Making Himself at Home in Paris

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Making Himself at Home in Paris
“I need a city, I need pollution, I need people.”  Considering the weather outside the Café Sélect in Montparnasse this afternoon, he could have added rain and cold, but (after all) the seasons and the weather change — and Rick Tulka has been here in Paris for 13 years — he knows what he needs—a couple of hours most afternoons at Le Sélect with his sketchbook and a pencil. He’s one of the many Americans who has made a new life in Paris. The café provides the people he draws: no one famous, no one important, just people like you and me who come for coffee and comfort.  Some are regulars—same time, same seat day after day—others pass through and are never seen again.  He does not like to draw tourists and, after over 13 years, he has tuned his eye to spot them. It’s important to understand that drawing in Le Sélect is not his trade, but his love and enthusiasm.  He does not do it to make money.  The money comes from being a professional illustrator—and if you still read MAD Magazine, you may have seen his work.  The Café Select, he says, “Is my Zen place.  The drawings I do here are mine, from my heart.  It’s heaven.  Nothing’s better.” Rick found heaven by accident.  When he and his wife Brenda were turning forty and living in Brooklyn, they decided they had to do something to shake up their lives.  New York was good, but it was a city life that was more about money and chasing money than they wanted. Brenda was tired of commuting from Brooklyn to a job in Manhattan.  And because they did not have children, they felt free to uproot themselves without collateral damage. Forty for them, as for many of us, also had a magical significance — it was the beginning of middle age, the now-or-never moment — so Brenda and Rick decided they’d better make their move. In 1975 when Rick was an art student at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, he had spent a summer in France, ending up in Paris.  Twenty years later, Paris seemed like a good idea—and he and Brenda figured they had nothing to lose.  If things didn’t work out, they could always come back to Brooklyn. They sold their apartment faster than they ever could have imagined and miraculously—though they could not appreciate it at the time— managed all their paperwork with the French consulate in New York; so quickly, in fact, that they had to move sooner than they had planned. There was no time for buyer’s remorse or second thoughts.  They were in Paris.  Rick continued to draw (thanks to the Internet, an illustrator can work anywhere) —and Brenda found work with the American University of Paris.  Then Rick found Le Sélect. Maybe it was karma or some good luck.  No matter, no other café provides him with the amusement and inspiration that makes him draw.  He was advised (thirty years ago when he first came to France as a student at Pratt) that he should find a café and make it his, and this is what he has done.  This after all was what Art Buchwald, arch American ex-pat, had advised many years ago, and Rick believed not only in art, but also in Art. When he needed to draw the façade of Le Sélect, he had to sit across the Boulevard Montparnasse in La Coupole.  He felt he was being unfaithful and tried to make sure the waiters at Le Sélect could not see him.  He only did it once. And Le Sélect has recently repaid his fidelity.  He illustrated a charming book by Noel Riley Fitch called Paris Café: The Select Crowd with pictures of the famous who used to frequent the cafe, like Hemingway and Isadora Duncan drawn from photographs, and the ordinary people, the piliers de l’établissement, and those just passing through.  The book, published by the Soft Skull Press in Manhattan, is a lovely, and an easy way to get a Paris fix even if you’re not in Paris. Rick is a happy man; it shows when he talks about drawing and about living in Paris.  But it seems fair to ask if there is anything he misses from New York.  Only three things, he says: sitting on a stoop in Park Slope and watching the world go by; the pizza they make in New York with that magnificent thin hard crust; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he used to sketch the visitors looking at the Impressionists. He can renew these pleasures with his (more or less) annual visits to the States to see family.  But he has been able to replace the simple pleasures of New York with some equally simple (but perhaps surprising) Parisian delights.  They are the Café Select itself—well, no surprise there.  The frozen food at Picard—who’d have imagined that?  And Montparnasse Cemetery — particularly the tomb of Charles Pigeon, inventor of a non-exploding gas lamp, that reveals Monsieur and his wife in bed, she sleeping, he half rising.  If this seems eccentric, remember he also loves la Sainte Chapelle. He has also been surprised at how fluid the world of ex-patriates and their often European spouses can be.  He and Brenda know more people here than they knew in Brooklyn and are constantly amazed at the variety of people they meet. He mentions a party he had recently…
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