Читать книгу Beyond Paris - Paul Alexander Casper - Страница 9

7:30 PM, April 8, 1970

The rain had been unrelenting, but at this moment I was dry and huddled alone under Café Le Select’s dripping awning. There were a couple of people inside, but as I looked down Boulevard Montparnasse and then over to Boulevard Raspail, it was quiet. Everyone was afraid of and fed up with the rain. It was the second time that I’d been in this famous café, dodging the rain, feeling each day more and more confident and Parisian.

“S’il vous plait, un Pernod,” I said and nodded to the waiter. I had only been here a couple of days, but almost instantaneously I sensed this was my city. I had never felt as excited, or for that matter as afraid of finally living in my own skin. As I flipped the collar of my corduroy sport coat up to protect me from the cool breeze, it was clear the waiter didn’t trust me to pour and make my own drink. As only a French waiter can, he made me feel inadequate and eager at the same time. I watched him place the cube of sugar on a petite spoon delicately resting on the rim of a small glass. There was no doubt he was being rude, but I could also see this was an art to him as he poured the Pernod over the cube and lit the sugar as carefully as Picasso would have added a dash of color to one of his paintings. After a long minute or two, he gently poured some ice-cold water, filling the glass halfway. And as I took a sip, that soothing licorice taste brought a smile to my lips. I gazed at the rainy mist slowly but persistently falling. I felt the nearby presence of Jake Barnes from Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and I also imagined Larry Darrell from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge quite possibly ordering a Pernod here or up the street at Le Dôme or La Coupole. Even though I’d tried to read Maugham’s book several times and failed, if I’d watched the movie The Razor’s Edge on TV once, I watched it a thousand times. That film was one of the most important inspirations for my international adventure.

Jake in The Sun Also Rises was a correspondent for The New York Herald in Paris. His life, in the movie version, looked wonderful. Paris looked wonderful. As I watched him on his Paris streets, I started to envision myself there also. My vision, how I pictured myself, was very different from a lot of other young travelers coming to Europe at this time. I didn’t see myself as a hippie. I wanted to be the Tyrone Power of 1970.

I imagined myself always in suits. My Parisian friends would be also dressed to the nines. My acquaintances would probably be successful creatives in art, words and fashion. I would work for a prestigious ad agency. I’d create great ads. I’d probably be around beautiful French models so often that I would get to know most of them and date some. If you wanted to find me, you’d check Paris’s best restaurants, cafes or nightclubs. I would have a great apartment with views of the Seine and the Île de la Cité. I saw myself at sunset, as Notre Dame was bathed in a mystical yellow and orange glow, sipping a glass of perfectly balanced Cabernet as I opened my gold-stamped cigarette case with one hand and paused for a moment to decide whether to pick a Marlboro or one of the French Gauloise, for I always kept both on hand.

But Jake didn’t only know Paris. He traveled often. Most importantly, he traveled to Spain. I wondered about Spain. Yes, Paris had to be my first stop, but I didn’t know any French, while I did know some Spanish. I wondered, was Spain very different from France and especially Paris? Jake was so carefree, in control of himself and his city. He had fun wherever he went, whatever he did. I didn’t know if I would ever find out about Spain; I was just finding out about Paris, and the more I delved into the city, the way of life and the history, I realized that what I wanted to learn might take me not days or weeks but frankly (and I worried about this) years and years.

Larry Darrell’s Paris was different. His Paris was more serious. As the 1960s were ending, many felt an impulse to look back and analyze what different movements had accomplished and what more needed to be done.

The youth of the world was a group moving and flowing, not in one direction but many at the same time. During my college days, I witnessed the unrest of the nation that seemed to have had its start on college campuses around the country. Many of the firsts were at the University of California at Berkeley, student demonstrations that soon would hit directly or indirectly many colleges and universities from coast to coast. My campus activity was peaceful, but many were not. The end of the 60s not only flashed protests over the airwaves nationwide and internationally but also inundated us with almost daily news about the Vietnam War, the rise of the counterculture, and fashion being turned upside-down by the mini-skirt. Drugs were an ever-increasing topic of conversation, with LSD especially fascinating. The world was seeing once and for all that the Civil Rights Movement was not going to go away. Rock music was exploding and piggybacking on all the subjects in the news. The young all over the world were being affected by the experiences of those who lived through Woodstock, those who changed Haight-Ashbury—the hippie world was now global.

