Me Talk Pretty One Day

  A bell, though — that’s fucked up.

  The Tapeworm Is In

  WHAT DO YOU WANT to do, my friends? Go out?”

  “Go out where? Go out to the discotheque?”

  “No, go out to a restaurant, to the House of Butterfly.”

  “The House of Butterfly! Is that a pleasant restaurant?”

  “It is not expensive, if that is what you mean.”

  “Oh, good. The matter is settled. Let us all proceed to the House of Butterfly!”

  Before leaving New York, I enrolled in a monthlong French class taught by a beautiful young Parisian woman who had us memorize a series of dialogues from an audiocassette that accompanied our textbook. Because it was a beginning course, the characters on our tape generally steered clear of slang and controversy. Avoiding both the past and the future, they embraced the moment with a stoicism common to Buddhists and recently recovered alcoholics. Fabienne, Carmen, and Eric spent a great deal of time in outdoor restaurants, discussing their love of life and enjoying colas served without ice. Passing acquaintances were introduced at regular intervals, and it was often noted that the sky was blue.

  Taken one by one, the assorted nouns and verbs were within my grasp, but due to drug use and a close working relationship with chemical solvents, it was all I could do to recite my zip code, let alone an entire conversation devoted to the pleasures of direct sunlight. Hoping it might help with my memorization assignments, I broke down and bought a Walkman — which surprised me. I’d always ranked them between boa constrictors and Planet Hollywood T-shirts in terms of vulgar accessories, but once I stuck the headphones in my ears, I found I kind of liked it. The good news is that, as with a boa constrictor or a Planet Hollywood T-shirt, normal people tend to keep their distance when you’re wearing a Walkman. The outside world suddenly becomes as private as you want it to be. It’s like being deaf but with none of the disadvantages.

  Left alone and forced to guess what everyone was screaming about, I found that walking through New York became a real pleasure. Crossing Fourteenth Street, an unmedicated psychotic would brandish a toilet brush, his mouth moving wordlessly as, in my head, the young people of France requested a table with a view of the fountain. The tape made me eager for our move to Paris, where, if nothing else, I’d be able to rattle from memory such phrases as “Let me give you my telephone number” and “I too love the sandwich.”

  As it turns out, I have not had occasion to use either of these sentences. Though I could invite someone to call me, the only phone number I know by heart is Eric’s, the young man on my French tape. My brain is big enough to hold only one ten-digit number, and since his was there first, I have no idea how anyone might go about phoning me. I guess I could stick with the line about the sandwich, but it hardly qualifies as newsworthy. Part of the problem is that I have no one to talk to except for the members of my current French class, who mean well but exhaust me with their enthusiasm. As young and optimistic as the characters on my cassette tape, they’ll occasionally invite me to join them for an after-school get-together at a nearby café. I tried it a few times but, surrounded by their fresh and smiling faces, I couldn’t help but feel I’d been wrongly cast in an international Pepsi commercial. I’m just too old and worn-out to share their excitement over such innocent pleasures as a boat ride down the Seine or a potluck picnic at the base of the Eiffel Tower. It would have been good for me to get out, but when the time came, I just couldn’t bring myself to attend. Neither can I manage to talk with the many strangers who automatically seek me out whenever they need a cigarette or directions to the nearest Métro station. My present French class involves no dialogue memorization, but still I find myself wearing the Walkman, mainly as a form of protection.

  No great collector of music, I started off my life in Paris by listening to American books on tape. I’d never been a big fan of the medium but welcomed them as an opportunity to bone up on my English. Often these were books I would never have sat down and read. Still, though, even when they were dull I enjoyed the disconcerting combination of French life and English narration. Here was Paris, wrongly dubbed for my listening pleasure. The grand department store felt significantly less intimidating when listening to Dolly: My Life and Other Unfinished Business, a memoir in which the busty author describes a childhood spent picking ticks out of her grandmother’s scalp. Sitting by the playground in the Luxembourg Gardens, I listened to Lolita, abridged with James Mason and unabridged with Jeremy Irons. There were, I noticed, half a dozen other pasty, middle-aged men who liked to gather around the monkey bars, and together we formed a small but decidedly creepy community.

  Merle Haggard’s My House of Memories, the diaries of Alan Bennett, Treasure Island: If a person who constantly reads is labeled a bookworm, then I was quickly becoming what might be called a tapeworm. The trouble was that I’d moved to Paris completely unprepared for my new pastime. The few tapes I owned had all been given to me at one point or another and thrown into my suitcase at the last minute. There are only so many times a grown man can listen to The Wind in the Willows, so I was eventually forced to consider the many French tapes given as subtle hints by our neighbors back in Normandy.

  I tried listening to The Misanthrope and Fontaine’s Fables, but they were just too dense for me. I’m much too lazy to make that sort of effort. Besides, if I wanted to hear people speaking wall-to-wall French, all I had to do was remove my headphones and participate in what is known as “real life,” a concept as uninviting as a shampoo cocktail.

