The Best Laid Plans

“Fuck,” I said.

“Yes,” said The Student. “Quite.”

The giant board in Lille-Europe winked threateningly at the two of us, standing in the middle of the departure area in the midst of rushing Europeans in one of the busiest train stations I’d seen. The line that read “Bruxelles” also had a little buzz-kill “Annulée” just down the line.

“Maybe there’s a later train?” I asked.

The Student shook his head. “I doubt it. The weather outside is terrible, and they won’t run the trains if the lines are icy.”

“Ask,” I said.

“I’m not asking if I already know the answer, it’s a waste of energy. We should spend the time looki—”

“Ask,” I said.

The Student tossed up his hands in defeat and joined a very long queue at the ticketing agent booth. I followed.

There’s something unifying and vaguely warming about seeing people from different countries complaining about the same thing at the same time and in the same physical area. It’s one of those things that we miss out on in the States, unless you want to count the Southwest, which is just as bilingual as French Canada is. At any rate, the good vibes were destroyed once it became clear how incredibly annoyed and angry most of the people in the line were.

After a few minutes in the line, spent behind a couple of German ladies, we got up to the booth where The Student asked what was going on. The ticket agent responded that the Eurostar trains were canceled for the day because of the weather. The Student asked if we could switch to the French line, and the ticket agent laughed and told us to get the hell out.

We left the line, stood at the fence along the walkway overlooking the trains, and leaned forward. “Well,” I said.

“That’s a fairly accurate description of everything that’s going wrong today. Indeed. Yes.” The Student hung his head.

See, this would not have been a problem any other day, and we would have otherwise just gone on our merry way and head back to Pascale’s place to slumber until the afternoon. However, having planned to be in Brussells by eleven, we’d made certain arrangements with Pascale—namely, she’d frolic on out to her parents’s house, thus taking her keys with her, and we’d be drunkenly swaying around the EU’s capital. And so, Pascale already nearly at her parents’ and us stuck in the train station, we were faced with another day spent wandering around Lille.

Eventually, we left the station and headed back out to the plaza. The trains were closed for good reason. Between us and the entrance to the plaza opposite, a distance of about fifty yards, there was a sheet of snow blowing at about twenty miles an hour. Neither The Student or I had scarves, so we covered our faces with our hands, barely cutting some of the coldness, and schlepped across the plaza, up the staircase, and onto the pedestrian portion of a bridge, where the wind was even worse.

I looked up and saw that we had about a quarter of a mile to the giant mall in EuraLille. I was so cold, I didn’t even have the mental faculty to delude myself into thinking I was stuck in a fictional world like Hoth.

Eventually, though, we made it inside a chain café—kind of like Panera Bread back in the States, except French. Everything on the menu seemed to flavored with onions and garlic and served with a baguette on the side. If my heart hadn’t frozen solid, I might have thought about how this was healthier than deep frying potatoes with every meal, but most of my working mind was trying to keep my body from dropping.

The Student and I ordered some breakfast with a couple of double espressos and took our trays to the windows. The people outside looked just as miserable as we did, but took it with a certain European panache that said that, oui, they knew that this weather was coming and had planned for their outfits to match the weather.

“Bastards,” I said.

“What?” asked The Student, who was still shivering.

“They manage to take this in such stride. We resembled two hunched-over old men with...” words failed me, as they often did. “Hunched-overitis.”

The Student cocked an eyebrow. “Perhaps part of that is because we’re from a rather hot climate. This, you may have noticed, is not.”

“Quite,” I said.

Through the rest of the day, this would be a recurring thing. We’d be on the verge of killing each other because of the cold, retreat inside, and talk nonsense over a couple of too-large espressos.

Docks and Statues

We arrived a kilometer and a half later, thirty minutes later, and just a bit more frozen. The beach was empty and dark. It seemed that not going to the beach in the dead of winter and at night was a universally agreed-upon principle that everyone but us adhered to. We followed it for a ways, and I was reminded of Whitstable’s pebble beach for an instant, then the lack of chavs brought me back out of it.

There was nothing to differentiate it from a pier you’d see anywhere in the States, and, except for this being the first pier I’d set foot on, it was wholly unremarkable. The French started walking onto the construction and The Student said, “Er, hey, wait.”

They turned around. “Yes?” asked Pascale, briefly stopping in her breathing into her hand for warmth.

“We’re not going on that thing, are we?”

“Of course,” said Andy. “Why, you scared?”

“No, not at all. I’m more concerned about the, well, fucking cold breezes out there. Wind doesn’t stop on the ocean, and this is some mighty cold air—don’t know if you HOLY SHIT.”

A gust of wind blew by, carrying with it a couple of newspapers, some Styrofoam containers, and a seagull corpse. We shielded ourselves against it and cursed in our native languages.

“Eh, it’s not so bad,” said Albert. “My family, we climb the mountains in the winters, usually. That is bad.” The fact that he said this through chattering teeth and a half-covered face made me doubt that he could handle the freezing wind, but I shrugged and followed them onto the pier. I heard a string of expletives behind me as The Student shuffled along after us.

We reached the end of the pier and stood around for a bit. I started spitting into the water, thinking that somehow my spit would freeze midair. Everyone else ignored me and went to look at all of the boats docked in the harbor to our right. Eventually I joined them, looked at the boats, lights illuminating the darkness, some foghorns honking into the night, competing with seagulls to see what sort of sounds would most directly counter a conventionally serene setting like a beach at night. A ferry set on its way out of the harbor, which, due to its size and the speed it was traveling at, meant that it would be out of the docks in thirty minutes—a length of time in which I hoped we’d be sitting warmly inside somewhere.

“Nice,” said Andy, lowering his scarf momentarily.

We nodded.

“Well,” I said, after The Student threw a snowball at my face, numbing my ear and making me wish I’d stayed in England. “Bout that time, eh chaps?”

Albert nodded. “Right oh.”

We walked back towards town.

On the way back, we stopped by a building that looked like a structure out of a strategy game I used to play. Turned out that this was the hôtel-de-ville and the other building was something else entirely. I thought about asking what the other building was, but instead decided that I’d get The Student back for making my ear not work for ten minutes.

While he and the French went up to a statue of three elders (Rotarians, for Americans) who decided that they’d rather not work with the Nazis, rebelled by helping people leave the city, and were, predictably, shot. There must have been about five inches on the ground there, enough so that I didn’t even have to bother with making a snow ball. I just bent down, scooped up what felt like ten pounds of snow and ran over to The Student while screaming, “Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaugh!”

He looked over and his eyes widened for the couple of seconds he had before I smote him with the snow mound.

Well, The Student dropped to the ground like a rag doll and lay there moaning. Gotta tell ya, it was a bit of an awkward time explaining to the three of them that I hadn’t meant to render him unconscious and/or kill him. It was even more awkward when we had to drag him back through town, especially as he spent most of the time murmuring about Rebecca. Things I did not want to know and now that I had heard, I could not unhear.

When we finally made it back to the car, we sat him up in the backseat. “Huh,” I said. “Er, yeah. Really didn’t mean that. Hope you all realize that.”

Andy shrugged. “It happens.”

“Frites?” asked Albert.

“Oh,” said Pascale. “Yes, I am hungry.”

I looked at the car. “Will he be okay in there if we just up and leave him like that?”

“Yes,” said Andy. “He’ll be fine. People will assume he is drunk and leave him alone when they steal the car.”

Pascale punched him in the arm.

“What? It was a joke.”

We walked off to find frites, along the way, I was given a history lesson in just how it was a Belgian idea to fry potatoes like this, even though Americans called them French fries. I kept telling them that I knew they originated in Belgium, and was met with a constant, “Then why do you call them French fries? It makes no sense!”

“Because that’s what they’re called,” made no headway. Nor did: “It’s like calling McDonald’s or Taco Bell ‘food.’ It’s nonsense, but that’s the socially accepted norm.”

The argument, surprisingly, persisted the entire trip to a mobile fry station, where we each walked away with what would equate to two super-size fries from McDonald's—and they say Americans eat more unhealthily than anyone else in the world. Pshaw.

Anyway, after that, we headed back to Lille. The Student regained full consciousness on the motorway, and, as a peace offering, I offered him the remainder of the fries. He hadn’t retained any memories of being knocked unconscious by a massive snowball, judging by the, “Did I fall? I knew I should have worn my boots on this excursion.”

Far be it from me to describe massive head trauma—and I also made sure to clear my throat and wink at the others in the car (though I’m not sure if they quite understood what I meant). “Yeah, pretty nasty one, too,” I lied. “Luckily, you didn’t cut yourself or anything. Don’t know if they have free health care in this country or what.”

“Yes,” said Andy. “We do.”

“There we go,” I said. “Bleed away, my friend.”

“My entire face feels numb,” said The Student. “It’s like when my brother and I used to smash each others' faces into the snow.”

“Yes. Indeed. You tripped forward into the snow. It was very unfortunate, but we got you out before any major damage could be done.” I cleared my throat. Lying always seemed to create ungodly amounts of phlegm. “Have some fries.”

“These look half-eaten.”

“Nope.”

“Yes, they are. My God, this one looks like a toothless rat was gumming at it.”

“That’s ridiculous, these are perfectly good fries that I bought for my dear, unconscious friend.”

The Student glared at me. “Liar. You ate most of these fries, didn’t you? You did, there’s no way to explain—good Good, there’s a pool of spit at the bottom of this container.”

“Drool, not spit,” I said. “Fuck,” I cursed. My cover was blown.

The Student grew just a bit green. “You drooled on your fries before you ate them?”

“They smelled delicious. I can’t help that they smelled delicious. Guys,” I said to the French, “didn’t they smell delicious?”

“You drooled on your frites?” asked Pascale.

“They smelled delicious!”

“That is disgusting.”

“Do you do that for all of your food?” asked Andy.

“No,” I said. “I just haven’t had fries in a while.”

A groan filled the car and I became the pariah. I spent the rest of the ride trying to explain why I was not a Neanderthal or a troglodyte, and thus deserved something other than the incredibly cold group of shoulders that I was currently getting. I’m not certain if I made the headway I thought I deserved, but I did get to shake people’s hands at the end of the night, so I think that I made some progress. We went our separate ways and prepared for the next day, when, unbeknownst to me at the time, The Student and I were scheduled to take a trip to Brussels.

Dear God It's Cold

We arrived in the evening, parked on the street and exited the car.

Calais, seemed to be made up of two-lane roads, with the exception of an area next to the mall and the hôtel-de-ville. A mile or so down the road from where we’d parked was a large mall, some more, iced-over roads, and a bunch of shops. For a port town, Calais seemed really nice—especially when one compares it with Dover.

In the waning light, snow was briefly illuminated by the streetlights spaced out every few yards, and people walked around with take away boxes and shopping bags. The sound of jazz, coming from speakers mounted on shopfronts, floated through the air. That’s all information that registered after I got out of the car. What I primarily thought of was a series of horrible invectives directed at the gust of wind that blew straight into my face.

The Student stepped out of his side of the car, slipped on a patch of black ice, and steadied himself with an impressive chain of body contortions that brought laughter and applause from our French friends. When he regained composure by clinging to the side of the car for dear life, The Student gave a little bow and shuffled his way to the sidewalk, which was alternately salted and covered in snow.

“So,” Pascale said, turning to Andy, “ou sont allons?”

“Oui,” said Andy’s friend, Albert, “Andy?”

I tilted my head to the side.

The Student, who had by now shuffled up to my right, whispered, “They’re asking where we’re going.”

“I know, thanks.”

Andy put on a disconcerted face. “What? Why are you asking me?”

“You wanted to go here,” said Albert. “What do we do?”

“I just suggested,” said Andy, shrugging up his shoulders.

“Pfft,” said Pascale.

“C’mon, man,” said The Student. “You drag us out here, we have to sit in friggen traffic for two hours to come to Calais, what are we going to do? Huh?”

Andy looked at us in shock, as if we were pinning war crimes on him or something. He gestured in the air, hands twirling in indecisive circles, like a compass trying to right itself with a magnetic force, and eventually, he pointed down the road. “That way. We’ll go to the beach.”

“There,” I said. “Was that so hard?”

“Now you?” he asked.

We laughed and walked down the street, every once in a while shouting obscenities while one of us lost footing on the ice, with the others laughing, masking their fear of the knowledge that it would probably be them who would fall next.

We made it about a mile or so before the sun started setting. We had passed the mall and were now on what would be a busy district, if it weren’t for the ice covering everything. The roofs’ overhangs were sprinkled with icicles, shops’ windows were frosted over, and in the dusk, the neon lights of the few open kebab, frites, and bakeries glowed like beacons. We’d spent the past fifteen minutes—or, in spatial terms, since nearly being run down in a roundabout and pausing in the plaza near the huge quasi-Gothic hôtel-de-ville to allow The Student to take roughly twenty pictures of its spires and clocks—discussing what to do for food.

Ultimately, as we walked along the street and stumbled upon the only large boulangerie that also did not seem as if it was a drug front, we decided to just get some rolls and such until returning from the beach, when we’d get something a little more filling. We went in, ordered some food, and continued down the street.

Pascale, Andy, and Albert took up the front of our promenade—which made sense since I had never been to France, even, and The Student hadn’t been to the country in a year and a half. They talked in that rapid-fire way that made it clear they were gossiping, and The Student and I followed behind, noshing on our baguettes.

“So, how’re you liking France?” he asked.

“Pretty, pretty good,” I said. “Lille’s my kind of town. The coffee flows like wine, and the wine flows like water.”

The Student nodded. “I like that. You should use that in your blog.”

“I’m gonna.”

“How is that going, by the way? I’ve missed the last few entries.”

“Going well. Just got to where The Drunkard smote The Stalker and banished him unto the dark depths of the Underworld, wherein the latter was forced to undergo a purging of all that was dark in his soul in order to rejoin our group.”

“The hell?”

“Allegory for when The Drunkard’s flatmates tossed The Stalker into Madame Guillotine.”

“What goes on in your head?”

“Twisted things that seem as though they were ripped from a Tim Burton movie, why?”

“That’s what I thought.”

A few minutes later, we’d taken a detour into a war memorial park because hey, why not? We walked past a few people, past a fountain that had frozen over and then, near a barren playground that, too, was frosted over, we saw a giant world map, the sort of thing that reminded me of when I was in elementary school and my friends and I pretended to be Godzilla and crush Ohio. It was big enough to show Cookeville, Tennessee—a true shitsplat of a town.

So, my instincts kicking in, I started pretending to crush the U.S. beneath my giant Godzilla feet while The Student showed the three French where we came from in the U.S.. Soon, we moved on.

We were now obviously close to the docks. I say obviously close, because everything was just a bit more run down than the rest of the city, and the human to seagull ratio was rapidly resembling the worldwide human to insect ratio. Off in the distance, I could see the dull glow of light pollution from the high-powered lights on various docks. The sounds of giant ferry horns wafted through the air, like the songs of horribly ill songbirds.

“Out of curiosity,” I said, “how much further to the beach?”

“Oh,” said Albert, “not that much further. Kilometer, kilometer and a half.”

“Oh,” I said. “Good.”

Calais n'est pas fermé!

The next day, I woke up before The Student and Pascale, and was thus treated to one of those incredibly awkward times in life that either drive one to reflect upon their own life, or hate others.

You probably know the horror that arrives when you wake up before anyone else in someone else's house. You’re sitting there on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, wondering why you woke up at six in the morning, since you’ve never done that before, and there’s no reason on God’s green Earth that you should be doing that now. You're wondering when your hosts are going to wake up, and wondering if their floor is one of those that’s overly sensitive and will creak at a decibel level equal to that of a Mastodon concert. To make matters worse: you really, really have to piss and you didn’t think to ask where the bathroom was the night before—because you were drinking with your hosts and didn’t want to break the seal or seem like a weirdo.

This was all my fault. I claimed the bunk and it was far from silent. Every time I turned, it would creak and squeak. Getting down sounded like a symphony of car wrecks, which would surely wake up The Student, who was snoring like a chainsaw down on the floor, if not Pascale, who was also snoring away on her mattress. And so, I lay there, looking at the ceiling, concentrating on dry, dry deserts and not roaring rivers when, suddenly, The Student bolted upright with a cry of “Fuck no!” bolted out of his sleeping bag, and ran out the door, down the hall to the toilet, and proceeded to make his own cacaphonous symphony of puking.

