WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 7: Rue de Zatla

My experience in purchasing illicit drugs was minimal, at best, across my 29 years of life.  Which is why, standing in the dark against a pitted wall in Arab Paris the day after Christmas, trying to score hashish with an equally edgy Abdullah, I was one nervous fellow.

I’d always had friends who knew guys. I didn’t much have to deal with those guys, which was fine by me. Just fork over some bills to my pals, then flick a Bic on my back porch, inhale. I’d always had pretty good weed karma. There was the time in college we lived way off campus in the cornfields, a farmhouse rented from an unreconstructed hippie, who’d gone off trekking in Nepal for a year. My roommate and I just knew our hippie landlord had to have a stash on that rattletrap estate. As Blue nosed at our heels, the friendly terrier we were trek-sitting, we conducted a comprehensive search of the farm and its lopsided outbuildings. Deep in the basement, behind a boiler that looked like it had been ripped from the engine room of the Lusitania — bingo. A Hefty trash bag, nearly full. That weed got us through our senior year. We left a little for him.

There was the nearly quadriplegic friend of mine who lived near me in the early years of my career as a newspaperman. He smoked weed almost continuously, no doubt to take the edge off the reality of his body, half-squashed and ruined from a steel plant accident in his early 20s. Kieffer always had weed. His live-in attendant, Billy, appreciated it when I came over and he got some time off to go get a beer. So, it’d be me who reached up into the back of Kieffer’s bedroom closet for the stash box, me who rolled the joint. Me who placed it between the locked pincers of Kieffer’s thumb and index finger, so he could roll his wrist and pivot his emaciated arm up to his mouth. In its way, it was an elegant move – his hand’s fingers were frozen in place, but he could roll the wrist and arc his thin arm up to take a hit, blowing the smoke out through the wisps of his Wyatt Earp goatee. Only problem was, with no sensation in his hands, he didn’t know when his cigarettes or his joints had burned down. So the skin between his thumb and index finger had a brown-black stain from one too many roastings. I kept an eye out when we were getting high.

I was keeping an eye out now. We were somewhere in Barbes, a part of Paris chock full of Arabs and Africans. (more…)

from “Travel Wonders of the World”

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Cockateels and Cops

“There is no progress in art, any more than there is progress in making love. There are simply different ways of doing it.” ~ Man Ray, from his 1948 essay, “To Be Continued, Unnoticed”

It is no good telling what the view is like from the observatory decks of la Tour Eiffel on the Champ de Mars.  Of course, it is spectacular up there. Of course, it is grand and you think of Napoleon and Hitler, all the relentless conquerors who thought they could rule this singular place for a thousand years. Now, they are gone, Paris still here. Not burning after all, except for the bronze sunlight burning off the fog floating in tendrils above the meandering Seine.

Or what it smells like inside Shakespeare and Co., in the 5^th arrondissement on the Left Bank. Dust and old linseed oil. Perhaps Hemingway’s rummy sweat lingering on the air amid the floor-to-ceiling stacks of books and books and books. And is that Man Ray’s shade in the Poet’s Corner scanning his “Self Portrait”?

And Notre Dame – yes, yes, it is big. Cavernous, with rapturous curves carved from stone old as the surrounding river. Sonorous inside when you scuffle your shoes or emit an owlish ‘whoo!’ into the candle-scented air. The sound scatters in the rose-colored light to a hundred alcoves where shaded saints wait your supplication, echos clattering off the distant ceiling where ten million prayers have jostled for God’s attention. And before that, for Jupiter’s favor in the temple Romans built here, on an island the French would name Ile-de-la-Cité, once they got their hands on it.

But you’ll have to see for yourself as this is no tour guide, or at least no guide to average Parisian sights (if such a thing exists). Paris and I — and this is no boast — had this short, tempestuous affair. It ended badly, as tempestuous affairs often do. I cannot say I’d do it again. It was, of course, my fault, not hers. Jimmy’s. Mine. All that’s left are imperfect memories, probably a few falsehoods. Some singular souvenirs. The usual keening and longing for something that won’t come again in this life. So let’s begin. Again. We may as well start with hashish and a few places to find it in Arab Paris. But that was our night life. First, the days. (more…)

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir

Chapter 5.5 ~ Un Yoga Poétique

Travaillant et retravaillant
les même textes
jour aprés jour
perdant tout sens
de “production” et de “publication”
tout idée d’une “réputation” a forger
Engagé plutôt dans quelque chose
– loin de toute littérature –
que l’on pourrait pertinement nommer
___ un yoga poétique.

Working and reworking
the same texts
over and over again
losing all sense
of “production” and “publication”
and “furthering one’s reputation”
Engaged rather in something
outside literature
that might rightly be called
___ poetic yoga.

