Overstimulation and Overdue Stories

Dear God, I'm here.

I live in a little red house with a lesbian couple and a man who turned yellow this weekend from Hepatitis-B.

I work insanely long hours in a fluorescent office. In a cubicle. My cubicle, which is complete with an array of Dilbert-like half-hearted decorations that strain with the effort to make me feel at home.

I live here. I work here. In South Florida. For an indeterminate period of time.

It's 2006, and my "adult" life has officially begun.

And I plan that this will be all the processing I will do on the matter for the next week.

Instead, please enjoy the rantings and ravings of a different period of culture shock--my unsent mass email from France this summer, which has been awaiting an audience for six months while languishing in my draft folder. Voila:
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Subject: Berlin and THAT American (or, in the French mind, "Americain")

I am stuck in Heathrow Airport for the night with nothing but a laptop to keep me company. Now is the last time I can legitimately write an email about my trip abroad from abroad...so I best get cracking.  I had two more adventures worth telling about.

#1: Berlin

So, following the landslide success of the Stolen Weekend in Paris, I decided, perhaps unwisely, to steal another weekend--the last one before my LG deadline in fact--to go to Berlin. I have a German friend--Lena--who lives there whom I met in St. Paul, Minnesota, of all places, who offered me a place to crash. And I am German, supposedly. Berlin was purely logical.

I book a cheap last-minute ticket on Air France, discover that the French security at airports is nonexistent when they allow me onto the plane without stripping me of my leatherman, and arrive in Berlin on Friday night. Lena happened to be helping to run a huge outdoor festival in the city that night, and I was supposed to meet her there, so I dutifully followed her careful bus instructions and arrive in the heart of things on a big shopping street, to promptly find myself totally and completely lost.

There is a reason for this...I have breezily forgotten to write down the last lines of her email telling me where to go.

"Los Angeles Platz," I thought.  "Ha! I'll remember that."

But I didn't.  Instead I ended up wandering up and down a street that I now only remember as Trenenbraunenbaugeshooshennstrasse for an hour with the Heavy Pack of the Damned. Only at dusk was I able to stumble into the festival, where I found Lena in the "VIP" beergarten serving up swill to paunchy Germans and their svelte hangers-on.  They and a hard-won wurst that took all my non-existent German to order soon soothed me, and later that night in Lena's East Berlin communist-style apartment (which is really quite stylish when outfitted with green paint and breezy curtains), I lay in bed looking at the moon and that pointy building that sits in the center of the city thinking, "Ah, at last, my home."

Great town, Berlin.

#2: THAT American

Last Monday night, I met an Australian 21-year-old in a hostel in Rennes She was my roommate, and she took a shine to me as soon as she realized that I enjoyed swearing and talking about sex--"I feel like you're someone I can connect with!" she said, five minutes after meeting me.  (Aussies make me swear like a sailor--something about hearing the accent sparks profanity in me. In this case, it seemed to be a good instinct.)

Laura, which was the Aussie's name, was annoyed that Rennes, a supposed party town, had proven dull on a Sunday afternoon in its off-season.  I was just putting my laundry in the washer and puttering around the room in preparation for a quiet night of writing when she got out of bed, put on makeup and earrings, and said, "Well, we'll go to a bar then, mate?"

ME: (Blushing coyly.) Oh no, I can't, I have to write.

[Note: This was always my excuse in France, and I even learned to communicate it in French: "Je bezoin de travailler se soir--le guide de voyage, oui. Desolee!]

LAURA: Oh, no, I don't think so--you've got to come out.  It's my last night.

ME: (Weakening.) But--all my pants are in the washer!  I can't go out in these!

[Note: "These" are my faux-basketball, quite-short sleep shorts. They are reversible and shiny, orange on one side and blue on the other. I'm wearing the orange side out.]

LAURA: Look, you're broke, right?

ME: Right...

LAURA: Well then, they'll help you get us drinks.

ME: Uh...

LAURA: (Wheedling.) Come on.

ME: (Hurriedly shucking the shorts and turning them blue-side out.) Oh, ok. You think it will be all right?

LAURA: (Eyeing my unshaved, pasty legs.) Oh yeah. We'll get free drinks.

Let me take a moment to explain shorts and the French. As I understand it, shorts are extremely risqué in France. French people at the beach, the usual habitat of shorts in the US, are not wearing shorts, except in rare cases.  Instead, the men and woman alike are wearing lightweight and extremely stylish unisex parachute pants that come down to mid-calf.  Only babies, ribald old men, and the occasional American tourist wear shorts.  Not wanting to be mistaken for any of these, I had kept my garish pair hidden under hostel sheets thus far in my trip.  But Laura had caught me in a weak moment where 90% of my clothing was unwearably sopping wet.  So out we went.

Laura had decided that we needed to go to an Irish bar, and so we did, attracting hoots and obscene hand gestures all the way. These weren't the normal taunts and innuendos women receive--these were righteous, amazed, gleeful shouts.  All of Rennes was shocked that someone--a female someone, no less--was walking around downtown on a 60-degree evening with nothing covering her from mid-thigh down.  Ridiculous. Outrageous. Hopelessly gauche.

We got to the bar, and I was gratefully able to hide my shame beneath a table, and the night began to improve. By which I mean I began to get drunk.

They didn't have Guinness, but only Beamish--in fact, I discovered that no one can serve both Guinness and Beamish at the same bar, by decree of the company that owns them both.  But Beamish works, and soon Laura and I were crooning along to "Bittersweet Symphony" as it played over the speakers, me occasionally kicking a bare, dough-pale, pasty leg high into the air.  This is how it must have looked to the outside world:

FRENCH BAR-GOER 1: And so then I realized that he only spoke English, and--

FRENCH BAR-GOER 2: Wait, I can't hear you at all.  There's some naked albino harlot behind you who keeps kicking me.

FBG 1: What?

FBG 2: I SAID, I CAN'T HEAR YOU BECAUSE--

LAURA: (Barging over to their table, miming blowing smoke.) Cigarette? Cigarette?

FBG 1: (Handing her a cig.) Only if you shove it up your friend's tiny pants.

LAURA:  Thanks, mate. [Note: Laura doesn't speak French.]

FBG 1: (Still in French.) I hate you both so much.

LAURA: Yes, I will.

The only thing that redeemed us was that later in the evening, it turned out that Laura had correctly appraised the drink-getting abilities of my legs.

JULIA:  I'm out of money.

LAURA: We can each get half-pints for this last one.
[Both pool money, shake out pockets, look for change, etc.]

JULIA: (To two out-of-place men from Manchester, England.) So, what are you two doing in a French pub?

MAN 1: Drinking.  What are you going in those shorts?

JULIA: (Handing bartender a fist of change in exchange for two half-pints.) Well, it's a funny story...you see, I'm doing my laundry...

MAN 2: (To bartender.) This one's on me.

LAURA: (In background.) Whoo-hoo!

JULIA: Thanks! (Brief pause as I struggle for a conversation topic worthy of the drink.) Say, do you work for the government?

I got home that night only after narrowly avoiding following a happy crowd of French youths back to their apartment to smoke up and exchange continental embraces. Even then, it took asking two French street people for directions in my best mime and then flagging down a well-to-do man in a Mercedes, who drove us back to the hostel, drunk and stinking.

It must have been the shorts.

Comments

[forget paris, fort lard-erdale loves those pasty legs!]

hilarious! you are a gorgeous writer! you had me at "Los Angeles Platz"! MWAH