by David Wright
“So you take him home and leave him out cold on the couch!” Aïda said.
“What else could I do?”
“Enough,” Monsieur Lebrun said. He turned to Moose. “Why did you get expelled?”
“The doors were locked, so I had to break a window in the gym. A teacher heard.”
“Wait,” Monsieur Lebrun said. “You got expelled for breaking into the school?”
Yasmina giggled, but Aïda said, “On God’s head, you’re a bigger loser than my brother.”
Monsieur Lebrun took one last long drag of his cig, then put it out in the ashtray. “If I’m to get you to your cousin’s,” he said to me, “and back in time to meet with the principal, we need to leave now.”
“Okay,” I said. I leaned to Moose and whispered, “That’s some craziness, you dumb ass.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I hope Marc and Yaz can talk the principal out of calling my father. Otherwise I’m done for.”
“It’ll be okay,” I told him, hoping it would be. Otherwise I was there on my own.
As Monsieur Lebrun and I were leaving, Aïda called after us, “The flag team has practice tomorrow. Come by, and you’ll see exactly what girls can do on a football field.”
MATT
It took a few days for things to cool off with Juliette. But I’ll confess: at first I didn’t think they would at all. I thought she’d still see me as the bratty, egotistical kid she used to babysit, and I would have to live out in Villeneuve with Yazid.
And my mom and dad…well, let’s just say it took a bit more than a few days, and I had to make some big concessions—mostly about Orford—to get them to sign the permission forms and not fly over to drag me back to Montreal.
The first two weeks I commuted up to Villeneuve, and I had some pretty good practices. It felt great to be suited up and zipping passes! The level of play was really uneven though—more so than I’d imagined. Guys like Moose and Sidi—Aïda’s brother, the one Moose got into trouble protecting—stood out, not for their skill but for pure athleticism. Others looked the part in pads, even if they were a little clumsy. Jorge was bigger than my center back home. But a lot of it was kind of comical. I could see why US Football magazine had ranked the team so low.
Still, the guys were super pumped that I was there and excited for our home opener in two weeks, against a team called the Jets from another Parisian suburb. All the guys really hated the Jets. I didn’t know what the Jets were like, but I hoped we could get by on enthusiasm and guts.
The senior team’s season opened that Sunday, the week before our opener—a “friendly” game, as they called them here, against a team from a lower division. It was at home in Villeneuve, so all of us went, the Under-20s, the bantams, the flag team, including Aïda and Yasmina. We all wore our home jerseys, like the senior side. I had to pay off Sidi to get to wear 15 for the season; it was my number back home, but he typically wore it for the Diables. It only cost me bottomless Cokes at the café beside the RER station while we played foosball after practice one night—pretty cheap in the big scheme of things.
The senior team was sixty deep, some with good size; in uniformed rows, stretching before kickoff, they looked good. The three leading warm-up—the QB from the cover of US Football, a lineman and what looked to be a linebacker—were obviously North American. You could tell by the way they carried themselves, the easy swagger—though whether they were from the United States or Canada, I couldn’t say. The visitors, the Sphinx, were a pretty ragtag bunch by comparison. Some had white helmets with white face masks; others, white helmets with black face masks. A few wore black on black. During their warm-up, they weren’t sharp at all. If they had an American on their side, he was disguising it pretty well.
Music blared over the loudspeakers—French hip-hop. I couldn’t really make out most of the words. Something like “J’suis trop ghetto pour cette France…D’où vient le malaise…Trop de différence de rue case nègre à Paris seize…” The stands were filling up. I noticed this kid six or seven rows up from us, sitting by himself, away from everybody else. He was black but clearly not from here. In fact, he was pretty obviously American, certainly an athlete, probably a football player. He looked wiry but was broad-shouldered, and his neck was too thick for a French player. Safeties back home were built like him (though by the way he carried himself—kind of guarded, uneasy, hands deep in his pockets and hunched into himself in his letterman’s jacket—I’d have said he was from the States, not Canada).
