a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Monday, March 21, 2005 A Vato in Paris Joe Loya gave the French a rousing excerpt from his memoir, The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell, last Monday at Shakespeare & Co., in Paris, and the place was so packed his wife and I couldn't find chairs. A regular Monday-night crowd shows up for poetry readings, but I think the people who came expecting to hear expatriate free verse were braced and surprised to hear a former bank robber from East L.A. talk about the American prison system and his own conversion to a life of peace. Joe's a friend from San Francisco; he blurbed the novel; he's an all-round good guy. During the inevitable bull session afterwards he said a bank robber was "a kind of bad writer" -- a peddler of clichés and sentimentality. "Every guy I knew in prison was sentimental," he said. "It didn't matter how tough they were." Joe and his wife Diane had never seen Paris. We spent the week in an apartment near the Eiffel Tower, which these days sends a bright revolving beacon across the city at night, like a lighthouse, and sparkles like a firecracker every hour. God knows how long it's done that. Maybe fifteen years ago I climbed the tower at midnight with some other hooligan, and made it to the first level (using a utility ladder along the elevator track in the western leg) before we both decided it was a stupid idea and climbed back down. The tower didn't sparkle in those days. And I'm pretty sure it didn't have the beacon. The title of this post comes courtesy of Diane, who told Joe over a crepe: "We should move here so you can start a blog and call it 'A Vato in Paris.'" I'd visit them every weekend if they did. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 5:45 PM | |
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