Barney's Version (9 page)

Over the years my straight-shooting father soured as he witnessed Irish
shikers
and French-Canadian
chazerim
, guys he'd broken into the force himself, being promoted over him. Izzy remained a detective-sergeant for nine years. “When I was finally promoted to inspector, you know what they done, it made me sick, they went to the union and made up a story that I hadn't passed my exams in shooting. I used to check out my men, you know. I was sincere. They hated me like hell. So they went to the union and complained about me.”

Izzy Panofsky's problems on the force were endless.

“Hey, when I went to pass an exam on promotions, Gilbert was on the board then, he says to me, how come the Jews are smarter? I got two answers, I says. You're wrong. There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert. My other answer is the story about the Irishman and the Jew. How come you're smarter? the Irishman asks the Jew. Well, we eat a certain kind of fish, the Jew says. In fact, I've got one right here, and he shows it to the Irishman. Christ, the Irishman says, I'd like to have that fish. Sure, the Jew says, give me ten bucks. So he gives it to him. Then the Irishman looks at it good and says, hey, that's no fish, that's a herring. So the Jew says, you see, you're getting smarter already.”

Last night I dreamt that Terry McIver had been nicked on the ankle by a deer tick, and had stupidly dismissed it as a mosquito bite. Lying in his bed on the twentieth floor of The Four Seasons Hotel in
Toronto a month later, the dreaded Lyme's disease pulsing through his bloodstream, flooding it, McIver was wakened by a horn honking in his room and then a panicky voice coming over the
PA
system: “We have a serious fire here. The elevators aren't working. Black smoke has made the stairways temporarily impassable. Guests should remain in their rooms and spread wet towels under the door. Good luck and thank you for choosing The Four Seasons Hotel.” Choking smoke began to seep into McIver's room, but, overcome by paralysis, he couldn't even raise his arms, never mind move his legs. Flames consumed his door and began to dance round him, licking at a stack of
Of Time and Fevers
on the floor, every copy as yet unsigned, therefore still qualifying as collectors' items … and that's when I leaped out of my own bed with a song in my heart. I retrieved my morning papers from outside my apartment door, made coffee, and soft-shoed into my kitchen, singing: “Take your coat and grab your hat …”

Turned to the Montreal
Gazette
sport pages first, a lifelong habit. No joy. The fumblebum Canadiens, no longer
nos glorieux
, had disgraced themselves again, losing 5–1 to — wait for it — The Mighty Ducks of California. Toe Blake must be spinning in his grave. In his day only one of his inept bunch of millionaires could have played in the
NHL
, never mind suiting up for the once-legendary
Club de hockey canadien
. They don't have one guy willing to stand in front of the net, lest he take a hit. Oh for the days when Larry Robinson would feed a long lead pass to Guy Lafleur, lifting us out of our seats chanting, “Guy! Guy! Guy!” as he went flying in all alone on the nets.
He shoots, he scores
.

The phone rang and of course it was Kate. “I tried your line maybe five times last night. The last call must have been at one o'clock. Where were you?”

“Darling, I appreciate your concern. Honestly I do. But I'm not your child. I'm your father. I was out.”

“You have no idea how I worry about you all alone there. What if, God forbid, you had a stroke and couldn't come to the phone?”

“I'm not planning on it.”

“I was on the verge of calling Solange to ask her to see if you answered your door.”

“Maybe I should phone you every night after I come in.”

“Don't worry about waking me. You could leave a message on our answering machine, if we're asleep.”

“Bless you, Kate, but I haven't even had breakfast yet. We'll talk tomorrow.”

“Tonight. Are you having fried eggs and bacon in spite of your promise?”

“Stewed prunes. Muesli.”

“Yeah. I'll bet.”

I'm rambling again. Wandering off the point. But this is the true story of my wasted life and, to come clean, there are only insults to avenge and injuries to nurse. Furthermore, at my age, with more to remember and sort out than there is to look forward to, beyond the infirmaries waiting in the tall grass, I'm entitled to ramble. This sorry attempt at — at — you know, my story. Like Waugh wrote about his early years. Or Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Or Mark Twain in that
Life on the what's-it-called River
book. Christ Almighty, I soon won't even be able to remember my own name.

