I love Paris in the summertime, especially after July 14, Bastille Day. 30-50% of the city's inhabitants vacate the sixteen arrondisements for Normandie, Les Alps or the South of France.
Less people, if you can avoid the foreign tourists thronging to the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, and le Louvre. The lack of traffic after le Grand Depart seemed to clear the sky of pollution and I relished the emptied streets.
Back on a warm morning OF the July 14, 1985 I had driven my friend's Vespa 150cc motor scooter west past the Arc de Triumphe to Porte Dauphine into the Bois de Boulonge, once the royal hunting grounds. The park is twice the size of New York's Central Park. I took off the Bell helmet. The wind fragrant with nature blew through my hair. Les Brazilian putes had erected their tents for le traffic des dejeuner or the lunch trade. Most were trans and I rolled past without a sideward glance. These girls brooked no gruff.
A bois is more a woods than a forest, but the green was a welcome change from the close street of le Marais medieval, the old Jewish quartier, where I resided in a small room in a small hotel on le Rue Des Ecouffes. Pulling over to a bank of the Lac Inferior to lay in the shade of an oak tree, I open my bag and spread out the pears and cheeses purchased from the shops of the Rue du Rivoli. After a few bites and a sip of a strong Cote de Rhine, I lay back and gazed meaninglessly at the cloudless sky. All the gray of Paris ceased to exist today and I felt one with the park.
A Citroen pulled onto the grass fifty feet beyond my resting place. A family sat inside. All their bags were packed atop of the sedan. An older man in his forties got out and pulled a well-coiffed poodle from the vehicle. His children were crying. He picked up a stick from the ground and threw it into the woods. The dog chased the stick. The man jumped in the Citroen and the family drove away headed for the Alps, le Sud de France, or further afield in France. The big poodle came back and searched for the car.
It was gone.
The poodle looked at me.
I already had a dog waiting for me in the Marais. Angus. A loyal Scottie.
The poodle was on his own.
Later that night I related this tale to my fellow doorman at les Bains-Douches and Grand Jacques shrugged saying that the poodle had been abandoned by the family for the summer vacation.
"C'est le tradition."
Throughout August on my travels to the Bois I spotted the poodle running with other dogs. An ever shaggy pack. They seemed happy to be tramps. Free at last.
A month later I drove through the same section of the park and spotted a Citroen slowly cruising the woods. The same one, which had deserted Fifi the previous month. It braked at the same spot as July 14. It was August 15. The day after le Grand Retour from le Grand Depart.
The tanned driver got out and called for his dog.
"Fifi, Fifi."
I shook my head thinking him cruel, but Fifi bounded from the underbrush.
His hair was matted like a Rasta and his body was considerably thinner from a diet of squirrels and trash.
The man greeted his dog with a smile, as if this rendezvous had been planned from the start adn that they had experienced this reunion more than once before.
"Oh, Fifi, time for you to see the beauty salon."
The owner opened the door to Citroen. Fifi jumped inside with joy and they drove off in the direction of Neuilly-Sur-Seine, proving once more Josh Fielding's old adage, "A dog is the only animal that loves you more than it loves itself."
Even if their owners are Parisienne.
ps Angus was just as happy to see me that day.
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"You can get what you want. But who will do all the house work? I love you! No wonder people say that computers are taking over the world. None of your business! I hope we can see each other again some time. I think so. Many young girls dream of being a fashion model. How are you recently? The enormous increase of population will create many problems."
painting by tristam quartremere of the steaming muslims of paris
Edwige Belmore arrived on the Paris scene in 1978 to become the doorperson at La Palace.
Blonde, punky, and lesbian her haughty demeanor put the Parisiennes in their place and served as Jean-Paul Gaultier's muse in that age of chaos. I met her in 1982 when I worked the door at the Rex for Actuel Magazine. Her friends; Paquita, Krootchey, Fharida, Claude, Tristan et al were my friends. Our worlds intertwined in New York. Sadly she passed from this world on Septerber 15, 2015.
That moment comes to us all.
But never yesterday.
To hear HISTORY OF A DISAPPEARANCE by Edwige and Hayley Moss
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Rainy day in Paris. A great title for my sixth novel, which I will finish when I'm 110. 2062. Spook Jacobs sent my lease renewal for 256 East 10th Street along with letters from the past five months of my travels; two from AJ, one from Sharon who has been released from rehab, from Nina Gold in London, Carmen in Cancun, one from my sister Pam, another from Miranda Seymour, who had been married in LA. Considering that I sent out over sixty letters from Biak, Bali, Penang, Bangkok, and Kathmandu, a 10% return was darned respectable, especially since correspondence by letters has fallen into disuse at the end of the 20th Century.
I had been a math major the first three semester of university. I divined numbers in my head. 300,000,000 seconds and counting until 1/1/2000. Not accurate, but close.
Humans have fast ascended into a time of literate illiteracy.
People in the West can write, but don't, because they have nothing to put down on paper or no paper or pen at hand. TV junkies with all their thoughts born from the marketing agencies of the corporations. I seek the road of a poet. Luckily I have resisted any desire to imitate Proust or TS Eliot. My friend, Rick Temerian, said once, "Your first writing was like you were trying to be Scott F Fitzgerald."
I didn't take the comment as criticism. I love THE GREAT GATSBY and have always imagined that Gatsby was a roaring 20s version of my old boss from the after-hours clubs Jefferson and Continental, Arthur Weinstein, operating an outlaw club in the wealthy East End, paying off the cops and dealing with the filthy rich and cocaine runners. I wouldn't mind writing a new 1984 or Maxie Laing's RUNNING a novel about an Irish tinker. No choice other than to be a populist writer always dedicated to 'smash the state.
A LITTLE LATER
I had lunch with Corinne at le Comptoir. I was blathering to my sometimes lover about literature and amity with ex-s, when she interrupted by saying, "I have a story to tell you. you know Claude Aurenson."
