frame 34 March 2023
It’s so hard to love your neighbour, man
by William McNamara
William McNamara is a semi-retired barman, occasional apprentice winemaker and hobby diarist. He lives in Marseille. His writing has appeared in the LA Review and elsewhere.
Marseilles now is like New York in the seventies.
You can eat cheap pizza by the slice and watch rats chase each other through the trash, which is inescapable and everywhere. Parts of town are tangibly slimy underfoot. All of the graffiti is anti-something: anti-anything. One author-vandal in my neighbourhood hates a convenient short term rental platform but has clearly never seen the name written down. On the walls around our building, you can read RBNB OUT and RBNB KILLS THE NEIGHBOURHOOD. Much of the graffiti is woven around cut-and-paste style posters advertising DIY gigs. Every band plays an unimaginable genre, communicated in inscrutable code.
In Marseilles, you can easily feel like an outsider. Nobody likes normal people. Like New York in the seventies. The town centre and all of its beautiful run-down and gutted buildings belong to the immigrants and the subcultures. You can still get mugged here, which feels archaic but also very normal. People in Marseilles are dressing like the world has ended or is about to end. Second-hand leather, polyester tracksuits, tiny sunglasses, complicated trainers. The post-or-mid-dystopian urban forager. At least in the old days, I thought as I ate a cheap slice of pizza beside a mound of garbage, there was the consolation of a mortgage when you got older and stopped understanding the music and the clothes.
***
My upstairs neighbour Nedjma moved out last month. I saw a man in cheap slacks help her load a few boxes into a beat-up Ford Galaxy when I left the house for work. Down by the port, I heard some English people complaining about a New York Times article about how cool ‘gritty’ Marseilles has become. At the bar where I work, the pre-lunch crowd of locals were complaining about how sea urchin season had already arrived along the coast in Toulon. Nedjma had scant things to load into that beat up Ford Galaxy, but she was tossing them in with great gusto and slamming the car doors in protest against the first-floor neighbours across our narrow street. Their dusty window remained firmly closed, empty plant pot unmoved. Sea urchin season is brief and they’re hard to collect, like small, unexploded World War 2 bombs or a handful of porcupine quills at the bottom of the sea. They’re delicate to open, a special cut with special scissors.
***
Roberto sells speciality coffee and independent magazines in a black kiosk box at the far end of Boulevard Chave. Approaching from a distance it looks like a pilgrim-less Mecca, or how I remember Mecca from a hidden camera video I watched online. Surreptitious fodder for the curious infidel. He has a Mean Streets energy, slight and good looking with soft brown eyes, but like he could turn turn at any moment. I struggle to remember what happens in the film Mean Streets. New York in the seventies, an atmosphere, menace. He sits in there alone, sells maybe three coffees a day, seems glad to have someone to talk to when I take a seat.
‘I spent all morning on the phone trying to sort out my health insurance. I wanted to fucking stab myself, man. Why do they make it so difficult to live in this country? No, all my family are in Colombia. We can’t really go back because of the situation. I didn’t come straight to Marseilles, but I feel good here. I was in London and Vienna. The energy of Marseilles is more familiar to me, like a Latin American city with the pollution, the criminality, the weather. Nobody gives a fuck what you do! I had a scholarship to study classical music. What, I don’t look like a guy who plays the cello?
But I love making coffee and I love being a barista, man. I love all the funky, freaky ways a coffee can taste. This one I gave you should taste like fermented pineapple. Next weekend I’m in Paris. Me and my best friends from home are going to watch Lamb of God. Oh, you like them? OK, you just know the name… Eight hours in the queue man, drinking whiskey, just to be at the front, it’s gonna be… Otherwise, only working man, working, working. Making coffee. I came to Marseilles with no money. I’m going to a wedding in Palermo at some point. I forget when. I live just over here, behind the church at Réformé. I was staying in another place and I had to get out. I didn’t have a contract at work or the money for a deposit or anything, but I kept responding to the adverts. I had one night before I was on the streets and this guy takes a chance on me. Said I could move right in and just pay the first month’s rent, no deposit. Fucking lucky, brother. Turns out, the owner lives in the apartment above mine. He owns both. After about a week, he came down with a bottle of wine and some vegetables. Said he figured I didn’t really know a lot of people and we could make dinner together… I told him to get the fuck out of my space man, I’m in here ventilating my balls… He could hear the death metal, he could smell my joint, he got the message. I work in service man, I shouldn’t have to deal with people when I’m not working.’
***
Nedjma didn’t live here when Cooper on the third floor left his wife. The news came as a surprise. He kept talking about the first time he saw Annie when we first hung out. She sat on the floor at a party in New York eating an apple. From the way he kept talking about how thin she was, and how mesmerising, I pictured her as drawn on a tarot card. Frail and bewitching. She only wears black. Vulpine, French-born Cooper meanwhile dresses like he never got over The Strokes. He grew up in New York and had spent the pandemic in Palermo exploring his Italian American ancestry. I used to hear Lou Reed’s Coney Island Baby leaking regularly from their apartment.
