Femmes: Sylvia's Library

It's quiet-ish. I've been here before. I forget it's summer now, not the lonesome cold of late fall that I remember, and so I'm not alone, no, far from it.  It's not just Sylvia and me set alone with her books today with the windows closed against the biting cold.  I see none of her webs, I hear none of her whispers in the silence.  It's hot outside.  Tourists hush about taking pictures in front of the "Please Do Not Take Pictures" sign.  I'm not depressed like I was, which makes things different and the only free seat is by, you've probably guessed it dear reader, a fucking writer type; or maybe it's just a sneaky mirror.

There's a furrow in his brow.  I know it, I don't even have to look up.  I can feel his messy corduroy pants angst on the humid French from the whispering tour guide, and the Paris air and he's had enough, he's gone.  Good riddance fucking tortoise-rimmed glasses and knapsack bag.  Good riddance to the iPad too, that's what all the writers are using these days, the real ones with their tortured souls and their "poetry"

Perhaps I spoke too soon.  Have you got a grasp on my thoughts now? Have you? Do my feelings pervade?  Good, because we must part ways now, there's a beautiful girl sitting in the corner and we keep making eyes at each other.  Take a picture of her dear reader, lest we forget, the Irishman from the cafe is a photographer after all.

Femmes: Corners (or Sauce de Piment)

Ah ha! And to think that I'd almost forgotten about my dear shitty Chinois! The microwave heat, the sitting still water oh, the memories.  This was real Paris to me those years back when a floor was suited just fine for sleeping on.  The city's been flooding back all day, walking past Bastille, past the metro at Filles du Calvaire and the corner at Rue Bretagne, the one with the ATMs, where I'd waited for Olivia that cold, cold November night ago.  I'll say it's much different in the summer sun.  No chill in the bone, it's a sweat on the brow instead, and nostalgia, and Cafe Charlot.  It must be the company that a memory clings to; her long fur coat, her deep rouge lips.

I have to smile.  I had been writing in a shitty Chinois that night too.  I was so, so young, pacing in circles in the tangerine light, freezing from fingers to toes right down to the core of me, wishing for her to be there, and suddenly she was, I remember.

It's these muses that cross our path, like glue that keeps the sand from sieving through, they're the heavy anchor in turbulent seas, I remember.  Beige jacket, red pants; of course I remember Rachel when I see the galleries.  They may be different now (JR's long moved on to bigger and grander iterations), but really it's the corners, life's intersections where the streets meet that are most clear and familiar.  Walking with Rachel I remember right where the broken toilet was on the corner across the street from American Apparel.  That memory might well outlast the facing storefront. After all, it's been six years nearly.  A lot can happen for a fashion brand in six years.  A lot of mistakes can be made, but it's still here.  For now.

Femmes: Cafe Shakespeare

I have a knack for meeting people, I suppose.  Maybe it's only when I'm traveling. Yes, for a second while this beautiful girl beside me twirls her hair.  Yes, it's my favorite thing, serendipity.  It's the way a woman in proximity, knowing not, has her hand on the faucet of my words, my word.  Is that a bit too garish?

Twirl, twirl, twirl.  She's a beautiful young thing, young brown hair, young legs, deep blue denim jacket, yes.  She's busy with a highlighter.  That's right, a student no doubt.  I can't imagine highlighting passages just for the fuck of it.  Her face is easily forgivable though, and when she looks up, I look back down of course, to stop from staring.  I've come to the curious revelation that my hand may write -- impressively straight I might add -- for some time without the consult of my eyes.  It can be a subconscious thing, and then I become the weird guy staring.  It can't be a strong look, but in my periphery I can see that she's smiling; shaking her head, but still she's smiling.

Ah! The line between muse and distraction is razor-thin sometimes.  Serendipity though, yes.  Not only fun to say, serendipity is a wonderful scheme.  There's no pretense, there's nothing really, it's free.  All it takes is a little perception and attention to detail.  That costs nothing, like singing Soundgarden songs to the babies waiting in line.

A recreational smoking habit helps as well.  I met the guy behind the counter two hours ago on a not busy street in the Marais.  After all, it's a Marais day.  An empty street I remember because of the clarity of the only few voices in the air, a whisper English in my ear as I walked by and the name Haim as he and a friend lit cigarettes.

It was Haim and the cigarette smoke that drew me to a decided about-face down the block to bum one.  If you smoke cigarettes at all, I swear, you need to come to Paris and walk the streets.  It's one of the simple pleasures in life; walking through Paris with a lit cigarette to drag on.

Anyways, they were Irishmen.  God I love the Irish.  They gave me three cigarettes when I told them I hated the Lumineers; real DB music, the Lumineers.  And we'll all race to marry the Haim girls. "On bended knee as soon as I see 'em!" I'd said.  I'm turning a corner with this Shakespeare place.  I'd left six years ago in the winter with such a sour taste for writer types.  Now it's iced chai on my tongue and familiar English in the air.  Maybe I'm thawing in the summer heat, maybe I just enjoy the company at the cafe better.  I'll poke into the bookstore shortly for a bit, see how Sylvia's doing, weaving her webs in the quiet parlor upstairs.

Femmes: Place D'Aligre

Against all odds and varying degrees of je ne sais quoi, let's call it scatter-brained indifference, I've woken up in Paris once again, and for only the second time alone.  It's new to me this Paris, not the 14th, my familiar stomp, nor the 7th that's familiar from Lili.  No, I'm holed up in the 12th now, not far from the Marais and Sacha's flat and still, entirely different. No, the 12th is a much more generic, wholesome humble Paris.

I arrived at Gare de Lyon late last night, near midnight, and walked myself north to the tiny square of Place d'Aligre. Only by good grace did I make it into the building without the code. A kind woman let me in, an older blonde, but ah, it's always a woman with me.

