IT WAS STILL possible to live on five dollars a day when I was a student in Paris, but only if you took your main meal every day at the university restaurant. Five dollars worked out to roughly twenty-five francs back in 1972, ten of which went to pay for my vest-pocket room in a charming pension right around the corner from the Duroc Métro station, where the boulevard des Invalides discreetly disappeared into the boulevard Montparnasse. Other friends lived in cheaper lodgings in crummy neighborhoods on the outskirts of Paris, but I had already spent my childhood in crummy lodgings back home in Philadelphia and saw no reason to repeat that experience here. Living in such a central location meant that I rarely had to waste money on public transportation, as I could easily walk home from the Comédie-Française or the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées or the Cinémathèque or the Latin Quarter at any hour of the day or night, while other friends had to watch the clock and make sure they grabbed the last Métro before the subway system closed down, around one in the morning. Otherwise, they’d be walking forever.
The remainder of my budget was disbursed in three equal parts: five francs a day were set aside for alcohol and tobacco; five francs were earmarked for entertainment; and the remaining five francs paid for food. For thirty-five francs a week, thanks to dirt cheap student ticket prices, I could go to the opera, attend two or three piano recitals, and take in a couple of plays. Five francs a day would also cover a baguette, a couple of oranges and bananas, the occasional liter of milk, and a once-a-day trip to the student restaurant. By economizing—say, by skipping a Maurizio Pollini or Alexandre LaGoya concert or a Genet play at the Odéon—I could slip in a weekly dinner at the Alliance française on the boulevard Raspail, where the food was both plentiful and good. This would set me back five francs, but if I cut my sliver of camembert into sufficiently tiny portions and matched each tranche with a massive slice of bread, I could consume enough to go without eating the entire next day. A meal at the student restaurant, by contrast, cost just one franc sixty centimes, roughly thirty cents. But even at that rate, it was overpriced.
There was a theory bandied about at the time that the French government had never forgiven students for bringing the nation to the brink of civil war four years earlier and that the food served in the university restaurants was designed along explicitly punitive lines. Soggy, revolting eggs, noodles that seemed to be vaguely animate, bread with the texture of macadam, and an assortment of grotesque entrées that seemed to have been lifted from the Jean Valjean Cookbook were the standard nightly fare concocted by the despised Pompidou administration. It was awful food, demoralizing food, and the fact that it was food served in a country renowned for its cuisine was an irony that was not lost on us. But it kept us alive, so we ate it.
Not all of my friends dined in the student restaurants. Some shared flats with friends and had kitchens of their own. Some lived with families as au pairs or tutors. And some simply earmarked a larger portion of their daily budget for food and ate in inexpensive restaurants. But those of us who had little money, or who wanted to stockpile as much cash as possible for concerts, plays, books, and alcohol, always ate in the student restaurants.
In Paris, I had many friends, some of whom remained close friends for the next forty years. Others I never saw again once my Wanderjahr was over. But I always tried to keep my disparate groups of friends segregated from one another, as their passions did not dovetail and I am sure some of them would have hated others. One group consisted of drinkers and carousers. A second group was made up of intellectuals, including a brilliant young composer who would later found the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble and a German American in an impudent fedora who was always devising Ten Best lists but could never complete the one ranking the great composers because after according the obvious titans—Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Verdi, and Wagner—the top slots, he could never decide which of the remaining colossi—Schubert, Liszt, Chopin, Stravinsky, Berlioz, Schumann, Haydn, Debussy, Mahler—most deserved the remaining positions. So the next day, he would switch to novelists. Or painters. But the result was always the same. Where did you put Botticelli? How could you leave out George Eliot?
A third group consisted of American medical students I met at the reviled student restaurant that bordered the jardins du Luxembourg. They would go to school for a year, flunk out, and come back the next year to do their first year all over again, once they had learned a bit more French. Some of them had already done the same thing in Cairo or Guadalajara. The French didn’t mind them coming back again and again, as long as the students themselves didn’t mind getting flunked. By doing each year twice, these desperate, indomitable young men hoped to eventually be admitted to some third-tier American medical school. They were splendid fellows, but I am not sure how many of them ever became doctors.
