A Game Ronin in Europe, part three: Paris

This post is dedicated to my brand new niece and nephew, Calla Marie Bourdeau and Easton Lewis Bourdeau, born on September 9th, 2004, at 7 in the morning. To see them and read more about them, check out my new daily journal, The Domestic Life.

Click here for the photos

...Mary Burge and I are laying on adjacent beds pushed together in the corner. We are trying to sleep. The room is a dark-ish haze. Sounds drift in like ghosts from under the door, through the walls, in through the open window. Out beyond is a narrow courtyard lined with other windows, and beyond those are excited girls who just got back from a drunken night in Paris, some men relating stories in an unidentified foreign language, a loud radio, a neglected child, other noises. From the hallway out past our door a man emerges periodically and sternly insists that everyone shut up, that he and his family are trying to sleep. Otherwise silent, Mary and I giggle at the sincerity of his frustration, hoping he can’t hear. An hour passes, and the voices drift off one by one, until all that is left is a tinny hip hop cd somewhere above that skips every couple of minutes until its semi-coherent owner advances to the next track. It is too hot to close the windows, but I do it anyway, and the room is finally dark and silent.

Hotel Basfroi was the recurring character in Mary’s and my experience in Paris. It was a loud, social place, a twisted Alice in Wonderland mansion. The cramped hallways were painted and carpeted in bright pastel colors: pink, blue, green. There was free internet and free breakfast, which Mary and I would bring to each other on trays and eat at our room’s small desk. A smiling San Franciscan staffed the front desk in the mornings, and she was generous, helpful, and conversant in at least 4 languages. Each night the bar was crowded with surly backpacker types looking over their shoulders or hitting on each other drunkenly, the air hung with blue smoke. The lift was never in service. In our room after getting back from the day’s adventures, Mary and I would drink our latest acquisition of cheap French wine (2002 or 2003 Bordeaux, 5 euros or less), bounce on the bed, open wide the courtyard window for breeze and atmosphere, talk and prod at each other, listen to Fanny Pack and Madonna on the ipod through my big headphones, opened up like mini speakers. Wine and exhaustion would take hold, our conversation would trail off, and we would sprawl across the bed and each other, sleeping despite the noise and heat.

Much has been written about Paris, but I found nothing really captures it. There are no representative districts you can visit to deduce its entirety nor hilltops from which it can all be seen at once. You have to roll up your sleeves and get personal with its various aspects: the riverfront, the monuments, the cafes, the cathedrals, the streets and boulevards, the lush parks, the metro. It doesn’t seem like the most romantic place in the world, not that I’m the one it should fall upon to judge. But to me, Paris seems too matter of fact for that. “Here I am,” Paris says. “I am beautiful and glorious. But I’m a little bit too busy to talk to you right now, so just show yourself around for a bit and maybe I’ll get with you later.”

Mary is a good friend from Austin. We had been very close, but somehow things deteriorated and became halting and jagged until I came to realize we’d had a falling out. Mary talks about her feelings in a language I don’t understand, made up of extreme close-ups, aerial shots, and abstract metaphors, so I try to be patient and listen carefully. She’d been in Europe since February, studying Spanish and religion, dancing, kissing boys, riding trains, racking up passport stamps and way more Euro tourist cred than me. Less than 24 hours before she departed Austin for the first leg of her trip, we finally made up. Huddled in our coats on the roof of a parking garage at night, we looked out over what passes for Austin’s winter. The six radio towers on the distant hill twinkled and blinked in red, and we lamented our lost time. “Well,” I said. “I’m thinking seriously about going to Europe. Maybe we can meet up there.”

…The name “Voltaire” is commonly seen in Paris – on street signs, buildings, businesses, his grave. I am relating to Mary, probably inaccurately, my favorite joke from the movie Swingers. I don’t really know who Voltaire is, but I have deduced that he is a French philosopher. “These two guys are at a diner in Vegas,” I say, “and one is complaining about how he can’t find the right woman; he wants a girl who is hot but also sophisticated. He uses the waitress as an example, ‘look, she’s hot and everything, but do you think she knows any, say, French philosophy?’. So then the waitress comes by to take their orders and he orders, like, ‘scrambled eggs, toast, orange juice, and The Rise of Man in the 18th Century’, or something like that, some famous book that Voltaire wrote.” Mary snickers. I check the status - Did she rolls her eyes, too? Did she figure out that I’m dumb? That was a while back, right? I guess it doesn’t matter, since she’s amused, so I continue. “The waitress just stares at him blankly and walks off. ‘See?’ he says to his friend, ‘she had no idea what I was talking about.’ But then the waitress walks by again, you know, busy with other customers, and he yells to her ‘Hey, excuse me, miss, can I have that orange juice now?’ and she yells back at him, ‘Hold your horses, Voltaire!’” We laugh and admire the humor, discuss the merits and lack thereof of the rest of the film. From now on, this will be our recurring joke whenever we see that name: “Hold your horses, Voltaire!”

