The Only Street in Paris: Life on the Rue Des Martyrs (24 page)

I was there because Cerise Sudry–Le Dû, who lives behind Bistrot 82 at No. 82 rue des Martyrs, wanted to show me her nighttime hangout. Cerise majored in journalism in college and graduate school and has beaten the odds. She is a print and digital journalist with a real job—at the free daily newspaper
Metronews
. She is single, in her late twenties, and likes Bistrot 82 because, unlike most Paris night spots, it does not have an entry fee. Plus, she’s already home.

“It’s not really seedy here; it’s not really trendy,” she said as we sat on stools at the bar that Friday night. “We’re some
where in between. There are people who are famous, people who live in the neighborhood, and people who are complete drunks.”

Leila, the bartender that night, was a tall Swede with a strong build, multiple piercings, and pink hair moussed into spikes. She poured Cerise and me shots of vodka that triggered a ritual. We raised our glasses, downed our shots, and then . . .

“Watch this,” said Cerise.

Leila poured a line of lighter fluid along the length of the zinc-topped bar and lit one end of it with a match. Flames rose two feet high. No one seemed flustered or shocked. Within seconds, the show was over.

“When the doors of the 82 close behind you, you enter a parallel universe,” said Cerise.

If Michou’s transvestite cabaret is safe, sanitized, and mostly for old-timers, Bistrot 82 is gritty, messy, and mostly for the young. It is the closest thing on the rue des Martyrs to what was once rowdy, out-of-control Montmartre.

Paris still lives on its reputation as a city of the night. Even jaded old-timers admit that it shimmers when the sun goes down and the lights go on. There is beauty to be discovered, perhaps even adventure and love. “The night suggests, it does not show,” wrote Brassaï, the twentieth century’s best-known photographer of Paris at night. “The night disquiets and surprises us with its otherness. It releases forces within us which by day are dominated by reason.”

By day, the rue des Martyrs belongs to longtime residents, stroller-wheeling parents, curious outsiders, and shoppers of all ages. Bicyclists and motorcyclists compete with bus drivers and motorists to frustrate even the most determined pedestrians. On
the lower, more gentrified end of the street, young people might linger over an iced green tea and white chocolate cookie at KB Cafeshop or a waffle at Café Marlette, known for its prepared organic muffin and pancake mixes.

By night, the tempo shifts. The night belongs to the young. The legal drinking age is eighteen, although it is easy for younger adolescents to be served. Consuming alcohol in public is allowed in France, which means drinkers overflow onto the sidewalk, especially on the Montmartre stretch. But it rarely gets out of control. Montmartre’s reputation as a nighttime den of iniquity has been in a long, slow decline.

“The legend that Paris is one of the most sinful cities in the world has been passed on from generation to generation,” the American humorist Art Buchwald wrote about Montmartre way back in 1952. “Unfortunately, as the tales grow stronger the sins grow weaker.”

Gentrification is coming, less ferociously than at the bottom of the rue des Martyrs, but it is coming—crowding out the cheap bars, small-time drug dealers, itinerant winos, and chain-smoking streetwalkers. Even Josette, who owned this part of the rue des Martyrs as its “lady of the night” for fifty years, made enough money to retire comfortably in Nice some years ago.

Two doors down from Bistrot 82 is the Motorbass recording studio, a renovated space with state-of-the-art acoustics. Built on the site of the studio that once recorded musical legend Serge Gainsbourg (who often performed across the street), it is now the go-to place for some of the best young musicians in the world. The French band Phoenix recorded its Grammy-winning album
Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix
here. (Thomas Mars, the lead singer of the band, is also famous for being the second husband of film
maker Sofia Coppola and the father of their two children.) American musical artists Kanye West, Pharrell Williams, Cat Power—they’ve all recorded here. In 2012, the Canadian pop artist Justin Bieber recorded a song for his mother here, as a Mother’s Day present.

That same year, Peoples Drugstore, which sells and serves more than five hundred brands of beer from around the world, opened down the street from Bistrot 82. It replaced a boutique that sold women’s clothing. The goal of the owners is to stock one thousand brands. Cerise goes there often, to hang out and play chess. She is in an inner circle of customers invited after hours into the windowless beer and wine cave below. There, they sit on beer casks, sip wine and beer, and pass around a water pipe. “When the shop first opened, it was just a lot of old men drinking beer and playing chess,” she said. “Then it was written up in the French press as the cool place to be. The clientele changed. Hipsters with mustaches came. Now you have to wait until they leave so we regulars can take back our space, and play chess as long as we like.”

