I’ll Always Have Paris — Chapter 6

I spent the winter of 1970-’71 in Nice in the South of France. I was on my way to Sicily to spend the winter there, rent a little house and write; however I got sidetracked by way of getting ripped off for my passport and $900 in Traveler’s Checks at the Youth Hostel in Strasbourg, a month into my trip, where the friendly guy who showed me around when I arrived, ripped off my coat with the passport and checks “hidden” in the lining because the pocket was basically a large hole. American Express, Strasbourg reimbursed me to the tune of $150 and said I would get the rest in Nice, which I did.

One day I took the bus to the big Cap Trois Mille (Cap 3000) Supermarket out by the airport to do a little food shopping for staples. This store had nearly been the scene of a crime when a few weeks earlier some friends and I were inside engaging in the time-honored practice of shoplifting — stuffing our coats with twice as much as we were actually planning to check out with — justified, looking back, by the arrogance of youth and the modest and finite funds we all enjoyed and the desire to stretch their availability. I know, pretty weak. Today, I return extra change if I get it, having gone through something of a religious conversion on honesty in general, but in particular on taking stuff that doesn’t belong to you, a notion I try and promulgate as well. This can be an uphill climb when you’re teaching public school, as I’ve been doing as a substitute for the past twenty-three years, where anything and everything not nailed down appears to be pretty much up for grabs.

At the time however, we were arrogant and reckless and morally-challenged. Luckily, I noticed a bespectacled, adult head checking us out from behind the end of an aisle, and realized we were also busted. We quickly put everything back on a shelf and passed through the checkout line totally clean, much to the frustration of store Security who’d been called to our register and demanded we turn out our pockets. We protested loudly and with great indignance, in whatever French we could muster at the time, that we were being taken for crooks. Instead of feeling shame, I put a premium on being not just the loudest of the bunch, but the most abrasively insulting (it’s a gift), demanding at the top of my voice as we were being escorted out the door, loud enough for everyone in the whole damn place to hear, if this was the thanks we Americans get for the Second World War.

Ouch! What a douchebag.

Anyway, this trip I was without an audience, kept a low profile, and on the return bus ride, despite open seats, uncharacteristically for me, sat down next to another passenger, an older, well-dressed guy who was as neat and well-groomed as I was the quintessential hippie, hair well down my shoulders, full, un-trimmed beard, and wearing a hand-knit, forest green, cable stitch sweater knit by my college girlfriend, Janice. Its weight alone was equal to almost all the other clothing I had brought, but baby, it was warm, and came in even handier now that the winter coat was gone (recall The Affair at the Nice Youth Hostel) — the winter coat I’d held out for ten years earlier with the faux suede and polyester wool .

I actually still have that sweater. I’m sentimental and tend to keep things in general, but although this was something I don’t think I’ve worn since the winter in Western Massachusetts the year after I came home from Europe, it was a hand-made gift from a girlfriend who stayed a friend — a good friend — until she died the year of my 50th college reunion, her body, once so petite and lithe, ravaged by cancer, Crohn’s Disease, and uncommon weight gain, her spirit pummeled by a hateful mother and a psychopathic brother who, as a lawyer along with her lummox of a father, was disbarred and did time for influence peddling. Now I just keep it in a bottom drawer of a second dresser, its history, like the woven top purchased in the market in San Cristobal de las Casas, and saved for just the right girlfriend, part of the eclectic ballast in a life that’s been perennially threatening to break its mooring and drift away if not for the keepsakes that tie me to the story I tell. Or, could be one of my own neuroses is I just can’t throw stuff out.

Anyway, it’s not a long ride back to town from Cap 3000, and I got to talking with my seatmate almost right away. Wasn’t long before he asked me what I did and what I was planning to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a writer. He immediately took out a pen and a scrap of paper. “I’m going to write something for you that Jean Cocteau once said to me,” he said in French. When he finished, he handed it to me.

« L’art, c’est pour troubler. Etonnez-moi! » “Art should disturb. Astonish me!”