It was not a question. Claude was the manager of le Privilege, Paris' premier boite de nuit under the Palace theater on Rue Montmatre. Corinne worked the Bains-Douches upstairs bar. She knew everyone on the scene as did I having been the doorman back in the 1980s.
"Well, I see him at the bar. Last week. I hadn't seen him in months, but he invites me to a party at le Privilege and asks my name. So as a joke I gave my nom de familie as the town of my birth. He looked at the name written on the paper and says, "I was born there forty-three years ago. I asked him about his family and he revealed that he was a bastard. He was born during the war and that was common in those years, but strangely he tells me about this man who never wanted to see him and I realize his father was my uncle and Claude is my cousin. We hugged like long-lost cousins and we take a trip to Toulouse together for a family dinner. I say nothing about this story and when my uncle comes to the house, he looks at Claude and is introduced to him. They share the same first name. Claude says nothing. I go into the kitchen and my Uncle Claude follows me and asks, "Who is that man?" I tell him just a friend from Paris, but he knows full well who Claude is. their faces are mirrors. One old. One younger. "That's my son." asks Uncle Claude. I say yes and he rushes out to hug his son. After forty-three years they were reunited and see each other all the time."
I cried happy to have heard such a beautiful story. Not everyone has a tale of woe.
A LITTLE LATER AT THE BRITISH PASSPORT OFFICE.
I have noticed that my journal entries have nothing to so with events. Days, weeks, or months. There is precious little happening in the outside world. Paris is Paris. Les Parisiennes are preparing for Le Grand Depart on July 14. The USA economy is in danger of collapse as always. Unrest in the Eastern Europe threatens the Iron Curtain and soon the World Cup begins.
Fuck Italy__
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In 1994 after a month long limbo in Penang I traveled from Malaysia to Paris on Aeroflot thanks to money wired by my loving mother to the Citibank in Penang.
The Kuala Lumpur-Karachi-Dubai-Moscow-Paris flight time to Moscow totaled about 24 hours. None of them were comfortable in the flimsy chairs of the Soviet era jetliner. More like lawn chairs and a fog hung over the the celing from AC condensation. After the meal not a single member of the flight crew entered the cabin.
Disembarking at night in Moscow, I discovered that my connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle had been delayed until the following morning. A Norwegian couple with whom I had traveled from Kual Mumpur were in a similar predicament and I said, "It's 10PM. What are we going to do all night?"
"Drink wine." The husband pulled out two bottles of wine purchased at the Dubai duty-free. Their flight had also been cancelled until noon.
"I have two."
"And my wife has two."
We opened the bottles and sat on the floor surrounded by hundreds of stateless travelers trapped in the aeroport. Some looked as if they had been in this limbo for weeks, if not months. We finished the wine and a refugee from Afghanistan sold us a bottle of vodka.
"I here one month. Can no go back Kabul. No go to Paris. My brother live there. Now this my home." His name was Jameer.
The vodka was homemade. The liter lasted longer than the wine. Several other Afghans fleeing the civil war joined Jameer with other bottles. They spoke in dialects. Dari adn Pashto. After two bottles of the gut-burning samogon I spoke in tongues an finally lost consciousness from the overdose of hard spirits and lack of sleep.
I awoke.
A gray dawn.
Moscow.
"Russia.
Not Idaho.
"Your flight is now." The Norwegian husband shook me hard and yanked me to my feet.
"I don't care. I want to stay in the aeroport. Life simple here."
"You have to go." He and his wife escorted me to the plane.
"Bon Voyage." I saluted them at the door of the Airbus.
Stepping on board I rejoined civilization and I stumbled down the aisle to my seat. The expression on the other passengers' face gauged my drunkenness better than a breathalyzer. No one wanted me to sit next to them. I fell into an empty row and buckled up for take-off.
Several hours later a stewardess shook my shoulder.
"We are in Charles de Gaulle Aeroport in Paris."
"Already?" I was the last passenger on the plane.
"We've been on the ground for fifteen minutes."
"Great." I rose to my feet and trudged out into the terminal. The time was 8:30. It was Bastille Day or 'le Quartoze', another day of wine ahead.
In July of 1789 Paris seethed with anger against Louis XVI and the ancien regime of the nobility.
The prison's most infamous guest was the Marquis De Sade, who shouted from the ramparts on July 2, 1789, "They are killing the prisoners here!"
The unrepentant sodomist was transferred 'naked as a worm' to the insane asylum at Charenton, but the fire had been lit and the on July 14 hundreds of workers gathered in the neighboring Faubourg Saint-Antoine seeking to seize the gunpowder within the Bastille.
Mythically recounted in Dickens' THE TALE OF TWO CITIES a tumbril loaded with casks of wine axle an axle on the Rue de la Roquette and wine flow down the gutters to be consumed by impoverished Parisians. The shadow of the dreaded upper-class Bastille prison loomed over the narrow street and someone shouted, "A la Bastille."
The Swiss Guards within the fortress defended the battlements against the mob. Mutinous royal Bourbon troops armed with artillery. The commandant surrendered the prison an freed its seven captives.
When Louis XVI was told the news in Versailles, the king asked an aristocrat, "Is it a revolt?"
His friend replied, "Non, mon Roi. It is a revolution."
Within three years after the Storming of the Bastille Citoyen Louis was sentenced to death and guillotined in Place de la Concorde before thousands of revolutionies.
I emerged from the terminal and sped in a taxi from CDG Aeroport to Paris. Traffic was light into the City of Light. THe exit lanes were cramped with vehicles as they had been for decades carrying Paris to le Grande Vacannes ie 7/14 go 8/14.
Atop Montmatre rose Sacre-Couer.
After the 1870 Commune had been quelled the Catholic Church had erected the Temple of Repression to remind Parisians that the Church ruled the Hearts and Minds of France, not the call to the ramparts by a perverse Comte.
The new Bastille.
My friend Tristam from the Musellmen Fumants waite at his apartment.
