Now what redblooded American with a Pontiac, a big mortgage and ulcers at March-time is not interested in this great adventure!
Hey! I should’ve also sang to the Navy boys:
“I joined the Navy
To see the world
And whaddid I see?
I saw the sea.”
24.
NOW I’M GETTING SCARED, I SUSPECT SOME OF THOSE guys crisscrossing the streets in front of my wandering path are fixing to mug me for my two or three hundred bucks left—It’s foggy and still except for sudden squeek wheels of cars loaded with guys, no girls now—I get mad and go up to an apparent elderly printer hurrying home from work or cardgame, maybe my father’s ghost, as surely my father musta looked down on me that night in Brittany at last where he and all his brothers and uncles and their fathers had all longed to go, and only poor Ti Jean finally made it and poor Ti Jean with his Swiss Army knife in the suitcase locked in an airfield twenty miles away across the moors—He, Ti Jean, threatened now not by Bretons, as on those tourney mornings when flags and public women made fight an honorable thing I guess, but in Apache alleys the slur of Wallace Beery and worse than that of course, a thin mustache and a thin blade or a small nickel plated gun—No garrottes please, I’ve got my armor on, my Reichian character armor that is—How easy to joke about it as I scribble this 4,500 miles away safe at home in old Florida with the doors locked and the Sheriff doin his best in a town at least as bad but not as foggy and so dark—
I keep looking over my shoulder as I ask the printer “Where are the gendarmes?”
He hurries past me thinking it’s just a lead-in question to mug him.
On Rue de Siam I ask a young guy “Ou sont les gendarmes, leurs offices?” (Where are the gendarmes, their office?)
“Dont you want a cab?” (in French).
“To go where? There are no hotels?”
“The police station is down Siam here, then left and you’ll see it.”
“Merci, Monsieur.”
I go down believing he gave me another bum steer as he’s in cahoots with the hoodlums, I turn left, look over my shoulder, things have gotten suddenly mighty quiet, and I see a building blurring lights in the fog, the back of it, that I figure is the police station.
I listen. Not a sound anywhere. No screeching tires, no mumble voices, no sudden laughs.
Am I crazy? Crazy as that raccoon in Big Sur Woods, or the sandpiper thereof, or any Olsky-Polsky Sky Bum, or Route Sixty Six Silly Elephant Eggplant Sycophant and with more to come.
I walk right into the precinct, take my American green passport from out my breast pocket, present it to the gendarme desk sergeant and tell him I cannot wander these streets all night without a room, etc., have money for a room etc., suitcase locked up etc., missed my plane etc., am a tourist etc. and I am afearéd.
He understood.
His boss came out, the lieutenant I guess, they made a few calls, got a car out front, I stuck 50 francs at the desk sergeant saying “Merci beau-coup.”
He shook his head.
It was one of the only three bills I had left in my pocket (50 francs is worth $10) and when I reached into my pocket I thought maybe it was one of the 5 franc notes, or a ten, in any case the fifty came out like when you draw a card anyway, and I felt ashamed to think I was trying to bribe them, it was only a tip—But you dont “tip” the police of France.
In fact this was the Republican Army defending a descendant of the Vendéan Bretons caught without his trapdoor.
Like the 20 centimes in St. Louis de France that I shoulda stuck in the poorbox, as gold of the real Caritas, I really could have dropped it on the stationhouse floor as I went out but how can such a thought spontaneously enter the head of a crafty worthless Canuck like me?
Or if the thought had entered my mind, would they cry bribe?
No—the Gendarmes of France have a school of their own.
25.
THIS COWARDLY BRETON (ME) WATERED DOWN BY two centuries in Canada and America, nobody’s fault but my own, this Kerouac who would be laughed at in Prince of Wales Land because he cant even hunt, or fish, or fight a beef for his fathers, this boastful, this prune, this rage and rake and rack of lacks, “this trunk of humours” as Shakespeare said of Falstaff, this false staff not even a prophet let alone a knight, this fear-of-death tumor, with tumescences in the bathroom, this runaway slave of football fields, this strikeout artist and base thief, this yeller in Paris salons and mum in Breton fogs, this farceur jokester at art galleries of New York and whimperer at police stations and over longdistance telephones, this prude, this yellowbellied aide-de-campe with portfolio full of port and folios, this pinner of flowers and mocker at thorns, this very Hurracan like the gasworks of Manchester and Birmingham both, this ham, this tester of men’s patience and ladies’ panties, this boneyard of decay eating at rusty horse shoes hoping to win a game from … This, in short, scared and humbled dumbhead loudmouth with-the-shits descendant of man.
