Rake (6 page)
Authors: Scott Phillips
“So what brings you here?”
“Trying to get a movie made,” I said.
“No, here to the club?”
“Meeting a friend,” I said. “I haven’t seen her, though.”
He looked across the room at Sammy, who was having some sort of problem with a group at the checkpoint. “Just a minute, I have something I want to discuss with you.”
I started watching a staggeringly beautiful brunette of thirty-five or so dance with a burly twenty-year-old with blond dreadlocks and no sense of rhythm whatsoever. She looked determined to put him in his place either on the dance floor or elsewhere, and I made a mental note: If they separated, and if Annick didn’t show, I was going to make a play for her.
A girl danced for the crowd in rags in a bamboo cage suspended above the dance floor, her hot pants torn in just the right way to show a tantalizing glimpse of bush and her T-shirt ripped
so that most of her right breast was visible. She was, I suppose, intended to represent a female POW, perhaps one who had disguised herself as a man in order to get into the air force and fly bombing missions over Hanoi.
Nursing my beer and looking around I wondered how you got a bank to loan you the money for such a venture. Maybe I could invent some similarly off-putting idea for a drinking and dancing establishment and reinvent myself as an entrepreneur, adding “well-known impresario of the Parisian nightlife” to my CV. A serial killer–themed nightclub, maybe, with Eddie Gein–inspired human-skin masks lining the walls. Bartenders dressed as John Wayne Gacy in full clown makeup. Portraits on the walls of BTK and Ted Bundy and Richard Ramirez. (Why were all the serial killers who came to my mind American? I’m well aware that Europe and specifically France have produced any number of homicidal monsters. Maybe the theme needed to be that specific in order to interest investors.)
I had that funny, prickly feeling again that I was being watched, which of course I was, surreptitiously or openly by two thirds of the people in the club. But again this was different, that sensation of being spied on with hostile intent, and though it was almost certainly nonsense, I was nonetheless on my guard.
I finished my beer and headed for the bathroom, finding it empty. I urinated with the overwhelming yet indistinct thumping of the bass passing through the door, a reasonably good likeness of R. Lee Ermey painted on the opposite wall and visible in the mirror. Ermey reminded me a good deal of my own drill sergeant in the dawning days of my military career, and I wondered what had become of cranky old Sergeant McMillan. Probably making the retirees run drills down in Florida. I should track him down, maybe pay a visit; he was the one who taught me my first choke hold. Seeing my enthusiasm and sensing a kindred soul, he took me under his wing and instructed me in the way of
the warrior. Unarmed, I was capable of killing an attacker in any of a dozen ways, a knowledge that leads paradoxically to a state of great calm via a lack of fear.
As I zipped up, the door opened and the young man with the blond dreadlocks entered, an expression of undiluted anger on his face, and called me a fucking sack of shit.
He pulled back his fist in an attempt to sucker punch me, but he was pitiably slow and I got in a good shot to his solar plexus. He dropped back against the wall, right into a painting of Tom Berenger dying in
Platoon
, and I planted my heel down hard on his metatarsals. The first blow had taken his breath away, so he didn’t scream, but as he slid down to the tile flooring he certainly fucking wanted to. In my jacket pocket was a telescoping steel tactical baton my friend Byron, a cop and former advisor to the show on police matters, had given me as a gift before I left, but its use didn’t seem necessary now.
“Here’s the thing about dreads,” I said. “They look great if you’re black, but if you’re a pasty blond white kid they make you look like a douchebag and a poser.”
•
•
•
When I got back to the bar I was told Mathieu was waiting in the private salon. This was located behind a door guarded by another Polynesian, this one even bigger than Sammy, who opened up and waved me inside. Waiting for me in the luxuriously appointed room were Mathieu and the brunette my assailant had been dancing with, whom Mathieu introduced as Esmée. Not knowing whether she was attached to Mathieu, and having just been attacked by another of her admirers, I didn’t press my attentions on her, but her cocked eyebrow suggested an interest in getting to know one another.
“You mentioned a movie,” Mathieu said. “As it happens Esmée is an actress as well as a model.”
“Is that so. I knew I’d seen you before,” I said, though this wasn’t the case.
“Mostly commercials. A small part in a Dutch film last year.”
“Her husband is one of the investors here. Is your film funded yet?”
“Not completely. We’re still looking for co-producers.”
Esmée smiled, and I could easily imagine that face on screen. Her head was large in proportion to her body, and if that sounds like a backward compliment, it isn’t. Head-to-body ratio is one of the key elements of stardom, determining how a person photographs. Look back at the great stars of twentieth-century cinema: Bogart, Bette Davis, Gabin, Gable—all had enormous heads in relation to their bodies. It’s no different in modern times: Hoffman, Depardieu, Julia Roberts, Jackie Chan. Picture Philippe Noiret with his head slightly smaller, and suddenly he’s your neighborhood grocer, or trash collector. Without his massive head threatening to capsize his tiny body every time he takes a step, Tom Cruise is the guy who tears the tickets at the movie theater, not the giant on the screen.
“As it happens my husband is looking for a project to fund, something I could be in.”
“Something that might feature the club as well. Is there room for a nightclub scene?”
“Absolutely, it’ll fit right in. I’m meeting with the writer in the morning.”
“Splendid. Maybe you can bring him along tomorrow night? The place should be a bit more lively. In the meantime, anything you want from the bar is on the house.”
The door opened and the blond kid with dreadlocks stepped inside. He looked chastened, though not necessarily by me. Esmée’s expression grew stern.
“Are you ready to take me home now?” she asked. No, let me amend that; though posed in the form of a question, it was nonetheless a command. She turned to me, all smiles again. “Let me introduce my stepson, Bruno.”
