Reckless : My Life As a Pretender (9780385540629)

by Hynde, Chrissie

  Sasha was meant to be the other singer in the band, and within a couple of weeks she invited me to stay at the apartment on Avenue Denfert-Rochereau. I bade farewell to Lilian, shifting my worldly goods to chez Letronière. Sasha and I had much in common: we both read the Bhagavad Gita, with lifelong devotion, and you can’t have more in common than philosophy.

  Sabrina was the star of l’Alcazar—a typically Parisian cabaret and one of the last in a great tradition. Sabrina went onstage around midnight in feathers and sequins, dazzling the audience while flying through the air on a swing trailing glitter, and performing French dance-hall classics. She designed all her costumes and was constantly drawing and putting new outfits together.

  In civilian life, “Sabo” looked like Lou Reed. “He” wore a motorcycle jacket, jeans, boots, striped mohair sweater and studded leather cap. I loved walking down the street with the Letronières, the only couple I’d met who could rival the reaction that Vivienne and Malcolm elicited.

  Sasha did the cooking and whatever administration needed doing, and drove Sabrina about in an old white Mercedes with leopard-print seat covers, steady as a Chinese lieutenant driving a diplomatic car.

  Everyone in Paris was an expert at rolling joints—hashish mixed with tobacco and don’t forget the filter, usually a spent Metro subway ticket. This common ritual took place hourly as we sat cross-legged on the floor around the brass tray, drinking Imperial Gunpowder or oolong tea.

  The brass tray was the centerpiece of the apartment on the fifth floor above an ancient billiards hall with a long view down the Rue Daguerre, which at Christmas was strung with every imaginable beast, from quail to wild boar, hung by their feet, bags tied securely over their heads so as not to splash blood on the cobblestones (a far cry from the frozen food department at the Acme).

  I realized that the time I was spending at Denfert-Rochereau was the best of my life so far. I felt like I was starting to figure out who I was.

  There was no furniture in the apartment except for a wooden chair and a little table in the kitchen, which overlooked the courtyard. As far as I knew the bathtub had never been used other than to store costumes and we all washed at the bathroom sink. They’d lived on a houseboat in Kashmir before and were used to “basic.” The French didn’t like to wash much anyway, so it seemed.

  Sasha made basic brown rice with tamari sauce and carefully prepared legumes—precisely my cup of tea. She was a good cook. Sabo preferred French delicacies, which included a daily round of fresh Camembert. And I do mean fresh.

  Every day, after taking Kalu out (my one duty—walking the dog), I’d climb the five flights of stairs, gasping a smoker’s gasp, then open the door to an explosion of Camembert fumes. Gagging, I’d stagger to a window and force it open in a panic.

  Sabo loved his Camembert and, as a grateful houseguest, there was nothing I could do about it. Like clockwork every day, he would take the fresh one that Sasha had bought earlier that morning down from the cupboard, give it a good squeeze (squeezing it was necessary for some reason before unwrapping it, maybe to release the fumes) and then sit down at the little table to eat it with whatever you eat Camembert with. Crackers or a baguette, I guess. I never knew exactly, as I cleared off as soon as the Camembert appeared.

  One day, while browsing through a joke shop, I found a rubber Camembert that made a loud blurting noise when squeezed. What genius thought that up? I rushed back to the apartment, flew up the five flights breathlessly excited as I replaced the fresh Camembert with the fake one. Then Sasha and I hid in wait for Sabo to unsuspectingly sashay out of his room and attend to his routines, which would inevitably culminate in squeezing the Camembert. We held our breath as he opened the cupboard, took out the dummy and pushed his thumbs into it.

  You could hear the screams all the way down the Rue Daguerre.

  —

  Although Sabo and I couldn’t have a conversation, I made it understood that I was fed up with men hissing at me on the street. It really pissed me off, especially because I couldn’t tell them to “fuck off!” I seemed to have no aptitude for French while Sasha, being Dutch, spoke four or five languages, including perfect English, so I wasn’t required to learn.

