Wednesday, December 9, 2009

The Drunkard and The French, Part One


When we arrived at the bar, we ordered our drinks and took a seat outside. The sky had cleared on our trip back to campus and, surprisingly, most of the water had evaporated from the tables. A quick brush of the hand cleared off most of the stubborn drops that clung on for dear life. At the table next to us, a couple of Chinese students chattered away in Mandarin and one of them looked at The Drunkard with a look that I might call coy.
The Drunkard gave her a winning grin and said, “Howdy ma’am, fine day today, isn’t it?”
She responded in English, but with such a thick accent I could not understand what she said.
The Drunkard gave it a couple seconds’ thought, tipped his cap that wasn’t there, and said, “Have a good one,” and turned back to me. “You get what she said?”
“Nope.”
He shrugged. “Oh well.”
“You know,” I said, “I haven’t heard about your French flatmates for a while. What’s been going on with them?”
The Drunkard sighed and shook his head. “Well, a couple of them went back to Paris to attend a rally—they were striking about something, probably for a raise of a couple of cents. The girl—Julie, who, when she’s not dressed up like some fucking existentialist nightmare, is pretty hot—hung around the flat for the weekend and acted like a normal human being.”
“You hook up?”
“Well I’m going to have to try now, aren’t I? Anyway, they all got back in-country on Monday and the flat returned to normal. Woke up this morning to find forty used copies of Camus’s The Plague stacked in front of my door.”
“That is—”
“Fucked up, yeah. I don’t get it, man,” he said, taking a drink from his beer. “The U.S. is supposed to be the country that sends a giant ‘fuck you!’ to everyone else in the world, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why is it that anyone in Europe with half a brain starts implying that we’re responsible for the global recession, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, corruption in the third world, and automatically assumes that we want Israel to scalp all the Palestinians—all right when they find out we’re Americans?”
The thought had crossed my mind a few times. There were a few of my British colleagues who sure as hell acted like we were responsible for all of that, and they were all, otherwise, extremely sane and intelligent people. God forbid they found out I was Jewish, or they might start refusing to take out money in my presence for fear that I’d lunge at it. Now, granted, most of the Brits were people like anyone else who were just happy that there was a new perspective on the table—and could tell the distinction between a government’s actions and the beliefs of the people—but there were a few (shall we call them the rotten apples?) who seemed hell-bent on taking America down a peg, starting from the individual level.
The thing I really liked about the Greeks—and, to my initial surprise, all of the Middle Eastern people I’d met so far… and Indians, to add to the list—was that they really didn’t care. Booze was the common unifier with the Greeks, and I could get on board with that.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The Traveler might know.”
The Drunkard nodded. “I’ll have to ask him when we next meet up.”
At this point, I noticed that, out of the corner of my eye, five slim and tall figures dressed in black sweaters, trousers, and berets filed through the door to the patio. They spoke in rapid, animated French, and a couple of them held copies of books. I tried to glimpse the titles, and, though my French was rusty, I thought I could see that they were clutching copies of Endgame and Waiting for Godot. “Oh Christ,” I said. “French existentialists gripping Beckett.”
As they made their way closer to where we sat, they spotted The Drunkard and I and fell silent. They filed into a straight line and we stared at each other. I looked over at The Drunkard and saw an expression of exasperation and fatigue. I looked at the French man in the center and saw basically the same look. Suddenly, I knew what had to be done. I could patch this bridge, but it would take a masterstroke of planning and execution—one that I was probably incapable of delivering. However, I knew what was at stake. I’d lived in a situation where no one got along with each other, and it was no way to spend one’s life. After all, with all of the problems one has to deal with in life, why should we spend our leisure feeling miserable at home?
I got off my stool, walked inside and to the bartender at one end of the bar, who was chatting up a beautiful blonde girl. “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but—”
“Fuck off,” said the bartender.
I could see flashes of Brooklyn pass through my vision, but I kept it down. Now was not the time to Hulk out. “Excuse me,” I said, putting a two-pound coin on the bar. That got his attention. “You can keep that,” I said, pointing to the coin, “if you listen to me and help me with a volatile situation.
“Outside,” I said, “there is a group of French Existentialists squaring off like a band of banditos against my fellow American. They don’t get along in politics, cleanliness, or literature. The way I see it, the only option left to exercise is music. Do you have any Bob Dylan that you can play?”
The bartender snorted. “Course we fuckin do. What do you think this is, some chav bar? Want Blood on the Tracks? Highway 51 Revisited?”
I scratched my head. Blood on the Tracks was typically seen as one of Dylan’s best works, but I wasn’t sure about it. It was accepted in the mainstream, and the Existentialists might just turn up their noses while The Drunkard and I howled along with “Tangled Up In Blue.” Highway 51 Revisited was equally thin ice. Being the album in which Dylan switched to electric guitar, it was exactly the sort of fodder the Existentialists might use to try and point out the Americans’ lack of taste in music.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Play a few tracks from Freewhelin’ if you have it, then go with the big ones from Blood on the Tracks.”
