Barcelona, Back To Texas, Viewing The Ruins

The room might not have been great, but Barcelona still was. I only had the afternoon to do all the things I'd planned, if I could beat back the drumbeat of the oncoming chaos I was sure would greet me in Texas. One thing I knew: I'd need some new clothes, because I wouldn't have access to mine for a while. Anyway, all the weight I'd lost in the past year meant all the pants I had that fit me -- two pairs of regular ones and one of Levi 501s -- were in my suitcase. I had the Levis on. They'd need washing soon.

I've always like the clothing I'd seen in the high-end Spanish shops along the Paseig de Gracia and, indeed, on some of the Spanish men walking along the street, so, since it was nearby, I went over to the Corta Inglés, the giant department store one sees all over Spain, to see what it offered. It was much like any other department store except that it had Spanish stuff (and, of course, a giant supermarket in the basement, the only part of the store I'd ever been to). The guy at the Hugo Boss boutique on the men's floor even suggested I look at Spanish brands, which were just what I wanted, as it turned out, and considerably cheaper than what brands I can get in Austin like Ralph Lauren and Boss and so on were offering. Two shirts and a pair of pants later, I had what I needed. I'm not a shopping-as-therapy kind of guy, but it did feel good to know that I wouldn't be naked in Austin.

And yes, I did head to the basement to pick up three cans of olives stuffed with anchovies and a couple of cans of Spanish tuna. I'm not a complete idiot.

And, as is my custom, I had my last dinner in town at the always-wonderful Nou de Granados, one of my favorite restaurants: a nice salad, and oxtails in a wine reduction on a pillow of truffled mashed potatoes, garnished with potato chips. Don't sneer at potato chips in Spain: they're a great example of the virtue of simplicity. I can't eat many because of the diabetes, but when they're perfectly crisp and greaseless but redolent of fine Spanish olive oil -- as these and many I was offered at bars were -- they put Lay's and the like to shame.

The next morning I woke early, had a decent breakfast downstairs in the hotel and grabbed a cab to the airport. Barcelona to Paris Charles de Gaulle (the hellish Terminal 2) to Atlanta to Austin. I was lucky: not only had I bought economy plus fare (recommended for large or tall people and/or people with legs, not to mention those of us who've experienced lower vein thrombosis or a pulmonary embolism as the result of a long flight), but it was a Tuesday, so not that many people were travelling, and I had no seatmate. Air France has a fairly crappy selection of films (unless you've always wanted to see The Angry Birds Movie with Arabic subtitles), so I had lots of time to read and think.

Something that's always annoyed me about the menu at the Nou has been the silly errors in the English translation, in particular "backed" for "baked." If I lived in Barcelona, I'd offer to edit their menu in exchange for a bottle of wine or something. (They've also confused "cherries" with "cherry tomatoes," the former of which one doesn't really hope to see in the Caesar salad -- and doesn't) But something Miguel had said in Madrid clicked in my head. He'd noted that Franco had suppressed the teaching of languages during his reign. I knew he'd suppressed Catalán and Basque and Valencian because he rightly feared that allowing them would lead to nationalism, but apparently all foreign languages were ignored until the university level, when it's arguably harder to learn a new tongue. So unlike Germany or France, elementary school kids didn't start adding languages until after Franco was gone.

Of course, this was just the end-point of the story I'd been living in for the past couple of weeks: in 1492, Spain expelled its mathematicians, physicians, philosophers, navigators, businessmen, bankers and intellectuals -- ie, its Arabs and Jews -- turning the country into a land of peasants under the mighty heel of an autocratic church and its Inquisition and a bloated and not very intelligent class of aristocrats, up to and including the royal family.

King Fernando VII, by Goya (detail). Does this look like a reasonable man? An intelligent one? Right on both counts, and obviously Goya detested him.

