PARIS, FRANCE (1984)

Even the beautiful 22 yr olds, shelving books at Shakespeare and Co with pencils behind their ears, were pretending to be adults.

I went by train to Amsterdam to the Gare du Nord in Paris.  I don’t remember my first impressions, probably that I was in a big international city, busier and more important than Amsterdam.  It was a bit chaotic getting out of the train station.  Things moved very fast. 

Let’s Go Europe had especially recommended a nearby hotel (“Madame S. will take good care of you”) so I made my way there.  I met with Madam S. that afternoon.  The hotel was for students and younger travelers.  It was a long-term kind of place, so Madame vetted the possible lodgers.  I passed the interview.  But I had to wait two days for my room. 

So I went down the street and stayed in a flea-bag (prostitute?) hotel. I still remember the sad, sagging bed.  Two days later, I checked into Madame S.’s hotel.  

My room was tiny. It had a sink, a hotplate, a single bed and an old wardrobe closet.  It also had a balcony, which was also tiny, just enough room to stand outside and lean on the railing.  But it was still a balcony.  In Paris.  Three floors above the narrow street, where I could watch the top of people’s heads as they rode by on their bicycles.

On my first day, I found the nearby Luxembourg Gardens, where I sat in one of the miniature metal chairs,  smoking cigarettes and watching the Parisiennes and their dogs and their children.

I had my first ever espresso at a hole-in-the-wall café a few doors down from the hotel. The barista was a loud, rude, dismissive Frenchmen who chain smoked while arguing with his assistant, the only other person in the place. I didn’t know why I had been given such a pathetically small amount of coffee, but when I tasted it I understood.  I sat at the one small table, against the wall, choking down bitter sips of coffee and writing in my journal.  I had a lot to write about.  Paris was way better than Amsterdam.  It was scarier.  It was wilder.

A couple days into my stay, I heard “Blue Monday” playing in the hallway of my hotel.  I went to the room, knocked on the door and introduced myself to the young couple inside.  They were from Chicago, grad students, my age.  They had a lot of good music. We would meet up each night, drink wine, smoke, recount our days’ adventures.  With their balcony doors open, you could hear the street sounds below:  scooters, arguments, bicycle bells. 

During my month in Paris, I wrote in the mornings and walked around in the afternoon.  Paris was beautiful and sophisticated in ways I didn’t know how to process.  A place like Luxembourg gardens for instance, I didn’t know why I liked it, I just did.  

Back in America, I judged a city by its music scene, its band posters, its street fashion. But there wasn’t much of that.  You never saw gangs of punks or goths walking around.  There were no clubs where emerging bands could play.  Popular groups like The Cure or The Talking Heads played in the legendary music halls of Paris.  But Paris didn’t create such things.

One day I went to the Shakespeare and Co. Bookstore.  I assumed it would be too old to be of any interest now (50 years after Joyce and Hemingway made if famous.)  But I checked it out anyway. It was actually really cool.

As it turned out: to work at Shakespeare and Co. was considered the ultimate achievement for young literary ex-pats.  The place was staffed by super cute English-major girls and nerdy British aesthete guys, all of whom were dressed in fantastic blendings of retro lit-fashion, 80’s art student grit and classic euro bohemianism.

The building itself was dark and tobacco stained and old and casual, but not sloppy.  It had upstairs apartments where many of the employees were rumored to live.  The main floor was divided into small shelved rooms with various nooks and crannies, so that you were constantly hearing conversations among the staffers and their friends about their relationships, affairs, trips to Italy and the novel somebody was working on.

There were lots of comfortable arm chairs and even a couch in one back area.  I got into a routine of going there in the late afternoon, taking their one paperback copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test from the shelf and laying down on that couch to read for an hour. 

I never tried to talk to anyone at ShakesCo. It was just fun to be there.  I would watch other visitors enter.  The normie tourists would come in, look around, and be psychically repulsed by the cool kid vibes.  But others, like myself, came sauntering in, expecting nothing, only to slowly realize ShakesCo had great books, journals, magazines, plus everyone who worked there looked like a budding French movie star from 1964.

Paris was a lot tougher than I expected.  In my wanderings one day, I found myself in a gambling district of some sort.  In every other doorway there was a bar with a dense, smokey crowd of drunk, brawler types, betting on horse races, arguing, jostling each other.

Another time, I saw a fashionable thirty-something woman on the Blvd de Saint Michel with a trenchcoat and fancy shoes, hurrying to catch a cab.  But as she came closer she wasn’t the delicate beauty I was expecting, but had a hard, intense face.  Mannish.  Grim.  Not pretty.  

The softness I associated with France, the nice food, the flowers, the gardens, there was that too, and it was nice, but that wasn’t what you saw on the street.

Paris also seemed very adult to me.  Being young and childish and bratty was a pose that still had currency in the post-punk/early 80s of New York.  Jean Michel Basquiat comes to mind. It didn’t seem like that would work in Paris.  Even the beautiful 22 yr Bennington grads, shelving books at Shakespeare and Co with pencils behind their ears, were pretending to be adults.  They were all probably sleeping with older Parisian men.  Of course they were.

Paris was a serious place.  It didn’t have much to say about the latest trends in music or culture.  That was the job of New York, Los Angeles, London.  But Paris stood above those places.  It was defiant in its insistence that it still set the standard for Western civilization.  And you felt that defiance coming at you. Every day.