Chapter 8

Summer of Love

IT HAD BEEN FIVE MONTHS since I had arrived in France. Summer was now in full swing, and in that way typical of countries that actually experience four distinct seasons (unlike my own, where there are only two: hot and cold), the city of Paris was coming out of its shell. Off came the scarves and overcoats beloved of all Parisians whenever the mercury dipped below 68 degrees Fahrenheit. Down went the guard they had spent all winter honing. And out the door flew that particular brand of Gallic indifference so often confused with arrogance.

For us new arrivals, it was a magical time to be in Paris. It was a summer of love, and no corner of the city was safe from our rapacious appetite for discovery. It was a time where no connection to the host of a house party was too tenuous. No bar, club, or restaurant was in a corner of the city too far-flung for us to sample. And no French person sitting in a bar was safe from our enforced (and usually drunken) company. We were strangers in a new city and high on the feeling of liberation that our anonymity afforded. We were alive with a sense of the possible and infused with the enthusiasm of the truly uninhibited.

We would routinely leave a bar with our cell phones full of new telephone numbers, having foisted ourselves upon anyone foolish enough to sit still for more than a minute. Each new acquaintance was at best a possible close friend and at worst a possible new entrée into la vie parisienne. No invitation, no matter how sketchy, was rebuffed. Every soirée was attended, and every avenue was explored in our attempts—whether joint or individual—to get under the city’s skin. We had all seen the postcards and, on previous trips, had checked off all the boxes on the Paris tourist to-do list. We were none of us in the City of Light to spend hours in front of Monet’s water lilies. What we wanted was a front-row seat at the seedy sideshow of underground Paris, and we found no shortage of willing local guides to aid us in our quest. Mild-mannered business executives by day, we would shed our corporate skin at night and follow our newfound friends to warehouse parties in outer suburbs of Paris where even taxi drivers refused to go.

After a few months of concerted bar-hopping and handing out our phone numbers to anyone who would take them, we found we had been unwittingly added to the e-mail list of a too-cool-for-school events company responsible for organizing legendary underground parties in a series of mystery Paris locations. Calling themselves Les Templiers, in a nod to the Knights Templar (the Christian military order made famous in The Da Vinci Code and that, legend has it, still operates secretly within French society), the events company had forged a reputation for hosting enormous, invitation-only, fancy-dress bashes all over the city. You would never know the location of the party until the last minute—you’d receive a furtive e-mail hours before it was due to begin. Each fiesta had a different theme. Each was packed to its heaving rafters with young, bright-eyed Frenchies, and each was sustained by a steady flow of free alcohol provided by one drinks company or another keen to hawk its wares to what it believed was a trendsetting demographic.

One Soirée Templiers had a futuristic theme, requiring us to dress all in white and assemble at a recently decommissioned electrical power station on the outskirts of Paris. Inside the cavernous power station, a roster of well-known international DJs whipped the crowd into a dancing frenzy, while trampolinists bounced in one corner and trapeze artists swung overhead. A bar made entirely of carved ice dispensed industrial quantities of a new designer beer, while across the way, in what once had served as the power station control room, an experimental electronica band turned the tiny space into a seething mosh pit.

At another Templier shindig James, Fiona, and I were summoned to a disused lime quarry thirty miles north of the city. The theme was graveyard chic, requiring everyone to dress as the living dead. We knew we were getting close to our destination as, with each turn off the highway, the concentration of cars packed with Morticias became more noticeable. Arriving at the quarry, we parked the car and, in full costume, joined the black-clad throng disappearing into the side of a hill to lose themselves in the labyrinth of subterranean dance floors, bars, and makeshift boudoirs. Turn a corner in one dimly lit tunnel, and you stumbled upon a space filled with beds, chaises longues, and appropriately reclining people. Take another passageway deeper into the maze, and you stepped into a vast cavern, crammed with masked, fancy-dressed French people dancing before a DJ with uncharacteristic abandon.

It was all good clean fun and only further aided our infiltration into the ranks of Paris’s so-called bobos—the term coined for the city’s army of part-time, halfhearted counterculturalists, the bohemian-bourgeoisie. It also made a mockery of the reputation the French have for being cold, aloof, and arrogant. Every local we met seemed genuinely excited at the prospect of showing off their city and sharing their culture with a ragtag bunch of foreigners.

But Parisian life wasn’t all louche underground parties and post-midnight debauchery. Flush with the excitement of actually living in Paris and inclined to pinch ourselves each time we crossed the Pont des Arts, caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower, or rounded a corner to fall upon yet another spectacular Parisian vista, we wasted no time milking every moment of daylight too. Lazy Sundays were spent lying in the Parc Floral in the Bois de Vincennes, listening to free jazz concerts and sleeping off hangovers. The long stretch of lawn running from Les Invalides to Pont Alexandre III became the venue for regular Saturday afternoons of amateur soccer, followed by beers in a nearby sunny outdoor café. The tennis courts at the Jardin du Luxembourg bore regular witness to our spectacular collective lack of sporting prowess. But what we lacked in style, we more than made up for in enthusiasm.

During the week we spent most of our hours at work on e-mail, dissecting the night before and making plans for the evening ahead. If we were feeling particularly energetic and the evening was especially balmy, we would rendezvous on Rollerblades and tear through the city’s largely deserted streets. Spectacular sunsets would cast a pink hue over the entire city, giving the limestone facades of Haussmann’s architectural handiwork a soft-focus, ethereal quality as we skated through the streets below.

