Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  To compound the problem, I began forgetting my English. Over a summer vacation with American friends, I shocked everyone when I asked if I should put out the “cutlery” for dinner. Things were made worse when later that week I pronounced hammock “hom-och.” Something had gone horribly awry. In an attempt to become bilingual, I was slowly becoming Jean-Claude Van Damme ni-lingual.

  Anaïs and I had agreed two languages should be used at the house. She’d speak to the kids in French and I would use English. But for them, English was a pain in the ass. Nobody spoke it at school. None of their friends spoke English. So what was the point? Better to help Dad out with his French, they said, which obviously needed tons of work. And at first I was forgiving. I didn’t want to add to their already cluttered minds. But after a while, a mild form of insanity grabbed hold of me. When no one I spoke to in English would respond in English, I’d be haunted by the impression that nobody was listening to me; that I didn’t count, and that I might not even be alive. Since it was apparent my English had no jurisdiction, I started scrapping it midstream. A “Bibi pick up your towel!” would be met by “Mais je n’ai pas envie, Papa!” (I don’t feel like it!), to which I’d respond, “Mais ramasse ta serviette tout de suite, merde!” (Pick up your damn towel now, Goddamn it!) The fact that she’d immediately pick up her towel showed me how counterproductive English had become in the house. And since I wanted a clean apartment more than bilingual kids, I kept going in French.

  Soon, the children were responding neither in French nor in English, but in something called Verlan, a Parisian form of French slang spoken backward, with syllables reversed much as in pig Latin. The name Verlan itself comes from inverting the syllables of the word l’envers, which means, of course, “inverse.”

  Asking Bibi “Who are you texting?” would be met with “Ah t’es chelou, Papa!” which meant “Stop being louche (bizarre, heavy), Dad.” But the word louche, in this case, gets thrown into the chipper of Verlan and comes out chelou. Half of Bibi’s and Otto’s words are like this.

  Fête (party) became teuf. Chez moi became chez ouam. If friends were black they weren’t noir, they were renoi. And if they were Arabe you had a choice. Either you used the early Verlan from the sixties and said beur or you could choose the remixed Verlanized version of beur, which was rebeu. I am told you can generally tell the age of the person by which version of Verlan they use.

  The list of words open to Verlan is bottomless, and often the Verlan version comes from a word that’s already slang. In the case of a police officer, the slang version has been flic for decades, but with Verlan, it’s keuf. If you have a girlfriend, she’s not your femme, because that’s too old-fashioned. You say ma meuf. And yes, it’s a lot cooler to say ma meuf than ma petite amie, which puts you back in the 1940s.

  Although Anaïs’s French will one day be housed at L’Academie Française, she, too, understands Verlan, and has no trouble understanding Bibi and Otto. Sometimes she’ll even speak it, and seeing her do so is like watching her break dance all of a sudden, a way to show the kids Mom still has it.

  The French spoken today in Paris has morphed into a juicy hodgepodge of English, iPhone, African, Arabic, and Spanish, a dialect that even a Verlan speaker like Anaïs couldn’t begin to comprehend. In fact there are times when Otto speaks that she looks to me in panic for clarification. And it is then that I realize I could be just as fluent as she is, maybe even better. Here, I realize, is a French I can finally perfect.

  * * *

  If you live in France long enough you realize the French never really say oui like we think they say it. More often than not, they pronounce it wayh, and it’s usually with an inhale, as if they’re talking while taking a drag on a cigarette. (Which is also most often the case.)

  “Wayh, pourquoi pas,” your friend might respond when you propose to meet him for drinks. “Wayh, je crois,” (yeah, I think so), you’ll hear from someone who’s not really listening to what you’re saying.

  The only time I hear oui pronounced wee (the way I learned in class) is when the French say it with exasperation or out of annoyance, as in Anaïs saying “Oui! (weeee), John, I turned off the stove.”

  But what I heard from Bibi and Otto during la rentrée (the back-to-school period each year) of 2015 had nothing to do with oui or wayh. They were saying wesh. But it wasn’t even to respond yes to a question. Wesh was more a tack-on word to something said before.

