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The Man Who Loved Bicycles
THE MEMOIRS OF AN AUTOPHOBE
by Daniel Behrman
Notes
1 Silent Springs or, Los Angeles is Anywhere
2 The Deadly Mustang-Cougar-Jaguar-Tiger GT Wheelchair
3 Interstitial Living
4 The Built-In Breakdown
5 Man the Mechanical Rabbit
6 The Eye of the Cycle
7 The Digestive Cycle
8 The Road Leveler
9 When Paris was a Pedestrian Mall...
10 Is This Bum Trip Really Necessary?
11 Flying Blind
12 Time is on Our Side
NOTES TO THE BR EDITION
The Man Who Loved Bicycles was published in 1973 by Harper's Magazine Press in association with Harper & Row. Its author, Daniel Behrman, died in 1990. Harper's Magazine Press is also gone. Harper & Row later became HarperCollins.
We assume copyright belongs to Mr Behrman's surviving relatives (if any), or HarperCollins. James E. Starrs, in the permissions section of his anthology The Literary Cyclist, reprinted an extract "Courtesy of Daniel Behrman," which inclines us to the former view. Whatever the legalities, the book has long been out of print, which is why we've made it available in this no-frills BR edition.
We first laid eyes on The Man Who Loved Bicycles early in 2002, in the form of a photocopy. The staff read and keystroked at the same time, breaking all office productivity records whilst courting carpal tunnel syndrome. (Knock wood.) The task called to mind the robot Marvin in Douglas Adams's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: the first twenty thousand words were the hardest. The second twenty thousand words were the hardest, too. The last twenty-seven thousand were also the hardest.
We ran all 67,120 words through spellcheck, the mere existence of which probably has Mr Behrman spinning in his grave. As many of our typos were actual words in their own right, there are undoubtedly other mistakes. We apologize for any errors, and will correct them in the fullness of time - feel free to point them out. You will also find a few [text missing] notices scattered about. These represent a xerographic failure and should not be construed as cryptic references to an ancient lost text.
Daniel is a really lost author.
Chapter 1
Silent Springs or, Los Angeles is Anywhere
If, from time to time, this book is outrageous, extravagant, and inconsistent, I will only be acknowledging the influence of the auto-huckster, whose claims pollute the newspapers and magazines I read daily. He claims without embarrassment that his product will do anything from curing athlete's foot to restoring sexual prowess. By the time the customer learns that it has restored his athlete's foot and cured his sexual prowess, the seller has moved down the river to deliver a new pitch about a new model that replaces hair and eliminates piles.
It's time the auto-huckster got a whiff of his own effluence. A few years ago, when a naïve publisher asked me to prospect a book on mass transit, I began to collect such memorabilia as National Academy of Science and National Research Council reports on motor vehicle emissions along with mind-boggling full-page ads from the leading car manufacturers of Europe and America. I call the publisher naïve because he was premature. One can miss the boat just by turning up too soon. Eutrophication had not yet become a dirty fourteen-letter word, the environment was not yet the protégé of Atlantic Richfield and Standard Oil of New Jersey. I was just as naïve as he was. I went looking for support (read money) from various places on the strength of encouragement from a nice fellow in the Department of Transportation in Washington. His encouragement was hearty but mostly verbal; he seldom answered my letters. He just would not commit himself. When we talked in his office, he kept looking up as if at a much higher power. Only later did I learn what was bothering him. I came across an interview with his boss, John Volpe, then Secretary of the department and former Governor of Massachusetts. The Governor jogs on the roof of the Department of Transportation building in Washington, so I learned. He also rides an electric bicycle at home. He seemed to be a firm believer in exercise but not as a way to get somewhere. A quick workout on the electric bike, down to the office in the car, then up on the roof for a few laps. Governor, pull the plug on that bike, take it onto the towpath of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal; the wilderness is almost at your door.
It was the publisher's original idea that I should ride transit systems, old and new, from San Francisco to New York, from BART to IRT, then talk to everyone closely or remotely concerned with the problem of mass transportation. I was to go from Lewis Mumford to Marshall McLuhan, from the cable car to the individualized personalized conveyor belt running from bedside to deskside on cheap convenient microwave energy beamed down from a satellite in stationary orbit. I had to study systems, said the nice fellow in his office at the Department of Transportation, old systems and new systems, all systems, trains, buses, cars.
The car a transit system? The more I looked at this system, the more it looked like an airline that was qualifying its people on Piper Cubs, then giving 747s and Concordes to pilots if they happened to be rich enough to buy them. From oilwell (whether troubling the oiled waters off Santa Barbara or deflating the earth when the crude is pumped out from underneath Colorado) to pipeline (try it on tundra) to refinery (especially downwind and, sooner or later, the wind always changes) to gas tank to exhaust pipe, it works as if it were designed as a pollution system, a form of chemical warfare we wage to defoliate our cities then our suburbs and our countryside, to interdict them all to the human race.
What's left over from the crude after the gasoline has been refined out is used to provide more boons at a cost the competition has no chance of meeting. DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons, for example. Our engines may be noisy but our springs are silent. Diesel oil, for another example. Trolleys go clang-clang-clang no more, instead we have the gas blast as the great GM bus roars off on its fifty-yard mission. We have the thirty-tonners racketing by everybody's front porch, putting everybody on the wrong side of the tracks; we have the diesel taxis in European cities that spread the choking blue haze of the open road into the most intimate urban nooks, where it stagnates, piling up like waste in an unflushed toilet. I will not get sentimental; I will say nothing of the living steam locomotives driven from the railroads by the oil-driven diesels, of the days when travel was a breath-taking adventure, when we needed only a ticket to take a trip, not a prescription. No, let us be practical and count the crumbs that the car gives us from the leavings of its table. Let us not forget petrochemicals, petrified chemicals, plastics in all their eternal forms. When they are new and bright, they drive out living materials; wood and leather, cotton and wool; when they are old and worn, they drive out life. Throw them away and they cover the countryside, the beaches, and the bottom of the sea. They neatly line the continental shelf. Burn them and they generate instant poison gas; chemical warfare all over again and within easy reach, no further away than the neighborhood dump.
And to what do we owe all these benefits, where should we direct our thanks? Why, to the car, of course. It oils the economy of the Western world. According to a providential article by Richard A. Rice, professor of transportation at Carnegie-Mellon University, who wrote it for MIT's Technology Review, transportation accounted for more than half of the 174 billion gallons of petroleum that the United States was using every year during the latter part of the Sixties. Private automobiles alone were burning about 60 billion gallons of petroleum a year. They may not have been carrying a full load of passengers, but they were certainly carrying the oil industry on their backs.
It is the car that puts the profit into drilling oil wells in such outlandish places as Alaska's North Slope or Europe's North Sea. It is the car that makes it worthwhile to air-condition the desert so that the oilmen can take their families with them to Araby. It is the car that makes it pay to build tankers a quarter of a mile long and send them around the Cape of Good Hope. The plastics and the insecticides, the fuel oil and the synthetic fabrics, they all get a free ride around the Cape. The cotton-grower and the cabinetmaker, the tanner and the sheep-raiser, they are all up against Ari.
Oil wins every time. Oil, cars, highways: that's where the winnings are. There is no need to break yet another lance against the depletion allowance or the top-heavy structure of American business with oil sitting on top. It is the richest industry in the United States; 91 leading oil corporations earned themselves $50 billion in 1969. It doesn't make much difference what Derby year one picks, the oil business always comes in first. It's bigger then automobiles, even though it is linked to them---one of a pair of inoperable Siamese twins.
It is no wonder that the oil industry gets the brightest people. At meetings of marine geologists---the kind of affairs of which I have some firsthand knowledge---you can always tell the oil company men. They are the ones with the pressed suits and the tape recorders, the first to pick up a check and the last to publish their research results. They have infinite good humor---one of them is still on speaking terms with me after I told him he could be proud to work for BP---British Pollution. They may have sold their souls, but they got a good price.
I cannot see any great point in frothing at the mouth about the oil industry's position. At irregular intervals, the New Republic reaches me by sea mail in my Montparnasse quarters in Paris and tries to bring me to a boil about the monopoly of the oil barons or the tax loopholes that they enjoy. I do not boil. What does the New Republic want? Cheaper oil for the people, more smog for the masses? Nationalization of the oil emperors and their auto satrapies?
About three miles down the Seine from where I live there's the home plant of the biggest automobile manufacturer in France: Renault. It was nationalized nearly thirty years ago because Louis Renault collaborated with the Germans during the Second World War as a premature Common Marketeer. I don't know if any nationalized Renaults ever got recalled, but I do know that there's no chance of getting city hall to do anything about it. City hall is Renault. Don't expect to hear about dirty Renault exhausts on French television. City hall is television. Through what is known as "mixed" ownership (so mixed that no one can tell who owns what) the French government has a sizeable piece of oil exploration and production in the Sahara and various other places. So lead in the gas is not a problem, and emission is a French word meaning a radio or TV broadcast, and just try to cut that down.
An unbelievable Paris paper, Le Journal du Dimanche (Le Monde is the only believable Paris paper) ran a story in 1970 about carbon monoxide pollution and concluded that "the situation is less perilous than one might have feared." It seems that cars put out the most carbon monoxide in Paris when they are idling. So there's really no problem, just set the carburetor so that the engine ticks at a clean idle... or race the motor all day long. "This method, applicable to all models, does not diminish the performance of vehicles and it costs nothing," says Le Journal du Dimanche. At least, this method cost Renault nothing in pollution-control expenses.
Apparently the sweet Parisian air (enriched by unfiltered exhausts) cleanses American cigarettes to the point where, just like the government-made Gauloises, they need carry no health warnings. The trouble with well-meaning socialism and nationalization is that it gets the state into evil businesses, which it costs too much to get out of, once the evil is discovered. The French government, according to another Paris paper, France-Soir (this one doesn't even believe itself, it changes is mind between editions), made almost a billion dollars making and selling tobacco in 1969 and about twice as much from taxes on gasoline and other petroleum products. That is why there is no Ralph Nader dubbed into French. When Nader gave a press conference in Paris and announced that about fifty thousand Renaults, Peugeots, and Simcas had failed to meet American safety requirements, he was simply ignored by the serious press. How do I know he announced it? It was reported in the Canard Enchainé, a comic paper that runs the prime minister's income-tax returns as a regular feature, easily as funny as Peanuts, hardly distinguishable from Pogo.