Pascale groaned and so did I. I didn’t want to spend my time pissing in someone’s puke. There’s something fundamentally dirty about that, something that seems like it deserves a section in Leviticus. “Thou shalt not relieve thineself in someone’s vomit.”

After a while, when everyone had cleaned themselves up and was properly caffeinated, Pascale broke the news that we’d be going to Calais with someone named Andy.

I’d apparently met the guy the night before, but hadn’t remembered. I shrugged and said, “Whatever.” The Student, however, was pretty excited. Andy was one of the people he’d known from a couple of years ago, and got along with pretty well—I don’t think he’d gotten on anyone’s bad side except for a German guy who had engaged in some alpha struggle with The Student. He was vague about the details, which told me that there was a girl involved.

At any rate, I was up for it, since I needed a break from wandering around Lille and stumbling across cathedrals and horse butcheries. 

So we waited around for Andy and his friend for an hour, and when they arrived, there was much rejoicing. Any was a tall guy with dark skin, curly hair, and--not to seem, ah, well, like myself--a Heeb nose. His friend was taller, but otherwise looked pretty similar, except he was wearing a hat. The rejoicing was followed by discussion about what, exactly, to bring on our excursion. Eventually, it was decided that, fuck it, we’d get coffee and food there. So we piled into Andy’s car, drove, and, several minutes later on the highway, hit traffic and sat idling for a couple of hours until driving off into a series of other roads leading to Calais.

Good Ole Jewish Guilt

We passed the Chabad car, and realized that it was parked outside of the synagogue. I nodded, made a mental note to come back before I left and take a picture for my Jew Hunt[1], and that would be enough. However, for The Student, it wasn’t. The Student shouted, “No! Damn it! I didn’t go to Yom Kippur services!” Then he dropped to his knees on the ground.

“Erm,” I said. “Yes, me neither.”

He turned to me with a burning look in his eyes. It was not rage, or anger, it was intensity and guilt. It was the look of Batman without the baggage. The Student, I gathered, was turning into Super Jew. “We are in The Book of Death.”

Pascale looked between the two of us with a concerned look.

“We’re not in The Book of Death,” I said.

He nodded. “We are.”

“No,” I said. I shook my head for emphasis. “You’re an atheist. You don’t believe in The Book of Death because you do not believe in God.”

The Student looked between me and the synagogue and then bolted to the synagogue. The entrance had heavy iron doors with a bolt across them, which, in turn, was behind a shuttered iron gate.

The Student ran—slid might be more accurate—up to the iron gate, pounded on it and yelled, “Succors! Aidez-moi pour succors! Sanctuary! I need to do some belated repenting!” Then he lost his footing and slid down the staircase, laughing and crying simultaneously.

“Perhaps,” I thought to myself, “there’s something about iron gates that makes him flip out. Magnetism or something like that.”

After a few minutes of The Student crying in the fetal position and the light contact of snow upon snow and cobblestone in the street, I walked over, helped him up, and we headed back to Pascale’s place in relative silence.

Around the time when we hit the broad avenues and not the sidestreets, and saw a bunch of students staggering around, clutching each other for sheer, drunken life, I asked Pascale, “Did The Student do this a lot a couple years ago?”

“He did spend a lot of time staring at a girl’s window and listening to the love songs.”

“Ah.”

“He was a bit, ah, what is how you say?”

“Melodramatic.”

“Yes,” she said.

“You could also tack on ‘slightly disturbed’ and you’d be a bit accurate.”

“Kebab,” said The Student.

“Yeah, we’ll get some kebabs,” I said.

We walked over to one of the many take-away kebab shops on the avenue. Pascale ordered cheesy chips (that aid and succor of drunken students everywhere), I ordered my usual soak-through-Styrofoam-greasy doner meat and chips, and The Student had a massive kebab. As we took the food away, walked down the avenue, and ate, The Student said, “Narrator, do you think HaShem will forgive me?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know. He’s kind of bi-polar.”

“You should say ‘yes,’” said Pascale.

I shrugged again. “It’s a momentary relapse into Judaism. It’ll pass by the morning.”

We walked.

---

[1] Let me explain. This was something I did in every city I visited. I’d drag whoever had let me stay at there place that week around the city and march them around until we found Hasidic Jews. At which point, in celebration, we’d go into a store, buy a bottle of Manischewitz and a loaf of challa bread, leave, and go drink.

