At least they don't call small "Tall"…

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Drogués et Droguées :

I swore I would never (ever!) set foot in a Starbucks in Paris because, well, why would anyone? If you've seen one Starbucks you've seen all Starbucks, so why would anyone come here and go there when throughout Paris there are unique French cafes offering wonderful coffee, flaky croissants, and people-watching opportunities that can keep any voyeur occupied for hours?

Okay, so forget that I said anyone. That's probably just caffeine-fueled hyperbole. I suppose, because Starbucks is an espace non-fumeur, that if you're a crabby nonsmoker who likes to use ridiculously complicated commercial jargon to order a drink (like un double crème-brulée latté moyen avec supplèment de mousse de lait s'il vous plait, or as they say in Starbunglish, "a double tall crème brulée–flavored latte with extra foam, please") and drink it from a paper cup rather than risk the possibility of a wisp from someone's cigarette ruining your day, I can understand that. But then I'd also recommend that you place your order in another country and avoid France and its smokers altogether.

My friend and neighbor Alexis frequents the Starbucks on the rue des Archives, around the corner from my apartment. I found this out after we had already become acquainted and began to rely on each other for the kind of mutual support Americans sometimes require after a brush with one of the rare Parisians who, despite their tiny numbers, are obnoxious enough to perpetuate the erroneous but widely held belief that all French people are astoundingly rude. If I had known she frequented Starbucks, Lex and I might not be friends, and I would be running home after my occasional cultural collisions to climb under the bed and do my impression of a frightened fetus.

Instead, I will call her on my way home from an especially harrowing attempt to buy stamps or what seemed like a death-defying triumph in a cheese shop to see what she's up to, and now and then she will tell me she's at Starbucks, and suggest since I'm nearby I should drop in and join her. But when I arrive and see her through the window I have to bang on the glass and pantomime that she should come out because I will not be seen in there. I don't even like banging on Starbucks's window and making the universal sign for "you should be ashamed of yourself; finish that immediately and meet me across the street at a real cafe or I'm going home," because it lets people on the street know that I associate with someone who's a Starbucks customer. This is completely unacceptable, and I have had a number of stern discussions with Lex to try to explain to her about friendships and boundaries and mutual respect, although I sometimes get the feeling during these heart-to-hearts that she is not giving the topic the serious attention that it deserves.

That said, there is the problem of the U.S. dollar's fall from grace and value, and the resulting fiscal strain it adds to asking professionals to prepare all the coffee I drink in a day. Before I sold my house and ended the financial woes that made it difficult for me to buy a cup of coffee anywhere in San Francisco, I justified the extravagant purchase of a home espresso machine by calculating that it could pay for itself rather quickly if I considered that every cappuccino I prepared myself represented about three dollars I was saving by not wandering down to the corner cafe to buy it ready-made. My financial situation at the time being especially dire, I decided it was would be irresponsible not to have at least three double homemade cappuccinos per day and thereby pay for the machine within only a couple of weeks of its purchase. I tried to explain this stroke of economic genius to friends at the time, but was greeted with confused expressions, and in retrospect I wonder if perhaps I was twitching too much and speaking a little too quickly at the time to make the logic of my accounting sufficiently clear to them.

Europe's 220-volt electrical system rendered it pointless to bring the American machine with me, so I've been using the stovetop coffee maker that came with my apartment when I brew my own coffee at home. Unfortunately, freshly roasted beans like they use in most Paris cafes haven't been so easy to find, and after my arrival in September I was buying unsatisfying, packaged ground coffee at the supermarket. While not as cheap as the freshly roasted stuff I used to buy in San Francisco, it was a relative bargain—prices for a 250g package (about a half a pound) run between 2€50 and 4€ ($3.25 and $6)—but it wasn't good enough to warrant buying a new 220-volt espresso machine. Even if I employed my previously effective coffee economics to pay for the device, I knew the supermarket coffee wasn't worthy. I might add what a shame this really was to discover, because despite the strength of the euro against my own currency, the fact that I have been unable to order coffee in any of the neighborhood joints without also requesting a croissant or pain au chocolat means that by making my coffee at home and accounting for the additional savings on pastries I would not be eating, I might have offset the currently abysmal exchange rate as well as accelerating the pay-off of the espresso machine.