  Desperate for material, I was on the verge of buying a series of Learn to Speak English tapes when my sister Amy sent a package containing several cans of clams, a sack of grits, an audio walking tour of Paris, and my very own copy of Pocket Medical French, a palm-size phrase book and corresponding cassette designed for doctors and nurses unfamiliar with the language. The walking tour guides one through the city’s various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.

  I followed my walking tour to Notre Dame, where, bored with a lecture on the history of the flying buttress, I switched tapes and came to see Paris through the jaundiced eyes of the pocket medical guide. Spoken in English and then repeated, slowly and without emotion, in French, the phrases are short enough that I was quickly able to learn such sparkling conversational icebreakers as “Remove your dentures and all of your jewelry” and “You now need to deliver the afterbirth.” Though I have yet to use any of my new commands and questions, I find that, in learning them, I am finally able to imagine myself Walkman-free and plunging headfirst into an active and rewarding social life. That’s me at the glittering party, refilling my champagne glass and turning to ask my host if he’s noticed any unusual discharge. “We need to start an IV” I’ll say to the countess while boarding her yacht. “But first could I trouble you for a stool sample?”

  With practice I will eventually realize my goal; in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight in my external audio meatus, walking the quays and whispering, “Has anything else been inserted into your anus? Has anything else been inserted into your anus?”

  Make That a Double

  THERE ARE, I HAVE NOTICED, two basic types of French spoken by Americans vacationing in Paris: the Hard Kind and the Easy Kind. The Hard Kind involves the conjugation of wily verbs and the science of placing them alongside various other words in order to form such sentences as “I go him say good afternoon” and “No, not to him I no go it him say now.”

  The second, less complicated form of French amounts to screaming English at the top of your lungs, much the same way you’d shout at a deaf person or the dog you thought you could train to stay off the sofa. Doubt and hesitation are completely unnecessary, as Easy French is rooted in the pre
mise that, if properly packed, the rest of the world could fit within the confines of Reno, Nevada. The speaker carries no pocket dictionary and never suffers the humiliation that inevitably comes with pointing to the menu and ordering the day of the week. With Easy French, eating out involves a simple “BRING ME A STEAK.”

  Having undertaken the study of Hard French, I’ll overhear such requests and glare across the room, thinking, “That’s Mister Steak to you, buddy.” Of all the stumbling blocks inherent in learning this language, the greatest for me is the principle that each noun has a corresponding sex that affects both its articles and its adjectives. Because it is a female and lays eggs, a chicken is masculine. Vagina is masculine as well, while the word masculinity is feminine. Forced by the grammar to take a stand one way or the other, hermaphrodite is male and indecisiveness female.

  I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant, it’s probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and Rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it’s the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.

  What’s the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I’ll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard. This works until it’s time to order and I decide that because it sometimes loses its makeup, a sandwich is undoubtedly feminine.

  I just can’t manage to keep my stories straight. Hoping I might learn through repetition, I tried using gender in my everyday English. “Hi, guys,” I’d say, opening a new box of paper clips, or “Hey, Hugh, have you seen my belt? I can’t find her anywhere.” I invented personalities for the objects on my dresser and set them up on blind dates. When things didn’t work out with my wallet, my watch drove a wedge between my hairbrush and my lighter. The scenarios reminded me of my youth, when my sisters and I would enact epic dramas with our food. Ketchup-wigged french fries would march across our plates, engaging in brief affairs or heated disputes over carrot coins while burly chicken legs guarded the perimeter, ready to jump in should things get out of hand. Sexes were assigned at our discretion and were subject to change from one night to the next — unlike here, where the corncob and the string bean remain locked in their rigid masculine roles. Say what you like about southern social structure, but at least in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing both ways.

  Nothing in France is free from sexual assignment. I was leafing through the dictionary, trying to complete a homework assignment, when I noticed the French had prescribed genders for the various land masses and natural wonders we Americans had always thought of as sexless, Niagara Falls is feminine and, against all reason, the Grand Canyon is masculine. Georgia and Florida are female, but Montana and Utah are male. New England is a she, while the vast area we call the Midwest is just one big guy. I wonder whose job it was to assign these sexes in the first place. Did he do his work right there in the sanitarium, or did they rent him a little office where he could get away from all the noise?

  There are times when you can swallow the article and others when it must be clearly pronounced, as the word has two different meanings, one masculine and the other feminine. It should be fairly obvious that I cooked an omelette in a frying pan rather than in a wood stove, but it bothers me to make the same mistakes over and over again. I wind up exhausting the listener before I even get to the verb.

  My confidence hit a new low when my friend Adeline told me that French children often make mistakes, but never with the sex of their nouns. “It’s just something we grow up with,” she said. “We hear the gender once, and then think of it as part of the word. There’s nothing to it.”

  It’s a pretty grim world when I can’t even feel superior to a toddler. Tired of embarrassing myself in front of two-year-olds, I’ve started referring to everything in the plural, which can get expensive but has solved a lot of my problems. In saying a melon, you need to use the masculine article. In saying the melons, you use the plural article, which does not reflect gender and is the same for both the masculine and the feminine. Ask for two or ten or three hundred melons, and the number lets you off the hook by replacing the article altogether. A masculine kilo of feminine tomatoes presents a sexual problem easily solved by asking for two kilos of tomatoes. I’ve started using the plural while shopping, and Hugh has started using it in our cramped kitchen, where he stands huddled in the corner, shouting, “What do we need with four pounds of tomatoes?”

