These guys were good. I would have happily stayed and watched them, but strangely, as we set up and started clanging our way into ‘Sound and Vision’ - ‘blue, blue electric blue’ - the crowd started drifting towards us. By the time we launched into ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ we were out-drawing the fire eater and his posse by four to one. I introduced the band in bad French and took the cap round, making sure to make eye contact with each and every one. This, by the way, is the true secret of busking success, not being a virtuoso flautist or hard enough to lie on a bed of broken glass, but having someone go round and collect the money with a smile and a wink and a smattering of bad French.
When we took a breather at the end of our first set, the fire eater came over to warn us off. ‘You are not permitted,’ he said, and we looked at each other.
‘Is our place,’ he added. I was not about to argue with a man who breathes fire, and his friend who lay on a bed of broken glass, and I was about to apologise and say we’d come back later, when Don stepped forward and faced up to the fire eater and the fakir.
‘No,’ he said, all but jabbing his finger in the fire eater’s face, ‘it’s not your place. You go back over there, do your thing. We’re staying here.’
Christ. I looked round and saw Beth’s eyes on me. Was I going to back Don up in his foolhardiness? I certainly didn’t want to. In the end I did nothing, didn’t advance to stand shoulder to shoulder with Don or back off, just stood there in no man’s land watching the fire eater stare at Don. I wondered what came next - the punch, the butt, the suddenly present knife? What was Don’s problem? Why couldn’t he let it go, didn’t he realise we were little more than kids? But then the fire eater just shook his head, spat on the ground and backed off, barking something in a language I didn’t even begin to recognise.
We clamoured around Don then, all of us angry and relieved at his bravery. And it struck me that Don was actually a big guy and his Mohican, with its three giant spikes, was distinctly unusual, and evidently menacing, for people who hadn’t spent the last few years in the punk-rock micro-climate.
Our next set was a riot, our good humour infectious enough to bring the sun out, and by early afternoon we had enough money not just for food and drink but for lodging too.
We ate lunch by the Seine, as you do when you’re young and you’ve never been to Paris before, back in a time when baguettes and pâté and red wine were still exotic fare, unavailable at home.
What did we do next? It’s all something of a haze, but I’m sure we went back to the Beaubourg and took the escalators up to the top, took pictures of each other against the skyline. And a bubble started to form around Beth and me. Things were said you can’t remember, but serve to signify that your heartbeats are converging, coming closer and closer still.
Towards evening we crossed over the river at Pont Neuf and went to Renée the gypsy’s hotel. We asked if she had room for us. She smiled, sat there huge in her robes in the front room. ‘Yes darlings,’ she said, ‘I have three rooms. Five beds. You will be OK, I think.’
We thought so too. We didn’t assign the beds just yet. It was not only Beth and I who were caught up in anticipation of what developments the night might bring.
On a roll now, we decided to go out and sing some more. The only place to busk after dark was the rue St André des Arts, a tourist-packed, café-lined walkway though the busiest part of the Left Bank, from St Michel to the rue Bonaparte. Halfway along, the road suddenly widened outside a school. It was the perfect place to set up and play: the night was fine and warm and the tourists were out in force, their generosity levels raised by drink. Beth sang her featured number, ‘24 Hours From Tulsa’, with all the sweetness and charming flatness of a young Françoise Hardy. My cap was filling up not just with the usual francs and centimes, but actual folding money.
Emboldened by our success, I actually started asking for requests, when a window opened in an apartment four stories up and across the road from us. A man leaned out, yelled something, disappeared, then reappeared with a bucket of water, which he threw down at us, splashing a couple of tourists but doing little harm.
‘When he does that he always calls the police afterwards,’ said a passing local.
‘Oh, right,’ I said, ‘so how long do the police take to arrive?’
‘Ten minutes,’ said the local.
‘OK,’ I said to the crowd, ‘the police are coming in ten minutes, that means we have five minutes to play a request, what would you like?’
An American smartarse called out for some Captain Beefheart. We looked at each other, Don gave me a thumbs up and whipped up a mighty percussive burst from which we launched into something that bore a very faint resemblance to ‘Big-Eyed Beans from Venus’. I’m sure to those watching it was just a cacophony, but, as I say, we were young and we were cute and they must have felt something of our own intoxication, because they laughed and cheered and put more money into the cap, then we saluted and promised to be back same time, same place tomorrow, and hotfooted it down the street just as the police came barrelling along in the opposite direction.
We were heading for the buskers’ café. It probably had some other name, maybe it was the Café St André des Arts or something entirely forgettable like that, but everyone knew it as the buskers’ café. It was full of 1970s hangovers, French guys with long hair and battered acoustics exchanging tips on how to play Neil Young songs. Up to now we’d held each other in amiable mutual contempt: they thought we were idiot punk rockers who couldn’t play an instrument, we thought they were ridiculous old hippies in Gauloise-reeking velvet jackets.
This time though, as we approached, I could see a whole bunch of these guys, five or six of them, mostly with guitars out, sitting at the big table in the window. They were banging their way through ‘Hey Jude’, which was not unusual, except for the fact that they were all joining in and two of them were playing the spoons on the table, and in the instrumental break one of them pulled out a kazoo. We stood there open-mouthed. The hippie bastards were stealing our act.
