My (then) girlfriend's girlfriends. One was responsible for us breaking up and the other was a tall, blonde test of my fidelity, but the amusing anecdote I'm about to recall happend with the second one, not the first. She was in Paris, studying French at the Alliance Francaise. I'd never met her, didn't know what she looked like (other than tall, blonde) so when she called me I asked her where she was to go meet up, as planned by my GF. She said, "I am at a café in the Place deTrocadéro".

 

 

As you can see, there are something like 7 cafés on the Place de Trocadéro. So I asked her, "What is the name of the café?"

Her answer, "It's the Repas à toute heure."

Which means, "Food served at all hours".

D'oh

Before I tell you this story, it isn't about religion or "Satan", but it is about evil and how it can be contagious.

For a couple of years when we moved into our building in Paris, things were pretty normal there, other than the fact there there were literally no children in the 12 or so apartments. We had a spinster just below us, a nice couple our age above, two older people both of whom died while we lived there. Life went on, and as the months past, we started hearing noises in the middle of the night. Not exorcist or ghost noise, pounding, from the next door neighbor (with a common wall between us). It soon became apparent that he was either hitting the ceiling with a broom or stamping his feet on the floor, depending upon who was bothering him. Although we heard nothing, it became obvious that he was bothered by the normal sounds of life people make in a big city. He once remarked that my sneeze was really loud.

I knocked on his door once and in a very calm and reasonable manner asked him what the problem was and explaining that the noise he was creating was disturbing us more than the people he was trying to bother. He had no answer, just grumbling through the closed door. Things got worse, we spoke to his other neighbors, who seemed reasonable. Our neurotic started acting like one of those people who climbs up a tower and starts shooting. He lived with an equally sick Vampira woman, the two of them making the most sinister couple I've seen since the Millenium TV series. 

 

This horrible neighbor, let's call him Beelzebub, started acting up more and more, yelling up the stairs and playing little "tricks" on people. When the young couple had a baby, they left their stroller downstairs in a corner where is wasn't in the way or even noticeable. Beelzebub wrote on the walls "it is forbidden to place objects in the common area" . Then he got worse, he began dumping raw garbage in the stroller. He spat on women in the stairwell. He had to go out one day at 4AM and when he left, he rang the downstairs intercom buzzer to wake us up and then ran away. He consinued to move furniture around in the middle of the night to make the downstairs neighbors miserable. And since that apartment, a small rental, had changed occupants often, he was able to inflict his odious behavior on several groups of people beside those of us that lived there for years. Sometimes the occupants stayed only a few months!

One day, he crossed paths with one of the neighbors below and the guy punched him in the stomach, which stopped the noise for awhile. When he took the stairs, the "boxer" would yell out to him "pussy" or "wimp". 

And so it came to pass that I was right behind him on the stairs, and he slowed down in front of me to provoke me. I jabbed him in the back a few times, which put him off balance and he stopped screwing around. Then I had a feeling that I've never had in my life. I'm the guy who shakes spiders off paper out the window rather then stomping them with my boot. The guy who can always try to understand the other guy, empathize, put myself in his shoes. I had this giddy feeling realizing how dead simple it would be to give this horrible person a good shove down the flights of stairs. That would teach him a lesson, right?

Fortunately, that didn't happen. I so wanted to just lift my thigh up and kick with all my might on this skinny-assed coward's back that day. Had I done so nothing would have been served beside the Devil, the devil in me. Evil is a disease, a very contagious disease, a disease with no cure, only prevention and event that doesn't always work.

Late one night I was walking near Notre Dame. Crossing the bridge to the Île Saint-Louis, something caught my eye down on the quais. It looked like a young blonde woman lying naked on the damp rough stone-paved section just near the water, which was lapping up. I walked down the stairs and while my view was blocked, heard a splash and then the footsteps of someone running away. There was no trace of the woman, but I had a Frank Black Millenium flash of what went down there. My mind melded with the killer's and and his victim's. The guy had met her in a bar, bought drugs and realized she had cheated him. He although the doorman of the hotel said she'd left, he went looking for her, knowing she'd be hiding on the quais.

  
Listen to Temptation

 I was drinking whiskey
She asked for soda water
I was pushing fifty
She could have been my daughter
Temptation, You're a terrible thing
If you can't resist it
You might just wind up losing
Everything.