Rollerblading down the middle of the Rue de Rivoli at midnight, toward the Place de la Concorde and around the huge, brightly lit Ferris wheel installed there for the Millennium celebrations would always involve making a brief stop on the Pont de la Concorde, to stare up the Seine toward the Eiffel Tower. Blading homeward through the empty, softly lit courtyard of the Louvre and around the base of the glass pyramid—which, lit from below, was a scintillating shard of glass and light—we would sit for a while in silence and breathe it all in. Staring intently at the scene before us, we would attempt to commit to memory every shadow, every play of light, every subtly illuminated feature of the Louvre’s baroque exterior. If, heaven forbid, we were sent from the city to never spend another hour in Paris in our lives, we wanted to make sure these moments were locked in the memory bank, to stay with us forever.

On some nights after work we would assemble in the Jardin des Tuileries for evenings of rosé-sipping or make our way up to the Parc de la Villette where, on a vast stretch of grass (reclaimed parkland from what was once a large industrial site), we would put out blankets, lie back, and enjoy an evening of open-air cinema. It was a summer marked by twilight picnics on the Pont des Arts, eating cheese, drinking red wine, and watching the sun set behind the Grand Palais to the sound of bongo drums and amateur strummed guitar. It was a summer, moreover, during which the human capacity for sleep deprivation was severely tested.

Most weeknights would end with James, Eric, and me retreating to Eric’s eighth-floor apartment on the Rue Saint Martin, just next to the Pompidou Center. Not content to simply take in the spectacular view from his living room—across the rooftops of Paris to the Eiffel Tower and beyond—we would arm ourselves with a bottle of whiskey, climb through the manhole in his hallway ceiling, clamber over a greasy elevator shaft, and emerge onto the roof, so that only the stars were above us. With the cold gray lead of a Paris rooftop under our bums, we would sit and stare out over the city, smoke whatever we had managed to score on the Pont des Arts, sip our whiskeys, and put the world to rights.

Weekends were different only inasmuch as the venues we patronized were busier and the sleep-ins the next morning more sustained. An average Saturday night might begin with a quick meal in the tiny brasserie behind our favorite bar, Au Petit Fer à Cheval, followed by a series of beers in quick succession at nearby Chez Richard. Then it was on to Favela Chic, a heaving little sweatbox of a nightclub near the Place de la République. Brazilian-themed, and keeping its eclectic clientele very well lubricated with the most potent caipirinha in all of Paris, Favela nightly transformed from a noisy restaurant to a salsa-dancing sauna.

Thanks to a door policy that allowed at least twice as many people into the establishment as were legally permitted, the dance floor was invariably so packed you often found yourself grinding pelvises with a complete stranger. Thanks to low ceilings and completely inadequate ventilation systems, shirts became a sweaty second skin and hair was plastered to foreheads within minutes of hitting the dance floor. It was so steamy, the bar staff would regularly spray the writhing dance floor masses with a shower of ice water. The combination of highly potent rum cocktails, tightly pressed bodies, and lack of oxygen made for an intoxicating couple of hours—literally and figuratively.

Stumbling out onto the street at two a.m., the still summer air caressing our sweat-soaked limbs, we would troop en masse back to the Marais and install ourselves at the Low Rider Café on the Rue de Rivoli. This twenty-four-hour eatery, which mercifully served croque-monsieurs and frites until six a.m., was a mustering point for the flotsam and jetsam of the Paris night. Drag queens from nearby Marais gay bars shared the early-morning space with insomniac poets, artists, and actors who had emerged from surrounding garrets. Dodgy-looking characters stood alone at the bar, shirt collars turned up over artfully unshaven jowls. “I was riding low last night” was a phrase that entered the Posse vernacular, referencing our late-night eatery of choice, and it became the standard response to any inquiry the following day as to why we were looking so rough.

All of this activity was only repeated, and with greater intensity, when visitors were in town—which had started to become pretty much constantly. Feeling obliged to show them a good time, and determined to ensure they left thinking I had the swingiest lifestyle since the Great Gatsby and that my apartment, now dubbed the Love Pad, was the Parisian incarnation of Studio 54, I would take them out on marathon evenings of eating, drinking, and rabble-rousing.

 

THE ONLY TWO THINGS more remarkable than my stamina to endure these back-to-back all-night sessions—which stretched long beyond the first summer and easily into the ensuing autumn, winter, and spring—was the apparent resilience of my liver to withstand them and the sustained patience of my employer to put up with them.

“Been out Corbetting again, have we?” would be the daily inquiry of me from one superior or another as I dragged my sorry arse into the office each morning. The fact that my surname had become a verb to describe drunken behavior of a most unbecoming sort should probably have given me cause for concern, but I was too busy dealing with a perma-hangover and marveling that instead of discouraging my behavior, my immediate superiors seemed to find it amusing—refreshing even. To them I was just a young man in Paris having a whale of a time. Variously married, most with adult children, they seemed to not only indulge my behavior but actively to encourage it, as if to live it vicariously (and olfactorily, given what must have been a permanent reek of alcohol) conferred a kind of vitality.

I spent most mornings in my office nursing a tepid espresso from the coffee machine and watching imported Berocca tablets dissolve in plastic cups of water from the communal drinking fountain. On the odd occasion that I was called in to a meeting or expected to make a presentation, I would do so channeling all the sobriety I could muster, before retreating once more to my office to pass out.

After a while I came to recognize that the midafternoon pledge I would regularly make to myself to “never get that drunk again” was essentially hollow. Besides, it wasn’t my fault that my life had morphed into an ambling series of hedonistic escapades. It was the fault of that old temptress Paris, the lurid corruptor of many a good man before me. And what had I come to Paris for anyway other than to lose myself momentarily in its famed bohemian nether regions?

Living a bachelor’s life, and as the master of my own orange-walled domain, I had no one to answer to and no one to disapprove of my gleeful skip down the path to certain rack and ruin.