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If you ever contemplate offing yourself, consider this: suicide is not a solitary death. Even if you were to crawl into the farthest corners of the earth to do the deed, eventually someone has to find you, someone has to report you and someone has to clean you up. Now, you ask, What’s this got to do with moving to Paris? Well, if you recall, it was back in September when I finally decided to relocate myself and my three very Californian cats to France. I gave myself six months to do it and got started immediately. I planned a week in Paris exploring the non-touristy parts of the city, visiting markets, hunting down job leads and basically coming to terms with what I was about to do. I was then going to stop in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving with my parent. Then, the unexpected occurred and I was invited to a wedding in Japan. Suddenly my two-week vacation became a five-week tour. I packed my bags, kissed the cats and took off. When my United Airlines jet first landed in Tokyo, I was, in a word, ecstatic. Paris had proven a cake-walk and Philadelphia even easier, which was truly shocking, since, based on their initial response, I was totally prepared for my parents attempts to talk me out of moving to Paris. I was going up against the best kind of parental offense: guilt, and so I prepared for the worst. I spent days plotting my defense, taking notes, memorizing facts. But if your parents are anything like my parents then you know what happened next. That’s right, like Southern Politicians, they changed the rules. Here I was, all geared for a fight and instead of discourse with

Quarkscrew Jones is a freelance writer from Los Angeles, California, who has relocated with her three cats to Paris. She’s written several screenplays and is currently working on a novel. Hollywood to Paris: Making the Move Now is Part 1 of this article. It appeared in the November 2001 issue of Escape from America Magazine. Quarkscrew's daily motto is, “Don’t hate me because I have no personal debt.” . Additional Resources Living Overseas  Unique Lifestyles  International Jobs Marketplace  Read Making the Move Part 1  Contact Quarkscrew Jones  .

Japan was supposed to be my last detour from responsibility before making my dream a reality. I had anticipated a rather carefree, albeit expensive seventeen-day jaunt through Tokyo, Kyoto, Ugi and Osaka, and at first, I was not disappointed. With all of its dichotomies and rituals, so many people, so little time to SHOP, Japan was gorgeous, loud, crowded and expensive. How ironic that the only luxury we middle-classed Americans could afford was a daily turn at the nearest sinfully fresh French patisserie. 
 

The wedding took place in Osaka. It was a warm, sumptuous affair that displayed all the good things about the culture: humble people, extremely fresh foods and tasteful excess. The Japanese bride looked divine in her Vera Wang original and the groom adorable in his traditional kimono. Capping off the festivities was the date: December 8, 2001, which was exactly fifty-one years and a day from when our two nations declared peace. As we handful of Americans discussed this with dozens of Japanese, we took collective pride our particular treaty. Where our governments had failed, we’d succeeded. We were smug in our revelries, morally superior in our

toasts, and just plain thrilled. It was at this lively reception that my friends and I decided to crown our visit with a trip to the National Deer Park in Nara the following day. We had just saved mankind, now it was time to feed the animals.

And so was my attitude the next morning when, as I stood with friends on the train platform to Nara. It was blistering cold, but it didn’t bother us. What did bother us was the Unknown Man, standing 15 feet away from us, who decide now was just the right time to remove his shoes and step in front of an approaching train…thus ending his life. Since he was so close to us, we heard it all, saw it all, lived it all.

And my world collapsed. 

Right now, you probably feel for me, but in the back of your mind you are still wondering, what’s all this got to do with Paris? Well, like this article, at first it wasn’t clear. 

As I mentioned, I had planned my move. I’m Aries, so each step had been meticulously calculated. Upon returning from vacation, I was to place an ad for a flat in the FUSAC, the local Parisan paper for English speakers. Next, I was to follow-up on my contacts with the non-profit organization I hoped to work with. Next, I was to check with my vet about vaccines and certificates. I was to renew my passport, submit a work visa application to the local French Embassy, and most importantly, I was to write a blindingly clever, Nobel-prize winning article about my recent adventures to Escape From America.  Instead I stalled. In the six weeks after I encountered the Unknown Man, I did little but eat too much, put off friends, court insomnia, and stare into my blank computer screen, waiting for the words to flow. The only real activity I managed was to secure a no-brainer, 2-day a week job that would cover my utilities and my bare-bones moving expenses. The job proved a blessing of sorts, as it required me to drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Twelve hours a week alone in a car with myself, I had time to sob and shout “Why Me?” as loudly as I chose.  And I chose often.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t whining. Bad stuff happens to good people all the time, and at no time did I think my Japanese nightmare compared to the trials of the women, men, and dogs working recovery at the Pentagon and World Trade Center. I was no Talliban survivor, my mosque hadn’t been bulldozed, my temple hadn’t been bombed. No machete had shortened my family tree, and none of my friends had suffered more than a hick-up in the past several months. So believe me when I tell you I was not complaining.
 