Still no wifi, but that's not important. I tried at the cafe but the password didn't work. I don't really care. Fewer and fewer things faze me now I'm beginning to realize. Perhaps it's a Paris thing.  From a space beyond interconnectivity it takes on the specter of a master and hostage reality. We have a sort of Stockholm Syndrome when it comes to our technology. We've been enslaved so long now that the thought of being free is frightening.

But free I am now, at least for the moment. The mind is open to more important and more beautiful things to be thankful for; like this market right outside my door, and the smile it brings to me, and more discreetly so, the dawn of thought that has come to me as I walked up and down the stalls of old antiquities and fruit.  I was searching for something more to buy her, but I found nothing, and perhaps that's because I need nothing else to give up to her; not a trinket, no jewelry or a shiny stone, not my love, and certainly not my life.

It's exhausted, finally, this merry-go-around of holding on and letting go and so the comfort, I should say, is only natural.  Its the little things; an old pencil and bound paper, a borrowed cigarette, a table to myself outside on the corner, and an espresso in Paris.  Paris is a power like that.  I can only find this here.  I might walk all day around the city I think, and let my feelings fly again through the streets like they haven't in such a long time.

The soul is whole again; anything is possible.

Femmes: Sunflowers at Sunset

I'm beginning to notice with more increasing regularity on this train all the people together: the couples, the families, the friends travelling together.

My eyes glaze over those alone--the commuters, the weekenders--and they focus on the relationships of those that know one another and illicit emotions.  Perhaps because solitude is silence, my ears pricks at conversation and my eyes follow.  It's usually the sound of love or joy or happiness, being carefree.  I wonder if eyes glaze over me.

Maybe people see the way I see, or maybe I'm one in a million, and no one understands the constant fireworks in between my ears like Bastille Day, Sacha's birthday, on the fourteenth of July.  It's curious that my oldest friends, both of them, were born on days of independence in July.  There's probably a story in there somewhere, and I wish I just had a mountain of speed with which to write it down.  With that, it wold only take days, smashing through the excavation.  What would Steinbeck do with that motivation?

I like reading his journal, or I should say his collection of letters to his editor.  Today he balked at Roger & Hammerstein's The King And I, calling it a thin show that covers it's thinness in luxury.

He said:

"I believe you can only be unafraid if you find what it is that you fear and you conquer it."

Not about The King And I, mind you, but about a more general kind of living.


*****

Whatever be the problem,
sunflowers at sunset
in South France
is the cure.

They have a powerful magic
at this time as they suck
on the last sunshine
of the day,

sunlight in the sky.

I hope when I die I wake up in these fields
to wander through forever.

Femmes: Love Sex Dreams

Only when I check my phone do I realize what train I'm on.  It's the 4:20 train to Paris.  Right on time, and away we go.  I know small details always fall by the wayside which is why I write them down.  Some things I don't want to forget, especially when I'm back home, back in Venice by the beach in the California sun and the weed haze, trying to remember everything.  The feeling of craziness tickles the peripherals of my mind yet again on this leg, Barcelona Sants to Gare de Lyon; French, Spanish, English, German all flying around the car.  I'm glad I'm on the second level, to be closer to the heavens, higher off the ground than before.

I smile at the thought of having wanted to throw myself off a bridge when I first got here.  I was desperate, which drove me, as it often does into the serendipitous.  An older English angel guided my hand in Barcelona and Andalusia, kept me company, kept me busy and away from the darker thoughts, French angels in France also, friends and young lovers, they always seem to be my saviors. I'm nowhere near suicide now, but still, I'm rocketing away I'm afraid.  Oh well.  Sanity's for the mundane and the overrated.

I'll think back on Seville and the curious Alberta (Elysia) I... well, that's just it.  It's curious isn't it?  What was that?  It was a laugh, a gas.  I wouldn't call it a riot, but it sure as hell was something new.  She doesn't drink, she doesn't smoke, she doesn't eat cheese, she doesn't drink tea or coffee, she doesn't eat meat on the principle of animal endearment, but everything else is attributed to having the pallet of a fifteen year old girl.  We didn't have sex.  She talked about her ex constantly and how she'd ran away from the only guy she ever felt anything for.  Her parents hated him because he was a dreamer.

Suffice to say, I could relate.  He grew up surfing in South Africa, I grew up surfing in LA.  Alberta (Elysia) showed me the other side.  She pushed me over an edge I needed to get over.  Maybe it's frowned upon, but I have to laugh at the fact, thinking back, that if it'd been me and myself in Seville, it might've been me having to do the pushing, and the edge maybe much more physical.  It's insanely hilarious.

I feel better now, much better, like I accomplished what I came over here to do with her.  Sure my balls feel like boules from the not cumming for three weeks, but I'll sort that out in Paris.

Fuckin' life is grand, isn't it.

Femmes: What's In My Head

The Fuzz song makes me think of Savanna; Ty Segall and Savanna blaring in my ears.  I'm writing to the music again like I used to do.  It feels good.  There was a feeling of the glow only a few minutes ago, that full body insanity when my fingers itch for a pencil, gripping and tapping and stretching and popping.

I wrote once after a long hiatus that I needed to write again or I was going to explode; that kind of glow, my hair stood on end.  They're all at attention now on my arm, I can see them listening on my leg because it's hot outside in summer Spain.

I just left Madrid.  I was in Andalusia in the morning, I woke up in Seville.  Tonight I'll rest my head in Paris again.



*****

The shadows of the
lines running beside
the train flick back
and forth across my
pages like windshield-
wipers as gold fields
and patches of purple
fly by outside.

It's because they're 
not totally taught.

I wonder what they're
wiping away.

I hope it's thee
anxiety.

