31. Les Puces, the largest flea market in the world.
I needed a pipe and something to put in it to make Paris more interesting.
Bienvenue to the 31st article in my Medium publication, Inside Me Inside Paris, a work-in-progress memoir about my 2016 deep-dive into Paris & my journey to find my soul amidst the onslaught of depression…
C’est 31 juillet 2016.
After I watched ‘The Secret Life of Pets’ at a theater in Nation, all in French, which didn’t help my French learning one bit, I got a Facebook message from Geraldine inviting me to meet her at Les Puces de Saint-Ouen. Les Puces, which means fleas, is the largest antique flea market in the world.
I took ligne #2 to ligne #4 on the Metro and I exited at Porte de Clignancourt only to be bombarded by North African vendors selling grilled corn being sold out of trash bags and second hand iPhones and knock-off Nikes. As usual, it took me a bit to get oriented, but after going in circles for a few minutes, I finally found Les Puces.
Les Puces is HUGE. Seven hectares huge of anything you could imagine. So much beautiful furniture and cool vintage toys and records and vintage clothes and all kinds of knock off fashion stuff. I was tempted to buy a ton, but I refrained as I didn’t want to lug anymore stuff on my return trip back to Los Angeles. Besides, I’m trying to thin out my footprint, be more minimal.
I was on a mission to find a pipe and weed. God, I’m jonesing for a little buzz to make this trip more interesting, because I’ve been here for an entire month now and yeah, it’s Paris, but honestly, it’s been feeling a tad ordinary and I want to give this trip a pinch of spice.
Okay, a couple pinches.
As we wandered around Les Puces to find a pipe, I got to know Geraldine. She used to smoke weed and do a lot of ecstasy but something major happened in her life, so she doesn’t do it anymore. She’s trying to stay focused as an actor and practices Buddhism to manifest her acting dreams. Secretly, I thought she didn’t fully comprehend the steep uphill climb to make acting a profession, especially in Paris, spirituality notwithstanding. There simply isn’t a big film industry here. But hey, go for your dreams, girl! Overall, I found her interesting and I like artists, but she likes girls. Oh, well. After a few hours of wandering around, I finally found the pipe! Next step was to find the weed. But I didn’t have any connections in Paris.
Geraldine mentioned that her friend Laura might have weed, so we took the metro down to Pigalle, which is just south of Les Puces, and we met Laura at a hotel called Le Pigalle where she worked as a waitress. The neighborhood of Pigalle is a bright buzzy neon light in the Parisian night, located at the southern slopes of Montmartre. A tawdry and brazen spirit hangs in the air here that attracts bad boys and artists, musicians and adventurers. I love Pigalle’s energy and if I had a wingman I’d stick my head into a few rabbit holes here. I’m fully capable of tooling around Paris solo, but having a wingman, especially a Parisien wingman, sure can make things more interesting, and the backup is nice to have in case trouble arises.
Laura wrote down a number on a Post-it note and said, “call my friend. He can help you.” Well, I know enough French to order a cafè au lait and to ask where the bathroom is, but uh, not enough to arrange a weed delivery on the phone. I tried anyway. As predicted, the dealer spoke in rapid fire French and I couldn’t pick up enough of it to earn his trust nor understand his surreptitious instructions so after a couple exchanges, he stopped responding to follow up texts and calls. Why Laura didn’t just offer to help me with the transaction, I don’t know. It can be SO French, in that they just can’t be bothered. N’importe quoi. Whatever.
I’m sitting in the metro, headed back home to the 20th, no weed. As such, I’m very empty and anxious inside and being in the unknown of my future prospects is uncomfortable. I don’t like this existence and maybe from your perspective, there’s progress, but I don’t feel it one molecule and I don’t really know if I want to keep living like this for much longer. Meeting new friends and discovering people whose DNA isn’t engineered like a ‘Murican and immersing myself in the nuances of Paris and speaking French has been fun and challenging, but still — I feel the same as I did when I started this trip.
The meds aren’t helping. I don’t want to take them anymore anyway. They keep me awake and I don’t feel whole. I feel muddy. Nobody sees it in my face, but I spend a lot of time thinking about how I’m going to disappear from this world while simultaneously minimizing the collateral damage of my friends feeling miserable about me being gone. “If you kill yourself, you’re just being selfish,” friends tell me. I’m supposed to keep drowning in my suffering — just to shield them from self-imposed misery? Who’s being selfish here?
They don’t know how I feel about how I massively botched the first half of my life and how I also feel about now realizing like I never had the right tools to pursue the life I wanted. So even surrounded in the magic of Paris I can’t make magic, mired in the mistakes I’ve made and I don’t know how to love. I’m carrying all of this into the unknown and I’m trying to not be sad about it.
I promised myself this week that everyday I would write for three hours. So here I am, sitting at my desk, sitting for three hours not doing much writing. Nothing is coming out of my head. With all the art and immersion in the experience of all this beautiful Parisien history and architecture in front of my very own eyes, the inspiration has led to nothing. I’m coming up with nothing creatively. I feel defeated and deflated. I did some doodling like the writers at production meetings do when they’re bored of listening to all the logistical realization of their creativity…and nothing. Nothing but a page full of flower petals and circles and diamonds and other assorted geographical patterns. I did a word association trick where I came up with words and make branches with words inspired by words and it was a flow chart looking thing but again, nothing. Usually when it gets like this I want to watch porn just to get excited about something, anything, but I decided to not run away from the discomfort of being a shit writer and instead I’m just sitting in the cesspool of my lack of creativity.
The negative voices in my head got louder and louder: “Why do you want to be a writer again? You suck. You don’t have anything meaningful to offer. You’re wasting your time. The stuff you write is crap anyway. YOU ARE NOT FUNNY.” I’m really mean to myself. I need to write some positive self-affirmation quotes and a bunch of gratitude hashtags and send them as status updates to tell myself I’m invincible. I mean, that’s what everyone else is doing.
I really could use some weed, though.
Thank you very much for reading this memoir I’m workshopping. Looking for publishers! I’m a writer/photographer based in Burbank, California. Some of my work is visible on my Instagram.
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