I’ll Always Have Paris — Chapter 1
Newspapers tend to stack up around my house. They can be found in various piles, un- or partly read, and that happened in particular this past fall after making two trips back to Chicago to deal with my parents’ house. My father passed away in April at 100, in his home, not Covid-related, but unfortunately my brothers and I could not travel due to the coronavirus outbreak. Finally, at the end of the summer, taking a chance on going and dealing with cleaning and preparing the house for sale and the actual sale of the house pushed a lot of other things to the side in late September and October. I’m a guy who likes to read the paper before it goes in the recycling, and yes, I’m one of those people who likes to hold it in his hands, not navigate it on a screen. That’s all right for articles that pop up in your inbox for various reasons, but not for the daily paper which I’ve had delivered all my adult life, regardless of where I lived.
My Mom had died several years previous after a decade-long bout with dementia, and with my father now gone and the house gone as well, I felt, for the first time, orphaned from my personal roots and the City of Chicago, where my great grandfather had come 130 years before. Yes, there were cousins, but my personal family no longer had a footprint where I had always called “home.” I felt uprooted and a bit off my game. It took several weeks before I could really turn my attention to anything in a comprehensive manner, including catching up on old reading. So, I almost missed it in the local celebrity Obituary Page of the October 6th edition of the LA Times that I finally got around to.
The picture at a glance, a man in a grey suit, somewhat monochromatically camouflaged by musted foliage and neutral facades, seemed to fade into the flatness of the page, and the much larger entry beside it, four column inches to two, with a bright, more colorful and populated photo, caught my eye — a well-known local entrepreneur whose life indeed was a great story: 96, a retired Jewish teacher who had become a successful supplier of fine, high-end produce. But I lost interest after a couple of columns, and glanced back to the other and this time read the headline: “Franco-Japanese fashion designer Kenzo Takada, 1939–2020.” Below, I now registered the photo of a slim, dapper Kenzo in a grey suit and dark vest, a splash of white accenting his otherwise still-dark hair. “Oh my gosh,” I thought. “Kenzo.” It had been so long ago.
I had actually worked for Kenzo, of all people, in Paris, in the fall of 1971, a fluke of a job I dropped in on through my friend Eric; we had become friends the previous winter on the Cote D’Azure, and he was already working there. It was my second go-round in Paris. The first time in late spring, I arrived at night and decided first to try and find a girl I had met in a pension in Rome — a fool’s errand on a mere name and address on a scrap of paper. After an Odyssey that involved climbing up and down thirteen flights of stairs with a backpack at midnight, hoping for a name on a door that never materialized, I wound up spending that night sleeping in the building’s open-courtyard, a common area at ground level, this being back in the day, a l’epoch, before exterior door codes, when pushing an outside buzzer on the sidewalk opened the main door, and Voila! you were in the courtyard that led to various labyrinthian stairwells and hallways that lay beyond. I rolled out my sleeping back on the concrete, slipped the strap to my shoulder bag that carried my passport other personal items around my arm twice, and settled down with my head on a folded shirt.
In the morning I feigned sleep and listened to everyone walk past me without a word, leaving me be. Whatever my excuse for being there apparently made sense enough to people far more tolerant of the backpacking culture than Americans, and more understanding of those without a place for the night. (In the winter, I saw the homeless clochards, — and in those days we had not, I’m sorry to say, evolved past the idea of “bums” — sprawled across Metro venting grates in the sidewalk for the warmth, as people matter-of-factly made their way around. A benign curiosity at the time, now a distant harbinger of the swollen homeless encampments that line so many American streets.) When I finally rose and took advantage of a merciful gap in foot traffic to dress quickly, repack, and leave, it was no different from a night off the road, hitchhiking through the forests of central England or the cultivated coastal fields of Yugoslavia — cement just a bit sterner a bed than soil. I soon found Eric where he lived above Kenzo’s “Jungle Jap” workshop/office, the atelier, and where there was room enough to bunk in with him as well.
That spring trip had been a brief stopover. I’d trained up from Rome and stayed no more than a week or two, “a cup of coffee” as they say in the Big Leagues, on my way to England and Scotland. No job was sought or offered, and I was free to wander the city as any tourist. My first time in Paris, and I loved to walk its streets, as I still do many visits and so many years later. I am always missing Paris. Eric and I and his best buddies ate Vietnamese most nights at a little dive on the Place Contrescarpe on the Left Bank where you could get a terrific meal for a few francs. My lunch was always on the go, often a pain bagnat, an enormous, round, salad niçoise sandwich on a crispy pain de campagne roll that you could find for under a franc — 20 cents, in those days.