As I took the piece of paper from him, I tried to remember if, other than the name being familiar, there was anything specific I knew about Jean Cocteau. There wasn’t, but I knew he was famous and kind of pissed at myself at the moment that I didn’t know more about him. However, the fact that I was sitting on a bus riding back from the grocery store with a guy who’d known him well enough to write down a quote for me was beyond hip, and there I was having a brush with the French Academie and being fed encouragement in my artistic life-to -come, indirectly, by (I later learned) a legendary poet, playwright, author, artist, and filmmaker. Funny, I never asked him the how or why of that relationship, how he knew Cocteau, and we moved on to something else before one of us got off the bus and it was over.

I put that scrap of paper in my wallet and have kept it ever since in all subsequent wallets. The one time I removed it, ironically, was for a trip to France in the early 2000’s — my wallet having gotten so bulky it was beginning to cut off circulation to my leg. I removed things I did not want to put in jeopardy of loss, and wouldn’t you know it, that was the trip my wallet was stolen in a Metro station. I was able to replace the credit cards immediately, and the driver’s license upon return, but I could not have replaced that memento, that urgent demand for excellence. It’s protected in plastic now in my latest wallet, and I like to think that it’s a bit of inspiration that I carry with me always, not just a relic good for a story, although as time goes by, the danger is much more the latter than the former.

From time to time I take it out and show it to someone, like some lucky purchase I got for a song that turned out to be worth “Antiques Roadshow” level dough; something cool, like the Mickey Mantle autograph my father once got in an elevator in New York and gave me when I was very young. That does have monetary value, and I keep it in plastic hidden in my bedroom. (Once took me two days to find it.) Is the value of the quote in its circumstance, its curiosity — French, Cocteau, bus ride — or in its exhortation? The reality more often seems a disappointment — a grail I’ve neither found (even the diligence of the search in question), much less lived up to — despite a lot of writing I’m very proud of. Have I disturbed anybody? Have I astonished anyone? In flashes and bursts, maybe, but I’m still waiting on me to make Cocteau proud.

Writing can be an exasperating endeavor, and I am not one of those people who can settle himself in for six, eight, ten hours a day and get after it, month in year out. I don’t have that kind of discipline and never did. Regardless of venue, I’ve never turned in any assignment late, but working on my own, on spec, involves, for me, a haphazard approach I would not encourage on anyone and involves regular trips away from the chair for any number of reasons. (Though they say too much uninterrupted sitting will shorten your life.) All of life is an embraced distraction. I just got up, for example, to walk into the living room and monitor for a few seconds a radio broadcast on the post-Merkel, German elections, Someone’s done poorly. Why, you ask, is the radio on in the living room when I’m in the office writing, and why am I listening? Well, there you have it, don’t you.

I used to be better. For years, decades ago, I put in 6–7 hours a day; always had jazz on in the background while writing, but got a lot of work done — diligently in the morning, and diligently in the afternoon after returning from the gym. There were fewer distractions — no MSNBC, no Google to find out who tanked in Germany and why — no email to check, no Twitter to make a pointed quip. How did Salinger, Roth, Hemingway do it? Were they selling prete-a-porter at twenty-four or seriously writing? Talk about your rhetorical questions.

When I was in sixth grade and eleven years old, I was, like most boys my age, absolutely oblivious to any serious adult goal. I wanted to make the local Little League team, put on a little muscle at some point, get my high game in bowling up to triple digits, and finish all “The Hardy Boys” books. What was for dinner was as far ahead as I was thinking, and that, only after I came home from school and had a snack. But that year, the boys took Shop while the girls took Home Economics, and I was introduced to some serious, floor-bolted tools: lathes, drills, and ban saws; cutting, gluing, melting and fabricating things; and, momentously, mechanical drawing.