Many people were saying many things, but one brilliant line hit the nail on the proverbial head when Dylan sang, “The times they are a changing.” As 1970 opened, many young people from various parts of the world began traveling, especially to Europe and parts east, to find themselves. Most were coming to loaf, to find cheap drugs and to avoid responsibility. I knew who I was and what I wanted. My plan was all laid out. It was good, and it was going to happen. I was different. After college and after a year of working in a nationally known graphic design studio in Chicago, I decided I knew most of what I had to learn about advertising/design–and about life. Quite an accomplishment to think so, let alone believe it, at that point. I was just twenty-one years of age.

Nothing was happening in Chicago, and I needed adventure. As seemed to happen often with me, I was sitting in a bar late one night with Steve Stroud, a Theta Chi Fraternity brother, fellow artist and good friend, and an idea was hatched. Our plan was to get jobs in advertising on the Champs-Élysées and have great adventures. Shortly thereafter, we quit our jobs, bought one-way tickets to Paris and were ready to go when Steve was drafted. It was only a couple of weeks before our travel date. I didn’t want to go at that point, but Steve never wavered. He said, “You have to live the dream for both of us; I might never make it back.” He put his money where his mouth was, drove me to New York and put me on an Icelandic flight departing JFK.

The flight was both eventful and uneventful. We were packed like sardines in, it seemed, one of Icelandic’s oldest jet props. It felt like we were flying in slow motion. The noise was deafening, and of course, I was anxious and antsy with the anticipation of shortly stepping foot on foreign soil for the first time. But the drudgery of the flight was broken by the announcement upon landing that there were problems with the aircraft. Apparently, our scheduled stop in Iceland—because the jet-prop couldn’t carry enough fuel to make it all the way across the Atlantic—was very lucky because somewhere over the deep blue sea all kinds of lights were going off in the cockpit…we needed to land, and quickly. Our short-planned layover lasted over twenty-four hours, with us passengers permitted to only walk around the airport.

I kept imagining what Europe would be like: would I be able to talk to anyone, would anyone understand me, how would I get to Paris from Luxembourg, would I be able to deal with French francs? What type of job would I obtain? So, when a fellow passenger, Doug Richmond, who was about my age and from New York, seemed to be interested in and curious about my plans to get a job in advertising and start a new life, I took the opportunity to explore why he was traveling. Doug was what I thought of as a New York type—not very tall, longish dark hair, bold and kind of mouthy. He had attitude and was worldlier than I was. As the day and night passed, and finally the flight continued, he decided he had to see if I could really get a job. He was just bumming and was intrigued. It seemed luck was with me again; my new acquaintance had taken French for many years in school, so we would be able to communicate. As he took care of one of my biggest concerns, I also took care of one of his. He was worried about finding an affordable place to stay. As Steve Stroud and I spent a couple of days in NYC before my flight, we had happened to start a casual conversation with a guy at the Museum of Modern Art. It so happens he had just returned from traveling himself, and he had a lead on a great small cheap hotel in Paris. He wrote the info down on a matchbook cover, and I put it in my pocket. But as we all know, luck can go both ways. As I talked to more people on the plane who lived in Europe and particularly Paris, the prospects for getting a job were not looking promising. A hard-to-get-your-hands-on work permit was apparently going to be a problem.

Our flight eventually landed, and Doug and I collected our heavy and way too many bags and found a night bus to Paris. It was 3:00 or 4:00 a.m. when we exited the Paris bus station. There was no one around and no taxis or any other type of transportation. We didn’t know the exact address of our destination, The Hotel Namur, but it wasn’t far from the intersection of the Luxembourg Gardens and St. Michel. Unfortunately, we were a block or so away from the Louvre and nowhere close to our destination. After crossing the Seine, always looking for non-existent taxis, and walking for literally four hours in pouring rain, we gave up on finding the Hotel Namur and talked our way into a seedy little place that didn’t even have a name but was dry.

It’d been a couple of days, and unbelievably it was still raining. We did eventually find the Hotel Namur, which was great and cheap. Unfortunately, the couple of local government offices I visited to find out about the process of getting a job were complete dead ends. It could take up to six months to get a work permit. I encountered a good number of smiles and giggles when I admitted I really didn’t know any French. What did I expect? But I was twenty-one and naïve.

