Let's End With An Outro

This is the end.  I leave Lili without much fluted fanfare and with two bags down the stairs and over the turnstiles at Tour-Maubourg one last time.  It seems so familiar now, like leaving home.  I guess I don't like traveling so much as I like to live in different places, and yes there's a difference.  A subtle one that not everyone understands really, because in truth it really isn't for everyone so I won't bother explaining.  I will say this though.  It's a restlessness.  And there's no slaking it.  I don't know if I'll ever come back here.  For what it's worth, I hope I do.  This city's too beautiful to abandon entirely.

I exit at L'Opera.  Back to the beginning, and as I wait for the bus to the airport the rain starts to come down at a drizzle.  I don't have an umbrella (why would I?) so I back up into a shallow alcove of the Opera House with a high ledge that offers some shelter.   It's like the place is sad to see me go.  Or maybe it's the other way around.  I didn't even finish the book, despite my better efforts.  Yeesh, what a cock I am.  I fucking hope I finish this thing.  Eventually.  Or hell, this shit just might drive me crazy.

The bus is twenty minutes late and a long beast of a thing that's caterpillared in the middle.  Even so, the throngish horde waiting barely squeezes in entirely.  I manage to find a seat right near the caterpillared middle, but the aisle is packed with standers.  Standing closest is a older-looking lady with short white hair and a piece of luggage on wheels.  She's got a book in hand, and I wouldn't say she looks fragile.  More soft and sunny by disposition.  Reserved and quiet by the looks of it.  Not flashy, yet somehow American.  So I raise my voice to offer her my seat.

"Oh, no that's quite all right," she says.  She's American all right.  "You look like you've got your hands full there."

"American?"

"Yes."

"Headed back home?"

"That's right."

After six months it's so nice to talk to a stranger in English, and I tell her that and we talk the whole way to the airport.  Her name's Edie and she works for Harper's Publishing in New York, which makes me laugh inside at the odds of such a meeting.  I tell her I've been over here writing.  She's been over here reading.  "And eating, of course," she says.  "I think I love the food the most." Satisfaction floods her face at, no doubt, some dinner memory.  A proper one too I'm guessing, not some shitty chinois.  She's a soft voiced conversationalist, with an intrigue that reminds me of myself, and before I know it we're at Charles de Gaule.  Her terminal's the one before mine, and as she grabs her things to leave I give her a web address to some writing samples for the hell of it.  "Au 'voir, Edie!" I'll never see her again, of that I'm almost certain.  But she warmed me.  Maybe just when I needed it too, and I run through my terminal on an up-beat and get to the gate with ten minutes to spare.  What a ruckus, but that's airports isn't it.  I wolf down a chocolate croissant that I paid much too much for right before boarding.

In my seat I konk out quick, then wake after some hours in the middle of the sky.

I'm in no mood to sleep.  Not now.  And there's a handful of pages left in my old notebook still so I crank them out to the end, c'est fin, and start the new one finally.


12/12 (in the Moleskin)

"In the dark, I'm dreaming
Of a new, white, light."

It's the only way, forward.  Galloping by the thousands of miles.  In my tiny seat by the window, the rows ahead telling me to politely fasten my belt while seated.  So I do.  Safety first kids, remember.  Remember.  Remember the important things.  The ones that stick.  The ones that hold one's sway, because those are teh ones that are trying to tell you something, and it's usually about yourself.  Not always good either.  But then again, not always so sad.  And if you can bear it, all of it, that window fogged with ignorance, comes clear and ever clearer still until there's no reflection and the world outside is just about the brightest damned light, all white with clouds.  She's a beauty from the heavens, Cotton Jones would agree.  That's a happy thought :)

