IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA by Peter Nolan Smith

New York in the summer of 1981 was everything it wasn’t in the winter of 1979. The temperature boiled the asphalt. Punk had been replaced by New Wave and somehow the city had escaped bankruptcy. Money flowed on the streets and even the East Village exhibited signs of regeneration, since abandoned tenements can only be burned so many times before ashes won’t catch fire.

People had work. Mine was menial construction on an after-hours club along the Hudson River. After paying rent, I had enough money for either Chinese take-out or beers at CBGBs. I lost weight either way and thought about robbing a bank. Whenever I entered one, guards placed their hands on the guns like they had been studying ESP. I was no Jesse James.

Daytime employment seemed the solution to my desperate situation. I had a college degree. My record was clean. I’d worked nine-to-fives before and knew they didn’t kill you, however Arthur, the nightclub owner had promised the work crew various jobs once the International opened its doors.

At his previous after-hour club I had coined $500-700 a night. We hoped to open before Labor Day. On August 13th the club was $20,000 short of our goal. Construction lurched to a halt. I started reading the New York Times’ Help Ads.

The International was saved by the arrival of a criminal refugee from Odessa. His money was rumored to come from smuggling Tsarist icons. The source was unimportant. The club was a dead issue without his help.

Arthur said Vadim had a beautiful blonde girlfriend. “Almost cover girl pretty, but too short to succeed on the runways.”

“Sounds like your old girlfriend.” Danny Gordon, the DJ, had heard that she came from Buffalo.

“No, couldn’t be.” A year ago Lisa had left for a modelling job in Milan. I hadn’t heard from her since. No calls. No letters.

When I spotted her in a French lingerie magazine, I almost flew to Paris, except she could have been in London, Milan, or Munich, so I remained in New York to be haunted by her distant footsteps on cobble-stoned European streets.

“She’s gone for good.”

“No one leaves New York forever.” Native New Yorkers like Danny considered anywhere else purgatory. “She’ll be back.”

“That’s what I’m worried about.”

Up to now I had been forgetting Lisa piece by piece. The smell of her skin after sex. Her laugh if I told a bad joke. Her stilted dancing to the Psychedelic Furs. Buying leather jackets together. Hers white, mine black, yet some memories had lives of their own. No matter how many drinks. No matter how many days.

“Still it would be funny if it was her.” Danny wasn’t letting go either. He had a thing for her. Any man would if she looked his way.

“Funny, but not ha-ha funny.”

I hoped it wasn’t Lisa. Despair told me it was and I chucked a hammer at his head. The missile missed by a foot and put a dent in an op-art sculpture from the 60s. Arthur noticed the damage a week later. We denied any knowledge of how it got there.

The Russian’s cash accelerated the final stages of the construction. The walls were painted lilac purple and the sound system was wired through the club. A Labor Day opening appeared realistic and on the hottest day of summer the Russian came to inspect his investment.

We were tearing down a last section of the ceiling. It was a dirty job. Rat dust caked my sweating flesh. Danny and I couldn’t have been lower of the feeding chain of Manhattan.

“Guys, I want you to meet Vadim.” Arthur shouted from the entrance.

The gang on the scaffolding stopped working and sucked on bottles of water before glancing through salt-stung eyes at a muscular man in his late-20s. Vadim was wearing a pastel linen suit. He was clean. The crew muttered hellos. Mine was silenced by the sight of a slender blonde in snug Versace. Lisa’s b-grade beauty was as haughty as a dethroned princess checking into a Holiday Inn.

“So much for the lack of coincidences.” Danny nudged my ribs.

“It’s a small world.” My throat tightened under a garrotte of lost memories. “And a long life.”

“Think she recognizes you?” Danny wiped a layer of grime from his face.

“Not unless she looks my way.” My body was black with soot

Her head turned to our perch. A dice roll of jade green eyes indicated my lack of social progress had not disappointed her low expectations for a punk poet.

“No, she hasn’t forgotten.” Danny laughed at my pained expression, as Vadim, Lisa and Arthur disappeared into the office.

Right before our lunch break, Lisa and Vadim exited from the office. She covered her mouth with a scarf. Vadim did the same with his hand. They left the site without a glance in our direction. After lunch we resumed work at a faster pace. By 4pm the ceiling had been replaced and Arthur called it a day. He was easier to work for than his other partner, a model who was on the cover of Time Magazine as a herpes sufferer.

As the rest of the crew filed from the club, Arthur pulled me aside. “This isn’t going to be a problem?”

“What?” I played dumb.

“You and Vadim’s girlfriend.” He was serious.

“Lisa?” Over the past year her name had floated in my mind a million times. This was the first time I had said it.

“Is it a problem, kid?” Arthur was risking his health by taking on Vadim as an investor. Russian from Odessa were no punks.

“No, she’s nothing to me.”

“Good, then stay away from her.”

“That what I intend to do.”

“Good.” He lifted a finger. “Vadim is a piece of work.”

Obeying his advice wasn’t hard. Lisa ignored me and I couldn’t blame her. I was a failure and not even 28. The Continental might change that status. Three months as the doorman would earn $5000 in tips and salary. That amount could finance a winter in Maine to write my first novel about a free love community in the 1840s.

WATCHIC POND was destined to garner the best-sellers lists. The world would worship my words and Lisa would run to my arms. Self-delusion rarely offers the wrong options.

Two weeks after Labor Day the Continental opened its door without a liquor license. Limos lined West 25th Street well past dawn, as models, actresses, and strippers dancing with abandon to the city’s best DJs. Movie stars snorted coke with two-bit dealers and national politicians seduced Amazonian TVs on pop-art sofas. The club was an immediate success.

Few revellers cared about the illegality of an after-hours club. Everyone knew that the police were on the take. Some people were always on the list. Sanitation inspectors glommed drinks with big-hair wives, plainclothes cops strong-armed bribes, and Jimmie Fats siphoned the cash cow for the firemen. Greed blinded the bagmen to Arthur's wearing a wire for Internal Affairs and the FBI investigating our Russian investor for counterfeit twenties. A myopia from $50 tips blotted out my better judgment.

By Halloween I had my $5000. $5000 became $6000 by mid-November. Vadim sold his share to three men in cheap suits. He still hung around the club, because no one wanted to go anywhere else after hours.

“I thought you were going.” Arthur paid me $500 for the week.

“I don’t know where to go.” My pockets were crammed with tips. It was getting cold. Wintering in Maine had lost its appeal. So had leaving.

“Anyplace, but here.” Arthur nodded at our new partners. They looked like cops.

“I’ll leave after Christmas.” Another month was worth $3000.

“Don’t wait too long.” He was trying to tell me something only I wasn’t listening as long as Lisa’s Nordic profile, blonde hair and sculptured shoulders dogged my peripheral vision.

She was a siren and to other men as well.

Vadim’s bodyguards explained Slavic etiquette to these suitors in the alley. My obsession rejected fear and I cornered Lisa once, when Vadim was out of town.

“All I want is explanation.” It was almost Thanksgiving. The anniversary of her leaving.

“Of what?” She had embraced the comfort of amnesia.

“Why you left and never came back.” I had thousands of answer. None of them added up to one plus one equalling two.

“If I explained that, then I would have to tell you everything.” She looked through me as if I were unsmudged glass and said wearily walking away, “Sometimes you don’t get answers.”

Refused an answer, I provided them by flipping a coin. A half-dollar got the best results. Heads meant yes. Tails no. “Does she love me?”

Tails. A spike jabbed my heart.

“Will she come back to me?”

Heads. There was still light.

“Will we have sex again?” Heads.

My boundless obsession accepted these random replies as the truth, especially since Lisa’s neglect was a game and she chose to exploit a pawn in December.

The winter dawn broke on the club’s fire escape. Danny was playing the Members’ SOUNDS OF THE SUBURBS. I stood on the rusting steel, watching the stars fade from the night. High heels clicked onto the steel grating. Lisa wore a fluffy fur coat. It was open and her silk shirt was unbuttoned to her waist.

“I needed some air.” Her flawless skin was the color of snow.

“Cold this time of year.” I started for the door.

“Not that cold in this coat.” She leaned against the door. “Don’t worry. Vadim is too high to care what I do.”

“What about his bodyguards?”

“They’re drunk.” She reached out for me. “Hold me.”

I melted into her like a nuclear core going China Syndrome through the Earth. After a breathless kiss the ashen blonde claimed, “I haven’t stopped loving you.”

“Me neither.” I wished our bodies were wrapped in silk sheets instead of buffeted by an alley wind.

“I can’t give you any answers.” She looked over her shoulder as if her eyes could see through the steel door.

“I don’t want words.” It was a well-rehearsed line.

“Good.” She pulled me closer and we embraced like lovers in a silent movie for a half-minute. Her heart was bare to my hand and beat like a clock ready to sound its alarm.

“I have to go.” Her Cinderella clock ticked fast after midnight.

“I understand.”

“I wish I didn’t.”

“Then leave with me. I have $6000. We can go anywhere. Europe, LA, Florida. Anywhere.”

“$6000 goes fast.” The narrowing of her eyes revealed that she was adding up the pros and cons of my proposition.

“We can rent a house in Key West.” I could work at a bar. We’d watch the sunsets from the pier. I loved the sea. It was only one of a million possibilities, if she said ‘yes’.

“Vadim says you’re headed nowhere.” She was weighing my worth.

“Only because I’ve been waiting for you.” Applause from NYU co-eds rewarded my poems about two days stranded in Garrison Junction, Montana, yet a drifter’s code wasn’t tattooed on my skin. “I could get a real job. Move into a nice apartment.”

A nine-to-five held little glamour to someone who has travelled first-class through Europe and her icy stare announced her final appraisal. Her hand withdrew from mine.

“Sean, it’s a nice dream, but life’s too short to live a dream.”

“Why you never call?” Asking questions was not part of my daydreams.

“Your phone got shut off.” An unpaid bill was only partially the truth.

“You could have sent a postcard.” This plea cut the scene short.

“The last thing I need in life is someone who’s only interested in breaking the score of CBGBs pinball machine.” Pity was not her forte.

“I’m good at pinball.” I owned the record for the SLASH machine at CBGBs.

“But your name isn’t Tommy.” Lisa fled inside the club like Vadim might have woken from his stupor.

She joined Vadim and his partner, Viktor Malenski, in the VIP lounge. Before I could broach the velvet ropes, the two Ukrainian bodyguards formed an immovable barrier. I possessed other means of touching Lisa and went to the DJ booth with two beers.

“Nice entrance.” Danny was sporting a broken nose and two black eyes. His hailing from Old New York money more than compensated for a crooked beak with the girls at the International. They loved him all the more.

“I wasn’t trying to be discreet.”

“You’re threading on razors.” Danny touched his nose.

“I’m not worried about Vadim’s thugs.”

“Really?” One punch had taught Danny to keep his distance.

“Not at all.” I pushed him away from the turntables and picked out an LP. Danny grimaced at my choice of WHAT I LIKE ABOUT YOU.

“That song only has an audience of one.”

“Two. You’re forgetting me.”

Two years ago the Romantics had played Hurrah. Hundreds of young women packed the uptown rock club to see the Detroit band. I took a break from the door to check out the show. A blonde stood before the speakers. Her beauty belonged in a fashion magazine and I leaned forward to smell hair fragrant as peaches dipped in burnt tar.

Mere mortals didn’t stand a chance with her, but she backed into me, as the group played their hit song. Her intent was more than flirtation and I should have retreated to the club’s entrance.

My hillbilly girlfriend was waiting at our East Village apartment. She said she loved me. I forgot this declaration of devotion and grabbed the blonde’s hand. The double encore of their hit accompanied our sex in the stairwell.

Now Lisa laughed, as if the song was for someone else. The dance floor emptied quickly. Arthur frowned at the DJ booth and slashed his hand in the air to cut the song short.

“Sorry, but I get paid to make people dance.” Danny didn’t need another broken nose.

“Put something else on.” I accepted its failure.

Danny segued to Chic’s LE FREAK and ransacked the EPs for a floor-filler to cover his tracks.

“There are other women out there.”

“And I’ve been with more than a few.” Vixens lounged on the club’s over-stuffed sofas in a languid mockery of foreplay and braless teenagers danced like they had graduated from stripper training school. I had slept with several. None of the one-nighters succeeded in erasing the ruins in my head. There had to be a magic word. A gesture. Something to change the present into another now.

“You ever hold something in your hands and know it belongs nowhere else?”

