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Authors: Dennis Cooper
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wrong.
Yes, this recent blather is a strike against my toned-down marbled swarm, but it’s also an assurance of my honesty, even when, as I’ve come to know and you will understand eventually, I was less finding my true self back then or living day to day in the democratic sense than enacting a “life” no more incipient than a toy’s.
If I’d taken I don’t know how many words of caution in my life and spun my insights thusly but within earshot of a reputable psychologist . . . well, I have no idea.
For his twelfth birthday, Alfonse asked me on what amounted to a date. His chosen getaway was Die!!Die!!Color!!!, an annual convention wherein the newest manga, anime, candy-colored gadgets, and other Japanese playthings with internal hard drives were unveiled to thousands of Asiatic Parisians and freeloaders like my brother in the Parc des Expositions.
Billed and barely marketed for years as your basic Japan Expo, the rechristened Die!!Die!!Color!!! had a screaming, jam-packed advertising scheme to match its switched-out title, and one could not have traveled via metro to or from Bastille, Belleville, or other hipster centrals in many months without trying to decode its vast, headache-inducing posters.
Thus, I pictured an event traipsed by coolness-seeking fashionistas, its aisles as wan and hushed by pretense as the runways of Chanel or Gareth Pugh, and I gambled that Alfonse would rein his usual Narcissus at the pond routine into, at best, a pitiable nerdiness that might, at worst, cause me to blush occasionally.
The only catch involved keeping my newly motivated hands off Alfonse’s freshly gripping figure and folded in my lap throughout the car trip to and fro, during which we’d be dangerously soundproofed in the rear compartment of the limousine my father had unhelpfully rented for the occasion.
Luckily, the route took us through Paris and not a Saudi Arabian desert-scape at night.
Vacations aside, I’ve been a hard-core Parisian since I was born the way dinosaurs stuck in tar pits might as well be fossils. So, once Azmir had eased our road hog through the cunning intersection where rue de Turenne crosses, kills, and swipes the cars from rue de Bretagne, then somehow squeezed onto the tiny rue Vieille du Temple, its close-knit, historically important views enlivened my Olympian detachment, and I fended off the hanky-panky building up on our respective tongues and fingers with the almost unbroken gushing of a tour guide.
You witnessed my skills in this regard when I bent poor Serge’s ear vis-à-vis the trove of his backyard, and my methodology was near identical in this case, but with baroque and art nouveau façades, and the wordier superlatives they portended, in place of samey trees.
By the time Azmir off-loaded us at Parc des Expositions, I had waxed, emblazoned, and spit-polished a fairly average set of boulevards into a virtual Champs-Élysées at Christmas,
and Alfonse, who found any city without flying cabs and giant, evil robots severely lacking, was my numbed, sensibly tight-lipped hostage.
I’d accompanied my father to the very same convention hall years before for a like-minded fair at which the tourism bureaus from hundreds of unpopular countries hoped to sell French travel agents on the blueness of their lakes and the alluringly slight differences in the layouts of their golf courses.
I believe he had a cockamamie scheme to turn the art he’d bought into the centerpiece of a museum in some country so bereft of wonders that it would be a major tourist attraction by default. As was usually the case when he hoped to close a deal, I’d been drafted in as his accoutrement in hopes of dazzling sentimentalists or pedophiles with his prestigious genes, which, of course, weren’t his to begin with.
All I can remember is my hair was patted to an oily clump and that my ass was groped surreptitiously so often and invasively by prospective clients that I suffered muscle cramps in my posterior
Yes, this recent blather is a strike against my toned-down marbled swarm, but it’s also an assurance of my honesty, even when, as I’ve come to know and you will understand eventually, I was less finding my true self back then or living day to day in the democratic sense than enacting a “life” no more incipient than a toy’s.
If I’d taken I don’t know how many words of caution in my life and spun my insights thusly but within earshot of a reputable psychologist . . . well, I have no idea.
For his twelfth birthday, Alfonse asked me on what amounted to a date. His chosen getaway was Die!!Die!!Color!!!, an annual convention wherein the newest manga, anime, candy-colored gadgets, and other Japanese playthings with internal hard drives were unveiled to thousands of Asiatic Parisians and freeloaders like my brother in the Parc des Expositions.
Billed and barely marketed for years as your basic Japan Expo, the rechristened Die!!Die!!Color!!! had a screaming, jam-packed advertising scheme to match its switched-out title, and one could not have traveled via metro to or from Bastille, Belleville, or other hipster centrals in many months without trying to decode its vast, headache-inducing posters.
Thus, I pictured an event traipsed by coolness-seeking fashionistas, its aisles as wan and hushed by pretense as the runways of Chanel or Gareth Pugh, and I gambled that Alfonse would rein his usual Narcissus at the pond routine into, at best, a pitiable nerdiness that might, at worst, cause me to blush occasionally.
The only catch involved keeping my newly motivated hands off Alfonse’s freshly gripping figure and folded in my lap throughout the car trip to and fro, during which we’d be dangerously soundproofed in the rear compartment of the limousine my father had unhelpfully rented for the occasion.
Luckily, the route took us through Paris and not a Saudi Arabian desert-scape at night.
Vacations aside, I’ve been a hard-core Parisian since I was born the way dinosaurs stuck in tar pits might as well be fossils. So, once Azmir had eased our road hog through the cunning intersection where rue de Turenne crosses, kills, and swipes the cars from rue de Bretagne, then somehow squeezed onto the tiny rue Vieille du Temple, its close-knit, historically important views enlivened my Olympian detachment, and I fended off the hanky-panky building up on our respective tongues and fingers with the almost unbroken gushing of a tour guide.
You witnessed my skills in this regard when I bent poor Serge’s ear vis-à-vis the trove of his backyard, and my methodology was near identical in this case, but with baroque and art nouveau façades, and the wordier superlatives they portended, in place of samey trees.
By the time Azmir off-loaded us at Parc des Expositions, I had waxed, emblazoned, and spit-polished a fairly average set of boulevards into a virtual Champs-Élysées at Christmas,
and Alfonse, who found any city without flying cabs and giant, evil robots severely lacking, was my numbed, sensibly tight-lipped hostage.
I’d accompanied my father to the very same convention hall years before for a like-minded fair at which the tourism bureaus from hundreds of unpopular countries hoped to sell French travel agents on the blueness of their lakes and the alluringly slight differences in the layouts of their golf courses.
I believe he had a cockamamie scheme to turn the art he’d bought into the centerpiece of a museum in some country so bereft of wonders that it would be a major tourist attraction by default. As was usually the case when he hoped to close a deal, I’d been drafted in as his accoutrement in hopes of dazzling sentimentalists or pedophiles with his prestigious genes, which, of course, weren’t his to begin with.
All I can remember is my hair was patted to an oily clump and that my ass was groped surreptitiously so often and invasively by prospective clients that I suffered muscle cramps in my posterior
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