It just wasn’t fair. I’d flown all this way just to be snickered at, laughed at and left on the street with not even a whisper of a hope of getting a job. One very nice French woman pointed out that not only was my dream of working in an ad agency in Paris caput, but I probably couldn’t even get a job as a street cleaner because I wouldn’t be able to understand my boss when he told me to go to a certain part of Paris to clean a certain street.

Although crushed by my recent findings, I discovered and got to know Paris, sometimes with Doug, sometimes alone. We went to the Louvre and sawthe Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo—amazing; walked and people-watched along the Seine—hypnotizing, visited Notre Dame and The Luxembourg Gardens—ancient greenery and captivating; The Eiffel Tower—beautifully arranged steel to the sky; The Arc de Triomphe—majestic at the end of The Champs Élysées. These are places that once seen can never be forgotten.

One night we went to The Olympia, a famous theater on the Boulevard des Capucines in the 9th arrondissement, to see a French variety show. I didn’t understand most of the evening’s entertainment, except for a French female singer, Marie Laforêt. Other than back in 1963, when I first heard “Sukiyaki” by Kyu Sakamoto, I had never really heard or been enticed by any foreign language song. But that night, when she sang “Paint It Black” by the Rolling Stones in French, I was mesmerized. Besides falling in love with her immediately, that entire experience of being captivated by mystical foreign music forever etched itself in my mind. I knew then I would have to find that kind of music, wherever or whenever; it would now be part of my life forever.

In recent days I’d been walking back to the Hotel Namur by myself, as Doug turned in somewhat earlier than me. It was now around 9:00 p.m., and I still hadn’t eaten dinner. At least it had stopped raining. I’d been sitting too long and needed to stretch my legs. Down Boulevard Raspail to Rue Leopold Robert, looking down a small, quiet street, I saw a warm ochre light breaking the darkness. Just a nondescript small café, but it looked empty and inviting. I entered and slid into a small table beside the front window, a perfect spot to write down some of the happenings of the day, as I tried to do every night, in my travel diary.

As I was finishing my bowl of boeuf bourguignon, a group of people arrived, a hodge-podge of unknown nationalities. One of the guys sat in a chair next to me, smiled, and in what appeared to be a South African or Australian accent, asked, “American? Francais? Oder sind Sie Deutscher?” Before I could answer, he continued in English. “What’s your story, mate?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant, so I said, “I’m not sure I have a story.”

If he meant what was I doing here, that was a good question. It certainly looked like I wasn’t going to get a job. If anyone needed a story, I did and quick. Right now, I was stuck in neutral in Paris. Quite literally up the Seine without a paddle.

“Maybe you will, if not today or tomorrow, maybe very soon,” came his reply as he got up and walked over to his group. One of the girls brought out a guitar and started strumming.

I ordered another beer as a guy in his sixties walked through the door and sat in the midst of the group. He was different somehow. Longish hair, deep tan and wearing casual, almost Mexican-looking field worker clothes but with a sport coat, a look I’d never seen. I thought, remember that look. I sensed right away that maybe I didn’t have a story, but this guy certainly did. He had lived. There was an ambiance. This was someone who had traveled; this was a man with presence. Maybe he didn’t have wealth, but he had experiences and the results of those experiences. I thought, when I grow up, I want to be him. I want to exude that kind of presence.

One of the group handed him a beer, and after a sip, he started to hum in unison with the guitar player. Then, in a soft voice, he started to sing in French words that fit and flowed perfectly with the tune. I would have given anything to know what those words were and what he was singing—singing almost as if to himself—but everyone in the restaurant was now straining to hear him.

I was just about to give up on knowing what he was singing about when the guy who had asked me about my story earlier motioned me over to where they were gathered around a small fireplace. Beer in hand, I sat down next to him.

After a minute or two, my tablemate leaned over and whispered, “My name is Marcos. That’s Caesar singing, and Christa is playing the guitar.”

“Hello, I’m Paul.”

“Where are you from, Paul?”

“Chicago,” I responded and asked softly what the singer was singing about.

“He’s singing about some of the journeys and the places he’s seen as he has traveled throughout his life, and about certain types of knowledge and wisdom he’s long been searching for but still hasn’t found.” Just then Caesar stopped singing, and Christa started singing in a different language—Spanish, I think.

