The Last Few Hours in Franceland

I just want to go home and sleep but it’s my last night in Royan. I have to go look at the Atlantic Ocean again from my customary vantage point. There went I on my first full day in Royan, and there I go again now, on my last full day. The romantic in me is a slave to symmetry. So, I’m tired, but I accept that there’s no real alternative, and down to the coast I go. I tell myself there’s no real choice, and there’s freedom in the thought.

I hadn’t really expected to become attached to this place. Royan. In the way that France is beautiful, Royan is not. All the buildings are new, all of them built in the 1950’s and 60’s; decades that were to architecture what the 80’s were to music: Pure indulgence in all the wrong impulses. If you think of architecture as a reflection of the times, you’d have to look on the buildings in Royan with the same uncomfortable feeling that you feel when you find your old, melodramatic poetry scribbled onto pages of old notebooks. You guess it’s all right, but you would not write that kind of shit now.

Still, right now I’m riding through the town in a haze of alcohol (partly) and nostalgia (mostly). Sounds reach me through a bubble, a thin curtain of air that’s following me and vibrating with memories from the past two years. I think of the times I’ve ridden with friends through streets that looked like these. That time we almost had a fight and the fucker attacked with a golf club and we retreated. Then riding home, we found a bike and I carried it with me on my bike in a pointless feat of strength to salve the dull throb of a bruised ego.

I arrived at the coast and called dad. He answered after a few rings. We talked about a lot of things, but one thing really stuck with me. I said,

“Well, I’m here looking out to sea in your direction.”

He said,

“Well, I’m looking in your direction. Well, down at the ground. I have to look down at the ground to look in your direction.”

I had forgotten about that. The world still is round.

***

Smash-cut to the present. My flight is delayed by half an hour. This is not a terrible thing: I had just been thinking that...

I worked until the morning of my last full day in Royan… Between packing and finishing work and selling my guitar (I sold my guitar) and going out with people I had not really contemplated the fact that I was leaving behind, indefinitely, the country that I had called home for two years.

David and I met Marcus, and then Salah, in town for a last night on the town sort of thing. We started out at the Phare, a bar I didn't know that well on the Old Harbor. Pints and Mojiti. Apparently there's a craze on in the United States called "icing" someone - in other words presenting him or her with  a Smirnoff Ice, which he or she is then required to chug. Marcus iced me, and since I didn't have a Smirnoff Ice to counter his (I don't quite remember the rules) I chugged. We chatted for a while about, as I recall, mostly "guy stuff" and then Marcus took off. Work in the morning. Afterward, David and Salah and I went to another place called the General Humbert's for a pint. We spent most of the rest of the evening making fun of an idiosyncratic hand gesture of the French. Now I wish I had a picture of that. It was a really good evening.

I woke up some time last night and ran into the kitchen and vomited forcefully into the sink. This morning, I woke up with a hangover, which is now technically a tradition; The last time I left La Rochelle I was feeling about the same. If we encounter a lot of turbulence, I will consider myself duly punished, and hopefully chastened, but who can tell?

This morning I got ready to go. Unpacked and repacked my suitcase.

La Rochelle airport is the smallest airport I’ve ever flown out of. It feels better, somehow. I do like the bustle of big airports – specifically I like to find little tranquil pockets to reflect and write – but now I know there’s something more welcoming, or intimate, about small ones. Normal (as the French would say).

My bag was overweight. In the end I threw away my shoes, left two bottles of wine with David, and finally got my baggage down to an acceptable weight. The place was full of English people speaking English to the airport workers. I felt annoyed. I’m not ready to leave France, and I’m not ready to no longer need to speak French. I know that because I feel a need to keep reminding myself that I’m going to see friends soon and get back to my chèrie. Still I know that because of all these other fuckers the workers are going to speak English to me. Well… I’ll keep going in French if they do.

David and I sat around and shot the breeze over cups of coffee. Talked about… nothing special – all the things we usually chat about. Then we left the bar, I joined the line, and David said he thought might bounce. A big hug, and handshake, a check-in, and a security checkpoint later and here I am.

I just checked my camera. The last picture that was taken of me in France was taken by Marcus as I chugged a Smirnoff Ice. Part of me enjoys that, but most of would prefer that I had a different last picture. So here’s me typing this:

To this truly beautiful country, and to the people I’ve met while living here: I miss you already, and I’ll see you again soon.

The plane just arrived. I thought: This is the plane that will kill me. I’m a nervous flyer. It’s weird though: The same part of me that is horrified of looking like a fool in public wants to know whether this is the plane that will kill me. So that I’ll be able to think as I’m falling “Yep. I knew it.” I’d like to be afforded the opportunity to be cynical about it. I’d like to somehow know in advance, so I wouldn’t be finding out and wrong-footed in front of everyone. Of course, I know that in the event of a crash landing my little seat on the plane would be the most perfectly anonymous place in the world, as terror tunneled our vision and we came to care so much more about our imminent death than about what the person in the seat next to is doing. I wondering if everyone is isolated in this way when they die; preoccupied with the fact of their death, a process that it is innate in us to avoid.

