Paris Noir

NEW SHOES by JOHN WILLIAMS

Sometimes when it’s late and you’ve been listening to Lucinda Williams and you have a bottle of Gigondas empty beside you and the noise from the drinkers in the rue Mouffetard down below won’t let you sleep, a line from an old song gets lodged in your brain, And I can never, never, never go home again, and you can’t help but remember, remember how you got here.

In the spring of 1981 there were only three places in Paris to busk. The first and easily the best, probably the best place in all of Europe, was outside the Beaubourg. Can I start to explain how fabulous the Beaubourg was back then? This building with its primary-coloured plumbing on the outside, with its giant Perspex escalator clambering across the front. I can hardly credit it myself – twenty-five years of living in this city has allowed familiarity to do its job of breeding contempt – but really back then it seemed to represent a whole world of possibilities, a future in which anything could happen. We’d lost sight of that you see, in those the first years of Thatcher, living in a city, Cardiff, that was closing down around us.

But back to the point. There were three places to busk in Paris that spring, and the big open space in front of the Beaubourg, always full of tourists and locals marvelling at this new wonder, was by far the best of them. The others were the Métro and the rue St André des Arts, but each of those had its problems, as we discovered.

Who were we? We were seven, no eight, refugees from the punk-rock experience, boys and girls hoping to shift our lives from black and white into technicolor. We’d pooled our dole money and student grants and wages from the anarchist print shop and crammed into the back of my old Transit van and headed to Paris to busk. Our act, such as it was, consisted of playing hits of the day – David Bowie, Adam and the Ants, Robert Wyatt, whatever – in ragged vocal-harmony style backed only by percussion and kazoos. At the time, and mostly because we were young, and in some cases even cute, it went over OK. I won’t bother you with all our names, since you’ll only forget them and anyway there was only one that really mattered. If any of the others play a part along the way I’ll name them then.

The one that mattered, matters even, was called Beth and the week before we left she had her hair restyled in a Louise Brooks bob. Actually I thought she looked more like Anna Karina in Vivre Sa Vie impersonating Louise Brooks than Brooks herself, if you see what I mean. Either way it’s obvious I was smitten. As for the rest of how she looked, well, I’m sorry, but I don’t feel inclined to go past her hair. Let memory fall lightly on what follows.

We’d been there, I suppose, for a week, long enough at least to have found some kind of routine. A lot depended on the weather. If it was fine we did well, two hour-long sessions in front of the Beaubourg and we were made for the day; we could eat and drink and some of us could even stay at the gypsy’s hotel. If it rained things were harder. No one wants to stand and watch buskers in the rain, not even in front of the finest new building in the western world, so the only option was to go down into the Métro.

There were good things about that, the sound you get singing in the tunnels is beautiful, it’s a cathedral for drifters, for losers, for loubards, for my people, and we sounded like angels down there. The bad side was the cops. Those French cops back then were bastards. Thank our lucky stars we were all white, or almost all, and Yaz was a girl so she was OK, but anytime they’d run out of black kids to persecute they were on our case, moving us on, checking our IDs, threatening us with all kinds of shit. One time, the first time, Don talked back to them. We didn’t make that mistake twice. They threw him up against the wall and practically ripped his arm off his shoulder as they searched him for drugs. They had no luck there, of course, as even on a good day our budget didn’t stretch any further than plastic bottles of vin rouge.

Rainy days we stayed in the forêt, out in St Germainen-Laye, right on the western fringe of the city. It was my idea. I’d been there the year before, when I’d stayed with an anarchist called Ifor. This time, though, Ifor’s house had been shuttered and locked. The neighbours said he’d gone to Mexico. But it was right by the forêt, so we’d parked the van and some of us slept inside and the rest took tents and camped. And in the morning we’d jump the barrier into the RER, just like the local kids, and go to work.

As I say the weather made all the difference and this day, the point where we’ll start, was fine. More than fine, it was unequivocally the best day of my life so far. Scratch that, let’s make it ever. It’s not as if I’m going to be revisiting that happy innocence again.