Femmes: Elysia

(At Hotel Fernando III)

The ways things work out man, I swear. It's like a goddamn--fuck, I don't know the word.  No well, I do.  I've probably got it somewhere, but I just can't think in this Spanish heat. I remember it was 41 degrees Celsius when we stopped in Cordoba for dinner and a look around.  That was yesterday.  I don't know what that is in Fahrenheit, but let me tell you, it's fucking hot.  Even by the pool now, it's fucking hot.  I'm sweating in this umbrella shade.  There's no wind, the air is still.  I can't imagine if everything had gone according to plan though, and not meeting Elysia out here.  Can you imagine?  Alone in Sevilla?  In this heat in some shitty AirBnb private room with some stranger next door and in the living room and the kitchen every day?  No thank you.

I was so worried about money.  Now look at me.  At a 4-star hotel in the old town, laid out in the umbrella shade by the roof-top pool, old tile roofs and bell-towers all around me, and some beautiful British slag at my side.  Sure, there's nothing in the way of sex between us, despite all efforts, but still, she's fucking good company, it's incredible.  I haven't felt down a day since we'd met up in Barcelona, and then too, the drive to Sevilla.

And to think: I'd wanted to kill myself in Andalusia a few weeks back.  It's the randomness in life that leads the way for me, not the safety of routine.  It's what keeps me alive, and always stunning beauties in proximity.  Like this other London girl in the pool with her pretty friend.  They're not too posh, not like Elysia, I wonder what side of town they're from.

And of course the Spanish girls.  God, if someone told me being alone kept you young, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.  Adventurers always aged well.  Writers too. Or they died young.


[stop]


Strange, I've barely moved today, absolutely no plans and it seems the words are just sweating out of me, about whatever.  Maybe nothing obviously, but it's a good feeling, like all my worries have melted away, and I'm young again, head in a cloudless sky.

(I'm writing to fill pages again--)

Femmes: Irene

She says to me,
"You know you're crazy right."

I say to her,
"Tell me about it, lady."

I've known this for years.
I'm also--

And the sailorly bartender
Barkeep from El Vaso del Oro
with Irene.

That look she gave me
for what might be the last
time I ever see her,
who knows,
but the look;

I'll not be able to stop
thinking about her anytime soon.
The rush will make me
remember things,
I'm sure.

Like the French girls
on the metro at San Marti,
and the way Irene flips her hair,

Femmes: Biscuits

I'm a wreck.  What am I doing.  How did I get here.  Let's say it's serendipity.  No, I use that word too often.  As the greats would say, this is fate.  I'm simply destined to be tortured by beautiful women.

Now even here in Barcelona, I find myself somehow in bed with a bombshell that wants nothing to do with me.  I should've known.  Six months ago she wanted to marry me for a green card.  Now she's here, sharing a shitty AirBnb in outer Barcelona with me.  We're close to nothing so we rent a scooter.  The scooter's actually the best thing to happen thus far on the trip.  Her idea, and not that bad of one. In fact, it's been an excellent idea.  I haven't been on a scooter since Bali.

She's weird and English. She doesn't drink coffee or tea, only coke, and she calls cookies biscuits.

Femmes: Defender

Emmanuelle drove me to the train station early in her old Land Rover Defender.  I had a ticket on the first train through Lamballe at 7:40 which would take me to Rennes and then onto Paris where I had to change stations to catch my train to Barcelona.  I knew I had a long day ahead of me, but frankly I was too drowsy to care or pay it much heed in the moment.

The last ten days had been that special kind of dream in the daytime; a weed-smoked bliss of beaches and bike rides through the countryside and the old villages and cider and moule frites and intriguing women and cavalier gentlemen of the best sorts (photographers, writers, designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, band managers, models, bakers, real estate ragers, the works, all ragers really), and a proper French family garden party, and spliffs, spliffs, spliffs, and hash and the best cocaine and the best molly, absinthe, excellent wine, home-cooked cake and galette, and oh yes, the cheese of course, and the red poppies and all the damned magic.

Emmanuelle's Defender sounds a little like my Dad's Ford Courier from when he used to drive me to school early in the morning before going into the office.   This drive is remarkably different though.  We're rushing through Brittany, the early morning sun poking through the clouds by the sea, the tide filled in all the way and into the wetlands.  It's quite a different picture than on the way in with Sacha and Tom and Matthew and the other girls, Arielle and Magda and T-Pain in the trail car, when the tide was out and everything was mud and boats dry on their side on the flats.

It was just me and Emmanuelle.  I had grown up with her daughters, Arielle and Sacha. I'd known them since high school, I used to go to parties at her house up in the hills in Los Feliz.  Her daughter had taken me to prom, and so of course I knew they had horses growing up.  She still had horses in fact, at her ranch in Ojai.  Driving, I saw a black horse alone in a wet green field, and I asked Emmanuelle if she ever had one, a black horse.

She tells me she had in fact, her most beloved, and she tells me of the day it died, "...and she looked at me with her old eyes that day, and I knew, I knew she was saying goodbye to me and when I came close she nuzzled me softly with her nose, and it felt like something went for her to me that day, something transferred.  I felt it.  And she was gone in the morning.  She looked so peaceful."

She tells me how she missed  her and how she cared for her and gave her the best things in life.  She tells me about the day her cat died too, and even in the drowsy morning it's ridiculously apparent that Emmanuelle holds in her heart the most precious kind of respect and beautiful love that I've ever seen in this life.  There's shades of it in her daughters, but to be with her, alone with Emmanuelle in her Defender, it's such a jolt of goodness, like unfiltered coffee.  She's straight French espresso, an absolute delight.  Simply the way she talks and the youthful passion she has for everything dear is enough to make me wide awake for the coming journey ahead.

We roar into the sleepy town of Lamballe with five minute to spare, but get turned around on the skinny winding cobblestone roads and Emmanuelle pulls over to ask a couple of old geezers the way to the station.  They oblige her starry-eyed.  She has that effect on people.  It's a small station, there's only one track and I see the train come to a stop as we pull up.  "We made it! We just made it!" exclaims Emmanuelle.  "Hurry! Hurry! Safe travels dear!"  She's such a darling.

