The Brussels Accord

"A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with. He can know his heart, but he don't want to. Rightly so. Best not to look in there. It ain't the heart of a creature that is bound in the way that God has set for it. You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man, the devil was at his elbow." Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

It was Sunday. After a while you can't help but look around and wonder what all of this is for. You snap photos of stately buildings. You wander through the streets. You take out a map, fold it up, walk five more steps, and take out the map again.

Listless might be the word. Adrift. Not lost, but you can only walk so far before your hands reach and bulge through the viscous curve of bubble you've drawn around yourself. Step back, watch the sun through the champagne colored dome as translucent oranges and oil slick purples wind around each other like serpents in an iridescent pit. 

Why, exactly, are you here? In Brussels, it was next on the map. No, why are you here? The dreaded question on this side of the hill, no account given to--no room to dread--the nightmare wet expanse on the other. Rats in the wall, they tunnel and bore, every muted claw the big question closer to gnawing through your stomach. Why? Why are you here?

Belgian fries are unremarkable. The mayonnaise is nice. Ketchup is so sweet, mayo makes for a nice muted fat to swallow some of the salt. Jupiler Beer is what the men in work clothes and young punks and bums drink, both with places important as the other in the ascension and decline of the social order. In the park, two in hand, this is Sunday now. 

A park next to the royal palace, once a shadow place where people forced into the shadows could carouse for rough gay sex, is now rendered tourist. White gravel crunches underfoot scattered on the diagonal and intersecting park walkways. Roundabouts and median and bifurcations lift with verdant green. Europe has nice grass, grass you can sit on. 

On one median two women pitch a shuttlecock back and forth aloft on racquets. One woman, pegged together with tightly wound athletic cordage, tries to implore the other woman to keep the shuttlecock in the air. She motions with her racket keeping the face skyward. The other woman continues to drive the rubber ball in its plastic nightgown to the earth.

"Up! Up!" she cries as the woman casts downward again, and the world watches as it is indeed drawn from these divergent polarities.

On another median two women, women in love, drink white wine. Their eyes always kiss for when their lips don't. The boy with them is a gawk, shoulders driven toward his crossed legs. He's seen it before, the familiarity of their discourse proves it, but he still hangs his grinning jaw to the side. Maybe he just believes in love.

Further into the park, a gazebo--with its lathe made poles and knit wood accent molding--is surrounded by happy people. Two DJs with open laptops push bass and treble through the pastel rotunda like long star cut clay ribbons wrenched from a child's plaything. All ages gather round. Infants bob near the front still uncertain of their center of gravity, still un-self conscious enough to dance with abandon. Young men in heavy metal tees and long olive colored shorts. Mothers who dance on feet inward, outward, and meeting underneath sway on birth widened hips. A girl, high waisted denim splendor not obliged to wear sunglasses, has a countenance of someone for whom you tatter your heart with a cat 'o' nine tails. Not because she wanted it that way, but because the light in her eyes said she'd listen. She'd suffer your self made prison until jailbreak was her only rational choice. Even though you've held the key the entire time.

Ever hear the one about the inmates in the asylum? Two inmates in a mental ward escape one night. They reach a gap in the roof. The first inmate jumps over. The second inmate is too afraid. The first inmate, feeling the urgency, pulls out a flashlight and says, just walk across the beam. The second inmate takes a step forward, stops, and calls across into the night, No, No, No. I'm not crazy. You'll just turn off the flashlight when I'm halfway.

You begin to reflect on this jeering misanthrope. How much time has been spent looking for trouble. The seconds, minutes, hours, years spent breathlessly building a card house reminiscent of The Good Life only to put a rock through it. A quiet life is one built on an equity of quiet misery. The monster has to eat. Simple pleasures of an extended holiday only starve the beast. There is no fear in a world simply touched with sight. Despair is besotted with too many joy shod kindnesses. It's still unclear what counts for more, the thrill or the guilt. Even today, on this serene Sunday in a city park people would dream to visit, the feeling weighs a ton. Sometimes, you want to sit on a beach side dune and watch the sea fill with fire. Lurching and churning with its enkindled spray until the flames lick clean your black sunglasses of what little eyes there were to be seen. And he finally smiles.

The second Jupiler is as forgettable warm. The DJ samples David Bowie's, "Five Years."

And it was cold

And it rained

So I felt like an actor

And I thought of Ma

And I wanted to get back there

Your face

Your race

The way that you walk

I kiss you

You're beautiful

I want you to walk

We've got five years

Like tumblers in a lock, revelations began to spill out. You realize what kind of life this is, what kind of life this is going to be. Not unlovable, it's just cruel to take someone with you. No money, not real money, but that's not a worthy ambition. This tedious clatter of words and punctuation, the only reward will be to save you, if never to be confused with salvation. You'll continue to spin all this life sometimes whirling toward the heavens and others screwing yourself into the filthy, corpse filled ground. Dead is the only neutral position. 

And it was okay. Nothing hurt, nothing slit the heart open, instead it made all things simple again, like unto a child. 

For once, for a brief moment, these were not the church bell's mournful song of surrender, but warm billows pushing above all existence. Rooftops below just far enough away to see the mosaic of summer palaces and working class tenements and factories vomiting black smoke. None of it perfect--perfection the worst sort of hell--but persistent in its flaws. The end of the ideal self. Devils left unslayed and angels beyond expulsion. Failure is only that of a man acquiesced. No footprint is so deep it will not be flensed from the ever molting indifference of time set to sweep clean the journeys men take across trails broken repeatedly in vain hope of discovery. It may take one hundred lifetimes to erase, but we only have to live through the one. A single, naked, hobbled pneuma remains. Untethered, inimical and luminous, beckoning to those unable to heed the assurances of union with this barefoot shade on some mythic far shore.

There was an art house movie theater outside the park. They were showing a silent film. A piano sat under one lone light and a player came to provide a live score. The story was of a drifter. He was trying to escape a past he was not made to burden. A woman came to love him. Invariably, a man's past comes to him. They ran away together, but a man's past is a beacon for those unable to loose their fevered grip on blights of indiscretion long transgressed. Everything is lost. Their child is thrown from a cliff. The man and woman, in tragic embrace, die, together, in the snow.

Vondelpark O'clock: The Happiest Days of All

Did you know grass was legal in Amsterdam?!? I know, right?!? And not just Amsterdam. It's not some rogue nation-state making its own rules, but all of the Netherlands. Me, I'm a Reagan Baby. I just say NO, wouldn't touch the stuff, but I thought it was an interesting, "travel fact." 

