How to Forget All Your Worries For a Good 30 Seconds
by Walter Agnew Moore II
25 March 2002, Amiens, France

My head hits the ground so hard that Fabienne feels it through her feet over on the sidelines. The guys on my Rugby team say I was going straight up the middle with the ball, and Tall Fabien laid me out from my left side (Stocky Fabien was on the sidelines in a folding chair with his crutches next to him). My Texas buddy Fabrice says I got up and walked around in circles some, then plopped down on my butt and started babbling nonsense words.

I will have to take their word for it. I don't remember much.

Maybe I should back up.

THE RECONSTRUCTED EVENTS OF 24 MARCH 2002, PRE-CONCUSSION:

So I wake up early, before the alarm. First big Rugby game today, and I am scared. The last practice was OK, but at the one before that I got hit so hard in the ribs that my heart and half my left lung shot up out of my right ear. It still hurts.

I am supposed to go to Fabrice's a little before two o'clock, we will all ride to the match together. I don't know where it is, but the name he gave me—"La Providence", sounds like some village way out in the back of beyond.

I stroll on down the hill towards the middle of town. It is sunny and almost warm for once. All the way down Route de Rouen you can see the massive cathedrale. There is no describing it. It is like a big grey mountain that fell in the of town 700 years ago, all out of scale to the buildings under it. Last night I saw the setting sun reflected gold off its front after the sky behind it was already black.

I need some hangover food. Wonder if those two hairdressers will be back at the pub tonight.

Now, hairdressers... If you are stuck in a college town like Amiens full of neotenous student-types who live off mommy and daddy, there is nothing like meeting a couple of feisty hairdressers who work for a living to bring in a fresh perspective. Celia and Lulu.

Celia is the little blonde one who hits and kicks and bites her friends, her favorite expression is "qui aime bien, chatie bien", which loosely translates as "whoever likes you well, gives you hell". She must love me. She is sick of being a hairdresser, and she is going to go volunteer for the French Army in September.

Lulu (Ludivine) is the tall one with dark red hair who looks like a brooding princess when she is lost in her own thoughts, but then she whoops those big eyes over on you and grins and you realize she is a loon. A Picard accent that could peel paint, think of the French version of the people in "Fargo". But I'm diggin' it. One of nine kids from out in a village east of Amiens.

Neither one speaks a word of English. Neither one cares. When they are off work they want to joke and goof around and play cards. They like me because I am as nuts as they are.

Lulu wears a tiny gold cross around her neck. Celia wears a little silver motorcycle.

I inhale a good greasy "Croque-Madame" in the restaurant, a fried egg over a sort of ham-and-cheese sandwich thingy. Walk on back towards home. Gonna be time to get killed in an hour.

Jes calls and sets off a high-pitched Russian tune in my pocket. I fish out my portable. Walking down the street talking really loud on a cell-phone makes you cool.

"Walter— no, I can't get my phone to work— I'm calling from a pay phone— are you playing? I want to come cheer you on!"

"Uh, I don't know if it's in Amiens or not, I can check—"

"Are you nervous?"

"I'm scared as hell. But I am gonna go have my Fear-Shit and then just go play—"

"Yes, it will be better after your Fear-Shit, won't it."

"Hope so. Look, I'll find out where it is and call you back in a little while..."

The Fear-Shit. The nice thing about Jes is that a guy can objectively discuss physiological matters of the grittier nature with her. As anyone who has ever played sports, or been in the Army, or given speeches or music recitals or had to fight the bully after school knows, the Fear-Shit is what you do first, you lighten your body of all bad things holding you back.

Jes understands these things. But then, she was the one who got kicked out of that fancy dress ball back in England for, well... maybe you better ask her. But there is more you can do out on the dance floor, in a dress, than just dance or have sex.

I call Fabrice. "La Providence" is a big private school with playing fields on the south edge of town near his apartment. I can just walk straight there. I texto Jes back and tell her it is exactly due South of the bar where she was staying.

So I get to the field, a couple of people I know are there, handshakes, bonjours, saluts. There is a problem with the field: goal-posts for American Football that are too wide for Rugby, the lines on the field aren't painted right, and best of all, right behind one of the goal-lines (sorry, I don't know all the Rugby terms yet, besides, I am learning the French versions, as in, it's not a "scrum", it's a "melee", which seems more accurate to me)— anyway, right one yard behind this goal-line that we are supposed to go tearing across at high speed, they have a thin screen of bushes in front of a barbed-wire fence.

