Just Another Night in Picardy

Walter Agnew Moore II, Roving Reporter
16 January 2002, Amiens, France

So I'm walking down the sidewalk on the Route de Rouen, narrow brick houses forming a three-story high canyon. Dark already, not that late, I'm trying to get back to the bus stop so I can ride for free. I bought a ticket 30 minutes earlier, see, and it's good for an hour.

Gnawing a hunk of dried sausage that tastes like mummified rat, over-salted. There a piece of metal in it somewhere that they used to clamp off the end, and I'm trying to find it with my tongue as I chew it. Yes, you're supposed to cut that part off, but I didn't. I just don't care.

It would be kind of ironic to bite down on it and chip a tooth.

I find the metal and toss out in a garbage can. Would have heaved it in the gutter, but I don't want some little dog choking on it. There are dogs walking all up and down this street. At least, there have been. I step carefully on the wet pavement. Pull a tangerine out of my pocket, I peel it and eat it. Gets rid of the sausage taste quite nicely.

The schedule at the Pagès bus stop is impossible to read in the street-light. The times, printed orange on blue, have faded. A girl walks up, stops to wait herself, asks me if the bus is coming soon.

"I have no idea—this sign (shrug)—I can't read a thing. I HOPE it's coming..."

"Oui, S.E.M.T.A... you can never read their schedules. Vous êtes Anglais?"

Am I English? Well, that's a good one. To the French, every White person on the planet who speaks English is English. You can be an Australian of Czech family, but you're still English to the French. It's especially fun to watch the Irish deal with getting called English, or "Anglo-Saxon" as the French say when they are in a culturally-descriptive mood.

"Uh... no. I'm American."

I can see the wheels turning in her head: "Ah, bon, he say he eez Americain, but zey are all ze Anglo-saxons, des cousins, all ze same..."

I wonder how they'd categorize Cajuns. That would be a twist. Nobody who doesn't worship Paris can be "French", and most Cajuns speak English... I bet there'd be heads exploding up and down the length of France if they gave it honest thought.

We do the bob-out-to-look-up-the-street thing for a few minutes. I joke that I can make the bus come right away if I start walking.

I tell her: "The bad thing is, I am taking the #6 bus north, so I can get to the #9 bus, so I can go to the Centre Commercial *south* of here..."

"You're going to be travelling for hours!"

Maybe. After a few more minutes, I tell her, "OK, I'm sacrificing myself, so that one of us can get the bus", and I start walking towards the center of town.

The whole point of this ill-fated journey was to get to a big sporting-goods store down south of town and buy a mouth-piece. If I had just started walking there instead of waiting on buses, I'd be most of the way there by now.

I get to the edge of downtown, take a detour to the right, following the boulevard with its rows of trees, its sunken railroad line, its ghosts of old walls. close to the Jules Verne monument, I find a bus stop. Well, wouldn't you know it—I can get out there, but I can't get back.

Maybe I'll have time before practice tomorrow to get a mouthpiece. I really don't want to lose any teeth. I am going to start playing rugby with a local team. I know nothing about rugby; one night I'm in My Goodness Irish Pub talking to my pal Fabrice, and he looks up at me and says: "You should play rugby with us!"

I say OK. Michael the bartender overhears us and starts mocking French Rugby. I really don't think about it much again, then I start seeing Fabrice all over town, and about the fourth time I promise the man I'll come play, I guess I have to.

I'm in My Goodness a week or two later, and I say as much to Michael.

"Jesus, Walter, are you serious? Have you seen the lads on that team? That Guillaume fellow? He's a monster. And they've got more like that."

"But you were making fun of them!?"

"That's because I'm not crazy enough to go play with them."

So I have approximately 24 hours to live at this point, according to Michael. May as well enjoy it. I DON'T want to waste it down at My Goodness. I have started hanging out there so much I'm practically part of the furniture. Like the fat guy in Cheer's. Norm? Yeah. Don't want to turn into Norm.

My pocket vibrates, I hear ringing. My phone. I switch it on and hear a blast of music.

"Hello, Allo?"

"Walter?"

"Oui, c'est moi, c'est qui?"

"C'est Yannick! We are at My Goodness!"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm on my way..."

"See you!"

Yannick. Now there's a guy who knows how to cook. He and his crowd typically party until 4 or 5 am, then cook good food. It's all downhill from here.