I wasn't tired, only hung over. That afternoon we watched the military parade on the Champs-Elysees.
That night we partied with friends.
I drank to Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternitie.
Hundreds sang Le Marseilles.
I cried each time.
It was good to be out of Moscow.
People drink too much there, then again so do I.
A bas le Roi__
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The environs of Paris have been inhabited since 10000 BN ie Before Now.
The banks of the Seine have provided life to the last of the Neanderthals, the Cro-magnons, the Celts, the Romans, the Franks, and then for the French.
After conquering northern France Adolph Hitler's army declared a curfew and the City Of Light was dark from 9PM in the evening until 5AM.
No curfew was declared during the 1968 Uprising.
The Mitterand government hadn't needed to enforce a couvre-feu in the early-1980s.
No one had money.
Les Citoyen stayed at home after dark, but not us.
At night the city belonged to my friends and me.
Paris was our playground.
Fuck the CRS.
We owned the 1980s and then heroin and AIDS stole it all back for the rich and their heirs, until COVID hit Europe.
Two days ago the PM appeared on TV to announce a curfew with an end date.
A city without the sound of humanity like 10500 BN, but I had been there in 1982.
I have been in an empty Paris.
One person.
And they we were two.
Candida et moi in 1984
With her I knew the world was destined to dance again.
Not like Orwell's world, because love will always ignite the light.
Not not today.
But close.
Close is good enough for me.
A bas les premiere Estate.
And long live the light.
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The teenagers of the 1950s worshipped Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Buddy Holly as gods albeit dead gods instead of risen god like Him of the Old Religion. The new generation of baby boomers preferred the living and the stars of the 1960s were transported by TV and radio to my family house under the Blue Hills south of Boston.
Bob Dylan’s BLOWING IN THE WIND toppled Elvis off his throne and the Beatles stole girls from Bobby Rydell with I WANNA HOLD YOUR HAND. Young boys worshipped movie actresses as wingless angels, whose beauty blazed eternal on the silver screens.
In 1965 Julie Christie won our hearts in DARLING and my older brother chose fur-bikinied Raquel Welch as his muse after her debut in 1,000,000 BC. The seductive virtues of various starlets were debated by the boys in my high school outside 128 in Boston. I held my sand ie said nothing, because I was searching for a goddess to call my own.
One cold January night I lay in bed in a split-level ranch house on the South Shore Snow clotted against the window. My older brother slept soundly under the covers. I was wide awake. My fingers turned the dial on the transistor radio. A wire running to a tiny ear plug transporting me across the Eastern Seaboard and beyond. Static, then the antenna caught a signal from Quebec transmitting a wavering female singing ‘La maison ou j’ai grandi’.
I cursed myself for not having paid more attention in my grammar school French classes and looked over to my brother’s bed. Dead asleep. I turned up the volume and rode the magic radio waves to the last fading notes of the guitar. The Montreal DJ announced with breathless admiration, “C’etait une autre tube par Francoise Hardy.”
I hadn’t understand a word, but realized that Francoise Hardy couldn’t be anything other than an angel. My angel. I remained glued to the station on the St. Lawrence River and the DJ rewarded my devotion with other tubes like LE PREMIER BONHEUR DU JOUR, QUI PEUT DIRE, and L’AMITIE, after which he said, “Bonne anniversaire, Francoise.”
Somehow my brain translated those words into ‘happy birthday, Francoise’.
I was a fifteen year-old high school student living on the South Shore. The DJ announced that Francoise Hardy had just turned twenty-three and lived in Paris. Three thousand miles due east across the Atlantic. The chances of our meeting were nil and she was a woman and I was only a boy.
“Turn off that Frog crap.” my older brother mumbled from his pillows.
“Okay.”
I shut the radio and went to sleep confused by conflicting images of Francoise Hardy. I envisioned her as a blonde. I fantasized about her as a redhead. I woke early to a dream of her as a brunette. Dawn was barely up. Snow buried our suburban neighborhood. I dressed for the cold and descended to the kitchen.
“You’re awfully quiet,” my father said at the stove, as he cooked pancakes for my younger sisters and brothers.
“I’m thinking about changing my language from German to French.”
In my freshman year the brothers had offered four languages; French, Spanish, German, and Latin. Students only take one. Most either Spanish or French. I chose German and Latin. I had never been able to explain why to anyone. Not even myself.
“I thought you liked German.” My father had studied French at college.
“I do.” I spoke it with a Boston accent much to the chagrin of Bruder Karl. My best grade had been a D+ and I had no feeling for Marlene Dietrich.
“Any reason for the change?”
“Maybe I’ll have more use for French.”
“Like for when you’re ordering French Fries from Simco’s at the bridge.” My older brother joked, as he sat at the table. My younger brothers and sisters laughed along with my father. Simco’s on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan had the greasy fries in Boston.
“Tres droll.”
I didn’t mention my restless night to my car pool friends, as we drove to high school on 128. My daydreams of Francoise Hardy consumed the morning math and biology classes. I barely listened to Bruder Karl. He was a good old Bavarian. After leaving his class, I had a study hall and went the library to search through the record collection. Brother Jerome, the librarian, was in his office. A freshman sat on his lap. One of his favorites.
I wandered over to the record trays and flipped through the LPs without finding a single French record. A few music stores in downtown Boston sold foreign music and I planned on heading to Washington Street after school.
“I’m not going home today?” I told my car pool.
“Where you going?” My best friend, Chuckie Manzi, wanted to join me.
“To see the dentist.” It was a good deterrent. No teenager liked the sound of the drill.
“You’re on your own.”
My friends dropped me at the Forest Hills T station and I got off at Washington Street. None of the big department stores had any French 45s or LPs. On the way to the Park Street Station I chanced upon a record store on Boylston across from Commons. The bearded owner looked like a beatnik. I was dressed as a mod.
“Can I help you?” Thousands of records according to genres were stacked against the wall.