After a couple of swallows of beer, Caesar, almost on cue, started singing again but this time in English as Christa continued softly singing some lines in Spanish. I wondered if he could be translating what he had been singing earlier. Marcos was right; this man had traveled around the world many times. And the places he sang about were the most exotic and dangerous places.

My mind started to drift as I listened. I wondered if I could do that. I was already away from home, already on the road. My initial hesitancy upon landing in Europe and during those first days in Paris was quickly fading. I was becoming much more confident in my ability to maneuver, navigate and communicate in a foreign land.

“Who’s your friend, Marcos?” Caesar said, turning towards me.

“Caesar, this is Paul. It appears you’ve enticed him with your tales. I sense he could be a traveler also if given a chance.”

The next couple of minutes were spent updating Marcos and Caesar on my current predicament and what I had been doing the last five years.

“He says he doesn’t have a story as yet, Caesar.”

“I don’t know about any story, but I came to Paris to work. And that now looks dead. I really don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I’m at a dead end?”

“You can come with us. We’re on our way to Morocco. But I’m not sure you would find your story there, especially going with us. My feeling is you need to walk alone for a while to truly discover your story,” Marcos suggested as he looked to Caesar for additional guidance.

“I don’t know. Usually I do get a feeling about people and what they should be thinking and maybe even doing, but honestly, I don’t get any vibe from Paul. Maybe Paul needs—well, maybe, metaphorically speaking, he needs to venture deeper into the woods. Paul, have you ever heard the saying—if you don’t get lost, there’s a chance you may never be found? That can mean different things to different people. I know you feel trapped right now with your initial plan gone awry. But maybe Paris wasn’t the end of your journey but the beginning.”

Now that thought was interesting. Was this problem meant to happen? If this was the beginning, where would I go next? So, did I want there to be a next, and how much would it cost?

Another hour passed listening to Caesar tell stories, real stories, stories that seemed to hold you on the edge of your chair, one right after the other. Stories that now were becoming much clearer to me, stories I didn’t have and frankly had never really wondered about.

“It’s getting pretty late, everyone; I think I should be going. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see what tomorrow brings. It was a pleasure meeting you, Caesar. Morocco sounds exotic, but I don’t think that’s my road right now.”

“Paul, your road will find you. Don’t worry or try too hard to discover your path. I believe all of us come into this world with a purpose. Some have called it a road, others a story, and many more refer to that something, that enlightenment, by other names. If I’m not mistaken, as you leave this café tonight and make your way back to your hotel, you’ll have a lot to think about. Maybe a direction will reveal itself. Peace be with you, Paul; maybe we will meet again. I hope so.”

After walking for a while, I realized there was no way I’d ever fall asleep with all these thoughts bouncing around in my head. I had made my way down Boulevard Montparnasse and saw it was late enough that I could get a cozy outside table at La Coupole. I sat down and ordered a beer. And almost immediately a young Parisian couple wearing amazing coats sat down beside me.

“Excusez-moi, monsieur, vous avoir une cigarette,” came a request in French with a German accent.

“Would you like a Marlboro?” I responded as he held up two fingers and said thank you in almost perfect English. With only a week in Paris, I was certainly jealous and surprised at how many Europeans spoke two or three languages. It was so different from the States. It was an ability I’d like to have myself someday.

“Where are you from?” he asked as we moved a little closer to each other.

“Chicago,” I answered as I lit all three of our cigarettes.

“Danke,” came his reply in German. “Have you been in Paris before?”

“No, my first time. I love it. Unfortunately, it’s very expensive. I had hoped to get a job here, but that’s not going to work out. Do you live in Paris or do you travel here often?”

“We live in London. We’re just stopping in Paris for a day or two on our way back from Moscow.”

“Are you traveling for fun or business? I’ve seen some people here wearing the same kind of coats both of you are wearing. So different, where did you buy them?”

“Well, we just like to travel. We travel, really, just to travel. We make some money here and there along the way. The coats are sheepskins from Afghanistan. I’d like to have fifty more of them; they are beginning to be the thing in Europe, and they are so hip. We bought our coats in Moscow from this guy who just came back from Kabul in Afghanistan. He was honest with us; he bought each one for $5-$10, and he sold them to us for $200 each. I could sell them for more than that to my friend Freddie who owns the Granny Takes a Trip boutique on Kings Row in London.”

