices were right, and most of the talent was Arab or North African or both. All he had to do was take care to distinguish them from the transvestites. But that was pretty easy. The transvestites had their own bar, for one thing, from which they sallied to work and to which they repaired between tricks. For another, the transvestites seemed to be maintaining and upholding a tradition of the zaftig in prostitution, of a buxom, wide-hipped, red-lipped, frilled-décolletage and altogether blowsy ideal of womanhood that had to have gone out of fashion, even among horny and naive GIs, shortly after World War Two.
No matter. The Arab boys, most of them from Morocco, were slim-hipped, full-lipped, tall, and mean. Of these Apaches sauvages, Bruce aimed to count his coup.
By and by the concierge of the hotel, a cheap narrow affair that leaned over an alley perpendicular to the cobbled one, across the street from a bar/hotel of heterosexual assignation such as, too, seemed to be a relic of another era, a place where you’d go to fuck a woman who reminded you of your mother, got to know him. This individual had determined Bruce’s purpose r
ight away, of course. He rented Bruce a room at an hourly rate equivalent to a whole night’s stay in any nearby hostel. Bruce didn’t care. Bruce was ramping up.
Soon enough, he’d more or less forgotten whatever other reasons he’d told himself he’d come to Paris. Museums, food, history, the language, whatever, Bruce was having none of it. He didn’t have the time. Much as he’d been in New York, he became a creature of the night. After only six weeks he had solid connects for cocaine, heroin, hashish, and amyl nitrate. While he was all too familiar with each of these substances, he was also chary of them. The idea was to accommodate the tastes of his dates. No trick he was willing to engage, however, as it turned out, wanted anything to do with any of them. Himself, Bruce sipped Côtes du Rhône with his steak pavé, pastis before supper, beer for refreshment in between. After all meals were over, during the night, which was the dark part of the morning to ordinary people, he would take only calvados, and that sparingly. Of debauchery, as it is usually defined, only sex interested him.
Soon enough he was hitting the hotel two and even three times a night, each time with a different date. Upon reflection, it reminded him of the old days. Although, of course, in the old days, when he was young and good looking and everything was free, sex, especially, was free. Upon reflection - for Bruce was not incapable of reflection, far from it; Bruce deployed most of his waking hours in such manner as to distract or fragment reflection - he realised he had never dated older men, ever, in the old days.
Now, of course, and he tittered inwardly, it would be quite a chore to find men older than himself sufficiently sub-decrepit to date at all; downright onerous.
* * * *
Akhmed was a looker. His facial index was straight off Easter Island, a thick-lipped mask of brooding menace. Bruce had run across him more than once and subsequently found himself seeking him out. Akhmed was one of those rough types Bruce favoured. Akhmed’s delusional system went so far as to include the old prison adage, I pitch but I don’t catch. Like that kid who killed Pasolini. In other words, Akhmed could do all kinds of weird things to Bruce, but Bruce couldn’t so much as discuss Akhmed’s giving Bruce a blowjob. No matter. Bruce could scare up a good-faith sissy any old time. Akhmed shaved maybe once in two weeks, so, after their every meeting, one or another of Bruce’s shoulders prickled from the abrasion for a day or two. Never did Bruce’s face prickle. Think of the ‘Were you in the Army?’ ‘Oui, La Légion Étrangére.’ ‘No kissing.’ ‘Bon – ptui!’’ scene in Fassbinder’s film of Genet’s Querelle de Brest. Finding aloe vera at the sign of the green cross turned out to be not so much trouble as he thought it might have been. Akhmed rarely bathed, either. And he didn’t like to talk. But he liked it that Bruce bathed. And he tolerated that Bruce liked to talk. Both traits were distinctively American, so far as Akhmed was concerned.
That’s typically American, Akhmed said offhandedly one night, as he watched Bruce ablute over the bidet. Clean at home, filthy abroad.
What’s that supposed to mean? What’s the matter with a little personal hygiene? Akhmed deigned no reply. Bruce might have suggested to Akhmed that he might himself consider periodic upgrades to his personal hygiene, but, the truth was, Bruce liked him just the way he was. Visit the planet, was Bruce’s credo, but don’t disturb the fauna.
Still, he couldn’t see what Akhmed’s problem was with cleanliness.
Forget it, Akhmed said, and he settled his black-eyed gaze upon the faux Degas screwed to the wall at the foot of the bed. I’m hungry. You ready to go?
They had fallen into a routine of a meal after the hotel room. These repasts were uncomfortable, for Akhmed didn’t want to talk and Bruce did. Bruce wanted to know where Akhmed was from, what his mother was like, how many brothers and sisters, their circumstances, how much and what kind of education, and so forth, but very little information was forthcoming. Akhmed was only there to eat, and he was there to eat only because Bruce would pick up the cheque.
