Chapter 22

Get Your Motor Running

IT WAS THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHER Jean-Paul Sartre who once famously opined that “hell is other people.”

You don’t have to live long in Paris to see where he was coming from. Sartre must have coined this enigmatic phrase almost immediately after taking a ride on the Paris Métro during peak hours in summer. I have nothing personal against the city’s extremely efficient public transportation system. It is reliable, practical, and (but for a semipermanent stench of urine) relatively clean. The infrastructure itself is fine. It’s the people who use it—and their collective aversion to showers or deodorant during Paris’s steamy summer months—that finally pushed me onto the seat of a motor scooter.

The epiphany came one morning as I boarded my train for work on the populous line one of the Paris Métro. Freshly returned from the Cannes Film Festival, and with the whiff of the sea air still in my nostrils, I was almost bowled over by the pungent aroma of unwashed armpits. Summer was almost upon the city, and when it arrived, I knew from experience it would bring with it the Métro commuters’ aversion to deodorant. The short train ride from the Hôtel de Ville to the Champs Elysées was enough to make up my mind. I resolved then and there not to spend another summer in the company of criminally neglected body odor. Calling the office from my cell phone, I told them I would be late for work. I emerged from the Métro at L’Etoile, in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, gasping for fresh air. It was nine in the morning, but already the large roundabout surrounding the monument was a furious mass of surging traffic. Like a colony of angry ants, innumerable cars, trucks, buses, and scooters crisscrossed, cut off, cut in, and otherwise forced their way in a frantic, clumsy, counterclockwise dance around the famous arch. The figure of La Marianne, the warrior-woman of France carved into the facade of one of the arch’s supports, looked down on the scene with an expression of wide-eyed horror. She knew, from years spent witnessing it firsthand, what I was about to discover: French drivers are certifiably mad.

But now, blissfully ignorant of the pact I was about to sign with the driving devil, I marched into the first of the row of scooter shops that line Avenue de la Grande Armée and started perusing. It’s a curious thing about Paris retail outlets: purveyors of the same product all tend to congregate in the same street. If you want a computer, go to Avenue Daumesnil in the twelfth arrondissement, where you will find every computer store in Paris. If you need a guitar, Rue Victor Massé in the ninth is where you’ll find all the music stores. If it’s a water heater you need, every one of those shops is crowded along Boulevard Richard Lenoir. I’ve never understood the logic behind this situation. Do they all share the same supplier, who has cleverly convinced them to stick together to simplify his delivery schedule? Is it a throwback to the days of blacksmiths and artisans, when guilds were formed and alliances between like-minded professionals forged? Or is it simply another example of the remarkable lack of nous the French display when it comes to entrepreneurship and competition? While it certainly made life easy for the consumer—having all of the competition crammed into the same street for easy comparison—it makes no economic sense whatsoever. But then, little in France does.

As I waltzed into the scooter shop, I clapped eyes on the bike I knew I would make mine. She was black, she was sleek, and she had fancy alloy trim and a distinctly retro design. It was love at first sight. She was an Aprilia Mojito—and she was as good as sold. When it comes to significant purchases like this one, I have always subscribed to the personal motto “Style over substance.” So as the salesman enumerated the many mechanical benefits of my new steed, I politely feigned comprehension. He talked of carburetors and brake fluid, mentioned something about gasoline consumption, and said something crucial about the oil levels that I absolutely had to remember. I nodded gravely and gave the front wheel a little kick for good measure, just to complete the fraud. Even if he hadn’t been speaking rapid-fire French and using vocabulary that even in English I don’t fully understand, I still wouldn’t have taken in a word. I was busy with a daydream that had me flying down the Champs Elysées on my Mojito, wind tousling my golden locks, Gitane hanging in a devil-may-care fashion from my bottom lip, stopping traffic with my derring-do and causing beautiful French maidens to swoon.

Jolted out of my reverie when the earnest grease monkey demonstrated the kick-start feature, I refocused momentarily to assure him that I knew exactly what I was doing, that he need not worry, and that there was no way I would forget whatever that crucial thing was with the oil levels.

I handed him a check, and he handed me the keys.

Now, I had never before ridden a motor scooter, nor any vehicle from the motorcycle family for that matter. Nor was I in possession of a motorbike license. But neither fact seemed to be an issue. He handed me a helmet and wheeled my new toy out onto the busy street. Suddenly I began to wonder about the wisdom of my impulsive decision. Traffic was surging down the Avenue de la Grande Armée toward La Défense at an alarming speed.

Jolting away from the curb and merging gingerly with the manic morning traffic, I felt my heart rate leap as the utter vulnerability of my situation suddenly became apparent. As it dawned on me that I was fast approaching the angry melee at the base of the Arc de Triomphe, I began to panic.

Some people who have lived their entire lives in Paris routinely take elaborate detours to avoid the traffic black hole that is L’Etoile. But here I was, two minutes into scooter ownership, about to be sucked into the massive roundabout. I felt like a canoeist being drawn irrevocably toward the lip of a massive waterfall, soon to disappear without a trace. The mob of cars that engulfed me on either side had created a momentum I was powerless to resist. And so, with a deep breath, a hurried prayer to a long-neglected God, and thirty years’ worth of life experiences flashing before me, I entered the fray and hoped for the best.

Cars flew at me from every direction. The only rule that seemed to apply was that of survival of the most aggressive. Brakes were squealing, engines revving, horns blaring, and tempers flaring. I fixed my gaze on Avenue Marceau and dared not look back, reasoning that what I couldn’t see wouldn’t hurt me. I hurtled in a blind panic toward the relative calm of one of the huge roundabout’s many axes. Motion, and the fluid continuation of it at all times, was, I would soon learn, the scooter rider’s best ally. Acceleration and maneuverability were the only weapons you had in your on-road armory—and all that stood between you and daily brushes with certain death. If you didn’t go hard, mastering just the right balance of fearlessness, aggression, and prudence, you were on a fast track to splatsville. It was a lesson I learned in those brief, horrifying twenty seconds on L’Etoile and one that I was to carefully heed thereafter.