It didn’t take long to have the proverbial light bulb go berserk, blinking wildly in my head. This was interesting, this was more than interesting, and this was exciting. I could do this; I could be rich. Afghanistan! Wow, of all the places as I thought of the world, I’d have to say Afghanistan had never come up. Where was that in relation to India? It seemed like a long way away, a very long way away. At that moment I blurted, “Afghanistan? How would you ever get there?”

“Well, there might be a number of ways to get there, but if I were you, I’d take The Orient Express,” my new acquaintance responded. “That would be so cool. I’ve never ridden on it, but you can catch it right here in Paris. Are you thinking about buying some coats and selling them?”

I think he kept on talking for another minute or two, but immediately upon hearing the words “The Orient Express” I was gone, again starting to daydream about sitting in a luxurious train car streaking through Eastern Europe on my way east to the exotic, to adventure, to halfway around the world, to Asia. Now that just might be the start of what could be “My Story.” How in a million years could Caesar have known that I would find my story so soon?

Back to reality and answering my new friend, I said, “Could I? I mean, can someone with no experience just go to some far-off place and buy some things and sell them and make a lot of money?”

“Well, there are people already starting to do just that. Maybe you could also.”

“Maybe I could.”

Not long after, they left. I ordered another beer and watched it begin to rain again as I let my mind drift. What was happening? Was I really thinking about going to Afghanistan? Was I thinking I could buy some coats and drag them 1,000-2,000 miles across the earth and then sell them? This was exciting, but was it also crazy? Was this me? Was I thinking about, well…I guess, maybe some would call it…an adventure? Was I just a regular guy? I don’t think regular guys wake up most mornings and say to themselves, “I’m going to have adventures.” Regular guys get up in the morning and go to their jobs, pick up some groceries on the way home and then spend the evening looking at a baseball game on TV, take the dog out for a quick walk and then go to bed watching Johnny Carson. Remember, I’m the guy who wanted to get a job, albeit a pretty neat job, in Paris and live here and do the things most would do living in a large international city. Hopping on one of the world’s most glamorous trains and traveling halfway around the world to negotiate and buy pounds and pounds of exotic coats and then lugging them back to London, a city I had yet to visit, was not regular-guy stuff. As the rain continued to fall, I tried to look through the raindrops for some clue…some hint of what I should do. Was this thinking just too wild? Who was I to think I could start a business out of nowhere with no research? My dad was a corporate guy; we weren’t an entrepreneurial family. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I did not know the clothing business at all, I didn’t even know how to begin to find out. This was feeling more and more half-baked.

Then I remembered. Paul, you’ve already experienced half-baked with your plan of coming over to Paris in the first place, cold, unprepared and thinking you could end up with some great advertising art director’s job and have a life out of a Hemingway novel. Remember how well that has gone so far.

How could I ever decide? And if I decided that any idea like buying coats in Afghanistan should be way off the table and decide against it, then what? Do I just give up and go home? I had miscalculated on how much French I would have to know. It seemed I’d never learn the language quickly enough to get a job. My savings wouldn’t last that long. So, what then? Stay a couple more weeks here or maybe travel a little to one or two more countries and then go home? Is that what life is? Daydreaming about big things, big adventurers, but ultimately coming back to reality and letting those ideas disappear in puffs of smoke? Hmm? I continued to daydream as I watched the rain fall.

Twenty minutes later I was bounding up the stairs in the Hotel Namur and knocking emphatically on Doug’s door. Yelling, “Get up, fucker, I’ve got it; we’re going to be rich!”

Opening his door and looking somewhat annoyed but intrigued, he said, “What is going on? How much wine have you had tonight? And what do you mean rich?”

“OK, sit down and give me some of that wine you’re drinking and hold on to your hat; I’ve come up with the idea of ideas. If you are up for it, tomorrow morning we are going to get tickets on The Orient Express headed for India. When we get to India or maybe Afghanistan, we are going to—now hold on to your socks—we’re going to buy as many sheepskin coats as we can. Then we are going to lug them back to London, sell them and then we are going to be rich.”

“You are incredible. You come knocking on my door with not one outlandish idea, but three out-of-this-world ideas. Why in a million years do you think we could do that? But I’ll give you credit, you’ve got a mind-blowing kind of wild imagination. Did someone give you some pot or hashish on top of your wine tonight?” Doug shook his head.

