by Walter Agnew Moore II
30 march 2002

I wake up in my bed in Amiens disgusted and queasy.

I don't know what I expected last night. I know Kitt hasn't got any big thing for me. If we go to a bar together, it's not a date. And if she likes some guy better than me, it's not a shock to the system.

But damn, out of all the guys there, why'd she pick Gregoire to slobber on?

The dude, the dude, he is a woosy little weed who wears a woman's head-band to keep his greasy hair back out of his eyes. His basic seduction technique is to sit next to a drunk girl and let his jaw go slack in a bad-toothed smile. And he just sits there. And Kitt kisses him.

And then, she wants to come talk to me about him. I blew up, as I remember, asked her if I looked like her goddam girlfriend. Gregoire. I am a better man than he is. Every other guy in the bar is a better man than he is. You could get a stray dog from the pound and teach it to shake hands, it would be a better man than he is.

I expected better. Alone in a crowd. That's what I told Marge and Matthieu and my other friends who drove me home.

I shuffle around the little apartment in my old working-class neighborhood. Dehydration, head-ache, black coffee, and egg-farts. I must have banged my right shoulder on something, it twinges. I fold clean clothes into my 1940 Swiss back-pack. I put on an old pair of army boots.

I need just a little time away from Kitt, just a little time away.

And I already bought a train ticket to go with her to Italy for 10 days.

I turn on my phone. There is a texto:

WALTER HOW ARE YOU? DIDN'T SEE YOU LEAVE LAS NITE- MEET YOU FOR LUNCH?-KITT

I look at the phone. I go buy a crab-and-shrimp sandwich for lunch and eat it leaning against the rail at Place Gambetta.

I get another texto from Kitt. ARE YOU OK YOU SEEMED DOWN LAST NITE WALTER I AM ON WAY TO STATION.

I think about it, and send one back: SEE YOU THERE.

There are the usual scrubby skinny drug-dealers at the station. It is grey drizzling. The French gangster-look is to wear cheap nylon running suits with one or possibly both legs hiked up to show off your skinny ankles. Then you cock a ball-cap back on your skinny head. You are French, so wrap a scarf around your skinny neck.

Now walk around with your head hunched down into your bony shoulders, walk without bending your knees in a sort of hop-hop-hop forward bob. Be too cool to notice the big American laughing at you. Yeah, you, punk, laughing at you.

And then Kitt comes in.

She is tall and classy in that funny eskimo coat with the fuzzy hood, and the pack on her back is as big as one of the high-school kids she teaches. She has those un-English eyes, almost Asian, and they slant a little more as she smiles at me.

I smile back.

"Walter! So, I see you've got your pack..."

"Ready to roll, kid. Little Anna?"

"She's already on the train to Paris, she'll be here in a minute."

We stick our tickets in the orange machine that clips an edge out of them with a loud "tack" sound, we go down the steps to Quai 3, and in a minute the Paris train is kachunk-kachunk-kachunking past us.

"There she is!" says Kitt. I see Little Anna's long dark hair behind a window flashing by, then it stops, and we heave on up into the train. It is a fluorescent-lit blue-and-grey inside.

I lever their packs up onto the overhead rack. Good Lord these girls packed way too heavy. They are each carrying twice as much weight as I am, and I even packed a sleeping bag in mine. This is one of those secret Woman Things that they don't explain to men: "When traveling, pack your weight in bricks. If you are smaller than average size, pack triple your weight in bricks. Never explain to any man why you do this."

The girls sleep in a seat behind me. I read some of "Le seigneur des anneaux"..."The Lord of the Rings", in French. "Baggins" translates as "Sacké".

It is black night by the time we roll into the Gare du Nord in Paris. Chrissa and Steph are supposed to meet us and put us up tonight. We walk up into the waiting area with our packs on.

"Walter, what do your friends look like?"

"They are average-size white people with brown hair. Ever seen anybody looks like that?"

The crowd starts to thin. I do my usual walk-around-tall-and-let-them-spot-you routine. No results. After a few more minutes, Kitt drops her pack next to the big heater.

I tell her, "You know, the minute you take your pack off is when they are going to—"

"HEY! Welcome t'PAREE!" yelps Chrissa as she jumps into our midst like a leprechaun winking into existence. Steph is shuffling up behind her, crooked smile, shakes my hand.

We ditch packs at Chrissa's and go eat in Pig Alley.

