Bum Basics
Bums of Notre Dame
by MonkFishHat
April 15, 2019 A.D.
Tonight Cathedral de Notre Dame de Paris burns. In salute to the grand home of Quasimodo and all our Gothic Horrors and Hopes, I remember…the bums of Notre Dame.
* * * * * * * * *
I was a student with a third floor walkup on Rue de Hotel Colbert, one or two blocks south of the Seine. I was deciding whether I’d fallen in love with Maria Teresa, a Ladin speaking occultist, or was I simply captivated.
“I am, how you say in New York…a bum?” he said to me. “I am Hugo. This is my friend Victor…although he never says anything. I don’t know who you are…but I know who you are not!” I wasn’t feeling quite myself that morning, so I was game. I smiled at the bum. “You are not Godot! Do you know how it is that I know you are NOT Godot?” I didn’t.
“It is because I am here every day, and you pass by, every day.”
He was correct - the logic was irrefutable. I was not Godot.
The Cathedral was phlegmatic.
“I used to beg in Copenhagen, and then Delft, but after everyone became socialist up there…they weren’t so generous to us bums anymore. So I had to come here. Parisians are naturally generous, although you’d never guess it, and the tourists are even more generous.”
Our Lady of Paris seemed impatiently smug. No one had ever accused her of warmth to strangers.
* * * * * *
One Tuesday morning (Mardi) I was walking home, past Notre Dame, and I saw my bum urinating in the crux of the apse.
* * * * * * *
We turned around, and this bum was talking to Uncle Peter and trying to do a magic trick with a filthy handkerchief.
* * * * * * *
The weather was brutal. Cold, windy and rain. Another one degree cooler the rain would have been sleet and the puddles little melting glaciers. And it was rainy and cold. Windy too. But, of course I could not offer shelter or food to the bum, because, he was, afterall, a bum. “And besides,” he said, “if I took you up on such an offer, I would no longer be a bum. I would have worked all these years and then thrown away…all this,” he gestured generally toward the water lilies or some garbage cans, “for the mere pleasure of a warm evening. No, tonight I will stay on the southeast side of the Cathedral. Out of the wind. The sun hits there first in April.”
The Church is his protector. (Glad it wasn’t me.)
* * * * * * * *
“I’d like to tell you more about it, but I’ve got to go down the block. They’re letting out from a 9 o’clock Novena at Chapel Saint Laurent, and the older ladies are in a generous mood. What we can do, though, is meet an hour from now at Café St. Louis. I’m meeting some other bums for coffee.” (Latte)
“Did you know that the courtyard in front of a church is called a parvis?” I did not. “Well, this,” again with the sweeping gesture, “this…is the most famous parvis in Paris.” He seemed pleased with what he thought might pass for a pun, or something intelligent. Why wouldn’t he be pleased with himself…he’s a bum.
* * * * * * * * *
My bum was now doing tourist sketches in the courtyard in front of Notre Dame, and he had a new, if ugly, mustard colored type of trench coat.
The nave was stolid.
* * * * * * * *
“Look. I’m trying this new look. Chin down, big droopy-dog eyelids. Just the slightest bit of a tremor with the open hand. And the eyes say, ‘I believe too.’”
For the first time, I thought the basilica might be getting annoyed.
* * * * * * * * * *
The bum, again with the “relieving.” This time on Vendredi, après midi.
The old gal would have like to shrug a gargoyle off on the bum at that point because, “I am not a toilet,” but, like Auntie Em, “Being a Christian woman, I can’t.”
* * * * * * * * * *
It was one of those perfect “Paris in the Spring” mornings. Blue sky. I had my ear-buds in…listening to Tony Bennett. Everyone looked beautiful. Notre Dame shimmered. I was carrying a baguette. And, this bum was feeding pigeons, and one of the pigeons pooped on my shoe.
“The original Paris sewers run right underground here,” he said.
“….And….the bum smelled worse!” “My nose tells me you do too,” I thought.
Notre Dame de Paris did not fail to see the irony.
* * * * * * * * * *
There were two portrait artists engaged in a chess game on the Parvis de Notre Dame. It was a way to spend time while tourists perused and decided whether to purchase. The painters were quite well known for their chess games. Rumors abounded that the neo-impressionist, that is, the guy who painted faux Monet, was a semi-Grand Master, and that the other painter, who worked in charcoal and watercolors, was no less the expert, having studied Chess at the right arm of Al-bin-Al, a Turkish Grand Master with questionable connections to “groups” that claimed to raise money to feed the Yemenis. They were nearing the endgame of a 64-move classic, but none of that mattered to the bum, who in shielding a piece of stale garbage-pail-harvested bread from the pigeons, collapsed onto the board, breaking one of the bishops. Everyone yelled at the bum, and a sidewalk artist threw green chalk at him. The Cathedral shimmered in the sunlight. I thought I heard it chuckle.
* * * * * * * * * *
“I could get a job…working as a street-cleaner…or running some big company with lots of workers…or I could….(he paused to check his Twitter feed)…or I could…go on welfare, the pubic dole. But then what kind of bum would I be? Certainly not a free one.”
Working hard for alms. Novel thought. Almost makes it honorable.
At that point the Cathedral burned, (my hair’s on fire!) and all of Western Civilization was lost.
* * * * * * * * * *
The next morning, the ogling bum was back. “Good to know that some things never change,” and with the gesture, “That lady has the finest flying buttress you’re ever gonna see….Hubba hubba. Well, somebody had to say it,” he said.
“And it had to be you,” I thought, “because you’re the bum.”
“I hear doctors are doing amazing things these days…you know, reconstructive surgery, boob-jobs…implants. But she don’t need much work. That’s the thing about timeless beauty.”
Notre Dame de Paris rose window eyes gazing West across the ages and into the setting sun behind the trees of the Bois forever, with the slightest smile. “Damn right,” she said. Scars, when beheld, become sexy. Love become Sacred. “Sacred be my Love.”