Four pills down the shoot, boop. That's it? Well, I hope it works. For my sake, and for every girl out there this had better work. I tell myself it's medicine, my doctor's simple order, so why shouldn't it. The only thing I can think of would be the jet-lag. Or the hour, whatever it is. Late. Dead morning in LA, but in New York, here it's only midnight. And I'm just at the end of an abysmal layover to Paris. Halfway there. I'm going to wake up in France, and with a long breath, I close my ringed weary eyes for a moment and listen to the music. "Now boarding," she says. It cuts through the tunes, and the assembly slowly rises to its feet to make queue. The small orange plastic pill bottle is still in my hand. I look it once over for some reassurance. It tells to take all at once orally, and I laugh with young adolescence and trash it before she scans my ticket.
Have I got everything? Yes. Clothes. Shirts, pants, socks. Underwear. Long underwear too, because fuck it might get a little chilly out there. So a knit sweater and a scarf as well. I have a towel and a washcloth, and a toothbrush and paste. Deodorant. Razor. Nice shoes, and a few books. Scar Tissue, On The Road, The New College French & English Dictionary, and East Of Eden and the rest are packed away in my checked green Samsonite luggage. The important stuff I keep close to me, in my backpack, which isn't enormous so I had to choose wisely. My laptop. My camera. Extra lenses, the new 35mm and the old borrowed fish-eye that I have to focus manually if I ever want to use it. My sunglasses. My passport. My old Perrington notebook that's written about halfway through, and the black leather-bound Moleskin I just stole from the terminal's airport market (I paid the four dollars for gummy worms, but thirty dollars was too much to ask for paper sheets, even if they did have a good texture and cute rounded corners; the old Perrington had rounded corners and I only paid ten dollars for it I believe, and they look just about the same) . Finally, the book mother bought for me at my request before I left; another of Kerouac's, his last in fact, and it's got a pair of titles between the covers. The second, called Pic, didn't really glean my eye at the bookstore. It was the first title that had piqued my interest and cocked my head to inspect further; Satori In Paris. "I want this one," I'd told her. I'm two pages in now, and already done with a chapter. By the look of things, the chapters are short. Easy reading. A little absent-minded too, but the magic is in his rhythm. No one can deny that. I read until dinner's served in all it's plastic-wrapped and preserved glory. The booze isn't free so I take a ginger ale to wash everything down and after it's all done I rest my head on a pillow by the window and try to find sleep in Cat Power's whisper to my ear.
*****
This is nothing special. I keep telling myself that over and over and over and over again. It sounds off like a loud pessimistic snooze alarm in my pulsing time-deprived head every minute or so as we slowly taxi towards the terminal at Charles de Gaulle. This is nothing special. I say, this is nothing special. Still, every fiber of muscle, every neuron fires with the thought that it is. I'm shaking. No, it's nothing. Fingers, play something soothing in my ears. They Adele me. Just the stress of living, that's all. Soundtracked. And I know it won't be this way forever, I say. I guess that's where the magic is. Everything's more beautiful and breath-takingly prominent when you think to yourself, "I just might never see this again, and I'll certainly never see it like this right now, not ever, no, never again." Each story between blinks becomes fruit for the soul, each and every one when everything's new. This holds true only more so if the story's quite beautiful to begin with, and Paris is a beautiful beautiful city. Believe me, I've been here once before.
I glide through the spaceport terminal. Really, with this place? It's got a taste of that vintage clean-sleek future with dark stainless metal and big glass. I feel like Ethan (Handsome) Hawke in Gattaca. Through customs I glide, to the baggage carousel and onward. At the currency exchange I give them sixty US dollars and they hand me back forty-six and change in their funny monopoly money that's all different sizes. Then it's towards the sliding glass doors. I call Lili from a pay phone, and it's early (7:45 or so by the airport ticker clocks), but she answers anyway, yawning and surprised, and tells me to take the Roissy bus to the Opera.
