James Lockhart Perry's Blog, page 12

Oświęcim

Many, including Steven Spielberg, the director of Schindler’s List, have debated whether to portray this place in color or black and white, the thought being that color might somehow make it more palatable. We have no real opinion on that, except to say that no movie or documentary or photograph of any kind could remotely prepare a human being for visiting the real-life horror show of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is that overwhelming.

When you walk the place, you don’t think of prisons, slave plantations, or even other concentration camps you might recall. Instead, what comes to mind are the Ford Motor River Rouge Plant in Detroit, the US Steel Plant in Gary, or the Krupp Stahlwerke in Essen. What you find here are the remains of a vast, single-story, hyper-organized, vertically integrated industrial factory, in this case for the processing of human wealth and labor.

No one really knows how much was stolen from the victims murdered at Auschwitz or anywhere else–the proceeds, which included everything from businesses and houses to spectacles and tooth fillings, were immediately absorbed into fueling the German domestic economy and war machine. But the Nazis were quite specific about the labor rented out to participating businesses in the 40-odd sub-camps that ringed this central processing plant. The calculation for a prisoner was 6 Deutschmark per day rental, minus 60 Pfenning per day maintenance, with a work (and life) expectancy of 9 months. That works out to exactly 1,620DM in revenue, 162DM in costs, for a profit of 1,458DM.

In case you were wondering what a human life is worth.

Reception/Rail Siding to Main Gate
Filed under: Travels Tagged: Poland, Travel

Jena-Auerstadt

Losers rarely advertise their losses, so it came as no surprise that it took us three hours, one speeding ticket, a schnitzel-and-wine break, and a 19th century map to find this intersection in Saxon Germany on the road from Jena to Auerstadt.

On this spot on the morning of14 October, 1806, the French Emperor Napoleon led his 40,000 troops with his habitual brilliance in outmaneuvering and destroying the 143,000-strong Prussian Army. An afternoon reprise confirmed the result, and then the ungentlemanly Emperor changed the rules of modern warfare by ruthlessly running down and decimating the remnants of the defeated Prussians. 

The impact on military history cannot be exaggerated. Every major strategist and tactician of the future German Army fought here as junior officers and apparently learned from their own Generals’ mistakes. But if there is any sign of the battle besides this tiny monument, we couldn’t find it. Interestingly enough, the inscription on the reverse only describes the few minutes when Prussian counterattacks came within a hair’s breadth of ruining the Emperor’s day. The rest of the morning–and history–went another way.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Germany, Travel

Geisa

At one time, the hottest of points in the iciest of cold wars. The Soviets planned to send their tanks across the East German border here and down through the Fulda Gap to Frankfurt. The Americans responded by bringing up their Davy Crocket tactical nuclear weapons. All that remains today are this warning track, a few decrepit Soviet listening posts, and a tiny museum.

How close we all came to extinction…

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Germany, Travel

Slavkov U Brna

We were driving along a Czech highway at German speed–that’s the other side of 100MPH–when we spotted these unmistakable cement silos dressed up as unmistakably grouchy French artillery. Suddenly it dawned on us that the nearby village of Slavkov U Brna had to be the former Austrian settlement of Austerlitz.

The confusion over place names was understandable, given that every village in these parts sports at least three names, depending on who most recently invaded whom. You have Polish or Czech and normally German and/or French. On top of those, the British have renamed just about everywhere on the planet to suit their Anglocentric tastes. Maps hardly ever match history books, much less road signs.

The conflict on 2 December, 1805, was called the Battle of the Three Emperors. Both Alexander I of Russia and Frances II of Austria contrived to personally show up and be thoroughly humiliated by the outmanned and outgunned French Emperor. Napoleon took unbelievable risks in his dispositions, only to watch the enemy tumble straight into all of his traps.

This particular spot saw a holding action between the French and Russians that allowed the former to maul the Austrians and knock them out of the war. Austerlitz and later Jena no doubt convinced Napoleon that he could defeat anyone anywhere. Which he of course did–until he didn’t.

