How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

by Dany Laferriere

  “Listen to this, man.”

  It’s the thirtieth time this week I’ve listened to it. It’s a Parker cut. Bouba’s face is as tight as a mizzenmast; he’s listening to it too. You could hear a tsetse fly buzz. Saint Parker of the Depths, pray for us. I listen as hard as I can. While Bouba literally drinks in every harsh note from Parker’s sax. Right in the middle of the Big Phrase (so says Bouba), right when R.I.P. Parker (1920–1955) is about to embark on those precious seconds (128 measures) that revolutionized jazz, love, death and all our goddamn sensibility—the heavens choose to unfurl above our heads in the brutal form of an all-out fuckfest punctuated with strident keening, the cries of wounded beasts, a gut-ripping cavalcade of wild bucking horses, right there, right above our heads. The turn-table jumps like a treetoad with sticky fingers. What’s going on? Is this the wrath of Allah? “Will they not ponder on the Koran? If it had not come from Allah, they could have surely found in it many contradictions.” (Sura IV, 84.) Is it Ogoum, the fire god of the voodoo pantheon? Bouba maintains we have rented the antechamber of hell and that Beelzebub himself lives upstairs. The racket resumes, more violently. Louder. More precipitously. The frenzied gallop of the four horses of the Apocalypse. Parker has just enough time to play “Cool Blues” and afterwards, that little gem of inventiveness, of audio madness, “Ko-Ko” (1945). The only piece of music that can stand up to this insanity comes from on high. The ceiling drops a millimeter in a cloud of pink dust. Then, silence. We wait for the end of the world, impatiently, holding our breath. A private, custom-made Apocalypse. Silence. Then this taut keening cry in high C, sharp and lasting, inhuman, first allegro, then andante, then pianissimo, an endless, inconsolable, electronic, asexual cry over Parker’s sax; the only song this dawn.

  The Great Mandala

  of the Western World

  THINGS ARE going terribly wrong these days for the conscientious, professional black pick-up artist. The black period is over, has-been, kaput, finito, whited out. Nigger go home. Va-t-en, Nègre. The Black Bottom’s off the Top 20. Hasta la vista, Negro. Last call, colored man. Go back to the bush, man. Do yourself a hara-kiri you-know-where. Look, Mamma, says the Young White Girl, look at the Cut Negro. A good Negro, her father answers, is a Negro with no balls. In a nutshell, that’s the situation in the 1980s, a dark day for Negro Civilization. On the stock market of the Western World, ebony has taken another spectacular fall. If only the Negro ejaculated oil. Black gold. O sadness, the Negro’s sperm is ivory. Meanwhile, Yellow is coming on strong. The Japanese are clean, they don’t take up much space and they know the Kama Sutra like the back of their Nikons. The sight of one of those yellow dolls (4 feet 10, 110 pounds), as portable as a make-up case, on the arm of a long, tall girl (a model or salesgirl in a department store) is enough to make you cry the blues. I hear the Japs are as good at disco as Negroes are at jazz. It wasn’t always that way. God didn’t used to be yellow—the traitor! During the seventies, America got off on Red. White girls practically moved onto Indian reservations to earn their sexual BAs. The co-eds who stayed behind had to settle for the handful of Indian students still left on the campuses. Naturally, a great number of Redskins came running from a great number of tribes, attracted by the scent of young, white squaw. A young Iroquois had his pride, but a free fuck is better than a bottle of rotgut. White girls were doing it Huron-style. A Cheyenne screw was the hottest thing around. Don’t underestimate the effect of fucking a guy whose real name is Roaring Bull. At night in the dormitories, each cry, according to its modulation, told of a Huron or an Iroquois or a Cheyenne inseminating a young white girl with his red jissom. It lasted until each and every Indian had come down with chronic syphilis. With the survival of the white Anglo-Saxon race in danger, the Establishment halted the massacre. WASP girls received drastic doses of penicillin, and the Indian students were sent back to their respective reservations to finish the genocide begun with the discovery of the Americas. The universities reverted to their daily routine, gray, washed out, going nowhere, and just as girls were about to succumb to boredom with the pallid, pale, faded Ivy League boys, the violent, potent, incendiary Black Panthers burst upon the campus scene. “Finally, some real blood!” came a choir of exultations from the Joyces, Phyllises, Marys and Kays driven desperate by the medicine-dropper sex of conventional unions and a gray life of frustration with the Johns, Harrys, Walters and Company. Fucking black was fucking exotic. And America loves to fuck exotic. Put black vengeance and white guilt together in the same bed and you had a night to remember! Those blond-haired, pink-cheeked girls practically had to be dragged out of the black dormitories. The Big Nigger from Harlem fucked the stuffing out of the girlfriend of the Razor Blade King, the whitest, most arrogant racist on campus. The Big Nigger from Harlem’s head spun at the prospect of sodomizing the daughter of the slumlord of 125th Street, fucking her for all the repairs her bastard father never made, fornicating for the horrible winter last year when his younger brother died of TB. The Young White Girl gets off too. It’s the first time anyone’s manifested such high-quality hatred towards her. In the sexual act, hatred is more effective than love. But it’s all over now. The second war fought on American soil. Compared to the war of the colored sexes, Korea was a skirmish. And Viet Nam a mere afterthought in the flow of Judeo-Christian civilization. If you want to know what nuclear war is all about, put a black man and a white woman in the same bed. But it’s all over now. We came close to total annihilation without knowing it. The black was the last sexual bomb that could have blown up this planet. And now he’s dead. Sputtered out between the thighs of a white girl. When you come down to it, the black was just a wet firecracker, but that’s not for me to say. Make way for the Yellows. The Japanese are going to take us dancing on the volcano. It’s their turn. The great roulette wheel of the flesh. That’s how it turns. Red, Black, Yellow. Black, Yellow, Red. Yellow, Red, Black. The Great Mandala of the Western World.

