Merde Happens by Stephen Clarke
"My high school cheerleader troupe won the state championship," she said, pointing a chicken wing at me. "And I want to study to be a trainer. It's America's fastest-growing sport, you know."
"I'm sorry, I didn't know. Will you be majoring in pompoms or chanting?"
She wondered about giving me a ketchup makeover, but then seemed to decide that it was too much trouble to open all the packets.
"You don't make fun of a girl on the first date, OK?" she said. "Not if you want a second."
"What?" Jake gagged on a mouthful offish. "This counts as a date with Paul}"
"Stupid," she said, lobbing an affectionate French fry at him.
"Yooliana!"
"Maria!"
A waitress with a licorice-stick perm was hugging Juliana. The two girls chattered in Spanish, flapping their hands about and apparently getting a year's news into two minutes of breathless speech. Then suddenly it seemed that the conversation had turned to me. This was confirmed when I heard Maria say a Spanish word that sounded familiar— men-een-skers-do-com. She stepped back and looked under the table, as if to check whether my legs were covered, and both girls collapsed in a fit of giggles.
"I gotta go," Maria said, giving me a huge grin as she headed toward the kitchen.
"Oh man," Juliana said. "You know you're famous, Paul?"
Over the next fifteen minutes, our table was visited by every waitress in the place.
"You the kilt guy?" they all wanted to know. They blushed and laughed and asked me to sign their order pads, and I got the impression I could have taken any of them for a ride in my car and—space permitting—got much more than was usual on a first date.
Jake was positively drooling, torn between frustration that he couldn't ask any of them whether they were willing to bypass the American dating system and a vicarious desire to see me take my pick of the goodies I was being offered.
And as each girl came and went, he seemed to sink closer and closer to despair. Because all I could do was smile, say hi, and think of Alexa. For all I knew, she was doing much more than smile at the treacherous Bostonian, but my body refused to give up hope. It wanted to be with her, the woman it had been so cruelly torn away from, not one of these girls it had never met before. And if Alexa wasn't cheating on me, as she claimed, then I didn't want to do any-diing that might make me stop wanting her. I can't stay in a relationship if someone else's body flashes into my mind all die time. Screwing around totally screws up my screwing.
"Bye," I said as the last waitress left.
"Merde, Paul." Jake's tongue was practically touching the floor. "You have a serious problem, man. You can take any of those women into your Mini, and boom." His hands mimed two bodies colliding. "Juliana, will you come with me to the car? Please?"
"Jake," she said, "you're the one with the serious problem."
4
I went to call Alexa from the privacy of the parking lot.
The sea was a blanket of shadow. Beyond the lights of die oceanfront hotels and restaurants, a couple of red pinpoints were the only signs that the Gulf of Mexico wasn't completely lifeless.
"Bonjour, c'est bien le portable d'Alexa ..." It was die start of the bilingual message she'd recorded—with my help—back in the apartment in Paris. I cut it off before the end. I didn't want to talk to a phone company's computer. I needed to speak to her.
I saw that I'd had a few texts, none of them from Alexa. Suraya had sent one. "Pis call asap," it said. Perhaps I was going to get the boot, not direct from my boss but via the outsourced call center in India. That was probably how they did it these days. There was also a screenful of messages from weirdo kilt fans. I stopped reading after three and cleared the whole inbox. A man can only take so many requests for a personal viewing of his undercarriage.
Next I phoned Suraya. Might as well get the bloodshed over with, I decided.
She sounded depressed and excited at the same time. She was hopping around from subject to subject, moaning that her dad was pressuring her to give up work, then raving about Jack Tyler and the national newspapers.
"You're mentioned in the English papers," she told me, "and you are on the home page of the Miami Herald, too. The picture of you in the kilt."
"Shit."
"No, it's good. Mr. Tyler has asked us to put a link from the Visitor Resources website to your page on Men in Skirts."
"But I asked him to zap all photos of me."
