Chapter 6

Boys, Boys, Boys

AS ECLECTIC AS THE COMPOSITION of the Marais was, one particular social subset definitely shone the brightest: the gay community.

Parisian gays had long ago claimed the Marais as their own. Among the city’s twenty arrondissements, the Marais seemed to please them the most. It was pretty, it was very well put together, and it featured plenty of bars that served a mean Cosmopolitan. Go figure.

What this meant for the Marais—as indeed it means for most other gay enclaves in major cities around the world—was that the quartier was full of funky shops, cutting-edge fashion outlets, groovy cafés, and more than its fair share of excellent restaurants. Living in the midst of it all was consequently pretty easy to take. Homosexuals, in my experience, tend to make excellent neighbors. They are house proud, meaning the place always looks good; their community boasts a disproportionate number of handsome members, relatively speaking; and they know how to have a good time. The boys with whom I shared the Marais were no exception.

If you were to break Parisian arrondissements down according to their respective soundscapes, the eighteenth, with Montmartre, Sacré Coeur, and the Place des Tertres, would be the evocative, mournful whine of that most French of instruments, the piano accordion. The sixteenth, with its bourgeois apartments and ladies-who-lunch, would be the elegant lilt of a symphonic movement. The fourth, with the Marais, where Kylie was queen and Lycra hotpants were de rigueur, would be the persistent throb of techno music.

Having now moved in and spent just over three months in my new apartment, it seemed to me that I was waking up and falling asleep to the rhythmic thud of techno music. And while for some, the prospect of sharing living space with the musical equivalent of a jack-hammer would be hell on earth, to me, it was all part of my new neighborhood’s definite charm, aural proof that my new home was at the throbbing heart of a semisleepless international metropolis. What I found less easy to get used to was the nightly melodrama of love gone wrong, a recurring soap opera invariably played out, at volume, directly beneath my bedroom window. At around two each morning, as the bars were closing and the last of the boys spilled out onto the street, an invisible cue seemed to be given for many of them to strike up a forlorn, guttural chorus of “Mais Jean-Pierre! Je t’aime!” or something to that effect. Screamed at top volume by a spurned lover to the back of his hastily retreating paramour, the plaintive cry would bounce off the narrow walls of the buildings lining the Rue Aubriot and jolt me from my sleep. I never bothered to get out of bed to verify, but I could usually tell by the speed of the footsteps disappearing down the street that despite the declaration of undying love of which he had just been the subject, Jean-Pierre didn’t quite feel the same way.

In honor of the countless hearts that were broken and the number of prematurely conceived visions of domestic bliss that were shattered outside my window each Parisian night, I christened the terracotta statue of the Virgin Mary, perched in an alcove above the corner of the Rue Sainte Croix and the Rue Aubriot, “Saint Jackie, the patron saint of melodrama.” She got her name from a former colleague in the U.K. who was renowned for her propensity toward all things melodramatic. Jackie stood watch over the Rue Sainte Croix, her head thrown back to the heavens and her left arm thrust outward and upward in a sign of genuflection. Her creators had no doubt fashioned her thus to convey a sense of obeisance before the Almighty, but I preferred to think of her in a perpetual state of exasperation.

And while Jackie bore silent witness to the high-camp, daily drama played out on the Rue Sainte Croix, the numerous business establishments that lined its streets ensured that that drama, and the players within it, were suitably well fed, well lubricated, and well turned out. My personal favorite, among the gay-oriented small businesses in my hood, was Le Gay Choc, which was ostensibly a bakery, though from what I could gather, it was more highly valued in the neighborhood for its cruising potential than for any of its actual breadstuffs. On Valentine’s Day you had to get in early if you wanted to nab one of the novelty loaves of bread baked in the shape of a penis—complete, rather disturbingly, with poppyseed-speckled testicles. I was never sure exactly what was going on behind the flour sacks at the back of the shop, but there was no question they baked the best baguette and most mouthwatering tarte au citron in all of Paris.

Then there was the nearby Raidd bar. Beyond its smoked-glass plate windows, boys would stand at the bar and sip beer while impressively muscular men bathed themselves in shower units built into the wall. Around the corner, should you decide you needed a haircut, the enigmatic barbershop of the Marais, Space Hair, was at your service. So called because all of its stylists were perpetually spaced out, it was more nightclub than hair-dressing salon. Clients were offered a gin and tonic upon arrival, and haircuts were offered in any of three distinct styles: gay, very gay, or screaming queen.

