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the Quai Voltaire, where I had a grand café and bummed a cigarette from a waiter who was tall enough for the NBA and weighed about ten pounds.
    I couldn’t wait to get back to my post in the subway. And when I did, I hit the ground running. I had never managed to make “It Never Entered My Mind” sound like that before in my life. And my “Green Dolphin Street” ran a close second. I even got a nice round of applause from a group of older women with folding umbrellas.
    Don’t ever get too comfortable. It’s just one of a thousand lessons that I have never truly taken in. My mother has been cautioning me about it since I was old enough to crawl. And Ernestine, my conscience, never tires of saying it. But I always forget.
    It was about five-thirty. I got through a couple of bars of “You Took Advantage of Me” before I realized something strange was up. I was hearing the same licks being played—note for note—not twenty feet away. On a violin, of all things. It startled the shit out of me. In fact, for a moment I thought I was hallucinating. I looked into the passageway and saw a long-legged, light-skinned black man with demure dreadlocks and wire-rim spectacles gazing directly, defiantly into my eyes while he bowed absentmindedly.
    I stood where I was, seething, until he finished, and then strode over to the gangly Caribbean-looking prick. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I was here first,” I told him in rapid-fire French.
    His eyes bugged behind the glass of his spectacles.
    â€œIdiot!” I shouted at him. And then went on to ask him if he was deaf, and then if he was under the mistaken impression that he was funny. I finished with “Who the hell do you think you are—Marcel Marceau?”
    There was plenty of anger in his eyes, but he said nothing. Which only increased my fury.
    â€œEh bien, salaud? Pourquoi tu me reponds pas?”
    â€œI’m not answering you,” he said, acidly, and in English, “because I don’t know any gutter French yet.”
    â€œOh my God. You’re…an American.”
    At this point he chose to answer me in French, adding a Gallic smirk to his little repertory of expressions: “No need to be so snotty about it. So are you—obviously.”
    â€œObviously?” I began to splutter. “Oh, so I don’t know how to speak French? Is that what your lame-ass little riposte is supposed to mean?”
    More smirk.
    I got right up in his face then. “Don’t even think about criticizing my accent, mister. You speak French like a pig.”
    â€œThat’s because I am an autodidact. I hope to polish my accent while—”
    â€œAn au-to-di-dact, ” I repeated, and then began to roar with scornful laughter. I was being the schoolyard bully picking on the kid with the bulging book bag. It was cheap and unworthy of me, but I couldn’t put the brakes on it. “Jesus, this is unbelievable. I have to come all the way to Paris to deal with an evil, pretentious, bourgeois asshole from the hood—”
    â€œI was thinking the same thing about you.”
    â€œHey, you see here! I may be pretentious, but I am not bourgeois—and I sure as hell am not from your hood.”
    â€œBitch, you can be from Jupiter for all I care,” he said, abruptly ending our absurd argument. “Just as long as you move your ass along. This is my spot.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, your spot? You own it or something?”
    â€œI mean I got a right to play here at this time four days a week. I have a piece of paper that says so.”
    â€œI don’t believe you.”
    â€œI have no interest in what you believe. I’m a legal resident of the city of Paris and I have an artist permit to play here.”
    I was going to slice into him about his prissy-sissy attitude, but suddenly all the wind was gone from my sails. Suddenly I knew who I reminded myself of: a