Virtual Doorman
I’m not sure if it was my benign suburban upbringing or my shockingly durable faith in people’s good intentions, but to this day, when I hear a knock at the door, I tend just to walk over, and swing that fucker open. No peep-hole-squinting, no ear-to-door pressing.
Just grab that brass and twist baby, devil may cry.
Even after a dozen or so audiences of my dad’s favorite college story of being mugged in his dorm room by a little guy and a big guy (the little guy did all the talking) after doing exactly what I’m talking about, I’m still seduced by the siren’s song of a buzz or a rap rap rap. There’s just something about the sheer cliff-face of walking up to a door with an unknown, but interested quantity behind it, and swingin’ ‘er open.
This was extremely true during those first few balmy September evenings of my first year away at school in Paris. The intense feeling of liberation when leaving one’s parents behind across the ocean and rushing headlong into the sweaty bosom of one of the world’s great cities worked on my eighteen-year-old head like a schedule one narcotic. I strolled through the moneyed quais of St. Germain-des-Près and up the reeking rues of the 11th that pulsed with life dripping in the syrup of new friendships and unlimited horizons. My feet never touched the ground. And in that state, sitting in my apartment in the Estudines Republique with my windows thrown open to the boozy din of the street below and the hot breath of the Parisian night on my neck, I heard a knock on my door. I wedged my cigarette, the ever-present article of my newfound autonomy, in one of the five or six ashtrays strewn around the shoebox-sized studio. I got up, and never before or since have I sauntered with such surety, such cocksure purpose towards a portal into the strange and uncaring night. This is in part because I was expecting to see my then-girlfriend looking back at me. She had eyes like some arboreal mammal you see captured on a motion camera in the depths of the Bolivian jungle and she once beat me in an arm-wrestling match. If there was one thing I thought I knew then, it was that I loved her.
But it wasn’t her, nor was it any other of the cast of characters that I draped myself with then and were my truest friends. I was instead looking at a rangy African fellow wearing a mismatched, silver-and-green tracksuit and holding a bulging grocery bag that was not holding groceries. He mumbled something in French that I couldn’t quite make out except for the words salle de bain. I thought for a moment that he might have been a neighbor whose toilet was out and needed to lean on some neighborly conviviality to take a dump. I myself had been in the very same situation up until recently for over a week, and that was how I met Beaux, my downstairs neighbor and good friend to this day. Coming to a stranger in good faith and desperation is a great way to make friends.
I wasn’t sure that me and the man standing in front of me, jabbing a finger in the direction of my bathroom with pleading eyes were about to open a beautiful chapter of our lives together, but I let him in. He shuffled past me and shut the door and I walked down the short hallway into my room.
My cigarette was still smoking happily in the ashtray, sending an uninterrupted ribbon of smoke up to splash against the stained stucco ceiling. I plucked it out and took a drag, congratulating myself for my act of intra-building camaraderie. Everybody has to take shits, I mused.
I heard the shower gutter on.
Oh.
Some minutes passed and an ever-thickening cloud of steam seeped from under the bathroom door. I reflected on my uncritical gatekeeping; everybody has to shower too I suppose. I heard the shower turn off, and within a few minutes the man emerged sheepishly from the humid hallway and stood at the door of my room. He was freshly shaven and wearing fresh clothes. He looked at me expectantly, like I was going to get up and take him by the hand and lead him off to school.
He crossed the room and took a seat on my bed.
Good shower? I asked in stilted French.
Very good. Thank you.
De rien.
I started to roll a cigarette even though I just had smoked one, just for something to occupy my hands.
Ah, you smoke? He asked, his face peeling into a grin. Le shit?
Being asked if I smoked shit was sort of a flashback to the hamfisted jibes of my middle school bully. But before I could stutter back with some kind of a response, he produced a little dime bag full of what appeared to be turds stamped into tiny rectangles. He shook it back and forth like a little drug maraca, as if to say I’m talking about hash you dumbass white-boy American.
I did smoke hash. In fact I loved it, and the quid pro quo of hash for hospitality suited me just fine. So I softened up the motley brown wad over the flame and crumbled it over a streak of tobacco and as I did, the palpable awkwardness of two strangers with nothing in common sitting in a small room disintegrated as well. The quasi-intruder, whose name, I learned, was Ghislain, and I had now broken bread, and the laws of hospitality henceforth proscribed any treachery or violation of the general spirt of good will. Hash had also provided us a common language grounded in ritual and the universal processes of rolling a joint. I felt like Acinous, king of the Phaeceans, welcoming the wayward Odysseus into my court. Later, when I sent him off with my last two beers and a container of left-over pasta, it felt roughly approximate to my daughter’s hand in marriage.
As we passed the joint, the grains of hash crackled and spit and Ghislain told me about himself as best as the tenuous spindle of a common tongue would allow. He came from Senegal to work, mostly under-the-table construction work that was backbreaking, figuratively if you were lucky, literally if you weren’t. He slept most nights on the street and knocked on doors to shower.
When he left I heard the front door click softly into the jam. I sat in my room stoned as hell and thought about how utterly different Ghislain’s, the hard-up Senegalese émigré, and my lives had been and would be. Even though, for twenty minutes, we were in the same room, experiencing the same moment, and plus or minus whatever was on the other side of my apartment door for either of us, our lives were for a fleeting instant quite the same. But I was high and my thoughts tended toward the moribund as they often do, and I didn’t feel like Alcinous, King of the Phaeceans, anymore. And I knew as I had always known that Ghislain was no Odysseus, and he would at no time in the future return home to slay his wife’s 100 suitors in spectacular fashion and assume his rightful role as king. He’d probably sleep on a bench.
But I stand by my long-running policy. If doors are the organs of hospitality, filtering visitors in and out, diverting the unwanted ones like kidneys gleaning piss from blood, at least we get to man to the pipes. And in playing foreman we’re bound to fuck up and pull the wrong lever, causing a devastating watermain break of accidental interactions that confuse as much as they nourish and leave you stoned at your desk mulling privilege and chance while the warm night air laps at the nape of your neck and draws thin beads of sweat rolling down from your armpits.
