Dying on the Rue Rochefourd
to the pickpockets and thief's of Paris, Merci (from the archives, April 2022)
I could begin with the black cherry taste of the wine and lie to you about how tannic this 2017 vintage of Bordeaux is. But to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever known what tannins are. I also don’t think I can describe what black cherry tastes like and I’ve definitely drank more red wine in my life, so I should probably be saying it the other way around. Black cherries taste like red wine. Another sip. I was going to start with sunlight painting with gold the white sheer-like curtains in the living room. I was going to write this by hand, with a Blackwing pencil on Japanese paper, then I thought No, I’ll do it on my typewriter. Scratch that, too loud. I’m typing it on the Mac, listening to Jon Batiste and Chopin’s Etudes on shuffle. Through the window behind me, crisp wind enters and lands on the nape of my neck—another good place to start. A kiss on the neck… I’m hijacking my interior monologue instead of telling this story chronologically. But I warn you, my inner monologue is not character driven. Very few soliloquies. Plus, I take quite a few liberties with details when I go strolling on my own. I’d even say my monologue —my electric inner rhythm— is more of a splintering of phrases, images splattering on shards of feeling. Smoke, the Siene, peach blossoms in the air. A kaleidoscope of memories. Or in Kant’s lovely phrase, “a rhapsody of perceptions” tied together by a narrative of sorts. With a hero that isn’t a hero but a register of a here. Hearing what’s out there, what was and what could be. Cathedrals, revolution, love. Another sip. Except I wrote this last sentence before taking the sip, so obviously I anticipated the taste, the thought of black cherries ready to assault the blood-like wine drying and burning and snapping like copper on my tongue, as if instead of wine I was French kissing a nine-volt battery.
I’m trying to talk about Paris, but I’m not sure how to get there. What do I have to add? How can I capture a whole city after only a few days?
I started with a title, Dying on the Rue de Rochebrune, a strategy which my friend Donovan, scientist, advises against, not just because it’s lazy, it can be limiting, perhaps even cowardly, what if the story wants to go somewhere else and I’m asphyxiating it with names, stifling its vigor, the raw stupor of the truth. What if this should be a story about a murder at Versailles and not about shivering weak in an Airbnb on the 11th Arrondissement? Connor is right, but I find it stimulating to throw the dice in the direction of a single phrase. A single word. Dying. A ghostly image of violet clouds on limestone façades, sirens and construction workers, a full moon rising over mansard roofs. Insomnia. Vomit. Shivers. The morning after, dragging our bodies through the Museé d’Orsay. Nauseous. Light. Hallucinating and dizzy, feeling like bronze statues when they are still just models of clay freshly carved by the same hatred as Camille Claudel’s Age of Maturity (representing her love triangle with Auguste Rodin and Rose) all three buffeted by wind and the passing of time. Melting.
I’m trying to write this almost automatically, you see, like a kind of game. In the spirit of Philip Aragon, the surrealist whose Paris Paysens I found in a gritty little bookstore in the heart of Cambridge University. Sure, writing a straightforward story would be better. More sensical. Maybe there’d be a life lesson there somewhere. Beginning at JFK, going up and down England, ending at Baudelaire’s tomb in the Cemetery of Montparnasse. After all, I even took notes and sketched while I was there.
I want to tell a story by clicking on the blue links of memory. This is a Wikipedia rabbit hole to get from where I am now to where I was last Monday, strolling through Paris, lilacs in full bloom. Rabelais may get thrown in here, as that’s who I’m reading now and that’s how my process works, through subconscious thievery. A hijacking of dreams by ghosts. Intoxication. Drinking red wine. Leaning back. Thinking about the chapter of Gargantua and Pantagruel I read on the plane titled ‘The Discourse of the Drinkers’, which reads more like a mad man bellowing atop a wooden table in a tavern somewhere in the Latin Quarter, “O poore thirsty souls, good Page, my friend, fill me here some, and crowne the wine, I pray thee, like a Cardinal, Natura abhorret vacuum. Would you say that a flie could drink in this, this is after the fashion of Swisserland, clear off, neat, super-naculum, come therefore blades to this divine liquor, and celestial juyce, swill it over heartily, and spare not, it is a decoction of Nectar and Ambrosia.” Rabelais is talking about wine, but also about dancing in a vacuum.