  Beelzebub, Lord of the

  Flies, Lives Upstairs

  HEMINGWAY SHOULD be read standing up, Basho walking, Proust in the bath, Cervantes in a hospital, Simenon in a train (Canadian Pacific, anyone?), Dante in paradise, Dosto in the underground, Miller in a smoky bar with hot dogs, fries and a Coke . . . I was reading Mishima with a cheap bottle of wine by the bed, totally exhausted, and a girl in the shower.

  She stuck her dripping head through the half-open bathroom door and issued two or three rapid requests: a towel to cover her breasts, another to go around her hips (I love Gauguin!), a third for her wet hair and a fourth so she wouldn’t have to set foot on the filthy floor.

  She came out of the bathroom with a smile. It cost me four towels to see her teeth. I resumed my position, opening Mishima to page 78, and disappeared into pre-war Japan for eighty-eight seconds, good for three and two-thirds pages, before falling into a Fuji bonze Negro sleep.

  Sleep is practically impossible in this muggy heat. I left the window open and the hot air completely knocked me out. I’m as groggy as one of those smalltime boxers who turn up in Hemingway stories. I don’t even have the strength to drag myself to the shower. An ocean of cotton closes around me.

  I don’t know how long I spent in that state. A distant buzzing awoke me. Airborne above the sink, an enormous green fly with bloodshot eyes is crashing into things. The fly looks blind. Totally drunk on the heat. Frenzied beating of wings. A fly high on codeine. A final collision with the wall and it does a kamikaze dive into the dishwater.

  From the horizontal position I consider the cardboard boxes and green garbagebags stuffed with dirty laundry, books, used records and spice bottles that have been cluttering the floor for two days now.

  The old fly is inert. It floats on its back. Its pollen-yellow belly swells with water. I pick up Mishima, page 81. The words run like fly streaks. The letters tremble and shimmer. Sentences jump like living things and move before my eyes.

  The fly is a stiff corpse drifting among the glasses. I alone am responsible in the eyes o
f the Lord of the Flies. Bouba maintains that Beelzebub lives upstairs.

  The bottle slumps sadly at the foot of the bed. I take a good pull and drift off into sweet somnolence. The wine trickles down my throat, smooth and warm. Not bad for the cheap stuff. I feel soft and sated.

  The Negro Is of the

  Vegetable Kingdom

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 I get up, steer clear of the shower and give myself a brisk face-wash in the sink. The cold water finishes the slow process of my awakening. Bouba must be on the Mountain checking out the girls getting a tan. The couch resembles an abandoned wife. Bouba will be back later; today is his weekly day out. Bouba is a true hermit. He can spend whole days without even turning on the light. The day passes; Bouba meditates and prays. He wishes to become the purest among pure men. He intends to accept the challenge issued to Muhammed: “You cannot make the deaf hear, nor can you guide the blind or those who are in gross error.” (Sura XLIII, 39.)

