Slack Paris: La Vie Gangsta in the City of Darkness
And then a muffled pop, like a softball struck at a distance. A metallic object sails in through the last window. There?a trail of yellow smoke. Someone yells, "Gazz!" and with that a panic sweeps through the car. Bodies climb on bodies. Those closest to the canister are screaming, scraping to get to an open window. People are hacking and fumbling toward you. You buckle down as low as you can, press your sleeve to your nose and hope the train will pull in to the next stop before the gas reaches you. But the train lumbers interminably now. The smoke spreads. And you sink even lower. Your eyes feel like they've been doused with chili powder. Your lungs bristle. The train finally reaches Défense and, bent double, you stumble out of the car along with the rest. You prop yourself against the station's arched, blue-brick wall and hack blood into a stray napkin. Then you hear laughter?a crazed, almost demonic cackling coming from a few feet away. You lean forward. A few bodies to your left you see the burly African. He is beaming, triumphant. But of course, he's managed to hold on to his joint.
You'd like to think of this event as an aberration. Coincidence. Like getting struck by lightning. But you know better. It takes a lot less then a Euro Cup victory for Paris to get ticklish. Sure, the so-called City of Light is elegant, charming, chic, cultured and?supply your own bromide here. Certainly, you could consent to the roster of cliches perpetually thrown upon this city and declare, "Yes, Paris is all that." You would not be far off the mark. But held edgewise, such descriptions are no thicker than a franc note. In truth, there's a wildness here. A perpetual, buzzing, medium-grade street-stress that, like biohazards at low tide, has receded from our borough shores. Paris at this point in time?the people, the streets, the environment?out-New Yorks New York. The active condition here is atmospheric, not racial. The modifier that serves most closely, but still poorly, is "loose." Simply put, Paris beyond the Tuileries is a gorgeous, rough and very loose place.
First, consider the menace personified: the street punk. He is a cocky, aimless little shit-disturber, in from the banlieues. In his ubiquity he elevates your habitual urbanite's caution to the level of paranoia, provoking fights on the street, copping feels on the metro, picking the pockets of the elderly, scamming fat-assed Texas tourists on the Quai d'Orsay. He is white and black and mixed. His plumage is evolved from some fin-de-siecle Bronx-by-way-of-Bristol hybrid?a two-piece Izod tuxedo and the shorn-short haircut. He is wiggerly, to be sure, and gives off sexual frustration like hog stink. He is the vermin beneath the hair of a bubonic rat, a typhoid pustule on the ivory Parisian visage. Avoid eye contact. Do not anger or provoke. Give him wide berth for now and praise the Republic for restrictive gun laws. You will revisit him shortly.
City of light? More like city of darkness. Here, public lighting?street lamps and hallway lights in buildings?works on the principle of absolute necessity. Who can fault conservation? It's an exemplary motive. But it gets dark! Spooky, whistling-in-the-dark, only-venture-out-with-a-friend-or-your-dog dark! The sun sets and until you edge along the wall and locate the timer switch, hallways are pitch-black. Most streets that are not main thoroughfares are dimly lighted, if at all, and frequently at night you're haunted by eerie silhouettes?idle, featureless forms morphing into and out of the solid geometry of benches and trees and doorways.
Traffic is deadly. Accidents are frequent. It's not like Athens or Saigon where, miraculously, the chaos tends to fall short of catastrophe. Or Mexico City, where the 7 mph you do in your 35-year-old idea-of-a-Beetle exposes you only to the risk of heat exhaustion. Here, the driving will kill you. Crack-ups are routine. They evolve out of nothing. And at warp speed.
Of the many you've seen, the ugliest happen in the center of town. Midday, and a Japanese double-decker tour bus coming off the Ile de la Cité sideswipes a couple on a sterling Moto Guzzi 1000S. The riders smack down on the hard cobble. The bike smacks down on top of them. You hear the sound like a gridiron tackle at close distance. Thack! Thud! Thack! The bus comes to an abrupt halt and 50 bewildered Japanese tourists fog the windows. After 10 sickening minutes the paramedics arrive and whisk away the bodies. Sawdust is sprinkled on the blood.
