Every time we go out to dinner I find something in my food. On Monday night it was a bit of tinfoil and today it was a rubber band. As long as it’s not glass or a thumbtack I don’t really care. I’m just wondering what it might be tomorrow.
May 20, 1999
Stuttgart, Germany
It rained yesterday so we all bought umbrellas. Mine is brown and is patterned with little flowers that Tini identified as edelweiss. I’d been in a crummy mood, but by lunch it blew over, and I enjoyed the company of my two hosts. Together we walked through the old part of town, where I saw a man with two canes doing tricks with a soccer ball. Later, at the restaurant, I saw an empty wheelchair parked beside a table for two. It was strange to see. Either someone didn’t need it all that badly, or one of the two people wanted a little change. After leaving, we came upon a bronze statue of the man who invented the Bunsen burner.
June 18, 1999
Paris
Today I saw a one-armed dwarf carrying a skateboard. It’s been ninety days since I’ve had a drink.
June 19, 1999
Paris
Abe went to Eastern Europe and stopped in Paris on his way back to San Diego. We were at the zoo, watching the monkeys, when he told me about a recent E. coli outbreak in Romania. A couple hundred people got sick and the government sent an agent to investigate. The source was eventually traced to a baker who’d been tainting his breads and pastries with the human feces they found stored in a plastic bucket hidden in his walk-in cooler.
“My only question,” Abe said, “is why did he keep the bucket of shit in the refrigerator? I mean, what, did he worry it would go bad?”
June 22, 1999
Paris
My friend Barb claims that when asked to justify his behavior, Ted Bundy responded, “Well, there are so many people.”
July 7, 1999
La Bagotière
Genevieve is taking care of her granddaughter, Edwidge, for the week. The girl is two years old and has a new doll, a Barbie clone who talks when tapped on the stomach. The tape track is short, so she speaks very quickly. “Hello, my name is Linette. Do you like my dress? I love to play with you!”
A year ago I wouldn’t have been able to catch any of it, but now Linette and I understand each other just fine. As a rule I speak a lot more French in Normandy than I do in Paris. Small talk’s more important in the country, so I have to be ready to engage at any moment. Today the butcher and I discussed the possibility of him buying a new car. Later I talked batteries with Annie at the market. As for the baker, she’s formally off my list. I liked the old one, the woman with the walleye, but her replacement is too impatient. I was looking at ice cream bars this afternoon when she came from the counter and said firmly, “Hey, I’m the one who takes care of that.”
I apologized and she pointed to a sign taped above the coffinlike freezer. “People get their own and they leave the door open. Then the ice cream is ruined and I have to throw it all away.”
As far as tongue-lashings go, I’ve had plenty worse. She’s just never been terribly pleasant.
July 17, 1999
La Bagotière
Someone called to tell me that John Kennedy’s plane has gone down off the coast near Martha’s Vineyard. We talked for a few minutes and all the while I wanted to ask, “Who is this?” She was French, but I couldn’t begin to identify her voice. At first I thought she said Ted Kennedy’s plane. Then I realized she’d said John, and I had to sit down. He always seemed like such a decent guy, a genuinely good person with excellent manners. I saw him a few times in New York, once on a bike and then again at a restaurant in SoHo, seated at one of the outdoor tables. A car with New Jersey plates pulled over and the woman driving sent her daughter out to get an autograph. “Tell him he’s good-looking,” the mother said.
The train from Paris was packed. A young man across the aisle from us slept, taking up both seats, and when a fellow in his sixties scolded him, the kid said, “Why don’t you just shut up.”
July 25, 1999
La Bagotière
A sample dialogue from my Teach Yourself Slovene book:
Gospod Skak: Kako gre?
Sara: Dobro, hvala.
Natakar: Oprosti, je to tvoja denarnica?
Sara: Prosim?
Ironically, the shortest chapter in the book is titled “Why Learn Slovene?”
July 30, 1999
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Hugh and I spent yesterday afternoon in central Ljubljana, and after three and a half hours I was so desperate to spend money I considered taking out insurance. If forced to buy a gift for someone, it would be a toss-up between an American-made notebook with a pony on the cover and a pair of those flesh-colored pads you use to protect your nose from the bridge of your glasses.
By the end of the afternoon all I’d bought were two plums and a pizza that came topped with canned peas, corn, and diced potatoes. These were referred to on the English-language menu they gave us as vagatbles. What they meant, I think, was Macedonian vagatbles.
July 31, 1999
Ljubljana
Last night at dinner Nancy mentioned a diplomat named Outerbridge Horsey VI. Afterward I complimented Yassa, the housekeeper, on her English. She is perhaps in her late forties, and blushed, saying, “No, I think I am speaking like a Negro.”