  Miz Literature left me a note, folded in four and stuck in the corner of the mirror. She had almost slipped my mind. She’s the McGill girl, the one Bouba nicknamed Miz Literature. That’s Bouba’s method. The girl we met the other day at a sidewalk café on St. Denis eating ice cream—he called her Miz Sundae. So as not to get Gloria Steinem on our case we say “Miz.”

  Miz Literature used two long paragraphs to tell me she had gone to a “delicious Greek bakery on Park Avenue.” She’s some kind of girl. I met her at McGill, at a typically McGill literary soirée. I let on that Virginia Woolf was as good as Yeats or some kind of nonsense like that. Maybe she thought that was baroque coming from a Negro.

  The room is awash in dark sweat. The fly has long since joined his comrades in the great beyond. Above, Beelzebub has been appeased. Green garbage-bags litter the middle of the room, their mouths agape. In a box (Steinberg cardboard special), with no semblance of order: a pair of shoes, a box of Sifto iodized salt, turned-up winter boots, a toothbrush, a tube of toothpaste, books, rolled-up Van Gogh reproductions, pens, a pair of sunglasses, a new ribbon for my old Remington and an alarm clock. Idly, I stow it away in a corner, by the fridge. The sun comes slanting through the window in blades of light.

  I pile the old newspapers into two stacks. It takes a while to bundle them up, then I stack them at the end of the table. I move silently through the darkness. I’ve sweated enough for a shower. The bathroom is tiny but at least there’s a tub, a sink and a shower—a miracle for this part of town. The old buildings in the barrio, if they’re lucky enough to have a bathtub, never have a shower.

  Miz Literature left her scent in the bathroom. In his journal (Le Retour du Tchad), Gide writes that what struck him most in Africa was the smell. A smell of strong spices. A smell of leaves. The Negro is of the vegetable kingdom. Whites forget that they have a smell too. Most McGill girls smell like Johnson’s Baby Powder. I don’t know what making love to a girl (over twenty-one, duly vaccinated) who stinks of baby powder does for you. I can never resist going kitchie-kitchie-koo under her chin.

  Miz Literature brought her bag of toiletries. Danger. What is she after? Is she intent on subletting the single room Bouba and I share? She must have a spacious Outremont apartment, full of light and fresh air and sweet smells, and now she wants to come down here to live! In the heart of the Third World. These infidels are so perverse!

  Miz Literature’s open bag reveals a toothbrush (there’s already a constellation of toothbrushes above my sink), and a tube of Ultra Brite toothpaste (does she think the Negro’s sparkling white teeth are pure myth? Well, think again, WASP. No kidding, it’s the real thing. Ivory jewels on an ebony ring!). Special soap for dry skin, two tubes of lipstick, an eyebrow pencil, some tampons and a little bottle of Tylenol.

  I never go anywhere without my little photo of Carole Laure. Hungry mouth and wide eyes next to the long, soft, refined adolescent face of Lewis Furey. The rich boy, intelligent, sophisticated, gentle, clever as they come—shit! Everything I’d like to be. Starring Carole Laure. Carole Laure starring in my bed. Carole Laure fixing me a tribal dish (spicy chicken and rice). Carole Laure listening to jazz with me in this lousy filthy room. Carole Laure, slave to a Negro. Why not?

  Through a microscope, this room would look like a camembert cheese. A forest of odors. The teeming (like the tearing noise of silk paper) of shiny creatures. In summer everything spoils so quickly. A fuckfest of a million germs. I picture the planet that way and among those millions of yellow seeds, I dream of the five hundred out of the five hundred million Chinawomen who would take me for their black Mao.

  Cannibalism with a Human Face

  A DISCREET knock-knock-knock at the door. I open. Miz Literature comes in, arms loaded with pâté, croissants, cheese (brie, oka, camembert), smoked sausages, French bread, Greek desserts and a bottle of wine. I make a summary stab at housekeeping, all aglow at the prospect of eating something besides Zorbaburgers or spaghetti à la DaGiovanni.

  I throw open the window: dry, burning air pours into the room in waves. I clear the sink of dirty plates and glasses and drain the soapy water. The fly is sucked downward into a better world. “I swear, by the moon!” (Sura LXXIV, 35.) Farewell, Fly.