I was surprisingly good at all of it. There were other boys who worked faster than I did, but no one was more meticulous. My Mom was great about using everything I made and brought home: the napkin holder, the laminated salt and pepper shakers, royal blue and transparent plastic, the letter opener, a deep, pumpkin orange, and sentimental fool that I am, I still have the salt shaker and letter opener, rescued from my parents’ house after my Dad died and before the estate sale. (Yes, you’d be surprised what people buy. The company running the sale prepped my brothers and I with one admonition: “Don’t throw anything away” and actually sold open containers of dry goods like rice and pasta and half bottles of dish soap. A dime here, a quarter there, it adds up. We made enough to cover the closing costs on the house.)

It was during the Mechanical Drawing segment of the class, as I had finished a “plate” and was waiting to be graded, that our teacher, Mr. Azriel, leaned down over my shoulder, his foul breath bathing me in the putrefying remains of not just what he’d had for breakfast but what seemed like the last several years of meals on the verge of becoming petroleum, and said, “You’re very good at this. Have you ever thought about what you’d like to do some day?” Like a puppy dog sitting up on its haunches after being given a treat and begging for more, I quickly replied, “I think I’d like to be an architect.”

He nodded both sagely and approvingly and adjusted his glasses in silent acknowledgment of the mentor-protégé moment that had just passed between us, reached forward with his pen like God reaching out to touch Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and wrote “100” in dark blue ink in the corner of my plate. A perfect score. Hard to come by. One of several I got.

Right there and then I stopped thinking about what I was going to be when I grew up. If anyone asked, I was going to be an architect. I also gave no further thought to what that actually meant, did no research into architecture, read no biographies of famous architects. Beyond my natural curiosity, I didn’t even pay any deeper attention to local buildings, and I grew up in Chicago which was and remains famous for its classic and contemporary architecture — buildings that survived the Chicago Fire, remnants of the Columbia Exposition, Louis Sullivan, Mies Van Der Rohe, the Architecture Boat Tour downtown — all things I learned years later, absorbed by osmosis, not inquisitiveness.

I did actually lay hands on one of its more famous buildings one time — The Merchandise Mart — in the day, the largest office building in the world, or something like that. It was once owned by Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. The summer I was sixteen or seventeen, a local Top 40 radio station was running a contest where you needed to guess how many 6-inch hot dogs would go around the Merchandize Mart. While others were no doubt digging up architectural drawings at the Public Library or searching encyclopedias for the dimensions, my boyfriends and I jumped in our cars and drove down there one night and began measuring it off with six-inch rulers. And we were perfectly straight, as this was before dope of any kind had entered our conscious behavior. I remember the walls not being perfectly smooth and a bit of controversy over whether or not we should follow the indentations of the façade. As I recall, we called it off after several feet or so. Whoever won, it wasn’t us.

When it came time to apply to colleges, financial circumstances dictated only three application submissions, and one of them had to be the University of Illinois, downstate in Champagne-Urbana. Fortunately, they had a well-respected Architecture School. A cousin of mine had actually graduated, though never practiced, as he got attracted first to industrial design and then toy design and manufacturing where he went on to great success. I applied downstate, as well as to Columbia in New York and Washington University in St. Louis, where I wound up going on a nice tuition plus books scholarship to study my boyhood choice, not passion, architecture.

But I never connected to my Architecture classes freshman year. The teacher, a guy named Stafford, was cold and distant, who never made a point of explaining the “why” of what we were doing. We were given more what seemed like art projects to do — posters, collages of found items — some of which were interesting, and I would appreciate more today, but I didn’t really understand why we were doing them and their relationship to architecture. Like I knew how the curriculum should go. Some I dove into with the almost obsessive attention to detail I had given to a sixth-grade Shop ashtray. Others I did at the last minute, phoning in something embarrassingly simple. I figured if he didn’t care, why should I. Should have been my first clue.