•
•
•
It was around three in the morning when I got out of the taxi in front of the hotel, and for once there was no one passing on the sidewalk to stop and point. The lobby was nearly empty, and the man at the reception showed no sign of recognition as he handed me my key and wished me a pleasant night’s sleep. As I climbed into bed, by myself for once, I almost felt as though I were someone else.
A
S A YOUNG MAN I CARRIED AROUND A GREAT deal of anger, and I used to be a brawler. Not the kind I am now, where somebody else starts the thing and I finish it, but the kind who looks for trouble and starts it when there’s none to be found. When I was seventeen years old I got into a fight over a girl and put the other guy into the hospital with a broken clavicle. When I came before the judge for sentencing he offered me a choice, much like the choice the army gave me later on: I could go to jail for a year and a half, or I could enlist. What the hell, I thought, the army sounded like a good way to bust some heads, and I joined up. I did so well in Basic Training they kicked me upstairs, and I kept on acing every test they gave me until I got into U.S. Army Special Forces. The Green Berets.
Once in, I continued to outperform all my peers intellectually and physically. I’d finally found something I was good at, better than anybody else around me. I was born to be a warrior.
The trouble was, I kept that anger coiled in me like a spring, and all the training was doing was wrapping that spring tighter and tighter. I hadn’t found a way to let it out, and then one day, having been taught a couple of dozen ways to kill a man with my bare hands, an opportunity for release presented itself while I was buying a six-pack of beer.
A young enlisted man was shopping with his doughy, sad-looking wife and two kids. Despite the wear and tear visible on her face, she was no more than twenty-five and retained sad vestiges of a genuine beauty lost to disappointment, early motherhood, and life on an army base. One of the few advantages for family men in the armed services is the base PX, where prices are a fraction of what they are in civilian grocery stores, but this guy wasn’t happy about the bargains to be had; he was bitching and moaning to his wife about the amount of food she was loading into their cart. One of the kids, a boy of about six with a blond crewcut bleached by the sun, grabbed a package of potato chips from the shelf and tore it open. The dad, a corporal, saw this and yanked his son by the arm and, while the kid was still in midair, smacked him across the face.
There’s a protocol to be followed in these cases. You alert the MPs, you get witnesses, you deal with it through the proper channels. What you don’t do is go all kung fu on the poor unsuspecting bastard, break both his arms and legs and put a crack in his skull so hard he’ll never quite think right again. All of which, without really considering the consequences or the logic of it, is what I did to that poor cracker son of a bitch, right there in front of his wife and kids, who looked upon me not as their rescuer but as an assailant, a turn of events which, though predictable and quite understandable, made me sad.
In the brig I had some time to think it over. I was more than a little bit frightened by what I’d done, particularly by the speed with which my rage had overtaken me, and after some words
with my commanding officer and with an army shrink I came to the conclusion that maybe a little bit of psychiatric work might be in order. My CO was a standup guy, and though he couldn’t pull enough strings to keep me in the unit (this was during peacetime—there’s no way today’s U.S. military would have kicked me out), he did manage to get me the option of a discharge instead of prison time.
Once out, I thought about pursuing therapy, but instead I managed to lie my way through the application process well enough to find myself accepted into Southwest Minnesota State University, where I promptly signed up for a theater course on the assumption that this would be where the good-looking girls were.
And the assumption wasn’t wrong. The thing was, though, I discovered that there was something else I was really good at. Before long I was the star of the department, was stringing along a half-dozen nubile beauties, and had discovered that acting was for me a means of controlling my anger as well as a path to self-knowledge. Since that time, I have never instigated a fight (though I’ve never run from one, either).
•
•
•
I had an interview and photo shoot scheduled with
Télérama
at eleven o’clock at the Musée Rodin. I had a reputation in the press for being an intellectual, at least by the standards of television actors, and the editors thought it would be a good visual joke to get me posing beneath
The Thinker
. The joke was probably on me—God knows, a few years of covering television would have made me hate the medium and everyone involved in it—but press was press, and I had a good working relationship with the reporter. We spent half an hour on the photos and then hunkered down in the restaurant in the garden for the interview.
Here I was at a loss: to mention the movie or not? Bad luck to talk about a project too early, certainly, but
Télérama
has a lot of readers, including no small number in the industry, and a casual allusion to the thing might cause some ears to prick up. And of course the film was about a piece of sculpture, and here we were amidst one of the great sculpture collections of the world.
“So what brings you back to Paris? Just a vacation, promoting the show?” my interlocutor asked.
“A little of both,” I said, cagey. Then I thought, what the hell. Let’s make this thing happen. “Truth to tell, I’m in the early stages of a film project, a Franco-American coproduction.”
“You don’t say. Who’s attached?”
“There’s a brilliant script by a young French novelist named Frédéric LaForge, he wrote a terrific book called
Squirm, Baby, Squirm
, and we’ve been working on getting the deals finalized.”
“What’s it about?”
“All I can say is that it’s about an archaeologist who makes an incredible discovery.” It sounded lame and incomplete as I said it, but Henri seemed very interested.
“That’s great. Is the network involved?”
“It’s not official yet, so don’t quote me, but it’s looking good.”
•
•
•
If I’m going to be talking up Fred’s book, I thought, I’d better read the damned thing, so I spent a good chunk of the afternoon absorbing it in the day room of the suite. It was well written—the kid could sling a phrase with the best of them, no question—but it was beyond the pale in terms of content. The main character, Jim, is so promiscuous and amoral that it was hard for me to picture my soft-spoken, mild-mannered new friend and collaborator as his creator. In the book’s Thai section, for example, Jim fucks eighteen prostitutes, nine of them underage
and four of them boys. Each of the prostitutes is described in detail, along with those of Jim’s couplings with him or her, and by the end of that part of the book he’s actively seeking those who show the most advanced signs of disease: