Warming up in a nearby café, my mind couldn’t help wandering from our get-to-know-you chat back up those picturesque but painful escaliers. Had I turned my back on fate and thrown spontaneity to the wind? This question often crosses my mind as I pass through the same Sacré-Cœur square, slowing my pace and wondering if I’ll ever run into my lost Prince Charmant coming to collect my glove.
Paris is Good for Your Health
All the Wheat
Brooke Takhar
I have never been to Paris. Don’t cry for me though. I have smoked weed out of a hose bong with a 45-year-old drifter in Australia, almost fought a samurai on public transportation in Japan and waded (fully clothed) into the cerulean sea of South Beach in Miami.
So you could call me well-traveled. Cultured, even. But I still think my passport is incomplete without that inky smeared Parisian stamp. (I imagine it’s a rotund croissant wearing a jaunty beret and expertly applied Chanel lipstick. My imagination is often stupid.)
Other than the iconic monuments, non-stop accordion street music and museums I would last 10 minutes in before getting hungry/bored/yelled at for taking pictures with my phone, the reason I absolutely need to go to Paris before my bones turn to dust is this: Parisian wheat.
To back up a bit, I have celiac disease. You can stop being sad—it’s not a trendy killer. It just means when my intestines were on God’s assembly line, they were accidentally perforated and subsequently slid onto the filthy floor. When nobody was looking, they were flopped back onto the conveyor belt and haphazardly smooshed into my mid-section. (That “angel” later went on to become Employee of the Month so you can guess I am more than a little bitter.)
Having celiac disease, I can’t eat wheat or gluten. If I do, it’s ugly. It’s the variety of vomiting that you only hear echoing in frat house bathrooms. It’s violent, often purple and leaves me sodden and weak for weeks. So, totally not worth it.
My good friend Karli, who speaks only the truth and has similar gut failures, took a risk on a hunch while in Paris. She gorged on croissants, pasta and baguettes—and she was FINE2.
**FOOTNOTE HERE**
2 In case it wasn’t abundantly clear, I am not a doctor. I don’t even know any doctors. I can only speak to one person’s experience with Paris wheat. Please don’t take my advice. About Paris wheat or really anything at all.
Whut. What. QUOI?
How have I not drained my child’s college account to go sit on the banks of the Seine, surrounded by every baked good I have missed for the past several decades and systematically taken one bite of each? Pass the crème fraîche, Monsieur. I am here, and I am going to eat ALL THE WHEAT.
So then I started to think. If the wheat is magical in Paris, what else is possible on that delicious soil?
Could I actually do my 12 times tables sitting at a coffee shop with a breadstick tucked behind my ear?
Would I be able to do one real goddamn push-up on a cobblestoned street damp with the French air’s invigorating morning dew?
Could I finally master a cat’s-eye with eye liner under the soft glare of a Parisian bulb in a black-and-white loft overlooking a flat where topless male models drink espresso and do door-frame pull-ups?
WHAT ELSE IS POSSIBLE IN PARIS?
There’s only one way to find out.
Les Urgences
David Whitehouse
The old man had fallen to the pavement, and his wife couldn’t get him up. A passing woman, plump and middle-aged, had helped him to his feet and that was how I found the three of them, locked in a tight, immobile huddle in the bright light of a winter’s afternoon.
“Are you going to be all right now?” the plump woman asked them.
The wrinkles on the face of the old man’s wife were fragile like the threads of a spider’s web.
“You’ll be all right now, won’t you?” the plump woman said.
The wife’s eye shifted shyly through her wispy brown hair toward me. Encrusted with flaky skin, it was delicate as that of a young doe.
“I’m afraid I really couldn’t say,” she said.
I took the man’s arm. He was big and burly with thick white hair. I glimpsed the seed of youth in the smile his wife directed at me.
The plump woman was gone.
“Dad! What are you doing? We’re going to be late for the PARTY!”
My kid, who I had fetched from school, was using a lamppost to swing himself round and round.
“Go on,” the old man said. “Don’t waste your time. You’ll be late.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ve got lots of time. We’re early.”
The three of us shuffled forward, the wife holding one of his arms and me the other. It was a hundred meters to his house, he said. But he couldn’t keep going, and I caught him as he slumped down again. We got him back upright, but he could go no farther. We were stuck.
“DAD! I don’t want to stand here in the COLD!”
“I’ll call an ambulance,” I said.
I pulled out my phone.
“Thank you,” the man said.
The call was answered straight away. I told the woman where we were.
“His wife and I tried to get him home,” I said. “But he can’t walk any more. We’re stuck.”
“Is he inebriated?” said the voice on the line.
“What?”
“Is he in a state of inebriation? Is he drunk?”
“No,” I said. “He’s an old man.”
“I’m eighty-five years old,” the man said.
“He says he’s eighty-five years old,” I said.
“And he’s not drunk?” the operator asked.
“No.”
“I’ll send an ambulance.”
We waited, motionless. My child sulked. The man’s wife, elegant in her long black winter coat, said nothing.