Meanwhile, the second-year teacher, Leslie Laskey, who just died last year, loomed as a forbidding prospect of often vicious and confrontational critique — a shaved-headed gay man who once greeted a recently pinned sorority student with the observation, “Ah, I see you’re wearing your brass nipple, today.” (Need I say this predates sexual harassment? Those were the days when teachers still got away with paddling, so all you could do was put your head down and take it.) But I didn’t want it that badly. I’d already had a run-in over a first-year project he’d supervised, when I’d designed a lightbulb package in a hexagonal shape, mimicking a honeycomb, because it’s the most efficient shape for getting the most out of the space. A lightbulb being utilitarian, I figured cost, and thus, price, would be a factor in my design. I got ripped from orifice to orifice as an unconscionable Philistine.

That summer, I decided I wanted to write and transferred out of the Architecture School. Any way you cut it I was not going to spend a year under Leslie Laskey.

DAN GABER

My two best friends in Architecture also left school after Freshman year. One guy was from Wilmette (home of the infamous “Rocky” the Cop, — curious how this suburb figured so prominently in my early life) and a population considerably better off financially. The high school, New Trier, was huge and not really a rival, since they beat us in the major sports, football and basketball, pretty regularly, though we were excellent in gymnastics and wrestling. In swimming, they were qualifying guys for the Olympic trials, and I suspect it was because they had us on back-yard swimming pools by like a factor of 270 or so. They were rich; we were middle class, or lower middle class in my case.

Ann Margaret and Rock Hudson went there. So did Charleton Heston. So did Dan Gaber.

I haven’t used a lot of last names here, but this is someone I’d like remembered for who he was. There was no one else quite like Dan on campus. He was tall, six-two or three, good looking with dark curly hair. He was like eighteen going on thirty-five and at one point even sported a little mustache, which gave him an even more continental look, kind of a Jewish David Niven. He wore slacks, not jeans, shoes, not gym shoes, and corduroy sports jackets with dark turtleneck sweaters, not t-shirts and jean jackets. He looked every day like I tried to look when dressing up, and much better. No hand-me downs, no one size bigger so I could “grow into it.” He smoked Gauloises, for God’s sake (and who knows where he got them), which I had never heard of, not Pall Mall, which I favored as a Freshman before switching to Lucky Strikes, because they were “toasted” and tasted that way, (God knows what chemical effected that flavor) and because the shorter pack rolled up better in a t-shirt sleeve. He had actually been to France and started the habit there, whereas I, at that point, was taking French 1, had only taken high school French, and had no thoughts of ever being there. He turned me on to Coltrane, and while I had listened to a lot of my Dad’s jazz albums, Coltrane was something new.

We hung out a bit, particularly over pool tables. The Men’s High-Rise dorm, where I lived Freshman Year on the 9th floor, had a full-sixed, drop pocket pool table on the ground floor, tucked away in a room behind the elevators, and it was often available. We would rack ’em up, play 8-ball and straight pool, quote “The Hustler” and take turns referring to each other as “Fast Eddie” or “Fats” or “Fat Man.” He clearly had more experience with a stick in his hand than I did — mine being relegated to the few hours at one of the local bowling alleys — All Star Lanes — and occasional visits to our more well-off cousins who had a table in their finished basement. Our basement had a cement floor and a drain right beside my Mom’s ringer washing machine, and was further embellished with overhead clothesline and clothespins, furnaces, storage sheds, and spiders. When it rained hard and long enough, it flooded up to your waist. I suspected Dan had had a pool table at home. I loved to watch him as he stood stretched over the table like something out of the movie, cigarette dangling from his lips as he talked, never dropping a spec of ash.

“You sure don’t leave much when you miss, do you, Fats?”

“That’s what the game’s all about.”

Dan was cool in a way that was something new to me, a tall, worldly Jew who grew up in privilege, comfortable in his corduroy and blended wool skin. I’d give a lot to remember our conversations or be presented with their texts, because somehow I’d like to think that unlike most all of the conversations I was having in those early days of sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll, they touched on meaningful topics more often than not. But maybe not, who knows. Maybe we just talked about girls.