Another Sip. More like gulp. The present doesn’t exist in a vacuum. There is a jet lag of feeling. A shadow cast by the past. That first day in Cambridge I was still by the Charles when I walked up the River Cam to Grantchester in the rain; today I am still in Paris as I write these lines at home. I say home and I mean New England, where I’ve lived the past twelve years, though as any good writer knows, books are the only homeland of the true writer, books that may sit on shelves or in memory; found, borrowed, stolen, bought on the banks of the Siene, lugged across continents in tattering tote bags. Paris is beautiful, as I’m sure you know or have heard. Best city ever. Still, I missed New England. Hard to put a finger on it. I certainly didn’t miss Bostonians, that angry bunch of bad drivers with the palate of a twelve-year old on vacation. Was it the sound of English in the air? Massachusetts’ slender coast? Her lush forests. My friends. The cat. Books. Easels. Brushes? It’s hard to place. Home is such a shaky concept, more of a feeling of comfort, belonging, though by belonging I don’t mean fitting in, because home is also the place where we try to distinguish ourselves the most from those we sense are just like us. The opposite is true when one is in “strange lands.” I’m never as American as when I meet Europeans.
Are “strange lands” an objective geographic reality, or a mental construct in constant flux? I doubt anyone in the west would call Paris a “strange land” and yet, to an American who has never left the continent, what is stranger than a thousand years of settlement staggered on a ten-mile radius? Thatched roofs, flying buttresses, cobbled streets, palaces of glass and gold. For fucksake, there is a whole underground with catacombs full of skulls. In New England, we have clean, immaculate forests that bear no trace of the millions who were replaced by Christianity and disease. And unlike their catacombs, our graveyards smell like pain, I mean pine. Pain is French for bread, which Paris has the best of in the world. Not that I am trying to draw comparison between us and them. They may sound a little funny and eat their roast chicken at a lower temperature, but people are people everywhere, and at least in Paris they have respect for the arts. Though that’s an unfair assessment, because Paris was built by Kings and Cardinals—two of the Muse’s most enthusiastic supporters— while Boston was built by Puritans and Pirates—two of her greatest foes.
That first morning in Paris we went up to the Belleville Park to catch a glimpse of the whole city. We were staying not too far from the cemetery where Jim Morrison was buried and the walk to the park was short. It was the first hot day after the last time snow fell and people had that kind of energy. Like winter was finally over, like COVID had ended. Bit muggy. Passing hints of weed and French rap. Graffiti on some walls. We walked to the top and sat on the last of green terraces that made up the park, next to an older man who fell asleep as his cat (with a harness and leash) played with a bumblebee. A camera crew above us took in St. Jean Baptiste out there in the gray distance.
No itinerary for the day. Today was my day, tomorrow would be M’s. I was going to wing it. Like Henry Miller at the beginning of the Tropic of Cancer, I had “no money, no resources, no hopes.” I was the happiest man alive. Unemployed. Uncertain about my future. Manic with the warmth of spring. Burning with an urge to move to Lyon and become a cook, or to Marseille to train as a pick pocket. Burning with an urge to write and discover this city that has always been so close to my heart. In a way, Paris is something of a homeland. Not the city, per say, but the mythical Paris of writers and artist. A Paris of dreams that is less a city and more of a hope, a verbal labyrinth woven by Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, Rilke, Cortazar, Miller, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Louys, Lautremont, Burroughs, Mondiano, Dubord, writers that I read and reread as I dropped in and out of school to “become a writer;” a Paris that is a codeword for beauty, decadence, love, liberty. An imaginary city where I strolled with ghosts at my ease. Back when I would leave at the crack of dawn from strangers’ bed with nothing but a crumbled copy of The Society of the Spectacle or Fleurs du Mal, depending on what mood I was in. I wasn’t as sappy or pedantic as this makes me sound. I was in search of something. A spark. Inspiration. Ironically, I was in search of something that was inside of me all along though I searched for it in others. I never thought about this then. All I cared about was the new, the adventure of the abyss, seducing and being seduced, overthrowing the police state, etc. I ignored the uneven steps themselves, the winding streets, the lingering smell of lilac leaning in for a kiss. What can never be taken away.
M had been working the previous week, and this was the beginning of her vacation. I know deep in her heart she wished we had a list of things for the day but given her generosity she agreed to do whatever I wanted to do. Which was nothing. Or close to nothing, walking around and getting surprised. Eating. Drinking. Taking it all in. Finding yourself by losing yourself. At least for a day. Pretending like we lived here. I even wore a turtleneck and smiled less, doing my best to look demure and unimpressed with a cigarette dangling from my fingers.
From Belleville, we took the metro into the city, getting off at Chatelet (the last place a Parisian might want to be on a sultry Sunday afternoon full of Easter tourists). We walked across the Pont Au Change. Not saying much to each other. There was still a cloud of something I brought up while we were in London, about… something not relevant to the story, an “about” that is a cloud made up of the emergency-like routine we had fallen into during the Pandemic and that now was beginning to fade, revealing … changes. Notre Dame under scaffolding.
I had said something cruel just the night before and it still hung between us like fog. We were in Paris now. I wanted to forget what I said. But how could she? We crossed the Ile de la Cite, circled through this street, took a turn on whatever that rue was called, and left, then right, the sun shining, passing a veggie crepe back and forth until we reached Shakespeare and Co.
