Between the Bridge and the River

  * * *

  Fraser was disappointed when he looked through the peephole in the room door to see the girl from the agency. He had asked for a busty redhead and the agency suggested Tiffany. They had her call Fraser in his room—she sounded very sexy on the phone, although Fraser was long enough in the tooth to know that didn’t mean much. He had a passing acquaintance with Senga Trotter, a sexy-voiced “phone hooker” who drank in the Press Bar. She charged men a fortune to talk filth to them on the telephone but she looked like a walrus—really like a walrus—same color, same weight, and a mustache.

  Tiffany set a price (two hundred dollars to come over, plus tip, which meant probably another two, three hundred, depending on how much Fraser wanted) and Fraser had asked her to describe herself. She told him she was twenty-five years old, red hair and green eyes, with a 36DD-24-36 figure.

  Fraser understood this description, bar a little salesmanship, to mean Tiffany was large breasted and young. When he looked through the peephole before he opened the door, he knew he’d been conned, but he went ahead and opened the door anyway.

  The woman who stood before him was at least forty years old. She had a thin, undernourished look and hard eyes that were partially cataracted by cheap green contact lenses. Her mouth was lipsticked to a bloodred gash—it looked like a wound. Her hair, admittedly a reddish color, had been dyed badly some time ago and some white was showing among the dark roots. Her fingernails were angry and red and chipped. In fact, she was angry and red and chipped. Her skin looked slack.

  She wore a cheap copy of a Chanel suit and white stilettos. She smelled of cigarettes and Listerine. She looked like a barmaid in a dockyard tavern who had gone to apply for a mortgage and been refused.

  “Hey.” She grimaced as Fraser opened the door.

  “Hello,” Fraser replied, trying not to sound too pissed off.

  “Is that an accent?”

  “Yes, I’m Scottish.”

  “Oooh, sexy,” mumbled Tiffany halfheartedly.

  Fraser guessed that would have been her reply no matter what nationality he’d said. He wished there was someone he could complain to.

  He was relieved when she left. He had settled for an extra sixty bucks and a hand job, and he couldn’t get her out of there fast enough. She offered to get naked but he talked her out of it, saying it was sexier with her clothes on, but the truth was he didn’t think he would be able to maintain an erection if he saw her naked. She was the opposite of sexual. All the sex, all her joy, had been wrung out of her years ago, there was hardly even politeness left. She worked his juice into a little napkin she got from the bathroom, and he thanked her and almost bustled her away.

  Annoyed, he got more vodka from the minibar. He didn’t bother to mix it with anything this time. When the four little vodkas were finished he moved on to whisky. Fucking hell, what was he doing drinking vodka anyway, he was Scottish, fucking Scottish, pal, and don’t you forget it, let’s have a beer.

  Fuck this TV, fucking Larry King with his fucking hair, fuck that nasty skinny hooker, I deserve better, he thought. Fuckit, I’m fucking going out.

  And out he fucking went.

  Miami was hot and clear like a movie. Pulsing gay techno beat from clubs and cars. Fraser, in his black Hugo Boss suit, wandered through the pasteled revelers like a nineteenth-century missionary. He was the anti-Presbyterian come on the quest for personal pleasure. He walked, walked and drank in bars, one, then another, always moving forward, always moving, always looking, he didn’t know what for and he wouldn’t have believed anyone if they had told him.

  Fraser was so drunk he didn’t even know he was in Boy Town. In a nightclub called Rage, among suspiciously big-handed women, he thought he saw Jung dancing. He approached him drunkenly, smiling and pushing. He hugged him ecstatically.

  It wasn’t Jung, it was Kenny Ipanez, a middle-aged orthodontist from Fort Lauderdale, who had driven to Miami for his monthly fix of crystal meth and raving. Kenny was friendly, friendlier than Jung had been recently, thought Fraser. Kenny and Fraser, unable to talk in the too-loud club, went to the toilets, where, in a stall, Kenny gave Fraser a line of crystal meth and tried to kiss him. Fraser felt the belt of the drug almost the second he snorted it. It cut through the alcohol and pushed him immediately to drink more. Kenny put his hand on Fraser’s crotch.

