Words

31 March, 2008

Less than Home, Part II: A Homeless Guide to Paris

Perhaps it is that I have never had to pay for accommodation in Paris. Every time I have visited I have always known somebody there who would host me. Or maybe it is because I was too stingy to fork out the cash for a hostel; or too lazy; or because the hostels are always full in the summer. Maybe I just did not feel eager about the complex process of finding a place to stay. Whatever the reason, during the three times I have visited the enchanting city of Paris I have adamantly asserted some misguided, romantic notion that the megapolis should take care of me rather than me taking care of myself. I have come to expect nothing less than the red carpet treatment.

During the summer of 2001, during a ten month stint in Europe, I may have treaded on the same red carpet too many times, until it looked like worn crimson Astroturf. In light of my abuse and disdain for first-class treatment and complimentary accommodation, the carpet was finally rolled back up.

My friend, who had generously hosted me a few weeks previously in Paris, seemed none too excited about my return to Paris from Sweden . In fact, she did nothing to hide that I was unwelcome in her flat. Undoubtedly, something I had done on my first trip through town had decreased her interest in re-hosting. I wondered which of the many offenses I committed was the one that resulted in the ban, or whether it was a build-up of social law-breaking, but she sternly told me that she’d had too many guests and there was to be no more – a kind way of telling me to get bent. Truthfully, I didn’t care why I couldn’t stay there, but that I now had no place to crash, after I had already made plans with her help in mind.

So now what, I wondered. Moping down her stairway and into the street. I expected to stay for free in Paris. Damn it, I will stay for free in Paris, I resolved, with unwarranted confidence. Hard-headed and stubborn as ever, I formulated a plan. I had about five days to kill until I was to meet with some friends to catch a train to Pamplona, Spain for the Festival San Fermines and the Running of the Bulls. Therefore, killing time and finding shelter until then were the key issues.

Regarding the city of Paris, the weather was dry and hot in early July, so there was nothing preventing me from partaking in 24-hour outdoor living. Besides, I felt that I knew the city pretty well, if not above ground then below. I had explored the ancient medieval catacombs under the city and toured the intricate sewer system. Above ground, I felt I had investigated thoroughly enough to navigate and keep myself safe. Just the other day I had tracked down Jim Morrison’s grave on the day marking his 30-year deathaversary. I felt comfortable in the city. I spoke the only French I needed to survive: baguette et vin, s’il vous plait. Merci. So here was my chance. What was stopping me from living the dream of vagrancy? This time, nothing. Looking around me in the streets I suddenly felt at ease. I wasn’t homeless. Quite the opposite. I was home. Now everywhere was my home.

I soon realized that the best place to be during the day in the Paris summer was in one of the many neighborhood parks. Lush and shady, the small squares nestled amongst the narrow streets, provided perfect reprise from the city’s chaos. They were a fabulous place to sit and drink wine discreetly or to sleep on the bench and clear a homeless man’s clouded head, which I predicted I would often need to do. I doubted much good sleep would occur during the night because the parks closed in the evening. That is when men had to begin to fend for themselves. Thus, resting and relaxing during the day was crucial.

Because of the simplicity of a bum’s life, the daily routine manifested immediately. There are only three major sought-after amenities: shelter, food, and sleep, with booze as a short-term replacement for any of the three. If I wanted to be successful on the street, these were the keys to my existence. Excited about the prospect of my new life on the street, I began my routine by satisfying two of my needs straight off: I spent about two dollars, purchasing a three Franc baguette and a 12-Franc liter-and-a-half plastic bottle of non appellation (non-certified) French table wine. One more similar such shopping spree in the evening would supply enough homeless sustenance for an entire day – a purposeless, four dollar day. With my bounty, it was off to the park, where a grand feast and boisterous celebration of vagrancy was to occur, compliments of me and attended only by me. A good wine buzz at this time in the morning, capped by fresh-baked French bread, under bright skies, is truly the stuff of bum legend. Had I known at the time that this was the best and most rested I would feel for the duration of my stay in France, I would have celebrated even more energetically. However, at that moment, feasting in the park, my prospects seemed fine.

Soon, at my peak of liveliness for the day, I decided it would be fitting to leave the park and head out for a walk. I aimed myself at the Place d’Italie, in the 13^th arrondissement. There was always something exciting taking place there. Traffic spiraled into this vortex via eight major boulevards, spinning in one non-stop, thundering, and dizzying traffic circle. I figured there I could enjoy the lively chaos of the French business day for a couple of hours.

