Paris is Not Paradise
Gritty Reality
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I wrote a piece about my Paris trip several days ago and was planning on editing it and posting but this now feels more urgent. What I want to tell you about is what happened on the 96 bus last night.
But before that: I now need to first tell you about fifteen minutes ago. (6/30/25)
Today is Day 6 of my stay in Paris. I’m at an Air BnB in the 20th arrondisement on Rue des Montiboeufs near Rue Belgrand and close to the famous cemetery Père-Lachaise, where Jim Morrison’s grave is (and many famous authors) and where I visited with my ex in 2007, in the winter of my 24th year, a long, long time ago.
This area feels pretty safe in general but it’s for sure got a little edge to it. Think South Berkeley where it borders Oakland. Big African culture. Lots of cafes and coffee shops (though the coffee shops here, like in Madrid, are not like in America; they’re closer to what we’d call restaurants).
I got here, to Paris, on June 24, at midnight, via train from Madrid. The speed train which goes close to 200 mph, something which the United States and specifically California should have been doing for two decades by now and probably never actually will due to red tape and regulations. We have the money we just can’t spend it without going through seven layers of hell.
So far Paris has been, minus last night on the bus and my experience just before I started writing, very good. My one week in 2007 is hazy in my memory at this point so my main frame of reference is books, reputation (city, good; people, rude), and more books, plus a smattering of films such as Woody Allen’s 2012 Midnight in Paris which I loved and have watched several times.
Anyway. I’ve been exploring a lot, walking for an hour, two hours and more to get from one place to another, riding the excellent, fast, smooth subway trains, and also taking busses. I have yet to take a single taxi or Uber. I like seeing the city from different angles and perspectives. I haven’t done any of the trendy expected things such as perusing the Louvre or walking inside Notre Dame or seeing the Pantheon, but I have visited the Eiffel Tower (from very close up but not paying to go in), stood close to the Hotel de Ville, strolled along the green, gorgeous sparkling Seine River (imagining Hemingway 100 years ago, then a young man and unknown aspiring writer, doing the same, which he describes beautifully in his 1961 memoir, A Moveable Feast). And yes, I went to Shakespeare & Company bookstore, the infamous bookstore founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach which brought together such luminaries as James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway,
Yesterday I hit my second English-language AA meeting. It was at 58 Rue Madame, in the 6tharroondisement, right by the Luxembourg Gardens and the Eglise Saint Sulpice. I did a meeting here four or five days ago and met a 33-year-old guy named Tim there from San Francisco. We hit it off and exchanged numbers. We were both here for a week.
Anyway the meeting yesterday was fantastic. Before the meeting I’d written at an outdoor café, as I am doing right now, for an hour-and-a-half, about Flaubert, since I am rereading his collected letters. He fascinates me beyond measure. I would like to post those pages of reflection on the 19th century French genius soon as well.
Then I went to the meeting. It was good; there were fifty, maybe sixty people. It was a fantastic, very open, honest and vulnerable meeting. After the meeting Tim and I (he was there) talked with various members for an hour and then he and I got dinner down the block. We really connect. He’s 33, almost a decade my junior, and a strange mix of extremely similar (it's like we're spiritual brothers) and incredibly different. He’s like me: A rich kid. Where I was raised in Ojai he was raised in fancy, privileged Marin, in the Bay Area. He’s very smart. He studied cinema in Paris for a year when he was 19. He speaks the language fluently. His very wealthy father lives in Paris three months of every year; he’s here now to celebrate his father’s 68th birthday.
We both have collarbone tattoos: Mine says Sick Boy (I know, I know; I was just out of high school, a fucking kid, it’s a Social Distortion song, not the character in Trainspotting); he has To Thine Own Self Be True. We both love backpacking and hiking. We both got sober young. I lived in the Bay Area for a decade. He’s a skinny, red-haired, trimmed-red-bearded post-punk-hipster-tech type and he’s been sober since he was 20. Which is miraculous. Despite his class background and being from Marin he had become, by the age of 20, a hardcore heroin junky. He was shooting up every day.
