by Tim Sandlin
I checked out and hit a 7-Eleven to buy a money order for seven hundred fifty dollars. That's what three months' back child support adds up to. I would have paid a month ahead if Mica hadn't poisoned Ty with that cowboys-are-losers garbage. As a teenager, Mica idolized cowboys. She read rodeo magazines for entertainment. Our first date was a reward for giving her a Lane Frost autograph. Now, she has my son doing glorified yoga. She'll no doubt turn him into a vegan.
I bought envelopes at 7-Eleven but had to go three places to find a stamp. Ended up back in the lobby at Super Eight. Guy there with muttonchop sideburns begrudged me the last stamp they had 'cause it was Labor Day and he couldn't buy more.
"These are for guests," he said.
"I was a guest last night."
"You aren't today."
Faced with hitting or tipping, I tipped. Gave the jerk a dollar for a thirty-seven-cent stamp. Sometimes I'm so reasonable I make myself sick.
Then came breakfast at IHOP. After four cups of coffee the waitress quit offering refills and I had to track her down, cup in hand.
Denver long-term parking is way the hell and gone off from the terminal. I piled my war bag and duffel onto the cab seat, even though the passenger door doesn't lock. My Mac laptop went behind the seat, along with the wire cutters, pigging string, stink bait, unmatched gloves, vise grips, sleeping bag, piles of maps, a crowbar, and my library. Leaving goods in a truck bed is like passing out invitations.
"I'd like one ticket to Paris, France, please." I worded it that way, to avoid confusion with Paris, Texas.
The Delta ticket lady had on a name tag that said DIERDRE. Her hair was piled up on her head and held there by a pair of laquered chopsticks. "Round-trip or one way?"
"Do I have to say now?"
Her fingers danced across the keys. "It's cheaper if you do."
I said, "Round-trip."
The lady talked with her eyes on the keyboard instead of me. I find that extremely irksome, but it's modern America for you. Not much you can do. "When do you plan to return?"
"I've got a rodeo in Dalhart Friday night."
"When do you plan to return from Paris?"
"Friday morning."
"You have to leave Paris Thursday night to be in Denver Friday morning."
"Sounds reasonable."
"How many bags are we checking?"
"We are checking none."
She hesitated, then typed some more. "What credit card will you be using today?"
"Am I allowed to pay cash?"
She finally looked up at me. Her eyes were green but you could tell it was from tinted contacts, not nature. "You can, but security will flag you. It's less hassle with a card."
"I'll pay cash."
My long-term plan is to ride bulls until I can't anymore, then I'll hit the cowboy poetry circuit. The living won't be great, but it can't be worse than what I make now. The only poem I've read in public, so far, was at open mike night in the Ten Sleep Laundromat — a piece called "The Bull Rider's Lament." The subject is airport security.
I consider myself a fairly average bull rider — except I don't put a pinch of anything between my cheek and gums, I read, and I don't use Jesus as a rabbit's foot. Otherwise, I'm normal, which means I carry more or less two pounds of metal enclosed in my body. Rods in my legs, and clips in my right shoulder, thanks to Ripple. A little titanium in one ankle. I know guys with a lot more, including stainless steel skull plates. I'll do whatever it takes to be the real cowboy, but, for me, metal on the brainpan is the rodeo version of a pink slip.
I've heard at Code Orange a penile prosthesis will set off the detector in Reno. That would be interesting to explain to the guy with the wand.
Anyway, I've had airport experience enough to carry X-rays and letters from various orthopods. Here's how much X-rays help — zip. None. You buy a ticket to Europe with cash, show up with no luggage other than a saddlebag, and make the metal detector sing like a mining town lunch whistle, and the gate security agents do not give flying whiz for a note from your doctor. Added to all that, in my haste to catch a plane I forgot the Udap Bear Deterrent wrapped in a bandanna at the bottom of my saddlebag.
"What's this?" the black woman with cornrows at the hand search table asked.
"Deodorant."
"Step this way, please."
