Me Talk Pretty One Day (13 page)

Due to my general aversion to machines and a few pronounced episodes of screaming, I was labeled a technophobe, a term that ranks fairly low on my scale of fightin’ words. The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it’s been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing between these two very different emotions. I fear snakes. I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind.

I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion - that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western - they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one. Each tiresome new thriller includes a scene in which the hero, trapped by some version of the enemy, runs for his desk in a desperate race against time. Music swells and droplets of sweat rain down onto the keyboard as he sits at his laptop, frantically pawing for answers. It might be different if he were flagging down a passing car or trying to phone for help, but typing, in and of itself, is not an inherently dramatic activity.

I hate computers for any number of reasons, but I despise them most for what they’ve done to my friend the typewriter. In a democratic country you’d think there would be room for both of them, but computers won’t rest until I’m making my ribbons from torn shirts and brewing Wite-Out in my bathtub. Their goal is to place the IBM Selectric II beside the feather quill and chisel in the museum of antiquated writing implements. They’re power hungry, and someone needs to stop them.

When told I’m like the guy still pining for his eight-track tapes, I say, “You have eight-tracks? Where?” In reality I know nothing about them, yet I feel it’s important to express some solidarity with others who have had the rug pulled out from beneath them. I don’t care if it can count words or rearrange paragraphs at the push of a button, I don’t want a computer. Unlike the faint scurry raised by fingers against a plastic computer keyboard, the smack and clatter of a typewriter suggests that you’re actually building something. At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

“It’s a typewriter,” I say. “You use it to write angry letters to airport authorities.”

The keys are then slapped and pounded, and I’m forced to explain that if you want the words to appear, you first have to plug it in and insert a sheet of paper.

The goons shake their heads and tell me I really should be using a computer. That’s their job, to stand around in an ill-fitting uniform and tell you how you should lead your life. I’m told the exact same thing later in the evening when the bellhop knocks on my hotel door. The people whose televisions I can hear have complained about my typing, and he has come to make me stop. To hear him talk, you’d think I’d been playing the kettledrum. In the great scheme of things, the typewriter is not nearly as loud as he makes it out to be, but there’s no use arguing with him. “You know,” he says, “you really should be using a computer.”

You have to wonder where you’ve gone wrong when twice a day you’re offered writing advice from men in funny hats. The harder I’m pressured to use a computer, the harder I resist. One by one, all of my friends have deserted me and fled to the dark side. “How can I write you if you don’t have an e-mail address?” they ask. They talk of their B-trees and Disk Doctors and then have the nerve to complain when I discuss bowel obstructions at the dinner table.

Who needs them? I think. I figured I’d always have my family and was devastated when my sister Amy brought home a candy-colored laptop. “I only use it for e-mail,” she said. Coming from her, these words made me physically ill. “It’s fun,” she said. “People send you things. Look at this.” She pushed a button, and there, on the screen, was a naked man lying facedown on a carpet. His hair was graying and his hands were cuffed behind his doughy back. A woman entered the room. You couldn’t see her face, just her legs and feet, which were big and mean-looking, forced into sharp-toed shoes with high, pencil-thin heels. The man on the carpet shifted position, and when his testicles came into view, the woman reacted as if she had seen an old balding mouse, one that she had been trying to kill for a long time. She stomped on the man’s testicles with the toes of her shoes and then she turned around and stomped on them with the heels. She kicked them mercilessly and, just when I thought she’d finished, she got her second wind and started all over again.

I’d never realized that a computer could act so much like a TV set. No one had ever told me that the picture could be so clear, that the cries of pain could be heard so distinctly. This, I thought, was what my father had been envisioning all those years ago when words had failed him, not necessarily this scene, but something equally capable of provoking such wonder.

“Again?” Amy pushed a button and, our faces bathed in the glow of the screen, we watched the future a second time.