Anyway, right from the start everything was running right, I knew it from the moment I clambered out of the van, where I’d slept stretched out across the front seats. I’d seen Beth emerge from the tent she was sharing withYaz, just that same instant. We’d walked down to the stream together, washed our faces and cleaned our teeth, not saying a word, just suddenly at ease with each other, at ease with what we both knew was coming. There had been no rush. That was the strangeness of it, just a week of slowly falling, of singing and dancing in the street.

Later that morning we arrived at the Beaubourg. Our favourite pitch, the one right dead centre, was occupied by some circus guys, so we moved off to one side and started to set up. We shrugged off our coats and showed off our Oxfam finery, pulled out our kazoos and drum-sticks.

There was already quite a crowd gathered around our rival buskers, so I walked over to have a look. They were a bunch of travelling circus types: there was a bed of nails laid out on the ground waiting for action, and next to it there was a guy stripped to the waist, jet black ponytail and tattoos, breathing fire.

These guys were good. I would have happily stayed and watched them, but strangely, as we set up and started clanging our way into ‘Sound and Vision’ – ‘blue, blue electric blue’ – the crowd started drifting towards us. By the time we launched into ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ we were out-drawing the fire eater and his posse by four to one. I introduced the band in bad French and took the cap round, making sure to make eye contact with each and every one. This, by the way, is the true secret of busking success, not being a virtuoso flautist or hard enough to lie on a bed of broken glass, but having someone go round and collect the money with a smile and a wink and a smattering of bad French.

When we took a breather at the end of our first set, the fire eater came over to warn us off. ‘You are not permitted,’ he said, and we looked at each other.

‘Is our place,’ he added. I was not about to argue with a man who breathes fire, and his friend who lay on a bed of broken glass, and I was about to apologise and say we’d come back later, when Don stepped forward and faced up to the fire eater and the fakir.

‘No,’ he said, all but jabbing his finger in the fire eater’s face, ‘it’s not your place. You go back over there, do your thing. We’re staying here.’

Christ. I looked round and saw Beth’s eyes on me. Was I going to back Don up in his foolhardiness? I certainly didn’t want to. In the end I did nothing, didn’t advance to stand shoulder to shoulder with Don or back off, just stood there in no man’s land watching the fire eater stare at Don. I wondered what came next – the punch, the butt, the suddenly present knife? What was Don’s problem? Why couldn’t he let it go, didn’t he realise we were little more than kids? But then the fire eater just shook his head, spat on the ground and backed off, barking something in a language I didn’t even begin to recognise.

We clamoured around Don then, all of us angry and relieved at his bravery. And it struck me that Don was actually a big guy and his Mohican, with its three giant spikes, was distinctly unusual, and evidently menacing, for people who hadn’t spent the last few years in the punk-rock micro-climate.

Our next set was a riot, our good humour infectious enough to bring the sun out, and by early afternoon we had enough money not just for food and drink but for lodging too.

We ate lunch by the Seine, as you do when you’re young and you’ve never been to Paris before, back in a time when baguettes and pâté and red wine were still exotic fare, unavailable at home.

What did we do next? It’s all something of a haze, but I’m sure we went back to the Beaubourg and took the escalators up to the top, took pictures of each other against the skyline. And a bubble started to form around Beth and me. Things were said you can’t remember, but serve to signify that your heartbeats are converging, coming closer and closer still.

Towards evening we crossed over the river at Pont Neuf and went to Renée the gypsy’s hotel. We asked if she had room for us. She smiled, sat there huge in her robes in the front room. ‘Yes darlings,’ she said, ‘I have three rooms. Five beds. You will be OK, I think.’

We thought so too. We didn’t assign the beds just yet. It was not only Beth and I who were caught up in anticipation of what developments the night might bring.

On a roll now, we decided to go out and sing some more. The only place to busk after dark was the rue St André des Arts, a tourist-packed, café-lined walkway though the busiest part of the Left Bank, from St Michel to the rue Bonaparte. Halfway along, the road suddenly widened outside a school. It was the perfect place to set up and play: the night was fine and warm and the tourists were out in force, their generosity levels raised by drink. Beth sang her featured number, ‘24 Hours From Tulsa’, with all the sweetness and charming flatness of a young Françoise Hardy. My cap was filling up not just with the usual francs and centimes, but actual folding money.

Emboldened by our success, I actually started asking for requests, when a window opened in an apartment four stories up and across the road from us. A man leaned out, yelled something, disappeared, then reappeared with a bucket of water, which he threw down at us, splashing a couple of tourists but doing little harm.

‘When he does that he always calls the police afterwards,’ said a passing local.

‘Oh, right,’ I said, ‘so how long do the police take to arrive?’

‘Ten minutes,’ said the local.

‘OK,’ I said to the crowd, ‘the police are coming in ten minutes, that means we have five minutes to play a request, what would you like?’

An American smartarse called out for some Captain Beefheart. We looked at each other, Don gave me a thumbs up and whipped up a mighty percussive burst from which we launched into something that bore a very faint resemblance to ‘Big-Eyed Beans from Venus’. I’m sure to those watching it was just a cacophony, but, as I say, we were young and we were cute and they must have felt something of our own intoxication, because they laughed and cheered and put more money into the cap, then we saluted and promised to be back same time, same place tomorrow, and hotfooted it down the street just as the police came barrelling along in the opposite direction.

We were heading for the buskers’ café. It probably had some other name, maybe it was the Café St André des Arts or something entirely forgettable like that, but everyone knew it as the buskers’ café. It was full of 1970s hangovers, French guys with long hair and battered acoustics exchanging tips on how to play Neil Young songs. Up to now we’d held each other in amiable mutual contempt: they thought we were idiot punk rockers who couldn’t play an instrument, we thought they were ridiculous old hippies in Gauloise-reeking velvet jackets.

This time though, as we approached, I could see a whole bunch of these guys, five or six of them, mostly with guitars out, sitting at the big table in the window. They were banging their way through ‘Hey Jude’, which was not unusual, except for the fact that they were all joining in and two of them were playing the spoons on the table, and in the instrumental break one of them pulled out a kazoo. We stood there open-mouthed. The hippie bastards were stealing our act.

It would have been too embarrassing to go in there now. So, as usual, everyone looked to me to come up with an alternative. Ifor the anarchist had taken me to a bar around here, I was sure. Could I remember where it was? Of course I could. I led the way unerringly, and soon we were sitting around the front table of a real locals bar, counting our takings and drinking the cheapest vin rouge yet, while watching a Chinese kid, maybe ten years old, score several million on the pinball machine.

For a while we were all one, high on the adventure, but as the evening wore on Beth and I went back into our bubble and drifted towards the back of the bar. I walked over to the counter to order more drinks. There was a guy leaning there, a real classic French boho in his late thirties, looked like Jean-Pierre Leaud’s dodgy older brother. He looked at me, then looked at Beth and said something to the patronne, and she laughed and reached up for one of the good bottles of wine and poured off three glasses. Jean-Pierre smiled and handed two glasses to me, then raised his glass. ‘Salut.’

‘Salut,’ I said back, and Jean-Pierre motioned us towards the bar stools next to him, and told us his name was Laurent, and I talked to him in bad French and translated everything for Beth, and I could see in Laurent’s eyes just how fine he thought Beth was, and I was not worried, just proud, because I knew our heartbeats were just casing themselves together, ready to beat fast.

Soon we were sitting at a booth together and Laurent was talking about shoes. He had stared at Beth’s shoes as we’d moved from bar to booth and shaken his head and said that ‘a très belle fille like you needs better shoes than those’. Those being a pair of deliberately old-fashioned schoolgirl sandals. ‘I have some wonderful shoes at my apartment,’ he said. ‘You must come and see. I will give you some.’