She took me to a room without windows and left me in the care of two incredibly sober men in thin ties, white short-sleeve shirts, and wrestling-coach haircuts. After X-raying every part of my body — no doubt giving me testicular cancer thirty years from now — and bags, they took my clothes to test them for chemicals and stuck a flashlight up my butt.
I grinned and said, "That feels pretty good," even though it didn't.
The man with the flashlight said, "Are you going to be reasonable?"
"You're the one makes his living looking up assholes."
In my poem, I include a list of lines I've learned not to say at security. The most important thing not to say is, "Do I look like a terrorist to you?" Other mistakes I've made: "Is what you're doing legal?" and "Touch me again, I'll wrap that wand around your neck."
Next time I rewrite the poem I plan to add, "Have you guys had a girl with copper-colored hair and a golden hoop through her nipple come by today?"
Despite what you've heard from everyone you ever talked to, the security people don't mind jokes, so long as they aren't sarcastic quips threatening violence. Even I'm not stupid enough to say, "Don't pull the red wire."
But chattering teeth in your carry-on, that's okay. It lightens tension. Rubber puke generally rates a chuckle. I caught grief once for setting a mousetrap in an electric razor case. Not everyone has a sense of humor.
"Why are you going to Paris?" said a man with a gun.
"None of your business." I could have explained the part about Dad dying without ever noticing that I'm a real cowboy, and how my son is growing up thinking his father is a failure and the only way I could show Tyson the truth would be to give him a buckle with CHAMPION written right on the front. I could have told the man at security that champions are not losers. I could have, but he wouldn't have understood.
The man said, "I don't have time for jerks."
"I'll let you strip me naked and X-ray me and light my shoelaces to see how fast they burn" — I know, I don't wear shoelaces, but I was on a roll here — "if it'll make America safe, but so long as I'm not breaking any laws, it's none of your damn affair why I do what I do."
The upshot was they kept my bear spray, refusing to write out a receipt, and I missed two flights to Paris. The plane they put me on left in the evening and I had to change in Chicago. What with time zones and all, I didn't arrive in Paris, France, till Tuesday morning.
Paris
9.
If I was the bureaucrat in charge of hiring employees to work the booth where folks line up to trade their dollars and pounds for local cash, I believe I'd hire someone who speaks a little English, just to simplify the process. That's my opinion, which, I admit, is American-centric. Maybe putting angry single-language bureaucrats in the money booth is the French way of establishing the rules, their way of saying, "Adjust, jerks. It's not our job to accommodate you."
I noticed a certain level of pissiness even before I reached the money line, right off the plane. You walk down this long hall of dead space and come out at Customs, where there's a bunch of lines with signs that say EUROPEAN UNION, and two lines for the rest of us. The woman at Customs was wearing black like everyone else French except Odette and she was sitting down, which would never happen in the U.S. She asked me what I was doing there and I'm not as green as you might think, so I said, "Tourist." I know what happens if you say, "I'm here for justice." Or "vengeance." Or whatever your purpose is other than to spend money.
She looked me over slowly and said, "Clint Eastwood."
"He's an actor. I'm the real Rowdy."
Her eyes had that expression you see on women when a double amputee with infected s
ores on his face asks for spare change. Or maybe I'm overly sensitive, coming from a town in Wyoming that makes its living off tourists. I know how much tourists are held in contempt by those who feed off them.
And anywhere you travel, you'll find two types of tourists — those who try to blend in and fail miserably, and those who strut their ignorance. I don't know which is worse, but I do know the majority of Americans in line at the money-changing booth were of the ugly variety. Underdressed, over-loud, suspicious, arrogant, with no control over their kids — nothing like a cowboy. Up ahead of me a couple groups a man wearing plaid shorts had a T-shirt that read I DON'T GIVE A DAMN HOW YOU DO IT HERE, I WANT ICE. His wife had flesh hanging off her arms and their son wore a Teletubby knapsack. From my days with Tyson, I would guess Tinky Winky. I remember Tyson curled up on my lap in his Roy Rogers jammies. As the Tubbies flew out of a hole in the ground, we'd both shout their names — Tinky Winky! Dipsy! La La! Po! — then we'd fall over in a giggle heap. We don't do that anymore.