Then there were the appropriately named Amnesia bar, the clothing store Boyz Bazaar, and the Sunday-night meat market otherwise known as Café Cox, the name of which always struck me as a master-stroke of marketing understatement. These establishments were all as much a part of the neighborhood as the designer tea shop opposite my apartment, the bakery owned by a cheery Moroccan family down the street, and the unemployment office two doors up.

I SOON DISCOVERED that the sidewalk outside my door was highly valued preening real estate: impeccably groomed young men paraded up and down it at all hours of the day and night. Less good-looking and decidedly older men would occasionally drive slowly down the street, stopping at intervals and giving hopeful, yearning looks at their young, elusive quarry.

I had begun to cultivate a few friends at work and was slowly building a semirespectable social life. Male friends would drop in to visit me in the Marais and remark at how many men had propositioned them or commented upon their arse as they walked down the street. But for me there was nothing. Zippo. Nada. Not that I wanted to be hit on by another man—I just didn’t want to be left out. I rationalized (as men are wont to do when it comes to questions of self-confidence) that as a local—a bona-fide, card-carrying member of the quartier—I had special status and had thus been earmarked by the boys to be left alone. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to make unseemly advances in my direction, but by restraining themselves they were respecting an unwritten neighborhood code.

As well groomed as my gay neighbors were, the beauty of my new quartier went much deeper than the multiple layers of fake tan on parade each night. Though the Marais was overtly gay in flavor, you didn’t have to scratch too deep below the surface to discover that people from all walks of life also called the place home. Struggling artists mixed with well-known film actors and a smattering of media types. Young professionals had moved in and transformed pokey old apartments into architectural visions. Old-age pensioners, who had lived in the area since it was a tradesman’s ghetto, still plied the streets, ensuring that nothing changed too fast and that the neighborhood retained its glorious old-world charm.

In their flashy way the gay community had made the most obvious contribution to the look and feel of the arrondissement, but they were closely followed in the neighborhood-influence stakes by the Jewish community, whose wholesale assumption of the Rue des Rosiers had created a mini-Zion in the heart of the French capital. This wonderfully colorful cultural influence in my newly adopted patch of Paris included the amusing spectacle each Sunday of what appeared to be every Jewish teenager in the greater Paris metropolitan area “hanging” on the Rue des Rosiers. Girls on one side of the street, boys on the other. They never appeared to do anything other than jostle and point and text and pout at one another—in that way teenagers do. The boys were especially entertaining. Dressed to a person in tight white long-sleeved tops, white Diesel shoes, and distressed Energie denim, the very sight of them would have warmed the hearts of hair-product manufacturers everywhere. It was a veritable Festival of Hair Gel. I worried that should a naked flame get too close to any of the boys’ carefully coiffed crowns, the entire street would go up in a spectacular fireball.

Having Jewish neighbors also meant enjoying a ready supply of delicious Middle Eastern cuisine. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the falafel roll with pan-fried eggplant from L’As du Falafel, it is doubtful that I would have regularly encountered at least three of the five basic food groups during my first few months in Paris.

Not being of the home-cooking persuasion, I started to rely heavily on the fast-food wares of my friendly neighborhood small businesses. When it got to the point that I could walk into the extremely down-at-heel yet always delicious Minh Chau Vietnamese restaurant on the Rue de la Verrerie, to be greeted warmly by the old grandma owner and asked, “Would you like your usual?” I knew I was being accepted as a local.

Also helping me to make the transformation from blow-in to local was a trio of café-bars at the end of my street, whose mortgages I would help to pay off with my faithful custom in the years to come. All owned by the enigmatic Xavier—the Marais café scene’s very own version of the Godfather—and packed to their heaving rafters with a cool collection of beautiful people, L’Etoile Manquante, Les Philosophes, and Au Petit Fer à Cheval sat side by side on the Rue Vieille du Temple. Working on the Monopoly-board theory of buy-up-a-block-and-stack-it-with-small-businesses, Xavier had become the Don of Coffee in Paris’s hippest arrondissement. By designing each of his café-bars in a style that played on the Marais’s rich tradition yet still appealed to the city’s style set—and by employing only dark-haired young men and insisting that they dress in the traditional French waiter garb of black apron over white shirt—Xavier had created a one-man French café empire.

As I sat one evening sipping a beer alone on the tiny terrace of the Petit Fer à Cheval, watching the nightly parade of boys, Jews, and beautiful people, it occurred to me that the experience would be all the more enjoyable if I had someone to share it with. Paris was doubtless an exciting city. I had rather fortunately landed in the heaving heart of it. But without friends to share it with, the novelty and excitement of being a stranger in a new city were destined to prove short-lived.

It was time, I decided, to launch Operation Find Some Friends.