Peoples Drugstore is too small to accommodate many customers. But it sits on a corner with a half-block cul-de-sac that has become a meeting place for chain-smoking young beer drinkers. Even after Peoples closes, at midnight, they spread out along the curb, drink too much, and get rowdy. The residents of the apartment buildings and the clients of the small hotel in the cul-de-sac complain about the noise, but the police, who never are out in much force, see and hear little.

A bit farther south, at the intersection with the broad boulevards that form the boundary with the Ninth Arrondissement, young people sit at outdoor tables or stand on the sidewalk in
front of the corner bar-bistros, keeping the street lively—and challenging for passing pedestrians.

Mohamed Maacha—his friends call him Momo—is king of this stretch of the rue des Martyrs. He opened Bistrot 82 in 1993, as an informal, no-frills neighborhood bar serving vast quantities of cheap alcohol and beer on tap and playing loud music until dawn. He describes himself as a civic-minded local businessman who watches over the street and interacts easily with the police on the rare occasions when they come to check on the place.

“With all the action we generate here, robberies on the street have stopped,” he said. “The drug dealers and prostitutes have disappeared. Parents of the neighborhood feel comforted that their teenagers have a safe place to drink and party that is walking distance from home.”

Momo boasts that over the years, French tennis star Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, French octogenarian singer Charles Aznavour, and Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar have visited. Bistrot 82 got another boost of celebrity in 2012 when Mika, a Lebanese-British pop singer, wrote a love song about a young woman named Karen. She sang “her dreams and ours” and other people’s songs at Bistrot 82. She pledged to “make people jealous” and slept with jerks.

When Cerise celebrated her twenty-seventh birthday, her friends filled Bistrot 82 and the street outside with balloons. Because it was August, most of the neighborhood was on vacation, and Momo was delighted to host her party.

“I once did a striptease here,” a waitress named Yona told Cerise.

“Oh, would you do it for me, for my birthday?” Cerise asked.

“Of course.”

The DJ played Joe Cocker’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On,” made famous in the 1986 cult film
9½ Weeks
, in which Kim Basinger strips for Mickey Rourke.

“Yona got up on the bar, the bartender set the bar on fire, and she did a striptease,” said Cerise. “This is a young woman who is really more tomboy than sex siren, not the type who would be doing a striptease, and that made it even funnier.” (Unlike Basinger, Yona kept her panties on.)

“Momo shook up a bottle of champagne, so when the cork popped, the liquid shot up in the air. Everyone was dancing. It was crazy! You never know what’s going to happen on the rue des Martyrs.”

The two-room bar smells of sweat, stale beer, and cheap whiskey. The floor’s varnish is worn, the paint on the walls yellowed and chipped, the red upholstery of a long banquette ripped to reveal its stuffing. A gleaming lighted dispenser offers six beers on tap. The rooms are decorated with oversized framed mirrors, posters of musical performances, and advertisements from magazines taped to the walls. Blinking tree lights and evergreen garlands make for a year-round Christmas feel. The tracking of bar tabs is so informal that you can slip out unnoticed without paying, or pay double because you’ve been stuck with someone else’s bill.

One of the regulars is a thin man of indeterminate age with a thick, dark mustache. He wears a vintage French naval officer’s cap and naval jacket, frumpy pants, and aviator sunglasses. He arrives drunk and sways side to side on his bar stool. He does not pose a threat because he converses mostly with himself.

“What makes this street special is not its glamour,” said Cerise. “There isn’t any. But you meet really original people here, not dangerous but very strange. And you get attached to them.”

Back home on the West Side of Buffalo, we had a word for this kind of place: dive. A dive was a good, safe spot for us to congregate as teenagers. Depending on the DJ, the music at Bistrot 82 might be too loud and bass-driven for sustained conversation, too hip-hop for dancing. But when the disco-obsessed DJ is working, you can get the best of American disco, circa 1970s. One night he played Donna Summer’s 1979 Grammy-winning “Hot Stuff,” and hey, that’s my generation. Even I couldn’t feel embarrassed doing my dated disco moves on the dance floor.