  I answer that I’m sure we can use them for something. The only hard part is finding someplace to put them. They won’t fit in the refrigerator, as I filled the last remaining shelf with the two chickens I bought from the butcher the night before, forgetting that we were still working our way through a pair of pork roasts the size of Duraflame logs. “We could put them next to the radios,” I say, “or grind them for sauce in one of the blenders. Don’t get so mad. Having four pounds of tomatoes is better than having no tomatoes at all, isn’t it?”

  Hugh tells me that the market is off-limits until my French improves. He’s pretty steamed, but I think he’ll get over it when he sees the CD players I got him for his birthday.

  Remembering My Childhood on the Continent of Africa

  WHEN HUGH WAS IN THE FIFTH GRADE, his class took a field trip to an Ethiopian slaughterhouse. He was living in Addis Ababa at the time, and the slaughterhouse was chosen because, he says, “It was convenient.”

  This was a school system in which the matter of proximity outweighed such petty concerns as what may or may not be appropriate for a busload of eleven-year-olds. “What?” I asked. “Were there no autopsies scheduled at the local morgue? Was the federal prison just a bit too far out of the way?”

  Hugh defends his former school, saying, “Well, isn’t that the whole point of a field trip? To see something new?”

  “Technically yes, but …”

  “All right then,” he says. “So we saw some new things.”

  One of his field trips was literally a trip to a field where the class watched a wrinkled man fill his mouth with rotten goat meat and feed it to a pack of waiting hyenas. On another occasion they were taken to examine the bloodied bedroom curtains hanging in the palace of the former dictator. There were tamer trips, to textile factories and sugar refineries, but my favorite is always the slaughterhouse. It wasn’t a big company, just a small rural enterprise run by a couple of brothers operating out of a low-ceilinged concrete building. Following a brief lecture on the importance of proper sanitation, a small white piglet was herded into the room, its dainty hooves clicking against the concrete floor. The class gathered in a circle to get a better look at the animal, who seemed delighted with the attention he was getting. He turned from face to face and was looking up at Hugh when one of the brothers drew a pistol from his back pocket, held it against the animal’s temple, and shot the piglet, execution-style. Blood spattered, frightened children wept, and the man with the gun offered the teacher and bus driver some meat from a freshly slaughtered goat.

  When I’m told such stories, it’s all I can do to hold back my feelings of jealousy. An Ethiopian slaughterhouse. Some people have all the luck. When I was in elementary school, the best we ever got was a trip to Old Salem or Colonial Williamsburg, one of those preserved brick villages where time supposedly stands still and someone earns his living as a town crier. There was always a blacksmith, a group of wandering patriots, and a collection of bonneted women hawking corn bread or gingersnaps made “the ol’-fashioned way.” Every now and then you might come across a doer of bad deeds serving time in the stocks, but that was generally as exciting as it got.

  Certain events are parallel, but compared with Hugh’s, my childhood was unspeakably dull. When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was
seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects. An eventful day for my mother might have involved a trip to the dry cleaner or a conversation with the potato-chip delivery-man. Asked one ordinary Congo afternoon what she’d done with her day, Hugh’s mother answered that she and a fellow member of the Ladies’ Club had visited a leper colony on the outskirts of Kinshasa. No reason was given for the expedition, though chances are she was staking it out for a future field trip.

  Due to his upbringing, Hugh sits through inane movies never realizing that they’re often based on inane television shows. There were no poker-faced sitcom martians in his part of Africa, no oil-rich hillbillies or aproned brides trying to wean themselves from the practice of witchcraft. From time to time a movie would arrive packed in a dented canister, the film scratched and faded from its slow trip around the world. The theater consisted of a few dozen folding chairs arranged before a bedsheet or the blank wall of a vacant hangar out near the airstrip. Occasionally a man would sell warm soft drinks out of a cardboard box, but that was it in terms of concessions.

  When I was young, I went to the theater at the nearby shopping center and watched a movie about a talking Volkswagen. I believe the little car had a taste for mischief but I can’t be certain, as both the movie and the afternoon proved unremarkable and have faded from my memory. Hugh saw the same movie a few years after it was released. His family had left the Congo by this time and were living in Ethiopia. Like me, Hugh saw the movie by himself on a weekend afternoon. Unlike me, he left the theater two hours later, to find a dead man hanging from a telephone pole at the far end of the unpaved parking lot. None of the people who’d seen the movie seemed to care about the dead man. They stared at him for a moment or two and then headed home, saying they’d never seen anything as crazy as that talking Volkswagen. His father was late picking him up, so Hugh just stood there for an hour, watching the dead man dangle and turn in the breeze. The death was not reported in the newspaper, and when Hugh related the story to his friends, they said, “You saw the movie about the talking car?”