My wife and I arrive in Paris and check into our hotel on the edges of the 2nd and 9th Arrondissement. Hemingway lived in the Latin Quarter, and Gertrude Stein held court in the 6th, and James Joyce scraped by in the 7th. I have A Moveable Feast tucked into my bag, and I cannot stop imagining old Ernest eating chestnuts and oranges in the extra room he rented just for writing and then throwing the husks and the peels into the fire. Drinking wine at lunch and scribbling simple, clean adjectives like “cold” and “crisp” into his notebooks with ink-stained fingertips, and I try to picture Gertrude Stein inviting him over to chat and Ernest consoling F. Scott on the size of his penis, but mostly I find myself coming back to the fact that we can barely afford to rent one room in Paris, let alone two.
The next morning, I get up and go down to find a cafe so that I can drink a coffee and write at a small round table and look out at the streets like a writer is supposed to. There is a restaurant appropriately named the Grand Café des Capucines, and I am giddy at the serendipity.
I buy a croissant, a cappuccino, and a fresh orange juice for 7€, which is the breakfast special that they advertise on a small plastic placard on each table, and I produce my journal and my pen and arrange everything just so, and I chuckle to myself when the phrase “mise en place” comes to me unbidden. I take a mental note to later explain this small joke to my wife.
The tables are perfectly small. They are not round as I had hoped, but they have rounded edges and it is hard to fit more than my food and coffee and journal, and that makes up for their shape.
Across the street, a man lies on the ground on his back, half in the street and half on the sidewalk. I walked by the man on my way to the Grand Café des Capucines when I was on the other side of the street, and he appeared somewhere between asleep and dead, but other people were around, and I am in a foreign country, so I did not stop.
The unconscious man does not appear homeless. He is well-groomed and likely only drunk, I think to myself. I try to scribble in my notebook, assuming the spirit of Joyce will descend upon me at any moment, but it is slow in coming. It is not something you can force, the muse. You must simply sit and wait for it to arrive and hope you have a pen in your hand when it does. Inspiration is a foggy fellow, emerging from nothing, dissipating into nothing, answering to nothing.
My mother found a website that matches up people who have means with those who do not, and in this case, having means is defined as having extra food in the pantry and the ability to cook it. She bakes trays of lasagna and takes them to random neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, I assume, and in Memphis, that mostly means Black neighborhoods, and she delivers them to people who never know her name because that is considered unsafe according to the website. But she is given the address, and she delivers the lasagna, which doesn’t sound incredibly safe either, but that’s what she does. She said the last time she dropped off the oversized lasagna, a man offered her gas money as a token of gratitude, but obviously, she declined it. It is very Southern of someone who signed up on a website for free food to feel the obligation to pay for it somehow.
My mom ended up telling that man her name. Telling him that she was called Ann Marie. But she didn’t tell him her last name. She isn’t crazy.
My mom also goes to the Greyhound station to help the migrants who come north from Texas on buses, fleeing Mexico or Venezuela or El Salvador and then fleeing Texas too. They often arrive in Memphis not knowing much of where they are or where they are going, but they do know that they need water and food and toothbrushes and even diapers for their babies, and my mother volunteers to help, and she goes and comforts the migrants as best she can and offers agua and ailmento and pañales.
When she started, she only knew a few words of Spanish, but over time she has studied and learned more, and she says it is fulfilling when she sees a female migrant – they are mostly female – get off the bus with wide, terrified eyes, unsure of where to go or who to talk to, but then finally they smile in that language everyone can understand when they hear my mother’s feeble attempts at Español, and somehow that attempt puts the migrant woman at ease because it is her language my mother is struggling with, and there is power in language and in knowledge, and suddenly this woman who is in a country that fears and vilifies her has one thing at least that my mother does not have.
I do not know what inspired her to start going, or why she keeps going. Something she saw on TV. Something she heard in church. She does not track her influences in the way that I do, obsessing over their origins.
