by Rich Terfry
I checked into an almost-affordable, quasi-fancy hotel in the Pigalle neighbourhood (the diseased vagina of Paris). The lobby of the hotel was dark and red-velvety. It hummed with menace. Working behind the desk was one of the strangest-looking and most beautiful women I’d ever seen. She looked like she had been photo-shopped with parts from fifteen different beautiful women.
“J’ai besoin d’une chambre, s’il vous plaît.” I slid my credit card and passport across the desk.
The woman didn’t say a word. She just nodded and went to work, entering my information in her computer. Her hands were beautiful. She smiled almost imperceptibly. When she had finished, she handed me a key attached to a giant tassel. She gazed into my eyes for a few beats longer than what is normally comfortable. She buried a hook in me.
There was no elevator; instead there was a grand spiral staircase. As I climbed to my room, I glanced down at the woman. And each time I did, our eyes locked. Somehow, it wasn’t embarrassing. I could feel her promising me something. I promised her back.
Over the next two days, I explored Paris. I rifled the city’s drawers and medicine cabinet. I searched under the bed. Every time I came and went through the hotel lobby, the telepathic games with the woman behind the desk intensified. I was returning from a thorough combing of Montmartre, when she forfeited.
“My name is Anna.” She spoke very quietly.
“What time do you get off work?” The question sounded bold coming out of my mouth, but it didn’t feel bold. I felt certain it was the question she wanted me to ask. Besides, telepaths don’t waste time with formalities and small talk. We see the light in each other that no one else sees and that’s all that matters.
“Midnight. Wait for me outside. On the corner. Not here.”
At 0030 we were in her apartment, sitting at her kitchen table, drinking tea. After the tea had been drunk, we moved to the rug on her living room floor and spent the wee hours coaxing kisses from each other. I didn’t need to ask questions to know she had many secrets to protect. Hard secrets.
It was almost four o’clock in the morning when it was time to say good-night.
“Can I see you again tomorrow?”
A sadness she’d been avoiding all night befell her. “It will be difficult. I’m not working at the hotel tomorrow, but I need to take care of some business. Tomorrow night I have to go with some guys to a party. I don’t want to, but I have no choice.”
I was afraid to ask what that meant—and her eyes told me not to.
“Will you be late? Can I meet you after?”
“Maybe so. I will call you. I would love to see you.”
She called me the night after at 2:00 a.m. “I want to wake up next to you.”
I ran to her. We fell asleep four hours later, as the sun was coming up. The three days that followed blurred together.
I didn’t want to leave Paris. But I had to. I had to finish my tour. I had another two weeks to go, travelling around France, Spain, Portugal. I promised Anna that I would come back when the tour was over. I was already thinking of quitting my job at the hotel back in Halifax and staying in Paris forever. I was ready to cut ties and distance myself from the curses, the bad luck, and the evil in the trees of Nova Scotia. I breathed better in Paris. I slept better. I ate better. Paris challenged me. I could feel it bringing out the best in me. I decided I needed Paris.
When I left, Anna cried. No one had ever cried over me before.
Four nights later, after stops in Nantes, Bordeaux and Toulouse, I was in Marseille. It was my birthday. When I arrived at the venue, I met a man named Frank. He ran the venue and was the promoter of the show. And he was a tough son of a bitch. Handshake like a bear trap. Face like a fighter with a losing record. Evil aura that shone a blinding metallic black. His ugly hands were coded with gangster tattoos. He looked like the last person you’d dare mess with.
As Gangster Frank and I were getting acquainted, I noticed a baseball bat leaning in the corner behind his desk. It was a Louisville Slugger of unpainted ash. Classic. Beautiful. “Powerized.”
“Frank, are you a baseball fan?” I pointed to the bat.
“Oh, that. I just keep it for law and order, if you know what I mean.”
“I do. Would you mind if I took a look at it?”
“Be my guest.”