"Thanks for everything Emmanuelle!  Thanks for letting us tear around your house for the week, and for all the berries and adventures and the secret beach and just everything.  I had such a good time! Seriously thank you, thank you.  A million times."  I put my hands together towards her and can't help but smile before I turn and rush off to the platform with my backpack bouncing on my shoulders and my bag in tow.


*****


There is an old man at the train station; two bags, two tired eyes.  He orders a cafe at the cafe, no croissant, no pain au chocolate, just a small espresso.  Renne.  He eyes the schedule board with his tired eyes  and the train from Voie 7 at 9:05.  A small squad of soldiers passes, four of them in military fatigues and freshly shaved faces, fingers just above the triggers of their fully automatic FAMAS rifles.  One of them, the youngest one, looks tired too.

The old man with the espresso in hand goes tense in the neck for a second, stands closer to his bags and looks hard at his coffee as the soldiers pass.  The oldest looking one looks him up and down without stopping.  He's not tired at all.  He's vigilant after the latest attacks.  Everyone's a little on edge after Bastille Day.

The man's train is on time, and the man is already on the platform waiting dutifully.  He gets on at the proper car and takes the seat on his ticket that's been reserved.  He puts one bag in the overhead carriage and keeps the smaller bag in his lap, hugging it just casually enough so as not be awkward as he stares out the window at the other boarding and those making their way  down the platform to the station.  There's a wishful longing in his eyes as he watches them walk away.  They're probably going to have a great day, the man thinks to himself, and he's jealous.  He doesn't cry, not yet.

The man had gotten quite good at disguising his desperation and the emotion in him in the mirror at home.  He had mastered his face, just as they'd told him to do.

A younger man, younger than the man who had mastered his face, sits down next to the old man as the train pulls away.  It's a plop, and it startles the master.

The young man starts at the startle and looks the master up and down, his loose pants and his shirt and his arms clutched tight around his bag, but not with eyes like the soldier's.  "Desolée. Pardon," says the young man in French, but his accent is not French, it's something else, and his French sounds like shit.  "Tu parle anglais?" he asks.  He's American.

The old man did in fact speak English.  Yes, he spoke English and French as well among other things.  "I do..." says the master cautiously.

"You much of a talker? asks the young man.

No, but the old man hesitates.  Despite everything they told him, all the rules, all the outcomes, the master looks at the young man with the American accent and sees something familiar, something he used to possess way back once upon a time.  It's camaraderie.  It's congenial interest in other people and a knob on the master's oven nudges a little and clicks.  He hadn't had a face-to-face conversation in weeks, nothing without some deep gravity behind it in months even.  He'd never been a man of vices and his drug of choice used to be small talk.  He used to talk to everyone.  He used to always make friends on the train.  The master's heart jumps at the prospect, and that surprises him, "You're in luck," he says.  "I've just had my coffee."

"Fancy that.  I've just had mine too," says the young man.

For a second the old man isn't thinking what was in his bag.  He's not thinking about all the reasons he's supposed to hate the young man.  He's not thinking about the hatred that the young man is supposed to have for him, the hatred they told him about, and in that second, there was a flash of light in the old man's heart and something began to grow; curiosity.

Who was this young man? "What is your name?" asked the old man.

The young man holds out his hand. "I'm Brian. What about you?"

"My name is Abel."

"Where you from Abel?"

The old man hesitates.  Is this a trap?  Best not risk it.  "I am from Turkey."

"Turkey," says the young man thoughtfully.  "Istanbul?"

"Yes. Istanbul." The old man had been to Istanbul.  His memory of the city comes rushing back, the streets, the markets, the summer nights looking out across the Bosphorus Strait with the woman that he would marry.  The mother of his child.  They had been so young then, not unlike the young man sitting next to him, with eyes that darted in wonder not in fear.  It was a different time then, the old man told himself.  But then again, it's always a different time isn't it.

"Always wanted to go to Istanbul," says the young man.  "Never got that far east though. Got as far east as Prague.  What's your favorite thing about Istanbul?"

The old man already knew.  "At night, when the city is all lights.  Sitting by the water at night with my wife.  But she wasn't my wife yet. It was the most beautiful thing.  I was so happy then.  We were young, like you.  How old are you?"

"Twenty-eight."

"I was not much older than you when I visited Istanbul.

"I'll be twenty-nine in January."

"That is six months away."

"I'm practically thirty. Time goes so fast nowadays."

"It only gets faster, Brian. This I know."

"Must be nice with someone to share it with.  I wish I had what you have.  My girl just left me, but maybe one day I'll get it right."

The old man gripped his bag a little tighter.  "My wife is dead."



[stop]

Femmes: The Performer

It's hotter than it should be.
I'm probably higher than I should be too.

The flies have moved in.
The trees in the distance seem like a stuttering stream.

No, not stuttering,
No, shimmering.

White noise,
White water in the breeze.

Matthew is playing the piano in the oldest part of the house,
and outside the shade is slowly working it's way over the hydrangeas.

I guess we're going surfing, Matthew and I.
How lovely.  I've never surfed in Europe before.

It's different here.

There once was a man not unlike every other man,
And just like every other man, he was different.

I wonder what he thinks about.
I wonder if I'm just writing for show now.

Femmes: Dominos

I don't know what it is about the sun room in the morning that draws me in when I wake with the donkey brays.  One could say the peace and the quiet, easily, but the silence is so alive in the countryside.  I can't remember the last time I heard doves cooing, or the loud hum-buzz of the flies and the insects out here.  A school of sharp chirps carries on outside like you never heard in the city and I wonder if they ever think of their cousins roughing it in the concrete and stone forest.  In Paris, ah.

I need to get out more.
The rush has seemed to run away from life out here.

There's dice on the table from last night.  There was some prime cocaine and spliffs and the hash cup and of course good French wine and cider, and I learned how to play dice, but wouldn't you know, I've forgotten how now.

Today is to be a garden party.

