Paris (From Memory)

I’ve not written a lot recently*, mostly because I’ve not done a lot that I think people would find that interesting. In the last year I’ve changed careers and focussed on building a life that is rewarding and sustainable. I think subconsciously my adventures with Death in Mexico and the pandemic since have made me realise that I’m not going out in a blaze of glory and the leaving-a-good-looking-corpse boat sailed over a decade ago. I’ve had to think about what my life looks like if I’m sticking around? A luxury problem I’m very aware that some people don’t get.

So in an effort to just feel my fingers on the keyboard I’m going to tell you about a college trip to Paris that happened in my early twenties. As such it will be a little light in details and the sort of observations I tend to lean on as a stand-in for ‘a point’ and ‘intelligence’ SHHHHH so far no one has noticed.

So, to hell with it, My goal is to have written. I’ll leave ‘Writing well’ to a later date

The crossing was, what I believe, sailors call “choppy” but what it seems most of my cohorts call “a fucking nightmare”. A quirk of my neurodivergence means I don’t really get travel sick. So I leave them looking green and taking turns in the cubicles to grab a couple of cans from the shop to look out on a blood black sea broiling like hot oil. Soon I’m told to come in and the decks are closed for “safety reasons”. And I take one of the most solid naps of my life in the padded plastic kids play area. Now, at this point in my life, I would find myself waking up in all sorts of places, to the point where I would judge how my day was going to go by the taste of the floor when I woke up: bed linen? Great. Bare mattress? Not as good but still a good sign. Carpet? Proceed with caution. The two worst are tile or the plastic mattress, which could mean a number of things, including hospital or in a cell. Luckily before long I was woken by my still green looking friends and escorted to the coach.

In our hubris, me and the two lads I was sharing a room with bought a bottle of tequila EACH at the duty free on the way into the country. That first night, having been forbidden by our chaperones to leave. We sat up with jovial grit in the canteen of the hotel that is the sort of tacky and elegantly cheap that Paris used to do so well. The three of us slamming back shot after shot of tequila on the formica fixed seat tables. While the rest of the trip went to bed.

Like most people I rarely black out when drunk, and like most people I also take advantage of the social contract the English have of pretending we do black out to avoid the mortifying post mortem of our actions if we did not. That being said I still remember almost nothing of that night, save one sorry scene that starts with a blizzard of lights and images that I assume is a very drunk me running through the red light district of Paris. Banging on the thick glass of a kebab stall.
“Fermé! Fermé!” a man with a thick mustache dismissing me with a wave. Me persisting, pulling french I didn’t know I had in me.
“Non, jay vood-dray un citrus” I say pointing at the lemons in an otherwise empty display.
“Non”
“Merci?” me pleading
“Non!” The mustache man was more annoyed than I’d ever seen him in our short relationship.
“Pourquoi?”
“Plastique!” he says, crushing one of them.

I wake up, I taste bed linen, cracking start, I cautiously open my eyes for more clues. The pillow is a long tube that I seem to have half mounted in the night? And I’m wearing one leg of my boxers. The room smells of other people. Moving hurts. When I do waves of nausea move through me. Am I on a boat? No, I was on a boat, I think. Something about a boat. A door leads to the bathroom and someone is asleep next to the toilet. A friend? The bed room is orange and brown and everything has that cheap crushed velvet texture I remember from my childhood. The curtains are heavy. I look at the window to get my bearings. An alley but I can see the main road. There’s signs, but I can’t read them? Blurry? No. Nonsense. I CANT READ?! I try to make sense of the words, the letters are the same but nothing will land in my brain. Have I drunk so much I broke the language centre of my brain? I finally did it, I drank myself illiterate. I knew this would happen eventually.

I hear a clunk from the bathroom, its occupant rolled over. I see the three empty bottles of tequila and the memory of most of the last twenty four hours vomit into my mind as I vomit out what was left of the poison in my stomach.**

We’ll skip the rest of the trip, including the bit where I earn a lifetime ban from Père-Lachaise Cemetery, and the night we find our way onto the roof of the hotel drinking and dancing to Fatboy Slim, which yes, dates me and this story.

The last day about fifteen of us are in one hotel room, some had been to Disneyland so are louche in Mickey ears, Some of us had been at a place where the bar was a wing of an aeroplane, and all the seats were airplane seats facing the same direction with only mirrors that had placed on the fold out tables hidden in the arms to talk to those behind you. We are lying there, on and over each other comfortably piled up on our crushes and people from our course that were relative strangers before the trip. We had decided to stay up all night rather than go to bed and get up early to check out. The sort of dumbass teenage decision I still make today. The feeling of connection and exhaustion settling into the room we settle in a comfortable near silence. One of the girls with a soulful gruff voice that belies her age sings Redemption Song by Bob Marley acapella. It’s the first time I’ve heard the song, and its power hits us all.

That moment sits in my heart, fragile and waiting for cynicism and the common sense of age to drain it of its power. But that moment where we shared something transient and perfect, I hope, will survive age and context and remain one of the treasured baubles on the tree of my memory.

We soon decide to walk up Montmartre to watch the sunset from Sacré-Cœur Cathedral. watching the red light turn into a bright cold morning over the skyline of Paris will also stay with me, not just the view, but the feeling. The raw possibility of youth, when you’re young you rarely appreciate how wide and open your future can be. But that cold, pain free, morning you could taste it, we all could.

*apart from an awful emo-esque tone poem called “I’m not dead” which, thankfully, I forgot to post. Which in retrospect saves me from deleting it and burning down the internet so no one can ever find it ever

**It would be nearly twenty five years before I could stomach tequila again

I seem to have lost all of my photographs. The above photo is from this blog https://www.life-gazing.com/lifegazing-blog/sacre-coeur-at-sunrise which is quite lovely in itself.