“No kidding,” I said, fresh from my phone conversation. “Listen, I need your advice. A friend’s little sister has decided to backpack through Europe on her own without any guidebook, and without knowing anything at all about the places she’s going, so this friend is calling all her friends everywhere to see if we can meet her at train stations and show her around.” By the brooding, baffled look Valérie gave me, she was clearly wondering if helplessness was genetic or in the American water, and in either case, how the hell had we managed to build McDonald’s all over the world. “I’m the friend in Paris. Do you know of a good restaurant I could take her to on our student budgets?” My graduate assistant stipend fell woefully short of Paris’ cost of living.

Valérie’s eyes brightened, and she sat back from her desk. Here, finally, was a real task, something worth her time. “I know of a really nice little place called Le Relais du Vin near Châtelet. . . .”

Valérie has impeccable taste in restaurants, but sometimes she can be a tad oblivious to location. Le Relais du Vin was nestled in the heart of Paris, Les Halles. The original heart of Paris—that giant, unhygienic, life-filled market that used to be Les Halles—was destroyed in 1963, the single most appalling city-planning decision Prime Minister Pompidou would make in his tenure of architectural horrors. Since 1135, Les Halles had been the biggest market in Paris, and perhaps even in Europe, the market that supplied all other markets, filled with energy at all hours of the day and night. 1135. 828 years. The government replaced it with a glass and aluminum mall, the Forum des Halles, so now you can stroll among a bland collection of chain stores full of cheap clothes in the spot Zola called the stomach of Paris and that Napoléon III called the people’s Louvre.

Les Halles is the nexus of most of Paris’Métro and RER lines, and people cram up and down escalators onto other lines or into the three underground levels of the Forum des Halles. The racial and social tension vibrates against your skin as you walk through the area until the fine hair on your arms stands straight up from the charge. This tension streams in along the RER lines from the suburbs, where Paris exiles its housing projects, and compacts into dense, hard energy at Les Halles. It hovers on the steps outside the Forum, where most of the drug trades seem to take place, judging by the odors and the police busts, or prowls the surrounding cobblestones.

“Fuck your race!” one man screamed at another as my friend’s little sister and I crossed the street in front of the Forum. “Fuck your whole race!”