Several weeks into my relationship with Mojito, I had gotten used to blending seamlessly into the manic morass that is Paris traffic—and I had grown to love my newfound sense of freedom. Not only had I been permanently liberated from the Métro and its stench, but every corner of Paris was now only a short, occasionally hair-raising, but always-exhilarating bike ride away. Pockets of the city that I never knew existed revealed themselves to me. The location of one part of town relative to another—which had hitherto been confused by a modular Métro map—fell together like pieces of a jigsaw.

My new vantage point transformed familiar perspectives of well-known Parisian panoramas. Driving by the Eiffel Tower at night, I would crane my head backward to catch sight of the floodlit, ornate spiderweb of crisscrossing steel. Sailing along the quai past the Musée d’Orsay, through the cypress trees I would glimpse staccato flashes of its bulbous, backlit, oversize clock faces.

And as I burst out of the underground tunnel next to the Seine, just in front of the Louvre, on a midnight midsummer ride, the view would never fail to take my breath away. The pepper-pot turrets of the floodlit Conciergerie reflected on the glassy surface of the river. The arches of Pont Neuf perfectly framing the illuminated spans of a succession of bridges beyond it, all of them glowing golden yellow. The white light of elaborate lampposts refracted through glass and skimmed across the river’s skin. The ghostly white towers of Notre Dame standing silent sentinel. On nights like these the Seine seemed not to move at all, as if awestruck by the beauty it was passing. The warm, still air of the hot Parisian day just gone caressed my naked arms. The road, by virtue of the hour, was deserted. It felt like this remarkable city belonged exclusively to me. And it was good.

Less good were the winter months, when the purchase of a goose-down, superstrength, waterproof puffer jacket was the only thing that prevented me from freezing to death. Also a little troubling was my growing tendency to leave the smallest possible margin of time between important appointments and actually leaving the house. Because the scooter made every corner of the city accessible in under ten thrill-packed minutes, I found I left my departure to the absolute last minute, ensuring a mad scramble to make any rendezvous. At times like these, no surface was safe. Sidewalks, bike paths, bus lanes, alleys, one-ways, squares, and even public parks were driven over, through, or across with willful abandon. If it was flat and it happened to be in a straight line between me and my destination, it was fair game.

I soon became a card-carrying member of the pesky scooter brigade. The curse of all car-driving Parisians, scooter drivers are morally obliged to drive with no respect whatsoever for road rules or traffic signals. Like one among a noisy swarm of locusts, I would swoop altogether too fast into a traffic jam, then squirm my way past stationary cars to the front. Near-misses and sideswipes were a daily occurrence. No side-view mirror was safe as long as I was on the road, and bumpers would quake in fear as I approached.

And woe betide any car driver who didn’t yield to my aggressive antics. A well-rehearsed stream of broad-accented Aussie invective would be rained upon them, and occasionally a well-aimed boot would come thudding into their passenger door. I learned quickly to deal with Frenchies on the road as I had learned to deal with them in person. Use aggression as a default position, go in hard with borderline hysteria as an opening gambit, and be prepared to climb down as and when the occasion required. When the appropriate words of French abuse failed me (as they often did), I would let rip with a stream of choice English obscenities. I figured what they didn’t pick up in actual meaning, they would surely divine from the tone. No doubt the police had a permanent arrest warrant out for a blond-haired scooter rider, terrorizing Parisian roads with aggressive driving tactics and maniacal streams of Aussie abuse.

It didn’t take long for scooter fever to grip the other guys in the Paris Posse. Jules, true to his French roots, had long ago been a scooter convert and had encouraged me to buy mine. Will was the next to fall under the Vespa spell, opting for a stylish retro model. In keeping with his commitment to form over function, his cream and alloy affair looked beautiful but kept breaking down. Then finally James succumbed, purchasing an Aprilia 125, which I disdainfully referred to as “the postman’s bike.” And that was the thing with scooters. Much as competing alpha males in other parts of the world try to outdo one another with the rims or spoilers on their Monaros, Thunderbirds, or Ford Escorts, in Paris, respect between males was afforded according to how cool one’s Vespa was. Engine size (perhaps unsurprisingly) was crucial. Anything less than 125cc was considered a girl’s bike. Color was also important. To step outside the safety of black, gray, or blue was a brave and potentially dangerous move, raising questions about one’s manliness. Windshields were for losers, and specially fitted scooter blankets, while extremely practical—especially in the dead of winter—were very definitely for sissies only.

More than anything else, scooter ownership afforded a certain street cred. And it always went down a storm with the ladies. Rolling up to a rendezvous with a maiden, chucking her a helmet, and inviting her to climb aboard for a thrill-packed ride through the streets of Paris was always a surefire way to start a date. As well as giving a girl a bit of a buzz, causing her to cling to my back in fear and exhilaration, taking a female pillion passenger was a great way to tell whether or not a girl fancied me. If she rode sitting upright and clinging to the railings under the seat, chances were it was going to be a dead-end date. If, on the contrary, she wrapped her arms around my waist and pressed herself into my back, there was no telling where, how, or at whose apartment the evening would end.

My only regret about welcoming Mojito into my Paris life was that I hadn’t done it earlier. Atop my trusty steed, I had the city at my feet. She was beautiful, reliable, and gutsy. But as I was soon to discover, enthusiasm for my two-wheeled friend was far from universal.