Cooper left Annie to pursue his music, he told me. He told Annie he wanted someone less intelligent with bigger breasts. Annie, meanwhile, told me Cooper had only ever played one gig: a try out at a restaurant in Palermo, singing for the after-dinner crowd on some piazza. It had been an unmitigated disaster. Of their Palermo, I glimpse only: a top floor studio apartment where it was always forty degrees Celsius inside, a hypermarket that was always open and sold the right brand of vegan cookies, and a New Yorker with a guitar struggling to communicate to a sleepy Sicilian crowd.
Cooper doesn’t like to talk about why he left New York. Something about an asshole dad, a jerk brother, a band that broke up. I’ve seen him once since the separation. He’s eating meat and drinking alcohol again, dating someone ten years younger who doesn’t have any eyebrows. I asked him about the word ‘VEGAN’, which was still tattooed on his throat. He told me ‘vegan isn’t just about eating or not eating meat, man’.
***
Nedjma wasn’t there when we went with Cooper and Annie (before their sudden divorce) to the police station. George on the fourth floor, who had parties all the time, had lost his keys and decided the path of least resistance was to kick his own door in. Ever since, whenever he needed to get in the building, he’d buzz our apartments.
When he wasn’t having parties, George liked to drop fag butts from his balcony then go down in the street and scream at strangers for littering.
On the way to the police station, we left a message with George’s letting agents. It felt important to let them know that they had a tenant without keys, who’d kicked his own door in, and kept having drug-fuelled parties full of strangers who tried to break into our apartments, and had threatened to kill us at least once each.
At the station, the police recorded our four statements and offered us advice off the record. They told us to move, that things like that never get resolved in Marseilles. Outside, we got a phone call from the lettings agent who had received our message and demanded to know why we were coming to the neighbourhood and spreading lies about poor, sweet-natured George. It occurred suddenly to contact the owner of the building, who replied ‘I’m on it.’
We never saw George again.
***
I let Patrick the real New Yorker buy me a coffee because I hoped he might satisfy my curiosity, might reinforce some of the parallels I saw between the real-life Marseilles of my everyday and how I imagined New York to be in the seventies. I hadn’t seen him in a while, he’d been away DJ’ing, so I was happy to see him back at his usual cafe in front of the big church at Réformés where he sings in the choir with in heavily accented beginner’s French.
‘We’re not in New York, man’, he said. ‘I grew up near the world’s greatest recording studios. My son would have to go to Paris. Some kids aren’t on their phones all the time. Some kids are in the bibliotheque studying their ass off, some kids are up first thing on a Saturday morning throwing a ball around. Some kids are at the Conservatoire after school learning an instrument.
I was lucky to grow up around people who never undervalued hard work or education. My dad was a postman, but he sold units on the weekend. You know, your cabinet with the hi-fi, your vinyl, your speakers, open up the top, bang!, your scotch, your anis, your little glasses, all that Italian shit. We haven’t got lawyers or doctors but we’ve got teachers, a principal, shop owners and people in management.
I want my kid to go to college, I want him to have that experience. I was going through nine women in seven days, that kind of shit. I had the afro, I was good looking. I could DJ. My dad is from New York, it was his dad who was from Palermo and always had the good-looking clothes on. I try and pay attention; I have my nice pieces, just like him. We were in America, they wanted us to be American and speak English, but I used to hear my parents speaking Italian when they were alone. I’d like to see Palermo, but I’m spoiled, I only like going places if I can play. I’m from New York, why would I need to see the world? If you get bored, it’s your own fault. My son can be such an asshole, man. It’s so hard to love your neighbour, man. Parenting is my only challenge, otherwise I’m good. I travel the world. I played in Barcelona and they put me up in this beautiful apartment, I went down to the nearest beach thinking I’d see some of the beautiful people. I get in the water and people are tossing balls at me. Turns out it was the dog beach, only guy dumb enough to go swimming with the dogs. I’m gonna drink my coffee, go pray, and this afternoon I’m gonna drop a hundred euro on some guppies. I admire Jesus. He had his twelve apostles, yo! Always got his back.
I’m alone out here, I don’t got disciples. What I really can’t stand is people who don’t respect each other, or the environment. Being aggressive. Littering.’
***
I would learn later that Nedjma got out of her rental contract with a signed diagnosis of insomnia from her doctor. Like Nedjma, I have felt at times like the voices of our neighbours across the street were coming from inside my apartment, or from inside my head. Unlike Nedjma, I have never flung the shutters open at two in the morning and yelled at the woman with the coarse voice that rounds off the bare walls of her unfurnished apartment, ‘speak more softly, you cow!’
I felt like disruptive neighbours were part of the Marseille experience, like how the public transport is always out of service or the time I was mugged with pepper spray for my inexpensive phone. Like New York in the seventies.
***
I have heard the taste of sea urchin compared unfavourably to a mouthful of pool water swallowed accidentally in a public bath in Budapest.
Various signs of life have appeared and disappeared at the neighbour’s place across the street: a caged bird, a large dog, a younger man or teenager who walked the dog, a potted chilli plant on the windowsill.
Since Nedjma left, we hear the loud neighbours who drove her away less and less. Maybe I am simply at work more, or exhausted from work more often.