The bartender nodded. “Anything I can do to ease international tensions.”
The music stopped playing as I walked back to the table, and “Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” took its place. I sat. The Existentialists looked up at the speakers, exchanged looks, and, just for a second, smiled. Just then, I knew it was going to be all right. I waved them over to our table with a gregarious grin on my face. “Bonjour, mes amies,” I said. “Comment-allez vous? Bien?”
They nodded, looking me up and down.
I leaned to The Drunkard and said in a whisper, “I’m going to get them to sit down, and then I’m going to go get a couple bottles of red wine.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re living with these people for a full year, and you cannot spend that time dangling them out of your windows. While I’m gone, you are to discuss music and music only. They seem to like Bob Dylan, so that’s a start. I’d guess that since they’re here, they’re not averse to rock.” I patted The Drunkard on his shoulder. “Tread lightly, my friend.”
I turned back to the French. “Sorry, but I’ve exhausted my French for the moment—haven’t practiced in a while, you see. Please, have a seat. I shall return momentarily.”
A slight breeze passed by, and we could hear ducks quacking on the other side of the building. The Existentialists looked at each other and made their way to the table. Now was my time to go and get the wine.
At first, the bartender didn’t believe me when I said that the bar had a stock of wine. “This is a rock bar, mate. Not some sort of fancy wine bar where you can get a spaghetti a la Bolognese.” The girl he had previously been chatting up giggled, and I realized that my task would be made infinitely harder.
“Sir,” I said, “there is some sort of miscommunication between us. I hold in my hand a menu that—”
“The only miscommunication,” he said, “is that, apparently, when the bouncer was told to keep the prats out, he mistook Americans for human beings.”
The title song to Welcome Back Kotter played through my head, complete with shots of alleys and streets. I saw roving gangs in leather jackets speaking in thick accents. I twisted my head to the side, cracked my knuckles. “There is no bouncer. Now, listen, friend,” I said, “this is a drinks menu. On this menu there is, clearly, a listing for red wine. I just want—”
“You can stop talking is what you want.”
I leapt over the counter before I could stop myself. I took the bartender by his neck at the collarbone and dragged him to the ground. I moved in real close to his ear and said, “Listen motherfucker, don’t go fucking around with shit that you can’t handle, capiche? Now I know good God-damn well that you freaks got some wine down here, and, lookie here,” I said, moving his now red face to looking at the wine stocked underneath the till, “here it is. Six bottles. Well holy shit, I think that’ll about do it. So here’s what we’re gonna do—you listening?”
I forced him to nod. He gurgled in response.
“Good. I’m gonna buy these six bottles and give you a nice fuckin tip, cause I like your face this color—really accents your eyes. Now you’re gonna stop being all high-and-fuckin mighty, shit-for-brains. I ain’t one of your Brits who just takes shit with a stiff upper lip.” I released my grip on his throat, and he sucked in air and started coughing. I smacked his cheek and said, “I’ll be waiting to pay you for the wine, buddy.”
This time I walked around the corner to the other side of the counter. The girl was staring at me open-mouthed, eyes wide, and sputtering in trying to utter a response. I cleared my throat and got control of my anger. “That’s why you shouldn’t date assholes, ma’am. It rarely, rarely ends well with them outside of the movies.”
“We’s not datin,” she said in the most hideous accent I believe I’ve ever heard. “We’s just havin a little fun on the side, then. You’s didn’t need ta go almost killin him.”
“Please, for the good of humanity, never procreate.”
The bartender managed to haul himself up and put the six bottles of wine on the counter. He tapped a few buttons on the register, and I paid. “Thanks a bunch, man,” I said. I took the wine bottles out to the outdoor area and saw The Drunkard slapping the back of one of the Existentialists, swept up in a fit of laughter. Indeed, everyone at the table was roaring in glee.
I put the bottles on the table, went back for the glasses, put them on the table, and said, “What’s up?”
The Drunkard turned to me and said, “Man, Mattiheu has the best—and I mean the fuckin best—Bush joke I’ve heard in the last nine years. Tell him, Matthieu.”
One of the Existentialists—the one with a big black bush of hair and James Joyce glasses—stopped laughing for a bit and told me the joke. It was in French, which was a pity, because my French was limited to “Je voudrais un espresso,” and none of those words happened to be in the joke. Still, he finished, the table burst into laughter again, and I joined in.
Most of the remaining hour and a half was spent drinking wine and trying to follow the completely-in-French conversation. It turned out that The Drunkard had a really good grasp on the language, for, though he stumbled from time to time on words and syntax, he followed them much better than I would ever have been able to do. Despite that, I had fun drinking wine, getting drunker, and chipping bits of the wooden table off with my fingernails.
After a while, we got up to leave, made our way back to the college—The Drunkard whispering into Julie’s ear, and she having a look of mixed terror and bemusement on her face (The Drunkard was quite drunk at this point, and probably not in complete control of what he was saying or even thinking)—and went our separate ways. I went back to my block and played Risk with Jay and Zaf and a few other people who surprised me by knowing not only the rules to the game, but the territories by heart.
The Drunkard’s night, though, got much more interesting than mine.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Epilogue to The Stalker's Tale

