Me: We bring them back.
Manager: And whose salary does that come out of?
Me: Mine.
Manager: Right. But what never happens?
Me: The fajita isn’t sizzling.
Manager: Yes! The fajitas are never not sizzling when they hit the table!
And after many non-sizzles, the following:
Manager: What’s going on?
Me: Nothing.
Manager: How many fajitas have you delivered in the last week?
Me: Fifty, maybe?
Manager: And how many were sizzling?
Me: Most of them.
Manager: Practically none of them.
Me: Umm, I don’t think so . . .
Manager: I think so, because I’m the one who gets the complaints.
Me: Maybe they’re not smoking real good when I drop some, but there is definitely sizzle.
Manager: What did I tell you when you started here?
Me: Deliver the fajitas sizzling.
Manager: Charley’s is known for their sizzling fajitas. That’s what works. People come here from all over the area to enjoy them.
Me: Right.
Manager: Deliver them sizzling.
I was on borrowed time from the beginning at Charley’s. I just wasn’t fast enough, hungry enough, “in it to win it” enough. But I raised enough to buy a ticket to Paris, with money left over to last a good month. I would be like Hemingway, but instead of hooking up with Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Picasso, my sole contact was a friend of my aunt Marion’s who owned a knickknack shop—more last generation than lost generation. Although, my aunt was a wonderfully eccentric woman who traveled a lot, so my hope was that her contact might prove interesting.
I boarded my one-way flight with big hopes of leaving all that broken America had brought me to live out my days wandering the streets and parks of Paris, a true bohemian. After taking the Metro into the city, I had the address of the hotel I had booked for the first few nights before I had to hustle an apartment or long-term place to stay. When I arrived, it was late at night, and the matron of the hotel spoke no English and had no record of my reservation and no rooms available, so I was out on the street to fend for myself. But this is what I wanted, right? A true Parisian bohemian experience. Nowhere to sleep, with only thousands of American dollars in my pocket.
So, I called home and cried. My rocky start did at least fit with my Moveable Feast–type plan to live in Paris and embrace my ennui. Embracing one’s ennui is a real pretentious to-do. Sullenly walking the streets of Paris would be the postcard view into my faux-tortured soul. The second day, it even rained! Next, visit the American bookstore and buy Parisian poetry, preferably obscure, so I had it at the ready. More wandering the wet streets without an umbrella. Umbrellas are for people who have a place to be. I had no reason not to be wet. Again, totally existentialist.
That night, I made the ill-fated choice to go to an American-themed bar called Tennessee, which was decorated eerily similar to Charley’s Eating & Drinking Saloon. It was pretty quiet, and they played country music, and I sat at the bar, with my wet copy of Les Fleurs du mal, ready for action. After about an hour, a young man sidled up next to me. He was tall, wiry, and very handsome, like a Jean-Paul Belmondo with long hair. He looked at me and his expression turned to shock.
“Ohhhhh.”
I was confused. I assumed he was reacting to my being rain-soaked.
“Broo WHEEL-us,” he shouted.
“Umm . . .”
“Broo Wheelus—DEE Har!”
“Um, I don’t speak French.”
“Mon Dieu! Broo Wheelus! Dee Har!”
“Ummm . . .”
“Vous etes Broo Wheelus.”
I just nodded.
“Ahhhhh . . . c’est fou! Dee Har . . . Jean McClane!”
He was patting me on the back and sputtering drunkenly.
“Jean McClane! Jean McClane!”
His visage changed and he quickly lit a cigarette and then he squinted his eyes and curled his lips and brought a finger up to his mouth and blew on it like a smoking gun.
“Happy trails, Hans.”
Then he laughed, loud. And, it became clear to me he thought I was Bruce Willis. I do slightly resemble Bruce Willis. Well, my hairline resembled Bruce Willis’s hairline.
