Excerpts from PARIS SCRATCH by bart plantenga

By Bart Plantenga

Paris Scratch: The Children Snapshots

[Les enfants instantanés]

 

excerpts from Paris Scratch
(Sensitive Skin, June 2016)

Walking, like writing, leads from an oft-known destination to an unknown one. From the familiar to the unfamiliar. While living in Paris I fell from natural fascination into rote routine & so I decided to attain a more wide-eyed approach during my walks both utilitarian [buying food] & those categorized as aimless or dreamy. I consciously pushed my awareness of the hidden/forgotten details of everyday life. At a rate of about one per day.

  1. Nez de la Gare [Train Station’s Nose]

The kid faces the men at the bar, wearing a mask with a big nose. Suddenly everyone is still as a photo in a frame. Even the cigarette smoke hangs there like a scratch etched into a carafe of thick air. The boy thinks it is his mask. While each of the bar’s patrons think s/he is the only 1 who has ever felt that odd rumble in the gut when the trains pull out of Gare de Lyon. & then the fat-fingered man reaches out past his drink into an area where he has not been for some time & grabs the big nose. Just like that. Just for the hell of it.

  1. La Boit Subliminal [The Subliminal Box]

The box at the curb simply said:

ROBOT

JEANNETTE

MOULINEX

& the kids de la Côte d’Ivoire take this box of secret messages & launch it into the gurgling water rolling down along the curb of rue André Antoine & as the sewer ate the box 1 hears the gleeful cries of triumph. They dance around the signpost on slender legs that seem to grow by several centimeters over night. It was 11 PM on a warm night.

  1. Une Chatte Enscenté [The Scented & Enchanted Crotch]

The morning is host to school children running with bright packs on their gleeful backs. The petite écoliére in pink slicker runs up the deserted early cobblestone street by the gutted television with her blue rucksack bouncing on her back, late for school. As if there is no end to the running. As if more pleasure is always just around the next corner where, looking somewhere else, she runs into the hooker who laughs, as the little schoolgirl’s nose nuzzles right into her perfumed chatte d’amoure. & she caresses the girl’s head. Runs her hand through her hair with a forlorn & tender wisp.

  1. À suivre de la Seine Urine [Following the Seine of Urine]

The petite fille squatted in the corner of where the pharmacy meets the cabaret along the northern edge of the 9th. She pees with her panties down at her ankles & watches with utter satisfaction as it runs down the sidewalk. She points proudly down at her etching as if the sidewalk is France & her urine is the Seine cutting through it. She begs maman to “Voir maman! Voir!” As if volition, art & cause & effect had suddenly become so clear for her. But maman is late for something, somewhere else & she’d seen it all before & takes forceful hold of her daughter’s wrist as if to emphasize that dreaming & movement were indeed inversely related.

  1. Le Sourire Synchronizé [Synchronized Smile]

The 4-year-old girl sits absorbed in the luxurious radiance of her own smile, suspended in the thick air on the #1 Line. These are the moments that the tick of writing or other arachnids & disease vectors try without fruit to burrow into. & as she chews her Brooklyn gum, I chew mine & with each chew we fall more & more in synch. & this secret knowledge of our giddy reconnaissance makes her smile which makes me smile into the rest of the day.

  1. Kids Sont Toujours Kids [Kids Will Be Kids]

The kids are too young to be smoking but are smoking nonetheless & precisely because of that very fact. Near their school along the Qaui des Celestins, they affect the stance & expressions & drag & puff styles of cinematic heroes like Vincent Cassel or Jean Louis Trintignant or Kevin Bacon or Richard Widmark. Periodically they give the finger to the woman (peut être the mother of 1 of their schoolmates) in a blue suit with white piping, directing traffic. & they run & run away until they’re out of breath & there is nowhere else to run & they are falling all over themselves with laughter & triumphant smiles dripping off their faces. A rolled-up Asterix comic book falls out of the back pocket of 1 of the écoliers.