On average, you see one car-to-car collision a day. Road signs are obscure and illogical. Scooter drivers are modern charioteers. They will cut off a vehicle of any size for the sake of forward motion. But they get theirs. They go down all the time.
Consider violence. Out of nothing. And at warp speed. A day later: Your elderly next-door neighbors, Mme. and M. Ballu, are crossing Rue Lamarck. They have the right of way. A cyclist barreling from around the corner yells a warning and then cuts them off, practically running over their toes. Furious, M. Ballu throws his sack of groceries at the biker, grazing the back of his head with a baguette and a few dozen cherries. The cyclist?18 or 19 judging from his butterknife mustache?halts, props his bike on its kickstand and proceeds to beat the ever-loving shit out of M. Ballu. Three jabs to the face and one to the gut and the octogenarian crumbles like last autumn's tinder pile. By the time you and a few passersby have broken it up, the old guy is unconscious.
But the vice that really fuels the chaos is alcohol, and from about, oh, Monday through Saturday, any public gathering can become a throw-down arena for pisspopped Marcel Cerdans in training. Granted, these are petite men. Bantamweights mostly, narrow shouldered, 5-foot-5 and under, and no hips to speak of. (It's the women who tower.) It's improbable that they would inflict much damage upon one another or upon you. Still, fights happen. They happen often. Out of nothing. And fast. And it's down in flashpoint central?the Metro?where things get really tetchy. Homebound after a night at the clubs off Bastille, 6 a.m., and the Metro cranks back to life and the same midget Lothario who was grabbing your friend's ass on the dancefloor has now locked on to you from the opposite end of the car. He's yelling something at you but you can't quite make it out. What's that? It sounds like "California is a pussy!" Yes, he's yelling, "California is a pussy! California is a pussy!"
Why California? Why you? You want to appreciate the accidental poetry of it all, but at present you're off your buzz and your fuse is short and he's closing the distance with a hand in one pocket. You think about it. Two of you, five of them. They're small and drunk. You're big and sober. Still, do they got moves? When you punch them do they dissolve? Or do they reproduce like mitochondria, like the skeleton armies in Sinbad?
You're provoked. You stare back and mouth the word slowly, so it can't be misunderstood: "Fuuuuuuuck yooou!"
You've taken the bait. Now something has to happen. And they've got a lot less to lose. As the train pulls into Gare St. Lazare, you time it just right, grab your friend and jump off. As the train pulls away they're knocking on the glass, flipping you off, laughing at what they've reduced you to.
Okay, then. Maybe California is a pussy. But there are benefits to this looseness. You can park a motorcycle anywhere. You can chug beer in public. Jaywalk. Take a piss on a tree. Post band promos. Smoke in a restaurant without some uptight junior executive waving her flabby elbows in your face. You can bring your dog everywhere you go. You can jump the Metro turnstiles if you must. Dance at your restaurant table. (Cabaret license? Don't think so.) Fling stuff into the street from your cafe seat?cigarette butts, olive pits, your bill. It's practically an art; and you do it all with impunity. You can get 30 of your closest friends and three crates of wine-in-a-box and go have a spontaneous party out on the quai and no cop is going to hassle you or close you down. Pierre the local constable is more likely to join you for an aperitif than give you trouble. These may seem like petty pleasures, but when you're here living it, the difference hits you with an expansive, eye-opening wallop. Your behavior is not controlled. And it's at these times that you realize the degree to which New York City has been dunned into submission.
And the cops. Paris cops are not the cranial thugs high on assumptions of guilt you've come to know from back home. In fact, here there exists a fairly evolved municipal symbiosis, a recent example of which was the Paris Roller. Every Friday night the police provide a four-hour, 30-kilometer escort for in-line skaters who make a citywide circuit beginning and ending at Place d'Italie. It's a remarkable sight, about 10 motorcycle cops on their hulking BMW R1100 sport-police cruisers, cigarettes cocked, sirens screaming and lights flashing, blocking off traffic and leading 5000 skaters down the wide Hausmannian boulevards. Suspend your judgments about rollerblading for a second and consider: the police provide an escort for the people. Doesn't exactly gliss off the New Yorker's tongue. Perhaps: "The police help the people" or "The police and the people, they work together."
Nope. Still doesn't flow. Too foreign a concept.
?
