And I sang this song in 1903 Without knowing that my love is like the Phoenix If it dies one night the next morning sees it reborn
Guillaume Appolinaire, "The Song of the Badly Loved"
Behind St. Eustache where rue Montorgueil meets the rue Montparnasse, there is a fivestory stone building which has been standing since the 1840s. On the troisieme etage of this building lives a man, now in his early fifties who went AWOL from the United States Marine Corps in the winter of 1969 after he saw a comrade blown to bits during a night fire fight with men they did not know, had never seen, and were trying to kill.
The shock of such a death, for some, never subsides into an acceptance of loss or a recognition of the Reasons of State and War commonly used to justify such dying.
It didn't for Matt.
Tom was a guy he had gotten to know in a bar in Saigon one night when they were both buying prostitutes tea for the price of scotch and wondering what the hell they really wanted. They were edgy and explained it by saying they wanted to fuck.
The girls they were counting on were sisters, and Tom and Matt found themselves thrown together when the girls told them they had only one room between the two of them, and said it would be good as a foursome.
They walked through the burning streets at 2 a.m. and wound up in front of a battered building still projecting some of the grandeur of its French colonial architecture. Inside the air was thick with the scent of lavender. The girls shared a large room, almost entirely mirrored. A king size red divan stood in the center of the room and a chandelier of innumerable cut crystal tears depended from the ceiling, whose gold lacquer was chipped and peeling.
They were beautiful girls and stripped to lacy black bras, thongs, garter belts, nylons, and spiked thigh-high shiny black boots, they were occidental dreams of oriental mistresses.
Soldier tired from hard fighting. Need rest and relaxation.
Nguyen pushed Tom onto the divan and rubbed his temples with the tips of her fingers, spinning a spell over the surface of his skin the way a harpist with the swirl of her hands makes the strings of the instrument sweep rapturous chords over the surface of the senses.
Mistress need pleasing. Want soldier hard so soldier can fuck pussy good.
And she was damned good at making him hard, slowly stroking and caressing the sack until he stood before her, and she took him in and said now you mine.
Lien had lit a joint and was teasing Matt with marijuana kisses, also rubbing his temples.
She stretched him out on the bed and sat over him, slowly going up and down.
Explode me up with your hand grenade soldier. Shoot me dead. Ready to fly into thousand pieces, Sir - the last accompanied by a sharp salute.
The two couples were lying side by side, the boys blissed-out on their backs, being guided to the edge and being kept from going over.
Then the girls slowed the rhythm and began to swivel their bottoms, shimmying slowly on the soldiers' bayonets, but giving each other deep throaty kisses. And as they did they guided Tom and Matt to worship their perfect tits, and then they moved the boys' heads nearer to each other, and then they had them so close that they were kissing the same breast; then it was each other's lips the soldiers were kissing.
Soldier boys must make love not war.
The marines, blown by the winds of rapture the girls had fanned turned towards each other as if operated by remote control, and as if moved by magnets, mouth drew to mouth and they thrilled each other with their own kisses, and when they were mad with desire and flaming with a lust for each other that had no boundaries, the girls began plunging and retracting until they blew the roof off the old colonial hotel and swam in the Gulf of Tonkin.
It cost them fifty bucks apiece.
Outside, Tom put his arm around Matt's shoulder, and drew his face close.
It was you I realized, it was you I wanted, and he slipped his hand around Matt's neck, drew him ever closer and kissed him on the lips. Matt did not resist but returned the kiss, tasting the hash scented Gauloise they had just shared
They walked through the street of the blue dawn in new euphoria, like high school lovers on a spring evening, exchanging kisses and high with the sense of each other.
In a ravine by a bombed out bridge, they took hold of each other cock to cock and gazed into each other's eyes.
Not yet, Tom said. I want to keep this with me for a few days.
He had forgotten that he was a soldier not a lover, and did not know that he did not have even one full day, no less "a few days," before him.
After that it was war no more for Matt. There was too much to digest, and he didn't like the idea of ending up as a whole bunch of scattered pieces.
He arrived in Sweden two months after desertion twenty pounds underweight and with a bad grippe. He'd always been pretty tight-lipped and had opened up with Tom only to be badly shut down.
But now his life depended on changing. He'd made it passed the running stage. Now he had to learn to be in one place, to be cool inside his own skin and live as if nothing catastrophic, like being found out and sent to an American prison, could happen. It would take concentration, but the kind of concentration that didn't give you an edge. He had to have a new identity, not just a new name. He had to become somebody else, somebody who didn't have capture lurking as a possible fate.
The people who ran the underground railroad knew this and didn't consider their work finished until they'd renewed a guy, not just gotten him out. That was just the beginning.