He then spoke to the bartender in French, telling him that I was Bruce Willis. Because it had gone this far, I just decided to be Bruce Willis, so I curled my mouth and said, “Welcome to the party, pal,” or “Yippee ki yay,” or some such line from Dee Har. It made more sense, given the language barrier, just to be Bruce Willis than try to explain that I wasn’t him. Plus, he was so excited; I didn’t really want to kill his dream of having met the real Bruce Willis.
We sat for at least an hour at that bar, where the bartender clumsily translated for us, and I made up a story about how I was filming a movie in Paris and made up more stories about the set of Die Hard and the practical jokes I used to play on Alan Rickman. After some time, I told the bartender to tell him that I needed to go to bed because of an early call in the morning. The bartender relayed back that the man wanted to invite me over to his flat nearby because he was a young actor and wanted to party more with Bruce Willis. I politely declined. I was Bruce Willis, after all. I don’t hang out with fans.
We left together and stood out in front of Tennessee, preparing to part ways—the belle epoque streetlamps splashing soft light onto the cobblestone street. I gave him the thumbs-up, and he shook my hand with a firm grip. Our eyes met—my signature Bruce Willis glare and his drunken, watery eyes. And then he pulled me toward him and kissed me long and hard on the lips. I wasn’t expecting it, so I didn’t quite kiss back, but I was surprised enough to let the kiss last at least ten seconds. It was my first passionate man-on-man kiss. I finally pulled away and awkwardly smiled. He looked at me, as if to say, “Come home with me.”
And for one long moment, the thought crossed my mind to let him have me, for one night, just so there would be some random young French actor out there who would have spent the rest of his life telling everyone he knows that he fucked Bruce Willis when he was in town filming a movie. But alas, I turned and walked away. He’ll always have that kiss.
* * *
—
So, back to Five Easy Pieces. The 1970 film explores the story of an upper-middle-class family whose paterfamilias is a domineering professional classical musician. Jack Nicholson plays his son, who has fled his familial ties by rejecting his music pedigree, becoming a manual laborer/drifter, working on oil rigs and drinking heavily and basically squandering his future. It was essential existential fare, in the tradition of the French new wave. I guess I realize now that I related to it then because I was living out my own version of this story, but in place of wasting my musical genius and working oil rigs, I was just a failed fajita deliverer, staying at student housing.
But now I was in Paris. Maybe technically not as romantic as Nicholson’s character, but I was pretentious, so the bar was lowered. In fact, there was even a revival theater in the Left Bank that exclusively showed Five Easy Pieces. I would often go see it just to solidify my expat cred. So many levels of irony going on. My rebellion was moving to Paris to watch the same movie over and over about somebody else’s rebellion.
As my money started to run dry, about a week and a half in, things got a little desperate. I had moved to a rented flat in the projects of the Stalingrad neighborhood of Paris, which was mostly immigrant (Algerian) and poor. It was like a riches-to-rags story sped up to ten days. If only I was defter at delivering fajitas, I would have had more money. But this quickly became the most thrilling part of my trip. Mainly because the people there were the friendliest, even the hardened criminals.
One guy, after stalking me for a block or so, on my way home, came up
behind me. I was certain he was going to rob me, and he said in broken English, “You think I’m going to take your money?” I stared. He laughed loudly. “I would have done that by now, but you live here with us and we don’t steal from us. Why steal from the poor? We steal from other neighborhoods, where the money is.” That was a relief, and a good rule to live by.
My life in Paris was, at this point, more retired postal worker than young bon vivant/flaneur (again with the French?!). I would sit in the park during the day, then, around four, go to the supermarket and return home to cook a depressing dinner alone in my apartment at night. In a weird way, this was probably the closest to the life of a real artist I’d ever get, except of course for the not-creating-any-art part. It was solitary. But my eye was still on the prize—that is, this was all just the seedbed for the real payoff, which was: “Yeah, I lived in Paris in the late eighties.” And also my answer to the question “Oh, what did you do there?”—I’d be able to softly chortle and reply, “What does one do in Paris? Nothing.”
