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

patois of Jersey City. By that point the cretinous gendarmes had naturally concluded that we were enemy spies sent to photograph top-secret installations.
    We’d probably be on Devil’s Island, breaking rocks right now, if not for the intervention of Gabor’s friend the baroness Lily de Rossignol, who is not only rich and generous but also an aristocrat—or married to one, at least. I have yet to meet her. Why doesn’t it surprise me that Gabor has kept us apart? When I finally set eyes on this saint of art, I’ll tell her how grateful I am.
    As I passed the dead man in the park, the memory of that incident prevented me from approaching the cops and announcing, “Officers, that corpse is family! Mon semblable, mon frère! ” I knew how I would answer if they asked how we were related: I too have come to Paris to starve and collapse in the street, to say adieu to this alley of trees pointing straight at the God who, if he existed, would be deaf to my prayer. In the morning I too will be found, preferably by one of the pony-riding brats’ more attractive nannies. And I will be buried in Paris, if not with Victor Hugo’s pomp and circumstance, then at least tossed into a pauper’s grave, like Mozart.
    Luckily, Suzanne and I had run out of money before I’d drunk enough to say that to a cop. I was sufficiently sober to weigh a night in prison against a night on the floor of whichever friend I could persuade to open his door. Fortunately, I was in Paris, where according to Suzanne, a gray sky is a mackerel sky, where each falling leaf skips across the pavement with a sexy smoker’s crackle. At least I wasn’t in Jersey, drinking myself blind.
    Who knows if the dead man wanted to live? I only know that I do. I will sell my blood to the hospital and rent my brain to ghouls. Future critics will trace my claw marks down the walls of the abyss. Did my dead “brother” in the park have strategies like mine? Did he have my inner resources, my will to scramble up from the depths?
    I have my tricks. Gabor and I entertain ourselves with a game we call “free drinks on the dead poets.” He and I walk into a café, preferably one named after a French philosopher or playwright. We fake a heated argument until at last I shout, “I don’t care what you say! The best poets have always been French!” Soon our table is surrounded by literary jingoists to whom I preach about the greatness of the French poets, especially those who died young.
    I could do the death of Rimbaud with half my cerebral cortex missing, but I put my whole heart into it, quoting A Season in Hell , daring someone to tell me that it isn’t sheer brilliance, raving about the poor bastard’s short life, the marathon walking, the affair with Verlaine. Though, depending on the crowd, I sometimes say the friendship with Verlaine. The Abyssinian voyage, the gun running, the cancer, the gangrene or whatever, the amputated leg.
    That so many of my listeners already know the story tells you something about the French. How many barflies in Camden are equally well versed in the life of Walt Whitman? The French buy round after round to hear the American cowboy rave about their martyred poet-saint. The hotter Abyssinia sounds, the thirstier they get.
    But even the looniest patriots have a limited interest in the madness of a teenage homosexual, however poetically gifted. The crowd returns to whatever they were doing before: gossiping, flirting, insulting each other. I forget what people do when they can pay for their own drinks. Meanwhile Gabor and I split what’s left in the glasses that our new friends have left on our table.
    That was how I met the beautiful, freckle-faced blonde with the ever-so-slightly rabbity teeth who turned out to be Suzanne. She stayed at our table after the others left. Sobbing her eyes out. I was afraid to ask what was wrong. I didn’t want to hear about the