A fourth group consisted of people who had roughly the same eyeglass prescription as me. Shortly after I arrived in Paris, I set out for Pigalle with three Canadian friends who also lived in the charming little boardinghouse on the rue Mayet. Right down the street from the funiculaire that carries overweight tourists up to Sacré-Coeur, we were set upon by a group of Algerian revelers while exiting a restaurant. No harm was done, though a fair few punches were exchanged, but I lost my eyeglasses and my passport during the melee. The passport resurfaced a few days later, thanks to a Good Samaritan who dropped it off at the American Embassy, but the eyeglasses were gone forever. When I found out that replacing them would set me back several hundred francs—about two weeks’ living expenses—I decided to do without them until I returned to the States a year later.
This worked out well enough at concerts and movies, where I could sit close to the screen, but up in the rafters of the Comédie-Française, which I would visit perhaps twice a week to take in L’avare or Le médecin malgré lui or Oedipus rex, it was hard for me to make out the actors’ facial expressions at such a great distance. And so I got into the habit of trying on complete strangers’ glasses whenever my paths crossed those of the obviously bespectacled. Mostly, they were young women. Initially, when I explained my predicament and asked if I could try on their glasses, they might have thought this was some sort of ingenious come-on, but they soon learned that I was quite sincere, as I would usually stop conversing with them as soon as I had established that our prescriptions did not match. This was true even if they were phenomenally cute. My interest in them was purely ophthalmological.
The girl whose prescription most closely matched mine was a plump, vivacious girl from Finland named Una. We met at the Alliance française, where I first bumped into so many of my friends, because Beck’s beer cost just one franc forty, and shortly thereafter she agreed to lend me her eyeglasses on nights she herself would not be needing them. We became friends of a sort—I once visited her at the house where she worked as an au pair in Versailles, where she made me lunch and rowed me around the Grande Jatte—but my interest in her was never romantic. I was only in it for the eyeglasses.
The principal members of my carousing group were an Australian surfer who could hold his liquor and a breathtakingly handsome young boy from Boston who could not. I became friends with Mick, my friend from Sidney, after I met his French girlfriend, Claudine, in a Monoprix on the rue de Rennes. There, after determining that I was American, she informed me that her boyfriend—who spoke little French—did not actually like French people and would be very happy to meet an American. We soon became the best of friends. Lurking at the periphery of that group was a feisty bohemian type from California named Annie and a girl from Seattle named Terry, who had a friend named Cammy from Long Island, who talked me into accompanying her to Morocco, where she could buy colorful Goulimine beads to be sold in America to raise enough money to bring a French girl named Josiane to the States. On the way back from Morocco, while we were crossing a bridge outside Pamplona, a white horse suddenly appeared on the far side of the river. It seemed terribly symbolic, though I never figured out of what. But I think about that horse every day, and when I do, I think of my African adventure with Cammy. Finally, there was a lanky sophisticate from Saint Louis who was destined from birth to desert the Show Me State and move to New York City. When I visited Jay in Saint Louis two years later, his house was filled to overflowing with New Yorkers, the magazine that has long served as an intellectual and psychological lifeline to so many sophisticated provincials who dream of a magically urbane life in the Big City, yet are presently stranded in the prosaic hinterland. The whole time I knew Jay I understood that it would be impossible for him to live in Saint Louis after spending a year in Paris. Impossible.
At the edge of that group was Rob, the aforementioned Adonis, whose parents were college professors and who had more money than the rest of us combined. One of his forbears had built the Panama Canal. Mine had not. Rob drank more, and more often, and with more determination and abandon, than anyone I ever met. And he didn’t mind spreading his money around. Rob and I would regularly find our way into weird subterranean nightclubs, where we would have the time of our lives and get completely blasted, and then never be able to find our way back to them again. Rob insisted that we once met Herbie Hancock fooling around on the piano in one of these gin mills, but I have no recollection of this event. We would get so drunk that I started keeping a notebook in my trench coat pocket in which I would ask our co-revelers to write down anything dramatic that had happened to us during the night that they felt we really ought to know about. Also, any relevant phone numbers.
One Thursday afternoon, after getting thrown out of his flat for excessive imbibing, Rob checked his bags into the Hôtel Parnasse, around the corner from my boardinghouse, then disappeared for the weekend. None of us knew where he had gone. That Sunday night I spotted him outside our favorite watering hole in the Latin Quarter. He was standing atop a dinky little Deux Chevaux, blind drunk, flailing his hands, madly inveighing against the myriad injustices of modern life. A meat wagon filled with cops drove up, slowed down, and pulled up alongside. A mutton-faced cop stuck his head out the window and told him to cease and desist and get the fuck down. The cop had a submachine gun in his lap, so Rob complied with the request. Rob, I soon discovered, had flown home to Boston for the weekend to shake down his parents for some more cash.
