Jokes from the bums

For some reason the few people I have meaningful contact with in Paris are the clochards, or what my father would call: bums. I have a predisposed liking for them as one of my grandfathers was a bum. Literally. (The last time my mother saw him he was a homeless man begging for quarters on a street.) So there is a kind of family tradition there. On at least two occasions the locals felt compelled to make wisecracks about my jogging. I suppose when your whole day is a physical challenge: trying to find a place to eat, to sleep, hauling your crap from one spot to the next, passing the time like a character from a Beckett play, the idea of putting on a T-shirt and what look like a pair of nylon undershorts to run around in circles and deliberately tire yourself is absurd.

There are two guys who have been living not far away in the back doorway of a Shell station mini-mart on Boulevard Raspail. How long they have been there I don't know, but they are as much a neighborhood fixture as the Musee Maillol diagonally across the street from them. One guy has long gray hair and a beard. The other guy has dark matted hair and glasses. Crammed in the doorway is some sort of duvet for their bed, their sleeping bags and two backpacks which I guess contain all their life’s possessions. I have seen a lot of people stop to chat, including the manager of the mini-mart. They sleep in the doorway all year long, even this past brutal winter.

Although they have a small plastic bowl with a perfunctory “Monnaie, SVP” sign in front of it, they are not aggressive beggars and actually don’t seem to care if you put money in it or not. I must have passed them hundreds of time going to and from my run. Mostly I just nod. A couple of times I put money in their dish to their great surprise. One day I was walking past them sweaty and relaxed on the Rue de Grenelle on my way home and the graybeard said, "Hey!"

I turned. "Where you going? The track is that way." And he started laughing at his own joke. I knew Spring was here.

The other, more droll comment came from a black homeless guy sitting meditatively on a bench tucked in a corner of the Luxembourg Gardens. He studied me each time I went past. I have a grim, preoccupied look on my face when I run, like I’m thinking about a dead puppy. So as I loped by him a third time he urged, “Allez. Avec JOIE” which basically translates into, “At least try to look like you’re enjoying it.”

Fascinating French fact: The word clochard comes from the French verb clocher, to limp.

Sunday In Paris

NEXT TRAIN :04

Getting out and around

You get punished for being a homebody in Paris. In the past few months I missed seeing the runaway horse, the naked pole vaulter and most recently (sigh) the naked models walking down the street where I get my hair cut, all of whom were galavanting just blocks away from our apartment. Oh well. Ever since I opted to blow off Woodstock and stay home and drink beer with friends, I felt like my destiny is always to miss the real party.

Fortunately I've discovered if you do manage to get out and around and keep your eyes open, there are still little surprises to be found. Some examples:

The other day I was passing a neighborhood wine shop which had their weekly specials in the window. Among them was a bottle of Cotes-Du-Rhone which caught my eye. The reason was the label.[See above left. Take a close look.] It had bumps all over it, like Braille elevator buttons, I thought. I told my wife I saw wine for the blind. I told my friends. I got the look usually given to people who say they have seen a UFO.

But I was right. The label was in Braille. I learned that since 1996 the wine maker, Michel Chapoutier, has been labeling all his wines with Braille, partly as an homage to the previous owner of the property who created a shorthand version of Braille, and partly to make his wine more accessible to wine lovers with impaired vision.

(Sometimes forgotten among in the thickets of history is how much various French innovators have done to improve the lives of the handicapped. A blind autodidact and gifted musician and inventor, Louis Braille gave the world the raised dot reading system used today on books, elevator buttons and wine labels. Another Frenchman, Abbe Charles Michel de L'Epee was the first person to establish a school exclusively for deaf children. It was replicated in the United States with the help of one of his teachers.)

* * *

On a more mundane note, I am constantly fascinated during my Parisian walkabouts by the extremes to which people go to keep their bikes from being stolen. This person removed his seat and U-locked the bike to a tree guard. It must take him an hour to get ready for a ride:

And I cannot get over the fact that sometimes you can turn an ordinary street corner and see hundreds of rollerbladers coming at you:

That's almost as good as a runaway horse.

Fascinating French Fact: Abbe Charles Michel De L'Epee is interred in the historic 17th century church of Saint-Roch on the Right Bank, where there is a statue of him and, below it, a thank you plaque from the blind people of Belgium.

