The people who deigned to speak to me—Jacquie, Anne, and later others—never understood me. They thought I was like them. And they thought they were like everybody else. They thought solely in terms of the masses. I don’t give a shit about the masses. Butron, Henri is the only person I’m interested in—and the masses are never going to save him. Whatever could I conceivably have in common with dopes in offices or factories? That’s just it, Anne would tell me, it proves that it’s social, your problem. According to her I was the victim of circumstances. God knows how many times I heard it: I was the victim, the plaything of circumstances. Everyone chanted the same mantra. Making excuses for me. I have never needed excuses. Whatever I’ve done I’m happy about. I know how valuable I am. For we were valuable people. We had broken with the things, the ideas that prevent gratification. All ideas prevent gratification. We were people of value, that’s what I say.
Eddy was a case in point. When it came to turning a penny, he went directly and straight away to the nearest capitalist, the most loaded, preferably young, not smart but convinced that he was, infatuated with cars and girls and dreaming of getting into movies. Eddy would lead the jerk on, buy him drinks, show him around. The jerk would think he had an entrée to a thrilling scene. Late at night, Eddy would take him to play poker with a professional, not even a cheat, just very good, and the jerk would be taken. And be glad to be taken. Five or six hundred thousand francs would change hands. Eddy would get his cut and the jerk would be delighted, thinking what great poker players Eddy knew, overjoyed to have lost, overjoyed to have met someone better than him, and utterly convinced that he was above the fray and able to laugh off such pinpricks. A dead loss of half a million francs was a pinprick to him! But he couldn’t be allowed to think about this too much, so at the end of the night Eddy would stick some broad from his stable between the jerk’s legs and her expert tongue would skillfully eat out the guy’s urethral orifice.
Jerk is ecstatic. Three, four weeks of this. Jerk gives masses of moola for Eddy’s film, jerk gets first role, Eddy gets the chance to show off his automobiles and his gun collection, jerk is told he has the perfect physique for it, gets blow jobs every night, jerk is in heaven, keeps paying up, a budget is drawn up supposedly for the entire production but is spent in a single night, Eddy tells jerk about overrun. Now one of two things happens: either jerk continues coughing up and things are as they were, or else he gets angry, refuses to do the picture, but his dough is truly gone and Eddy is living high. Eddy lends me money and his girls get bonuses. He is no egoist, Eddy, he even wanted to give me his piece, and I should have taken it.
Here’s another story: Mouche, a blond chick with narrow hips whose pimp was a greaser. She had posed for dirty pictures, then done porn movies. She handed her take to her mack, even funded his whole gang. We even featured that gang in one of Eddy’s shorts. They were Iron Cross worshippers. Whenever they were busted, the cops pinched all their insignia, beating them up for good measure. Afterward it would take them a while to replace the paraphernalia by scouring the flea markets. They had real collector’s items. They lost them every time they were busted, but they never gave up. In the end they attempted operations that were too big, though smaller than those the press loves to regale us with. Mouche’s mack got himself wiped out by the bulls near Meudon Wood. He was hiding out there, and tried to escape, but they wasted his ass. A demise that nobody reported, not even Detective magazine. Today Mouche is a secretary; she has joined the rat race; she’ll die poor; we really liked her.
Let me explain how we organized our existence. We lived well—we ran our flag up all over the place. We hung out in any spot where rich bourgeois, likely marks, rubbed shoulders with other losers (like us), fresh-laid egg vendors and such. This let us get up con games now and again. The girls had other alternatives: when film work dried up they could always clean out gullible old schmucks. For our part, aside from the homo route, we had more difficulty in that department. Especially me, who wanted to write screenplays.
To begin with, I meant to create very personal works, masterful in every way, with me doing everything. In the end, though, after the little part I mentioned before, I had a horrible dry spell, began to worry about my finances, and before long was only too delighted when a friend pitched me as a writer bursting with ideas to a maker of porn flicks. I wrote two for him, taking no credit in view of his startling conception of intellectual property “I buy something from you, so it belongs to me, and it’s credited to me.”
A nice guy, that said, a good husband and a good father who appreciated work well done. Not a Ravachol or an Alexandre Jacob. No Lautréamont or Goya. What then? A maker of porn flicks. The most honest one among them, and God knows I have dealt with a lot. I did not inspect his annual reports. I knew that if a single penny suddenly accrued to me he would phone me on the spot. And that counted, that counted a shitload. So I never went to look at his books, but I did go to see the guy now and again. We chatted, had a drink together. I liked him in a wistful kind of way, because he had taken the verdant, glistening, well-watered path,* while Butron idled around between one botched job and the next.
Cahiers du Cinéma felt free to poke fun at him by saying his work was not even art.
