“Alright then, where’s Michel Mohrt?” (in French) (my editor of sorts there, a Breton from Lannion Bay at Louquarec.)
“He’s out to lunch too.”
But the fact of the matter was, he was in New York that day but she couldnt care less to tell me and with me sitting in front of this imperious secretary who must’ve thought she was very Madame Defarge herself in Dickens’ “Tale of Two Cities” sewing the names of potential guillotine victims into the printer’s cloth, were a half dozen eager or worried future writers with their manuscripts all of whom gave me a positively dirty look when they heard my name as tho they were muttering to themselves “Kerouac? I can write ten times better than that beatnik maniac and I’ll prove it with this here manuscript called ‘Silence au Lips’ all about how Renard walks into the foyer lighting a cigarette and refuses to acknowledge the sad formless smile of the plotless Lesbian heroine whose father just died trying to rape an elk in the Battle of Cuckamonga, and Phillipe the intellectual enters in the next chapter lighting a cigarette with an existential leap across the blank page I leave next, all ending in a monologue encompassing etc., all this Kerouac can do is write stories, ugh”—“And in such bad taste, not even one well-defined heroine in domino slacks crucifying chickens for her mother with hammer and nails in a ‘Happening’ in the kitchen” —agh, all I feel like singing is Jimmy Lunceford’s old tune:
“It aint watcha do
It’s the way atcha do it!”
But seeing the sinister atmosphere of “literature” all around me and the broad aint gonna get my publisher to buzz me into his office for an actual business chat, I get up and snarl:
“Aw shit, j’m’en va à l’Angleterre” (Aw shit, I’m goin to England”) but I should really have said:
“Le Petit Prince s’en va à la Petite Bretagne.”
Means: “The Little Prince is going to Little Britain” (or, Brittany.)
17.
OVER AT GARE ST.-LAZARE I BOUGHT AN AIR-INTER ticket one-way to Brest (not heeding Goulet’s advice) and cashed a travellers check of $50 (big deal) and went to my hotel room and spent two hours repacking so everything’d be alright and checking the rug on the floor for any lints I mighta left, and went down all dolled up (shaved etc.) and said goodbye to the evil woman and the nice man her husband who ran the hotel, with my hat on now, the rain hat I intended to wear on the midnight sea rocks, always wore it pulled down over the left eye I guess because that’s the way I wore my pea cap in the Navy—There were no great outcries of please come back but the desk clerk observed me as tho he was like to try me sometime.
Off we go in the cab to Orly airfield, in the rain again, 10 A.M. now, the cab zipping with beautiful speed out past all those signs advertising cognac and the surprising little stone country houses in between with French gardens of flowers and vegetables exquisitely kept, everything green as I imagine it must be in Auld England now.
(Like a nut I figured I could fly from Brest to London, only 150 miles as the crow flies.)
At Orly I check in my small but heavy suitcase at Air-Inter and then wander around till 12 noon boarding call. I drink cognac and beer in the really marvelous cafes they have in that air terminal, nothing so dismal as Idlewild Kennedy with its plush-carpet and cocktail-lounge Everybody-Quiet shot. For the second time I give a franc to the lady who sits in front of the toilets at a table, asking her: “Why do you sit there and why do people give you tips?”
“Because I clean the joint” which I understand right away and appreciate, thinking of my mother back home who has to clean the house while I yell insults at the T.V. from my rockingchair. So I say:
“Un franc pour la Française.”
I coulda said “The Inferno White Owl Sainte Theresia!” and she still wouldna cared. (Wouldn’t have cared, but I shorten things, after that great poet Robert Burns.)
So now it’s “Mathilda” I’m singing because the bell-tone announcing flights sings just like that song, in Orly, “Ma – Thil – Daa” and the quiet girlvoice: “Pan American Airlines Flight 603 to Karachi now loading at gate 32” or “K.L.M. Royal Dutch Airlines Flight 709 to Johannesburg now loading at gate 49” and so on, what an airport, people hear me singing “Mathilda” all over the place and I’ve already had a long talk about dogs with two Frenchmen and a dachsund in the cafe, and now I hear: “Air-Inter Flight 3 to Brest now loading at gate 96” and I start walking—down a long smooth corridor—
I walk about I swear a quartermile and come practically to the end of the terminal building and there’s Air-Inter, a two-engined old B-26 I guess with worried mechanics all fiddling around the propeller on the port side—
It’s flight time, noon, but I ask the people there “What’s wrong?”
“One hour delay.”
There’s no toilet here, no cafe, so I go back all the way to while away the hour in a cafe, and wait—
I go back at one.
“Half hour delay.”
I decide to sit it out, but suddenly I have to go to the toilet at 1:20—I ask a Spanish-looking Brest-bound passenger: “Think I got time to go to the toilet back at the terminal?”
“O sure, plenty time.”
I look, the mechanics out there are still worriedly fiddling, so I hurry that quartermile back, to the toilet, lay another franc for fun on La Française, and suddenly I hear “Ma – Thil – Daa” singsong with the word “Brest” so I like Clark Gable’s best fast walk hike on back almost as fast as a jogging trackman, if you know what I mean, but by the time I get there the plane is out taxiing to the runway, the ramp’s been rolled back which all those traitors just crept up, and off they go to Brittany with my suitcase.
18.
NOW I’M SUPPOSED TO GO DABBLING ALL OVER France with clean fingernails and a joyous tourist expression.
“Calvert!” I blaspheme at the desk (for which I’m sorry, Oh Lord). “I’m going to follow them in a train! Can you sell me a train ticket? They took off with my valise!”
“You’ll have to go to Gare Montparnasse for that but I’m really sorry, Monsieur, but that is the most ridiculous way to miss a plane.”
I say to myself “Yeah, you cheapskates, why dont you build a toilet.”
But I go in a taxi 15 miles back to Gare Montparnasse and I buy a one-way ticket to Brest, first class, and as I think about my suitcase, and what Goulet said, I also remember now the pirates of St. Malo not to mention the pirates of Penzance.
Who cares? I’ll catch up with the rats.
I get on the train among thousands of people, turns out there’s a holiday in Brittany and everybody’s going home.
There are those compartments where firstclass ticketed people can sit, and those narrow window alleys where secondclass ticketed people stand leaning at the windows and watch the land roll by—I pass the first compartment of the coach I picked and see nothing but women and babies—I know instinctively I’ll choose the second compartment—And I do! Because what do I see in there but “Le Rouge et le Noire” (The Red and the Black), that is to say, the Military and the Church, a French soldier and a Catholic priest, and not only that but two pleasant looking old ladies and a weird looking drunklooking