Just Buzz Me In

The morning we walked into the courtyard of our apartment building for the first time a compact little woman came walking towards me. She was shaped like R2D2 and was carrying a 50-pound suitcase from the curb – mine – in one hand and shaking my hand with the other. This was Madame Rosa, our concierge.

The last concierge I dealt with was a smarmy, oleaginous fellow working the front desk of a hotel in Los Angeles who helped me find a good Thai restaurant. Madame Rosa was part of a different tradition. Her job dates to the 19th century. Back then Napoleon started the whole thing by requiring that every apartment building in Paris have a caretaker, a concierge. (No one seems to knows where the word came from, but one school of thought says it was a corruption of le compte de cierge, literally the “keeper of the candle” and originally referred to a person in the Middle Ages whose job was to light the castle candles - cierges - at the end of day and take care of other housekeeping matters. Or maybe not.)

SNITCH IN RESIDENCE
Whatever the word's provenance, Napoleon wasn’t thinking of candles or the comfort of Parisians when he laid down his mandate. He wanted to keep his eye on his fellow Frenchmen. The guy was a world class paranoid.

Concierges in those days knew a lot - part of their job was to open the doors for their tenants and their guests - and were paid little. Consequently they also made ideal informers for government agents and anyone else willing to buy from them what they knew. Fairly or not, the concierges became typecast as a kind of latter-day Madame DeFarge, cold-hearted gossips and greedy harridans willing to turn in their tenants for the right price.

By the turn of the 21st century many of these gardiennes had been replaced by the security keypad with numbered buttons [see photo] you will see in the doorway of most Parisian apartment buildings. The concierge was becoming part of a quaint, fading tradition like the hurdy-gurdy man outside the Luxembourg Gardens or the guy in the Tuilleries who rents sailboats to children. In many buildings the little one or two-room concierge apartments by the front door were renovated and sold for a tidy pile of Euros, and their occupants were encouraged to return to Portugal where many, including Madame Rosa, are from.

NEW CACHET

The number of concierges in Paris have shrunk drastically. In the 1950s there were around 70,000 in Paris. By some estimates today there are around 20,000. Now that they are so rare, there is a newly discovered chicness to having a concierge in one's building. I found this out one day when Peter, an American I met in Paris, was stunned to hear me say that we had one. Or as he put it: “You have a concierge?” He was impressed.

I was impressed that he was impressed. He had lived in Paris off and on since the 70s and was continually bemused by the simple minded discoveries I was sharing with him. (“Peter, have you seen this huge pointy thing on the south bank of the Seine? Made by a guy named Eiffel?”)

Because of his approving reaction I looked at Madame Rosa in a new light. But she seemed oblivious to her status. She had the forlorn expression of someone constantly beset with worry about: the cleanliness of our courtyard, the efficiency – or lack of it – of mail delivery which the tenants complained about, the parade of workmen renovating the apartment upstairs in, the mess they made in her hallways, the theft of champagne from one of the caves in the basement during the renovation, the carelessness with which people sorted the trash. Notices were going up almost weekly to alert us to be on the lookout for thieves, to tell us that she was not withholding mail and delivering it when she felt like it, to tell us we should crush our cardboard cartons before dumping them in the trash, to tell us it wasn't her fault the workmen were making a mess.

Still, she had power and we were instructed to woo her. “She has a lot of time on her hands during the day for ironing," our landlord suggested. "You could give her some of your shirts.”

Crap, I thought. All the shirts I brought with me were made of some astonishing no-wrinkle superfabric. If you tied them in knots and drove a steam roller over them and staked them out in the dessert soaking wet, they would never, ever, ever show so much as a pucker. But I had to do something, so one day I grabbed a couple of wet shirts right out of the wash, smushed and twisted and knotted them and immediately ran to Madame Rosa's apartment to hand them off to her before they unwrinkled on me.

An hour later I heard was a buzz at the door. There she stood proudly holding out my shirts as though they were vestments. I don't know how she did it but somehow she had managed to iron new wrinkles into them. (A year later they are still there.) But they were folded neatly.

I gushed, “So quick. Thank you. Thank you very, very much. How much do I owe you?”

“Pffffff,” she waved the matter off as though it were just a favor, neighbor to a neighbor. But it was like more a favor done by the Godfather. The burden of just and appropriate recompense was on me. And whatever it was I knew it had better be good.