Bagration resists Lannes and Murat on Northern flank of battlefield.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Czech Republic, Travel

Gliwice

The lunacy all started here. On the night of 31 August, 1939, when Gliwice was still the German town of Gliewitz, a Nazi thug named Alfred Naujocks murdered and scattered an assortment of concentration camp inmates around this radio tower, all dressed in stolen Polish Army uniforms, their faces disfigured to prevent identification. The next morning, Adolf Hitler used this pretext of a Polish attack to justify his invasion of Poland. Millions perished.

The tower is still the largest wooden structure in Europe and visible from miles around.

 

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Poland, Travel

Kazimierz

We’re all happy again in Kazimierz, the ancient Jewish neighborhood of Kraków. After the German invasion in 1939, the Nazis forced the Jews out of here and across the river into the hideous ghetto and killing ground most people associate with wartime Kraków. This once wealthy neighborhood fell into disrepair and desolation and only recently has started to transform itself into a very hip and eclectic center of Kraków culture. Amazing restaurants, chaotic markets, seedy bars, colorful shops, and even a handful of Synagogues struggling along together–in short, a Nazi’s worst nightmare.

Maybe it’s a commentary on the residue of Communist standards in Poland that I’m actually preventing this drain pipe from falling apart in my hand. But things are changing, more or less…

 

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Poland, Travel

Praha

One of ancient Bohemia’s gifts to the language of the world was the concept of “defenestration”–the throwing of political enemies out of multi-story windows.

The practice got underway in 1419 with the tossing of 15 local political leaders through the windows of this castle. The Second Defenestration of 1483 disposed of eight Prague Aldermen. In the Third Defenestration of 1618, three Catholic hardliners were tossed. The Virgin Mary apparently interceded that time–the victims survived the 21-meter fall–but she failed to prevent the Hundred Years War that ensued. In 1948, the Czech Communists threw the world-reknowned patriot Jan Masaryk out of another Prague window in his pajamas (the Soviet NKVD swore it was a suicide, until it wasn’t).

The standard practice requires lots of noise and broken glass–unlatching the windows beforehand is apparently frowned upon. But the death of the victim isn’t a prerequisite, and more than a few have survived.

Filed under: Travels Tagged: Czech Republic, Travel

The Secret Lives of Eddy Casanovitch

Our favorite erotica peddler, the nearly real Eddy Casanovitch, is forced to drastically pull in his horns when a young rocket scientist Mallory and the runaway Texan teenagers Sarah and Cozette fall on him from out of the beachy California sky.

“You call that a plot?” Alex’s New York publisher Grace bellows. Maybe not, but then the ancient love of Eddy’s life, the gorgeous Keisha, shows up as a world-class madam with her own fascinating flock. And then the other love of his life, Sarah’s Mom Roxie, roars in from Texas to collect her due. All this while Eddy’s doing his best to talk Mallory’s irritated CEO Daddy out of killing her.

The fundamental problem: Eddy’s just a regular guy with a vivid, if degenerate imagination. But the more he tries to explain it to neighbors, lovers, vengeful CEOs, and publishers, the less they understand. After all, he wrote all that trash, didn’t he? But, as the exhausted man keeps repeating, there’s a reason they call it fiction.

Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

The Secret Lives of Eddy Casanovitch
A Sad, Little Comedy of Less-than-Erotic Errors, Not for Lack of Trying

Dedication

To the memory of Veronica Franco, Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, and Xaviera Hollander, three extraordinary women who created their own fates without losing their extraordinary senses of humor.

Author’s Note

The following is a work of pure fiction—unfortunately. The names have been changed to protect no one. As a matter of fact—now the author has a chance to think about it—the names haven’t even been changed.

Chapter 1

It’s not every Fourth of July a girl falls into your lap from out of the clear blue sky. Literally collapses on top of you from an excess of drugs and alcohol, as you sit out on your beachfront brick steps, minding your own business, with the half-baked, half-naked holiday madness flooding by.