Once Bruce pointed out a couscous place and suggested they eat there. Non, was all Akhmed said. Instead, they stuck strictly to French bistros and cafés more or less south of Pigalle and, Bruce presumed, resolutely out of whatever neighbourhood Akhmed called his own, which, by hints Bruce detected here and there, was within walking distance of Barbès-Rochechouart.
One night as they lay in bed entre’acte, Bruce having paid in advance for a double play, as Bruce prattled on about how most people in New York had an overdeveloped sense of style, Akhmed blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling and abruptly said. In many countries in the middle east and about a third of those in Africa, I could sell you to the Islamists and they would drill holes in your knees.
As Bruce was somewhat taken aback by this turn in the conversation, as a witty friend used to term the appropriately uneven match of social skills, he simply asked why.
Because you’re American, Akhmed said, as if staring the obvious.
No, Bruce said, why would you sell me? And, despite himself, the construction sell me sent a shiver up his spine, a shiver unexpected, licentious, and unexplored.
Akhmed, who seldom deigned to look Bruce directly in the eye, did so now, and he did so out of frank incredulity. For the money.
And now another unexpected sensation shimmied up Bruce’s spine like a fun-loving singe after a banane flambée au rhum: Sold for money. Not ideology. Money. OK. Got it. But in the here and now what it means is that all this terrific sex we’ve been having tonight, and for any number of nights over the past four months, means nothing to this guy. I’m hurt, Bruce said sarcastically, but to himself. Mordacity as a defence mechanism. The root is to bite, but the one bitten is oneself. Because, quite irrationally, be was hurt. A little bit, anyway. But beneath that he liked it. Les Délcieux d’Amour dans Les Nuits de Paris, indeed. He liked it.
And what would you do with the money, he asked.
Akhmed shrugged. Same thing I do with all my money.
Which is?
I send it home to my mother.
All of your money?
All of my money.
Admirable. A Confucian would call that filial piety.
Whatever a Confucian is, Akhmed glowered, is not me.
Mostly a lost value, in my society anyway, Bruce concluded lamely.
Akhmed’s silent expression reflected only a sour disinterest.
Bruce snuggled up and traced Akhmed’s lower rib with a forefinger. And you don’t send the least tithing cent to your local mosque? he asked playfully.
The side of Akhmed’s hand clipped Bruce above the ear, catching his head between it and Akhmed’s chest, the musculature of which Akhmed had the reflexive foresight to tense, thus inducing a temporary tinnitus in both of Bruce’s ears.
Cocksucker, Bruce said reflexively, though he said it in French. He didn’t mean it that way, in the way that Akhmed thought he meant it. Bruce meant to say mangeur de bite! merely as an exclamatory remark, an expostulation of marvel over the abrupt change in the course of events. But Akhmed thought Bruce was calling Akhmed an eater of dick which, even in ordinary circumstances, would have represented a breach of protocol - another word the French may have invented, which thought caused Bruce to giggle incontinently.
Under the circumstances, Akhmed beat the shit out of Bruce. Beat him well and thoroughly, all the while saying to himself, Akhmed, you are a fool. It’s his western way. He’s an idiot. He has no idea who you are. All you’re doing is thrashing your meal ticket. And cross-rationalising: he insulted me. I pitch but I don’t catch. I’ve had it with this suceur, all he does is insult me. When he wakes up, maybe he will have learned his lesson.
Indeed, Bruce lost consciousness long before Akhmed finished with him. So that Bruce took no pleasure when, at the end, having set aside everything of Bruce’s that could possibly have any value, including his clothes, Akhmed fucked him again. Fucked him hard. Fucked him so hard that it was all that Akhmed could do to refrain from finishing the job, i.e., killing the fuckee. For he hated himself
at the last moment of pleasure, because it was pleasure, and for that pleasure, he hated himself.
Finally, pretty worn out, he rolled Bruce’s senseless and pasty white old man’s bag of bones, some of them broken, off the bed onto the floor, doubled the dive-hotel pillow between his back and the wall, and smoked himself a cigarette. His hands were trembling. Strictly adrenalin, but he saw it as a weakness for which he blamed the old man and gave him a kick.
But, after only a few drags, Akhmed became too introspective to relax. What he had done, what had happened, was complex. The rigidity of the discipline he applied to his prostitution, to his money, to the whole of his circumstances, as altogether illegal as they were altogether modest, here in this thousand-year-old city of extreme decadence, of lights everywhere and of people from all over the world, a city which allowed him to live in a way that he could never live almost anywhere else . . . did not apply so easily to the emotions coursing through him. He felt himself a one-man colonial uprising. He would never feel himself up to the stature of a warrior of God. Yet God must have something to do with it, else why do fools such as this Bruce cross his path? He’d never had a French client who wanted to ask him about his mother. Never had a French customer who cared what he did with his money or his time away from work. Nobody had even so much as asked him what part of Morocco he was from; to them, it seemed to him, Morocco was a sort of child’s alphabet block lost among similar blocks, indistinguishable, one from the other, in a pile called ‘Africa’.
Paris Noir [Anthology] Page 23