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

Animal Intelligence

A pigeon crapped on my head today. I was running my last lap of the Luxembourg Gardens, when I felt a warm, semi-solid dollop of goo splat on the top of my skull. Even before I smelled it, I knew what it was. You don't mistake something like that for rain. My attempt to wipe it off only smeared the poop around, creating a greenish birdshit mousse that made my hair stink and stand up in very odd ways. But this special event got me thinking about the complex relationships the French have with their animals in particular. And about animal intelligence in general. Let me explain.

If one were do some sort of I.Q. rating of the animals in Paris, dogs would be at the top of the brain chain. Every day you see them out on the street, self-possessed, four-legged boulevardiers. usually ambling yards ahead of their owners, thinking doggie thoughts, off on a doggie mission, lost in doggie world. Unlike their American versions, the dogs of Paris rarely take note of people. They don't pant or pander or snarl or bark or hop up obsequiously or even look at you. Many stroll along leash-less, although an owner and leash are close by. I once saw a dog carrying its own leash in its mouth, sparing its master even that burden. For all I know they may vote in presidential elections.

At the other end of the animal I.Q. spectrum are pigeons. They are far, far, far at the bottom. They are underneath the bottom. To put it another way, their intelligence only slightly higher than gravel.

One of my first impressions of the Luxembourg Gardens was how spectacularly dumb pigeons were. Unlike most creatures with eyes and ears and the ability to walk, not to mention the ability to fly, they were beyond dense. Barely a day went by when I did not almost step on a pigeon during my jog. The scenario was always the same. After I almost tripped over it, the bird would frantically flap its wings and coo and then run around in a tiny circle on the same spot like one of the Three Stooges, giving me multiple chances to step on it or accidentally kick it again. How do they keep from getting run over? I wondered. (Answer: They don't. See photo above.)

First I thought all the birds of Paris were all dimwits on the wing, until my wife and I were waiting for a train at Gare Austerlitz. We were sitting in the inside portion of a cafe. I noticed that a small posse of sparrows were loitering suspiciously outside the automatic door. Whenever a customer walked in, a sparrow would fly in behind him in a kind of I'm-with-him move, then flit around until it found a table with crumbs or, even better, a sympathetic diner. One flew over to the table next to us, perched on the back of a vacant chair facing a woman reading her paper and stared at her with its beady little eyes until she smiled and tossed it some crumbs.

I'M SO HUNGRY I COULD EAT A HORSE . . . REALLY.

Of course critter love does not extend to all animals in France. Go to the markets and you'll see skinned bunnies and the heads of piglets hanging from meat hooks. Go to some neighborhoods and you will find signs for chevalines, horse meat butchers, like this:

Although my understanding is the French are losing their appetite for eating a distant cousin of Seabiscuit, this shop I saw was doing pretty good weekend business. (In case you're wondering, the older the horse, the more tender the meat.)

IN THE COUNTRY

Once you get away from the city there is a big attitude shift. You will not see French people carrying their dogs as though they were made of porcelain or hauling them around in precious carriers with mesh netting windows so Monsieur Le Fido can get a little air and see the sights.

"Country people are more basic, more grounded," is how one veterinarian put it to me.

She has a thriving practice in the Limousin and during one of my visits she showed up late for lunch looking distraught. She accidentally hit a cat. "I can still hear the thump of the body when I ran over it," she moaned.

She figured out which farmhouse it belonged to, went to the front door and nervously knocked. "Do you have a red and white cat?" she asked the woman who answered.

"I have two," the woman said.

"Not any more," said the vet. Then she told the cat owner about the accident.

The woman shrugged. "Better the cat than me."

"This is what I like about country folks," the veterinarian said. "They see animals as animals. Not as people or substitute children."

Later she was complaining about a young horse she had recently bought and how aggressive and untrainable he was. When I suggested she sell it, she replied, "I couldn't do that. He's too dangerous. I would worry he would hurt the new owner."

What about loaning it out for breeding?

"He's not that much of a thoroughbred. I'll try one more round of training."

"And if that doesn't work?"

"I'll eat him," she said.

Bon appetit.

Fascinating French Fact: The oldest public pet cemetery in the world is Le Cimetière des Chiens on the outskirts of Paris.

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.

Meet Mr. Alphabet

“Ooooh,” Mlle. Butterfly groaned and dropped her head onto the desk. “I'm exhausted.”

In the months we had been desk buddies this was the most demonstrative she had ever been. Usually class began with a nod, a perfunctory “Ça va?” and we’d open our notebooks in silence. She did not encourage questions. I did not ask any. Our relationship was like that of two polite strangers sitting next to each other in coach on a long, long flight, each doing their best not to invade the other’s armrest space and minimize personal interaction. For her to even share the small fact she was fatiguée was unprecedented.

“Why?” I asked.

“I spent all day Sunday at EuroDisney.”

“My god,” I gasped. “WHY?” I completely forgot that place existed.

“Visitors. With children,” she muttered into her folded arms.

It turned out that even exhausted, she loved every minute. She was a fan and often went to the Disney World in her hometown, Tokyo.

“Have you been?” she asked.

“To the one in the United States,” I said. “I saw Tokyo Disney on the way to the airport.”

“You’ve been to Japan?” She looked up.

