How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired (9 page)

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.

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.

Miz Snob shares a seven-and-a-half with two other McGill girls who are out at Jasper for the summer. A large living and dining room, a spacious kitchen, three small bedrooms. One window facing west and two east. A nice bathroom with an antique tub. An antique mirror on the shiny black wall. In front of her bedroom window, Miz Snob has a big walnut bed that forms an angle with a large armoire. A black piano against a high-gloss white wall. An old daguerreotype under a soft spotlight (gift from her grandmother, Toronto's first woman photographer).

Miz Snob is studying photography at McGill. According to the posters in the big living room, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Marguerite Duras are the only citizens of this planet. I must admit, Miz Snob is sexier than M.D. She uses a professional Nikon model and used to go out with a Japanese guy during her Dawson College days.

A ROOM
with bright stained-glass panels, like the Bibliothèque Nationale on St. Denis. They remind you of children's drawings. A Chagall reproduction hanging on the wall. Chagall shines. In the center of the drawing, an enormous circle with eight spheres of Mozartian clarity. All around, fish, birds, earthly animals and letters of the alphabet dance a joyful round watched over by the Lion of Judah (a young lion with round, domesticated paws). In the distance: Jerusalem, the yellow city.

Miz Literature disappeared into an album of Lewis Hine's photographs when we got here and hasn't been seen from since.

The steaming tea is served in a handsome Dresden china service. Another gift from the Toronto grandmother. I assume the Black Cat position on the hassock. Incense wafts toward the ceiling. Great clouds, like Sioux signals. I watch them float upward and feel myself about to launch into a gustatory description, mingling the delectation of the spices of the Sugar Route with the seven savors of ginger at the noon hour, ending with a dazzling leap (the new black Malraux) whereby the Tao would dissolve in this Dresden china teapot—but no one would forgive me for that.

Miz Literature is completely wiped out. She goes to lie down in one of the empty rooms. Miz Snob, so I understand, is insomniac. Now we are alone.

Miz Snob goes to the kitchen for more tea. I feel as soft as one of those Rocky Mountain land crabs. I surrender to my daiquiri. Half horizontal on a hassock, I carry out a lascivious inspection of the room: the sculpted wood of antique furniture; a flea market chair; Polynesian seashells around a Dahomey sculpture on a tiny shelf; two batiks of New Delhi women in light silk saris standing on the right bank of the Ganges.

And snobbishly floating in the air from a chain, an enormous Truman Capote portrait (with hat) shot by Andy Warhol.

MIZ SNOB
suddenly reappears with hot tea and catches me rummaging in her records.