In Paris I finally stepped off the edge into full adventure traveler mode. No more cushy hotels, no more daily schedule. It was time to get ghetto, build my own itinerary, see amazing things. My travel buddy for this first leg was competent and experienced, a compatible friend and a reliable sugar mamma. To explain the latter: immediately upon arriving in Paris I found my checking account was empty; for a while I had neglected to make a savings-to-checking transfer, a fact which demonstrates the fatal flaw of to-do lists: even if it says “keep an eye on bank balance”, you don’t have to. For some reason, the automated phone and internet services wouldn’t let me make the transfer, so I had to call my bank, but they weren’t open Sundays, they weren’t open that Monday because it was Labor Day, and in any case they didn’t open til 3 pm, Paris time. Mary, who like the rest of the universe manages her money with at least a scrap of competence, floated my insolvent ass until Tuesday, 3 pm, and didn’t even make me put out. That’s when you know you’ve got a good friend: willing to fund your luxury tourist lifestyle when they’ve got one of their own to provide for and their credit cards and cash were stolen on the train to Budapest months earlier. Or, like Lulu, they live in one of the US’s most expensive cities but still use magic computer mojo to transfer you US$100 so you won’t be literally flat broke, having instead a few thin, crisp euro bills to call your own.

…Mary and I have met up with Mathilde, and we are all sitting on Pont des Arts, eating lunch. To the East is the Isle de la Cite, to the West, the Palais Royal / Musee du Louvre, behind that, the Tour Eiffel, underneath is the Seine. Mathilde thinks nothing of the scenery; she has lived in Paris for many years. It is a little too sunny on this bridge, and I am probably getting a sunburn. It is Mary’s first Mathilde experience, and I suspected they would love each other. Mathilde scowls and laughs and struggles enthusiastically with her limited English: “Today I interviewed a man, a doctor who helps people with addictions, like drugs. He also is helping people who play too many video games, because they are addicted in the same way, and he wrote for a magazine about this.” Thin, well-dressed people lounge in the sun on benches or walk by purposefully while speaking into cell phones. I inquire after her son, whom she once called “the greatest character I ever made” in the “world’s hardest MMPOG.” “You want to know where is he now? He is at his school.” I try to ask her about soccer practice, which I thought she mentioned earlier, but this line of inquiry is somehow a joke to Mathilde, and she doesn’t really answer. Mary and I are eating identical lunches: cheese crepes with raspberry tarts for dessert. We recently discovered that we both know all the lyrics to Carley Simon’s “You’re So Vain”.

This is where Paris’s magnificence comes from: that everywhere you go, everywhere you look, you are surrounded by objects made to solidify and celebrate luxury and grace, history and beauty. Paris is lavishly rich with tourist destinations, as though someone carelessly scattered a brimming handful of gems onto a map, too many to count, each one representing something worth visiting, something that, with a casual air, winds up being more impressive than you expected. You move from gem to gem, overwhelmed, never capturing more than a tiny percentage of what the city has to offer. In-between and overshadowed by the larger ones, the smaller gems become improvised adventures, distractions, and discoveries. And in-between these, you sit sipping overpriced espresso in café chairs lined up like theatre seats to watch the parade of passers-by. You learn to take all the luxury and ease for granted, which seems exactly how it was intended to be taken. In Paris, you are one of the chosen ones.

…Mary and I are at one of the largest such jewels, a huge sapphire let’s say, although I at least hadn’t the cultural background to gauge its significance beforehand. It is the Pantheon, a massive, solemn, domed building, a vault which houses striking paintings, stately and calculated architecture, the graves of crucial historical figures, and Foucault’s pendulum. Mary and I stand in front of Voltaire’s grave in the vaulted tomb below. “Hold your horses, Voltaire!” we explain to his earnest but strangely unresponsive white statue. Later we discuss a wall painting depicting a deathbed scene in which one of the mourners, a young lady, seems to have forgotten her clothes in her rush to get where the dying is at. “Check it out, she’s pulling on her shirt. That’s hot!” I say. “No, it’s totally that other guy’s arm, see?” Mary corrects me. “That guy’s a perv, then!” I respond. “He’s twice her age, and he’s totally copping a feel!” “Not THAT guy,” Mary laughs. “Look at the sleeve, it’s that young guy.” I study; she’s right. “He’s trying to be so slick about it,” I observe. “Had me fooled. ‘Shit, I just gotta point past you, baby. Sorry if I touch your tit.’”