“Do you have any Francoise Hardy?”
“How do you know about Francoise Hardy?” The older man seemed amused by my request.
“I heard her on a Canadian station.”
“Must have been a strong signal.” He went to the French section and pulled out a sealed LP.
“Francoise Hardy dropped out of the Sorbonne to record OH OH CHERI with Johnny Halliday. He’s the French Elvis. She became one of the biggest stars of Ye-Ye music and her hit TOUS LES GARCONS ET LES FILLES made the charts in the UK. I think it was 1964. This LP came out in 1962.”
He gave me the album. Up to this all I knew about the singer was that she was French. I held the cover in both hands. The name had a face. A cinnamon strands of hair streamed across feline eyes. An ivory hand held an umbrella with a detached interest. Francoise was a woman made for a rainy afternoon.
“Can I hear a little?”
“Sure.” The old man slipped the LP onto a Garrard 401 turntable and cued up LE TEMPS D’AMOUR.
A patter of drums opened the song. A twangy guitar and solid bass joined on the next bar. The singer wasted no time getting to the lyrics. They must have been about love. 2:27 passed in a second.
“What you think?”
“I’ll take it.” Her pose sold youthful innocence. I gave him $5. “Is this the only one you have?”
“Of that LP, yes, but I can get some of her other records, if you’d like.”
I nodded my answer and promised to return on the weekend.
“My name’s Osberg.” He handed me a business card. “Call to find out when to come in.”
“Thanks.” I left his shop and caught the T to Ashmont.
That evening after finishing dinner and my homework, I went down to the basement and put the LP on my father’s record player. My brother had a better one in our bedroom, but I wasn’t sharing Francoise Hardy with someone in love with a woman in a fake fur bikini, even if Frunk was my older brother. He had Raquel Welch to himself 100%.
One play of her record and I became her biggest fan south of the frozen USA-Canada border.
Every night I listened to the Quebec stations in secrecy. Her songs soothed my soul lost in the empty suburbs south of Boston and I felt as long as she was out there, there was someplace other than here.
At school I hid my secret. THE only French we knew were the Canucks from Quebec. Good for playing hockey for the Boston Bruins. I didn’t want to risk their attacking Francoise. I bought several LPs from Mr. Osberg and as winter melted from New England, he introduced me to the other Ye-Ye girls; Frances Gall, Sylvie Vartan, and Jacqueline Ta’eb as well as the Sultans from Quebec and Serge Gainsbourg.
None of them were Francoise Hardy. I dreamed about flying to Paris. An airline ticket cost hundreds of dollars. I settled for listening to her music with my eyers closed.
In 1968 Francoise Hardy released COMMENT TE DIRE ADIEU written by Serge Gainsbourg. Mr. Osburg said that he was the wicked man in France and played his hit with Jane Birkin JE T’AIME MOI NON PLUS.
Love dripped off the record. Mr. Osburg was right about this Gainsbourg man. He was as ugly as sin. I had to save Francoise and as soon as I arrived home, I asked my father, if we could vacation in France.
“They’re having riots there.” My father was very conservative. He tolerated the length of my hair, even if he thought I looked like a girl. “Students in the streets. Worse than the hippies. We’re going to the Cape.”
Our family rented three motel rooms in Harwichport. The pool overlooked the small harbor. The beach boasted the warmest water on Cape Cod and the sea registered 65 Fahrenheit by the 4th of July.
Every morning I read the Boston Globe. The newspaper covered the War in Vietnam with little mention of the Paris student unrest. I was certain that Francoise Hardy wasn’t the type of girl to get mixed up in trouble on the Left Bank. Not unless she fell into the hands of the evil Serge Gainsbourg and I plotted a trip to France. A rumor was whispered across Boston about a jet plane leaving Boston every morning for Paris. Its cargo of Maine lobsters was traded for eclairs, creme brulees, and pomme tartes. $100 round trip.
Two weeks before the start of school I emptied my bank account and took the T to Logan Airport early one morning. None of the terminals listed the ‘lobster’ flight and I spent the greater part of Saturday hunting for the mythic plane to Paris.
“Ha.” A Boston cop laughed upon hearing my query. “Once a week some kid comes up looking for that plane. There ain’t none. Some bullshit story someone invented for who knows why, but the weird thing is that all these kids want to meet the same girl. Francoise Hardy. You ever heard of her?”
“No.” These other boys’ feelings for Francoise Hardy could never rival my love.
“Me too. Must be some kind of film star. Like Brigitte Bardot.”
I fought back an explanation, not needing any more converts to the faith, and returned home in defeat. That summer America was deep mourning after the murder of RFK in LA. MRS. ROBINSON replaced Archie Bell and the Drells’ TIGHTEN UP as # 1, while Simon and Garfinkel sang about an older woman from the movie THE GRADUATE. Francoise Hardy was eight years older than me. I changed the words from Mrs. Robinson to Francoise Hardy. I never sang it in front of my girlfriend. Kyla was the same age as me.
COMMENT TE DIRE ADIEU was not a hit and the radio station in Quebec played less and less of her songs. Kyla and I went steady. I liked to think that Francoise would have approved of my selection, but I was stupid and left Kyla for no good reason in 1969. That year Francoise released Francoise Hardy en Anglais. Like the Catholic Mass in English her songs lost their magic in the translation.
My travels in the late-60s and 70s were confined to hitchhiking across America. None of the drivers played TOUS LES GARCONS ET LES FILLES, but I defended French music to hundreds of hippies, rednecks, and disco fanatics by saying, “You’ve never heard Francoise Hardy.”
In 1973 she appeared in the film SAVE THE TIGER. The American director failed to break the twenty-nine year-old singer to America. She remained a creature of France.