~ Kenneth Wilson

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir

About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~ Chapter 4 ~
Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 5 ~ Holy Spirit

The plains of Paris lay below my feet. A conqueror’s view. Me, I was just an unemployed newspaperman about to turn 30 when May came that Spring. But I’d overthrown something to get here. (Caution and common sense, my congenitally anxious mother an ocean away in Ohio would say). The white walls and soaring triple domes of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Paris rose at my back this Christmas Eve. From Sacre Coeur’s perch on the butte Montmarte, the highest vantage point in town, I gazed down at the City of Light. Make that a city of a million coruscating lights.

Town — what a funny word to call Paris. What did the Parisii, the tribe from which the city would cull its name, call their settlement here on the river Seine three centuries before Christ? Lutetia. Ah. Even then the place was mellifluous, at least in name. Lutetia Parisiorum, “Lutetia of the Parisii.” The city stretched to the horizon, low to the ground. No skyscrapers allowed, except for a cluster of glass and steel towers to the west in the business district, La Defense, rising like a lone batch of cornstalks from a sweeping field of rye grass.

Out of the flat Parisien plain the eye leapt toward a few other exceptions. The jutting index finger of the Eiffel Tower, bathed bottom to top in bronze light. The stout, bulldog shoulders of the Arc de Triomphe in the Place Charles de Gaulle. The arch’s mouth was big and wide enough for an exuberant French pilot to steer his biplane though a couple weeks after World War I ended in 1919. There’s newsreel of it somewhere.

I shivered from the bone-cold chill. What was I doing here? When I began mulling the answer to that question (whose translation into motherspeak was: ‘What are you doing with your life, not-so-young James?’) I ducked. Weaved.  I answered the pocket-size version of the question. What am I doing here? Going to midnight mass on Christmas Eve in Paris. In Paris. That bore repeating. I turned from the low marble parapet, from the living postcard view of the city, and entered Sacre Coeur. The basilica was packed, hardly a pew to be squeezed into throughout the vast interior. France was a mostly Catholic land, after all. This was the place to be on the eve of the day that marked the entry of the faith’s Messiah into humankind’s grubby midst. (more…)

What, you make ask, is a fictional memoir? I borrowed the phrase from a Meridith Sue Willis review of a new book by “Crum” author Lee Maynard, titled “The Pale Light of Sunset: Scattershots and Hallucinations in an Imagined Life.” As for my own fictional memoir? It may not altogether be factual, it may be fictional. It may also be true, or may try to be true. You can be the judge of that. To keep up, you could subscribe to the blog, you know, via e-mail or RSS. Just cursor up to the upper left-hand corner there, where it says  “subscribe: Posts | Comments | Email “ Or click it right here. Yep, that’s it. You may begin  “WHAT HAPPENED” at the beginning, or anywhere in between.

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Le Basilique de Sacre Coeur (from earthinpictures.com)

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Chapter 4 ~ Sacre Coeur

There really is no hope of capturing Paris in words, though I will make some tiny, sorry attempts. The subject is too big, at least for me. Better to stay small. I will not be obligated or responsible for you somehow seeing the Paris of those years. This is a failure I concede up front. Go yourself. Look up pictures. Read Hemingway, whomever. I declare I am not responsible for Paris, although I am responsible for leaving some things behind there. That will be my tale, my story of Paris. That is all it will be. Better, I say, to stay small.

I saw before me a demitasse of chocolat chaud, a tiny spoon delivered by a Tunisian waiter at a Montmarte cafe along with our gleaming white porcelain cups and saucers. Back home, where gulping food and drink, then gulping more, was my norm, this French serving seemed an impossibly tiny amount of hot chocolate for such a freezing night. Abdullah and I had arrived in the City of Light on Christmas Eve,  1986. We paced ourselves through our cups. With each teensy spoonful, the spoon’s metal tang came first, then the hit of syrupy, steaming chocolate went down like what chocolate must have first tasted like to a Mayan lord or whomever first served the cacao bean, warm and wet. We were ecstatic to be free young men in Paris for several days and nights, hot cups in cold hands, so our judgment was perhaps severely clouded. But I remember, twenty years later, how that chocolate tasted.

Our hands and faces were frigid from a walk up out of the Marcadet des Pouissoineers Metro stop to this café blocks away in Montmarte.  On our way along boulevards, up serpentine side streets, we passed bakeries, bookstores, groceries, candy shops, perfume stores. All the minutiae of French commerce, the slivers of shops you bounced among to compile your needs for the day and night. We strolled past an open butcher shop. On a hook above the window outside the shop hung head-down the body of an antlered deer. A sprig of mistletoe decorated its mouth

We each poured the last drops into our mouths. Left a few centimes behind, exited the café. The moment had come. Would this work? We rounded the corner to a seven-story building hunkered at a three-way intersection. The building commanded the corner. It looked as if it had been there since Napoleon, maybe well before. The way in was through two massive wooden doors, twice as high as  Abdullah or me. So, let’s see. (more…)