Graveyard Rock Stars: Popularity, Père Lachaise and the Living Dead

POPULAR!

. . . it's all about popular.

It's not about aptitude,

It's the way you're viewed

-from the song “Popular” in the musical Wicked

There have always been two kinds of popularity in my mind.

There’s the first kind, that I’ve dubbed “meritocracy popular.” People who are meritocracy popular have risen in the ranks because they’re genuinely good and deserving. They’re friendly and caring and you’ve never heard them say anything particularly unkind or seen them trample over others to get where they are. If they have lots of friends, it’s because they’ve been a good friend to many people.

Then there’s the other kind of popular, which I call “rock star popular.” People who are rock star popular exude cool. They’ve won affection from being beautiful or having gifts that others admire. Maybe they try, but they don’t seem to. And they don’t have to be a good friend to anyone to have people lining up to adore them.

Someone I used to know, who had traces of both kinds of popularity, once said:

-Children like me

-Why?

-Because I’m tall.

I laughed. It seemed simple, silly. No real reason to like someone. He was, at 6’3, a head higher than most people, so to kindergarteners, he towered even taller, a man on stilts. I hadn’t entirely believed his assertion until one day when we were ice skating together in front of the Hôtel de Ville in Paris.

He’d grown up in a place where winter sports existed and whizzed around the rink, looping and circling and crossing over, triple lutzing. I came back inside and pulled my skates off, tired by the unaccustomed cold, knowing my calves would ache. He ambled in afterwards, stood beside barefoot me in his skates, which added another six inches, and within seconds a crowd of French schoolchildren gathered.

Regardez l’homme très, très grand avec sa toute petite femme !

-Did you hear what they said?

-No.

I relayed it, but didn’t mention that they had married us in their minds because we were grown-ups.

C’est un homme GÉANT ! Avec une dame MINUSCULE !

It’s a GIANT man! With a MINISCULE lady!

Soon a clump of children gathered around us, laughing and pointing. Fingers accusatory. Mouths ajar. At first we laughed, too. Then, as the little blond garçon, the ringmaster of the freakshow we’d found ourselves featured in, kept calling out to his friends to see the big man and his little lady, their howling laughter began to feel cruel. Maybe we didn’t belong together. Maybe we didn’t fit.

But he was right. They did love his height.

At the Cimetière du Père Lachaise, the biggest graveyard in Paris, there are two kinds of gravesites: those of the popular people (the living dead) and those of the forgotten. Oscar Wilde, Édith Piaf, Jim Morrison, and Balzac lie alongside the tombs of cemetery citizens unknown to the vast majority of visitors. At the entry, you can grab a map that indicates the resting places of the most sought-after deceased.

Putain. J’y comprend rien, quoi, RIEN ! exclaimed one twentyish woman with a male companion as they scrutinzed the map.

He shook his head. There’s a system of double numbering. Sections have a digit. Gravesites, another. Sometimes, people just head in the general direction and look for the crowds. Every once in a while, you can start off excitedly towards a grand group, convinced that you’ve struck graveyard gold given the number of groupies, then approach to realize the throng is not comprised of tourists but funeral-goers. They’re mourning the recent dead. Someone they actually knew.

As I walk, I come across one grave with fresh flowers and an 8 x 10 framed picture propped on it. 1993-2010. Just a kid. A few people start towards me thinking I’ve spotted another graveyard rock star then back away, embarrassed. They think I know him. Imagine they’ve interrupted.

I also give up on the map, which I’ve tried to reproduce in my notebook since they’ve run out at the front, just about the time I find two other Jim Morrison-seekers.

-He was a rock and roll guy who died young, says a fortyish man in khaki shorts.

-How young, Dad? How young?

-Oh I don’t know

-Twenty-seven, I supplied.

I could tell by the girl’s expression that she didn’t think that was especially young. It’s not, when you’re thirteen.

