Bar Fights and Bike Rides

Walter Agnew Moore II
30 October 2001, Northern France

OK, last time I wrote y'all I was pitching a fit after a long day at the prefecture, also known as the Place In France Where The Obsessive-Compulsive Find Employment. But my grandmother always made sure I knew there was good and bad in every race, and the land of Homo Francus is no exception.

For instance, did you know that the French love Americans?

No, I'm not talking about that guy who sneered at you on the subway in Paris, the twitching Trotskyist of the cafe. But that guy doesn't like ANYBODY, so why should he like you? I mean the kind of French people around here who go to bars and drink way too much beer and have interesting scars on their faces from motorcycle wrecks and knife slashes (pistols are hard to come by here, so you are far more likely to survive a bar fight). The kind of French people who have home-made tattoos all up and down their left arm because they are right-handed and they got bored in prison.

These people love Americans, perhaps because they are the kind of people who would have run off to America themselves in the old days to start new lives. Now, they have no job here, but they have a government check and free health care and one day runs into another down at the bar.

I'm in Pub Geronimo, a long low tunnel of varnished warm wood, shark and bow and arrow motifs. Luisa the Semi-Hooker is snarling at the Moroccan girl: "Toi! Tu veut baiser mon mec? Quoi?" The Moroccan girl says, no, she doesn't want to baiser Luisa's mec, she was just talking to him, she didn't even know he was Luisa's mec... meanwhile the Moroccan girl's friend/pimp/brother is doing card tricks at the bar, and me, I'm talking to Manu, who looks just like Steve Reynolds. Manu's giving me a run-down of Amiens recent history: "Oh yeah, we got all kind of people who came to Amiens: Portuguese, English, Germans, Belgians, Polish... all kinds of people came here after the wars to find work." Now they are all Frencher than French, the same way they'da been American if Grandaddy had gone to Chicago instead.

Three little guys in ball-caps are roiling around the back of the bar, mean, loud drunks. Jeff the Owner says to me and Manu: "God, I'm tired of all these Mexicans coming in here." I'm kind of baffled, because two of these guys have blue eyes, and the odds on that in Mexico are more like 100 to 1 than 2 out of 3, but what do I know. The card-trick pimp is Russian; Jeff keeps calling him "Hey, Cossack." The Mexicans and the Cossack keep aaaalmost getting into it—the air is tense—Christophe behind the bar is alert. Christophe looks and acts a little like Robin Williams playing one of his calm sad roles. I mutter, "Hey Christophe, it's about to get out of hand, huh?" He's like, "No, no, Chef, you can't ever say things like that."

The Mexicans are out of hand. One is trying to fight the Cossack, one is having a yelling match on the side-walk with the two women, and the third is waving around a huge wad of bills and declaring he's buying drinks for us all.

Jeff has had it. He cuts them all off. The Mexicans, The Cossack, The Moroccan. They protest, they weren't the ones who started it ...No, he has decided, they are cut off. That is that.

5 minutes later the whole crowd is calmly standing at the bar, sipping coffee and discussing the weather in soft voices. I have seen some drunks cooled out before, but Jeff is the pro.

I find out the next day that "cossack" is slang for a hell-raisin lady's man, and that "mexicain" is a real old-fashioned expression for somebody who runs off at the mouth (sorry, Frances).

So now I've got a bike. Francois went with me to a sale, and I found a bargain, a blue Motobecane 10-speed that was a steal, 150 francs, 20 bucks. I asked the guy if he'd knock 50 francs off the price, and Francois jerked a glance at me in shock—the guy just chuckled and said the new tires alone were worth 50 francs. He had a point.

It would have been easier to test-ride if they'd let me ride it in the parking lot instead of inside the store, or if I'd been sober. Little French kids can dodge out of the way fast.

So Francois set me up in the basement of his parents with oil and tools, and I tore that mother down; the front gear was completely 'foutu' but I just removed it. Now I have a nice 5 speed bike. The brakes aren't perfect, but I'll only need those to stop, so it's not critical.

I have christened it T'Chiot Bleu (pronounced Cho Bluh), which is sorta local dialect for Lil Blue.

Me and T'Chiot Bleu took it down the back road yesterday, good little 4 hour crawl through itty-wee villages that ain't NEVER seen a train or a bus come through. I saw a house with a thatched roof and a satellite dish on top. I wonder how it feels to inhabit a metaphor. Only 20 minutes out of town I was deep in the green fields on roads no wider than driveways, cow shit on the breeze. The few drivers were considerate. They are true jerks in town, but on the other hand they are used to seeing bikes and scooters.

Every 3 miles or so there is a compact village. Close to Amiens, they are mere 'dortoirs'—bedroom communities—with few local businesses, but farther out, they still run on their own.

The seat kept slipping low. I felt like a circus bear. I tried pulling it out, and picking up dirt from the side of the road and rubbing it on the shaft so it would help wedge it in. It helped a little.

I hit a steep hill. They are rare, but they exist here. I got off the bike and was about to push it when a car full of old people went past and they looked at me. "Damn it, get your butt up that hill", I thought, and I attacked it riding the bike. I used all my tricks, zig-zagging, pulling up on the toe-clips, spitting, cussing. I started to feel like I might die, I'm 41, people who are 41 can have heart attacks-- "SO MUCH THE BETTER! Die on a beautiful green hill on a misty day with my ancestors the Gauls smiling down on me while the birds sing and all my friends remember me, not some forgotten soul on a drip in an empty room..." I suppose I was hallucinating. My pulse roared. I hypnotised myself with the rhythm of my breathing. I got to the top, and I rolled on in pride.

Revelles. Tiny village, little cafe. Two cold beers and a big country sandwich at the bar, crunchy outside soft inside bread, ham, thick creamy butter. I ask the man if he has any wrenches—they use the same word in French for 'wrench' and 'key'—I tell him it's prolly a 10mm, he strolls out from behind the bar, goes outside, comes back in: "No, I think you'll need a 12 for that", and he gets it for me. 30 seconds later I've fixed the slipping seat. I tell him I like the way you can find a cafe in all the villages. He snorts: "This is nothing, we used to have 12 cafes here." "12?" "Oh yeah. There were 1,100 people here in the old days. All moved to the city. Now...400?"

The WWI memorial has 22 names on it. 2 per cent of the village died in the war, that is, 4 per cent of the men, or maybe 12 per cent of the young men. Always 2 or 3 times that many wounded. So maybe more than half the farm boys from Revelles got hurt or killed then.

I get turned around on the way back to Amiens, easy to do with crooked medieval roads and overcast skies. Find shrines to Mary at a crossroads, chances are there has been a shrine to her there longer than they've been calling her Mary, one staue replacing another as it is lost or damaged.

My road turns to dirt, then to two ruts, then to nothing. There are faint scooter tracks on the thick green grass. T'Chiot Bleu follows them.