This should be a lesson to the New Republic and others. All power to the people can make for an awful tangle when it comes to a separation of powers. There is only a smooth front, not a handhold can be seen in the monolithic face of the nationalized corporation. There is no way to scale it. What's good for Renault is good for the country because Renault is the country. Neither the German occupiers nor the American liberators touched a fraction of the precious stones of Paris that would be destroyed in a plan to put a mini-urban freeway along the Left Bank of the Seine. No need to look for the oil lobby or the highway lobby here. President Pompidou himself has been quoted as saying, "Paris must adapt to the automobile."
He is right. When it comes to moving people inside cities, the car must come first. The other entrants---subways, railroads, trolley cars, trolley buses, even that fourth cousin, the diesel bus---are in the transit business, the car is in the consuming business. That is why it is always ahead. Traffic jams use more gasoline and use up more cars, they must be preserved as living monuments of the free world. Free to do what? To build freeways and spread the jam around, to flatted the lumps into a smooth spread. The more freeways, the more cars; the more cars, the more jams; the more jams, the more freeways; and, not even paradoxically, the more subways, busways, and commuter railways.
There is a symbiosis here, though it cannot be detected at first. I got the scent of it when I came across an item in the New York Times to the effect that something like 115,000 cars come into Manhattan every day from Long Island and 25,000 from Westchester. Call it 200,000 people---each car is estimated to carry 1.3 persons (the .3 is the one that drives). Then what are we talking about? From the Bronx, from Brooklyn, from Queens, from uptown, they pour by the millions into Manhattan every morning on the subways. And 25,000 from Westchester... on the Major Deegan Expressway, the Henry Hudson Parkway, the Connecticut Turnpike the Sawmill River Parkway, the Merritt Parkway, the New York thruway. Twenty-five thousand cars, 25 1,000-passenger subway trains, half an hour's work for two tracks. That is what all the bother and the pother is about... 25,000 cars from Westchester. This is not mass transit, friend, this is class transit.
Everybody has a car, everybody talks about his car, not everybody's going there by car. At least, not in the cities I know best, New York and Paris. Only when the subways and the Metro stop does the great beast crawl out of its burrow to blink its eyes, then unsheathe its rubber-clawed paws to mangle the thruways and the autoroutes (both words are in italics because they are foreign to the English language). Nothing moves, not even if it comes from Larchmont or Montfor-l'Amaury. It is then that the hubbub starts, ground is broken, the Second Avenue Subway rides again, the new Regional Métro flashes in from Saint-Germain-en-Laye to what used to be Place de l'Etoile, resting place of the Unknown soldier, until it was renamed Place de Gaulle in honor of a well-known general.
Too little transit and the old cars come out of hiding and into use, the Edsels and the Packards, the Simca Arondes and the Dyna Panhards, wheels for the people. When the motormen on the Paris Métro go on strike, the motors go to work. The buzzing smoking inching junk oozes through the gates of Paris, freezes during the day, thaws in the evening, and oozes out again. Every day, the brown stain over the city gets thicker, another layer is added, it is visible another ten miles out on clear sunny days. The Métro motormen only strike on clear sunny days, they never get their weather forecasts wrong, they must keep the pedestrians on their side. So it is the good weather that is bad, it is the bad weather that is good. The west wind that brings rain in from the coast of Normandy flushes the brown stain from the city's sky, it washes the carbon monoxide from the streets, it is an emergency whiff of oxygen. There is something to breathe until the wind reverses again and the air grows still over the valley of the Seine, trapped by the low hills that mount in the west toward Versailles. One need only to look at the Impressionists to see what has happened to the air of Paris. They were able to get the dappling of light on the city when steam from the first trains out of Saint-Lazare station shuttered the sun so that it striped them in gold. Not any more, Monet, not any more. The sun turns Paris gray, Paris turns the sun into an over-cooked fried egg, brown and sickly. The Eiffel Tower might be rising to infinity, no one can see where it ends.
Paris might as well be Los Angeles. Thank God for Los Angeles; no matter how crudded a city may be, there is always Los Angeles and its peculiar inversion, easily seen in local mores and clothes. Everyone is always better off than the Angelinos. Serves them right, too, all those movie stars and sunshine, it was too good to be true, retribution was bound to find Los Angeles. A scare lead in a British paper, the Sunday Times of London: " 'She has not lived in Los Angeles long,' said a coroner, reporting on a recently found body. 'Her lungs are barely damaged.' Los Angeles in unique---its cars poison more people than do those of any other city."
Further along in the text that went with the Englishman's Sunday roast:
Because British towns are generally gloomy as well as draughty, the unburnt hydrocarbons in the exhaust gas are relatively unimportant... Exhaust gases always contain partially burnt hydrocarbons. Sunshine turns these into a mixture that damages the lungs and causes weeping, and sunny California, in particular, suffers this way. This is the principal reason why cars for export to the United States must no be fitted with devices to complete the combustion of the exhaust gases.
Tommyrot... balderdash... waffle. Is this the Sunday Times or Le Journal du Dimanche? Perhaps it's Le Times du Dimanche. Smog must be a foreign disease, an extrainsular affliction that strikes down all those, and it is not greatly to their credit, who are not Englishmen. Nothing good ever comes from abroad, the rain on the French Riviera arrives on "the wind from Italy," the Spanish disease struck down Casanovas everywhere except in Spain, smog is as alien and un-British as sunshine. Oh, is it? A quote from another London Sunday read, The Observer---a story dated February 20, 1972, and trumpeted by Jeremy Bugler, their Environment Correspondent:
Widespread repercussions are expected from the disclosure that Los Angeles-type photochemical smog was found in the South of England last summer.
Three scientists from the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell, Berkshire, have proved for the first time that photochemical smog as occurred in Britain's atmosphere. The report of their finding appears in the current issue of Nature.
"These are most important results," said John Reay, head of the air pollution division of Warren Springs, Stevenage, the Government pollution laboratories, "We shall now have to take seriously the smog problem in Britain."
The smog occurs when car exhaust fumes are exposed to strong sunlight, setting off a chemical reaction. At one stroke, the scientists, Dr. Dick Atkins, Dr. Tony Cox and R. Alan Eggleton, have destroyed the widely held view that photochemical smog could not occur here because Britain has less sunlight than, for example, California.
The scientists set up their instruments in a first-floor Harwell laboratory. They measured the concentration of ozone over a period of 35 days. The presence of certain levels of ozone is considered by United States Government experts to be evidence of photochemical smog.
On six days they found ozone levels that reached or exceeded the safety levels recommended in the U.S. "On two of these days, we found the ozone above the level at which smog is known to cause eyes to smart," said D. Eggleton, "and this was out in the countryside, not in the towns."
So Los Angeles is anywhere. No airport rush, no reservations, as soon as the cars and the sun come out together, instant Los Angeles, Even on the sidewalks of New York.
A dip into my clips and up comes an interview with Dr. Robert N. Rickles, Commissioner of Air Resources (both of them) for the city. He was recorded by The New Yorker as saying: "There is evidence that people living near freeways in Los Angeles accumulate lead in their tissues, and we know that the levels of lead that have been measured out there are lower than those on some of our streets. Our levels are really pretty high."
Here we are being preposterous, we are mixing photochemical smog and lead poisoning. So let's be outrageous and throw some oil in as well. Dr. Rickles was also worried by a city bus garage on Staten Island.
"Apparently, they have inadequate space over there for all their old diesel-engined buses, and they've been afraid to leave them out at night for fear the engines won't start in the morning so they've been running them---as many as seventy-five of them, by our count---all night long. We know of fifty families who live in private houses just fifty to sixty feet from those buses, and we can document cases of kids who haven't been able to go to school because they've been made sick by those exhausts. Now just how long are we supposed to tolerate this sort of insult to our people?"
Until the horse cars come back, no doubt, Commissioner, and there will always be an oil flak to shed a tear for the poor kids who will be kept awake all night by the neighing. If the lead doesn't get you, then the diesels must. Anything that doesn't run on oil gets run out. Cars run on oil, but they run better on lead. Between 1946 and 1968, according to a figure that Barry Commoner left lying around loose in The Closing Circle, the amount of lead cars needed to run 1,000,000 miles went up from 280 to 500 pounds and the total that went up into the air from 50,000 to 260,000 tons every year. As my friend from British Petroleum once put it to me, people must decide whether or not they want high-performance cars. Or low-performance people.
Or growth. The effect of the car on the economy is read most easily perhaps in the pollution indices. The most conservative estimate I ever saw, courtesy of U.S. Public Health, blames 60 percent of the air pollution in the country on the car, with industry providing 17 percent and electric power plants 14 percent. But what is industry making most of? Cars. Where does an unidentified but certainly large chunk of the electric power go? Automobile plants, for one. For another, air conditioning; the smoggier the air, the more it needs conditioning.
Come and wander with me along the motor trail. Let your imagination go, don't just stick your nose up in the air, get it down near the water. Salt water first. The fish off southern California are swimming around with twice as much lead as the fish off Peru. Fresh (ha!) water next. Bugler, our Environment Correspondent in the Observer of London, took a stroll along the River Irwell that fumes through Manchester, among other places in industrial Lancashire. "If you fall in the Irwell, you will be rushed to hospital and stomach-pumped." What does the poor automobile have to do with the Irwell? Directly, nothing. Indirectly, draw your own conclusions. Lancashire Steel is on the river; if they're not producing for the car industry, they probably wish they were. Right on the other bank of the Irwell, enters the Mersey with a load of oil and chemical waste from Shell Chemicals. Let's amble downstream with Bugler. To your left, the Berry Wiggins refinery and oil waste, to the right the Burmah Oil refinery and more you-know-what. Some oil spillage from an Esso tank farm a little further on and here we are at Electric Power Storage, producing Exide batteries and lead pollution. No one is making sexy Minis (Morris or Austin) on the banks of the Irwell, but that is why the refineries and the battery plant are there.
And the jobs. Drive the automobile into a corner and it will always reverse out. Sure we're dirty, but look at all the good we do, the millions we support. Knock out the prop of the car and the whole country falls flat on its face. Or if you prefer, more polite language by Earl Cook in Scientific American: "We could not now make any major move toward a lower per capita energy consumption without severe economic dislocation."
At the risk of being un-American, I shall be unscientific. What have we been going through during the past few years if not severe economic dislocation? What kind of jobs do oil and cars provide? What about quantity? A figure comes to mind; the French want to spend 600 million francs (about $132 million the last I looked at a paper) to put in a big refinery complex on the coast near Brest and bring jobs to Brittany. Six hundred, to be precise, $220,000 per job; the interest alone would be enough to give each man a handsome annuity without lousing up the Bay of Brest. Or else the money could be used to subsidize those underdeveloped Western European countries that do not make cars. The French could send food packages to Switzerland and warm clothes to Norway and Denmark. Belgium could come in for a share of the aid, so could Sweden and Holland with their relatively small-sized car factories. With the money, the Swiss could then build expressways in the Alps and close down outmoded electric railroads running at all hours of the day and night, even through snow and ice, when people should be sitting home and planning their next year's vacations. The Danes would widen their roads to engulf the bicycle paths that now run alongside them, they could reduce their ridiculous taxes on cars so that drivers would change them more often instead of nursing along Plymouths or Opels old enough to vote.