Magda has me and Tom running about arranging things around the garden to her content, heavy wood stoves, and old fold-out French benches.  Olivia's set in one of the benches elegantly beneath the pear tree writing at a fever pace it seems.  There's something on her mind.  T-Pain's gliding about with a cigarette in hand.  Arielle's gliding as well, in a magnificent canary yellow full length billowing summer dress.  Everyone's drinking white wine.  And Sacha.  Well Sacha is just Sacha, as always.  Carefree, buzzed, and a little high from the day's spliffs.

Her mother's family is all here too, two sisters and kids about our age, and husbands.  Simply put, they're a beautiful family, very French.  A bit of awkwardness ensued over lunch and politeness and toe-stepping and what have you, but whatever.  Marion, Sacha's cousin made a quite astonishing birthday white cake garnished in fresh fruit from the garden and kiwis, and Tom and I, freaking out that we didn't get any birthday presents, panicked, and high as we were decided to rush out to the patisserie to buy pastries for everyone for dessert.  Only when the cake was served did we realize our affront.  You put an stoned Englishman and a blitzed California boy, roll them into a French garden party, what do you expect.

Sacha laughed it off, even if the caught breaths of some of the elders started ringing in my ears.  My skin crawled for a while as the awkward was palpable in the air.  The French have a unique quality of not caring and demeaning all at once sometimes if there's been an offense.  Especially those that grew up French in the old style and had an eye for the way things ought to be.  Me, I found comfort in the country cider, and Magda's eccentricity.  What a ferocious women she is, and delicate too.  It's a beauty to see those to together.


We were riding bicycles on the way back from the old house overlooking the ocean that supposedly used to belong to a German spy and his German Shepherd.  It was a fortress of a thing.  The old French lady Jeanne that lived there now was renting out the bedrooms individually on AIRBNB, and Price and her boyfriend Tobin were in one of them.  Jeanne slept in a loft in the look-out tower.  Two kittens ran and tackled about, along with a shaggy black dog that looked like a rug or a pile of clothes whenever he laid down from the heat, and then the kittens would come tumbling through and paw at his wet nose.  Jeanne was Jewish and had a very precise and orderly style about the house, with old big viewing books and interesting pieces--like old robot figurines and an antique gun collection--filling the rooms.  She was hesitant at us all when she returned from walking the shag rug, saying in French sarcastically (and what sounded like slightly put off) that she wasn't expecting the calvary to show up, and that she thought there would only be two Americans.  Arielle rolled her eyes, and Tom was quick to point out that he was in fact British.

Anyways, riding back Arielle and Tom rode ahead, and Magda and I pretended to be on our French countryside honeymoon.  We held hands as we rode and I called her darling and such, and as we passed the cornfields Magda stopped her bike and pulled her phone out.  "Right here," she said in rapt focus framing the corn.  "Hold it right here."  And then she dove into the corn and took her clothes off, not facing the camera so that all I saw was the naked figure of a woman walking into a field of corn.  It's what she does.  So I took a few pictures, as I was told.  A little farther down the road she handed me the phone and stripped down to nothing but her hat and rode off down the middle of the lane, me snapping all the while.

She's a girl with fire, Magda.  Every morning she would come down the stairs from the girls' dormitory and into mine and Tom's room and open the windows above our heads "because it smells like boy," she said, and then she would go out onto the grass by the pear tree where we usually play boule, and she would do yoga and stretch in her undies.  When the relatives were there, all the aunts and Sacha's mom went out and stretched with her and Marion.  Tom and I watched from our beds through the hydrangeas feeling fat and lazy.  "Should we go get a croissant then?" Tom would say.

I'd smile and nod in agreement, "An excellent plan, Tom. As always."  It was Sacha's Fat Camp after all.  It used to be Sacha's Summer Camp, but we changed the name.


*****

The sun is coming through the smoke and the trees by the outdoor kitchen.  Matthew's manning the fire for this feast.


I never did quite shake that awkward feeling in Brittany; perpetual foot in mouth.  My words escaped me.  I think what made me nervous was being surrounded by people who so knew who they were.  Everyone here had come into their own.  Matt had his fab-lab in Panama, Tom had is playground equipment business (very Tom of him), T-Pain was between managing band tours at the moment; she'd come straight from one to Paris and slept a full day straight.  Magda was between project being a badass photographer/art director around the world.  Scotty was an art director, Jon was in real estate, Price! oh, that's right, she had her pizza restaurant in LA, and Arielle and Sacha were the sisters Pytka, painting and vintage selling and making clothes.  I'm just a guy trying to write everything down.  How does one come into their own doing that?  I feel like Nick Carraway in places like this, with these amazing people; a few steps removed, a little awkward and flirting with the lax golf pro.


I had come to Brittany with a slight feeling of validation from Emma.  So slight in Paris, and of course i threw it to the side and ran away.  That's all slid away now.

Femmes: Chanel Slanted

What this is.  This is what a moth would call the light.  It's an energy here, a brightness that all life turns to face and wonder in awe.  Chez Sacha de Bretagne, an old French oasis by the sea on a cold breeze, a super gravity of strictly intriguing individuals.  I'll have to tell you all about them sometime darling.

For now all you need to know is that Sacha is an icon in the tiny French towns around Plevenon.  Her birthday is always fireworks and celebration for Bastille Day and in the town square children come up shy and nervous inquiring, "Qui est Sacha?"

I jump at their youth and my high, and my thoughts freeze so I don't say anything, I just point.  That's the point.

We're all buzzing from moule and galette and French wine, except Jon who's sober and drinks about twelve espressos a day to counter the cravings.  He's a fucking wild sport that guy, always ready to rage, always ready to dance and get weird in the rave lights, and always stone-cold sober.  I could learn a lot from this man.  I should really swing by his AA commitment in Venice when I'm back in California.  It's a five minute bike ride from my house on Thursdays, and I could use some good wild conversation back home.  Living seems so bland now, looking back, with the trends and hip society and the next big thing.  LA is a city where tradition died with the first street cars, killed by the money that runs it.