  1. Vélo, How Are You? [Bicycle, How Are You?]

The boy skidded to a halt on the shiny vélo, a bike still too big for him. He likes the noise & the dust he leaves behind in the Parc Monceau. He looks at me & smiles a smile I haven’t been able to wear for at least 20 years. What wears the smile out the most? His voice suddenly transforms into the roar of a motorcycle & he is off again, just within view of his maman, sitting on a bench, acting like she is not keeping an eye on him—close but not too close—& that is the orbital relationship he craves. When I get home that evening I try his smile on for size in our salle de bain mirror.

  1. Nausée de Rire [Nausea of Laughter]

The petit garçon takes aim from behind the door barely cracked open in the fire station. His green water pistol emerges from the crack &—squeeze, squeeze—gleeful laughter as he dashes off, gazing over his shoulder to make sure the pompiers are giving chase & indeed they are until they find him doubled up, totally immobilized by his own laughter out back. He can’t move another inch & the threat of the firemen tickling him makes him even more nauseous de rire.

  1. Poubelle et la Puberté [Garbage & Puberty]

Les petites filles in their full after-school gaieté, their weird beaded braids & open jackets are dancing a jig or more like a French gigue, which requires some ballet, which it seemed the group of girls all wanted to some degree affect. & suddenly, just for a second, because fortuity sometimes allows a peek into a hidden part of truth, you could see exactly what these girls were going to look like in 20 years. Meanwhile, the old woman in white go-go boots & orange plush housecoat rakes leaves under the bare elm. It is early in the morning & the girls help the woman pick up the leaves & stuff them into a public poubelle near Buttes Chaumont before they run off in a direction the old woman remembers well.

  1. La Perceuse Mystificateur Too Early [The Too-Early Mystifying Drill]

The 5 jeunes étudiants in their school outfits of some color & little leather shoes were standing very still, holding hands, fixated, mystified by the huge drill that is pecking into the pavement of rue St. André des Arts at a time many will consider much too early. Then 1 let go, breaking the circuit, breaking the spell & holds his hands cupped over his ears. He wants to go. School is just around the corner.

  1. The Voice Sans Souci [The Unsuspecting Voice]

Le petit garçon is in the Luxembourg Gardens, behind a hedge where his maman cannot really keep an eye on him & so how long will this idyll last? He is poking around the leaves & dirt with a stick & singing, humming, la-la-ing a tune. It is a happy song with a lilt he cannot quite reach. It is a tune no 1 has ever sung before & so it is his. He really did not seem to have many cares yet. & then I hear his maman raising her voice: “Mon Petit! Mon petit! Où es-tu?!” But there are plenty of us impatient to introduce these cares to him. Although I now know where he got his nice voice from.

  1. Flipper King de Perdre du Temps [Flipper King Of Wasting Time]

The écolier was playing flipper (pinball) in the café with the floor already littered with sugar cube wrappers because he is way too early for school & he is enjoying it, winning free balls, wasting the time of the world like a little king. Until the proprietor, not his father, calls out “Jean,” & nods toward the clock to let Jean know that his time as the king of wasting time is running out.

__________

bart plantenga is the author of the novel Beer Mystic (Autonomedia, 2017), the short story collection Wiggling Wishbone & the novella Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man. His books Yodel-Ay-Ee-Oooo: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi plus the CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created the misunderstanding that he is one of the world’s foremost yodel experts. He’s currently working on the Amsterdam-Brooklyn novel Radio Activity Kills with his daughter, Paloma. He is also a DJ & has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris & now Amsterdam since 1986. He has written about working with refugees in Amsterdam for Truthdig & Vox Populi: The Refugee Center & Guarded Hope. He lives in Amsterdam.

  • Read the review of Paris Scratch in Coal Hill Review
  • Listen to the Paris Scratch soundtrack as you read
  • Also Read: The 2nd part of the diptych: NY Sin Phoney In Face Flat Minor, Sensitive Skin, November 2016.

Filed under: Prose