Part Fifteen

For the second Christmas in a row Preacher came home with me. On the way up the road he told me he was thinking about going to France for the summer. He told me that he’d talked to Peter Washington in Ocean City and there was still a job there for me, if I wanted it.

I didn’t. I didn’t want to go to France, either. My French was even worse than his. Plus, I didn’t have a trust fund. I had to work over the summer if I wanted to continue to live off-campus.

So Spring rolled around and our respective girlfriends dumped us and he got his student visa and prepared for a few months abroad. He let me use his Jeep all summer. I wasn’t exactly a Jeep kind of guy but I took it. Played Sonic Youth and the Pogues and had a good time with it, actually.

I worked for my dad all summer. With a new kind of respect. I would sooner blow my brains out than work as a plumber, but I realized one day that by the time he was 20 he was married and working this job full-time with a baby on the way. I was 20 and felt utterly ill-equipped to do any of those things.

But anticipating a pretty dull summer of snaking drains, I made Preacher promise me something: “I want,” I said to him, or words to that effect, “to have a vicarious, English-speaking, sleeping-in-my-own-bed summer abroad of my own, so I expect detailed missives of your journey.”

“Sure,” he said, “I’ll send you some racy French postcards.”

“No,” I said. “Not postcards. I want details. Usually if you can’t say something nice, you don’t say anything at all. I hate that. And you have this misguided sense of chivalry that prevents you from sharing juicy details of your sex life. I want REAL letters. Set aside your proper upbringing and make me feel like I am there.”

“My sex life is much juicier in your imagination than it is in real life,” he said, “but I promise: detailed letters."

I note the above exchanges because I kept the letters. And true to his word, he gave me a few details. Because they are real letters and not some epistolary device I’ve concocted to tell this part of the story, they don’t have all of the exposition that you might find in fake letters. So I will be filling in from time to time.

June 8, 1987

Nick:

The French aren’t really rude, per se. But they want to know who you are before deciding how they’re going to act. If you show up wearing sneakers and a baseball cap and put a big grin on your face before you start talking to someone… they know you’re an American, and treat you coldly just on general principles. If you wear regular shoes and talk without smiling they are nicer to you. THEN you can smile. But not too broadly. You don’t know them well enough for that. In France, they think people who smile too much are hiding something.

Maybe you’d fit in here better than I do.

Technically speaking I have a student visa and I am supposed to be attending classes at the University of Paris. But school seems beside the point here. I could have stayed home if I wanted to spend my days with a bunch of American college students. So after just a few days I’m already planning on ignoring school completely. If I’m bored I guess I’ll go. But if I’m bored in Paris it means I’m not thinking hard enough.

The French need to work on their pop music. Very derivative. And Oi is still big here, at least among certain circles. I don’t mind punk but the skinheads are a bit much. In a way, though, it’s reassuring: racists are a universal phenomenon. Makes you feel better about America.

But I’ve already fallen in with the wrong crowd, I’m afraid. The trouble is that I am culturally blind to the nuances that would warn me in advance about the kind of place I’m going into. It’s one of those things where the locals can look at the sort of pants people are wearing, or the name of the band that’s headlining, or the haircuts of the bouncers, and tell you what kind of politics you’re going to be exposed to inside. But as a stupid American I can’t tell until I’m in the middle of it. I went to a club my second night here and heard a catchy little ditty called “Le president est un connard.” I don’t know if “connard” will be in your French/English dictionary or not.

I also learned that, despite speaking good St. John’s French, I don’t speak much actual France French. I can understand it OK if I concentrate. But I’m learning to keep my mouth shut because even if I stop smiling and wear uncomfortable clothes they can tell I’m an American the instant I open my mouth, and… it’s like the Heisenberg thing. If they know they’re being observed by a foreigner they’ll act different. Or was that Schrödinger? Call Ellen, because I’m sure you don’t know either.

Anyhow the club turned out to be a rather rough punk venue. But nothing particularly French about it. Smelled like stale vomit. Standard dim lighting, and bad music so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. The thing about punk is, nobody cares if you understand the words or not. I had a good time. I met this girl who is about the diameter of my arm with about an inch – sorry, two centimeters -- of soft blonde fuzz growing in on her head. She colored her hair (and part of her head) black with a magic marker while I was standing at the bar. I asked her name and she wrote ²²/₇ on the back of her hand and showed it to me.

I said, in my best françois, that in English “Pi” is a homonym for the word for “tarte,” but that in English “tart” also meant something bad when applied to a woman.