So strange to think that the sun's already set on old Paris as we race it west in this sleek 767.  It's still bright blue over Canada with clear skies and the ground's covered in snow and the water in the inlets and the lakes is all frozen over.  Even the great river's got a scab of ice above it, and it looks so still as it snakes its way to the north, to that soft white horizon muddled in the low winter's haze of the Klondike.  Old Jack London never saw the north like this, or at least I don't think he did.  Not like this.  Nor did that wily French-Canadian Kerouac.  Not with reclining seats and in-flight movies and headphones crooning some slow, jazzy melodrama by my trusty Jones.  The Cotton one.  I wonder if he pulled his hairs out like I do, inspecting them vaguely before tossing them aside to reach for that tea-sized plastic cup of Canada Dry.  No, he was a cognac man, and it seems as though he lived off it on his trip to Paris.  What was it... 10 days?  Ten days to dig up his history.  Ten days to find his Satori on a steady diet of cognac.  Hell, I was there for a month and a half.  And not so much cognac as a steady wine glass in my hand that was never quite empty.  And Lucky Strikes and Lili.  And spliffs and that darling Rachel.  And my Satori?  Hardly.  There's no bulb glowing bright above my head, just another reminder of the one burnt out constant in my chest.  Stepped on and shattered slowly on the cobblestones of the 7eme arrondissement.  I can't even tell for sure if I picked it back up.  I sure as hell hope I didn't leave it there.  

Pull the window shade down.
Play something slow and sad.

Eyes closed.

Naked Lunch

It's funny when you're reading William Burroughs on a low wall, laid down in the sunlight and a man materializes beside you with dark skin and white hair and silver sunglasses on that fade to rouge, with a silver shirt and a bag of peanuts, and he says, "You better stop reading there or you might get you some smarts."

"Well, shoot. I sure hope not."

"You've got the butter brown skin, my man. You can do anything. You can be anything, you mulatto, you Egyptian, you cancer, you capricorn."

"I'm an aquarius actually," I say.

"No matter. You're what the gods have wanted for three thousand years, you are.  You're everything."  He says it with a hand on my chest, and I feel him over my heart.  He's sixty today he tells me.  "How many girls you fuckin' a week?"

"Ha! Not nearly enough."

"I hope it's around ten, man, because you're good for it. I can tell, trust me."  He's not even looking at me, and I have to laugh.  I'm definitely not fucking ten girls a week.  Not even close.  Honestly, I can't think of one person I know that's bedding ten a week.

There's some mystic aura about this man though, and when we part ways (I need to get back to work), I feel a fulfilling sensation within me.  It's strange I think, and altogether wonderful how an eclectic phantom vagabond (I'm not even 100% sure he was real) can bring such warmth and light to a lost anxious depressant like myself.  It's one of life's great secrets, I suppose.  Be nice to strangers.  You never know who they might be.

To my wildest thought, he was some groovy blind bluesy jazz angel, sent from on high with a mission of soulful sunshine.  To the stalwart and close-minded, he was probably just another crazy bum that passed by like the breeze.  Now I'll never forget him.

Savanna

What a knot in the chest, she is.  What a twist of the mind, what a thrust of the hips.  She's salt on a sore that tastes good on the lips.  She's quite light, and she's sweet and discreet between sheets.  What a man wouldn't do for to slake her desire.  Me, why I'd trek through the night and scheme the most schemingful schemes and conspire.

She's a girl plucked among dreams, she is.  In a swirl of red streams, she is, through the breeze like a lone ribbon bow.  Savanna.  With soft envy eyes and sharp hips. Savanna.  Of fair princess skin and thin lips.  Savanna, oh my-my.  My sweet, sweet secret mistress.  Savanna, Savanna.  To be saved by her kiss once more and once over and over another in a mist tryst that she pulls through yearning.  That she brings through most dreaded to uncertain delight.  

It's a lost boy's fancy.
If only there were no others, but lo, lost boys are as hard to score as a shit dime bag anywhere here in the city, where heaven meets sea and sheep-flocked are the angels.  For fuck, her lust wrings the words from my wrist.  In despair, true form.  Because she's not here, not really.  She's only just before me with my eyes closed, all the colors of the rainbow.

Let's Start With An Intro

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.

Quote of the Day: I See Sea Shells

Writer

I remember thinking to myself one day, and then for a year on end that I would love nothing more than to be a writer.  To write books and be witty and charmingly cavalier like a young Hank Moody. There was a girl involved (there always is). So one day I started to write and I wrote and I wrote, sometimes more, sometimes less.  But never too much and it felt free and full and freshly new and exciting, like it was the only life for me.

Only after it was too late did I realize something, and it's still now just slowing dawning, this fact.  No writer ever known was ever known to be happy.  None of the great ones anyways (except maybe Dr. Seuss).  And nothing good or well worth the time was ever written without passion or at least a little tick-tick-tock of craziness. Or an eye twitch, or a death wish.  What the hell's wrong with me.