I translated for Beth and she smiled and said ‘Oui merci.’

‘You like to come now. Is not far.’

We looked at each other and laughed, shook our heads.

‘No problem,’ said Laurent, ‘I will see you again,’ and he returned to his perch at the bar and we went back to the others, who must have been waiting for us, as they stood up as one and we headed out into the street.

I knew then, as the night air hit, that I was drunk. I picked out the route back to the gypsy’s hotel without thinking, almost without looking. As we passed the school on St André des Arts I turned to Beth, the self-same second she turned to me, and our kiss started there, lasted all the way home and up the four flights of stairs and into a room that was instantly ours and I’ll spare you the details, spare me the details.

In the morning we staggered down to breakfast late, sat in Renée’s parlour, eating croissants and drinking coffee from bowls. The bubble around us seemed positively hermetic and it was only when we were finally dressed and standing outside with the others, looking like a band of gypsies, that I realised it was raining, not just a shower but the implacable stuff that’s booked in to stay.

We did our best, tried a few bedraggled songs outside the Beaubourg, went down into the maze of Châtelet Métro, but nothing was right. The public hurried past us and the sense that we were a team had been destabilised by Beth and me. By mid-afternoon we’d barely earned enough for food, let alone another night at the gypsy’s. Don had had enough.

‘Fuck this for a game of soldiers,’ he said, as we huddled outside a patisserie awning. ‘Let’s go back out to the forêt, go to the sports centre there, have a swim.’

The others grunted agreement. I wasn’t ready to give up, wasn’t prepared to cede defeat to the bloody weather, but Don was implacable and the rain kept on, so I opted for a partial surrender.

‘Fine,’ I said, then turned to Beth. ‘You fancy going to see a gallery first?’ She nodded and stared at her feet, embarrassed to be marked out like this as part of a couple, apart from her friends, but still clear in her choice, choosing me.

That settled, we said we’d see the others later, out at the forêt. They headed off to the RER and we took the Métro up to Notre Dame de Lorette and soon found ourselves the only people in the Musée Gustave Moreau, all princesses and serpents and opium, beloved of any young aesthete who’s read Huysman’s Against Nature, and yes, of course, I was that soldier. But its emptiness was really the thing, drifting through this grand house full of weird paintings midway between kitsch and powerful, in our bubble, sealed in our bubble. Did we kiss in front of… Did we… No, too much recall.

Afterwards we drifted south, walked down St Denis and goggled at the whores, found some little second-hand shops at the southern end and bought a ‘50s shirt we both liked. Skirting Les Halles, not going anywhere in particular, just putting off our return to the forêt, I took us into Parallèles, an anarchist bookshop Ifor had shown me one time. And there, reading a copy of Actuel, was Laurent.

‘Hey,’ he said, ‘mes amis’

‘Hey,’ we said right back and we got to talking. We went to the bar a few doors down and Laurent bought the drinks and we talked some more, then he asked what our plans were.

‘Not much,’ I said, ‘we have to go out to St Germainen-Laye.’

Laurent looked disgusted. ‘But why? There’s nothing there, it is just… bourgeois.’

I explained that we were camping in the forêt and he laughed at that and said, ‘OK, but go later tonight. I’ll take you some places that are not so… bourgeois.’

Beth and I looked at each other, and I mumbled something about money and our lack of any, but Laurent brushed it aside. ‘I have money, don’t be so bourgeois.’

Well, neither of us wanted to be bourgeois, that was for sure, so we looked at each other again and smiled and said, ‘OK, merci.’

It was full dark by the time we left the bar. Time to eat, said Laurent and led the way up to Chartiers, off the rue Montmartre, a big old Toulouse-Lautrec place with mirrors and moustachioed waiters and cheap decent food. It’s a bit of a tourist classic, of course, I know that now, but right in that moment it was wonderful.

We sat down and looked at the menu, and I translated what I could. Beth wrinkled her nose up and said, ‘Don’t they have anything for vegetarians?’