  It was something of an adjustment for me to be mute, but I got used to it. After the first week around the tray I only managed to understand what “Tu vois ce que je veux dire?” meant. Nevertheless, I made my grievance clear, and Sabo proceeded to coach me for an entire night until I could say with near perfect diction, “L’ideé de vous baiser me fait gerber! Maintenant, foutez-moi la paix!” with special emphasis on the word gerber (vomit). He thought that was the funniest thing ever, making me repeat it over and over as he laughed real tears, especially with my vicious attack on gerber! I went on to impress passersby with it whenever someone hissed. The offender, then becoming the offended, would launch into a tirade of abuse to which I would become the dopey American tourist, saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak French.”

  There were door hangings made of glass beads with pictures of exotic flowers and birds in all the doorways that made a whooshing sound as you wandered from room to room, which was infinitely more pleasant than the sound of doors opening and closing and made me wonder why everybody didn’t have them. There was no phone, or television, and time stood still with nothing to alert you to a schedule of any kind, except for Kalu when he needed to go out.

  The stereo was the only modern convenience, and Sasha used to play a lot of Tina Turner and Fats Domino. Smoking the amount of hash we did was a real eye-closer, and not being able to understand a word made it even more of a mind-fuck. I liked it, though.

  Every night, Sasha and I would drop Sabrina off and—if we didn’t stay to watch the show—go back to pick her up around three in the morning. We smoked into the night until, one by one, we’d go off to our respective magic carpets. I had my own mat in a corner.

  Sasha had lacquered the paneling and doorframes of the lounge room red. Moroccan wall hangings lined the walls. They told me that someone had got them from the film set of Performance. Sasha’s room was pink with gold detail around the coving and light fittings. I guessed that it was what a palace or temple in India must look like. Sabo’s room was dark blue, strewn with costumes from days gone by. Just like a Chinese or Italian restaurant, once inside the apartment there was no way of telling what year it was or what country you were in. I loved that sense of timelessness.

  There would often be visitors from the cabaret, including the beautiful Marie France, one of the best singers I’d ever met. I was the resident rock-and-roller, and they all liked rock in the way the French like things, the classic way. Viva la Rock! My natural androgyny, I guess, is what allowed me to fit into the scene. I added a certain amount of yang, more boyish than the rest.

  A Templar monk dropped by sometimes in the afternoon, and he loved looking through Sabrina’s scrapbooks of costumes. He was very proud to show us his antique gold rings and elaborately embroidered vestments. We didn’t smoke in front of him, though; man of the cloth and all.

  Most evenings I would walk up to Montparnasse, where there where a bunch of bars and restaurants. La Coupole was an enormous dance hall/brasserie famous for its pillars, each individually painted by artists in the twenties. I didn’t have the money to go inside but I could hang around the bar and observe, which was just as good. One night, I picked up a heavy cigarette lighter that someone had left on a table and put it in my pocket. Twenty minutes later, a guy came running in, shouting, “Mon briquet! Mon briquet!” He was in a lather, frantic to find it. I handed it to him and he looked like he was going to cry with relief. I thought, “Imagine getting like that over a stupid lighter” (even if it was a solid gold Dupont). Some people.

  Sasha bought a little Mobilette scooter that I would race around on, but I had to be careful as people drove in a way that made me think of tadpoles darting through a pond. “That must be why they’re called ‘Frogs,’ ” I reasoned.

  Paris was so beau
tiful. I could get lost in a kind of euphoria just tooling around under the tilleul blossoms which spilled overhead, filling the streets with their luscious fragrance. The cemeteries were, as in all cities, a haven of tranquility, awash with flowers and the cats who lived there, and I could happily spend a whole afternoon wandering along the cobbled paths, reading inscriptions and meditating on the timeless nature of the departed. Everyone wanted to see where Jim Morrison was. As in life, his poetry followed him to the City of Love.