The Journalism Party

A few hours later, Pascale, The Student, and I were back out on the streets of Lille. (The hours in between the story-now and the last time we met were filled with me shouting obscenities at my laptop due to my inability to write more than a sentence of my Ranting in Literature essay—I’d chosen the topic about Upton Sinclair’s Oil! being the first modern novel-length rant—and The Student, in turn, telling me to shut up as he was trying to read a difficult passage of the original language version of La Morte D’Arthur. For fun. So, really, you don’t want to hear about that.)

Pascale was talking about a friend of hers who came into France as a refugee from Afghanistan and was having trouble adjusting to the culture. “He talked to me about a girl he met and said she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen and he’d been following her around, watching her.”

“The fuck?” I asked.

“Weird, yes, but wait. Then, he says to me that he wants to marry her, and wonders how to approach her father. I told him that he should just talk to her about it. He said that he couldn’t do that since he hadn’t talked to her or her family before.”

“So he’d been following her around. Stalking her,” said The Student.”

“Yes.”

“The fuck?” asked The Student.

“So then I ask him about her, and he says, ‘She is fourteen.’”

“Fuck!” The Student and I said in chorus.

“Yes,” Pascale said, “exactly. And then I told him that this was illegal, and he said he didn’t understand.” Pascale then went “Pfft” and shrugged her shoulders and laughed.

I nodded. Good as a reaction as any, I thought.

“Oooo!” said The Student, pointing ahead of us.

I looked ahead and saw a small car, Ford Fiesta type, with a giant menorah on it, lit up with seven candles on the top, and the French equivalent of “Chabad Lubavitchers” on a placard on top of it. “Hey, we’ve stumbled upon a Jewish place!” I said. “Happy Chanukah, Student.”

“You too, my friend. Let’s get schloshed.”

“What does this mean? Sloshed?”

“No,” I said, “schloshed.”

She tried four more times, but she couldn’t get the hang of it.

I waved it off. “No biggy. It means drunk.”

“Ah, yes. There will be a lot of drinks there. You’ll like it, and I’ll introduce you to friends.”

“Sounds good,” said The Student.”

We turned a couple of corners and walked up to a building that could have easily been a church. We walked up the steps, into the lobby which, thank God, actually had heating going through it, and Pascale checked us into the party, which had not yet begun.

Imagine, if you will, a hallway in a public high school. The walls are decked out with announcements on several different colors of paper, the tile floors are stained, and the doors to different classrooms are discolored and the windows are fogged-over from various kinds of schmutz. The only difference between this hallway and the high school in your head is that everything is in French.

And there was a DJ stand and a rack of show lights, and a set of sincerely high-quality speakers set up along the walls, and the Christmas lights all around the edges of the walls.

Oh, and the collapsable table draped in a red tablecloth covered in five kinds of liquor and a few kinds of snacks.

But, other than that, it was like a high school hallway.

While I stood in awe of the actual, high-quality Scotch (single malt at a party – God I love journalism students), Pascale pulled a friend of hers over and introduced her to The Student. I didn’t notice, as I was still thinking about who would bring something not in a plastic bottle to a party.

Then, when I felt my hair being ruffled, I reacted in my normal way: I shouted, “Please don’t attack me!” and jumped in the opposite direction, in this case, into the table, knocking off the bottle of Scotch. In a rare display of the reflexes I hadn’t used since I played baseball when I was a kid, I ducked down, caught the bottle and put it back. Then, for good measure, I cleared my throat and looked at my attacker.

She was wearing a red sweater, had short brown hair, brown eyes, and had a great smile. “Guh,” I said. I shook my head. “Yo. I’m The Narrator.”

She looked between me and The Student, “The Narrator and The Student. Relatives?”

“No, thank God,” The Student and I said in chorus.

I pointed at The Student and shouted, “Jinx, you owe me a Coke!”

He sighed and shook his head. Pascale asked what that meant and The Student explained.

Jessica, for that was her name, held out her hand and introduced herself. In a rare occurrence, I did not go “guh” at her, but actually held a conversation.