The Atlantic Ocean separated America from the Old World. My opportunity to cross the waters came in 1982, when I was hired to work as a doorman first to work at the Rex for the counter-culture magazine Actuel and then after a stay in Hamburg, the Bains-Douches, a popular Paris nightclub. At first I was unfamiliar with the French pop stars. Over the course of the next year I met Johnny Halliday, Yves Montand, Catherine Denevue, Yves St. Laurent, Coluche, countless Vogue models, arms dealers, and other lightbulbs of the night, but never Francoise Hardy and I asked the owner about her absence.
“She doesn’t go out at night. Her husband, Jacques Dutronc, is very jealous.”
“Of what?” Dutronc was a rock star for the French. Nobody in the USA knew his name, but ET MOI ET MOI ET MOI was a great song. I had it on tape. “Other men?”
My boss warned that her husband was capable of almost anything against any man seeking intimacy with his wife. “He is very much in love with her.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
My boss shrugged with mutual understanding, He was a Francoise Hardy fan too.
The nightlife was a small world in Paris and I didn’t mention Francoise’s name again. People had big mouths. Jacques Dutronc visited the club on several occasions. He was a star. I was no one. A thick cigar hung out of his mouth. I hated the smell. He never came with Francoise. The rumor was that she was terribly shy after having been the Ye-Ye Girl for so many years. I made her husband wait to get in more than once.
Jacques Dutronc complained to my boss, who laughed behind the singer’s back.
My job was to make French stars feel like getting into the Bains-Douches was a privilege. My friends were granted an easy entry, especially Suzi Wyss, the Swiss mistress of a Getty Oil heir. On my days off I smoked opium at her oriental pad in the 13th arrondisement. The Swiss courtesan was superb cook and traveled through many cliques. She called me poor poor Peter, but never turned her back on me. We were lovers. One night she invited me to a dinner, but said, “Don’t tell anyone, but Francoise Hardy will be coming.”
“I thought she didn’t go out.” This was a miracle.
“She doesn’t, but she loves my cooking and I am always discreet. So not a word.”
“Silence will be my vow” I wanted Francoise to myself. “Will her husband be there?”
“Not for dinner, but he might come for dessert. He has a thing for my Swiss chocolate torte.”
Suzi’s piece de resistance was a culinary delight and I prepared like a nameless suitor for this rendezvous with Francoise Hardy.
I bought a chalk white shirt from Agnes B and a gray suit from my tailor in the Sentier. No tie was better than pretending to be a business man and I purchased Cuban heels from the Marches Aux Puches flea market. They dated back to the time of her greatest success. I cut my hair short and didn’t bathe for two days to emulate French men, who avoided bathing in fear of losing their masculinity.
That evening I showed up on time with a bouquet of roses. Suzi loved flowers. We smoked hash. Opium was for after the dinner. The door bell rang at 9. Francoise arrived at the apartment with a young gay man. Yves knew me from les Bains. We opened a bottle of wine. She wasn’t a drinker, but was amused by my stories of New York nightclubs awash with beautiful women and crooked cops.
“It would make a good movie.”
“Only if you played the lead.” I envisioned us on the podium of the Academy Awards receiving Oscars.
“I’m too old to play that role.”
“You’re never too old to be a star.” I wanted to tell her I had loved her forever. Now was not thee time. Maybe never was the time. She was only thirty-nine. I was thirty. I told her the story of hearing her on the Montreal radio and the plane with the pastries. She laughed at my love from afar. She had had a lot of lovers like that in her life.
“Didn’t I tell he was sweet?” Suzi lit another joint.
“Sweet as your torte.”
I was falling in love again.
In fact I had never stopped loving Francoise. She spoke about her music and picked up a guitar from the corner. The Ye-Ye girl sang two new tunes. I was in paradise and was about to tell her about hearing her music on a little radio twenty years ago.
A knock on the door trashed my moment. The newcomer was Jacques Dutronc. Francoise’s face said that she loved him and no one else. Any man would have been a fool to not love her the same.
“I know you.” He pointed his cigar. “Bains-Douches. Doorman.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“A writer too.” Suzi was on my side.
“Pouoff” Dutronc had witnessed thousands of writers attempt to seduce his wife. “Women only love directors and producers. They prefer chauffeurs before a writer.”
Francoise laughed at her husband’s joke. Suzi thought it funny too. I might have joined them, if the riposte hadn’t struck so deep. After Suzi’s famous Swiss Chocolate cake rejoined to the living room, where Jacques Dutronc picked up the guitar.
“Francoise and I recorded a song in 1978. BROULLIARD DANS LA RUE CORVISART.”
He put down his cigar and sang the song’s opening lines. Francoise accompanied him on the chorus. I applauded their duet as well as their shared love.The odds of my getting anywhere with Francoise were stacked higher than the records in Mr. Osburg’s music store. An hour later the famed couple left with the gay friend. Francoise didn’t even said good-bye. Jacques winked to me. I wouldn’t make him wait at the door any more.
“Poor Boy.” Suzi patted my cheek. “Everyone loves her.”
“Yes, I suppose we do.”
“And I know how to make you forget, if only for a few minutes.” Suzi handed me a pipe. Opium was a good doctor for an unrequited love. Suzzi was even better. A good friend in the slumber of her bed.
The three of us met several more times at Suzi’s apartment. The same routine as always, dinner, wine, and a joint or two. Jacques came late and they departed ensemble. Faithful forever. Suzi and I not faithful. Just lovers.
I imagined myself being him, but I didn’t like cigars and my French was even worse than my German. Francoise loved Jacques and that was good enough for me, because all men at one time in their lives need a goddess to teach them about love.
This week the journliat staff from the magazine Actuel arrived at New York's JFK aeroport. The publisher Jean Francoise Bizot led the quintet of Bernard Zekri, Elizabeth D, music promoter Jacques Kourakas and another writer unkown to me across the tarmac.. Later this week Actuel will celebrate the tenth anniversery of French publication's existence. I met them through their New York Corespondent, Bernard Zekri, who is thriving for the first time in this city. He has discovered Rap and Break Dancing, traveling up to the Bronx and Harlem and Brooklyn. I've never accompanied him to the distant boroughs of the city, since I'm working at the Jefferson after-hours. My old girlfriend Karine had introduced us. While she has gone back to France, Bernard has become a good friend. I would love to go to Paris and France, although Bernard has said that the City of Light has become more bourgeois losing the edge described in Orwell's DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON. The vicious cops corralled the street whores and addicts obey the orders of the haute-class.