On day one we visited: Jardin Du Luxembourg, the Latin Quarter, the Sorbonne, the Pantheon, the Hotel de Ville, Marais, the Tour Eiffel. I called my bank in the afternoon, but they said I couldn’t make a transfer over the phone, and I got cut off when they put me on hold to see if there was anything else they could do for me. Sweet customer service. So that short window of opportunity closed, and Mary had to float me for another day. Later, I tried to wish my mom happy birthday from the top of the Eiffel Tower, but just then my phone decided it was of minutes, the single biggest sin committed by my chaotic evil phone, the one purchased in Lyon.

…back at Basfroi, Mary is showing me her photos of sunsets in Scandinavia. She holds reels of film up to the light for me to look through. “Wow, why are these so awesome?” I ask. Mary has always been my photography instructor. “Is it the wide-angle lens?” “It’s because I’m good,” Mary replies. She flops backwards onto the bed and glances through her half-closed, upsidedown eyes. “Ah, Mister Smith,” she says. “Miss Burge,” I respond. We usually use our last names when speaking to each other. Less personal that way.

On day two, we hit the Louvre, Champs Elysee, and the Arc de Triomphe. Place de la Concorde is a pointlessly expansive plaza between Palais Royal (where the Louvre is) and the Arc de Triomphe, and that’s where I got ripped off by three old Indian ladies. The freewheeling good Samaritan, I was helping them make change for a twenty, they plucking euro coins straight from my cupped hands, when the chick with the twenty faded into the background and the front guard presented me with some index card which seemed to describe a needy, diseased child they were seeking donations for, although I didn’t take the time to read it, coming instead to the jolting realization that these innocent looking grandmother types had just jacked me for my last readily-available, Lulu-bequeathed 15 euro in the world, evaporating away what had been passing earlier that day for a modicum of financial agency. As they bowed and lamented and backed away slowly, I quickly formulated and evaluated several plans for making a scene: grabbing one by the arm, calling the cops, performing the Flying Cross Chop on the one lined up in my sights, or maybe just putting her in a headlock and giving her noogies until my cash rematerialized. I opted instead to suggest that perhaps they should “Fuck you”, figuring it wouldn’t be worth my 15 euro, and besides I’m not the one that has to get reincarnated as a cockroach for my misdeeds. See how far that 15 euro takes you when you’re eating dropped tortilla crumbs and human skin flakes off someone’s kitchen floor, sluts. It was a good learning experience, though, as I’d never have guessed I’d feel the moral obligation to communicate in such a base fashion with oldstresses of their ilk, and, also, the chick who attempted the same scam in Amsterdam wound up embarrassingly searching through her pockets while I sat patiently eating a falafel and waiting for her to come up with the change, until eventually the dude I was with gave her a euro out of pity. Fuck pity, I’m hard.

Back at Hotel Basfroi, I saw that my bank had not responded to my urgent email request for assistance. Without cash or cell minutes, email was the only Europe to US communication I had at my disposal, so I came up with Plan B: email Lulu and have her ride shotgun, calling the bank on my behalf. Meanwhile, Mary clocked in day 3 of sugar mamahood. With all my travel money sitting uselessly in the wrong account, I felt trapped, powerless, and dependant, but I made some good progress at amputating my frustrations and the outdated machinery in my psyche that pressed me to dwell on them with a frequency suggestive of nicotine addition.

That night Mary and I bought food for a picnic and were searching for some bread to complete the soon-to-be picturesque scene. Apprehensive about pickpockets, I had been keeping my passport in my front pocket, figuring someone would have to fondle my balls to steal it, and I would stand a fair chance of noticing such a disturbance to my nether regions. Mary and I were walking through Marais when my balls were fondled, and I instantly patted down my pockets to confirm the continued presence of my passport. Turning behind me, I made eye contact with the smiling groper, boyfriend walking obliviously alongside. Marais is the gayest part of gay Paris. Down at the hip kids spot, I composed artful avocado, tomato, and brie sandwiches for us, and we took drags from the bottle of wine, surrounded by lively conversations in several languages. In Europe you can drink anywhere. That’s true freedom. USA can keep the fucking fries. Labeling American fast food “French” was the best way to insult them, anyway.