Bistrot 82 used to be an all-night joint that opened at three p.m. and closed around six a.m. But a 2008 law that banned smoking in public places pushed smokers onto the sidewalks and outdoor terraces. Soon the neighbors were calling the police to complain about excessive street noise and the health hazard of secondary smoke. They won a city order forcing Bistrot 82 to close at two a.m.

In protest, Momo reopens on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday mornings at five a.m. for a five-hour-long
after
—or “after-party.” Sometimes on a morning jog, I hear music blaring through the door and watch as the drunk and disheveled stumble out.

“Maybe the neighbors have a point,” I said to Momo one morning.

No way, he replied. “This is Montmartre, where we party,
drink, and have fun. If all these uptight, boring people want quiet, they should never have moved to this part of town.” Besides, he added, he has invested 65,000 euros in soundproofing, which should be enough evidence of his goodwill. Then his resolve dissolved into resignation.
“Ça se meurt à petit feu,”
he said of Montmartre. “It’s dying a slow death.”

That’s debatable, at least at No. 82, where residents hold an annual celebration in the courtyard of their building. In other neighborhoods, such an event might take place with a genteel late afternoon barbecue. “Not here,” said Cerise. “Here, the party starts at midnight.”

At a party not too long ago, Dina, No. 82’s concierge, suddenly burst into song. Although she had belonged to a musical group in her native Portugal, Dina no longer sang much. That night was different. She sang a Portuguese song of melancholy known as a
fado,
then another and another.

“No one knew she had this incredible voice,” said Cerise. “People from other buildings came to their windows to listen. When she finished, everyone applauded and cheered.

“We all went to Bistrot 82, and Momo treated everyone to champagne. Then we went to another place in Pigalle and sang karaoke until dawn. Then we went to breakfast at Carlos Cheio, on the rue des Martyrs.”

Momo owns not only Bistrot 82 but also a small, inexpensive restaurant called La Cave Gourmande, at No. 96, and a café and bistro—Le Bistrot des Martyrs—on the other side at No. 93. The Sacré-Coeur Basilica, at the top of Montmartre, is close by; both places appeal to tourists walking down the hill or stepping off the funicular.

“So you’ve become a pillar of the neighborhood,” I said.

“No, not a pillar! I don’t like that! I’m just an old dude.”

No. 93 has an interesting history. Until a few years ago, as Chez Sorlut, it was one of Paris’s most celebrated dinner clubs for what the French call
échangisme
. Clients came to dine, but they could also linger to watch or participate in sex, as this was a “libertine” place that facilitated couple swapping and group sex. “Swingers’ clubs,” we call them in the United States. To ensure privacy, opaque draperies covered the windows. The street in front was widened and cut into the sidewalk to designate two spaces as a delivery zone for quick drop-offs and pickups by private cars and taxis. Someone I know who visited the club told me a story about a couple he saw there: an elegant man of about seventy and a stylish, fiftyish woman wearing a mink coat. When the maître d’ asked to check her coat, she handed it to him. Underneath, she was stark naked. I was amazed by the story—not that a woman was naked in a libertine club but that she was confident enough of her fifty-year-old body to show it off.

Now the club at No. 93 has become respectable, complete with Wi-Fi. Cerise uses it as a second office in which to read newspapers, conduct interviews, write stories, and meet neighbors. She ventures south of the boulevard mostly to go to and from her office—not to shop or eat or have a coffee. “I can spend the weekend without ever leaving the rue des Martyrs,” she said. “It’s my drug. My family was always moving when I was growing up, and I don’t see my parents very often, so I have created a core of a family here. It’s a good thing I have a job. Otherwise I’d let everything go and party all the time.”

The next time I went to Bistrot 82, my daughter Gabriela and some of her friends came along. When I went to the bar to order
drinks, a tall, handsome French man in his late twenties, his skin the color of black satin, asked if he could buy me a drink. I was gobsmacked. But I graciously declined. “Uh, thanks, but I’m here with a big group,” I said.

Another young Frenchman made a similar offer. I smiled and walked away. Then a third Frenchman, also young, asked if he could kiss me.