"The clubs suck."
Bernard has proposed that I come to Paris in June.
Jean Francois, the publisher, will be opening a club on the Grand Boulevard.
In 1978 I had left NYC to join my model/girlfriend, Lisa. We lived in West London Studio, A two-story post modern complex on Fulham Road. Right at the entrance to the Chelsea football pitch. Game days we didn't leave the apartment. As the opposing crews waged war outside the pubs.
I had nothing to wear that declared I was from the South Shore of Boston and not Strafford Bridge or Westham. I bought a leather coat from a second-hand store on Kensington High Street. A little roughed up yet elegant
Lisa and I returned to America. She left again for Europe in the summer of 1979. She came back in 1981 with a Russian gangster. I liked Vadim. I worked for him at the Continental on West 25th Street. I left when I clocked FBI agents at the after-hours club. I’m wasn’t Vadim.
In 1982 I fled a joint police-FBI investigation to work as a physionomiste or doorman at Le Rex Club for the magazine Actuel on the Grand Boulevard in Paris. Opening night was with Toure Kinda. The basement was packed for the African superstar. A froggie longhair kept bugging me to come in. I told the babacool to wait his turn. Hectoring me with indecipherable French swears resulted in a nightlong ban.
"Twa oncule!" He strode to a dented double-parked Citroen Deux-Cheveaux. I thought nothing more of him, until he ran through the crowd and threw a bag at me. Yellow sprayed from it and I thought it was les frites or French Fries from the pseudo Mickey Ds next door.
Wrong It was yellow paint. Splat!
I stood stunned.
The hippie ran back to his voiture des peasants. The two cylinder engine would not start. Le choc of the attack triggered a rage. I ran the sidewalk, jumped atop a car hood and launched a kick through the hippie's driver side window. I leapt on the roof. Jumping up and down and up and down. Black steel toed combat boots smashed front windscreen. Shattered the passenger door window. The hippie cringed at the steering wheel. The boulevard sidewalks was crowded with club goers. I saw no one.
The car still refused to start. My boots took their toll.
The car coughed to life. The hippie shoved the shift into First and steered into the oncoming traffic. I tumbled to the street. He drove straight into a passing taxi. Crash. I wanted more and scrambled my feet. My security held me back.
Corinne my squeeze gave me a towel. I wiped off the paint. The ghost of it haunted the coat forever. Jean-Francois the publisher gave me 3000 francs. “Go out of town for a week."
I acted on his advice and took a train to London. With the coat. I stood in front of the West London Studio a few times. No sign of Lisa. Only the trace of yellow on the leather coat.
ps Upon my return my bouncers said that I had totaled the hippie’s car. They weren’t impressed. After all it was just a Deux Cheveaux.
In Jan. 1982 a french magazine ACTUEL hired me to work the work at their Paris nightclub, Le Rex. I bid good-bye to New York and flew from JFK to Heathrow with one bag of my best clothing and an Olivetti typewriter.
After a brief visit with friends in London, I boarded a train at Waterloo Station for Dover and caught a night ferry to Calais. The immigration officials stamped my passport with a six-month visa and I passed through customs without any of the smoking officials casting an eye in my direction. It was cold outside and I walked to the Calais train station.
My Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter weighed a little over four kilograms. Nine pounds isn't much, but as I walked to the the Calais train station on a June evening, the weight grew heavier in my hand and crossing a bridge over the Calais canal I contemplated ditching it. The tide was out and the river bottom was thick with mud. The world didn't need another writer or another doorman at a nightclub, then again this world doesn't need much, so I trudged into the terminal with the Olivetti and bought a one-way ticket to Paris.
Gare Du Nord.
For me and my typewriter.
I have no idea where it is now, but me I'm in New York and my typing is as bad as ever.
My 31st birthday party at Jurgen's house on Rue de la Tour with Bridget, Tony, Tracy, Alfredo, Karine, Diana, Olivier, T, Rufus,David, Philip Brook, everyone absolutely smacked out on Persian brown. Julie Cole was the only straight person. The less about this evening the better.
Tony later said, "Anyone who can survive a birthday like yours deserves to be at the next one."
The next entry is about hanging with Willie DeVille and Countess Gudmilla von Bismarck morning Jurgen, Willie, and I retreated to Willie's room on the Grand Boulevard. Willie shot up in the bathroom not wanting to show the damage to his arms. I had seen them the previous night. Bad. Real bad.
Jurgen nodded out and we spoke about East Village junkies, his feud with the Rolling Stones, the betting odds on Johnny Thunders OD, vomiting on stage, my battles in the night, and his many attempts to stop heroin. We crashed without a care for nothing but more.
Thankfully Jurgen had more.
Jurgen, a German telex criminal, was a good friend with Kalle Swensen. The Black King ruling the biggest brothel in Hamburg. The Eros Center.
I worked for them at BSir's.
Good money until in December SS Tommy presented a bill of 20K Deustchmarks for sleeping with a blonde lingerie American model.
Stephanie.
"I didn't know she was working. She had been Jurgen's girlfriend.
"Everyone in Hamburg is working for someone."
SS Tommy was a murderer and I gave the keys to my orange VW which two weeks before I had driven into the forest with Philippe Kroechey, a Paris DJ screaming we were being chased by zombies.
The car was still in the forest. Prisoner of a tree trunk. I handed over the keys to the VW, promising to settle the rest of the debt in the morning. I went to my apartment in Mittelweg, and called Stephanie.
No answer.