“My Little League baseball bat.” Danny grasped an imaginary slugger. “Women are mist on the water and no man can hold onto a ghost.”

“Lisa’s flesh and blood.”

“A zombie is the one ghost you can never raise from the dead.”

“She told me she loved me.” I watched, as she led Vadim onto the dance floor.

“No phone calls, no letters, and a Russian boyfriend don’t spell love in any language.”

“Not if you’re only reading the subtitles.” Lisa swayed to the music without looking my way and Vadim moped like a trained bear. I danced better than him and I had read her TS Eliot in the bed of a Niagara Falls Hotel. Poetry under the sheets had to count for something, but cutting in was not an option. The bodyguards glared at me.

“She never said she was going away forever.”

“Never can change to forever in a heartbeat. You were a poet a year ago. Your shit was funny. Why you stop?”

“I walked into a bookstore. Thousands of books were on the shelves. At least five hundred said what I felt.” Self-pity served as the coup de grace to my muse.

“So now you’re a thug.”

“And Vadim is a gangster.” Vadim and Lisa stopped dancing and went to the coat check. They were leaving for the night. My quitting time was dawn.

“If a woman has to choose between the lesser of two evils then she’ll go for the money.”

“Love’s not about money.” Not at the moment of orgasm.

“That coat is worth more than you earned last year.” Danny focused a light on Vadim covering her shoulders with a sable fur.

“So?” My time with Lisa mouldered like a Playboy pictorial left in the rain.

“So no matter how much a woman loves you, she’ll always seek the safest harbor.”

“And my life’s too messy to offer any woman shelter.” My apartment was in a ghetto, my bank account languished in double figures, and my plans for the future extended no further than breakfast.

“You’re a storm at sea.” Danny spun TAINTED LOVE and revellers thronged onto the dance floor.

Arthur waved for me to return to the door, as a flat-chested brunette in a slick black leather dominatrix outfit slinked into the DJ booth. Several men on the dance floor recognized Sherri. My cousin had starred in scores of XXX movies. Her most famous role was as a teenage runaway. I had seen the film twice. We had met in a Times Square bar after she tilted my pinball machine. Our mutual affinity for self-destruction determined that we were better off friends than lovers.

“Hi, cous.” Sherri greeted me with a kiss on the cheek.

Sherri was more than a hellbound succubus. She was smart and very funny. We had good times together. Claiming a family tie negated any explanation of our relationship.

“You’ve really have to give her up. No woman will cross a bridge she’s burned.” Sherri followed my eyes to the couple exiting the club.

“What if I walked across water?”

“We’re sinners.” Sherri’s failures in love rivaled my debacles. “And only saints can depend on miracles.”

“I can change my ways. St. Paul did.”

“St. Paul wasn’t chasing another man’s woman.”

“He thinks their bodies were created for one another.” Danny almost played James Brown’s IT’S A MAN’S WORLD and then switched to Sly Stone’s TAKE ME HIGHER. “Like Adam and Eve.”

“I don’t care what they wrote in the Bible, God created the first woman for himself. Adam had to make do with the animals until God got tired with Eve.” Sherri’s opinion of men hovered low to the ground.

“I’m not saying Lisa was created for me.”

“No woman is created for any man.” Sherri preferred girls. Her fans did too.

“And worst you think there are only two kinds of women other than your mother.”

“Only two.” I had thought there were at least five.

“Marlon Brando has his way Blanche in STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE and two minutes later is calling out, “Stella.” Your ex-girlfriend looks like a virgin, except she’s sleeping with another man. Men can’t choose between the virgin and the whore. You have one. You want the other. No woman can be both. Not the Virgin Mary. Not even me.”

“Your audience does.”

“They’re suckers.”

“Most men are, but all I want is someone to love.” I was hoping that she possessed a secret potion, instead Sherri said, “Your first night with Lisa you made ‘love five times. At least that’s what you told me.”

”Five times?” Danny’s eyes widened in admiration.

“My heart was on fire.”

“Yes, you’ve been using that 'five times' as a yardstick for involvement with a woman. Lust is not love. Lust is lust. See the girl in the boa feathers.”

A scantily-clad redhead teased a circle of leering men. Che Chasta was the leading lady in Sherri’s films.

“I told her you were good in bed.”

“How would you know?” Danny turned up the volume.

“If I’m great, then my cousin has to be at least good.” Sherri tapped my cheek.

“Are you two really cousins?” Danny had a thing for Sherri.

“Blood’s thicker than thieves.” Sherri dragged me from the DJ booth. The hopes of the redhead’s admirers were dashed by Che’s kissing my cousin like a snake swallowing its prey.

“Che, I think you should go home with my cousin." The two women were more than on-screen lovers, but Sherri wanted to keep her distance. "He needs some TFC.”

“And I’m an expert at ‘tender fucking care’.” Che’s feathery caress scintillated my marrow. “Anything stopping you?”

Lisa had left with another man. The sexual revolution was burning the moral tenets of America. Everything was ‘go’ and not ‘no’.

“Just a second.” I went up to Arthur. “I need to go home.”

“I can see why.” The wily owner glanced over my shoulder at the waiting redhead. “Good luck.”

Envy accompanied my departure. The bouncers flicked thumbs up, as we got in the taxi. Che gave the driver a show on the way to a Tribeca loft. In the elevator she stripped naked, singing Rick James’ SUPER FREAK, “I’m a Super Freak, Super Freak.”

“You’re really sexy.” Her lingerie smelled of cigarette and Estee Lauder perfume.

“I hear that all the time.”

“You have anything else you want to tell me?”

I spoke dirty. She cooed with a little girl voice and caressed herself with a shiver. The elevator door opened and she danced into the loft. Cameras and lights were arranged around a large bed.

“Tomorrow Sherri and I are shooting two sex scenes.” She unzipped her boots. “Tonight is rehearsal.”

Che lay on the sheets. Her breasts flattened on her chest. I peeled off my clothes. I knelt between her thighs. Her tongue licked at her lips and hands guided me inside. I shut my eyes. Men across America would have killed for this moment of heaven, except my erection withered under a phantom’s stranglehold and I faked a premature ejaculation.

“Don’t feel so bad, softies happen to a lot of men with me,” Che consoled with an expertise forged by cinematic sex. “Let me fluff you for seconds.”

Che expertly tried to arouse me, but something was broken. After three minutes she stopped and asked, “You’re not gay, are you?”

“No, I’m sorry.” I didn’t feel like talking about my futile fixation and deserted the sex icon, for my East Village apartment, where I scissored women from glossy stroke books to construct a Frankenstein collage of Lisa. My onanistic delusions animated the sharded succubus and our reunion was one lie I believed, as December collapsed towards Christmas.

I lived off cocaine bribes from customers and sold the excess to customers. My $6000 rose to $8000, but I wasn’t leaving, despite things going downhill fast.

Sherri was arrested by the precinct police for possession. My threat of snitching to Internal Affairs prevented her being the station house’s party favor. Vadim ODed on heroin. My reviving him earned scant thanks from Lisa, although the Russian stopped thinking that I was his enemy. Danny’s parents threw him out of the apartment after he stole a family heirloom. He crashed on my couch. We were our own worst enemies. Inexplicably outsiders viewed our lifestyle as glamorous.

A French magazine front-paged my photo and their journalist wrote that I was a legend at 29. Bernard based this title on my urban exploits without any knowledge of my stalking Lisa from her apartment on East 73rd Street to Vadim’ Central Park penthouse or tailing the couple’s ricochets around Manhattan.

Vadim never spotted my surveillance, as he met with Odessa diamond traffickers and his thugs visited gulag violence on complete strangers. Lisa endured the beatings with heartless sighs and I wasn’t the pair’s only shadow.

Right before Christmas Vadim’s partner was arrested by the FBI. Viktor refused to talk. The precinct police were called before Internal Affairs. They maintained a silent wall of blue. These harbingers of the approaching end failed to pierce my narco-ambulation. My wake-up call came on New Year’s Eve, when Viktor Malenski was shot dead in front of the club.

This execution bared the Continental to a public frenzy fed by the city’s newspapers. I wasn't witness to the murder, yet my name skirted the periphery of the widening scandal of drugs, fame, and beauty with NYPD’s Internal Affairs drawing lines between the dots.

Lisa came to my apartment. We stayed in bed for an entire day. She swore that she hadn’t pulled the trigger. I believed her every word and confessed nothing during a police interrogation.

“Don’t leave town.” The Internal Affairs sergeant wasn’t buying my version.

19 cops were suspended from the force. I knew half their names. Arthur knew them all. A phone call from Paris averted my appointment as state’s witness.

Bernard told me that the magazine Actuel wanted for an American to work a nightclub in Paris. Bad French was a prerequisite for the position of physionomiste. A round-trip ticket was waiting at Air France. My passport was up-to-date and I asked Lisa what I should do.

“You have to go. We won’t be safe here.” She lay in my arms naked. Her skin still smelled of tar. “I’ll meet you in Paris five days from now.”

“Notre-Dame.” It had to be easy to find.

“At noon.” She sealed the pact with a long kiss.

The morning of the flight I felt like Ingrid Bergman’s leaving Rick in CASABLANCA.

Lisa walked away from East 10th Street, saying. “Twelve noon.”

“In five days.” I tried to hold her scent in my lungs but exhaled as her taxi merged with the traffic on 1st Avenue.

Sherri drove me to the airport. Che was in the front seat. They were driving cross-country to set up a life in LA. I sat on the rear seat with Sherri’s parrot, Boo.

“Best thing about this trip is your leaving that blonde bitch.” Sherri dodged a truck. She was colorblind and couldn’t see brake lights.

“She’s meeting me in Paris.”

Both women groaned and Boo cackled, “Ha-ha.”

“You really think she’s going to meet you?” Sherri glanced in the rear-view mirror.

“She says she loves me.” That changed the odds to 50/50.

“You buy her a ticket?” Che swung her head to the back.

“No, she said she would get it from her agency.”

“Make that 9 to 1.”

“Which are better odds than I had before.” Slush on the Grand Central Parkway slowed traffic. I leaned back in the seat. Paris would be our refuge. I would write a book. Lisa would grace the cover of ELLE. We’d practice French in bed, drink espresso in small cafes, and wander along the Seine in the rain.

“Everything will be fine.” Sherri turned on the wipers.

“Whenever I’m in her, I feel like she is a glove.” Lisa’s scent simmered on my skin as burnt fruit. “She has to feel the same way too.”

“I’ve been hundreds of men and I’ve never found one that fit me. On the other hand women are another story.” Sherri reached over to Che. Boo screeched her support.

“This will work out.”

“Cous, don’t bet all your heart on a long shot,” Sherri was glad to say it about someone else other than herself.

“I promise I won’t,”

Sherri braked before the Air France terminal. We hugged good-bye. I said she should visit Paris. She told me the same thing about LA and then drove away into a flurry of snow.

I half-expected the police to stop my boarding the Air France, but I got on the plane without any problem and within in an hour the 747 was banking north over the northern tip on Long Island.

Bernard was waiting at Charles De Gaulle Aeroport. He arranged a week’s stay at a hotel in the old Jewish Quarter. Opening night was that evening. He had been tapped to be the club’s DJ. The Rex was under an old cinema along the Grand Boulevard. The magazine held high hopes for the subterranean space to serve as a European crossroad for politics, fashion, and the arts.

“Why you want an American at the door?” I asked the publisher.

“It amuses me.”

“Like a Jerry Lewis movie.”

“Maybe, but you will piss off the Parisians.” Jean-Francoise offered this explanation and then added, “That will be funny.”

His sense of humor depended on my ignorance and by midnight hundreds of Parisians were gathered before the club. Their faces said that they were someone. I could figure out who.

“Do you know who I am?” asked a man with wavy hair.

“Not a clue.”

The crowd jeered the man. I later learned he was the minister of culture. I chose women by their looks and men if they had a good smile. The cashier spoke little English. If anyone famous stood too long before the ropes, she would hiss and point them out. Finally I recognized Françoise Hardy from her years as the ‘yeh-yeh-yeh’ girl. “Welcome to the Rex.”

I gave the singer of PREMIERE BONHEUR DU JOUR a good table to watch the Senegalese band on stage. Her cigar-smoking husband’s career spanned decades and he viewed my dismissive treatment as a sign of disrespect.

“You know who I am?”

”You’re no Serge Gainsbourg,” I replied and Jean-Francoise toasted my riposte with champagne. I could do no wrong, except to myself.