Sorely out of funds, I used my aunt’s contact to try to get some work from the woman who owned the knickknack shop, but unfortunately she had no openings selling plastic Eiffel Towers. But she did have a contact in the South of France who ran a commune/farm, which took in volunteers to help with the farming. It was really my only option, so I took it.
I took a train down to a rural area in the Ardèche mountains, where I was greeted by a large American woman, her very small French farmer husband, and their two daughters. The farmer spoke no English and barely any French. He mainly communicated in a series of grunts and slugs from a wine bottle. He looked really “of the earth,” almost half human, half botanical, or better described as like a sentient root—a “froot,” so to speak.
Their farm surrounded a beautiful sixteenth-century stone house built onto a steep hillside, with tiered bean fields carved into the hill below. They led me to my room in an adjoining shedlike structure with a private small bedroom. Before I knew it, I was summoned to the side of the house, where I met some of the other people who were staying there. Without a moment to even process, the farmer, ax in hand, grabbed a rooster from the yard, strode up to me, and put it in my hand—the ax, not the rooster. He then walked to a tree stump that had a hook fastened in it and jammed the rooster’s head under the hook, trapping it. I had not really seen much animal cruelty before, so this was a bit of a shock. He signaled for me to come over and nodded to chop the rooster’s head off. Everyone was gathered around, but I just got there and didn’t want to immediately murder a bird. Seriously, what the fuck?
The American woman said, “Just aim below the hook and give it a good swing. All our new guests do it, and tonight we’ll make coq au vin to welcome you.”
But this felt not altogether welcoming. I got shaky, and I tried to hand the ax back to the farmer, but he looked at me sternly, as if to say, “You will kill it.” I had never killed anything before, with the exception of my neighbor’s dog, but that was just because I put vodka in its water dish (also, I’m not sure that’s how she died. It might have been old age, or vodka). I was really beginning to fall apart now, and the rooster was squirming violently under the hook, and these people were staring at me, so I quickly did a very broad “No, thanks” gesture.
“I don’t really kill things,” I said. (Replace We for I and always for really and you have a potentially good slogan for the army.)
The farmer grabbed my arm firmly, and before I knew it, swung my hands up, guiding the ax above my head, and then forced it down onto the rooster, chopping its head clean off. It happened so fast; I had no course of resistance. I had killed. Well, he had killed. Well, we had killed.
I think it might have been Ted Nugent who claimed that meat tastes all the sweeter if you are the one who’s done the killing. As I ate my coq au vin that night, it really tasted pretty much the same as if I hadn’t been the rooster killer who cut its head off. Lesson learned.
Around five the next morning, I was awoken by hard poking into my rib cage. The farmer stood there with his dog by his side, stone-faced. He signaled to get up. Tired and disoriented, I quickly dressed. I followed him to his truck and got in. We drove in silence, as the sun peeked over the hill, spreading bright morning light onto the plateaus and deep-cut valleys.
We drove to town and then parked in front of a small café. Inside, we sat and the farmer spoke briefly with the man behind the counter. My head throbbed from the wine from the night before. The man slammed a bottle of wine onto the table, like a sommelier from the Old West. So we sat and drank the bottle in silence. This was my first wine-only breakfast, and it did make me feel a little better, especially considering the “we can’t talk, so we might as well drink” vibe, but sunrise is a tad early for booze, I think.
Around 6:30 a.m., drunk, I was dropped in a bean field to pick beans alone in the summer sun. Then, at around noon, already with a hangover from breakfast, the farmer picked me up in his truck with his dog, and we went back to the same café for more wine. More wine? This farmer’s tolerance for drinking and bean picking was epic.
At around five thirty the next morning, I felt a poke, and it began again. Back to the café for vin rouge at daybreak. Holy fuck! How is this sustainable? By nightfall, I’d aged thirty years. And with dinner came way more wine, and the sorting of the beans into piles small, medium, and large, to be separated for the market. It was literally drink, farm, drink, sleep. Day bled into day, because it had been two days. But by day three, my body was breaking down. Mon dieu, the wine.