Ninety percent of the passengers jumped on cell phones the moment the plane touched down. God knows, they had to inform the world they were back in touch. The guy directly in front of me in the money line wore a DUKE cap and talked continuously on his phone while his dazed wife stood at his side in what I took as a Xanax fog. He shouted the way people did when telephones were first invented. "Don't tell me what I already know! They'll cheat us blind every chance they get! They hate our guts here!"
His wife gave me an embarrassed smile. When her husband stepped to the window to deal with the money changer, she said, "We've only been in Paris twenty minutes and I can already tell this trip isn't going to save my marriage."
I said, "I'm sorry, ma'am."
She nodded twice, and her face took on a sad, walleyed smile. "I'll go shopping."
When my turn came, I said, "I'll take five hundred worth," and slapped my bills on the counter.
The guy with a rubber on his right thumb chattered to himself, counting, or maybe he was chattering to me, thinking I understood. The money was different colors and sizes for different denominations. I suppose the sizes are so blind people can tell a one from a ten. I don't know what the weird colors are for. Looked like Monopoly money to me. And the cash isn't called francs, like it is in stories. It's euros. I probably knew that already but I tend to ignore information that doesn't relate to bulls. Now I wish I'd paid more attention to all those USA Todays I've read in truck stops over the years.
I said, "Thanks, pard." See how I was already falling into the act. You do that in strange places where they expect certain behavior. I'd never call a man in Wyoming "pard."
The man said, "Cowboy," and pretended to shoot me with his rubber thumb and index finger.
He said, "Bang, bang."
I said, "Never shoot anything you don't plan to eat."
De Gaulle Airport gave me the same feeling I get deep in the Teton Wilderness, up on Fox Creek Divide. Up on Fox Creek, or any of the divides along the Yellowstone border, there is the illusion of solitude. No one is going to tell you where to sleep or what to eat or which lake's water will give you the trots. There is no one to point the way down to safety. No one to hold your hand and say, "Calm yourself, honey. It'll be okay." Break your leg back there, and you're dead.
De Gaulle felt the same way. Even though it was full of people, I was on my own. Not a soul in there cared whether I got out of the building alive or not. For me, it was a mass without communication.
Luckily, I found McDonald's. Hot oil and meat smells covered by Lysol, plastic garbage cans with flaps, life-size statue of Ronald himself in his yellow playsuit. Home. McDonald's may be as close to stability as most people who live on the road ever come. Even bat poop tastes good when you can count on it.
The de Gaulle McDonald's had breached the language barrier by having a menu that was pictures of what you were buying. I pointed and the boy behind the counter rang up the bill. Couldn't have run smoother had it been in California. The hamburgers were more overcooked than stateside, if that's possible, and the fries dripped, but they made up for their shortcomings by selling beer. There's not a McDonald's in the Rockies sells over-the-counter beer. I tried a bottle and it was tasty.
Chowing down on my burger, I looked around at the families and cute Goth couples and European businessmen in McDonald's who were instinctively giving me more room than they gave one another and I thought to myself, piece of cake.
Remember how I said I'd tell the truth or shut up? Well, truth be told, I'd never ridden in a taxicab sober before. Not that I'd ridden in hordes of them drunk, but the two or three I had been in, I was more or less poured into the backseat. I had no experience at flagging one down from scratch. I tried the way they do in movies because movies is where I learned most things about getting by in unfamiliar situations. In movies, they stand on the curb and hold up their hand like asking a teacher to be excused.
This doesn't play in Paris.
After a bit, I wandered up the airport bypass there until I found a line of taxis stretching one way and a line of people the other. They converged at a bike rack — looking thing where people were loading into one taxi at a time. The taxis waited their turn. The people waited their turn. Nobody walked down the taxi line and hopped into an empty.