No one goes to LA to see the old buildings, to take in the history and the culture.  People go to LA to see famous people, or to be famous people, or to get a line on that money that's running things.

Scott knows.  He knows a lot more than I do, that's for sure.  He's seen it, the foreverness of losing someone.  He's from LA, he's seen it.  We talked stupidly over a font for the cover of a book I wrote.  I somehow landed on Chanel Slanted, a messy-as-all-hell typeface.  He thought I was cool because I  pretended to be a writer.  I thought he was cool because well, he killed it.  He's a graffiti artist, but what he's really is a designer.  He plays on Illustrator for fun and to pass the time sometimes.  I think I read somewhere that the best way to learn is to put yourself in another person's shoes.  That's how I learned I wasn't a designer, not really.  All the people I thought of as designers, designed.  They worked design, their passion was design.  They constantly had projects on the mind, and with nothing else better to do, they designed.  I always tried to write in those moments.

And so it's unfortunate--no it's silly to think that I put myself through an entire design program on a whim that lasted two years, just for the hell of it really.   I wasn't bad, and it was all very interesting, and I made decent work, but perhaps the most important thing I learned was that I wasn't a designer.  I only really did work when I had to.  And then I'd write, just like I'm doing now.  Wasn't that the point?

No, a castle sits out at the end of the point, off in the far distance; a blip on the horizon that nonetheless dominates a difficult focus of everything around at the beach.  I'm at the beach now.  The old man is out there again on the low tide, polishing his boules on the hard sand by the water, petonking, plombaying.  He plays by himself.  The children build moats by the breakers and slides in the reeds by the stream.  We smoked a spliff over there earlier and I thought to myself, sinking in the sand, that I must be dreaming, I must be.  Everything I hear is wind in the reeds and waves crashing, and I'm surrounded by only the most beautiful women, the most interesting and topless and of course delightfully English Tom with his stories of the weimaraners and mushrooms foraged at the old north castle by his home and shelfing the best drugs in London.  Whenever he mentions Derbyshire it reminds of Claire.  I still can't escape her here.  Maybe I really don't need to.  Maybe everyone runs away from the past because they're afraid of pain.  I don't know, I've always been a masochist.  There's something romantic and dizzying in my existence at the moment, it's a Dalian dreamscape.

Life's now a towel soaked in spilled champagne.

Femmes: Plymouth Lines

There's a nautical light on the ceiling of the room
I'm sharing with Tom.
A breeze comes in from the window behind me,
the great big smell of flowers wafting in from right outside;
hydrangeas.
It's the aroma of the coming celebration,
or I should say of the life I've come out here to see.
It's a dream of a day,
a light in the eyes when I turn around.
It's a light that blinds the mind.

I stare straight at it
and fly the way one does when
he's not quite certain
of the reality of things.
Please let me still be alive,
Please I pray I haven't already taken that leap.
Let me be not sleeping,
let these memories never fleet.

This is one of the grand times of my life.

Femmes: Nauds Marins

I'm in the sun room on a good hash high I am.  There's a consistent waving breeze rushing through the leaves and the garden and the trees in the back on the neighbor's property, over the quaint property wall and across a field of what used to be.  Wild orchids are growing off the walk, growing thick, in the thick of it.  Out of arms reach.  Wild and free.  Free from the march of time we're all slowly marching to.  Matthew said (or was it Tom) that the poppies were the first things to start growing again after the war.  There they were after the shelling stopped and the thousands muddied by death again, growing among the dead in the war fields.

Red poppies.

I've only ever seen orange ones before, in California.

There's a frame in which holds a number of knots with white rope, nautical knots you know, like for sailing.  Each has a different name that sounds quite nautical and French, and above all of them in the frame is a title for the piece: Nauds Marins.

"Nauds marin, hmm. Oh right, knots. Quite right. Those are some knots."  Tom's British.  The way he says things sounds like they should be in an encyclopedia or a Charles Dickens novel. Someone's probably said that before about the British, but it's true.  He had a point that guy.  Anyways, Tom's a wicked sport.  Fucking excellent roommate he is, with a Manchester accent.  He's got a country way about him too, not rough or cockney, but rural and in the way that someone would be if they talked to animals a lot, which he does, his two weimaraners, Buckley, and oh hell, I don't remember her name,  the other one, the new young terror apparently.  Tortures old Buckley day and night he tells me, a true terror.  Bit his friend, bit the postman, bites anyone he's never met before, needs constant attention, bullies poor old Buckley, but what can you do.  He's a rescue.

Tom takes the two for a walk most days.  Tom used to live in London, big on the club scene, knew where to dance all night, knew who had the best uppers, the best acid, the best MDMA.  Now he lives in the north near Nottingham in a small town called Derbyshire.  I stayed by there with Claire when we went to England in the winter.  When he walks the weimaraners it's through the woods, past streams and up ancient sheep's paths, rocky green hills and old castles, and he forages for magic mushrooms.  It's a lush, sleepy timeworn land.

What a life.  He loves it, takes a comfort in the solitude.

We talk, Tom, Matthew and I like old men as we doddle through the trimmed grass and the cherry trees in the dabbled light as Tom calls it.  Good strong word, dabbled.  How very British, Tom.


Now Matthew, he's a Panamanian.

[stop]

Femmes: (Sacha) Mykonos

There was a wedding in the Aegean Sea on a Greek isle in the summer.  The billionaire and the supermodel.  Of course Kendall was going, no time for airport lines.

"I need to get to Mykonos. First class, of course." A glass of rosé champagne.  That fucking boy in line at LAX.  He blew a good kiss.  She concedes that at least, then shakes it off with a smile.  He's nothing.

"Why you cuttin' Kendall?" Because I can silly man.  No one's ever talked to me like that.  I guess anonymous snideness is a new approach.