Deux*

*two

See You Again

Yesterday

I HAVE NEVER BEEN ONE of those Americans who pepper their conversation with French phrases and entertain guests with wheels of brie. For me, France was never a specific, premeditated destination. I wound up in Normandy the same way my mother wound up in North Carolina: you meet a guy, relinquish a tiny bit of control, and the next thing you know, you’re eating a different part of the pig.

I met Hugh through a mutual friend. She and I were painting an apartment, and he had offered the use of his twelve-foot ladder. Owning a twelve-foot ladder in New York is a probable sign of success, as it means you most likely have enough room to store one. At the time, Hugh was living in a loft on Canal Street, a former chocolate factory where the walk-in coolers had been turned into bedrooms. I arrived at his place on a Friday night and noticed the pie baking in the oven. While the rest of Manhattan was out on the town, he’d stayed home to peel apples and listen to country music.

Like me, Hugh was single, which came as no great surprise, considering that he spent his leisure time rolling out dough and crying to George Jones albums. I had just moved to New York and was wondering if I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. Part of the problem was that, according to several reliable sources, I tended to exhaust people. Another part of the problem had to do with my long list of standards. Potential boyfriends could not smoke Merit cigarettes, own or wear a pair of cowboy boots, or eat anything labeled either lite or heart smart. Speech was important, and disqualifying phrases included “I can’t find my nipple ring” and “This one here was my first tattoo.” All street names had to be said in full, meaning no “Fifty-ninth and Lex,” and definitely no “Mad Ave.” They couldn’t drink more than I did, couldn’t write poetry in notebooks and read it out loud to an audience of strangers, and couldn’t use the words flick, freebie, cyberspace, progressive, or zeitgeist. They could not consider the human scalp an appropriate palette for self-expression, could not own a rainbow-striped flag, and could not say they had “discovered” any shop or restaurant currently listed in the phone book. Age, race, and weight were unimportant. In terms of mutual interests, I figured we could spend the rest of our lives discussing how much we hated the aforementioned characteristics.

Hugh had moved to New York after spending six years in France. I asked a few questions, rightly sensing that he probably wouldn’t offer anything unless provoked. There was, he said, a house in Normandy. This was most likely followed by a qualifier, something pivotal like “but it’s a dump.” He probably described it in detail, but by that point I was only half listening. Instead, I’d begun to imagine my life in a foreign country, some faraway land where, if things went wrong, I could always blame somebody else, saying I’d never wanted to live there in the first place. Life might be difficult for a year or two, but I would tough it out because living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

I didn’t see this as a romantic idea. It had nothing to do with France itself, with wearing hats or writing tortured letters from a sidewalk café. I didn’t care where Hemingway drank or Alice B. Toklas had her mustache trimmed. What I found appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.

“Built around 1780 … a two-hour train ride from Paris … the neighbor keeps his horses in my backyard… pies made with apples from my own trees …”

I caught the highlights of Hugh’s broadcast and understood that my first goal was to make him my boyfriend, to trick or blackmail him into making some sort of commitment. I know it sounds calculating, but if you’re not cute, you might as well be clever.

In order to get the things I want, it helps me to pretend I’m a figure in a daytime drama, a schemer. Soap opera characters make emphatic pronouncements. They ball up their fists and state their goals out loud. “I will destroy Buchanan Enterprises,” they say. “Phoebe Wallingford will pay for what she’s done to our family.” Walking home with the back half of the twelve-foot ladder, I turned to look in the direction of Hugh’s loft. “You will be mine,” I commanded.

Nine months after I’d borrowed the ladder, Hugh left the chocolate factory and we moved in together. As was his habit, he planned to spend the month of August in Normandy, visiting friends and working on his house. I’d planned to join him, but that first year, when the time came to buy my ticket, I chickened out, realizing that I was afraid of France. My fear had nothing to do with the actual French people. I didn’t know any actual French people. What scared me was the idea of French people I’d gotten from movies and situation comedies. When someone makes a spectacular ass of himself, it’s always in a French restaurant, never a Japanese or Italian one. The French are the people who slap one another with gloves and wear scarves to cover their engorged hickies. My understanding was that, no matter how hard we tried, the French would never like us, and that’s confusing to an American raised to believe that the citizens of Europe should be grateful for all the wonderful things we’ve done. Things like movies that stereotype the people of France as boors and petty snobs, and little remarks such as “We saved your ass in World War II.” Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos were born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are “We’re number two!”

