Awash

Fagtown France, which is the hip, scatological way to say Gay Paris. When we walk out of the Metro tunnel into the arrondissement 18 du Montemartre, it rains and clears and rains. My mother, whose organizational prowess was renown even in the most despondent depths of her addiction, mistakes the date on the description of our apartment for the address. We later discover that the directions were sent as an attachment she never opened. A manager from the municipal sanitation office walks with us for two hours up and down the slope of Rue Lamark as we look for window grills that resemble those in the photograph on the description sheet. His eyes are almost colorless and he speaks no English. My mother is surprised by the geniality everyone shows us. She had read that the French were especially hostile to Americans for countless obvious reasons. I am surprised to find that she still believes anything she reads. I say, ‘Mom, everything we say and do is an approximation.’ She smiles. Like all of our primitive forebears, we are compelled at sunset to come out of the rain and take shelter for the night. 10 million French novels charge to a head in L’ermitage, a two story bed and breakfast overlooking the whole gray cache of Paris cobbles. The concierge is easily the maddest petty-bourgeois player in the brief history of the industrialized world. She’s almost as small as a doll and as tautly strung as the proverbial poodle. Her forelip is wrinkled, her eyes almost bulbous and a flame of incurable gray in her roots betrays the black die in her hair. She chatters in zee accent and insists that we not do any cleaning at all when we finally get to our rental if we are paying 100€ per night. Hospitality is her industry and she ought to know. Later she points out to me that every room in the rickety house is upholstered in English cotton. I run my finger along the draped walls with their enormous brocaded tropical flowers and birds of paradise. I look at the brass chandelier dripping with cut glass overhead. I lap with faint amusement at the edges of the chintz and gimcrack all entangled in recent civilization. This is the moment. This is the day. In a few minutes I’ll walk through the drizzle with my mother to the Basilisque du Sacre Couer. White marble spires on the highest hill and the bells that ring for Easter. These grand names are pregnant with a wildtoothed comedy.

We’ve strolled the boulevards from the northern hills to the river. My historical groundwire was slashed when I went mad in Africa and everything in this rococo town, especially Le Palaise Royale, looks like gingerbread. My mother, meanwhile, is herself indulging in the great petty-bourgeois pleasure of being astonished by the price of everything. I am whirling and swirling and passing endlessly witty comments — mainly to myself. At La Isle de la Cit, I consider turning into a fish and flopping off the bridge into the oily waters of the Seine. But then I think: No, stay human. I am now in a cafe across from the Montemartre cemetery. Zola’s cold bones are interred in some stately moss-soaked sepulcher and with them the two-century old novelty of class consciousness. The Terass Hotel has a prospect onto this city of the dead and I thought we might someday take a room there with a balcony. We could lick the manic root and cover our naked bodies with absinthe and crme de menthe and howl until the gendarmes crashed through the door.

A moodless and persistent rain. You’ll want romantic descriptions of these papery Chinese Elm blossoms clinging to the slip and slobber of the pavement like fish scales. Am I following in the wake of Henry Miller’s syphilitic molting mermaid or is it a gargantuan salmon head in a suit flopping through le Madeleine to le Rue Rivoli? Small, rectangular, purple Metro tickets gleam in their thousands alongside crimped pigeon feathers in the gutter. The unthinkable pink of a 1967 finned Cadillac echoes down le Rue Roquepine into the neon signs strung through a closed alleyway of Chinese restaurants. I look purposefully around when I reach the Faubourg Saint-Germain. A young, tired, bizarrely beautiful woman sits primly as passenger in a customized Mercedes flashing past. How many times have I been bludgeoned with the name of this street when reading Balzac or Flaubert? The immensity of their craft becomes even more apparent to me now. Even after seeing one so closely, I think myself incapable of creating a character, much less a myriad of them, hollowed out by vanity and living in the monotonous rows of limestone apartments here. The idea of mastering all of the nomenclature of high fashion and the minutiae of the perfumeries, boulangeries and pastelieries exhausts me. In the glance we exchange, I see the fear that lurks in the quieter, more sensitive rills of the woman’s brain. An axe-faced man standing in the rain finds her affectations to lie somewhere between laughable and piteous. His eyes are no longer capable of even an envious smirk. He is only interested in her music and what she might say…and what if that is nothing in particular? More squirming mirth to see all of the big houses of fashion along the Champs-Elyses. Without embarrassment they ask 3,500€ for a snakeskin jacket in the Gucci store patrolled by elegant greasers in tailored suits. Radio antennae protrude from their heads and phone wires curl from behind their ears into their collars. Shall we stop at Cafe le Champs du Mars and make a luncheon of l’escalope de veau cordon bleu? Should we afterwards step into Le Decorateur Tappisier on Rue de Grennelle and ask Lorraine of the steep blonde bangs to design our terrace apartment in Boulevard de Capucines? She is in such high demand this season and we would certainly look smart if, while taking an aperitif at le Cafe de la Paix near the opera house, we could casually mention how easily we procured her services. I would perhaps order a chilled bottle of the Cote du Rhone ‘76 and, after sending it back in favor of the more piquant ‘83, you could go into raptures over Lorraine’s delicacy and vision with lam fabrics.