“For a few weeks. On business. I know five Japanese words: Hai [yes], Arigato [thank you], Domo Arigato [thank you very much], Ohayo [Good morning] and Konichiwa [Good afternoon]. No, seven: sushi and saki. No nine: Toyota and Honda.”

No smile. “Did you go to Kyoto?”

I could not figure out a way to say in French, “I did want to go, but It was a working trip and I was scheduled from nine in the morning to late at night every day so I didn’t have any free time except for one Sunday, and by then I was so fatigué all I wanted to do was sleep in, even though Kyoto was only a three hour train ride away so I did, but I feel guilty about missing it.”

So I said, “No.”

“You should have gone.” She frowned.

“Yeah, well I should have done a lot of things.”

THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING CLASS

“Coucou! Coucou!” Mlle. G. our teacher was calling out, trying to get everyone to quiet down. Our band of French grammar explorers was shrinking by the week.

The very sad Japanese woman I noticed the first class abruptly disappeared after just a couple of sessions. A few weeks later it was the young woman from Cuba. I missed her droll sense of humor. (When I told her I knew some people who had gone kayaking in Cuba and asked if she ever tried it, she shook her head. “My family is descended from slaves. We don’t get into boats.”)

Then the Hungarian costume designer who had an amazing wardrobe of silk scarves disappeared. Perhaps he ran out of class scarves. And then there was Maria, the animated Italian with the beautiful smile and delightfully accented French. She followed her husband back to Rome.

But Mlle. Butterfly remained, doggedly coming to every class. She had been a bit of a mystery, not so much aloof as wistful. Gradually I learned that she had come to Paris ten years ago, stayed to marry a Frenchman, stayed on after the divorce. She was in her 40s. She used to work for an insurance company. But now she worked in a shop on the Champ d'Elysees as a vendeuse, a saleswoman, handling expensive handbags. She told me the name of the boutique and was horrified I did not recognize the brand.

“I'm not a handbag shopper,” I apologized.

“But the bags are famous,” she said.

“No doubt,” I said in broken French, “but the World of the Handbag is not the World of Doug.”

In spite of my ignorance of bags, we had become a team. She was able to explain things to me in baby French. In return, I had a talent I had underestimated. I knew the alphabet.

MR. ALPHABET TO THE RESCUE

Early on, I noticed that she took notes in Japanese script. She had an electronic French-Japanese dictionary which showed on its screen French words in Japanese script. One week after I missed a class and asked to copy down the homework assignment. She showed me her notebook, pages of Japanese writing. That was when I realized why those impromptu essays we had to write were so difficult for her. She hadn’t mastered the Western alphabet. She struggled to craft one sentence, while I would crank out paragraphs of bad French on the most absurd topics.

One typical assignment: What does a baby dream? I was thinking of an old Jack Handey Deep Thought: “A boy wants to grow up to be a fireman, but a man wants to grow up to be a giant, monster fireman.”

So I wrote: “I will be a fireman or perhaps a soldier, but not the president because I hate politics. I will live in the country and would like to have two or three chickens, and some cows. I will stay in a little house in the Perigord.” This, from a grown man. (Don’t laugh. I got a “Tres bien.”)

Whenever someone from the two-student teams had to go the blackboard for an exercise, Mlle. Butterfly commanded, “You go. That’s not my métier.” So I would stand there meekly as she called out grammatical corrections for me to make or sometimes send me back to the board to fix an error. It's fair to say that if I made a list of 10,000 possible scenarios of my life in Paris, standing at a blackboard being ordered around at by an ex-pat Japanese vendeuse would not be on the list.

That night as we were leaving class, I overheard someone say to Mlle. Butterfly, "Are you not feeling well?"

"I'm just tired. I was at Euro Disney all day yesterday."

"My god," I heard. "WHY?"

"I'm with stupid"

One gift to global culture for which Americans owe the world a big apology is that bastard spawn of the bumper sticker: the clever T-shirt. For years, the French had the good taste not to wear those things. Nowhere in Paris would you ever see anything like: "J'accompagne l'idiot" across someone's chest with a cartoon hand pointing to their companion. Sadly, this is no longer true. "I'm with Stupid" has come to town. Some examples seen on the boulevards:

"PORNOGRAPHIC STAR"

(Worn by a 13-year-old boy.)

"You will go to hell for what your dirty mind is thinking"
(Radiohead fan.)

"FIGHT 4 SURVIVE"
(Above a picture of an endangered species, I think. A bison. Or a cow. It was hard to tell.)

"DON'T TOUCH WHAT YOU CANNOT AFFORD"
(Across the chubby chest of a chubby woman.)

"ROCKET SHIP ROBOT FUTURE IS HERE"
(I have no idea either.)

"KISS AND MAKE UP"
(Copied from a candy heart.)

"WHERE AM I?"
(Good question.)

"I WANT TO BE YOUR COWBOY"
(Seen on a funky smelling guy with no shoes and mocha-colored teeth.)

"QUI ES TU?"
(Another good question.)

"UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA"
(What is that - a branch of United States College?)

"I'M NOT IN THE MOOD"
(Worn by a 10-year-old boy.)

"FBI: FEMALE BODY INSPECTOR"
(Worn by an idiot.)