So I left Barcelona in the middle of the night. The rains had already started by then. I thought maybe I’d get lucky and ride out of it, but no such luck. By the time I got to Marseille, it was worse, God taking a dump on us, rain falling in sheets and wind blowing up a storm. We pulled in at six in the morning, I oblivious to most of the trip, though somewhere we changed drivers, probably at the Spain/France border. If Customs or immigration did anything, I’m not aware of it. They did upon arrival at the bus station in Marseille, running a sniffing-dog through the bus, regardless of the fact that people have already gotten off en route. The French police like to make a show of things, especially in Paris at the terminus of the route from Amsterdam. France is not sympathetic to any loosening of recreational drug laws. Alcohol is the drug of choice by tradition. You just don’t smoke joints by candle light and whisper “Je t’aime” in a breathy swoon. I guess it’s just not romantic. I don’t know why not. They don’t have any problem doing the same with cigarettes. I read today that France is the last country in Western Europe to outlaw smoking in public places. Four years ago the thought that any of them could do that was unthinkable. Ireland was the first, believe it or not, they of pub culture exported world-wide. So now cigarette smokers seek out open doorways in the train station like wi-fi scum looking for a signal. When they find them, they stand right in them, as though an open door were not a passage but an invitation to congregate. This was a conceptual problem already that smokers have co-opted for themselves.
Marseille has some of the cheapest rooms I’ve seen in a developed country in a long time, unheard-of prices like fifteen, twenty, and twenty-five dollars a night. Every room seems to have its own particular price, I guess based on square footage. That doesn’t mean they’ll have a shower, though, and if they do, you might have to pay extra for it. Thus the reputation of Frenchmen is confirmed by the system. We all knew they seem to carry a heavier bacterial load than most Westerners, we just didn’t know why. In France bathing is optional. Smells from laboratories sell well. When the first cheap hotel I inquired about told me there were no showers, I thought she meant there were no showers in the room, i.e. down the hall. She meant none, period. The rooms have sinks, though, so I guess you can take a whore’s bath, whatever that is, in addition to whatever else a guy might do with a sink, considering the crapper’s down the hall. I could use some help here, not being French, so I’ve considered offering a whore money to let me watch her bathe, but I don’t know if she’d do it. It’s probably too kinky. Those rooms don’t even have an electrical outlet, much less TV, or curtains on the window. Now if there’s something scarier than the fact that there are thousands of Frenchmen walking the streets in various stages of un-wash, which we already knew, it’s that they might be giving themselves a mop-job and whatever else over a sink by an open window while God and the whole world looks on. Better leave the kids home on that European vacation.
In North America rooms this cheap would have long been overrun by junkies or closed by order of the local government. Junkies don’t need showers either. That’s the way it is in Vancouver, BC, Canada. You can smell them coming. Apparently half our genes are devoted to smell. Now you know why. That leaves room for a lot of creativity in Evolution by the way. But the junkies in Van City don’t care about that; they have another concern. They also have their own district between the upscale part of Gastown and Chinatown. They roost like vultures, gravitating to the sunlight and surveying the terrain for easy pickings. Zoologists probably go there to study their feeding and mating habits, if they still have any. Marseille just has winos, good old fashioned bums begging coins for booze. I don’t know where they sleep, probably on the street. The cheapest hotels close their doors at ten, eleven or midnight latest. That’ll keep the riffraff out. This is a part of Europe scarcely known or acknowledged anymore, the old Europe, mostly southern and eastern, of poverty and degeneracy and petty crime, far from the tourists and modern development, wherever unemployment is rife and competition for scarce resources is fierce. A tourist concentrating on these areas could see Europe almost as cheap as anywhere in the world, certainly as cheap, or cheaper, than West Africa. This includes much of Portugal, southernmost Spain, southern France west of the Riviera and Italy from Naples south, in addition to most of the East European countries. Conversely the New Europe of budget airlines and capitalistic fervor hasn’t even scratched the surface here yet. There is no bus to Paris and the cheapest one-hour flight is four hundred bucks. So I’ll take the TGV. There’s no choice. International buses have cheap rates and traverse the country, but they don’t serve local routes. Welcome to France. Enter Sarkozy.
So I opted to go a half-notch upscale. For forty bucks and change net, I get some old European style with rough beams in the ceiling (including fake adze marks), a large bed, six stations of French TV, a sink, and… a bidet. I’ve got a bidet in my room, but no bath. Crapper and shower are down the hall, five euros to bathe. While I contemplate the ceiling beam right over the bidet and the multiple uses to which a nylon rain poncho might be put, I remember the scene in Tropic of Cancer (or was it Capricorn?) where Henry Miller’s American friend used the bidet to lighten his intestinal load to the chagrin of… well, everybody, but especially… the whores taking their whore’s bath. Now I’m getting the picture. Hey, I want my five Euros back! Even funnier was my architecture professor at Jackson State trying to explain the concept to the down home bloods who’d probably used outhouses during childhood. When he could get a word out at all between stifling his grins and muffling his guffaws, he called them ‘bidgets.’ I’d read Henry Miller so I knew what he was talking about, despite the bad French, but the rest of the class was lost. So we shared a bond there, derriere la scene, united in our imaginary knowledge of the ways of the world, while the peasants wallowed in their ignorance.
Marseille is a fast food paradise. That’s good considering that sit-down meals would be about the same price as the cheap rooms. I’m in the shawarma part of town, little Africa. If you want bouillabaisse, then that’s another quarter. Moroccans here seem right at home, sipping mint tea in sidewalk cafes, while their wives stay at home and do all the work, just like good little Tangerines back home, ‘the other TJ’. There are Asians here, but they seem fairly Frenchified, offering lunch specials with wine. The Vietnamese restaurants don’t even have pho’, the national dish, good old rice-noodle soup. Pizza is ubiquitous, and good. Kebabs and frites line every corner. The bakeries are to die for, of course. Me, I try to limit myself to fast food no more than once per day, not because of restaurant fatigue, but high carbs and boredom. So I cook noodles in my room and make sandwiches to order. The space between my window and the outside shutters makes a fine fridge, thank you. They have a combination cranberry/mango juice here, so all is right with the world. Kidney stones are in remission and I’m taking the TGV to Paris Sunday. I’ve got a wi-fi signal in my room, just by accident. Plan C just might salvage this trip yet. I’ve had visions of Marseilles for a long time. I don’t want to sound spooky like I had a premonition or something, because after all, I could’ve gone to Toulouse, but I think I always thought Marseille might be a part of France I’d like. It’s hard to learn the language of a place you don’t really like, after all. For me to enjoy a place is to internalize it, know it’s insides until I feel like a local. What cathedral? What statue? Show me the produce section.
