Technicolor Pulp (14 page)

“Yeah, I got it right away, but I had some things I had to get done and I didn’t wanna call you until I had them outta the
way.”

I pull him in with a hug.

“I kinda needed to split for a couple of days. I’m caught in this family thing and it’s driving me crazy.”

“I thought this guy, Helms, was your buddy?”

“He is… It’s just, I’ve been with him at this girl’s place with her mom and dad… And I’m getting fucking antsy… Come on over
and meet them.”

We walk back over to Doobe and Jane, and I
introduce Harry. I don’t know Harry all that well myself, but he goes out with an old friend. When I met him, we connected
right away. I need Harry. I gotta get away from Doobe and Jane for awhile. I’m sick of the
All in the Family
scene with the family. I’m broke again. All the uncle’s money’s gone, and I need some new wells to tap into. I figure Harry’s
lonely for some back-home companionship, and we can hang out for a couple days. Everybody will be happy. Doobe and Jane can
do their thing and I’ll go do mine.

We sit down and pass the wine. Jane keeps on saying, “Ray would’ve loved this.” It’s her latest profound discovery. After
Notre-Dame, Ray’s come “to love” everything that happens to the three of us. I’m beginning to get worried about her. There’s
a twisted look in her eyes every time she mouths the phrase. Doobe and I’ve gotten to the point where we just look at each
other and shrug when she says it. The girl needs help and I can’t pay lip service to the communal mourn. I’m out the door.
Let Doobe handle it.

“So yeah… Harry knows all the same people we know,” I say, evoking a bond. “Went to U. of Maine with all your buddies from
home, Doobe.”

“Do you know_____?”

“Yeah and_____.”

A network of fuck-ups looping the globe. People roaming lost and looking. Hiding out in all the most picturesque places the
world has to offer, killing time. Everybody knows someone, and if
they don’t, then they know someone else who does—it’s the “do you know” game. Perfect for immediate comradery. Names are tossed
back and forth and the wine is passed. I sit back and listen, closing my eyes. All I can see is that little spot of red you
see when you close your eyes facing the sun. Letting my friends and their friends meet, while I relax and drink. It’s nice
to be in Paris. In five years, I hope I just remember the good parts. The sun and the park and the conversation and the children
playing and the winos being warm on the grass. Me, just sitting back with my eyes closed and my head cupped in my hands, looking
at the red screens. I don’t wanna talk.

The sun goes behind the clouds and the bottles run dry. Harry wants to get going, we gotta meet some friends of his at a bar
across town, so we get up to leave. I look down at Doobe and Jane and my melodramatic engines kick in. I wanna get away from
them and yet, I feel like I’m abandoning them.

“I’m going back to London in two days, I gotta work this weekend.”

“Harry’ll be sick of me by then, anyways… I’ll call you.”

“Jimi, I’m glad you came and stayed with us. My parents thought you were funny.”

“I had a good time. We’ll call you tomorrow and see what you’re up to,” I tell them.

Doobe says, “No problem.” But he knows this is it. I think he gets the vibe. We say our good-byes and I start walking away
with Harry.

“Don’t forget to call us!” Jane yells and I wave back. I always say I’ll call. It’s a lot easier than having to say good-bye.

Harry and I walk for about two miles through the city. We gotta stop and pick up a friend of his, and then we’re meeting some
other people at a place called the Crown.

“He’s a good guy,” Harry assures me. My head immediately translates that into “a guy who will have some food and beer for
me and maybe a chunk of hashish.”

It ends up that the guy lives in the 7th district, not too far away from Jane’s parents. He’s not home and we wait on his
stairs.

“Harry, do you ever miss the states?”

“I did for awhile… Until one day I realized that I didn’t really have anything to go back to… I mean, I flunked out of every
college I went to and I’ve been away from home for so long that that’s the last place I want to be now….”

“I feel like I have everything to go back to… I just don’t wanna go back to it.”

“Paris is kind of surreal… It’s like I don’t age here or something, because everything’s so different
to begin with… Back home, I’d always be thinking about what I should be doing and shit… It doesn’t fucking matter here.”

Harry sees a guy coming towards us and gets up.

“I thought you were gonna be here… We’ve been here an hour!”

“I did not say that I would be home before six o’clock, Harry.”

“Flavio, this is Jimi.”

“Hi, Flavio.”

“Nice to meet you, Jimi.”

Flavio looks spanish. He’s light-skinned, tall and skinny, dressed in natty clothes—kind of a fashionable guy, and his hair
is slicked back tight on his skull, perfectly. We follow him up two flights of stairs to his apartment, a big loft with framed
prints on every wall and a thin black leather couch in front of a lone onyx table.

“Nice fucking place you got here, Flav.”