This was it, my Five Easy Pieces moment. Would I commit to my pretentiousness and eschew American upper-middle-class values forever and stay till my liver became large and French, like a swollen leather canteen?
The next day I took a train back to Paris and flew home. As it turns out, even pretentioneers can fail.
Failed Pickup Lines
I couldn’t help noticing that you might have social anxiety.
Do you work out, or are you just naturally tense?
Has anyone ever told you you look like my mother?
I’ve been waiting all my life to ruin this moment.
Excuse me, but is this pussy taken? (Point at her crotch.)
Am I seeing double, or do you have two tits?
Are you into double entendres? Because if so, can I look under the mat for the key, so I can open the back door?
I’m an atheist, but after seeing you (at the top of your lungs), Allahu Akbar!
I know this might sound old-fashioned, but do you want to have sex with me in a cave?
It seems like you have a head for business, and a bod for . . . business. I guess you seem like you’re probably in business?
You look exactly like a model . . . who I used to have sex with.
Is it just me, or are you Jewish?
My mother always told me to find a nice girl to “settle for.”
I know you’ve probably heard this before but . . .
You’re a grand old flag,
You’re a high-flying flag
And forever in peace may you wave.
You’re the emblem of
The land I love.
The home of the free and the brave.
Ev’ry heart beats true
’neath the red, white, and blue,
Where there’s never a boast or brag.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
Keep your eye on the grand old flag.
CHAPTER 11
How I Failed to Study the Holocaust
They say “Those who can’t do, teach,” but one could also say “Those who can’t do, write.” I think I’m exposing the veracity of this as we speak, or more accurately, “Those who can’t write, still write.” Another truism you might entertain is, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” but this one has some very dark undercurrents, because if you
’re Hitler, for example, try, trying again is a bad thing. One would have compelled him to stop trying, because succeeding had some very dire consequences.
The ancient art of tai chi tells us to stop trying, to give ourselves completely to the energy of the universe, because trying is working against a natural flow. I tried this once in an actual fight at the Dream Machine arcade in 1982, and I couldn’t stop the fist that was hitting my cheek with my mind, so this model doesn’t always work in a practical sense. But there is something very affirming about not trying. Professional athletes talk about “the zone,” that feeling one gets in the heat of competition, where things basically become effortless, like intuition takes over and all tension is released and they can just “do,” instead of “trying to do.”
After college, I was trying to do a lot of things, like the aforementioned moving to France to become a socialist farmer, but finally landed on going to graduate school in Chicago for Holocaust studies, to start the process of becoming a teacher. But it also concurrently set in motion the question of what happens to those who can not only not do, but can’t even teach. Maybe “Those who can’t teach . . . go into real estate”? Or “Those who can’t teach, become hobbyist inventors of a food product called ‘Vampagels: the bagels with two holes,’” or something like that. But at least I was starting to try to become a teacher, even though “trying,” as I tried to explain earlier, is against nature. In the late eighties, Holocaust studies was a pretty under-the-radar field of study.
Of course, scholars existed who wrote extensively on the Holocaust, but very few universities actually offered whole programs focused exclusively on it. In fact, I was the only student at the university in the program. So, yes, I was on the ground floor on what would become a real cottage industry, but the downside was a lot of attention was put on me. Being the only student in a program is a bit like being a prince or princess. Everything you do comes under heavy scrutiny. I started to notice this early on, when I turned in my first paper to my professor on the topic of the authoritarian personality in the context of the rise of Hitler, and he wrote across the top: “Grossly insufficient analysis.” I blame the heavy scrutiny. He blamed my substandard work. Soon, I would learn that I was very good at “grossly insufficient analysis.” In fact, if I were to start an analytics company, I would now call it Grossly Insufficient Analytics.
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