As for the kind of jobs that the car business provides, it's high time we talked about the quality of work along with all of our blather about the quality of life. People like to identify with their work, it is the way they have always defined themselves, the Millers and the Wainwrights, the Smiths and the Carters. They don't seem to be able to identify with making automobiles, they would rather not be concerned with the crafting of the 6,700,000 Chevrolets that came out between 1965 and 1969 with defective engine mounts or the Volkswagens that teeter in a high wind of the Morris Marina of a Mr. Derek Pope that, in the space of nine months, required a new gearbox, exhaust system, alternator, front brake linings and drums, two front seats, four door locks, glove comparment lock, steering column lock... no need to continue, but I could.
Automobile plants are much better at making a fuss. This is the industry where mass production of heavy consumer goods began; it was in the automobile plants that the CIO and industrial unionism got their start. Coming down from ancient to more current history, it was in a Renault plant in Normandy that the tragic farce of May 1968 began when some young Maoists on the line decided to occupy the factory. Renault pays the best wages in the French auto industry, it has the newest plants, they probably are nices places to live in as long as no one has to work there. The Renault hands lived in their plants for over a month in 1968, not even their union could get them out.
Closer to the present, there is the spate of what the New York Times has called "blue collar blues," heard mainly in the automobile plants. At Ford, GM, and Chrysler, Agis Salpukas said in an article in the Times, absenteeism went up from between 2 and 3 percent in 1965 to 5 to 6 percent at present, and it can go as high as 15 percent on Fridays and Mondays, thereby making for a four-day or even a three-day week. We are supposed to keep driving automobiles because they create jobs, but who wants the jobs? Not too many people at Chrysler in 1969; almost half of them couldn't get through their first three months. that was the year that 8 percent of Oldsmobile's Wixom plant near Detroit was quitting every month. "This meant that 4,300 workers had to be hired every year to maintain a work force of 5,000." The Times reporter went out into the field and interviewed hands who were getting through the day by bringing bottled lunches, whiskey or wine. The reporter listened. "I don't know what it is they can do, but they have to change these jobs. If you don't get a break off that line, you can go crazy... Each year, I felt like I accomplished something. Suddenly I realized that I'm at a dead end and I'll probably be hacking on the line for 30 years." Suddenly, the Times reader learns that making cars can be as boring, dull, and deadening a way to pass time as driving them. there is not much hope of a change. He reads on: "Proposals such as having teams of workers build one car or a large unit, or having workers follow one car along the assembly line are considered iimpractical by auto executives and even some union leaders. Douglas Fraser, the head of the UAW's Chrysler department, said: 'If you tripled plant capacity and would be willing to pay $10,000 per year, then you could have teams build cars.' " The production line really came into being in automobile plants; first it got the worker, then it got the customer; it has got all of us who are around cars, we all lead production-line lives.
Not necessarily. There is a way out without spending $10,000 for a car. About twelve years ago, I spent $10 for a used bike in Paris. Never buy a used bike from anyone; the model has not changed since 1903, there is no plausible reason why anyone should get rid of a good bike. The one I bought was ageless; the seat quickly gave way to reveal that it had been concocted of rubber painted to look like leather. That bike had gone through the Occupation, but I was not ready to make a proper investment. I only needed a bike to pedal around the Bois de Boulogne. The man who used to rent bikes outside the Bois had given up, he had converted his shop into a service station. So I acquired my venerable black bike. I didn't dare ride it in the streets of Paris, I stuffed it into the back of the car and drove it, like an invalid, to the Bois de Boulogne where we could take the air together on a bike path all of a mile and a half long. I was a secret cyclist; no one in the quartier knew of my old black bike.
Then the Métro went on strike. As usual, the nationalized electric-power workers went out at the same time. The traffic lights went off. At every intersection, the French rules of the road applied: driver on the right has the right of way, he has top priorité going into the intersection and none at all getting out. He comes in like a lion, he goes out on tiptoes... if he is lucky, if the Métro is not on strike and people he would never dream of associating with are not using their cars. If they are out, then he does not go out at all. Cars clog the crossing concentrically like tree rings until they reach the sidewalk, they mount the curb, now they swirl more slowly as in a sink with a plugged drain, they overflow to the building line, the swirl stops.
That was how I found Carrefour Vavin on the morning of the Métro strike when I took my car from the garage and set out to work. There is a painting of Carrefour Vavin in the Montparnasse of the Twenties; people are dancing on the fourteenth of July there where Boulevard du Montparnasse meets Boulevard Raspail, where Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner met on the terrace of the Dôme after the First World War, where American students in Paris on the GI Bill of Rights used to sit after the Second World War, one of them mounting guard to spot the big Ford of the Veterans Administration attaché at the embassy who drove around checking attendance in the cafés because the French refused to check it in the classrooms.
The morning of the Métro strike, the steel and rubber flood had washed away all traces of Hemingway and Faulkner, of the table at the Coupole where we used to take a café liegèois, letting my infant son lap up the whipped cream, of the table at the Dôme that caught the sun at breakfast time in the empty Paris of August.
I backed the car into the garage and took the rusty black bike out of a corner where it was gathering dust. I walked it through Carrefour Vavin, I swung into the saddle, the springs squeaked, my muscles creaked. I was not used to such violent exercise with a charcoal suit, a black raincoat, and a briefcase, the accoutrement that I favored in my attempt to pass unnoticed among the Parisians who go around all year long as if they were going to a funeral, their brows frowning, their eyes set on the thin blue line of the Vosges standing between them and their next vacations, the vacations that stand between them and retirement.
Beyond Carrefour Vavin, the road was clear. There were no cars to be seen on Boulevard du Montparnasse, Carrefour Vavin was clinging to them like an Auvergnat to a gold louis. I had the road all to myself right to Montparnasse station, where Charybdis had been at work again, another whirlpool that had to be skirted high and on the outside, then it was all downhill to my destination at the Organization, the captor of my labors. Ten minutes from start to stop, a mile and a half from door to door, the wrought-iron door of my apartment house near the Luxembourge Gardens, the plate-glass door of the Organization. Six minutes with the best I had ever done by car and that was only coming home for a late lunch when I was alone on the street and everyone else was putting down a second apéritif prior to starting on the wine. Three-quarters of an hour my my worst time, it was at six o'clock on a Friday night just prior to one of these big neap rides when the city of Paris ebbs to the provinces, when everyone takes his car, not just those who can afford to drive. Then the trip had to be planned all day long; gas, water, and battery checked; alternate routes memorized; food, drink, and reading matter taken aboard.
On the bike, I was above it all. I surveyed everything from my high perch as I used to look down on New York from the open top deck of a Fifth Avenue bus. The old black bike wasn't as high as a double-decker bus, but cars had gotten a lot flatter since I was young. From my crown's nest, I could see the village-sized Paris I had known right after the war, when there was only one car to be seen for a mile around and it was mine. The city shrank, my perspective lengthened, my world was no longer limited to the runways where I could land my car.
My romance with the automobile was ending, that great American love story was almost over. I had been first smitten at innocent seventeen when I got a Michigan driver's license that I could display in New York when I came home on school vacations, a pseudo-farm boy. I have had New York driver's licenses now for long past thirty years, never a black mark to my name and no wonder; I do all my driving in France. As for the French driver's license, I got it in 1948 for life. It never needs to be renewed, there are no physical examinations, I can go on driving with it after death into the great beyond.
The first car I ever owned was a '47 Chevrolet, light tan, two-door sedan. The next year, I came to Europe; the Chevy paid our passage with enough left for a black Citroën when we got here. It was the first of a series of Citroëns, part of my ludicrous attempt to blend into the landscape, a black Citroën and brown Gauloises. Every Parisian I met in those days was trying to get his hands on a Plymouth and a pack of Chesterfields.
I still own a '69 Citroën; it stays in a garage for weeks on end. It comes out only to serve as a bike carrier, a first-stage bike launcher. I use it as the eleventh speed (eighty miles per hour) on a ten-speed bicycle to get out of the foul-air zone around Paris while admittedly fouling the air some more in the process. I take the bike out in the car as a last resort, when I have had all that I can stand of the imitation countryside of city parks and squares with their varnish of unburnt hydrocarbons and their day-long Muzak from the passing mufflers. Then the bike goes into the trunk of the car; the Citroën looks like it is trying to swallow it all except for an indigestible front wheel, and I roll out to the forest of Fontainebleau or Rambouillet. I stop the car. I break out the bike, and I am off through the woods, a wheeled deer, the brakes jutting out like antler branches from the racing handlebars. The air bites, the oxygen gets into blood and brain, the wheels sing on the narrow strip of a tarred forest lane, an idea comes to mind.
And that is how I have done this writing: I get on my bike and I get mad. This piece is written as much in passion as in reason. I am an old hand at science writing, I know how to check a fact to a frazzle and weasel my words to the satisfaction of the most worrisome source. But not this time, for once let the burden of proof be on the other side.
Chapter 2
The Deadly Mustang-Cougar-Jaguar-Tiger GT Wheelchair
Car-lifting the bike is the only way I know to beat the syndrome of city living. The whole thing works as if were master-minded by Dr. Fu Manchu or Moriarty; it works so well that it can't be accidental. The more you drive, the less air there is to breathe, the less air there is to breathe the more you have to drive because you are just not capable of doing anything else. Heaven help you if you try.
Back in bad old Los Angeles, I understand people are told to stay home and do nothing during air-pollution alerts. I learned this by reading a Paris newspaper---the best way to learn what is wrong with Los Angeles and the rest of the United States. But no Paris newspaper has yet gotten around to explaining to my why I spit black solid particles in Paris and nowhere else, not even in New York. Paris was once civilized, now it's dieselized. It is when I start spitting black that I sound my own alert; I cut my effort down to the point of doing nothing more than wiggling the steering wheel of my Citroën until I have gotten up up and the hell away.
But don't let the exhaust fool you, it's only a smoke screen. Run an automobile on steam, electricity, sunshine, or the morning dew, it'll still get you. Put on bumper of eiderdown, bring back the man on horseback waving a red flag ahead of every motorcar (why did they ever take him away?), the automobile will still be lethal.