 It was a nickel for a quarter
I never got her name
When I asked the old night porter
She was gone... or so he claimed
Temptation, Temptation got me in a bind
If I can't overcome it
I'm surely going to lose my mind

 (solo)

 They got my wallet where they found her
They dragged her body out of the Seine
Somebody's gone and drowned her
I just couldn't stand the pain
Or Temptation
Temptation pushed me around the bend
If you let it get the best of you
You're gonna wind up paying
In the end
Yeah, I let get the best of me
I know that I'll be paying
In the end

 Until I was able to record Temptation, I didn't sleep a wink. The drummer and bass player are from Tom Waits' group of time of the recording, sometime in 1993.

Places: Minneapolis, Bellevue, Seattle, Berkeley, Mill Valley, Fresno,Costa Mesa, Newport Beach, Iowa City, San Antonio, Eagle Rock, Highland Park, Manhattan Beach, Silverlake, Montecito Heights, Simi Valley, Van Nuys, Venice, Paris, Bordeaux. Every place I've lived has a separate and distinct vibe. What creates a vibe?

Air quality and odors, noise level, population density, architecture,advertising, language, regional accents, expressions of people on the street (where there are streets and people on them). Also, the relations you have with people from those you pass on the street to neighbors to those with whom you live. The look you got on the street in say, Mill Valley where every single resident would say "hello" and smile and nod to everyone they met would be so much different than the experience in Chicago, L.A. or Paris.

I recall the first time I set foot in Paris, for example, in the late 1970's. The first sensory impression was the very heavy odor of diesel fumes. Paris is very polluted by cars. Cars bring noise, too, and myfirst morning in the Hotel Boëtie, a symphony of car horns was my wakeup call. Paris is densely populated, so there's lots of street noise and activity as well. Delivery people calling out to each other, buses, pedestrians. Out on that street, when you pass a café, you can smell the espresso. Often, walking by a bakery you can smell the bread or croissants fresh from the oven. All this in spite of the diesel fumes.You used to see teams of men sweeping the water by in the gutters with"brooms" with bottoms which, although plastic, were green and made to look like branches in a fractal sort of way.

Life in Paris was radically different than the one I had left in L.A.and every day was a new discovery. The first days in the hotel, before Ifound a place to rent, were quite an adventure. Much of my French practice was done in the tiny bar there in the hotel, because I quickly discovered that in order to overcome the sensation of expressing oneself at the level of a four year old, some kind of anti-inhibition method was needed. Either sex or alcohol work well for this, but at that point in time I was limited to the latter, so in the evenings I often spoke tobusiness people passing through. It was great fun, and my French improved considerably during the first week by the total immersion. The staff was great, too. At night, there was an Egyptian student who patiently helped me improve my vocabulary in areas the books don't usually cover. During the day, the Spanish clerk was friendly and helpful and the maids were adorable.

In the second week, a tech was sent to help me and he was ready to accept the offer of a "girlfriend" that one of the night staff had been suggesting we try since he'd arrived. The call was made to arrange this.We were sitting in the bar when a lovely Eurasian woman came and sat down next to me with a big smile. She asked in French about my astrology. Since I'd lived through the L.A. days of people asking that, I should have had no trouble understanding it but I knew she was D's "girlfriend". I will call her W for woman. Here's the rest of that conversation in my improving by the moment, but still not ready for prime time French:

W: "What's your sign, baby? "

R: "I do not have any children."

W: "No I mean like Goat, Fish..."

R: "I do not have animals, either."
W: "What is you as-tr-lo-gi-ca-l sign?"

R: "Ah. Yes. I have been a Cancer, but it is only that my friend who he telephoned for yourself. You are for me not here."
W: "So, how does one do?"

R: "Fine. How do you do?"

W: "No, I meant, how can we make the switch politely?"

R: "What Switch. The light switch?"

W: "Are you being stupid on purpose, or what?" (Smiling)

R: "Ok, I see what you are meaning. I will erect myself and move myself to the bar of whiskey. Then you will move yourself over on the leather thing to be next to my friend."

When they went upstairs, I felt lonely but oddly fulfilled by mylinguistic experience. I like the idea that languages used to be called "tongues". That's what ties together the experience of the four of usand makes it coherent. I'd never forget Paris. Maybe that's why I moved back and lived there for over 25 years.