Every noon I waited by the famed Cathedral, as tourists and pilgrims flocked through the saint-encrusted doors. The souvenir sellers glanced at Lisa’s picture and shook their heads with a blasé shrug. She had lied about coming to Paris.

The hotel had no TV. There was no need. My room overlooked two gangs’ fight for control of Rue Des Ecouffes. I learned their names and took no sides. Neither was strong enough to win or lose more than an uneasy truce. When they got older, it would be a different story, but for now they were still kids and life was a game of bloody noses and hurt feelings.

Breakfast was an espresso and croissant at the closest café and lunch was its plat du jour. My dinner companions were gangsters, models and intellectuals at the ethnic bistros dotting the narrow streets of Les Halles. Models on the cover of Elle, dancers at the Moulin Rouge, twins from Blois, and a German countess opened their homes, apartments, and hotel rooms. Lisa’s face blurred during the kisses, caresses, thrusts, and seconds-long exhilaration of ejaculation, yet her ghost was stronger than my ability to forget.

For diversion I viewed obscure films at the tiny cinemas in St. Germain and books stolen from WH Smith store opposite the Tuilieries. I found Maxie Laing’s RUNNING, VS Naipul’s AMONGST THE BELIEVERS, George Stein’s THE LAST PORTAGE OF AH, and scores of other novels and non-fiction books I devoured to kill the minutes, hours, and days. Some were unreadable. I attempted ULYSSES tens of times. It became a door stopper.

Paris was city for walking. My favorite ambulation was to pass through the Church St. Gervais, cross the Pont Louis Philippe to the Ile St. Louis, drink a beer at the Brassiere du Ile, and strolled over to Notre-Dame. The crippled trinket seller hadn’t forgotten my original quest and greeted my passage with amusement. “Ou tu vas?”

I’d tell him my route and he’d wish me well.

Steal a book at WH Shakespeare, traversed the Seine on the Pont Neuf and ended up at the Palais Royale for a lunch at Dave’s, whose Chinese spare ribs were the best in town. These journeys brought me to the various gates of Paris and I soon knew the city better than a taxi driver. In truth eyes filled with gloom saw little of Paris. The African quarters offered no magic potions. The heroin along the Rue de la Quest was defeated by my phantom. I was killing time and purgatory had to change locations with the closure of the Rex in the summer.

Without a job I returned to New York. The city was alien after Paris. People were in a panicked hurry and the food was bland, except for pizza. At my apartment I shuffled through my mail. Mostly bills and no letters from Lisa.

Her vacant apartment remained in her name, indicating she might return some day. I didn’t have the luxury to wait. Two cops from 9th Precinct warned Internal Affairs were seeking my appearance before a Grand Jury. Neither had news of Vadim. No one had seen Lisa.

A nightclub in Germany offered a manager’s position and I told my parents I was going to Hamburg. My brothers and sisters thought it a great opportunity to see more of Europe. They had no idea that this trip wasn’t the Grand Tour.

The club on Eppendorfer Weg fronted for the Reeperbahn’s most notorious pimp. Nigger Cali paid a generous salary. I bought a car and rented a penthouse apartment. The lakeside vista was the ideal bedroom vista for an affair with a blonde lingerie model from an aristocratic family. Hilke’s weakness was roulette and mine was confusing lust with love.

Every two weeks we drove my BMW to drop off Cali’s earnings from the ErosCenter at a Geneva bank. The trips were far from romantic since Hilke gambled the nights at various Spielhalles along the route, but looked a little like Lisa. Any blonde model would in the right light.

My younger sister visited Germany to investigate a US Army Colonel for embezzlement. A fellow Justice Department employee had passed on a report about my involvement at the Continental. She left for America convinced that I was a spy and Hilke was my KGB informant.

The truth was more disheartening and in December Nigger Cali presented a bill itemizing six months of sex. Everyone in Hamburg was on his payroll. Hilke was no exception. My BMW keys bought 24 hours and I wisely used the grace period to escape to Paris.

The south-bound train pulled out of the Bahnhof at midnight. Sleep was interrupted by stops throughout Germany and the Low countries. The morning dawned as a joyless mist. We were entering Paris. The gray dome of Sacre-Coeur threatened from the height of Montmartre. No one greeted me at the station. I took a taxi to the Marais. The old lady at the hotel had my room. As she set out a breakfast of coffee and a baguette, I called Bernard.

“Where are you?” Bernard sounded happy to hear my voice.

“Paris.” I couldn’t tell for how long. The 5000 Deutschmarks from Hamburg would last about two months.

“I quit my job and now spin records at the Bains-Douches. They need a doorman. You have papers.”

“Papers? Sure.”

My work papers were forged on the only color copier in France. The owner of the Bains-Douches deigned to not examine the document. Americans consider the French rude, arrogant, and chauvinistic, especially Paris waiters in July, when every other French person is on vacation, but the froggies were offering me a place to live and I was grateful for their hospitality.

Women were easy late at night. The nameless sex offered little succor. Heroin better soothed the beast gnawing my soul and no one noticed my losing weight, although the loss of appetite extended to more than food and winter passed into spring without a woman’s savage touch.

April brought the expected dreary rains followed by May’s warm winds swimming across the Mediterranean from Africa. My addiction was only skin-deep and kicking dope not as bad as listening to John Lennon’s COLD TURKEY.

Sherri and Che arrived to film S&M videos in Versailles. Frenchmen at the club greeted them with an adoration reserved for pagan idols. After the club closed for the night, Sherri, Che, and I ate at a transvestite African bar. More for the show than the food.

News from the Pacific Coast was good. Her bird was happy in the Van Nuys studio. She had won the best actress award at the Las Vegas Adult Film convention. The IRS had settled her delinquent tax bill for a fraction of the bill. LA was smiling faces.

New York was another story. My cousin reported that Jimmy Fats the bagman had been murdered to keep his mouth shut. Arthur had escaped an assassination attempt and my subleasee had called to say that I had been subpoenaed by a Grand Jury.

“You should stay out of New York for a couple more months.”

“More like a year.” Che was eyeing a Brazilian TV and Sherri seemed a little hurt by her lover’s distraction. She had been ignoring her own advice. “You can come live in LA.”

“What would I do in LA? Be a porno actor?”

”Lights, camera, action.” Che mouthed an obscene gesture to the TV. “You could be a star. The audience would identify with your type.”

“Me?” I was 30 and ten pounds overweight.

“The wankers don’t go to gym.” Sherri explained without any malice.

Palm trees and porno was a tempting offer, however I said, “Men in porno films are strictly extras. Better I stay here.”

“At least the girls are cute here.” Sherri commented, as Che went to the bathroom. The TV followed her inside and my cousin’s lips narrowed to a flat line. “You stop judging women by your lust-o-meter?”

“For the most part.” I wasn’t having any sex. “I can’t get Lisa out of my head. I wish someone would smack me on the head, so I could forget.”

“I could hit you with my high heel.” Che’s mischief had ignited Sherri’s sadist streak.

“I don’t want to suffer brain damage.” Her heels were stilettos and I downed my vodka. “At least not permanently.”

“Nothing’s permanent in this world.” Sherri stared at the bathroom’s closed door.

“All we are, are dust on the wind.”

“I hate Kansas, except in the WIZARD OF OZ. If only I could click my heels and make everything right.”

“Maybe you will one day. Until then you’ll have to be satisfied with men licking them.”

“Women too and I know just the one.” Sherri strode to the bathroom. She stepped inside and I could have joined them, except four was more than a crowd in such a small room. I left for the Marais with hopes of sleeping the day away till dusk. At noon old lady from the hotel desk rang to inform that I had guests.

Sherri and Che had an off-day and were in need of a guide. I dragged them over to the Louvre Museum for my special tour.

“Twenty minutes and then lunch at the Café de Pais.”

Most tourists sought to see the Mona Lisa and the more distant galleries were devoid of humanity.

“Best to let the paintings look at you.” I kept them moving.

“Same as being up on stage at a strip club.” Che pranced forward with hands cupped over her eyes. “Peek-a-boo.”

“I’ve been thinking about why you’re not with anyone now.” Sherri also averted her eyes from the paintings, as if the men on the tableaus were peeking toms.

"Why?"

“What are you’re favorite movies? CASABLANCA, THE APARTMENT, AND THE WIZARD OF OZ. Only one of them has a happy ending.”

“Jack Lemmon ends up with Shirley MacLaine in THE APARTMENT.”

“Only for that last scene. The rest of the movie he is in mourning like a dog without a bone. You’re the same with Lisa.”

“I like Life imitating Art.”

“They’re only movies.”

“THE WIZARD OF OZ has a happy ending.”

“Dorothy goes home with her dog.”

“Man’s best friend.”

“Not a happy ending to any boy-meets-girl story.”

“So I’m not so good at boy-gets-girl. Maybe I better change my top three movies then.”

“All my movies have happy endings.”

Sherri skipped away to join Che and they held hands like schoolgirls playing hooky. The eroticism of David's oriental harem paintings stopped them in their tracks and the girls were dying to get to their hotel.

“One more painting.”

At the Mona Lisa Sherri stood with her back to Da Vinci’s masterpiece. “I can imagine she is staring at me.”

“Cheap tart.” Che ruffled her red curls and the male tourists focused on the living rather than the dead. The women wandered to a hermaphrodite statue. Neither woman could keep their hands off the marble skin. Their wanton fondling stalled the guards from calling a halt to the free show. They exited from the museum laughing and disappeared into a Versailles-bound taxi.

They reincarnated Sodom in the nightclub every night of their visit. Women sought their secrets and the two actresses conducted re-education camps in the dark corners. Che used me for the show-and-tell.

“Sherri’s cousin is the best I had.”

“The best?” Her devotees cooed with unbridled curiosity.

“A man takes 2.8 seconds to cum and a woman 3.8 seconds.” Che announced with a professorial exactitude. “While he’ll never be as good as a woman, he’s certainly better than most men.”

She later confided my efforts hadn’t been the worst. It was nice of her to lie. We held a bon-voyage dinner at the transvestite restaurant. The place was packed with prostitutes, porno actresses, pimps, and bikers. Morality had been put on hold for everyone, but me, and Che dug into the grave.

“You miss anything about the States?”

“Friends, family, and pizza.” Two dominatrix salaciously beckoned with whips. I waved them off.

“Nothing else?”

“He misses that skinny blonde from Buffalo.” Sherri groaned with disbelief and Che smiled with a satisfied savoring of my agony. “Someone said she was in Ibiza.”

“Then I’ll put that on my list of places to avoid.”

My strong face was a bluff and as soon as they left town, I flew to that island. My visit turned up no clues and in Paris flames consumed Lisa’s photographic doppelganger in less than a minute.

If I couldn’t be lovers with a woman then being a friend was the next best thing and I put this to the test when a cover girl model with a duplex on Ile St. Louis needed a caretaker for her Scottish terrier. The South African liked drinking, flirting, and being a bitch. The order jumbled up according to the time of day.

Every week Brigitte travelled to distant fashion shoots and spent weekends at her husband’s villa in Cap D’Antibes. She said I didn’t need to pay any rent. “Take care of Angus, that’s all.”

I had no trouble with that task. Angus was a good drinking partner, but resisting Brigitte was more difficult. Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin shot the nude body that exited every morning from the bathroom with her singing from the hallway mirror.

“No peeking.”

“I only believe in staring."

The tension excluded a platonic relationship, even though we slept in separate beds. I must have meant something to her. At parties she pretended to be my girlfriend. At the club Vanessa waited to make sure every woman left with any man other than me and few females dared to brave her jealousy.

“You’re everything I want in a man.” She cooed after a long dinner at La Coupole. “Faithful, funny, and smart. Too bad we live together, then again if we had sex, you and I wouldn’t be friends anymore.”

I was tired of being a friend and had to show my feelings. Vanessa modelled for a designer on Rue St. Honore. One night what I couldn’t say sober, I wrote drunk on the wall opposite the atelier. The words were big and I was so drunk that I never saw the gendarme until bumping into him. He was drunk too. “Qu’est ce-que tu fais?”

“I’m writing a poem.”

“Poem?” His truncheon swung over my head and I fled his shouts, “Arrete, arrête.”

When Vanessa returned from work the next afternoon, she joked how the poetry police had almost arrested some fool for defacing the British Embassy.

“Maybe they will sentence him to life for bad meter.”

She was familiar with my handwriting from letters. Her ridicule was sharp. A glutton for abuse I didn’t move out.