For that deadly Mustang-Cougar-Jaguar-Tiger GT you take by the tail is really nothing but a wheelchair. The difference is that most wheelchairs give the patient a chance to push the wheels. Hardly a wheel to push or turn in the deadly Mustang-Cougar-Tiger etc., it demands no more effort than the paraplegic's eyelid to flick that flips the pages of an electrically operated book. A buddy of mine who had a foot nerve severed in the infantry got a priority in 1945 for an Old Hydramatic; everybody has a priority today. Everybody is a paraplegic, we have superpower for infra-people.
Rewrite the riddle of the Sphinx, cut the legs out from under it. What starts out in life on wheels and stays on wheels until wheeled out? What starts out in a carriage, graduates to a stroller, then walks only through childhood and early adolescence until carried again by wheels? Why, it is man the hunter, that two-legged beast of prey. He could run a horse into the ground, he could plow a hundred acres, take a reef off Cape Horn, shovel four tons of coal on a single shift, he could do all of that and more. Not any more. Now he sits and twitches a finger and a toe. Yet his genes and his metabolism have not changed during the nanosecond of his biological history that has seen him reduced to a lump of helpless cushioned cosseted flesh.
He goes on eating like the hunter and the plowman, the boeuf bourguignon of the peasant winegrower, the bouillabaisse of the fisherman, the lumberjack's flapjacks, the cowboy's steaks, and he does nothing at all. Again the syndrome; the more he eats, the bigger the car he needs to be able to move. He can pass on a hill at eighty miles per hour, but he can't climb a flight of stairs. This is where the car gets us; we are turned into a nation of Falstaffs but only superficially. We are not jovial fat men, we're just fat. The pot belly and the beefy jowls of the Victorian exploiter of child labor, we've all got them now, the exploiters and the exploited, a classless society all the same weight class. Everyone looks like Diamond Jim Brady, but it doesn't come from high living with Lillian Russell.
Small wonder that the organism of man the hunter races wildly; all that energy intake is going wild, Achilles' heel is on the accelerator, his toe is on the brake. Small wonder that the energy bursts out elsewhere; perhaps it erupts into carcinomas that strike us down willy-nilly like the plague in Defoe's London, you're here today, you're gone tomorrow. It cloaks us, too, with unhealthy tissue, a refuse heap of quivering grease that we must tote with us when we jelly out of our wheelchairs, our hearts pumping like a schoolgirl's at the sight of her first swain, our chests heaving, our lungs panting.
A preposterous outrageous claim. Of course it is but go take it apart. Find a controlled population identical in all respects except that some drive cars and some do not. Keep tabs on them from adolescence on, prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the disease pattern for the drivers is the same as that of the carless, that the incidence of cancer is identical or, at least, within the bounds of statistical error. Even if you succeeded, I wouldn't believe you because it doesn't suit me. It did not suit a number of people to believe the Surgeon General when he produced his report on smoking, based on patients living the same lives in veterans' hospitals except that some used cigarettes and some did not. But don't worry, the tests are being run now, everyone is in the experiment whether he likes it or not, no one is asking him, we have been volunteered. What is it that knocks the growth process askew, that disturbs the balance of regulatory mechanisms? We do not know, of course, there are too many factors; some may be self-cancelling, others are certainly synergistic. What we do know is that no human beings until now have ever commanded so much artificial energy while using so little of their own.
The calories pour into the gut; the gasoline that goes into the tank is converted into motion, but not the calories in the gut. The power has to be used up, it has to go somewhere. Smoking is one way. I do not know the physiology, all I do know is that I was a lot more tired when I smoked. I did much less, I needed sleep more than I do now. Tobacco can use up the excess energy. Yet it, too, seems to spoil the balancing act. For a while, we can do anything, smoke, drive eat, drink. Not forever, though; the furnace stops drawing, we keep shoveling the stuff in but it doesn't go away. Cut down on sweets, try cyclamates instead; no, back to saccharine again; anything that will save the sweet sensation of fuel going down the gut without forcing us to convert it to work. Try the drinking man's diet, try the driving man's diet.
That is the true physical pollution of the car. The maimed and the dead are the tip of the iceberg, the gassed and the poisoned are but part of the picture. The real loser is the winner, the man who, like my late, dear father, never has an accident, never is hit, just sits and swells in his driver's seat, from Willy-Overland to LaSalle, over the years his engines growing more and more powerful as he grows weaker and weaker. It was the second infarctus that got my dad. After the first, he watched the cholesterol, he stopped smoking, he thinned down until the confidence came back, he started driving again, eating again, taking a taxi four blocks to the office. He thought he was whole again; he was moving less than when I had walked him slowly through the Bagatelle Gardens in the Bois de Boulogne after the first heart attack that had hit him in Europe. And he died, he survived his own father by only two years. The old man had faded at eighty-nine. I think his last car must have been a Franklin and he got rid of it when it was almost new. He walked through the jungles of Manhattan unafraid, he lived on the edge of Harlem where he had moved up from the Lower East side as a young man; he smoked to the end; he outdrank three generations; he never used anything more than a cane to move about. He was a sport and a sportsman. Fifty years ago he visited a ranch in Wyoming, he had kept horses and women; he went deep-sea fishing with his cronies who kept their derbies on as they dropped their lines and hoisted their glasses. He looked you straight in the eye with a flask in his hand, straight with his untamed eyes. He was a pre-car man, my grandfather, he lived but he did not talk of his living.
He was a sport in the day before the advent of the sport car, that contradiction in terms, the overhead-cammed, mid-engined, wide-tired wheelchair for the dead tired. I won't malign the pro, the rally driver who does it for a living. I once rode with Jean Vinatier of the Renault stable around the road circuit at Montlhéry outside Paris. He took me with him for some kind of a story that I had to do. He did a day's work; I remember he had forearms thick as telegraph poles, they moved the wheel at just the right moment to throw us into a power skid. We drifted around the turns of Montlhéry without a swerve, the Renault sideslipping easily, power holding it in place, wheels cocked at the right angle to keep us sliding. Then the forearms moved just ever so little and we were rolling down a straight, moving up to a hundred miles per hour until down went his foot and the smell of brake pads rose up again. Vinatier was risking only his own life; I felt safer with him than on route Nationale 20, the Paris-Orléans highway that I had taken out to Montlhéry. No one was watching us, no one was listening, he was keeping his touch, running through the scales. That was sport driving, it had nothing to do with laying rubber on Boulevard Saint-Germain before the impassive eyes of some poor agent who knows that anyone who can afford a Porsche can fix a ticket... and fix the wagon of some poor agent along with it.
The sport car is nothing but plastic surgery; the older and uglier one gets, the leaner and younger one's car must look. The pudgy and the puffy are turned into svelte long-muscled youths with the barrel chests of four-barreled carburetors, the tapering limbs of flared tailpipes. The car is a face; how many times have I been told that I did not see an acquaintance who drove by me in a red Peugeot 204 while I was on a bicycle. Yvonne saw me on a bicycle. I saw only the red Peugeot 204; it could have been Yvonne, it could have been the pharmacist on Rue Brea, it could have been anyone completely hidden, anonymous, nameless behind the huge mask of the windshield. It could have been a red Peugeot 204 driven by a computer and guided by radar, an experimental model intended to test the neuromotor responses demanded by traffic on Rue d'Assas. The only drivers I know by their vehicles are a few truckmen: Feron, the moving man, with the special high green body he put on a Mercedes-Benz chassis; Gasq, the coalman, a flatbed Citroën truck bowed under coal sacks. These men use motors to work, not to consume, they do not buy them as disguises.
That is how the pudgy and the puffy wear their jaguars and their Citroën Maseratis in Paris. Their wives seem to favor Fiat 850s or sawed-off Peugeots as if, unlike the menfolk who try to present a face of power, they want to look winsome and petite. The heart of the little Fiat is young and gay even if Madame is old and sad, sadder and wiser with the knowledge of what Monsieur is up to with the E-type Jaguar, all hood and engine, a four-wheeled phallus, more plastic surgery, the ultimate prosthesis.
I know a great deal has been thought and written about the bumper guards of Cadillacs during the Fifties and the thrust of hood ornaments, but even that aspect of the automobile is illusory. A friend of mine, Serge Vitry, once let me drive his steam locomotive. I sat in his chair, I looked out the window, there was the boiler, black, thirty feet long, shooting orange flame at one end, spouting steam at the other, whistling in the middle. I told him about the symbolism, he had never heard of it. He didn't know what I was talking about, he let me shout my inanities while he kept an eye on the water gauge and the track. Not many E-type Jaguars would be sold if a few more people could have a chance to watch a steam engine cleave the countryside, leaving it quiet and contented after the train has gone, the leaves hardly trembling in their repose, a caress of love, not at all the gang-shag of the superhighway, the perpetual day-and-night flashing of the putative Vinatiers in their sport cars. What a strange sport, there is none like it; men of fifty do not buy football helmets to go out and emulate Joe Namath, but anyone can buy Vinatier's Alpine and, in France, drive it legally as fast as Vinatier does. In America, cooler heads prevail; the car is meant to be seen rather than heard, the Toronado and the Le Mans purr along at the same quiet rate as the laundry trucks and the campers. Americans belt up in their sport cars, they are trussed like sausages, wrapped like packages, physically fit only to be tied. Yes, the car has given us mobility. On some cars, the trouble with the safety belt is that it makes it hard to reach the hand brake and the hand brake is the last aspect of automobility that demands any effort at all.
So we are bound hand and foot to our sport cars, we seal ourselves in, we drop into the box, we have all the mobility of a letter except that it can go first-class. We go fourth-class, junk mail, containerized bulk shipments. We can't even go to the toilet, no stopping except at designated rest areas. We have true mobility, eternal mobility, we are condemned like the wandering Jew to wander from one rest area to another, to beat like the Flying Dutchman around the Hawthorne Circle or the Bagnolet interchange. The British scream blue murder because steers can't turn around on factory farms, yet it is the British who pen humans into MGs and Morgans where they can hardly move enough to glance in a rear-view mirror, let alone turn their heads. I once interviewed a pioneer of the research submersible; he could not understand why people were reluctant to cram themselves into spherical pressure hulls no more than six feet in diameter. "It's not nearly as uncomfortable as going from Boston to New York in a Volkswagen." The airlines hesitated before they tried to sell us the big economy-sized box of a 747. They were wrong, they should put their tallest passenger model into the back seat of a two-door import and redesign their seats around him.
As it is, there is hardly any difference between driving to and flying from an airport. In both cases, the passenger is fastened to his seat and various distractions must be placed at his disposal to stop him from reminding himself that he can be dead at the next moment before he even has time to change the stereo tape cartridge or put on his earphones to catch the dialogue of the mature film. Planes and cars alike need entertainment: in-flight movies put seeing back into flying, rear-seat television is apparently on its way in cars. Only the driver will be deprived of a view of the world outside. He will have to be content with what he can glimpse of the passengers' expressions in his mirror as they watch the show. He always has the same view through the windshield, he only has to keep track of the exit numbers; never have people traveled so much and seen so little. The car started as a way to go places, it soon became a place.
