Rowdy in Paris

by Tim Sandlin

  To go in and out you had to pass through a line of depressed radicals giving out xeroxed flyers on issues or some folderol. If it'd been Colorado, I would have taken them for religious lunatics, but I think these were more politicized. I went outside and came back in, working my way from zealot to zealot until I found one spoke English. She had real short hair, not bald, more in the way of a crew cut, and a mole on her neck, looked pre-cancerous. Her nose had a crook to it I tried not to look at.

  She thrust a washed-out yellow sheet of paper in my face and said, "You are responsible for your government's actions."

  I said, "Not-me. I'm from Wyoming."

  "Meaning?"

  I hate politics and will as a rule belch in the face of anyone tries to talk it, but this girl spoke English and I needed cooperation. "I could dynamite myself in the town square and it wouldn't affect Bush any more than a rock tossed in the Pacific Ocean."

  "That is the mind-set of a German under the Nazis."

  The thing makes me burp in the face of political fanatics is they ignore any logic that says what they think matters doesn't. The crook-nosed woman jumped into a rant about globalization and Kyoto and the arrogance of imperialism. I missed most of it. The bottom line was the United States wants to turn the Third World into customers for Wal-Mart.

  I said, "No, duh."

  She made a fist, leaned toward my ear, and shouted, "The Egg McMuffin shall never displace the omelet!"

  I told her I agreed wholeheartedly and I would write that in my day planner first chance I got and she said if that's true I should take up arms. I said I would do so soon as I got back home but first I had to find the literature department. I asked if she could help.

  "I am here to fight American aggression, not be a tour guide."

  "I promise I'll help your cause soon as I find the literature department."

  "French, Russian, or English?"

  "American."

  She used her sheaf of flyers as a pointer. "One floor up, east wing, end of the hall. The door is green. You can't miss it unless you are color-blind."

  I said, "Much obliged," but by then she'd turned to inflict her views on someone else.

  You would not believe how good it feels to be eighteen and a real cowboy. The spit and sizzle of it. The incredible joy brought on from just being outdoors and breathing. The future stretches forward like a string of Christmases, an all-you-can-eat buffet of bulls and women, women and bulls. The possibilities are endless and you, you are the very thing you admire most.

  I went off to college flush with confidence, two good knees, a full set of teeth, and a hot, young wife. Five months later, I limped out of town with none of the above.

  The rodeo coach and I disagreed right off. He said I held my spurs too far back on the bull, at an improper angle. I called bullshit. He said I had an attitude. I was eighteen and he was thirty and so racked with arthritis he couldn't saddle a big dog. To me, the man was a dinosaur.

  And here's what I learned in Casper: Relentless wind blows love away. It simply wears you down. Mica couldn't forgive me for dragging her out of her niche. There's kids whose deepest desire is to get the hell out of their hometown, and there's kids who want to stay put, and the two should not marry each other.

  Mica and I were fighting so hard I couldn't be bothered by classes, except for an English lit class I went to because the fox teaching it winked at me once on campus, thus fueling enough creative visualization to keep my tail in her class. She knew it, too. She held her educated snatch out like a carrot, leading me into Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham, and Evelyn Waugh, who is a guy, by the way, in spite of his girlish name. My preconceptions of Paris came from those three, especially Maugham. In Razor's Edge he says a martini is nothing but a common cocktail until you add a splash of absinthe. Of course, bull riders don't drink martinis, so I'd never had one and still haven't, but absinthe sounded like it met cowboy standards. I was hoping someone in Paris would offer a splash.

  By Christmas, Mica was long gone, back to GroVont. I blew my ACL on a practice bull no meaner than a Holstein, and the coach pulled my scholarship. I was too embarrassed to go home, so I drifted down to south Texas and worked a car wash till my knee got its flex back. That summer, I tried British Columbia under the false hope cowboys there would be less competition.

  Then Mica sent me a letter, saying how much she missed me and how she wanted to try again because now she knew our love was pure and everlasting, so I drove home and got married a second time. Until the letter came, I didn't know she'd annulled the first go. All that year, I'd thought I was committing adultery.

  What brought this stroll down memory lane up is the similarity of the English lit office in Paris to the English department at Casper College. The both of them ooze institutionalism — walls, desks, and file cabinets, all standard issue — and they must have a farm where they raise women to work in those places. Genetically engineered and corn fed for maximum anuses, bureaucrats who live for rules and get a charge out of crushing students in the name of policy.

  In the Paris situation, there were two of them, an older one in a tight silk blouse doing her nails, and a young one dressed as a matron playing computer solitaire. A Nordic-looking doofus in the twenty-five range was feeding paper into a copy machine. He was white-blond, lanky as a bareback rider, cheekbones that cast a shadow. With each page, he pushed a button, then slapped the copier on the side and waited till it spit out a copy. Through an open door at the back of the office, I made out another office where a man who must have been the boss was eating a sandwich about two feet long.

  The matron ignored me — she was concentrating on her cyber cards — but the old lady dressed for allurement looked up and blew on her nails. She asked me a question in French.

  I said, "I'm looking for two students named Odette and Giselle. They came back from a William James seminar in Boulder, Colorado, yesterday."

  The old one looked at the young one, who grimaced. Grimace is not a word I use lightly.

  I said, "You understand American?"

  The old woman chattered at me in French. French people talk fast. Imagine walking through the woods, pissing off squirrels.

  I tried the line I'd learned from the Colorado State frat boy. "Parlez-vous anglais?"

  This got the matron started, then the old one kicked back in and they overlapped. Whenever two or more French people speak, they overlap.

  I said, "This is the English department. How is it you don't speak English?"

  The secretaries jabbered. The kid on the copier slapped at his machine. The man eating the sandwich came to his door to watch.

  Finally, the older woman who took herself as spokesman turned to me and said, "Clint Eastwood."

  11.

  There was an empty plastic mop bucket out in the hallway, the yellow, rectangular kind with the squeegee attachment. I turned it upside down and hoisted myself on top so I was above the general gaggle of students.

  "Who all out here knows English?"

  I probably shouted louder than need be because up and down the hallway people stopped whatever they were doing. It was like that freeze shot at the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

  "Somebody out here must know English," I shouted.

  This bespectacled boy of about fourteen held his hand up shoulder height. I took him for one of those child geniuses goes to college when he's twelve and doesn't have the social wherewithal to lie when asked if he knows something. I hope Tyson isn't way-gifted like that. Those kids all seem to have nervous acne. Most are asthmatic.

  I pointed at the boy. "You. Come with me."

  Back in the English office, I gave him the rap. "Tell them I'm looking for two of their students. Odette and Giselle. They were in Boulder, Colorado, at a conference and came back yesterday."

  The women looked at the boy, who looked on the verge of tears.

  I said, "Now."

  The boy launched into a translation that took quite a bit longer than my origina
l statement. After a while, the old secretary jumped in, and then the matron. They talked all at once. The older one waved her arms in the air, as if speech wasn't enough to get her point across.

  The man in the doorway aimed his sandwich at me and said something of a gruff nature. His women shut up.

  The boy who spoke English said, "They have no students named Odette and Giselle."

  "Do they have anyone who's been to a seminar in Colorado in the last week?"

  This didn't take near as long to translate. The man in the doorway said, "No."

  The boy turned to me and said, "No."

  No translates as no. "Are they sure? Maybe they lost track."

  "None of their students have been in the States recently. This is the first week of the new term. They would know if they had a student at a conference."

  I looked from the secretaries to the man in the doorway. He bit into his sandwich. Dead end.

  I went out to the hallway to turn the mop bucket back rightways and consider the options. At the moment, I couldn't see any, other than standing next to the green door there like a wooden Indian waiting for two women who no doubt lied to me about being students at the University of Paris. Or maybe I was at the wrong U.P., if the Libyan cabdriver was to be believed. The thought of traipsing around Paris from school to school, reliving that mess I'd just gone through, depressed me no end.

  The bespectacled boy slid out of the office door and hugged the wall as he passed by me. He had the skittish look of a person who's come through a narrow escape. I supposed if I was going to make the rounds of every English lit office in every college in town, I should nab him, but he was such a quivery mouse, I let him go. I could recruit new translators.

  The blond fence post who'd been slapping the copy machine came from the office, carrying a pile of papers. He made off a few steps down the hall, then he turned and came back.

  He spoke in a Southern accent. "Hey, Slick, William James is philosophy."

  I was momentarily at a loss, like you are when you expect an answering machine and a real person answers the phone. "What?"

  "Henry James is English literature. William is philosophy."

  "I thought Will wrote books."

  "Philosophy books."

  "Oh." With that blond hair I should have guessed he wasn't French. Not that French are never blond, but his hair was longer than I'd seen so far, and his face wasn't squinched up in disapproval. He had the relaxed posture of a snowboarder after two bowls.

  "Do you know where the philosophy department is?" I asked.

  The kid nodded, northward. I think it was northward. I never did get my Paris bearings straight. "North wing. Ground floor."

  "Will you take me there? I'll need a translator."

  He hesitated, looking me up and down like you would a salad bar in a cafe where you don't trust the freshness of the ingredients.

  He said, "Why not?"

  I said, "Much obliged."

  "We don't get many cowboys through here. It should be interesting."

  "I've been told foreigners are fascinated by the American cowboy."

  "That's not what I mean."

  Real cowboy style may look snazzy but it's based on riding a horse a long ways over uneven ground. The getup isn't worth much indoors. You got your pants — Wranglers that fit when you sit in a saddle, as opposed to Levi's invented by a miner for miners. The shirt must be long-sleeve, tuck-in, buttoned right at the cuffs 'cause cowboys knew about melanoma decades before the rest of the country. The hat is your basic hands-free umbrella, great if you've got space in front of and behind your head, but hell on airplanes or even pickups with a headrest. The code won't allow taking it off in public except for two occasions: during the national anthem at sanctioned events or when your horse dies. I don't know what son of a bitch made up the code, probably some dime novelist didn't even wear a hat.

  The least convenient cowboy attire is the boots. Cowboy boots have pointy toes to go through stirrups and a heel so they don't go too far through. If you're not on a horse, they're nothing but vanity. Like a woman's party heels, they're okay for dancing, somewhat handy in a fight, but painful as your second divorce when it comes to walking a distance on pavement or a hard surface such as the floors in the University of Paris that go for miles without so much as a throw rug to soften the step.

  By the time we reached the north wing, I was ready to screw the code and buy tennis shoes.

  Early on in our trek, my guide stuck out his hand and said, "Michael Gunner, Orlando, Florida."

  "Rowdy Talbot. PRCA. Why didn't you speak up back there when I needed a hand?"

  "It wasn't my business. Everyone in the office knew English."

  He walked dead center in the middle of the hall, like he owned the building and couldn't be bothered with weaving through the little people. I rethought my stoned snowboarder impression. Michael was more of a star quarterback on an Ivy League football team, that is, a major stud within the confines of an extremely small arena.

  "Jerks," I said. "Do they always fake stupidity?"

  "Only if they think you're being rude."

  "I'm well known for my politeness. Ask anyone on the circuit."

  Michael chuckled in the soft, Southern style that makes you think of the laughing-with or laughing-at deal. "When you came in, the first thing you should have said was 'Bonjour, madame. Bonjour, monsieur.' It means good morning. If you say that every time, they can be fairly cooperative. If you don't, they treat you like a rat."

  I had to step around a clot of students blocking the hallway with their books clutched up against their chests like they were braced for a robbery. Michael sailed through without a swerve.

  I said, "How can they talk? The French are famous for being the rudest people on Earth."

  He smiled. Imagine Mona Lisa's mouth on a boy. "They have high standards in Americans."

  "We don't have any standards for them."

  "A Frenchman justifies his rudeness by saying you were rude first."

  Besides extreme foot discomfort, I reached the north wing with a bad case of nausea from the prevailing fumes. The walls smelled recently painted, and the coeds I dodged in and out of were wearing perfume would embarrass a Tonopah whore. Some bunnies wear perfume — generally Corral West's finest — to cover the cigarettes, but I never smelled anything like what a Paris woman uses as the daytime norm. I swear, I smelled it on some of the boys, too. Give me the stockyards, any day, over a building packed with French students.

  Michael the would-be stud pulled up in front of a door I took to be our destination. He said, "Think of yourself as an ambassador for your country. It only takes one thoughtless remark to turn these people against our entire nation."

  I didn't much care if Parisians hated Americans or not. I didn't like Americans outside the middle two time zones that much myself. Coastal Americans value what television tells them to value.

  "Most important," he said, "always assume they know what you're saying, even if they pretend they don't. It saves on embarrassment."

  I said, "Embarrassment never hurt anybody."

  "You're not from the South, are you, Slick?"

  "Wyoming."

  "That explains it." He looked at me, as if apprising my chances of survival in the big world. "Odette and Giselle, right?"

  "I need to find them."

  "Okay," he said. "You want cooperation, meet their eyes, smile, and radiate goodwill."

  "I always radiate goodwill."

  "Bonjour, monsieur," Michael said.

  "Bonjour, monsieur," I said, although it didn't sound the same. Michael and a man in a sneaky mustache shook hands, formally, like chess masters after a match. When my turn came it was shaking hands with a slice of white bread.

  Michael and the man exchanged pleasantries before Michael launched into the question. I waited, patient guy that I am.

  The philosophy department was as institutional as English had been, only with more square footage. More file cabinets. T
here were three minions — one male, two female — instead of two, and they were actually working, none of that nails and computer solitaire in philosophy. They had a window. English lit hadn't had a window.

  I don't get philosophy. It's the study of Deep Thought, right? Thoughts made up in the philosopher's brain, from scratch. They make a product out of no raw material, which is my definition of a scam. I mean, I think Deep Thoughts every day but I wouldn't go telling other people what I think. It's like religion or politics or true love or just about anything else. Think about it all you want, but for God's sake, keep it to yourself. Words never changed anyone's mind. Studying Deep Thoughts people other than you came up with is like studying their stool to figure out how to cook what they ate. It may be possible, but it's not worth what you have to wade through.

  So Michael's talking to this man whose very reason for being I would deny. That's bad enough, for a first impression, but the man also has a mustache looks like a nightcrawler crawling out of his nose. He might as well have had a tattoo reading SNEAK on his face. You won't see a cowboy wearing facial hair that gives away his character.

  As Michael went on, Mustache Man got up, walked to a file cabinet, and pulled out a file. His answer to Michael was fairly long and unintelligible, except every now and then a word popped out — Colorado, James, Odette Clavel.

  This one female secretary who was keyboarding like a house on fire looked at me and smiled. I smiled back. Her little pink tongue flitted out and touched the tip of her upper lip. American girls don't do that.

  I said, "He knows them."

  Michael nodded. "He knows Odette. Never heard of Giselle."

  "Where is she?"

  Michael listened, then said, "He's not about to help us track her down."

  I spoke through my smile. "What if I bust him in the face?"

  Mustache slapped the folder closed and cut it back into the file. Michael said his piece, and Mustache said his piece. The girl with the cute tongue went back to typing. She was through with me.

  Michael said, "He thinks you're a stalker."