Down and Out in Paris

I changed my pants this morning and I am in a pickle. A tip from a friend set me off on foot in search of a little store selling interesting junk: “Better than the Marché aux Puces, guaranteed,” was the recommendation. From the map, I figured the distance to be about six kilometres as the crow flies, but I am not a crow, nor do the streets of Paris cooperate in letting anyone walk in a straight line, so I may have walked seven or eight. I get near the address, up past the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, somewhere in the Tenth Arrondissement, I think, or the bottom of the Eighteenth. It’s a part of Paris I do not know except from when I get a ride to the airport and its grimness makes saying à bientôt a lot easier. I’m tired and hungry.

I go into a café and an old habit takes over. Whenever I go into a store or a restaurant, I tap my right back pocket to make sure I have my wallet. I do not. As a waiter greets me, I do a bad actor’s job of feigning a sudden recollection of another appointment—looking at watch, throwing up hands, making funny exhaling noise—and turn on a centime. Out on the street again, I also confirm that my cash is not in my front right pocket where I always keep it. When I changed my pants, I forgot to empty the pockets and load up these. So I am in a pickle in a quartier I don’t know or like, hungry, footsore, without a Métro ticket or the money to buy one. It’s getting worse.

It looks like rain, and I remember a miserable experience. Many years ago, I was trying to hitchhike somewhere south of Paris—a bad idea then as now, but I had just come over from England where people would stop their cars and ask you if I wanted a ride when I was walking from one end of a village to the other. That was in another country. No luck south of Paris, and when it got dark, I fell asleep by the side of the road. I was awakened by a shrill woman’s voice saying, “Is he still alive?” “Yes,” said a man standing near me. “Then let’s go,” and they did, even though I began calling after them. The French can be likable, but they don’t usually take to strangers warmly and, more to the point, immediately. I still wonder if they would have stayed around had I been dead.

No matter. I am alive, down and out in Paris, and with no confidence of finding a helping hand. I am too respectable-looking to try to pan-handle—and anyway, I wouldn’t. My French is good enough to explain to passersby that I’m in a pickle—je suis dans le pétrin—and maybe, come to think of it, just good enough for them to get a huge belly laugh out of an American clochard begging alms.

I start to walk home, not with a spring in my step, believe me, and in a few minutes I hear a lot hooting. When I get nearer the noise, I see a man pushing a car to the side of the street and a bunch of punks making fun of him. The voyous are not scary, just annoying and not helpful—though come to think of it, a voyou can be a thug and not just a punk, so for clarity I settle on considering them connards. The man with the dead car is African. They are not. I figure someone is having a worse day than I am and out of gratitude I trot over and help him push. He thanks me and shakes my hand. Something inside me hopes he will offer me a reward, but looking at his beater of a car tells me that’s not in the cards and I don’t think it would be right anyway. Besides a single euro, the standard tip, would leave me fifty centimes shy of a subway ticket.

I start walking again and I turn when I hear someone calling “Monsieur, monsieur!” A small man, past forty I guess, is running toward me and waving his arms. He’s got a 1940s slouch hat on his head and a trench coat a size too big, but so what? He arrives, not the least bit winded: if I ran that hard, I’d be poussif, but so what? He smiles and tells me I did a beautiful thing helping the African and ignoring the… he insists on the ethnicity of the connards which wasn’t the African’s or mine and or his. So what? Not worth getting into unless a two-hour debate on wearing the hijab in public is someone’s idea of fun. Not mine.

A truly beautiful thing, he says again, and he shakes my hand, then starts to embrace me all over, and I realize he’s patting me down and trying to pick my pocket. In the circumstances, I don’t mind—and when he looks surprised I laugh and tell him I have no wallet, no money, and no subway ticket for that matter. “You know, I always thought a voleur à la tire sized up his marks better. Are you new at this or what?” With huge indignation he tells me he is no thief, and certainly not a pickpocket, but has a great deal of experience nonetheless. In a loud voice, I tell him to beat it and give him a hard shove. He runs off fast: at least he’s mastered that part of his trade.

A man across the street asks what’s the matter—am I all right, someone bothering you? I cross and tell him the whole story, starting with the walk from the Sixth Arrondissement. He listens, nods at every point, and thinks it’s hysterical. “And the best part, you know, or maybe the ironic part, is that the store you are looking for closed months ago. No business. The stuff they were selling was really awful.” I get my first laugh of the day. He hands me a Métro ticket.

Merci. Je vous en prie. Au’voir. Au’voir.

© Joseph Lestrange

If you’re coming to France (or for that matter anywhere) you can reserve your hotel here. To rent a car, Bonjour Paris recommends Auto Europe.