  T’es nul wesh (you suck, you know), Bibi would remind Otto at breakfast.

  Ta gueule wesh (shut up, okay?), Otto would then respond while slurping his cereal.

  Wesh could also be “of course.” Mais wesh, Papa, I have swimming class today. I always have swimming on Tuesdays wesh.

  Wesh can be “all right!” as in Wesh, those Jordans are slamming wesh.

  Wherever or however you want to say it, wesh has taken over the French language and has become the most emblematic expression of urban French. If you listen to a conversation of young kids in my neighborhood, it’s possible you may hear four or five weshes per minute. It’s in every rap song. Most reality TV stars or soccer stars drop weshes here and there, and over one summer in Boston, we even overheard preppy French kids saying wesh in front of us at the ticket counter at Logan Airport.

  Wesh, I learned, is a derivative of oui mixed with the Algerian and Moroccan Berber expression ach, which means what! I love any word that combines yes and what simply because that’s basically my motto—Yes . . . wait what?

  Nobody born before 1980 uses wesh. And if you do, you sound ridiculous, kind of like those forty-five-plus dads picking up their kids at school and trying to be cool. Wesh has been ushered into our house with myriad other words I never would have thought would work in France. There’s swag as in T’as le swag, Papa (You’ve got swag, Dad!) or thug as in Oh le thug! (Check out the thug!), but Otto and Bibi pronounce it without the “th,” so it comes over as tug, as in tugboat, which, of course, makes me laugh, almost as much as it does when they pronounce Facebook Faycebooook or Instagram Anne-stah-Grum. Then there’s bledard, which means nerd. Bledard comes from the West African expression bled (pronounced blehd), which means small town. Basically, if somebody’s a bledard in Paris, he has small town tastes, and doesn’t understand what’s cool. And to make things even more insane, Otto recently called me a darblé, which is bledard in Verlan.

  Thanks to all of this Verlan weshness, I’ve fallen back in love with my French. Maybe because, for me, this new French is the real French, and is the French I’ve always gravitated toward, probably because, as an immigrant, it’s the language I encounter in France, meaning I understand it better than most of my French friends.

  But wesh stirs up a certain strong reaction in people, much beyond what a playful modern slang word should. In a way, wesh is seen as worse than a curse word, because it seems to mark the invisible line between those who use it in their everyday speech and those who are properly educated. How parents of some of the kids I see using wesh could ever think their Jean-Christophe is going to be mistaken for anyone other than a rich smartass is beyond me. But the French sensitivity about wesh betrays just how tenuous the grip of proper French is over the pecking order of modern society.

  Sometimes I wonder if the French response to wesh that I sometimes see comes down to our complicated feelings about culture, class, and race. Maybe there is a parallel between the way France won’t allow itself to appreciate the wesh richness the country has to offer and the way it sometimes undervalues the vital contributions millions of immigrants living here have made.

  * * *

  For her twelfth birthday, Bibi hosted her first boum (pronounced boom but spelled with the letter u, and don’t ask why). Boums are starter parties for French adolescents and preadolescents, and they’re dry runs for what to expect in the next six decades of socializing with the opposite sex: mixed dancing, gossip, crushing rejection, elation, fear, shame, and
somewhere in the corners of all this, you hope, fun. Yours truly was asked to DJ, which means I was simply a chaperon who helps out if there’s a technical difficulty, but I’m not supposed to touch the music, ever.

  Bibi’s playlist featured the usual suspects: Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé, Rihanna, but the song that brought everyone to the floor, even the boys who’d been sitting on the side hiding their shyness by making fun of everyone, was MHD, a skinny twenty-two-year-old from the Cité Rouge projects in the Nineteenth, who’s become the it rapper in Paris. In a way, MHD incarnates the disconnect between real France and official France. His eponymous album MHD seemed to be everywhere; in the street on those Bluetooth portable speakers, inside passing cars, on cellphones in the subway, and, of course, on YouTube, where his clip (video—pronouced kleep) had more hits than the population of France, more than any known French pop star, and more than all those national treasures like the late Johnny Halliday or Charles Aznavour combined. And yet, not shockingly, he still wasn’t considered a mainstream success in France.

