Becon-les-Bruyeres to La Defense and Back

I took the suburban suburban commuter line from Gare St. Lazare to Becon-les-Bruyeres every Monday. I was teaching English at the French sales division of an American car parts company in Asnieres. Becon-les-Bruyeres isn’t a town, it isn’t a city, it isn’t a community; it’s just the name of a train station in Asnieres. There’s a station called Asnieres, too, but it’s on the east side of the city, which is pretty grim; it’s filled with rain-stained modern concrete bunker-style apartment complexes. The west side, the Becon-les-Bruyeres side, is charming. Quiet suburban streets, older picturesque brick apartment buildings and houses. The car parts company office was in a converted mansion.

The best part of the gig was the train ride out. There must’ve been some program for deaf kids, and a bunch of them would take the train with me. Each week, these two really cute deaf girls would check me out, sign to each other, giggle silently, check me out again and sign to each other some more. I was 23, and they were high school kids, 16 or 17, so nothing was going to happen. Besides, I didn’t know sign language.

I say that was the best part, but really it was the only good part. The company was teaching its employees English because the secretaries and salesmen would sometimes have to take calls from the head office in the states. No one really wanted to learn English, unlike most of the other places I worked, where people had to request the classes and hence showed up motivated most of the time. These people were being forced, they were tired and bored and uninterested, so they were tiring and boring and uninteresting.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was this: I taught two classes there, one after lunch (12:30 to 2 p.m.) and one after work (5 to 6:30 p.m.), leaving me with a three-hour break. Now if I’d had that schedule the year before, when I was still a student, it would’ve been OK, I could’ve been reading L’Education Sentimentale or L’Espoir or Lettres Persanes or working on a paper for the Histoire des Idees class. But college was over, so the three-hour break was a problem. Newspapers on Monday are particularly thin ¬– nothing much happens on Sunday in France.

Plus, there was only one café in the neighborhood and its girl-watching offerings were pretty limited. So I got in the habit of hopping back on the train to the next station, the giant office skyscraper complex called La Defense.

There were a couple of bars and cafes there that could be pretty lively, and I felt more comfortable sitting there for two hours than I did in Asnieres. One of the places even had a Pac Man machine! What happened to the extra hour? That was taken up with walking back to the station and waiting for the train which ran about every ten minutes, a little more often at rush hour.

One day as I was leaving the café after a vigorous round or two or three of Pac Man, I was walking back to La Defense station through the hallways under La Defense. I was behind two young women in summer dresses and sandals. One was black, the other was mixed or Arabic. They slowed down and I sped up and passed them. Just as I did, a tall black guy turned a corner and walked alongside me for a few steps, then stumbled a bit – I could tell from his unsteady walk plus the look on his face, that he was either moderately drunk or wildly stoned.
He turned and saw the two girls. He said something to them and they didn’t respond. He said something else, and they still didn’t respond.

The four of us turned a corner and climbed a flight of stairs to the train platform. The girls sat down on a bench and the guy was pacing back and forth behind them. I’m sure they could sense him. And that he had an issue. I sure as hell could. But they pretended not to. They just kept talking with each other as if nothing was happening.

“Who do you think you are?” the guy said to them, from behind. “Don’t ignore me.”

The black girl dropped the pretense at that point.

“Leave us alone,” she said, not turning, and with an irritated tone, as if he were some annoying bug.

He answered: “What do you think? You think you’re white?” Then he slapped her on the side of the head. “You’re not white.”

I have to stop the story here for a minute. Chicks take a lot of shit walking around Paris, and riding the buses and trains. Sometimes guys offer compliments that are charming, but sometimes the compliments are less charming. And then there’s the stuff that’s over the line. One night I had a seat facing a black guy on the subway and when a white chick sat down next to him he said: “Hey, you wanna come back to my place with me?” When she said no, he called her a racist. Well, I thought to myself: “If she wasn’t before, she is now. That’ll teach her to sit down next to a black guy. Way to go dude.” I’d seen a lot of shit that chicks had to take. And I’d heard about worse. But I’d never seen a guy slap a girl’s head from behind before. So maybe that’s why I shouted at him:

“YOU LEAVE THEM ALONE, NOW!”

