Dans la nuit du 25 au 26 novembre, Vincent tombait d'un troisième étage en jouant au parachute avec un peignoir de bain. Il a bu un litre de téquila, fumé une herbe congolaise, sniffé de la cocaïne. Le retrouvant inanimé, ses camarades appellent les pompiers. Vincent se redressa brusquement, marcha jusqu'à sa voiture, démarra. Les pompiers le coursent, s'engouffrent dans son immeuble, montent avec lui dans l'ascenseur, pénètrent dans sa chambre, Vincent les injurie. Il dit « Laissez-moi me reposer », eux : « Andouille, tu risques de ne jamais te réveiller. » Dans la chambre d'à côté, ses parents continuent de dormir. Vincent a foutu les pompiers dehors. Il s'est endormi comme un charme. À neuf heures moins le quart, sa mère le secoue pour l'envoyer au travail, il ne peut plus bouger d'un pouce, elle le transporte à l'hôpital. Le 27 novembre, prévenu par Pierre, je rendis visite à Vincent à Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours. Deux jours plus tard il mourait des suites d'un éclatement de la rate. Ce livre est paru en 1989.
On the night of November 25 to 26, Vincent fell from a third floor while playing parachute with a bathrobe. He drank a liter of tequila, smoked Congolese weed, snorted cocaine. Finding him unconscious, his comrades called the firefighters. Vincent stood up abruptly, walked to his car, and drove off. The firefighters chase him, rush into his building, get into the elevator with him, enter his room, Vincent insults them. He says, “Let me rest,” they say, “Andouille, you risk never waking up. » In the next room, his parents continue to sleep. Vincent kicked the firefighters out. He fell asleep like a charm. At a quarter to nine, his mother shook him to send him to work, he couldn't move an inch, she took him to the hospital. On November 27, warned by Pierre, I visited Vincent at Notre-Dame-du-Perpétuel-Secours. Two days later he died from a burst spleen. This book was published in 1989.
Crazy for Vincent[/b] begins with the death of the figure it fixates upon: Vincent, a skateboarding, drug-addled, delicate "monster" of a boy in whom the narrator finds a most sublime beauty. By turns tender and violent, Vincent drops in and out of French writer and photographer Hervé Guibert's life over the span of six years (from 1982, when he first met Vincent as a fifteen-year-old teenager, to 1988). After Vincent's senseless death, the narrator embarks on a reconnaissance writing mission to retrieve the Vincent that had entered, elevated, and emotionally eviscerated his life, working chronologically backward from the death that opens the text. Assembling Vincent's fragmentary appearances in his journal, the author seeks to understand what Vincent's presence in his life had been: a passion? a love? an erotic obsession? or an authorial invention? A parallel inquiry could be made into the book that results: Is it diary, memoir, poem, fiction? Autopsy, crime scene, hagiography, hymn? Crazy for Vincent is a text the very nature of which is as untethered as desire itself.
