Take the Flan

The phone is down to 4%. I've got the "Lime" app open because I'm on the bike, the "Maps" app open cause I'm up in the Marais, I'm riding the wrong way on a wrist-thin, cobblestone street clogged with leisurely piétons and the 8PM sun is blinding me like the giant yolk of an oeuf from hell, and on top of that I've got to pee so bad I may poop my pants. I have never been happier!

I turn off the cobblestone and hit a main drag, trusting my instincts over GPS and almost always being right. I may not be intimate with all the side streets of the 4th, but three weeks in, I somehow know my Parisian elbow from my ass. Last year it was about food. I spent my time browsing boulangeries and butcher shops and wandering the open markets. I chose the fromagerie over the Musee d'Orsay and though I did see an exhibit of Matisse paintings of his daughter I was more intrigued with Tomme de Savoie than I was with Henri M. But this time la bouffe is in the background and the city itself is what fills my mouth.

I headed to the Marais around 6PM, my destination, a hat store and restaurant to follow. The Chapeau shop is disappointing. I tell the young woman who works there how much I loved Le Cerise (my favorite Parisian hat store) and how sad I am that it closed. She says she worked there for six years and that she’s even sadder than me and we bond over how much better that store was than this one. I browse the summer fedoras, mostly Panamas, but the brims are too wide and make me look more like Bella Abzug than a Cuban dandy. There's one with a slightly stingier brim that might just do, but it turns out it's a sample that can't be bought, though I can order one and get it in October. I look over the at the caps and see a beautiful light cotton newsboy in olive green. I haven't worn a cap since high school (when I sported a blue Chairman Mao adorned with a red Ho Chi Minh pin my mother had brought back from Hanoi). It gives me a certain old Italian man, bocce ball playing charm, but my beard has grown wild and rabbinical and the cap doesn't frame it like the fedora does. I consider a major trim of my barbe or maybe even going clean shaven and start to see it not as a grooming choice, but as a late second act story point--Summoned to Paris for work, our lead character visits a hat shop looking for a fedora and stumbles upon a magic cap that makes him shave his beard of thirty years and start a whole new chapter of both life and face. I buy the cap, but decide not to race to a barber seeing as I'm in the Jewish quarter and shaving the beard here might seem like spitting in the face of Hashem. I walk over to the restaurant. It's been open five minutes and there's not even a seat at the bar. It's a tiny place with a great reputation and my free range chicken with chanterelles in natural juices after an appetizer of rillettes de cochon will have to wait. I figure I'll just cross the Seine and head back to my part of town and that's how I get myself running out of phone juice and needing to pee.

When you hop off these rent-a-bikes you have to "end" the ride on the app and take a picture that you're parked in an appropriate spot and sometimes it takes a minute, which of course it does now. I shift from foot to foot doing the pee dance, but see a phone store right in front of me and decide that I can hold it. I duck in and ask the young, good looking Indian kid if I can get a quick charge (He's rail thin with long curly dark hair and a John Waters mustache that he somehow pulls off). He tells me, no, they're closing, but I can buy one of those charging batteries, which I just enviously saw some guy using at a coffee place an hour ago. I say “I’ll take one," and he says "great” and knocks it down from 55 Euros to 40 since I'm the last sale of the day. "Can I charge for a minute?" "No problem." I look over and see a guy in a Boston Red Sox hat who turns out to be the owner. "You like the Red Sox?" "Yes," he says in his French accent, "I love them." I playfully curse his soul and tell him I'm a Yankee fan. He says he used to be, but switched sides. We dive into an American sports conversation and now I can stay as long as I like. We talk Aaron Judge and Ohtani, and he tells me he bought two faux satin Yankees bomber jackets and his wife almost divorced him. "For buying them?" "For wearing them!” (She’s a fashion snob, not a Red Sox fan.) He's considering moving to the west coast, has a pal in San Fran who turned one bakery into ten and might need him to run one. "San Fran's great" I say, and then we get into the Knicks and how he was pulling for New York over Wemby. In the middle of all this a guy on a scooter drops off two cake boxes from the bakery he works at, a thank you for fixing his phone. I leave with a half-charged phone, a new battery and one of the cake boxes, which contains a large flan and is one of the best pastries I've tasted since I've been here. And I'm going to go back to Los Angeles? For what?!

Hold on, there's more.