Such an escapade was an unforgivable transgression against the unspoken rules of the Wanderjahr, where our only contact with our native lands while we were away in France was supposed to be postcards or letters and maybe a phone call if someone was dying. Going home during the year away from home violated the very spirit of the enterprise. The Wanderjahr was supposed to be time out of time, the period when all ties with our homelands were sundered. The rest of us understood this, but Rob did not. It was perhaps why Una and the others never had much time for him. The rest of us had to fend for ourselves. The rest of us had to make ends meet. The rest of us had to eat in student restaurants.
I loved each and every one of these people, even though none of the non-Finns had the same prescription as me. Inside our group, affections flourished but bore no fruit. Jay had a crush on Annie, Annie had a crush on Rob, Terry was quite taken by Jay, and I was altogether smitten by Terry. Rob had no more than a passing interest in any of them, and Mick and Claudine had each other. Nothing ever came of our flirtations because we all had crushes on the wrong person. I also had a French girlfriend and a Czech girlfriend and a Japanese girlfriend, all of whom I met in a little storefront around the corner from the Alliance française where foreign students could practice their French with natives, including a diplomat who had once served in Yemen. The little shop was operated by the Catholic Church. I never found out why, as religion was rarely mentioned.
None of these liaisons lasted long. The women were taking me off the lot for a trial spin around the block, and I was doing the same with them. It was like going out with a cracker or a redhead or a Mennonite just to say you had done it. This was the only reason I went to Morocco: to get the statutory visit to the third world out of the way early in life so I wouldn’t have to do it again. I did have a very nice day at the Louvre with the statuesque Czech, who was a few years older than me, and asked if she would like to do it again. But then I met her husband, not a Louvre-going type at all. And that was the end of that.
Rob and Mick and I would regularly convene at a dive on the rue Saint-Jacques called Qui Êtes-Vous, Polly Maggoo? Often, some of the others would join us. The bar was a Lilliputian, malodorous hole-in-the-wall jam-packed with hundreds of young people who were more than happy to pay twice the going rate for a beer in Paris merely to be jam-packed into a tiny sliver of a room jam-packed with young people who were also willing to pay twice the going rate for a beer in Paris just to be in that room. The youthful clientele was supplemented by several mysterious adults, including a North Carolina war vet named Cat, who had reputedly been involved in black ops in Vietnam in the early sixties, and a suspiciously unworldly “sea captain” who had perhaps sailed one or two seas, but certainly not all seven of them. There was also a fierce Dutch woman with a wandering eye who is the only person I ever met who told me that she disliked me purely because I was American. None of these people were especially interesting, yet we went to Polly Maggoo’s three or four nights a week and always ended up spending time with them. To this day I have no idea why. It was like fulfilling a lifelong dream that you have never actually had.
One night I turned up at Polly Maggoo’s after seeing the cadaverous Arthur Rubenstein play Chopin at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring had caused a riot sixty years earlier. That night I met a thirtyish Peruvian with a punched-in face who looked like the last Incan night watchman. He worked as a chef in the student restaurant system, a job he did not like. He had been around the block a time or two and seen a few things. I had not.
“If you are in China and you eat in a Chinese restaurant and you order duck, you will get dog,” he told me. People were always telling me things like that. They found me callow, untested, a babe in the woods, a tabula rasa. It may have been because I was from Philadelphia. “If you order chicken, you will get cat. If you order beef, you will get rat.”
“What will you get if you order duck in a Peruvian restaurant?” I asked.
He did not answer.
Later that night I advanced my theory that the fare in student restaurants was deliberately intended to keep students undernourished and ill and despondent so that they could no longer raise the red flag of insurrection.
“Only some restaurants,” he informed me. “The students at the law school and the medical school are always holding demonstrations, so the food in those restaurants is terrible. But the language students and the art students never protest anything. If you go to their restaurants, the meals will be outstanding.”
