Harold Jaffe, from "Paris 60: Docufictions"

This month begins a new direction for this blog, as we are going to start featuring recent works by our 13 Starcherone authors, with new works appearing every week or so, creating a type of journal from our list. American fiction is moribund and predictable; its most well-heeled promoters are intentionally looking to print works in already tested formulae, and as a result fiction is the most conservative of all contemporary art forms. This is a small attempt to give voice to an alternative, to renew the art form. Starcherone Books tries to publish and promote the types of non-mainstream authors ignored by big publishing.

The following are from an unpublished manuscript by veteran fiction writer Jaffe, called Paris 60. Its 60 pieces were each composed in Paris, as dated semi-documentary, semi-fictive journal entries.

4.3 Dracula
I saw Bela Lugosi as Dracula walking in the Tuileries gardens.
It was daytime, the sun was out, he looked splenetic, distinctly out of sorts.
His head (with the widow’s peak, Asian eyes) was bent.
He was wearing black.
(Of course French males wear black as a rule.
Whether for reasons of style, tacit devotion, grieving, or indirect satire, has never been established).
Lugosi as Dracula was wearing black for his own immemorial reasons.
Looking hard, I thought I made out a sharpened canine.
At that moment I heard a bird sound—a raven on a dead chestnut tree clacking like a woodpecker.
It was warm, the raven could have been in courting mode.
Bela Lugosi died in 1956, and here we are eight years into the Millennium with a small hyper-ambitious man named Sarko at the helm.
Lugosi didn’t die, his morphine habit and quality time as Dracula on those Hollywood sets sucked up death and vomited it back out as life eternal.
These off-center formulations unreeled rapidly in my chest.
When I came to my senses (if that’s what they are), I thought of following him.
But he was gone, disappeared into nuclear springtime.
Then I remembered the dream I had in my small bed in my small Paris flat.
Alongside someone else, unidentified, I was looking across a broad verdant landscape when suddenly it began to sink behind the horizon until it disappeared.
I turned to the person by my side and said: “It’s over at last.”


4.6 Solitude
Baudelaire in Paris Spleen goes on about the virtues of solitude.
This was before the advent of the Internet.
After despising Parisians with whom you’re compelled to interact daily, returning to your flat at dusk and securing the locks on the door would seem reassuring.
The cask of laudanum, half-open bottle of absinthe, and hashish laced with opium are arguably more productive than surfing the Net or watching a DVD.
I’ve been isolated in New York, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Mexico City, Quito, Tokyo, Singapore, New Delhi, Paris.
Paris is the most evocative city in which to be alone.
It is only the French who admit, or do not deny, the fou and folle.
The mad and palpably deviant.
Not the functionally mad: bankers, corporate chieftains, uniformed child-murderers.
Those are welcome everywhere in the First World.
I mean the dysfunctional who smell bad, can’t decipher the métro do nothing “right” but dream and rant.
True, Sade was imprisoned and Artaud institutionalized, but there were mitigating circumstances.
Parisians cross the boulevard at the red.
Drive their cars and motorcycles on the sidewalks.
Litter the Bois de Bologne with condoms.
Love their dogs but don’t pick up the dog shit.
They welcome, at least in principle, the transgressive tradition in art and letters.
After a bad day with bad people, cross-dressing or undressing,
Getting high on anything,
Then going out in the Paris dark to a film festival or gallery opening and sexually groping the human or sub-human to your left,
Stabbing him in the thigh with the poisoned tip of your umbrella,
It’s a rush, cathartic, very satisfying.
And Paris is the only major city I know that grants you your donnée, won’t even turn around to glare.


4.8 Nose
Depardieu, Philippe Noiret, Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura, Aznavour, Bonaparte, Sade, Le Grand Charles, Sarko himself . . .
The prominent nose accords with the broad forehead of Descartes.
With the cathedrals of Chartres, Notre Dame, flying buttresses, gargoyles.
The intricate streets and rooftops of Paris.
Redondo Beach, California, is a Pacific Ocean beach city in Los Angeles County.
Silicon-rather than carbon-based, one might say.
Profile-less as the computer.
Females are blonde and tall with flat, pretty faces.
Males are blond and rangy with flat, handsome faces.
The male voice is low, without timbre.
Like the radiant Pacific when the tide is out.
It came to pass that a well known philosophe from Paris was on
his way to deliver a lecture in the Flemish city of Antwerp.
Sitting next to him in the first-class cabin of the Air France-slash-Delta Airlines aircraft was a champion surfer from Redondo Beach.
He was on his way to a high-level competition near the Flemish city of
Knokke-Heist, on the North Sea, where for obscure reasons, the surf was breaking abnormally high.
Each of the principals was according to type: the philosophe, 49-years-old,
medium height, sallow with an imposingly broad forehead and De Gaulle-like proboscis.
The surfer, 23-years-old, tall, rangy, broad-shouldered, sun-bronzed, with blond hair, a flattish face, very white teeth, and a small upturned nose.
It might have happened after the complimentary champagne (two small bottles each) that the unlikely pair got into a conversation in English (the philosophe was fluent), and decided to exchange identities.
The six-foot-four-inch surfer with the blond hair and flat face would deliver the lecture (on Gilles Deleuze) at the University of Antwerp, respond to questions from the distinguished audience, be honored at dinner, then return to his senior post at the Université Paris-Sorbonne.
While the sallow-faced philosophe with the Cartesian nose, who could not swim, let alone surf, would compete in the surfing competition near Knokke-Heist, from there fly to Hawaii for another surfing competition, then return to Redondo Beach, California and smoke a joint.
This exchange was validated with a handshake, the surfer’s long, tanned hand tenderly enclosing the philosophe’s delicate fingers.
Was the extraordinary transfer of identities implemented?
The aircraft crashed while trying unsuccessfully to negotiate the short Antwerp International Airport runway.
No survivors.