Of course I saw the same Cadillac on Rue Lamark after walking back to le Basilisque de Sacre Couer when the rain cleared. It was full of short swarthy businessmen from somewhere on the Mediterannean. Maybe they were Persians or Greeks. They had loosened their ties and taken the top down. The park below the church was full of a milling Good Friday crowd watching the sky die and recovering from what must have been a lurid recounting of the crucifixion. As I went by, a gang of pimply Parisian youth leapt into the photo of two busty Italian girls and they laughed at the insolence of it. The setting sun inspires such flirtations in new blood. Then I saw a cat that I think must have been feral slipping into a recess in the stone stairwell at the park edge. It was another good sign. What have I still to see?

Waiting for the M2 to take us to la Cimitierie Pre la Chase. Near the entrance to the platform a man in his late sixties scampers after his granddaughter in a game of tag. She weaves between the long-drawn legs of two tall, profoundly handsome women wearing cunning sheaves of black cloth — presumably her mother and her aunt. They are sober, frowning slightly, absorbed in discussion of today’s business. The girl has long chestnut hair and eyes that are bright even in the functional dimness of this tunnel. Her grandfather capers and prances and grumbles French endearments as she circles the women’s legs. They are both ignored. The girl laughs unabashedly and I think of how her delight will soon be made into something artful and charming. Maybe there will be rare moments when she laughs like this — almost ecstatically. Doubtlessly she will wear black and pout when deciding the best schedule for shopping and delivering her own daughter to school by train. She has been dressed in a checked skirt, white stockings and a gray sweater. Maybe her mother’s jeweled fingers tied that blue ribbon in her long hair. Life will do with her as it does us all, but she will always remember her grandfather with tremendous love. She will remember these games of tag in the subway caverns, the scent of his tobacco and his pale goat eyes. She will remember the feeling, if not these details I write, of his hand clutching her arm the instant she decided it would be amusing to be caught by him.

Ah, le Rue Saint-Denis… The center… As far as I can tell, this is the hot pulsating sphincter of Fagtown France. The Frog and Rosebit Brewery. The New Hong Kong Fast Food restaurant serving soups chinoises. The sex shop with its blue neon sign. The glistening lamb flesh displayed on a rotissierie at the window of the Eclipse Caf. The narrow greasy place is manned by an impossible number of sweating Turks with great barbarous mustaches. Plump black nannies from west Africa shamble slowly past pushing blue-eyed babes in prams. I look at the high arched entryway of a shopping arcade: Passage Bourg-Lbbe is the legend in the limestone.

I write a postcard to no one in particular: Balzac knew that a narrative need only be faithful to be compelling. I lingered long at his graveside and conducted several rituals that I hope will bring me some small part of his literary juju. Mainly I stood silently by admiring the shades of verdigris on the bronze statue of his head and thanking him for his example. My mother and I have walked the moss-foaming necropolis of Pre la Chase in all of its circuits. We have studied the winged and sculpted tomb of Oscar Wilde and passed by the unremarkable headstone of Jim Morrison. Being children of the age, we felt obliged. Now, in this bastardized Vietnamese restaurant, she is eating a shrimp ravioli soup and I have just finished devouring shrimp with sauce piquant and nouielles. At le Metivier Caf next door I saw a faded, narrow-nosed gallic man sitting alone and eating a pork chop bathed in some lavender-colored sauce. A driblet of it had stained his knit tie. I have yet to write a novel, but I am alive.