That's what the GIs used to call it in the 40's. Pigalle, a long stretch of sex-shops and transvestite hookers. Over here are some nice trees, see them in the middle of the boulevard? It can get a little chancy up here from time to time, but really, the most dangerous thing is probably eating at the McDonald's on the corner. I wonder how much a triple-bypass would run you in France.

If you walk all the way down, you can see the real Moulin Rouge. We turn right instead and head up the steep Butte, because we are going to that Italian Place.

I forget the name. Hell, I never knew the name. I just call it the Italian Place, and I eat there with Chrissa whenever I get up with her in Paris. They seat the five of us upstairs, where it is hot and claustrophobically crowded the way a good Italian Place should be. We get pizzas and pasta, I have the Napolitaine Pizza with salty anchovies and olives on it.

We slug down carafes of water and gallons of red house wine. This is good. I feel like less of an evil bastard already. Chrissa generally has that effect on me. I started laughing the first time she spouted off some bizarre comment back in Austin, Texas, and I haven't stopped since. Kitt and Little Anna are feeling more at home, Steph can speak English with them, people are loosening up.

Do we wanna go out somewhere for a drink? Hell yeah we wanna go out for a drink. What was that bar? Where? I dunno. There's this bar, let's go.

I spent Christmas Day 2001 in a bar up here with no name, Alex Thiltges showed it to me, he used to live in the cheap hotel over it, there were murals and a guy with a peg-leg called The Pirate and a little courtyard out back with a bathroom with a rough plank door and the figurehead from a sailing-ship overhead.

Chrissa thinks she knows that bar, so we head there.

But wait, this isn't it. What is this place with this airplane wing set up as a bar and and reddish lights shining on jars of pickled what-not on the table? Why is that guy wearing the bead-cap crawling around on his hands and knees under the table? I almost step on his head. What? WHAT? I can't hear you with this damn gay-bar techno music blasting, let's bail—

I suck in some fresh air outside the door. Little Anna and Kitt are puzzled why Chrissa and I retreated out past them. It's that shit-music that did it.

Chrissa says, "Yeah, that's what my friend Will calls 'late-night homosexual music'. You need a handfull of pills to listen to that. It makes me think of a bunch of people in overalls jumping around throwing steel frisbees at each other."

We walk past the former house of Dalida. Then we turn right and climb some more up the Butte.

Halfway up the hill we find the Yellow Bar, known as "La Camille". This place looks like it could be on Jackson Square in New Orleans, the same high narrow windows and high narrow doors, a little bit old and flimsy. There are "characters" in here, they smile and say hello to us.

We are headed towards the back tables when ahead I see a tall blond Braying American Girl. The kind of loud stupid nasal voice that almost makes me want to run to the nearest British Embassy and say, "I'm sorry. Please take us back, and teach us how to talk..."

"Hey, it looks full back there. Let's sit out on this little porch thingy."

And we do. It is cool but not too cold. Half-pints of lager. There are two dogs that stand out here with us, take no notice of us, and obviously own this entire hill. We inhabit an undiscovered Impressionist painting. Steph and the girls kick back on chairs and stools, I perch up on the railing over the cobblestones and look down at the city dropping off below us.

It gets a little nippy, and we find ourselves back in the corner by the Braying American Girl. She is part of a group. A couple of them are Americans as well, at least one is German, and I think another two are French. They are drunk and in that zone where you rilly, rilly, rilly have to, like, exPLAIN yourself clearly, maaaan.

The German is falling onto her side and telling a guy about how she wants to someday see all 51 American states. Good luck. She and her guy decide that it is all about being a good PERSON, if you are a good PERSON, that is most important, because it is important to be a good PERSON.

The Braying American Girl is the queen-bee of this group, and I suppose they can hear her in Belgium. She has frizzy blonde hair and a tattoo on the small of her back. Who got the idea that getting a tattoo on the palest, flabbiest part of the body was a good thing to do?

She is explaining French verbs to the French people. "So you got like COMPRENDRE which means like to COMPREHEND, that's how I like REMEMBER IT."

She introduces them to music: "Oh like BUCKLEY? You don't know BUCKLEY? OH! LIKE! You got to hear BUCKLEY? He drowned."