“I met this German guy and girl, they were coming back from Moscow, and they had these beautiful coats that you and I have been noticing here in Paris. He told me this guy who sold them the coats had recently bought them in Afghanistan and that he only paid about $5 for each of them. The German guy then says he knows he could sell them in London for about $250 each. Listen, we could pool our money and buy, say, 200 coats, sell them and pocket $50,000!”

We stayed up the rest of the night. With no plan of his own going forward, Doug eventually saw the enlightened wisdom of going to India and Afghanistan to buy coats. He started to get very excited. I don’t know how much wine we were drinking; we were getting loud, and there seemed to be empty bottles rolling around the room everywhere.

“The first thing we have to do is buy a map. How are we ever going to find our way to the East, to Afghanistan to India or even maybe ‘to meet the Czar?’” I finally put forth.

“It’s easy, we just go to the Champs-Élysées and turn right and ride the rails towards the rising sun.”

“Imagine,” he said. “The Pyramids, Mecca, Masada, and then to the shores of Babylon. Think of the mystery, the adventure of it all.”

“That’s right. Then after that, all that’s left is to climb a mountain and look down the other side to Afghanistan just sitting there waiting for us…it will be easy, you’ll see,” Doug related, nodding and handing me another bottle of wine to open.

As I continued to drink into the night long after Doug dozed off, I was concerned with my financial situation. I boarded my Icelandic flight with exactly $900. I’d watched my spending in Paris, but this city was a killer; everything cost more than in the US. I wasn’t sure how much the Orient Express would cost, but it didn’t matter—we were going, end of story. But the reality was that we better strike it rich quickly with this idea. I knew that not every city was as expensive as Paris. But every city would cost something. I was guessing I’d leave Paris with $600-$700 in my pockets. Afghanistan was a long way away and probably an even longer way back, as we would have to find a way to transport all those coats.

From meeting on a plane a matter of days ago, to going into international business together, my relationship with Doug had evolved quickly. My companion, a writer by trade, also had the feeling that it was his time to see Europe. As New Yorker, his manner was much more aggressive than mine. He was one of the over 500,000 who had lived through and been deeply affected by his experience at Woodstock in August of 1969. It had been great to have a companion in my first days overseas. I was incredibly lucky to have someone to commiserate with, laugh with, eat and drink with, and, of course, someone to translate until, day by day, I got more comfortable with communicating—sort of—in a foreign land. We got along and were both wide-eyed about all we had seen so far.

We rose the next morning to a sunny day and made our way through the French Quarter to buy our Orient Express tickets. Nothing seemed to be easy, even with my companion’s ability to speak some French. It took forever, and at the end of the experience, I was hoping more than knowing that we were scheduled for the right train. What I did know was that we were now set to leave Paris in a couple of nights and, implausible as it may sound, we were going east. “Going east to meet the Czar”, as Jim Morrison would say, voyaging to some of the world’s most exotic and unknown lands. And I couldn’t help but imagine the trip, journeying through many of the capitals of Europe to those somewhat secret lands of Eastern Europe, then to Constantinople with its history and then the land of the Crusades and the Middle East and eventually, I could barely say it, Asia, and adventures halfway around the world.

And those adventures started on the world’s most interesting train, The Orient Express.

I wondered if I would be in a train coach with European royalty, or possibly a movie star from Italy. Might I pass a spy from Berlin as I walked down the hallway to what I was sure would be a fabulous dining car filled with some of the most interesting people in the world?

The day passed slowly as we walked the Champs-Élysées, that avenue of avenues that ends with Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, so massive and beautifully positioned. Along the way I bought a map, what would be the first of many maps, I thought, as this one only showed Europe to Istanbul. I say “only” a little tongue in cheek, as the map, laid out, covered a large café table and made Istanbul look thousands of miles away, even though, as best we could discern from the ticket agent, the ride from Paris to Istanbul was only about a day and a half. Buying a train ticket in a railroad station is one thing, but to now have this map to look at—this was adventure; this was really the start of something exciting. Doug eventually got bored with my insistent opening and looking at “The Map” as we made our way from one café to another. As it was now late, he said he’d meet me back at the hotel. I walked for a while and again ended up near the Black Jack Discothèque.

I had stopped the other night for a while talking to the doorman or at least trying to in some broken French. We had spent an hour that night watching a young French prostitute soliciting possible clients walking by, laughing and shaking our heads at the success and failures she experienced.