Paranoid French fact: Napoleon had Baron (who was not a Baron) Haussmann widen some of the narrow streets into leafy boulevards not for their gentle ambiance, but to make it difficult for a revolting citizenry to blockade them and to serve as routes to dispatch masses of crowd controlling troops in case of an uprising.

A Fashion Innocent Abroad

I was not prepared for how woefully out of place I felt as I strolled down the boulevards of Paris. The sidewalks were teeming with intimidatingly chic women, slim as whippets, carrying tiny shopping bags, often accompanied by sleek men radiating insouciance and effortless disdain. My look, by contrast, screamed: “Say Bonjour to Monsieur Doofus.”

THE SCARF
Believing the devil is in the details, I tried to deconstruct the Parisian look. I started with accoutrements, like scarves. Back home I considered a scarf an article of clothing, associated with mittens and wassailing and scraping the ice off my windshield. But in Paris a scarf is a statement. Eskimos may have one hundred words for snow, but Parisians each own about 1200 scarves.

How they wear them is the result of subtle confluence of many factors: sex, age, height, attitude, posture, time of day and, for all I know, shoe size and the phase of the moon. Air temperature and weather are only marginally relevant. I’ve seen people wearing them with T-shirts and shorts, while jogging, even indoors teaching class. Knotted, double knotted, draped, tightly wound around necks like an attacking python, it doesn’t matter. Parisians look dashing in them. When I strove for the same panache, I resembled a deranged lumberjack.

THE SHOE
So I moved on to shoes. I decided I would buy what was popular. And what was popular were Converse sneakers. These are perfectly adequate coverings for feet, but I could not bring myself to spend the equivalent of a meal in a three-star restaurant for what is essentially canvas glued to a slab of rubber.

Then one day I noticed a shoe boutique around the corner from me. I knew the store was dangerously expensive because it had in its window a single shoe. Nearby, mounted under plexiglass like an information plaque in a museum exhibit, was an exegesis of the exotic piece of footwear [See above].

The item was a “mocassin fétiche” – a shoe which had a fanatical following among “collégiens américains.” In my country, I was informed, it was known as: “Le Penny Loafer.” And in Paris it cost the equivalent of a semester at the Sorbonne.

I should have been pleased. I own a pair of “Loafers de Centime” and even a pair of “Sneakers Converse.” The problem was they were in a storage container in Nouvelle Jersey.

THE EPIPHANY
Plus this brought me no closer to solving the fashion conundrum. So I switched to analyzing the gestalt of the Parisian look. My epiphany came from my stylish daughter who had lived here. Parisians, she noted, do not wear a lot of color. I decided that if I dressed as though I were going to the memorial service of a casual acquaintance – dark but not overly somber clothes which say, "I am marginally sorry Bob is dead, so I'm dropping in, but I will be running a few errands afterwards" – and wore a scarf, I would get by. And I have.

Le shock of the culture

We quickly discovered that the country that always gave Mr. and Mrs. Colligan, the Tourists, a cheery Bonjour did not open their arms quite as readily for Mr. and Mrs. Colligan, the would-be Residents. Since we were planning to stay for at least a year, French immigration laws mandated that we get a Long Stay Visitor Visa before we left the U.S. To qualify, we had to assemble a plump dossier of paperwork to present to the local French Consulate.

In addition to obvious stuff like marriage certificate and proof of U.S. citizenship, we had to demonstrate:

o that we had enough money to support ourselves in France for a year

o that we had an address in France

o that we had our own health insurance

o that we had a the correct attitude. We had to write a letter saying why we wanted to live in France. (We said it was because we admired the culture. And the cheeses. And the baguettes.)

And since we also had to sign a letter promising we would neither seek nor accept work after moving to France, we lined up work beforehand.

About two months later, the visa was approved, and so on a chilly January afternoon, jet-lagged and in a state of disbelief, we were dragging our overweight suitcases into a one-bedroom sublet on the Left Bank.

At first I wandered the streets pleasantly bedazzled by where I was. But after a few days I could no longer ignore the nearly dark sky which greeted me in the morning when I opened the shutters of our ground floor apartment. And the early, early sunset which cast a funereal pall over the city around four in the afternoon. Then even when the sun was out there was the unrelenting 40 Watt dimness, the damp chill, the dogs crapping on the pavement outside on the street as their owners looked the other way. As David Sedaris might say, it was Parisian darkness, Parisian chill, Parisian dogshit.