The gendarmes have a school of their own, meaning, they dont accept bribes or tips, they say with their eyes: “To each his own, you with your fifty francs, me with my honorable civic courage—and civil at that.”
Boom, he drives me to a little Breton inn on Rue Victor Hugo.
26.
A HAGGARD GUY LIKE ANY IRISHMAN COMES OUT and tightens his bathrobe at the door, listens to the gendarmes, okay, leads me into the room next to the desk which I guess is where guys bring their girls for a quickie, unless I’m wrong and taking off again on joking about life—The bed is perfect with seventeen layers of blankets over sheets and I sleep for three hours and suddenly they’re yelling and scrambling for breakfast again with shouts across courtyards, bing, bang, clatter of pots and shoes dropping on the second floor, cocks crowing, it’s France and morning—
I gotta see it and anyway I cant sleep and where’s my cognac!
I wash my teeth with my fingers at the little sink and rub my hair with my fingertips wishing I had my suitcase and step out in the inn like that looking for the toilet naturally. There’s old Innkeeper, actually a young guy 35 and a Breton, I forgot or omitted to ask his name, but he doesnt care how wildhaired I am and that the gendarmes had to find me a room, “There’s the toilet, first right.”
“La Poizette ah?” I yell.
He gives me the look that says “Get in the toilet and shut up.”
When I come out I am trying to get to my sink in my room to comb my hair but he’s already got breakfast coming for me in the diningroom where nobody is but us—
“Wait, comb my hair, get my cigarettes, and, ah, how about a beer first?”
“Wa? You crazy? Have your coffee first, your bread and butter.”
“Just a little beer.”
“A Wright, awright, just one—Sit here when you get back, I’ve got work to do in the kitchen.”
But this is all spoken that fast and even, but in Breton French which I dont have to make an effort like I do in Parisian French, to enunciate: just: “Ey, weyondonc, pourquoi t’a peur que j’m’dégrise avec une ’tite bierre?” (Hey, come on, how come you’re scared of me sobering up with a little beer?)
“On s’dégrise pas avec la bierre, Monsieur, mais avec le bon petit dejeuner.” (We dont sober up with beer, Monsieur, but with a nice breakfast.)
“Way, mais on est pas toutes des soulons.” (Yah, but not everybody’s a drunk.)
“Dont talk like that Monsieur. It’s there, look, here, in the good Breton butter made with cream, and bread fresh from the baker, and strong hot coffee, that’s how we sober up—Here’s your beer, voila, I’ll keep the coffee hot on the stove.”
“Good! Now there’s a real man.”
“You speak the good French but you have an accent—?”
“Oua, du Canada.”
“Ah yes, because your passport is American.”
“But I havent learned French in books but at home, I didnt know how to speak English in America before I was, oh, five six years old
, my parents were born in Canada in Québec, the name of my mother is L’Évêsque.”
“Ah, that’s Breton also.”
“But why, I thought it was Norman.”
“Well Norman, Breton—”
“This and that—the French of the North in any case, ahn?”
“Ah oui.”
I pour myself a creamlike head over my beer out of the bottle of Alsatian beer, the best i’ the west, as he watches disgusted, in his apron, he has rooms to clean upstairs, what’s this dopey American Canuck hanging him up for and why does this always happen to him?
I say to him my full name and he yawns and says “Way, there are a lot of Lebris’ here in Brest, coupla dozen. This morning before you got up a party of Germans had a great breakfast right where you’re sittin there, they’re gone now.”
“They had fun in Brest?”
“Certainly! You’ve got to stay! You only got here yesterday—”
“I’m going to Air-Inter get my valise and I’m going to England, today.”
“But”—he looks at me helplessly—“you havent seen Brest !”