I was on a sort of pilgrimage to the tombs of my literary predecessors. Taking note of their vision, the bohemian alternative to capitalism that is now less of an ethic and more of an aesthetic for yuppies in trendy cities (in Paris they call them bobos). Shakespeare and Co. published Ulysses in 1922, when no one would, and lent books to broke nobodies like Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, though now, in 2022, they are better known for their tote bags. We waited in line to get in and after looking around the bottom floor, I ended upstairs where — and I swear I’m not making this up— there was a cat, curled and sleeping on a pile of books while a man in a black trench coat played the piano. I wanted to laugh when I saw them, in separate rooms like watercolors in a children’s book. Perhaps on some other day, I would have taken a video for my reel and gone on my merry way, like a good tourist, but today I felt like sitting and reading (The Wild Iris, Louise Glück). Maybe it was the Chopin, which he played with melancholy. After a few minutes, I closed my eyes to better fall into the music. I felt a shiver, like when the sun is hot and the wind blows cold, all my hairs standing on edge. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I had forgotten how. I opened The Wild Iris again and tried to distract myself. The first poem of Glück’s book begins with these lines, “at the end of my suffering /there was a door. /Hear me out: that which you call death /I remember.”
From here, we went to Montparnasse. I bought the Glück book, a novel by Olga Tokarczuk, and a tote bag. Earlier it sounded like I was shitting on the tote bag, I wasn’t. I’m not that kind of writer. I happen to think that being a little basic is good for the soul.
The music left us in a better mood. It left me in a better mood, I should say. M was quiet. Pensive. Maybe she was surrendering to Paris in spring bloom. Maybe she was thinking that life is too short to not appreciate it when you can feel it palpably close, drifting with the peach blossoms, and sun, always a bit of sun, even if… We joked around as we walked towards the cemetery. I don’t remember the jokes. Something about Ernest Hemingway, a bull fight in St. Germain, and a closet.
We passed by the Museé de Cluny, where I wanted to go, but it was closed for remodeling. It’s the museum that houses the tapestries of The Lady and The Unicorn, an artwork that has meant a lot to me for reasons that get more mysterious as the years go by. It was so obvious at first, it’s allegory so clear. As the history book said, it was a gift for the Dauphin, an allegory of Jesus with traces of a pagan fertility myth. Then I fell in love with this girl, let’s call her B, and I was flipping through a copy of The Oak King, the Holly King, and the Unicorn at some secondhand bookstore in Rockport when I re-discovered it. The tapestry had a new meaning. Falling in love. All my senses confused. Hot and cold. A Mon Seul Desir : my only wish. True love, that’s what it had to be about. Things didn’t work out with B. Those early bartending days were messy. Time passed. I healed. Met someone else. A Mon Seul Desir is the title of the last tapestry of the series, and the key to the whole thing. The phrase itself could be translated as “by my desire alone,” or “to desiring itself,” or even, “to my solitary desire,” void of its pretentions, a desire as a kind of empty stage (or vacuum) where what you do is meet. Come to think about it, there’s an empty blue tent in the last tapestry that is missing from the tapestries about the senses. Details: that’s what you gain from getting older; may not be paradise, but it’s where the devil likes to hide.
The cemetery was closed by the time we got there. We were too late. We had lunch at the Luxemburg gardens and then got distracted by that other kind of cemetery, a flea market along the boulevard. A lot of cigarette smoke and fast French, bright African tapestries, old books, trinkets, jewels, statues of Egyptians, Japanese tea sets, old Vogue ads. M found a ring and I got a deck of cards from 1945.
More Paris stuff happened. Balcony windows’ half-open, long curtains drawn. Purple violet orange sunsets above the Lutetian limestone and mansard roofs. Red wine. Night.
The next morning, we made love with the windows open and then went into the city. We took the train to Montmartre, and right below the Sacre Coeur, I got scammed fifty Euros. They had a crew of six all in on the scheme, the whole audience was part of the show. I should have known, the “tourist” who was most excited to bet, but who “let me go first,” was missing a few teeth. By the time I realized I had bet fifty, it was already in the magician’s hand. “Next time, my friend,” he said in English after showering me with the fastest French I’d ever heard anyone speak.
Sketched the basilica. A few people next to us. M saying no and pushing me away with the biggest smile, covering her eyes as she looked towards the city and took a bite of the passionfruit macaron.
At the Museé de l’Orangier, there was a large crowd at the Water Lilies. Pictures everywhere. Posing. A few sitting down, fixed intently at certain parts of the painting. I opted for walking around and closing my eyes, letting the blues and greens and purples blur into each other. Lunch at the Tuileries. Walked to the Louvre and didn’t go in, went to a courtyard towards the back, and walked towards the Pont des Arts, stopping for an accordion player playing As Time Goes By while we held hands and looked at the bright sky over the river.