As I walked around in my ex-pat daze, little observation slowly forced themselves on me such as:

Why do so many very small children wear glasses?
Toddlers no older than one year were wearing spectacles. Optometry must be a huge business here. Is there a high percentage of nearsighted/farsighted Pre-K kids just in Paris? And how do you give a small child who can barely speak an eye exam, I wondered. How do you get a little kid to respond to "Better? Or worse?" "Better? Or worse?"

How hard does it have to rain before people use umbrellas?
Of course I knew umbrellas exist. There is a famous, very fancy umbrella shop - Alexandra Sojfer - on the Boulevard St. Germain not far from our apartment which sells umbrellas that cost as much as a small car. But on the rainiest afternoons, Parisians seem content to lean into windswept downpours hatless, umbrella-less, perhaps in the hope that it is merely a quick misting and will pass. And when they do use umbrellas -- literally after the deluge -- it seems as though they are still mastering the technique of carrying them, spastically clonking into each other on the streets, bouncing off other umbrella holders, lamposts, parked cars, buildings, muttering what may or may not be apologies before pressing on. And it seemed to rain almost every day.

How cold does it have to get before everyone wears hats?
Freezing, nasty days. Bitter winds knifing off the river. Narrow streets become icy wind tunnels.Ice cream headaches was part of the pedestrian experience. Yet few wear hats. Older, dapper men wear Borsalinos. One day I passed the Borsalino boutique on Rue de Grenelle and it was packed - which is to say about four customers. But no one below a certain age wears hats. Oh wait, one day it was 16 degrees Fahrenheit and I saw one guy wearing a hat. He must have been from out of town.

How long does it take to learn to be an injury-free pedestrian?

It took me weeks to figure out how to walk around here. I used to live in Manhattan and thought I knew how to cross a city street, but that experience was totally useless. For one thing crosswalk etiquette is anti-pedstrian. The red crossing light says "You may not cross . . . unless of course you can't see any vehicles coming too fast. Then give it a shot. Courage, mon ami."

Conversely the green pedestrian light means, "OK now you can try to cross, but be aware traffic does not necessarily have to stop if the driver thinks he or she can beat you through the crosswalk - even if you happened to be in the way." In which case be prepared to be run over. And it would help to know how to say in French, "Hey asshole, I'm walking here."

I learned that second lesson the hard way while attempting to cross hectic rue de Vieux Colombier near St. Sulpice. The instant I stepped off the curb a dusty little red car came whipping around the corner. The driver came straight at me, without bothering to slow. Dead-eyed, hands firmly gripping the wheel he had his foot firmly depressed on the accelerator. Prick. I wimpily stepped back and instinctively put out my hands to protect myself. The car slammed against my outstretched palms as it whizzed by and bounced me back onto the curb (Boing-oing-oing), like a cartoon character. I left my two handprints on its dusty chassis as it shot down the street and, I hoped, straight into a telephone pole. A French guy standing next to me looked very, very, very shocked, and impressed. I know because one eyebrow went up ever so slightly. Then he resumed talking on his cell phone.

Pedestrianism is also tricky because people do not walk in straight lines. Ever. Never get between a Parisian and a shop window. Eight out of ten will stop abruptly to study what is on show. There is no way to predict this. I've seen men stop to stare at women's shoes, and, memorably, one woman who stopped before a dental supply windows with a fascinating display of drill bits and tooth enamel color samples. Unless she was a dental hygienist, which I doubt, there was no earthly reason to look at any of that stuff. All I can surmise is that there is something about the experience of viewing displayed goods that Parisians find deeply satisfying.

Why are so many people on crutches and with their arms in slings?
There are days, I swear, when the streets of Paris resembles Lourdes. People of all sexes and ages wobbling down the streets on crutches, arms in slings, legs in casts. One woman stopped and asked for directions. When she turned her full face to me she had a giant eye patch. (Maybe she got whacked in the eye by an umbrella toting Parisian, I thought.) Forgetting my bad French, I said, "Holy shi . . ." but instantly corrected it to merde.

One night we were in a bar and in limped a young man with one leg in an elaborate brace and both arms in casts. My wife decided that he had been in a motor scooter accident. Not necessarily, I thought. Maybe he was just trying to blend in.

Intriguing French fact: The French are the highest per capita consumers of anti-depressants in Europe.