Boozehound - Jason Wilson [88]
This was long before the days when everyone had a digital camera or a Facebook page, so I have no photos of this evening, but I can vividly imagine what our small band of a half dozen high school students from the Jersey suburbs must have looked like: big hair and banana clips and tight acid-washed jeans for the girls; mullets and kelly green varsity jackets and tuck-and-roll jeans for the boys. Inside a random bar—where, I swear to god, they were playing what I now know was Edith Piaf—we ordered beers, and a crew of dodgy middle-aged Frenchmen got very interested in the girls. These guys were classic: thin mustaches and scarves, smoking by inhaling through their noses. “You make kiss with me and I buy you drink,” one said to V.’s friend. She did, and the men started buying us all drinks. Weird drinks: pastis, Suze, Chartreuse. Drinks we’d never heard of. Drinks that forced us to make a face, which of course delighted these middle-aged Frenchmen. After our third pastis, I remember telling V., like a jaded man of the world, “This isn’t so bad; it’s like sambuca.” Soon enough, the Frenchmen got a little grabby, and one of my classmates in his varsity jacket got a little chippy and threatened to kick “some French ass,” and so we decided it was time to leave the bar and return to the hotel.
We walked back through the chaos swirling around Pigalle, in the glow of the pastis. As we walked by a transvestite club, one of the guys in the varsity jackets yelled, “Dude, those girls are guys!”
“Oh, relax, dude,” I said. I had V. on my arm—she’d made it clear the boyfriend at home was no longer an issue, and that what happened in Paris would stay in Paris. All it took was three pastis and we’d thrown off the shackles of our bourgeois suburban existence. We were freakin’ Continental now. If someone had given me a Gauloise, I would have smoked by inhaling through my nose.
Back at the hotel, I crawled into bed with V. as her friend slept in the bed next to us. We kissed and began to strip. Wow, this was going straight from naughty Moulin Rouge to full-on Henry Miller! But within four minutes reality intervened, and the teacher-chaperones were banging on the door. And then I was out in the hallway, half-dressed, being yelled at by the French teacher, who was threatening to send me home. Apparently, our permission slips only covered so much decadence.
After Paris, I headed off to drink Calvados in Normandy, which I’d been looking forward to for a long time. Some years before I’d taken on the spirits beat, near the end of a tedious and unsuccessful autumn work trip, I found myself dining alone in the Italian restaurant of an airport hotel in Lyon, France. It wasn’t a bad restaurant, but neither was it uplifting. I ate a passable lasagna and drank an average Rhone red as I and the other solitary diners silently watched the bar’s television, where a soccer game was mired in a scoreless tie. For days, it had been cold and rainy, and I was pretty depressed.
Then came the dessert menu. I don’t often order dessert, but at that moment I also did not want to go back to my room. So I ordered tarte Tatin. And then, scanning the after-dinner drinks list, I lighted