Barney's Version by Mordecai Richler Read Free Book Online

counted on for the invention of our most outlandish pranks, I suggested that Cedric invite his publisher and his wife to dinner at his apartment, where the four of us would pretend to be his hired help. Clara and I would cook, and Boogie and Leo, wearing white shirtsand black bow-ties, would serve at table. “I love it,” said Clara, clapping hands, but Boogie wouldn’t have it.
    â€œWhy?” I asked.
    â€œBecause I fear our friend Cedric here would enjoy it too much.”
    An ill wind passed over our table. Cedric, feigning fatigue, called for the bill, and we dispersed separately into the night, each one troubled by his own dark thoughts. But, within days, the episode was forgotten. Once again we took to gathering in Cedric’s apartment late at night, after the jazz clubs had closed, digging into his stash of hashish.
    Those days not only Sidney Bechet, but also Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were playing in small
boîtes de nuit
which we frequented. Lazy spring afternoons we would pick up our mail and some gossip at Gaït Frogé’s English Bookshop on the rue de Seine, or saunter over to the Père Lachaise cemetery to gawk at the graves of Oscar Wilde and Heinrich Heine, among other immortals. But dying, a blight common to earlier generations, did not enter into our scheme of things. It wasn’t on our dance cards.
    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.
    â€œYour position,” said Titian,
    â€œInspires 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