The ambulance arrived, along with a police car. Three young men jumped out of the ambulance. Two blue-uniformed women emerged sluggishly from the car. They wore black boots and carried long black truncheons. The old man’s wife stood aside and looked at me, as if puzzled.
We were in Paris. I held the man up from behind by slipping my arms under his armpits.
“Good afternoon, sir,” said the ambulance driver. “We’ve come to take you to the hospital.”
“I’m not going to the hospital,” the old man said. “I want to go home. It’s a hundred meters down this street.”
“If you want to go home, call a taxi,” the young man said. “I can only take you to the hospital.”
I was starting to sag under the old man’s weight. The five uniforms stood impassive before us.
“I’m a bloody doctor,” the old man said. “And so is my daughter. I want to call her. Her number is at home.”
“It’s best to be examined,” I said. “Then you can call your daughter.”
The driver of the ambulance folded his arms.
“Yes,” he said finally. “You need to be examined.”
“Maybe your wife can get your daughter’s number?” I said. “While you get in the ambulance.”
“Don’t ask her,” the old man said. “She’s got Alzheimer’s.”
At this, the other paramedics moved forward and grabbed the old man’s arms. The driver, arms still crossed, gave me a small nod. I stepped away. My child, like a wild horse springing out of a box, charged headlong down the street.
~~~~
It started the next Sunday morning as a dull ache in my testicles and got worse. By the time I stood in my living room, in front of the parents of the new kids at my children’s school, it felt like a spoonful of molten lead had been dropped into each one of my balls.
The parents had come round to discuss how we could share the job of taking our children to school.
Five assorted kids were running wild in the background. The visiting mother was a tall, large-breasted woman, and as the pain grew worse, I struggled to keep my chin up to meet her gaze.
“I’m a public
relations consultant,” she said. “So it’s very difficult to know exactly where I will be on a particular day…”
“Stop leaning against the wall,” my wife said to me. “Why can’t you stand up on your feet?”
The husband shook his head and sighed, staggered by the dimensions of the problem. I wanted to cup my balls.
An intense round of negotiations followed. I smiled through gritted teeth. There were numerous complications. Mondays. Tuesdays. Wednesdays. Thursdays. Fridays.
I could feel a fever coming on. After what seemed long enough for the international war crimes trial of a minor African warlord, it was done.
“My balls hurt,” I said to my wife once they had gone.
The emergency doctor came straight around, and we grappled briefly in the children’s bedroom, my wife having indicated this was where the examination should take place. My temperature was through the roof.
“You should have gone to the hospital,” the doctor said, “rather than calling me. If there’s torsion in the balls, you have only six hours to save them.”
“Six hours? To save my balls?”
My balls: six hours.
“When did they start hurting?” he asked.
“They’ve been hurting for… a few hours,” I said.
The ambulance was soon there, and I was bundled into the back. Off we went, red light flashing, into uncharted territory. My amazing years of potency, it seemed, could be drawing to a spectacular end.
When I came back home it was possible that I would be… something else.
At the hospital, a woman in a white coat pulled me out of the waiting room and took me to the guy that was going to examine me.
Except there was no guy.
How could there be no guy? She wasn’t going to… it wasn’t possible that… oh no.
I looked at her again, and three crucial points struck me. In this order:
1. She was wearing knee-high leather boots.
2. She was wearing black pantyhose. They had to be pantyhose, the alternative didn’t bear thinking about.
3. A quick glance at her face showed her to be aged between 20 and 70 and free of any major disfiguring marks.
This was an infringement of my human rights. I would write to my health insurance company. I would complain to the association of balls doctors.
I would contact my Member of European Parliament.
I took my trousers off in the changing cubicle. Then I stepped into her office.
I lay down glumly on the couch.
“Please take your penis in your hand,” she said.
She was wearing latex gloves. She rubbed a cold liquid on my balls. Then she ran a scanning device across them. She studied the results on a big screen in front of her. I could see now that she was about 50, wore glasses and had brown, mousy hair.
Her manner was quick and professional. This was crazy beyond my wildest dreams. My private little world had not been breached. She might as well have been a dentist. It might as well have been my teeth.
“There’s no torsion,” she told me. “You have a minor case of epididymitis. You’ll have to take some medicine.”
“No torsion,” I said. I struggled to absorb the news.
I was still me. I was going to leave here and end this day as I had started it.
“I just need to do one more test,” she said.
She squeezed the skin on one ball between her fingers, and I screamed. She squeezed the other ball. I screamed again.
“That’s right,” she said. “Scream!” She grinned at me with a toothy leer. “Come on, SCREAM! Which one hurts the most?”
“Both of them!”
“Perfect,” she said.
She laughed, and I roared in tortured relief.
~~~~
At home I sagged triumphantly into an armchair. I was exhausted, but the medicine was already starting to wash the pain away.
“Dad! Dad!”
One of my kids came hobbling up to me.
“What?”
“My little toe is hurting. I think I need an ambulance!”
I called out to my wife.
“He says his toe is hurting.”
“Just kidding, Dad,” he said. And off he ran.
This story first appeared on Chippens.com.
Whine Country
April Weeks
The story begins in Germany.