My mother says the hardest part of her job helping migrants is that they have to carry cases of water, and she is not strong enough to do it, although she tries. The helpers are always sent in pairs, and often the other person has to carry most or all of the water. And because they are sent to the Greyhound station in groups of two, and she isn’t much help carrying the water, she feels a small guilt, and I know this weighs on her.
A delivery van is parked ten feet away, and the delivery man checks on the sleeping or possibly dead man to make sure he is alive. The delivery man, satisfied, drives off and the passed-out man lies there still, half in the street and half on the sidewalk, and his limbs are limp in the way of dead or unconscious bodies like cooked spaghetti noodles. I cast about, but there is no one else, just me and the man on the curb across the street and somewhere the waiter, who has disappeared into the bowels of the otherwise empty cafe. I try to write again, but only wild, disconnected thoughts surface, and the muse is nowhere to be found.
But at least the cappuccino is good: the milk is well-frothed, thick as icing, and the croissant is fresh, and the orange juice is also fresh and sweet.
A shop owner across the Boulevard des Capucines unlocks the glass door to her shop, then comes over to check on the man, talk to him, and touch him. The man shifts but does not get up or open his eyes. The shop owner goes back inside, satisfied like the delivery driver, satisfied like me.
It is more romantic to write outside in the fresh air with a pen, and I think I write better this way because it forces me to slow down and to think more about my choices. It does not allow the body, or just the hand really, to run ahead of the mind, the way it does at a keyboard, fingers flying and stabbing, and the brain dashing to keep up. And so I sit there at the cafe table, capping and uncapping my fountain pen, and also thinking. It is important to think before you write.
❦
The inside of the house was cluttered and carpeted and dark, and smoke from the fire swirled in the air, desperate for someone to choke. A tired old couch sagged in the middle of the room, and an upholstered chair with rips and frays unraveled nearby. A wooden TV stand and its fat-backed television stood lonely against a bare wall. If any money had been put into that house, it had been done in the way of poor people, folded in a wad, buried under a dingy mattress, tucked into a yellowed pillowcase.
I stood alone in that smoke-filled living room, waiting for my father to return, and I heaved ragged breaths, suspended between a memory and a dream.
Before we went into the house, we had been in the grocery store, and when we left, my father was wearing his navy blue New York Yankees jacket, and the sky was bright. Suddenly, there was smoke and then a fire. On the small side street next to the Piggly Wiggly, with small houses one on top of the other, there was a single roof leaking dark fumes. I know it was daytime because the smoke was dark against the bright sky, and my father knocked, but no one answered. Then he splintered the door of this house with a forceful kick, and we went inside.
I stayed in the living room with all that decrepit furniture, bellowing, “Is anyone here? Is anyone here?” and I worried that my lungs would fill up or the roof would cave in. My father charged farther into the house, into darker rooms and thicker smoke, and finally came back because the place was empty.
The fire department showed up in a whirl of red lights and blaring sirens, and got to work in thick, protective suits and with gushing water. We stood with a throng of people in the street for a few moments. A neighbor asked my father if we would stick around or leave our information so the family could thank us. He declined.
“Anyone would do the same,” he said, even though no one else had. Soon after that, we slipped away.
When I was sixteen, maybe seventeen, my friends and I took all of our leftover fireworks one summer to Williamson Park, a rarely used, unkempt green space with a child’s jungle gym and beaten-up soccer goals just north of Poplar Ave. It shared a parking lot with a shabby brick apartment complex that housed maybe six or eight apartments. The tenant of one had swapped in a red bulb for its exterior light, and we joked that a prostitute lived there, but we never saw anyone go in or out. And we would have, too, because we hung out in that parking lot at all hours of the day and night, smoking Marlboro Reds and drinking cheap beer and malt liquor.
The beauty of Williamson Park and its parking lot was that they were set back from the street far enough that we could see cops coming a long way off. We sat on the curbs and on the trunks of our cars and chain-smoked, trying to figure out how to get our hands on alcohol and where to go to drink it. Or sometimes, Williamson was our nightcap, the place we went for one last cigarette, the ashes burning orange circles in the night, lighting up our dull, buzzed eyes, a sad substitute for whatever stars must have been up there somewhere beyond the streetlights.