"Oh no, he has given us some more. Very cute. The girls here are all fans. So is one of the boys."
"What?" Tyler must have gone direct to the madwoman who'd interviewed me. He'd got his hands on all the busby and Beefeater shots. And the ones in between, like when I'd put on the kilt but forgotten to take off my Beefeater collar. I must have looked like a pink-stemmed daisy. And this stuff was going on Britain's official tourist website? What kind of image were they trying to promote?
"It's fantastic," Suraya bubbled. "Mr. Tyler says that some men in Miami have posted a message telling everyone to lobby the mayor to support your campaign. Isn't that great?"
"Yeah, wonderful." In an indescribably hellish way.
"Imagine if it spreads. You will just need to arrive in a city, show your legs, and the vote will be won."
"Fantastic." Although my sarcasm did start to ebb away. What if—just if—she was even partially right? What if I could win Miami after all, thanks to the stupid photos? "So Tyler's actually pleased with the gay-website fiasco?"
"Yes. It makes the problems in New Orleans seem less important," Suraya said.
"Sorry? What problems?"
"New Orleans. They sent you a text. Didn't you see it?"
"I zapped most of them. What's the trouble?"
"I told you we're sponsoring a performance of a Shakespeare play there, right?"
"No, Suraya, you didn't."
"Ah, sorry. Anyway, the Shakespeare should be good. It is on a plantation. You don't have to do anything except show them your Mini—and maybe your legs." I let her get away with a gratuitous giggle. "But a problem has arisen."
"What kind of problem?"
"The best thing is if I e-mail you the number of the organizer there, a man called Woodrow. He will explain."
"OK, fine. What's the play?"
"Othello."
Great, I thought, a tragedy about a guy who thinks his wife is shagging someone else. Just what I needed.
5
"Holy fur." I caught myself just in time, remembering that I was in a public place. I was consulting my e-mails back at the hotel, a semichic business place, its lobby decorated with a deep burgundy carpet, shiny leather sofas, and oil paintings of historic American landscapes.
I had already alienated myself from the cleaning staff by handing over a plastic sack of the most rumpled laundry seen in America since a trunk was salvaged from the Titanic. They were going to have to wash it as a single asteroid-like blob of material, and see what kind of garments separated themselves out during the spin cycle.
I didn't want to add swearing to my misdemeanors.
The first part of Suraya's long e-mail outlined the problem with the Shakespeare, which was obvious, really. I mean, what idiot had had the bright idea of trying to boost British tourism by putting on a play in Louisiana, a former stronghold of the old slave economy, in which a black guy kills a white woman? Sounds like typical Tyler, I thought.
Anyway, Suraya said I was going to get an e-mail from this Woodrow guy who was in charge of the event.
"Fur me," I said when I got to the second part of her message.
It was a list of radio stations and their phone numbers, with each station allotted a ten- or twenty-minute slot throughout the following afternoon and early evening. There were also a couple of newspapers in there. And all of them wanted an interview with the undercarriage of the month. With me.
My fifteen minutes of fame had arrived, it seemed, and because of the different time zones in the USA, they had been spread out over half a day.
She needed to "think about us," she told me. Think about us? What did that mean? She was going to fantasize about me while she was banging her oversize leprechaun?
She was "really disappointed in me," she said. I had chosen Jake, after all. I had left Miami without her, and then called from a car where it was totally impractical to talk. It was proof that I "didn't care enough about us," she said.
That is "total bollocks," I wanted to reply. You are being "bloody unfair."
All in all, she concluded, it was a good idea to spend some time apart. It had been too "restricting" in the car, and "in our case, too much proximity gives too much conflict."
Oh, yeah, I thought, she was probably getting pretty damn proximitous, or whatever the word was, with Mike.
6
"Good morning, Ohio."
It was a phrase that I never imagined having to say in this lifetime.