Brigitte's husband suspected the worst and she told the ex-legionnaire that I was gay. The lie worked for a year, for her real beau was a French painter. I had written and article about his painting group. Philippe was good-looking and talented. Vanessa met him at the Bains. They went home that first night.

Vanessa declared she loved him and tried to prove this with her lovemaking, although the diabolical moaning from the bedroom was better suited to a porno set. I had to get out of the apartment and told the old lady at the Marais Hotel to ready my old room.

That night I stopped at a disco on Rue Montmartre, intending to wait out Brigitte’s early morning departure. Philippe’s previous girlfriend danced with a natural wantonness to WARM LEATHERETTE. Her partner was a famous French singer. My eyes x-ed him from the surroundings.

Honey-hued skin covered the teenager’s long lean limbs. Lisa had possessed the same boyish body. Candia noticed my staring and I turned to the bar. The cold beer in my hand was empty and I would have left, if Candia hadn’t accosted me.

“Your friend Che says you’re good in bed.”

“She was exaggerating.” Lying was more like it.

“She didn’t seem the type to joke about sex.” A finger toyed with a froth of golden hair. “And I saw the way you looked at me.”

"My cousin says you can tell how someone fucks by the way they dance.” I was trying to scare her from any entanglement with someone almost twice her age, but Candia simply smiled and said, “Long and hard.”

“Shouldn’t you be home?” She was still in high school.

“I’m no Cinderella.” A kiss led to my hotel, where she stripped off my clothes with teenage hunger. She emerged the victor. On sweat-damp sheets Candia said, “You weren’t half-bad.”

“Not the best?” My flesh was raw.

“My ex was huge.” She stroked me to a painful hardness and lay on her stomach with her ass in the air. “I like it from behind. It makes you seem bigger.”

I attributed the marathon to her half-Puerto Rican/half Jewish blood. As she got dressed, I thought that was it, instead she said, “You have no one and I have no one. Everyone else does. Winter is coming on. I don’t like sleeping in a cold bed. You want to live with me?”

“What about love?” Staking my heart on a teenager’s whim was a risky proposal. My other choice was more of the same of the months before last night.

“I think you know the difference.” She kissed my cheek once and went to the door. “Most men do by your age. So what will it be? Me or a long cold winter?”

“Warm in bed sounds good.”

Candia went home to inform her mother, while I crossed the river to Brigitte’s apartment. She considered my moving as a betrayal of her dog’s love. As a friend she should have wished me good luck.

“What does a man want from a woman? To be his bride? The mother of his children? What can little bitch know about love?”

“About as much as anyone.” No formula predicted the paths of the heart.

“You think sex will help you forget that girl from Buffalo?” Birgitte’s jealousy was more deep-rooted. “Fucking is not the answer.”

“Neither is sleeping alone.” I packed my bags in five minutes. Angus whined his good-bye and Vanessa asked for the keys. One word would have saved my long train ride to the 15th arrondisement, except the door shut and the TV came on to the news. I walked out of the building and caught a taxi on the bridge.

The driver knew the address. Candia’s atelier was located across from Paris’ Lost and Found Bureau. Her airy 1930s artist loft contrasted with the quartier’s dreary buildings. My house-warming gifts were a stereo tape deck and an unspoken vow of fidelity. Candia slept in my arms. My French improved in bed, although the honeymoon period had a short shelf-life.

I stole books about love and sex. The millions of words failed to solve my dilemma. Candia sensed the malaise and suggested a physiatrist, who prescribed pills. The downers offered more emptiness and I threw them into the gutter.

We ate boudin with her mother on Sundays and dined at cous-cous restaurants on Monday. We vacationed twice in Normandy. Our reflection in the store windows mirrored those of content couples as long as I didn't look in our eyes.

Bernard and I opened a dance club near Opera. Le Reve’s plush décor harkened back to the 50s. The young rich loved the mix of soul and classic French hits stitched together by Bernard’s world hits. We hired a young black bouncer to handle the voyous. Jacques had run with several gangs from the outer suburbs. A two-year stint in prison had not ruined his smile. The young girls from the good neighborhoods thought the muscular Martiniquean handsome and came in droves to try their luck.

These beauties in turn attracted men who brought them drinks. A glass of champagne cost $20 and Le Reve coined money.

A week after the opening an older man entered with two dowdy women in fluffy coats. His nose was splayed across his upper lip like a wet sox. An argument ensued with the cashier about the cover charge.

“Give one reason you don’t have to pay and you can come in for free.” I could tell he had been someone once.

“We never pay,” the ex-fighter rasped in a punished voice. “Not to un putain Amerlot.”

“Fucking American.” The insult was rewarded with an immediate response. “Jacques, escort these frogs out of the club.”

Puzzlement mired on Jacques' face and the fiftyish blonde woman glared with disbelief. She looked very familiar and I ran out to say they could come in, except they had already reached the boulevard.

“So can you explain why you threw out Brigitte Bardot?” Bernard asked at the door.

“Brigitte Bardot?” The boxer’s companion re-assembled into the legendary sex symbol as would any woman who was Brigitte Bardot.

The story of her rejection hit the morning papers and I expected the Paris Police to institute deportation proceedings, instead the passage of time had rendered the animal lover’s beauty passé to today’s youth and our business doubled with their appreciation of my indiscretion, though Bernard suggested more tact in the future.

"We will be old one day too.”

At home the story between Candia and me was fraying at the edges, for the happiness of a relationship can be measured by the distance between a man and woman in bed and my arrivals near dawn earned Candia’s back. Our lovemaking diminished to a monastic stalemate and her silence indicted every man as a potential threat.

We needed time apart and Candia spent the summer modelling in Japan. I called Tokyo every night. Her rare pick-ups mimicked Lisa’s vanishing act in Europe and my imagination painted of a pantheon of Japanese men eating sushi off her body. Sherri came to perform a series of lesbian films in Versailles. This time she was alone. Che had run off with a man.

“Why are we unlucky in love?” I asked at La Coupole Brasserie.

“We are lucky in love. It’s relationships we suck at,” Sherri eyed a fresh-faced Sorbonne student, then her lids drifted across her irises. She was treating her pain with drugs. “At least long relationships.”

“Any time I’ve been faithful to a woman, it’s ended badly.” Most of my romances had ended like a 747 cartwheeling into an Iowa cornfield.

“Any time you have been unfaithful you’ve achieved the same result.” Her remedy for a broken heart was an orgy of women topped by heroin. It was an old friend.

“Meaning?” Mine was more wine.

“Meaning you shouldn’t worry so much.” Sherri autographed a waiter’s bill. “You can’t do anything about the things you can’t do anything about.”

”Nihilism.” Nothing meant sitting in your bed alone with the clock ticking out the seconds at the speed of a 45 spinning at 16 RPMs.

“No, some things you can’t change, because they’re beyond your power.”

“So I should do nothing.”

“Something will happen when you least expect it.”

”And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll push your wheelchair down the stairs when you’re 80.”

“That a promise?” Earlier would be better.

”We’re family. Remember?” At least Sherri had Boo although parrots usually outlive their owners.

“Cousin and cousin.” At 32 I should have had a wife, a car, and kids plus a dog and bills.

Every time my father called, he would asked, “When are you going to settle down?”

“You mean move to Boston and live like everyone else?”

I wish I had a better answer and he did too, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that living with a teenager in Paris was as settled as I could manage. He was a 9-to-5 guy and loved my mother at first sight.

Candia returned in late August. We didn’t have much time left. The phone rang at odd hours. If I answered, the caller hung up.

Suspicions bred accusations bound by resentment and we would have probably broken up, except Middle East terrorists bombed Paris to gain the freedom of three imprisoned comrades.

A Sunday night explosion on Rue Faux barely scratched its target and no one had been injured, however the rest of the street got off less fortunate than the Israeli bank. The blast shattered every window on the block, charred a dozen cars, and shoved our nightclub’s ornate entrance onto the dance floor.

“On a la chance.” Bernard gingerly ran his finger over the blistered woodwork.

“Yes, we were damn lucky.” If Le Reve had been open, the casualty list would have topped a hundred. The possibility of a thirty-two year-old American heading the ‘dead’ list didn’t deter a police inspector from interrogating un estranger as the primary suspect.

“Merely a formality.”

“Do I need a lawyer?” I asked the policeman and he shook his head with a laugh. “Not unless you are guilty.”

Bernard agreed with this assessment and advised to do nothing until charged or arrested. As a French citizen he was familiar with the Napoleonic legal aberration of guilty until proven innocent. His nonchalance demeanor evaporated with the contractor’s estimate that the repairs would take at least a month.

“This is impossible.” He ranted against the sloth of French workers. A few glasses of cognac redirected his rancor to the real culprits. “C’est le guerre.”

And the war killed and maimed innocent people throughout the French capitol, while the socialist government played tough guy. Having escaped one bombing I imagined lightning wouldn’t strike twice and resumed my normal walks around the city.

Two days later I had a coffee at the Café Tartine in St. Paul. I visited the Eglise St. Gervais and lit a few candles. Old habits died hard. I walked across the courtyard of the hotel de Ville, thinking about how nice the spring sun felt on my skin.

A powerful detonation knocked me off my feet. The ringing in my ears was replaced by the cries and I ran to the post office to wrestle the wounded from the debris. At home I washed off the dust and decided to not give the terrorists a third shot and bunkered for the siege’s duration at my girlfriend’s apartment.

Candia’s modelling agency cancelled her bookings. The seventeen year-old was more bored than scared by this enforced confinement. Her phone conversations were conducted in whispers.

“We should go to America.” Only one hope existed for us.

“You think I can work in New York?” Candia’s career was in a state of stagnation, since the better-paying commercials and editorial work in France were reserved for girls with Caucasian roots.

“They love girls like you there.” A mulatto stood a better chance in America, plus a friend was the photo editor for Details and another comrade shot photos for Elle.

“New York has to be safer than Paris.”

“Fantastique. I want to visit Disneyworld.” She squealed with teenage delight.

“Yes, we can go see Mickey.” I didn’t explain Orlando was over 1200 miles from New York and reaped the benefits of that deceit in bed.

In the morning I opened the atelier windows. A soft breeze carried the traces of Africa. I listened for anything else and heard no explosions. At noon Radio Nova announced Mitterand’s government had freed the Lebanese prisoners. Hearing the news, Candia hugged a Mickey Mouse doll.

“What about Disneyworld?”

“We can go after the summer.” I had a business to run.

“You promise we see Mickey.” Her feet stamped on the floor.

“I have to check on the nightclub.” I dressed quickly. Dishes flying at my head would complete her repertoire

“You can sleep at the club tonight, if you love that place so much.”

Her suggestion was an order to be disobeyed. Flowers and a nice dinner would earn a reprieve, but she wouldn’t forget my promise to visit Disneyworld until passing through the turnstiles of the Magic Kingdom.

I arrived at Rue Faux, expecting no change after a two week absence, for when a French worker says, “A month.” he usually meant six weeks, however a new wall had been erected, the entrance was restored to its gaudy glory, liquor bottles rose over the bar, and the dance floor shined with lacquer.

“Where have you been?” Bernard was cueing Willie Bobo’s SPANISH GREASE at the refurbished disc jockey booth.

“The bombs.” I shrugged my excuse.

“Eh, alors?” The new speakers favored the clean sound of the Latino Swing.

“I didn’t expect this much progress.”

“A phone call here. A phone call there.” His brother held office in the socialist government, the club’s liquor came tax-free from a military base, and our new bouncers were off-duty marines. Neither of us deemed these ‘favors’ inappropriate.

“Opening date is in five days.”

“Damn.”

“Problems avec ta copine?” Bernard nodded to the flute hitting a high note.

“Big problems. I promised Candia a trip to Disneyworld.” I rolled my eyes. “Now we’re opening I have to cancel.”

“Ah, quais, Mssr. Mickey et les filles.” Having known Candia since she was 14, Bernard was surprised that I had lasted longer than her other boyfriends and played Maurice Chevalier’s THANK HEAVEN FOR LITTLE GIRLS.

“If you want to go, go. We have one more week at least.”

“Thanks.”

I went upstairs to telephone Candia. She hung up a dozen times. Finally she answered and I blurted out, “I have a surprise for you. We’re going to Disneyworld.”

“I can’t. I have a job in Milan.”

“Then we can go to dinner at La Coupole tonight.”

”My plane leaves this evening.” ADDICTED TO LOVE was playing in the background. She hated Robert Palmer’s hit, since she hadn’t been chosen as an android model for the video. Another man had bought her the record.