While the commercial airliner is only an occasional experience, even for the seasoned passenger, the car is a semi-permanent environment. It influences the way we apprehend things. Not only does it cut physical activity, but it filters and inhibits sensory stimuli. We do not touch, see, and smell the way we did. Has this changed the way we interpret the world? It might be a good subject for researchers, the same sort of scientists as the ones I read about recently who were putting kittens into a room where they only had horizontal stripes before their eyes. When they grew up into big cats, they could not recognize vertical stripes, these were not part of their store of references. What are the references of the car children? Are they blind, perhaps, to everything that moves at less than forty miles per hour? What have they lost forever from the reference libraries in their heads? go to it, researchers, but hurry, you may not even have any controls left as it is.
This is the sort of work that could be carried out by a family or a team of scientists, working from one generation to the next. Father and son could follow the car children from the carriage to the hearse. Then perhaps they could catch that subtle moment when the addition of horsepower turns into a subtraction of strength, when Phoebus' chariot burns out and falls to earth as the wheelchair. Youth can stand anything... cars, cigarettes, education, the perpetual jet lag of its biological clock brought on by night living with artificial light (which has not been around much longer than cars as far as the ancestors of most of us were concerned). Then a discontinuity seems to appear. We do not have a smooth transition from youth through maturity. Instead, youth is lost, all is lost, it is a reverse moult, the butterfly becomes a caterpillar. Lewis Mumford talks about somewhat the same process when he describes how we now discard old technologies, the ways of the past, instead of building and improving on them as our ancestors did. We are obliged to drop our youth like a beautiful shell, to leave it to the next generation to don and display, while we crawl defenseless towards some sort of security. By the time we realize what has happened, it is too late. We have been moved down the production line, we are the senior citizens, we are the pro-pension lobby. Fear appears; if we lose our security, we will lose our cars and our energy, we will be cut down from two hundred and fifty horsepower to one manpower. So we do not take chances, as we grow older, we prefer not to gain so that we need not venture. The car gives us that illusory freedom to move but, in fact, it is the cars that are free to move. Socially, we are bound, just as we are belted into the car; we cannot move for fear that we will lose our parking place. In the end, the car serves as a school for discipline when it is used in large numbers. It is a training ground for sheep. Anyone who accepts a traffic jam will accept anything.
And yet, in all this dullness, there is that imminence of death at best or, at worst, disfigurement and maiming. We accept this as part of our transportation system run by incompetent amateurs, that is, ourselves. As usual, the French seem to have outdone most other people in this respect. It is just about impossible to get a French driver's license unless one is "presented" by a driving school So the future driver must take lessons at five dollars an hour, which can be five times what he himself makes an hour. The winner is the driver who gets his license with as few sessions, as little experience, as possible. One is worried sick if a friend or a relative is a few hours overdue on the highway in France, one has any number of acquaintances with bashed-in foreheads, glass eyes, rebuilt noses.
There is tension in the air of Paris, any intersection can deal a mortal blow. The driver is allowed to continue when the light turns orange if he is going too fast to stop... and there are ways of making sure of that. On a warm evening with the windows open, sleep may come to me softly until it is frightened off by the usual sequence of tires screeching, steel buckling, glass tinkling, a woman moaning, all for no reason at all, a trip to the movies, a visit to the children in the suburbs (those suburbs that would not exist, either, if the car had not destroyed the villages of Paris.)
I think the tension must exist everywhere, even in well-behaved American cities. There is always the subconscious attention that must be exerted, all the good driving habits that must be practiced. No matter how you slice it, you are still flesh and blood shooting along at the speed of an eagle, only you have no feathers to slow the landing impact, you are not the master of your element, you do not have two-hundred-fifty-horsepower reflexes.
What I am getting at is that you can survive as a city-suburb driver but only at a price. You are under tension, you use tension, a synonym for force and strength. Use it up driving and you have less to use somewhere else. Tension is creativity; God knows how may Sainte-Chapelles of stained-glass windows are lost to Paris in its daily jousts with danger.
No one has a choice, everyone must play, the pedestrian and the bus driver, the cyclist and the aging Don Juan with his monkey glands by Austin Healey. The car takes it off the top, it skims the cream from the city, the Parisian does not have much left by the time he has reached safety. Nor does anyone in any big city. He is in a state of constant battle fatigue, he gets only a few weeks a year away from the front; we gave our combat soldiers better treatment than that.
I am talking about a loss of creativity at any level, not necessarily the work of art. I mean good building, good cabinetmaking, good shoemaking, good cooking, the kind of creating that comes from the human mind and hands working in a place that does not intrude upon one's substance, that does not pluck and jangle nerves just when they have been turned to the proper pitch for making music, for making anything. The city dweller uses sedation and stimulation to try to achieve this pitch as he fights off the assault of the car on his ears, his eyes, his nose, and his very life. Or he flees to the seaside and the countryside where, precisely in the very places where nothing at all can be done, he feels capable of doing anything.
Chapter 3
Interstitial Living
The automobile takes fifty-five thousand lives a year in the Unites States alone. How much life does the bicycle give every year everywhere? I do not know, there are no statistics, I can only judge from my own experiences.
Follow the rivers, follow the water. Up the Hudson in Manhattan, you can take Riverside Drive, use the footpath, it is empty. Watch for the squirrels, they scurry up and over the wall separating the footpath from the derelict park. Roll past Grant's Tomb; I once met a girl there, I hadn't seen her in twenty-five years. She was coming in from Scarsdale in a station wagon big enough to be barred from a no-trucking zone. I was riding up from Herald Square on a bicycle in the rain. I had bought what was damn near a diving suit for the trip, it made no difference. The rain squashed down my back and into my shoes. We met on the steps of Grant's Tomb and we sat for an hour in a student Cafeteria on Broadway with our pasts while I fed quarters into a parking meter that was mounting guard on the station wagon with my bicycle locked inside.
Roll past Grant's tomb, past the Claremont Inn and the 125th Street dock of the Hudson River Day Line, past all that is gone, on and up Riverside Drive, over the George Washington Bridge and come out on the Palisades. There is a colony of rabbits on the New Jersey end of the George Washington Bridge. They are waiting there, biding their time, waiting to move into New York
At the end of the bridge, turn right, hang onto the brakes, let 'em squeal, let the wheels go, down you go down the side of the Palisades, the human fly on wheels, and you are on the shores of the broad Hudson, a mile of sun and scum between you and the heights of Manhattan. There is a road along the river, the trees arch over it in summer, it is as civilized as any gemütlich lane in Europe. A sign says cycling is forbidden; pay no attention to it, the police don't. Just roll along the river, go up the river as Henry Hudson did. Don't knock New York, don't kick America; the city is dead, the country has gone to hell, but I don't know another city that size with a state park on the other side of its doorstep, mile after mile of wilderness and rabbits and heaven knows what else. You can take the bike about seven miles up, almost to Alpine. On the way you come across a house that witnessed the Revolutionary War, then the road ends at a marina with wire fences guarding the yachts from river pirates, protecting them from everything except the Hudson swilling at their sides.
I have never gone any farther north, I do not know what lies beyond. I leave it to others to discover.
There are discoveries to be made; these are new trails, they can hardly be discerned on the maps issued by gasoline stations that mostly indicate roads where gasoline can be burned and bought. There might be a way all the way up to Bear Mountain, I don't know, I leave it to Henry Hudson to find it, Hudson on a bicycle like La Salle; Hudson and La Salle, no wonder those river names did not last on automobiles.
For a cyclist the Hudson is a fresh airway into the wilderness. The city's other waterways are too busy working for a living to worry about what they look like. The East River takes on some airs along Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive but loses them pretty quickly around 96th Street. A pedestrian walk starts there; it is a good place to cycle, you won't bother anybody. No one has seen a pedestrian for years along the East River, where they are as rare as fish in the river. Perhaps there is a correlation with the introduction of chlorinated hydrocarbons into the environment (DDT, if you prefer, but scientists like to say chlorinated hydrocarbons, it sounds like a soft drink).
The pedestrian walk leads to a footbridge over to Randall's Island, one of the most deserted places in New York (where The French Connection hid out its heroin ring). The view of the city downtown is well worth the journey, traumatic though it may be. One day, I pedaled along the walk until I got to the footbridge, I walked up a spiral ramp, then wrestled the bike up some steps to the bridge. It is a lift bridge, it could be hoisted out of the way in case a big ship came up the river, perhaps a de-mothballed United States making a profit at last by hauling tourists around Manhattan Island, the latest addition to the Circle Line fleet; 5,000 passengers at $5 a head, the ship could make a trip an hour running at 40 knots, it would be a license to print money. Nobody would see anything, the whole waterfront would have to be rebuilt to solve the problems of loading and unloading, but people put up with worse to ride airplanes where they see even less.
On the Randall's Island side of the footbridge, a track laid out as an idyllic path ran past broken park benches set on the water's edge, right to the foot of one tower of the Triborough Bridge. It was somewhat eerie, riding there after reading what the papers say about crime in New York. Randall's Island is a lonely place, any lurker could have cut me down without a trace, with no one to hear my screams, just the East River stinking by, waiting like a foul-mouthed hyena to gobble up the corpse, to dissolve me as if I had been dropped into battery acid.
But there were no lurkers, Randall's Island runs right off the danger scale. Jane Jacobs has observed that neighborhoods become risky as they empty out. People in the street police the street. When the little stores close to be replaced by supermarkets, there are no more shopkeepers, they do not keep an eye on the street outside as well as on the stock inside. But if you empty the streets of all targets, of all signs of life, then the predators leave for want of prey. That was the case of Randall's Island. I could not imagine a lurker waiting for a venturesome cyclist, loitering there for weeks, months, or years, living on garbage thrown overboard from passing tugs, growing a knee-length beard an, in final desperation, hoisting a signal of distress in the hope that drivers might see it from the Triborough Bridge.
Lovers of wild life overlook Randall's Island and they are wrong. I have never seen bigger or wilder rats in my life than the ones that share the island with its other inhabitants, the patients of a mental hospital. The hospital is fenced off from the idyllic park but I once saw the other side. I had ridden over from Queens on the footpath of the Triborough Bridge and, losing altitude, I landed inside the hospital grounds on Randall's Island. I asked a nurse how to get to the Manhattan footbridge. She advised me strongly against going outside the fence, there was worse than rats there. Yet I had no choice, either I would get to that bridge or I would wander about the hospital grounds as dazed as the other shapes I could see on the island. I found a hole in the fence, I got through, I got the bike through, I almost patted the rats, I was that glad to see them.
