Euro-Looters

You showed up in Paris with your friend Greg. You were going to ride your bikes to Barcelona. You were twenty years old and you grew up in the suburbs of Los Angeles and you’d never been to Europe.

You took the train from London to Dover and the ferry to Calais and then got on a train again there and arrived at the Gare du Nord first thing one cold morning at the beginning of March. You made your way across Paris and found your friend Julie’s apartment on the rue St. Jacques, up six flights of narrow, twisting stairs.

Julie was doing her junior year abroad. She’d been studying music, but they just fired her teachers in a pay dispute so she was taking French classes and doing some drawing, but mostly just sitting in cafes and hanging out.

Her roommate, Joan, had lived down the street from you through junior high and high school. She had left Paris a few weeks before.

Julie and Joan had gone out one night and met two Nigerian guys at a café. They got to talking about life in Africa, in France, in the United States. They must’ve seemed like nice guys. So as the night turned to morning and the café was closing, they all went to the Nigerians’ apartment.

Once there, things got tense. The Nigerians wouldn’t let them leave. They thought there’d be sex. But that was not what Julie and Joan thought. Joan got nervous and aggressive with them. One of the Nigerians picked her up and threw her over his shoulder, as if she were a sack of wheat he had bought at the market. He was going to carry her to bed.

Probably the only reason they didn’t get raped is because Julie kept her cool. “Why are you doing this?” she asked them. “Pourquoi vous faites ca?” Good question. Maybe it was a reality check for the guys and it reminded them they were nice girls and didn’t deserve to be hurt. The Nigerians let them go home.

But Joan didn’t feel safe there anymore, though, so she packed her bags and moved back to L.A. She sent Julie a tape.

Julie played the tape for you the day you got to Paris. Joan talked about her nightmares. She would dream she was getting raped by a Nigerian. You put your hands over your face. “Oh poor Joan!” you said.

Julie’s new roommate was a gorgeous redhead named Lolly. You fell in love with her almost as soon as you saw her. She took you to bed. Then you and Greg took off on your bike ride to Barcelona. It was spring break so Lolly and Julie hitchhiked to Nice.

Lolly fell in with a group of people hanging out on the beach, some young travelers from France and other countries, and some street people. Somehow, everyone gravitated toward a squat in an abandoned farmhouse on the outskirts of town, past the Chagall Museum. They pooled their money for groceries but pretty soon they were broke.

Lolly became a valuable member of the gang because of her striking curly henna-tinged hair and remarkable curves. She would spend the day on the beach with the travelers and the bums. The men walking on the path above would lean over the wall and shout down to tell Lolly to take off her top. When they threw enough coins, she did.

A British guy named James was a member of the gang, and Lolly was sleeping with him. One night he got food poisoning and crawled out of their sleeping bag and walked to the hospital. That was the last she saw of him.

Marco was the leader of the squatters. He asked some of the other Brits and Belgians and French guys if they wanted a job. They said yes. He told them to follow him.

It was 2 a.m. They walked up the road, heading out of the city. They arrived at a house. It was uninhabited for the moment. They broke in. Marco found a linen cabinet and took out some pillowcases. They filled the pillowcases with plumbing fixtures, doorknobs, anything that wasn’t nailed down and some stuff that was. They carried the jangling pillowcases back to the squat. Marco said he could sell the stuff in the morning.

But it wasn’t morning yet and he was hungry. Looting a house must work up an appetite. There were pigeons roosting in the rafters of the squat. Marco devised a slingshot and killed one of them. Lolly grilled the pigeon and Marco whipped up some sauce from a stick of butter and some flour and thyme and they ate it.

“How was it?” you asked her when you got back to Paris and she told you the story.

“The pigeon was awful,” she said. “But the sauce was really good.”

You and Greg had done your ride to Barcelona and spent a week with a friend, Elisabeth, who was teaching English there. She was sharing her apartment with an American and a couple of Brits. It was spring break, so there was also a guy and a couple of girls from Belgium, too. The night you arrived the whole group went out to dinner. A young Irishwoman named Kaitlyn and her Spanish boyfriend came along. It was a dark restaurant, which was good, because that way when the rabbit came you couldn’t see that it was served with its brains. Greg told you that part later.

