Paris: A Bohemian Reverie
The following is an excerpt from Ryan Wildstar’s upcoming memoir, The Cephalopodic Reveries of An Epicurean Vagabond. Paid subscribers will receive all of our exclusive content, including excerpts from our works in progress, as well as poetry, creative writing and audio versions of select articles.
[Editor’s Note: As in a roman à clef, many of the names have been changed and/or fictionalized.]
Paris, 2000
When I was just a small boy, I told my mother that one day I would go live in Paris. She was baffled, being that I was only four or five years old and we had no French relatives or connection to Paris. When she asked me, “What do you even know about Paris?” I said simply, “You’ll see.”
As I write this (January 2nd, 2021), it’s the anniversary of the day I met Ryan 21 years ago, and he’s now officially been with me longer than he has not. When we met, he was just a fresh-faced devotee of academia, swinging his newfound ideas about like a thurible at high mass. I was taken in by his zealous enthusiasm for knowledge and the Western Canon, but skeptical of his age and naiveté. Still, I think we both knew that something powerful was afoot, although I don’t know if either of us could have foreseen where the road would carry us.
We decided to go to Paris in August, just before my 29th birthday. Ryan had a post-graduation art history course that was scheduled with his beloved professor of literature, Taylor Spears, who was to lead the small group of Jesuit-educated post-graduates on an art tour of Paris for two weeks. Ryan’s mother, his best friend Pandora, and a handful of other students were also going to attend. When he asked me if I should like to join them, I said yes immediately. Then, a few months later, as our relationship and our love had deepened, he proposed that we should go to Paris for the tour with Professor Spears and stay…indefinitely. I protested, at first. I had come out of such a dark time in my life and managed to secure a great job at one of the top restaurants in the city as a sommelier. I had a bank account, a car, a house and I wasn’t in despair for once. Why change it all? Why give up the security I had worked so hard to attain? But the answer was clear. I was in love and I knew that the beautiful being asking me to take this leap was the man I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. Also, I wanted to go live life in Paris... with him!
I decided to call my dear friend, La Comtesse Yoanna Davidoff, who lived in Paris. If her name sounds imposing, you can only imagine what an encounter with this intricate, labyrinthine creature might be. When I phoned La Comtesse Yoanna to tell her that Ryan (whom she had yet to meet) and I were coming to Paris and hoping she could help us find an apartment, she was shocked. She shrieked, “But this can’t be! I am moving out of my tiny flat this month and taking the apartment across the hall. I was planning to let the apartment to someone but now it must be yours!” And so, it was done. For 1,400 francs a month (roughly $200 USD at that time), we took the Comtesse’s tiny, intimate, 11-square-meter apartment in the heart of Paris on the Île Saint-Louis and stayed for the next five years.
It was perhaps the most blissful time in my life. I felt at home for the first time ever. I was living in the city I’d always dreamed of living in, with the man of my dreams, and I was healing from the tragedies of my past by creating art. Upon our arrival, I had decided I needed some outlet to let go of the deep pain that was almost crippling me. I could barely make it through a day without thinking of all the people I had lost in just under a year – my lover of nine years Paul (a heroin overdose), my best friend and roommate William (suicide in our apartment), my venerated gay uncle Trip (AIDS) and most recently, my cherished and belovèd Grandma Lucille (who thankfully had died peacefully at 86). I felt that I had no more words, no more music, no other artistic outlet I’d previously engaged in that could adequately express my grief. So I turned to art.
I began to collage and collect “la poubelle” (garbage) from the streets of Paris. And when I say garbage, I mean the antiques and oddities that were frequently jettisoned on the streets of the city to be picked up by the trash collectors. The jackpot was often when some old inhabitant on the Left Bank had kicked the bucket and their bougie young relatives (now only interested in nondescript Scandinavian particleboard furniture assembled with dowels and an Allen wrench) would toss the “old belongings” of their poor old grande-tatie onto one of those winding little streets off the Boulevard St. Germain.
42 Rue Saint-Louis en l'Île
Nothing could have prepared us for the life we were about to experience at 42 Rue Saint-Louis en l'Île. Our tiny inhabitance became the birthplace of our great love affair, our safe haven. Rather than see the constrictions of our Lilliputian apartment, we found a cocoon, where we could create art all night long and sleep all day. It was an unparalleled bliss that I will take to my grave. We were the free men in Paris that Joni Mitchell sang about, unfettered and alive. We were absorbing the spirit of our ancestors – Rimbaud, Chopin, George Sand, Baudelaire, Delacroix, Berlioz and Théophile Gautier, many of whom had conducted séances and gobbled hashish behind our building at The Club des Hashischins a century earlier. What conversations must have taken place? We longed to know, we needed to be a part of that dialogue. And so we traversed the same streets as Gertrude and Alice, bought our discounted, ammoniated cheeses from our favorite vendor in Le Mouffetard and sat under the Hôtel de Lauzun, reading and writing our own verses with love and desire and devotion to the creative spirit.
We were living our Bohemian dream, cut off from our country of origin by design, and we flourished. We made art, we made love, and we made a home together in each other’s hearts. We never had much money but we were in the center of Paris, writing, creating art, visiting museums, going to the opera, and celebrating daily along the banks of our backyard, La Seine. It was more than enough.
While Ryan worked as an au pair and English teacher to our next door neighbor’s three-year-old daughter Twyla, I was taking classes at La Sorbonne during the day and working at a smoke-filled jazz club at night as a bartender and sommelier. Café Cosmos was the only free-entry jazz café in Paris at the time and its owner, Zazou, became my Parisian papa. Zazou was of Moroccan descent but had lived in Paris for over 30 years with his beautiful wife and two children. I was hired because of my bartending skills and my background in wine, but also because of my extensive knowledge of jazz. I think he also particularly liked that I wasn’t a college kid in my early 20s. He was thrilled to have someone with some actual restaurant experience who was responsible and could help him run the café. That said, he spoke almost no English and my French was still on training wheels, so our interactions were strained at first. Even though I later got my degree in French from La Sorbonne, it was really Zazou who was my real French teacher and Café Cosmos was my classroom.
Our life became a ritualistic ballet of new-century expats, which, obviously, had been perfected by our illustrious predecessors at least a hundred years before our arrival. Nonetheless, some things hadn’t changed much . . . brunch along the banks of the Seine with a couple of crêpes complètes, some hashish and a cheap bottle of Côtes du Rhône became the quotidian of our new Parisian existence. Day after day, we’d sit for hours au bord de la Seine, perched on our favorite bench below the Quai d’Anjou, just around the corner from our apartment. There we were, both of us writing fervently in our journals and sipping wine from real wine glasses (naturally) that we would schlep down from our apartment. Then, between inspired passages, we’d both tear off large, warm chunks of fresh baguette from the award-winning bakery just beneath our building, layering gooey knifefuls of precious Brie de Melun from the Île Saint-Louis’ most decadent fromagerie and toasting to our illicit Bohemian life.
Expositions
Within two months after our arrival, in November of 2000, I’d finished my first art piece and was working on another one. La Comtesse persuaded me to show the piece I’d completed to a local underground artist friend of hers, Serge, who is now quite famous and has exhibited his work at the Pompidou. He told me he thought I could get a show and to take the piece to Le Café Léopard (now long since gone) in the 11th arrondissement on Boulevard Voltaire. The owner, a friend of Serge, was captivated by the piece and said simply, “How much?”
I was flabbergasted. I had about 20 francs in my pocket (all the money we had at the time) and I had jumped the metro just to get to the café to show him the work. I think I stammered, “You want to buy it?” incredulously.