It’s not every Fourth of July a girl misplaces the next four hours of her thrilling drunkard’s life, then wakes up, miraculously still clothed—if you can call it that in her itsy-bitsy bikini—on your living room floor. Yet that is exactly how I met the young woman named Mallory.

Not to be confused with the duck. “That’s a Mallard,” she observed with astonishing coherence for a hung-over beach bum with headache wedged in hands. “My name is M-A-L-L-O-R-Y.”

I’d taken refuge behind the pretend-desk as far across the living room as I could manage, with a sofa, a pair of filing cabinets, and a dead plastic fern for protection. “Glad you’re suddenly so precise. I take it you can float anyway? Although I was planning on waiting until dark to dump you in the ocean.”

“You want me to just leave?”

“Whatever gave you that idea?” Although I was serious about letting the neighborhood toddle safely off to bed before ejecting her.

This Mallory could do defensive when it suited her. “You don’t have to be so hostile, you know. I’ll pay for the damn computer.”

An interesting offer, considering that it wasn’t every Fourth of July your New York publisher forewent a day in the Hamptons to threaten you with bloody murder if you didn’t immediately turn in the manuscript you’d promised her. The manuscript in the laptop that, surprisingly enough, was sitting in your lap out on the steps, when the wingless duck took off in defiance of the laws of gravity and lost control of knees and elbows.

Just then an impatient publisher and a wrecked laptop were the least of my worries. The girl helped neither matters nor my mood by turning her head to focus past the empty salad bowl I’d left next to her once comatose, now airsick, brow for emergencies. Her eyes lit on the bookshelf beyond and brought on an attack of curious. “You really read all that trash?”

Trash? Did she say trash? “What are you talking about?”

She took a minute to recover either her sight or her ABCs. “The Casanovitch books. Aren’t they porn?”

Porn? Did she say porn? “I don’t know what you’re—”

“Holy shit. You’ve got a dozen copies of each. What are you, some sort of…?” But then a lightbulb must have shattered in her buoyant brain. “You’re him, aren’t you?”

“Who?”

“Eddy Casanovitch! You’re the porn guy. I heard he lived around here somewhere.”

I don’t know what I expected from the revelation. Not my ex-wife’s pseudo-shocked reaction when the word had leaked out that all that time wasted scribbling—whatever the hell I was doing—had turned into one of the larger viral sales outbreaks at the more colorful end of the internet publishing alley. Nor the neighborhood’s outrage as they raced to lock their doors and windows against the tidal wave of smut they suddenly imagined flooding out of my camouflaged literary brain.

Nancy hadn’t needed the scandal to justify her flight, but then my ex-wife was always a thorough soul. By the time she and her long-term boss-and-lover parted ways with me, her gossipy, pseudo-Methodist lips had over-publicized my tacky-cheesy nom de plume and left me a pariah from one end of our sand spit to the other. No more anonymous, smutty scribbles out of this molester and pervert. Only, as of the current afternoon, I was a pariah with a young, nearly naked waterfowl passed out on the floor of my living room.

Thank God for webcams and duck-proof desktop computers.

This Mallory girl must have read my mind. Her eyes quickly flitted over the ties and folds of her bikini for signs of unauthorized ingress. It was all I needed to see.

“Time to go,” I told her and crossed the room with a less-than-gentle lift of the nearest sun-fried wing. “No, I didn’t date-rape you, and yes, I can prove it beyond a shadow of your unwashed fingernails.”

“Hey! Lemme go! What’s the matter with you?”

I couldn’t very well tell her that I’d acquired an army of overwrought citizens watching for the slightest kink in my infamously fake and degenerate façade. No question, I needed to move and change my pseudonym. More immediately, I needed to stop admitting ducks in bikinis.

“Why’d you bring me in here in the first place?” Mallory protested, as I helped, or maybe herded, her to the front door.

“It wasn’t my idea. And get yourself better friends. After you passed out on top of me, they talked me into bringing you inside, then left to supposedly get your things.”

