Authors: Scott Phillips
Rake (17 page)
“Just wondering how a couple of French kids knew a word in English that I didn’t. And an Elizabethan one at that.”
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The desk clerk at the hotel was very excited to see us. “The manager on duty before me made a grave error in judgment,” he said. “I’m afraid, madame, he allowed your husband access to your suite.”
For a moment Ginny was stupefied, then alarmed. “My husband? I don’t have a husband anymore.”
“He had a valid American passport, listing you as his spouse. The manager in question will be in a great deal of trouble for this.”
“There’s no point to that,” I said. “It was an honest mistake. The question is, what do we do now? Call the police?”
“It would be a delicate matter,” the night clerk said. “Potentially embarrassing for the hotel.”
“Why don’t you go up there and tell him to take a flying fuck at the moon,” she said to me. “He’s a shrimp, you could take him on easy.”
I looked at the night clerk seeking his approval. He nodded, though he looked far from certain that this was actually the best plan.
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She was staying on the seventh floor in a suite fit for royalty. I slid the card into the lock and it clicked open, then swung the door quietly open. I heard the sound of a shower running and what sounded like a woman singing to herself. Had this ex-husband actually had the balls to bring a woman up to Ginny’s room? I supposed, though, once you’ve been married to a porn star your notions of propriety probably change somewhat.
Cautiously I moved into the suite’s front room, and as I rounded the corner I came face-to-face with a tall woman, heavily made up, wearing a dressing gown with a towel wrapped
Lana Turner–like in a turban around her hair. Gathering the front of the dressing gown protectively together, she let loose a shriek loud enough to draw my hands to my ears, and then she punched me.
To say I wasn’t expecting the punch is one thing; it’s quite another to express my surprise at its force. It was, without a doubt, a man’s fist, and when I hit back I assumed I was hitting a man. What makeup came off on my fist revealed a fine skein of whiskers on a strong jaw, and when he was down I kicked him hard in the jaw, which didn’t stop him. He lunged for my throat and plunged both thumbs into my trachea, and I thought he might be strong enough to choke me into unconsciousness.
So I went for his left eye, one thumb on the nasal corner and the other at the distal. As soon as I applied the smallest amount of pressure he screamed at the pain—a very male sound, compared with the shriek my entry had provoked—and rolled off of me.
“You son of a bitch,” he said, and I knew that voice right away. The dressing gown was open now to reveal a pair of panties and matching bra, both of which I recognized as Ginny’s, the turban lay wet on the floor, and he sprinted for the front door and bolted down the hall to the stairwell. There wasn’t any point in chasing him; I didn’t want him arrested anyway. Even underneath the exaggerated makeup I now recognized him, and I had plans for him.
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“You never told me you were married to David Steinke,” I said when I got Ginny up to the room.
“Yeah, it didn’t last long. Kind of a mistake. He didn’t like me doing the vids with other guys, just wanted me to make them with him. Problem was the ones he wanted to do were just too damn kinky.”
“Some of the ones I saw were pretty far out.”
“Yeah, but his were real specific kinks most guys don’t share. Rubber glove fetish, diaper play, that kind of shit. I mean, there’s a market for everything, but I’m in porn to make money, not satisfy some obscure niche for the kind of weirdos who don’t even get off on regular porn.”
“By the way, he made off with your dressing gown and a matching set of bra and panties.”
“By ‘made off with,’ I assume you mean ‘ran away wearing’?”
“Basically, yeah.”
“Huh. For him cross-dressing is usually a prelude to either fisting or some serious scat-play, so it’s a good thing you chased him off.”
“You know how you might reach him if you needed to?”
“Probably,” she said. “Why?”
“No reason.”
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Having been treated to a hero’s repertoire of arcane sexual favors from a very grateful Ginny, I left the hotel and, wearing a cap and dark glasses and carrying a newspaper, got onto the Métro.
I was standing across a lady with one clouded, milky eye and a cane and who looked too old to be out and about that late. She reminded me of my great-grandmother who died when I was five, a dear old soul who always smelled of violets and tooth decay and who thought the sun shone out my little ass. She seemed ancient to me, and I suppose she must have been past ninety when she finally went. The sudden memory of her holding me in her lap and handing me a hard candy wrapped in cellophane made me chuckle, which drew the attention of the old lady across the aisle from me.
“Filth,” she said, little flecks of spit flying from her false teeth. “Pervert.”
I looked around to see who she was talking about. Was she referring to me, or to Dr. Crandall Taylor, or had she mistaken me, with my dark glasses and baseball cap with its bill pulled down, for Satan or his emissary?
“You there,” she said, fixing her milky gaze on me. “You heard me. I know all about you and your filthy, filthy games. People like you ruin this life for decent folk like me and Raymond.”
I looked away, hoping whatever her particular brand of crazy was would allow her to fix her rage on someone else, but she kept it up until she got off at Poissonières. As she struggled to get onto the platform before the closing of the doors I heard her say, “Yes, Raymond, I told the dirty little bastard.”
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I got out at Pigalle, crossed the square, and mounted the rue Germain Pilon. As I reached the top someone called out to me.
“Want a date?” rasped a feminine voice trying desperately to rise above its unmistakably masculine natural register. Across from me stood a streetwalker who looked like Yaphet Kotto in drag.
“Thanks anyway,” I said, wondering why tonight seemed to be drag queen night in Paris and wondering also who exactly constituted the clientele for his genre of hooker. There was a market for any kind, I supposed; there used to be a block—maybe there still is—at the south end of the rue St. Denis where all the whores were over sixty; one or two of them were quite elegant ladies, but most were weather-beaten alcoholics catering to the poorest, most indigent of johns. I remember passing through on my way to the Les Halles RER station one day, I must have been about twenty, when someone hissed at me.