Since dinner in the Marais ain't happening, I come back to the hotel, take a shower, blow dry my balls (I don't really, but there is a blow dryer) and head back out on the bike to a place I have already eaten at twice that makes some damn fine food. I had delicious sweetbreads my second visit, but I'm going back to my first meal, which was a first course of seared rabbit livers (foie de lapin sounds a lot more appetizing) and a nice piece of fish after. My favorite waiter isn't there tonight and the food isn't quite as good, but it's still more than acceptable. When asked about dessert I pass because I have been here almost three weeks and I have not had profiteroles, and whenever I see a waiter pouring hot melted chocolate from a kettle over ice cream filled pastry it makes me happy.

I go online and look for good profiterole reviews nearby and settle on Brasserie Lipp in Saint-Germain which is a five minute ride away. I walk into the Lipp and I get some lip. Actually, what I get is the cold shoulder as they won't let me just order dessert. I give the guy my best "come on garcon, you can bend the rules for this sweet boy" delivery, but he's not buying my act. People have been so nice to me here it takes me a minute to register that someone is actually saying no to me. Luckily there are four other joints within spitting distance. I end up across the street at Cafe de Flore of Picasso and Simone de Beauvoir fame. I order my profiteroles and wait. It's a bustling Friday night in Saint-Germain: elegant Arab women in headscarves, elegant French women without headscarves, flaneurs and fancy Philippes, an endless stream of bike riders and waiters weaving in and out. The roar of the crowd is everywhere, as if the boulevard is a boxing match and the sidewalk bistros ringside seats.

I look over at the next table (which is a foot away) and there's a good looking African cat about fifty with a plastic baggie of five cigars already cut and ready to go. I smile and say, “You're serious about your cigars" and in two minutes we are deep into it. Isaac lives in Hell's Kitchen on 37th between 9th and 10th and works for Citibank. I tell him I have all my money with Citibank and he assures me nothing can go wrong as long as I'm patient. "Oh, I am Isaac, I am." My profiteroles arrive. Already swimming in a river of chocolate sauce they're a major let down, but Isaac is a gas. Born in Ivory Coast he has an incredible speaking voice: deep, musical, wise, playful, the cadence and confidence of a great salesman. The French he speaks to the waiter is as good as listening to Yves Montand.
"Is Cameroon near Ivory Coast?"
"No, Cameroon is more in the middle."
"I used to play with a musician from Cameroon."
"A bass player?"
”Yeah, how'd you know?"
"Cameroon is famous for bass players."
"His name was Andre Manga."
"I know Andre Manga... He played with Michael Jackson.”
"WHAT?!”

In the mid 90s I had a band. I was the singer/talker/poet and I had some really great musicians with me. My backup singer was Lisa Simone, Nina's daughter and my bass player was a sweet cat and bad ass musician, but I never kept up with his career and now I find out he played with Michael! Michael and (from Wikipedia) "Angélique Kidjo, Boyz II Men, Janet Jackson, Paul Simon, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, Dr. Dre, and many others." I had to come to Paris to find out my bass player went from Swerdlow to Stevie to the king of pop.

I'm still marveling over the Manga news when an older cat dressed like the Good Humor man comes to the table selling newspapers. Isaac seems to know him and they chop it up in French. The guy tells me he has been selling papers on the street since 1972, and Isaac tells me he's famous, which I take with a grain of salt, but then the paper seller tells me to google "The last newspaper hawker in Paris” and I’ll see an article in the New York Times. It's true, there's an article on him in the Times. "He got the medal of honor from Macron" Isaac says with pride, and the guy breaks out his phone to show me a video of Emmanuel M pinning a red ribbon to his chest. I am both impressed and amazed, and though I don't want to steal the guy's thunder, I can't resist saying "My boss just got one of those" and break out a picture of my boss and old friend Chris Meledandri recently getting a red ribbon pinned on him by Macron as well. It's three nudniks and two medals of honor on the sidewalk in Saint-Germain. And that's what Paris has been like. A web of new connections that lead to old stories. I feel like I've grown up and grown young here. That these three weeks have crystallized something in me; hurled me into a life and city that has use for all I've learned and survived. That a new chapter has started and that I had to get out of the house and onto the streets to set it free. Had to trade the car for the bike and Pico Boulevard for Rue de Lafayette. I feel alive. Like I have something unique to offer the world and even more, a blessing to still receive from it.