Once again, I have to stop the story for another minute in order to convey the full extent of the absurdity of this situation. I’m 5’7” when I stand up straight and I’m pretty sure I weighed in at about 130 at the time. I was wearing motorcycle boots that day – they were in fashion. While they may have made me look a little taller – maybe 5’9” – any advantage the appearance of more height gave me may have been diminished by the emphasis it placed on the slightness of my physique. This guy that I had just yelled at was 6’5” or maybe even 6’6.” He wasn’t bearish, but he had a strong build. I’d say he might’ve been about 80 pounds heavier than me. Maybe more.

And just as I had shouted at him, the train approached.

So here’s the equation I did in my head:

If he takes six steps toward you, and if you don’t kick him as hard as you can in the shin or the balls – and are you up for that? – he could grab you by the bicep and toss you onto the rails in front of that oncoming train. Above all, man: Show no fear.

So I looked at him and he looked at me. I have no idea what he was thinking. Maybe it was this: That guy’s gotta have a knife or he wouldn’t be so confident. Or maybe he knows karate. And I’m shit-faced; it would be easy for me to lose balance. But if I took six steps toward him, I could pick him up by his bicep and throw him under the train. Unless he gets in a good kick first.

So he didn’t do anything. He just gave me the stink-eye. The train rolled to a stop and he got on the car that in front of us. The girls got up, but the whistle blew before they could make it to the next car.

“Shit!” one of them said. They both stopped. They were going to miss the train rather than get in the same car as him.

“Don’t worry, get on,” I told them. “He won’t do anything now.”

So the three of us boarded the train and sat down. We sat as far away from the guy as possible. But still, there we were, the four of us, on the train together. No one else was in the car.

The girls continued talking, keeping up the appearance that, as far as they were concerned, everything was cool. I wondered what I would do if he came over to strangle me. I realized that I didn’t quite know. So it was a good thing that he didn’t.

The girls and I got off at the next stop.

“Thank you, sir,” one of them told me. “Merci monsieur.” They ran down the quay and got on the next car to continue on to Paris. The guy stayed in his seat.

I didn’t take the train to La Defense on my break anymore. I decided it was just too much effort to spend killing those three hours. So I went back to reading Liberation or Le Monde, walking around the block, and sitting for a few minutes at the corner café. I had learned to appreciate the boredom it offered.

Years later, back home in L.A., I was a reporter on an overnight ride-along with a sheriff’s deputy patrolling Malibu when he saw a crazy homeless man trying to climb a fence onto the grounds of a castle overlooking Pacific Coast Highway. So I watched the deputy arrest him. The homeless guy’s name was Dynamus and he believed he owned the place and was carrying a note he wanted to deliver to the occupants, threatening them if they didn’t leave. (The castle was just being rented out for movie and TV production, so there was no one living there.) The deputy later asked if I’d noticed the “escalation of force” he used throughout the arrest process: First asking the guy to place his hands on the hood of the patrol car, then using his “command voice” to trigger the guy’s instinct to obey authority, then pushing him onto the car and cuffing him. I guess I must’ve used my “command voice” on the train platform that day, without knowing it. Lucky for me, huh?

I still fantasize about those deaf girls. What if they had been a little older? Think I could’ve got a threesome going? There are hotels all over Paris and the suburbs, practically one on every street. Now that would’ve been a fun way to spend that three-hour break at Becon-les-Bruyeres – a place that doesn’t really exist. What if I’d got them in bed? How would we have communicated? What’s that you say? The international language of love? Yeah, in theory. But I’m talking practical, real life stuff. I’m not just talking theory.