She took her scrawny leg and pushed me against the bar, grabbed my shirt, and licked my face. One long slurp from the bottom of my jaw to my eye.

Mmm. Cigarettes and wine and the intoxicating smell of magic marker. When she pulled her head back she told me that she swore to taste the first person who correctly identified her nom de guerre for the evening, and I was the first one out of six attempts. That it was a bilingual double-entendre, she said, was just a bonus.

Was there anything unusual about me correctly identifying “pi”? It seemed obvious to me. The whole Pi-pie-tarte-tart thing, OK, you had to know a little English slang, but still, it wasn’t that complex.

So Pi and I moshed a little. She got a bloody nose. Wiped it on my shirt. Thought it was funny. When the music was over I started staggering back to the hostel they set up for us by the university and she grabbed me and told me she had some people she wanted me to meet.

I don’t think I like you, she said, but you’re a good sport.

And I figured, what the hell.

She also said that she wasn’t going to fuck me because I still had too much America on my breath. I can taste the McDonald’s, she said to me.

They really hate McDonald’s over here. Yet apparently the local McDonaldses (?) do a pretty good business. Go figure. And tell me that a Big Mac tastes worse than Gitanes on someone’s breath?

We got to this flat near the university where there was another girl and three surly looking guys.

Actually, we were all pretty surly looking. It was late.

One of them asked Pi if she was bringing home another stray dog and the other girl – who, that night, was calling herself Fente – Cleft – said didn’t you learn anything from that Czech.

When they learned I was American they tried to talk real fast, but when I could (mostly) keep up they started talking in Verlan, which I couldn’t understand at all. It’s sort of like French pig-latin where they reverse the syllables (l’envers, get it?). I tried to take it with good humor. They were trying to get a rise out of me but I decided it wasn’t worth it. Listen, I said to Pi, I thought we were going somewhere interesting; the next time you’ve named yourself for a mathematical concept look me up and we’ll go dancing.

So this asshole name Michel decides that the whole evening is wasted if he can’t pick a fight. He’s the only true skinhead in the group, apparently. So he says to me, in heavily accented English, “fuck America.” Like that was supposed to make me fly into a rage or something. I just laughed. I started to walk out and he jumped up and said that I owed him eight francs for the beer Pi handed me when we walked in. I laughed again and said he could come by my place for a beer any day, and the dumb bastard punched me in the eye. I fell over backward. He jumped on me and we rolled around a little. The others mostly just stood there, although a guy named Neuf (yes, he called himself Nine) told Michel that if he got the cops up there again he was going to kick his ass out.

I didn’t see where it was worth breaking my hand on his ugly bald head, but I really didn’t have any choice but to hit him hard enough to get him off me. So I punched him a few times and got my knee on his chest and waited until he stopped squirming. It was my second exposure to French blood for the evening and frankly I was getting tired of it. French noses must bleed pretty easily, because I hit like a girl. You know, I'm a lover, not a fighter.

You fight like a fucking Frenchman, I said in English, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and then I walked out. He chucked a beer bottle at me from the window. It smashed on the sidewalk. Missed me by a mile. Apparently the French can’t throw, either.

Nick, I know you would have had a much better riposte than that. Send me some insulting things to say to French guys after they punch me.

Anyhow that’s what you get to live vicariously, my first week in Paris. Scary girls and a black eye. (I haven’t had any depth perception for a couple of days). And magic marker and two different kinds of blood ruining a perfectly good shirt.

-- Preacher

June 29, 1987

Mon Copain:
I told you I would write you detailed letters, not frequent letters.

So now I live with Pi, whose real name is Julie and the girl who, today, is calling herself Branché (what was she the last time I wrote? Fente?), and Marc (he was Neuf then) and David – I don’t remember what fake name he was using then.

They’ve all given up on the fake names except for Branché. I still don’t know her real name. Each morning she tells us what to call her. For everyone else it was a two-week fad.

They are all students at the University. Michel, who blackened my eye and bruised my knuckles, is not; he was a genuine working-class skinhead whom Branché brought home one evening. They brought me in, they said, as a substitute barbarian, because Michel was just getting too tiresome.

Julie is letting her hair grow out, but still uses magic marker to look less blonde. Black, acrid-smelling stubble and blonde, almost white eyebrows – not a good look. Still insists she doesn’t like me, even when she agreed that I could crash there indefinitely.