4.9 Cannonball
Julian (Cannonball) Adderley, jazz alto saxophonist and composer, especially known for his bebop arrangements, was living in Paris between 1959 and ’63.
He changed apartments three or four times, first living in the 14th close to Saint Anne Hospital; next in the Marais, then in the Belleville quarter.
While in Belleville he was visited by his younger brother Nat, a virtuosic jazz cornetist.
Cannonball opened the door, he and his brother embraced, Nat said:
--Man, this is a small pad.
Cannonball laughed:
--Yeah, it’s a small pad. But it’s a small pad in Paris.
They both laughed.
Over a drink, Cannonball said:
--Notice the Parisian women?
--Damn right, Nat said. Real lookers. Elegant.
--You got it, Cannonball said.
Nat sipped his gin.
--Are all the bathrooms as small and dark as this one?
--Most of ‘em, yeah, Cannonball said. Some have bathtubs but no showers. Others--it’s the other way around.
--How can a French chick look so fresh in a bathroom like that? Nat said. How can she apply her makeup ‘n shit?
--That’s the 64,000 dollar question, right there, Cannonball laughed.
They sipped their gin.
--How’s the music going? Nat asked.
--Good chops here, kid bro. The audiences dig us. Ain’t many black folks in the audience, true. But you remember that singin’ soul sister Josephine Baker? They loved her in Paris.
--I heard ‘bout that, Nat said. Was a long time ago. And she showed her titties, as I recall. Me, I’ll do some shit, but not that.
They laughed and sipped their gin.
--I can’t tell you how it all goes down, Cannonball said. But they seem to understand what we’re up to much better than that other place.
Nat feigned surprise.
--You don’t mean America?
--Polish your horn, Cannonball said. You gone see fuh yo’sef at our gig tomorrow night.


4.10 Fast Train
First class on the fast train from Marseilles to Paris.
Every seat taken but one, next to a middle-aged man sitting near the window.
I face a family of three: mother, son, grandmother.
The son, about 10 years old, called Alfonse, can’t sit still; he stands on one foot, hops down the aisle, kicks the air like a kung fu warrior, puffs out his cheeks and makes goofy faces.
(Americans would label his condition Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and attribute it to a malfunctioning brain).
The mother and grandmother appeal to the boy.
“Alfonse, Arrête-toi!.
“Alfonse, Viens ici!”
Alfonse ignores them.
Mother and grandmother glance at each other in familiar futile frustration.
Meanwhile, the middle-aged man who alone has an empty seat beside him has gestured to Alfonse and, astonishingly, coaxes the boy over.
The man gets up from his window seat, sits on the aisle, and manages to get Alfonse to sit by the window.
Once seated, the man talks to him softly, and while he talks Alfonse looks at the floor or actually looks at the man without jerking his body or twisting his face.
Next, the man puts his hand gently on Alfonse’s back and begins to stroke.
I’m reminded of a documentary I saw of one of Mother Teresa’s nuns stroking the back of a severely traumatized Palestinian boy.
Alfonse responds to the gentle stroking the way a feral cat, temporarily appeased, might respond.
Are the mother and grandmother suspicious of the obviously homosexual man stroking their child?
Pas du tout.
The mother and her mother smile and exchange a look which says silently: Unexpected relief. Thank you, Monsieur, whoever you may be.
For his part, the man is now talking softly, almost lovingly to the boy, while stroking his back with longer, more penetrating strokes.
Alfonse occasionally responds with a few words.
Even when he doesn’t talk, the boy seems relaxed, almost at peace.
This continues for the duration of the trip, which is about three hours.
When the train pulls into Paris’s Gare de Lyon, I watch the middle-aged man trade friendly, low-key goodbyes with the mother, grandmother and with Alfonse.
He.tousles the boy’s hair.
The family and the man go in opposite directions.