There is a popular French blog that I follow and is a mixture of photos and occasional pieces about characters, books, and movies. My French is hopeless, and I appreciate that Google allows me to right click and translate it into dodgy English.
I like the blog, but today I have inadvertently discovered that what I took to be cleverly written pieces are really a collection of plagiarised snippets from other websites.
It came to light after researching a story it had featured about Jean-Claude Brialy, a French actor from the 1950s and 1960s, Yves Montand, the Italian-born French actor and singer, and Reda Caire, a popular singer in Paris from the 1930s to the 1950s. I found that the story existed word for word in several places.
A synopsis.
Brialy once claimed that Montand had a nine-month gay affair with Reda Caire while working as his private secretary.
Helene Hazara, a cultural critic, radio hostess and expert on French chanson, wrote that “everyone in show business knew that Montand had been Caire’s lover. In the ’50s, Montand used to make homophobic jokes about Reda, who called him up one day and said, ‘If you say nasty things about me, I can also tell stories about you!’”
But Caire, speaking about Montand, also came up with the best and bitchiest line. ”It is odd that a boy with such a beautiful membrum should have such smelly feet.”
There is a scene in Molly Manning Walker’s coming of age movie, How to Have Sex, where Mia McKenna Bruce’s character, Tara, walks along Dinokratias, the wildest street at Crete’s Malia Beach.
It is the morning after the night before.
The sun is rising behind the mountains. The bars are closed. Rubbish is strewn along the street, the wind gets hold of it and blows empty bottles along the warming tarmac, there are discarded flip flops, and piles of vomit that will soon be scorched by the sun. It is deserted, except for the solitary bar owner who sits looking at an apocalypse that must be cleaned up.
I’ve gone back in time, same place, same time of day, only a distant year.
Hours earlier, the street had been full of kids like me enjoying drunken depravity. Drink after drink after drink, until the world had started to spin, and where I had to park my backside on the kerb and listen to banging dance music, and the screams and shouts of people who, the more they drank, got louder and louder.
The sticky heat of the night, with the smell of wild orchids, and sun lotion, and Davidoff Cool Water. Tanned, sweaty, half-naked bodies, with dirty feet. Skimpy shorts and ripped tee-shirts. Pecs, tits, and tattoos. Gold chains and nipple piercings. Skinny Joes with holiday haircuts. Six-pack caballeros. People who were in love with everyone. A moment that would bookmark itself in the subconscious , until the day you see a movie that reminded you.
Then there was the shirtless guy with long legs and sticky out ears who parked his arse next to mine and offered me a bottle of lukewarm water. He chatted shit, but we were strangers who were in this together, and he suggested we take a walk. I followed him through tiny dusty roads, away from the noise and crowds, to where it was dark and quiet, and cicadas sang while we talked.
He told me about his shitty job in a supermarket, his girlfriend who had got pissed and gone off with another bloke, and his brother that nobody knew about, who was in the nick for murder. I told him how popular I was with girls, which was true, and he was impressed. There is little else to remember except that we talked until the sky lightened, a cockerel crowed, and he said he must go back to where he was staying in the hills.
By the time I walked back to the apartment, Dinokratias had ditched its partygoers. There were no tears in my eyes like Tara had in the movie, but there had been a feeling of satisfaction, that I had experienced something unique, a moment in time when I had met somebody who I would never meet again. I never asked him his name, but he had been happy, and drunk, to tell me everything about himself, safe in the knowledge that what he told me would go nowhere and quickly forgotten.
I have reached the end of André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis Essays, and it has been a long journey. I finished it, and realised that for the most part, I have no idea what Aciman is writing about. As I’ve mentioned before, this is perhaps because I am not as clever as he is.
But I have persevered, and he talks about irrealis moods and uses examples from his interesting life, in books he has read, and in the movies he has watched. I have even taken the trouble of researching ‘irrealis moods’ but became more confused.
I have tried to explain it to my partner and got it hopelessly wrong.
“Something that happened, but might not have happened, but we expected it to happen, therefore it might have happened, but we did not realise that it had happened, and might not have even happened yet, but might still happen.”
I can take satisfaction that I have at least written like Aciman, even if it is entirely incorrect.
There are fantastic lines in the book that I wish I had written… if only I had been clever enough.
It was incredibly cold. He wore a thick coat and long scarf, a snood covered his face, and he sported a black woolly hat. Only those blue eyes might have given him away, but nobody gave him a second glance.
The tram was crowded, and he had to stand, but he didn’t mind because he could watch people and not be recognised. He didn’t normally mix with these people but there were no airs and graces, no standing on ceremony, just ordinary honest folk going about their business, and that was a comfort to him.
What would they say if they knew who was standing beside them?
