It’s August in Paris, and the ancient rain is pouring down. I arrived yesterday to stay with Katia, my Parisian girlfriend who lives in the 20th District. On the flight over, a Frenchman reading Le Figarowearily tells me: “I would much rather leev in San Francisco.” He pauses. “Maybe it’s a case of the greener grass always being.the greenest on the other side. I just mees zee Old Paris.” The 20th district is a moveable feast of funkiness: a Nigerian guy on the street corner is playing a xylophone while crooning Billy Ocean’s "Get outta my dreeeams, get into my car!" with a sleepy dog plopped by his side collecting euros in a hat. He hollers "Obama!" in my direction with a mischievous gleam in his eye. Then he shouts: "Keep hope alive!" (I know it's probably obvious that I'm a Halfrican in Paris, but how does this dude know I'm a Halfrican-American in Paris?) North African men in sleek suits are deeply absorbed in their chess games at outdoor cafés, and school kids are skipping in brightly colored hip-hop gear, looking like they just leaped off the set of an old Spike Lee Joint. A street artist wearing dark wraparound shades wildly beckons for us to sit for a portrait sketching. There's a crackling, freewheelin’ electricity in the air.

Parisians carry themselves with a sort of casual, grumpy regality that brings a sexy, almost neurotic energy to everyday life. "We (Parisians) are enveloped and steeped as though in an atmosphere of the marvelous, but we do not notice it,” observed Charles Baudelaire. The furniture mover, the delivery woman, the laughing parking attendant all have a velocity about them that you don't see in the U.S. The flower shop owner stands in front of her store with a pronounced scowl. A gypsy beggar staggers toward us like a phantasm, and a chic, six-foot African mother and her young daughter are having a cell phone conversation while standing three feet from each other (both are obviously tickled by their antics and periodically glance up to see if we’re all as equally delighted (and at least I was.) A scene that would have been borderline nauseating in the States was endearing on this exotic, rainy street with the smell of couscous wafting in the cold air. The nouvelle vague, Godardian dreamscape that had always been the Paris of my mind's eye was rapidly being replaced by something much more interesting.

I want to visit the Pere Lachaise Cemetery. When I tell Katia this, she shoots me a look like a San Franciscan being dragged to Alcatraz. "Ugh, okay, but I hate cemeteries," she says. “We'll all be in one soon enough. Why would you want to go somewhere so…dead? I'd even rather go to the Eiffel Tower.” As we stroll toward the cemetery, we pass by an old-world bookstore and peek in to see a bearded scribe behind a podium, bundled up in a scarf and gloves, loudly reciting his prose at uninterested customers. As we duck out, I ask Katia what he was saying. "You are a narrow-minded and wicked woman!" she howls, imitating him. We pass through cobbled alleyways, sharing an umbrella. People are huddled under awnings, taking shelter from the heavy rain. Parisians have the ability to look supremely blasé, especially in the rain. "When you're strange, faces come out of the rain." We stop for some delicious split pea soup at a little bistro. Our waiter has a long, jowly, miserable face that exudes a barely restrained mixture of contempt and moroseness as he leads us to our table. He reminds me of one of those haunted, distorted ghouls in a Francis Bacon portrait. At first I took his mood personally, but as we sipped our soup I saw him standing alone by the entrance, scowling to himself and emanating a sort of tortured disdain for the very air he breathed. What got him out of bed in the morning? Here was a man (an apparition) working at a hip bistro in the heart of Paris, with its velvet-curtained windows and colorful impressionist art adorning the walls and the scent of freshly baked bread in the air, and he was encased in gloom and barely holding onto this world. When we were finished he snatched up our euros without a word. “It is perfectly possible to be enamored with Paris while remaining totally indifferent or even hostile to the French,” James Baldwin observed.

We arrive at Pere Lachaise with a baguette in hand, and Katia watches with bemused perplexity as I break off little pieces for the pigeons who line the gothic cemetery gate. I feel a bit guilty now for dragging her here. The combination of the rain and the particularly deep hue of grayness, unique to Paris, casts an especially forlorn and noirish mood over the elegant mausoleums and endless gravestones. There are relatively few people wandering about until we arrive at Jim Morrison's grave, where we stop to chat with a sullen young Morrison look-alike from Poland who says he's been holding vigil for four days straight. He takes a drag from his Gitane and stares at the grave with studied introspection. A large group of tired-looking tourists embark upon us, and he goes into full method actor mode, crouching down and carefully rearranging the bottles of wine and whiskey left in Jim's honor. We continue walking and Katia taps my shoulder to draw my attention to two gravestones side-by-side, connected by a thin piece of rope. Balancing on the rope are two miniature tightrope walkers, a man and a woman, facing each other with arms outstretched in full concentration. Another grave has a stone engraving of a gargoyle peering ominously from behind a tombstone that reads “Pas de Repos Pour Les Vilains.” We pass Edith Piaf, Apollinaire, Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and Chopin before we reach a solitary patch of ground with a tombstone that simply says “Richard Wright 1908­–1960.” A single fuchsia rose lies atop the stone. "I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in all of us," he said about writingNative Son. And here we were, two solitary figures filled with that gnawing and straddling the short distance separating life from death..