But I was reflecting. Those of us lucky enough to live in countries where life is about choice, we often don’t see the signs of hopelessness that exist within our own societies. After all, CNN does such a great job of glamorizing our lifestyles, that membership in the religion of ‘we are not like them’ is at an all-time high. Thus, we don’t think of the Japanese, the French, the British, or any other society that competes with us economically as being emotionally oppressive or disparaging. We don’t even see ourselves that way. All we can see are people making money, living large, drinking wine. We assume they are happy and live with few social demons.  France’s level of mystique in this area is extremely high. Since announcing my move to Paris, a lot of people have told me that they too

have always dreamed of living ‘there’ and doing what I’ll be doing. Although they have no idea what I’ll be doing. It rarely dents the conversation when I say that I am hoping to work with an HIV non-profit organization called FACTS.  People hear ‘American writer moving to Paris’ and it’s end of dialogue, you are Hemingway. Suddenly you’re knocking over chairs in some rowdy café, before gruffly kissing the closest pretty girl and staggering out into the brisk, Parisian air. You buy some bread, cheese, wine, then scurry past your angry, elderly landlady (to whom you owe two months back rent), up to your squalid, yet quaint little cell of a room (which surprisingly, gets the best sunlight on earth). Once there, you tear into a sparse meal with all the grunts and graces of a Viking; then wipe your mouth with your sleeve, light a freshly rolled Cuban and proceed to pound out ten hundred thousand of the most brilliant words ever known to man. All on that broken manual typewriter of yours. 

It’s a brilliantly lush, terribly Western fantasy, one to which people cling with so much abandon. As they wax on about how I’ll soon be sitting in a café, writing on my laptop, a steaming hot latte nearby, you can actually hear the accordion playing in the background. Imagine the screech if I were to expose my serenaders to the truth about writers. If I assured them that most writers are too cheap to own a laptop, and even if we did, we’d never be caught dead in a café window with one. For with the exception of the Happy Harry Potter Lady, most of us prefer to hole up like winged vermin when working. We don’t drink wine and smoke cigars; we chew pencils and hastily imbibe the most available, i.e. free, scraps of substance we can con out of our sweet little old landlady. When I’m writing, I’m playing God, and the goal is to avoid humanity (and bathing, for that matter) at all costs. Engaging with the real thing only throws me off, and so, until I’m finished, no amount of coffee, bourbon, or testosterone could get me out of my room.

Fortunately, I never give this speech to my fan club. Whenever someone sighs and sways and cups their hands under their chin and looks deeply into my eyes and, winks as if to say, “Paris, eh? You sly minx,” I realize that they are somewhere else. And you know what, with the state of the world today, that’s a pretty nice somewhere else, so why shock them with the ugly truth? Rather, I just nod and wink back with a knowing, “Ah oui, Paris”.  And it ends there, blissfully.

The Japanese conductors, the ones charged with removing the Unknown Man from the platform, they failed to wink or sway at me. They did sigh, however, but it was more out of boredom and annoyance than any kind of fantasy. The fact that there is a suicide epidemic amongst middle-aged men in Japan is reported in America as regularly as France’s booming unemployment rate. I’ve been told it takes a worldly person to know such things. I’ve been told I’ve arrived. Perhaps, but what is the state of my arrival? What is my human condition? Besides unemployment, what else will I have to deal with in my transition from Los Angeleno to Parisian? After all, my goal is not to become French, but to be the best American I can be…in Paris. What will that take? Before Japan I thought I knew what that would take, what it would look like. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
 

Then my photos arrived. Having visited Paris several times already, I took very few photos on this trip. But what I took was poignant for, along with the requisite shots of ancient buildings and blossoming parks, there she was, the original Statue of Liberty. My girl.  For those of you who aren’t aware, the Statue of Liberty that sits in the New York/New Jersey harbor today is a duplicate of the original Lady of Liberty who resides across from the Hotel Nikko of Paris. Overlooking the Seine, not only is she 100% French, she is also petite, tan and required greeting for any African American visiting the gay ville, since it’s long been rumored in the Black press that she was modeled after an anonymous slave woman. Complete with thick lips, a broad

nose and shackled ankles, the reports claim that before accepting the larger version as a gift, our own American government asked France to ‘fix’ her, and change her face to look ‘more angular, more attractive’. When I was in France in 1999, she was gone, on tour in Japan, of all ironies. So there I was, on this day last November, after having stumbled past a Vietnamese restaurant my friends and I had enjoyed on a previous trip, when it suddenly struck me. The Hotel Nikko was just around the corner and that meant… I turned the corner and my heart glowed, for there she stood, looking proudly out at the river. Shielding the sun from my gaze, she was too far to see clearly, so I couldn’t tell if she was White or Black or Republican. Instead, I raised my camera and let my zoom lens do the confirming.

Now I was holding the resulting evidence.
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