*****

No, it's a back and forth, this story.  As always.  An existentialist and a princess; TV royalty, well-known, recognizable, envied, adored.  It's one of those Princess Bride tale of the ages kind of story.  Don't let her be boring.  Tit for tat with this one.  Like life, as always.  A reality in the ebbs and flow of two paths crossed only on the most charming of occasions.  An airport, across friends and in Spain.

I say existentialist, like I am one, but am I?  No, hardly.  Maybe I used to be.  When I used to give a damn.  And I always said I didn't care about anything.  In reality, I didn't care about myself, my standing, my worth.  I had a purpose, I was happy, and I thought big picture.  The injustices of the world pissed me off.  Not caring allowed me to care about real issues of civilization, etc.  I mean, hell I still care about all that (I was about to write that I didn't), I do.  I just don't write it out like I used to is all.  Not to Noam Chomsky idealisms anyways.  I wish I could.  I should.  The first thing is obvious.

When did power overcome happiness as the motivator for our species.  I guess it's always been like this really.  Men have always craved power, unhappy men.  Unlike happiness, power is an addiction like any other addiction.  Like cigarettes, like cocaine, like sugar.  Once you have a little you want more, you need more, and what's more, you'll sacrifice happiness for this temporary satisfaction.  And what's lesser and more unfortunate is the amount of viciousness and ferociousness that becomes a part of your life when power enters.  Lesser men wilt or are eaten alive.

No, but happiness is the easiest to achieve.  Simply give to someone else, share with others.  It's a wonder to think, that we are conditioned with something so simple, so logical; a Darwinian property attributed to a means of survival as a species, a cornerstone in all major religions.  Give of yourself, help those in need, love one another.  And yet we live in a world of perpetual war, of murder and destruction in many places; led by the guises that we all know to be true evil--money, greed, power.  But we stand idly by and comment and critique and do nothing at our own peril.  Because technology maybe.  Someone in the movie last night referred to the Internet as the anti-Christ.  I hesitate to disagree with her.  I haven't yet.  After all it was never said that the devices of the devil did not serve the masses.  What it did was pull the curtain over.  When you think of life as a collection of time, it is literally taking life away from us.  It entertains and it makes us more efficient slaves.  That is the nature of technology now, in a connected world.

*****

This is all in my head of course.  Me, I'm set at a lovely table just out of the sun by the terrace, inside, at chez Sacha.  High ceilings, room for the mind to unfold and expand.  Sacha's environment in life has always been a place for me to escape to, to expand and unwind and find peace, I love it.  I hope she knows how thankful I am.

We've been smoking hash on a little screw under a cup.  I feel proper bohemian now, whatever that means.  To be true, left unattended, I could write for hours at this post I believe.  Until my hand cramped, and I developed a kink in my shoulder from hunching over the notebook pages, hazy in the hash smoke as the sun creeps through the day in Paris.  If Kendall were to go to Mykonos, Sacha would be the perfect anchor to both of us.  She'd be believable.  She could be anything.  She's amazing as far as people and characters go, one of infinite possibilities.  Now that I think back, it's fantastically odd; I don't think I've ever taken one picture of her.  Out of all the pictures, all the girls, all the worlds.  Oh, the dogs of course, maybe dozens of the chihuahuas, George and Mimi and Coat and her Venice apartment, but none her.  I wonder why.

Let's say it's because a photo would never do her justice.  She worth more in words; a timeless timelessness.  If anyone ever tries to take anything away from my life, doubtful as that may be, I hope they see with all clarity the importance of an actor like her in one's life.  It's a shame everyone doesn't have a Sacha.  Bless you, Matthew.

Femmes: Midnight Mover

Tell me about it, sprinting through Montparnasse.
What is it with this city, eh;
a sweat dried on the metro breeze.
Defeat is now officially a congruent line in my life.
I've seen crushing defeat at the brink of victory in the faces of threes nations now.
The French may be the most romantic so far I'd say,
or maybe it's the air in my lungs at the moment.
It's crisper in the Third I'd say,
the Marais.

Enchanté, I'd say.
The mind's got more space to breathe here,
to think on the nights past and the nights to come in a lovely French clarity.
A convex lens of rose gold and cotton clouds,
cotton candy cotton dreams floating by on the blue sea sky by.
And skylights and chimneys all over along the courtyard.
Overgrown, the vines are a mind of their own.

And the trees are singing,
breeze singing in the seas.
There's a pigeon in the crow's nest.
Another page,
another crease.

I'm a heartbreaker once again then.
Poor Emma

Dear Sacha you're a savior.
Or I should say the lady in the window on Rue de Minimes, Therese
The woman from New York drinking white wine in the window of the first floor flat next door,
She looked yearning at me
at the hour, nearly 3:00
and me
from out the darkness breathing heavy with bags and sweat and a cigarette.

She let me borrow her phone
She told me I could stay with her if all else failed
but Sacha answered and let me in.

[stop]

Femmes: Depart Un Autre Jour

The fog of the day is fuzzing my eyeballs.  I don't know what to say.  I wonder if anyone in this ticket station feels as lost in life as I do.  No, I doubt it.  Everything is certainty to them.  They're getting out of the city to see family this weekend, or it's a hotel room in the south of France for Bastille Day.  You can go anywhere from Paris.  Same day tickets, short sight, smiling faces, vacation is in the air.  And yet the stress is so prevalent, the rush, the itinerary, tickets to relaxation clutched in hand, tickets to get away, sometimes children in tow.  I guess we're all trying to get away.  Mais I'm not getting away today.  I'm buying tickets from Lamballe in the north to Barcelona for the end of the month, a fortnight away.

Lamballe's the closest station to Plevenon, the little coastal village where Sacha's mom has a country home.  She spends the summers there because it isn't too hot.  Not like it is in Ojai.  The summers are usually overcast and wet.  That's why I have a water-slick windbreaker packed in my bag, added it's wonted weight to the trip.  I'll be thankful when it's raining.  (said the farmer to his wife)

Context is everything.

