Read Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 for Free Online Page A

yet . . . the truth is: I have never felt so alive! Why? Because I am in Paris! I could be back in Jersey City at the copy desk, calling the mayor’s office to make sure that his youngest son is really nicknamed Jimmy Jim. And at the end of another hellish week, I could be handing over my teensy paycheck to Beedie and baby Walt.
    Those poor slobs in my former office are the ones I should pity! Except that I am apparently so depraved that I can work up a cold sweat of grief for being a bastard who ditches his wife and kid and takes off for France. Poor me! Fortunately, Beedie has remarried a bootlegger too alcoholic to notice the pennies she skims off the grocery money and sends when my desperate pleas make her wonder how she’s going to tell little Walt that Mommy let Daddy starve to death, in a foreign country.
    If I believed in God, or in anything except my talent, my heart, and my cock, the first thing I would thank the deity for is my survival instinct. When gloom sets in, I know enough to start walking. I inhale the scent of a Paris night, rotten vegetables, horse manure, sewers, cigars, and flowers. The hot breath of Napoleon, the panic of Marie Antoinette, the faint breeze stirred by the guillotine blade dropping on Danton’s neck. Lavishing my attention on every overbred pooch, I gladden its owner’s soul with my admiration for Fifi or Rex, whose need has dragged its adoring slave into the luridly lovely night.
    Tonight I passed two farm boys lying on top of a cart heaped with cabbages, under a streetlamp, both masturbating like crazy, not giving a damn who saw. What a city! Paradise! My hard-on had subsided, and it cleared my mind. How could I have wasted one instant of this stupendous night on anything but gratitude and pleasure?
    As gravity pulled me through the alleys twisting down from Montmartre, every streetlight was the one at the end of the tunnel. So what if I’m a useless middle-aged bum? A phony and a poseur. Who cares if no one reads my work? I can write what I want and rip the ghastly wig off the beautiful bald head of truth!
    At the bottom of the rue Blanche a group of sewer repairmen were sitting, smoking and belching on top of a smoking, belching machine. Would I like a swig of champagne? They were celebrating a birthday.
    â€œ Bonsoir ,” I said in my best French.
    â€œCharlie Chapleen!” they said. “Hot dog!’
    I asked if they’d be here tomorrow night. I said, “I have a photographer friend who would love to take your picture.”
    The birthday boy said, “Our sincere apologies. But that is unlikely. We will be wherever our fair city suffers a painful blockage.”
    In Paris even the sewers are maintained by poets! After a few gulps of champagne, I was feeling even better. I crossed the sparkling river, floated through St. Germain, then cut through the Luxembourg Gardens, which at that hour is usually empty, except for the usual perverts draped around the fence waiting for someone who wants to beat them or be beaten. But tonight the park was crawling with police. Some poor soul had been found dead on the tree-lined gravel path where spoiled French brats go for pony rides.
    One cop mumbled that a clochard had died from exposure and starvation.
    News like that means one thing to your average citizen, and quite another to a starving writer with no idea where he’ll be sleeping. I had to be very careful not to see my own grim future in this unfortunate stranger’s.
    I also had to be careful not to get arrested. I’d had a few run-ins with the French police. The last time was when my friend Gabor, the crazy Hungarian genius photographer, bribed me and two other guys (with a decent Bordeaux) to dress in cheap suits and caps and pretend to be thieves picking a lock so he could take our picture. You can imagine how that played out, explaining that to the law, Gabor, in his awful paprika-spiced French and me spewing the raw unfiltered