It would have been too embarrassing to go in there now. So, as usual, everyone looked to me to come up with an alternative. Ifor the anarchist had taken me to a bar around here, I was sure. Could I remember where it was? Of course I could. I led the way unerringly, and soon we were sitting around the front table of a real locals bar, counting our takings and drinking the cheapest vin rouge yet, while watching a Chinese kid, maybe ten years old, score several million on the pinball machine.
For a while we were all one, high on the adventure, but as the evening wore on Beth and I went back into our bubble and drifted towards the back of the bar. I walked over to the counter to order more drinks. There was a guy leaning there, a real classic French boho in his late thirties, looked like Jean-Pierre Leaud’s dodgy older brother. He looked at me, then looked at Beth and said something to the patronne, and she laughed and reached up for one of the good bottles of wine and poured off three glasses. Jean-Pierre smiled and handed two glasses to me, then raised his glass. ‘Salut.’
‘Salut,’ I said back, and Jean-Pierre motioned us towards the bar stools next to him, and told us his name was Laurent, and I talked to him in bad French and translated everything for Beth, and I could see in Laurent’s eyes just how fine he thought Beth was, and I was not worried, just proud, because I knew our heartbeats were just casing themselves together, ready to beat fast.
Soon we were sitting at a booth together and Laurent was talking about shoes. He had stared at Beth’s shoes as we’d moved from bar to booth and shaken his head and said that ‘a très belle fille like you needs better shoes than those’. Those being a pair of deliberately old-fashioned schoolgirl sandals. ‘I have some wonderful shoes at my apartment,’ he said. ‘You must come and see. I will give you some.’
I translated for Beth and she smiled and said ‘Oui merci.’
‘You like to come now. Is not far.’
We looked at each other and laughed, shook our heads.
>
‘No problem,’ said Laurent, ‘I will see you again,’ and he returned to his perch at the bar and we went back to the others, who must have been waiting for us, as they stood up as one and we headed out into the street.
I knew then, as the night air hit, that I was drunk. I picked out the route back to the gypsy’s hotel without thinking, almost without looking. As we passed the school on St André des Arts I turned to Beth, the self-same second she turned to me, and our kiss started there, lasted all the way home and up the four flights of stairs and into a room that was instantly ours and I’ll spare you the details, spare me the details.
In the morning we staggered down to breakfast late, sat in Renée’s parlour, eating croissants and drinking coffee from bowls. The bubble around us seemed positively hermetic and it was only when we were finally dressed and standing outside with the others, looking like a band of gypsies, that I realised it was raining, not just a shower but the implacable stuff that’s booked in to stay.
We did our best, tried a few bedraggled songs outside the Beaubourg, went down into the maze of Châtelet Métro, but nothing was right. The public hurried past us and the sense that we were a team had been destabilised by Beth and me. By mid-afternoon we’d barely earned enough for food, let alone another night at the gypsy’s. Don had had enough.
‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ he said, as we huddled outside a patisserie awning. ‘Let’s go back out to the forêt, go to the sports centre there, have a swim.’
The others grunted agreement. I wasn’t ready to give up, wasn’t prepared to cede defeat to the bloody weather, but Don was implacable and the rain kept on, so I opted for a partial surrender.
‘Fine,’ I said, then turned to Beth. ‘You fancy going to see a gallery first?’ She nodded and stared at her feet, embarrassed to be marked out like this as part of a couple, apart from her friends, but still clear in her choice, choosing me.
That settled, we said we’d see the others later, out at the forêt. They headed off to the RER and we took the Métro up to Notre Dame de Lorette and soon found ourselves the only people in the Musée Gustave Moreau, all princesses and serpents and opium, beloved of any young aesthete who’s read Huysman’s Against Nature, and yes, of course, I was that soldier. But its emptiness was really the thing, drifting through this grand house full of weird paintings midway between kitsch and powerful, in our bubble, sealed in our bubble. Did we kiss in front of. . . Did we . . . No, too much recall.
Afterwards we drifted south, walked down St Denis and goggled at the whores, found some little second-hand shops at the southern end and bought a ‘50s shirt we both liked. Skirting Les Halles, not going anywhere in particular, just putting off our return to the forêt, I took us into Parallèles, an anarchist bookshop Ifor had shown me one time. And there, reading a copy of Actuel, was Laurent.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘mes amis’
‘Hey,’ we said right back and we got to talking. We went to the bar a few doors down and Laurent bought the drinks and we talked some more, then he asked what our plans were.
‘Not much,’ I said, ‘we have to go out to St Germainen-Laye.’
Laurent looked disgusted. ‘But why? There’s nothing there, it is just . . . bourgeois.’
I explained that we were camping in the forêt and he laughed at that and said, ‘OK, but go later tonight. I’ll take you some places that are not so . . . bourgeois.’
Beth and I looked at each other, and I mumbled something about money and our lack of any, but Laurent brushed it aside. ‘I have money, don’t be so bourgeois.’
Well, neither of us wanted to be bourgeois, that was for sure, so we looked at each other again and smiled and said, ‘OK, merci.’
