Holiday in a Coma & Love Lasts Three Years: two novels by Frédéric Beigbeder. Frédéric Beigbeder
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ocean.
He remembers the night he spent at Love and Sex on the top floor of Gold where a dozen of Joss’s mates fucked some Chink girl as innocent as she was handcuffed. It was here, after he’d had his turn, that Marc was introduced to Joss’s wife. You learn something new every night.
Marc is horribly unlucky: his parents are in great shape. Every day, they fritter away a little more of his inheritance. Meanwhile, the Digital Sampler, a machine invented in the mid-eighties, has made Joss Dumoulin rich and famous. The sampler makes it possible to nick the best bits from any piece of music and recycle them to make ‘dance’ tracks. Thanks to this invention, DJs, who were previously little more than human jukeboxes, have become musicians in their own right. (It’s as if librarians were writing books or museum curators painting pictures.) Joss was quick on the uptake: suddenly, his productions flooded the Japanese club market and from there the world. All he need do is drag out whatever he likes from his record collection and serve it up to his nocturnal public. He watches their reactions, ditches anything that doesn’t make them dance, notes what works. He feels his way: there is no better focus group than a dance floor. This is how you become an inter-national star while your old friend goes on uselessly studying.
Commercial success wasn’t long in coming. It was Joss who first mixed birdsong with Mesopotamian choirs: the record was number one in thirty countries including Sri Lanka and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Then Joss launched bossa-soukouss over a melody stolen from the Goldberg Variations: a huge hit which made it onto the heavy rotation playlist of MTV Europe. Marc still laughs when he thinks about that summer when, thanks to Dumoulin’s bossa-soukouss video (sponsored by Orangina), everyone was doing the dance where you yank the girl’s breasts.
And so on and so on: Joss chalked up a fortune pretty quickly. Georges Guétary dressed in Jean-Paul Gaultier singing traditional Israeli chants? Joss produced that one: twenty-three weeks at number one in the French charts. Techno-gospel? Joss. That instrumental with Archie Shepp playing sax over a drum solo by Keith Moon (of course you remember – the one that made acid jazz seem gay)? That was Joss. The Sylvie Vartan–Johnny Rotten duet? Joss again. Right now (Marc read about it in the Vanity Fair article where Joss was photographed by Annie Leibovitz drowning in a sea of quarter-inch tape), he’s working on a mix featuring an Airbus A320 crashing and Petula Clark singing ‘Don’t Sleep in the Subway’, a garage version of the speeches of Maréchal Pétain and a one-off concert at Wembley Stadium featuring Luciano Pavarotti singing with AC/DC. He’s got his work cut out for him. His kleptomaniac imagination knows no bounds, to say nothing of his CD sales. Joss Dumoulin understands the age in which he lives: he only makes collages.
And here he is, Joss Dumoulin organising the grand opening of Shit, the club all of Paris has been waiting for. It’s hardly a revelation: Joss does one-nighters all over the world. And not just anywhere: at Club USA (New York), Pacha (Madrid), the Ministry of Sound (London), 90° (Berlin), the Baby’O (Acapulco), the Bash (Miami), the Roxy (Amsterdam), the Mau-Mau (Buenos Aires), Alien (Rome) and – obviously–Space (Ibiza). Different sets where the same people are squirming, depending on the season. Marc is a little bitter but decides to look on the bright side. After all, Joss will be able to introduce him to the prettiest girls at the gig. Or at least the one he doesn’t want for himself.
Marc has access to a network of informants: PR sluts and certified star-fuckers. They phone him to tell him that Shit really was built in an old public toilet. They’ve built a giant toilet on the place de la Madeleine. A six-feet-high pink bog roll serves as an awning above the entrance. But the main attraction, the thing that will completely revolutionise clubbing in Paris, is that they’ve built a submersible circular dance floor in the shape of a toilet seat, equipped with a giant flush mechanism which plunges the dancers into a huge whirlpool at some unspecified point during the evening. Marc also learns that, to maintain the element of surprise, the guests for the opening were deliberately not sent their invitations until the day of the opening, at the last possible minute. He thinks that most of the interesting people will somehow manage to wriggle out of their multiple prior engagements.
