Ah, springtime in Paris.

The sidewalk cafés on the Boulevard Saint-Germain are alive with Parisians and tourists soaking up April light and moderate warmth, and the street performers are doing their thing with newfound energy—the old guy in the beret playing 78 RPM chansons of Edith Piaf and Yves Montand on an antique hand cranked Victrola, accompanied by his basset hound, has a true spark in his eyes.

Les cafés-crèmes du matin
Montparnasse, le Café du Dôme
Les faubourgs, le quartier latin
Les Tuileries et la Place Vendôme
Paris, c'était la gaieté, Paris
Mon grand Paris

Even the patrons of the porn shops and “Life Shows” on the Rue St. Denis seem to have more joie de vivre in their step as they alight the emporiums relieved of their respective burdens.

Printemps à Paris, indeed.

I sit in a tiny Vietnamese restaurant on the Left Bank, watching cars and pedestrians on the narrow street outside, nursing my second beer of the young spring day and lunching on garden rolls and a very good bowl of beef pho.

I pop a codeine and acetaminophen tablet—a generous supply of which I have procured in Antwerp, Belgium, where the prevailing vibe is Flemish rather than Gallic—for desert. Then, I order a nice, strong Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk.

It’s always best to mix a little bit of an up, even a caffeinated one, with your downs.

What to do? Take a walk through the Louvre? Go for a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens? Head over to the Trocadero and watch Parisian kids skateboarding? Wander along the Seine? Park myself at a sidewalk café and slake my thirst with more bière?

So many choices and so much leisure time.

My business is concluded. Now, I have a week to chill in Paris, blissfully alone and blessedly unencumbered, except for nightly calls to my girlfriend in Washington, who is depressed that I’m in Paris in the springtime and she is not.

I feel her pain at missing out on the City of Light at the nicest time of year, but nothing can be done. She is working on her Master’s and it is the home stretch of the semester. A reporting trip to the UK, Belgium, Germany and Switzerland—which enabled me to cop a supply of low-grade pharmaceutical narcotics in Belgium—has led me to Paris, where I am holed up in small hotel in the Latin Quarter. The best I will be able to offer is some modest Parisian bling, an assortment of fine teas from Mariage Freres in the Marais and some other souvenirs, plus the photos I have promised to take of Oscar Wilde’s final resting place in Pere Lachaise cemetery. My beloved is a literary creature much enamored of Wilde’s spirit.

C’est tragique.

I finish my coffee, take note of the nascent and subtle narcotic glow of codeine, and pay the check.

Out on the street, I light up a Gitane—a Parisian affectation more than anything—and walk toward the Seine.

I stroll to the Pont Neuf and stand on one of the stone balconies looking toward the Louvre. Two Parisian teenaged girls are standing a few feet away, holding large plastic cups. They are talking and laughing and pointing at a bateaux mouche, one of the tourist boats that ply the Seine, day and night.

The bateaux mouche is packed with tourists enjoying the scenery and snapping photos. The boat is approaching the Pont Neuf. The girls dump their drinks over the edge, on the tourists down below.

A dozen newly wet tourists are now angrily looking up at the Pont Neuf, from whence la deluge has come, and gesturing at me.

Je suis innocent.

A woman screams something that is undoubtedly very ugly in German.

I look to my left. The girls are hiding and laughing hysterically.

I look back down at the screaming tourists on the bateaux mouche. The boat is about to pass under the bridge.

A middle-aged man looks up at me and screams, “Fuck you!”

I am in the middle of Paris and an American has shouted, “Fuck you!” at me because he thinks I dumped a Coke on him. I laugh with a mellow sort of gauzy narcotic gusto.

The girls see me laughing and they smile.

I smile and shrug.

This adolescent prank drama concluded, I walk across the bridge to the Right Bank and wander until I enter a café near the awful Les Halles shopping complex. Coltrane is playing quietly in the background. I order a glass of cognac and an espresso, swallow another codeine tablet, peruse the International Herald Tribune and contemplate the state of the world.

It is still early. Outside, the sun is shining and the temperature is in the upper 60s. I pass a pharmacy, stop and wander in.

A gentleman with white hair, wearing a white smock, looks up at me over the top of his thick glasses. In French, he asks if he can help me.

“Parlez vous Anglais?” I ask in hideous French with pronunciation so bad that it draws befuddled looks from Parisians upon whom I try it. I have resorted to speaking Italian with several people who could not get beyond my evil butchery of French.

“Oui,” he says. “A leet-tel.”

“I’m American. I’m traveling in Europe for the next month on business, I’m a writer, and I forgot one of my prescription in the U.S.”

“Oui.”

“I need the medication.”

“Oui. What eez?”

“I think it’s called Xanax,” I say. “Is that right? It’s for my nerves and for my sleep. I can’t sleep.”

“I know zees thing. You ‘ave pay-pear for eat?”

“No, that’s the thing. I forgot my pills at home and the prescription is at home in a pharmacy in Washington, D.C.”