Their place is a three-bedroom flat right on the edge of the Fifth and Thirteenth Arrondissements. Sort of in between the Latin Quarter and Chinatown. The Latin Quarter is where the college is. Although I think that they don’t get many Latin students here anymore. Except for us Johnnies.

The building is a hellhole, though. The flat reminds me of the lair of the Sleestaks on The Land Of The Lost. Do you think the Sleestak caves smelled like cheap wine, marijuana, and BO? Me, too.

Mostly they make fun of my French and eat my cooking. Despite the worldwide reputation of French food, I managed to shack up with four people who can’t boil water. We talk about music a lot. I actually have them listening to the Stanley Brothers. It is authentic, they say sagely, nodding their heads. Veritable. My secret American agenda is to create a bluegrass scene in Paris.

Actually there already is a little bit of one. The only kind of music you can’t find in Paris is French music. I can find a French version of everything here – jazz, pop, ska, country, you name it. They’re real big on this techno-dance stuff, here, too. And apparently Springsteen is on a level with McDonald’s – everybody hates him, yet his concerts are sold out. They admit to liking Little Steven. I mean I do, too, but they like him for a different reason here: they like him because they think he’s anti-American. I tried to tell them they were misinterpreting. They didn’t want to listen.

Some French women seem to regard me as exotic, which I find really bewildering. But fun. The trouble is that they also seem to regard sexual activity as a political statement. Who am I kidding: the crowd I’m with, they regard EVERYTHING as a political statement. Frankly I’m not interested in making a political statement by humping some tobacco-breathed neo-Marxist. I don’t mind the hairy armpits but the lecture about supporting the Palestinian cause gets sort of tiresome. So, sorry, no lurid sex stories to tell you. But even you could get laid here, Nicky.

As you can see, these are not real punks. These are college students pretending to be punks. But I’ll say this – my French is already noticeably better. I can understand the verlan, mostly, even though I can’t use it properly myself; there’s something instinctual about know what words can and can’t be switched, and I don’t have that instinct.

Oh, and I haven’t been to a class in weeks. I mostly just hang out in disreputable places. When I can ditch all of the etudiants I go to this little Algerian place across the river in the 12^th. Good coffee. Good music. Pleasant conversation with people who don’t mock my French. I am trying to avoid picking up any Arabic – I’m linguistically confused enough as it is. I’m trying to compose this letter in French in my head and then write it down in English – trying to teach myself to think in French. It’s not really working. I just think in gibberish.

I know, I know, same as always.

By the way, my new friends think that my name is really funny.

Say hi to your folks and Jen for me.

-- Prédicateur

July 7, 1987

Dude:
I’m not in Paris anymore.

It all started on July 4. I made a Fourth of July picnic for my roommates. We went to a park called the Bois de Vincennes. Seul (that’s what she called herself that day… the whole name-changing thing is pretty annoying by now) said there was an American drink she always wanted to try. So we had to trek a few blocks in the opposite direction to this place near the Pantheon.

And it was Dr. Pepper. That was the big American flavor we went out of our way to find. Anyhow we had Dr. Pepper and beer, and the closest thing I could find to hotdogs (a bland Austrian kielbasa sort of thing), and I got a baseball game on Armed Forces Radio. They all speak varying amounts of English, Dave the most, Seul the least, so I tried to explain the play-by-play to them. We had some chicken salad, too, that I made with walnuts and grapes and a little Dijon mustard. And I tried to teach them how to play whiffleball. Yes, I found a whiffleball and bat in a department store here. We argued about politics (what is it about being an American in Paris that makes you feel compelled to defend Ronald Reagan? God knows I never said anything nice about him back in the US) and about art.

Here is my take on the difference between French art and American art. In America, we expect that art will pay for itself – that “the market” will reward the good art and the bad art will starve. In France they will go see movies they dislike, and insist that the government fund exhibitions for artists with no talent. And they will even go see it.

We each though the other's country was insane in this regard.

Late in the evening Julie – who now has a good ten centimeters of visible hair, and who has started coloring it with blue magic marker – told me that it was time for me to leave Paris. If you stay here any longer, she said, you’ll think that all of France is like this. Unlike the other three, Julie wasn’t from the city. She grew up to the south, in eastern Aquitaine.

I need to take you there, she said. You can hear how we talk in the south. Find out what it’s like to be a normal person.

So the next morning we got up and tried to borrow a car. We went to see a waiter she knew who reminded her that the last time she borrowed his Volkswagen she dented the fender. Then we went to a former lover of hers, a teacher, actually, at the Sorbonne whom she still called Madame Alexia, and Madame Alexia said that she’s sold her Citroen a year ago and darling, why don’t you visit anymore?