I packed a single bag with books, clothes, a world band radio and taxied to the Hamburg Bahnhof to flee on the midnight train to Paris like an anarchist escaping from the Nazis.
I didn't breathe easy until we crossed the Belgian border at dawn.
A month later I met with Stephanie for a weekend at the Hotel Lutece in Paris. Neither of us mentioned Hamburg.
It was better that way.
Clean sheets, soft skin, a woman's breath on my skin and dreaming this could last forever.
An October evening
Myrtle Avenue
Clinton Hill
Brooklyn
A week after the equinox
Sunset
6:21
The western sky golden__
A chill in the air
The neighborhood
Afoot on the sidewalk
Car traffic dying down
The world passing by
People in a hurry to get
Out of the wind
Not me__
I sit
In the peace of the evening.
A busy street
Not quiet
Just quieter than the bright of the day__
I sit in a collapsible chair
On the sidewalk
Holding hadns with coffee creme
A terrace of my own making
Happy dreaming of Paris
Le Boulevard St. Germain
Et le Cafe de Flore__
1984
Sitting outside en hivre
On a sunny winter's day
In the city
Grim Parisiennes chilled
By the prism of gray on grays
The exhaust
Of the Buses
Of the car
Of the taxis
Peitons bemused by dreams
Of the summer wind from Africa__
Smiles
People
Men hurry to ‘evening designations’
With mistresses
In the small hotels
Bordering the Parc de Luxembourg__
Here
On the terrace
Well-dressed and heeled women
Smoke
Check gold watches
A late lover
They smoke cigarettes
None waiting for me
A man sits with an elegant blonde
She smiles
Kiss on the lips
I smile__
I am sitting alone
And then
Time stands still on the Boulevard
And I drift__
Women
I remember women
Women of my life here
In Paris
Karine
Bernadette
Corrine
Mira
Gabby
Julie
Bridget
Et toutes les femmes
Polaroids in my memories
Other faces without names
Forever in love with the impossibility
Of me with them__
I am alone
But I smile
The waiter serves
Welsh Rarebit
A glass of Bourgogne
I take off my gloves
Hold hands with my wine
Warm in my cashmere
Sitting on the terrace
Watching the Sixth Arrondisement
Head to the cinemas
Les Deux-Magots
Le Drugstore
To evening assignations__
Friends arrive
By accident
Par hazard
We sit together
Not alone
We order a bottle of Bourgogne
Parus home__
Never thinking of the home
Left across the Atlantic
Then
My mother’s Welsh Rarebit
Not like that served by the Cafe le Flore
But I remembered hers and her
The first woman in my life
Some people never forgotten
Some things never forgotten__
Not the Cafe le Flore Paris
The last time there
2015
Mid-morning
St. Padraic’s Day
With
Julie
Candida
Christine
Gabby
And their Beaus
My plane leaving in four hours
Plenty of time
Stories
Not hiding a thing
No secrets laughter and then au revoir
Paris amour le Cafe le Flore
Toujours et forever
Even here on Myrtle Avenue
Not Paris
But 100% here__
Below photo Olivier Brial RIP et moi 1985.
ps with my eyes open I see us all at that table on Rue St. Benoit. No traffic on the Boulevard. Paris' air pollution so bad that the prefecture had closed the city to cars, trucks, and even buses. A quiet had seized the becalm. Occasionally to be disrupted by the Metro's rumble underneath the boulevard. Friends, wine, the Cafe Flore.
Back in the 80s I loved climbing the stairs with a phone jeton in hand to drop the token and dial America. The call lasted about fifteen seconds. Hello good-bye.
I am stronger now. I keep thinking of travel. I feel like Richard Burton, who in the 19th Century sought the source of the Nile with John Spekes. I have been all over the world, but now like Burton trapped as the British Consulate in Trieste at the end of his diplomatic career. Standing on the quai with ships setting sail south on the Adriatic. Wanting nothing more to be asea. Thankfully I have been trapped in New York and Montauk and not Kansas, knowing I will wander again.
Baby City, April City,
angel spirits hiding in the gates,
poets, parasites in their hair, beautiful Baudelaire,
Artaud, Rimbaud, Apollinaire,
contemplate the night city -
Whistleblowers and goalkeepers,
Penalty of Montparnasse, mortal Notre Dame,
contemplate the night circle, the inherited dome,
Hugo and Zola buried together,
harleccino's death trap,
the Seine breeds filthy sludge,
The Eiffel looks from above - it sees the Apocalyptic scorching with ants.
nyc city ,
Town of dead and buried Germans.
Mamma Guerra's doll house.
Gregory Corso with Jocelyn Rothschild - Chez Rothschild sur Ile St. Louis
A poet ugly as sin with a dark view of the City of Light, although anyone who has lived there long enough to identify a friend at the morgue by the Seine is no longer fooled by the lights.
Le Quai de Le Rapee. The black hearses of the State driving the departed from the Bastille to the cemetery de Pere Lachaise.
ps. the opening line of another version is recorded as ‘Childcity, Aprilcity’.
pps My search for Jocelyn Rothschild came up goose-eggs.
ppps The only found meaning for Harlecinno as the Itlaian word arlecinno, an amusing servant in theater
I found this poem thanks to Eric Mitchell, Pittsfield Capitalist and B-Movie legend.
"Paris, as everyone knows, is pre-eminently a gray city. I mention it because, in the realm of watercolor, American painters use this made-to-order gray excessively and obsessively. In France the range of grays is seemingly infinite; here the very effect of gray is lost." Henry Miller - Quiet Days In Clichy.
Counting only ten shades of gray in this purgatorial hallway, I recalled walking through the Marais on a drizzling November afternoon in 1985. Buses spewing diesel fumes to create filthy clouds hanging head high over Rue Francois Bourgeois. The facades along Rue Francis Bourgeois coated a somber Verdun gray . Even the rain was gray. Henry Miller's words crossed my mind.