Laurent heard her, laughed and said, ‘You are in Paris now. We do not have this vegetarian shit.’ And then he ordered snails and entrecotes and red wine for all of us.

Beth looked at me and said ‘Oh God, please don’t tell Yaz.’ And then her foot found mine under the table, and when the steak came she ate it with all the relish of a pale girl who hadn’t seen red meat in a year.

Did we go to La Tartine next, to drink the black wine of Cahors, sitting on the same banquette once perched on by Lenin? My memory wants to say yes, but common sense says that must have been the next night, because the club was in the other direction from Chartiers. Whatever, we went somewhere and drank a verre and Laurent asked if we would like to go dancing, and we both said ‘yes’; then, ‘What about the time, we must get to the forêt,’ and Laurent gave us the look that said we were in danger of becoming bourgeois again and sighed and said, ‘Maybe you have time to catch your train. If not you stay with me, pas de problème.’

So we went dancing. I never found the place again. By day I suspect it looked like a hundred other restaurants along the boulevard Sebastopol, one of central Paris’s least charming thoroughfares. By night, though, it was African. We were amazed. This was before world music was invented, you understand. Reggae was as exotic as things got, as far as we knew. Yet now we were in Africa.

Up till then we – well I at least – had barely registered the city’s African population, and now we were surrounded by them: fresh-faced young guys in suits, women in smart dresses. I felt shabby and pale, but I didn’t care, I was too busy trying to take in the music. There was a band playing, I’d like to think it was someone legendary, Dr Nico perhaps. Whoever they were they were great, the circling guitars and the ease of the bass and drums. I was intoxicated three times over: by the music, by Beth next to me, her feet starting to measure out the beat, and by way too much red wine.

Things blurred a little. We sat down for a while then we tried to dance. An African guy came up, laughed at us, then offered his hand to Beth. She smiled at him and took his hand and he moved her round the floor. I sat back down next to Laurent.

‘You look tired, my friend,’ he said, ‘maybe you’d like something to pick you up?’

‘Sure,’ I said, for a moment thinking he meant a black coffee, but not demurring when he slipped a wrap into my hand and suggested I make the acquaintance of M. Cocaine.

It would be nice to blame everything on that old cocaine. Certainly it didn’t help, but just as in vino veritas is basically true – you may say things you regret but the reason for the regret is their truth – so cocaine may turn you into an asshole, but that asshole is your own inner asshole.

And let’s not forget it’s also really good fun. I took a toot in the toilet and the blurring went away and later on, on a nod from Laurent, I introduced Beth to my new friend, and she liked him pretty well too, and the night wore on the way you can most likely predict. And yes, of course we did, and not in the toilets but in some kind of pantry off the deserted kitchen, her elbows resting on a marble shelf.

It was lucky we had taken our chance when we did though, as Laurent’s place turned out to be no more than a one-room eyrie on the Ile de la Cité, fabulous views but no privacy, and no bed either. Laurent was no gentleman, he took the big dark wood sleigh bed and we took the blankets on the floor, holding each other at first for warmth, then pulling apart, lost in our own private battles for equilibrium as the chemicals fled our systems.

Next morning was awkward and sore-headed as you might expect. We fled around eleven leaving Laurent still in bed, a vague promise to meet in the bar by Parallèles that evening.

We found the others outside the Beaubourg. They looked a sorry crew without us. Em had taken my role as leader and her fitness for the job can be gauged by the fact that this is the first time I’ve mentioned her; a nice girl but dull. They were pleased to see us at first, relieved I suppose, then angry at our thoughtlessness. We tried to slot back into our roles, and succeeded more or less. It was OK, the sun peeked out in between shows, we made lunch money then dinner money, but the harmony was off, and later on I raised the status of meeting Laurent to an obligation.

‘You coming back to the forêt later on?’ asked Don.

‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘expect so, but if not we’ll see you here. Usual time, usual place, yeah?’