Femmes: Utopia

Write in the now, write in the now, in the now, now, now.  I'm at a bar in Paris listening to live Creedance Clearwater Revival covers like I'm at fucking Finn McCool's on Main Street.  Mais non, this is France.  It's foreign music here; American music.  I'm not down the street, I'm around the world right now.  Right now, in the now, now.  My hands feel free with no rings on them.  I feel young again, or just younger maybe.  Like with the rings, I've thrown the wear out of my face, my eyes, my mind.  There's everything at my finger-tips again.  This is a city of eternal youth I believe, if I know what sips to take, where the fountain is.  In the Fourteenth.

Utopia.

Emma's friend is a music producer.  He's young an ambitious and bearded like me.  Emma rolls cigarettes on the table and we smoke in the bar.  While the old boys wail away.  They all look about fifty.  An old French Samoan with a ponytail is singing lead and riffing in a Hawaiian shirt.  He doesn't quite sound like Fogerty, but he's not far off; just a pinch of French.  I smoke one of Mathieu's Camel cigarettes.  It makes me think about Max and his Camel Blue's all those years ago when I was always bumming off him.  Like yesterday.

After a beer, Emma takes me home.

Femmes: Emma (Peinture Aerosol Sur Toile)

The Fourteenth seems to be the birdcage of my soul in this city.  I, tweety bird.  I'll fly around for a little today, see all the familiar streets, remember how Paris has grown on me.  I can't wait.

Emma has said to me that we will meet her friends later, but first she promised to take me to a part of Paris I've never been before.  She points on the map because I told her I've never been to the north, past the Seine (an thoughtless lie), and I say sure without looking.  I should pay more attention.  I should remember more because I have been north before.  On the map at Montmartre I see Sacre Coeur, sacred heart.  I remember.

Anyways, we still go north.  I asked her to take me to a lovely park.  There's a few she tells me, and she takes me.  We eat lunch in the park.  I'd picked up some shitty sandwich and a bottle of Orangina from a Monoprix just off the metro.  It's a lovely park, truly.  More ghetto than the pretty parks of the Seventh near where Lili lived, or the one down south by Marie, but lovely none the less.  Lovely with graffiti and shaded walkways and stairs stepping down and abandoned building from the un-remembered 80's.  There's a dried up fountain with a rusted spout, but still there's people everywhere. People on the grass eating and drinking wine, being merry.  There's a family and the father is playing a small drum like they do in Venice on Sundays in the sand.  He plays and sings and his wife dances with their small child.  They're so happy.

I'd been so close.

Emma is a soft-spoken girl.  She ironically smokes hand-rolled cigarettes, but that's not so uncommon here.  It's Paris, after all.  I miss this city.   I coax the conversation from her sometimes, but really she loves to talk, and she's an absolute delight.  On the bench while we eat, she tells me all about living in England, away for London, teaching French to little English kids.  She's so young.  Well no, not so, but she's young than I, and suddenly I feel old being here again in Paris.  We meander south, Emma and I, guessing our way through the city.  Emma's shit with directions.  We stumble upon Republique.  There's a half-pipe erected by the metro stop.  There's young people everywhere, and graffiti and flower laid down by the old monument.  A young man's writing something in French in big white letters on the ground.  I ask Emma, "What's it say?"

Femmes: There's Claire

[DO NOT WALK OUTSIDE THIS AREA]

I'm in the air again.  It's been almost forever now since I've been to Paris.  The first leg, LAX to Moscow, didn't feel real.  It was a wild ride, right over the north pole.  It's strange.  Only now, in a window seat just behind the wing and above all the clouds flying south, and the Cotton Jones in my ears, I finally feel the life flooding back.

Excitement is in each breadth again, I feel it.  I remember this, I'm younger now.  Now I'm older.  There will be much to write and I think my hands and my fingers are ready for that now, without the burden of rings.  I've been warming to the idea ever since I took them off.  What a weird sensation, like having hand-cuffs off.  My thumb still goes to my middle finger to spin what's been there for five years now.  My last ring had been an old French franc pushed through in the middle.  It was bought for me in England by a girl I loved, the only one to really crush my heart.  A powerful sway she had.

I'll write to her.  Things are good now.  Well, better at least.  I'll probably still kill myself, but there's charm in the way I think again.  I want to pull strings again, against good judgment and sound logic.  I'll toy with her ball of yarn again.  It's almost been forever now.


logline: heartbroken writer goes to Spain to jump off a pretty bridge, but instead fall for a wonderful beauty of distraction instead.

Femmes: Fucking Kendall

"Excuse me, pardon me."

I'd dummied my way into the Priority Pass TSA line.  Still, I wait.  The line's certainly the shorter of the two, but it's still a line, and still, I'm waiting.

"Pardon me."

The guy in front of me was an actor on Lost once upon a time.  Now he's just a guy in the Priority Pass line.  He smiles at me when he turns and we eye contact.

"Coming through."

It's a TSA agent.  She's cutting through the line with her hand raised, sounding off.  It's a second before I realize there's people following her, two people: a short woman, and before her a bewitching minx of a girl, almost my height.  She  looks like maybe she's tired behind her sunglasses, or maybe she's just bored; long uncrushed strides, she breezes by silently.

"Excuse me."

I don't even hear her shoes.  There's not much of a rise in them.  She's naturally tall and her leather jacket stops way short of her waist so I see the tight lines of her back after she slides past.  Not a sound from her.  She seems quite pleased with herself.

Just before the metal detectors, she half-turns back in an elegant way in which her whole body swings, and in profile I see her eyes and the rise of her nose and I can't help but blow her a kiss.  Lips puckered, and the ends of hers curl.  I guess she was expecting only staring faces.

That's right, it's Paris fashion week.  I'll see you there, darling.

***

"I've never seen you nervous. Do you know how to look nervous?"

There.