When it comes to art, I could say a lot. Stories and characters like these I have galore—certainly far greater in number than the shekels I ever got from filmmaking.
Some I knew I saw working super hard. They would end up with serious careers. Not my style. When it came to rigged competition I had had a bellyful of it, ever since my mother plopped me down at the starting gate. I had decided long since that henceforward I would do the rigging myself; I was still looking for the best way; my meager efforts were just groping, just maintenance, just making contacts. After a while, all the same, I got myself invited to eat ten or twelve times a week; of course, I had to turn some of the invitations down, but, little by little, there I was with easily half my meals covered.
Which didn’t stop the paternal funds from draining away. But why should I give a fuck? Another two or three cool years at that pace—it was an eternity.
My life was regular. One or two weekends a month in Rouen. I would see Jacquie there. We didn’t talk about anything. Not even our violent fight. Aside from money matters, things are never violent when they are real—or much less, anyway, than when conflicting ideas are involved, as I have noticed many a time.
Hostilities between Jacquie and me had calmed down. She had earned a bit of dough with me, but now she was making some from articles on other subjects. She didn’t even have me read them, which showed I no longer interested her.
As a matter of fact I preferred that she not be interested in me. I would have hated myself for being interesting to the wretched woman; except, that is, in the case of a hard cock, to which she never said no, and nor did I: we did it whenever we felt like it, time and again.
We no longer spoke of Anne. I think she believed that her daughter, of whom she was jealous, was quite out of my life. I saw Anne sometimes, however. It happened that she was in Paris, pretending to study at the Sorbonne. We all know what higher education involves: mainly going to the movies three or four times a day, plus the Cinémathèque at night, along with spurts of politics. Well, okay, let’s be objective. No doubt there are some students who study, but it is obvious that they do so only out of stupidity. As for politics I could say a lot, but don’t get me started. Anne was a militant in some sort of federation of groups, a subdivision of UNEF, the National Union of French Students, which was led by Kornak and Guilledoux, a camel jockey and a midget. Of the Leninist persuasion: disturb the peace, yes, but in a disciplined way. With Anne I went on a demo, maybe two. At one, a policeman was jostled and his kepi tossed from hand to hand. Our crowd filled Boulevard Saint-Germain. The kepi hurtled into the air, pirouetted, fell back down, and was thrown up again, amid shouting and raillery, to the delight of the good citizens at their windows. Then the union marshals intervened. UNEF confiscated the kepi: supposedly such rowdiness was unacceptable. What a bunch of assholes!
Only the ends of demos are good, precisely because the organizers have gone home to bed and you are able to have a bit of fun. I remember one occasion. The march route was a downer: from Bastille to Hôtel de Ville. I don’t even recall what the demonstrators were shouting. In fact I have never made out the hollering of hordes of chumps. Once I even joined a demo in the belief that the crowd was chanting “Free Algeria” when in fact the slogan was “Peace in Algeria.” On the day I am talking about, however, the crowd scattered after a couple of police charges. It was a large crowd and small groups fled down side streets. Night was falling at Place des Vosges. I was bushed. I had been struck twice by gun butts. Lamebrains were singing the Marseillaise. Be my guests, kiddos! We are bolting in complete panic, and you think this kind of thing doesn’t make you look like perfect idiots!
Now some moron was haranguing groups that were moving swiftly but circumspectly. This had been a great victory, he announced, but now it was time to disband. I saw some who were taking the metro. Plenty of others were doing nothing of the sort. Some knots of protesters lengthened out as they headed aggressively for Les Halles via the small streets; I followed suit. We found ourselves in the dark of night on Boulevard Sébastopol. There were enough of us to make a modest force. A hundred or a hundred and fifty. Far from a big popular protest. But not a fucking thing to do with student unions. What we wanted was to have a go at the cops. They approached nonchalantly, nightsticks in hand, and came straight for us. A construction site popped up: the roadway was under repair. What a lovely sight: pickaxes, wheelbarrows, fine sand, and cobblestones in profusion. Gleefully we started the battle. A guy in front of me felled an officer with a pick handle right across the mouth, then moved on. The cop was crawling on the ground, barely conscious and all bloody. I leapt toward him joyfully and booted his repulsive face. Once back home, between the upper and the sole of my cheap shoe, I found a tooth, a canine, cleanly snapped off. My raincoat was covered with blood. I drank a gin and lemon and toyed with the cop’s tooth. I felt a deep satisfaction. I didn’t give a rat’s ass for politics, but there were wonderful moments in life.
*“herbagère, éclatante et mouillée”—the words are those of the poet Lucie Delarue-Mardrus (1905). (Trans.)