‘Fine,’ said Don, ‘see you then,’ and we fled, relieved, back into our new Parisian life.

That night Laurent took things up a notch. We exchanged Chartiers for Bofinger, still, then and now, the best of the big old brasseries. You could, if you wanted, find me there from time to time even now, maybe on a Sunday evening late, but you might, I must confess, regret it.

That first time it was sublime. Laurent ran into friends there; beautiful people, film people. They’d been working on a Rohmer movie earlier in the day. Was one of them the lost girl of French film herself, Pascale Ogier, soon to be dead of a heart attack at twenty-five? Part of me would like to think so, to think that I was not the only one whose stars were so far out of alignment. I read once what her mother wrote after Pascale died. It trumps my own self pity every time.

En ce moment, je joue au théâtre avec des acteurs très jeunes, qui ne I’ ont pas connue. Et tous les soirs, je salue. Quatre fois, cing fois, six fois. All bout de la sixième fois, je regarde les visages, dans la salle. Parmi ces visages, il y en a toujours un, un peu pâle, entouré de cheveux noirs, qui sourit. Une jeune fille. Il y en a toujours me. Et pendant un court instant, je pense: ’Tiens, Pascale est venue, ce soir. Elle aurait pu me prévenir. C’est très bref.

Jesus.

I’m delaying things now as you can see, reluctant to move forward. Tiens indeed. After dinner we – Beth and me, Laurent and his friends – walked through the Marais till we came to Les Bains Douches. It looked from the outside like what it was, an old swimming pool. Except there was a man on the door checking names and a gaggle of beautiful people offering themselves up for his approval. We had no problem, the guy on the door even favoured Beth with a small bow and a Bonsoir Mam’selle.

It was a vision of the very near future. Inside a year there would be places like this in London, New York, Berlin, but right then there was nowhere cooler on earth than Les Bains Douches, nowhere where the new worlds of fashion and music and film were more inseparably intertwined, creating what… ‘The Eighties’, I suppose, with all their flash and filigree.

I loved it. I was in raptures. I could see everything ahead of me. I was talking to a friend of Laurent’s, he said he was sure he could find work for a cool guy like me, making music for films. I wanted it all, to swallow it whole. I wanted to live here forever and I was so grateful to Laurent, so in awe of his command of this world, and so coked off my face that, later that night, when we were sat there on a banquette, watching Beth dance to Grace Jones, and Laurent leaned over and said, ‘You mind if we share?’, I didn’t even hesitate, just nodded like I’d known all along that this was the price on the ticket.

I mean, I should say I knew she liked him, and it wasn’t as if I forced her. It’s only that when she looked at me, like she was asking if I was sure this was OK, I just smiled again, a smile I hope to Christ has never passed my face again.

It was simply managed. They left together. I stayed on for an hour or so, maybe more, you know how time flies when you’re with M. Cocaine, and I had my new friends to talk to, my new career to plot. Then I came back to the Ile de la Cité. Rang the bell and went up and straight away Beth left the big sleigh bed and joined me on the floor. In the morning Laurent went to work, and Beth cried in my arms and said not a word.

That was the end of us. It wasn’t the real end, of course, there was a coda, a tailing off, the same old sad decline, but that was the end. Of course.

And I did at least receive my rewards. A month later I had a job as musical director for the first ever French punk-rock movie, and I was living in an attic flat of my own, on the rue de la Roquette. I saw Laurent from time to time. Once at the Palace he leaned over to me, said, ‘You still see that girl? You know she really liked you, man. She told me I could only fuck her in the ass, said the other place was strictly for love.’

There are things, you know, you prefer not to hear. More than that there are lessons you prefer not to learn. Like this one: that some things, when they break, they stay broken.

That’s enough. I have, as I mentioned, been drinking, and if I stay in any longer I will become maudlin, listen to more records I shouldn’t. Instead I shall go out, take a petite tournée around the bars. I’ll see if there’s a girl who would like some new shoes.