I’ll Always Have Paris — Chapter 2

It would be hard to call working for Kenzo a 9–5 job. Right up to this very minute, I’ve had very few jobs where I actually had to arrive “on time.” Even substitute teaching, there’s a wide window before school when you can show up, and frankly, if you’re late, they’ll cover for you. My first two summer jobs I punched a clock with a time card: stock boy at Montgomery Ward and jack- of-all-trades at a little electronic parts factory called Ohmite. They fired me at Montgomery Ward for talking back to the boss, but I had the last laugh. Where’s Montgomery Ward today? Bankrupt, gone; what’s left is a tiny little on-line catalogue run by a Swiss company, hanging on by its fingernails. My last summer job I worked for a buddy’s father, and he picked me up each morning, so I couldn’t be late. Since then, I’ve had one job where I had to show up at an appointed hour, the Welfare caseworker job in St. Louis, from which I was also fired. I’m sensing a pattern.

Kenzo was not a punch-the-clock job. Eric and I arrived some time before ten, after coffee and croissants or a tartine (baguette with butter and jam — which I’d be happy to live on, by the way), and stayed until the work was done. The atelier was a huge, second floor, loft space divided by function except for the office in the back that had makeshift walls. Eric and I had our own little proprietary area right inside the front door where we fielded orders and made up cartons for shipping. Beyond us was a huge, central space that was dominated by two things: large, labeled cartons which were everywhere, full of the wonderful Fall Line clothes returned from Bendel and Bonwit Teller, where Kenzo and Gilles had chosen to go exclusively in the States before missing their delivery date by a week. Fifth Avenue cut them dead and returned the merchandise. They were stacked against the wall, in places as high as the fifteen-foot ceiling, on makeshift shelves and on the floor, framing the second thing, the dozen busy seamstresses at their sewing machines, working under the forbidding threat of a cardboard avalanche. The girls, all Japanese, all working illegally at a grid of long tables, dominated the open floor and had to be hustled away and hidden in the bathroom when the Labor Union Inspector dropped in to check for papers. The French have a lot of rules about work; foreigners cannot take jobs if there’s a French person available, I learned. When the inspectors showed, I would descend with other Americans and Germans to the safety of the Basque-run bar next door.

There was nothing exotic about my job other than I was working in Paris, which felt pretty fucking exotic enough. I might as well have been hand-making les macarons or giving tours of the Louvre. And it was nice to be around people. True, making and shipping cartons wasn’t exactly what my high school counselor, Mrs. Bowersox, said a college degree would lead to, but then again, neither was sniffing around to see if Welfare recipients had a man sleeping in. I concentrated on making great cartons. I was in France. Where was she? But being a salesman, son-of-a-salesman, and possessing the gift of gab in a couple of languages, I was soon spending more time selling the current line to buyers from boutiques around the world who would just drop in than sealing up cartons.

Half the remaining space, under the windows, was devoted to racks of clothes where the buyers and I would wander while they pointed out their choices. I would lead them to what I thought was hot or point out what other people were buying. Selling when someone’s in the mood to buy is one of the most fun things you can do. Kenzo’s stuff was fresh and new and colorful — little sweaters with his signature anchor logo that season, coats with sleeves cut on a bias that no one had thought to do — it was silly on so many levels and yet so much fun.

Eric and I would occasionally take somebody’s car or van and deliver cartons here and there, and we once picked up finished clothing from fabrication plants just outside Paris. There was some sort of tax break if you kept your manufacturing outside the city, in les banlieus, the suburbs. I remember one time we left late and arrived back at evening rush hour. It took an hour and a half to clear the Place de Concorde, circling its diameter, centimeter by centimeter. I was driving. I wanted to bite someone in the leg when it was over.