My friend was there again. He greeted me, “Bonsoir, Chicago,” and I called out “Hey, Jack, how’s it hanging?” I’m sure his name wasn’t Jack, but that was the name on the sign above the door, and he seemed to understand my intent. Even though I was running out of Marlboros, it was an obvious choice to hand Jack one. An hour passed as we talked and watched an unbelievable assortment of unusual late-night characters walk past us. Michelle, as Jack had named the prostitute, was not having much luck. As he had the other night, Jack attempted to get me to spend some time with Michelle. At one point he even went over to her and seemed to argue with her. I think he was trying to get her price down for me.

Even though he was a doorman, Jack didn’t seem to care who came in and out until a big limousine pulled up in front, and several guys in black suits got out. He rushed over to them quickly. I was left alone, trying to imagine who these guys were. Were they hoods, were they celebrities, were they French or from some far-off land?

Just then there was a tap on my shoulder. Michelle was standing almost right on top of me. “Ainsi, vous avez peut-être comme moi. Cet homme affirme que nous devrions faire un deal.” I wasn’t sure what she had just said. Of course, she said it very fast and again, with my almost nonexistent French, I could only guess. However, as I was starting to be totally captivated by her perfume, I noticed Jack, still holding the door for the limousine occupants, motioning to me with one hand, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in a circular motion, indicating, I believe, “negotiate with her.” With Michelle now standing so close, I noticed how young and attractive she was. I asked, “Combien?” As a new world traveler, I had learned how to ask how much for a bowl of soup and now, you see, I knew how to ask a prostitute her price. By now she knew I was American and probably able to speak very little French. She saw the doorman motioning to me and made a face in his direction, mumbling surprisingly in English, “Screw him” and proceeded to say, “Il vous en coûtera 250 francs pour être avec moi.” I only understood the 250, which she said in English. My quick math told me she probably wanted $50.

“No, no—no way” was my instantaneous response. She again made one of her faces and started to walk away. But after only five or six steps, she turned around and started to look me over, head to toe, seemingly trying to judge what to do next. I took out a pack of Marlboros and motioned would she like one. She smiled for the first time and walked over to me, taking one from the pack. “Merci.”

As she turned against a slight wind to cup her hands over my lighter lighting her cigarette, I again began to feel hypnotized by the fragrance coming off the back of her neck. I took the opportunity to put forth, “One hundred francs.”

“Non, ce n’est pas possible” came her quick reply. She turned up her nose and started to quickly walk away.

But then, again, she stopped and turned toward me. Quickly, sensing hesitation on her part, I immediately began a hopefully pity-producing monologue that went something like this.

“Mademoiselle, I have been on a long trip. I’ve had great adventures, met lots of interesting people and have seen many beautiful things around the world, but never have I seen anything like you. You are truly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I leave tomorrow to fly back to America, and I have spent all my money.”

I’m not sure I looked sincere enough in my lie about leaving tomorrow, especially trying to fool a probably experienced and skillful, if young, working girl. I’m not sure how much she understood of my speech, but she seemed to grasp the essential meaning. Again, her facial movements and hands lifted in exasperation. Even at one hundred francs, about $20 US dollars, I was splurging. But I thought twenty dollars was doable, especially since I was shortly going to be a wealthy fashion entrepreneur. Although I had never thought about having a sure-to-remember experience with a French prostitute, some things just happen, and as they do you have to make decisions.

I continued, “All I have is one hundred francs, no more.”

She again stood there looking at me and then looking around, seemingly to check if there was anyone else, anyone with more money. I looked around also; there was no one.

She started talking to herself as she looked around. The more she talked, the more the conversation with herself became agitated. I wish I knew what she was saying, but on the other hand, I kind of did know.

After a minute or two she more pointedly vocalized in my direction, “Est-ce que je peux avoir un autre Marlboro cigarette?”—accompanied by raising two fingers to her mouth and intimating taking a puff. I didn’t have to understand French to know she wanted another cigarette. I took one out for both of us and struck my lighter as she put her hands over the flame to let us both inhale our protected first puffs. She was calmer now. All of a sudden, the atmosphere surrounding us turned from confrontational to relaxed. She even smiled a little as I blew a smoke ring or two, and the late-night breeze floated them past her and up into the air.

“OK, oui, one hundred francs,” she whispered and motioned for my hand. She took it in hers as we turned and walked down the avenue.