29 January 2007

Just Say No, You Idiot.


When Benjamin the French bartender in Libourne invites you to his apartment after the bar closes to drink champagne and watch bad video of Phil Collins live at an outdoor concert in someplace like Gdansk where he’s still wildly popular, say no. It’s not because your homophobic. There’s nothing gay about drinking champagne in the middle of the night with a roomful of strangers, watching Phil Collins singing “I Can Feel It in the Air Tonight” -- not in France.

No, you say no because your train leaves for the airport at 6:30 am and missing it means missing your flight out of Charles DeGaulle. The next flight will cost you two sleepless nights in the airport and another 155 euros which you don’t have. You say no because you’ve already had a few beers and armagnacs and what happens is you pass out for 5 hours upon returning to your hotel room, oversleeping by 4 hours and 45 minutes.

Say no because changing your last $100 bill at the train station in Montparnasse will cost you $20 of it and due to a lack of real sleep you will not realize it until it is too late. After a croque monsieur and 2 coffees and the Metro to the airport, there will be 38 hours left before your next flight and you will have to live off 15 euros, which is about twenty bucks. Say no because twenty bucks in an airport is worth about five dollars in the real world.

You say no because though you’re used to crazy homeless people from those years you lived in San Francisco there’s something extra creepy about the European homeless people who start to come in from the cold around 5 or 6 am, like they’ve all been hit in the head with shovels. You are in a chilly, empty airport, sleeping on the only armless bench in the entire place, and somehow, unlike them, they think you have money for food. When you tell them no, they pull out a full pack of cigarettes and don’t bother to offer you one. You cannot afford cigarettes. This makes you wish you had said no to the champagne and the warmth and hospitality, even though these are 3 of your favorite things in the whole world.

Say no because there is no heat in the Aeroport Charles DeGaulle. You will spend two nights there shivering and wrestling with trying to preserve some sort of dignity when the extremely drunk Frenchman tries to converse with you in French and refuses to understand even your most rudimentary responses. “No, j’ai ne parle Francais!” you repeat over and over as he continues to speak with you. He wants desperately to shake your hand after he stubs out his cigarette on your suitcase. This, luckily, is the low point.

Ultimately you say no because this is a lesson you did not need to learn. Knowing that the friends and family you spent all night trying to reach to get you out of this jam now think of you as the World’s Biggest Idiot is something you may never fully recover from because you are sure of one thing:

They are not wrong.