I was living the dream—young, enlisted in the U.S. Air Force and stationed overseas at the largest military installation outside the United States: Ramstein Air Base, Germany.
The beauty of Ramstein is that it’s approximately a four-hour drive from some of the greatest cities in Europe. Amsterdam, Munich, and yes, Paris were all at my disposal any weekend I cared to hop on the autobahn and take advantage of them. Unfortunately, living overseas also encouraged crazy family members and their even crazier friends to use me as a tour guide. Most of the time this was great fun, but sometimes it went terribly wrong.
It was a lovely July in 2008 when my sister Anna and her friend Karen embarked on a European getaway. My husband Steven and I welcomed them and encouraged them to use our house as a launching point to see all the sites of Europe. Since I didn’t have a month’s worth of leave, I left them to their own devices most of the month. But for their final hurrah, we planned a four-day trip to Paris. While Steven and I had been to Paris on numerous occasions, this was the first time my sister and her friend would be going.
Now Karen comes from a small town. A very small town. That, in and of itself, isn’t a problem. The problem is that she loves her small town and is prone to homesickness. Looking back, saving the big hurrah for the end of the trip was Mistake Number One.
In 2008, the Fourth of July fell on a Friday. That meant Steven and I could savor a delicious four-day weekend without burning much leave time. What better place to celebrate America’s independence than in France? After all, the French were instrumental in helping us gain our liberty from the oppressive monarchy situated just across the Channel.
~~~~
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
The minute Steven and I got home from work, we grabbed Anna and Karen and loaded up the car. We hit the road at 6 p.m. and expected to arrive in the City of Light around 10 p.m.
Once we crossed the border into France (oh, the wonders of the EU—no passport control!) we were promptly flashed by a speed-control camera; my husband, a notorious speed demon, had been driving about 30 kilometers over the limit. It was one of the hazards of leaving the long stretches of unregulated German autobahn.
On previous trips to Paris, my husband and I had taken the high-speed train from Kaiserslautern, Germany to Paris in two hours. This was made extra magical because of the food and beverage car, which I always ended up in. Driving into Paris was a new and not-so-wonderful experience.
We planned to park near Charles de Gaulle airport and take public transport into the city. This plan failed when we missed the airport sign, the signs showing the distance to the exit, the exit—all of it. We searched, but were unable to find the mythical parking lot numerous co-workers had ensured would be there. We decided we would be able to navigate Parisian traffic and roads just fine. After all, we did it in Germany all the time. This was Mistake Number Two.
We reached Paris and the infamous roundabout circling the Arc de Triomphe. Even now, it’s possible I died in a fiery car crash that evening and am actually living in some sort of weird limbo. Based on the way we drove, we most certainly should have died. We circled the Arc de Triomphe at least four times before veering off on what we thought was the proper road. Nope. BACK TO THE CIRCLE OF DEATH! We took the wrong street at least three more times while we desperately searched for our hotel. Tiny twisty streets with no apparent rhyme or reason, and somehow we always ended up back at that damnable circle.
We didn’t make it to the hotel until 2 a.m. After a day at work, the drive down, relationship tests with the speeding camera, I told you so’s, and near-death experiences,
we were beat. We parked somewhere that appeared to be appropriate. This was Mistake Number Three. Blessedly, our room was still available.
~~~~
Thursday, 3 July 2008
I figured after a nice rest, we would all be refreshed, over our crankiness and ready to hit the town. We woke up, had one of those delightful continental breakfasts that Europeans are famous for and prepared to do some heavy sightseeing. This was where la merde started to hit le ventilateur.
The four of us hopped on the Métro to get to the Louvre early, as you must if you want to take in the full wonderment of the museum without a glut of tourists ruining everything. I fully recognize the irony of that statement as I was a tourist, but I’ve never claimed not to be a snob.
Whenever I visit the Louvre, the first thing I visit is The Winged Victory of Samothrace. She’s beautiful, sitting at the top of an elegant staircase in the former palace. If you can beat the crowds she’s truly magnificent to behold. Armless and headless with a gorgeous wingspan, she is indomitable. Breathtaking.
I love the Louvre, but it’s impossible to get out of. After three hours, Karen started to feel poorly. Maybe she needed to eat. She didn’t want museum food, which was hard to come by anyway, so we made our way toward the exit. After an additional hour of fruitlessly searching for an exit (so many doors, but no way to get out), Karen exclaimed, “We’re all going to die here!”
I kept thinking if she didn’t shut her trap, she probably would die there, by my hand. Another hour later, with everyone’s blood sugar dangerously low for group activities, we escaped from the palace into the warm French sunshine.
“Ah! Cafés!” I exclaimed. “Time for wine and baguettes!”
“No,” responded Karen flatly. “I want something American.”
Something American? In Paris? A bit of cordial bickering, and I gave in. It wasn’t worth it. And we had reservations that night at Benoit, an upscale restaurant with a Michelin star rating. So for lunch, we ended up at McDonald’s. MCDONALD’S. Crazy Americans. By this point, my frayed nerves were crying out for a glass of that amazing French wine, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it at McDonald’s.
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