Faster Than Hell

Back in 1984 a Paris friend bought a fiendishly fast KZ 1100 cc bike. One evening we were sitting at le Savanne, an African transvestite after-hour bar in Les Halles, Francois dangled the keys in front of my face, “How you like to take the monster for a ride?”

I had a Vespa. Its top speed was 120 kph downhill.

"It's a little late for a test drive." Francois' bike was out of my league.

"You can drive around the tunnels of Les Halles. There are no cars this time of the morning."

"Do it," cooed a gloriously thin slender ladyboy. "I like fast men."

"Pourqui non?" I downed a glass of tequila to quell my survival instinct and I grabbed his keys.

The bike felt big between my legs. I turned on the engine. It growled with more power than all the horses in BEN HUR's chariot race. I goosed the throttle. The bike asked for more. The pre-dawn streets were slick with winter rain.

"See you in five minutes."

I screeched down the street.

My wrist flicked through the gears and I entered the tunnel system beneath Les Halles in 3rd. Its maze of parking garages has been featured in many films. Francoise was right. An hour before dawn the subterranean passages were devoid of traffic. I leaned forward on the gas tank with the RPMs coasting at 3000. A twist of the wrist redlined the dial. I hit 160 in a second. The flesh peeled from my face. The KZ hit 200 kph on a straight-away. My death wish competed with the desire to live and I returned to the bar at a conservative 40 kph. I had been gone three minutes. Francois asked with a junkie smile, “Fast?”

“Very.” My eyes were wet wind wind tears

My assault on the Paris speed record was a good effort, however nothing in comparison to that in the film C'ETAIT UN RENDEZVOUS.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. A professional Formula 1 racer drove through the heart of Paris to meet a beautiful blonde in Montmatre. The Benz was an automatic. No streets were closed, since Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit for the film, which was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes,

The driver ran twelve red lights, nearly hit a few delivery trucks and pedestrians, and drove the wrong way up one-way streets, and completed the course from Porte Dauphine through the Louvre to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur under nine minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches.

Lelouch added the sound from a Ferrari to the short movie to pump up the adrenalin.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was supposedly arrested for speeding, although critics have calculated that the top speed never broke 160. The same as me underneath Les Halles.

The director has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

I remember seeing the short film in Paris.

Damn that car was fast.

But few people drive as fast as drunk Thai boys on their little scooters. No helmets. No lights. Death wish 2011.

To see C'ETAIT UNE RENDEZVOUS, please go to this URL http://vimeo.com/88309465