Club Delta—It's intermission and everyone steps outside for air. Two bars are lit, active. A throng has spilled onto the street. Nothing can be heard but the sparking and sputtering of striking matches punctuating a haze of cigarette smoke. All of a sudden, this noise subsides. A buzzer goes off and rustling sounds supersede: the audience shuffles back inside. Everyone sits. It's curtain time.

I watch as a heavy-set man appears, wearing a black jacket, black vest, and black cravat. Sinister-looking, he cuts across the stage and through the crowded house, wading among the seats, waving a revolver. Slowly, he loads it in front of us, cocks it, and begins the atrocious pantomime. He has been cleaned out in a card game. Oblivious as a lunatic, he collapses on a chair, crying. But an odious force makes him get to his feet. My eyes are glued to the puffy flesh of his swollen face, his two stubby hands. Some cruel and tragic strength enables him to draw himself up blearily before us, the living embodiment of rank despair, anguished but redoubtable. He spares us nothing, not even the blood which dribbles from his lips when he fires the pistol point blank.

"The Mime" comes from Streetcorners: Prose Poems of the Demi-Monde by Francis Carco (Green Integer, 2004). The cover photograph is by H. Martinie. Gilbert Alter-Gilbert provides a typically-wonderful translation and a thorough introduction entitled "The Thousand and One Nights of Francis Carco." Please read my interview with Alter-Gilbert (he talks about Carco).

Selections in this volume were taken from Instincts (1911) and La Boheme et Mon Coeur (1912).

Here's the ending of Alter-Gilbert's intro:

Carco embodied the spirit of his age; he was the Paris of the teens, twenties, and thirties. He will always be remembered as the underworld dilettante and latter-day boulevardier who sang of murky thoroughfares and drizzle-dappled pavements, and who solemnized for an entire generation the studied irreverence of the professional outsider, and the velvet crush of the demi-mondial "Life." Carco was at his best in the role of "gutter poet." But he was not merely a celebrant of lowlife, nor was he a moralist, for he did not judge his subjects, but presented them without preachification or prescription. He was simply a gifted poet who etched with words the vicissitudes of the damned and not-so-beautiful inhabitants of society's darkest corners.

TamTam Books publisher Tosh Berman likes Carco's pulp fiction, which is surprisingly not too hard to find (yet). I'm sure I'll be rambling about it here soon. Also see this page.