However, my fabulous morning quickly took a turn for the traumatic as I dashed across one of the boulevards that fed the circling beast. An old man stepped into a lane of oncoming traffic and was put down by a quickly moving vehicle. In my negligence – I was watching him carry his groceries across the street rather than looking at the road I was crossing – it could have just as easily been me who was walloped by that hurried motorist. He wasn’t halfway across the street when BAM! – the sound of a body glancing off a car. The car’s breaks screeched but it was too late. The gray-haired man lay, immediately killed, his sacks of groceries spread out in the street, oranges rolling in traffic. He collapsed into the oddest of positions. Kneeling, his bald forehead fell against the asphalt as if he was praying toward Mecca, but his hands lay back towards his feet, still gripping some of the grocery sacks. He was gone. All the pedestrian onlookers and some of the traffic itself froze. Several of us watched and waited a few minutes for the ambulance, which was useless at this point. I forced myself to watch in order to appreciate the fleetingness of life. To see how quickly it can depart, to know that it just as easily could have been me, right there, right then.

This was only second time I had seen someone die and the first when it was so unexpected. His body looked so cold and, well, lifeless, other than the fleeting animation in his face. He was dead. Forever. In this desensitized world it becomes easier or more convenient, over time, for people to utter the words, “he is gone,” without thinking much about how true those words are – that person will never be conscious again. He was dead and he will never smile or wonder; never take another step on the planet; never eat the oranges rolling out of his grocery bag and into the street. Even for me now it is difficult to relate to the strength of the feelings I had at that moment, sun ablaze, intoxicated, without wondering: what if the scenario had played out differently? What if it were me who had been hit by the car? Imagining my own mortality, my own loss of life and the eternal end, I contemplated the possibilities over and over. What if I had mistakenly stepped into one of the eight roads of swiftly moving cars coming into Place d’Italie? The idea was so overwhelming that I suddenly felt faint and weak. I staggered into the middle of the traffic circle and lay on my back in the grass for a good time, pondering cruel fate, as the cars spun counter-clockwise around my ocular perimeter, further adding to my queasiness.

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Nightfall for the man without shelter is a serious issue. No more navigation by light. No more parks. No more trustworthy public citizens. This is when the vilest of the street vermin thrive, their mystery only enhanced by the blackness of the night. I was a newbie on the scene. Those who had been in the streets for any length of time knew their home turf infinitely better than me and had adapted so well that they were mostly invisible to my untrained eye. The few I saw maintained a low profile, slithering through the shadows. I stuck out like the homeless rookie that I was, walking alertly and pensively, hoping to spot potential threats or promises of safer night shelter.

Every potential protective shadow, it seemed, had its drawbacks: too light so I would be overly visible; too dark and therefore dangerous, too isolated and unsafe, already occupied by an unsavory character, or an illegal domain. There were a million factors that could ruin a likely shelter. All I could do was continue to walk and search, constantly prepared to break out of a dangerous situation by speeding into a full sprint. By midnight the streets had cleared and I narrowed my search for the chance of an evening’s sleep to a series of patches of thick, bushy undergrowth on the side of a main road in the 13^th arrondissement. The spot was dark and solitary enough that nobody could see me, but perfectly light and public enough so that I could make a scene if I was physically threatened. I reluctantly made my decision, crouching toward the ground. Lying down on the unforgiving land, where roots dig into ribs, is not a comfortable position, no matter how much unregulated French wine one has consumed. That night I never slept longer than an hour before one of my limbs fell asleep and I was forced to move, or a disruption occurred in the street and I had to find a new spot. These are the kinds of sleep patterns that drive bums to insanity.

By 6am, after so much shelter shifting, the sun was up and blazing. A new day dawned. Yawn. A hot, fresh baguette would do, followed by a new plastic bottle of psychosis-inducing wine. But on day two, like the demented street dweller I was becoming, I was constantly groggy and confused. I could not clear my head, no matter how much head-shaking or wine-chugging I accomplished. My level of consciousness wavered between marginally aware and asleep sitting up. It was a good thing I didn’t have to go out and earn my six dollars of daily wine and bread money, because I didn’t feel mentally or physically capable. Maybe this is why most homeless folks do cartwheels in the streets for quarters – they are absolutely exhausted. If this was day two, what kind of zombie would I become after a week of life on the street? What about a month or a year?