I rescued the bat from the corner. On closer inspection, it was chipped, and marked with brown stains. It was still beautiful, though. I squeezed it and worked it in my hands. It felt good. The previous two months were the longest I’d gone without holding a bat in my hands since I was eight years old. It all came back. I could smell the grass. I wasn’t in France anymore.
Then Frank brought me to.
“There is no le baseball in France. Here football is ze king.”
With those words, my life was folded in half. I felt a monumental sadness. No baseball. A perfect cruelty. France had everything I needed—except the one thing I needed most. I gave Frank his bat. He had cracked my skull with it, and not even realized what he was doing.
After my sound check, I went back to my hotel with an ache in my heart that soon spread to the rest of my body. Maybe it was the words “no le baseball” poisoning my veins. Maybe it was not hearing from Anna all day, after our messaging each other incessantly since the minute I had left Paris. Whatever the cause, my weakness was exploited by a particularly satanic strain of the flu. It came on fast, and a cough jumped out of my mouth every time I tried to speak. Still, I hoped getting some rest before showtime that night would be all I needed. No such luck. An hour before I was scheduled to go onstage, I was curled in the fetal position and willing to make a deal with the devil. I was afraid to call Frank to report my condition. I feared losing a finger for failure to perform my job. But I had no choice. I was at death’s door.
When I coughed up my confession, Frank snarled “Wait” and then hung up the phone. Less than ten minutes later, a doctor out of a Norman Rockwell painting appeared at my bedside. He set to work right away, studying the light of my dying flame through my ears and throat. Having made his undisclosed diagnosis, he set up a miniature laboratory on the desk. He withdrew several small vials and lined them up in a neat row. Working quickly and in silence, he concocted an elixir in one of the room’s standard-issue, paper-wrapped drinking glasses.
“Buvez ça.”
I swallowed the solution in a single gulp as the doctor observed me with folded arms. For the next ten seconds, I felt as if ants were swarming all the systems of my body. A golden tingle spread throughout my anatomy. I imagined myself glittering like the Eiffel Tower does at the top of every evening hour. I didn’t want the sensation to end. When it did, not only was my ailment gone but I felt superhuman. I could have karate-chopped the desk in half. I felt quite tempted to try.
“Bon?” the doctor asked.
“Bon,” I said without a cough.
Then poof. As suddenly as he had appeared, the doctor disappeared. Seconds after the door clicked shut, the phone rang. Frank.
“You ready to go?”
“I’m ready! Frank, what the hell just happened?”
“Laisse tomber, mon ami.”
I haven’t had a cold or the flu since.
After the show, Frank had a surprise waiting for me. Someone (presumably my agent) had tipped him off that it was my birthday. On the table in my dressing room were a fancy cake and a small fortune’s worth of booze. I was towelling off, when Frank entered the room with his baseball bat and three women. The women were completely naked except for high heels. Frank was smiling; the women were not.
“Bon anniversaire, Big Boss!”
Dread gnawed at me. I was tired. I never drank alcohol and wasn’t about to start. I knew explaining all this would be impossible, and that my refusal would offend the scariest man in France. The girls were pretty in a hard kind of way, but my heart belonged to Anna. All I wanted was the cake.
“Frank, why don’t you be bartender and I’ll cut the cake?”<
br />
“Bravo.”
My hope was that if everyone had a good time, no one would notice I wasn’t drinking. It didn’t work out that way. When I finally told Frank I didn’t drink, he laughed. When I said it again, I realized I would have offended him less if I’d slapped him in the face.
I said: “Seriously, I don’t drink. Not even wine or champagne. Pas du tout!”
Frank heard: “Shove your bottles of monkey piss up your ass, you piece of shit. Death to France!”
The girls heard: “I’m a fag.”
For the next fifteen minutes, I ate cake. Frank and one of the nudes mumbled to each other quietly and shot threatening glances in my direction. The other two nudes had sex with each other. I was quite uncomfortable.
Frank drank hard. His aura got blacker and shinier. The edges in the room became sharper. I stood up.