The panicky girl glanced past me back into the apartment. “What things? Where are my things? Who brought me—?”

I had no idea what she was babbling on about and cared less. As far as I could tell, the door opened on a clear coast. “Like I said, get yourself better friends.”

“Wait a minute!” She shook off my hand and shoved me away. “I don’t have any money. How do you expect me to get home?”

I wasn’t about to start handing out cash to departing bikinis in my front doorway. The crowds might have thinned from the exhausting day-long beach orgy, but there were always satellites, helicopters, and neighborly binoculars to consider. Not that I was paranoid.

I geared up for a foul-tempered retort, but mysteriously never let it escape my lips. The truth was, this Mallory had somehow struck me as a pretty harmless, maybe even pleasant, girl when she wasn’t airborne or critiquing my literary standards. Not to mention a figure-eight body with an impressive cleavage, muscular thighs, runner’s legs, and skin so smooth and unblemished that it was hard to picture her as a habitual drunk or drug user.

In spite of my earlier snarky comment about her fingernails, she at least looked and smelled like she might have suffered through more than one shower in her short life. But considering my situation, the operative word was short.

I shook my head at the utter stupidity of letting her get a word in edgewise. “Let me see your driver’s license.”

“How do you—”

“It’s stuck halfway up your overdressed butt, young lady. I noticed it when your pretend-amigos were flopping you in here.”

She reached back quickly enough that I was convinced when she insisted, “I’m twenty-six, if that’s what you’re worried about. And I’m not going to accuse you of anything, so get over it.”

“You’re a student?”

“Hardly. I’m a rocket scientist.”

“Very funny.” Yet when I turned over the thin, plastic sleeve she handed me, it included an employee ID card from a high-tech space and defense contractor, no less.

Maybe this genius Mallory would know which satellites and neighborly listening devices to jam if I ever dared to negotiate the beach walk with an unsuspecting, true-to-life date in tow. It wasn’t hard to forgive her twenty-six-year-old smirk, considering, but then she stormed the enemy position anyway with, “I don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. In case you’re interested, I was mugged.”

Interested? I suppose it depended on the definition.

Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.
Filed under: Novels Tagged: California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas

Exposure

Sam Spaulding is a tough, violent former war photographer with a Pulitzer Prize and a dead brother Henry who at one time ran one of the ugliest gangs in Los Angeles. Sam finds out he has Stage III intestinal cancer and decides to go out spitting in the face of death. But he reckons without his wife Lydia, who takes on her husband’s fate with every ruthless weapon at her disposal.

The skeletons in Sam’s closet hardly help, when they come back to haunt him in the foul-mouthed ex-junkie Rudy Spavik and his angry girlfriend Sheri Ballin. From Los Angeles to the Mexican Baja, this unlikely foursome careens between hell and redemption, never entirely sure which is which. Until a nasty spat with Abe Smullen, the most beautiful drug lord in history, welds them together into a reluctantly indestructible clan.

Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.

Exposure
A Love Story

Part I



Sam

Chapter 1

Dead. Every last one of them, lives erased without a residue, souls exhausted, a thin collection of ghosts in no one’s imagination except his own. As far as he knew anyway—he being Sam Spaulding, whose agnostic finger touched the high-resolution monitor and smeared a fingerprint across the white shirt of Mischa Spavik, the last of the violent crew to go. All six of them in ten miserable years.

How many times had Sam opened this photo file to gaze at the final defiant lob of hubris it represented? In all the thousands of photographs—hundreds of thousands—he’d taken in his career, this one still resonated the strongest. But not until today, at this hour—at this very minute, in fact—did it dawn on him that every one of the six human beings in the fourteen-year-old image lay dead in the ground and long disremembered. Except by him, of course, but how much did that count for? He’d known every one of the furious offenders, and now he knew no one. No one who mattered anyway. No one like him.