She speaks flawless English, having grown up in Los Angeles. But with you she insists on French. She insists because she knows you're trying to learn and because she knows the deep, private injury that results from the inability to turn thought into language.
"Look at this," she says, holding out her right arm. About 10 scars run down her forearm, perpendicular crosshatches, each an inch long but too shallow to require stitches.
"I'm hopeless. Can't even do it the right way."
"You're how old?"
"Twenty-three."
"A 23-year-old knows you go lengthwise."
"You're right. I just wanted to scare my boyfriend."
"There're other ways."
"Do I disgust you?"
"That does. Just stop!"
She stops. Looks dazed.
"What kind of drugs do you do?" You're curious.
"He ignores me."
"What's his name?"
"I'm clean. I smoke once in a while, but I'm clean."
"Uh-huh."
"I did a little coke about half an hour ago."
"Uh-huh."
"But I'm clean."
"Right."
"His name is Wolff."
"Wolff."
"Je voudrais un kir," she tells the waiter. And then she turns back to you. "You speak okay French. Three months till you're over the wall. Then it really kicks in. You'll get it. You've got the ear."
"Thanks."
Her name is Rebecca and you'd just swallowed your first Bretagne oyster at the excellent Brasserie Wepler on Place de Clichy when she came over to your table and said something unintelligible.
"Slower please!" you responded.
"I said, are you alone?"
"Yes."
"Do you want company?"
"No."
"Good," she said. "Neither do I."
And with that, she sat down, wrapped her brown hair around her neck and dipped her tortoise-shell Vuarnets over her blue eyes.
Rebecca is a prostitute. You guess she exacts a high price, judging by her age and remarkable figure. You do not patronize her. That kind of thing is not your truc. Rebecca can be a drama queen, circular in her logic, but hard-pressed she's as real as it gets. And she does you the honor of pushing your French. So you spend time with her whenever you can, be it the Fête de la Musique or Bastille Day or opening nights of The Patriot and The Perfect Storm (voiceover, of course). If you think she's missing out on work you offer to pay her a little something for her time, but she rarely accepts. Her cellphone rings, but she doesn't answer it.
"That's money. You should answer."
"Want to see something spectacular?"
"Okay."
She takes you out to Rue du Faubourg-St. Honoré, in view of the Arc de Triomphe. It's 10:30 p.m., still light out, and you're wondering what's up.
"Attendez!" she says. "Fifteen, 20 minutes."
The two of you take a seat at a cafe. Immediately she starts in with her favorite operation, producing a pack of cigarettes and some tin foil from her purse. Called "le shit," pronounced "le chit," the hash comes in a pressed stick the size and shape of a piece of Juicy Fruit. She breaks open the cigarette and empties the tobacco onto the marble-topped table. Using a business card, she shores the pile into a neat little mound. Then she cups the hash in her palms and exhales about 10 times to soften it up. With her pinkie nail she cuts about five thin strands off the stick and then cuts these strands in half again. She rolls 10 morsels into balls, drops them into the pile of tobacco and, with the business card, sifts the pile like a baker sifts flour. Finally, she rips the filter off the broken cigarette, rerolls the mixture with the remaining paper, licks it, lights it and smokes.
For five minutes she smokes and then, as the last of the sun dissolves through the Arc's distant portal, they appear. Slowly, at first. Like emanations from vapor. As though they were conjured. Beamed down and re-atomized. Dozens of them. Women: Amazonian, statured, ridiculously proportioned, gluteal, abdominal, breasticular, gigantic women. Just suddenly there. Stepping into the avenue. Tremulous at first, like toddlers testing the water, but then like toddlers, soon brazen. They wear shrugs and miniskirts and bikinis and hotpants and any other vestments that help publicize their notion of synthetic virtue.
"Holy shit!" you say.
"They're about half-half," she says.
"Huh?"
Rebecca whistles to a black one in pumps and a raincoat that opens to reveal a pink bikini. She has a Lil' Kim air about her. Full-bodied and sassy. In fact, maybe she is Lil' Kim. She walks over, smiling, teasing her coif.
"Bonsoir."
"Montrez-nous vos cadeaux!" demands Rebecca.
Lil' Kim opens her raincoat and pulls aside her pink bikini, and her dick falls down to her knees. She grasps her thick, black, veinous cock and swings it like a lasso.