Words cannot express the happiness I felt when The Drunkard took The Stalker by his shirt collar and dragged him out of the pub. Judging from the sighs of relief from The Traveler and The Writer (The Student having long ago passed out in the corner), I was not alone in thanking God that The Stalker was forced to stop his bizarre list of… I don’t know what.
“Jesus H. Christ,” said The Traveler. “What was that?”
“I do not know,” I said.
The Writer took a swig from his drink. “Something eldritch. Unfathomable. Ripped from an episode of To Catch a Predator.”
We sat in silence. I looked out of the front window of the pub and saw The Drunkard pacing back and forth in front of The Stalker in the middle of the square, his face red and his hand outstretched and index finger always pointing at The Stalker. The Drunkard looked a bit like what I would imagine General Patton would have looked like on the battlefield if a soldier were brought to him complaining about being afraid. I couldn’t hear what The Drunkard was shouting—for he was shouting, the people backing away from my companions was testament to that—but the absolute lack of reaction from The Stalker made the whole scene incredibly unnerving. I would have expected a nod, or a response, or a mutter from The Stalker while he was being upbraided, but there was absolutely no reaction. He stood there, facing straight ahead, back bolt-upright, like a man against a wall and facing a firing squad. I imagine that The Drunkard was shouting something to the effect of the following:
“You miserable little worm! How dare you soil the sacredness of our contest with such profane babble as that? Did you consider, even for one second, that what you were doing implied that you had engaged in behavior that would be considered, by any justice with half a mind, to be anti-social behavior indicative of a sexual predator? Son, I should throw you in the clink right now and have you await trial by court-martial! No, that’s too good for you. Some sick idiot might think you are innocent. What I should do is have you shot. No, that’s too quick. Hung! You should be hung by the neck until dead. Boy, you are the epitome of everything that has gone ill with human society.”
Of course, The Drunkard was probably just shouting obscenities at The Stalker and calling him a pervert, but I couldn’t be sure. Eventually, The Drunkard exhausted his surely copious list of obscenities and resorted to kicking The Stalker, once, in the ass. The two then walked back into the pub, and sat down.
There was a silence. To describe the silence as awkward would be an understatement. To describe it as pregnant would be—in addition to odd—an understatement. I could only say that it was a Lovecraftian silence. One could almost see ancient, malevolent beings cackling in the darkness, pleased that we puny humans were so ill-at-ease.
“I should apologize,” said The Stalker. “And so I do. Sorry. This is me. Being sorry. Saying what I did was ill-advised and I should never have volunteered to begin talking.”
“And?” asked The Drunkard.
“And I am not a sexual predator. You can look that up on the database.”
 Rather than accept the apology outright, we at the table nodded—except for The Student, who started snoring against the radiator.
“Okay,” said The Traveler, “let’s hope that nothing else like that comes out again.” He shivered. “That was just about as bad as The Interloper.”
“I would remind you,” said The Stalker, “that words are simply words. Though I strung words together in a chain, forming sentences, and, in this case, the beginning of a comprehensive list of my… interests in Tennessee, that does not inherently mean one thing or another.”
“Bullshit,” said The Drunkard.
“I find myself agreeing with The Stalker,” said The Writer. “Words do not mean one thing or another. He might as well have been reciting something from Facebook.”