The rest of the day, I ducked my head into every little store that sold some sort of food, astounded to find so many bakeries, so much flakey pastry and cream (Where had milles fois been all my life; who knew bread and butter was the perfect breakfast?), stores that specialized in just cookies in a thousand shapes, chocolatiers, stores with cooked specialties of every astounding flavor and aroma — quiches, pates, charcuterie, any of which could be bought by the modest hundred gram amount. Cent grams of this, and cent grams of that became my battle cry. Every day was a French picnic garnished by a constant snack of dark chocolate, chocolat a croquer, a partially-eaten bar of which lay nestled in my jacket pocket at all times where I could break off a taste on demand. I was a Midwestern kid raised on Mars and Hershey who hadn’t seen an avocado until he got to college, and I was on a mission to make up for lost time.
I soon paid an informing price for my new eating habits. Waking in the middle of the night on my mattress on the floor, excruciating pain in my right side, I took a taxi from the atelier to the American Hospital to discover I had crise de foie. Yes, my liver was in crisis! I had so overloaded that poor organ with the constant intake of saturated fats that you could have probably buttered your baguette just running it down my arm. “Back off, Buddy!” my liver was screaming. It took a shot of morphine to find relief that night. From there it was cold turkey for weeks, and later, in London, even a Cadbury dark chocolate Fruit N’ Nut — not a bad bar, by the way — meant a twinge of cautionary discomfort. Luckily, Cadbury aside, England proved to be France’s very poor cousin when it came to richly enticing food, and my first eggs cooked in grease (No need to flip eggs over; just splash the grease over the top.) were my last. By the return, fall stint in Paris, Kenzo-Time, I was no longer a greenhorn and had learned to pace myself.
By late summer of 1971, I was a year into my post-university, ultra-budget hitchhiking Odyssey that had begun with working my way across the Atlantic on a freighter — perhaps the ultimate Kerouacian fantasy. (No Icelandic Air for me; I intended to save even that discount fare if possible.) Romantic, yes. Easy to accomplish? Turned out, not so much. Remember this is long before the day you could just Google: “working your way to Europe on a freighter.” Instead, I just talked about it incessantly from senior year in college on. As people began probing each other about their plans for the looming “real life” to come, I had my answer ready, “I’m going to work my way to Europe on a freighter,” first, last and every time; then I stopped thinking about any other possibility. The more I said it, the more fun it was to say and the more convinced I became of its inevitability. A year and a half later, after an abortive stint as a Welfare caseworker in St. Louis, (I and another friend were, to our knowledge, the only people ever fired from that job), and I started seriously asking around, people pretty much laughed in my face. “Nice idea. Good fucking luck!”
However, real credit goes to my then girlfriend, Janice, who took it seriously enough to also drop it into any conversation where it could possibly be appropriate, and she finally found out about the Ugland Management Company, a Norwegian outfit out of Grimstad, Norway that had a “work-away” program — passage in exchange for labor — on a freighter. After an exchange of letters and being instructed to inform my Draft Board (terrifying, as I was thus putting in jeopardy my 1-Y military deferment I had fought so hard for Senior year — essentially “we’ll take you when we start taking the crazy people” status), and receiving no “cease and desist” from the government, in September of 1970 I shipped out of New Haven harbor, with a crew of a couple of dozen Norwegians, a couple of Brits, a guy from the Canary Islands, and my cabin-mate, another American like me whose name escapes me, “working away.”
After dumping my backpack in our cabin, my first task as a new crew member, and as far as the crew was concerned my most crucial for the entire voyage, was to hustle off in a cab and score provisions. In this case, “provisions” meant a trunk- and back seat-load of booze: cases of beer, quarts of vodka, etc. I was the one guy who could actually leave the ship, and with the hundreds of dollars in cash they all chipped up and shoved on me, along with a shopping list, off I went to the nearest liquor store. Trust me, it was all gone in a couple of days. My first exposure to our English cousins was watching a guy drink 14 beers to my two that first night out of harbor then punch another Norwegian crewman who popped a tab top too close to his face. Within seconds they were cordially drinking again while I sat wide-eyed on a lower bunk awaiting Armageddon.
Hours after weighing anchor, we dropped off hundreds of Swedish Saabs in Baltimore, driven off ramps onto the pier at night by local crews. After that, as we headed South, I was immediately a full participant in making space for the next cargo, the loading of gigantic, thousand-pound barrels of cured but not yet dry tobacco in Moorhead City, North Carolina, tobacco bound for Sweden and cigarette-making machines.
