Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [15]
Each age gets the arts patrons it deserves. My bunch’s benefactor was Maurice Girodias né Kahane, sole prop. of Olympia Press, publishers of the hot stuff in the Traveller’s Companion Series. I can remember waiting for Boogie more than once on the corner of the rue Dauphine as he ventured into Girodias’s office on the rue de Nesle, lugging last night’s twenty-odd pages of porn, and, if he were lucky, coming away with maybe five thousand sustaining francs, an advance against a stroke-book to be delivered as soon as possible. Once, to his amusement, he collided with the vice squad, the men in trenchcoats from La Brigade Mondaine (The Worldly Brigade), who had barged in to seize copies of Who Pushed Paulo, The Whip Angels, Helen and Desire, and Count Palmiro Vicarion’s Book of Limericks:
When Titian was mixing rose madder,
His model was poised on a ladder.
“Your position,” said Titian,
“Inspires coition.”
So he nipped up the ladder and ’ad ’er.
On a whim, or just because a motorcycle ride was suddenly available, we would take off for a few days in Venice, or bum a ride to the feria in Valencia, where we could catch Litri and Aparicio and the young Dominguín in the Plaza de los Toros. One summer afternoon, in 1952, Boogie announced that we were going to Cannes to work as film extras, and that’s how I first met Hymie Mintzbaum.
Hymie, built like a linebacker, big-featured, with black hair curly as a terrier’s, brown eyes charged with appetite, big floppy ears, prominent nose misshapen, twice-broken, had served with the American Army Air Force 281st Bomber Group, based in Ridgewell, not far from Cambridge, in 1943; a twenty-nine-year-old major, pilot of a B-17. His gravelly voice mesmerizing, he told Boogie and me — the three of us seated on the terrace of the Colombe d’Or in St–Paul-de-Vence, that summer of ’52, into our second bottle of Dom Perignon, every flute laced with Courvoisier XO, Hymie’s treat — that his squadron’s brief had been daylight precision bombing. He had been in on the second raid on the Schweinfurt ball-bearings factory in which the Eighth Air Force had lost 60 out of the 320 bombers that had set out from East Anglia. “Flying at twenty-five thousand feet, the temperature fifty below zero, even with heated flying suits,” he said, “we had to worry about frostbite, never mind Goering’s personal squadron of ME-109s and FW-190s, circling, waiting to pick off stragglers. Do either of you young geniuses,” he asked, the designation “geniuses” delivered in italics, “happen to know the young woman seated in the shade there, second table to our left?”
Young geniuses. Boogie, that most perspicacious of men, couldn’t handle liquor, it made him sloppy, so he didn’t grasp that we were being patronized. Obviously Hymie, who was pushing forty at the time, felt threatened by the young. Clearly my manhood, if not Boogie’s, was in question, as I had never been bloodied in combat. Neither was I old enough to have suffered sufficiently through the Great Depression. I hadn’t cavorted in Paris in the good old days, immediately after its liberation, knocking back martinis with Papa Hemingway at the Ritz. I hadn’t seen Joe Louis floor Max Schmeling in the first round and couldn’t understand what that meant to a yid coming of age in the Bronx. Or caught Gypsy Rose Lee stripping at the World’s Fair. Hymie suffered from that sour old man’s delusion that anybody who had come after him was born too late. He was, in our parlance, a bit of a drag. “No,” I said. “I have no idea who she is.”
“Too bad,” said Hymie.
Hymie, blacklisted at the time, was shooting a French film noir under a pseudonym in Monte Carlo, an Eddie Constantine flick, Boogie and I working as extras. He called for another Dom Perignon, instructed the waiter to leave the Courvoisier XO bottle on the table, and asked for olives, almonds, fresh figs, a plate of crevettes, some pâté with truffles, bread, butter, smoked