The photograph wasn’t the most original shot in Sam’s portfolio. He’d arranged his older brother Henry and his gang of reluctant fallen angels on the sand and rocks of the breakwater south of Redondo Pier before climbing the bluffs above them with a medium-format camera and telephoto lens. Identical white, button-down, cotton shirts and jeans, no belts, no shoes, all of them hauling in paunches for a last-minute stab at youth. The sunset had buttered their smug, lupine faces to a wrinkled shade of leather. They sat atop the world, they owned the joint. Nothing could defeat them except death itself.

And so it had.

The door to the darkroom burst open. The light momentarily blinded him. A quick flick of the wrist and a snap of the mouse button—the computer belched politely to announce the file’s closing.

“Didn’t you see the red light?” he snarled.

“Get a grip, old man,” Lydia drawled behind him. “This hasn’t been a darkroom for years.”

“Get out of here! What do you want?”

“Make up your mind. You got a customer.”

“Get the hell out of here!”

“No problem! I quit!”

The door slammed shut and popped Sam’s eardrums. He hadn’t turned his head, but could tell from Lydia’s hostility that she was going nowhere. Fifteen years with the woman, and he knew every one of her hostilities as well as he knew his own. Even if she did leave, she’d be waiting for him at the apartment, hidden behind the front door, a metaphorical cast-iron frying pan in her fist.

Sam brought up the photograph again. He stared at the six upturned faces. Damn, he was good. He took the magnification to one hundred percent and admired the handiwork that had wiped away the flaws in Henry’s face. The age spots, the boulos pemphigoid bruises, the melanoma scars and lesions.

Henry, Sam’s older brother, had been a photographer’s nightmare, ugly enough to start with, his face a misshapen battleground between nose, chin, and those angry, sunken eyes. But the skin, so soft and smooth in his youth, was what killed him. His damn skin.

Henry first, then BJ in a drive-by on the Camino del Rey, then the two Daves—Dave G and Dave T—one after the other, from gunshot wounds and cirrhosis, leaving just Donny and Mischa to hold back the gloomy curtain. Then, eight years earlier, the indestructible Donny had collapsed from a heart attack and left his lover Mischa to defenestrate himself as a reasonable alternative to withering away, alone and loveless, in the grip of an AIDS epidemic.

All so long ago, but it wasn’t until this afternoon—when Sam opened the certified-return-receipt letter from his own doctor—that he let the news prompt him to pull it all into perspective.

A tentative knock at the door took a second to register. Obviously not Lydia. “What!” Sam shouted anyway. He closed the file and let the dismal moment recede.

“We’ve been waiting out here a half-hour.”

A woman’s voice, young and matter-of-fact. Sam struggled to his feet in the gloom, dropped his reading glasses to the desk, and opened the door. The light from the young afternoon flooded the darkroom. A tiny, black silhouette drew back, surprised. Sam shielded his seventy-two-year-old eyes and waited for her to morph into a three-dimensional human being.

“Where’s Lydia?” he asked.

“The old lady outside? She said to tell you to go to hell.”

“She might look old to you. What do you want?”

The girl was actually grinning. Or laughing at him, not that he gave a damn. She fingered a coal-black lock of hair and pointed behind her. “Not me, it’s my boyfriend. He wants to hire you.”

“I don’t do weddings or babies. Come back tomorrow, and Lydia will help you find someone who does.”

Sam started to close the door, but the girl’s foot and snort of disbelief stopped him. “He’s waiting in your office,” she insisted. “Going through your shit.”

“What?”

Sam barged past her along the corridor through the gauntlet of wedding and baby photographs Lydia had hung to paint a veneer of activity over his nearly defunct business. The sudden exertion speared his knee. He stumbled into the office just in time to catch the boyfriend snoring in one of the two guest chairs. On the desk blotter, the report from the gastroenterologist lay untouched where Sam had dropped it. Shit. He’d hoped Lydia would find it and save him the trouble of breaking its grim news to her.

“Rudy!” the girl said. “Wake up. I tracked him down in a closet out back.”

“It’s a darkroom,” Sam said.