She starts discussing different cultures. "Like, in FRANCE they don't like to speak ENGLISH even though they all DO, but that's OK cuz like my FRENCH is great, hyanh hyanh hyanh, and I just like say JE PARLE FRAN—"

I don't hear the rest. I have leaned close to Steph to whisper:

"Steph, you grew up in Paris?"

"Yes?"

"And you saw lots of tourists like this?"

"Huh...Yes?"

"And you never wanted to kill an American?"

"Hmmm..." he chuckles, "I think killing is wrong..."

All this time Chrissa has been sitting with her elbow next to the back of the Braying American Girl, and her eyes look like they are about to start smoking. She looks at me, then she starts speaking far too loud in a remarkable imitation of the Braying American Girl:

"WALTER! Like, what's this about KILLING people! The only person I ever killed was my aunt, and it was only cuz, LIKE, LIKE—"

"Cuz the ICE-PICK stuck up her nose?"

"YEAH! Freakin ICE-PICK up her nose, and NO HAMMER like anywhere, had to, had to—"

"HAD TO USE YOUR SHOE?"

"DAAAMN how'd you know? Bangin on that ICE-PICK up inside her damn HEAD!"

"Did the same thing with my aunt! She still walks funny!"

"Yeah well my aunt is DEAD now WAL-TOR, I learned how to kill that bitch RIGHT, cuz my DAD taught me, he's in the—"

"The SEALS?"

"NO!"

"The Mafia?"

"NO!"

"What's he in then?"

"What's that club, the Ku Klux Klan? Yeah! MY DAD IS IN THE KKK! MY DAD IS IN THE KKK! MY DAD IS IN THE KKK!"

"The WHAT?"

"The KKKAAAAAAAAAY"

The barman smiles and says "bonne soirée" to us as we amble out. We have seen the Yellow Bar, now it is time for the Purple Bar.

'Le Relais de la Butte' is done up in purple. It is up towards the top of the Butte where they used to have the windmills. There is some sort of free feed going on inside. It looks like the food has been laid out for a while. I look at it sideways.

Little Anna says "Oh it's a hen par-ty."

"A what?"

"A hen par-ty. Sum-body is getting mar-ried."

English people always tell me that their Northern accents are impossible to understand. Not for me. The vowels are different, but the rhythm is identical to the Southern US accents I grew up with. Maybe those people originally came from the North of England. Maybe everybody sounded like that in England back in the old days. Maybe it's a coincidence. But I always find Little Anna's Northern accent clear, while Kitt's posh, Southern, Queen's English accent sounds like jumbled mumbling to me with every other vowel swallowed.

The tiny boy waiter serves us drinks at the metal tables outside in the courtyard.

"The "Relais"... this would have been some kind of horse-changing station in the old days..."

A couple of guys roar by yelling on a scooter. The sound fades away.

We are talking about movies. It comes around to "Lord of the Rings". Chrissa went to school with Liv Tyler, the Elf-Princess in the movie.

"Yeah, she was younger— maybe in 5th grade when I graduated. Looked like 'Kenny' on South Park, hood up over her head—" she slips into a squeaky voice: "hi! my name is liv rundgren!"

"Rundgren? I thought that Aerosmith dude was her dad."

"He is. But back then she thought it was Todd Rundgren. Her mom was Bebe Buelle, big groupie... First time I saw her, she was yelling across the street at Liv going 'Hi honey!' and wearing aviator goggles and a mini-skirt."

"...Buelle?"

"Oh yeah, she knew all those guys. Elvis Costello's 'Party Girl' was about her."

The Purple Bar is closing down. We have officially Shut Down Paris France.

At Chrissa's, I am singing the blues to the cat Kitty Grey on a very nice Telecaster. It is solid-body, but it resonates even without an amp. I have GOT to find a guitar like this.

"Hey Walter, you wanna buy that? I don't want to lug it back to the States."

"I don't know, whaddaya want?"

Chrissa names a gift-price, a nominal fee.

"YES!"

"OK, I'll peel all the '64' stickers off of it."

"What are those?"

"Rebel Basque Nationalist stickers. '64' is the postal number of the Basque country."

"Leave 'em on... I never had a Basque guitar before."

And dreams of Rock-and-Roll glory filled Walter's head as he slipped off to sleep on the couch, with Paris five floors down outside the triangular room, dreams of taking postal code 64000 (Basque) to zip code 78713 (Austin) to play music with far-away friends on a summer's night.

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NEXT: Part Two: Milan