The four of us, after The Student finished explaining the intricacies of American middle school humor and puns, grabbed some drinks and went on a brief tour of the school. There was a kitchen in there, which I found odd since none of the schools I’d been to had kitchens available for students—but then again, English Lit was never one of those disciplines that required students to pull all-nighters. Inside the kitchen were a few people smoking and reclining, talking rapid-fire. 

Other than that, it was a basic school-ish building with halls, restrooms, and classrooms. After the brief tour, we walked back into the bit of the hallway with the DJ booth and the lights and whatnot and saw that some more people had arrived. Pascale introduced us to them as well, and The Student and I engaged in some serious self-deprecation at the the expense of the South.

(One thing I’ve noticed: If you’ve lived in the South for a while, and don’t necessarily share the stereotypical beliefs of the region—which, if you’re travelling abroad, you probably don’t—then you can make some quick friends by joking about it. The vast majority of people have a perception of the South based on Deliverance, and you can make a distinction between the film and the reality, and still be funny. Such as: “No, people in Nashville won’t sodomize you if you make eye contact; however, they will if you say bad things about Garth Brooks.”)

Soon after that, the music started, and I was treated to the most bizarre array of dancing I’ve ever seen. They were even whiter than my AEPi frat brothers. The dancing on the floor—which accompanied everything from gangsta rap to ska—ranged from the hopping thing you see at teenage punk concerts (Pascale and The Student), jazz swing (Jessica in her own amazing little world), headbanging (a group of guys over in the corner), club dancing (led by a girl who’d chosen to drape herself in Christmas lights), and then my own spastic movements of the arms and legs that I considered dancing. In short, everyone was having a good time, even me, and I never have a good time dancing.

For example: the Greeks back in Woolf went clubbing as if it were their job. Thursdays through Sundays around ten at night, they’d descend upon Canterbury in five or six six-person cabs and go out for overpriced drinks in crowded basement bars across the city and stay until three AM, then complain that everything closed so early in England. It was mind-boggling to me, a person who would go out to a house party and fall asleep on a random couch around one in the morning. I went out with them a couple of times, a couple of them tried to teach me how to dance, I’d give up and hang around the bar and glare at people who fulfilled my requirements of “douchebag.”

 And so we drank, we danced, I fell in further “guh” over Jessica. (The state of guh can last anywhere from three minutes to three days, but generally not longer than that, and will, by and large, never result in my taking any action to form any relationship whatsoever with the girl—mainly because I’ve been rendered borderline retarded.) At one point, I may have started regurgitating John Donne poems, mangled beyond any comprehension to an English Lit student, much less a French journalism student, but I’m not entirely sure. The night gets blurry around the time when The Student and I formed an air guitar duo when the DJ (which, I should say by now, was actually a massive iTunes library that people just went up to and requested songs) played a string of Queen songs off of one of the greatest hits albums.

I do know that I sobered up about the time when the three of us were in the kitchen and someone was trying to make me understand a phrase. “No, that is not it,” he said. He was shabby, looked like he should be a poet instead of a journalist, with a scruffy beard, brown sweater, and a mop for hair. He said it again.

I repeated what he said.

“Yes,” he said, clapping his hands once and then pointing at me. “Exactement!”

“What does that mean?” I asked. I’d forgotten how to ask the question in French, which, in the back of my mind, struck me as extremely ironic.

“It means ‘you’ve missed the point entirely.’”

“But. W—that’s the complete opposite of the English expression that we were talking about.” That expression, I think, was, “You hit the nail on the head.”

“Oui, exactement,” he said. “We like irony in this country.”

“We like irony in the U.S.”

“No, you like sarcasm. Different things entirely.”

I responded with the phrase he taught me.

“Oui, exactement!” he said.

I’m not entirely sure why that sobered me up. Perhaps it was because my brain had to take away energy from the portions that were having fun being wasted and divert that energy to portions that were normally reserved for figuring out crossword puzzles. At any rate, thinking about the mental gymnastics that were required to make an ironic statement while being completely sincere were enough to sober me up. Which, looking back, was a good thing. Ten minutes later, as The Student was stumbling into coat racks shouting that someone had stolen his blue coat, when it was caught on his shoes and he was dragging it around, I’d needed that sobriety to carefully dodge around him, pick up the coat and shout, semi-convincingly, “Hark!”