By the time Spain revolted and threw out the Inquisition in the early 19th century, it had missed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and had to import British and German workers to ramp up their technology. Fortunately, those workers did a great job -- and the Germans taught the Spaniards how to make good beer and sausages. To this day, a Frankfurt is a Spanish joint featuring beer and sausages! But the progress was halted again with the appearance of Fascism in the 20th century: it wasn't until 1974 that the transition to democracy -- and cultural freedom -- began, which is why the vibe of post-Communist Berlin is still noticeable in the air.

Spanish design of the '60s and '70s: a collection of SEAT automobiles in the Valencia train station. 

I think this explains a lot about Spain, and why it appeals to me: the process of discovery of new possibilities is still in the air, the Catalan secession movement may not succeed, but, like the Scottish one, may force some interesting and needed change, and the arts and the young people who make them, are still charging ahead.

* * *

Meanwhile, I was on an Air France flight back to a country where, for the first time in its history, it was being challenged by an overtly Fascist candidate in a Presidential election. And, on a more personal level, I was returning to a house that was unlivable and many possessions that had been destroyed, including materials I'd need for my next book. To soften the blow, I rented two nights in the most reasonable hotel I could find, actually a big B&B in Travis Heights that I found on the Hotel Tonight app. The first night, I just crashed, destroyed by 20 hours of flying and changing planes, including two hellish airports, CDG Terminal 2 and Atlanta, where CNN is blaring at an unreasonable volume out of the sound system. The next day, a friend and I went to see what was left of my house. 

It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't as bad as I feared. 

Looking from the living room into the office: the toilet that exploded was in the bathroom whose entry is seen on the left. 

These giant honking dehumidifying fans were everywhere. The electric bill will be stupendous, but I do believe the damage will be far less because of them.

Not a great picture, but a lot of stuff was saved. 

My landlord was great: he sprung into action and got a company involved that specializes in this kind of rescue. Despite my lack of renters insurance, his insurance covers the packing and storage of the contents of the house until it can be rebuilt. (Presumably they also bring the stuff back, too). The company gave me the weekend to take what I wanted for the period ahead, which, jetlagged and just a bit traumatized, I sort of did. I checked into the Extended Stay America on the corner of W. 6th and Guadelupe for a week, and arranged for a Facebook friend's airbnb to be my home for a month after that. Heaven knows if the renovation will be done by then; the landlord says the construction folks say it'll be ready by Thanksgiving, but he thinks mid-December is more likely. Whatever. All I can do is take it a day at a time, passively waiting for word.

Eventually, there'll be dealing with Austin Water and the electric company. On November 6, I'll be on a panel at the Texas Book Festival with Joe Nick Patoski and David Dunton, my agent, talking about writing about music from two viewpoints: biographical (Joe Nick's specialty) and historical (mine) and how the two approaches do in the marketplace. It's free, and I'll be signing some early copies of both the rock and roll history and the Michael Bloomfield book. If you're in town, drop by. If you can't make it then, there'll be a rock and roll history release party at Book People on the 19th.

* * *

This hotel I'm writing this in is a circle of hell, and I'll be glad to be shut of it in a couple of days (the parent corporation has been pestering me with e-mails for my thoughts, and boy are they going to get them!), but when I moved in, I decided to try an experiment. Downtown Austin, in the 20 years I spent in Europe, changed utterly and completely. It's like aliens dropped an entire new city onto a few square miles, but I decided to try a little experiment while I'm here and spend as much time walking and looking at the new city as I could. There are primitive cooking facilities in the hotel, and there's the Whole Foods corporate mothership within walking distance, again making it my neighborhood supermarket like it was 30 years ago (except in a different location and with about a dozen times the floor-space). Waterloo Records and Book People are also at 6th and Lamar, and there are loads of new high-rises and boutiques and restaurants scattered all through the west downtown and what the property developers call the "warehouse district," which, yes, it used to be. 

