Le Royal Lieu

The bomb blast at the Bank Leumi had transformed Rue Des Italians to an old daguerreotype of Paris from the 1870s. A tent had been erected under a balcony of the carless street. A young clochard cut 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, but then she didn't smoke. Candia threw it in the trash and packed her bag for Italy. Her good-bye kiss was a peck.

Albert, Serge, and I worked twenty-hour days. Sleep was our only respite. Five minutes before the doors of le Royal Lieu were to open, hastily electricity blew the fuses. Bernard found the breakers and switched on the lights. We were ready for business.

Fun-loving Parisians flooded into Le Royale Lieu. Bernard's DJing drove the teenagers onto the dance floor and they drank with an apocalyptical abandon. Candia showed up unexpectedly with her father. Johnny ran a small boite de nuit in St. Germain. He was considered a gangster. 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 struggled with a lighter.

"He say why?"

"No," Jacques and I had been working together for two years. He knew my mind. "You want I make him go away?"

"No." Twenty francs bought the bum a bottle of wine and good luck our club. "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? You smell like a corpse."

"I didn't think the French cared about personal hygiene."

"I'm an American." Parisian men's adherence to 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?"

"About then." My three-year exile hadn't lessened the danger of telling the truth.

"You were lucky. Another Russian was killed and twenty cops were arrested for an assortment of crimes."

"What about Arthur?"

"He was wearing a wire for the FBI."

"And he was shot?"

"Not at all. He's still the Prince of the Night."

"As you are here."

"My friend 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 Danny to the basement changing room.

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

"I'll 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 and said, "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 she and Vadim were living in Russia."

"I haven't heard a thing." I left the washroom with his tattered clothes and dumped them in the trash bin. They had outlived their usefulness several people ago and I 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. Serge waited 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 now the Americans are exporting bums to France." Serge 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 Royal Lieu'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 from the Korean War 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 when I'm drunk, but not me."

"Fool."

"A fool in love with you."

"You say those words so easy."

"I mean every syllable." I escorted her to a taxi.

"Then what is love?" She shut the taxi door before my reply and I stood on the sidewalk trying to come up with 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 during 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 grammar school nuns had beaten a respect for classical cadence and proper grammar into my 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 Freddie Hubbard, but who was I kidding? Our band 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 backs. 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. Do you belong to a cult giving away their possessions?"

"I'm waiting for my ship to come in. Good crew. Great captain.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 had 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 a la 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 already 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, the sea gives the fears and the fears are many, but next week 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.

"The deep blue sea." I had lived in Gloucester. Fishing was a tough both on and off shore.

"It has more colors than blue."

"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 more of my apologies. "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 bed, fiercely clutching her Mickey doll. "If it's not the skinny blonde from America, then it is someone else."

"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.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 7 By Peter Nolan Smith

I returned to Manhattan 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 last forever in most of America, but not New York.

In late April I was driving the Triumph down 3rd Avenue. The asphalt was slick. It had just rained and was promising more. Not many people were on the streets; 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 fulfill 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, And don’t fuck it up by thinking of your ghost."

Ghost?" asked Elana.

Old story."

About the blonde girl."

You know about her?"

Everyone here tell me about Lisa.

You're not the same."

"No, I better." 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 accouterments as a Trappist monk’s cell. Not the way I liked it, simply the way it was. For now and a long time to come.