He got off somewhere in the suburbs and called at a Londis where he asked for twenty Marlboro Gold. He looked at the shopkeeper who appeared nervous, like he was going to be robbed, and only afterwards did he realise that the man was suspicious of his American accent.
It was a short walk to the tiny terrace on a side street, and he knocked on the door. It was opened by John who gave him a peck on the forehead.
“I didn’t think you would come.”
“Why wouldn’t I come?”
“It’s just that you are a famous actor, coming to my house for tea.”
Back in the States, tea was called dinner, and this amused him.
“Where would you like to eat?”
He took off his winter clothing and settled on the sofa beside the fire. “I think we should eat here and watch Emmerdale and Coronation Street.”
I have a friend request on Facebook from Cameron who is Gen Z beefcake and part twink. I’m flattered. But there is a problem. Trouble always follows him. My friend says reject it, but I believe that if somebody sends a friend request then they obviously fancy you. My friend says I’m delusional, and I hope he’s wrong, but seldom is.
It’s late and I can’t sleep because Ben’s messaged me. “Are we having a catchup this year, or should I wait until 2025?” He wants to go out for a drink, and I’ve been avoiding him for months. It’s only the second day of the new year and I reply by saying that it will soon be next year. I once loved him, but now he annoys me.
I try to rid myself of the guilt by staring at the books stacked beside my bed.
Jarvis, who grew up in a house that is less than a mile from where I am now, and who went to school with my friends. A nerdy genius who made something of his life and that makes me envious because he’s rich and successful and has a smart apartment in Paris. I’m not particularly fond of Pulp but he fascinates me, and I think he’d be good to chat with over a pint.
Noel, who wrote twee plays and witty songs like Mad About the Boy that people had no clue about its meaning. Being gay meant something entirely different then. I don’t suppose he’d have been good to chat with over a pint because it would have been gin and tonic and chilled champagne. And that plummy voice would have irritated somebody with a northern accent like mine and I would have punched him in the face. “Oh darling, I am bleeding from the nose, it is most inconvenient.”
André, who once wrote a book that I thought could be a wonderful movie and my friend said I was silly. All I shall say to my friend now is… Call Me by Your fucking Name. André’s essays wobble between lustre and mundane. As such, he makes me feel inadequate because his lengthy musings bore me, and I realise that I’m not intelligent enough to understand these scholarly thoughts.
You are the son of Venus, Goddess of Love, because you are Italian with thick black hair and dark seductive eyes.
You gave me a red rose and spoke of your sacred mother who ran towards her lover to warn him about the plot to murder him. She cut her ankle on a thorn bush, and her blood turned into blooming red roses wherever it touched.
“I will stand by your side,” you said. “I am showing you my depth of commitment and my intention is to build a lasting and meaningful relationship that is based on my love and devotion.”
I took the red rose and thought about passion and love, romance and deep feelings, desire, beauty, harmony, joy, luck, and pride.
That enchanting fragrance mingles with the water, salt, and the delicious oils of the body.
“Footsteps on the dance floor, remind me baby of you, Teardrops in my eyes, next time I’ll be true.”
Whenever I hear that song, I think of you.
We heard them singing it live and they wore yellow raincoats because it was cold and rainy.
And that song still makes me think of you.
I ask myself questions. How the fuck did we adopt you? Where did you come from?
Blue jeans, leather jacket, and slicked back hair. Skinny as a rake and nice legs that were shit at football.
We called you Boy. Because you were young and cheeky, naive, impressionable, eager, and needed someone to look after you.
Things went wrong in London, something to do with drugs, and you reached out to us.
We were the big brothers you never had. Shaping your life, leading you astray. Pumping your ambitions. Picking you up when you fell.
Your parents loved us and thanked us.
“And the music don’t feel like it did when I felt it with you, Nothing that I do or feel ever feels like I felt it with you.”
When you wanted to go out. Just the two of us. Week after week. Somewhere quiet to talk. Something to say. But we never said what we wanted to.
That obsession with Dirty Dancing. It played in that white car of yours, and Belinda Carlisle sat in the back seat singing Circle in the Sand. But there was only us.
When your head rested in my lap, and your hand squeezed my thigh and stroked my leg. They said you were drunk, but I knew different. I went to bed happy. I can still feel that gentle hand.
When you went to a sauna, and begged me to go. An excitable boy who wanted to learn. But I wouldn’t go because I wanted to do whatever they did to you. I didn’t tell you that, and I regret it.
That afternoon in the rain, when Womack and Womack sang Teardrops, I should have said come home with me. Stay in my single bed. Let me hold you and care for you and love you. Because I think you would have done, and everything might have been different.
“I took a crazy chance, And next time I’ll be true, I’ll be true, I’ll be true.”
Perfectly Hard and Glamorous 