“You going somewhere, Big Boss?” It wasn’t a question. It was a threat.
“Salle de bain.”
The dressing room had a water closet, and I remembered it having a window. I wasn’t sure if it was big enough for me to fit through, but I had to try.
After locking the bathroom door behind me, I opened the window as quietly as possible. I climbed up, using the toilet as a ladder, and started working my way through the window. It was a tight fit and a fifteen-foot drop on the other side—but it was that or Frank’s bat. Escaping in this way meant leaving some things behind: my pay and some equipment, but also my death. I had made another deal with the devil.
I was in Lisbon three nights later when I finally heard from Anna. She was crying and whispering into the phone nervously.
“We can’t see each other anymore. Ever. You must stay away. Don’t come back to Paris. Not even the airport. Never come to the hotel again. The owners are gangsters from Russia and they’re looking for you.”
Before I could say anything, she hung up. I never heard from her again.
•
I returned, heartbroken, home to the greys of Halifax. But I was also alive and rich. My suitcase was busting at the seams with British pounds, Norwegian kroner, Swedish kronor, Finnish markkaa, Swiss francs, and euros. So much colour! I marched straight to the bank and paid off my student loan debt in one shot. That felt like hitting a walk-off grand-slam home run.
As I walked back from the bank, a small woman wearing a wacky outfit and a large smile stopped me on the street.
“You need a manager. But not just any manager. You need the best. You need me. My name is Liz.”
“I’ll tell you what, Liz. If you can get me a record deal in a week, you can be my manager.”
“Done!”
We shook hands and she jumped up and down. She had an infectious enthusiasm. Liz’s assignment wasn’t a hard one. All the major record companies had been calling since I had been knighted by Radiohead. It was her job to get me the best deal. And she did. A week later I signed with Warner Brothers.
The day I signed my record deal, I quit my job at the hotel. That same night, I booked a one-way ticket to Paris. The up-front money was more than enough for me to get there, rent an apartment and find my footing.
Making the decision to leave Halifax was hard. It meant walking away from my baseball dreams. It meant I would never play competitively. But I packed a couple of gloves and balls in the hope of finding someone who would play catch with me. If nothing else, I figured that there would be rocks to throw in Paris and I could read the box scores every morning in the Herald Tribune. As for Anna’s warnings, they rang only faintly in my ears. I figured I’d take my chances.
THE INTERROGATION III
“Why did you leave Canada?”
I was sure my interpreter was paraphrasing the interrogator’s question. His delivery had had spikes and his mouth was wet with rage, which reminded me of Humphrey Bogart. He was leaning on his knuckles, which reminded me of James Cagney. The ringing in my ears was an echo of the violence in his eyes.
I’ll never see a movie again, I thought.
The radiators hissed with danger. Maybe it was the lights in that room. Maybe it was the air going out of my life. Maybe it was the thought of the woods back in Mount Uniacke. Whatever the reason, I suddenly understood that those woods were why I had left Canada. I had thought I could get away.
The interpreter waited for my answer. But I could hardly see her through the trees.
•
I FOUND A ONE-BEDROOM apartment at 15, rue de Sèvres in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in the heart of the Left Bank. The flat was tiny by Halifax standards and huge by Paris standards. It was old and slanted and wooden and sunny. The window in my bedroom looked across the courtyard into the apartment of a pretty girl with black hair. She had large collections of books and teas.
The Sèvres-Babylone metro station was directly across the street. The Bon Marché department store—with its glorious food hall, La Grande Épicerie—was a block away. The Jardin du Luxembourg was a five-minute walk. And a movie rental shop called Prime Time Video was nearby. It catered to Anglo film nerds and was run by a friendly Irish guy named Ian. I would visit every few days to rent Hollywood classics and engage in some English conversation. Ian and I would talk about girls and music.