"Right, yeah, great, Paul. Can you make it, like, a bit more up? Good mo-orning, O-HTo!" Pete, the guy at the other end of the line, was clearly riding high on a wave of Prozac and laughing gas. He said it like a kid who's just woken up and remembered that last night he lost his virginity.
"Good morning, Ohio." I sounded more like I'd just lost my sanity, but Pete was happy enough. I guessed he was always happy enough. I imagined a tall guy, all tan and teeth, with a sports car and bimbo waiting out in the parking lot. Of course, in reality he could have been a one-legged toothless anemic. That's the wonder of radio.
"Perfect. We can get started."
There was a computer-generated musical whoosh, followed by a gospel choir singing the four letters of the radio station's name to the same tune used for radio jingles all over die known universe, and then Pete started gushing about me.
"He's young, he's English, he talks like one of the princes, and he is over here in America to publicize his sexy website, on which you can see him wearing a Scottish kilt that's so short he would suffer some painful frostbite if he wore it in Cleveland. You know what I mean, ladies, right? Hey, Paul, welcome to America!"
This was my cue to lose my radio virginity, but I didn't know what to say. I was in America to publicize my sexy website? Hadn't someone told him why I was really here?
"Hello, Pete," I finally said, after two seconds of radio silence that even I, the amateur, found painful.
"So, tell us about this kilt of yours, Paul. How short is it exacdy?"
"Just a bit too short."
"Yeah, because on this website, apparently we can see more than just your kilt, right? I haven't seen it, but my producer tells me it's very revealing." No way would Pete have clicked on a guy's undercarriage, of course.
"Yes, but it was an accident, you see."
"You accidentally put on a kilt? That's a pretty freak accident, Paul."
"Ha, yes—no—I mean, the main purpose of the website is to make Americans more aware of Britain's natural and historical heritage. We have a thousand years of history—"
"Yeah. Talking about history, Paul, there's one thing I've always wanted to ask an Englishman."
"Yes?"
"Was Princess Diana murdered by the royal family?"
The interview went downhill from there. I ummed and erred, producing plenty of whatever the opposite of a soundbite is. Sounddribbles? Soundburps? And then all too soon it was arrivederci Cleveland.
After good morning Ohio, I did good afternoon New England, wake up Wisconsin, coo-ee Connecticut, and hola California, some of them live, some of them recorded, but all along the same lines. The interviewers were always surreally friendly, the general tone being, "Hey, you're in America doing something wacky; entertain us about it." Everyone was very glad to have me on their show, highly amused by the kilt business, but totally uninterested in the World Tourism Contest and how I was staging British-themed events to attract votes for my country.
Predictably, almost all of them steered way clear of the gay-website issue. Only California broached the subject.
"Are you gay, Paul?" the butch-sounding hostess asked.
"No, I'm English. There is a difference."
She sounded disappointed.
The coyest of the lot was the host on a station called something like KGOD, who warned me before our interview began that it was live but with a one-minute delay to allow them to censor any immorality that might creep into the discussion. He seemed keen to point out to his listeners the moral dangers of male skirt-wearing, especially when it is part of pagan local folklore.
"You're right," I told him, "the kilt is a bad thing. Especially if you're wandering around the Highlands in summer with nothing on underneath. The insects can get right up there and have a free bite at your—"
The interview ended before the insects could get any further.
Still, my half day stuck in the hotel did bring one piece of good news—an e-mail telling me that Othello had been canceled. And I couldn't blame Suraya or Visitor Resources for the bad choice of play, either. It had been picked by this guy Woodrow, who'd written me a stream-of-consciousness message totally devoid of capital letters and punctuation, in which he blathered on about Shakespeare and the need to heal black-white relations through theater and sugar planting. Or something like that. A typical sentence (if you could call a group of words with no recognizable beginning or end a sentence) ran like this:
the teachers vetoed othello and then threw out my second choice romeo and Juliet on account of it was too sexy i guess we would have had to bring forward the marriage scene to make it moral enough for them
Exhausting. But, if I understood correctly, now that he'd ditched the Othello plan, the Shakespeare show he was going to put on at his plantation would have the approval of the local community, so there was less chance of me taking a midnight swim in the Mississippi with a riverboat anchor tied to my feet.