Since it’s all so fresh, I don’t know whether to write this vignette to relive Paris, or if I should try and preserve how I feel now, in Boston, coming out of a hibernation of sorts with the unmistakable feeling that anything is possible once more.
On the plane back, I saw Casablanca. A Hollywood classic from 1943, when the Nazis controlled Paris, when victory was still uncertain. In watching it, I realized that I used to be Victor Laszlow, the idealist, fighting the good fight, and now, I am something of a Rick, working the night life. Victor gets the girl in the end of the movie, while Rick, the owner of a café in Casablanca, helps the couple escape the Nazis. Rick’s a cynic when the movie begins, or at least he wants us to think he is, but in the end, he is the one that takes the greatest risk in securing Lazsclow and his wife passage to America. As we come to learn, Rick loves Ilsa, Victor’s wife. They were in love in Paris once. Rick and Ilsa almost run away together, but Rick changes his mind and lets her go with Laszlow. He even lies to Ilsa to get her to leave when she reveals how she feels, her two kinds of love, the admiration she feels for Victor’s vision of a free world and the passion she feels with Rick. He lets her go not so much because he believes in Laszlow’s mission, a noble one to be sure, but because he believes in Lazsclow’s love for Ilsa. “But what about us,” asks Ilsa when they are alone one last time. “We’ll always have Paris,” says Rick.
Linguini and clams for dinner under the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. A champagne cruise up the river. The sound of boots over cobblestones in the dead of night. One last kiss on the balcony. It was with this kind of afterglow, after being in bed, that I went to get a McDouble and Chicken Wrap. We were hungry. It was open. We ate in bed and watched an episode of Friends. It’s the kind of thing you can do when your lover is also your best friend. Alas.
I won’t get into the details. I woke up two hours later and didn’t go back to sleep. It was worse than having COVID. I was two seconds away from dying. At some point, I tried to go to the kitchen to get water, but the scent of garlic in the tiny kitchen almost knocked me out cold. The whole day went on like this. Trying to drink water. The windows cracked open, sirens driving by every twenty minutes, hammering construction work across the street. Shivers. Shakes. Flushing.
It was probably the clams, but I blame McDonalds.
Then, like nothing, we woke up fine. Weak, but fine. It was raining and I felt like a new person. Not exactly in a good way. M was still a bit ill. We went to the Museé d’Orsay and mostly sat in the central room, on the hard benches facing the statues. The museum itself was designed as a train station, and in the central room you really feel the weight of waiting in a kind of bright limbo of twisting iron and glass, with statues of marble and metal scattered around. Art hits different when you’re sick. Especially the Rodin statues that felt like either hyperboles of strength or as if they were collapsing on their own weight.
It's morning now. Second day since I’ve been back. I’m drinking coffee instead of wine. A new rhythm begins to insinuate itself. I started working at a bar in Harvard Square that hasn’t been running since March 2020. I’m working on a screenplay and two novels, writing in the morning, working by night. It’s almost like I’m the same person I was before all this happened. Though of course, you never step into the same river twice. It’s never the same river. I’m not the same man.
More happened. We redeemed ourselves with the rest of our time in Paris and Paris didn’t let us down. The last day was the most beautiful, we went to the Cemetery on Montparnasse, and I left two roses on Baudelaire’s tomb. For a second, I almost recited the lines of his that I knew by heart, but that felt forced, performative. I thought of leaving one of my poems, but the dead don’t read. I thought less of him, whose slab had traces of red lipstick, and I thought of who I used to be when I still introduced myself as a poet to girls at bars when they asked what I did for a living.
Right after, when we went to get the last metro ride to the Gare du Nord, two teenagers ran through as I put in my ticket, jumping through the side when the doors closed. A scrawny guy with tattoos and a girl with pink hair. They looked like I looked when I was a dirty skater in the abandoned navy yards of San Diego. No masks. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. He ran in first and she jumped right after. For a split second I made eye contact with her and saw in her eyes the fear of accusation that anyone who has been young and stupid in any western city after 2001 knows very well. Yuppy prejudice, fundamentalist rage, the shadow threat of the police state. We made eye contact and I smiled. I took my mask off so she could see me. My smile gave her relief. I wasn’t a narc. She winked and ran after her boyfriend. They were headed to a different part of the city, and so had to make it to the other side of the platform in under a minute, jumping up and down the stairs, catching their breath as the tunnel began to fill the station with light. They kissed and held hands as the screeching wheels of the train grew louder. She looked over across the tracks and took a deep, ecstatic breath, disappearing behind the white and teal train as it arrived. Fuck the Louvre and Arc du Triumphe, this is the Paris I came to see, gritty, romantic, and free.
That Donovan sounds like a real cunt.