Otherwise, the East River is not very frightening. There is the park around the mayor's Gracie Mansion and a hanging promenade over the motor highway leading south. In the 80s and the 90s, there are still two- and three-story houses off the river; there is Yorkville putting up a wall of ethnic identity against nonentity, it succeeds almost as well as Chinatown does. Not quite, though; it is just a little too paunchy from all that wurst and beer. I prefer my East River below 14th Street, that is where I prefer my New York. The bicycle has guided me to all the beautiful cities of Manhattan; the frame houses of Grove Court to the west, the Oriental columns and the pastel walls of the East Village, the inner turnings of Mercer and Greene Streets, Mott and Mulberry. It takes me to places I had never heard of on my native island, Republican Alley and Old Slip. Get there fast while they last, they're coming down.
Brooklyn Bridge isn't falling down, it carries automobiles, it is allowed to stay up. They zoom at your feet when you go over the bridge on the plank path shared by pedestrians and cyclists. I once crossed it in a winter dawn; I have never seen anything like it anywhere, red-pink light like stained glass inside the Gothic arches of Roebling's towers, those stone spires stuck in the bottom of the East River and put to work holding up a bridge. I was caught inside the spun web of the cables. Upstream lay Manhattan Bridge against the redish-pink light, upstream from Manhattan Bridge the power plants were pouring out great clouds of white steam condensing in the cold, they were puffing away at full steam, the last of the tall-stackers, trying to keep Manhattan Island where it is, trying to hold it in the mainstream.
On the other side of the bridge, Jehovah's Witnesses give you the time and the temperature. If they weren't so pious, you would accuse them of lying when they flash 5 degrees at you. It can't be that cold. Yes, it is, the heat that you had stored up overnight is running out, mittens can save your hands but there is nothing you can do about your feet. You are like those European electric radiators that accumulate heat at night on the cheap rates, then trickle it out unplugged all day long. On Brooklyn Bridge, all the heat runs out all at once. You can hardly make it back to City Hall, then over to the diner on Canal Street that stays open every day of the year, New Year's Day included. A glass of tea will warm you hands before it warms your stomach, thereby warming your feet, tingling them back to life for a few more minutes, a few more miles until you are home.
Brooklyn Bridge leads to a number of places. There is bucolic Brooklyn Heights on the other side with the other view of Manhattan, this time with the castles and the cathedrals flattened to a silhouette against the curtain of the World Trade Center. From Brooklyn Heights, the port of New York becomes visible again. Freighters load at the foot of the heights; it would be a good place to stroll or roll if it were not for the infernal six-lane highway plastered against the cliff of the Heights, three lanes at a time. I seldom cross to Brooklyn Heights, I keep it in reserve for the future. Instead I concentrate on the Manhattan side of the bridge, Fulton Fish Market down below, first the aerial view from the bridge roadway, then the market itself at six o'clock in the morning. Around Christmas is a good time to catch the market. The big porters climb up to the tops of open tank trucks to net eels for the Italian and Portuguese trade, the fish-crate fires roar around the pillars of the elevated highway that keeps drivers off the street and keeps the street away from drivers so they can never see it. They do not even know of the existence of Fulton Fish Market, Les Halles and Convent Garden all wrapped up and packaged at their doorstep, they cannot see it, they can only flee it. I push the bike through the market, I warm my rear on a fish-crate fire, a Jewish porter starts a conversation with me. Handcarting fish around the Fulton Market was one of the old trades of the Lower East Side. It is going; when the market is gone, it will be gone. No need to replace the old iron-rimmed carts, they're good for a few more years. You can see some that Stieglitz must have seen with his camera. They are almost big enough to be pulled by a horse, they are still towed by a man over the cobblestone of Front Street.
When the market is gone, the Seaport Museum will take over on Front Street. I like the museum, but it will not be the same. One must be thankful for small blessings, the museum pier is always open. At any hour of the morning, the cyclist can find a snug harbor of silence there after watching helicopters arrive with their high-priced cargoes of commuters to Lower Manhattan, so much more upper than the Lower East Side. On the museum pier, a cyclist can circle slowly in front of a schooner or a square-rigger or the Ambrose Lightship. At lunchtime, he can eat there, too, without worrying about someone walking off with the bicycle, there is a bike-in counter on the pier. Congress has devalued the dollar, but not bicycles. I don't know how much they are worth in New York. I once took one into a shop, I left it in a corner, a salesman told me: "Don't leave it there, it'll grow feet." In Central Park on a Sunday, I saw a racer take his bike into the comfort station with him. I expressed amazement, he knew better; the bike was worth four hundred dollars and he had already lost two outside that comfort station.
There is another pier where a ship sleeps on the Hudson River, a freighter used as a school by the city of New York. The ship's flanks catch the setting sun the way that the towers downtown reach for the sunrise. From the pier, you can see a retired Staten Island ferry. Manhattan seems to rest on its waterfront, where it once worked so hard. The ferry slumbers on the Hudson river, the police in their prowl cars pull up on the walks of the small stretch of park along the East River near the Williamsburg Bridge, sleeping the sleep of the just. The cops bat a sleepy eye when asked for directions, then they go back to their napping. No one is worried by a cyclist. People whose life it is to take the joy out of other lives do not go around on bicycles, such people are too important for that. So the bike is accepted everywhere.
It is even more adept at making friends if the rider happens to be a photographer with a French accent and a fascination for fire engines. In New York the fire engines are like the private garbage trucks, they are great powerful tools, monuments to the high-priced American workingman. They go through the streets like an emperor; no dignitary visiting Paris in a puny Citroën with a motorcycle escort can flatten the city like a Manhattan fire engine. We once caught one down around Houston Street. The crew had stopped to inspect a theater. Two firemen were riding in the back platform; one looked as if he were on a seven-day bat. He had been out on twelve calls on a Saturday night in midwinter. Fatigue slurred his voice and blurred his eyes, he had not shaved in two days. He was glad to see the photographer from France. "You're from France? Why my mother was a hooker on the Champs-Elysées. She worked the right side." He looked at his buddy. "His mother worked the left side." His buddy looked at us. "You know how it is, there's one in every outfit."
We stood in the cold, talking to the firemen who stayed with their engine to prevent a frustrated bicycle thief from making off with it while the rest of the crew inspected the theater. It didn't take long, just time enough for me to botch a picture of the photographer wearing the fireman's hat. Then the driver came out, they all got aboard, the engine shrieked, and off the went, back into the pages of Currier and Ives: THE AMERICAN FIREMAN---Always Ready.
It was in Washington that we made the greatest haul of all these American urban fishing trips. We were in the streets of Georgetown, feasting our eyes and stuffing them on downtown frame houses and trees. A garbage truck came along the street, as it does sooner or later on every street. The cyclist becomes a connoisseur of garbagemen; they must necessarily go through the city more slowly than he does, he has ample time to study them. There are the garbage trucks of Paris with the Africans and Arabs on the back end and the European driver, reading his paper at the wheel. There are the monsters of New York that wrench ten tons at the time off the street. There is the farm tractor hauling a wagon that comes around every other Saturday in Lanloup in Brittany and inevitably stalls in front of the Duvals' café. But I have never seen anything like those Georgetown garbagemen. They belonged in the Olympics; no pro football team could have put on a better passing performance even with presidential play-making. Three men in orange worked the street. They sent great plastic garbage cans arching through the blue sky in mortar trajectories that landed them right into the basket on the rear of the truck. Then back went the cans to the owners' stoops in a series of flat lateral passes. One man on that crew was memorable, he was strong as a lion, graceful as a panther. His secret was the follow-through, you could tell by watching him. The garbage cans flew after the truck with his hands still fanned in their direction, driving them on in their flight with the field of force emanating from his fingers. He wasted no time with the photographer, the truck kept moving, so did he, so did she. She loaded and reloaded, focusing and clicking away at him while those trash cans floated through the air with the greatest of ease. There is nothing demeaning about street cleaning, not when it is a game of skill and strength like polo that only a few can play.
It was our bicycles that caught the Georgetown Redskins at practice; nothing can be hidden from the bicycle in a city. It brought me into the courtyards of Paris, even the one next to my own home where twenty years went by before I found Ossip Zadkin's sculptures tended by his widow in the garden of their house. The bicycle took me to the remote arrondissements of Paris where nothing of note ever happens, where the human species will survive a few more years until concrete overruns its sanctuaries.
I have come to think of the streets of Paris as the oceans that bound a continent. Travel along their shores and you will know the coastline. To know the continent, you must ride the rivers into its innermost fastnesses. So it is with courtyards. Through doorways, one enters another city of town houses and greenery, cobbled lanes and weathered shanties; one, two, three courtyards behind the street, the third level of consciousness. There in the soul of the city are sculptors and upholsterers, locksmiths and printers, the crafts and arts that need bulky equipment and plenty of space. There are fountains and gardens, vegetable farms and châteaux. There are old streets cut off by the façade of a new building on the avenue but running back, back, back into the innards of the block where you can turn around and see that the old street crosses the new avenue and keeps going through the newer buildings on the other side. The courtyards of Paris, I like to think, are its subconscious, where everything is deposited, where all is preserved until the New Parisian comes along with his bulldozers and his hollow bricks to house Eliot's hollow men in co-op coops for battery humans, wiping out all the layers of consciousness, lobotomizing the city, separating it from its memory.
In the courtyards, I found the city that Elliot Paul wrote about in The Last Time I Saw Paris, but not where he found it. His Rue de la Huchette no longer exists as he saw it. The buildings are still there, but they might be in Disneyland, Florida; Mystic, Connecticut; Williamsburg, Virginia. The character is gone, it is replaced by characters, the rich who expensively dress poor, acting out a play that is all the more Living Theater because they do not even know they are actors themselves. Rue de la Huchette has gone through the travail that transforms urban villages everywhere into Greenwich Villages. It would be more honest to tear them down and put glass and ferro-concrete in their stead rather than leave this stage set, freshly painted in trompe l'oeil to look down-and-out, with its smellovision show of stale fat frying in cheap restaurants where the food is dreadful because it is cheap, thereby punishing all the New Parisians, tourists in their own country, who dare sin by stinging on their sacrifices. Adventurers form the far reaches of Auteuil and Westchester rub shoulders in the dives of Rue de la Huchette, providing local color for each other.
