The Dishwasher Dialogues

The Dishwasher Dialogues offers a rare insight into the Paris of the nineteen seventies as few people knew it. Here is a rich dialogue between a Canadian dishwasher/bartender and an American bartender/dishwasher at the renowned soul food restaurant Chez Haynes in the red-light district of Paris. The staff were dreamers, writers, painters, actors, dancers and photographers. They all survived thanks to the legendary African American Leroy Haynes, who knew everybody from the mayor to the call girls deluxe. Between dishwashing and mixing cocktails, these two young exiles wrote and painted, talked about art and death, and embraced their muses and demons. They lived it and never forgot.

In Paris. A city at the end of an era. The trains had wooden doors and the streets had public toilets. There were no computers, credit cards or copying machines; most apartments had no phones, heating, or indoor toilets. There were the big spenders in sable coats and Ferragamo shoes, the daily scolding from waiters in bistros and shopkeepers, and the clochards dying of the cold at the closed metro gates. But freedom beckoned everywhere. The cops left you alone, the authorities looked the other way and the metro (plus a cheap carte orange) took you to every nook and cranny of the city. There may not have been much equality or fraternity, but liberty ran rampant.