Also, five Amstel tall boys, .70 Euro cents a piece, fit in my shoulder bag.

These things are at the heart of Vondelpark O'clock.

As I've traveled alone more and more, city parks have become a haven of sorts. I'm not sure if since--going back to a rocky start in Madrid--the first place I felt really good in Europe was in a city park it's a conditioned reaction. Notwithstanding, I visit every major city park in every city I go to. People watching is endless entertainment and city parks in Europe are just nice. Compared to Texas, the weather is cooler, the grass is greener, and the wild life is almost like the pages of a picture book emptied into real life.

The Dutch, among so many over things, have their parks down. With what seems like a little more room and urban planning from the get go, the Netherlands has a nice mixture of well ordered city parks with benches and ponds and city parks of dense forest with a few trails weaving through the columns of trees. Vondelpark in Amsterdam is the former, but it is massive. I took a different entrance into the park everyday and as many landmarks as I established I never seemed to double back. They have wide stretches of lawn where you can lay out. Park benches situated near the more populated areas to soak up humanity in its supreme weirdness. They even have an adult sized tree fort/jungle gym I couldn't find again if you begged me too. And the birds! They have amazing ducks. I would always feel a thrill when I saw a mallard, but compared to the massive wooly brown and purple ducks quacking around, they're like green headed turds. And all the ducks had their babies at their feet. No matter how broken you are on the inside, when you see a bunch of ducklings drinking from the pond hidden under their mother you can't help but feel, for at least a second, maybe I can be good. They have a fucking heron in Vondelpark! Huge with her s-curved neck and feathers like hand strung strands of lace curtain. 

God, it's beautiful day. I love the murky and oppressive blue in the sky here. I'll sit here until sundown and go get something to eat. The same place. The place behind Wok to Walk. I think that kebab saved my life last night. Best one I've had in Europe. The chili sauce left a thumbprint on my brain. The tatziki and chili and meat on a spit meat, he just...that guy gets it. It's cause he's Dutch, the Dutch get it. Look at this guy. 

He made a wide circling turn on his rickety bike spray painted red and black and as he was bound to careen into me he made a lazy turn. Lickety-cut, lickety-cut his bike trundled on.

That's how I'll write it later. I like the way Malcolm Lowry writes sounds, I think I can steal that. Lickety-cut.  Can you use trundled there? I'm going to, all words are made up anyway. I swear I'm two days out from speaking Dutch...Holy shit, he got off his bike and in the middle of the path broke into an impeccable Michael Jackson dance. Robotic tics and shuffled feet and body control, it was all there. I wonder what song it is. He's dressed like smooth criminal era MJ, I wonder if he's stopping and dancing to that weird digression in the song that always bothered me so much as a child. 

Look at these ducks and baby ducks. Mother and father look like calico cats and the babies are just tufted in brown and yellow and black. I wonder how many we're lost this spring. It seems impossible to believe all of them, these babies, survived. 

Hey Dutch girl. Hey Dutch couple. Ne, ne, ne. That's why I want to speak Dutch so I can say--Ne, ne, ne--in that convincing and melodious arc. I like their friends on their bikes. It's like we all get to be ten years old forever here. I wish I'd rented a bike. I'll tell people I did, I'll insist they have to, but I didn't. I lie. Not about things that matter, not too much, but I lie. It's like a compulsion I have to get out in small and inane ways or the beast will grow in me like a tapeworm. A long flat liar tapeworm. It must be an occasion. Their friend on yet another bike charged in with hugs for the couple floating on their imperceptible pedestal. Marriage? Come on Dutch girl, you know I'm cuter than your Dutch boyfriend. 

Heeeeyyy Dutch girl, you know I'm cuter than (bomp, bomp) your Dutch boiiiiiifriiiiend. 

That's a fucking hit record. Why am I falling in love with every Dutch girl I see? The one from earlier today, on the side street backlit like it was movies with her longboard and flaxen hair. Her cool sunglasses. She laughed at us, but it was in a good way. I wish I had better clothes. I'd take picture of people if I had better clothes. Like some tapered paints and slim jackets and bow-ties. Tortoise shell Lennon sunglasses and a stupid hat. Like a skimmer or something. And dress shoes, nice pointed brown dress shoes. I'd tell people darling this and darling that and tell them I'm an aspiring fashion photographer collecting the street looks across Europe. I could print fake Vice Magazine business cards. Vice would probably love it. Then I'd feel obligated to start a fashion blog, cause I can't live with creep guilt. Could be cool. 

And the girl from the other hostel, the one one Den Haag, I could have loved her. We had a whole conversation and we made that good eye contact. The game of chicken who'll break it eye contact. I was certain she looked prettier the next day. Her hair was down and I think she was looking for me as I came in and out of the hostel. I swore she had on a Nirvana tee. I'm American, that's our thing, but it could be our thing. Mine and hers. Our eyes locked every time. Maybe because I was looking for her.  She even mentioned she didn't have a boyfriend. The breadcrumb trail.

"What's the wifi password," he called after her.

She crossed with an armful of laundry poised and efficient. A good worker, the loveliest quality yet of her glittering menagerie putting weight on his once forgotten heart.

"I like you," she replied with one azure eye cast over her shoulder, hair like honey dredged chrome pulled up in sheer practicality.

He paused for a moment, never responding, and quickly stared into the void of his tablet to punch in the password "ilikeyou" embarrassed to think even a crack would show from the impact of her words.

"Don't you believe me?" she asked having paused on her path to the laundry room perched on the balls of her slender feet.

"No, it works. I just hoped that was exclusively for me."

She laughed. A good laugh. He could hardly tell pity from flirtation anymore, but he was glad he'd said it.

She said she'd have to have a boyfriend before she could go on a trip like mine. I could be that boyfriend. She loved the trip. She might could love the traveler? Maybe as much as I love telling people about my trip. "Woooaaahhh," they all say. Fuck your two weeks after your semester in Rostock. Six months! I'm so fucking cool. You're so cool. Her skin was so fair and pretty with her dumb sandy hair and stupid, perfect blues eyes. Like, no other blue. But, really, like lots of blues. I need more words for blue. Maybe thats why we have so few words for blue, because that RadioLab podcast said blue was the last color we made up. I love how the greeks described the ocean as the color of wine. I could have loved her, but why all these Dutch girls? It's because they don't have to be real. No, it's so you don't have to be real. You don't have to eventually ring hollow and watch the facade cave in with their growing disappoint as their eyes wonder for something no longer real, as you once were to them....Damn, that's good, I'm gonna use that somewhere else later. You're so smart. Smart and cool.

