Vieux Carre Read Online Free PDF Page A

here, the . . . man’s a painter, does popular bayou pictures displayed in shop windows in the Quarter, his name is . . .
    NIGHTINGALE : Oh, I know him. He’s got a good thing going, commercially speaking, tourists buy them calendar illustrations in dreamy rainbow colors that never existed but in the head of a hack like him.
    WRITER : . . . The, uh, atmosphere is . . . effective.
    NIGHTINGALE : Oh, they sell to people that don’t know paint from art. Maybe you’ve never seen artistic paintings. [
His voice shakes with feverish pride
.] I could do it, in fact I’ve done good painting, serious work. But I got to live, and you can’t live on good painting until you’re dead, or nearly. So, I make it, temporarily, as a quick sketch artist. I flatter old bitches by makin’ ’em ten pounds lighter and ten years younger and with some touches of— decent humanity in their eyes that God forgot to put there, or they’ve decided to dispense with, not always easy. But what is? So— you had an experience with the bayou painter? I didn’t know he was, oh, inclined to boys, this is killing.
    WRITER [
slowly with embarrassment
]: It wasn’t with Mr. Block, it was with a . . . paratrooper.
    NIGHTINGALE : Aha, a paratrooper dropped out of the sky for you, huh? You have such nice smooth skin . . . Would you like a bit of white port? I keep a half pint by my bed to wash down my sandman special when this touch of flu and the bedbugs keep me awake. Just a mo’. I’ll fetch it, we’ll have a nightcap— now that we’re acquainted! [
He goes out rapidly, coughing, then rushes back in with the bottle
.]
    The witch has removed the glass, we’ll have to drink from the bottle. I’ll wash my pill down now, the rest is yours. [
He pops acapsule into his mouth and gulps from the bottle
,
immediately coughing and gagging. He extends the bottle to the writer
.]
    [
Pause. The writer half extends his hand toward the bottle
,
then draws it back and shakes his head
.]
    Oh yes, flu is contagious, how stupid of me, I’m sorry.
    WRITER : Never mind, I don’t care much for liquor.
    NIGHTINGALE : Where you from?
    WRITER : . . . St. Louis.
    NIGHTINGALE : Christ, do people live there?
    WRITER : It has a good art museum and a fine symphony orchestra and . . .
    NIGHTINGALE : No decent gay life at all?
    WRITER : You mean . . .
    NIGHTINGALE : You know what I mean. I mean like the . . . paratrooper.
    WRITER : Oh. No. There could be but . . . living at home . . .
    NIGHTINGALE : Tell me, how did it go with the paratrooper who descended on you at Block’s?
    WRITER : Well at midnight we went out on the gallery and he, the paratrooper, was out on the lower gallery with a party of older men, antique dealers, they were all singing “Auld Lang Syne.”
    NIGHTINGALE : How imaginative and
appropriate
to them.
    WRITER : —I noticed him down there and he noticed me.
    NIGHTINGALE : Noticing him?
    WRITER : . . . Yes. He grinned, and hollered to come down; he took me into the lower apartment. It was vacant, the others still on the gallery, you see I . . . couldn’t understand his presence among the . . .
    NIGHTINGALE : Screaming old faggots at that antique dealer’s. Well, they’re rich and they buy boys, but that’s a scene that you haven’t learned yet. So. What happened downstairs?
    WRITER : He took me into a bedroom; he told me I looked pale and wouldn’t I like a sunlamp treatment. I thought he meant my face so I— agreed—
    NIGHTINGALE : Jesus, you’ve got to be joking.
    WRITER : I was shaking violently like I was a victim of— St. Vitus’s Dance, you know, when he said, “Undress”!
    NIGHTINGALE : But you did.
    WRITER : Yes. He helped me. And I stretched out on the bed under the sunlamp and suddenly he—
    NIGHTINGALE : . . .