I said “Well, if I can come back here tonight and sleep I can stay in Brest, after all I’ve gotta have some place” (“I may not be an experienced German tourist,” I add to think to myself, “not having toured Brittany in 1940 but I certainly know some boys in Massachusetts who toured it for you outa the St. Lo breakthrough in 1944, I do”) (“and French Canadian boys at that.”)—And that’s that, because he says:–
“Well I may not have a room for you tonight, and then again I may, all depends, Swiss parties are coming.”
(“And Art Buchwald,” I thought.)
He said: “Now eat your good Breton butter.” The butter was in a little clay butter bucket two inches high and so wide and so cute I said :–
“Let me have this butter bucket when I’ve finished the butter, my mother will love it and it will be a souvenir for her from Brittany.”
“I’ll get you a clean one from the kitchen. Meanwhile you eat your breakfast and I’ll go upstairs and make a few beds” so I slup down the rest of the beer, he brings the coffee and rushes upstairs, and I smur (like Van Gogh’s butterburls) fresh creamery butter outa that little bucket, almost all of it in one bite, right on the fresh bread, and crunch, munch, talk about your Fritos, the butter’s gone even before Krupp and Remington got up to stick a teaspoon smallsize into a butler-cut-up grapefruit.
Satori there in Victor Hugo Inn?
When he comes down, nothing’s left but me and one of those wild powerful Gitane (means Gypsy) cigarettes and smoke all over.
“Feel better?”
“Now that’s butter—the bread extraspecial, the coffee strong and exquisite—But now I desire my cognac.”
“Well pay your room bill and go down rue Victor Hugo, on the corner is cognac, go get your valise and settle your affairs and come back here find out if there’s a room tonight, beyond that old buddy old Neal Cassady cant go no further. To each his own and I got a wife and kids upstairs so busy playing with flowerpots, if, why if I had a thousand Syrians racking the place in Nominoé’s own brown robes, they’d still let me do all the work, as it is, as you know, a hard-net Keltic sea.” (I ingrained his thought there for your delectation, and if you didnt like it, call it beanafaction, in other words I beaned ya with my high hard one.)
I say “Where’s Plouzaimedeau? I wanta write poems by the side of the sea at night.”
“Ah you mean Plouzémédé—Ah, spoff, not my affair—I gotta work now.”
“Okay I’ll go.”
But as an example of a regular Breton, aye?
27.
SO I GO DOWN TO THE CORNER BAR AS DIRECTED AND walk in and there’s old Papa Bourgeois or more likely Kervélégan or Ker-thisser and Ker-thatter behind the bar, gives me a cold gyrene look gyring me wide around and I say “Cognac, Monsieur.” He takes his bloody time. A young mailman walks in with his leather shoulder-hanging pouch and starts in talking to him. I take my delicate cognac to a table and sit and on the first sip I shudder to miss what I missed all night. (They had some brands there besides Hennessey and Courvoisier and Monnet, that musta been why Winston Churchill that old Baron crying for his hounds in his weird wield weir, was always in France with cigar-a-mouth painting.) The owner eyes me narrowly. Clearly. I go up to the mailman and say: “Where’s the office in town of the Air-Inter airplane company?”
“No savvy.” (but in French).
“You a mailman in Brest and dont even know where an important office is?”
“What’s so important about it?”
(“Well for one thing,” I say to myself to him extra-sensorily, “it’s the only way you can get outa here—fast.”) But all I say is: “My suitcase is there and I’m gonna get it back.”
“Gee I dont know where it is. Do you, boss?”
No answer.
I said “Okay, I’ll find it myself” and finished my cognac, and the mailman said:
“I am only a facteur” (mailman).
I said something to him in French which is published in heaven, which I insist to print here only in French: “Tu travaille avec la maille pi tu sais seulement pas s’qu’est une office—d’importance?”
“I’m new on the job” he said in French.
I’m not trying to belabor no point but listen to this :–
It’s not my fault, or that of any American tourist or even patriot, that the French refuse the responsibility of their explanations—It’s their right to demand privacy, but farcing is submit-table to a court of Law, O Monsieur Bacon et Monsieur Coke—Farcing, or deceit, is submittable to a court of Law when it concerns your loss of civil welfare or safety.