He turned and blinked slowly at me, as if a Neanderthal. “Whuh?”

“I have stopped the vagrant mid-stride as he absconded with thine coat!”

The Student held a fist in the air. “Woo!”

“Here,” I said, flinging it through the air. The Student caught it. “Wear it with pride, for it is a trophy of goodness and wonderment in the modern world.”

The Student, drunk beyond any reasonable standard, put the coat on backwards. It was good enough. We waited up in the lobby as Pascale made the rounds, then headed back into cold and desolate world of wintertime Lille at night.

The Army of Snowmen

We walked down the drive, away from The Citadel and made it about halfway when The Student looked to the right and was off in a mad dash, camera held out in front of him.

I looked to where he was going and saw about twenty people scattered around a section of the park that had been invaded by snowmen. In a treeless, semi-hilly space there were about fifty snowmen and women in varying shapes, sizes, and stages of undress. That’s right, there were hooker snowpeople. 

The one I saw was about fifty yards away from where The Student and I stopped. He immediately bolted and treated each snowperson as if it were a model and he was making art. I wasn’t sure what possessed him to take angled pictures of everything, playing around with all of the various shutter settings on his camera and acting, generally speaking, as if he was on the verge of being the next Ansel Adams.

(I don’t say that to be mean-spirited. When we first arrived in Lille, and he started on his almost Tourette’s-like picture-taking spree, I asked him what he was going to do with all of the pictures he was taking. “Probably nothing,” he said.

“You’re not going to submit them anywhere?”

“Oh Lord, no. I’ll just upload them to my computer. Maybe use them as desktops from time to time.”

It was the most trouble I’d ever seen anyone go to in order to create a computer desktop.)

I made a beeline down the center of the field bit of the park, not because I’d seen the prostitute snowman yet, but because I wasn’t interested in staring at snowmen, and all the benches were taken up by young couples who were really, really into making out. So I walked on, made it to a part of the park filled with evergreens right next to an iced-over pond, looked to my left, and there, right next to a couple of shrubs, was a snowwoman wearing a lacy red and black bra, garters going up the bottom snowball, and matching panties. Someone had even taken the time to apply mascara and lipstick to the head of the snowprostitute, and I had to stand there for about ten minutes so my brain could thoroughly work out all of the insanity needed to think to oneself “Hey, I should make a snowprostitute,” and then, further, I needed to fully understand the dedication to one’s craft needed in order to apply mascara and lipstick to a fucking snowman.

It goes without saying that I had to sit down.

The Student found me a while later, still staring at the snowstitute, and said, “Ah, how lewd,” before taking a couple pictures. “Well, you ready?”

“What? We just got here. There are so many other snowmen to see.”

The Student tapped his camera. “And I’ve documented them all. Even the snowbear mauling the snowchild.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I worry about the state of humanity.”

“Personally, I think this is a good sign.”

“How so?”

I got up, dusted the snow off my jacket, and we started walking back towards the drive. “Well, think about it. In the States, especially Tennessee, what’s the general reaction to snowfall?”

“Chaos,” The Student said without any hesitation. Then he nodded, as if affirming the gut reaction put forward by his brain. “Yes. I was talking to my mother last night on Skype, and she told me about the Hell that she went through when she had to run to Kroger to pick up eggs. Apparently, she had to fight someone off a la Black Friday. Mishegas,” He finished, shaking his head.

“And yet,” I said, “take a look around you at these streets, at this park. Do you see the same madness reflected in the Frenchies’ eyes? In their actions? Nay, I think not. Instead, they go out and build snowmen, as if it’s a genetic or evolutionary reaction to seeing snow. This, my friend, is what humanity needs to strive for.”

“Snowmen?”

“More being in a state of mind where it is acceptable to express glee at things that, well, inspire glee. None of this repression of the inner child malarkey we have back in the States. You want to go out and build snowmen? By God, go out and build snowmen!”

“I don’t think anyone’s keeping anyone from building snowmen, Narrator.”

“Oh, they are.”

“Who is?”

“Society.”

“I—” he shook his head. “Yeah, sure. Okay.”

A burst of wind hit us from the northwest and we cursed in chorus.