“Oh.” I suspected that he was in the apartment and told Bernard that I would see him tomorrow.

“Embrace your chouchette for me.”

I exited from the nightclub to a carless street resembling a scene out of the 1870s. A tent had been erected under a balcony. A young clochard was cutting vegetables into a pot. The thin bum was better clothed than most derelicts sleeping under the Seine bridges, yet a tremor sizzled in my spine, as he lit his stove. It didn’t explode and I flagged a taxi, elated to have survived my fears.

At the atelier Candia was alone. A cigarette lay in the ashtray. The tip was bare of lipstick. Candia threw it in the trash and packed her bag for Italy. Her good-bye kiss was a peck.

Bernard and I worked twenty-hour days. Sleep was our only respite. Five minutes before the doors opened, the electricity blew the fuses. Bernard found the breakers and switched on the lights. We were ready for business.

Fun-loving Parisians flooded into Le Reve. Bernard’s DJing drove the teenagers onto the dance floor and they drank with an apocalyptical abandon. Candia showed up unexpectedly with her father. The old Puerto Rican ran a small boite de nuit in St. Germain. I bought a bottle of champagne. Candia's kiss was warm, but before I could hold her in my arms, Jacques tapped my shoulder.

“Someone to speak with you.”

I accompanied him to the door and Jacques pulled apart the curtains.

The young clouchard was struggling with a lighter.

“He say why?”

“No,” Jacques had only worked breaking and entering before my hiring him. All I had to do was say the word for him to prove his gratitude. “You want I make him go away?”

“No.” Twenty francs would buy the bum a bottle of wine and good luck for le Reve. “I’ll see what he wants.”

Jacques unlatched the ropes for the quartet of well-heeled youths from the 16th Arrondisement and I pulled out a few spare coins.

“Hey, you don’t recognize me?” The bum raised a smiling face.

Squinting I scrapped away the filth and hugged Danny Gordon for a short-lived embrace.

“When was the last time you bathed?”

“I didn’t think the French cared about personal hygiene.”

“Hey, I’m an American.” Parisian men’s one bar of soap per annum didn’t excuse his smelling like week-old garbage and I opened the ropes to the amazement of several customers dressed a la mode. “We have a shower in the basement. I’ll cuff you a couple of drinks afterwards.”

“That’s an offer I can’t refuse,” Danny broke out of his slouch. “I ran into your cousin in New York last year. She said you were here. Didn’t you leave right after Viktor Malenski got killed at the Continental?”

“No, I left about a month before that.” Three years since that deadly night hadn’t lessened the danger of the truth. “My partner and I started this club. I get paid to act rude to the French. Can it get better than that?”

“You’re my new hero.” He nodded to the cashier, who held her nose, as I led the ex-trumpeter to the basement changing room.

“So how about a shower?” I opened the taps of the washing room.

“Be a new man after that.” Danny stripped off his clothes and climbed into the steam-filled shower stall.

“You didn’t see Lisa when you in New York?”

“Ha, I was wondering when you were going to ask that.” Danny soaped his body. “Aren’t you over her yet?”

“Yeah, long ago.”

“Right.” He didn’t believe me either. “I saw her once. She was with Vadim.”

“She ask about me?”

“Didn’t get a chance to speak with her.” He soaped his hair. “Someone said they were living in Russia.”

“Thanks.” I left the washroom with his tattered clothes. They had outlived their usefulness several people ago. I dumped them in the trash bin and rummaged through a backstage closet. I hung a musty suit from the 1950s on the door and went upstairs with two cases of champagne. None of it vintage. Bernard was waiting at the bar.

“You throw Brigitte Bardot out of the club, then you let in a clouchard.” Ordering drinks Bernard asked, “So who is your guest?”

“He’s a friend from New York.” I ordered a whiskey.

“So the Americans are exporting bums to France.” My partner scoffed with the immense pleasure of hearing that an Amerlot had plunged to the bottom. His happiness was short-lived, for a twenty-minute shower and a suit transformed Danny into a modern-day Casanova for Le Reve’s haughty female clientele.

“A new man.” I led him to the bar.

“Same old me, just cleaner.” We toasted the East Village. Candia danced with him twice. Her father knew Danny’s dad. I had another drink. It wasn’t my last.

Candia announced her departure and I gave her a sloppy goodnight kiss.

“You are not so handsome as a drunk.”

“Everyone else is pretty.”

“Fool.”

“Love you.”

“You say those words so easy.”

“I mean it.” I escorted her to a taxi.

“Then what is love?” She shut the taxi door before I could answer.

I drank the rest of the night with her father, trying to gather insight into his daughter. Instead he recounted his falling out of plane in the Korean War. “I didn’t die either.”

He had a lot of stories like that. So did Danny and me too. As the night drew to a close, I asked Danny. “You have anything in your ‘room’ you want to keep here?”

“No, ain’t nothing worth stealing.”

“What about your trumpet?”

“I hocked it in Spain.”

“Pawn it? You lived for your music.”

“Like you used to live for your poetry.” Danny chugged his whiskey.

“I couldn’t even write in meter.” The illiterati might have overlooked this fault, however my grammar school nuns had beaten a respect for classical cadence and proper grammar into our knuckles and editors came from the same school.

“Your stopping partially inspired my dumping the horn.”

“Please don’t follow my failures.” My blame plate was full. “You could have been another Chet Baker.”

“I’d rather be Horace Silver.” His band’s deconstructed version of SONGS FOR MY FATHER with Danny’s neophyte trumpet stubbornly orbiting the free-style band’s chaotic non-melody had been a show-stopper at the Mudd Club in the late-70s. "But who was I kidding? We sucked and no one cared if we sucked. We were young and pretty. I don’t regret quitting music and DJing and I bet you don’t regret stopping writing either. “All that ‘art’ shit was a monkey on our back. Now we can live as real men are supposed to live.”

Danny spoke with the coolness of a man who had abandoned a woman he didn’t love after seeing her with another man.

“Better than pretending to be Hemingway.” Ghosts of stories lurked in my skull as half-built ships in dry docks.

"Or Chet Baker." He pushed back his wavy hair.

"But why are you living on the street. You belong to a cult giving away their possessions?”

“I’m waiting for my ship to come in.” The ex-trumpeter nearly swooned off the stool. “The whiskey kinda went to my head. I’ll be fine once I’m out at sea.”

“Your parents bought you a boat?” A 50-foot catamaran was not beyond their means.

“I’m not taking their money anymore.”

“Yeah, fuck money.” I said, while wishing that his parents adopted me.

“I’m talking about fishing and not the rod-and-reel shit either. Nets and trawlers and thousands of hooks capable of tearing the flesh off your bones. And tons of fish on the wild sea.” His voice climbed an octave with an imagined voyage to the North Atlantic. “Fishing ala Captain Courageous for cod on the deep. Hacking fish from a line, as the ship plows into the sea and resurfaces streaming foam. Fishing in the black of night, the wind___”

“Stop already, I’m seasick.”

“Mal de mer has two cures. Land or drowning.” Danny possessed a convert’s devotion for his new profession.

“If you love fishing so much, what are you doing in Paris? I mean hanging a line off a bridge into the Seine isn’t that exciting.”

“No, a long-line boat from Gloucester is supposed to dock in Brest and I’ll fish the Georges Bank.” Danny picked at a front tooth.

“When is that?” I had lived in Gloucester. Fishing was a tough on and off shore.

“Maybe a week. The wait is unimportant, if I’m on a boat in the end.”

“I wish I could offer you a place to stay.” A week was a long time on the street. Even longer at my place.

“Thanks, I’m fine in my humble hovel.” Danny lifted a hand to forestall any extra excuses. “You remember what your cousin said about men wanting a virgin or a whore. Well, I have my girl coming from Madrid. Crazy girl. Young like your girlfriend. Her mother was a flamenco dancer. Likes having sex. Her body is insatiable____” Limb by limb Danny reincarnated an ancient sex cult’s goddess, finally accusing her of nymphomania. “It’s no Roman orgy. It’s hard work. You’ll see. Believe me, you’ll see.”

His prediction was almost a curse and that night as I was having sex with Candia, a super 8mm porno movie flickered in the shadows. The teenager noticed my distraction and asked, “What are you thinking?”

“About how much I want you.” I thrust harder into her vagina.

"Ouais?" She rolled out of bed to vainly examine my clothes for the telltale signs of infidelity without success, since the only traces of another woman were in my mind.

“I’m tired of living with another woman’s ghost.” She lay on the floor, fiercely clutching her Mickey doll. “If it’s not the skinny blonde from America, then it is someone else.” She

‘There’s no one, but you.” I reached over to Candia. She wasn’t having any of me and I fell asleep on my side of the bed, as dreams of Lisa were replaced by those of Danny’s girlfriend.

She sounded too good to be true, but whenever models, dancers from the Paris Ballet, French actresses, artistes, and svelte students from the Sorbonne tried to seduce Danny, he told them, “I’m saving myself for Elana.”

One night Danny didn’t show at his usual hour and I checked his shack. His canvas sea bag was gone. After the club closed I began to worry, since Paris was as tough a town as New York. When I reported his disappearance to the police on the third night, the gendarme joked that people disappear in Paris all the time.

I didn’t laugh, but should have.

Two nights later Danny approached Le Reve, newly shaven and with his haircut. When he hugged me, I smelled a woman’s perfume. “Let me guess. Your girl came into town.”

“I told you she would.’ He beamed the joy of a sailor on leave.

“I was beginning to believe she was a fragment of your imagination.”

“No, she’s the real thing.”

A slender female in a cotton shift was crossing Rue Faux. Her black hair was dishevelled; several buttons had been popped from her dress, and her cheeks were flushed from exertion. She personified the wraith from my dreams and even more so when Danny whispered, “We had sex on top of the Opera house.”

“Good view.” Two bodies atop the art-deco palace.

“I didn’t go there for the view.” Danny introduced us.

“He talks about you.” A serpentine arm encircled his waist.

“What he say?”

“That you’re a genius for not wanting to be a genius.” The two appeared deep in love.

“I specialize at failurology.” I ordered three glasses of champagne at the bar and fended off my jealousy. “Here’s to making Danny happy.”

“To everyone’s happiness." Elana stopped my raising the glass. "Yours, mine, and Danny’s.”

“Watch out, my friend.” Danny slapped my back. “Elana has you in her sights.”

“I have a strict rule about sleeping with friend’s girlfriends or wives.”

“I like a man of principle.” Her body melted into his and I feebly excused myself to count cash in the office.

When I returned, the staff and customers had vanished from the bar. Plastic Bertrand’s JET BOY JET GIRL was playing underneath my feet. I descended the spiral staircase and pushed my way through the bustling crowd to the dance floor.

Danny was in the DJ booth and Elana was writhing against a shining steel pole, then the song segued to The Kingsmen’s raucous MONEY and she stripped off the cotton shift and flung it to a wide-mouthed Bernard. She deftly popped a flimsy bra to bare cupcake breasts and her fingers salaciously beckoned the men to join her in a dance.

My attempt to break through the mob came too late, for Danny leapt into the circle and yanked Elana by the hair. The club-goers were delighted by the impromptu Apache dance. Danny seized the girl like a Roman taking a Sabine woman. I advanced one step to cut in, then the song stopped and the crowd applauded the two dancers.

Bernard segued into Gainsbourg’s LOVE ON THE BEAT and Elana bowed her head. A string of black hair bisected her face. This apparition of a lost Mayan princess paralyzed nearly every man in the room and Danny held up an empty glass. “Hey, man. You’ll break your eyes that way.”

“I liked her dancing.” It had emptied my soul.

“Only liked?” Elana stepped into her dress and stuffed the bra into Danny’s pocket.

‘He loved it.” Danny laughed hard. “And you owe us a drink for the show.”

“More than one.” I ordered the bartender to give Danny and Elana whatever they wanted and left the nightclub to clear my head. The air was cold and I prayed against any more temptations. God averted his gaze, for a voice said with a Castilian lisp, “I saw your look.”

”What look was that?”

“The devil was trying to buy your soul.”

“What’s the temptation?”

“You and me naked in warm weather so sweat will form on my belly and___”

“You’re Danny’s girl.” I thought he was in love.