When I was thirteen, I’d had a rock star crush on Jim Morrison and read all of the books on him, even the trashy, conspiracy theory ones that insisted he was still alive. I had a big poster of him, his arms outstretched like Jesus, pasted to my closet door, above a black-and-white photo of Marilyn Monroe.

My friend Alison and I had stayed up late one night writing out the lyrics to all of the songs on the Doors’s first album. It felt like a deep and meaningful activity. And compared to most of our other eight grade occupations, it probably was. Funny . . . the boyfriend I’d had at thirteen grew up to be a rock star. But a nicer one than Jim Morrison.

Five to one, baby.

One in five.

No one here gets out alive.

What was that song about anyway? A starstruck scribe, I’d dutifully recorded the lyrics on notebook paper in my loopy lettering. One of the titles of the more sensational Morrison biographies borrowed the last phrase.

At the gravesite, people leave flowers and notes. Sometimes, they’re just phrases from the songs. Nearby trees and tombstones have suffered the effects of graffiti. There used to be a guard here because there were so many problems. I’d heard that they actually wanted to kick him out of the cemetery for his posthumous hellraising. People wanted to show up and smoke a joint or spray paint “JIM LIVES” on the surrounding tombstones.

Today, two teenagers sip a can of Stella, the local equivalent of Budweiser, and converse in German. A series of metal barriers prevent visitors from getting too close, like bodyguards at a concert. The graveside activity isn’t as much of an issue now. As one tourist notes, the fans are starting to die.

I move on, seek others.

-Vous avez vu Yves Montand ? inquires an older lady whose map I’ve borrowed.

-Yves Montand est là ? Je passerai lui dire bonjour alors !

-Have you seen Yves Montand?

-Yves Montand is here? I’ll drop in and say hello!

I realized my response made it sound like we were at a dinner party and I was surprised to bump into an acquaintance. But then again, we were only acquainted. Mainly because he’d slept with someone I knew better. Someone more popular than he was. Someone of my own nationality, who also died young.

Having greeted Yves, I returned to looking for Oscar Wilde, who also has enough rock star allure to attract graveyard groupies. Hundreds of lipstick kisses adorn his enormous white tomb despite an engraved plea to halt such “defacement.”

According to my guidebook, the tomb isn’t the only enormous thing. There’s a sphinx-like angel sculpted onto the marble front with missing genitals, the statue’s, supposedly huge. Now, according to legend, the missing member rests on a British ambassador’s desk. A penis paperweight.

The lipstick kisses seem like such a heteronormative expression of love for a writer whose most celebrated liason, whose muse, was a man, Lord Alfred Douglas, or as Wilde knew him, “Bosie.” In a way, you could say Oscar Wilde was lovelocked, adoring a man much younger than he, who never entirely returned his mentor’s affections.

In the end, Wilde went to prison for that love, accused of sodomy and locked away for gross indecency. But if he died alone, in a hovel of a hotel with tasteless wallpaper, he’s found hordes of posthumous admirers. Metro tickets and scraps of papers destined for the deadman collect on all sides of his tomb.

One person’s note reads: Dorian Gray made me love literature. Thx for that.

I wipe my eyes. It gets to the ex-English teacher in me, on two levels. The emotion behind it makes me misty-eyed because I also believe that a book can change a life. But the “Thx” makes me want to wield my lipstick like a red corrective pen and fill in the letters lacked. Out of my own respect for Oscar. The note reminds me that on the same closet door, I had also pasted quotations from The Portrait of Dorian Gray, having graduated from Doors lyrics by the tenth grade.

My dearest Oscar, a woman named Amy had written on the tomb, we are winning!

I first read “we” to mean gay people. Then again, maybe it also means unpopular people. Wilde was a rock star now, but he hadn’t always been loved for who he was.

His epitaph, pulled from his own poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, speaks of outcasts in a manner strangely prophetic:

And alien tears will fill for him


Pity's long-broken urn,


For his mourners will be outcast men,


And outcasts always mourn.