  Despite not understanding French, I was getting the gist of a certain hierarchy which really came to light one day when I was picked up by a policeman on the Metro, in what was, I guess, a routine check. He asked to see my passport and I told him I didn’t have it on me, paranoid that he would confiscate it. He hauled me off to the police station as if I’d committed a crime, and he was unnecessarily heavy-handed. I sat there for over an hour waiting for something—I didn’t know what. Finally, his superior came in, wondering what I was doing there. When I could see the officer who’d picked me up explaining that I was without papers (surely thinking he was about to score some points for this important coup) I produced my passport and handed it straight to his superior, who in turn waved me away and started shouting at his minion. Ha ha—showed him! Prick.

  Everyone under someone else—same as anywhere.

  —

  I met an Afghani guy, much older than me, about thirty-five, at the Select, another bar/restaurant in Montparnasse. He noticed me in my tight jeans and cowboy boots trying to look hard, and said, “I bet you’re a bitch!” to which I replied, “How much do you want to bet?” That must have appealed to him, as he was, I was about to find out, a professional gambler. We started to see each other and he was the closest thing I had to a boyfriend, although I saw him infrequently and would never have taken him back to Denfert-Rochereau. That would have been in poor taste.

  He and I had little in common except a love for Jimi Hendrix, but, well, that was all I needed. He stayed out all night, every night, playing poker and drinking vodka. He was, in his own words, “not a good Muslim.” He slept by day in a tiny room in a two-star hotel off the Boulevard Raspail after stopping by a bar as the sun was coming up and dunking a lump of sugar into a shot of bourbon for breakfast. I liked his vampiric habitudes and thought he was handsome. With his dark, bloodshot eyes and long face he actually looked like an Afghan hound, the hippie dog of choice back in the day.

  He told me that Afghanis were “Oriental, not Arab.” (I had a big argument with my dad years later: “Oh, Christy, of course they’re Arabs!”) He dressed real straight: slightly flared black trousers, thin belt, Italian shirt, black calfskin ankle boots that zipped on the inside, tan sports jacket. He was nothing like the French guys I was hanging out with, who all wore motorcycle jackets, tight jeans and cowboy boots.

  One night he told me, “In your country people say, ‘Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names can never hurt me.’ In my country, if you insult someone, you meet that night in the cemetery and one of you goes home in the morning.”

  He’d take me to see a film sometimes in the afternoon before going to work—playing poker. He liked crappy American movies but I didn’t mind; I never got to see films in those days otherwise.

  Once I found him sitting at a bar brooding over something. He was leaning on his elbows, looking down at his vodka and soda and, without looking up, said, “I just want to go back to Afghanistan and get a horse and a rifle.”

  He had a kind of Wild West thing going. I liked that. I often thought about what he said about insulting people—a good thing to know.

  —

  Marc Zermati was the French-Algerian entrepreneur who ran the Open Market in Les Halles, a record store that had a definitive selection of vinyl—the Flamin’ Groovies, Stooges and all the pre-punk classics. It was as intelligently stocked as any record store in the world. It’s no wonder that the word “connoisseur” is French. That’s probably the reason so many jazz artists ended up there. The French embraced the best of modern culture, but didn’t throw out what was ancient, beautiful and worthy of preservation. (Their appreciation for the offbeat earned them the closing line in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending: “Thank God the French exist!”)

  Of course, they got it wrong too sometimes. If you looked the part and called yourself a poet, you could go a long way there; it was a poser’s paradise.

  Under the Open Market there was a series of descending basement caves, maybe three or even four subterranean rooms where Zermati let fledgling bands rehearse. Across the road was an enormous crater that was the site of the as yet unbuilt Centre Georges Pompidou.

  I hooked up with a couple of Keith Richards lookalikes (everybody at the Open Market was a Keith Richards lookalike) and we attempted to put something together, but never got as far as finding a drummer. I embarked on a few other misfires too. I was now on a mission.

  Sasha had got me a Japanese Les Paul copy, and she and I still talked about being in a band, although she didn’t play anything yet herself.

  One day, she handed me a big pair of scissors and asked me to cut off her hair. She was fed up with the unwelcome attention of lowlifes on the street. I hated cutting it—it was so long, black and sleek—but she wanted it off. Like the rest of us, she was preparing for something. We could feel it coming. Punk.