Madame Alexia was about fifty. When we were leaving Julie said, are you surprised I’m bisexual? I said, no. Are you surprised I slept with one of my professors? No, I’m surprised you sleep with people who remember the Third Republic, though. We then went all the way across the city to the 19^th. and she met this drug dealer named Casio who let us borrow his Audi, but it wouldn’t start. Plus I was getting a contact high just from sitting in it.

I said, Julie, by this time I could have taken the train. And she said no, I know Americans don’t believe in trains, we’ll take a car. So we went all the way back down to Monmarte, Place du Tertre, this insanely touristy little collection of easels and con artists, and she talked to a guy who agreed to let us use his Renault on one condition.

He told me what the condition was. It made me laugh. Then I complied. I took off my shirt and sat there in Painter’s Square for 45 minutes while this gay French painter made sketches of my torso. Then he told me that he would give me his car if I would let him paint me for an exhibition he was planning next month. (Remember what I said about it being your civic duty to support bad art?) By paint me he meant, actually use me as a canvas. He wanted me to undress and stand on a crate while he covered me with tempera paint, and then stand naked and paint-covered in some skuzzy little gallery for a night. Or two.

I politely declined. Although that might have been interesting. He was the only actual Parisian and the only actual artist there, and mostly he drew insulting pictures of the other painters. If you ever go to Paris, don't miss the Place du Tertre -- there is so much to mock there that even I couldn't resist. You would have been delighted.

The car was ancient and rusty and smelled of rancid wine. But it ran. If my handwriting looks shaky, it’s from the carbon monoxide poisoning – the exhaust system leaked badly. We weren’t sneaking up on anyone in that thing. Even if you were stone deaf you could have seen us by the cloud of smoke we trailed. We left the city late in the afternoon and drove south until it was not only dark, but desolate enough that Julie was afraid to drive any farther – the car only had one functional headlight, and it was pretty dim. She pulled over at the edge of a field and we had sex in the back seat.

I promised you details, right? Let’s see… Julie is about 5’6” and rail-thin. She is a natural platinum blonde (how she was raised in the south of France is another story, involving a teacher from Zurich and a man from Alsace and government jobs…) and her eyes are a watery blue. She wears too much black eye-makeup. Kohl-rimmed, you might say. Her hair is very short and spiky and, on July 4^th, a cerulean blue color – she tried to color it navy but for some reason that magic marker color didn’t hold well. She has very good skin – you know me, a pushover for a good complexion – in part because she is as photophobic as a vampire. Pale almost to the point of translucent. Our little picnic was the longest I’d seen her outside in the daylight. Her arms and legs are very skinny, like the rest of her. She has an “innie.” Or is it “inny”? You know what I mean. I could feel her vertebrae under my fingertips. She had a small, almost invisible scar on the back of her right arm, about four centimeters above her elbow; she said she got it falling off a fence when she was eight. I could feel it more than I could see it. Her breasts were small and almost perfectly conical and her nipples were large and light pink and pointed. Is that enough detail?

The back seat was too small. “Doucement” is very sibilant and easy to whisper in someone’s ear. It was good – quiet and peaceful and good, if also cramped and a bit chilly.

And in the morning we got dressed and found a place to eat and she ditched me when I went to the bathroom. Left a note – Something about how she can’t take these loving breezes any longer, so goodbye. Written in blue magic marker, of course.

Yes, my roommate took me out to the countryside and dumped me. Don't get any ideas. I could find my way home in Annapolis.

(I couldn’t tell if there was an accent mark after brise. It meant something different if there was an accent mark.)

She stuck me with the check, too.

So I paid the check, shouldered my little pack, and started walking down this gorgeous country road in the Limousin. Explosively green. Lots of streams. Finally I came to the little town of St. Bris. Not the “famous” St. Bris of Burgundy, they tell me, but another even smaller St. Bris in the Creuse district of Limousin.

Ever heard of the “famous” St. Bris? Me neither. But I’m not a big wine guy.

Anyhow I was walking into town (not suspecting it was the lesser known version) and there was this guy on the side of the road in a truck with a flat tire. His arm was in a sling -- he told me he dislocated his elbow (ouch) when a cask of wine fell on it. Such a French injury. Which meant he couldn’t change his tire. Which meant he’d been sitting there for an hour waiting for help.

So I changed his tire for him.