It was obvious that Matt was edgy from the moment he arrived at the safe house. He was a delicate case. After all, first his gut is psychically set to be a Marine. That's heavy in itself. Then he finds something in himself he never knew was there, and before it gets the chance to know itself, it's blown away by the same blast that obliterated Tom. And then he turns around - or maybe he's just going in the same direction, only further -- and challenges himself to break unilaterally with the Marines and with everything he'd ever been connected to, home, family, identity - everything. To wrench himself free from what was once a willing bondage and throw himself into a foundationless freedom - what a gamble.
They decided on hypnosis for him, first to relax and depressurize, deprogram, him, then to set up positive images for him to integrate and mold himself into.
They told Matt what they wanted to do, and he agreed.
There's one condition, he said. I want to know everything you're going to do. I want to know everything that comes up, things I say, things I think, things that I'm usually not aware of. I don't want to be made to forget anything, or at least I want to agree to forget if you think I should.
You know what that means?
I think so. I think it means that I'm going to have to face some pretty tough stuff about myself and I'm going to risk the possibility of having some pretty intense reactions or even of going crazy.
He was right. He got beaten up in a bar one night, for example, when he challenged a guy he'd never seen before, saying he'd been looking at him with sexual intentions.
But he survived it. He was comfortably seated in a Danish chair and Raknes was swinging a small jeweled pendulum in front of him and chanting slowly
Now we are beginning You are feeling heavier and heavier There is a heavy sensation inside your legs And your shoulders cannot stay up by themselves That's right Slump down in your chair And feel yourself going deeper and deeper Into the ocean of oblivion And you no longer know who you are Or what you want Where you came from Or where you are going Your name is nobody.
They laid him on a bed and covered him. And he slept for four and a half days and awoke with a ravenous appetite.
Raknes was sitting beside him.
Tell me what you feel.
A gripping emptiness pulling the outside inwards to a center hollow like a drum, he said in a voice that was not his.
Good, said Raknes. We're going to fill it.
When I met him --but it wasn't really meeting -- it was ten years after he'd obtained a carte de sejour and settled in Paris. John Lennon had just been shot, and I was wandering around Montmarte, wondering what in hell was going on, fearing the worst and not knowing what to hope for. There was a light snow dusting Paris and I stopped into a little place because of what I heard coming from the piano, a brilliant, hot, ironic melancholy mix of Eric Satie, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, and something else I'd never heard before.
He was the piano player, handsome, buff, and built, limpid green eyes, a full head of dark blond hair, and I was in a trance. I sat there till after two, nursing a few beers and already in deeper than I knew.
I left when they were closing up. He had stopped playing and gone somewhere in the back behind the kitchen. I wandered around the Sacre Couer. It wasn't as cold as you'd think. I couldn't get him out of my mind - the way he looked, the way he played the piano. Already I worshipped him. But that was that. I didn't even know his name, and if I did, it wouldn't have mattered.
Anyhow, I was taking the train to Amsterdam next day to finish my book on Jews living underground during the Nazi period. I had been a major in sociology and I got interested in reconstructing the inner lives of people who had to fear every moment for their lives and no longer were able to be themselves openly or move openly among other people. I had visited a few prisons and done a few interviews, and Ben Nelson at the New School said it was more than a dissertation, that I could make it a book, and then he arranged for the Anne Frank Foundation to fund it and me for three years. Entering hell was putting me in heaven. The Holocaust was big at the time, and Viking had contracted to publish it even when they'd only seen half of it.
I was back in Paris the next October on a book tour, and I ducked out one night and wandered around Montmarte, passed the café I'd heard him in, but he wasn't there. I didn't know it till a few days later when I read in Le Monde he was in jail. I recognized him from the picture immediately.
The French had nothing against him. It was the Americans who'd put pressure on them to apprehend him after they'd discovered his whereabouts, and they wanted him sent back. Reagan was making a point of demonstrating in all kinds of ways that sixties thinking was over. But it wasn't clear the French would go along.
That's when I got involved. Yes, I had motives, personal motives. It was a way of seeing him and of getting him to notice me. But I also really wanted to save him.
I used what little name recognition I'd gathered since my book's publication and held a press conference. I also got in contact with Marc Raveneau, one of the best lawyers in Paris, who had been a friend of my family and whose son had gone to Cornell with me. It was altogether a good time, politically, for us. Mitterand's Socialist electoral victory still had popular enthusiasm, and after six months, David, for that was Matt's name now, was as free a man as any other Frenchman, and the Americans were busy selling Saddam Hussein biological weapons and bribing Iranians to be quiet about the arms-for-hostages deal they'd pulled off.
