This is the last chapter of the first half of a story about a young artist in Paris trying to make sense of himself via sex, drugs, & booze. Like many who came before him, the artist will fail. You can read the debaucherous opening to this story here, which is free for everyone.
Enjoy the show.
“It is a good idea to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about […] I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not … Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”
Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem
Nowhere else in my life have chapters ended so abruptly as in Paris. One day Louis XVI is King, and the next day it’s off with his head. I wrote a song about it once, about how quickly what feels like forever can fade away. The first verse went like this:
I’ve seen so many come and go, one thing I remember
Is the way they said goodbye, while I stayed behind
Find a way to free these words, from one way conversation
Two sides of a truth, in words I cannot sing
But maybe that was a false start. What I mean is, I always think about rebirth in the autumn. For some reason, Americans call it the fall.
When I arrived at the hospital, Henryk was nowhere to be found. The nurse said he’d been discharged after assaulting the doctor; I called Henryk from the brightly-lit lobby to get his version of the story.
Henryk was angry with me. He blamed me for abandoning him in the park, said it was my fault he got mugged in the first place. “You only ever think about yourself,” he said. “Always chasing women.”
I didn’t admit Henryk was right, but I did apologize to him and accepted the blame for his bruised ribs and broken jaw, courtesy of a group of teenagers he’d run into at about the same time me and Amandine were starting up.
“They were on synthetic weed and tequila-infused beer, most likely,” he said. “Fucking hopped-up yuppies.”
“How do you know they were hopped up yuppies?”
“Because that’s what you all are,” he said.
The hot odor of a passing hospital cart paired with the hospital’s white linoleum flooring made me sick. I walked outside to finish our conversation.
“You’re just another privileged middle-class little shit,” Henryk continued. “You call yourself my friend and then you leave me in the park. You only think about yourself. Your generation exists in a vacuum. You’re the Vacuum Generation. How could you let me walk home alone, and for what? You didn’t even know her name.”
“Her name was Amandine.”
“Whatever, man. You did this to me.”
“That’s not fair,” I said, and what I wanted to do was recite the lyrics of Radiohead’s “Just,” but I knew these lyrics also applied to me:
You do it to yourself, you do
And that’s what really hurts
Is that you do it to yourself, just you
You and no one else,
You do it to yourself,
You do it to yourself,
I remained an empty voice on the other end of the line, playing the guise of a good listener so I might reinforce my own poisoned sense of wisdom, unwilling to tell Henryk the truth because I, too, was afraid of what I needed to hear: you need to get your life together. You’re heading towards something resembling rock bottom. You need to stop seeking distraction in toxic relationships—especially the one you have with yourself.
Henryk said this for me, but in a different way. “You’ve been treading water for how many months now?” he said. “Fucking a torrent of strangers? You fuck them because you’re a stranger to yourself. And to me.”
I stood in the cold comfort of the rain as Henryk continued blaming me for getting jumped. He was right for the wrong reasons. “Paris is changing. You can sense it,” he said. “There were two kids following me out of the park, and then another one on a goddamned white moped, tailing me on parallel side-streets, sputtering through the darkness towards Ménilmontant—”
My focus faltered.
Henryk’s voice began receding.
Life was now elsewhere.
For some people it’s a taste, and for others it’s a smell, but my Proustian moments often materialize with a single word.
Ménilmontant. Mais oui, madame. I am walking up a cobblestoned hill in a north-eastern Parisian village. I used to have family-style dinners amongst these narrow streets, at a jovial Moroccan restaurant that served free couscous and only charged for the wine. I’ve just learned a new word, warren, which means a network of interconnected rabbit burrows, but this word takes me away from the labyrinthine streets of Ménilmontant, because the word rabbit has derailed my train of thought, and I am now a little boy in a locked bedroom reading Watership Down.
I was only a child back then. I am not much older now.
The word souvenir means to come up from below, and so it goes with Ménilmontant: I first heard the word in a song by Charles Trenet, in a French compilation album called Chansons d’entre Deux Guerre, the English translation of which means something along the lines of “songs from the in-between of war.”
The cover of the album was a black and white photo of Montmartre, taken in front of an old boulangerie on what appears to be the back side of the Place du Tertre, or somewhere else along the uneven, sloping cobblestones of another Parisian village square at the end of Rue Norvins.
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