Rebecca lets out an embarrassed giggle.
"Assez! Assez! Vas-y!"
"Je vous en prie!" says Lil' Kim as she struts off.
"Oh, I see."
They work the avenue aggressively, ignoring police and the heavy gazes of bewildered tourists. They hop into cars and out of cars and there seems to be a cycle?a brisk, ant-colony mechanics?to the business, but what it is exactly, you can't say. Eventually, someone calls to Rebecca from across the street. A guy in a black suit.
"Wolff?" you ask.
"Oui."
He is short, with a pointy nose. As he nears, you notice a patch of craterous acne on each cheek. Still, he's handsome in a psychopathic, girlfriend-abusing sort of way. He looks at you without smiling. Some air passes through his lips. He grasps her arm a little too tightly and whispers something in her ear.
"Do you mind if I leave you here?" she asks, sincerely.
"Well?"
"Don't worry. They've seen us together."
So the same looseness that makes Parisian life a pain in the ass, and even menacing, also makes it interesting. A more historically savvy observer might try to arrive at some sort of scientific thesis about what makes Paris Paris. Perhaps referencing political/historical events starting with, say, the Celtic Parisii at the end of the third century BC, through to the current Chirac/Jospin era. You're just looking out your window. And what you see is that there is actually a gangsta aspect to Paris but it does not adhere to or emanate from a single race, or from a commercially co-opted idea of the Bronx/Compton ghetto d'or, and most definitely not from that crappy French rap (more on which shortly), but rather to and from this more general condition, this slackitude, this looseness.
And as the days pass, an apartment building on your street goes up in blazes; a 15-year-old girl throws herself into the Bassin de la Villette; outside your window a couple, acquaintances actually, make loud, thumping, skin-smacking love against the old stone wall of the Cimetière Montmartre. And you ask yourself, does everyone see this? Or are you just always in the wrong place at the right time?
With this condition coloring your perceptions day after day, you're inclined to a heavy sort of daydreaming, an atmospheric reverie. It hits you at strange times, like when you and your dog are returning home from Bois de Boulogne on a Saturday at 11 p.m., and the late-setting sun has turned the white mansions along Boulevard Foch into a boundless canvas of sandy pink, and you're lying down in the tall grass of that grand promenade alone, unseen, in the shadowy embrace of a centurion oak, biting into a sweet peach while fumbling in your pocket for your can of mace?it's that contemplation born of looseness that enables you to make the connection and to sense the rumble and gravity of an older Europe. The Europe of immense wealth, of aching beauty, and of tectonic instability.
?
Then is not a bad time to eat. And in preparation for eating you have not eaten. Perhaps you've had a bowl of tabouleh and a quarter baguette earlier in the day, but now that the weeks have passed you have quelled the urge to gorge yourself every third hour on your favorite snack of Boursin and Gruyère, a half-baguette, a peach, a croque-monsieur and a glass of that supermarket Lussac St.-Emilion, 1996. And those echoes you hear are really not the old Europe, but rather your empty gut requesting nourishment. Only now your gut is telling you it wants something different. No dairy product! Enough with the heavy aligot! One more cote de boeuf or tarte flambé and it will digest in reverse right here.
So it's time for something different, but something that Paris, owing to France's brutal colonialist history, does very well.
The Senegalese restaurant you've come to enjoy is a 25-seater located on Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud in the Oberkampf circuit. Rue Oberkampf and its 11th arrondissement environs is Paris' sprawling simulacrum of East Village NYC, though without the boho pedigree. And here on Rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, which runs perpendicular to Boulevard Voltaire and is minutes from either République or Bastille, is a restaurant named Le Petit Farafina.
Le Petit Farafina is a redoubtable, workmanlike place. It recalls the more sincere Indian and Pakistani joints around 28th and Lexington in Manhattan. It is essentially one small room, the walls, velour banquette and drapes of which are cast in deep rouge, which is set off against the black-and-white flame-zebra swatches of the bar siding, ceiling support columns and pipes. Aside from this vaguely exotic color scheme and the small poster of Boby Lapointe et Les Negropolitains, there are few visual cues to suggest that the thematic locus is Africa. No glossy Tourist Board posters of gentle natives, palms out, beckoning you to visit their blighted, developing nation. No masks or tribal armor. Tablecloths are of the utilitarian variety, white and disposable, suggesting a more relaxed style of dining, though not, as it turns out, in the Ethiopian bare-hands fashion. Adjacent to the bar is a tiny riser, constructed of backlit glass brick, a festive touch, that is used as a stage. In general, the interior evokes a notion of a well-traveled neighborhood restaurant whose ethnic themes resonate where they are appreciated most?in the food.