Avenue de la Republique. Le Bistro de Anomene has unfurled its awning and placed tables far out onto the pavement to accommodate the sun worshippers. A bald man is seated placidly before me. He gazes with proprietorial eyes out onto the bricks. His red silk shirt is open at the furry chest. Designer sunglasses are pushed far back on his sweating dome. He rolls his wrist incessantly and rattles his loosely fitted Timex. The diamonds which encrust it twinkle merrily in the daylight. On the table is a half carafe of Bordeaux, a snifter of honey-yellow brandy, a double shot of espresso, a full pack of Lucky Strikes, a 100€ note and a silver lighter engraved with floral patterns. This is the Big Time, I realize, this is the Real Thing. I lean forward and discreetly ask my mother to describe the explosive shirt of the shriveled but imperious woman seated in front of him. She calls it a contemporary pattern in fuchsia, gold and green. The latter is apparently intended to embolden the already startling green of the woman’s sunhat and skirt. So I am learning the cadences of high fashion after all. By the way the waitress speaks to this grande dame, we think her to be either a very regular customer or a relative. Maybe she is the waitress’s grandmother. She keeps dropping her fork and the waitress keeps picking it up and reproaching her. It is a comical scolding, theatrical beyond the French language, and everyone smiles. When the old woman’s filet mignon and potatoes arrive, she has no trouble holding on to her cutlery.

Walking, appropriately enough, down Rue de les Martyrs past the street vendors’ stalls and their displays of antique buttons and enamel vases and astral insects and iridescent velvet butterflies in display cases. My mother tells me of a behavioral modification experiment staged in the wake of World War II in an American universitys psychology laboratory. Unbeknownst to them, the graduate students conducting it were, in fact, the test subjects. Apparently, after some convincing, almost every one of them administered what would have been lethal currents of electricity to the people who were dummy test subjects. I wondered aloud what might have induced the students to keep turning a dial if they thought that to do so would char the intestines of someone they were looking at across a room. Not too terribly much, I realized…. But then I’ve always known that it takes little to sour the mob or to twist the man of virtue. It’s a cattle prod to the genitals and a barbed wire necklace kind of world. As we walked and discussed the credibility and ethics of the experiment, my mother stopped to point out the puffy mink pompoms on the shoes of a woman buying a lamp. Aside from the metropolitan prices of life and entertainment, my mother is deeply fascinated by Parisian women’s shoe fetishes. I thought of a poster I had seen the day before in a shop window displaying a fantastical array of beaded, pointy, high-heeled shoes. It showed a dark, sensuous woman uprooted from one of the French island colonies in the early 20th century and brought to Paris in a frilly chemise as a whore. The bodice of her dress was opened and her stiff breasts leapt out of it. Her face was fixed in an expression of savage and unrelenting stoicism, but her eyes were wet, black, unguarded and horrified. I tell my mother of this but it doesn’t prevent us from laughing aloud later when we turn onto the upper part of le Rue Saint-Denis and realize that we are surrounded by a host of prostitutes who do not belong to escort services. We laugh out of sheer surprise and only for an instant. Then I say that we should show pathos, and my mother somberly agrees. Later that night I smoke a few reeking crumbs of hash bought from a jaundiced African dwarf at the park head and hallucinate until early morning. I wrest incredible literary pearls from the night. Phrases like ‘I have been railroaded into philosophy by some strong-armed cosmic force’ and ‘My lack of paranoia has become alarming’ litter my notebook.

We take what has become a customary pastry and cafe ol near the Hotel DeVille. It rains lightly. Four men wearing pancake makeup and designer shirts with ‘ROCKER’ patches sown onto them go sulking past into a body piercing salon. On a cement pillar near the entryway, some revolutionary wit has written ‘Viva Mexico!’