Where we’re different is hilarious. He identifies as a “progressive communist” and feels that the globe should mimic France’s economy. (Evidently he likes unemployment, low wages and high taxes.) He clearly wants the government to run everything. He likes the idea of higher taxes for a bigger, wider, all-encompassing social safety net. He’s one of those old Gen Z or Young Millennials who feels they have all the moral answers to the problems posed in the 20th century; but then again, doesn’t every generation feel that way, including mine, including my mom’s Baby Boomer gen in the explosive, transformative 1960s? Every generation pushes back, hard, against the one which came before and brought them into this chaotic world. It’s a historical dialectic, not to sound like Marx here. (Marx got much of his ideas from Hegel.)
He also identifies as a sometimes “ethical monogamist.” And, again, to repeat, he calls himself a communist. He said he assumed I was “progressive” and I politely corrected him and explained my “political homelessness.” But anyway, the point really is: None of that mattered. Because we’re both sober, smart, good people. We had a great time. We didn’t have to agree on everything. AA, I’m telling you, is the way forward for our culturally-ruptured, divisive, polarized nation. Everyone needs to get “spiritually sober.” (Emotionally sober.)
After eating steak and fries and having a great conversation, I walked him to his train, which was right at the entrance to the Luxembourg Gardens. I entered and walked around. It was absolutely glorious. I was stunned by the natural beauty, the architecture, the flowers and trees, the fountain, all of it.
When I decided to head home: That’s when the bus incident happened.
But as I promised! Let me tell you what happened just before I started writing. Sorry, people: Cliff-hangers are a writer’s greatest tool. (One of them, anyway.)
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An hour ago now I went to a café. I picked one randomly. It didn’t matter where. I just needed to write and my tiny, stuffy air BnB tragically has no desk. So I wandered and quickly found an outdoor café because they’re everywhere. I ordered black tea with milk and sat down between a white Euro trio and a Black trio, each at small round black tables like mine. They all smoked cigarettes which wafted right into my face. Welcome to Europe, folks. Every man, woman and child has 3-4 cigarettes plopped between their lips at all times of night and day here, 24/7. Madrid, too. Everywhere in Europe. It’s an obsession, far as I can tell. (Every country has their obsessions. The States' might be fentanyl and school shootings.)
Anyway I wiped the sweat from my brow a few times—it’s a high of 97 degrees here today—set up my little traveling Android Tablet and my wireless big keyboard (I get side-glances and double-takes here often) and was just about to get into writing about The Bus Incident, when the African woman to my near right, at the table next to me, startled me by suddenly, apropos of nothing, speaking to me.
I can’t explain how much this sudden speech jolted me. I was deep inside my creative mind, already writing my essay in my head, where the beginning always gets written prior to my fingers doing the actual physical labor. So it was like being alone in your room with the door locked and the lights off, deep in thought, only to have some random asshole kick your door in and start yelling.
But then there was a bigger problem: She seemed to have some kind of mental disability; this became clear in the skewed, strange way her eyes bulged out and somehow both looked at me, away from me and through me all at once, but also in the manner in which she spoke an odd mixture of French and thickly-accented semi-English and the way in which she seemed to be speaking mostly to herself, as if I just happened to be the object of her self-speak, as if she were trying her speech out on a stranger to see how it’d go. I glanced at the man and the other woman at her table; they appeared nonchalant, unhurried, unworried.
For them, this was clearly normal.
The more she spoke the less I understood. She asked me what I did; I said I was a writer. She said “artist?” I shrugged and said, Yes. She said film? I said no, writer, novelist. She didn’t understand. I mimicked typing on my keyboard and then pulled my Flaubert book out and pointed at it. She said she understood. I was a writer. Yes. Ah. Ok. Got it.
