His doorbell rings. Marc Marronnier loves a lot of things: the photos in the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar, Irish whiskey straight up, the avenue Vélasquez, a song (‘God Only Knows’ by the Beach Boys), chocolate éclairs, a book (les Deux Veuves by Dominique Noguez) and belated ejaculation. Doorbells ringing is not one of those things.
‘Monsieur Marronnier?’ asks a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet.
‘In the flesh.’
‘This is for you.’
The bell-boy in the motorcycle helmet (he looks like ‘Spirou and the Golden Bowl’) hands him an envelope approximately three feet square, jiggling impatiently as though he urgently needs a piss. Marc takes the envelope and gives him a ten-franc piece to disappear out of his life. Marc Marronnier doesn’t need a bell-boy in a motorcycle helmet in his life.
Inside the envelope, he is utterly unsurprised to discover the following:
A NIGHT IN SHIT
* * * * * * * * *
Grand Opening Night
Place de la Madeleine
Paris
He is, however, pretty surprised to find, stapled to the invitation:
See you tonight, you old queer Joss Dumoulin
JOSS DUMOULIN? Marc was sure he was living in permanent exile in Japan. Or dead.
But dead men don’t host club nights.
And so Marc Marronnier brushes his fingers through his hair, a gesture that indicates a certain inner contentment. It has to be said, he’s been waiting a long time for ‘a night in Shit’. Every day for the past year he’s walked past the construction site for the new club, ‘the biggest nightclub in Paris’. And every time he passes, he thinks, on opening night, there are going to be a truckload of honeys.
Marc Marronnier aims to please. This is probably why he wears glasses. When they’re perched on his nose, his colleagues think he looks like William Hurt, only uglier. (NB His myopia dates from his secondary school days at Louis-le-Grand, his scoliosis from his days studying at Sciences Po.)
It’s official: Marc Marronnier is going to have sexual relations tonight, whatever happens. He may even do the deed with more than one person, who knows? He has packed six condoms, for he is an ambitious young man.
Marc Marronnier senses he is going to die, in forty years or so. When he’s quite finished getting on our nerves.
Society scoundrel, armchair rebel, photo-opportunity mercenary, disgraceful bourgeois, his life consists of listening to messages on his answering machine and leaving them on other answering machines. All the while watching thirty channels simultaneously using picture-in-picture on cable TV. He sometimes forgets to eat for several days.
On the day he was born, he was already a has-been. There are countries where one dies at a ripe old age, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, you are born at an old age. Blasé before he had lived a day, he now cultivates his failures. For example, he boasts about writing slim volumes of barely a hundred pages with print runs of less than 3,000. ‘Since literature is dead, I make do with writing for my friends,’ he eructates at formal dinners, knocking back the dregs from the glasses of the girls sitting next to him. It is important that Neuilly-sur-Seine not give up hope.
A nightlife correspondent, copywriter–editor, literary journalist: Marc cannot commit to anything. He refuses to choose one life over another. These days, he says, ‘everyone is insane, the only choice left is between schizophrenia and paranoia: we are either many in one or one against all’. And yet, like all chameleons (Fregoli, Zelig, Thierry Le Luron), if there is one thing he hates, it is being alone. This is why there are multiple Marc Marronniers.
Delphine Seyrig passed away in the late morning, it is now 7 p.m. Marc has taken off his glasses to brush his teeth. I’ve just told you he is unstable by nature.
Is Marc Marronnier happy? Well, he’s got nothing to complain about. He spends vast sums of money every month and has no children. That, surely, is happiness: having no problems. And yet, from time to time he feels something like worry in his belly. The annoying thing is that he is unable to determine what kind of worry. It is an Unidentified Anguish. It makes him cry watching dreadful movies. He is definitely missing something, but what? Thank God the feeling invariably wears off.
In the meantime, it will be very strange for him to see Joss Dumoulin again after all this time. Joss Dumoulin, dubbed ‘the million dollar DJ’ in last month’s Vanity Fair: an old friend who hit the big time. Marc is unsure if he is really happy about the fact that Joss has become so famous. He feels like a sprinter still at the starting-blocks, watching his best mate ascend the podium to howls of adulation from the crowd.
In a nutshell, Joss Dumoulin is master of the universe, since he practises the most important profession in the world in the greatest city in the world: he is the best DJ in Tokyo.
Is it really necessary to remind you how the DJs seized power? In a hedonistic society as superficial as ours, the citizens of the world are interested in only one thing: partying. (Sex and money being implicitly part and parcel of the whole: money facilitates partying which facilitates sex.) And DJs have complete control. Not content just with clubs, they spawn the rave culture and have people dancing in warehouses, car parks, building sites, any available patch of waste ground. They are the ones who killed off rock and roll, inventing first rap and then house. They lord it over the Top 40 by day and the clubs by night. It’s getting hard to avoid them.
DJs remix our lives. Nobody gives them a hard time about it: if you’re going to hand over power to someone, a DJ is at least as qualified as a movie star or an ex-lawyer. After all, to govern, all you need is a good ear, a little general knowledge and the ability to segue.
Being a DJ is a curious profession. Somewhere between priest and prostitute. You give everything you have to people who give nothing in return. You spin discs so that other people can dance, have it large, come on to the pretty girl in the skin-tight dress. Then you head home on your own with your records under your arm. Being a DJ is a dilemma. A DJ exists only through other people: he steals other people’s music to get other people to dance. He’s a mix of Robin Hood (steals from one to give to the other) and Cyrano de Bergerac (living his life by proxy). All in all, the most important profession of our time is enough to drive anyone mad.
Joss Dumoulin didn’t squander his youth at the Institut d’Études Politiques like Marc. At twenty, he headed straight for Japan with nothing in his luggage except the three Bs of success: Bone Idleness, Bullshit Artistry and Bigging It Up. Why Japan? Because, he used to say, ‘If you’re going to take a gap year somewhere, you might as well head for the richest country on earth. It’s all about the Benjamins, baby.’
Of course, Joss’s gap year turned into a gap life. In no time flat he was the mascot of Nippon nightlife. His club nights at Juliana’s, it is said, were bangin’. It has to be said he arrived at just the right time: Tokyo was just discovering the delights of capitalist decadence. Government ministers were increasingly corrupt, foreigners increasingly numerous. Tokyo’s gilded youth was having a hard time spending all their parents’ money. All in all, Marc Marronnier took the wrong turn.
He went over for a visit once. He can confirm that Joss Dumoulin has only to walk into Gold and suddenly every guy in the place is snorting loudly or popping little bits of blotter. As for the girls, they turn themselves into geishas as he walks by. Marc has Polaroids in a drawer somewhere to prove it.
Joss Dumoulin has lived Marc Marronnier’s life for him. Pulled all the girls he doesn’t have the balls to talk to. Taken all the drugs he’s afraid to try. Joss is the polar opposite of Marc; maybe this is why they got on so well once upon a time.
Marc only drinks fizzy drinks: Coca-Cola in the morning, Berocca in the afternoon, vodka and tonic at night. He fills himself