His name is Alain Monjalin. He runs a farming supply store, running equipment and fertilizer and the like out to the little farms throughout the region.

He liked the fact that I was an American. For some reason he has this idea that Americans worked harder than the French, something I haven’t seen any real evidence of in either France or America. But he went to America to visit his daughter and said that when two Americans meet each other, the first question is “what do you do for a living?” and two Frenchmen say “where are you from?” and that, he says, makes all the difference. Alain is a nice guy, though, despite his funny opinions about the French work ethic.

Anyhow he gave me a ride into town and found a place for me to stay, a room over a boulangerie run by his mother-in-law. It is, as my mother used to say, hotter than the hinges of Hades in my room – it’s July here, too, you know – but it smells like fresh-baked croissants all the time, so how can I leave? Plus Alain promised me a real insider’s trip around the countryside if I would go with him on his deliveries for the next few days and help with his bad arm.

-- Preacher

July 31, 1987

Nick:
OK, I went all the way to France to get a girlfriend. Her picture is enclosed. I’m in love.

-- Preacher

[The picture is of a young woman in a sundress. She has tanned skin and a few freckles across her nose. Thick, curly black hair. Dark eyes. High cheekbones. She’s smiling. Her arms are bare and muscular. Nice breasts, too.]

August 2, 1987

Nick:
I purposefully stopped that last letter short just to drive you up the wall. Did it work?

So, violating about 57 French laws, I'm working for Alain. I drive a delivery truck around the Creuse. I would be jailed and deported instantly if anyone found out. He would be in trouble, too. He pays me cash under the table, and apparently you can go to jail in France for trying to avoid paying benefits like that. In fact he says he would be in more trouble for not giving me benefits than for hiring an illegal alien.

And Ana – you still have the picture, right? Eating your heart out, right? Enjoying a branlette, right? – is the daughter of a farmer some ways south of town. She’s teaching me the langue d’oc one lip-movement at a time.

I made a delivery to her house. I purposefully kept something in the truck so I could have an excuse to go back later, at the end of my route. I flirted shamelessly. So much for Alain’s idea that Americans work harder. She was unswayed by my best efforts, my most winning smile.

Then she called Alain and told him that I had delivered a half-empty sack of fertilizer and demanded that I return with a full load the next day. I told Yves that I delivered as much fertilizer as I could and she hadn’t been particularly receptive to any of it. He laughed. “Y’a du monde au balcon,” he leered. See, at St. John’s they don’t teach you expressions like that. I won’t bother to translate it. Balcon means “balcony,” OK? And in France they prefer small-chested women, so that’s not exactly flattering.

"If I were a younger man,” he added, “and her standards were lower…”

Apparently they weren't too high for me, because when I went back and unloaded some more fertilizer she agreed to go out with me. (I learned later that part of the problem was that in France you usually met someone “out” rather than asking her “out.” Just in case you were curious.) I borrowed one of the delivery trucks and we rode into Aubusson, home of the nearest movie theatre. She let me hold her hand. I bought her popcorn and tried to be as charming as I could. She said to me “you’re going to shut your mouth once the show starts, right?”

I liked her even more.

We got in an argument about the movie and bickered good-naturedly the whole way home. When I pulled up the lane to her house she said that she’d seen American TV shows and was I going to walk her to the door? If you’d like, I said. So she waited, laughing, the truck for me to come around and open the door. “Why do American boys do this?” she said. “To protect girls from Indian attack?”

"To get a good night kiss,” I told her, and she put her arms around me and planted one on me that made my knees turn to Jello. And not a trace of cigarette smoke. Just a faint whiff of fresh grass. It was like heaven.

So I said “how many nights do I have to wait to ask you out again and not appear too desperate?” Apparently that doesn’t translate well, either. See, it’s hard to play dating games when you don’t know any of the rules. When all the games are new. That’s part of what’s so great about this. We are incapable of playing games. I mean, she’s expecting milles bornes and I’m used to water polo, so we don’t even bother with the games. If that metaphor makes any sense.

Anyhow we started spending a lot of time together and I am NOT giving you the details I promised about my sex life for this girl.

OK, a few. With her permission. The first time was in a hay shed during an evening rainstorm and it was far itchier than movies would lead one to think. Plus there was a lot of sneezing. But it was still great.

(I told her that my best friend in America insisted that I share every intimate detail of my time in France with him. I told her I wouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be galant. She laughed and offered to pose naked for you. We compromised with the snapshot I sent a couple of days ago. Sorry.)

