The International Writers Magazine: Sex and the City

French Kiss • Dean Borok It’s a dream come true for me to have French presidential politics determined in a New York City hotel room on the basis of a blowjob. Lately I haven’t been able to afford a visit to France, so France has come to me!

As we all know by now, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, president of the International Monetary Fund and presumptive Socialist candidate to oppose Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s presidential election there, was yanked off an Air France flight from New York to Paris after having allegedly molested an African hotel maid in his $3,000 a day suite at the Sofitel Hotel near Times Square. As I once rhapsodized, it’s a treat to beat your meat on Forty Second Street. According to the Wall Street Journal account, Strauss-Kahn allegedly emerged from the bathroom of his suite stark naked, brutalized the maid, forced his penis into her mouth, tried to rip off her panties and chased her around the place until she was able to frantically flee.

Strauss-Kahn then hastily checked out of the Sofitel, leaving his cell phone behind. He later called the hotel management to find out if they were in possession of it (imagine the phone numbers in that phone’s memory!) and gave his location as JFK Airport which they gave to police, who dragged him off the plane and deposited him in a holding cell in a Harlem precinct house.

I happen to know that police station, having been briefly incarcerated there for smoking dope at a roller skating party in Central Park many years ago. They chained me to a fat Puerto Rican dude who stank like a skunk before transporting me down to the Tombs in Lower Manhattan, where I spent many memorable hours communing with nature until the judge released me with a wrist slap the next morning.

The idea of one of France’s most distinguished intellectuals from the pinnacle of that country’s splendid culture sharing that experience makes me feel closer to him. We are sort of like fraternity brothers, in a sense. At the least, we certainly share a common experience to discuss if we should ever meet socially.

Hey, Strauss-Kahn knows the New York Criminal Justice system better than I do at this point. The times that I have spent there, my visits were very brief. Strauss-Kahn is still inside at the time of this writing. He has just been refused bail for being a flight risk, since he has already been dragged off one plane, so he is lodged at Rikers Island, which has no stars in the Michelin Guide. Instead of exclusive escargots and delectable armagnac at the Tour d’Argent restaurant as the bateaux mouches glide gracefully by, he will be dining on freakin rancid baloney sandwiches and Kool-Aid in the company of José and Frankie The Rat in a mess hall reeking with filth and disinfectant and filled with screaming morons and flying food.

Not that they don’t have the same accommodations for detainees in the French Republic, but if Strauss-Kahn had succeeded in getting home, instead of kindly giving up his location to the NYPD, he never would have seen the inside of a French jail. Back in France, Strauss-Kahn would have had the influence to brush off US extradition efforts against him the way you brush off some pesky gnats.

It’s not likely Strauss-Kahn will be leaving New York soon, so he gets to perfect his English and Spanish. It’s also a miraculous stroke of good fortune for me as a writer, having a New York blowjob become the determining factor in a French presidential race, if not French history itself, if I can figure out how to exploit it. This is where having a contact at Rikers Island jail is already becoming a desirable social asset.

I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, considering my intense interest in French politics, which I have avidly explored over the course of many years in this space, the concept of a New York criminal trial over a blowjob becoming the Ground Zero of French presidential politics is almost too much for my fecund imagination to wrap my mind around.

Hell, it could develop into another “Affaire Dreyfus”! All it lacks is an Emile Zola to light the fuse. If New York was not already the Capital of the World, this place is going to fill up with high-price Frenchmen covering all the aspects of the case – media, attorneys, friends-of-friends, financial industry fixers, you name it!  It’s going to be a freakin French invasion, with Strauss-Kahn the main attraction, like the vision of the Madonna that created a media uproar in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”. The Americans are slow to recognize it, but this eclipses even the bin Laden story, at least in France, anyway.

Again, who do I have to bribe at Rikers Island to arrange an interview with Strauss-Kahn? What would I want to ask him? The details of the case are too mundane. If you take away IMF banking issues, he’s obviously a cipher. No, the media event is the main event, and how to promote an original commercial approach to it.

This is great news for Sarkozy, who presumably would have had to face Strauss-Kahn in the 2012 election. Now the Socialists have no one of stature to put up. Strauss-Kahn, as the president of the IMF, would have represented world-class prestige and economic stability. Now he is going to be “picking his feet in Poughkeepsie”, as Gene Hackman so delicately put it in “The French Connection”.

