I want to write something that makes them cry. I want to give them a chance to believe. Give them the opportunity to hear voices of the ones that made a difference in their lifetime. I pray to Paris on many operative occasions.
I pray for the French sunlight banking off the windows and then redirecting to blind the barge pilots asleep at the helm running the muddy waters of the Seine. I pray sometimes to heaven and hell, simultaneously, that I could maybe be transported into an instantaneous lurk breaking my way through narrow cobble stone ways busting the glass frozen in pooled sheets with my stick. Taking paean pulls on fourteen-franc wine, a bottle after a bottle every now and then, screeching to an emancipated rest parked on seventeenth century grimacing gravestones that the ridiculous Parisian families must still pay an annual rend duty on.
Sitting under the only and the proudest fir tree in Paris being warmed in the early evening by a sun that will not say goodbye and that fights itself from the dark that it is dying to become. Sitting with my friend alone in a monolith of progress waiting for the dull and damp changing of the guards. Waiting for a moment where we both know and cock slant-headed at each other with defiant looks anticipating the night to arrive and spread its cold, cockeyed comfort upon a Peer Lachaise cemetery still standing through the war-torn ages.
No time is more energetically engaging upon your soul than holding hands with a female friend lamming it away from the Man who wants to ban your presence from his pattern of employment. So as the perennial and unpredictable Parisian day left us and forgot behind its dark shadows that evenly coalesced with night we ran for our lives searching for rain pounded and wind washed headstones of our favorites, Morrison, Balzac, Rousseau, and the countless other dead that still lived in our hearts and left scars on our love for them.
I visited them almost every day for eight days. I walked there every chance I could. I scratched my way through the brown and rustling leaves that seemed like a human rat trap for those of us who did not want to be found.
I could barely make out the phonetic syllables of my name when she called out for my presence to evacuate our blessed bodies from the cemetery and I told her that this is where I want to go when I die. As I made my way through the mini-house sarcophagus cities I saw their dirty rat infested concrete insides, with scattered rotting flowers and colored candle wax spread all over in remembrance, all highlighted by stained glass windows shaped as crosses and swords casting their baked colored light into the memorial presenting a glimmering show of sunlight versus a spectrum of heavenly odes to the dead.
I wanted to sleep there in the fear and as I made this known I got a reaction of pure and feminine terror. At this I maniacally laughed my mechanical menace and I knew then and there that I was the only one of us that wanted to stay there. The rummy, the wino, the blasphemous heathen, it was all in my smile, it was all there in front of her and panic struck her like the Romans had just breached an impassable wall and were in search of healthy young maidens fit enough to breed, that type of sheer horror.
I lit a Gitanes Blonde and the strong smell permeated an aroma that cleared my sinuses and I pondered my next move. Should I run off into the dark or help the heap of hysteria climb the wall to a freedom of the outside that felt more like a cell than the confines we were presently locked into.
You see the guards had warned us thrice and to our silent efforts we dodged the brigade so far, yet now we were in a pickle, bolted in and wandering with the dead and those who floated around this place in apparitional elysium spitting in the face of God, not wanting to leave the old world to face an unknown future, yes we were one and the same, us ghosts. I took a slow drag on the blonde looking upward and laughed my approval over the situation and wondered if it could possibly get any better than this, ah Paris.
My comrade was not as pleased as I at our predicament so it was time to hatch a plan. We considered scaling the wall, but it was humanly impossible to not break our limbs and end up in a French hospital, with no insurance laid up on white sheets both of us with compound fractures, so we went to the next plan. The "you go that way and I'll go this way" didn't work. So together we walked the inside of the twenty to thirty foot stone walls searching for an unlocked gate and hour after hour we had no such luck, but I was having a gay old time reading the century old headstones making up stories about the families who were buried there.
The sheer magnitude of this place was inconceivable, it was the size of fifteen city blocks, and I have always been and under estimator. Packed to the hilt with gigantic gravestones reaching to the sky in all kinds of fearless forms, it was like a stone garden where the flowers you smelled were the dead ancient and decrepit hoping you don't walk over their plot. It was looming and gigantic and beautiful.
I found a tragic comedy to all of this and reiterated my novel idea of bunkering down in a deceased family's empty stone house and it was received with the same rude profanity. Finally in a hazy and wet-eyed desperation she spoke undecodable languages to passersby on the Rue below us and they in return laughed and chuckled up a European storm while shouting ideas on how to relinquish ourselves from our stunning and wonderful dilemma.
They spoke of a miniature city that existed inside the boneyard and pointed scrawny French fingers in two different directions. I could have sworn they were flipping us off but I couldn't be sure so I politely responded with the ancient French expletive, "Sacra Bleu", yelled steadfast and directly at their cheap berets.
I think I threw a stone at them after I ducked behind the wall enamored with the thought of sleeping in the green grass with the decomposition of centuries ago slumbering below me. The cheap yearly red wine was warm in me and I felt it stirring my blood and I knew it was taking hold of my bravery and I Indian danced around with countless war whoops blistering from the deepest part of my being secretly and hopeful in believing this would all never work out.
Yet nonetheless, I followed my friend, not leaving my wing man, as we tranced around the flowers dead and molested and forgot from the last French memorial day. My partner, fed up with my perverse wickedness, almost succumbed to my side of thinking until her pretty blue eyes started leaking. This set upon a whole new freezing wave to ride and I pulled her from the depths and made it my undying crusade to find this mystical Lilliput that the outside Frogs had told us of.
After what seemed an hour of digging through the trenches, and even once contemplating jumping to our deaths, we found the little peculiar village and screamed for help, hoping for a life preserver. Finally, one was thrown to us in the form of a toothless gardener hell-bent on telling us the error of our thought process and with an ancient jingle of skeleton keys on an oversized keyring he let us out into the Parisian night, myself, gratefully disappointed. I said one last time we should have slept the night in there and I received no answer.