Introduction (outtake), The Noir Album
It all goes so fast for the young black boy in a “foreign” country for only the second time in his life, visiting that obligatory unrequited love that all young boys must encounter sooner or later. So fast. A whiplash speed that could unhinge your neck springs, leaving you looking like those teenage black girls who can roll their necks all quick fast.
The boy is slim, a hundred thirty-five pounds maybe. (And what is that to the French, only about sixty-two kilos?) He’s growing dredlocks, for the second time, so he’s sporting an Afro all twisted up in budding knots with beeswax; he regrets cutting his first set of locks the previous summer. It’s springtime again. The boy is clean-shaven and his visage resembles Michael Jackson’s pre-surgery, sort of circa Off the Wall. As a true boy, at age thirteen way back when, all the eighth grade girls told him so.
The boy is twenty-three, but a 1994 twenty-three, not, like, a 1974 twenty-three. The boy was already a three-year-old when the boy’s father was twenty-three, in ’74. At a 1994 twenty-three, a black boy could still be enrolled in school, like the Fordham University School of Law, instead of already supporting a young family uptown in the Bronx. He could steal away some of his tuition loan during his first upper-graduate spring break and buy a roundtrip ticket to Paris for nine days, to hang out with his unrequited love. His girlfriend even gives him permission. So he goes. You would too.
The boy disembarks the plane at Charles de Gaulle wearing platform shoes and bellbottoms and sunglasses. He’s only a boy, he hasn’t found his identity quite yet. Soon come. He’s Lenny Kravitz today, his first day in France. His unrequited love, we’ll call her Camille, meets him at the airport with her French best friend, Christine.
“He won’t dress this way when we go out?” Christine whispers to Camille.
“You see why I toy endlessly with his emotions instead of simply giving in to his advances,” Camille replies softly. “What a weirdo.”
Christine is cute, the boy thinks, but he only has eyes for Camille. Of course.
Christine’s car is a red Fiat, stick shift like most European cars. She drives them all to Paris, to Camille’s one-room flat in the thirteenth arrondissement, and takes leave. Back in Westchester, New York, Camille attends Sarah Lawrence College, she’s studying here at the École Normale de Musique for the school year. All week they’ll be sleeping on the same mattress, oh joy, oh joy.
Paris is gray but grand, magnificent to the young boy. Riding the métro for the first time while reading Honoré de Balzac—because singer Terence Trent D’arby recommended the writer in an interview somewhere—he thinks to himself, This book sucks. The trains are cramped in comparison to the New York City transit he’s used most of his life, lengthwise phone booths with seats. He hops the métro his first few times before buying a métro card; NYC won’t have its own version for several years, they still use copper tokens.
Camille, born and raised in the Bronx like the young boy, is fluent in French. He can’t speak the language for shit. He loves the crêpes sold on the street corners like hot dogs, especially the ones with the chocolate inside, the Nutella hazelnut-and-cocoa blend. He can’t figure out francs, c’est très difficile. The temperature is lower than he expected, much colder for March than he anticipated. He can’t figure out Celsius, c’est très difficile.
In the space of nine days Camille takes her paramour all over the city limits: Père Lachaise, the famed cemetery where Richard Wright, Jim Morrison, Édith Piaf, Honoré de Balzac, and more are interred; the Eiffel Tower, naturally, where they march the stairs to the second level as the young boy teases Camille about gnashing her teeth and farting in her sleep (“Do not!” “Do too!”); to L’As du Fallafel in the Marais, where the young boy eats the eggplant falafel with hot sauce recommended by vegan Lenny Kravitz in Rolling Stone (he’s never tasted a falafel in his life, he’s still more inclined to McDonald’s); more French cuisine at Chez Foufoune, Paradis du Fruit, Hippopotamus, Oh!… Pouvrier; to the movies on avenue des Champs-Elysées—Romeo Is Bleeding—where they spot actor Danny Aiello sporting a Do the Right Thing jacket in the theatre, streets away from the Arc de Triomphe; and finally, on the eighth night, to a farewell dinner at the apartment, to which Christine and her cousin Vincent are invited, mostly to run interference.
“Nice legs, Christine,” the young boy tells the French dinner guest, rubbing his hand up her smooth left leg as she lays on the futon, in hopes of inciting jealousy in Camille. Christine, twenty-four, is the same milk-chocolate complexion as the boy, she’s finishing her third year at La Sorbonne Nouvelle. She’s lived in Paris since the age of four when her parents moved from Martinique, the Caribbean-island départment of France. Christine doesn’t slap him for caressing her shapely leg, doesn’t stop him at all. And he does indeed find her legs smooooth.
“Oh? Merci, [Young Boy],” she says, with a quick giggle in the flirtatious moment. Camille, setting the table, sucks her teeth absently.
Twenty-one months later, January 1996, mirrors on the ceiling of an Andrea Motel suite in the northeast Bronx reflect images of Christine and the young boy’s naked bodies intertwining on a queen-sized bed. Thirty dollars for three hours. A rampant blizzard grounds all international flights from Kennedy Airport, including Christine’s return flight to Paris. Roads are so bad that the young boy’s mother refuses the use of her car for his amorous mission, and so she believes a cab has shuttled the two to this illicit lodging off the New England Thruway. Her Renault is parked in the drive, white with falling snow.
The young boy is me. But you already knew that.