But then she started talking about where she lived. She said her name was Sharon, made me repeat the name, and then mentioned it three or four times more. She asked my name. I gave it. More and more I was becoming worried, anxious, impatient and annoyed. I tried too tell myself that this was “part of the experience.” But: Of what? Paris? How so, exactly? All I wanted to do, with every cell in my body, was be left alone so I could write. I’m used to silence at home alone in my little office, so writing at cafes, something I used to do a longn time ago, is foreign. It was getting hotter outside every minute. Already my bald dome was beading sweat again. The waiter brought my tea and milk and water. I gazed at him but he couldn’t rescue me.
Somehow the woman began talking about, of all things, P. Diddy and Tupac and Fifty Cent. I couldn’t understand 75% of the audio sentences she was laying down but I heard those names. She mimicked firing a gun with her hand multiple times. I nodded the whole time and quietly pretended to know what she was talking about. I felt trapped. If I was direct, something I would certainly be in the States, she might get offended and become angry. She seemed unstable. I didn’t know how the man and woman at her table would react, either. Plus there was a racial component. I also felt like I might soon explode. So, finally, after she several times nodded and waved to me from two feet away, and at last seemed to be finished only to turn her head to me and start up all over again, I decided I was done.
I packed up my Tablet and keyboard.
Despite the fact that she was facing away from me again, she somehow intuited my move, turned, and, appearing shocked, eyes wide, said, “Are you already done writing?” I repressed a maniacal giggle. Yes, I said, not knowing what else on earth TO say. She shook her head. “But you didn’t write anything,” she protested. Another suppressed giggle. Finally I said I was getting too hot and was going to move inside. She said “Ohhhhhh, ok. I see.” I quickly stuffed my pack, got up, paid inside, and fled.
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The Bus Incident. Alright. You made it. Congratulations.
So, like I said, I enjoy riding busses in various cities to explore. You go slower and get to see more and it’s a break from walking or taking the train. In my 2.3 years in New York City I took busses endlessly and learned a lot about the city as a result.
Anyway. Let’s get to the point; no more beating around the bush.
Using Apple Maps on my phone I saw that my best, slower but more direct bus option to get back to my air BnB, was to take the 96 bus. It would take the better part of an hour from where I was, still near the Luxembourg Gardens. After exploring the gardens (after dinner with Tim, the ethical-monogamist-communist sober dude), I’d gone to yet another outdoor café and relaxed, drinking two pots of herbal tea (if you haven’t realized it yet I have a serious tea obsession/fetish), checking Substack, talking on the phone with my wife, eavesdropping on nearby conversations, and observing the two men in their seventies who kept very obviously checking out the scantily-clad late teen girls tromping by endlessly.
By the time I checked the hour it was nearly 11pm. Night had fallen. I felt alive and happy, physically and spiritually full from the meeting, the dinner, the walk around the gardens, and hot tea alone. (Plus the conversation with Britney, which always makes me happy.)
I paid and left and used my GPS to find the 96 bus again, heading back towards my air Bnb. This was my first time walking around Paris at night. I’d never been out here this late. I felt mostly safe, even as giant men walked by me in dark shadows along empty streets.
At the closest 96 station, not far away, there was also a metro entrance. I knew I needed to add money for the bus to my metro card and I could only do that in the train station. My GPS told me I had five minutes until the next 96 bus going my way arrived. So I ran down into the station and tried to add money to my card. But it was glitching out. I tried several times. Minutes were wasting. Fuck it: I left without adding money.
Twice before on this trip I’d taken busses, and both times I hadn’t had a card and the bus driver had smiled in a friendly way and said to just get on and not worry about it. I figured this would be the same. Especially late at night. But for some reason the 96 bus didn’t stop, despite me waiting in front of the bus stop; it blew right past me like I wasn’t even there. Wow. Ok. That sucks, I thought, irritated.
My GPS told me it was a two hour walk. Almost four miles. I seriously considered getting a taxi or an Uber but I’d been on a roll of not using either and I didn’t want to spend the $25. Screw it: Maybe it was 11:15pm but I loved walking. So I set off, following, on my GPS, the 96 bus route, thinking I’d catch one further on along the journey. Why not: It was an adventure.