Will we play? That's for the Ref to say.

Only four or five of our guys are here yet. Then a whole convoy of vans and cars come rolling in at once. The other team. They spill out into the parking lot, yelling, pitching balls around. Big mothers. Big damn dudes with scruffed-up hair and no necks. They have squinting grins on their faces as if they enjoy inflicting pain. About half of them look like they weigh at least 260 pounds. I look at them, and I look at our guys, who used to seem so big and tough, and the other team makes us look like a bunch of bulemic Art students.

Our guys come driving up in twos and threes.

Well, I am with my team. We'll see how it goes. I am slightly amazed that I am so detached. I think that mentally I have just stepped sideways from whatever those big Brueghels-painting peasants are going to do to me.

We still don't know if it'll be a game— Ref isn't here yet. Fred our trainer yells, and we run down into the locker room to suit up.

There are 20 of us sitting on benches around the room. A couple of guys are playing grab-ass and joking, but most are quiet. Lots of the guys are ritually putting on bits and pieces of armor under their clothes— it is bogus that they don't wear anything in Rugby. They just don't wear much of anything that would really protect you.

My protection is a pair of long purple socks with a hole by the little toe, a pair of blue shorts, a fading red jersey, and a pair of cleated shoes, all borrowed. A toothguard, bought by me.

Fabrice is getting dressed over on my right. He doesn't talk. I notice that my metal cleats can make a really interesting rhythm when I clack them on the cold smooth cement floor.

Fred comes in, and the few who were talking shut up. He plants himself in the middle of the room, and he speaks.

"Hey, les mecs. I have two choices for you: There will be a game today, or there will not be. The Ref is not yet here to decide."

"If there is a game: I want to see real Rugby. Those boys drove all the way down here from Arras, and they have come here TO WIN. You will not beat them unless you play REAL RUGBY. It is up to you."

"Now, if the Ref says no game: We still play. It won't be official. We need to practice for next week's match versus Douai. If this is the case, NOTHING is different— I still want to see REAL RUGBY."

He looks over at me: "T'as compris, Monsieur l'Anglais?"

I chuff back "Oui mon chef!" and I throw him a salute.

It's a game we play, Fred and I, it started when I was over at his house watching the France-England match, and he grinned and told me he didn't trust me to root for the French, because English and American, that's just the same. Now whenever I show up he yells "Hello Mr. English!" at me, and I yell back "Hello Mr. Belgian!" at him, because French and Belgian, that's just the same.

Olivier's dad comes in with a crate full of jerseys and slams them down on the floor. They are white with blue stripes, sparkling clean.

Fred yells out who will play the 15 positions. Those guys go get jerseys #1 through 15 out of the crate. I am in reserve. I strip off the red jersey and go get an extra white one. I am Player Number Eighteen now.

We crunch up the ramp out of the basement locker-room, and we come up past wives and girlfriends and a couple of children, they are standing murmuring, watching from our right behind the railing. The sun makes us squint as we turn and give them crooked smiles. Everyones' cleats together make a sound like rocks being smashed by hammers. It is a beautiful day.

We hit the grass, and the steady crashing sound changes to rapid thumping as we start running. The other team is already out there at one end of the field, blue jerseys, warming up. We are at our end of the field, running, kicking. I am in a herd of buffalo warming up by passing several balls back and forth as we run in line.

It is the first time for me that I have gotten to play Rugby, and I am not freezing, or wet, or sick with dread before it even starts.

Then the Ref comes out to the field, waves his arm at the barbed-wire, and cancels the match.

Well, damn.

After the Ref goes away, Fred goes to talk to the president of the other team and proposes a friendly practice. They mull it over on their end of the field.

Fabrice says, "Hey, did your friend show up?"

I look at the blur of people over in the distance. "I don't know— without my glasses, the Queen of England could be standing over there, and I wouldn't know it. She called me, you know."

"Wha-aat?"

"The Queen of England. We had a beer yesterday, and she said she'd come to the match."

"Bouf."

The blue mass at the other end of the field turns and runs away back toward the parking lot.

"They decided if it wasn't an official match, they didn't want to play with us."

We take the obvious solution to the problem of 20 guys standing on a Rugby field on the first sunny day in two weeks. Half of us go back and get our motley colored jerseys, and we split up for a game of 10-on-10.