Basically, whatever they needed me to do, I did. We think of Paris fashion as a concern of substance, but “Jungle Jap,” as it was then known, or just Jap, was a playful disruptor and completely seat-of-pants in those days; we were like a big family of French, Japanese, Germans, and Americans, getting it done with a minimum of planning and efficiency. Luckily Kenzo was the flavor of the moment and almost self-propelled. We all went out to eat regularly at a Vietnamese restaurant frequented by people in the business, Long Hiep I think it was called, and every now and then I’d receive a fistful of francs from either Gilles or Barbara, the German office manager, who spoke perfect French and appeared to be the only competently organized person on the premises.

Barbara was a sweet and petite gal who never lost her cool or her temper but could frown you into submission. Working for a genius who had no business sense, partnered with a dilettante in over his head and learning as he went, she was the nucleus, and her gravity alone kept those two electrons from flying off into unparallel universes. At the time, she was with a German fashion photographer named Uli, who was a warm and fun-loving guy, just getting going in the business and trying to hustle work. He knew where the best German-themed beer halls in Paris were, and we hit most of them. They both spoke English, and we got along great.

I remember one time Barbara’s mother came to visit — a very sweet and prim little German lady. We took her to Long Hiep where she sat right across from me, arm’s distance, and we chatted (I called her Mutti , “Mommy” in German) all night. On the way home in a cab, she was sitting between Barbara and me. All of a sudden, she started producing restaurant plates and cups and saucers from inside her sleeves, her purse, her pockets… She had stolen, right before our eyes without anyone the wiser, an entire setting of the restaurant’s lovely patterned china. After that I called her “Light-Fingered” Mutti.

This second, extended stay in Paris accelerated my love affair with the city. In the spring, I had gotten out of Paris a little. Once I took the train to Le Havre, and a bus to Etretat, where Monet had famously painted the cliffs that jutted into the water — les falaises. And the Place Contrescarpe group had gone to the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget airport northeast of the city. Lindberg landed at Le Bourget. Less known is that two weeks before, two pilots had taken off from Le Bourget in their own effort to make the trans-Atlantic flight in L’Oiseau Blanc, The White Bird. The plane disappeared without a trace. That spring I saw the Concorde at the Air show. I watched it break out of a low cloud cover, no further up than a skyscraper rooftop, like a great, silver pterodactyl. We were all mesmerized.

I don’t think I left town once in the fall. I became endlessly fascinated with the Metro and took pride in learning the lines and where they deposited you, and in particular, the routes to the next train at transfer points. I didn’t ride buses to get anywhere until my fourth or fifth trip to France. Now I mostly ride buses, particularly since the Metro has become crowded to the point of physical refusal at certain hours. I never experienced any of the boorish behavior for which the French are so famous here in the States; rather, people seemed to go out of their way to be nice and helpful. I’m sure it had something to do with my speaking French, but you’d be surprised what a little, “S’il vous plait, or Excusey-moi at the beginning of a sentence can do regardless of your fluency. That misbegotten spring night I wound up sleeping in the courtyard is a perfect example. A total stranger first helped me use the phone (remember I was trying to find the girl I’d met in Rome), and when no one answered, he actually drove me to the nearest Metro stop that would get me to her neighborhood without a transfer, walked me down into the Metro, bought me a ticket and one for himself, and took me down and made sure I was on the correct side and headed in the right direction. Who was the last American who did something like that for you?

That kindness was not the last of its breed for me in Paris, but I also saw the cool aloofness that was possible, despite my improved vocabulary and accent and confidence, expanded by working every day in conversation with a wide range of people. The French do not get the education in English you find in Germany or Scandinavia. A proud people who had yet to get over taking it on the chin in World War II and having to be bailed out by the Yanks, they would much rather you struggle in their language than they struggle in yours. Going from Napoleon to a second-tier power in a century and a half has tested their equilibrium and can manifest in ridiculous ways. At one point they totally rejected the internet for some homegrown technology called Minitel, which was not only limited to French data, but defined cumbersome. They might as well have named it, Enigma. They’re also not casually verbal with strangers in the street like Americans. You can surprise the hell out of them as they hustle past you in Paris by accosting them with a pleasant word in French. Once they realize you’re actually speaking to them in French though, or trying, and get over the shock, they’re actually quite nice. But if you play the Ugly American, they will cut you dead.