“Relationships don’t stop the work of the Devil.” Her hand grasped mine. “I tell you a story. I was born in Madrid. My mother she worked as a flamenco dancer and also took men home too. Una puta. One night she didn’t come back. Where she went, I never found out. My aunt took care of me. We moved to Barcelona and she worked the Ramblas. Men came to her room and I hid in the closet. At first I shut my eyes, thinking they were killing her. After a while I watched. It was better than TV. Sometimes I had to wait in the corridor with the other children. We played the same games as our parents; only it was a joke, then when I’m twelve a man comes to my aunt. He is handsome. He wants me to watch. Nothing more. My aunt tells me to leave. I say I have already seen her do everything. The man gives us both money. I think one day he will take me too. He never does he touches me. Not when I was thirteen fourteen or even fifteen. I watch and he wouldn’t let me touch myself either. Watch. Nothing else and then one day he stopped coming to see my aunt. Maybe she was too old or I was too old. You know what?”

”What?” I was helpless.

“You look a little like him?”

“I've had never been to Spain."

“That shouldn’t stop you from making my dream come true.” She rubbed her body against mine like a stray cat seeking a home and then slinked into the club, murmuring, “Moi et toi.”

I bit my lip and followed her into Le Reve.

Elana pushed a handsome boy off a stool. His frustration was almost audible, as my hand trailed up her thigh hiking the short dress higher.

“You touching me while other men watch thrills every atom in my body." She arched her neck back with eyes searing the ceiling. "They want to be you and I want you in me. Can we go someplace?”

A cheap hotel was across the street. No one would miss me for an hour, however my answer died with Candia’s entrance. She stormed out of the club and I leaped off the barstool in pursuit.

“What about us?” Elana caught me at the door.

“I’ll have to take a rain check.”

“Rain check?” I didn’t waste any time on translations and chased Candia to the corner. Our fight continued on the cab ride and in front of our atelier she tried to hit me with her high heels. I grabbed her arms and begged her forgiveness.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve never been with another woman since I met you and you’re more to me than a warm bed.”

These words granted a temporary absolution and we went upstairs to make love so frantically that our ardor massacred every woman in my life to a first kiss in kindergarten, however in my sleep Elana danced out of the mist, wearing a sheet of sweat. My tongue must have been licking my lips, for Candia punched my arm, “If you dream about other women, sleep in another bed.”

I wandered into the living room. I was trapped by a ghost. This time one in the future.

The next night I constructed a bed of pillows in the nightclub office. My preparations were wasted. Jacques handed a note from Danny. The New Yorker was going down to his ship in Brest. Elana had also left Paris for good.

Two days into 1986 Candia left for a photo shoot in the Alps. She phoned the first night to say her boss had invited the fashion team for a ski trip to Isola 2000. Having heard her opinion that skiers were too poor to vacation in the tropics, I bit my tongue and drank heavier than normal that weekend. Candia called on Sunday to say they were stranded by a snowstorm. When she hung up, I convinced myself this was a fling and everything would be like it was before, otherwise she would have never bothered with the call.

On the day of her return I cleaned the apartment, bought flowers, chilled a bottle of champagne, and sprayed a perfume on the bed for an evening of coaxing her into my arms.

Candia arrived late. A silver fur coat adorned cinnamon skin untouched by the alpine sun and my heart crumpled like a cheap beer can. The telephone rang and she snatched the receiver out of my hand. After several whispers Candia announced, “I have to meet a client at the Hotel Crillion for dinner.”

“Go ahead.”

She left without mentioning what time to expect her home. It wouldn’t be early.

I had dinner at La Coupole and took a taxi to the club. It was an off night and I ordered a whiskey-coke. By 3AM I drank myself partially deaf and dumb.

“What’s wrong?” Bernard stopped my dancing on a stool to Arthur Lee’s HEY JOE.

“Nothing another whiskey-coke wouldn’t cure.” I shouted for a refill and Bernard annulled my order. “Go home and sleep this off?”

“A house is not a home.” I staggered to the entrance and a runway model from Baltimore waylaid my departure. “Care to join me for a nightcap.”

“Where?” I had champagne waiting in a bucket of melted ice.

“Where is unimportant.” And she whispered an obscene proposal. Her idea of a nightcap differed from mine. “So?”

My girlfriend was probably making love to another man, however I held the high moral ground. “Another night.”

“Another night?” The beautiful redhead graced the cover of Elle. No male in their right mind had refused her favors. “You’re making a big mistake.”

“It won’t be the first or the biggest.” I weaved out of the club into a flurry of errant snowflakes. My feet trudged across Place de La Concorde to the Seine. The river lay between the two banks like octopus ink and I lifted my leg onto the parapet.

“Eh, vous.” A fat policeman appeared out of the gloom. He was the same gendarme from the Rue St. Honore. I ran off the bridge, as the flic yelled, “Arrête, arrête.”

I outran the fat flic into a thick snow softening the night. Cars glided almost noiselessly on the streets, as I marched relentlessly to the 15th arrondisement, realizing while I might not forget this trespass, I could forgive Candia’s sin. I just needed the chance.

Reaching the Impasse Dantzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. My key turned in the lock. The door opened with a creak. An empty champagne bottle was on the floor between shiny Gucci loafers. They were neither my size nor style. A man moaned behind the nearest closed door and I charged into the bedroom with a roar. A balding man lifted his arms too late to deflect my fist and he tumbled semi-conscious onto the floor. I threw Candia on the floor. The girl nursing my cold, the lover cuddling me after sex, and the dinner companion laughing at my jokes were gone.

“Why?”

“You know why,” she spat with an unrecognizable hostility. “You never loved me. You loved a ghost. Your cousin told me about this ‘Lisa’ and she never loved you.”

I envisioned a deadly blow, police, and trial. No French court had convicted a man of a crime de passion, but my blow would have been revenge for her speaking the truth. I chucked the Mickey Mouse telephone through the window into the street, after which I scourged the couple from the apartment with the frayed wire. The man’s suit and shoes followed it out the broken window as a petty act of vengeance.

I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos. Five minutes later I fled the apartment fearing the arrival of the gendarmes, and hailed a taxi on the nearest boulevard. The hour and my bag explained the story and the unshaven driver shrugged knowingly, “Un hotel?”

“Ouais, le Hotel Marais.” My accelerated breathing worried the driver, who asked, “Mssr., vous etes okay?”

“Ouais.” I lowered the window. The cold air failed to pluck the splintered razors from my lungs. A bottle of tranquilizers rested in my coat. Three or four were on the menu. It took the driver 20 minutes to reach Rue Des Ecouffes. I paid with a 100-franc note.

“Keep the change.” The sky was fettered by glowering gray clouds. The day would have no dawn.

“Merci.” He drove away to pick up a couple holding hands.

I entered the hotel lobby with my hand gripping the bottle of tranks. The old woman was asleep at the desk. Waking her seemed a sin, except I had nearly broken the 5th Commandment twenty minutes before. I rang the bell and she blinked several times before recognizing my face from the previous stay.

“Ah, Mssr., je imagine que vous voulez une chambre.”

“Une chambre pour un nuit.” A room with a bath fulfilled my physical needs.

“Chambre 312.” She passed over a brass key and indicated the stairs.

It was the room from before. Nothing had changed. I sat on the soft bed and weighed my options. The pill bottle was only one route. The window was another. Neither would save my soul and I dropped three pills. The rest would have to wait for a more desperate occasion.

I woke to the shouts of the little gangsters on Rue des Ecouffes. The bells from a nearby church toned out the noon hour. The throbbing of my hangover was replaced by the resurrection of Candia’s infidelity. She had brought her lover on purpose. Jack Lemmon must have felt the same way in THE APARTMENT when he realized Shirley MacLaine was having an affair with his boss, Fred MacMurray.

My hands mimicked the act of strangulation. I choked her dead. Thin air was no replacement for a seventeen year-old’s neck, except I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts.

I tore up the photos of Candia naked in the changing cabinets of the Piscine Deligny, singing in Clermont-Fernand, and visiting her grandmother in Vichy. The shreds built a pyre in the hotel ashtray and burned with a chemical speed. The flames wrinkled her face and an acrid fume corkscrewed into my nose. Fearing Candia might invade my body, I flushed the flaming photos down the toilet, then left the hotel for a drink.

The icy wind hurried me to the Tartine on Rue Du Rivoli and I sat on the terrace sheltered by a glass wall. The waitress wrote down my order of a cafe au lait, croissant, and two shots of Calvados before disappearing inside.

Waiting for my breakfast I viewed passing couples with hatred. Two more Calvados numbed my senses to the grisly weather and diminished the bite of Candia’s words, Vanessa’s coldness, and Lisa’s disappearance. After a fifth applejack I failed to register someone sitting beside me, until he lit a cigarette.

“I’ve been looking for you.” Judging from the stubble Bernard had not woken at his apartment

“Why?” My face was numb from the alcohol.

“I called your house this morning and spoke with your girlfriend.” Bernard signalled to the waiter for another round.

“More like my girlfiend.” Dropping an ‘r’ from friend was lost on the Frenchman. “What the bitch say for herself?”

“She is worried about you.” Bernard’s eyes pursued two schoolgirls.

“If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?” I blew into my hands.

“You Americans treat women as men. They are women and we have to protect the double standard, otherwise the battle between man and woman will be lost.” Bernard waved to a model heading to a casting call. “You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her.”

“I almost killed her.”

“C’est vrai, and now she appreciates you.”

“Appreciates me?”

“Yes, a woman is a horse. You hold the reins tight and the horse will throw you. Too loose and she will run away.” He slapped his hands together. “Yeei.”

“You’ve been watching too many cowboy movies.” My parents had reared me to not hit a woman. It was their one rule that I obeyed without question. I was sadly learning that there should have been more.

“The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave.” Bernard inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “They have a little corps-a-corps. She stays with him. Not the man who lets her ugh-ugh with another caveman.”

The only drawings of a Neanderthals dragging a woman by her hair existed as TV cartoons, however man’s dominance over woman needed no historical proof in France. “This is the almost the 21st Century.”

“Eh, alors, the collapse of classic family structures reinforces the need to establish a rapport de force,” Bernard stubbed out his cigarette. “Yell at her, hit her, and make love. She expects you to act like a man, not a Mickey Mouse.”

“Couldn’t I be another animal?”

“No, you are not a dog, you are not an ape. You are man.” My passivity ignited his machismo for my own good. “I have seen you throw Brigitte Bardot out of a nightclub. Your friend Danny talked about your fights with the Russian mafia. Are you going to let a teenager push you around?”

“Sometimes you have to know when to do nothing.”

“If you let this wound bleed, you will be no good for the next woman you meet.”

”I’m done with women.”

“Ha, there is always another woman. A plus tard.”

To prove his thesis Bernard stalked a fashionably-attired woman in her thirties. Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile and they linked arms.

Bernard was right. I had sung I’M A MAN a hundred times.

Restrengthened by the Yardbirds song, I shambled to the boulevard, foreseeing my kicking in the door, except every taxi was occupied and the urge to reclaim Candia was humbled by the icy drizzle.

I called Brigitte. She came across the bridge for lunch. Angus was happy to see me.

“I knew this would happen.”

“I knew you would say that.”

“Philippe said she was too young to be faithful.” This was hard to take coming from an adulteress, but my problem with Candia had nothing to do with her infidelity.

“I was faithful.”

“Only in body. That blonde in New York has a lock on your heart. Fool.” Brigitte offered my old place on the sofa. Sleeping with Angus might accelerate the healing process, however I opted to remain at the hotel.

The owner brought me tea and a baguette every morning. Candia came to the club and asked for a second chance. It was more like the fifth. We slept together three nights and I got a venereal disease. She said it came from a toilet seat. Our final good-bye was at the VD clinic.

I bought a typewriter and wrote a novella about a nightclub owner being offered fame and fortune by Satan. A French production company invested money in a script of GO-GO GIRLS FROM HELL. Bernard hired three models to cut a record TAKE ME HIGHER. The three models got pregnant from their boyfriends and blamed me for the miracle of Immaculate Conception. The hundred sample records of TAKE ME HIGHER arrived warped as potato chips and the film company lost interest without the girls.

Worse Vadim and Lisa showed up at le Reve.

“Surprised to see me here.” I bought a bottle of champagne.

“No, everyone said you were here.” Her eyes were distant.

“They said it was fun here.” Vadim held her hand.

“Some nights it is.” Usually the ones Bernard and I drank too much.

“You get back to New York?” Vadim ordered a better bottle of champagne.

“Not at all.”

“That’s good.” Vadim’s eyes followed the waitress to the bar.

“Vadim can’t go back to the States.” Lisa ignored his surveillance. Her beauty was passing from youth to near thirty.

