Many people, eager to put a face on the stray observations recorded on this page, have been urging me to post a photograph. I’m afraid they’ll have to be patient. My digital camera is not in serviceable condition at the moment, having been inadvertently dropped into a large bowl of bouillabaisse.
I’m hoping to get it working soon, but in the meantime let me respond to a related query I’ve been getting: which celebrity, living or dead, do I most resemble? Well, it may sound immodest to say so, but I’ve often been compared to Orson Welles in his F-Is-for-Fake period.
This talk of bouillabaisse is making me hungry, and reminding me of that trying business at lunch today (or breakfast, I should say, since I hadn’t left the table). I was in a private room of my favorite café, hard at work on an abstract charcoal rendering of my lovely twenty-two-year-old lover Dudu, who was posing nude against the balcony. The light was exquisite. A waiter burst in and, before I could look up, spilled an entire tureen of billi-bi on my little sketch.
“Fils de putain de tete de merde!” I cried and grabbed a gigot d'agneau à la provençale, wielding it menacingly. I did not, however, strike the man, who retreated abjectly. Dudu was laughing, in her cruel way, but I was in no mood to join her. My billi-bi was wasted, my sketch obliterated. Thank God I’d had the restraint to spare the lamb.
Out of sorts, I called for coq au vin, foie gras, pot au feu, crème brulet, and a bottle of cabernet sauvingon. A waiter came running--not the same one, unfortunately--slipped on a steak au poivre that had somehow ended up on the floor beside me, and broke his collarbone.