There's been much talk during the development of this of a "revitalized downtown" and a "walkable city" and how much revenue the property taxes will bring the city. I had lunch with a lifelong Austinite who used to live downtown yesterday, and his views were very interesting. "When I was down here," which was in the '70s and '80s, "the residential population of downtown was between 1000 and 2000. Now it's more like 20,000," although another friend had noted that many of the new buildings are 30% empty because they're used as second residences or "investments." I mentioned to my friend that as I'd walked the streets -- something not too many other people seemed to be doing -- I'd noticed that not only the people I'd seen, but the whole way the residences were marketed, were young, rich, and white. The boutiques also slanted that way, and certainly the restaurants did. (Many are parts of luxury chains with branches in upscale parts of California, Arizona, and elsewhere in Texas, and there's a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse not far from my hotel). 

"Yeah," he said, "there was a lot of talk about rentals and a certain percentage of affordable housing, but in practice the way that plays out is that the renters of the affordable spaces live there for a while and then get offered enticing buy-outs so the developers can up the prices or condominiumize the place. As for the places that are already condos, they're hit and miss." He pointed out a couple that are pretty full, and indeed there's one particularly hideous one near me that's all lit up at night with just about every unit seeming to be full. Others, though, especially some of the more expensive ones, don't seem to be much occupied at night. Still, they keep building them and advertising luxury. Certainly West 6th, which is the thoroughfare I'm on and which I walk daily, is lined by very upscale bars (and a few corpses of failed ones), in contrast to East 6th, which has been party central for ages, and attracts frat boys and sorority girls to bars where the aim is to get blotto. West 6th isn't much different, but I sense that the bars are more expensive here. Offering valet parking for $6 to $10, which you won't see on the other side of Congress Avenue, they seem tonier, the patrons better-dressed and maybe more seniors and MBA candidates or law-school types than on the other side. It's comforting that UT's jeunesse dorée has its own blotto-toria. 

As for the restaurants, I've found very few I'd want to return to. An exception is Lambert's, which has made a workable gimmick out of very good barbeque served in a fine dining context. But even there, the sheet listing the day's specials included a $27 shot of bourbon. As I remarked to a friend last night, for three times that you could probably buy an entire bottle of it. And Manuel's is doing a good job with upscale Mexican food, which needn't be as expensive as you'd think. The service bordered on servile when I was there, but it's usually a good bet. 

It's a cliché for old Austinites to lament what's passed, but to me, there's change and there's change. I'd be a lot more in favor of the new downtown if it were more racially, economically, and culturally inclusive. It's not. I love the idea of waking up what was a wasteland of auto parts shops, printing supplies, and derelict spaces, but it looks like greed had far more to do with it than I'm comfortable with. Imagine that. 

And yet, and yet... One of my favorite memories of West 6th was the spring day I had lunch at Hut's Hamburgers (still there! -- although now paired with an inedible pizza joint) and was walking back to my car, crossing the small bridge over Shoal Creek, and saw a mother turtle plodding down the creekside, with five or six youngsters following her. The other day, I was walking back from Whole Foods on the other side of the street and saw something by the creek. I stopped and held my breath: a heron, four feet tall, was stalking down the creek. It was a really magnificent bird, and I edged closer to the side of the sidewalk to look at it. A Type 1 jogger, togged out in expensive sportswear with some sort of phone/music player strapped to his bicep, swooshed past, hissing "Thanks" as he went by. I didn't do it for you, man. But I'd do it for a few seconds more with that bird. Anytime. 

Go East, Part One

And so it came to pass that I got tired. Tired of waiting for a number of things that were, it's true, in the pipeline and out of my hands, to happen. Tired of Texas, a place that seemed insane not just to the elite snobs on the coasts, but to an increasing number of its inhabitants. Tired of Austin, a place I used to know and now don't know and where I hardly know anybody. So when a friend posted on Facebook that he was looking to sublet his apartment in a historically listed building in Brooklyn Heights for six weeks, I offered to rent three of those weeks starting on January 11. A check was mailed and, in return, some keys were also mailed. I really had no plans, but I knew I'd make some.

