Excerpt from Winners, a shortish (3,000 words or so) account of the Parisian bike taxis during their glory years in the previous decade. Since no American publisher will touch me with an offer at the end of a ten foot pole, I might as well post it here with a dividing line for the haves and have-nots.
Even if the casual reader may believe this is fiction, it is in fact reportage lightly touched up, names changed, one location substituted for another with a few literary fingerprints at the scene of the crime. I still see Franco from time to time – usually around the Tour Eiffel where he lords it over a small fleet of gypsy tuk-tuks – and we’re on friendly terms, even if he did want to kill me. It wasn’t the only time he and his confederates tried to get rid of the loud-mouthed, nosey American.
Franco
Tangled weeds and long grass dangle over the abandoned roads a quarter mile from Orly. Except for runway lights, the breeze and deafening roar when the planes take off, the airport is invisible. Crickets rub their hind legs, birds settle in for the evening, calling out Over here, I’m over here. Planes grind to a halt on the tarmac, spin around, others take off. Each one packed with people inspected, collected, strapped in. Strange world, far away but close.
A green bug climbs over wild sage, traversing in camouflage. Antennae vibrating so subtly it's hard to make out in the slow summer dusk. Punaise verte, its lower back camouflaged like an African mask, goes to the tip of a leaf quivering in the evening air. What's on the menu tonight ? Enough of them and they devour a plant in under an hour.
The car races past with Franco at the wheel. He puts his new acquisition through the paces, disappears down the road, swings back, grinds to a halt.
“What you are doing, James ?”
“Just looking.”
“We talk.”
He gets out of the car with a stick as thick as a club in hand and looks around.
“What's that for, Franco ?”
“I no know who else is here.”
Franco and I were going to straighten things out — at least that's how our little adventure had begun: We'd go to his place and talk. He was going to make his case and I'd argue for the Sensible Approach one more time: we all work together, share tools and chargers, stay out of each other's hair, act as if, despite the obvious differences, we had something in common. As if. As if this wasn't going to be another Battle Royale for a tiny bit of turf.
Except that suddenly there we were, careening down the road out of Paris, D7 towards Orly in Franky's car headed god knows where.
It all began innocently enough.
Maybe I would like to come over to his place and meet his family ? Franco asked. Why not ? Maybe I could even get my hands around a glass of some Romanian gutwarmer. Good deeds pay off, I told myself. It didn't look that way now.
“Get in,” Franco said. It sounded more like an order.
Franco has a simian little face and dark eyes that suck you into his anger. He's more nostril than nose. On edge, always ready to flare. 5'4" and a Romanian prince no doubt who looks like a cross between a caveman and an altarboy. Very little to dissuade me his relatives hadn't politely shown him to the border and told him to get lost.
So where are we going, Franco ?
We're flying beneath steel walls, humming along gray embankments, moving like a mole below the level of the lights. The stars are far above us, nailed to the screen behind the gray curtain. We're below ground, swallowing the fumes.
“Eyes on the road,” I tell him. Franco has a hands-off way of driving while he goes about proving his point. “And where are we going anyway ? This wasn't the plan.”
“I want test car, see what can do.”
We're going to straighten things out between us, Franco and I. Everything that's said travels – there are no confidences among bike-taxi drivers. From one mouth to another it twists in the air like smoke, a fabrication complete unto itself. I knew everything I needed to know about the sandy haired, pint-sized Caesar behind the wheel, and what he'd heard about me doesn't bear repeating. I’m some kind of meddler or worse. Undoubtedly true.
We sail past the Eiffel an hour before sunset at a crazy speed. Local limits mean nothing to the man. It's early June and the sky is putting on a show : an enormous scalloped wave, white with blue fringes, rises up to crash the tower. Like Botticelli upsidedown, with the tower playing the role of Venus. A majestic scene with hints of the apocalypse which I glimpse for all of a second.
“Slow down, you maniac. I want to take a photo.”
“Tower you see everyday.”
Franky laughs at me or maybe it’s the cars he's busy side-swiping as we dive into another underpass on the peripherique. Some kind of artist son of a bitch, an unknown quantity, the Big Deal from New York : that's how he had me pegged. A curiosity or an over-educated freak, it's all the same to the drivers. More than a few taunt me with being gay to while away the time. Wonder how they know what a homo is like ? You learn new things every day.
We left the 13th, hospitals and apartment towers far behind. I'm a little nervous. Franco has already shown me the stick he keeps under his seat just-in-case. Who's to say there isn't a Romanian pistol sitting next to it ? Just in case.
“You shut up, listen. I know place where I can drive car.” I take that to mean put the car through its paces – or teach me a lesson.
Franco and I have already had our share of run-ins. His plan, as far I can see, is to make anyone he doesn't like as miserable as possible, by thievery, by damaging their bikes in a dozen different ways. Then he'll replenish the workforce with his clan, control the organization with his own little mafia and take a cut on every ride. Am I the only one who sees it coming ? He's working hard. Drivers are tired of paying and not having a functioning moneymaker. There's turnover in personnel every week. But how will I know for sure if I don't ask him to his face ?
“Me honest man. Have family. Why you don't like ? You see car I buy ?” No getting a word in edgewise. In this case, buy comes with shrieking quotation marks.
As we sail past Villejuif, I give a few thoughts to the sweet little house there and wonder why I'd left to get involved in this mess. But that's the way things are: go out for a short walk and when you aren't looking, existence changes beyond recognition.
Franco is spread across his part of the front seat with the steering wheel aimed downwards, gesturing at me, trying to convince me he couldn't possibly be behind the wave of vandalism.
“Listen, Franco, where are we going, really ?”
“We go good place, place I make car work. Kid sick, no good you come to house. Upset wife. I no want trouble with her or you, yes, James ?”
I have to accept the changes and the fact that maybe I'm wrong about Franco and he isn't trying to set-up a city-wide racket that will cost me the one source of money I've found in three years in France. I could be wrong. He resists attempts at interpretation.
Franco is quick with the hand gestures and his stubby fingers are always grabbing my arm to make his point. Then he puts three of them around my wrist and I throw a quick, light punch in his direction. He pulls the car over to the side of the road.
“James, don't do that. Is dangerous,” he says, cackling like a fox with its eyes on a meal.
“Listen, Franco. We were going to talk about the bikes and now we're going I don't know where. Turn around and go back to Paris. I've got things to do.”
“I want show you my car," he says. So there it is: Franco admires the big American type, the first one he's met, someone who's gone out of his way to slight him, based only on suspicion, on clichés. He's trying to show me that much. But what he feels is very different. I have no idea what's going on inside that hard, brown nut. If he could read my mind, he'd know I'm about to put my hands around his neck and squeeze.
“I know place where I can drive car. We go fast, talk later. You no like ?” Everyone all over the world knows Americans are addicted to speed.
And so we make our way to a desolate stretch near the airport where the pavement is old and cracked and the grass uncut and no one in their right mind goes, except maybe to drop off a body. Or so it occurs to me at that instant.
It could of course be that Franco is playing it both ways. Have a nice spin and find out what my intentions are. That they are laughable and merely an attempt to introduce a bit of honor among thieves he cannot know. Maybe he's just out for a bit of fun. But, my mind racing to understand what's happening, if he can make a big Renault appear out of thin air on the money he makes from tourists, he can just as easily come up with a small-gauge Romanian firecracker. The limb of a tree will do in a pinch.
Some pages ask for eighty bucks a year; others one hundred eighty euros. Free-range roaming to all articles on Continental Riffs is thirty a year or five a month if you prefer, cancel if disgruntled. Don’t make the same mistake as Louis XVI or Davey Jones.