  Miz Literature finishes cleaning the table. She puts water on to boil for tea. I get comfortable. She fills my glass with wine. I close my eyes. To be waited on by an English girl (Allah is great). Fulfillment is mine. The world is opening to my desires.

  I begin to look at Miz Literature with new eyes, though she hasn’t changed. She’s a tall girl, a little hunched over, with albatross arms, her eyes are a little too bright (too trusting), she has pianist’s fingers and a face with astonishingly regular features. Apparently she never had to wear braces, incredible for an Outremont girl. She has small breasts and wears a size 10 shoe.

  “Aren’t you eating?” I ask her.

  “No.”

  She answers with a smile. The smile is a British invention. Actually, the British brought it back from one of their Japanese campaigns.

  “Don’t you want to eat?”

  “I’ll just watch you,” she breathes.

  Just like that, with her eyes on mine.

  “I see. You’ll just watch me.”

  “I’ll watch you.”

  “You like watching me eat?”

  “You have such a good appetite . . .”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “Watching you eat fascinates me. You eat with such passion. I’ve never seen anyone do it like you do.”

  “Is it funny to watch?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I find it moving, that’s all.”

  Watching me eat moves her. Miz Literature is incredible. She was brought up to believe everything she’s told. Her cultural heritage. I can tell her the most outlandish stories and she’ll nod her head and stare with those believing eyes. She’ll be moved. I can tell her I consume human flesh, that somewhere in my genetic code the desire to eat white flesh is inscribed, that my nights are haunted by her breasts, her hips, her thighs, I swear it, I can tell her all that and more and she’ll understand. She’ll believe me. Imagine: she’s studying at McGill (venerable institution to which the bourgeoisie sends its children to learn clarity, analysis and scientific doubt) and the first Negro to tell her some kind of fancy tale takes her to bed. Why? Because she can afford that luxury. I surrender to the least bit of naïveté, even for a second, and I’m one dead nigger. Literally. I have to be a moving target, otherwise, at the first emotion, my ass would be grass. Miz Literature can afford a clean clear conscience. She has the means. I gave up on that luxury a long time ago. No conscience. No paradise lost. No promised land. You tell me: what good can a conscience possibly do me? It can only cause problems for a Negro brimming over with unappeased fantasies, desires and dreams. Put it this way: I want America. Not one iota less. With her Radio City girls, her buildings, her automobiles, her enormous waste—even her bureaucracy. I want it all: good and bad, what you throw away and what you keep, the ugl
y and beautiful alike. America is a totality. What do you expect me to do with a conscience? I can’t afford one anyway. The way things are going, it would be down at the pawnshop in a flash.

  I have to make sure not to bug Miz Literature about being so nice. She’s still the best thing a Negro can afford in these hard times of ours.

  When the End of the World Comes,

  We Will Still Be Locked in a Metaphysical Discussion about the Origin of Desire

  BOUBA EMERGES from a 72-hour sleep cure and inquires after the health of our planet.

  “What about the bomb?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What are they waiting for?”

  “Your sign, Bouba.”

  “What sign, man?”

  “The Big Sleep.”

  “What keeps you holding on?”

  “The thought that there’s still plenty of beautiful girls out there, and the illusion that one day I’ll have them all.”

  “Beauty, beauty. . . What’s beauty anyway?”

  “It’s what straightens out a crooked nigger.”

  “You’ve got it all wrong, man. Desire is what gives you that hard-on.”

  “Whatever you say, Bouba. But where does desire start in the first place?”

  “When you get a hard-on, it’s your vision of the world, it’s the fantasies of your adolescence and the weather outside that’s giving you a hard-on. Beauty has nothing to do with it.”

  “But a nice ass . . .”

  “Only in your mind, man.”

  “Ass exists only in my mind?”

  “Sure, man. Here’s the proof: when you make love with a girl and she’s on her back, you don’t even see that mythological ass.”

  “We don’t all do it the same way.”

  “Don’t confuse the issue—we always go back to that missionary thing. All right, let’s take the mouth. You meet a girl in the street. She has a sensual, hungry mouth, the whole package. You tell her this and that, she answers that and this, and a couple hours later you’re kissing. But when you’re kissing you can’t see her mouth. When you’re up that close you can’t see anything at all.”