"But we are welcome in Russia.” Vadim toasted me with a nearly empty glass.

“Back in the USSR.”

“You should come out there. Moscow is wild like New York.” Vadim glowed with pride. “Another few years and communism is dead.”

“Yeah, you two were made for Russia.” Lisa’s disdain extended to both of us and I wondered how Vadim had survived the last four years with her.

“I like any place fun.”

Bernard joined our table. We drank more champagne. Lisa kept saying she wanted to leave. Vadim wasn’t in the mood to sit in a hotel. Bernard and he became friends that week. Lisa never came to the bar again.

Bernard accepted Vadim’s invitation to vacation over the holidays in Ibiza. He wanted me to come too, but instead I bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Paul.

A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. I dumped my spare change into the charity bowl for children. There were no good-byes.

My parents didn’t question my return and I celebrated a family Christmas with all the trimmings. My brothers and sisters sensed my smiles were superficial and asked me to stay, except Boston was too small after Paris and New York.

The Amtrak train took 5 hours to reach Penn Station. A taxi drove me to East 10th street. My apartment was small after living in Candia’s atelier, but the pizza at Stromboli’s was good and TV was in English. My friends initially greeted me with suspicion, since any absence from the city was regarded an act of treason to New Yorkers.

No one mentioned the Continental, Viktor Malenski, or Lisa, for Manhattan moves too fast to allow scandals to take permanent root. My mail from the past year held nothing from the NYPD and the phone messages complied by the subleasee were from friends and not Internal Affairs.

At the end of January I instructed Bernard to sell my share of the club. He warned this was an imprudent business move. I needed the cash. The money arrived the end of January.

An albino producer hired me to write a screenplay. We spent the winter in the Berkshire Hills, fleshing out a tale about a young mistress inheriting an offshore island in the Keys. He had me sign over the rights to WHERE THE HIGHWAY ENDS for $10,000 and a 1964 Triumph Tiger. The movie was made it to film.

“You should come out to LA,” Sherri said XXX companies were paying good money for porno scripts.

“You said that before.”

“And you said ‘no’.”

“Give me a good reason to come out.”

“Maybe you can meet a nice girl.”

“Are there any?”

“Well, maybe not nice, but sexy.” She never lied to me.

“I’ll be there.”

I flew out to the valley and wrote several screenplays, however the industry was switching from film to video for the fast-forward action crowd. Starlets would rather fuck a car valet than a writer. North Hollywood was hell for writers.

Without Che’s star quality my cousin’s films had degenerated to sloppy free-for-alls. Her name dropped from star to supporting roles and Sherri’s condition worsened with an arrest for indecent exposure. After I bailed her out, she drove her battered Skylark directly to the dealer in Sunland.

“Maybe you should cool out. We could go to the desert.”

“So you can fuck me like everyone else?” This was the drugs speaking.

“No, so you don’t die.” Her arms and legs were stitched with tracks. She was nodding behind the wheel and we narrowly missed a semi-trailer on the Ventura Freeway.

"Let me drive."

"No."

"You're going to kill us." I was desperate, but not that desperate.

“I survived being deserted by my mother. I survived adoption. I survived these films. I survived Che leaving me.” She cried for an hour by the side of the road. I held her in my arms. Worst was sure to come.

“You can’t die on me. You promised you would push me down the stairs.”

“I’ll live that long.” Sherri sniffed away the tears. “Even if it kills me.”

Several days later Sherri dropped me at LAX and I wondered whether I would see her again. Our friends and enemies died from AIDS, ODs, suicides, and stupid accidents. Natural causes were for the rest of the world and so were normal relationships.

New York women were looking for millionaires. I didn’t stand a chance against bald-headed bankers or loud stockbrokers. On a visit to Boston my mother suggested visiting Ireland to find a woman like herself or my sisters.

“I’ll even pay the ticket. I know you want to marry and have kids."

"I do.” It was the first time I admitted this goal.

“You’ll never meet a girl like that in New York.”

“Other people do. Maybe I’ll be lucky.”

“Lucky is for horse races.” She believed more in prayers than casinos. “What about Ireland?”

“I’ll save it for a rainy day.” Every Irish woman leaves the Emerald Isle once she’s old enough to breed or else she’ll have a brood of five before she’s 20.

I returned to Manhattan even more committed to finding solace as a bachelor. Life was comfortable. My job at a nightclub paid my rent and more. Friends were fun. No highs or lows. The sameness of the days could go on forever in most of America, but not New York.

In late April I was rolling on the Triumph along 3rd Avenue after a rainstorm. Not many people were on the streets, only a trio of addicts on 14th Street, two junkie whores working the car traffic of 13th Street, and at 12th Street a raven-haired girl in a long leather trench coat struggling with a bald man in denim.

When he slapped her, I jammed on the brakes and the bike skidded on the wet pavement to halt a foot from the couple. Her assailant unbuttoned his jacket. A gun was tucked into his waistband. Any sane man would have roared away like an A-4 jet slingshot off an aircraft carrier deck, instead I warned, “Don’t touch the girl again.”

“You want a piece?” He wrenched apart her coat. She wasn’t wearing any clothes underneath. A vee of pubic hair fluffed below the pouting belly. The pimp forced her forward by a shank of hair. “Sometimes we have force them into what they like?”

The streetlight hit the face.

“Elana.”

“You’ve met before?” The bald man relaxed slightly.

"In Paris."

"You really do get around."

"Fuck you." Elana dug a high heel into his foot and she jumped on my bike. “Go, go, go.”

We burned a red light at St. Mark’s and she snuggled against my spine.

“You happy to see me?”

“Yeah.”

"Take me someplace."

I drove to a bar far from 3rd Avenue. The three old drunks on the stools straightened their postures for Elana. I ordered two beers from the bartender and led her into a dark corner. Lifting the tail of her coat, Elana sat on my lap and her rounded ass settled into my crotch.

“I liked your lips in Paris.”

“I haven’t forgotten yours.”

“We weren’t so lucky that night.”

“Where’s Danny?” I had to ask. He was a friend.

“Danny and me go to Brest. His boat comes in. He says to meet him in two months. I wave good-bye and cry. I work in a dance bar in Amsterdam.” The intonation on ‘dance bar’ meant a strip club. “I make money. You like my dancing?”

“Who can I forget?” Her dance at the Reve was acid-etched in my retinas.

“Never I hope.” Elana wriggled sinuously, as her reptile tongue slithered into my mouth and I fell without any safety ropes to haul me from the chasm. Finally she released her hold. “Many men love me in Amsterdam. I meet this bald man and he buys me a ticket to New York, so I can find Danny. We arrive this afternoon and this night two friends visit his place. They want a ménage a quatre. I refuse and he beats me.”

Elana pressed my fingers to the raised welts on her belly. The story was simple and they always are, if the worst parts are left out. My muscles tensed into knots. She opened my fingers and guided my hand underneath her coat to her vagina. The lips were wet.

“That doesn’t matter any more. I need you. You tell me where first.”

No man can retain his sanity after hearing such a confession, but I only had time to lose half my mind, for the bald man shouted from three feet away, “You bitch.”

How he found us was unimportant and I shoved Elana at him. She scratched his face. Her attack opened his defenses for a hard-swung beer bottle. Blood spurted from a gash in his forehead and he fell to his knees, pistol in hand. One kick to the skull and he flopped to the floor. The bald man had paid more for the sins of others as well as his own.

Elana deftly rifled the man’s pockets. The bartender shouted he was calling the police. Brandishing a wallet and keys, she jumped to her feet and grabbed my hand. We ran to my Triumph.

The bike started with a backfire and we roared away from the bar. My temples pounded faster than the pistons of the 650cc engine and I wondered if the entire episode had been a cheap thrill. A glimpse over my shoulder revealed the bald man wasn’t a joke.

“We go to his place, get my clothes, and then you can have me any way you desire.” Elana directed me to a decrepit three-story building in Chinatown. The streets were empty and she slipped off the bike.

I’ll be a minute.”

The door slammed shut and my hand revved the gas. When she emerged with one bag she smiled, "I half-expected you to be gone."

"I'm not going anywhere this time."

"So this is a raincheck?"

"Yes."

"Good.” Her arms curled around my chest and she nipped at my ear. “Let’s go to your place. Fast.”

We reached East 10th Street in less than two minutes and climbed three flights to my apartment in thirty seconds. I opened the door and she scampered into the unlit bedroom. Shucking her leather coat she fell on the mattress to become a carbon-black shadow on the white sheets.

“Come to me.”

I knelt between her legs and she locked her ankles around my hips to guide me deep inside her, saying, “Oh, yeah.”

With each orgasm Elana shape-shifted from vivid temple whore to virginal lover to hardened streetwalker to an aging courtesan, and finally an old lover telling a dirty bedtime story. There was no bald man, no Danny, no New York, no Paris, no anything. When I tried to roll off, she held on. “Stay in me longer.”

She aroused me once more with a stroke of my thigh. Her fingernails feathered the tight flesh behind my testicles and her teeth scrapped my foreskin. She hadn’t learned this technique at dance school.

“You bitch.” I grabbed a length of hair.

“I’m whoever you want me to be.” Her hands peeled her ass cheeks and I followed her darkest wish, this time for an hour and the next time to dawn and sleep.

I woke in bed alone, but Elana was no Cinderella. The water was running in the bathroom. Elana rested under a steaming surface with her black hair fanned on the curved edge, so she resembled a fairy-tale princess in slumber. With closed eyes Elana asked, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“It matter, if I did?”

“Not this time.” She lolled her head and I pressed my thumbs into the taut muscles of her neck. Her sibilant moan verified if I didn’t have a girlfriend, I did now and she stood up in the bath.

“Are you scared?” Elana was five foot-four and weighed a hundred pounds.

“I can deal with you.” I wrapped her in a towel.

“You know that story I tell you about that man. I go look for him everywhere last year. In the end I find is you.” She let the towel fall to the floor. “I will kiss your skin and kiss your heart. I will kiss your body.”

I could have asked why. There had to be more than one reason. Maybe more than two, instead I let her fulfil this promise during the next three days in bed. The number of times we spoke could be counted on one hand. Truthfully words would have rotted the bonds of flesh. On the fourth evening Elana dressed in a black plastic dress and a matching coat.

“We’re going for a ride. I’ll tell you where, when we get there.”

The night air was warm and the trees were budding bright green leaves. My bike sped us downtown to under the Brooklyn Bridge. Elana tapped my shoulder and pointed to the concrete bumper encircling the Manhattan support tower. Upon reaching the concrete causeway to the bridge tower, she ordered me to stop.

“I have a special place to show you. It was in this movie WOLFEN.

“WOLFEN had a scene on top of the bridge.” I had seen the urban tale of werewolves several times. “There’s nothing here.”

“Only you and me.” She crawled through a breach in the chain link fence and walked out on the corroding concrete bumper. A tug hauling a barge blew its horn and its wake lapped at the pier. Traffic hummed overhead on the bridge’s steel gratings.

“I saw this pier in the background of the movie.” Elana placed her hands against the tower’s base. “You can feel the power of the city in the stones. Vibrating with a hum. Feel it through me now.”

“Here?” No one was in sight.

“Now.” Now had one meaning and afterwards she said breathlessly, “I have some more places to visit too.”

Elana was wild and I had no intention of taming her.

Out on a fire-twisted Hudson pier we coupled with total rejection of self-preservation. Inside an elevator stopped between floors with the alarm blaring I brought her to orgasm with my tongue. During a downpour we fucked against a post office wall, her skirt pushed above her hips and shirt opened to the waist. Neither of us noticed the passers-by. Once we were joined together, nothing and nobody was pulling us part. After a handful of such episodes I understood that Elana’s insatiability was destined to break me and I was beyond caring whether the wreckage was my body or soul.

The word ‘love’ was forming on my lips and other people loved Elana too. The homeless people on Avenue A called out her name. She always had a spare change. The police cars whooped in passing. She flashed her ass. The kids in the park loved to see her dance. She befriended the old Puerto Rican lady across the hall. They would sit in her kitchen and laugh at the Latin DJ’s jokes. Whenever I asked what was so funny, they laughed harder.

Sherri met Elana and the exchange of sordid tales was almost painful, except they were both so funny.

“You were made for the movies.” Sherri begged for Elana to come to LA.

“I’m happy right here.” Elana tore herself away from my cousin to sit on my lap.

“You got a good thing happening.” Sherri wore envy in her eyes.

“Don’t fuck it up.”