The thing is that it’s all hurtling toward a conclusion. But I’m not kidding about being in love. I can see getting tired of France. I’m a little homesick sometimes. But the thought of leaving her just aches.

-- Preacher

August 23, 1987

Nick:
I’m flying into Philly at 5:47 p.m. on August 29^th. US Air Flight 5257. Decide if you want to go straight down to Annapolis from there, or crash at your place for the night. Be forewarned: I’ll be jetlagged and probably sleep the whole way down. You’re driving. We might as well just go straight down, right?

I got your note. The difference between you not telling me about the new house you rented and me not sending you a naked picture of my mega-hot French girlfriend is that in a week I’ll be living in that house.

Every time I see her my heart skips a beat. Still. I was in love once before, in high school, but this is different. Grown up, and all. Well, grown up for me. She has forbidden me from mentioning my departure. She said, one day you’ll be gone, and that will be that. Plus lots of mushy stuff that will have you pretending to stick your finger down your throat, so I’ll get off this topic.

My French has improved. My accent hovers somewhere between Paris and Limousin. And San Diego. They tell me I sound Flemish. I don’t know if that’s good or not. They won’t tell me. Better than American, they say.

The fact of the matter is that this whole linguistics experiment has taught me something, and that is that no matter how good my accent and grammar and vocabulary get, I’ll always be American. I just can’t express myself the same way in French. You know those French phrases you always hear people say, where they act like there’s no good English expression so you just HAVE to use the French? “Je nais se quois” is the only one I can think of right now. Anyhow, that’s a lot of crap. There are very few things I can say in French that I can’t say in English. But a lot of stuff I can say in English that I can’t quite get right in French. And my hunch is that it’s American English – that is to say, I would suffer the same idiomatic shortcomings if I was in London. I mean I can say that we got shitfaced on some “famous” St. Bris sauvignon, and staggered up to my overheated room that smelled of bread and old wood floors, and did it as languidly and easily as a bead of sweat running slowly from one shoulder blade to the other. But when I try to say it in French I have to decide if “allumé” really connotes the same thing as “shitfaced” and what is the right euphemism for “did it” and… I don’t know. It just doesn’t sound right in French.

At the end of it all, I’m ‘merican, dammit, that’s all there is to it. And Ana, my sweet, she’s French, and my only regret is that I didn’t meet her at the beginning of the summer. But I can see that we couldn’t last forever. It’s not a question of genuine emotion. It’s just that in the end, we don’t speak the same language.

I know, Nick, I know, right now you’re sticking your finger down your throat again. I bought presents for you and Jen and your folks and even your asshole brother, so you have to endure some mushy stuff in my letters.

Madame Meuchat, my landlady, wants to send me bread by Federal Express. I might take her up on that. You wouldn’t believe this stuff. I thought that living on the fumes from her oven each day would make me heartily sick of baked goods but this stuff is brown-crusted nirvana, dude. I have to admit that the bowls of coffee still don’t really do it for me – this stuff is strong and bitter, and I’m not much of a coffee guy anyhow.

I would kill for decent orange juice, though. The French are abusive toward citrus of any kind. I've had better duck l'ronge at Cafe Normandie than anyplace in France.

That's a lie. I've had unbelievable food here. I've never ordered duck l'ronge here because everyone would laugh at me.

When I get back I’ll try to describe the countryside. You know my feelings on photographs – a camera keeps you from really seeing things. So be content with the shot of Ana, and I’ll do my level best to do her and everything else justice when I see you.

-- Preacher

He arrived looking tanned and rested. He bought me a carton of French cigarettes, and a tape by a French punk group called the Warrior Kids. Porcelain from Aubusson for my mother, a blouse from Paris for Jen, couple bottles of wine for my old man, and a few French porno magazines for my brother. I drove into the night and he painted a picture of France for me. The man could tell a story, I’ll give him that. And for the archive I confirmed some of the details. That he never went to class, for example, and moved out of the official hostel early on. That he lived in a little room over a bakery in a tiny country town in Limousin. That he worked for a man named Monjalin, who confirmed that Preacher had taken up with a local girl named Ana, now married to a local doctor… but she refused to talk to me when I mentioned Preacher’s name, and I didn’t have enough information to identify and track down his old Parisian roommates.

If you are a student at St. John’s and you go to the Sorbonne for the summer and you get an incomplete for the class BUT you come back with a story like Preacher’s, you are held in far higher esteem than if you had gone to class every day and gotten an A.