France in New York

"The French have taken over my life."

I said that to friends once I moved back to New York. That was late summer 2004. And I reiterated it over the following months.  After three years of living in Colorado - okay, I zipped in and out of the city, on average once a month, for one business meeting or another - I moved back in to my south-of-34th Street mini-loft.

I had ransomed my 401K and bought the place at the bottom of the Manhattan real estate market in 1993. In hindsight, it was a genius move. I didn't know it at the time. I ate a lot of peanut butter sandwiches during the first years of the cash-squeezed gut-renovation. 

Easy-E, a new-ish American friend in Paris, phoned me and asked if he could crash on my sofa for a week. He was coming over for a wedding, to see friends, and to drum up interest in a documentary film he wanted to make - about French-Cameroon musicians.

You betcha. I was fashioning one of the lead male characters in my novel after Easy-E. Having him here would provide rich fodder. I watched him sleep (he stayed out all hours of the night with friends), sprawled under the jumble of sheets, limbs flung across my long sofa, and I seized the opportunity to describe a cabled, freckled shoulder, or his stray brown curls flopped over and obscuring his blue eyes.

"Have a party, " he said. "You've been back a month, and you haven't had a housewarming?"

We used the roof deck. And they came. My longtime friends. And then...the French. Easy-E's friends. Friends of his friends. And with zero degree of separation, I learned that some of them lived in the small, dilapidated building - right next to mine. New next door neighbors. French. And it took an American visitor from Paris to introduce us.

One of them, a model whose professional moniker is Jean Phillipe, told me about a bi-monthly, sort-of private event. In halting, staccato English, he pressed, "It is a very nice party. Very nice people. Very friendly. You come. I put you on the list."

He sat at my computer and this is what he typed:

Hello, je t'envoie une nouvelle personne a mettre sur la liste, elle est ecrivain, cool, et sympatophe.….je  te remercie et te voi ce soir, vive la vie.

And bingo, presto, I was in for Frenchtuesdays.

That rain-soaked Tuesday night, Jean Phillipe met me at the door of Lotus (this was over a year ago, given the half-life of a NYC nightclub), introduced me to one person after another, and then disappeared. I gulped. I was alone among all of these gorgeous, polyglot internationalists. I hung in there. I drank champagne. I made dreadful small talk. Mostly, I watched. Anthropology.

Easy E. showed up later. 

I got home after one in the morning. Easy E stumbled in at sunrise.

A few days later, he returned to Paris.

Here in New York, the merger was complete.

    

Comments

[Marianne Sun]

So it begins at last. Out you've come.Voila! The begining is always the sweetest.

congratulations and love.

Marianne

[GVWonder]

Three cheers to the first posting.

A star is born.