You strain spaghetti with a colander. Mary McCarthy wrote
The Man in the Brooks Brothers Suit
or
Shirt
. Whichever. Walter “Turk” Broda was the goalie for the Toronto Maple Leaf team that won the Stanley Cup in 1951. Stephen Sondheim it was who wrote the lyrics for
West Side Story
. I've got it. I didn't have to look it up.
The Mississippi, Life on
.

To recap. This sorry attempt at
autobiography
, triggered by Terry McIver's calumnies, is being written in the dim hope that Miriam, reading these pages, will be overwhelmed by guilt.

“What's that book you're so absorbed in?” asks Blair.

“Why, this critically acclaimed best-seller is the autobiography of my one true love, you inadequate little
shmuck
on tenure.”

Where was I? Paris 1951 is where. Terry McIver. Boogie. Leo. Clara, of blessed memory. Nowadays when I open a newspaper I turn to the Dow Jones first and then to the obits, checking the latter page for enemies I have outlasted and icons no longer among the quick.

Nineteen ninety-five got off to a bad start for boozers. Peter Cook and a raging Colonel John Osborne both gone.

Nineteen fifty-one. Quemoy and Matsu, if anybody can find those pimples on the China Sea now,
¹⁷
were being shelled by the Commies, a prelude, according to some, to an invasion of what was then still called Formosa. Back in America everybody was still scared by The Bomb. Something of a jackdaw, I still own the Bantam paperback of
How to Survive an Atomic Bomb
:

Rotarians were digging A-bomb fall-out shelters in their backyards, laying in supplies of bottled water, dehydrated soups, sacks of rice, and their collection of
Reader's Digest
condensed books and Pat Boone records
¹⁸
to help while away the contaminated weeks. Senator Joe McCarthy and his two stooges, Cohn and Schein, were on a rampage. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were for it, and just about everybody liked Ike for '52. In not-yet-querulous Canada Inc., instead of a prime minister we were being managed by an avuncular
CEO
, Louis St. Laurent. In Quebec, my cherished Quebec, the thuggish Maurice Duplessis was still premier, riding herd over a gang of thieves.

Mornings, waking late, our bunch could usually be found at the Café Sélect or the Mabillon, gathered at the table where Boogie a.k.a. Bernard Moscovitch presided, reading the
International Herald-Tribune
, starting with
Pogo
and the sports pages, monitoring how Duke Snider and Willie Mays had performed the night before. But
Terry never joined us. If Terry was to be seen at a café table, he would be seated alone, annotating his Everyman's Library edition of Walter Savage Landor's
Imaginary Conversations
. Or scribbling a rebuttal to Jean-Paul Sartre's lead essay in the latest issue of
Les Temps modernes
. Even in those days Terry appeared not to be worried that, as MacNeice put it,
¹⁹
“not all the candidates pass.” No sir. Terry McIver was already sitting for his portrait as the handsome young artist fulfilling his manifest destiny. He was intolerant of frivolity. A rebuke to the rest of us, time-wasters that we were.

One evening, strolling down the boulevard St-Germain-des-Prés, bound for a bottle party Terry hadn't been invited to, I caught a glimpse of him maybe half a block ahead, slowing his pace, hoping I'd ask him to join us. So I stopped to look at the books in the window of La Hune, until he faded into the distance. Late another night, a far from sober Boogie and I, ambling down the boulevard Montparnasse, searching café terraces for friends from whom we might cadge a drink or a roach, came upon Terry at the Café Sélect, writing in one of his notebooks. “I'll bet you ten to one,” I said, “that the covers of his notebooks are numbered and dated out of consideration for future scholars.”