Still, I seemed to slip into my days there so easily, that at some point I began to think I must be ancestrally French; it was the only explanation. With my last name, it was easy to decide I was a Sephardic Jew whose family was originally from the South of France since Roman Gaul. We had left France at some point a millennia or more ago for unknown reasons or been booted out. French Kings were constantly kicking out the Jews and stealing their wealth before inviting them back again to acquire new wealth and help run the Kingdom before expelling them and grabbing it again. Anyway, we were ensconced in Greater Russia when great-granddad Jonah finally made it to Chicago from Lithuania with the original family name intact: Paradisetal. Pardes, where “paradise” comes from, means a garden or a grove in Hebrew. Tal is dew. Jonah got rid of the dew because he thought it made the name unpronounceable. I can’t complain. So, basically, I was originally French, which made everything decidedly more romantic.

And Paradise, I discovered, is one of those names that allows anyone to indulge their nationalistic proclivities. During my time in Scotland working on the Dale Farm, Tommy Dale and his mother, both said the same thing on first introduction: “Paradise, Paradise…,that’s a Scottish name, isn’t it?” So who knows, maybe we took a detour on the way to The Pale. I did like Scotland. I guess I need to try that 23 and Me test.

Secure in my new, pre-Lithuanian, ancestral French identity, I took quiet pleasure in my ever-improving, more idiomatic mastery of the language, now commonly peppered with phrases like ras le bol, (fed up, had enough) and ca m’est egal (I could care less). I was even learning a word or two in Basque from the bar owner next door. And plans were being made for me, chez Kenzo. My job performance had gotten noticed. One day Barbara sat me down and told me they were planning to move knitwear manufacturing to Hong Kong, and the plan would be for me to go there twice a year, a couple of months each in the spring and fall, to supervise the work since I spoke English. These were the days when Hong Kong was still a British protectorate, not China’s punching bag, and the world had never heard of coronaviruses or wet markets. There would also be a month over the summer in St. Tropez, back down on the Riviera (this was a kind of rotating Jap perk). An actual future was developing with the company while I just did my thing, and friendships were deepening.

There was more news. Barbara and Uli had found a fabulous apartment on the Rue de Rivoli across from the Louvre, two stories, three bedrooms, and they wanted me to move in with them. Rent free. Ooh la la!. I had begun spending more time with Uli and Barbara than with Eric. In fact, after a month or so he had politely asked me to find other accommodations, which I did with a mutual friend who had a bit more room. I understood. A studio is hard to share, and we still hung out, still worked together, and still occasionally went to Place Contrescarpe for dinner. One early morning hour we emerged from hours of enjoying someone’s Afghani hash and were stopped by plainclothes cops on the way to the car. I knew Eric had a gram or two in his underwear (it’s a French thing), but I was clean. I also had my American passport with me. But the cop talked to Eric like he knew him, and asked him if he’d been keeping his nose clean. He told me later that the same cop had busted him once before, and it would have gone very ugly for him if he’d been caught holding again. I recalled my own experience with the French Narcotics Squad.

My last month in Nice — February/March — had been spent crashing in the apartment of my now good friend Anne. She and her cousin Pamela were doing a year abroad at the local university and had one of those large, uncomfortable, straight-backed wooden couches in the living room of their apartment that seemed more like a bed, anyway. The girls had apparently made a brief trip to Morocco over the Christmas holidays, and on behalf of a French guy from Montpelier who Pam took a liking to, agreed to bring back some distribution-size pieces of Moroccan hash and received a nice chunk of the goods as a bonus. One night we got together with a few other Americans we knew, and smoked up our fair share, plus a little THC one of the guys had just received from back home as a chaser, leaving dice-sized pieces of camel dung spread out all over the place when we crashed.