The French have decided to ignore our self-proclaimed superiority, and this is translated as arrogance. To my knowledge, they’ve never said that they’re better than us; they’ve just never said that we’re the best. Big deal. There are plenty of places on earth where visiting Americans are greeted with great enthusiasm. Unfortunately, these places tend to lack anything you’d really want to buy. And that, to me, is the only reason to leave home in the first place - to buy things. Hugh bought me great gifts the summer I stayed home and he went off to France. He’s not really that much of a shopper, so I figured that if he had managed to find these things, they must have been right out in the open where anyone could have spotted them. As far as I was concerned, the French could be cold or even openly hostile. They could burn my flag or pelt me with stones, but if there were taxidermied kittens to be had, then I would go and bring them back to this, the greatest country on earth.

There was the shopping, and then there was the smoking. Hugh returned from his trip, and days later I still sounded like a Red Chinese asking questions about the democratic hinterlands. “And you actually saw people smoking in restaurants? Really! And offices, too? Oh, tell me again about the ashtrays in the hospital waiting room, and don’t leave anything out.”

I went to France the following summer knowing only the word for bottleneck. I said “bottleneck” at the airport, “bottleneck” on the train to Normandy, and “bottleneck” when presented with the pile of stones that was Hugh’s house in the country. There was no running water, no electricity, and nothing to buy but the pipes and wires needed if you wanted to live with plumbing and electricity. Because there was nothing decent to buy, the people greeted me with great enthusiasm. It would be the same if a French person were to visit, say, Knightdale, North Carolina. “My goodness,” everyone said, “you came all this way to see us?”

Had my vocabulary been larger, I might have said, “Well, no, not exactly.” Times being what they were, I offered my only possible response. “Bottleneck.”

“Oh, bottleneck,” everyone said. “You speak very well.”

They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous, and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity. The house is located in a tiny hamlet, a Hooterville of eight stone houses huddled in a knot and surrounded by rolling hills decorated with cows and sheep. There are no cash registers, but a mile away, in the neighboring village, there’s a butcher, a baker, a post office, a hardware store, and a small grocery. There’s a church and a pay phone, an elementary school, and a place to buy cigarettes. “New York City!” the shopkeepers said. “Well, you’re far from home, aren’t you?” They said this as if I’d left Manhattan for a short walk and lost track of the time.

It seemed that if you had to be from America, New York was as good a place as any. People had heard of it, especially the three village teenagers who studied English in school and often dropped by to discuss life in what they called, “Ny.” I tried to explain that the N and the Y were initials that stood for New and York, but still they insisted on joining the letters into a single word. Ny, they said, was what the insiders called it. Didn’t everyone in Usa use that word?

The teenagers were under the impression that New York was a glamorous wonderland, a celebrity playground where one couldn’t leave the house without running into Madonna and Michael Jackson sitting in the park and breastfeeding their babies. I thoughtlessly named a few of the stars I had seen in my neighborhood, and for the rest of the summer, when describing our house, you’d say, “It’s the place with all the teenagers lying around out front.” They stretched out in the middle of the road, flat on their backs, not wanting to miss anything should one of my celebrity friends decide to drop by and help me dig the septic tank. I was afraid that one of them might get hit by a car and that I would be blamed for the death. “Oh, don’t worry,” the neighbors said. “They’ll grow out of it in a few years.”