On the way out, casting about for conversation, I stop off to chat with the gardiens. There’s a funeral here today. Women in black dresses. Men in suits. A carful of flowers.

-People are still buried here often?

-Every day.

But death doesn’t get them down. They are playful, flirt a little, ask about Louisiana, if I speak French because I’m “cadjin,” make me promise to drop by again.

-À l’été prochain, alors ?

-Non! C’est trop long ! Revenez à Noël !

-See you next summer then?

-No! That’s too far off! Come back at Christmas!

Though I’ve never been sociable enough to maintain a large group of friends all at once, I leave feeling a little popular.

Vagabondes: Women, Walking

-What do you like about living in Paris?

-That it’s feminine.

-Feminine?

-It has curves. It’s slow. Buildings are close to the ground. You can wander. You can’t wander in Manhattan.

-Conversation with Cyndi, who moved to Paris last year from New York

The French language offers a wealth of words for walking, a dictionary list, long and imagistic, of ways of moving through the space. While we stride and amble along the glittery cement of American cities with “skyscraper wallpaper,” to use Jim Carroll’s description in The Basketball Diaries, the French are apt to se promener or errer, along the cracks and crevices of cobblestone, amidst marble façades that stretch up only a few stories.

I contemplate cobblestone: maybe that is what slows them, eases the pace of “walking” into “wandering.” Its uneven edges, its dips and drop-offs, remind you to slacken your step for fear of stumbling, to look around as the land shifts endlessly beneath your feet and you realign your stride.

Of all the words for Parisian peregrinations, vagabonder is my favorite, perhaps because it calls to mind Cosette. As a writer, divorcée, and cabaret performer, she often matches her character Renée in La Vagabonde, a self-described dame seule, re-envisioning her existence after parting ways with her partner. Both women seem shared between the desire to settle into stability with someone else and an equal longing to revel in the terrifying freedom of singularity.

People say Paris is a great city for couples, but I think Paris is a great place to be alone.

It was a statement made by one of my first friends here, each of us in some ways like Renée, each of us realigning our strides as the land shifted. As she suggested, when you are alone, you look both outward and inward. You notice more. When coupled, you look at one another. John Donne had said it best in “The Good Morrow”:

For love all love of other sights controls

And makes one little room an everywhere

Cyndi had commented on the curves. A popular saying, quoted on Parisian post cards reads: Ajouter deux lettres à Paris, c’est le paradis. (Add two letters to Paris and it’s paradise.), but the city’s concentric circles might remind the errant traveler of Dante’s rings of hell. Descend to his innermost circle, the ninth ring reserved for traitors, and you will rub shoulders with Mordred, Cain, Judas Iscariot, and Satan, himself, frozen in a lake called Cocytus. But if you spiral into the center of Paris, you’ll find the first circle, point zéro, a copper-colored stud on the parvis in front of Notre Dame from which all distances are measured. It’s as if Paris is a pinwheel of an art project, expanded, glittered and glued, cut and crafted, by 2,000 years’ worth of city dwellers, and the creation is all held together by a tiny golden brad.

Dante’s inner ring promises perpetual punishment; Paris’s, perpetual pleasure.

Point zéro is a wishing stone, but no two wishes are the same, nor are the ways of wishing. Some days, as I’ve watched, people toss coins onto it, a price paid, even if a pittance, for what’s wanted. Other days, they touch their toes to the middle, close their eyes. Still other times, they tiptoe over it. Once, I saw several people, one after another, step into point zéro and spin around, as if you really had to spiral into the center of something in order to know which direction to take, which one would one would wind you outwards toward your wish.

Many walking tours begin in the center. Many times, even if I begin on this outskirts, I walk almost subconsciously towards it, submitting to the city’s centripetal pull.