…Mary and I have gotten the hang of Paris now, sinking slowly into it like a comfortable armchair. We relish riding the metro, on which we sing Outkast and Madonna with the flair of brazen anonymity that comes with being in a non-English-speaking metropolis. “Why o why o why o are we so in denial that we know weren’t not happy here?” we inquire the blank Parisian faces. Being on the metro means that we are going somewhere, that we have something to do next.

On day three, we visited the catacombs, the Notre Dame, the Basilique de Sacre-Coeur, and Montmartre. An early morning fax operation culminated, finally, finally, in my desperately-desired $3k transfer. We didn’t visit the Moulin Rouge on purpose, instead winding up there after walking a hefty 2-3 clicks past touristy shops and food vendors looking for a single, solitary cashpoint to consummate the reunion. It turns out that moulin means “windmill”. Well, fuck, that makes sense. Demonstrating a compassionate, lawful-leaning change of heart for which all is nearly forgiven, the chaotic evil phone miraculously rang outside Notre Dame so my mom could tell me that my niece and nephew had just been born. The cuffs of my black jeans were still dirty white from a kicked up, airborn powder, soapy to the touch, produced from the millions of bones in the catacombs. Rows of bones and skulls marched past when I closed my eyes. Everything was better.

…Mary and I are standing in our room, bags packed. “Sure you don’t want to come to London with me, Mister Smith?” she inquires. “You could meet my mother dear.” “Pass,” I say. “I have places to go,” though in truth I’m not sure where. We pause and look at each other. Last night’s attempt to further our connection was good but has left much unsaid, and despite 3 days of each other’s constant companionship we find ourselves once again out of time. I still don’t understand your language, I think. “Thanks for everything,” I say, “it wouldn’t have been Paris without you.” “Ah, Mister Smith,” she says, and we hug, and walk together to the metro.

Comments

[Mariafatal]

Hold your horses Voltaire! Actually I have read some Voltaire back in the day, but it gets a bit verbose. He brought in the naturalization of God and the Age of Reason, having slummed with Sir Isaac Newton in Britain.

Why do you have to be so glossy, Mr. Smith? when I got so used to pulp fiction....

[Mariafatal]

You forgot to mention our search for Jim Morrison's grave and the freaky old hippies. Where are the old hippies' pic?

[Randy]

yeah, that's it! "age of reason" or some such. fuck, now i'll have to tell that joke right from now on.

glossy, eh. if you've got another half to the story, miss burge, be my guest. i wanted to link to your paris post (note: published 5 weeks ago, when these events actually happened), but you seem to have archived your euro material out of existence.

as for jimmy m, you have to check that 9 page photo album a bit more carefully, no? get with it.

[theron.]

it is a 7 page photo album. and, for the record, you posted the damn thing four times over.

NOW who is the fool?!

no longer will i suffer being mocked for my inadvertant, redundant posts.

don't pick on maria either.

thanks for mentioning my "copycat" blog though.

and, btw, voltaire is hilarious. candide is a laugh riot. you should read it!

my bad-but I thought you had a close-up pic. T-dawg is right, why are there 4 posts? I will put up my Paris version so you can link, 'kay?

Did you get sick or become anorexic upon returning to America? I can't seem to consume anything but vegan smoothies and water.

[Randy]

wow, good typepad service. last night they pooped out so i couldn't post at all, this morning they quad post to make up for it. i'll go do some housecleaning.

no, i've been eating a lot, actually. i switched back to a pseudo-vegan diet, too. i did get sick, though, but i think this all has to do with the cold environment more than anything else.

[Randy]

now that i've published a zillion words out into the internet void, i'm proud to say that GR is getting picked up pretty frequently by search engines. here are the most popular querries that will land you somewhere in GR territory:

prison jargon check off
beyond black rock
he sucked my
gemini tattoos
cold sores terri warren survive in air
white dots on tonsils
tonsils white dots

[Lulu]

I just got a referral from a google search I haven't seen in a while (probably #7 on my "popular google searches that lead you to Bitter Greens" list)
"Fucking during periods"

other favorites in the top 10:
"depo made me bitchy"
"naked hot springs"
"JK Rowling book signing"

[Randy]

here are my latest new keywords:

smith tower penthouse photos seattle
clockwork milk bar copenhagen
work in lyon
new york:adventures in time and places
fourteen fuck
hsv theme song unknown artist
invented detachable shower head
gallo wines job opps
blast billiards v0. 2
kylian lappi inzoo
getting my freak on
doctors fucking patients

[Randy]

okay, i'll stop after this, but i just wanted to say that today i got "new york gay dudes pictures" from somebody staying at the Hampton Inn in Orlando, Florida.... this is the best day of my life!