“Darkroom? Weren’t you using a computer?”

The boyfriend stirred and came to his feet, surprised. “Hey, it’s you,” he observed. He wore a ghastly purple fedora over a matching garish purple silk shirt split open halfway to the waist. Sam glanced at the girl. She was dressed in black, with a sleeveless blouse and attractive pale arms the camera would turn into drooping gobs of white flesh. Obviously not a pair of professional models.

The boyfriend smoothed the brim of his hat and pointed behind him at the largest of twenty black-and-white wartime photos Lydia had hung on the office walls. As if all that pain and fury would inspire a young bride to stop blushing long enough to hire Sam for her wedding. “Is that the Pulitzer?”

Sam took a pass on illumination. He gazed back and forth from girl to boyfriend. Some people were immune to hints, but he tried out his stock answer anyway. “Whatever you want, I’m not doing it anymore. I’m retired.”

“Then why are you here?” the girl asked.

“Here?”

“The store?”

“Come back tomorrow and ask Lydia. I’ve no idea why she keeps it open.” Except otherwise, the two of them would have to spend their days staring wordlessly at each other across the dull clutter of a dining room table.

“We want you to take our photograph,” the boyfriend said. “We heard of you. We’ll pay your going rate.”

“My going rate is zero. You heard of me where?”

“You knew my uncle Mischa.”

Sam hesitated. That explained the purple anyway. Mischa always had the worst fashion sense in history, all noise and bombast. Yet if any member of the gang were destined to leave behind a residue of nostalgia, it would’ve been Mischa. He’d always treated Sam well, better than Sam’s own brother Henry.

Sam had served as the seventh wheel to Henry’s gang, the cliché of a sibling allowed to hang out, but prevented from getting his fingers dirty by a pact between a dying Marge and her dear firstborn gangster. Nothing had changed the sonofabitch’s mind, not even Sam’s stints shooting the Central Highlands of Vietnam and the slums of Beirut and Sarajevo, not even the bullet that took off his right pinky fingernail or the knife in his left knee that had sent him stumbling through the rest of his godforsaken life. Henry didn’t give a shit who killed his baby brother, as long as his own hands remained clean.

“He’s not gonna do it, are you?” the girlfriend asked now.

Sam ignored her and turned to the boyfriend. “What’s your mother’s name?”

“Vera, but she’s dead. Why?”

“I knew her.”

And so he had. Vera, the wild-child Russian and the neighborhood exotic dancer—to use the well-mannered version. So this loud-dressing lout was Vera’s long lost brat Rudy. Sam had always wondered what the boy looked like. He’d just assumed that, by now, the kid would’ve followed his unlamented dangerous beauty of a mother down the sewer of her life. “You still living in South Gate?”

“Hell no. We’ve been in Hermosa for years. What do you know—?”

“Not a damn thing.”

Sam could match the young hoodlum all day long for belligerence. The last time he’d let the mother Vera run him over was at Bud’s, the legendary and long vanished gentleman’s club in Bellflower. Vera was a tall, leggy beauty with a raven shock of hair and two smirking green eyes that gazed over your shoulder whenever you sucked up the nerve to talk to her. “Hey Sammy,” he could still hear her calling out from the stage with a leer for the other customers and a finger pointed at his crotch. “Whatcha got in there for me?” Apparently, not enough. Fifteen years ago, a pair of Latino children had found Vera’s needle-punctured body stuck in a clump of briars in the desiccated concrete trench of the San Gabriel River.

“What’s your name?” Sam asked the girlfriend.

“Sheri. This is—”

“I know who it is.” Sam couldn’t help a grimace as he glanced from Sheri to her boyfriend. The kid had his narcissistic mother painted all over him. What on earth had led the punk to wander into Sam’s relic of a studio? Of all the gin joints…

“Don’t tell me,” Sam sighed. “You want me to shoot you having sex.”