I think I'm in love (probably just hungry)

I think I'm your friend (probably just lonely)

I think you got me in a spin (probably just wasted)

I don't think those are the words. I do love that song. I'm gonna listen to it later. Why'd you do it J Spaceman? Why do lead singers think they matter so much? Fucking Sting. But no time for all that, it's Vondelpark O'clock, me bruv. We going one for one?It won't be like yesterday. Monte, Compete! as Swide would say. Reach! as the wolf would say. Fuck it! Woo! It is our designated park time after all. Holy, sacred Vondelpark O'Clock. Like when those German seeming girls asked you and it sounded like, "Where is Wonder Park?" It is wonder park, but I had to tell them I'm just a stranger here. I wonder if I look Dutch? Maybe I just walk with purpose.

I'm a stranger here, just blowed in your town. I love that song. Sonny and Brownie. Or is it Brownie and Sonny? I should listen to that song.

Look at them. This couple and their friends. I wonder if they'll make it. I wonder if any of us will make it. I've always wanted to say that to a girl who is just pretty, who has only had to be pretty "Don't worry, maybe your second husband will love you." 

The heron lit into a tree with her gossamer plumage of confederate greys and eyeshadow blue--and her s-curved neck--the air supplicating to her beating wings. 

I wonder if I need to specify what kind of eyeshadow? It's like that type that's light and silvery the classy girls just barely use a bit of. I love these birds. I'm gonna write a fucking poem about it. I swear I could be a great poet. It's only because I think poetry is a joke. It may be the only kind of writing I wouldn't try so had at it might be good.

Walk Away Renee

Duck families skitter by. Mother and father poised painted wooden decoys. Ducklings but fawns tufted in brown and white. They drink from the river, a quorum of five crowded around mother's column feet.

A Herron, with its elegant neck shaped like the bend in the creek 

Two dark water birds with candied corns beaks and dinosaur feet.

Fat leafed plants with their faces upturned savage their thirst until dusk turns to dishwater, crowding those cast in shadow, those looking downward into the wavering reflection for salvation.

A couple sits wrapped in blankets.

 A man with a bong in front of him and a boy on a bike have an exchange of sorts.  

The couple decides to go.

The trees have had it easy. You can tell by their arrogance.

I wonder if it'll make people think about death. Or religion. That's every poem ever, right? I've got to figure out where I'm gonna use the heron neck reference. Is that even a heron? I'm not gonna read it again. I'm pretty sure it's no good. It's not me, it's not Rimbaud. That guy didn't care. I just care too much. No, not true, it's the ongoing battle to be me. I'm a withering echo chamber of I don't give a fuck. It's a vacuum in me where the words echo over and over again. Maybe that's the way it is with everyone but people dare to build something irrational in defiance of this base state of being. I wrote a poem, how fucking ridiculous. I wonder if people even notice me as much as I cackle to myself. 

And when you're smiling for no reason you'll know you're happy again, and they'll know you've gone mad. 

As quickly, he felt bad. 

There it is, the sickly sweet wave of nausea. How many deep did we go today? It's the tobacco. Why is it always with tobacco here? I hate cigarettes but I want to be polite. I can't do all of this. All these things. The light meals and the tall...I can't even finish the word. I can't focus on a single thought too long. The fifth one-for-one was a bad idea. Vondelpark O'clock is too much fun? 

Lickety-Cut. Lickety-Cut.

No, no repetitive thoughts. Nothing over and over again. You can't. Not in a foreign land, not in a park like this. You will not be able to recover if you lose the thread. It happened yesterday, how'd you let it happen again? Put your goddamn headphones in. 

His mouth perspires saliva and his guts rose into his--stop fucking narrating.

Oh God, music only made it worse. It was like it was thrumming tilt a whirl off center in my brain. The scene from the Sandlot. Kids sick everywhere. 

Why would you do that to yourself?

Lay down. 

It's Michael Jackson again. Across the river. 

I can hear the young kids mocking him. They're so cruel. Their cruelty is so heavy the water on the pond ripples. 

Okay, you cant lay down. Just sort of, like, perch against the tree. Pour out the rest. Just tump it over and don't look at it. You know you'll lose it if you watch it pour onto the ground. If you can weather the storm, maybe twenty-thirty minutes to go, and we'll go get our kebab. From the same place as last night. Then we'll go to the hostel. Out till around 11, that's a good day. Hold it together. Kebab. Sleep. That's the perfect day. The park has a hostel in it. We'll stay there next time. We'll be okay and eat our kebab with chili and tatziki  and stay here again and hold hands with our Dutch girlfriend...

He awoke like a man in peril, a man thrust from a dream just shallow enough to drown in. He did a cursory inventory of his bag and skulked away eyes darting back and forth. The congress of night gathered round him whispered to one another, hands over their face.

Our Gatsby

Baz Lurhrmann's most recent incarnation of the Great Gastby is not good. In fact, in this world of subjectivity we've confused for fact, let's just go ahead and say it's terrible. All films are afforded the same advantage, extremely low expectations. I'm a grown up, and after all, isn't adulthood really just the perpetual lowering of expectations? 

Arriving at the movie house in Den Haag, all full up of Dutch magic--perfect society there in the Netherlands, damnedest thing--beers in hand, 3D glasses snug tight, I set my brain for turd. Maybe slightly better than turd, but an aim no higher than crapsterpiece. Word to the wise, if you go to the Pathé in the Netherlands, get two beers, the price break almost defies basic economic principals. Plus it's Grolsch so you get to pop the top of the second mid-movie. And Gatsby provides plenty of hilarious, overwrought moments to squeeze off that bad boy, the only real entertainment you'll glean from this grueling two and a half hour film.

What went wrong? It's like trying to perform a post-op on a man who fell on a bomb. Grab a shovel, grab a garbage bag, and do your best to unlearn the horrors wrought. The only meaningful criticism applicable: after the film, the next two days were spent wondering what I liked about the book in the first place.

I read the Great Gatsby at eighteen. It was one of the few assigned books devoured in high school (here's looking at you Watership Down). To add some context, I was terminally eighteen. Boastful, nihilistic, drug addled, and laying in wait for a world set to quiver in the wake of my perceived genius. I was a lot cooler then. Over the years a lot of the details of Gatsby have been forgotten, the only certainty: it was one of those few perfect novels. I recommended it, waxed poetic about the lyrical prose, and--even after the fall to earth--I'd try and chat up kiosk girls reading it at the mall where I was selling shoes to flex my intellect. 