7
It took us only a short day's driving to cross the remaining wedge of Florida, a sliver of Alabama, and a couple of hours' worth of Mississippi coast. We progressed from idyllic bleached-sand beaches, with villas on stilts built right over the sea, to the anonymous ribbon of the interstate, and finally to a sort of car-borne buzz of anticipation as we approached the cluster of highways leading into New Orleans. With Juliana at the wheel, the Mini seemed to have found its place in the food chain as the little hustler, the opportunist, a kind of four-wheeler mongoose. It was too small to make the big predators feel threatened, and nippy enough to dart out of trouble if it annoyed anyone. Thelma had learned how to survive in the ecosystem of the interstate highways. And Juliana had obviously been born there.
As we branched off left and followed highway 10 into downtown New Orleans, the heavy winter sunset suddenly lit the sky ahead. The twin bands of highway were like two blue stockings poking out of the pink tutu of cloud.
We crossed the longest bridge I'd ever been on, a causeway so endless that you forgot you were over water, and then we hit more swamp. Low-lying woods and wetlands, glimpses of the vast lake. It was hard to know whether it was the usual state of things or if Katrina had flooded the area and the water had never receded.
"See that? Bayou Sauvage," Jake said. He was sitting in the back, working on his Baudelaire translations. "And have you seen that sign before? Bienvenue en Louisiane. The last piece of French culture in America."
"Of what?" Juliana asked. He had pronounced it "cool-toor." I translated it for her. "All Cajuns do is sing country music with French words," she said.
Jake grunted in pain. "The proof—we Americans know nothing of the real French cool-toor that inspired the Cajuns, that is the problem. This is the reason I will change my name."
Juliana and I both expressed our surprise. This was the first we'd heard of it.
"Yeah, this is why I come to see my mom. I must tell her. I want to change my name to Rimbaud."
"But he's Italian," Juliana objected.
Again,
It was logical, I reasoned. Jake was already a French poet in all but name—he smoked like one and had a very poetic view of sex in that all his relationships were haikus rather than novels.
"Why don't you change it to Baudelaire?" I asked.
"Oh no. I am not worthy."
"But mightn't it cause confusion in the bookshops to have two poets with the same name?" I asked.
"Hey man, don't mock my om-ahj," he warned.
Did he mean his "homage"? I asked. Yes, he replied, his "om-ahj," and Juliana backed him up. Turned out it was one of those words like herb that the Americans pronounce à la francaise. "Erb," they say, making themselves sound like Rasta dealers.
"Well, you've certainly arrived in France now," I said. "We just passed the Pointe aux Herbes, herb point, and there's a Lake Born. What's that?"
I handed him the atlas, and he took great pleasure in correcting my pronunciation.
"Born-ya. Lake Borgne. Man with One Eye Lake. Hey, and look, here is Chef Menteur highway—chief liar. It's fun, Louisiane." He then ruined the newly upbeat ambience in the car by adding, "They will adore Baudelaire."
We sloped down off the highway, all of us slightly nervous about entering the city at dusk. We knew that there were neighborhoods where a Mini and its contents could be seen as very worthwhile prey. We'd all heard about the hurricane damage and the slow pace of regeneration. It didn't feel like the land of place to get lost in.
But we found the French Quarter easily, and within five minutes we'd got ourselves a luxurious room with three queen beds—all for the price of a windowless cubicle in a London backstreet. The hotel was a converted city mansion, with bare brick walls, French windows, and the faded, flaking glory of New Orleans's ironwork balconies.
We strolled out to a restaurant that featured a guy with a metal glove opening a never-ending supply of oysters. They looked tempting, but I was put off trying any by the legal disclaimer at the foot of the menu—"Eating raw oysters may cause death." These American lawyers sure knew how to ruin an appetite.