“Thank you, it is my father’s but he is only here one week a year. He’s an art dealer. He travels very much.”

“That explains the prints, I guess.”

“My father is very fond of your american artists.”

“Lichtenstein?”

“Yes. He is his very favorite painter.”

“I always liked the whole cartoon thing myself.”

“Very powerful.”

“And funny too… That’s big.”

Harry returns from the fridge with some beers.

“Jimi, this is som’a the finer french lager,” and
hands me an open beer. Flavio returns from the kitchen with a long-stemmed, glass, hashish pipe.

“Welcome to Paris… Please do us the honor.”

I take a swig offa my beer and hold the pipe up to my mouth as Flavio so graciously gives me a light. I take a hit. The hashish
is powerful. I’m thrust back instantly to my first bong hits in junior high. Sitting behind the local church, thinking my
old man was gonna walk around the corner at any minute and ground me for the decade.

“Strong… Isn’t it.”

“Strong… I’m ready to call up my parents and apologize for everything I’ve ever done… This shit makes me feel like a child
molester or something.”

“It does have sort of a PERVERSE air doesn’t it, Jimi?” Harry adds. “Our friends travel quite a bit… Some of the guys we’re
meeting later on just got back from Turkey with this stuff.”

“No wonder those people never make it out of their robes.”

We drink our beers and pass the pipe, listening to some sitar music that Flavio just picked up. I’m not crazy about the music
but I keep my mouth shut about it. I don’t want to insult Flavio’s well-intentioned hospitality. At least not until I’ve stuck
my head in the fridge. Harry’s flipping through a print book and Flavio gets on the phone to sure up plans for the evening.
I start to play with a little grey kitten that’s been darting around the room. Flavio looks up from the phone.

“Her name is Zooey… Like the Salinger story.” Flavio loves to drop a name here and there.

“Come here Zooey… Come here girl,” I say, beginning to crawl on the floor. “Come here baby… Come on.”

Zooey is shy and she continues to dodge me. Flavio is on the phone and Harry is lost in his book and I start to chase this
little cat. “Come on Zooey… Come on over here.”

The cat doesn’t want anything to do with me, but finally I get her in a corner and come up close to her. I lean my face down
in front of her and make kissing noises.

“Come on little one… Smooch smooch… Come on.” WHAM! She catches me with a paw right across my cheek. Rage fills my face with
blood. I grab her in my hands and flip her over onto the ground. I’m furious! The little slut scratched me! I look back over
my shoulder. No one’s looking and I begin to squeeze her, the soft fur in between my fingers. She looks up at me, frightened,
and I grab her around the throat, twisting her head to the side, pulling at her throat. I wanna kill the little fuck! I take
another glance over my shoulder and still no one has looked over at me. I continue squeezing and the kitten starts to struggle
with more intensity. Her eyes look away from me. I figure she’s starting to realize that maybe her life is in danger. A wave
of nerve runs the length of her torso with a jolt… She’s now fighting for her life. I lean close to her. “I’m your
god right now… Your life is in my fucking hands,” and continue to twist and squeeze while she desperately shows her claws
and tries to scratch her way out of the mess she’s got herself into. She’s put herself in a real bad situation. Little kitty
yelps sneak out from between my fingers.

“Jimi… Do you want another beer?”

“What?… Oh yeah… Yeah… Yeah, I’d love another one.”

I let go of the little cunt and she tears across the room into the closet. I turn around and Harry’s coming towards me with
a beer.

“You OK?… Jimi… You look a little flushed.”

“Yeah… Oh yeah… I’m fine,” I stammer and take the cold beer from his outstretched hand. I take a sip and try to regain a little
composure while Harry goes over to fill another pipe. The beer’s dark and thick—high-octane mud. I take a few more sips and
I realize I’m shaking. Some kind of rush, maybe an adrenaline-shame speedball or something. Zooey’s hiding under the couch
and Flavio sits back down on the couch.

Everything in life seems worth the trouble as I walk through the swinging doors of the Crown. The
place is so classic that my vision goes black and white the minute I set eyes on the bar. Time stops and I hear those beautiful
horns again, just whispering and crying back in time. The bartender, bored, leans over on his handlebar moustache and checks
his watch, ignoring us. There’s even a sad blonde at the end of the small bar with a glass of half-drunk red wine and an ashtray
full of cigarettes. The barkeep straightens his black vest and asks Flavio a question in french. Flavio answers, the guy runs
both hands through the week-old-looking grease in his hair, wipes his hands on a rag that he pulls from his waist, and reaches
down to put three glasses down in front of him on the bar. We sit down behind the glasses and I get my first of many Calvos.
It’s an apple liqueur, and we chase down the shots with espresso. The juke box only plays french tunes.

“What are they saying in this song?” I ask.

“They’re all singing about Love and Loss.”