I had to get up at 5:15 to make my plane, but I figured I'd rather get there early than wander the streets of Brooklyn after dark looking for a street. I called Uber for my transportation, because there is no way to get to the airport from where I live unless you or someone else drives. The driver was a cheery guy who told me the minute I got in the car that David Bowie had died. A great start to a trip, right? (Of course, the punch line was delivered by e-mail when I set up my computer once I got in: unlike the $26 trip to the airport the other time I'd used Uber, this one cost $42. I already had moral compunctions about using this service, which is battling background checks -- very routine ones -- for its drivers in Austin with full-page newspaper ads, but an inquiry to customer service indicated that I had chosen a deluxe version of the service without knowing it, hence the higher charge. There was no appeal, and their doom was sealed by a text to my phone: "Your Problem Has Been Solved!" Sad to say, theirs has just begun, since I'll never use them again; I'll get Lyft after the return flight and delete both apps.)

A boring flight, a boring subway ride, the requisite getting lost when I got to the subway stop (a tradition with me), a chance encounter with a mailman on his rounds, and I found the house. The apartment was very nice, the kitchen tiny and rather underequipped, and a block away was a street with everything I needed, from a branch of my bank to a magnificent grocery store, to a friendly wine shop and a number of restaurants, all of which I'd been cautioned by my host to avoid. There was another couple of long shopping streets nearby, Atlantic Avenue and Court Street, which I needed to explore, but as for Monday, despite spending close to $100 at the Garden of Eden, the supermarket, I still didn't have dinner, so on friends' recommendation, I went over to Court Street and began the hike to Rucola, a small restaurant on a back street.

Now, these days, my mealtimes are fraught. Some months back, my doctor informed me I had diabetes, a diagnosis I still don't understand fully. In response, I've cut back the carbohydrates, including such favorites as pasta and fruit, taken my glucose readings four times a day, and ingested a pill called metaformin. I read the nutritional specs on everything I buy, and exercise rigid control when I eat out. I've also started exercising regularly, walking small streets by my house as humongous vehicles careen past me at extra-legal speeds. It's worked: I've never exceeded the maximum glucose numbers except for one time I knew it was going to happen (I was making a beef stew and hadn't read the recipe right and at dinnertime still had another hour and 45 minutes to go so I drove to the supermarket and grabbed a package of frozen fried shrimp which were delicious, but broke the bank utterly), my hemoglobin numbers are in the safe zone, and I've come to hate dinnertime.

No worry at Rucola: a salad and a serving of what they called porchetta on a base of white beans which were delicious but which I avoided (foolishly, as it turned out) for the most part was excellent and affordable. Still, I was going to have to try to cook in a kitchen with no equipment to speak of unless I won the Powerball. People who weren't talking about David Bowie were talking about the Powerball. Sometimes both. I dedicated Tuesday to exploration.

Court Street seemed the best bet, and this time I walked it slower. Food discoveries included Shelsky's, a famous delicatessen that was like a museum of traditional Jewish fish with traditional high prices and a friendly guy behind the counter (the bigger guy on the homepage there), and Union Market, a Central Market/Whole Foods kind of place, sort of a long ways to go in this cold weather, but nice to know about. I was also looking for Caputo's, an Italian joint that makes their own mozzarella and seems to be a trove of other Italian delicatessen, but I was getting tired and decided to turn back: the wind was not friendly, and it was picking up. I turned on Atlantic Avenue to see what was up with it, and entered a time machine.

I'm sure Urban Outfitters was commanded to keep this display intact, but it's a healthy reminder that the waterfront, once a far better place for merchant ships to dock than Manhattan, was just a few blocks away. (Of course, once unloaded, you had to get the stuff over to Manhattan somehow, so warehouses also did a thriving business). There were also loads of Arab shops on Atlantic, including several Yemenite cafes with no menus in the window and no inviting aspect whatever. Most of the action seemed to be happening in the back. Is qat legal? That might have been it.

