Thursday, August 14, 2025
June 21, 1990 - Paris - Journal Entry
Rainy day in Paris. A great title for my sixth novel, which I will finish when I'm 110. 2062. Spook Jacobs sent my lease renewal for 256 East 10th Street along with letters from the past five months of my travels; two from AJ, one from Sharon who has come out of rehab, from Nina Gold in London, Carmen in Cancun, one from my sister Pam, another from Miranda who had been married in LA. Considering that I sent out over sixty from Biak, Bali, Penang, Bangkok, and Kathmandu, a 10% return was darned respectable, especially since correspondence by letters has fallen into disuse at the end of the 20th Century.
I had been a math major the first three semester of university. I divined numbers in my head. 300,000,000 seconds and counting until 1/1/2000. Not accurate, but close.
Humans have fast ascended into a time of literate illiteracy.
People in the West can write, but don't, because they have nothing to put down on paper or no paper or pen at hand. TV junkies with all their thoughts born from the marketing agencies of the corporations. I still seek the road of a poet. Luckily I have resisted any desire to imitate Proust or TS Eliot. My friend, Rick Temerian, said once, "Your first writing was like you were trying to be Scott F Fitzgerald."
I didn't take the comment as criticism. I love THE GREAT GATSBY and have always imagined that Gatsby was a roaring 20s version of my old boss from the after-hours clubs Jefferson and ContinentalArthur Weinstein running an outlaw club in the East End, paying off the cops and dealing with the filthy rich and cocaine runners. I wouldn't mind writing a new 1984 or Maxie Laing's RUNNING a novel about an Irish tinker. No choice other than to be a populist writer always dedicated to 'smash the state.
A LITTLE LATER
I had lunch with Corinne at le Comptoir. I was blathering to my sometimes lover about literature and amity with ex-s, when she interrupted by saying, "I have a story to tell you. you know Claude Aurenson."
It was not a question. Claude was the manager of le Privilege, Paris' premier boite de nuit under the Palace theater on Rue Montmatre. Corinne worked the Bains-Douches upstairs bar. She knew everyone on the scene as did I having been the doorman back in the 1980s. "Well, I see him at the bar. Last week. I hadn't seen him in months, but he invites me to a party at le Privilege and asks my name. So as a joke I gave my nom de familie as the town of my birth. He looked at the name written on the paper and says, "I was born there forty-three years ago. I asked him about his family and he revealed that he was a bastard. He was born during the war and that was common in those years, but strangely he tells me about this man who never wanted to see him and I realize his father was my uncle and Claude is my cousin. We hugged like long-lost cousins and we take a trip to Toulouse together for a family dinner. I say nothing about this story and when my uncle comes to the house, he looks at Claude and is introduced to him. They share the same first name. Claude says nothing. I go into the kitchen and my Uncle Claude follows me and asks, "Who is that man?" I tell him just a friend from Paris, but he knows full well who Claude is. their faces are mirrors. One old. One younger. "That's my son." asks Uncle Claude. I say yes and he rushes out to hug his son. After forty-three years they were reunited and see each other all the time."
I cried happy to have heard such a beautiful story. Not everyone has a tale of woe.
A LITTLE LATER AT THE BRITISH PASSPORT OFFICE.
I have noticed that my journal entries have nothing to so with events. Days, weeks, or months. There is precious little happening in the outside world. Paris is Paris. Les Parisiennes are preparing for Le Grand Depart on July 14. The USA economy is in danger of collapse as always. Unrest in the Eastern Europe threatens the Iron Curtain and soon the World Cup begins.
Fuck Italy.
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