I pointed him out to Moose. “From one of the other teams?” I asked. “A scout or something?”
“A spy?” Moose said. He leaned into Sidi, on the bench below us, and whispered something in his ear. Sidi looked up at the kid and shrugged. Moose turned back to me. “Let’s go see.”
The American turned toward us as we approached.
“You’re from the States?” I said.
He gave a slight nod but kept his focus on the field.
I sat down beside him all the same. Moose sat on the other side. “Mathieu Dumas,” I told him and offered my hand. “My friends call me Matt.”
“Freeman B…,” he said. It sounded like Bay-HAN-zin, or something like that.
“Moussa Oussekine,” Moose said, and he threw out his hand for a soul-brother shake. All the Diables shook that way; it surprised me at first too, and this black guy, Freeman, was looking kind of suspiciously at Moose for doing it.
The senior Diables kicked off—a good kick, high and deep. Their coverage team tagged the returner, and the American was like, “Oh, dang!”
“Fabrice, there,” Moose said in English, “is the most hard hitter on the senior side.”
“That was not particularly friendly,” the American said in French, “for a ‘friendly’ game.” His French was a little stiff, and he had a heavy accent. Still, you had to like the effort.
“The French are odd that way,” I told him. “They call pre-season games ‘friendlies,’ as though guys in plastic armor ramming into each other could ever be warm and fuzzy.”
“You are not French?” he said, using the formal vous for me instead of tu.
“Canadian. From Montreal,” I responded in English.
“But you”—vous again—“reside here?”
“For the season. I play on the junior team. I’m going to coach a bit too.”
He looked surprised. “Junior like JV?” he asked in English.
“The Under-20 division. One of fifteen or so clubs, across two divisions. It’s club teams here,” I explained, “not affiliated with schools like back home, so no varsity and JV.”
“They pay you to do it? To coach and play?”
“Insurance, an allowance for my cousin who boards me and for my meals and subway fare.”
“Nice gig,” he said.
On the field, the senior Diables had the ball and were driving toward the end zone. They were methodical—a dive that gained four yards, a sweep that went for eight.
Freeman turned to Moose. “You too?” He kept to English.
“No, I am French.”
“French? Right,” he said a little snarkily. “But what I’m asking is, they pay you to play?”
“Ha! This is only for the foreign ‘talent.’” He reached across Freeman and nudged me. “To keep this one from getting too sick for home and running back to his maman.” Then he put his fists to his eyes and made a wah-wah crying gesture.
I shoved him, and he slapped at my hand, but Freeman leaned out from between us, a little peeved, and we stopped. “So is it the regular season over here right now then?” he asked.
“The French have to do everything their own way,” I said, for Moose’s benefit more than to answer Freeman’s question. “They play January to April here.”
“Hear tell y’all Canadians ain’t so different, doing things your own way.” I hardly understood his English. “Three downs instead of four, twenty-yard end zones, playoffs in October…”
“And not just with footb
all,” I said. “Here, they call hot dogs ott doe-gue.” I pronounced it like Inspector Clouseau would. “In Quebec, we call them chiens chauds.”
Literally hot and dog.
“Like a little Dachshund puppy in a bun,” he said, “steam rising all up off him.”
And he and I laughed.
Moose didn’t. He looked like he couldn’t follow what we were saying. He said, “I will be honest, my teammates and I”—he pointed to our guys, who were all looking up at us—“we thought that maybe you were a spy from the Jets.”
“A spy? Ha! Before yesterday I didn’t even know y’all played here.”
“Do you play?” Moose asked him.
“Yeah. Back home.”
“I could tell,” I said, in French to make sure Moose could stay in the conversation. Freeman wore a gaudy ring—a school ring, I’d thought at first, but maybe it was a championship ring. “Where’s home?” I asked him.
“San Antonio.” He said it kind of boastfully.
“They say Texas high-school football is the best.”
He gave me a long look, as if to say he couldn’t believe I would actually question this. “Sho nuff,” he said finally.
