I had made a connection through a teacher and was in Paris to work in a print shop, where I had to start immediately, even before finding a living arrangement. At first I worked in the afternoons, and after I found a dormitory room in the Cite Universitaire, I started attending morning classes at the Alliance. My progress was excrutiatingly slow because the classes were large and taught by rote, with every one of about thirty students required to repeat the same phrases one after the other, around and around in an endless cycle of dumb repetitions. I had never particularly liked the French language and the routine boredom of the Alliance classes felt like punishment and only estranged me further, yet in a curious way the difficulty drew me on and kept me going as a kind of masochistic challenge. I was determined not to let this French thing beat me, but now all these years later, it's still an even race. Of course I speak much better than I did then, but somehow I'm still essentially neck-and-neck with that sadistic language. (The aspiration to learn a foreign language is a terrible thing to waste on French.)
My continuing distaste for French is odd considering the enormous time and effort I've spent trying to learn it. It is harder than Spanish or Italian and other Latin languages. In three months of intensive Spanish in Mexico I picked up the basic structure of that language and learned a lot of things I never expect to master in French even now. More than twenty-five years after that first visit to Paris, I'm still working at it, albeit reluctantly, and frequently decide the time has come to just give up and admit that I'll never master the language with all its impossible idioms, silent suffixes and endlessly confusing homonyms. Damn the French anyway for speaking such a complex and difficult language that seems intentionally designed to be opaque to outsiders.
Some big famous person (Thomas Jefferson?) once said that Americans go to France only to discover how American they really are, and I agree with this sentiment. My last trip home from Paris serves as an illustrative example. There I was near the Luxembourg gardens with my travel bags, descending down into the bowels of the city to the RER, the extraordinary deep-level subway system that enables very rapid access across the city and out into the surrounding suburbs. Every time I ride the RER I curse our American religion of private transportation. The Europeans in general and the French especially are lightyears ahead of us in modern rapid transit.
The RER is fantastic and impressive, but for some reason the people who ride it don't seem appreciative of their great good fortune in having such a wonderful system, and appear to simply expect it as their due. Everyone on those trains looks severely bored and utterly disinterested in their surroundings. Maybe it is the famous sang froid, the European sophistication and formality, but whatever the explanation, the face that French people put on to meet the faces they encounter on those trains is repellant.
The train arrived at the Charles De Gaulle airport, a magnificent sprawling temple of modern airport design. The fact that the beautiful winding reinforced concrete sructures occasionally collapse to crush a few hapless travelers only indicates for me the daring nature of architecture across the puddle, and as I strolled through the glorious interior volumes of the various pavillions I felt uplifted by the sheer beauty of the place. I boarded the plane finally and—
after the long miraculous flight
—the arrival at Kennedy airport in New York was a violent shock by contrast to the departure from Charles De Gaulle. One is herded like a pig to be slaughtered in customs and the baggage area, then unceremoniously dumped out onto the ring road with no indication of what to do or where to go. Eventually, after standing in the rain and wondering what to do, a Manhattan bus arrives, but turns out to cost $35. Many people board it anyway, seeing no alternative and grumbling about the rip-off, but you can stick it out for the jitney bus that circles through long-term parking and finally stops at the A-Train, which is what I did.
The little bus was jammed with people I recognized from the flight. The ventilator was not working properly so it was uncomfortably humid and stuffy, and the driver had to stop to wipe down the windshield every couple of minutes so he wouldn't smash into other vehicles. There was something distinctly ominous in the experience of riding that little bus, and I noticed an attractive young French couple looking terrified at what they'd gotten themselves into. I joked with them to put them at their ease, but I understood their consternation at finding themselves in the great city of New York—Numero un dans le monde—and feeling as though they might be in for some good old-fashioned American violence, something they obviously had not expected.
After a twenty minute ride, the jitney finally arrives at the A-train station and everyone gets off to stand once again in the rain, there being no protective roof at that station. Almost unbelievably, there were hardly any lights either, so in addition to the indignity of being exposed to the pouring rain we had to stand waiting in near total darkness, which multiplied the general feeling of distress and even danger. Considering such conditions on arrival, one is forced to conclude that the great and powerful United States of America has descended to the status of third-world backwater.
Eventually the train arrives, and of course it's a cattle car compared to the magnificent Parisian RER. During the long rattle toward Jay Street I find myself surrounded by a bunch of crazy kids who are yacking away excitedly about all sorts of things, projects they are working on, their future plans and some gritty stuff about serious problems caused by unemployment, drugs, poverty, racism, etc. and suddenly I am content to be back in squalid America, where transportation is problematic, public education is a disgrace and all sorts of terrible social issues are glaringly obvious all around me, but where people are happy to talk on the subway.
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