Down with the Calvos, and back up with the espresso, all night long, listening to songs I can’t understand the words to, only
feeling them. It’s nighttime and I stir brown cubes of sugar into my espresso, sitting in the Crown. I can only hope the sun
never comes up again. A bunch of other Spanish guys show up, and Flavio joins them. Harry introduces me to them but we stay
off to the side on our own.

“You know, Harry… I never thought life was gonna be like this… I mean I kinda wanted it to be like this… In Europe and everything…
But you
know it’s different from what I THOUGHT it would be like.”

“I never thought I’d live here… But I love it now.”

“Sitting in this fucking place makes me forget everything.”

“Now you get it….”

“I could die here.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t be the first.”

“You know, Harry… I’m a little short on cash.”

“Don’t worry about it… My treat tonight… I’m glad you called me.”

“I’m glad I called you, too.”

“It’s nice to get someone over here to hang with now and then… We’ll have a good time… Just drink and enjoy yourself.”

I’m filled with forgetting… Sweet… And simple. No more cats will cry in my hands tonight.

Wrapped in a thin veil of dusty cloth, with a throat of sand and a deaf nose, I roll over. I gotta go, my bladder is a pregnant
balloon. Where the fuck am I? Paris… The rest is questionable. I check to make sure I don’t have some once-beautiful pig next
to me that I gotta crawl over without waking up. I
don’t wanna have to perform. I’m as far from sex as a chronic masturbator can be. I have to dump bad.

I get up and walk out a door. I see Harry sleeping in an alcove and I feel remotely safe. There’s a small shitter in the foyer
between us. I’m definitely in the SMALLEST apartment I’ve ever seen—two closets fused together, walkway and a toilet. We’re
high up, many stories. There’s a window in the bathroom that looks out over a whole side of the city. At least fifteen stories,
no broken neck on the landing of that jump. I imagine it’d be clean. What a view.

I sit down and the valve that is my sphincter opens. Buckets of glass squirting sour. I’m pissing out my ass. It’s painful
but not as bad as the pain of holding back. Every once in awhile, some kind of metal peanut flies out and tears at the wall
of my butt. All the buildings are wet, the city looks rested. I can’t see any people from where I sit, just windows, stone,
and some brick. I let out some gas. A long balloon-on-the-loose kind of fart, and another pocket in my bowels cuts loose.
PURE JOY. It smells bad. Am I getting rid of the bad stuff? Or is this an indication that there’s MUCH bad stuff inside? My
head goes back to the Crown, something about a faded lily of a bleach-blonde, telling me the story of her life, while I try
to gauge whether or not she likes me. Does she tell everyone the story of her being raped by her brother, or does she trust
me? Flavio appears in my mind, briefly, handing me another Calvos, toasting Lichtenstein’s cartoons. It’s the first real triumph
of my alleged college education—a free
shot of booze for some rudimentary art history facts. It was all worth it, Dad. A few more farts and then what feels like
swollen sand pellets begin to squeeze out of my butt in sequence—grainy strands of pearls. After a couple of minutes, the
strings get shorter and the pebbles get smaller, until they pop out one at a time, and it ends. I look around to see, much
to my chagrin, that there isn’t any
papier du toilette.
The injustice calls tears to my ducts. It isn’t fair! This shit is not fair! I can take a lot of things, but this is just
too much! What the hell did I do that’s so wrong! Am I just a bad person or what?! There’s nothing in the room! Not even a
piece of cardboard! I look up next to the tiny sink, off to the left, and see a soiled glimmer of salvation—A single threadbare
sock in desperate need of a good darn and wash. Such a precious commodity in the life of a young man like Harry or I, there’s
almost a factor of guilt, but I erase it immediately out of what I deem an ABSOLUTE NECESSITY. I gotta do it! It has to go!
I take a long stern swipe and pull the rag up to my face. Brown, not bloody—A good sign. A few small seed-like remnants from
an old meal. The smell is much more intense face to face. When I smell shit in the air, it smells bad because I’m expecting
to smell air. When I smell it on a piece of toilet paper, it’s more like a medical checkup or something, and it’s not as bad,
it’s intense. The sock is a little stiff, so as I wipe, there’s a certain amount of scraping involved to what is already a
ravaged bung-scape. Yeah… It hurts! My face muscles turn
stoic on me as I power through the last wipes, and then I follow it with a couple handfuls of water. Someday… I’ll be able
to fart again without whimpering. The sock… Now that’s another story altogether. That baby’s got no place to go but out the
window. I open the latch and let it go… Watching as it flutters and rolls down past the other windows and buildings, until
at last the angle is too severe and I can’t see it anymore. I pull up my pants, wash my hands, splash cold water on my face,
and take a gulp. I’ve done as much as I can to get rid of yesterday.