It’s 1:30 am in the Hôtel des Alliés, rue Berthollet, Paris. 5th Arrondissement, a block down from the Place de la Contrescarpe. Cecille has just left the room, forever, she says. Tant pis. I’m wearing black pants, suspenders, white shirt, smoking a Danneman cigar, drinking the remainder of the Veuve Cliquot, then reaching for the last couple of Kronenbourg 1664s. I let my feet dangle outside the window, watch the traffic below. I'm where I want to be, in the middle of a post-coital, champagne-induced fog, within spitting distance of caverns and grottos, and subterranean haunts that I'll never reveal to anyone as long as I live.
Gerry has been sending me telegrams, letters, phone messages. Go back, he says, return to the scene of the mafia virgins you whoring debauchee, that’s what you went there for, don’t let the whore grab you, it’s the dark Madonna you want. Leave me alone, Gerry, a pox on your pilgrimages. Every time I go off on your pilgrimages, I end up in a fistfight.
On the other side of Berthollet, an old man is looking out on the passersby, smoking a cigarette. I’m flipping through a street map in my plan de Paris. Just up the street is boulevard Port royal and the Académie de la Bière. If I follow that West, I’ll hit the Closerie des Lilas, where it turns into boulevard Montparnasse. From there, rue Vaugirard and the Porte de Versailles. But, luckily, in between is Le Select, La Rotonde, Le Dôme and a hundred other unnamed pockets of booze and derivative souls. I’ll never make it, but my conscience will be clear. I’ll be swept up by the street cleaners somewhere around rue Vavin or the Villa Seurat. Gerry can be appeased, and I'll return to the hotel for a quiet meal, and safe, miles away from those poxy religious freaks.
1:30 in the morning, and I’m thinking, early yet, Paris is awakening. I head for the stairwell, leave everything behind , and take a stroll towards the Closerie, just a little nightcap, then back home for shuteye. Inside, there’s Samy the bartender, and the drinks are unholy expensive, so after a six euro beer, and a bowl of salted peanuts, time to move on. Another couple of hundred yards, and Le Select rises out of the asphalt like a gallic Las Vegas. Bunch of thieves these Montparnasse bartenders, sure, give me another bottle of that Gewurtztraminer and some oysters, what the hell. An oafish man with a head like a coquille is telling me about a place called Compostella, and I’ve never heard of it, but he says, don’t even call yourself a pilgrim. Who said I’m a pilgrim, I never said I’m a pilgrim? I’m eating oysters. We’re all pilgrims, mate.
And, then, it’s four am, and I’m stumbling up a road past the Parc des Expositions, thinking of the Douanier, Rousseau the Customs man, painting jungles while he calculated excise taxes. And, a couple hundred metres further, and two chavs waiting for an idiot just like me, waiting in their suburban discontent, up the hill in Issy-les-Moulineaux, and I might have been wearing dress pants, but I love a rumble, especially when the opposition takes me as a pushover.
I’m walking down both sides of the street at once, I’m a sot from the New World, take me into the Meudon forest. I've got a pretty good idea that with this attitude problem of mine, that this might be the night I've been gunning for, when I can finally really get the crap kicked out of me.
I didn't care much about mohawk rasta man and his sidekick with a face like a tomato can calling me a fag, or as he put it a baltringue. I'm of the Bukowski school - nothing against two men sleeping together as long as I'm not one of them. It was what he said just before.
"Why don't you just go back where you came from. This is chez nous, our neighbourhood."
"Well, actually, this is Céline's neck of the woods."
"What Céline Dion? Cette teupu?"
That earned him a snort from tomato can.
"No, Louis Ferdinand."
"Yea, well I say he doesn't own it."
"Tell that to Racine."
That's when he said he figured I was some kind of a putain de baltringue, which is a fag in chav-speak. Which meant it was time to use Gerry's rule number one for writing: show don't tell. When you want to take out somebody, it's like a law of physics. The maximum violence within the shortest possible time frame. I never aim for the face, that's for the movies, just ask mohawk man how it felt to have his oesaphagus crushed, with a follow up head ram straight out of Swansea.
Tomato can face turned on his heel and ran, pretty well in the direction of Céline's house. Maybe he was related. There were some fires going in the distance, and some dogs barking, and some shadows dancing in the moonlight... you could see the vagabonds were really taking control again. You wouldn't be surprised to see Villon come through and say hello. I pushed my hiking boot into Mohawk's throat. He looked way better to me on the ground.
"Louis Ferdinand's coming back my friend, he's coming back with his dogs. He'll be looking for you..."
Dawn was breaking; it was time to move out of the forest, and onwards to Versailles for breakfast. I was getting thirsty, and needed to get cleaned up.
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