And then he was gone. Left after Freshman year, and we lost track of each other. I do remember sending a telegram somewhere in the summer of ’67 when I heard on the news that Coltrane had died. “Trane Down” it said. I have no idea if he got it. And there the memory lay for decades, but many years ago, with a lot of creative digging, I was able to locate, not Dan but his brother, and called him. It was not a pleasant conversation. He did not want to talk about Dan and was genuinely angry that I had called and was forcing the subject on him. He wasn’t going to tell me a damn fucking thing, but the obvious inference was that Dan had died. And it seemed to me that maybe he had taken his own life, though I couldn’t be sure, and there was nothing I could do. Our history would remain one of those moments frozen in amber time, pristine, forever young.

A year after graduation, I was in Europe and at some point had my first Gauloises. It was like smoking a tree limb, but I thought of Dan when it was offered, while I lit up, and through smoking it down to its filter. Maybe he died of lung cancer. At the time, a Frenchman, Michel Jazy, was one of the greatest middle-distance runners in the world, winning Olympic medals and holding world records. I remember reading that he smoked two packs of Gauloises a day. I was thinking they should dig him up and study those lungs, but turns out he’s still alive at 85. God bless him.

Smoking was more than a pastime in France. Everyone smoked. It was one of the first things I noticed: Je fume, voila, j’existe!. I remember watching a guy tearing up the street with a jackhammer, his cigarette bobbing up and down to the rhythm of the destructive machine he held propped against his belly, the ash miraculously holding on the way Dan’s would hold on out over the felt. I was surprised by how many of the French smoked Marlboros. Apparently, they had bought into the he-man branding, or maybe it was because they were American. Kool and Winston were also popular.

I had decided, before leaving the States, to quit smoking. I had brought no Luckies with me when I met the boat in New Haven, and pretty much got through Denmark and Germany without succumbing. But France was a different story. Everyone smoked, so I smoked. Soon I was trying Dunhill, then English Ovals. I dug that oval shape, though it wasn’t really oval. Each had a kind of seam, like pressed pants, on both sides, so they were oval, but came to a point at each side. And Du Maurier, which turns out to a Canadian cigarette, came in a cool, black and red flat box. Sleek. Design quality. The French could have Marlboros. I had Du Maurier, at least for a while. Gitanes, though, were a bridge too far. I was smoking one once, and the cigarette went out by itself. When I checked why, there was like a serious piece of wood (tobacco stem?) about a half inch long in the middle of the cigarette. I smoked the whole time I was there, but only that one Gitanes. I quit when I got back, and never started again.

At one point, a month or so in to working for Kenzo, I began looking for an apartment of my own, something small and furnished. I learned to read the ads for apartments tout mouble , and one day, at lunch, met a dapper, middle-aged guy who took me up to the top floor of an oddly triangular-shaped building — sort of a mini-Flatiron Building — tapered to a point at one end. We opened a door into what looked like a movie set, manicured and dressed to the last detail.

It was tiny, barely room to move around, so tiny in fact that the bed folded against the wall like a train compartment bunk, and at that was barely wide enough for a person my size. The place was painted in shades of white, soft grays and blues, and had a small, but serviceable bathroom off the smaller kitchen. It had been conceived as an artist’s garret — though quite the opposite of the dismal, hovel I’m sure my father had in mind when predicting my starvation after being informed of my planned change of college majors — and among the sparse furnishings was a table, meticulously laid out with brushes and a palette, curved in the old style.

I lingered over those brushes a moment. They were fanned out, thinnest to fullest, in perfect progression, a soft, bushy little arc of seventy degrees or so. The love and the care that had gone into that display was palpable, as was the intent, a near longing, that the space would attract and hold the perfect creative spirit. I may have looked the part, for as I glanced up from the table at my prospective landlord, I thought I caught in his eye a sincere hope that I, in fact, was going to fulfill his dream — that the table of brushes had somehow sealed the deal. It was only a matter of time before I would be showing my own work, he bringing friends to my gallery, and recounting how he was not just present at the creation, but played the midwife.

