Maxim Jakubowski - Paris Noir

As I lie on the ground, flat on my back, several actions register at once. The talkative stubblehead pulls out his gun, fires and kills the man who wanted to shoot Ségolène Royal but shot me instead. Deafening screams. Everyone, it seems, is screaming. Except for the candidate, who is quickly surrounded and whisked away. To safety. People are gathering around me. I hear screams and questions. People screaming questions: What happened? Did he do it? Who is he?

As the blood pours into my eyes and I feel life slipping away, exactly like wakefulness slipping away as you fall asleep – only a trillion times more powerful, the sensation – I think only of S. She was smiling at me. I am sure of it. She looked directly into my eyes. And she was smiling. Right at me. Her destiny.

Bruce inherited a bunch of paper from his mother’s father.

After he’d shaken off the good-fuck/bad-fuck couplings of Mr Leather World, whose year of ascendancy Bruce had never precisely determined – and, since M. Cuir du Monde dyed the pelt favoured by Pediculosus capitis and depilated all the rest, including that of his legs, pubis, armpits, and back (which might otherwise have been positively ursine), and his neediness, which exceeded even that of Regis Capone, a minor (no pun intended) soap opera star Bruce had dated for a while, occluded all the other factual topics, leaving little room for age determination, although his birthday was very important, etc. – Bruce found himself at the end of a bindle of cocaine with nothing better to do, at four o’clock in the morning, even in New York City, maybe especially in New York City, than to break out and study his legacy.

By the time the sun was well up that July morning, everything had changed.

By the end of the week he’d opened a brokerage account and sold off half his grandfather’s gas leases which, though depreciated over their various lifetimes, left him with approximately the same value in cash as remained in the leases, which, though he’d never before shown the slightest talent or inclination for financial manipulations, arcane ones least of all, he fed straight into a diversified portfolio projected to earn him nine per cent per annum, excepting $40,000 in cash which, however, would itself earn four per cent in the brokerage checking account, so long as he maintained a minimum balance, leaving gas leases sufficient to yield some $5,000 a month for the foreseeable future.

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?