The one thing I couldn’t find in Paris was rocks. There are almost no rocks in Paris, only pebbles. And pebbles are not good for throwing. They have no weight. Because finding a decent rock was a rare occurrence, I took to stashing them in my pockets whenever I did stumble upon them. Then, once a week or so, I’d take a bag of them down to the bank of the Seine and throw each rock at a piece of garbage floating by. That was the extent of my Parisian baseball workout routine.
Meanwhile, I made it a point to steer clear of the Pigalle neighbourhood whenever possible for fear of a run-in with Anna’s Russian gangsters. It wasn’t difficult; the streets of Pigalle are lousy with shops selling cheap souvenir trinkets and even cheaper sex. But there are also many music shops and venues, so I did have to pass through from time to time. Whenever I did, I checked over my shoulder constantly. I looked for Anna too, but never found her. Wondering what had happened to her filled me with sadness. I had a hard time imagining that she was still alive.
I wasn’t living in France legally, but I left the country often enough to stay within the bounds of the immigration laws. Still, this impeded my progress learning the French language and fed my loneliness. I was never standing still long enough to give myself a chance to connect. But I was living a life of constant adventure and learning how to be a person of the world.
Paris is rich—rich in almost everything: beauty, grandeur, history, culture, ideas, food, flowers, fur coats. Its one impoverishment is space. The apartments are small, the cafés and restaurants are cramped (your leg is always touching someone else’s), the sidewalks are narrow, the Métro is crowded. You can’t stretch your arms out without knocking something over. And that something is probably precious and fragile and one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable. When you knock it over, it smashes on the ground and you feel like an ogre, and the Parisians stare at you with an attitude that says, You don’t belong here and you never will. And you know they’re right. Although all Parisians look amazing, they don’t appear to exercise. How could they? Where would they do it? You couldn’t run in Paris if you wanted to. It’s like one big art gallery. That’s why the pace is so slow. What choice do you have? Grass is a rare sight, and when you do find a patch, you will probably not be allowed to walk or sit on it. If you are allowed, that patch will be occupied by picnickers who look like they’re re-enacting a Manet painting. There are no parking lots in Paris. Garages, sure; but no lots. And this may be why most Parisians’ favourite pastime is arguing. You don’t need much space for that.
The elegant claustrophobia of Paris, combined with my longing to play baseball, inspired in me a particular yearning that would burn intensely when I saw open farmland—especially fallow fields—during my numerous journeys by rail across Europe. I would feel a desperate urge to escape the confin
es of the train and run across those fields. Each time I saw an expanse of green, the urge grew. It felt as real as needing badly to pee. Eventually, a new habit was born: even now, whenever I see open an open field as I’m driving in Canada or the United States I pull over to the shoulder, stop the car, get out and run. I’ve been chased by bulls and by farmers with shotguns, but I’ve never regretted a field sprint. As I’m running, I picture myself from high above. I see the whole field—or sometimes a patch of desert—and my life streaking across it. And I feel screamingly alive.
•
One of my early, lonesome European train rides took me to the city of Fribourg in Switzerland. I was there to play an arts festival that attracted artists of every stripe, and lovers of culture from around Europe and beyond. After my show, I met a woman from Rome who ignited a raging fire in my heart. She had it all: style, brains, grace, appreciation for the arts. And she was beautiful. She worked as a model and was very successful at it. We hit it off and agreed to keep in touch.
For a few months, we exchanged messages filled with longing, and then we made a plan to meet again. We had matching breaks in our work schedules and decided to spend that time together at her place in Rome.
My first night there was glorious. She had an amazing apartment in the Trastevere neighbourhood and we filled it with sex and laughter.
I woke up the next morning with the thrilling feeling that my life was about to change. My head was swirling with daydreams of us running away and never looking back. But over breakfast, just as it occurred to me that this was our first shared moment during daylight hours, I noticed something I hadn’t before: rashes of scars in the crooks of her arms. This was my first glimpse of the broken person I so badly and naively wanted to be my answer for everything. I tried to put what I had seen out of my mind—to convince myself that there was no possible way she could be a junkie.