I looked out the windows at the rooftops approaching from all angles and the intersection below. The light certainly was fantastic, but I was not a painter and had no ambitions in that direction. I could not have slept on that bed and in no time would have been fighting back whatever it was that consumed Jack Nicholson in The Shining. I turned back to my host. If he’d had a hat he would have been holding it in both hands in front of him at his waist with a look of supplication appropriate in front of omnipotent authorities. He read the moment. I thanked him. I said surely he would find a young artist who would love it because the light was so wonderful. I didn’t say anyone trying that hard deserved to be fulfilled, but I thought so. And meant it.

It was the only apartment I ever saw. Soon after, Uli and Barbara located the place on the Rue de Rivoli that they invited me to share with them, and all thoughts of moving into my own place drifted away. Things would work out, they would take care of themselves. My life was a personal take on the old joke about the man who jumped off the 100-story building. As he passed someone in a window on the way down, he was asked, “How’s it going?”

“So far, so good,” he replied.

Was it? I was twenty-four and neither the architect nor writer I’d set out to be. Architecture was now relegated to appreciating what had been already built, from the Acropolis to the Hancock Building to the Biblioteheque Nationale. Writing was a few lines scribbled in a journal overwhelmingly composed of blank pages. I had no organized idea of what I was going to do with my personal ambitions, clearly in flux despite changing majors years before, and it appeared just as likely, if not way more likely, that I would rise in the ranks of the Kenzo posse to become a force in the French ready-to-wear business than become a published writer. Others I knew were in graduate school. Some on their way to post-docs. Some were working, taking home a defined salary, renting their own apartments, making down-payments; some were married, and some of those were raising children. Some who weren’t were raising children. Some had been to Viet Nam and back; others were still there. Others had come back in zippered plastic. I had turned twenty-four on the rim of an underwater volcano, better-known as the black-beached island in the Mediterranean. I was racking up those kinds of distinctions, and there were others whose distinctions made mine look like crossing a suburban street at the crosswalk. A seed in the wind, I had not even begun to ask Alfie’s question: “What’s it all about?” I was, though, seemingly doing my best to live his life.

There are a series of scenes early in “The Hustler,” where Fast Eddie Felson (Paul Newman), the Oakland, California pool shark, ahead and cocky, begins to drink himself into ever sloppier play, in the process dropping his jacket, and becoming ever more sartorially unkempt as he squanders the advantage he holds over Minnesota Fats (Jackie Gleason), as the Fat Man, who at bottom and suffering a whipping, had already removed not just his coat, but opened his vest, shirt, and loosened his tie, begins to reconstitute himself button by button, because he has not become drunk. In the end, it’s Felson slumped in a chair, drunk on JTS Brown, admiring Fats — ahead now and putting him away for good — a new flower in his lapel and looking as clean and powerful as he did when play started.

I often think about that stretch of film, comparing my circumstances to Fats’. Not the Fats who has the character not to slip into sloppy ineptitude — “Minnesota Fats has more character in his little finger than you’ve got in your whole skinny body,” the gangster, Bert Gordon (George C. Scott), rails at Fast Eddie later on. No, it’s the reconstituting. The reassemblage. It’s that time and again, it seems, I’ve had to sit myself down, and put myself back together — find center, relocate and identify the ambition, decide to move forward and how. Choose something to be my next project. Organize around it and begin. When that happens, I always think of Fats, buttoning his shirt collar and straightening his tie. Pulling it up to his neck. Buttoning up the vest. Putting back on his coat. Accepting the new boutonniere. Difference is, when he’s done, he knows he’s still Minnesota Fats. When I do it, I know I’m still Mitch Paradise.

I miss you, Dan. We might have gone to Paris, the two of us, and been the Chicago Boys — open a pool hall with blues and soul on the soundtrack and serve deep-dish pizza we flew in from Uno’s. I’d give a lot to chalk it up over a table somewhere, and chop it up a while, just the two of us like old times in the amber of yet-to-be-adulterated youth.

“Fat Man, you shoot a great game of pool.”

“So do you, Fast Eddie.”