It’s as tho some Negro tourist like Papa Kane of Senegal came up to me on the sidewalk on Sixth Avenue and 34th street and asked me which way to the Dixie Hotel on Times Square, and instead I directed him to the Bowery, where he would (let’s say) be killed by Basque and Indian muggers, and a witness heard me give this innocent African tourist these wrong directions, and then testified in court that he heard these farcing instructions with intent to deprive of right-of-way, or right-of-social-way or right-of-proper- direction, then let’s blast all the uncooperative and unmannerly divisionist rats on both sides of Spoofism and other Isms too anyway.
But the old owner of the bar quietly tells me where it is and I thank him and go.
28.
NOW I SEE THE HARBOR, THE FLOWERPOTS IN BACK of kitchens, old Brest, the boats, coupla tankers out there, and the wild headlands in the gray scudding sky, summat like Nova Scotia.
I find the office and go in. Here’s two characters in there involved with onionskinned duplicated copies of everything and not even a mistress on their knee, tho she’s in back right now. I put points, papers, down, they say wait an hour. I say I wanta fly to London tonight. They say Air-Inter doesnt fly direct to London but back to Paris and you gets another company. (“Brest is only a you-know-what-hair from Cornwall,” I wish I could tell them, “why fly back to Paris?”) “Alright, so I’ll fly to Paris. What time today?”
“Not today. Monday is the next flight from Brest.”
I can just picture myself hanging around Brest for one jolly whole weekend with no hotel room and no one to talk to. Right then a gleam comes in my eye as I think: “It’s Saturday morning, I can be in Florida in time for the funnies at dawn when the guy placks em on my driveway!”—“Is there a train back to Paris?”
“Yes, at three.”
“Sell me a ticket?”
“You have to go there yourself.”
“And my suitcase again?”
“Wont be here till noon.”
“So I go buy ticket at railroad station, talk to Stepin Fetchit awhile and call him Old Black Joe, and even sing it, give him French kiss, peck on each cheek, give him quarter, and come back here.”
I didnt actually say that but I shoulda but I only said “Okay” and went down the station, got the firstclass ticket, ca
me back the same way, by now already an expert on Brest streets, looked in, no suitcase yet, went to Rue de Siam, cognac and beer, dull, came back, no suitcase, so went into the bar next door to this Air Office of the Breton Air Force which I should write long letters to Mac-Mullen of SAC about—
I know there are a lot of beautiful churches and chapels out there that I should go look at, and then England, but since England’s in my heart why go there? and ’sides, it doesnt matter how charming cultures and art are, they’re useless without sympathy—All the prettiness of tapestries, lands, people:– worthless if there is no sympathy—Poets of genius are just decorations on the wall if without the poetry of kindness and Caritas—This means that Christ was right and everybody since then (who “thought” and wrote opposing views of their own) (like, say, Sigmund Freud and his cold depreciation of helpless personalities), was wrong —in that, the life of a person is, as W. C. Fields says, “Fraught with eminent peril” but when you know that when you die you will be elevated because you’ve done no harm, Ah take that back to Brittany and Elsewhere too—Do we need a Definition-of-Harm University to teach this? Let no man impel you to evil. The Guardian of Purgatory has the two Keys to St. Peter’s Gate and himself’s the third and deciding key.
And you impel no one to evil, or you shall have your balls of your eyes and the rest roasted like at an Iroquois stake and by the Devil himself, he who chose Judas for his chews. (Outa Dante.)
Whatever wrong you do shall be returned to you a hundredfold, jot and tittle, by the laws that operate in what science now calls “the deepening mystery of research.”
Well re-search this, Creighton, by the time yore investigations are complete, the Hound Dog of Heaven’ll take you straight to Massah.
29.
SO I GO INTO THAT BAR SO’S NOT TO MISS MY SUIT case with its blessed belongings, as if like Joe E. Lewis the comedian I could try to take my things to Heaven with me, while you’re alive on earth the very hairs of your cats on your clothes are blessed, and later on we can all gape and yaw at Dinosaurs together, well, here’s this bar and I go in, sip awhile, go back two doors, the suitcase’s there at last and tied to a chain.