*
Although tonight he is spoiled for choice. Marc’s coffee table groans under the weight of possibilities: a performance at a gallery opening on the rue des Beaux-Arts (the painter is scheduled to cut off both hands at around 9 p.m.), a dinner at the Arc in honour of the half-brother of Lenny Kravitz’s bassist’s best friend, a fancy-dress ball in the old Renault factory at Issy-les-Moulineaux to launch a new perfume (Assembly Line by Chanel), a private concert by the hot new English band (The John Lennons) at La Cigale, a themed party at Denise’s on the ‘Heterosexual Lesbians as Leather Queens in Drag’ and a rave at the Élysée Palace. In spite of everything, Marc knows that all over the city, the question of the moment is: ‘Are you going to Shit tonight?’ (The uninitiated who misunderstands risks betraying not only his ignorance but a personal incontinence problem.)
Marc poses in front of the bathroom mirror. Tonight he’s going to kiss girls he hasn’t been introduced to. He’s going to sleep with people he’s never met, people he hasn’t previously had fifteen intimate dinners with.
He’s impressing nobody, especially not himself. Deep down, he knows he wants the same thing all his friends want: to fall in love again.
He grabs a white shirt and a navy blue tie with white polka dots, he shaves quickly, douses himself with eau de toilette, howls in pain and leaves the flat. He refuses to panic.
He thinks: ‘Mythify everything because everything is mythic. Things, places, dates, people are all potential legends, you just have to find the right myth. Everyone who lived in Paris in 1940 will eventually be a character in a Patrick Modiano novel. Anyone who set foot in a London pub in 1965 will have slept with Mick Jagger. When you get down to it, being a legend is easy: you just have to wait your turn. Carnaby Street, the Hamptons, Greenwich Village, le Lac d’Aiguebelette, the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Goa, Guéthary, le Paradou, Mustique, Phuket: it doesn’t matter if you’re bored shitless at the time, and twenty years from now you can brag that you were there. Time is a sacrament. Sick and tired of your life? Hang in there and you’ll be a legend.’ Walking gives Marc some peculiar ideas.
The toughest problem is managing to be mythic and alive at the same time. Joss Dumoulin might have pulled it off.
Does a living legend keep his hands in his pockets? Does he wear a cashmere scarf? Does he agree to spend ‘a night at Shit’?
Marc checks to make sure he has no signal on his mobile. No, not a single bar. There’s no need to worry, then. It’s perfectly normal that his phone isn’t ringing. Marc will be uncontactable for another six yards.
There was a time when he went out every night, and not just for professional reasons. Sometimes he’d run into a certain Jocelyn du Moulin (oh yes, that’s what he was called back in the day; the ‘du’ which indicates he’s part of the old French aristocracy is something he only dropped recently: now he’s pseudo-working class).
The weather is fine so Marc starts singing ‘Singing in the Rain’. It’s still better than humming ‘Le Lundi au Soleil’ when it’s raining (especially given that it’s Friday.)
Paris is a film set mock-up. Marc Marronnier wishes that it was all really made of pasteboard. He prefers the fake Pont Neuf, the one Leos Carax had built in the middle of nowhere, to the real one that Christo wrapped. He wishes that this whole city were deliberately fake instead of pretending to be real. It’s too beautiful to be real! He wishes the shadowy figures he can see behind the curtains were cardboard cut-outs moved by a system of electric pulleys. Unfortunately, the Seine is full of liquid water, the buildings are made of dressed stone and the passers-by he encounters are not paid extras. The special effects are elsewhere, better hidden.
Marc has been seeing fewer people recently. He’s selective. It’s something called ‘getting old’. He loathes it, even though it appears to be a commonplace phenomenon.
Tonight, he will pick up girls. Why isn’t he gay? It’s pretty surprising, given the decadent circles he hangs out in, his