I am so practiced at hitting up pharmacies all over Europe for prescription drugs without a prescription that I will still likely be able to do it when I am old and senile and cannot even remember my own name.

Wife: “Bob, do you know who I am?”

Me: “The pharmacist. You’re the pharmacist. Please help me. I forgot my prescription back in the United States and I need pills until I go home.”

Wife: “You are home, baby. What do you need?”

Me: “Xanax. You could call my doctor. He’s in the United States and there’s a six hour time difference and it’s after business hours there, but you can try. Here, I can give you his phone number. He’s treating me for anxiety.”

“Normah-lee we do not geev wizout pay-pear,” the Parisian pharmacist says.

“This is very important,” I say. “Look, if you can’t give me the Xanax, do you know a doctor around here that I can see? Maybe I can get a prescription from him and come back. Oh well. I was hoping to spend the rest of the day at Pere Lachaise.”

“Pere Lachaise?”

“I want to visit Simone Signoret and Edith Piaf and Proust and Apollinaire.”

“Very good.”

“So, about the Xanax. Can you help me?”

“’Ow long wheel you be in France?”

“In France, about three weeks. In Europe, for six weeks. I take three or four a day. Point five milligram.”

“Ooh la,” the pharmacist says. “Eez very much. You ‘ave proh-blam?”

“I’m very tense, and that’s what the doctor wants. Do you want his telephone number? I’ll pay for the call. It’s after six there, but maybe he’s still in.”

(Rule Number One of shopping for pharmaceuticals without a prescription in Europe: Taking into account the six hour time difference between Western Europe and the East Coast of the US, always start after Noon for Eastern Time, adjusting accordingly for different time zones and remembering the few weeks in spring and fall when different beginnings for daylight savings time and returns to standard time, briefly cut the gap to five hours.)

“No.” The druggist waves his hand. “I geeve you hundred and twenty. Enough for three in day for six week. Four too many. Okay?”

“Great! I can’t thank you enough!”

I pay for the 120 tabs of Xanax and put the bag in the pocket of my long black coat. The pharmacist wishes me luck as I leave.

Actually, it is a perfect afternoon to fulfill my obligation to my left-behind girlfriend and pay a visit to Oscar Wilde, who resides in Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris’ 20^th Arrondissement.

I catch the Metro, ride two stops and change to another line that takes me to a stop across the street from Pere Lachaise.

On the way, I tear open a package of Xanax and swallow three tablets. That should give me a relaxed feeling as I stroll the byways of Pere Lachaise.

Inner peace by the milligram.

Pere Lachaise is a very large cemetery, so sprawling and with so many famed dead residents that it even has streets with names. There is much graffiti pointing the way to the resting place of Jim Morrison, who is both the cemetery’s most famous resident and the only one who attracts people that tag the place up. If you are buried in Pere Lachaise, there is a good chance that someone has, at some point, spray painted your headstone with “Riders on the Storm” or “Light My Fire” or an arrow pointing toward the Lizard King.

I eventually find Morrison, although he is roped off because he’s being cleaned of graffiti and awash in a sea of noxious chemicals.

No Oscar Wilde, however.

I walk back to the entrance I came through in the first place.

A guard stands there.

I approach him.

“Où est Oscar Wilde?” I say.

He looks at me and says nothing.

“I’m American,” I say. “Où est Oscar Wilde?” I gesture around the cemetery. “S'il vous plaît.”

S'il vous plaît with sugar on top?

“Ohs-kerr Wilde,” he says.

“Oui, Oscar Wilde,” I say. “Où est?”

“Ohs-kerr Wilde,” he repeats.

It is like talking to Inspector Clouseau.

“Oui.”

“Oui,” he says. “Ohs-kerr Wilde. Dix-huit.”

“Par-dohn?” I say.

“Dix-huit.” He points toward a sign. Pere Lachaise is divided into numbered sections and sub-sections. Just like arrondissements in Paris, but for the departed.

Dix-huit=Eighteen?

“Eighteen,” I say.

“Dih-zuite,” he says.

“Deh-sweet.”

“Dih-zuite,” he corrects.

“Dih-suite.”

“Dih-zzzuite,” he says stiffly. “Zzzzz. No, ssssss. Zzzzz.”

Possibly it is the Xanax and the codeine, but I believe the gentleman just hissed at me and made a mosquito noise and is waiting for me to pronounce dix-huite correctly.

“De-zzzzzuite,” I say, sounding like a fly.

“Oui!” he says, clearly satisfied. “Dih-zzzuite.”

He points in the direction I need to go.

“Merci beaucoup,” I mutter.

I locate a variety of French Generals and politicians. I discover Gertrude Stein. I find Alice B. Tolkas.

And, finally, praise God, I find Oscar Wilde.

I pay my respects. I look at the flowers that admirers, no doubt boys and girls just like my sensitive girlfriend, have left behind. I snap several photos.

I turn to go.

There is a café near the Metro stop. I shall camp out at an outdoor table, sip cognac and and truly appreciate printemps à Paris.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.