“Making room” meant reconfiguring the hold. Below deck, the cars had been supported on segmented, hollow, steel, mini-deck pieces that fit together to form levels of cargo space in the hold. Starting with the bottom pieces, they needed to be jacked up, each flush below the next above, until all four levels were flush below the main deck, leaving an empty hold. I was assigned to a jacking crew — four groups of five, each on a corner — clearing the space for the tobacco. No hydraulics, just sweat and muscle as braided steel cable pulled the lowest deck piece up flush to the one above it, then the two of those up to the third, getting progressively heavier as we went. Brutal. The final jacking was a George Bellows painting of men straining to their last gasp. And I wasn’t done even when we finished. My bunk buddy and I were then lowered down into the hold, all that steel hopefully secured above my head, three stories below sea level, to sweep it clean of lead-based paint debris before the massive, reeking barrels were loaded and stacked on their sides like a honeycomb. The fun part was running around on them the next day like some TV Ninja obstacle course.
The shipboard experience was a bit of everything. I worked a regular 5-day workday. Mostly we cleaned; there’s a lot of grease on a ship. We actually swabbed the deck. One day we washed down the entire engine room (100% humidity) with long power washers, moving along slippery catwalks above the two monstrous, 24-valve engines that powered the ship. They showed two movies after dinner — I remember “In the Heat of the Night” — and ate very well. Great food (we had a chef on board), and there was a seamen’s mess fridge you could raid whenever you felt like it with tubes of caviar, fresh fruit and leftovers.
One night we got some bad news on the radio. Janis Joplin had died. What made this so eerie was that the week before I left, Jimi had died. Both Hendrix and Joplin down. Bad juju. These deaths hit my generation hard, raging talents flaming out so young. I had seen Janice before she became nationally famous at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco, summer between sophomore and junior year. Raw and thrilling. Their deaths made me wonder about the days to come and what was ending.
At night my bunkmate and I would go out and sit at the prow of the ship as it cut through the North Atlantic beneath the stars. I dug around in an old pipe bowl I found in my shoulder bag, secured enough ancient and burnt dope gunk to get us loaded a couple times. One night a school of dolphins picked us up and flanked us for miles, flying along on both sides just for fun, ’cause hey, that’s what dolphins do. It was pretty damn wonderful.
There was also the teenage daughter of someone who worked for the company, coming back from a summer in America on Daddy’s ship. She had a much nicer cabin somewhere on that ship, but she spent the first night in mine, which did not endear either of us to the Captain the next morning. She took a blistering in Swedish from him, but we all got past it, apparently because sex was not particularly frowned upon in Sweden, though sleeping with the crew, not encouraged, I took it. I never saw her again the entire trip. She did leave me something though, and I learned a week after landing that like Mexico, you can get tetracycline in Europe without a prescription. Not so damn wonderful.
Eleven days later and four dollars and seventy-five days richer for the first night’s overtime, I walked off the ship in Malmo, Sweden, having cleared a shipboard Customs interrogation. There was a moment’s confusion when I was asked how much cash I had with me, and I replied, $4.75, which the captain had given me in a small envelope. The Swedes were about to send me back home for insufficient funds to enter their country when I mentioned the thousand dollars in Traveler’s Checks, which to me was not cash. Language barriers! In English no less! I said my goodbyes, hoisted my backpack on my shoulders, walked to a bus to the ferry, ferried across to Copenhagen, and began the two-month, meandering descent by thumb into the heart of Europe, destination Sicily and Mediterranean warmth for the winter.
One year later I was in the “ready-to-wear” (pret-a-porter) business, with Kenzo. You’d have been hard pressed in 1971 to find someone less interested in the fashion business than I was. I’d been an architecture student for a year in college and always appreciated good design, but the whole concept of a business that revolved around keeping up with someone else’s idea of what you should look like and all new clothes every six months? No. Fine for Jackie Onassis, not me. (For the record, however, how can you watch “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and not be blown away by the costuming?) Sure, I knew who Yves St. Laurent was, but at the time it was really the last thing on my list of what would make Paris interesting second time around. Or ever. And I wasn’t looking for a job either, even though I was coming to the end of the Travelers Checks I’d left with, but I was reconciled to being home in a month after doing what I could to explore Paris one more time.