August 4, 1999
Paris
In Venice I got a haircut at a little place not far from the hotel. The barber spoke no English, and because I’d left my phrase book back in the room, we just nodded to each other, me indicating, I’m guessing, that he should just go wild. The result is a hard, mousy-brown dome that sits on my head like a helmet someone tossed from a few feet away. After leaving, I tried to soften it, but nothing worked, so I had to walk around like that until after dinner. We ate at an outdoor restaurant someone had recommended. Beside us sat a family of Germans—a man, his wife, and their daughter, who looked to be around thirty. They were just finishing their meal and had ordered another round of drinks as we arrived. The man lit a cigarette, then, with no apparent shame or self-consciousness, he farted. Ten minutes later he did it again. The table to our other side started laughing and looking our way, thinking that Hugh or I had done it. They were American and while it would have been easy enough to set them straight, it always looks like you’re lying when you try to deny it was you who farted.
August 8, 1999
La Bagotière
I got a letter from my father and realized it’s only the second one he’s ever sent. Regarding my break with French school, he writes, “I do believe that you need to continue your study on a formal, regimented basis. GET WITH IT!!! Having a good command of any language reflects class. Anything else is not cute, it’s pathetic.” He then suggests that for my next reading in Germany, I switch from my book to the Bible, “vis-à-vis Noah and the ark, and observe the response you get from the audience—ha!” In the next paragraph he tells me that I should read in Athens. “In the old outdoor theater just below the Acropolis, the Herod Atticus Theater built in the second century A.D.!!!”
Because he so rarely writes, I’d never known he was the type to use exclamation marks.
September 21, 1999
Paris
To celebrate my six months without a drink, we went with Ronnie to Le Parc aux Cerfs. A Scottish woman sat at the next table and in time joined our conversation. She was, we learned, a psychologist, in town for some sort of training session. I wouldn’t describe her as drunk, but she seemed at least tipsy and said a lot of strange things. She asked Hugh, for instance, if I was wonderful to love, which isn’t a question you’d expect from a stranger, or from anyone, really.
September 24, 1999
Paris
Ronnie was tired so after dropping her at the apartment to take a nap, I walked to La Maison du Chocolat to buy a gift for the Gs. The shop wasn’t crowded and the saleswomen acted as though they remembered me. Afterward, proud of the day’s French and just generally pleased
with myself, I crossed the street to the Métro station and experienced one of those moments of extreme joy, the kind that result from something small and make you grateful that you never committed suicide. And it was just then that a gnat flew into my eye, a big one. I tried looking into the window of a parked car, hoping I could spot it, but the reflection wasn’t strong enough. Near me, two teenage girls stood on the sidewalk selling cigarette lighters to raise money for a class trip. They doubled as can openers, but still, lighters! You’d never find kids doing that in America. Instead, they’d have to sell things like candy bars.
I told one of the girls I had something in my eye and she opened her purse and held up a small hand mirror. I bunched up my sleeve and eventually caught the gnat on the wet, wadded-up tip of it. It was so sweet of her to hold up the mirror. I bought a lighter for much more than its asking price, and she told me I was très gentil.
October 3, 1999
Paris
A year ago I would have begged Hugh to accompany me to the hardware store, but now I go on my own. On the first of yesterday’s two trips I said to the clerk, in French, “Hello. Sometimes my clothes are wrinkled. I bought a machine anti-wrinkle, and now I search a table. Have you such a table?”
The fellow said, “An ironing board?”
“Exactly!”
A few hours later I returned. “Hello. Sometimes I drink tea in a hotel. I now search the little thing, a stick to make boiling water.” He taught me the word for “heating element,” but I’ve since forgotten it. The one I bought came in a little carrying case and will hopefully last longer than the one I got last spring in Germany.
October 4, 1999
Zurich, Switzerland
Last night after the reading, Gerd and Tini took me to dinner at Kronenhalle, where we were seated beneath the Picasso. I ordered the Wiener schnitzel, which was huge. The waiter served me half of it, and when I was ready for the other half, he heated it up on the traveling stove he’d parked beside the table. The Swiss Tom Jones was eating a few feet away, having just returned from what our waiter called “a beauty center.” He was in his late sixties with a tan, a face-lift, and hair implants. His date was in her twenties, which, I was told, is nothing new.
While eating, I learned that under German law, Gerd is forbidden to continue selling my book under its current title, Nackt. It’s been used before, apparently, and the author of the earlier book is suing the publishing house for 40,000 marks, which is interesting. In the United States I could call my book Gone with the Wind if I felt like it, but not here. Thus we’re changing the title to David Sedaris’s Nackt. So there.
October 8, 1999
Regensburg
The movie Groundhog Day was released in Germany with the title Eternally Weeps the Groundhog. That is so beautiful.
October 9, 1999
Paris
Yesterday in Düsseldorf, Harry told me the following joke: Aliens land on earth and cut open the head of a German, finding inside a dense network of circuits and chips. It’s all too complicated so they close up the German and open the head of an Austrian, which is much simpler and houses nothing but a thin wire running from one side of the skull to the other. They snip it, and the Austrian’s ears fall off.
He’s alarmingly forthright, Harry. Over lunch I asked what he did with his morning. “First, I took a shit,” he said. “Then I inserted a rectal suppository for my hemorrhoids, and then I made some phone calls in the nude.”