Kaitlyn’s hands were slightly deformed, but otherwise she was pretty. She had thinnish light hair and a nice face. The American and the Brits were teasing her with Irish jokes. A Brit said: “The Irish wolfhound chews on a bone all day long and when he stands up his leg falls off.” The conversation turned to the Irishwoman’s boyfriend. He’d recently finished his military service, where he’d been trained as the Spanish equivalent of a U.S. Special Forces officer. But he had long hair and he looked more like an artist than a soldier.

You were standing outside the restaurant after the meal and it started to drizzle. You were telling Elisabeth about the unusually wet winter of heavy rains she’d just missed in Los Angeles. Suddenly, you were in the air! The Spanish soldier had picked you up by your thighs and was holding you in some sort of Spanish Special Forces carrying position, straight up, as if you were a tree branch or a flagpole that he’d locked his arms around, and he was running down the street, holding you aloft. He plopped you down on the hood of a car and he said:

“Never stay with one woman for too long.”

Then he ran off down the street and disappeared into the Barcelona night.

Two days later, Elisabeth told you:

“Kaitlyn hasn’t seen Fernando since that night at the restaurant. She wants to know if he said anything to you before he ran away.”

“No she doesn’t,” you said. “She doesn’t want to know what he said. Tell her he didn’t say anything.”

Greg stayed in Spain and you went back to Paris because you decided you were in love with Lolly. But her interest in you had faded by the time you got there. You spent a week together, then she ditched you one night to go out with a French guy named Dominique. She came back to the apartment the next night. You said you wanted to take her out for a last drink. So you walked down the street together and went into the Closerie des Lilas. You went inside and she stepped on a Borzoi’s paw and the dog yelped just under the seat at the bar marked with the brass plaque saying that Hemingway drank there. You got a table outside and ordered a beer for yourself and diabolo menthe for Lolly. You drank together without saying much except goodbye.

You left for Brussels and stayed there with one of Lolly’s friends, Suzanne. You took her out to a bar on the Grand Place and got her drunk. She barfed out the cab window all the way home. You left for Amsterdam the next morning. You spent two days in Amsterdam, walking around the canals and daydreaming. You didn’t go to the Van Gogh Museum. You knew you’d regret that for the rest of your life. And you do.

You took a ferry back to England and checked into the White House Hotel on Earl’s Court Square. The guy working was a long-haired blond from Santa Barbara, his name was Rick and you knew some of the same people and places. He had grown up in L.A. You were about to book a flight home. But he said he was quitting and was looking for someone to replace him. You figured it might be fun to stay in London for a while so you said you’d do it.

Rick went up to Scotland to visit his friend Perry there. Perry was in prison. He was from Los Angeles, too. When Rick came back to London he told you how Perry wound up in prison and what the visit was like.

Perry had been hitchhiking around the U.K. He met a girl in Edinburgh. She introduced him to her friends. They asked him if he’d come along with them on a job. He said yes. They drove out to the country in the middle of the night and broke into a mansion. He was the lookout. They came back out carrying candelabras, silverware, paintings, anything and probably everything else of value.

A couple of nights later the Edinburgh crew took Perry out on another job. They drove him up to the gate of another country estate, gave him a crowbar, told him to break in and come out with everything he could carry. So he did. But they weren’t waiting there. The police were. The gang had tipped them off and pinned the previous looting on him, too. That was to keep the cops off their trail. Perry told the cops everything, but the gang had skipped town by then. So he got a three-year prison sentence.

A guard brought him out to the cafeteria to meet Rick.

Rick told him the prison didn’t look very secure and you asked him if it was a low security facility. It was rather isolated, but still ….

Perry explained: The access to the road was tightly controlled. But in every other direction it was surrounded by moors covered with thorn-bushes and bogs. People tried to escape every now and then, he told Rick. The lucky ones came back after a few days, starving and with their arms and faces and chests and legs ripped to shreds by thorns. The unlucky ones? Sometimes they’d find a body. Sometimes they wouldn’t.

He leaned over to Rick and said “Get me out of here. Get me out of here.” Then he started sobbing and crying.

“How?” Rick asked. “How can I get you out of here? I can’t get you out of here! You know that!”

“I know, I know,” Perry said, composing himself. “I know. I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself. I had to ask.”

Rick went back to the gate and got into his rental car and drove back to the train station.

You and Perry and Joan and Julie and Rick and all your friends grew up during the last years of the Vietnam War in the comfortable and safe tract-home suburbs of Los Angeles.

You picture those thorn-covered moors, stretching out into the distance and fading in the mist.