  What I love about MHD is that he always refers to Paris as Paname, an expression that harkens back to old-school crooners like Edith Piaf and Léo Ferré. He’s also tapped into the current habit of young kids who refer to their neighborhoods by the first two digits of their zip code. If you’re from Paris, you’re from the 75 (le sept-cinq). If you’re from the rugged northeast suburbs of La Corneuve, you’re from the 93 (neuf-trois). There’s a moment in one of MHD’s songs, “Champions League,” when he gives a shout-out to the various corners of Paris, in an easy-to-remember verse that everyone, even I, can follow and pronounce.

  And it was during this moment of the party, me with the laptop trying to be invisible, watching all these sweaty mixed-up kids from the Tenth shouting out their sept-cinqs and neuf-trois and sept-septs, that I realized my story with the French language had come full circle. I’d arrived here with the hope of mastering classic French only to walk away with a twenty-first-century version, one found on Snapchat, in schoolyard insults, and on posters with asterisks; a French that’s part English, part Verlan, part Wesh, part Brian in the Kitchen, and fully French sung by a kid from a nearby neighborhood and repeated by a new generation of boum attendees, who shared, in some way, his story, his city, and, of course, his language.

  It was also during this party that I recalled one of the visits my mother made to Paris. It was during the lead-up week to our wedding, and she and my father invited Anaïs and me out to dinner in the Marais to celebrate. When the waiter approached and asked if we were ready to order, I turned to my mom to do the honors, expecting her to shine in French just as she had years ago when I was a child.

  When she started to speak, though, I realized Mom’s French wasn’t all that. It was broken a bit and lopsided. There were too many uhs and pardons, the pronunciations were off. She didn’t really roll her r’s like I’d remembered. And by the time she botched the escargots, I realized the fluent French I envisioned Mom speaking had never been that fluent at all. But when I was a child, what she’d conveyed to me in her stories and speech was a love of place and people, of colors and ambiance; probably much in the same way my American friends see me today when I order those insane baguettes and almond and pistachio dessert cakes from the 150-year-old boulangerie on our street.

  And it’s moments like these that have taught me what it truly means to master a language. It’s where the pride and love you have for your home comes through with an ease and dexterity and, yes, a fluency that’s all your own—even if you do speak French like Ahnuld, and the walls surrounding you smell of piss.

  Will You Be My French Friend?

  One of the things I took away from studying abroad is that there’s no guarantee it will work. There’s a real chance you’ll come back to the States not speaking French at all. Parents, of course, don’t know this. They assume the boots on the ground immersion and their son’s or daughter’s youthful ability to pick things up will more than do the trick. And they’re happy to fork over the money to make it happen. Little do they know it’s more likely their child will return fluent in hash smoking or consequence-free sex than French speaking. At least that was the case with my program. So much so that our host town of Aix-en-Provence was coined “Sex-en-Vacances.”

  The reason fluency isn’t a given is that life isn’t fair. The classroom can only take you so far. There’s preseason and regular season, and players of all sports will tell you, the speed’s just not the same. And what happened in the petri dish of my study abroad program was a horrible irony. Those who slaved over their grammar and vocab in class but who stuck socially with the University of Wisconsin crowd enrolled in our program came back with a substandard French. Especially when compared to the bubble-writing platinum blond Shannon, who landed the French boyfriend.

  Unlike most on our program, Shannon identified value in the marketplace the week she arrived, realizing the most important thing to do was to not just make friends, but make French friends. French friends were Monopoly properties like Boardwalk or Park Place or the railroads (which we all know you need to have), assets that would pay off big time if you played your cards right. The Swedish pal or German hanger-on were nice and all, but you were never going to get anywhere in French with them.