It was full dark by the time we left the bar. Time to eat, said Laurent and led the way up to Chartiers, off the rue Montmartre, a big old Toulouse-Lautrec place with mirrors and moustachioed waiters and cheap decent food. It’s a bit of a tourist classic, of course, I know that now, but right in that moment it was wonderful.
We sat down and looked at the menu, and I translated what I could. Beth wrinkled her nose up and said, ‘Don’t they have anything for vegetarians?’
Laurent heard her, laughed and said, ‘You are in Paris now. We do not have this vegetarian shit.’ And then he ordered snails and entrecotes and red wine for all of us.
Beth looked at me and said ‘Oh God, please don’t tell Yaz.’ And then her foot found mine under the table, and when the steak came she ate it with all the relish of a pale girl who hadn’t seen red meat in a year.
Did we go to La Tartine next, to drink the black wine of Cahors, sitting on the same banquette once perched on by Lenin? My memory wants to say yes, but common sense says that must have been the next night, because the club was in the other direction from Chartiers. Whatever, we went somewhere and drank a verre and Laurent asked if we would like to go dancing, and we both said ‘yes’; then, ‘What about the time, we must get to the forêt,’ and Laurent gave us the look that said we were in danger of becoming bourgeois again and sighed and said, ‘Maybe you have time to catch your train. If not you stay with me, pas de problème.’
So we went dancing. I never found the place again. By day I suspect it looked like a hundred other restaurants along the boulevard Sebastopol, one of central Paris’s least charming thoroughfares. By night, though, it was African. We were amazed. This was before world music was invented, you understand. Reggae was as exotic as things got, as far as we knew. Yet now we were in Africa.
Up till then we - well I at least - had barely registered the city’s African population, and now we were surrounded by them: fresh-faced young guys in suits, women in smart dresses. I felt shabby and pale, but I didn’t care, I was too busy trying to take in the music. There was a band playing, I’d like to think it was someone legendary, Dr Nico perhaps. Whoever they were they were great, the circling guitars and the ease of the bass and drums. I was intoxicated three times over: by the music, by Beth next to me, her feet starting to measure out the beat, and by way too much red wine.
Things blurred a little. We sat down for a while then we tried to dance. An African guy came up, laughed at us, then offered his hand to Beth. She smiled at him and took his hand and he moved her round the floor. I sat back down next to Laurent.
‘You look tired, my friend,’ he said, ‘maybe you’d like something to pick you up?’
‘Sure,’ I said, for a moment thinking he meant a black coffee, but not demurring when he slipped a wrap into my hand and suggested I make the acquaintance of M. Cocaine.
It would be nice to blame everything on that old cocaine. Certainly it didn’t help, but just as in vino veritas is basically true - you may say things you regret but the reason for the regret is their truth - so cocaine may turn you into an asshole, but that asshole is your own inner asshole.
And let’s not forget it’s also really good fun. I took a toot in the toilet and the blurring went away and later on, on a nod from Laurent, I introduced Beth to my new friend, and she liked him pretty well too, and the night wore on the way you can most likely predict. And yes, of course we did, and not in the toilets but in some kind of pantry off the deserted kitchen, her elbows resting on a marble shelf.
It was lucky we had taken our chance when we did though, as Laurent’s place turned out to be no more than a one-room eyrie on the Ile de la Cité, fabulous views but no privacy, and no bed either. Laurent was no gentleman, he took the big dark wood sleigh bed and we took the blankets on the floor, holding each other at first for warmth, then pulling apart, lost in our own private battles for equilibrium as the chemicals fled our systems.
Next morning was awkward and sore-headed as you might expect. We fled around eleven leaving Laurent still in bed, a vague promise to meet in the bar by Parallèles that evening.
We found the others outside the Beaubourg. They looked a sorry crew without us. Em had taken my role as leader and her fitness for the job can be gauged by the fact that this is the
first time I’ve mentioned her; a nice girl but dull. They were pleased to see us at first, relieved I suppose, then angry at our thoughtlessness. We tried to slot back into our roles, and succeeded more or less. It was OK, the sun peeked out in between shows, we made lunch money then dinner money, but the harmony was off, and later on I raised the status of meeting Laurent to an obligation.
‘You coming back to the forêt later on?’ asked Don.
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘expect so, but if not we’ll see you here. Usual time, usual place, yeah?’
‘Fine,’ said Don, ‘see you then,’ and we fled, relieved, back into our new Parisian life.
That night Laurent took things up a notch. We exchanged Chartiers for Bofinger, still, then and now, the best of the big old brasseries. You could, if you wanted, find me there from time to time even now, maybe on a Sunday evening late, but you might, I must confess, regret it.
That first time it was sublime. Laurent ran into friends there; beautiful people, film people. They’d been working on a Rohmer movie earlier in the day. Was one of them the lost girl of French film herself, Pascale Ogier, soon to be dead of a heart attack at twenty-five? Part of me would like to think so, to think that I was not the only one whose stars were so far out of alignment. I read once what her mother wrote after Pascale died. It trumps my own self pity every time.
Paris Noir [Anthology] Page 5