I was beginning to like this neighborhood, no question. The Brooklyn Historical Society was just down the street and I couldn't wait to see what they offered. They're only open Wednesday through Sunday, though, so I had to wait. Naturally, on Wednesday, some gift of a fellow airline passenger or subway rider laid me flat on my back, so I mooched around the house, which was okay because it was being winter outdoors. I made it to the store, and that was about it.

I had to get better on Thursday, because I'd bought a ticket for the Picasso sculpture show at MOMA, as the Museum of Modern Art is now universally known. I'd seen the blockbuster show in, was it the '70s? when most of what's in the Paris Musée Picasso set up in New York while they fixed it up, and it was both exhaustive and exhausting. I've come to a better understanding of him since then, at least partially aided by John Richardson's magisterial biography, still in progress as we pray for the aging author to live to finish the last volume, and this show forces us to come to terms with his thinking in a way that mixing up paintings, etchings, drawings, and sculpture never would. Focussing entirely on Picasso's 3-D work, it clarifies ideas that show up in the painting and other 2-D media. Transformations of objects into planes is easily understood once you check out his varied guitars, mandolins, and absinthe glasses: instead of standing there facing one aspect of them, you can walk around them, or look at them from the side. And for those of us who are impatient or tired of his postwar celebrity, there are works made from junk or scraps that fairly scream that the artist is having big fun. This, I realize, is why when I went to MOMA as a kid, I loved his goat and baboon, which the museum owns. Picasso is quoted as saying the goat is more like a goat than a real goat, and I don't know why, but that's the absolute truth. And even a kid can get the joke in making the baboon's head out of one of his son's metal toy cars. I had a blast.

Less so in the rest of the museum, though. On the top floor is an extensive show dedicated to Joaquin Torres-Garcia (1874-1949), a Uruguayan who managed to hit all the artistic hot-spots and absorb and contribute to their innovations before returning home to be his country's premier painter. There's some brilliant stuff scattered throughout his career, and I don't think I gave it enough time, but I recommend seeing it while you're there; the guy may be second-tier, but he was no imitator. There's also a large exhibition of the museum's Jackson Pollock holdings that is great to see all in one room. The rest is hit or miss, with, I'm afraid, more miss than hit. Soldier, Spectre, Shaman is about artists' response to World War II, and is just too broad an idea to be coherent. A show dedicated to Lebanese artist Walid Raad shows him to be an exhortatory political artist who, yes, makes important points, but to me unimporant art. (But remember that that kid who went to the museum also got to see the Guernica, which he's been digesting for his entire life). A show on the museum's new photo acquisitions is almost entirely art about art, which, admittedly, is what the art world is about these days, as is an exhibition of the museum's other new acquisitions, although Feng Membo's Long March Restart, a Super Mario adaptation of the Chinese Revolution that you can actually play, is fun, Cara Walker's huge cutout silhouette covering an entire wall is amazing -- I'd like to see more of her work, exhortatively political though it is, because she's fearlessly dealing with black history -- and Cai Guo-Quiang's "Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows," a wooden boat hanging from the ceiling, flying a Chinese flag, and pierced with thousands of arrows, is oddly moving.