We took that bag of leftover fireworks to the park one day in July and stuffed them all into a metal garbage can near the corner of the lot. The explosion promised to be magnificent, and we stood back after we crammed it full, and someone lit a match or a piece of paper, or maybe it was a string of firecrackers, and tossed it into the can. The sound was thunderous, but the colors were muted in the sunlight, and it was all a waste without an ink-black sky for the canvas.
But soon the fire soared too high, and the limbs of a nearby tree swung just above the flames. The wind was gusting, and the tongue of the fire licked at the edge of the apartment building. I don’t remember how it died down because I don’t think we were there when it did. We had scattered like ants from a flattened hill. No one kicked down the prostitute’s door or called the fire department. No one attempted to get water to douse the trash can.
We all laughed about it, but that was later, once we found out that nothing had caught fire and that no one had died. But it is hard to know whether we were really worried about the apartment at all, or whether we were thinking only of ourselves when we fled from that fire.
On the way home from the house fire outside of Piggly Wiggly, my father told me, unprovoked, that he did not want the people who owned the burning house to know who he was. That is why he refused to give the neighbor his information. They might not have gratitude on their minds at all. They might try to sue him. To sue us. His Yankees jacket might already be ruined, and that was enough.
“No good deed goes unpunished. Remember that,” he said. He pursed his lips and nodded his head, distraught at the state of the world. And then, “You never know about people. People are shits.”
He was always teaching me useful lessons like this one. I had not considered it, that these people could be bastards, that most people are bastards. But I wonder if that is what he was thinking about as he hurtled through those shadowy rooms, searching for a sleeping baby or a passed-out grandmother, cursing such shitty people for making him break down their door.
I wonder if he knew already that this was a moment of great consequence, if only he could find the right words.
❦
In Paris, at the Grand Café des Capucines, I consider the sleeping or dying man and think to myself next how I should call 911, but I do not know the number. Surely it is not 911 in France? Then I think how easy it would be to look it up. But I am in a foreign place, and I am a tourist, and I speak only a handful of French words, and I consider how silly I would sound on the phone Vous devez m’aider and that it is funny I have never added any foreign language dialogue to my writing, and that Hemingway did it all the time, and I hated it when he did, but if he did it then it must be okay. I absolve myself of the responsibility of making the phone call. I drink my cappuccino and eat my croissant, and the glass of orange juice is empty now, and I try not to look at the man across the boulevard.
You must be careful about what you are reading on the days that you are writing, because if you hold the writing of another author in your head, it may influence your own. Sometimes more than you want. Words can come falling out in the style of Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Baldwin (he lived in the 6th Arrondissement, too) and before you know it, the whole thing is a jumble of different rhythms and styles, and the influence has come from somewhere deep within that you didn’t know existed, and sometimes it’s an influence that you want, and other times its an influence that you don’t. It is important to hold only the role models you want to stick around in your head, but it is almost impossible. I keep trying and failing. But all we can do is keep holding it there and hope it will rub off.
Eventually, two other men come, broad, young, confident men, walking down the street with an air of confidence that must stem from good upbringings and strong role models, and they see the passed-out man. They try to shake him awake and fail like everyone else. One of the confident young men gets out his phone and makes a call, and soon an ambulance arrives. The French EMTs wake the unconscious man somehow, probably with smelling salts, and the man is very disoriented and surprised, I think, to find himself half in the street and half on the sidewalk, and the EMTs help him into the ambulance and take him away, and the two young men continue on, and it is all so easy.
I finish my cappuccino and sit staring at my empty notebook on the table until I finally close it. I pay the waiter, who has reappeared, and leave the cafe, and I think how Paris is not as romantic as I hoped, and I walk north on the Boulevard des Capucines in the direction of our hotel. ⬥
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