After the four dismal days at the trade center, I packed up and got on a train to Paris, where I would stay for about a week until the next market in Cannes, and then was to take another train to Cannes where I was to have no home-base to drop the dozens of promotional videos, one-sheets, posters and other marketing and sales material that I schlepped.

It was an overnight train and I was in a six-bed cabin with just one other woman, and I went right to sleep. I woke up in Paris the next morning, the train was already stopped and in the station. I felt like my head was run over by the train, my eyeballs felt like they didn’t fit in my head anymore, and I felt like I knew what it was like to have a broken neck. And I had no wallet. Apparently, every passenger on the train car felt the same way, and they didn’t have their wallets, either. The train was apparently sabotaged by thieves who used some kind of sleeping gas, and thieves went into each cabin and robbed the shit out of everyone on the whole train. Cool. So there I am, alone, in Paris, already depressed because I failed miserably to do the job that I was hired to do, with no wallet, no money, nothing. I filed the police report, along with dozens of other headache-laden passengers, for nothing but a carbon copied flimsy receipt of the copy of the complaint.

Thankfully my aunt and uncle were vacationing in Paris and hadn’t left yet, so they took me to lunch at a nice restaurant near the Quai d’Orsay, it was my sole connection with reality…and some dough.

My bosses didn’t buy the story. I think they didn’t want to buy the story, because I didn’t want to either. They pretty much stopped communicating with me, and I had a week to try to do my job in Paris out of the hotel room. For about two days, I tried to make calls and get appointments with buyers in Paris. No go. What I realized later is that in my haze, I was leaving a phone number for the hotel on the messages for these contacts; and it was the wrong number. I was reading it off the sugar-cube wrappers that came with my room service coffee, and it was to a different hotel. So even if someone wanted to return my message for a meeting, they couldn’t get in touch. That was a really kind of a pivotal moment.

So I called this freaky girl who I met in Milan and went to her apartment because I was out of money for the hotel. She lived on the top floor in a typical beautiful old Parisian building in the 10th arrondisement. Top floor in Parisian building terms isn’t what we call a penthouse…it’s the maid’s quarters, so the ceilings are about 6ft, teeny windows, and shared bathrooms. She was going out of town for a few days, so she left me the keys and some bread and fruit to eat. I was so depressed, but at the same time I had this intriguing feeling that at no other time in my life would I experience this—I was hooked on being successful and selling movies and doing whatever it took to be satisfied and to satisfy others.

But after this pace of work, with no gratification, for some reason no alarms were set off within me to just stop and smell the roses. It was like a forced grasp that yanked me out of the futile struggle to succeed in these abstract terms…that I had to hit a rock bottom before moving on, learning from the experience, and seeking happiness through other means.

Getting gassed and robbed and left hanging after working my ass off for two years for these shitheads didn’t quite sink in. I needed another kick in the head to change pace.

The keys to the apartment were the ancient old skeleton keys, one for the front door, and one for the bathroom. I thanked her before she left, then I crashed really hard for a long and hopefully regenerative sleep that night. I woke up trying to feel better about things. I would re-start this trip, enjoy my time in Paris, and just take things moment by moment. Maybe I’d become a vegetarian. Maybe I’d meet someone. Maybe I’d stay in Paris and not come back to my hallway in New York. Maybe I’d just get lost.

I put some water on for some tea so that I could sip and contemplate things as I peered out the window at my favorite city. I went to the bathroom and took the key, that part I remembered to do. Came out of the bathroom, remembered to bring the key and walked down the hallway back to the apartment. I was wearing was an old boardwalk crank t-shirt, “Stop Staring at my Tits” and boxers. I got to the door, looked at the bathroom key I was carrying, and realized I didn’t bring the apartment key. Oops.

No, really, motherfucking OOPS.

Talk about panic…I find myself quivering as I write this because I tried to block this out. After all these years, it still isn’t even funny to me. Yeah, yeah, I know you’re already laughing, but this really sucked. Remember, I still didn’t have a wallet or ID, barefoot, and I’m in fascist France!

So I go down to the concierge, who of course speaks neither French nor English, but Portuguese. Of course. She starts to yell at me because she doesn’t know me, and Quelou, the freaky girl, didn’t tell her that I was going to be staying there. So she slams her door in my face, and I’m standing downstairs, in freezing cold and rainy March, barefoot, with a “Stop Staring At My Tits” tshirt and boxers, with no keys, no money, no ID, and no idea what to do at 7:30 in the morning in the rain. And of course it was raining, it’s Paris. I walked around the block, dazed and panicked, looking for a locksmith or police, nearly too embarrassed to know what to say to them. But I didn’t find anyone anyway, except for a carpenter who was getting out of his truck across the street who felt like he needed to remind me that I was wearing no shoes. I just got really dirty looks from the busy, mean French people going to work.

Wait, didn’t I put a kettle of water on the stove for tea? Jesus Christ, can this trip get any more screwed up? So I bang on the concierge’s door again to tell her that there’s going to be a fire upstairs if she doesn’t help out quickly. If there’s a word for motherfucker in Portuguese, she said it over and over and over again looking me right in the eye. So she calls the Pompiers, the French firemen. They’re awesome, they dress in metallic silver outfits, with shiny silver helmets like on Star Wars, and they are just as dramatic as their outfits.

Meanwhile, that observant carpenter walked across the street to ask me what was going on. He then proceeded to go upstairs, while the Pompiers were arguing amongst themselves and fielding shouts from the crazy concierge whose husband just came home from his night-job. Hubby was extremely confused. It turns out, the carpenter was also a locksmith (e.g., he was a thief) who had already once broken into the building and was recognized by the husband. By that point, the Pompiers didn’t look as if they had any sense of urgency because no one clearly explained to them what was going on, since the concierge didn’t speak enough French (and she kept screaming like an insane person). I negotiated a deal with the thief to break into the apartment to give him some Nintendo games that Quelou had in the apartment in exchange for his work. But I had to also get him out of the building before the concierge’s husband got upstairs and realized that I had let a thief in the building.

So that’s what we did. He broke in and replaced the lock, I gave him the Nintendo games and what little money I had which was given to me by my aunt and uncle, and snuck him out the back stairwell for the garbage chute. I asked him for a receipt so that I could try and get the bosses to pay for this calamity. Believe it or not, he wrote me a receipt. Typical for bureaucratic France—imagine asking a burglar for a receipt.