Desperate to meet my need for thrift with a more satisfying drink, but unable to locate a source of beans, I finally broke down and did the unthinkable. I wrapped my scarf high around my neck and chin and pulled my hat down low and donned dark glasses and I dashed as quickly as I could into Starbucks to buy a bag of freshly ground espresso (5€ for 250g) and, well ... it was fucking delicious. But before you start with the gloating, please note that I am not about to concede for a second that I'm a Starbucks whore. This was just a desperate measure to see me through a week or maybe two, an experiment while I dug a bit further to find an alternative coffee-bean source, and I didn't actually buy a coffee drink—just the ground beans—and to take my mind off the dirtiness I felt about the transaction I tucked my purchase deep inside my knapsack and stopped to have a quick coffee in three or four cafes in my neighborhood on the way home.

My friend Arlyn, visiting from California and made instantly aware of this dilemma, did a bit of research while I was busy in school and was good enough to jot down the address of a place within walking distance of my house that advertised the sale of freshly roasted beans. When the level of coffee in the Starbucks bag became dangerously low, I strolled down to the address Arlyn had left me and walked into a lovely little shop whose two young owners, standing by an enormous, fragrantly churning roasting machine, greeted me excitedly.

"Bonjour," I responded to their cheery bonjours, and I told them I would like to buy some coffee, and without the slightest wince at my accent or derisive snickering over my verb mis-conjugations, they described all my choices and asked me my preferences, and together we decided which of their beans was best for me. It was then that I noticed that the prices marked on all the bins of beans, which I thought were costs per kilo, were actually the cost for 250g, and each quarter-kilo of the coffee we had just determined would suit my tastes was 9€95, or just insignificantly under $30 per pound.

Because these young men were so earnest, and I was their only customer, and they were so friendly, and also because I don't know how to blurt out "Are you fucking shitting me??" in French, I decided to take 250g of the stuff, and after they gave me five cents in change for the last ten-euro note I had in my wallet I took one of their little brochures and instead of just wishing them good evening said, "Until next time!" and I went straight home (past nine cafes without stopping) to see what these magic beans were all about. Amazing. Simply amazing. These guys are selling coffee that tastes exactly like the cheap stuff from my local supermarket.

Yesterday, as these "gourmet" beans dwindled towards the bottom of their bag, I called another friend to hear a familiar voice. Audrey lives in Florida and orders raw coffee online to roast in her counter-top roaster. You may get the impression from what you've read so far that I am somewhat obsessive about coffee, but not really. This quest simply comes from being in a city where there just doesn't seem to be any reason one should have to drink bad coffee, and my idea of "obsessive" (at least on the subject of coffee) is to buy unroasted beans and roast them yourself each morning before you've had a chance to first have a cup of coffee. I told Audrey my predicament, and she advised me to order up beans from her supplier in the States, and then she said, "Now I know what to get you for Christmas!"

"You are not sending me coffee, Aud," I told her. "Are you insane? Shipping will cost more than the coffee, and there's really good coffee here. I just have to find it. Do. Not. Send. Me. Coffee." I was sorry I even mentioned it to her.

Today, my thirty-dollar beans ran out and I slinked back into Starbucks to buy another bag of espresso roast from a sullen teenager who has the same I-don't-want-to-work-here expression on her face as many American Starbucks employees and an attitude that as she matures will prove valuable in upholding common French stereotypes. Feeling a little defeated, I returned to my apartment, made myself a cup, and spent some time online looking for a coffee source that was less damaging to my sense of self. A search turned up the place in my neighborhood, and a few others doing online-only business in France with prices that range from reasonable to outrageous, and shipping charges that make the reasonable prices outrageous and the outrageous prices whatever the superlative of outrageous is, although one place does waive shipping charges on orders of 140€ ($210) or more.

I also found a purveyor of unroasted coffee for about three times what Audrey's U.S. supplier charges, and before I came to my senses I checked out the cost of roasters, and then the cost of grinders (which would become necessary if I were to begin a pre-morning-coffee coffee-roasting ritual), and before I even did the euro-to-dollar conversion to see what all those beans and gadgets and a new 220-volt espresso machine would cost, I realized I would be an old man or dead from a caffeine overdose long before a thirty-double-tall-extra-foam-cafe-lattes-per-day habit made the slightest dent in paying off all those purchases.

This is only temporary. I will find where people buy good coffee here, I know. But in the meantime, please, if you see me occasionally in Starbucks, note that I am just buying a small bag of beans—nothing more—and don't say hi or do anything else that might draw attention to my presence there.

À votre santé...

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Haute Crotture and Other Excretions

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Diane et Blonde, chiennes de la meute de Louis XIV (Detaille de Diane) 1702, par Alexandre-François Desportes (1661-1743), La Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris.