The sun was going down by the time I left, and I walked over to the subway to meet Gary Lucas, a guitarist/composer I've known for a while, for a chat at the famous White Horse bar in the West Village. I guess it's a tourist trap some of the time, and we sat in the Dylan Thomas Room, where the poet drank himself to death one evening, but neither of us indulged in alcohol. We caught up, he gave me his two new CDs, one of which is a tribute to the music in Max Fleischer's cartoons, a typical Lucas idea that should be fun to listen to. He told me about a party he and his wife were going to around the corner from where CBGB used to be, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first issue of Punk magazine. He went home to pick up his wife and change clothes and, with nothing else to do, I wandered through the Village until I suddenly found myself there. The room was packed, and I didn't recognize a soul. I actually hate going to things like this unless I'm reporting a story or know someone and the Lucases weren't showing, so after about a half-hour, I left for Brooklyn, where I decided to ignore my diet and get a cheeseburger at a cafe near the house. The bad news is that, as I'd been warned, it was awful. The good news is it didn't bust my glucose level at all.

Punk sculpture, artist unknown

I was apparently sicker than I knew, because I was tormented with a fever all night and slept fitfully. Friday I mooched around the apartment, only putting my shoes on at 5:30 so I could go get something to eat at the store. Saturday found me feeling a lot better, so I decided to really look at this place I've found myself.

The best way, I decided, was to walk down the street to the Brooklyn Historical Society. Surely they'd have a comprehensive overview of the city. But no, the place is small and, I guess, underfunded. A neat exhibit about abolition and Brooklyn was fascinating, although I knew that Henry Ward Beecher's abolitionist church was in Brooklyn. I didn't know that a lot of escaped slaves and lots of free people of color lived in Brooklyn, at least partially because the slave-catchers couldn't be bothered with such a podunk place and spent most of their efforts in Manhattan. The so-called Dumbo neighborhood (I think it stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge and have no idea what the O is for unless it's to keep people from thinking of the Ramones and pinheads and so on) was a thriving black section of town and several black preachers were instrumental in enforcing equality here. I skipped the exhibit on the hockey team in the basement, and the other rooms in the building didn't have much of interest, so I headed out with my camera, no particular destination in mind, but a desire to find the First Colored Schoolhouse, if it still survived.

One thing I discovered was that my theory that Brooklyn preserved more old buildings than the rest of the city was correct. Part of this is that I'm staying in the Brooklyn Heights Historical District, the first urban neighborhood to be so designated by the federal government because of the existence of buildings like the one I'm in (which was pictured in a full-page article in a 1965 New York Herald-Tribune on display at the Historical Society). There were places that made me curious right around the corner:

For that matter, there was a whole street I'd stumbled on that seemed to be converted stables or carriage houses:

Hunts Lane

As I wandered up Henry Street, I entered the Fruit District, so-called because it has streets named Cranberry and Pineapple, and some houses that must date to the early 19th century.

I turned on Middagh Street, thinking that was where the Colored Schoolhouse stood, but all I found was this beauty:

At that point, I noticed I was near the water and wandered over to a historical marker that noted that there was a house on Middagh Street that, at one point, had been shared by W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers and...Gypsy Rose Lee! It also noted that it had been demolished in 1946. But what an odd bunch of folks under one roof.

I realized that I was at one end of the Brooklyn Promenade, a scenic walk from which, it developed, one can see not only Manhattan, but Governor's Island and Liberty Island. I took a truly awful photo of that view, but another shows an island I once knew well, but no longer do:

What are all those buildings? 

Of course, this brought to mind coming to Manhattan in 1999 and seeing the World Trade Center looming over lower Manhattan, two buildings I'd never seen before and weren't part of my mental map at all.

Fortunately the path eventually gave me this more traditional vista to look at:

Whew. I was beginning to worry there for a minute. 

The Promenade seemed to have ended, and I was astonished to realize I'd come to the beginning of my street, having gone in a very eccentric circle to where I'd started. It was time to head back to the apartment, download the photos, and try to make sense out of the day. One thing I realized, though: so far, I really like Brooklyn.

A theme I'll explore later, but for now, I'm headed up to Boston (on the train, no less) on Tuesday evening (that is, if the Amtrak app will give up my ticket, which is living on my phone) to see more art and history, and then return on Friday to see another old friend perform.

And there'll be another, shorter (I promise) post tomorrow or the next day. See you then.