There’s a literary archetype in French literature, le flâneur, that arose from another word for walking. Flâner is a verb that describes a leisurely, aimless stroll, defined as se promener sans but, au hasard, pour le plaisir de regarder or “to walk without aim, haphazardly, for the pleasure of looking” (Larousse’s online dictionary). I think of it as the exact opposite in time, aim, and gait, of a power walk. In the nineteenth century, as Baron Haussmann revised the city’s geography, expanded streets and cleaned up the infect sewage of boue, walking became easier and more pleasant. People, and personages took to the streets. Masculine ones, that is.

In a book review of Catherine Nesci’s academic work devoted to the subject of flânerie (Les Flâneurs et les flâneuses: Les femmes et la ville à l’époque romantique) Denise Davidson comments on the qualities of the flâneur:

“ . . . The classic flâneur of the early and mid nineteenth century symbolized the transformations of modern, urban life. In Baudelaire’s writings of the 1860s, [ . . . ] the flâneur is associated with bohemian Paris. He was an artist and an intellectual, an upper-class man of leisure, a dandy and a connoisseur of the pleasures of the city. In Le Flâneur et les flâneuses, Catherine Nesci focuses on an earlier period, when the flâneur took a slightly different form, and was more an observer and chronicler of all that he saw than an artist transforming it through his creative impulses.” (H France Review Vol. 8 September 2008 121)

In literature of the same period, women walking often translated to promiscuity, real or perceived. Women, who flânent unchaperoned, are seen as a softer version of street walkers. How funny that our euphemisms in English and in French still suggest a connection between women’s walking and loose morals. The term faire du trottoir or, literally, “to do some sidewalk” means to sell one’s body, offer it up to the public for more than viewing pleasure. Balzac’s novel Ferragus, le chef des dévorants commences with the premise that every Parisian street has a character, and certain streets are so notorious that simply being seen on them can ruin a woman’s reputation.

Oui donc, il est des rues, ou des fins de rue, il est certaines maisons, inconnues pour la plupart aux personnes du grand monde, dans lesquelles une femme appartenant à ce monde ne saurait aller sans faire penser d’elle les choses les plus cruellement blessantes

Yes, there are streets or ends of streets, there are certain houses unknown to the majority of people in the wider world in which a woman who belongs to this world would know to not go into without having people think the most cruelly injurious things of her.

Yet, women want to walk, to move about, uncorseted, to stretch and stroll and claim the space. Some of Dumas’s characters in The Queen’s Necklace, Oliva and Jeanne de la Motte, sneak out of their towers for witching hour walks. The author George Sand, who adopted a male pseudonym for the purposes of publication, cross-dressed to be able to circulate freely.

She writes in Histoire de ma vie, “La découverte jubilatoire du monde par la flâneuse travestie donne ainsi naissance à la creation artistique: la ville se fait paysage et espace de la rêverie.” (The cross-dressing flâneuse’s jubilatory discovery of the world gives birth to artistic creation: the city transforms into a landscape and space for reverie.)

Perhaps, because it was once denied us, we desire to vagabonder on broad avenues and cramped alleys. Maybe that is why people like Cyndi, like me, like so many other women I’ve met take such pleasure in the slow discovery of self and city that occurs on winding walks though Paris’s curves.

-What did you do on your last night in Paris? I asked Liz, who left this morning.

-I went on a walk.

Sometimes, as a woman, it is still dangerous to walk alone. I have encountered women who will never walk unaccompanied, who imagine danger waiting in every shadow. In college, my first-year roommate called a male chaperone for the three-block walk between the bookstore where she worked until nine and our dorm. She was always safe, but what sadness I saw in that safety. What willingness to relinquish freedom.

As I have written before, I have been attacked in my apartment, in broad daylight, on a Sunday afternoon, with all of the neighbors nearby, at a time and in a place where I felt perfectly safe. I have been scared into submission, physically overpowered. I have wondered briefly and powerfully if I was about to die and how. I still jump if someone startles me on the sidewalk. I still, on occasion, have nightmares.

And I still walk myself home.