On weeknights the place makes for a perfect appetizers-and-beer drop-in. There're usually only two other tables going while on the tiny stage a guitarist or a gourd player or both work through skeletal renditions of popular Senegalese songs (think Ladysmith and you'll be on target). The matron, who goes simply by "Mama," will sing softly along with the musicians while attending to the patrons. The muted sticking on the gourd and the simple, dry, untreated sound of the maple Stratocaster sketching out chords provide unobtrusive accompaniment for quiet table conversation or, in your case, for crude pen drawings and the completion of letters to friends back home.
Returning with a friend on a Saturday night, you find the place packed and boisterous. Onstage, an amiable behemoth named Sultan and his diminutive sidekick, Una, have the place in an uproar. Spontaneous walk-ons from patrons who've finished their meals and are on to smokes and drinks add a variety-show aspect to the evening. You and your friend arrive late and famished. You wash the food down with copious amounts of very cold Heineken. The beer tastes good cold. It neutralizes the chili heat, which, though it doesn't actually hijack a single dish, does accrete noticeably over the course of the entire meal. For dessert, Mama presents you with thiakry (chak-ree), a traditional pudding made from couscous, raisins, yogurt and sour cream, and sweetened with pineapple juice. This is followed by complimentary glasses of rum spiced with ginger root. The rum is refreshing and full of pucker?it's an appropriate elixir to stimulate conversation with Mama's best friend Sylvia, a journalist who writes for Radio Paris.
You've seen Sylvia's type before. Avuncular, inquisitive, she reminds you of some of your friends back home. Sylvia is French, but has adopted West Africa for her own. In a sense she's a native gone expat in her own country.
"I used to live three months out of four in Abidjan," she tells you. "I lived in Uganda, too. I knew Idi Amin when he was a boxer."
Sylvia's zaftig, broken face looks like it cries itself to sleep every night. But here in the restaurant she is de facto maitre d', all swing-'n'-sway and out on the happy tip?rousing patrons from their tables to dance and insisting, as she's done with you, that if you play guitar then you must sit in with the band.
"Tu dois! Tu dois! Absolument oui!"
But the West African music is a puzzlement, at once foreign and familiar. The harmonies are Western-common (they work thirds and fifths like nobody's business), while the time signatures remain baffling to two-four/three-four ears. Still, the music has a beautiful melodic backbone and a rowdy piquancy that lends an air of transport. You join Sultan and Una, fumbling at first and then rising to the occasion. They accept your style, or rather anti-style, and they forgive you as you lay off and punctuate rhythmically when the leads don't come. The leads don't come often, but two rums later and with the arrival of the branché-club crowd, Una, Sultan and you are finally onto something, doing respectable things to Manu Chao, and the club kids are singing and percussing gleefully with various handheld rhythm instruments.
"Hoy día luna, día pena..."
That is bliss. One hour playing with Una and Sultan is worth a lifetime on the couch. And at 5 a.m. you stumble out and peer back at the humble, brown awning and realize that Senegalese food will probably never make it into most Westerners' personal top 10 of international cuisines. Still, you enjoy knowing the stuff is out there. You're happy for a casual hang and a bit of art without pretense. You think of Le Petit Farafina as a trustworthy emissary from the dark continent, a loose restaurant for a loose city.
?
You've come to realize that, more than anything, Paris today is Africa. The influx of Senegalese, Gambian, Tunisian and Algerian nationals has radically altered the city's demography. All the more preposterous, then, that the republic should enforce quotas requiring radio, tv and other media to purchase French-language rap and hiphop?it's an artistic idiom that is so directly North American and so cancerously inauthentic, its practitioners simply copping the fat-beat production stylings of American hiphop and laying French lyrics on top.