“
Jeune homme!
” An obese crone of seventy-odd years was leering at me from a doorway. “
Viens voir!
” Then she hiked up her
skirt to reveal an immense, ancient salt-and-pepper bush above a pair of chalky thighs, withered and dimpled. When I failed to approach, she tilted her head down at her crotch and grinned, nodding. “
Viens voir!
” Though I declined the invitation, I have no doubt that she did a lively trade on the whole.
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I said earlier I wasn’t going to complain about being a celebrity, and I’m not, but here’s where I point out that this is one of those situations where it complicates things. In L.A. you just go to the store and say, “I’d like a gun, please, and some armor-piercing bullets, and throw in one of those maps to the Stars’ Homes while you’re at it,” and no one bats an eye. In Paris you have to know someone who knows someone, and if you’re famous then it’s damned hard for word not to get around that you bought a gun.
I should have had Fred do it, but he was busy taking care of Claude, and I was impatient for the script to be finished. Anyway, on the Place des Abbesses I found the café Balthazar had mentioned, and at the bar I ordered a Kanterbräu and asked for Gégé.
“Never heard of him,” the bartender said.
“I’m a friend of Balthazar’s.”
“I don’t know any Balthazar.”
I could understand his reluctance to help. Here was a guy with a baseball cap and dark glasses—indoors, at midnight—and a foreign accent, asking for someone who does a brisk trade in various sorts of illegal merchandise in your place of business. He must have taken me for some sort of cop, and reluctant though I was to drop my cover, I took off my shades for a moment.
“I’m not a cop,” I said. “More like a doctor.”
Recognizing me, he nodded and poured me a beer. “Okay. Balthazar said you might come by. I’m Gégé. What you need?”
“Something for protection.”
“I got it.” He yelled at a young man in a black waiter’s vest who was sweeping around the pinball machine. “Ahmed, watch the bar for a minute.”
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The gun was in a safe in the office, and he put on a pair of latex gloves before he took it out. He handed me a pair and advised me to put them on.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t have any prints on this gun and neither should you. Last guy who handled this gun is an asshole, and if anything funny happens we don’t want it traced to us, do we?”
“I just want it for protection.”
“I don’t give a shit why you want it. I’m just offering you some advice. Wear the gloves when you handle the gun and I promise you’ll be happy about it later.”
2
:00 AM.
I was at home in a very deep and contented sleep when I was awakened by an indignant Esmée.
“What are you doing asleep?” she asked.
“It’s been a pretty big day, actually.” I didn’t mention the fistfight with the cross dresser or the strenuous sex with said tranny’s estranged wife, as this wasn’t the kind of information that would soothe Esmée, but I did allow as how I’d purchased a gun for self-defense.
“Excellent,” she said. “It’s going to be a big night, too. Come on, get dressed.”
I was hoping the big night wasn’t going to involve more than one ejaculation, since I’d already done that twice and was approaching my limit. “Can whatever it is wait until morning?”
“Tonight’s the night. Claude’s last.”
Shit. Despite the purchase of the gun I hadn’t thought about its eventual use all night, really, which was sort of a blessing. My
ability to compartmentalize has been a boon to me as an actor; no matter what turmoil is affecting my personal life, I’m always in the moment onstage or on set. “You know, I’m pretty beat. Could we do it tomorrow?”
“Get out of bed. It’s tonight.”
I got out of bed and got dressed without showering, presuming that she wouldn’t be too keen on my taking the time for it. In the kitchen I ate an apple to make me alert (better than coffee, at least in my case), and I let her leave first in case we were spotted.
Ten minutes later I left the building myself and, as luck would have it, hanging around outside the nightclub next door was the guy I’d beaten up the week previous. He looked just as drunk as he had that night, and he stared at me with a look of intense but befuddled concentration while his buddies laughed at him.
I turned the corner in a hurry and caught up with Esmée’s mint-condition ’67 Karmann Ghia a few hundred meters up the Boulevard St. Germain. With her at the wheel we raced down the near-empty boulevard over to the Cluny and then up the Boulevard St. Michel while she lectured me about taking things more seriously. Then she admitted that my ability to face such a situation with aplomb, even boredom, was one of the things that drove her mad with desire. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that my attitude wasn’t insouciance or indifference or anything of the sort; it was just sexual exhaustion, ascribable to one of her rivals.
We drove well past the dormitory, all the way up to the Boulevard du Port-Royal, where she parked on the sidewalk and we walked down a side street to where a baker’s truck sat. She pulled out a set of keys and we drove it in silence to the rue de l’Abbé de l’Épée.
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The mood in the basement was dismal, funereal even. Annick and Fred had been drinking wine and were both telling sad tales of love gone wrong, and before we got started with the main business of the night, Esmée joined in.
“Wait until you’re older,” Esmée said. “Believe me, whatever heartbreaks you’ve had you’ll have worse before you’re through.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Seems to me the main thing is not to take these things so seriously and just try and have fun.”
All three of them looked at me as though I were an idiot or a bastard, but I was the only one of the four of us not whining about long-gone, unfaithful lovers. Hadn’t I ever had my heart broken? Sure I had; the difference was that after a brief period of sadness I stopped giving a shit. And that’s why, romantically speaking, I am one of the happiest sons of bitches you will ever encounter.
After five minutes of listening to them I realized that Esmée was no longer in command, that in the presence of the others she was deferring to my authority. So I told them to knock it off. It was time to transport Claude. When we opened the door to the meat locker and turned on the light he squealed through the gag at the sight of Esmée, or more precisely at her predatory expression, and when he saw that steamer trunk we were going to put him in he panicked and began struggling for real. Weak though he was from nearly a week in restraints, the fear of death stimulated his adrenal glands and I thought he was going to bust that chair into pieces.