  Fraser head-butted Kenny, feeling no remorse, he was well out to sea now.

  Kenny slumped in the cubicle, crying, as he did every month.

  Fraser stumbled, spacey and whirring, back into the club. The crystal revved him much higher than any speed he had ever taken. He battered shots of vodka down his neck to keep from going completely psychotic. And he danced and danced and danced. Madness.

  He was in a blackout when he staggered out of the club. His brain was capable of performing motor functions but nothing was being recorded. It was as if he had left the building with the lights burning.

  That’s when they saw him. They had been waiting for the best part of an hour for the right candidate and Fraser was just peachy. Prime. Out-of-towner, gotta be a fag in that suit, drunk, and probably stuffed with cash and traveler’s checks. Couldn’t be better.

  BAD BOYS

  T-BO’S REAL NAME WAS TOM BOSLEY, which is also the name of the actor who played Mr. Cunningham on the hit seventies situation comedy Happy Days on American television. The show also starred Henry Winkler as Arthur Fonzarelli, a.k.a. the Fonz—a cool character who wore a leather jacket and put up his thumbs and said “Hey” when anything good or bad happened. If T-Bo had been called Henry Winkler, he might have used the name, but Tom Bosley’s character had not been cool, he was the stuffy dad who wore a cardigan. Luckily T-Bo was tough enough to make the other kids use the nickname of his choice, at least to his face.

  T-Bo was tall. Tall and lean with a long, thin nose and almond-shaped dark brown eyes. This was because he was an almost pure-blooded Watusi warrior chief. If things had been different, then he almost certainly would have been a king and had many wives. Although if things had been different, Archduke Ferdinand would not have been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and the First World War would never have happened, therefore the Second World War would have been the First, if it happened at all, which would seem unlikely. There would have been no treaty of Versailles to humiliate Germany into Evil and Nicholas II would not have been usurped by a desperate and panicky Russian mob. Therefore Europe would still be dominated by the Hapsburg, Ottoman, and Tsarist dynasties, and Hitler and Stalin would have been two forgettable serial killers in an industrialized society ruled by a slightly updated (minimum impact on the ruling classes, please) feudal government system.

  T-Bo was unaware of his royal blood because two hundred years previously his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Musinga had been captured and thrown into slavery during a raid by Portuguese brigands on his village. Musinga’s ancestors had been related to the Pharaoh and had drifted south after the decline of Egypt. This is not the kind of information that would have shown up if T-Bo had ever tried to research his family tree on the Internet.

  Musinga had fought the Portuguese fiercely but the Watusi were heavily outnumbered and their spears were just no match against muskets and steel. Of ninety-five people captured that day, he was the only one to reach America alive; his two wives, whom he adored, and the three children whom he loved beyond all reason died in the unbelievable squalor and misery of the slave ship.

  The experience of the slave ship was so intense, so brutal and unjustified, so heartbreaking and agonizing that it was stored in Musinga’s DNA as rage. Science has not yet identified that DNA can store rage or any other memory because the scientists, the grown-up geeks from the Astronomy Club, are too busy proving that genetics store really important stuff like the propensity to be overweight or lactose intolerant.

  But in Musinga’s DNA the rage was strong. It was there when he saw American children born from his new slave wife taken and sold off to God Knows Where. It wa
s there the day he grabbed a fat white man’s riding crop and pulled him from his horse and beat him to death with his bare hands. It was there the day he was hung, which was, of course, the same day he killed the boss.

  Musinga’s rage spread out through the slave population, mixing with the rage of other captured warriors, both male and female.

  The rage fueled war, crime, and brilliance. In some descendants it produced a nobility and drive that beggars belief; in some descendants it produced the desire for justice and equality, for reparation and forgive ness. For other descendants it produced despair and self-hatred, alcoholism, addiction, and depression, the rage turning inward and killing the host body, as rage is wont to do. (It seems that alcoholism and addiction are highly present among present-day African-Americans, Native Americans, Aborigines, and Celts, people who are not without a certain amount of justified rage.)

