Free How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired by Dany Laferrière Page A

The biggest adventure in her life. Theft. Corrupting an Outremont girl is practically a BA in itself.
    â€œHow many do you have in your bag?”
    â€œFive or six, I don’t know.”
    â€œThat’s a day’s work. Let’s go. Give me your bag.
    Go ahead, I’ll follow. Don’t look at the cashier. I’ll take care of everything.”
    MIZ LITERATURE is in exultation.
    â€œYou know, I made a wish back there.”
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œOne day we’ll come here and steal your book.”
    I close my eyes. And picture, with a dash of perverse pleasure, an old lady slipping a book unnoticed into her purse: Black Cruiser’s Paradise.

Miz Clockwork Orange’s Electronic
Rhythm Drowning out Black Congas
    I TURN onto St. Catherine Street.
    â€œHello, Black Beauty.”
    A transvestite.
    â€œWhere’s the Clochards Célèstes?”
    â€œThat way, Beautiful.”
    Bouba left me a message next to the Remington. Miz Literature had come by at noon. She’d be waiting for me tonight at the Clochards Célèstes.
    The staircase is as narrow as a rope ladder. Two spacious rooms. A bar. A trio of guys in battered fedoras, elbows on the bar, watching a baseball game on TV . No sound. The TV is on a shelf next to an enormous Budweiser bottle. This Bud’s for you.
    â€œA Bud.”
    Advertising works.
    At the far end of the room, thirty tables around a stage. Senegalese playing music. Four drums, two congas. Insistent, frenetic rhythm. Zoom to the back, right: Miz Literature sipping something green. Electricity in the air. The black bodies of the Senegalese glow in the darkness shot through with magnesium flashes. A whiff of hashish, light but persistent. I cross the room through the Senegalese show. The moist pulse of burnt bodies waiting for a rain of nago rhythm. Call of the bush on St. Catherine Street. Black music for white dancers. Soul. Soul on fire. High tension. Miz Literature is talking with a punk girl. Miz Punk shoots me a killing glance. She wants to play rough.
    Koko, one of the Senegalese musicians, winks my way. Brother. Miz Punk caught the signal.
    â€œWhere are you from?”
    â€œHarlem.”
    â€œHarlem! I love Harlem.”
    â€œDo you?”
    Miz Punk is totally wired.
    â€œIs there a lot of crime?”
    â€œYou do what you can.”
    â€œI heard no one makes it past seventeen. You die first. Is that true?”
    â€œSure. I’m fifteen myself.”
    Miz Punk is seventeen. She gives me a strange look, trying to ferret out the famous Harlem beat in me. The killer instinct. I shake my head gently with my best Malcolm X look.
    THE SENEGALESE finish their show in a burst of frenzied rhythm. They gather up their instruments (drums, congas, kora), wave goodbye and go headlong down the suicide stairway, followed by a cluster of dashiki-clad groupies. Colonialized white girls. The priestesses of the Temple of Race. High on Negro.
    THE DJ puts on hard rock. Miz Punk leaps onto the dance floor. Tina Turner. She starts jumping up and down. Madness. Dervish. Hard face, upper lip split by a razor slash, deep-set eyes, her body dislocated, disjointed, off-center, fragmented. She dances a half-hour with no reprieve. Miz Punk lasts longer than the copper-top battery. (“You, as well as they, are doomed to die.” Sura XXXIX , 31.)
    We don’t waste time getting out of there, Miz Literature and I, leaving Miz Punk, alias Miz Clockwork Orange, to crash through the floor of the Clochards Célèstes. It’s raining. We take shelter under the marquee of the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde. Miz Literature kisses me on the mouth in front of the Death of a Salesman poster. We take the 129. Miz Literature has wet hair, which only adds to her charm.
    â€œI don’t want any unpleasant surprises.”
    â€œI’m telling you for the hundredth time, my parents are in Europe. I got a telegram this morning. Here’s