Elana wrapped her arms around me as if they were made for my shoulders.

“I’m her prisoner.” And a happy one too.

Elana attended the dance classes at the community center opposite my apartment. From my fire escape I watched her lewd spinning around a pole. This move offended the modernists, until a lascivious gesture dissipated their resistance and they gathered around the heretic like moths in a maelstrom for a reward of raw abandonment to which I was no stranger.

Elana returned from these classes to perform Salome to the music from the movie, VAMPYROS LESBOS, an earth nymph to Joni Mitchell or a jazzy angel to John Coltrane. Sapped of her reserves, she would collapse on the sofa and softly beckoned to take her.

One night as we lazed in the sexual afterglow, she said, “You not love me for me.”

“It’s not that I don’t love you.”

“You are scared I can hurt you.”

“Sorry.”

“Not be sorry. You wanting my body is fine. I want you the same way. One girl in the dance class has seen you spying us. I told her you were my boyfriend. She wants to meet you. Can you handle two women at one time?”

“I can satisfy you, can’t I?” I dragged her into the bedroom and my heart nearly burst through my ribcage to prove my ardor.

She was ready for more and said, “I win.”

The proposition was forgotten, although I remembered her questioning my involvement. I wanted more from her. Walks in the rain and fireside chats were becoming more appealing than sex.

I returned to the apartment with flowers and found Elana was underneath a heavy-bodied female. She reached out with a rehearsed lethargy.

Powerless I dropped the flowers on the floor and days elapsed with the decreasing need for what she was more than willing to give without my telling her that I wanted something else. We were locked in the language of sex. My fingers entered secret passages, my tongue explored caves, and my penis was swallowed to the root, then the phone rang at dawn.

It continued throughout her free-fall of orgasms and I tried to knock the phone off the hook. She blocked my hand and held the receiver to her ear. Hearing the voice on the other end she squealed with an unbridled joy. “I’ll come to you.”

The caller was Danny and I smiled to hide my heart turning to dust.

“Where is he?”

“Gloucester.” She stroked my side. “Is it far?”

“Far enough? When are you leaving?”

“Today, if you give me the money for a bus.”

I swallowed hard. “Not tomorrow?”

“No, I have to leave today.”

“Get packed and I’ll drive you to the Bus Terminal.”

She collected her few belongings and informed my neighbor about her departure. The old bruja kissed her forehead. “Buena Suerta.”

Driving to Port Authority I contemplated leaving her on the street, except too many women had vanished from the bus station and I bought a round-trip ticket to Gloucester, thinking one day she might use the return half. At the gate for Boston, she said, “You knew one day he will call.”

“But not this soon.” I got no explanation how Danny knew she was at my place.

“I had fun.” Elana motioned for the driver to wait a second.

“Laughs too.” I was deaf to my heart begging her to stay. “You better hurry.”

She kissed my cheek and boarded the bus. It pulled away in a choking cloud of exhaust. I panicked and ran to my bike. The bus route was straight up 8th Avenue. I arrived outside to find a Midtown cop writing a parking ticket and he wasn’t buying any love story. Back on East 10th Street I purged my apartment of scent-saturated sheets, soiled panties, stray stockings, lipstick tubes, make-up, nail polish remover, combs, brushes, and hairpins.

Within two hours my place was as devoid of female accoutrements as a Trappist monk’s cell. Not the way I liked it, simply the way it was.

The spring rains washed the dirt from the streets. Thunder echoed across the city and lightning slashed jagged bolts through the sky like a celestial film crew was remaking THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW. Every song was written about Elana and I was tossed out of several bars for punching out the jukebox.

Other women had lips too thin and their eyes dead from too many boyfriends. I begged the old Puerto Rican lady to exorcise Elana from my soul.

“You tell her stay?” she asked in broken English,

“No, she wanted to go, so she went.”

“Stupido, you no say no go, she go. You say stay, she stay.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I am a witch.” The old lady slammed her door. “Not your mother.”

May plowed relentlessly into June. Couples strolled hand in hand and I woke day after day alone in my bed. Summer promised much more of the same, then one morning someone jiggled my front door. The East Village was overrun by thieves. I grabbed my baseball bat and ripped open the door.

”Don’t hit me.” Elana cringed in the hallway.

“I won’t hit you.” It took a couple of seconds to lower the bat.

“You mad?” She leaned against the door.

“No, surprised, that’s all.” She had a black eye and wore a thin cotton shift. Everything else was in a paper bag. “And Danny?”

Heart-rending sobs racked her body and the old senora leaned out her door, her left eye armed for a hex. Elana rattled off an explanation in English and added, “He’s not bad man.”

“You take care of her or else.” The wizened witch warned with a wavering finger.

“I will.” As a superstitious Irish-American I feared her ‘or else’ worse than any hell promised by the nuns and priests.

Elana was sitting on my living room couch. I joined her and she laid her head on my lap. Her tears dried on my jeans and she regained her breath. The window was open and music played from the dance studio. It was Issac Hayes' version of BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX.

“I get to Gloucester and Danny is very happy." Elana wiped her nose with the back of her hand and then continued, "We move to an old boat in the harbor and make love for many days. After two months I ask him to marry me.” Her confession chipped at my heart. “Danny goes crazy. He throws me out of the boat. He beats me, telling me I am trying to steal his freedom. I stay on his boat and cry myself to sleep. I wake up, Danny is gone to sea. I wait one week. He stays at sea. Where can I go? Not home. I come here. You are my only friend. Can I stay with you?”

“As long as you want.” Maybe forever.

“It has been so long.” She stripped off her clothes to reveal the fading belt marks and bruises, but she sighed, “They will leave. I will not.”

The door remained shut for days. She was my slave and I hers. Somehow the sex was different and I put my finger on this change one afternoon, as we lay naked on my bed.

Elana’s lips were moving in what I thought was a slattern incantation, but then I deciphered two syllables. With her eyes closed I was Danny. This substituted identity sobered my lust and I rolled off her.

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m tired.” Like that the end began.

Each time she tried to seduce me with her hands or mouth or body, I said I wasn’t in the mood. Frustrated she would storm off to the old senora. I quelled my discontent with drink and drugs, a deadly combination on a motorcycle. One night I fell through the door in a near-stupor.

“You should not drive in that condition.” Elana helped me to bed.

“Why not?”

“I was waiting for you.”

“Why? Couldn’t you find one of your little dancers or another version of Danny?”

Her face went white and she ran into the bedroom.

Comforting her was a small price to pay. Perhaps one day she might have called my name. My pride argued I didn’t need her. It didn’t take long to discover the penalty of my self-deceit.

When I crawled into bed around dawn, ready to repent, she showed her back. That afternoon I told her, “Elana, my sister is coming to the city.”

“I have to leave?” Her feet slowed across the floor.

“Do you have anyplace to go?”

“Yes, I will stay with friends.” She stood without mentioning who those friends might be and I left before I regretted my lie.

When I returned, she was gone. A quick check revealed that she had stolen a couple hundred dollars. It seemed a small price to pay for her leaving, only I was hiding the real cost.

The old lady across the hall asked about Elana.

“No se.”

Wicked Spanish hissed from her lips and I fled inside my apartment too late. Chicken bones were scattered on my door step and her cackling filled the hallway. Her curse sentenced me to another desert.

Some women sought to be friends and others thought I was gay. Mrs. Adorno seemed to shrink every week of this penance. I searched the streets of the East Village for Elana. No one would say where she was, even though I could tell they knew.

Sherri flew into town for a dance session at Show World. She patiently listened to my story and then said, “I used to think that sex was the answer, but I’ve learned that the sex is sex. Nothing more and people make too much of it. To sell movies. To sell TV time. To sell cars. It’s not about the sex. It’s about the way you feel when you have sex with someone you love. Everything else you can get from jerking off.”

“Everything?” I had my doubts.

“Well, only if you don’t think masturbation is a sin.”

“I was brought up Catholic.”

“Then you’re doomed to damnation.”

“And wouldn’t have it any other way.” Sherri and I were destined to survive our tribulations if only to tell people about them, since most of what we would have to say was unbelievable. We weren’t the only people with stories.

In early autumn I ran into Danny at a gallery opening for his friend, Jean-Michel. His face was weathered by the sea. I lunged at him and people had to hold us apart, but finally I calmed down and he asked, “What did Elana say to you?”

“That you had beaten her.”

“I never touched her.” Danny grabbed at a passing glass of wine. I took another. Like me he wasn’t a woman-beater. “I wasn’t pissed at you for taking care of Elana. When she came up to Gloucester I could tell it was different between us. We only had sex that first night and the rest of the time she would look out the window at the harbor.”

“You lived in a house?”

“On a wharf really.”

I knew Gloucester and bet the wharf was on Rocky Neck. “She lied about that?”

“She tell you a story about her mother abandoning her?” Danny’s eyes went sad. “I met her mother and father in Madrid. Had a dance school. Nice people. The other story was what you needed to hear. What men wanted to hear, because she thought she wasn’t enough to be who she wanted to be?”

“I didn’t see her that way.”

”Neither did I, but she did.”

“So now what?”

“Let’s get drunk.” We drank whiskey at the Odeon. He slept over my apartment and in the morning left for Gloucester. I wished him luck.

Leaves fell from the trees. The air grew cold. I saw my friends, drank at bars, and told stories about Paris. Their laughter proved that tragedies could become comedies with time.

The night before Halloween I was sitting on my Triumph before Madame Rosa's near the Holland Tunnel. A yellow taxi pulled into the alley and stopped a foot from my bike. A blonde in a black leather cuirass and steel-strapped girdle emerged from the Checker. The Devil would have been proud how this sadistic apparition paralyzed every man on the street. Her unworldly eyes trawled for prey and settled on me.

I thought it was Lisa, but the blonde rearranged the wig to change into who she was.

“Elana.” I revved the engine.

“I’m happy you have not forgotten me.” She threw a leg over my bike. “Let’s go. Anywhere.”

My heart thumped through five gears. Within minutes we were on 10th Street. Twenty seconds after my apartment slammed shut, we were naked. It was like our first night. Neither of us held anything in reserve and the pleasure became a pain, which I quelled with a shuttered ejaculation.

As I strained to regain my breath, Elana explained, “You throw me out. These punks from the park live in a squat. We live as animals and are animals with each other. Not washing and eating food we find in the trash, fucking like savages. Soon the men only want me. The other women hate me. One day I meet this woman. She and I perform dominatrix shows for businessmen. They love us. We are the best. This girl and I start a business. I have a loft and a beautiful girlfriend. I thank you for throwing me out.”

“You didn’t come to tell me that.”

“No, the old senorita told me she had placed a curse on you and the only way for it to come off was for me to make love to you.”

“Thank you.”

"You fucked with me, but didn't deserve that."

“Why the stories? About Danny? About the man in Madrid. About everything? Did you really love Danny?”

“Yes, and you too. You both only wanted me for sex and I gave myself freely, but not anymore. Men pay me $500 for an hour. There is no way even a thousand free orgasms can add up to an hour, but life is way too long not to fall in love and I have that with this woman. The sex is good. Everything else is so much better. Maybe you helped me to understand that. Maybe you didn’t, but I’m almost happy now. Happy to be me and not a fairy tale for someone else like your stupid movie THE APARTMENT. Your friend Sherri told me to watch it, but it was just a movie. Nothing else and you’re not either man in the movie. You’re not bad and you’re not good. You’re just you and no one else.” She attached the leather and buckles and clips with the care of a samurai suiting for battle and slowly counted out $400.

“I owe you that.”

“Where are you going?” I felt more like me than I had in a long time.

“Uptown. A priest needs a succubus to a ritual crucifixion.” She offered a full view of her body, as her gloved hand reached for the door. “Do I look like a goddess ready to die for her sins?”

“You’ll have a million worshippers.” I was one of them. Saying I love her might change everything. I said nothing instead. She already had someone to love.

“I’ll be seeing you.” She went to the door.

“I hope so.” This was a good an ending as I could hope for the both of us, although for weeks afterwards I searched the Daily News’ police reports without reading about the discovery of a crucified woman matching her description.

No one saw her again. Not me. Not Danny. Not the old lady across the hallway. At least the chicken bones vanished from my doorstep and this said Elana was fine.

I started looking for a woman. I had been a fool to love a woman who didn’t love me. A greater fool to not love someone who loved me. Six years was a long time to learn this lesson, but I was happy to know in the future I would be a fool again. Any sinner will be as long as they’re willing forget the past, forgive the present, and live for the future.

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