At seven the next morning, there was loud knocking on the door, and when Pamela opened it, in came the Nice Narcotics Squad, all trench coats and Fedoras. All three came into the living room, the first room off the hallway, talking very loudly in French, exulting over what lay strewn on the living room table, which luckily gave Anne, who slept in the back bedroom, time to get to the kitchen, take a ten-gram ball of hash wrapped in tinfoil out of the refrigerator, and heave it sideways out the window into the empty lot next door.

“Nobody says or knows anything,” I said to the girls.
“No English!” les flics shouted at us.

We were all allowed to dress, then hustled down to the station. As I left the room under the watchful eye of two detectives, I snuck a glance up at the supercharger made from a paper towel tube, the end wrapped in tin foil, several inches of which could be seen sticking out over the top of a seven-foot armoire.

At the station we were separated and interrogated. I was shown pictures of various people and recognized the dealer from a picture the girls showed me, but said nothing. Pamela, however, for reasons that will always be known only to her, could not contain herself. When asked how we smoked the hash, she described the supercharger, and two men up and hurried back to the apartment with her in tow and brought it back. It was paraded around the station as an example of American ingenuity equal to the cotton gin or maybe the fire Prometheus brought down from heaven. Yankee knowhow; where will it end? At lunch we were actually locked in a cell. I had my shoe laces and belt confiscated (my Arlo Guthrie, “Alice’s Restaurant” moment) and was given a pate sandwich on a baguette and charged two francs for the service.

Turned out they had busted the dealer, and when asked where he got the shit, he ratted out his couriers as the masterminds who supplied it. It was hairy for a moment. Instead of “Alice’s Restaurant” it might have been my “Midnight Express” moment, but by five o’clock we were out of there with business cards to use as reference in case we should ever have any trouble during our stay. Both girls, I believe, got a couple of propositions. We were American tourists. We had money to spend. They were not going to make an example of us for a teaspoon of crumbs and a supercharger, which, for all I know, sits in that station to this day, under glass, with a brass plaque: “Confiscated in the great raid of ’71.”

When we got home, it took Anne about two minutes to find the ball of hash in the weeds. We went upstairs, broke it down, baked it into a sheet of brownies, divided it up, and two days later I was off to Italy with my share, which I will only say came to great use the night my friend Dennis and I decided, “Fuck this National Museum Strike,” and snuck over the wall and down into the Roman Forum at midnight. That adventure too, by the way, ended in a pleasant, sharing-a-smoke, early morning chat with a Roman plainclothes detective while sitting on fallen Doric columns. He took our names and passport numbers and said there’d be no trouble this time. “Americans are crazy.” (This from an Italian.) However, should we repeat our mistake, he made fists and crossed his forearms at the wrist. The “lock-up” message was crystal.

Lately I’ve lamented over France for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s been five years since I’ve visited. Starting in the mid-90’s, I got there every couple of years, if not more often, escalating particularly in 2015 when I thought someone I’d met there might become a permanent relationship, and I would decamp for the Continent. When that blew up in my face, circumstances seemed to conspire against another visit. I made do with the local COLCOA (City of Lights, City of Angels) Film Festival and subscribed to TV5Monde on cable. I began checking the Paris weather regularly in the paper. Then first, my father slipping away and now the pandemic, has rendered travel, especially to France, moot, not to mention the film festival.

I read where 50% of the French are against taking any vaccine, which sadly, doesn’t surprise me. They are so suspicious of the government there, and of course, of things not French. For a while, their infection rate was three times ours, and I worry for my friends, some of whom are elderly and some of whom have children. I email and call friends, and now occasionally Zoom. No one I know there has gotten sick, and for that I’m grateful; yet how long before we open the paper to read about the new French variant of Covid-19, and that won’t mean it comes with a side of pommes frites. Merde!

(To be Continued)