Sure, the Gauls often reject American tastes only to turn around and co-opt them for domestic pleasure (Johnny Hallyday? Euro Disney?). But if you want to get all snippy and French-intellectual about it, then the notion of the republic's in effect subsidizing its own subclass of raw dawgs and wiggas must raise a few practical questions. After all, your true gangsta is, as a sociocultural agent, a pure Darwinian free-marketeer. A taker, not a receiver. One must ask, then, what does the state-subsidized wigger's carte d'identité list as his occupation? Given the hazards of his job, is he entitled to workmen's comp? Six weeks' paid vacation and a time-share chateau in Blois? Will some future minister of culture erect a Hotel des Invalides de la Vie Gangsta to care for ripening, battle-scarred survivors of the life? When his government subsidy arrives in the mail, does raw dawg Jacques deposit it into a burgeoning IRA or does he grab his hos and bitches and hightail it to Corsica for a three-day jag of pastis, crepes and poppers? And most importantly, what Frenchman will emerge as the watered-down hack-facsimile of Eminem? The smart money is on a Marseillesian, no doubt.
Where you live, on the border of the 17th, 18th and 9th arrondissements, there is a lively northwest African community comprised of Gambian and Algerian expatriates who, it is quite clear, prefer to create music that both describes and emanates from their own heritage rather than make some circuitous, half-baked toss at telling their story in the manner of the American urban black experience. A recent weeklong tribal rhythm festival at Divan du Monde in the heart of the Pigalle delivered the point quite succinctly, fat beats and all: Paris is already African enough and gangsta enough in its own way. Why should it cop to faux-American permutations? Still, the stuff is put out there?acts like Sly the Mic Buddah, Saian Supa Crew and Pit Baccardi, with their wonderfully titled smash hit "Ghetto Ambianceur"?and it sells. You can only ascribe the popularity of the Francified hiphop/ghetto esthetic to what you refer to as the "Auster-Lewis Axiom" (That's Auster, as in Paul), which dictates that a perfectly good reason exists for the thing's popularity among the French, but as a member of the culture that produced the thing, the reason is as graspable as mist.
This is not to suggest that every Parisian male is a gangsta. Indeed, the cellphone-abusing, capri-pants-wearing, neo-yuppie centrist abounds. On Thursday nights you see them en masse, polishing their Vespas outside clubs like Etoille and Les Bains Douches. But when your average Didier is running low on scratch, does he bust his gat-'n'-nylons and do the local kebab jockey for all da paypas in da drah-wah?
No, he does not. In general, il n'est pas un gangsta, l'homme parisien.
But still, there are those days when the French rap trails you like a hungry cur. You provoke it, and it gives you a deserving bite in the ass. And one morning you're out for a run on Boulevard de Batignoles. It's a Saturday, about 8 a.m., and the only people out besides you are a battalion of street cleaners in their reflective greens, blasting graffiti off of historical landmarks and vacuuming the streets with their motorcycle-Hoover contraptions. The sun glistens off the wet sidewalk while the odor of astringent cleaning solution tweaks your nose. You're trancing out to the rhythm of your trot, of your sneakers slapping down on the wet pavement and of your labored breathing, when some sprite in Sergio Tacchini chemise/pantalon combo cruises up on his low-rider bicycle with an 80s-era ghetto chest on one shoulder, cranking. It brakes your rhythm and rattles your spine and over the thrumming low end, the sprite shouts, "Mec, as-tu une cigarette?"
"Do I look like I smoke?" is what you want to shout back, but your French isn't that good. You pass him off with a quick "Je ne fume pas" and try to get your own groove back.
"Comment? Quoi, mec."
"Je ne fume pas! ME NO SMOKE!"
You are running faster now, trying to lose him. He picks up his pace, peddling to stay astride. The box is blaring. You're panting.
"Comment? Comment, mec?"
That he thinks someone out for a run will also be packing smokes is quintessentially Parisian and quite understandable, but still, is he taunting or can he really not hear you?
You stop running.
"Donc," you scream, "baissez ta fucking radio!"
He looks surprised. He circles around you once, snarling. Then he laughs, derisively. He pedals off, but from half a block away stops and turns off his radio and, in perfect, almost British English he yells back: "Show a little class, man. This is Paris."