The next week he gave me a mimeographed copy of the menus from several student restaurants. The restaurant up the street from the Luxembourg Gardens was serving the same old pig swill. But the language school over on the Right Bank near the Petit Palais was offering chicken and rice and fresh bread and even some kind of rudimentary pastry as dessert. It was a bit of a hike from where I lived, but I dutifully hoofed across the river one night, and sure enough, the food was superb. From that point onward, I never ate in the student restaurant near the Latin Quarter.
Late in my stay in Paris, I inherited a tiny sixth-story maid’s room from one of the American medical students, who had gone back to Staten Island for the summer. By this point, the dollar had come crashing down—after Nixon conceded that the war in Vietnam was lost—and I was strapped for cash. I had given up my room in the boardinghouse, which was costing me three hundred francs a month, and moved into the maid’s room for less than half the price. My neighbor was a good-natured lady of the night named—what else? — Chantal, who had a boyfriend who was an out-of-work Elvis impersonator. His name was Ringo. He was a splendid chap, though thick as two planks, and he was always ready to share his cigarettes. He told me that his dream was to fly to Las Vegas and meet Elvis. Her dream was to meet a sugar daddy at the place Saint-Michel and ditch Ringo. Around that time, I got a job working in an outdoor fruit market, courtesy of the French girl on whose behalf I had trekked all the way to Tangier. Her father, a black marketeer during the war, had his own fruit and vegetable business, which set up shop twice a week in Malakoff, a working-class district just to the south of the Porte d’Orléans. It wasn’t far from where Samuel Beckett lived, and several times I saw him in the street.
The men who ran the market insisted that I eat tripe and drink calvados at five o’clock in the morning, just to watch my face turn green. They also made me holler out things like, “Regardez mes belles pêches, mesdames et messieurs! Cent cinquante la botte!” It was the only rite of passage I ever actually enjoyed. Our customers thought I was kind of cute. So did my co-workers. I could barely understand anything they said to me, though one afternoon they personally thanked me for the Allied landing at Normandy. “Lafayette, nous voilà,” I responded, channeling Black Jack Pershing arriving in France in 1917. I had waited my whole life to say something like that, though I suspect the allusion was lost on them.
Eventually I developed terrible problems with my teeth, and my money started to run out, and I decided it was time to go back to the United States and put away the things of a child and start my career as a writer. Mick and Claudine had headed south by this point, to a drab town on the Atlantic coast where the beaches were lined with German pillboxes and all the streets were named after Lenin and Stalin. Rob had long since gone home to Boston. Terry had flown back to the West Coast, Cammy had returned to Long Island, my Canadian friends had headed back to Montreal and Halifax.
Just before I left Paris, I joined Una and Terry and Josiane and Jay and a French teacher named Elizabeth and a few other people in a Montmartre fondue joint where the owner sang and danced and gallivanted around and drew the blinds and locked the door to any new customers as soon as the place was full. We ate a lot and drank a lot and sang a lot. Then Una unexpectedly burst into tears.
“Why are you crying?” I asked her.
“Because we’ll never see each other again after tonight,” she exclaimed. “We’ll never all be in the same room together again.”
“Yes, we will,” we consoled her, but we were wrong. Some of us stayed in touch, some of us crossed paths again. But most of them I never saw again, not Terry, not Josiane, not Elizabeth, not Una. We were all saying good-bye to the best year of our lives that night, and only Una was smart enough to realize it.
Thirty years later, on one of many return trips to Paris, I was walking through the Luxembourg Gardens when I spotted Jay standing in the middle of the path, perhaps twenty yards ahead. He was positioned not far from that horrendous student restaurant that had kept me alive so many nights when my bankroll was getting thin. He seemed lost in thought. I was now at the point in my life when I was nostalgic for the city of my youth. When I first came here at age twenty-one, Paris was old and I was young. But now Paris seemed young and I felt old. Maybe Jay, whom I was seeing for the first time in twenty-five years, even though we had both lived in New York the whole time, was thinking the same thing.
“What are you doing here, Jay?” I asked.
He looked up, not at all surprised to see me, as if we had just seen each other the night before at Polly Maggoo’s, as if the last quarter century had not somehow vanished without our noticing.
“I could never get this place out of my head,” he said, smiling. He might have been talking about the jardins du Luxembourg, or that particular spot in the jardins du Luxembourg, but I knew he was talking about Paris. No, none of us could ever get Paris out of our heads. None of us ever could. Wherever you are, Una, thank you for the eyeglasses.