Goodbye To The Slum

It all happened so quickly after not happening so quickly.

For the past few days, I'd been wrestling with boxes that EP had brought over in small quantities (disassembled, they're unwieldy, and he has to take the tram). I'd put one together, wrestling with the tape, which, charged with static electricity, would sink back to the mother roll and form a bond that was impossible to break, then spend precious minutes looking for the start of the tape to make my next seal with. With the box half-made, I'd load it with the stuff the movers weren't going to deal with and go through the whole sealing process again. I'd then usually discover that the box was overloaded, and that it was too small to accommodate the load. Tearing and bulging would result. I'd vow to do better next time, but usually as I was getting into the swing of things, I'd run out of boxes. In the end, I made a discovery: only Castorama, of all the bricolage places around, makes boxes that are worth a damn. Remember that next time you're moving within or out of France.

J came over at one point to raid my supplies of exotic groceries: Chinese and Indian stuff, mostly. She also got my fantastically-seasoned wok. I'll need to start working on another one. The disassembled apartment made her whip out her camera.

I am not really that fat. J explained that "It's the angle," and it is. 

At the point she took this, I could barely keep my head up, I was so tired, but later that day I went out and got some dinner.

Yesterday I forced myself out of bed at 6:30. The movers would be here at 8, although EP warned me that they're always late. I did some last-minute stuff, but I was amazed at how ready I was for them to come. Which they did, only a half hour late, and that because of the difficulty of getting a permit to stick their truck in the pedestrianized zone.

The crew was made up of three people: the guy who'd visited to make the estimate, a tough-built middle aged blond French guy, and a tall African guy. The blond guy set to packing books right away, the African took full boxes down and, when necessary, brought disassembled ones up. The boss dispensed sticky labels, one per box, while registering the contents on a form. When it came time to disassemble the wire bookshelves, he helped, but otherwise was a supervisor. As were EP and I, with the advantage that EP translated from time to time.

Once the office/living room was stripped of what was going, which was the main effort, the CD shelves in the hall were hauled out one by one, coated with protective paper, and taken intact to the truck. The bookshelf with the cookbooks at the end of the hall had already been taken care of. The bedroom took no time at all. I had already disassembled the bed, so they just taped the pieces together and took them. The clothes I'd been told to keep on hangers, and a couple of those nifty boxes with rods in them appeared and within seconds the clothes were loaded. It took longer to tape them up than it did to fill them. The African guy took charge of the kitchen, although not much from there was going: just my precious Allclad pans, a nice Le Creuset Dutch oven I bought myself for Christmas one year, and a few glasses that were as much souvenirs of Germany as anything. My two best wine glasses and the blender attachment for the food processor were left, because of my clumsiness, but E and J will get the glasses in return for mailing me the blender. Finally the Adolf-Hitler Eßtisch, the massive wood leaved dining table, so named because somewhere on it is a label showing its place and date (1936) of manufacture, which I understand is worth some money, but mostly is a fine piece of workmanship, and the venue of some future meals with friends in Austin.

They were gone by 1, miraculously enough. It was jarring, almost. I went over the paperwork with the boss, signed a bunch of stuff ("You must sign this one because it is pink," he remarked at one point, as rational an explanation as you'll find in the world of French bureaucracy), shook hands with the crew, thanked EP for his help, and collapsed in the desk chair just in time for Gerry to show up from Nîmes to take me to lunch. I took a quick shower, put on some clean clothes, Gerry helped me move the futon onto the floor, where I'd spend the night, and we went off to the Beehive, the English pub near St. Roch, for burgers (Gerry's wife is a strict vegetarian) and beer for him, Coke for me. Even with the caffeine in me, I was groggy from lack of sleep and release of tension, and when, after we'd parted company, I went for a last haircut from the woman who's done such a good job over the past five years, I almost dozed off a couple of times.

Finally, I came back up here and marvelled at the emptiness.