It is my supreme joy to have two of the biggest and quickest guys, Brez and Guillaume, right in front of me on the other squad. I don't get flattened as much as I should because both of them are able to shoot past me if they get even a glimpse of an opening. Guillaume especially is freakishly quick at changing direction.

My job, as one of the "costauds", the "tough guys" up front, is to snag and tear and push at the ball carrier. This takes some getting used to if you haven't done it before. To capture the feeling without actually playing Rugby, just run at high speed around your home, throwing yourself at furniture, walls, television sets, or out the convenient window.

I give it a shot, but am constantly slowing down because I don't really know when I am supposed to hit and when I am supposed to just pass off the ball. This gets Fabrice really pissed off, and he gives me gentle encouragement:

"What the fuck, Wal-taire? Are you gonna hit him or not?"

"HIT them, Wal-taire, HIT them, LOW! You are WEAK!"

"Goddammit Waltaire, these are not your FRIENDS," (well, actually, they are). "You want to HURT them!"

"Waltaire, we are playing RUGBY here, quit hugging that guy and kissing him good-night on his shoulder!"

The condensed version of what Fabrice is trying to say is that either I hurt somebody, possibly but not necessarily myself, or else I hit the road packing to join a touring drag revue singing showtunes with a lisp, or whatever it is that sissies like me are into.

Well now by God we can't have that, so I try to forget my personal sense of survival built in from a gazillion years of evolution selecting those who did NOT smash their own bodies to bits, and I start running into them the way Fabrice wants me to. What are my unbroken bones versus his happiness?

I still miss tackles, but now I miss them gloriously. I refuse to pass the ball until I have been flipped through the air and it is too late anyway. Still, no praise from my tormentor.

The other team is doing too well. For balance, Fred has me and Guillaume swap teams and jerseys. I run back out to the other side, and a guy I don't know, wearing one of those rubber cave-man-looking helmets says:

"Wal-taire! Post yourself 3 or 4 meters behind me. If you see I get the ball, you RUN, and I pass it to you! T'as compris?"

"Oui!"

I drop back. He gets the ball. I sprint past him on his left and snag the ball as he passes it without looking. It WORKS! I am tearing past all their guys and there's nothing but air between me and

THE RECONSTRUCTED EVENTS OF 24 MARCH 2002, POST-CONCUSSION

It is an hour after the game, and a dozen of us are at Fred's house for "tea", which means your choice of Russian tea, pernod, beer, or whiskey. I am feeling no pain, sprawled down on a low cushion-chair between the higher chairs of Peter to my right and Fabienne to my left. Fabrice has been talking to me and tossing a ball to me. After I catch it about 10 times in a row, he seems satisfied about something.

Fabienne's kind of concerned about the strawberry on my right eye." What are you going to do about that?"

"What do you think I am going to do? I am going to go out and brag about it to all the little girls in St. Leu tonight!"

The conversation quickly shifts to Peter's need for a haircut. "Homme des bois!" ("Forest Man"), his girlfriend shouts from across the room.

Fabrice gives me a ride home. "Walter, after you got hit, I felt bad that I was yelling at you."

"Ah, it doesn't hurt so bad. It was worth it to shut you up."

"Well, at least you went back in and played some more later. That was good."

Clean up, call Jes. She is already out of town. "We tried to find it, Eddy and I, and we almost did, but we got lost and eventually just gave up."

"Well, you know Eddy— sunlight has ill effects on him."

Slide on down to the pub. Eddy comes up and checks out the eye. "Yeah, Jes and I tried to find you, but she led me off due North, said it was where you were."

"We were due South"

"Yeah, we figured that out after a while... what can I get you? Oh, Keith's got you? OK."

Cousin Keith's Hot Whiskey goes well with a concussion. Two shots whiskey, boiling water, granulated sugar, a lemon slice with four cloves in it. If it isn't too hot, it's not hot enough. And it's even better when hairdressers pull up stools on each side of you. I got slapped and had a finger stuck in my ear, but no bites this time. Well, Celia *claims* I bit her arm through her leather jacket, but I didn't, and she was jabbing a finger in my ear first anyway.

Then we all went over to a table and played Crapette. Crapette is one of those hypnotic card games that also involves a lot of yelling at each other. If somebody makes a mistake, you all yell "CRAPETTE" at them, and they lose a turn. Just by listening to these two women play, I learned three new ways to call somebody "Bitch!" in French.

Lulu stares at the cards like a cat watching a piece of string. She likes to say "PAUSE" to her opponents with a toneless Arnold Schwarzeneggar voice when their round is over.