The cocky bastard.
Then Moose said in English, “Maybe you would desire to play for the Diables Rouges?”
Freeman didn’t respond; he just stared back at Moose, face blank, clearly surprised. And I remember thinking, Sure, why not? Like me.
If he was for real, that is.
Moose said, “What age do you have?”
“Seventeen.”
“Parfait,” Moose said.
Freeman looked Moose up and down, as if he wasn’t taking him seriously.
“Why not?” I said. “Under-20 teams can field two foreign players. We only have me.”
“I start college at the end of January,” Freeman said.
“Postpone until the fall,” I told him. “That’s what I’m doing.”
Moose looked more and more excited by the prospect of it.
“Playing football in Paris,” I said. “How many opportunities like this do you think you’ll get? I mean, if you think you could make the team, that is.”
“I’d own this league!” Freeman said.
I got up, and Moose followed. We started back down the bleachers.
“We practice here tomorrow at six,” I told Freeman. “Come by. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
FREEMAN OMONWOLE BEHANZIN
Finding out about the game had been a complete fluke. I didn’t know that Villeneuve even existed, much less that they played football there. I’d come upon a poster in the metro the day before. It had a picture of a running back, a buff Brother, straight-arming a would-be tackler, some high-rise buildings off in the background, Match Amical de Football Américain block-lettered along the top. And I was like, For real?
But sitting on the RER train headed back into the city after meeting Matt and getting the Arab’s invitation to try out for the team, I knew there was no way I’d go back up there the next day—no way!—’cause I had to get home to the States, to Mama and Tookie and Tina. Then to Iowa State. There wasn’t no way I could stay longer in France, so why even mess with it? Still, the whole ride back, my mind kept troubling the possibility of it.
» » » »
My host family’s building, by the Parc Monceau, was fly: marble floors and fancy ironwork on the windows and doors. Their apartment was bigger than our whole house back in San Antonio.
When I walked in the door, Françoise, the mom, called from the kitchen, “Just in time. Dinner is almost ready.”
In the family, there’s Françoise, Georges, the dad, and a daughter named Marie, who is away at college. Georges was sitting on the sofa, listening to the news on this old-school transistor radio, holding it up to his ear, the volume turned low. He clicked it off and asked me how the game was.
“Merveilleux,” I said.
“You see, Françoise?” he called toward the kitchen. “I told you it would be fine.”
I had told him and Françoise that the game was a class excursion because they had been worried about me going up to Villeneuve. “It is a very dangerous neighborhood,” Françoise had said, looking grave, when I’d asked where to find it on a map. Me, I was like, Paris, dangerous? But Georges had chimed in, all serious too, “People don’t go there.”
I thought, Well, somebody must, because folks live there. I had seen the poster.
But Georges wasn’t all wrong. Villeneuve, when I first stepped out of the RER station, was not Paris. For real. Not like the Paris I’d been getting to know anyway. The train dropped me next to some projects—straight-out-of-the-hood projects. Jacked-up cars on cinder blocks, tagged-over concrete and steel. Everybody hanging about was colored folk, like me: African and Arab, a smattering of Asians. White folks too, but they blended in, carried themselves like the rest.
The place was more Arab than not though. On the boulevard beside the station was a bunch of boutiques and stands, bustling, their signs in Arabic. Men in suit coats and shirts but without ties stood on the sidewalk outside. Most had mustaches and were hawking everything from gold necklaces to cameras. Inside, the stores were full to bursting with shoppers, mostly women, some veiled, all with kids, coming and going through the glass doors.
Georges walked to the kitchen door. “You worry for nothing, Françoise,” he said in thick-accented English (even though the host families were only supposed to speak French around us). “I told you his teacher would see to his well-being. The Americans are good and trustworthy people too, after all.”