To this moment, there is a deep seeded fear in looking up the specifics from the book. Yes, it's a film, and film adaptations are meant to take liberties, but there are some narrative devices, if true to the book, are trash. Examples of lowest common denominator storytelling requiring no imagination, certainly not what should be required of a, "great American novel." 

In the ensuing days I read a sterling piece of criticism in regard to Baz Luhrmann's Gatsby. Every generation gets the Gatsby film it deserves. It's important to refrain from speaking of any generation in broad strokes. If this critique was infallible, the underlying conceit would be this generation is bad. It's simply not true, but if this film served as a civ to catch the glaring impurities in this generation's collective psyche, it's a damning condemnation of the millennials. 

To quickly retrace the lineage of Gatsby, one has to begin with the book. A bellwether of the lost generation of writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's book is not the best book from this era of authors--not by a long shot--but it's the most famous and an appropriate, enduring symbol. This was a generation who had the first peek at the size of the world and then this world collapsed into itself in a grisly, destructive war. After the winners were parceled out from the losers, the American dream took shape. Luxury goods took the place of character, the world to end all wars had the correct victors, and life would be cocktails and jazz parties heretofore. At least to those who deserved it, the others in society left to be forgotten in slums and tenements, a fate deserved and probably of their own making. Fitzgerald--at least as memory serves--captured the sentiment with subtlety and grace. The book reads like a faded Art Deco print torn from the front of a gilded concert hall wrapped around the shoulders of a bloodied drunk in a disheveled tuxedo destitute in content, if flush with money.

There is a silent version from 1926 I have not seen. If you have it, I'll take that piece of junk off your hands on the cheap. Then there is a version from 1949 with an exceptional performance from Alan Ladd as Gatsby, maybe one of his best. The film has been overlooked, but the trend seems to be post-war Americans looking for their soul love to generate another iteration of Gatsby. Filmed in splendid black and white, it's hard to fully gauge the merits of the film. With the Hays Code casting a shadow over all Hollywood film production, the carnality of the story is toothless. This was a time when American's were perceived as the best at their very best, and the film misses some of the pungency of a failed, misguided generation. 

Next comes the 1970's version starring Robert Redford. With the false promise of civil rights and the love generation having deflated into an era of conspicuous consumption along side economic ruin, the film served as an outgrowth of what President Carter would call, "a crisis of confidence." The film tried to tap into the nightmare of Vietnam, high gas prices, low employment rates, and nauseating largess as best it could. The adaptation falls well short in many ways, but the movie is executed with an even hand and a hint of coolness. The film is almost a two-way mirror meant to stand between different generations as close to each other as they are far apart. Far from a perfect film, and at times painfully vacuous like the era from which it comes, it's a respectable film bridging two eras of corrupt decadence with keen, satirical wit.

In 2000 a made for TV version was produced with Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway, and, really--for your sake--forget it ever came up.

Baz Lurhrmann's Gatsby is a two and a half hour long selfie. I despise the term, but it's indicative of the merits of the film. If I was an old man in owl eyed glasses and a dark colored suit, this would be my bold pronouncement, "an entire generation that knows how to take a picture of themselves." Said with dread and contempt--and one of the many lenses through which I view a more curmudgeonly part of myself--it does represent a peculiar state of affairs. Every moment captured in high definition and clicked off and then telegraphed to the world left to linger in the expanse of Internet ether. A photo taken, then filtered, then cropped is posted and liked in the most noncommittal way and quickly forgotten with the refresh of a feed. Everything is gilt. Nothing resembles the arc of a glorious and contemptible reality. Even sadness is served up in an oblique way, more in line with self aggrandizement than self improvement. The lens has grown too wide and is skewed with too many soft focus lenses. We're no longer Gatsby and Carraway. We've become a culture who venerates Tom and Daisy.

2013 Gatsby is like a fancy dinner. The servants are in full livery. The fine china and silver have been impeccably laid out. The multitude of drinking glasses are like a quiz in refined manners. When everyone gathers round the table--outfits as sterling as the setting--after a hearty round of cocktails, the help comes out with dinner. As they know their station, they make no eye contact and keep their gaze focused on the line of old money golden dome serving dishes scuttling from the kitchen. Wide platters with classical motifs etched around the edges, they are placed in front of the partygoers by the almost invisible hands of the staff. When the moment comes, each placement with a butler perched at the ready, the dome is pulled off, a billow of steam uncurls toward the vaulted ceiling, and the plate is empty. Everyone cheers and digs in to the fantasy scooping heaping piles of nothingness into their unhinged jaws and vacant stomachs. Someone takes a photo of the invisible feast with their phone. It receives a combined 72 'likes' from various social media outlets.

The Great Gatsby is not meant for full color 3D splendor. This is not a story for saturated hues and heavy handed slow motion climaxes. The focus of this tale is not the garish facade, but the withered strand of human decency at the core. Where we would hope we were some artful and elegant notion of boats beating against the current, borne back ceaselessly against the past, we've reduced ourselves to the once great man, now a corpse, with one uninterested acquaintance standing over us with a simple, demure comment to add:

"The poor son-of-a-bitch."

The Lay Preacher

This is the story of a man named Vincent. This man, Vincent, would come to nothing in his life. Vincent would die by his own hand unable to heal the wounds no one else could see. Perhaps they could see the madness in his eyes, or his uneven temperament would fall in them like a strange and violent blade, but his wounds, save an ear, were concealed from the world. Or, the physical manifestations were not left to be discovered on his person.

Vincent failed at many things. A misfit born for his time is a misfit for all time, but his failures were the only abundance afforded to this destitute life. In a life wealthy with so many shortcomings, there are many unlikely steps off the carousel forever tilting on its crooked axis toward more defeats, the necessary cuts made to gnaw a man down to bone. One of these in auspicious footings was that of a man of God. 

Vincent was a lay preacher. Vincent was an unordained preacher with his unrefined ideas sent to men who could level with these ideas and see the parts of themselves, both godly and unrefined. God's unfinished preacher sent to shepherd the hard scrabble flock to what valley may give respite if the low, peaceful valley was never intended for these crude cut souls.

Were his sermons about God's love? Did he speak in analogies of light and color? Did he simply read from the good book, monotone, another illformed station in this world chafing his uneasy mind?

