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 right 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.