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.