This is the story of a boy, a man by all accounts with his eyes sunk into his shadow box face looming over paunch and stubble, but very much a child. He never cared much for the things hung in stone edifices with their large souvenir tickets and guided audio tours. He preferred the weight of books in his hands and the shaft of light from projector screen, but art--the cadavers splayed cold on examining tables in galleries the world over--was distasteful. These things required an explanation. These things so needed an arid mausoleums to subsist. These things could not cast their own shadow. These things were the murder of art, art as some fictional sentiment worth believing.

 This is my story. This is the story of my visit to the lay preacher.

Mine was never to sit in his congregation. There was no tumbledown church with creaking, unfinished pews and an endlessly circling collection plate for a new roof or hymnals. All of this was gone, and I was left only to observe his sermons rendered mute. His fables and lessons preserved by those who knew the value of his message even though he was gone. Teachings now housed in a palace bearing his name, the sort of glittering cathedral this lay preacher might scorn and strive for in his unpredictable, irradiated colors of fugue. 

There was the sinister and funny parable of the smoking skeleton. There was the parable of the many workers of the field. The allegory of the potato eaters, though an early, perhaps overwrought attempt, was a cornerstone. Like his beatitudes, the flowers who turn their face to the sun revealed a tenderness never before known to me. So many grasps at capturing himself, an attempt to understand the face peering back, because the true kingdom of Heaven lies within. The words of the men circling the prison yard fell deep into me. His final doctrine, the almond blossoms--branches aching toward an untouchable blue sky, dotted with delicate hands waving white, never made to ascend beyond roots bound to soil, and in defiance of this resolute fate they unfurl their beauty as a sacrifice portending their flutter into the abyss of indifferent earth where unforetold rebirth can finally begin anew--this was the benediction.

It's easy to like the Vincent, the lay preacher. Perhaps my new found devotion to this man is simply a cart set on rails greased with years of repeated references to the mad genius and his work, omnipresent, peering down from classroom walls and bedroom doors. But, his work appeared next to that of his contemporaries, and none held sway, not like Van Gogh.

Among his finished masterworks, there were sketches and model drawings. His footsteps retraced, removed from infallible icons of his genius, the struggle is revealed. Misshapen drawings of farmers. Stilted lines of perspective. Influence of admired peers shown through too much. Techniques refined in art schools in which he could never survive. This is the story of a man named Vincent. In slavery and starvation, in unrequited passion, crippled with unseen sickness, he was united with his place in this world. 

I have no reason to believe Van Gogh was a good preacher. All the same, I want to go back. A man is always an artist, a man is always mad. I want to put on what modest overcoat my means afford. Button up a shirt laundered and saved for Sundays, my wedding, and my funeral. Sit on the wincing, un-lacquered benches, look on to the hymn book with four others, and listen. Perhaps not the most brilliant orator, maybe even in some circles tiring and droll, but when one can unite the sullied masses with a profound sensation outside themselves, this is the power of the lay preacher.

Many Sundays he is so meek you can't hear his voice at the back of the hall. But some Sundays, the right Sunday, he speaks a truth. The unheralded scenes of forgotten lives unfold above his pulpit toned in horror, yet haloed in vivid color. We sing "Down By the Riverside," and he leads with a booming, ragged voice. And before we part, he reminds us, filled with the spirit, when all things are brought out--darkness or light--they, for those willing to see it, crawl with unexpected and articulate beauty.

Deauville

Having played myself up to 150,000 Euro by midnight, the tuxedo jacket had flattened and formed to my sitting figure. So many cigarettes, all the times I've quit forsaken for this, but it's what Bob would do. Just remember what the book said, every card flip, every bated breath from the ever expanding audience, it was all like the book said.

This was the narrative. On the train to Deauville, anxious legs and hand cupped around my mouth, grimacing, my mind wandered in and out of childish fantasies. Normandy fell away from the train track sutures in rolling green hills and dairy cows and farmhouses with the occasional field of unbroken yellow. Normandy is a postcard parody of itself. 

The French  Film New Wave/Noir tour continued.  Deauville and Hon Fleur. The climactic scene of the brilliant Bob Le Flambeur in the Deauville Casino and the final moment, the iconic scene, of Truffat's 400 Blows imprinted on the Hon Fleur beach. I've been told my writing on movies is, "painful," so I'll refrain. Simply: Bob Le Flambeur is a film about a gambler in need of a hot streak. 400 Blows is the story of a boy who wants to see the beach. 

The train arrived in Deauville and a grey morning hung in cantilevered clouds moped about. Deauville is right next to Trouville and it's unclear why it isn't just one town. Even in a European sense where every village--even 5 KM apart--has a crest and a flag, these two towns were divided by nothing save a harbor the size of a football field and a pig tail river meandering into the French countryside. Trouville climbed the hill and Deauville settled in the sea plain. 

Moments away from the train station, not ready for the reveal, there was a large Ferris wheel, raised on candy striped supports, stone still. Behind it, a two story building with CASINO arched over the door spelled out in block letters, dimmed neon tubes fitted on the inside: Deauville casino, my spiritual and ancestral home.

Chemin de Fer, an old French from of baccarat, was the game. There is a banker and punters and a dealer, and you leverage betting interests accordingly. I'd started reading, "How to Win at Baccarat," on a lark. It was Bob's game, so it'd be mine. It wasn't meant to go like this, so well, like the dealer was holding the book in his lap and making sure my success was a tutorial. Follow the book, do what the book says. Keep your hair slicked back, don't cater to the crowd, be there alone--as in all things--and keep a cigarette perched between your lips. Shot in black and white, pure, unfettered elegance.

Some pictures for posterity's sake, the camera's incisors pinching the image from reality, and something fired in my memory: this isn't the casino from Bob Le Flambeur. Did they tear it down? Does crappy ass Trouville have a casino? Back around the small harbor along the main road against the coast, an old man with a dog said something to me. Shrug and smile, a well rehearsed gesture having been the foreigner for a while now. You could see him collect the jumble of English words in his mouth before they tumbled out. 

"Very cold day."

"Oui, very cold."

He smiled and pulled on his dogs leash, a squat mutt.

"Do you know where the Deauville Casino is?"

"Casino?"

"Oui, oui."

His reply was largely in French, but he pointed toward the casino on the harbor and swiveled on his aged hips and pointed toward some unknown place hidden in the streets of Deauville behind us. 

"Merci, merci." Which always makes me think, "Oh, mercy mercy me." Things just aren't the way they used to be.

