How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired

Miz Clockwork Orange’s Electronic Rhythm Drowning out Black Congas

I TURN onto St. Catherine Street.

“Hello, Black Beauty.”

A transvestite.

“Where’s the Clochards Célèstes?”

“That way, Beautiful.”

Bouba left me a message next to the Remington. Miz Literature had come by at noon. She’d be waiting for me tonight at the Clochards Célèstes.

The staircase is as narrow as a rope ladder. Two spacious rooms. A bar. A trio of guys in battered fedoras, elbows on the bar, watching a baseball game on TV. No sound. The TV is on a shelf next to an enormous Budweiser bottle. This Bud’s for you.

“A Bud.”

Advertising works.

At the far end of the room, thirty tables around a stage. Senegalese playing music. Four drums, two congas. Insistent, frenetic rhythm. Zoom to the back, right: Miz Literature sipping something green. Electricity in the air. The black bodies of the Senegalese glow in the darkness shot through with magnesium flashes. A whiff of hashish, light but persistent. I cross the room through the Senegalese show. The moist pulse of burnt bodies waiting for a rain of nago rhythm. Call of the bush on St. Catherine Street. Black music for white dancers. Soul. Soul on fire. High tension. Miz Literature is talking with a punk girl. Miz Punk shoots me a killing glance. She wants to play rough.

Koko, one of the Senegalese musicians, winks my way. Brother. Miz Punk caught the signal.

“Where are you from?”

“Harlem.”

“Harlem! I love Harlem.”

“Do you?”

Miz Punk is totally wired.

“Is there a lot of crime?”

“You do what you can.”

“I heard no one makes it past seventeen. You die first. Is that true?”

“Sure. I’m fifteen myself.”

Miz Punk is seventeen. She gives me a strange look, trying to ferret out the famous Harlem beat in me. The killer instinct. I shake my head gently with my best Malcolm X look.

THE SENEGALESE finish their show in a burst of frenzied rhythm. They gather up their instruments (drums, congas, kora), wave goodbye and go headlong down the suicide stairway, followed by a cluster of dashiki-clad groupies. Colonialized white girls. The priestesses of the Temple of Race. High on Negro.

THE DJ puts on hard rock. Miz Punk leaps onto the dance floor. Tina Turner. She starts jumping up and down. Madness. Dervish. Hard face, upper lip split by a razor slash, deep-set eyes, her body dislocated, disjointed, off-center, fragmented. She dances a half-hour with no reprieve. Miz Punk lasts longer than the copper-top battery. (“You, as well as they, are doomed to die.” Sura XXXIX, 31.)

We don’t waste time getting out of there, Miz Literature and I, leaving Miz Punk, alias Miz Clockwork Orange, to crash through the floor of the Clochards Célèstes. It’s raining. We take shelter under the marquee of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. Miz Literature kisses me on the mouth in front of the Death of a Salesman poster. We take the 129. Miz Literature has wet hair, which only adds to her charm.

“I don’t want any unpleasant surprises.”

“I’m telling you for the hundredth time, my parents are in Europe. I got a telegram this morning. Here’s the proof.”

She rummages through her bag and pulls out a balled-up piece of paper. Then wipes off her lipstick with it and throws it away, into the rain.

HER ROOM is upstairs, across from her younger sister’s (a Roy Orbison groupie). Posters of Roy everywhere. Roy at the National Arts Centre. She pinned a tiny photo on the picture of Roy that covers the whole left side of the room: two suntanned girls hitch-hiking with their tops off. Roy at the Peterborough Memorial Centre, with a certain Vicky. Roy at the Lord Beaverbrook (this time she wrote “Roy Roy Roy” on the poster in black felt-tip pen). Roy at Toronto’s Massey Hall and the Winnipeg Concert Hall (consumption in the hall that night: one ton of marijuana). The last concert was on Vicky’s sixteenth birthday. On a Roy poster she scrawled in eyebrow pencil, “I just feel like killing myself.”

“Those are Penny’s things, she’s my younger sister. She’s really crazy. She’s on tour now with Men at Work.”

Miz Literature puts on a Simon and Garfunkel record and runs off to the bathroom to dry her hair. I stay in her room. Cushions everywhere. All kinds of colors. Left-over from the sit-in days of the seventies. Books piled up on the floor next to an old Telefunken record player. To the left, facing the door, a large walnut wardrobe. Reproductions: a beautiful Brueghel. An Utamaro by the window. A splendid Piranese, two Hokusai prints and in the corner by the library (made of bricks and boards) a precious Holbein. By her bedside, against the pink wall, Miz Literature placed a large photo of Virginia Woolf taken in 1939 by Gisèle Freund at Monk House, Rodwell, Sussex.

I CAN hear the water running in the bathroom sink. Private sounds. A wet body. The luxury of soft Anglo-Saxon intimacy. Big red-brick house with walls scaled by ivy. English lawn. Victorian calm. Deep armchairs. Old daguerreotypes. The patina of antiques. Shiny black piano. Engravings from another age. Group portrait with corgis. Bankers (double chin and monocle) playing cricket. Portraits of young girls with long, fine, sickly features. Diplomat in pith helmet posted to New Delhi. Odor of Calcutta. This house breathes calm, tranquility, order. The order of the pillagers of Africa. Britannia rules the waves. Everything here has its place — except me. I’m here for the sole purpose of fucking the daughter. Therefore, I too have my place. I’m here to fuck the daughter of these haughty diplomats who once whacked us with their sticks. I wasn’t there at the time of course, but what do you want, history hasn’t been good to us, but we can always use it as an aphrodisiac.

MIZ LITERATURE walks into the room. Tired but still smiling. I’m lucky to have found her.

“Sherry?”

“Sherry.”

“What would you like to hear?”

“Furey.”

“Sherry with Furey.”