Oh man, I thought Berlusconi and the underage hookers were something, or Sarko’s travails with his various consorts! Those were all Molière-style stage comedies. This Strauss-Kahn case rises to the level of historical drama. No writer has ever conceived a tragic comedy scenario of a potential president of the French Republic on trial in New York for sexual assault on a servant. It’s just too rich in culture!

O thank you, Lord, for delivering me this juicy and delectable scandal! How far could I go with a human punching bag like Donald Trump or a zombie like Barack Obama? Dominique Strauss-Kahn, with his alleged forcible humping of a hotel maid in Times Square surpasses even Silvio Berlusconi’s trial for employing underage hookers, or even Bill Clinton’s Oval Office blowjobs by Monica Lewinski, who was of legal age and a willing participant. There’s no historic precedent on record for a naked IMF banker and potential French president chasing a chambermaid around his hotel suite and allegedly forcibly introducing his erect penis into her mouth. Not that it hasn’t happened a million times, but for it to emerge in the public consciousness! Strauss-Kahn obviously felt he was entitled to a certain noblesse oblige, like the duke in Beaumarchais’ “Marriage of Figaro”, for example.

No, he could only be held to account in the USA, which places an astronomical sanction on sexual incontinence. America is very strict about sex. You have to steal a hundred million bucks to get the same jail time that you would for a mundane rape.

Not to mention the class resentment. In “The French Connection”, NYPD detective Gene Hackman is forced to stand out on the freezing sidewalk drinking sour coffee from a pizza stand while narcotrafficker Fernando Rey enjoys a delectable French meal in an exclusive East Side restaurant, which is a huge factor in Hackman’s determination to bag Rey. At the end of the film Rey manages to evade capture. Unfortunately for Strauss-Kahn, he was not so adept at losing his police tail. In fact, he telephoned his location to hotel detectives, who immediately told the cops. The NYPD is patting itself on the back for its effective police work in capturing Strauss-Kahn, but the reality is that he was undone by his own lack of criminal experience (at least at the street level). If Strauss-Kahn had decided to forego his telephone and fly quietly back to France, which has no extradition treaty with the US and tends to place a lower priority on the sexual indiscretions of the ruling classes, he would have been home free. I guess that being a successful criminal requires a different skill set than the president of the International Monetary Fund.

I’ve been locked up a couple of times over the course of my residence in New York. How could it be otherwise for a person of my expansive nature? But these little visits were for relatively minor derelictions, bar fights, smoking dope, etc, not for any crime of moral turpitude. Where I had an elementary education in incarceration, Strauss-Kahn is going to receive a college education, if not a graduate diploma. New Yorkers are going to be able to inspect that rare specimen, a totally pampered French intellectual. The police are already sick of him. They say he is loudly objecting to being treated like a common piece of rubbish. Sorry to say, in the New York City jail system there exists no first class seating.

I actually believe that my brief visits to jail have steered me away from trying my luck at criminal behavior, the way an inoculation prevents you from catching polio. Maybe if Strauss-Kahn had passed a few overnight visits to the pokey, he would have resisted the impulse to jump naked on the back of a chambermaid and ride-er cowboy. One look at this guy’s face is enough to tell you that he’s led a charmed life, where the only setbacks have been theoretical, and he’s probably developed a massive god complex. These kind of guys fall the hardest because the fall is longest.

Normally, an offender with no past record and a sterling career background can expect relatively lenient treatment, as I did when I got arrested for artistically rearranging a fellow’s face on the subway after he had sneeringly insulted me in a threatening manner. Fortunately for me, the “victim” was an athletically built young male with a criminal record himself. Strauss-Kahn, however is charged with allegedly forcing a chambermaid to sodomize him, so he can expect considerably less indulgence from the bench or from public opinion at large.

Realistically, he may be forced to confront the possibility of a ten-year stretch in Attica or Sing Sing. I will certainly visit him if he is not too far from the City, and if I can do enough research to pose him an entertaining line of questioning. Why would he not see me? It’s not like his dance card is going to be full, y’know?

Most prisoners can’t even imagine meeting a personage like Domenique Strauss-Kahn, much less share a jail cell or a dinner of Kraft macaroni and cheese with him. Hell, if he had felt so inclined, Strauss-Kahn could have used his gigantic influence to arrange a candlelight dinner in Napoleon’s tomb, complete with an orchestra of blind musicians, and then to top off the whole memorable experience with a little romantic tryst on top of the emperor’s sarcophagus itself? Pourquoi pas? So he may become rather discomfited to find himself being used as the mattress itself.

© Dean Borok May 17th 2011
deanyorkave@yahoo.com
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