  Musinga’s rage went forth and multiplied, and history piled injustice and denial on top, fueling the rage, making it stronger. Occasionally the rage would break out in an artistic movement or a riot, in the young the rage produced athletic prowess and strength, but the rage kept building. The intellectual and compassionate DNA battled the rage from within and movements were born, society changed, but only little by little, for there was fear and shame in the DNA of the descendants of those who had perpetrated the atrocities that had caused the rage.

  They felt that if they allowed too much, those with the rage would consume them, so they gave only enough to keep the rage at an acceptable level to those in power. Like a pressure valve, let enough steam through from time to time to stop an explosion.

  This worked for those who carried the fear and shame but it didn’t do a whole lot of good for the individuals who carried the rage. Especially those individuals whose background or upbringing had not supplied them with enough tools to deal with the rage.

  This was T-Bo. Born in the projects, never knew his father, mother had three low-paying jobs just to pay bills and feed her children. The state would not provide T-Bo with an education or discipline that he understood but the gang system would. Like most people would under the circumstances, he joined a gang, for protection and acceptance. The tragedy of this young black male was like that of many others, that in order to reach where most white kids start out he would have to be almost superhuman. But he wasn’t, he was just human. Money is status. In the gang status is everything. You get a lot of money quickly from crime.

  That’s why T-Bo was standing outside a nightclub, coincidentally called Rage (although more like “It’s all the . . .”), in Miami that night looking for a muggee.

  With him were his friends Silky and Wilson, two young men whose stories were similar to T-Bo’s, but the real difference was that T-Bo had big courage. He had a warrior spirit. Cajones. With T-Bo as their leader, the three boys had started robbing drunks coming out of gay clubs. This they did for a number of reasons: (1) Gay men tended to wear better clothes, which the boys stole and resold. (2) Many gay men mistrusted the authorities almost as much as the boys did themselves, so often the crime would go unreported. (3) T-Bo was homosexual and deeply ashamed of it, and although he never told his confederates this, he felt somehow better punishing men who openly lived the way he wanted to. And (4) even if the crime was reported, the cops were less interested because it was a fag who got rolled, and who fucking cares.

  They followed Fraser along the street outside Rage to a blind alley that they knew well. Just as Fraser passed the alley mouth they rushed him, bundling him down toward the darkness and the trash and the vomit.

  Fraser put up more of a fight than most of their victims and this adrenalized the teenagers—it was more like sport when the victim hit back. This, combined with the fact that up close T-Bo knew that Fraser was just the type of guy he was attracted to. He’d love to date him and go antiquing with him and kiss him on the mouth. With tongues. This meant that the violence that they meted out, especially as far as T-Bo was concerned, was far more horrific than anything they had previously committed. Although it had been escalating with every attack, as these things do.

  Fraser lay in the filth, drunk as a lord, while T-Bo, Silky, and Wilson administered a beating so thunderously cruel and harsh that the blows and kicks rocketed him into a fourth dimension.

  C’EST LA VIE

  THE UNIVERSE IS VERY, VERY BIG.

  It also loves a paradox. For example, it has some extremely strict rules.

  Rule number one: Nothing lasts forever.

  Not you or your family or your house or your planet or the sun. It is an absolute rule. Therefore when someone says that their love will never die, it means that their love is not real, for everything that is real dies.

  Rule number two: Everything lasts forever.

  For example, George was made up of billions of atoms, some of which had, at various times, been parts of, among other things, a Tyrannosaurus rex, a red felt hat, and some porridge.

  In a staggering coincidence, Claudette had a few atoms of that same bowl of porridge in her system. It had been served to Alexander the Great during his campaign in Afghanistan. He loved porridge.

  Perhaps that was the key to the attraction between George and Claudette—their shared porridge molecules. It makes as much sense as anything else that goes on between men and women.

  Also they were in Paris.