Tristan, he'd have to be dragged kicking and screaming. Just bring your guitar, every thing else is settled, repeated again and again. He still might not come. But he'd have no choice. Bangkok, him and that other reachin' bastard, we'd meet in Bangkok and do things and never be able to make eye contact again. Where would my sister want to go? She'd love Paris. Only assholes don't like Paris. What a lie. What a myth. Great town. Then the couples would be coordinated in waves. Doodles to Scandanavia. Robily, some place we could just turn the fuck out. Wittblooms, UltraFest in Split, easy. The P's? Lisa would know. In Mrs. P we trust. My Mongol Warrior Brother, well, whatever she wanted, I like it that way. The Collins fam gets the world, without them, there may be no trip at all. Mose and Katy, Mexico. We'd have to flee the country by the time we were done. When did I get to know some many couples? And where would that shifty white son of a bitch want to go? Poland? Not sure why, but it seems right. Pancho would never want for anything again. The Retired Major General Rev. Pancho "Boots" Train would finally get the oil portrait in full military regalia he's always wanted. And the good dog food, the really good stuff.

It was all so ridiculous, an appropriate smile cracked my face. Always the same since childhood; a singular fantasy like a cooper coil wrapped around a nail then tied to a current. Once the field is generated, dense visions with flavor and smell fly in from the corners of my dim imagination until a weighty clump of daydream persists in my brain. There's no book about Chemin De Fer, but I did read a Wikipedia entry. Well, there is a book, like I found it existed. No tux, nor could I pony up to rent one at the last minute in a seaside French resort town. But electromagnetic pull is not cut so short in this cross-wired brain.

There it was, the Deauville Casino, my spiritual and ancestral home. Did you know the climactic scene from Bob Le Flambeur took place in there? It looked exactly like in the film. Stripped of some of its bygone sophistication, tarted up with terrible signage and flyers for dinner shows and Jermaine Jackson concerts, but there it was. It was as though I'd pass Jean Gabin in the crosswalk. I made my way around the joint and even found the street where what's his name, the other character, the young guy, gets  gunned down. Do they have some sort of...like, monument in there for the movie? Surely they have to. They HAVE to.

A jockey laid in stone whipped his steed outside of one entrance. Cursive "LB," entangled in its needlessly accentuated curls, was cobbled in front of another entrance. Cottages lined the streets. Cottages from the fairy tales of the rich. Deep sloped roofs ordered in well shingled rectangles overgrown with wild orange and green lichens. Slats of dark wood laid across white plaster, three at right angles, three vertically, lines vivisecting and dividing until you pull back and see the endless peasant geometry of triangles and squares. Some of the cottages had been converted into high end stores, Hermes, Voltaire and (Something), Armani, all prostrate in the sight of the true money temple, Deauville Casino. Deauville is a gorgeous town. It's too early to walk in to the casino, though. Hon Fleur was first.

The cards started to fall with ugly faces. Jacks and Queens grimaced and winced as they took my money. All this fake money nothing had been done to earn. I thought back to the film. Bob had a bad draw or two, he furrowed his brow, took his cigarette in his lips, picked up his chips, and moved around the table. It's was on the reel to reel projector in my minds eye. Poised, like I was in the color remake, I got up. The dealer flashed relief, the rest of the table, riding my heat signature like lesser predators, froze. I moved to an empty seat next to an Eastern European luxury model girlfriend tethered to an old Italian man. Her painted eyes and rose petal lips hovered above the loose circles of bald head and gut and sausage fingers of her benefactor like abstract art. She smiled. He didn't. I sat back down--the other gamblers attention rapt--exhaled smoke from my nose, blue vapors crawling through the trellis of my slick black hair, and I threw two twenty thousand euro chips on the table.

Hon Fleur is unremarkable. Eventually every town in Europe pulls apart in a few shared characteristics. Find the cathedral, find the WWI Monument, the WWII monument, find the harbor and/or central square, look at the carousel, and get the fuck out. Hon Fleur raised itself to these qualifications with minimal acumen. Legendary harbor? Puh-lease. Cassis has a Jules Verne themed carousel, are you even trying? I made my way through town and down a long promenade toward the beach. The final scene of 400 Blows played back again and again in my memory. Did the boy run down that street? Did he escape from the little school over there? Were people crowded on the beach watching the film crew? It'd be less magical. I want to believe it was Truffat, boy, camera, and tripod on the beach all alone...

....

....Holy shit this beach is tragic. Littered in driftwood, vacant, garbage strewn, two earth movers pulled black mud from some low just off the shore. The water was grey. Seagulls didn't even scavenge the strand. Industrial platforms made themselves visible in the haze smeared distance, ragged scarecrows looming through smoke. The beach of Truffat's imagination is gone. Sulking back toward the center of Hon Fleur, there was a white boat with two masts and three sails gleaming against the grim ocean view. I'm not a man who looks for symbols in his life, but the boat was dubbed the J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Hobbit, my protective emblem of getting out the door. Is this happening? Have I finally opened myself for once? I'm the nail, this adventure is the copper coil. And for the first time, I've tapped into the current of life all around us.

I kept winning. Every card fell like it was bound to the pages of "How to Win at Baccarat." Each turn simply the illustrations found on pages 106-122. Audible gasps punched from the crowd's guts as my stack grew with each improbable hand. We'd gone through two dealers. As I knew he would, a man, handsome, fit, born in a charcoal suit, came to my side. The  musky cologne of his charm and confidence arrived behind me before he did.

"Mr. Monreal is it?" His pronunciation was perfect. His English even better.

"Charmed." I shook his hand and set my cigarette in an ashtray.

"We here at the Deauville Casino would like to congratulate you on a sterling performance, right folks." He looked to the audience, reiterated something in French, and the crowd cheered. "To celebrate your exceptional performance, I've been asked to invite you to the high-rollers  penthouse and serve you a complimentary bottle of our finest champagne. Would you be so kind to accept our generosity?"

A sentence to fall in love with, constructed with a salesman's wit. Always ask questions they can't say no to. "It would be my privilege," I smiled and picked up my cigarette, "but just one more hand." 

Back in Deauville I went to the beach. It was living atonement. White sand was unafraid to stand out against the ashen sky. Rainbow colored beach umbrellas were cinched shut and set out as though on a perfect grid only visible from the air. A young woman on break from one of the high end stores laid on the sand with a coffee and cigarette. A couple with a camera on a tripod was trying to stage a we're-jumping-in-the-air photo. I wonder how many fights have erupted from ill conceived cute couple photos on vacation? If the line was set at the number of grains of sand on the Deauville beach, I'd take the over. Heavy. Where the tide washed over the shore cords of fragile finger shells crunched under foot. I snapped a couple of photos and then a boy ran past. All alone, not on a jog, sprays of ocean water cast off his his stride. It was the end of 400 Blows, just for me. 