  Zermati let us all rehearse in rotation in one cave or another. The thing with the French was that they could play, but just not with each other. As soon as one guy started to tune up, another jumped in to “vamp.” For some reason it was virtually impossible for four guys to wait until everybody was ready and count in a song. It was permanent chaos.

  At first I didn’t mind—I like a bit of chaos. But it didn’t take long to see that nothing was going to come together in a madhouse. No one spoke English, which was a problem because they all wanted to sound like the Rolling Stones, who were at the height of their “elegantly wasted” period. There was palpable frustration because everyone’s favorite bands sang in English, but rock is idiomatic and lyrics have to be written in a first language to nail the nuances.

  I could feel their frustration, but feeling my own was worse. Although everybody had an appreciation for the great pre-punk bands of the day, nobody had heard of my favorite: Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels. When you start to get serious, your roots become everything.

  Then there was another stumbling block. Paris, where everyone smoked hash, was enjoying a heroin epidemic. Everyone was getting strung out, and heroin, as is its wont, was becoming more important than the music. I woke up one day and, instead of thinking about finding a band, I was thinking about if I was going to score. Alarm bells.

  Every day it became more apparent that I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for in Paris. What good was paradise to me now? What was the point of the Garden of Eden with no Adam and no apple?

  I’d been sneaking around without work papers, no work, and it looked like no prospects. That didn’t bother me so much, but I got fixated on Mitch Ryder. I needed to start hanging out with someone who understood my roots.

  I loved Paris but it was now standing in the way of destiny. I used my return ticket and went back to Akron, disappearing just as Flipos had done, back to the streets.

  21

  BACK TO OHIO

  Being back in Ohio was a lot crazier than I’d expected. I was less suited to life there than before—a lot less. I knew that staying with my parents was a temporary situation, but it was insane to think I could hold out even for a week.

  For a start, after Sasha’s place and my mat on the floor, I found I could no longer sleep in a bed. I slept on the floor next to the bed in my room, on the silver polyester shag carpet, in the Clockwork Orange house.

  I was already back to hiding from my parents. They would have been appalled and furious to find me on the floor. I was already trying not to rile them. What had I been thinking?

  My pictures of Iggy were still on the wall, as was th
e poster of Brigitte Bardot with the cheroot dangling from her lips. How odd it all seemed; it occurred to me that maybe I’d actually gone insane.

  I was also to discover that I couldn’t sit in a chair for more than a minute before I had to move onto the floor. What the fuck? I couldn’t sit on a chair! I’d have to get out of there.

  One of my problems was that I did things—everything—too fast. I made my decision and left Paris the second I realized I wasn’t going to get a band together there. Now I was back in a self-imposed high-security prison: no money, no job, no setup, no idea and, the most scary part, no hash. I hadn’t figured that into the equation when I booked my ticket. What self-respecting drug addict would allow such an omission when making a plan? Did I think I’d just stop smoking and everything would be fine? The expression “climbing the walls” springs to mind.

  None of my old pals would have dope, nor would they be interested in finding any. They’d either have jobs or would have moved away. I couldn’t even get on the blower and arrange some. I had absolutely no way of scoring.

  It was turning into my worst nightmare. I had actually, of my own volition, put myself back in Akron. I knew I had to be calm and find a solution, but a solution to what? That I’d lost my mind? No, I couldn’t fixate on negative shit. Think. There’s always a solution.

  I called Duane. It had been some time since I’d blown off his audition, and I didn’t really know him well in the first place. He was someone I’d admired from afar.

  “Oh, hey. I’m back in town. What’s happening?” I tried not to sound panic-stricken.

  Bingo! He was playing a gig at the Brick Cottage in Cleveland, some little cement shithouse bar on Euclid Avenue. I called Debbie Smith and begged her to pick me up and take me to the top of Route 76 at the entrance ramp, where she could drop me off and I could thumb a ride. Only Jeffrey Dahmer could stop me now.