At the market on Rue Fleury on la Isle de la Cit, there are caged birds showing more colors than we can account for with words. The spectrum is undone completely in that sad aviary. The birds flap and make their domestic trills and boys and girls moon at them and look imploringly at their parents. The sky is drab and gray. Soon it will rain. Like a good chaos theorist, I drag my eyes suddenly and unexpectedly to what turns out to be the granite sculpture of Roman armor adorning the top corner of the police prefecture at the end of the square. First I see the prisoner birds, then I see this grim war statuary. What the hell can it all possibly mean? No matter, we continue on to see a Matisse exhibition at the museum in le Jardin de Luxembourg. A woman in a lavish, billowing, embroidered burgundy dress, a fur cape and high laced black boots with sinister heels passes us as though she is swimming. People take clothes very seriously in Paris; I am always afraid to be called aside by an extravagantly cultured agent named Rnard and cited for lack of chic. The pageantry is indescribable. For a few moments, as I watch this queen pass in front of the gaping crowds at the entrance to Notre Dame, she does not look ridiculous. The way she walks…for a few moments…you could only call it graceful. Matisse is intriguing — technically he is childlike and in his writing he speaks of breaking away from imitative schools and painting with emotion. My mother is delighted to encounter an old hero of her time. I tell her the legend I’d heard of him mad as a bug, sitting in his wheelchair at the end of his life and cutting geometrical patterns out of construction paper. She smiles. We go outside, back into the ceaseless rain, and I say that the trees look brightened for my having seen Matisse’s Tree of Life study. She smiles. When she goes off to the toilet in the park, I watch an old mastiff-headed pro brutalize a hesitant black man in a game of speed chess held under a tent. The crowd strokes its collective chin and murmurs. It’s an ugly game, jagged and inelegant as a dog fight. I wince but watch until it ends and then I move on to look at the tulips.

The Palaise Royale — surely it’s made of gingerbread. A street performer stands still for hours covered in a shining gold sheet and wearing a Pharaohs mask. My mother tells me to go drop a coin in his basket so that she can take a photo and I tell her that I am not a trained monkey. She says, ‘Come on, humor your old mother,’ and I do it feeling slightly ashamed at my impatience. A teenage girl with braces smiles at me lasciviously and I look away in shock. To the left, in front of a circular pond, is a statue depicting a lion killing a crocodile. To the right, sitting on a low wall, is a heavyset contemplative black woman wearing a shawl. Behind us is a castrated tree and a wild grackle sits in the crotch of its mutilated limbs singing: breeee-ooo-oot, squeee-preeet.

In Ville de Saint Ouen I am beguiled by a distraught and haughty French bulldog prancing in front of a tapissier on Rue des Rosiers. While my mother furthers her degree in chintzology, I kneel on the pavement and, after much coaxing, befriend the flat-faced beast. His master is a man with long white hair in a ponytail. He is wearing a black suit and rose hued glasses. I immediately suspect hes a Parisian warlock. He winks at me and says, ‘One meeellion dollarz for zat very special dog.’ I say that I wouldnt think of depriving him of such a friend for such a negligible sum of money. He laughs at the trumping. My mother buys innumerable knickknacks and we have lunch at the end of the street. I try les moules in garlic butter with frites and a subtle glass of Bordeaux. Kill me anytime; now Im ready.

My mother sits in a chair in front of an algae blurred pond and I make a hurried sketch of the nearby statue of Neptune in repose. His loins are covered in a cloth of seaweed; his beard is long and wet; his high forehead is crowned with laurels. Men at the scale of babies or even large insects climb over him while he looks out alertly into his underwater kingdom. He is leaning against a bust of the sphinx and a bursting cornucopia comes out from under his arm. Really, what can it mean? On le Quais de Grande Augustines I pay 5€ for both the postcard image of Celine and the atmosphere of the old debauched hawker who sells it to me at this cutthroat price. With his red beery nose and jaunty cap, this man would have been scorned into oblivion by the mad penman. Nevertheless, he swears in abominable pigeon English that he is a Celine expert. ‘I read everysing, everysing,’ he says. ‘I expert, true Celine expert.’ Past the rows of open tents displaying unending postcards and prints, two drunkards have wandered into the harmless fringes of The Social Contract. They jeer and whistle at women, hang limply off of each other and sing bawdy French songs. Put a machine gun in their hands, clothe them in a uniform and tell them that their cause is righteous and the mild charming discomfort they cause becomes another matter. My mother ignores them when we pass and begins to tell me of her recent trip to see grandma. They had gone to a Thai restaurant somewhere in the jungles of suburban Michigan and my grandmother had said that she loathed carrots. I looked off into the window of the Max Chaoul Paris shop to our left and said, ‘Oh really?’ My mother replied, ‘Yeah, reallyThats the princess shes always been.’ I look at a squat woman putting her lap dog into a carrying bag on the stone walkway along the river below us and say, ‘Hmmmmm.’

