Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [137]
Bracing myself as she began to buck and moan, gradually subsiding, I was finally able to pull back and wipe my mouth with my wrist. To my astonishment, she raised her legs, delivering a sharp blow to my chin with her knee. “You know, and I know, that none of this ever happened. Prevaricator. You made this up, you little wanker, sullying the good name of a perfectly respectable schoolteacher … born and bred in London, a survivor of the Blitz, our finest hour, only to be shipped to this callow dominion, this tiefste Provinz, where they use tea bags. … You invented this because you are suffering the dégringolade of old age, and hoped to rouse yourself sufficiently to trickle a drop or two of spunk on your sheets. Crikey, it’s become so rare you ought to have it bottled. You fabricated this picnic —”
“The hell I did. You took me on a —”
“Quite. But you got no further than groping me in your greedy, inexperienced manner before that rustic — that habitant — speaking that patois that passes for French here, came to say we were trespassing. You made up the rest, because no woman worth her salt will even give you a look any more, you filthy-minded, shrinking, liver-spotted, sunken-bellied old Jew, now almost a deaf-mute, if the truth were known. You concocted this salacious story because you are still procrastinating, and would scribble anything rather than get to the truth of what happened at the cottage. Now out of bed with you for one of your pathetic little pees that couldn’t fill an eyedropper. Poor Boogie.”
17
I never lost touch with Boogie, who would send me cryptic little postcards from wherever he was. Marrakesh. Bangkok. Kyoto. Havana. Cape Town. Las Vegas. Bogotá. Benares:
In the absence of a mikva, there is always the Ganges for purification. Read Chester, Alfred. Green, Henry. Also Roth, Joseph.
Or a note from that city in Kashmir, whatever it’s called,66 where the druggies stop to refuel. When I was a boy, I had a map pinned to my bedroom wall on which I traced the path of the Allied armies in Europe after D-Day. Now I kept a globe in my office so that I could follow the progress of my friend the latter-day pilgrim through his own Slough of Despond. His short stories appeared infrequently in the Paris Review, Zero, and Encounter. Inevitably, Boogie settled into a loft in the Village and became a regular at The San Remo and The Lion’s Head. Women sought him out. Among them, to the amazement of onlookers one evening, Ava Gardner. He commanded the attention — no, something approaching reverence — of the young as well as beautiful women, by his silence, broken only when he made one of his rare pronouncements. One evening, for instance, when Jack Kerouac’s name came up, he muttered, “Energy isn’t enough.”
“It’s not writing,” I said. “It’s typing.”67
Boogie was also disdainful of Allen Ginsberg. Once, when I just happened to be there, a beguiling young woman, out to make an impression, made the mistake of reciting the opening lines of Howl to him:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix…
Boogie responded, “The best minds? Names, please.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Isaiah Berlin? No, too old. Surely not Mr. Trocchi?”
Among Boogie’s regular drinking companions were Seymour Krim and Anatole Broyard. He was the polar opposite of Hymie Mintzbaum, never dropping a name, but then a letter might turn up from Cuba, addressed to Boogie c/o The Lion’s Head, and it was from Ernest Hemingway. Or John Cheever could come by and take him to lunch. Or Norman Mailer or William Styron might pass through, and they would sit with him or, if he wasn’t around, inquire about his whereabouts. Billie Holiday, after her disastrous last cabaret tour of France and Italy, turned up looking for him. Mary McCarthy came. So did John Huston. His