Barney's Version

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Book: Read Barney's Version for Free Online
Authors: Mordecai Richler
the other one, “I’ll bet you pay a personal trainer to time your laps in your goddamn swimming-pool every morning. Neither of you is fit to shine old Mintzbaum’s shoes. Fuck off, both of you.”
    Nineteen eighty-nine that was. I’m jumping all over the place. I know, I know. But seated at my desk these endgame days, my bladder plugged by an enlarged prostate, my sciatica a frequent curse, wondering when I will be due for another hip socket, anticipating emphysema, pulling on a Montecristo Number Two, a bottle of Macallan by my side, I try to retrieve some sense out of my life, unscrambling it. Recalling those blissful days in Paris, in the early fifties, when we were young and crazy, I raise my glass to absent friends: Mason Hoffenberg, David Burnett, Alfred Chester, and Terry Southern, all dead now. I wonder whatever became of the girl who was never seen on the boulevard Saint-Germain without that chirping chimpanzee riding her shoulder. Did she go home to Houston and marry a dentist? Is she a grandmother now and an admirer of Newt? Or did she die of an overdose like the exquisite Marie-Claire, who could trace her lineage back to Roland?
    I dunno. I just dunno. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as E. M. Forster 10 once wrote. Anyway, those, those were the days. We had not so much arrived in the City of Light as escaped the constraints of our dim provincial origins, in my case the only country that declared Queen Victoria’s birthday a national holiday. Our lives were unstructured. Totally. We ate when we were hungry and slept when we were tired, and screwed whoever was available whenever it was possible, surviving on three dollars a day. Except for the always elegantly dressed Cedric, a black American who was the beneficiary of a secret source of funds about which the rest of usspeculated endlessly. Certainly it wasn’t family money. Or the pathetic sums he earned for stories published in the
London Magazine
or
Kenyon Review
. And I dismissed as a canard the rumour rife among some other Left Bank black Americans that, in those days of crazed anti-communism, Cedric received a monthly stipend from the FBI , or CIA , to inform on their activities. Whatever, Cedric wasn’t hunkered down in a cheap hotel room but ensconced in a comfortable apartment on the rue Bonaparte. His Yiddish, which he had acquired in Brighton Beach, where his father worked as an apartment-building janitor, was good enough for him to banter with Boogie, who addressed him as the
shayner
Reb Cedric, the
shvartzer gaon
of Brooklyn. Ostensibly without racial hang-ups, and fun to be with, he went along with Boogie’s jest that he was actually a pushy Yemenite trying to pass as black because it made him irresistible to young white women who had come to Paris to be liberated, albeit on a monthly allowance from their uptight parents. He also responded with a mixture of warmth and deference whenever Boogie, our acknowledged master, praised his latest short story. But I suspected his pleasure was simulated. With hindsight, I fear that he and Boogie, constantly jousting, actually disliked each other.
    Make no mistake. Cedric was truly talented, and so, inevitably, one day a New York publisher sent him a contract for his first novel, offering him a $2,500 advance against royalties. Cedric invited Leo, Boogie, Clara, and me to dinner at La Coupole to celebrate. And we did whoop it up, happy to be together, going through one bottle of wine after another. The publisher and his wife, said Cedric, would be in Paris the following week. “From his letter,” said Cedric, “I gather he thinks I’m one dirt-poor spade, living in a garret, who will jump at his invitation to dinner.”
    This led us into jokes about whether Cedric could order chitlins at Lapérouse, or turn up barefoot for drinks at Les Deux Magots. And then I made my gaffe. Hoping to impress Boogie, who could usually be

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