Terry, a man of daunting integrity, naturally took a dim view of Boogie. For a much-needed five hundred dollars, Boogie had churned out a steamy novel for Maurice Girodias's Traveller's Companion Series.
Vanessa's Pussy
was dedicated to the unquestionably constant wife of the Columbia professor who had failed Boogie in a course on Elizabethan poetry. The dedication read:

Boogie had thoughtfully sent copies of
Vanessa's Pussy
to his professor and Columbia's arts-faculty dean, as well as to the editors of
The New York Times Book Review
and the book pages of the
New York Herald-Tribune
. But it is difficult to know what any of them made of it because Boogie had written the novel under a pseudonym: Baron
Claus von Manheim. A disdainful Terry returned his complimentary copy unread. “Writing,” he said, “is not a job, it's a calling.”

Be that as it may, such was the success of
Vanessa's Pussy
that Boogie was promptly commissioned to deliver more. The rest of us, eager to help out, gathered at the Café Royal St-Germain, long since displaced by Le Drugstore, to improvise sexual epiphanies that could be savoured in a gym, underwater, or taking advantage of all the artifacts available in an equestrian's tack room or a rabbi's study. Terry, naturally, eschewed these late-night seminars, appalled by our salacious laughter.

Boogie's second Traveller's Companion opus, by the Marquis Louis de Bonséjour, proved him to be a man ahead of his time, a literary innovator, who intuited karaoke, interactive
TV
, computer porn,
CD
-Roms, Internet, and other contemporary plagues. The virile hero of
Scarlet Lace
, blessed with monstrous equipage, went unnamed, which is not to say he was anonymous. Instead, wherever his name should have appeared, there was a blank space, enabling the reader to fill in his own name, even as one of his gorgeous, sex-inflamed conquests, enjoying multiple orgasms, called out, “———, you wonderful man,” in gratitude.

It was Clara, a compulsive dirty-talker, who contributed the most imaginative but outlandish pornographic ideas to Boogie, which was surprising, considering what I then took to be her problems. We had, by this juncture, begun to live together, not as a consequence of any deliberate choice on our part but having casually slipped into it, which is the way things were in those days.

Put plainly, what happened is that late one night Clara — suffering from
le cafard
, she said — announced that she simply couldn't face her hotel room again, because it was haunted by a poltergeist. “You know that hotel was a Wehrmacht brothel during the war,” she said. “It must be the spirit of the girl who died there, fucked God knows how many times through every possible orifice.” Then, only after she had harvested sympathetic looks from the rest of us at the table, did she giggle and add, “Lucky thing.”

“Where will you sleep, then?” I asked.

“Bite your tongue,” said Boogie.

“On a bench at the Gare de Montparnasse. Or under the Pont Neuf. The only
clocharde
in town who graduated
magna cum laude
from Vassar.”

So I took her back to my room, where we passed a celibate night, Clara sleeping fitfully in my arms. In the morning she asked me to be a sweetheart and fetch her canvases and drawings and notebooks and suitcases from Le Grand Hôtel Excelsior on the rue Cujas, assuring me that I would have to tolerate her only for a couple of nights, until she found a more agreeable hotel. “I'd come along to help you,” she said, “but Madame Defarge,” which is what she called the concierge, “hates me.”

Boogie grudgingly agreed to accompany me to the hotel. “I hope you know what you're getting into,” he said.

“It's only for a couple of nights.”

“She's crazy.”

“And you?”

“Don't worry. I can handle it.”

Drugs is what we were talking about. Boogie had graduated from hashish to horse. “We should try everything,” he said. “
Kvetchy
Jewish princesses before they go home to marry doctors. Arab boys in Marrakesh. Black chicks. Opium. Absinthe. The mandrake root. Magic mushrooms. Stuffed derma. Halvah. Everything on the table and under. We only get to go around the block once. Except for Clara, of course.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Miss Chambers of Gramercy Park and Newport is into reincarnation. It comes with her trust fund. Didn't you know that much about her?”

Clara's things included, among other items, a two-volume edition of
The Secret Doctrine
by H. P. Blavatsky, a water pipe, a dictionary of Satanism, a stuffed owl, several volumes on astrology, palmistry charts, a deck of tarot cards, and a framed portrait of Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666, wearing the headdress of Horus. But the concierge wouldn't let us remove anything until I had paid her 4,200 francs in overdue rent. “Money disgusts me,” said Clara. “Yours. Mine. It doesn't matter. It's not worth talking about.”