When I first visited him in jail and told him what I was doing, David laughed. Then he shook my hand. We were in the same room, none of that telephones and Plexiglas stuff like you see in the movies. Raveneau had managed it all.
Why are you doing this? David asked.
Because I once heard you play the piano, and because I have a certain fascination with living underground.
What I enjoyed most during this period of our frequent prison meetings was the opportunity to shake hands with him upon meeting and parting. It was electric, for him too. I could tell. It was in his eyes. It was all the contact possible, but night after night I was frantic with phallic desire, and I usually put myself to bed with detailed fantasies of lovemaking with him. It was ironic since I'd never in my life been more in demand than since my fame came, and he was the only thing that really excited me.
I took him somehow from his jail cell. He was tired beyond endurance, but his body and his mind were firm nevertheless. He rippled inside the blue denim prison shirt, and his eyes sparkled in complicity with my desire for him.
I stripped him slowly, admiring each inch of muscle and flesh as I took the clothing off, and then I stripped myself for him, showing off; and he admired it as much as I admired him and we grabbed each other with the passion of discovering that we constituted one whole.
We kiss and wallow in each other's flesh, and drown in each other's eyes, and speak with each other's voices, and overcome each other and submit to each other. And then I feel him, gently at first, rubbing, rubbing around the place where I want him so bad to come into me. His fingers are silky, and I am repeating please, please, oh yes, please, and my breathing becomes quicker and heavier until I am on automatic and swiveling like a rotary and in the same rhythm, with the my own saliva, I am running up and down my cock shaft bucking like a bronco until the cum reels out of me like lassos at a rodeo. And I know I have to get him out and have him for real.
The morning sun for me in Paris shines at mid-day. Where ever I am it usually takes me a few hours to get sharp. I bathe, shave, dawdle, look at the day's news, roam the streets if the weather is good. In Paris I sit at a café on the Rue François Premier and take a strong espresso with a piece of chocolate and a Gauloise while my mind idles around and I find phrases, images or whole concepts that I jot down in the pocket-size carnet I carry around.
I walked over to Alma-Marceau, off the Avenue Montaigne and the Champs Elysses where Raveneau's office was located, and at two we were headed in a cab to the Prefecture of Police near the Hotel de Ville, where David was to be freed, and we were to pick him up.
He was beaming. We shook hands all around, and this time we kissed on both cheeks too. I was stung all over again by the electric excitement of his flesh. Raveneau signed some papers for the police, and so did I. Outside, in the great square dominated by the heavy blond stone architecture of the Fourth Arrondissment, a host of reporters, mostly American, were waiting.
How did it feel being free?
Normal.
What was the first thing he was going to do?
Might not be something you'd want to print in family newspapers. He was grinning, and I was sure he was looking straight at me.
What about the second thing, then? a snappy reporter shot back.
Probably listen to Billie Holliday singing "I'll Be Seeing You." I'm not sure. Might be "I Cover the Waterfront."
Will you go back to playing piano in Montmarte?
If they still want me.
How do you feel about people who did what you did?
I think it's a matter of conscience, and conscience always ought to have at least as much weight as authority.
That done Raveneau thanked everybody for coming and ended the press conference.
We said good-bye to that noble jurist, thanking him effusively. He was a portly and stately gentleman in his seventies, still good looking, even dashing. He encompassed us both in his arms. My congratulations to you, mes enfants. And to me, Please say hello to my dear, old friend, your father and to your delightful and beautiful mother.
I promised I would, and he got into a cab.
We had kept the apartment by St. Eustache during David's incarceration, and there we went now.
I had prepared for his homecoming. There was champagne and caviar, sweet and mellow grass and what I figured David would welcome more than anything, plenty of hot water for a bath.
It was not a large apartment, but it wasn't small either. There were parquet floors and beams that ran not quite parallel across the plaster ceiling. The floor to ceiling windows draped in red damask over a diaphanous gauzy lace gave out onto small terraces protected by iron railings wrought with curves and swirls.
He took me by the shoulders.
Now tell me, he said, what you really are, because even though you feel solid under my hands I can't get it out of my head that you aren't flesh but an angel from heaven.
I'm very much flesh, I said.
We'll see, he said.
And tell me, he continued, why you have gone through all this for me. It's not that I'm ungrateful. I'm not, but I want to understand.
I told you already.
You like the way I play the piano.
I do. The night I heard you it knocked me out.
That can't be all, even when you add to that your professional concerns.
Well, I said, grinning, I figured it would be much harder to get your cock into my ass if you were in some American prison.
[When you write me, please put the name of the story in the subject slot. Thanks.]