In Le Havre. Young man, dismount this train!
And so he did, and wandered a while, along a wide and boring road with houses a few businesses a few trucks several cars a person or so passing him every so often on the sidewalk.
But then he got closer to the sea, to the city center and the sun shone.
Concrete steps, a wide yellow boardwalk. A woman with too much make-up serving bar in a strange room with a cement floor, lots of space, and a couple tables huddled around a small wooden (brass trimmed) bar in the center of the room up against one wall. Oui, oui, and she–in a long red sleevless dress and a white feather boa, motions for you to follow. She is fifties and old-looking, with black mascara, red lipstick and face powder caked over and her small, button-eyed, slip-nosed wrinkled face. Her small-featured face poked out beneath curling hair that hung slightly askance with difficult-to-believe volume. She’d smiled when you first entered and said something in French to her comrades–all about her age, mostly men in brown suits with or without the tweed jacket and old-fashioned tweed cabbie hats. They all also smiled at me, waved me Salut, let me go on up with her around the winding carpeted, in some spots unsteady, steps, to see a tiny bedroom down hall from a tiny bathroom. Reasonably priced, probably safe, unless there was a fire. And so I was set; threw my stuff down, squeaked down the steps behind her, once again simultaneously greeted and parted from her customer/friends, who nodded jovially, raising a thick hand or full glass. The room was strangely dark and basement-like, but it was on the ground floor, and soon I was back on the street, with money in my pocket and dinner in my heart.