Our ritual is formed. Every day we have walked to the river and visited some site of splendour. When my mother grows tired and her feet ache, I put her on the Metro and return to Montemartre alone. Seeing a street painter seated on a stool by the Louvre with his small open case of watercolors and his display of comedic characters on parchment paper reminds me that everyone is a genius. To stand erect, drag clothes over the animal body and kick your feet forward in the gesture of walking is a miracle. To move your mouth, to hustle your gums, to shape your lips, to push your diaphragm and utter words — however grotesque — is a slavering mystery. I am paralyzed with horror and amusement. We are all children. As we move along Rue des Pyramides towards the Chatelet station, my mother tells me of a friend who was a near suicide. This woman had filled the tub with hot water, swallowed the whole bathroom pharmacy and lay down in the ocean to wait for rebirth. As she was submerging and growing wings, she very clearly saw the eyes of the murderous taxi cab driver she knew she would become if she went through with dying by her own hand. She dragged herself out of the bathtub and put her face forward into the storm again. While my mother speaks and pauses to look into shop windows, I watch a woman with frosted hair wearing a long sable fur. She walks very shakily ahead of us and presses a handkerchief to her mouth. I wonder aloud if she is staving off the germ clouds of the common streets. When she drops an umbrella on the station steps and I pick it up for her, she smiles slowly, broadly and so openly that I am ashamed for thinking her a snob. She is a little girl dying in an expensive coat.

I never return by the same route and this last walk home brings me along Boulevard Clichy to Pigalle and the red light district. A gendarme who looks to be12 years old passes me on the roundabout as I head towards the contained glare and harpoon promises of pornographyland. I cannot believe it. His cheeks are aflame with prepubescent acne. A flexible cord attaches his gun to his belt and I am reminded of gloves tied with twine to infants’ coats to prevent them being lost. Child soldiers stalk the earth. All of humanity is on the pavement. Most of the onlookers walk between the galleries of sex shops and smirk in a way that proves they are only curious and not in any way venal themselves. I show no such compunction, make no such faces and walk smoothly beneath a cursive sign of ruby neon into Le Sexodrome. The clerks are all transvestites in lingerie and a big screen on the back wall beyond the rows of sex tapes shows a woman lifting up her nun’s habit and reverse fucking a supernaturally built black man. I peruse the selection of film titles. Orgy Porgy and the Cum Guzzling Sorority Girls looks like an interesting immorality fable of penetrating insight. An inordinately tall, blonde transvestite in a gown of see-through scarlet lace asks me if I’d like to see a live show. Sure, but I don’t have the 30E. I wander upstairs and see a small army of sperm-moppers going along the row of cabines automatiques. Most of them are older west African men. I wonder what they make of their employment. I go back out onto the concourse and sit on a bench on the median. It is very clean and well maintained and beset with shrubbery and flower gardens. The civic authorities are not lax even in this sty of iniquity. I watch men with flushed furtive faces come out through beaded curtains into the fading light. What visions have they had with a strip of keelnex in hand in the peep show booths? Families go past — mothers holding sleeping babies go past. On the ground at my feet there are a few pigeon feathers, a scattering of rose petals and a crumpled racing form. I pick it up and read ‘Les promotices de nos confreres’. The weathered plaster and the wallpaper in places like the Hotel Rhin Danube and Le Regence Hotel have witnessed many strange naked struggles, I’m sure.

The wide stone terrace and balustrade jutting out into air beneath le Basilisque de Sacre Couer. I have smoked a few particles of hashish and walked here to watch the sun menstruate all over Paris. Cumulus clouds boil over the city in relief below. Strange pacified sounds reach this hill. Tomorrow we leave for Morocco. Earlier, at la Place Emmanuel, across from the monsterous Saint Eustache Cathedral, my mother and I had sat for a few minutes in a small park watching an empty spinning carousel. All of the bobbing animals going round and round to the chiming bells were sleek horses except the one peach colored pig with a bridle in its snout. What could it mean? The hash has again shown me that we die as we live. My life is flashing before my eyes frame by frame. There is Paris. If I last long enough, I could easily return here and come to this stone balcony above the city every night. I could write sketches of the crowds and listen to the ogan music of the puppeteer in his coral costume on the street above. I could keep watching.