Detail of Diane from Diane and Blonde, bitches from Louis XIV's pack o' dogs by Alexandre-François Desportes

Renifleurs et Renifleuses:

Even the most nimble and alert French fashion slave, gingerly stepping over the ubiquitous turds of Paris's oh-so-hip-at-the-moment miniature French bulldogs, has yet to make the connection between the "Merde!" she shouts when she inevitably missteps and ruins her expensive shoes and the "Merde!" her neighbors shout after stepping in her miniature bulldog's unretrieved crottes.

Until madame makes that connection, there is little hope for France's oh-so-hip-at-the-moment, miniature-bulldog President to dramatically reduce the public payroll as he's promised; if President Sarkozy doesn't sustain the enormous number of vigilant Propreté de Paris employees who scrub the streets here, the city's lovely cobblestones could disappear beneath the muck faster than a Parisian dog owner can squeal, "Quel bon chien! Qui est le petit bon chien de maman? C'est toi! Oui, c'est toi! "

Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, added an item to the city's official "To Do" list in October regarding his own new pet pee-ve. Following a particularly revelrous evening of beer drinking on the occasion of this year's rugby World Cup championships, a larger proportion than usual of the city's male population was relieving itself against the grand Hôtel de Ville (city hall) just as hizzonner was arriving for work. Reeking with displeasure, Delanoë announced his intention to modify the ingrained urination behavior of Parisians, a great many of whom simply unzip and let loose wherever they're standing, whenever nature calls. (The most interesting example of this I have witnessed personally was during rush hour in the Châtelet Metro station when a man in a business suit stepped to the side of the crowded and bustling connector passageway between the 1 and 4 lines, undid the fly of his well-pressed trousers, and peed in the company of his fellow commuters.)

The mayor thought he'd had the problem zipped up in February 2006, when he abolished usage fees for the city's 200-plus public toilets—in the following 12-months the flow of patrons to the toilets increased by over 650%—but he's realized a strong message is needed, too. This he plans to deliver directly to the offenders using newfangled undulating walls that spray urine back on the urinators, a concept described by the walls' architect as l'arroseur arrosé ("the sprinkler, sprinkled").

Time will tell if the mayor's sprinkler-sprinkling campaign will succeed, but I stand behind him. On my particular street in the Marais district—a short residential block adjacent to some popular watering holes and therefore convenient for full-bladdered bar patrons who prefer its seventeeth-century charms to the bars' less-picturesque twentieth-century plumbing facilities—the stench can become pretty awful on warm days between disinfections.

A number of friends have asked me the origins of my street's name—the rue des Guillemites. Through cursory inquiries, I've determined that the Guillemites were an order of seventeeth-century monks named for St. Guillaume de Malavalle, a figure from the twelfth century who was excommunicated for reasons no longer known. What happened to the monks is also a mystery, although my guess is that Guillaume's tonsured little acolytes were driven from my neighborhood for incessant and incorrigible public urination. I can just imagine that a Marais homeowner in the up-and-coming new quartier, worried that local clergymen with self-control issues threatened his property values, said, "Enough!" and put his foot down (looking for a clean spot first, of course). I admit that my research has turned up nothing to back up this historical hypothesis, but it would even explain Guillaume's excommunication. God surely wouldn't tolerate such behavior in heaven, and for eternity, ferchrissakes.

I also believe that the name of Guillaume’s hometown, Malavalle, might mean a) "foul-smelling valley" or b) "to no avail," inspired either by a) the odor of its streets or b) the futility of attempts by its mayor to curb the urinary transgressions of its citizens, but I can find nothing to prove this theory, either. The only assumption I can make about the dearth of historical evidence regarding the circumstances of his excommunication, or to corroborate my suspicions about the disappearance of his followers, is that Guillaume's brother, Jeb de Malavalle, must have successfully purged Vatican files regarding these matters, as a favor to their mother.

My neighborhood is filled with ancient streets that have interesting histories, both documented and imagined by me as a way of occupying my mind as I scrape my shoes each evening on the curb outside my home. The nearby rue des Blancs Manteaux was so named for the white coats worn by nuns who resided there, an order that I tell myself was made up of former cleaning ladies whom God (before the falling out with St. G.) called to serve the Guillemite monks by scrubbing their odiferous deposits from the city's ancient metro stations and government buildings. I even suspect the better-known Carmelite nuns were originally Blancs Manteaux girls who left the Marais along with their Guillemite brothers, and got their name from the stubborn caramel-colored stains left on the hems of their previously white frocks by the dog feces through which they were dragged on a daily basis.

Paris has been the birthplace of some stranger fashion milestones, and judging from the number of oh-so-hip miniature bulldogs here today—and their resulting countless crottes—I don't think my particular revisionist history seems so far-fetched.

À la prochaine fois...

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