All-Night Lingo Tango

Ode to Airheads, Hairdos, Trains to and from Paris

Ode toAirheads, Hairdos,Trains to and from Paris For an hour on the train from Beauvais to Paris Nord I’m entertained by the conversation of three American girls about their appointment the next day with a hairdresser, and if there is a subtext to this talk, I’m missing it, though little else.Will bangs make them look too dykey?And layers, sometimes they hang like the fur of a shaggy dog. Streaks, what about blond streaks? “Whore,” they scream, laughing like a coven of wild parrots, and after they have exhausted the present tense, they go on to the remembrance of hairdos past— high school proms, botched perms, late-night drunken cuts.The Loch Ness Monster would be lost in their brains as in a vast, starless sea, but they’re happy, will marry, overpopulate the earth, which you can’t say about many poets, I think a few weeks later taking the 84 bus to the hairdresser, where I’ll spend three long hours and leave with one of the best cuts of my life from Guy, who has a scar on his right cheek and is Israeli, but before that I pass a hotel with a plaque— Attila József, great Hungarian poet, black moods and penniless, lived there ten years before he threw himself under a train in Budapest. If we knew what the years held, would we alter our choices, take the train at three-twenty instead of noon, walk in the rain instead of taking the Métro?The time-travel films I adore speak to this very question: overwhelmed by disease and war, the future sends BruceWillis back 18 to stop a madman. I could be waiting by the track as József arrives in Paris, not with love but money, which seemed to be the missing ingredient, the honey he needed to sweeten his tea. Most days I take the B line of the RER, and one of the stops is Drancy, the way station for Jews rounded up by the Nazis before being sent in trains to the camps, but we can’t see those black-and-white figures in theTechnicolor present like ghosts reminding us with their pallor how dearly our circus of reds and golds has been purchased and how in an instant all those colors could be erased. 19 ...