By then, I spoke pretty damn good French — “like the Swiss,” a man told me on the street, which I took as a compliment, regardless of what the French would think. At least I sounded European from a country where French was actually an official language. I’d been an “A” high school French student, but the one year in college had been freshman year, four years before. My early days of attempting to speak it had been excruciating: thinking of what I wanted to say in English, translating it to French, saying it, listening so very hard to the response, translating what I could, then starting all over again. Getting directions to the Post Office could take twenty minutes. But after spending the past winter on the Riviera, in Nice, I was actually thinking in French. All those rules, conjugations, and vocabulary had stayed with me, and with a chance to speak every day, it all seemed to kick in. Always a good mimic, I had a great ear and was unafraid to speak a foreign tongue. The more I spoke, the better I got. When I woke up one night having dreamt in French, I knew I’d arrived.
And the second time Paris was a destination choice for other reasons, a redirect from an original plan to head South to Israel for the winter. The determinant factors were two: 1) A green-eyed, red-headed Greek girl, Jenaki (“Jenny”) Papadimitriou, I’d met on the Greek isle, Hydra, and who lived in Paris, and spoke English, wound up trumping the Italian I’d met on another island, Santorini, who I thought I might be able to locate in Israel. 2) I was also convinced that a war was coming in Israel, and I didn’t want to be there for that. I was two years prescient on that one.
This time there were only two stories to the Paris apartment where Jenny lived, no courtyard and multiple stairwells, so finding her was easy. And she was happy to see me. No climbing stairs looking for names on the doors, rather an open-arms welcome and passionate lovemaking. I spent my first night in Paris in blissful intimacy and a new world of possibilities in front of me. Lying in bed after sex, we listened to her one English language record, an Edwin Hawkins Singers album. “Oh Happy Day,” they sang, and who was I to argue.
When I woke in the morning, though, there she was sitting with a packed bag, and I didn’t like the looks of it. She was headed to Amsterdam for the weekend, she told me. It had been long-planned. Friends were involved. I was welcome to the apartment, and she’d see me Sunday night. Okaaaaay, I thought. I had arrived unannounced, and didn’t expect her to change plans for me. We were young; there would be plenty of time, so after seeing her to the station, I unpacked, oriented myself to the neighborhood, bought some food, cleaned like a bandit, including windows, which I don’t think had been cleaned since the Paris Commune.
She lived on Rue Tiquetonne (love saying that — “teek-ton”) right off Boulevard de Sebastopol. That street was an education in itself, as it appeared to be, alongside regular commercial activity, a locus of rather blatant prostitution, albeit with a fun-loving approach that ran counter to my preconceived notions as a Chicago boy. Prostitution to me was 14th and Peoria, a desperate whorehouse in a black neighborhood where white boys like me got their throats slit after being robbed. In addition to women of all shapes, sizes, and ages stationed every 10–15 feet on the Boulevard like Centurians, there were many hotels whose glass doors faced the street. Women in every possible state of undress, including completely, would plaster themselves up against the full-frame panes in exuberant exhortation to the passing pedestrians to “come on in” and be treated to unimaginable delights, night or day. Culture shock doesn’t begin to describe it, and they were definitely decades ahead of their time in “putting it on the glass.” Having already had my dose of Euroclap, and out of fear and loyalty, I held out for Jenny.
Sunday night I bought flowers and took the Metro to the Gare du Nord for the first train from Amsterdam. She wasn’t on it. Deflated, I went home, put the flowers in water, and fell asleep trying to stay up for the late train. I awoke to a commotion at the door that seemed excessive for one 5-foot tall Greek girl and a small bag. Sure enough, my Jenny was not alone. She introduced me to Jean-Yves, with whom she had returned from Amsterdam. Her boyfriend. (Never so glad to have missed a train in my life.) I was “the friend” she’d met on Hydra. My stuff wound up in the extra room without my seeing it getting moved. I learned later she thought this triangle might work very out well for her. I wasn’t nearly so sanguine.
I never discovered what Jean-Yves knew or had agreed to, but luckily Eric had his own apartment by then with enough floor space, even in a studio, for me to bunk in. Despite my earlier visit, Kenzo was still the brilliant clothes designer I’d never heard of, whose fresh and fun clothes had taken the fashion world ever more by storm over the past year. I showed up in the morning with Eric at the new atelier on Rue St. Anne, just down the street from the Place de l’Opera and was immediately embraced and hired to work if I wanted to, on a “we’ll pay you what we can” handshake with Kenzo’s business partner, the incredibly handsome and endlessly charming and buoyant, Gilles Raysse. Why not, I thought. This could be fun and in some haphazard way would supplement my diminishing funds. I spent the next four months in a freewheeling, unstructured environment of genius meets chaotic management at best.
(To Be Continued)