The beach had changing cabanas named after golden age movie stars. One was the Jean Gabin cabana. The immortal Jean Gabin, star of such legendary films as Pepe Le Moko and Bob Le Flambeur.

As the hand began to play out, I knew what I was going to do. The dealers hand was just as I hoped, almost unbeatable. I looked through my chips, made a loose mental inventory: vacations for my friends and family, college, a down payment on a house, additional funds for the current trip, the rest was too much. I plucked a huge portion of chips from my stack and laid them down on the player. For the first time all night I did the exact opposite of what the book said. The crowd sucked wind. "No," was muttered in at least three different languages. I knew what I needed, and the rest was superfluous, unbecoming of the man I believe I am.

But some things are not up to you. Sometimes in all this entropy there is a shuffle in a shoe of cards predetermined hours before to defy the odds down to shavings of percentiles. As the dealer finished the hand, one million bottles catching one million bolts of lighting all at once, I won.

The casino manager could hardly put a good face on for the picture. I insisted I be photographed, unsmiling, with my cigarette. Call me Bob, Bob the Gambler.

Upon entering the casino, the door man pointed at my shoulder bag and barked orders in French. There was no doubt it would have to be checked, but his head to toe look of contempt was a touch ribald. My wind blown hair and sand grimed brow paired with baggy blue jeans and battle tested walking shoes wasn't what I had in mind either, but were all making sacrifices. The inside of the casino was cold. Not frigid, but an oppressive atmosphere with all traces of sunlight and joy vacated in the name of games of chance.

I checked my bag. My passport was scanned by the ID checker. His job description must require the intense facial expressions indicative of results he doesn't like to see. The casino floor was where confidence began to waiver. Carpeted and painted in deep scarlet red, it was ugly. Gamblers sat hunched over tables all seemingly integrated with some computer technology. Old men and old women sat at penny slots straight faced and lever pulling, coin sinking into oblivion. 

The coins in my pocket fumbled between my fingers. I walked the floor a couple of times. I casually approached a slot machine and tried to enter a one Euro coin. It immediately dropped out. The lukewarm will be spit from God's mouth. The words of a devout woman met in Lyon echoed in my brain. The machine clearly called for a dollar investment. The coin plopped in and was again rejected, ringing in the tray. An old Asian woman held a bucket fat with coins. Peering over her shoulder, she swung around, smoldering. I backed off, she had tokens. Where do we get tokens? 

Slinking out of the slot room, the real gambling parlor beckoned at the end of the hall. The middle of the day, there was no crowd, but a few friends around one blackjack tables. A bored croupier stared, hypnotized, into his roulette wheel. The gamblers were dressed in tacky button down shirts and bad European denim. The casino has no Chemin De Fer table. The casino is non-smoking. I found a token changer, and poured five Euro into a slot machine I didn't know how to play too embarrassed to play nothing. I didn't win a single pull. 

On the way out, there was a different bag check person than the one from twenty minutes ago, a welcome relief. Through the door, I walked a few feet and started cracking up. Tickled, smiling and chuckling all the way to the train station, the clouds finally broke. The best laugh is in the imploded remains of your daydreams, no matter how self indulgent and naive. Without those laughs, you're not lucky or rich in anything.

Chinese Buffet Alone In Bayeux: The Happiest Days of All

In the morning, it pissed down rain. It was a continuation of the night before, and by dawn the pool of rain-urine collected in the corners of my tent and psyche alike. I'm a novice camper, but my tent went up as easy as an erection. Both acts have so much to do with quantifiable manliness, the euphemism is hardly a coincidental sight gag. In my confidence, my vainglory, I remember holding a thick rectangle of tent fabric and thought, "What is this useless piece of shit? The floor? It doesn't even fit in the bottom of the tent..." It was summarily discarded. I did at least attach the rain fly, if poorly.

When I woke, my bag and sleeping pad soaked through, cold bullets of rain ambling down the seams of my tent, fattening along the internal trellis of fabric and mesh until they were laden with weight enough to drop their purchase, I just kind of said, "fuck it," and went back to sleep. I had strange dreams, dreams about my father watching me brush my teeth. My neighbors snoring rain out of the clouds and a group of English Boy Scouts--or whatever they were--mucking about and being, well, boys were the unexpected master strokes elevating it all to high art.

"Did you sleep well, mate? You got 2/3rds of the Irish snoring team right here."

"So, I fell. Into this girl. Right into her..." you didn't even have to see his hands to know they were cupped in the international sign for boobs.

"And then you probably started ogling her. Uhuhuhuhuhuh."

"No...it was...MY. HAND. But she didn't care, she was like," up a few octaves, "Oh, I'm sorry."

"Was she fit?"

When the rain finally soaked through my third and fourth layers, I knew I had to unchain myself from the raindrop pixilated tarp humming with grey light. I remembered the campground had a TV room, with glorious WiFi, so I gathered my iPad and left the sinking ship.

A quick note about European campgrounds. They have pools! And electricity! And hot showers! And bowling greens! And TV rooms! And a market on site! And WiFi! But no place to build a fire. I'm still not sure what to think.

In the safe, dry echo of the TV room I did a little work. I did some writing, blogged a bit, messed around on the Internet, and my world took shape. Around lunch, the Boy Scouts (Air Cadets?) came rumbling in from a morning bike ride soaked to the bone. Jolted to life, the room quaked in the presence of the young storm conquerors. Mothers calling in boys from the rain clucking at them to remove their wet things had lost. Their troop leader was organizing lunch for the group even though there were multiple signs posted in the room reading, "NO EATING! NO SMOKING!"

"But, sir, the sign says no eating."

"Brian, you've never read a sign in your life. Why are you starting now?"

The list of menu items: "Okay, we've got some stewed potatoes but they have to last for everybody. We've got some pie with...some kind of meat in it. ('Yessssss' one of the boys interjected) There's some bread and some apples and some...cheese, idinit."

Oh, it was cheese. I could tell from where I sat, and it occurred to me how hungry I was. I was weird English meat pie hungry. I wasn't quite ready to go look at my tent, more inclined to spray paint some Katrina code on there and walk down road, but I had the hunger on me something mighty fierce.

After the boys ate they went outside and played no-rule-having-made-up kid games. On their effort, after another hour or so, the sun came out. It was time. I at last went to survey the wreckage. 

