It was a real summer night. July in Santa Monica. I don't know who decided on Copa D'Oro, but that's where we were. I'd never actually been inside the place before - just walked by it, driven by it, biked by it. Come to think of it, I haven't been back to the place since. Strange.
It's the kind of place that when you look into, doesn't look like all that much fun. So what. A place doesn't have to be fun for everything to happen at it. It's dark, and it's not big, but it's also not cozy. No one's really moving with much life in them. The cool lounge music is just loud enough to mute all one's thoughts.
We gave it a go though. The girls insisted. Even away from the bar, conversations had to be a bit louder to be audible over the white noise of ambient thought. Not everything got through, but when Lili said I should come out to Paris to write for a little, something sparked like a flint rock, and I snapped to and said, "Why yes, of course."
I don't think she entirely believed me, but we cheers'd and she said, "Ok. Good." Even at the thought of it now, the idea sounds crazy. But that night at Copa D'Oro, leaning on the wall bar in the warm dim light, two months in Paris seemed to me to be the most reasonable course of action. The plan crystallized instantly. The clarity was like a sharp adrenaline shot; it would be a two month round trip ticket, just like the one to London, and I would finish the book there. Two months was plenty of time. There was no weighing whether to go or not, just a lust to be back in Paris already, a wonder how, and a determination to make it so. It wouldn't be easy.
Consciously, did I know what I was doing? No. It was a gut-run, sprinting blindly towards open doors.
Unconsciously, it was simple.
I was writing a novel.
And so from then on I did not drive the eight miles to and from the shop everyday, I biked it. I did not go out and buy lunch everyday. I made it at home with breakfast, and packed it in an old backpack with my black leather Piccadilly notebook and a mechanical pencil. After finishing my lunch, I'd spend the rest of my hour break sitting at the beach with my feet in the sand, writing. I listened to music, and I wrote in the sun and the sea breeze a short five minute walk from the shop. I set an alarm on my phone to stop from continually checking the time. That's determination. That's fear of wasting our most precious finite resource; time (or is it money).
