Forever Blue

I’ve never bought anything on Facebook Marketplace that didn’t feel like a curse or at least a sad story. Even so, I would rather bring home another person’s tragedy than wait for another Amazon delivery, and I like the perverse procrastination and thrill of the hunt. I love meeting these people out on the street in front of their offices or in the garage next to their homes and wondering what horrible fate has made them sell a white leather couch for a third of its value: what love has ended, what dream has been crushed, what debt has to be paid? I like to keep an eclectic home decor.

On my last visit to my mother, I found her in the throes of her own household purge to finally clear out my dead father’s things, and so I drove back to the city with a crate of old records saved from the indignity of the trash pickup. Of course, I haven’t had a turntable since I was a student, but this was just a new quest for my Marketplace skills. After a week of lusting for cabinet players of polished cherry that wouldn’t fit in my already cramped apartment, I settled on a beautiful little Technics turntable that was a steal at a thousand pesos. I gave my number to the owner and made plans to meet him by the turnstiles of Metro Refinería after he sent a video to demonstrate the turntable’s working condition.

He arrived late and out of breath. I had expected the lateness – no one has ever been on time to meet me for one of these cursed exchanges, but at best they put on a half-hearted improv of shame. This man was genuinely flustered by his own situation. He was tall and thin, probably in his mid-twenties, with wide, bloodshot eyes and a nervous tic at the corner of his mouth. He was drenched in sweat in spite of the chilly winter day. He waved to me across the turnstile and grunted as he lifted a large box onto the top of the barrier.

“I brought some records for you too,” he said.

“Oh, what do you have? Let me take a look,” I replied.

“No, just take them all, please. Free of charge.”

The cardboard box was barely held together with cheap, plasticky tape. At this price, it didn’t seem worth it to inspect the goods and have the box fall apart on the way home. Sometimes, you just have to gamble.

I shrugged and handed him two crisp five hundred peso bills that seemed to wilt instantly in his sweaty palms. Before I could manage to lift the box off the barrier, he disappeared into the crowd.

Back at home, I hooked up the turntable to a sound system I had purchased a year ago from a young woman who caught her boyfriend cheating and was selling all his things before he got home from work, and I began to pick through the records. Nearly all of them were battered and scratched to the point of near-uselessness, and nearly all of them were quite cliched: New Order, Madonna, Culture Club, José José. The first to catch my eye was an almost pristine collection of Mexican ballets performed by the Philharmonic Orchestra of Mexico City. I popped it on the turntable while I continued to sift through the rest. Finally, at the very bottom of the box, I discovered something unknown and yet familiar.

The front of the cover featured a reproduction of a painting by Caillebotte, one I had seen on a trip to the Musee D’Orsay. Hidden from the multitudes who made a line every day for the eternal scandal of “The Origin of the World,” this minor painting had been pulled out of storage for a temporary exposition of male nudes, even though the man in the middle of the frame wasn’t naked at all. He was a laborer resting in the middle of his workday, judging by the flat light that highlighted his swollen muscles with harsh shadows. He sat with his back to a wall, with his legs stretched out in front of him in a perfect V. He was shirtless, sweaty, and shoeless. His earth-colored pants were rolled up to the knees. His face was serene with exhaustion. The tools of a carpenter surrounded him, but his face was too young to imagine him as a master artisan. When I saw it in person many years ago, I felt like if I took the painting off the wall and shook it, the wood shavings around his feet would fall out of the frame and onto the museum floor. Printed on the yellowing cardboard of the record cover, this man was a ghost of the one who lived in the museum. And worse, some graphic designer had defaced his beauty: a pink neon X covered his groin, and the words “FOREVER BLUE” were pasted across his face as though they were cut from a magazine for a ransom note.

The back of the cover was divided in two: the top half featured a photo of two figures running hand in hand through a blurry, bustling Parisian street. Thanks to their bulky overcoats and their shaggy haircuts, I couldn’t discern anything about their gender: they only irradiated youth and beauty. The first figure looked forward with determination, the second looked back over one shoulder. A man in the background, seated in front of a café, clasped his glass of wine with both hands and frowned as though he worried that these restless, insolent youths might make him spill a precious drop. An ashtray hung in the air, caught halfway through its tumble from the café table. The two youths were lovers, surely; how could they not love each other? And they were in danger. If the danger was their love or something else (money, drugs, family), I imagined the film (they were clearly in a film) must explain. By the blurriness and grain of the image, I could imagine some cameraman running alongside them from the other side of the street, filming with a cheap Super 8 and without a permit, of course.