I prefer my courtyards where the last time I saw Paris it had not changed a whit since the next-to-the-last time. These are the recesses where humanity holes up, where a way of life survives around a tree, flowerpots at a window, ivy tumbling down the wall. Every courtyard dweller thinks he has a piece of the country to himself in the midst of the infested city. Each thinks his situation is unique because, obviously, he seldom goes out. He need not, has has a full feast for his eyes and his soul. Like the wandering tinkers who once brought the news from one lonely farm to another, I move from courtyard to courtyard on my bicycle. I keep an eye on the stone brow of the city for a new friendly wrinkle that gives away another principality in hiding.
Paris is like Gruyère cheese, more holes than solid matter, almost a Potemkin city that pretends to be a metropolis on its outward side but actually lives as a network of atoms interlinked as in those big molecular models used to teach chemistry. When I began to hunt courtyards, I would pedal off, coast along looking for a doorway, enter when one looked promising, spot some trees on the other side of a wall, wheel around the block, try to get at the trees, climb a flight of stairs for an aerial view, mumble to a concierge that I must have been at the wrong address, brave a dog that suddenly became fierce as soon as it could yap from its own doorway, forget where I was.
At first, I knew only a few courtyards. I was like their inhabitants, I thought them unique. One was behind the city hall near Les Halles. It was a rough lane, cobblestoned, with two bellying medieval buildings arched over it, forming a passage festooned with gas pipes and electric cables. Down at the end, daylight showed where a friend of mine was living in an old stable he had turned into a duplex. The ceilings were low but the house was quite liveable if one went around on all fours. He had been told that the courtyards outside has once been the Court of Miracles where the lame beggars walked and the blind saw in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, making the place at least an ancient as Victor Hugo. So began my miracle of the Courtyards.
The next one I found started with another cobblestoned lane not far from Rue Mouffetard, la Mouff', that street of market stalls, Arabs selling lemons one by one, fruit stands decorated like a feast-day altar in front of the Church of Saint Médard. La Mouff' is dying, slowly choked by the necrosis that seeps down from Place de la Contrescarpe where the cheesy greasy restaurants are taking over along with the pubs imported lock, stock, and Watney's barrel from Olde Englande. An Armenian shoe dealer who sells everything from espadrilles to sabots told me how it worked. A hole-in-the-wall business becomes an antique shop, an art gallery, a bar, all of them busy only in the late afternoon and at night. So, during the day, the street loses people. Shops trying to sell something useful find themselves high and dry, cut off from the sea of humanity in which they once thrived like fish.
I walked into the doorway not far form Rue Mouffetard. It looked promising, a high wooden double gate, a stone placed there as a convenience for those alighting from a horse, I imagine, and the rugged paving stones that have never been changed in these courtyards because they never wear out. Beyond the gates of the buildings, the hidden streets of Paris are paved as they were when Ben Franklin walked the city with that fresh all-embracing curiosity of his. Paris is not foreign to me in its old parts, it has more of my past as an American that many an American city where no era tails beyond its end, where every decade apparently has an automatic self-destruct button, timed to explode like a delayed-action mine---its artifacts, its traces on earth thrown away, destroyed like ten years of calendar pages. I go over the city of Paris again and again on my wheels, stopping, prying; each time I ride over it is like another chisel stroke in a woodcut. There is always room for another line, another miniature image in the great mural of a city that I am putting together in my mind.
I rode into the lane running off Rue du Cardinal Lemoine that leads into Place de la Contrescarpe. Beyond the gate, a row of two-story buildings. An illusion of an inner street, not a bad bag for the courtyard hunter. A tall, full plane tree at the end of the street. I ventured up to it. Always go to the end of the courtyard, it may not be the end. To the right, there may be a gap, a winding around a corner and into another corner, even more of a lull in the storm of a city. This courtyard did not end at the plane tree, nor did it wind. It opened into a blossom of lawn and lilac bushes bounded by two old town houses glorious in crumbling stone, flaking paint, shutters askew.
The place, so a sign said, was a pension de famille. Several times, I went into it, where I could smell the odor of measured portions and old lives running down as they, too, were measured to the last drop. I found no one there until, one day, a glum woman told me the building was coming down to make room for studios (a Paris studio, like a New York studio, is a large room that has been converted into a small room with bath and kitchen so that it can get a large rent).
I took the photographer, who is also a painter, to look at the courtyard during its last days, in that pause when old buildings are left alone, locked and barred with their memories, shut up to shut out the bums, before the bulldozers move in to knock down the ceilings and the floors, leaving only a faint imprint, a painted panel, a few bathroom-wall tiles, the pattern of a staircase on an adjoining wall. As we stood in the yard with our bikes, a little boy walked up, took a lilac from a bush, and went off into the street.
His mother emerged from the house. She was as slender as he was, she had the same open look in her face, she might have been her child projected against a screen so as to give a somewhat larger image. We talked to her; she and her husband had bought the pension de famille and they were going to make a small hotel out of it. Mainly, they wanted a place to live, a base from which they could send their two little boys out from a country house off Rue de Cardinal Lemoine to go to school with lilacs for their teacher. Nothing else would change, there would be no studios, the tattered carpet on the stairs would stay, so would the old corner room with both windows opening full into the embrace of the boughs of the big tree I had seen from the street.
Only the dining room would go, there would be no more old gray heads bowed as if in meditation over soup of leeks, wrapped in concentration while teeth, seldom their own, chomped bread and skinny skeiny beef, scraping clean the sides of little glass bowls to get the last cool acid drop of yogurt from them. The dining room did go, but the smells of that cooking lingered on for weeks.
They were not unpleasant, they talked to the painter as she worked in that corner room embraced by the tree. They talked to her in the intervals when she was left alone by the owners' two small sons who crept upstairs like mice, slithered into her room like snakes, then worked like beavers over the paper, paints, and crayons she dispensed to keep them busy while she went about her business. She worked well in her courtyard; whenever she had enough she charged down the stairs, ran over the grass with her big feet kicking high like a sprinter's, ran out the double gate on Rue du Cardinal Lemoine to a baker for a loaf of bread, to a cafe for two cups of coffee boiling hot. She could have ordered a large coffee but then the second half would not have been as hot as the first.
I used the courtyard myself as an advance camp for my exploration of the twistings and writhings of Paris-off-the-street. I would return with my tales, my addresses jotted in a shirt pocket-sized notebook; I passed my scout's reports to the painter. Then, converted into a photographer, she sallied forth, camera on her back, lens case on her hip, the two of us awheel as we set out to record another image of the countryside-in-Paris, the city of gardens and children and old women that is going down faster than I can write it up, faster than she can put it onto film. That city is still so much bigger than the mites who are destroying it. It will outlast them, I think and I hope; I think and I hope that it will always be able to offer the photographer a new castle, a new bosk that she has not yet seen, a new cranny of the Paris that both of us had once crissed, crossed so unseeingly. I think it will last; I can discover five courtyards in one afternoon, she can take five afternoons to photograph one courtyard.
Once, she entered the life of an old lady on the verge of eviction from the country house she had occupied in the 13th arrondissement for fifty years. The old lady brought up her family and grew her vegetables there all within sight of the elevated Métro line that ducks in and out of the ground like a demented mole as it rings the inner city. When we met her, she was gathering her things together, her meek meager belongings, to make the move to a studio apartment in a high-rise that had been rented for her by her family. It was not that she disliked the idea of moving, she simply could not imagine it. She had no idea of what life is like in the city of Paris if one does not have a house, a tomato patch, a few hens for fresh eggs and, as neighbors, old workmen who come by every day to tend their allotments, turning over the soil, planting vegetables, pruning fruit trees, eating cherries off the branch, all within sight of the Métro.
The old lady used to have many neighbors. The wasteland around her had once been a city of coopers making the big barrels for the Halle aux Vins, the Left Bank wine market that has also died, its site marked by a tombstone of the usual glass, steel, and concrete into which science students have been funneled. I visited that wine market many years before, it wasn't a bad place in those days. There was one small building on stilts for the science students while tank cars full of Beaujolais and Big Red were switched between its legs. I had to do a story on the leading Paris dealer in Beaujolais. Next to the big clean vats in his market shed, I traveled through the litany of villages that make up Beaujolais, saying my beads with him: Saint-Amour, Moulin-à-Vent, Juliénas, Brouilly. The leader spat out the wine we tasted. I didn't. I had to write the story from memory, my notes were deep purple. I walked through the market into the dark cellars where I met an old man bottling his own brand of wine, sticking labels on by hand, truly an anachronism in his comfortable sweet-smelling cellar room under the high vaults that had been built in the days of the first Napoleon. The old man knew he had to go, he did not mind for his own sake; he only thought that he and his kind were more of a help to humanity that (a wave in the direction of the science school's first building) the others with their atomic bomb.
When the wine market went, the city of the coopers was bound to follow. I discovered it only by accident, following my glances into side streets, back alleys, front yards. Nearly all of the coopers' village had been demolished by the time I found it. There were only the houses of the old woman and her family, lone hummocks in the steppe of dust and ruts and weed-grown walls around them. The old woman was eighty but she had the blue eyes of a child, a diaphanous skin that was almost luminous at times, and white hair that covered her fragile head like a delicate veil of thin silk. It was the hair that bothered her, she had just done it, she did not want to pose with a scarf on her head. The photographer agreed; she came back the next day without me but there was not enough light to photograph the old woman in the yard of her house. She went back to the house at least twice more before she was able to get her pictures. Occasionally, I joined her and we prowled in back of the old woman's house, eating a few fresh cherries from a tree that had been left to its own resources in the few weeks of life remaining to it.
Through the orchards and gardens of the 13th arrondissement we roamed until we were met by a powerfully built man and his German shepherd dog, even more powerfully built. He was the watchman; he had been keeping an eye on us from his perch in the attic of a deserted two-story house. We got along well with the watchman because we took him seriously. First intruders, we quickly became his guests. He gave us a conducted tour through a magnificent town house that was coming down in a few days in the name of urban renewal: winter garden, billiard room, butler's pantry with call board, bathrooms upstairs and down, fireplaces, parquet flooring, all to be fed to the wreckers. The watchman was taking care to see that none of this fell into the wrong hands. While we were there, we watched as he and the dog and a friend moved a great mirror that had once looked down from over the fireplace. They heaved it and they hauled it, backing and filling and tacking downstairs through entrances until they reached the watchman's command post in the deserted house that was coming more to resemble a warehouse.
The watchman talked readily. Most people do in the courtyards of Paris. They are not city people fearful of strangers and movement but villagers at home on their own turf, confident and therefore not defensive. He told us everything except his name. He was one of those leftovers from the fall of the French Empire: l'Indochine is gone and so is l'Algérie. There is not too much demand for easy-talking men who swim best in troubled waters. One often meets them as watchmen outside some of the treasures of Paris, where they display the alert wariness, latent strength, and social ease that go with their role as men of the world, professional pacifiers in retirement. They are left with their dogs and their lonely patrols, waiting for the Viet Minh or the fallagas or Abd-el-Krim to turn up in the 13th arrondissement within sight of the Métro.