My sleeping pad, my sleep sheet, my tent bag, my sleeping bag sack, and my food bag were waterlogged. A whole round of groceries lost. My sleeping bag itself was damp. Most everything else was relatively dry. I hauled my stuff onto the lawn and rebuilt. My things, not in the tent, not in their right place, so stark laid out on the lawn, it was all a painful referendum on my campsite. My existence. Maybe he can't pitch a tent? If the other campers didn't judge me, they should have.

I secured the floor under the tent (Ohhhhhhhh....that's how that works). I tied down and staked the rain fly. I laid my pad out in the sun. I draped everything else over my improved shelter and sopped up the remaining mess with my towel. It took some time, it would have been a fine montage, but I raised my area back to respectability. My sleeping pad and sleeping bag dried out quickly, the little storage bags I just tied to the tent, but the sleep sheet needed a good old fashioned dry on the line. I hung it across two wires on the clothes line and...just...I just waited. It wasn't as though I thought someone would steal it, I thought it would be rude of me to leave it up there.

For the next hour or so, sunlight measured the length of the lawn and the space over the hedges and the size of my face until clouds took hold of its wandering ambition. Immediately I snatched my half-dry sheet off the line and placed it inside my warm, dry square inch of space. As I reflected on my domain, this rugged slice of can-do-ism at its best, the moment of repose finally opened the window for my hunger to lay me out. 

Like industrial chainsaws echoing from a forest gorge, my stomach struck up a  goddamn row. I felt hollow and frayed and did the recent meal rundown to compensate my belly. We had...a beer for dinner last night? And...we definitely had toast and a coffee at breakfast in Lyon yesterday. I'm not sure who was less impressed, me or my gut, but we both agreed this cannot continue. Then, in the state of being where Baudelaire's angel indeed wakes, I remembered something special, a secret: on the way in, I'd passed a Chinese buffet. I don't remember how far it was, but I could recall the red and yellow neon sign like it was my lover's face.

I put on both of my jackets and tied on a scarf and was still shivering even though it wasn't very cold, which couldn't have been a good sign, and I set out. I was prepared for this to be a bit of a goose chase, but it was okay. I knew it existed. I'd just be really, really hungry when I got there. Then, as I walked through the camp's exit, there it was. It was so close I could hear it whisper, "All you have to do is reach out and take it." I wanted for nothing, but I'm still greedy and wished for more. Thirteen electric guitars, arranged in octaves, screaming a version of "The Star Spangled Banner," in time with every step I took. I was gonna show these Frenchies how fat fucks do it in the USA.

His fake-authentic silk top, the man who seated me, told me a story. Decorated with caricatures of the Orient, a hackneyed vision of golden thread and cloud motifs--not a hint of sincerity--I knew I was home. He brought me a champagne flute filled with a tart citrus drink and then had the audacity to bring me a basket of rice wafer chips. I almost grabbed him by the collar and made him watch me knock them to the ground. Unable to maintain, too far gone to play along with the ritual drink order where we humor each other and he smugly brings me a glass of water, I did it. I just got up from the table and grabbed a plate.

The center of the restaurant was a red pagoda crafted with an angled roof carved to look like it had scalloped shingles. Where roof beams met support beams gold dragon heads jutted out with their curled lips and long, curled whiskers. Along the hexagonal base, the lighting focused with unbending fixation, there were the steam trays.

I was a little disappointed. They were about sixteen dishes short from really being a Chinese buffet. And where each tray is usually brimming, heaped with whatever twice fried and sauce covered offering they have in The States, the bottom of most of these trays were covered, but little else. Europe, what are we going to do with you? 

I grabbed my first plate and made the round: caramel pork, fried rice, steamed  dumplings, fried duck, fuck salad, fuck hardboiled eggs, fuck fruit, never sushi, something that looked like egg rolls, and some crab Rangoon. After what most  would consider the perfect lap, I sat down and resented thousands of years of human evolution. I should never have to breathe when I need so desperately to pack my gaping maw.

Everything on the plate was perfect and predictable. Crispy bits and overly sweet cornstarch based sauces and duck skin which made me want to tilt my head all the way back and dangle it into my mouth-trough. The real revelation were the dumplings, really delicious. Also the egg rolls, which contained no vegetables whatsoever, but were some sort of pork mixture wrapped in an egg roll cover and deep fried. When you finally touch they sky, they probably have a tray of those waiting.

Plate two: noodles, beef and onions, fried shrimp with peppers, fired chicken, more pork only egg rolls, more dumplings, and some crab Rangoon. They hadn't even had time to clear my first plate by the time I was face deep in plate two.

Plate three is when you expand your conciseness. Plate three is where your resolve is tested. Naturally shorter of breath and "feeling full," but quitting there is the mark of a deficient spirit. I loaded up with my favorites and some crab Rangoon, saw the horror in my server's face, and finally felt good, really good, about what I was doing.

The world slows down. You look up from the cheap dish-ware lousy with goodness and survey the humanity around you.

One table was an English family on holiday. The English, the only other really dedicated fat people in the world. The son was trying to insert chopsticks through the tight bun on top of his sister's head. 

There was a single father there with his two daughters who wanted a nice warm meal for his girls. All buffets have a discount for kids under ten. One little girl kept putting sugar on top of every plate she took from the buffet. Or maybe Mom was just out of town.

An old couple who came and went before I'd even hit my stretch plate.

A blonde French girl with her boyfriend, full, tantalizing proportions crafted in defiance of gravity. Stripped down to cotton panties, sitting on her pink legs, an expectant glint in here eye welcoming what incongruent response you have to offer, the icon, the fertility goddess forever etched into your cave wall. The prettiest girl in Bayeux. She rides the train to her shitty job in Caen everyday, and everyday swears this is the time she goes all the way to St. Lazare in Paris and never comes back. The bubble shimmered around her in the grease filtered restaurant light begging to burst.

The lone laborer whose long day after long day were spelled out in flecks of paint on his jeans and plaster covered boots, drywall dusting his grey hair. He was a three plate man, I could tell. This was the looking glass, one of many other selves on either side. He kept looking at me over his bell shaped glass of port. I was certain, hope against hope, he was going to wipe his mouth, pay his bill, cross over to me, and offer in his French accented English, "You want to...erm...how you say...get into some terrible shit?" No rape. No murder. Let's go. I'm still just a child with an over-active imagination.

Philosophically I had a fourth plate. Not some pathetic fruit and gross buffet dessert plate,  a chicken wing and egg roll plate, but my stomach couldn't do it. I'll get that fourth plate back for her. Someday. I paid the nice lady, and paraded--fingers fanned through the long streamers of magic hour light--singing Tom Petty's "American Girl," all the way back to camp.