That is what I’m assuming they said. Without Hugh by my side to translate, every interaction was based upon a series of assumptions. The kind butcher may not have been kind at all, and the grocer might have been saying, “To hell with you and your bottleneck. Go away now and leave me alone.” Their personalities were entirely my own invention. On the downside, my personality was entirely their invention. I seemed to have reached my mid-thirties only to be known as “the guy who says ‘bottleneck’,” the pied piper who convinces young people to lie in the road, the grown man who ignores the electric-fence warnings and frightens the horses with his screaming. Were such a person described to me, I’d say, “Oh, you mean the village idiot.”

In this situation, pretending to be a soap opera character failed to help. When told, “You will understand me,” the citizens of France responded with blank stares. I picked up a few new words, but the overall situation seemed hopeless. Neighbors would drop by while Hugh was off at the hardware store, and I’d struggle to entertain them with a pathetic series of simple nouns. “Ashtray!”

“Yes,” they’d agree. “That’s an ashtray all right.”

“Hammer? Screwdriver?”

“No, that’s okay, we’ve got our own at home.”

I’d hoped the language might come on its own, the way it comes to babies, but people don’t talk to foreigners the way they talk to babies. They don’t hypnotize you with bright objects and repeat the same words over and over, handing out little treats when you finally say “potty” or “wawa.” It got to the point where I’d see a baby in the bakery or grocery store and instinctively ball up my fists, jealous over how easy he had it. I wanted to lie in a French crib and start from scratch, learning the language from the ground floor up. I wanted to be a baby, but instead, I was an adult who talked like one, a spooky man-child demanding more than his fair share of attention.

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals. I told myself that I’d never really cared about learning the language. My main priority was to get the house in shape. The verbs would come in due time, but until then I needed a comfortable place to hide. When eventually developed, our vacation pictures looked as though they had been taken at a forced-labor camp. I knocked down walls and lugged heavy beams, ran pipes and wires, and became a familiar dust-masked face at both the dump and the pharmacy. My month of hard work was rewarded with four days in Paris, a city where, without even trying, one can find a two-hundred-year-old wax model of a vagina, complete with human pubic hair. On the plane going home, I was given a Customs form and asked to list all my purchases:

Two-headed-calf skull

Ashtray in the shape of a protracted molar

Somebody’s gallstone, labeled and displayed on an elegant stand

A set of eight Limoges dessert plates custom made for a pharmacy and hand-painted with the names of various lethal drugs

Suede fetus complete with umbilical cord

French eye chart that unintentionally includes the word FAT

Illustrated guides to skin rashes and war wounds

I ran out of room long before I could mention my outdated surgical instruments. Hugh told me that I was wasting my time, that they were looking for people who’d bought platinum watches, not rusted cranial saws. My customs form was, for me, a list of reasons to return to France and master the language. Conversation would be nice, but the true reward would be the ability to haggle fluently and get my next two-headed skull for the same price as a normal one.

Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realizing I’d gone an entire month without hearing anyone complain that they were “stressed-out,” a phrase that’s always gotten on my nerves. People in New York love to tell you how exhausted they are. Then they fall apart when someone says, “Yeah, you look pretty tired.” I kept an eye out for foreigners, the Europeans shopping on my SoHo street and the cleaning women who’d answer “Poland” or “El Salvador” when asked a yes-or-no question. I felt that it was my responsibility to protect these people, to give them directions they didn’t want and generally scare them with my kindness. As an American abroad, you’re bolstered by an innate sense of security. Something goes wrong, and you instinctively think, “We’ll just call the embassy and see what they have to say.” People know where America is on the map. They know that it’s loud and powerful. With certain other countries there’s no such guarantee. “Oh, right, Laos,” I once heard someone say to a dinner guest. “Didn’t we bomb you a couple of times?”

Hugh and I returned to Normandy the following summer, and I resumed my identity as the village idiot. “See you again yesterday!” I said to the butcher. “Ashtray! Bottleneck!” Again I hid indoors, painting and scraping until my knuckles bled. I left promising to enroll in a French class and then forgot that promise as soon my plane landed back in New York.

On the following trip I sanded the floors and began the practice of learning ten new words a day.

exorcism

facial swelling

death penalty