“Once again, bullshit,” said The Drunkard.
“Please,” said The Student, “though I agree with you, you’re going to have to qualify that statement.”
“Figured I would,” The Drunkard said, taking a drink from his glass. He straightened up in his chair and popped his neck. “Right. You say that words are inherently neutral, correct? Now, if they were inherently neutral that would mean that they, in essence, have no bearing on the way they should be used in certain situations. In other words: would you agree with me if I were to state that whenever a party, A, is insulted or offended by the word choice of another party, B, they are overreacting, and are not in full understanding that a word’s connotation may be nullified over time?”
“I am,” said The Stalker.
“Very good. Now, Traveler, if I were to walk down the street and come across a black guy, and were to shout, ‘nigger!’ at him, what do you think would happen?”
“You’d probably find yourself getting your ass handed to you,” said The Traveler.
“I agree. Now, further, Traveler, would you have sympathy towards the person who shouted the racial epithet? Would you spring to his assistance?”
“God no.”
“And why not?”
“Because to do so would, to the outside world—and, honestly, to myself—suggest that I have sympathy for certain, ah,” he fidgeted in his chair, “anti-social views.”
“Exactly,” said, The Drunkard turning to The Stalker and The Writer. “While, semantically, you are correct in saying that words are neutral and they do not lean one way or another, we find that, in the real world, they, in fact, do. In the abstract, one could very well go around shouting ‘chink,’ ‘kike,’ ‘dago,’ ‘WOP,’ and any other slur you might think of, and that person would be perfectly fine, for he doesn’t mean any harm, he’s just shouting out sounds that translate into harmless, harmless words. However, we find that, in the real world, our epithet-spewing friend finds himself with broken bones, black eyes, and a whole mess of hospital bills. For, you see, his actions show him as a racist.”
The Drunkard sipped from his whiskey. “In a concrete example, would you want to hang around with The Interloper when he spots an Indian restaurant? Would you want to chill with a skinhead while you drive past a synagogue or mosque? I posit that if you say that you would not mind hearing invectives spewing forth from a foaming, racist mouth, then you are playing devil’s advocate and, in reality, have no argument to make beyond the semantic tripe that I’ve heard a thousand times.
“And so, Stalker, when you say such bizarre and grotesque things as ‘walks down dark paths,’ we are led to believe that you are a sexual deviant who must be punished.” He took another drink. “You probably are, but we need evidence to convict you. Words do in fact have a meaning and a, to mix metaphors slightly, alignment—there can, in other words, be an evil term—because of the weight society lends them.”
“Basically,” said The Student, “don’t shout slurs at people just because on the semantic level, it doesn’t mean one thing or another.”
“Exactly.”
“I must say,” said The Writer, “you are completely wrong and your entire argument is pedestrian and caters to the ills of society. You are, in fact, a coward.”
“Am I?” asked The Drunkard. Amazingly, the vein hadn’t popped out of his forehead yet. Perhaps the whiskey acted as a calming agent in some cases. “Well, next time you see your muscular German flatmate, you call him a Nazi—in earnest and not joking in the least, as if you were stating his name—and tell me what happens.”
The Writer fidgeted in his chair. “Er.”
“Exactly.”
The Traveler checked his watch. “Well, I think we’ve made some real progress here. However, I’ve got a research seminar I have to go to, so shall we adjourn for today?”
We nodded in agreement, and filed out. The Drunkard and I, though, were quite bored, so we decided to go to one of the bars on campus.


