Dirty Dick

The Dirty Dick is among a quaint triangle of bars in the upper 9th district of Paris and sits so unprepossessing among its neighbours - le LAS VEGAS, SOHO BAR, La Boheme, a cabaret and theatre - that if you were not startled by the ingenuousness of its name, you might not stop.

The outside is poorly lit and the windows obfuscate; in the morning, the glass door is closed; but in the evening, when it is busiest, this door is left open, the heavy satin curtain is constantly drawn and redrawn and drawn again, and high-pitched titterings peep out and float high, seem to stay a bit on the breeze, then wash away with everything else down the end of the avenue. Madame Tamor has been there a good number of years, though the Dick was there long before her and will be long after. She is about 50, has a lovely worn face and is gentle-mannered. She wears glasses and doesn't smoke. She remains behind the bar and demurs to the most outlandish things with a patient smile, fills your glass and, when needed, translates for the girls with the little English she's picked up.

Momo Le Petit has a wife and 2 children back in Morocco. He does not so much hold the door as pass by to make sure everything is okay, and directly if Madame Tamor calls for him. He is about 5 foot 3 and has a temper twice the size. The Morrocan hash he smokes sometimes calms him, sometimes makes him paranoid; and when he is paranoid, Madame Tamor is the only one who can talk to him without any real danger. But he shares what he has regularly and buys you drinks more often than not; and if he is in good mood, he will push you on Melda, or her on you, because he has a little thing for Melda and this is his way of showing it.

His brother, tall and skinny and a very sloppy drunk, has been studying 20th Century German philosophy at the Sorbonne for the past five years. He talks a lot about himself and has a weird way of staring, but whenever he shows up with Momo the girls are polite. The most exotic among the girls is Rahab. She is good at what she does and knows it - it seems she picks who and what she wants, rather than the other way around. She puts out a sexual energy so thick that you can feel it when she walks towards you, even if your back is turned. She has long dark tressed hair and the edge of a tattoo raised slight above her shoulder straps, and dark eyes like steamed windows and a smile that is half-mocking, half-inviting. When the place is most convivial - and because she is a woman who loves male attention - she gets up and dances, clapping loudly with her arms raised high above her head, and twisting and turning in the front room until she is carried off to the back with a gleeful cry and a kind of naughty, imperious glance backwards.

Men sometimes make the mistake of falling in love with her, and once she couldn't work for a week because of a bruise on her cheek from where she'd been hit. Be that as it may, Marie is the most beautiful, with something sad in her that you just can't touch. When she is not taken, she sits at the corner of the bar, smilingly a bit timidly, despite her metier, and you can see that Madame Tamor is very fond of her. She is what they call "the youngest", which means she has been there the least amount of time: she still wants to be a singer and hums to herself when a man sits near her. Her voice is not very good, though when the evening has been slow or worn to a close - when Rahab is tired of dancing and the others are spread about the red couches, smoking - it adds something to the place.

Flattery still makes her preen and she acts as if she still believes everything she is told. Really, especially when she suddenly starts to giggle and then covers her mouth with her hand, when she is not trying to act sexy, she is just like a little girl.

Just down the road from the Dirty Dick, and worth seeing as well, is a small avenue by the same name. It is cloistered among tall trees and houses and gates, like an aborted foray towards a different type of quarter, twisting up about half a kilometer. The French director, Jean Renoir, once lived there and there is a plaque commemorating this with a quote about filming nothing except what comes directly from the heart, which is something we too often forget.

On some days, among the sometimes stench of the other streets, you can smell the trees way down the avenues approaching. Other than that, there is the Sacre CÅ“ur de Montmartre far away on top of the hill or, a bit closer, the Moulin Rouge, where all the other tourists go. From rue Lafitte, it sits in the distance like a sequestered village, or some foreign king that has crested the hill and looks upon the heads below.

Directly ahead, and nearer, the columns of Our Lady of Lorette hold the impression of where the sun has constantly lain upon from the East, so that in the evening, when everything else is dark, it is like rays extending on it from some sun you cannot see.

WILLIAM PRENDIVILLE