  Many people associate the city of Paris with romantic love, even if they have never been there. This is understandable. There is so much beauty and life and art and history in the city that to be there feels like being in love even if you are not. But there are many cities with art and beauty and history. Why, then, is Rome or Istanbul or Moscow or Williamsburg not Love’s city? The answer is, of course, the French people and their language. The French understand that love, without cloying sentimentality—that irritating overfed cuckoo—is the meaning of life, and they celebrate and worship and laugh at it accordingly. French culture is extremely courtly and polite, as the French are themselves; they have a very delicate and beautiful manner, Parisians in particular. This is a fact that is hotly contested by boorish visitors to France who do not understand how it works.

  For example, in Paris, if one desires to buy something, you enter the store and say, “Good morning, sir” or “madam,” depending on what is appropriate, you wait until you are greeted, you make polite chitchat about the weather or some such, and when the salesperson asks what they can do for you, then and only then do you bring up the vulgar business of the transaction you require. To avoid this little exchange is to be extremely rude to the person working in the store and they are likely, at best, to be cold with you. To barge into a store and bellow, “Hey, buddy, any gum?” has almost the same effect as if you were to arrive and take a crap on the carpet.

  The French, God bless them, also believe it is respectful that you make some form of an attempt to speak their language in their country, and contrary to the belief held by many American and British people, they don’t all speak English and are just pretending not to understand to be mean.

  So French, then, is the language of love. The only thing more alluring is English spoken with a French accent by a beautiful woman, and that is what George was listening to as he strolled down St. Ger-main at four A.M. with the remarkable Claudette.

  Claudette told the story of her life and George listened, fascinated. The drunken father, the nuns, the movie star, the racecar driver, diplomats, and gangsters. It was so dramatic and urbane.

  He forgot about himself for a while and Claudette noticed this and was intelligent enough to be flattered by it.

  They reached an all-night bistro across the river from the dark Gothic dream of Notre Dame. George stared at its menacing silhouette as little thoughts of hell flitted across his consciousness, spurring flashes of adrenaline. Claudette noticed him worry, she put her hand on his arm and smiled at him, and he felt better. God’s Gift to dying men, she ordered them coffee and pastries.

  She lit two cigarettes,
one for herself and one for George, a gesture he had only seen people do in old Hollywood movies. He drew the smoke deep into his lungs. It was his fourth of the night and he was already beginning to love them again although he had had to run downstairs to the tiny bathroom in Les Deux Magots and barf his croque after the first one. Luckily he had the perseverance required to re-ignite his addiction.

  A few months later, for no explicable reason, the phrase barfing your croque became a slang term for ejaculation in the Australian sex industry.

  It was unusual, the way that they took to each other, George and Claudette. Her terrible bereavements and his big news meant that they both had reached a place in their lives when anything rather than rigorous honesty seemed pointless, and because of this they were able to throw away a lot of the “getting to know you” rubbish required of strangers who find each other attractive. They were both acutely aware of the value of time, and they were both determined not to waste any that they might have. A real gift.

  They cut to the chase. (The phrase cut to the chase has been attributed to the late Jack Warner, the demonic head of Warner Brothers Studios in Hollywood for many years. Supposedly, if he thought a movie that his studio was about to release was boring or too long, he would instruct the editor, regardless of the director’s thoughts, to “cut to the chase,” the inevitable climax to most movies. He damaged many movies this way but he also saved many movies this way. He was blamed when the movie was hurt and never praised if the movie was helped. He didn’t care, he just liked money and broads. That was what made him so successful. He was like the vast majority of cinematic audiences and a prototype for every present-day Hollywood studio executive and agent. He didn’t really give a rat’s ass about films.)

  Claudette asked George about his family and he told her. Of course, he now saw his life through a lens of recklessness, which allowed him to be more objective than he had ever been before. He told her about his parents, James and Susan, who had met each other in high school and had been in love until they died. His father first and then his mother, both of the same type of cancer that he now had himself. He told her that his father was a Protestant and his mother was a Catholic and she had felt guilty about not having more kids but she couldn’t for some reason he wasn’t sure of. He had a cousin, Sandra, who worked part time as a receptionist in his office. George wondered if his partners would keep her on now that he’d “copped a Stonehouse.” (John Stonehouse was a British politician who faked his own death and disappeared in the 1970s, only to turn up later repentant and broke. George wished he was faking his death.)