Anyway… time to get on the plane!

Tina's Café

I learned a new word: Anatopism. I have heard of anachronisms, but never of anatopisms - Something that's out of its proper place. Last night, I was taken to one.

- You were asking about the Toulouse accent?

I had been asking.

- Here you go. She's from Toulouse. T'es pas Toulousaine? Baptiste asked her in French. He (meaning me) was asking about the difference between the Toulouse accent and the Paris accent.
- Okay. The différence, she started, is... ...say "bread", she instructed Baptiste.
- Pain, said he, using the typical nasal vowel. Paa.
- Pain, she countered, making a sound much closer to the English word "pain."

That cleared that up, although it was a little bit strange to hear a Toulouse accent on a girl in Meschers. Baptiste and I had come down to Meschers from Royan to play guitar and ukulele in an American bar. The bar, called Tina's Café, was hidden in the corner of a beach that was itself hidden among chalk cliffs in the Gironde Estuary, an almost comically idyllic place for a delightfully ramshackle and charming bar/buffet/juke joint. I had seen plenty of places like it in North Florida, but never in France. It took me back, and it made me feel at home in a way that, mercifully, did not exacerbate the homesickness I've been feeling lately. It was, simply, wonderful to see so many things that I had not seen in a long time. It was wonderful and strange to see a Home Depot apron on the waitress with the strong Toulouse accent. It made me think of my father, and how much I hated it when he would drag me through that god-forsaken store. Souvenirs from America were everywhere. The definition of a "Florida Cracker" in the bathroom made me swell with statal pride (I meet the criteria, apparently, though I wouldn't call myself a Florida Cracker), and there was a sticker on the door warning me and others off of treating Texas in any way that could be considered dérangeant.

Baptiste introduced me to Tina in French, and we continued that way. It's always weird to meet a fellow countryperson and speak to him or her in what is a second language for both of you, but I was unwilling to switch to English before she did. As a foreigner in France trying to make your French work for you, you learn to hate it when you speak French to someone and they hear your accent and switch to English. Especially when their English is much poorer than your French.

Having met Tina, Baptiste and I clicked our beer glasses together and planned our set. Moving to an adjacent room in the bar, and sheltered somewhat from the sound of old blues standards pouring from the establishment's speakers, we rehearsed. Briefly. Then Baptiste went to find Wayne, the music guy for  Tina's. He told Wayne that we were ready. We had not actually played a song through in its entirety, but such things to tend to work themselves. One way or another, you reach the end of the song.

I don't know why this is... I'm fairly shy, I guess... but I don't really suffer from stage fright. I'm not front-man material, but if I find myself in front of an audience, I don't really get nervous.

When we reached the end of our set, someone shouted for one more song. Wayne arched his eyebrows and shrugged in the way that says "Why the hell not? If you guys want to, it's way more than cool with me". We played "I Will Survive". Started slow, sped up and dropped into a mariachi groove, slowed down. I thought the song was over until Baptiste, who was singing while I played the guitar, waved and clapped me into a bizarre, syncopated coda that would not have been out of place at some kid's Bar Mitzvah. Good fun, a set "sans prétension" as Baptiste described it. I would chalk up the lack of pretension to the improvised nature of the set more than to any artistic or aesthetic choice on our part, but... six of one...

We sat with Molly and Kim, a couple of gals from Nashville and New Orleans, respectively. Molly was, I gather, a session fiddle player who was playing for Kim, who was in the middle of a European tour with her honky tonk band. They complimented Baptiste and I on our set, and I was taken aback when Molly told me that I had kind of a French accent. Later on, when the girls were scheduled to go on stage and play before their band had arrived, I stepped in on guitar - one of the highlights of my evening.

Some of my coworkers had showed up to watch me play, and I went and sat with them. We discussed work politics, and I remembered abruptly that I had a bag of salad in my backpack, which I then produced and dug into, to the amusement of everyone at the table.

Before I left, I played a song with Tina, the eponymous owner of the café. She asked me if I knew this and that song, which I invariably didn't. In the end, she said "We'll just make something up" and announced it to the audience. So, as I strummed the twelve bar blues in an easy swing rhythm, Tina improvised a song about her life. Afterward, she asked me if I was on vacation. I wasn't, I told her.

- I live here, but I'm actually leaving in two weeks or so.

- Oh... well you gotta come down again before you leave. Come by and sit around and have a beer with us... you'll be an honored guest.

I felt honored, and I felt grateful to have found a piece of home in such an unlikely place.