"I have not counted how many. But I have seen the grays of Paris. They are without number.
But when there's light, there will always be the Eternal City of Light, although richard Dailey wrote, "Paris is really clean right now - even when it was built it wasn't this clean, not all at once - today we saw a dirty church and I thought, "How nouvelle vague"
Paris, le Ville-Lumiere.
Sauf quand il ya le pluie.
ps I wish I still had that coat and hat, but even more so those years. Comme on etais jeune.
Sur l'Ile Saint-Louis
Sous la gris pluie
Seule,
Mais pas 100%
J'ai mon chien
Angus
Avec moi__
Sur le Rue des Deux-Ponts
Sans toi,
Notre menage a trois
Deux__
Il y a une semaine
Tu a me dire
« Adieu »
Non à bientôt
Simplement adieu __
Aujourd'hui, avec Angus
Sous la gris pluie
La Seine gris
Paris gris
Et Angus noir
Comme mon couer__
Il y a une semaine
Angus et moi te suivre
Sans espoir
A le Pont Louis-Phillipe
Toi a volte a face
Cinq mots tes tout derniers mots :
"Tu peux garder le chien."__
Mantenant
Sur le Pont Louis-Phillipe
Paris et le Seine si gris
Nous sommes deux
Angus et moi
"Angus, viens, on va prendre un verre.
"A le Louis 9."
Comme moi, Angue n'est pas seule__
In English although somehow I wrote the French version first thanks to my French lovers or 'les dictionaires couchant'. Thanks to those and alos the subtitles in the French cinemas. If it weren't for them I would have never leasrned 'quelgues-choses' meant something.
ps this poem was recorded for a scene in Jack Haven's WAITING FOR BROOKIE in which I have a role. Mina Walker engineered the track for background music for a early scene with Alex McVickers in Paris. Only my voice as James Steele, French Pop Star
I'll add the song at a later date
Angus et moi - Rue de Basfroi chez Alan Vaughan - Paris 1984
"Paris, as everyone knows, is pre-eminently a gray city. I mention it because, in the realm of watercolor, American painters use this made-to-order gray excessively and obsessively. In France the range of grays is seemingly infinite; here the very effect of gray is lost."
Henry Miller - OUIET DAYS IN CLICHY
His only quote I recall, but never in entirety.
I do remember back in the 1980s walking out of Le Hotel Des Ecoffes, a classic hotel particular to the Rue de Rivoli in the winter. Sky field gray. Faces morgue gray. My suit flannel gray. The air thick with car and bus exhaust. All diesel. Everywhere a film of gray creeping on a chilly breathe of a wind. Ah, let's not forget the damp.
Then I enter a warm cafe. Run by women. A cafe, laughter, a croissant. The perfect menage a trois.
Back in the late 1960s the biggest house in Quincy, Massachusetts was owned by a funeral director. His blonde daughters were the most beautiful girls on the South Shore in 1967 and one night they introduced the British rock trio Cream to their admirers. I was one of them. So was an apprentice embalmer for their father. The other suitors joked that Adam made love to the still bodies in the basement of the funeral home. The near-albino played a strange style of guitar. The older daughter loved his licks. Like Ulysses he slayed his rivals with a stringed weapon weapon.
A Fender Stratocaster.
One night when we were high on LSD, Cherie confessed that her boyfriend liked for her to pretend that she was dead.
"I lie on a cold stone slab."
I remembered a similar line from the film IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT, in which a cracker cop asked a young white trash girl why she made love in the cemetery.
"Well this man said, "Hey, little girl, you know what the coolest spot in town is?"
And I said "No, Sam. I guess I don't."
And he said, "The cemetery. That's where."
"Cos they got all of them big, cool tombstones to lie on naked."
That was a real 'huh' moment for the movie viewers of the time.
Like what the fuck are they talking about.
I learned what later when I found the photocopied THE JOURNAL OF LUCIEN H. by Gabrielle Wittkop on the quai by the Seine selling books.
I read several passages and paid the seller fifty francs for LE NECROPHILE.
The prose brought to life the passion of a young man, who digs up bodies of the young and beautiful at the graveyards of Paris.
Gabrielle Wittkop wrote most eloquently, "She is not of the dead from whom I have grief in separating myself, the way one deplores having to leave a fiend. She certainly has a mean character, I would swear to it. From time to time she emits a deep gurgling that makes me suspicious."
This lover is dead, but he assigns the young girl lifelike mannerisms. Her resistance to him lasts only as long as the rigor mortis.
Lucien's range of lovers include young children.
He feels no guilt, since he feels as young as his lovers and he sees friend's beauty in the bloom of death.
Their fine powerful odor is that of the bombyx. It seems to come from the heart of the earth, from an empire where musky larvae trudge between the roots, where blades of mica glean like frozen silver, there where the blood of the future chrysanthemums wells up, among the dusty peat, the sulforous mire. The smell of the dead is that of a return to the cosmos, that of sublime alchemy.
Lucien is charming in his own way and when a house maid declares that he smells of vampires. He laughs inside for the common peoples' confusion between a vampire and necrophiliac.
He's cursed by his desire for the dead.
"I can't see pretty woman or handsome man without wising that they were dead."
And he is capable of love.
"Suzanne, my beautiful Lily, joy of my soul had started to marbleize with violet patches. I multiply the use of ice., I want to keep her forever."in their death
Only love and lust.
Lucien dumps her rotting body into the Seine and later remembers Suzanne with tenderness
"Hardly a day doesn't go by that I am not reminded of Suzanne. Her breasts with their large brown aureoles, her sunken in belly suspended like a tent between the two points of her hips, her sex whose memory stirs my own sex.Yet today the ivory of her bones, whit what marine life has it integrated?"
Lucien flees Paris for Naples.
The last lines are "November, which always brings me something unexpected, though it has always been prepared."
Most incredible passage of someone who loves the dead.
Not a serial killer.
Only a man cursed with the desire for death cooled flesh.