By the third day I couldn’t even form proper memories and I kept forgetting which day it was. Concentrating enough to purchase my daily amenities was about all I was good for. Socializing seemed out of the question, even when I was given the rare opportunity. Around mid-day, sitting on the park bench like always, alternating between guzzles and drowsy rocking, I noticed a girl staring thoughtfully at me from another bench across the park. Instead of smiling politely, as I would have done just a couple of days previous, I broke eye contact. My sleepless paranoia kicked in. Did I know her? Is she an undercover police who knows I am homeless? Maybe I should leave. After a few minutes I got up to exit the park. As I stumbled up the steps I heard, “Hey, are you American?” in a distinguishably west coast US accent. “Yes,” was the most clever response I could come up with, turning back toward the girl from the other bench. She had seen me drinking wine, both today and the day before, and was quite curious about my pointless existence. So I showed her just how meaningless it really was.

We walked and talked. I showed her my hideouts and I continued to drink. She questioned me politely and was visually disgusted at the majority of my answers and behaviors, but hid it well. A student from UCLA, she was in Paris studying French, just like the thousands of other Americans. I couldn’t have cared less what she was doing. I just hoped to be able to talk my way off the streets for the night by forcing her to pity me or tricking her into fancying me. She told me she had eczema on her hands, which broke out when she was nervous – and I made her nervous. Eventually, after hours of talk, I convinced her that I was truly homeless. Likely, out of pity, or less likely, out of some mild perverse attraction, she invited me to her luxurious apartment. In truth, it was likely far from luxurious, but indoor plumbing was a luxury at that point. I rewarded her generosity by passing out somewhere in her apartment long before any meaningful conversation could take place.

She woke me up at some time in the morning and told me to leave. So, as quickly as it had ended, I was back on the streets again. At least I had gotten some sleep. It appeared that another day of sitting in the park was on the agenda. One more of those and I could head for Spain. Sometime in the afternoon, UCLA materialized in the park, emotional. She told me she had spent all day looking for me. Her eczema had flared up. “Well, why didn’t you check the park first? I pretty much live here.” Apparently, in my sleep-deprived and delusional state of trying to impress my potential hostess, I told her fancy tales of how I would be meandering the graceful turns of the river Seine’s left bank that day. These were precisely the kind of fraudulent lines that had earned me shelter the night before. Although secretly proud of myself, I was shocked and somewhat apologetic that she thought I would do anything other than sit on a bench drinking wine that day. She must have ignored all the evidence that I was homeless, lifeless and far beyond an attempt at such creativity and recreation in my emotionally barren world.

For some reason she didn’t hate me. In the dark, we walked together toward nowhere in particular. I attempted to mend the wounds in order to sooth her stress – and to win me another night in the first-world comforts of an actual building. As if by plot, in the streets we ran across my friend who had disallowed me to stay at her apartment in the first place. She was also walking with a friend. What were the odds? She acted as if nothing between me and her had happened. Technically, she was right. Other than the red carpet being yanked out from under my feet, time had passed mostly uneventfully. I wasn’t angry. But then, as I stood by emotionless, she began telling UCLA what a great guy I was. Then why had I been left to fend for myself in the streets by her? My brain could not comprehend such contradiction. As they chatted on, I wandered off, eventually losing all of them and ending up in one of my usual nightly hiding spots. At this point I was more comfortable lurking in the shadows than socializing pretentiously. The unwelcoming night darkness came and went yet again. And in less than 24 hours I was on a train headed to northern Spain.

In the book Down and out in Paris and London, by George Orwell, Orwell is the homeless man’s advocate. No doubt partially because he was the person experiencing street life, he asserts the view that the homeless man is either 1) a victim of circumstance, for instance when there are no jobs available to an unskilled worker, or 2) the homeless man prefers not to be part of the system. The system he is referring to is the one which forces a slave-like workforce to make their livelihood by performing meaningless task that cater to the elite, such as being a bellboy or dishwasher at an overpriced and mediocre restaurant. In this bleak outlook of employment, which the common man in most societies is forced to enter if he wants to survive, those who choose to not work, and therefore live in the street, are sometimes better off than those who work tirelessly, day in and day out, producing nothing worthwhile, and then only treading water financially. The homeless man, at least, has not lost his workplace dignity or his free time.

My brief homeless experience in Paris put me in the former category. I was one who fell victim to circumstance. Although, there was a major difference between my mild bout of vagrancy and one experienced by a destitute individual. Ultimately I chose the street rather than was obliged to it. I had the financial means to pay for accommodation and to claw my way back into comfortable society. Those who are forced into street life have no other option. However brief, this dose of living low did increase my empathy for those who are forced onto the street without a say, and I now better understand their plight, their uncomfortable survival, and constant struggle and search to acquire basic necessities. For all of us who have never had to endure the hardships of being destitute, it behooves us to revel in our good fortune. But if that day should one day come, just hope you happen to be in Paris, close to a French bakery.