Boyfriend and girlfriend lit up with matching gapes of surprise. The boyfriend recovered first. “Well, now that you mention it…”

Available in paperback and eBook from Amazon.
Filed under: Novels Tagged: California, Kentucky, Mexico

Bouillabaisse

Waiter! There’s a crab in my bouillabaisse!

But fortunately for the purist, this little guy is only there for decoration. The true bouillabaisse contains no shellfish, not even mussels–in fact, it contains nothing fish-wise but Rascasse (a pungent Marseillaise rockfish), Chapon (a Scorpion Fish), Mullett, John Dory, and Conger Eel. And this ain’t just snobbery–in 1980, the 11 leading restaurants of Marseille fought off the dumbing down of their culture by signing la Charte de la Bouillabaisse. The charter committed their chefs to these ingredients, along with a healthy dose of Saffron to transform the muddy-gray soup into something even the faint-hearted could consume with relish. And you need to relish it–the meal as served involves a massive quantity of food and rings the register starting at fifty euros per plate.

Second course at le Miramar

Strange all this fuss over what started out many centuries ago–some say even with the Ancient Greeks who first settled the city–as a poor fisherman’s stew. After selling their more conventional cargo to the rich, the Marseillaise fishermen would gather their scraps and unsellable fish and boil the mess right on the dock in a vast cauldron of seawater. After hours of reduction, the thickened purée would be parceled out and taken home to the wives for further dressing.

Bringing in the fish the old way in le Vieux Port

Today’s meal is served in two basic courses:

First, the soup–with toasted bread topped off with Rouille (a variation on the local Aioli, basically a very garlicky mayonnaise).

Second, the soup–with all of the fish deboned table-side and nicely arranged (with fennel, potatoes, tomatoes, and a whole lot more garlic) to overflow the bowl.

Which is why James Bond (we think) was quite right when he claimed that the only place you could find the true bouillabaisse was in Marseille. The Rascasse in particular has no real equivalent and is only to be found lurking in the hidden calanques and rocky coves of this onetime smuggler’s paradise. As for the Rouille, the garlic and eggs from the local farms have no equal anywhere on earth.

If you’re OCD enough to travel to Marseille for the real thing, you might as well splurge on a bottle from the village of Cassis, a few kilometers along the coast. After all, if you’re counting coins or calories, you’ve come to the wrong place.

Homegrown in Provence

The current signatories of la Charte include:

CHEZ FONFON

Roger et Alexandre PINNA

140, Vallon des Auffes

13007 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 52 14 38

Fax: (011) 33 04 91 59 27 32

Email: chezfonfon@aol.com

LE CARIBOU

Maurice CATONI

38, place Thiars

13001 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 33 23 94

CHEZ CARUSO

Antoine ZANABONI

158, quai du Port

13002 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 90 94 04

LE MIRAMAR (our favorite, right on le Vieux Port)

Pierre et J.M. MINGUELLA

12, quai du Port

13002 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 91 10 40

L’EPUISETTE

Bernard BONNET

Vallon des Auffes

13007 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 52 17 82

PERON

Roland FRITTOLI

56, Corniche J.F. Kennedy

13007 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 52 43 70

LE RHUL

Alex GALLIGANI

269B, Corniche J.F. Kennedy

13007 MARSEILLE

Tel: (011) 33 04 91 52 54 54

CHEZ GILBERT

Robert GASQUET

19, quai des Baux

13260 CASSIS

Tel: (011) 33 04 42 01 71 36

LA RESERVE

Jacques JACQUET

Avenue de la Libération

83150 BANDOL

Tel: (011) 33 04 94 29 30 00

CHEZ CHARLOT

Pierre DARIDAN (Owner)

12, place Clichy

75009 PARIS (seriously?)

Tel: (011) 33 01 53 20 48 00

CHEZ CHIBRAC

Francis CHIBRAC

LE MONT PELLERIN SUR CHARDONNE

1801 CH – Canton de Vaud

SUISSE (even more seriously?)

Tel: (0041) (021) 922 61 61/62

Filed under: Travels Tagged: France, Travel