Georges is straight up the class clown. From day one, he’d been picking at Françoise, acting like she was neglectful or inconsiderate toward me, or just one of those snobby French types that doesn’t like Americans (which she is not, not none of it!—she’s the sweetest lady I’ve ever met). He’d act like he had to take up for me. At breakfast he’d say, “Voyons, Françoise! The sugar bowl—it is empty. The Americans are good people, are they not? Shouldn’t they have sugar for their coffee too?” (I didn’t ever even drink coffee.) If she didn’t refill my plate lickety-split, Georges would scrunch up his face in a put-upon rage, like it was him that had been wronged. “Ah, no! We must feed this poor boy properly. The Americans are good people too!” Françoise would just wave him off and keep on with whatever she was doing, but I always busted a gut behind his antics.
The day I went up to the game in Villeneuve was a Sunday, and Sunday meals had been a big deal the two Sundays I’d been here, but that night seemed different. Special. Françoise set out the nice china and silverware they had used at the meal when I’d first arrived, and after salad, she served coq au vin. It’s just chicken, but stewed in this wine sauce, and I’d told her I loved it the first time she made it. She brought it from the kitchen with a fanfare like, Ta-da!
Georges leaned forward in his chair as he served me. “It is really a pity that you are returning to America so soon. Marie has holidays soon. We will meet her at Mont Blanc. The Alpes françaises!”
I asked, “How many years have you been to make to ski?”
I could always hear it when my French was slipping.
Georges continued in English. “Me, since I was this high.” He indicated his knee with the flat of his hand. “I am really quite expert. Marie too. As for Françoise…” He wobbled his hand on the air. “Comme çi, comme ça. She’s so-so…”
She slapped his arm.
“And you, dear boy,” Georges said, “do you ski?”
In San Antonio? Right.
“If you were not leaving, then you could accompany us!” He was all excited-like.
“Yes. That is kind to say,” I said.
“So, how was the game of foot you and your classmates went to see?” Françoise asked.
I knew she meant soccer. “Very interesting,” I told her. “But it was football.”
“Football?” she said and made a kicking motion.
“Le football
américain,” I said and mimed a catching motion with my hands, though I expect she didn’t know what this signified.
“Le football américain?” Françoise said. “I didn’t know it was played here.”
“But of course it is, my love. Americans are good people too, n’est-ce pas, and like we French, they need sports to distract them from life’s more serious affairs.”
We went back and forth like that in French (well, me and Françoise anyway). See, I got French like a skunk got stink. Natural. That’s why Ms. Glassman, my teacher, took to me: ’cause I was the only jock in her class, and I be cooking with my French. For real. I hadn’t even considered trying to go on this trip when it was announced at the beginning of the school year. It was Ms. Glassman who called Mama and told her I should apply. She said there was an all-expenses scholarship I’d be a good candidate for—and I got it!
The two weeks here had flown by. Ms. Glassman led the group of us on daily excursions: the Louvre, Notre Dame, all what you’d expect. Interesting. Me, typically I’d bounce as soon as we were free. Not snobbish or nothing, it was just that none of the others in the group really appealed. They were three guys and eight girls. Most of them I knew by sight from the hallways at Heritage Park, our high school, and they’d be friendly enough. But they’d be all loud all the time, always wanting to stay just among us, never with the French, and they’d always be speaking English.
And all of them were white. I hadn’t thought it would matter before coming, but I felt like a fly in buttermilk the whole time I was with them. They’d always speak at me, never to me. Whenever we were together, the white boys would break into some funky pseudo-ebonics, like I wouldn’t understand if they spoke proper. One or the other would toss out knuckles; he’d be like, “Whaddup, bruh!” or “How’s it hanging, cool,” all but calling me “my nigga.”
“Bonjour,” I’d say back. “Ça va bien, merci”—It’s going well, thanks—and offer my hand to shake like the French do. For real.
Back home, I talk like I talk, not ’cause I don’t know better but because I do. Mama corrects me, but with my boys, how I talk is who I am. These here on this trip weren’t my boys, and whoever they thought I was, I wasn’t. So I would throw my French at them and keep my distance and bounce from the group whenever I could.