The Stalker's Tale


Alan, Rebecca; 3549 Peacock Court, Nashville, Tennessee; 458-2391; 24 years old, brunette, brown eyes, likes her treadmill and her Husky puppy named Princess.

Alan, Sue; Not related to Rebecca of same surname; 919 Broadway, #4-A, Nashville, Tennessee; 919-2913; 30 years old, blonde, blue eyes, also likes her treadmill; works at Callahan’s Pub from 8 pm to 2 am.

Ames, Amy; 1000 Bob’s Road, Murfreesboro, Tennessee; 459-1920; 22 years old, red hair, green eyes; lives with ex-boyfriend; possible nymphomaniac.

Anderson, Ashley; 1242 Jefferson Davis Avenue, Cookeville, Tennessee; 876-1922; 26 years old, brunette, green eyes; originally from Chicago; likes wearing track shorts.

Anderson, Denise; 876 Jefferson Davis Avenue #B-2, Cookeville, Tennessee; 291-8192; 25 years old, brunette, blue eyes; drinks a lot, walks down dark paths.

Anderson, Rebecca; 712 Harkness Place #412, Nashville, Tennessee; 129-6834; 21 years old, blonde, brown eyes; probably fake hair color, member of Alpha Delta Pi.

Ascot, Becca; 5 Holly Circle, Big Rock, Tennessee; 776-9128; 18 years old, brunette, purple eyes [contacts]; listens to Coldplay, has two Dobermans.

Ayers, Anna; 16 Willows Avenue, Murfreesboro, Tennessee; 765-5462; 19 years old; brunette, green eyes; does not answer phone.

Baden, Lucy; 1890 Ridley Street, Smyrna, Tennessee; 655-1924; 20 years old; blonde, blue eyes; extremely gullible.

Baker; Anna; 87219 Baker’s Ridge Road, Antioch, Tennessee; 102-4102; 18 years old; blonde, green eyes; supremely stupid.

Baker, Becky; 19241 Old Hickory Boulevard, Franklin, Tennessee; 192-9210; 20 years old; brunette, hazel eyes, works for the Democratic Party.

Baker, Beverly; 8128 18th Avenue, Nashville, Tennessee; 828-1924; 21 years old; jet black hair, blue eyes; compulsively listens to “Wish You Were Here” while dressing in the morning.

Baker, Erin; 919 Hollisfield Place, Belle Meade, Tennessee; 919-8591; 27 years old; black hair, brown eyes; undresses in front of an open window.

Baker, Freida; 717 Marshfield Road, Nashville, Tennessee; 478-5555; 25 years old; brunette, blue eyes; has a golden retriever named Happy.