On the bottom half, in white text on a blue background, read:

A VIRGIN PICTURES LTD PRODUCTION

RELEASED IN THE UNITED STATES BY VIRGIN/20TH CENTURY FOX

FOREVER BLUE STARRING ISABEL ADJANI, VINCENT LINDON, RICHARD BOHRINGER, AND BUD CORT

AND INTRODUCING LOUIS LAVEY

ORIGINAL STORY AND SCREENPLAY BY DANIEL ODIER

DIRECTED BY JEAN-JACQUES BEINEX

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SIDE 1

KNOCK AT THE DOOR

SHE’S DEAD

IN THE METRO

BRING A GUN

GET ON

FOREVER BLUE (Gainsbourg)

ALAIN CHAMFORT

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SIDE 2

MERCURE, SCÈNE 1: LA NUIT (Satie)

LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

THE FLY

ORIENTAL CAFE

EMPTY REVOLVER

SUNRISE

LET IT FALL

FOREVER BLUE REPRISE, INSTRUMENTAL (Gainsbourg)

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ALL TRACKS COMPOSED AND PERFORMED BY MAURIZIO GUARINI UNLESS NOTED OTHERWISE

ALAIN CHAMFORT APPEARS COURTESY OF WARNER BROTHERS RECORDS

1982 VIRGIN RECORDS

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And then, a gold foil stamp read:

LENT FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY. ANY SALE OR UNAUTHORIZED TRANSFER IS PROHIBITED AND VOID. SUBJECT TO RETURN UPON DEMAND BY OWNER. ACCEPTANCE OF THIS RECORD CONSTITUTES AGREEMENT TO THE ABOVE.

Well, I thought, who can argue with an object that comes into your life stamped in gold with a curse?

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While I sat right there on the floor in the middle of the pile, I looked up the film online, and I couldn’t find anything. The next day, a Sunday, I took the bus down to the Cineteca Nacional to ask a friend who worked in the archive. While I went to a screening and basked in the air conditioning and the immortal beauty of Pedro Infante, my friend looked through all the digital records and even asked around the office. Still nothing. I even went up to Buenavista the next Saturday to the punk flea market with the record in hand to ask the old man who sells bootleg DVDs for a clue.

“I’ve never heard of it,” he said. “But if you like weird shit, I have some copies of Coapa Heights. It’s got Diego Luna before Cuarón, it’s got cocaine, they even blow up a Volkswagen bug. It’s wild.” He dug through one of his crates for a DVD wrapped in a computer printout of Luna’s round, nineteen-year-old face, and I gave him thirty pesos.

I walked through the market, talking to all the old-timers to see if anyone had any idea what kind of person would even have a promotional disk like this. Someone from a radio station, or, since it’s for a movie, maybe a film distributor, they all told me. But who distributes a film that doesn’t exist?

The record consumed me. I’m as spoiled by the internet as anyone these days, and it shocked me to find so many dead ends. How could there be a movie that starred Isabel Adjani that isn’t on IMDB? Well, Coapa Heights isn’t on Diego Luna’s IMDB page either.

I bought copies of Daniel Odier’s old romans policiers on eBay, and I read them with difficulty, thanks to a Larousse dictionary. I left drunk comments that someone always scrubbed from Vincent Lindon’s Instagram posts. I fantasized about flying to Los Angeles and banging on every door in Silver Lake until I found Bud Cort and could ask him, what about FOREVER BLUE? I felt the weight of time, of trying to find someone, anyone, who had touched this film and wasn’t already dead or demented thanks to their heyday of drugs and alcohol. The next spring, Lancôme plastered over the city with a new campaign—Isabel’s eternal pout stared down at me from every billboard and peeked out from every transit shelter for weeks. I scratched out her eyes with my keys one night while I waited in the rain for my bus.

The only name that surprised me was Louis LaVey. I looked in every database, I left desperate comments on Reddit threads, but I couldn’t find a damn thing. I could imagine Serge Gainsbourg, lost in a cloud of cigarette smoke, playing the melody of “Forever Blue” on his piano covered in empty whiskey tumblers, but who was this missing boy? Surely, he was one of the two youths on the cover, but did he look forward or over his shoulder?

One day, many years after bringing home the record, my phone lit up with an email notification: an eBay listing for a 45 of a song called “Je t’aime pour toujours” by a Louis LaVey. I was on a date, drinking a cocktail I didn’t like with a man who already bored me, and I ran to the bathroom to login and click the “BUY NOW” button. I finished my drink and ran home. Every stupid detail of my life was a blur of anticipation until the disk arrived.

It was from 1981, just a year before the film. The song’s title was a joke, but when I played the disk, LaVey’s voice made my hair stand on end. Who cares about the lyrics when the singer has the voice of an angel? It lived on my turntable for weeks - the only thing I wanted to hear was this link to LaVey, this lost boy who ran away from no one but me.

When I finally tried to put the disk back in its paper sleeve, I noticed that it wouldn’t slide in—there was something else wedged inside. I pulled out a newspaper clipping, and I sat on the floor to read a cruel text, one so simple that I didn’t even need the Larousse:

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16 July 1982

Louis LaVey, 19

LaVey, a talented artist, had begun a career in music and film. He is survived by his parents, Jean-Pierre and Marlene LaVey, and his sister, Celine LaVey, of Melun.

Religious services will be held in the Church of the Immaculate Conception in Melun, on July 20.

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And well, that’s it then.