This arrondissement is my despair; it is here that rural Paris is getting hit the hardest. Since it borders on the Latin Quarter, it allows the promoters to boast that their concrete filing cabinets for carbon-copy humans are "Left Bank residences." I rush at the 13th arrondissement on my bicycle like a man who has been placed before a smörgasbord and told he has only five minutes to eat all he can. I tote the bike through streets that end in steps where, on top of one, I found a parked bicycle with wooden rims on its wheels, wooden mudguards over them. It must have been there for years and years, left perhaps when its front tire went flat during the exodus from Paris in 1940, overlooked by occupiers and liberators alike, moldering peacefully on top of the steps. No one would steal a bicycle with wooden wheels, not even in New York.
Two doors away from the bicycle, I sighted a house with a telltale bust outside in a wall niche, almost a sure sign of a fallen mansion. I entered, I saw tall doors that had once opened into a stable. An old lady came out, the concierge who had been there since 1910. The house had been a hunting lodge for King Henri IV, she told me, and there were rooms upstairs over the entrance where the king could enjoy a little variety in his game. There was also a country pump she had to show me; she pulled away a few flowerpots, pried loose some boards, and there in the wall was the old pump, its long iron handle rusted but recognizable. The old lady did not mind living in the king's hunting lodge now that she had electricity, but she had to wait until the end of the Second World War for that.
Burrowing through Paris, I came across another old woman in the 15th arrondissement who was lighting with gas. I asked her what she did for wicks. She said there was still a shop on Avenue Emile Zola that handled them but she did not know what she would do when they closed. The possibility that her landlord might electrify never crossed her mind. There was no reason why it should have, the building was doomed. It stood in the way of the Paris of the Year 2000 that is going up on this other left Bank flank of the Latin Quarter, edging out factories, rooming houses for Arab factory hands, and more more more gardens, farmhouses, backyard woods.
It was in this disaster area that I wandered one morning, fleeing the dust and the monstrous mixer trucks. I ducked into alleys and lanes, I had no idea where I had landed. And I saw a blacksmith shoeing a donkey. He looked up in irritation when he saw he was being watched, because the animal was skittish, then he went on with his work. He had a leather apron tied around his waist and a leather sling around his neck. He placed the donkey's hoof in the sling. This left his hands free; he took some nails from a pocket in his apron and hammered them home. It was serious business, he had neither the time nor the inclination to chat. He was shoeing the donkeys and the ponies that rot out every day from that unpaved courtyard in the 15th arrondissement to the Luxembourg Gardens and the Camp-de-Mars, where they carry children, some in carts, some on their backs. A country boy leads the animals and reassures the city children, delighted but a little fearful in the presence of beasts almost as rare as the panda, as exotic as the platypus, almost as extinct as the dodo in their city.
I was once riding down Rue de Sèvres, a Left Bank artery in the vein of Carnaby Street, when I pulled up at a red light next to a panel truck with a donkey inside. The driver told me he sold sachets of lavender, bottles of lavender toilet water in the street from a big basket on the donkey's back. The donkey provided an authentic touch of Haute Provence, where the lavender grows. The light changed, the truck moved off slowly. The driver said he was looking for a place to park. I asked him why he did not use the new underground parking lot that had been gouged out below Boucicaut Square, leaving the square with a layer of pallid grass and puny trees trying to grow over the scene of the crime. Oh no, said the lavender-truck driver, the donkey didn't like to go under the ground, he baulked in the darkness where the shoppers parked. He may have been a donkey, he was no ass.
Rue de Sèvres is a good street for courtyard shopping. I go down it at least once a day; it always changes, depending on which gates are open. Two lead to convents and church schools; this is a neighborhood of nunneries and residences for the clergy. When the gates open, it is like looking into a magic Easter egg, an image of flowerbeds, shaded lanes, sleepy provincial old church schools. But the gates seldom open and they do not work automatically when you push the bell button. That is a trick I often use: I see a promising gate, I ring the bell, the doors swing open, I glance inside, take some mental notes, drink in what I can, then shut them softly. On Rue de Sèvres and other Church properties, this will not do. There is always a little grille at the door where one must state one's business. In many Paris convents, it is hard to find someone willing to allow a photographer to photograph the gardens and the henhouses and the sagging verandas. Nuns are well-trained to pass the buck; the ultimate power of decision lies somewhere in the provinces, they tell you with uplifted eyes.
This limits my activities, because nuns control so much of Paris behind the walls; businesslike nuns who run neighborhood dispensaries; wing-hatted nuns who dispense handouts to bums, shuffling respectfully up to the convent door, hobbling on canes, pushing three-wheeled baby carriages loaded with gleaned garbage; lithe nuns in sweatsuits who teach physical education; young Irish nuns who speak French to you with a brogue. They are the vestals of the old city of Paris; they watch their sanctuary being nibble away as the Church sells off properties to the builders. Half a convent goes down so that apartments can go up. The other half stands next to it, the paint of inside rooms on outside walls, old dark walnut doors that now open onto this air. Every time we cycle by, the photographer says she expects to see a nun walk out one of those doors and fly away on the wings of her hat.
Adjoining houses are the best places to spy on convents, so I have been told. One Peeping Tom watches nuns work their vegetable gardens in the 7th arrondissement and tries not to miss the moment of their daily recreation when they relax with a wild game of volleyball. He is not really a Peeping Tom, he designs grandfather-clock-sized pocket watches or arm's-length-thermometers in a shack three courtyards behind Rue du Cherche-Midi that runs back to back to Rue de Sèvres, providing a long swatch of country in the busiest part of the Left Bank, a rural stretch between two traffic-occluded colons, Boulevard Raspail and Boulevard du Montparnasse. I like riding down Rue du Cherche-Midi; cars always use it to beat the jam on Boulevard Raspail, then they get caught behind a moving van standing still on an all-morning job and the street is mine.
On Rue du Cherche-Midi, there are those high old doorways, tall enough to let a carriage through with baggage on the roof, tall enough to let a horse rear, that give away the presence of a mansion in the old aristocratic quarters. From under such a doorway, so a plaque tells me, Rochambeau left to fight alongside the revolutionaries in America. Two courtyards behind, an upholsterer works at his trade in one of those slanty wooden sheds, all splinters and fire hazards, that creak happily behind the frosted façades of Paris. The upholsterer will talk to you; courtyard people talk to the infrequent passerby once you assure them you are there to admire their courtyard and not take it away from them. They can understand this, they bask in your admiration, they show you a secret fountain, a hidden tower, a sculptured pediment. It is a good rule on Rue du Cherche-Midi, Rue de Varenne, Rue de l'Université, Rue de Lille, Rue du Bac, Rue Barbet-de-Jouy to look behind the high doorways. Space opens beyond, a preface of paving stones leading to the steps of a town house, to the half-timbered walls and low gables of a stable where a Rolls is groomed, or even a road that runs up to houses facing a wood, parents lying in hammocks rigged to trees, reading and relaxing, unaware of their kids climbing out the attic window, wooden swords in hand like d'Artagnan, teetering on the edge of the roof gutters, whispering to us on the other side of the wall where we watch silently, with complicity.
Courtyards are rife in these quarters of Paris where nobles built without a car for space, leaving an odd acre of English park below their windows, a wilderness that betrays its presence to the street outside only by the cool breath that comes from the doorway on a hot summer day. In the back streets of these quarters, Rue de Verneuil, Rue Saint-Dominique, Rue Cler, Rue de l'Exposition, Rue du Gros-Caillou, the tradesmen work in courtyards of their own, overlooking more wilderness planted in flowerpots, oil drums, old tires, anything that will keep soil in place on top of cement. On a small street of Rue de Sèveres, a lady has a parasol and a table in the garden behind the little hotel she runs; she sits at the table and writes poetry when the sun and her inspiration are out.
There is also much for the eye to rest on in the working-class parts of Paris where space was laid on lavishly because land values were low. There, the gardens run off bumpy private streets never paved for the motor age, some still with center gutters to take what used to come out of the houses. I know an apartment house with allotment gardens behind it, to each tenant his own garden below. Population densities are high in these streets, but so are amenities for the population. Houses can stretch back a block or so, hidden forever from whatever is happening on the big streets. These little streets are called villas or cités; many were built to provide the most modest possible housing for workmen and artisans who now enjoy air, trees, gardens, grass, solitude, the most royal of privileges in the city of Paris. In the heat of June or July, kids romp naked through the cités and dogs run unafraid.
The situation is gradually being righted; step by step, little by little, these pockets of sanity and humanity are being cleared away, houses knocked down as if they were of cards, trees uprooted so that the soil can sprout high-rise beanstalks. Or even worse, the walls stay up, the roofs stay on, but the insides are gutted, the intestines are torn out to make way for rich stuffing. Such is the urban plight of Paris; the rich can destroy a city far more thoroughly than the poor. They can turn it into a exurb with none of the inconveniences of commuting. The suburban trains and the Métro are the lot of the fugitives chased from the city core. The result is the same as Westport or La Jolla; work is banished, dirty hands are the sign of the pariah unless they belong to maid or plumber. On Sundays, holidays, in July and August, these inner suburbs look as if someone had spread the word the Russians are coming.
It is among the aristocrats and the artisans, Faubourg Saint-Germain and Faubourg Saint-Antoine, that life still edges out death in the courtyards that the bicycle enters and leaves without a trace of its passage. This could be a model of urban planning, a city polka-dotted by the countryside. This could be the Paris of the Year 2000, the Paris of eternity, but the up-and-coming and the here-and-now will have none of it. The doorways of Passy are twice as high as those of Faubourg Saint-Germain, a double-decker bus could get through with everyone standing up; the concierge's lodge is twice as humble, the promise is that of a Versailles or, at the very least, a Fontainebleau behind the gates.
So I go in and there is a frosted glass door at the other end of the entrance. Bad sign that, must be something to hide. Open the door, a yard that looks more like an inch; the used to call it an airshaft in Hell's Kitchen. A monotony of yellowish brick, cheaper than the hewn stone outside, a building whose tenants enjoy neither light nor air, just the address out front. Behind it, more of the same. Those that built here knew the value of a square meter, they did not waste a millimeter, they raised their vertical deserts for the cream of Paris, letting it rise to the top by elevator. In the morning, the desert Bedouins become nomads in their cars, clotting the streets, clogging the air, agreeing only that le progrès has made city life possible.
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