While he was doing all that, I had gone downstairs into what I thought was the breakfast room of the hotel. It was different from the others I’d been in this week. Instead of many tables, there was just one long one, and the five people seated around it were casually dressed, some still in their robes. They made a little commotion as I entered and took a seat. “Just coffee for me, thank you,” I sang.
The oldest of the five, a man in his fifties, said something in German, and when I told him that I didn’t understand, he left the room and returned with a teenage girl who explained to me that the dining room was one floor down. I was, it seemed, in the kitchen of the hotel owner.
October 12, 1999
New York
Before leaving Paris, I passed the Greek man who lives across the hall, and for the second time this week he said, “Bonsoir, madame.” The first time he said it I assumed that I’d misunderstood him, but apparently I hadn’t.
October 18, 1999
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Before leaving Boston I went to Tiffany’s place in Somerville. The apartment was all right the last time I was there, but now it looks abandoned, like the occupant took a few of the larger pieces of furniture and left the rest behind. It was filthy, junk stacked everywhere, cigarettes ground out into the floor. It would take a solid week to clean it and still it would have looked like a dump. Sections of wallpaper were torn off, and areas are painted in different colors—a patch of blue, some yellow. As I was leaving she told me they’d found some cancer in her uterus, and that she’d soon be going in for surgery. She made it sound like a minor inconvenience, something hardly worth mentioning.
October 22, 1999
Nashville
At the book signing after last night’s show I met a woman named Franda, a blending of her parents’ names, Francis and Brenda.
October 24, 1999
Davis, California
Politely ask Paul not to do something, and he ramps it up to previously unimagined heights. One of Amy’s pet peeves is change on her floor. She said something about it when Paul came to visit, and before he left he scattered $20 worth of pennies, dimes, and nickels throughout her apartment. To top it off, he coated all her doorknobs with toothpaste and peed a little on her bed.
October 25, 1999
Seattle, Washington
A volunteer picked me up at my hotel and drove me to the Sacramento airport. She was plump and gray-haired, in her sixties, I guessed, and she smelled of shampoo. Her husband had died a few years ago and she moved to town to be closer to her daughter, who is adopted and in a wheelchair. The woman started telling me about the disease her daughter has when we came upon tens of thousands of tomatoes scattered across the road. “Farm-truck accident,” she said, then got back to her earlier topic. The woman enjoyed talking, and I enjoyed listening to her. Everything was great until we reached the airport, which had recently been remodeled. After circling twice, she stopped in front of terminal A. There were signs out front for American and United but not for Alaska Air, which is what I was scheduled to fly on. “I’m not sure we’re in the right place,” I told her.
At this she sighed and popped the trunk. “Listen,” she said, sounding suddenly weary. “Lots of airlines go to Seattle. I’m sure you’ll find something.”
She said it as if I go from city to city and just buy my tickets at the counter.
Here I’d listened to all these stories, and this was how she was leaving me? After she drove off, I asked a skycap where I might find Alaska Air. “See that flag?” he asked, pointing off into the distance.
I did. It was the same size it is on a stamp. That’s how far away it was.
“Alaska Air is two buildings beyond it,” the skycap said.
I cursed the woman as I walked to the distant terminal with my heavy suitcase, and I cursed her again in the long, unmoving line I joined upon my arrival. For good measure, I even cursed her adopted daughter, the one in the wheelchair with an incurable disease.
October 26, 1999
Ashland, Oregon
In Seattle I moved the sofa in my room in order to unplug a floor lamp and found half a joint lying on the carpet. A year ago I would have smoked it. Pot is still incredibly tempting to me, but I quit it when I quit drinking. Otherwise what’s the point? I smelled the joint I found beneath the sofa. I examined it, and then I put it back for someone else to find.
November 6, 1999
San Diego, California
You can walk across the border from the United States into Mexico, but c
oming back you have to state your citizenship and show papers if you’re not an American. Abe and I parked in San Diego and the moment we crossed into Tijuana we were swarmed by children holding cups. They didn’t hold them the way most beggars do, as if they were full. Rather they held them sideways, as if they were pouring something out. As we walked down the street everyone called out to us. “You want titty? You want pussy?” “I got pussy, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. Tell me what you want.” “Taxi?” “Hey, dog, check it out.” “You want to party?” “Hey, guys, before you get drunk, check this out!”
Lining the sidewalks were countless prostitutes, young women, mainly, wearing cheap, unflattering miniskirts. All of them had the same mid-1980s hairstyle, the bangs trained in an arc over their foreheads while the backs and sides fell to their shoulders. Their tops had shoulder pads and their shoes broke my heart. They smiled as we passed, but the men did all the talking. “You want pussy?” I guess you’d go to a hotel or something.
On our way to dinner, Abe stopped at a fruit and vegetable stand for a snack. Everything on offer was rotten. It stank, but the guy behind the counter was very friendly. We went into a cathedral that was lit with fluorescent tubes. The floor was covered in linoleum and in one of the little alcoves I could feel the heat from a hundred burning candles. I’d never noticed that candles give off heat, perhaps because I’m not a Catholic.
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