  French friends became part of Shannon’s vernacular, and she’d name drop them any chance she had, even in a generic way just to run up the score.

  “Well this weekend, I went to Marseilles with my two French friends,” she’d brag at one of the program’s start-of-the-year mixers. “And they brought some of their French friends, too. And well, it was just sooooo French.”

  When she’d introduce you to one of her catches, she’d do it in a garish way, as if the person’s Frenchness were a job title, like attorney.

  “John, have you met my French friend, Philippe? He was born and bred here, French as French comes. Ain’t that right, Phil?”

  I was never sure what the French friend was getting out of the deal. Being paraded around like a Marc Jacobs bag must have made him question whom he’d just become friends with. Yet I probably underestimated his ulterior motive—learning English from an American woman.

  I was neither a nose-to-grindstone studier nor an attractive and socially savvy blonde, but I made up for it all by being a virtuoso at Foosball. And it was during countless games with French peers in the student lounge just off of the auditorium where I was supposed to be attending lectures that I made my French friends and learned to communicate. I was never that discerning about the French people I met. I assumed I was the one who had to prove himself. And whereas after five seconds with an American I could tell if we’d click, I had to give more leeway to the French kids I’d meet just to bridge the culture gap. If you were French, you could have been a racist snob, but I wouldn’t know. I was too caught up in impressing you to judge.

  The French speakers I ended up being closest to weren’t even French. They were Moroccan. And although their French was perfect, they, like me, were studying abroad that year and looking to make friends, which in right-wing-voting Aix wasn’t easy.

  Once exams wrapped, I was invited back to Casablanca with them, where one of their fathers was the satellite dish king of the region. There I was given a room in a sumptuous suburban spread and a sham of an office job distributing mail. On weekends, we’d road trip to the casinos of Marrakesh or hang out in Casablanca nightclubs that looked like the set of Scarface. And while my fellow Wisconsin Badgers were spending the rest of their summer traveling with other Americans to yet another American backpacker destination, such as Interlaken in Switzerland or Bruges in Belgium, I was learning how to sell a satellite dish called parabole, order a vodka tonic to the dance floor, and scream to a pack of cackling Moroccans from a sunken velour couch, “Plus on est de fous, le mieux on rigole mon bébé!” (The more the nut jobs, the better the fun baby!”), which made them all gasp with laughter, probably because I sounded like B
orat before Borat. And that was fine, too. Because I was speaking! And when I came back to the States, much to my parents’ delight, my French was better than that of anyone else in my program; well, except for Shannon’s, of course.

  * * *

  When I married Anaïs, part of the dowry she brought to the table was her wide selection of amis, which, by marriage, I was allowed to use. This was exciting, because I haven’t yet outgrown the reflexive desire of wanting French people to like me. It also meant I wouldn’t have to scrounge around at the American church for buddies, like the other expats I saw, leaving pathetic Craigslist-type announcements on the corkboard, like “Do you want to speak conversational English in a relaxed environment in exchange for French lessons?”

  Anaïs was okay with letting me play with her friends—“but only temporarily,” she said. “Until you get on your feet and make your own.” She wasn’t kidding.

  The varied life Anaïs had up until we met gave me a wide range of potential friends to sample from. As a teenager, she lived for a while in a posh suburb called Ville D’Avray right outside Paris near Versailles. There she’d made preppy friends who voted right, but had club memberships and liked to drink. Later she’d majored in political science, got the equivalent of an MBA, and worked in advertising, so the friends she made during this time were quick and witty and knew what stuff like “bad optics” meant. And now that she worked in opera and theater, there were actor and singer friends, one more eccentric than the next.

  Following our wedding, we began receiving invites to dinner parties (or as the French call them, dîners), and for two years, I felt like a debutante coming out to society. Each week, it seemed, Anaïs would announce a new lineup of dates. “We’re invited to the Guilberts this Saturday and the Ariels will be there, plus the Terasses want to know if we’re free next week.” I was forever running to the barber to get my hair trimmed or to the dry cleaners to get my shirts pressed.