Every pen has it's muse.  Her face just changes occasionally (along with her name, and it never stays the same for too long).  C'est la vie.  Ma vie en femmes.

Fall Paris: Kerry

She was a jazz singer and she played the piano.  She played with a soft hand and a warm butter voice that I could only just barely hear over the French hustle of a packed Friday night crowd.  She wasn't tall, but she wasn't short either, and her hair was straight and short and looked wild and refined at the same time.  Her slender frame swayed on the bench while she sang, and her head bent at the neck with her eyes closed, and if you'd take the time to lean in and look at her face you'd know, at least in those split moments she was singing somewhere else.  Anywhere.  In a palace maybe.  To a duke after making love all night.  Wherever she wanted to be, she was there when her eyes closed and she was happy.  I could tell from the smile she sang through.

Lindsay had talked her up on the metro over to the Twelfth.  "She's fantastic," she gushed when I pried to know more.  "It's this girl from my writing class."

"Not Olivia?" I jabbed sarcastically.

"No," she jabbed back, "not Olivia.  She's a bit older, this one.  Oh!  She's fantastic!  Like really good."

"I like older.  What's her name?"

"Her name's Kerry.  She's forty."

"Forty?"

"Yes, forty.  Four-tee.  That's right.  Or maybe thirty-eight, but she's still up there.  You would never think it to look at her though.  She looks my age."

"Well, you could be forty," I said squinting.  "You could pass for it anyways."

"Shut-up.  Ass." And she put her fist into my arm with some strength, while her mother looked on covering up a laugh with her hand.

The French Hole or whatever the place is called is one of those cozy abodes with a small frame on the street (just a window and a door).  It's skinny, but the thing reaches deep into the building like a catacomb.  There's the bar, then the old-timey weathered upright with Kerry wailing away.  Past her there's a jumble of closely huddled tables and chairs that we have to slink by in a single file to get to.  It's a packed house tonight.  The only standing space is behind Kerry and her keys in what's little more than a wide Parisian hallway that's shoved precariously between two walls in the 12th. 

Then there's Kerry.  That sweet dandelion of a woman.  She's everything I'd hoped for from Lindsay's words.  Hell, she's even more so. She's wearing a quaint faded white rural dress printed in small blue and red and yellow flowers that are faded too and pulled in close together and everywhere from her knees to her short tight sleeves.  Her hair's straight brown and cut above the shoulders, and her jawline's crisp.  She's cinnamon brown with freckles and red lipstick, and she looks two, maybe three years older than myself.

She's so pretty when she sings because she's somehow always smiling.  It's an immediate entrancement with her, I can't stop looking.  If it's not her face, it's her fingers.  They foxtrot slowly on the keys to a bluesy jazz rhythm.  While we stand waiting, I find myself staring.  Lost.  My look, but not my mind though.  My eyes are dazed and blurred and notice movement without response.  Like a pair of empty observation windows.  That's because everyone's looking inside now at the ballroom, and the whole party seems to come together, and the fingers become dancers on a floor of white-black checkered marble.  And they sing me a whole story.  With pen and paper in hand, I write it all down in my mind's eye.  Something tells me to remember this.  Remember how beautiful this is.  Her voice.  Her neckline.  The faded dress.  The old piano, and this place and this city that I'm in.  The smell of Parisian night.  I should remember all of this, or at the very least not forget it.

It's all in a stare.  I catch myself and tell my eyes to blink and look away so I turn to the three girls.  They're staring too.. "She's real good," I say.  "I think I love her."

Lili clicks her tongue.  "You'll love anything," she says.

"Yeah, who don't you love?" asks Lindsay.  We're not loud so only we hear, and Lindsay's mom just barely, but listen she does.  I can see her lean in.

I say, "Definitely not you two, but Momma Lindsay you're a doll."

"Right answer," she chimes in.  "I hope you like to eat."  And a man alone at a table offers us seats.

[stop]

Kerry is the reason why
most wise men don't have wives
and if they do
they have mistresses too
or at least always a wandering eye.

She may be poor
but she's free
and she sings
oh, she sings
she's what every man is looking for.

She is the timeless beauty
the wiltless flower
that old favorite playlist
on endless repeat for hours
and hour by hour stays true
she is the fruit that does not sour.

[stop]