Half an hour later, walking the whole way and more or less enjoying it, I indeed did bump into another 96 station and the electronic sign said the next 96 was arriving in 2 minutes. I waited for it. It came. Several of us got on. I tried my card, knowing it had no money. The light flashed red, meaning nope. But, as before, the driver smiled and waved his hand, saying, “Go ahead.” I was delighted. It was a 40 minute bus ride home from this point.
Literally one stop later the bus stopped but didn’t move again. We just sat there. Then three metro/bus ticket cops stepped onto the bus. Fuck. Just my luck. Two burly male cops walked to the back of the bus. There was a smattering of African men back there, a few young white people, a couple women. I was up towards the front. An African woman cop walked over to me. She asked for my ticket. I felt my stomach tighten. I tried to explain what I already knew, in English, but she didn’t understand.
She took my card and scanned it and said it didn’t have money on it. I nodded. “So you got on the bus without a ticket?” she said. I wanted to explain the metro card glitch in the station and how the bus driver had said to get on, but I knew it wouldn’t matter. I said yes, I’d gotten on without paying. She said something in French to one of the burly male cops. I heard some talking which seemed to be slightly growing louder in the back of the bus.
The woman cop told me I had to pay a $70 Euro ticket. (It was just like our experience in Poland with cops there.) I nodded, hiding my annoyance. Didn’t seem fair. Then again, it had been my fault, of course. I should have found another metro station to add money. But, my other inner voice protested, I’m a foreigner; I’m not from here; they clearly know that; they should be more fair! But whatever: Shit happens. I paid the fee with my card and the woman sauntered down to the back of the bus.
Suddenly, maybe two minutes later, the bus still not moving, everyone turned because the voices in the back of the bus were getting much louder. There appeared to be two African men arguing with the woman cop, the two burly male cops standing beside her. Then, out of the blue, one of the African guys lunged and tried to attack the woman cop. It happened very fast. There was a loud scuffle. Chaos ensued. The two burly men were standing over the attacker, pinning him down against his seat, which he’d lunged from. The man yelled. Words were flung back and forth. Then another scuffle ensued. It was all confusing.
Several people got off the bus. I did something I’ve never done before in this sort of situation: I started filming the scene with my phone. Yeah. I was that guy. It’s not like I was gonna “do anything” to help either side. There wasn’t anything I could do. None of us could.
A minute later I got off. More yelling, between the burly male cops, the attacker, a second man who was now down on the floor of the bus, and the woman cop. Anarchy. (See embedded video at top of post.)
Everyone minus the three cops and the two men were now off the bus. We all watched in horror and confusion. The other African man was lying there not moving. For a moment the horror of George Floyd passed through my mind and I wondered if they’d killed him. But then I saw him slightly move. The two burly cops still held the attacker down against the seat. Surely they’d called the actual Paris Police who would be on their way. The woman cop looked up and saw me filming and yelled something at me in French. I got the point. I stopped filming and walked off, passing the other riders now buss-less. I’d paid $70 Euros to ride one stop, and on top of it had to deal with this.
A Greek guy from the bus walked with me for ten minutes, since we moved in the same direction. He said, sarcastically, “Welcome too Paris.” He said the city had been getting worse and worse. But I got it: Any city has risks, and my choice to ride the public city bus without a ticket and at nearly midnight had obviously not been wise.
Pumped full of adrenaline, I walked the rest of the way home. An hour-and-a-half. I got home at past 1:30am. I felt alive, scared, sad for the men who’d been taken down on the bus, and I wished I knew more about the who and the why. Were the men on the bus drunk? On drugs? Why had the man attacked the woman cop? Had she asked for his ticket and, like me, he hadn’t had one and had therefore resented the $70 Euro fee? Or had it been something else entirely?
I’d walked home hard and fast. Once in the apartment I took a quick luke warm shower, turned the fan on aiming it directly on my face, and laid there thinking.
By the time I passed out it was rounding the bend on 3am.
What a day it had been. I felt both resentful and grateful for the cops. I felt both bad for and irritated by the men on the bus who’d caused the problem. I felt relieved that I was safe and home and sober.