They were mostly mid-90s black Mercedeses, nice car for a taxi. I seem to recall my drunk-ride-home taxis as being yellow. The one came up when it was my turn had tires you wouldn't brag about and a radio antenna dead center on the roof. The license plate was black on yellow and four feet across. Inside, the heater blasted even though it was about eighty-five degrees already, and there was a dog gate between me and the driver, whose name started with two As. Aahuad. Aachma. It was hard to read the card on the passenger visor. He was short, by any standards, and southeast Kansas mud-colored, and he wore a nice suit and tie he must have bought in the boys' department.
He knew on sight that I spoke English. "What is your destination, please?"
I said, "The University of Paris."
"Which one?"
"Crap."
He waited patiently for me to pull a destination out of my ear hole.
"How many are there?"
"Six, maybe. Seven. I do not know."
"The one where they study William James."
That seemed to satisfy him.
Once you leave the airport, the deal goes foreign. There was a sign — ! inside a triangle. What's that supposed to mean? And the speed limit was 120. The fog was inky, not the fluffy low-flying clouds we get in the mountains, and the highway was packed with cars driven by Ritalin freaks who acted as if they had X-ray vision. My driver was right there with them, whipping in and out of lanes, passing on the right, on the shoulder, on the white line between lanes. We're talking aggressive. It came to me that saying piece of cake was somewhat premature.
I broke the cowboy code of strong and silent. Fear does that. "You lived in Paris all your life?" I asked.
He held up his thumb. "One year." I had no idea what the thumb business meant. "I was born in Libya," he said, without slowing down a bit. "I came across after Gaddafi's men kill my brothers and rape my sister."
"Is that true, or a line you tell the tourists?"
He said, "I do not understand?"
"Back home we make up stories like that for the tourists. I tell them my grandfather was a Cheyenne warrior nailed to a tree by Kit Carson."
I think maybe I hurt his feelings, which is the last thing I'd want to do with a low-end wage earner. I'm generally a sensitive fella, when it comes to pride issues. Or maybe some other car passed us and he took it as a challenge. Whatever caused the attitude change, little Aahuad or Aachma's bad driving got worse. We drove hell bent for leather into a tunnel. I hate tunnels with more passion than I hate almost anything else in the world, and I knew a Paris tunnel was where they ran Princess Diana to ground. Suddenly, red lights blazed like when some drunk stabs you in the eye with a lit cigarette, and the Libyan driver s
tomped his brakes. Traffic came to a dead stop. Imagine an L.A. freeway going from full blast to gridlock in six seconds.
My driver leaned back and lit a cigarette. "Are you a musician in the United States of America?"
I said, "Not me," and rolled down the window, careful to keep my feet off the floor. When I was a kid, Dad told me his own personal self-evident truth, which was you must hold your breath on bridges and keep your feet up in tunnels. That was practically all the preparation Dad gave me for life, so I go along the best I can.
"Why do you ask?" I said.
"Americans dressed as you very often play the musical instrument in a band. Or they gigolo."
"I'm not a gigolo, either."
He seemed to take that for granted. He tilted his little head back and blew smoke at the ceiling. He had the look of a man there for the long haul.
I rolled the window back up, figuring cigarette smoke would take longer killing me than exhaust fumes from a traffic jam in a tunnel.
I said, "If Chad attacks Libya from the rear, do you think Greece will help?"
He said, "I do not understand." Then, he didn't say anything else the rest of the drive into Paris.
10.
The University of Paris isn't a real university, not in the American sense. Real universities have a student union and a quad for Frisbee and sunbathers. Dormitories. Even Casper College where I went for one semester on a rodeo scholarship had that much, only we called the food court a commons instead of the union. Every college I ever saw has grass and a rock students paint before basketball games. The University of Paris doesn't have any of that. I couldn't find dorms anywhere. How can they call themselves a university without dorms? Mostly what they have is long hallways painted glossy gray, classrooms that smell stale, and a couple of auditorium-type things. No gym that I saw. I wandered the halls looking into the faces of girls for an hour or so. The smile-to-frown ratio was horrendous. No one I saw in the French educational system was having fun.