Looking into the office/living room from the front door. 

The hall, walkable without tucking in my shoulder at last!

The bedroom, its tininess not indicated by anything in this picture, which was taken from the doorway.

With all my silverware and cookware gone, I couldn't eat here, but I was also way too far gone to go out: one glass of wine and they'd have to carry me back here. I mooched around for a while, and finally went to the Monoprix on the corner and got a couple of beers, stuck them in the fridge, and then went downstairs to Hani's place (which will feature in the next post) and got a taouk platter. I told him I'd return the plate today, because I knew that just going down and back up the stairs was going to be an effort. One by one I sipped the beers (after clearing off the couch) and read a little.

I actually made it to 11, and nature helped by providing a rainstorm that kept the binge-drinking, howling, hooting students indoors. It was hard lowering myself to the floor and harder getting up, but I managed 9 1/2 hours of sleep. In a few minutes, it'll be time to start loading up the suitcase, carryon, and computer bag, after mailing some stuff to myself in the States. At noon, various people come to claim various stuff (including the office chair I'm typing in), and later I'll check into a hotel around the corner. A little more giveaway tomorrow, and that's it. The adventure has begun.

A Few Words About Observation, With A Miette

Funny, he doesn't look Montenegran

Yesterday, having been awakened by the adrenaline rush following the blast occasioned by someone playing a radio at top volume at 7am and then forced out of bed by the sheer awfulness of French pop music, against which I finally had to shut my living-room/office windows just so I could concentrate, I began to droop around noon. I was hungry and ready to indulge in one of my vices: a half-liter bottle of Coke (still made with cane sugar in these parts) along with the sandwich I was envisioning making.

I set off for the store. This involved turning left outside my front door, then turning left again and heading up to the Comédie, after which I turned right and bore right until I finally entered the Polygone, the mall in whose basement there's a very nice supermarket run by Monoprix. I usually do this at least once a day. Nothing odd about it.

The problem was at the store: there seems to be a law in France that says that everyone takes off 90 minutes for lunch at noon or shortly thereafter. Thus, the supermarket is jammed between noon and 1 with people buying lunch. Go there at 2:15 and it's empty. Of course, part of the jam is that all the cashiers are at lunch, too, so there are generally only two registers open.

But I have no office I have to be back to by a given time, so I just cruise around, look for ideas for dinner if I need them, and buy something for lunch. Yesterday it was a package of Spanish chorizo, a paprika-infused sausage that's nothing like the Mexican stuff of the same name. Grabbed a warm Coke (€1 cheaper than the chilled ones! And I have ice at home), and then stood in line. After paying, I walked over to the Paul bakery franchise (travellers' tip: if you need a sandwich or a croissant or similar while travelling in France and it's just a question of a quick transfer in a train station or something, Paul is everywhere, and a distinct step up from any other chain bakery) and got a ciabatta (which the French, disdaining the Italian language, call chapata).

I was now ready to go home and make my sandwich. Really, I do this often enough that my mind is frequently elsewhere during the entire process. So when I went into the street off the Comédie and saw all the cops, who seemed to be standing in line by the kebab shop, I thought huh, look at all the cops buying kebabs. They didn't move when I got to them, either, so I had to go around them, giving each of them the chance to look me over. This was sort of ominous, as was the pair of army guys walking up my street.

Now, both the army and the police have a pretty heavy presence in my neighborhood. For one thing, a favored gathering point of the junkie/alcoholic crew is in front of the other Monoprix, at the other end of my street by the carousel. The cops come and clear them out at regular intervals, and then the garbage collectors come with their wheeled cans and pick up the beer cans, food boxes, and so on. For another, there are regular army patrols of four soldiers, each with an automatic weapon, that roam the town. This is evidently an anti-terrorist crew, although I don't see how it prevents terrorism. Nor am I going to argue that it doesn't exist here: after all, one of the 9/11 hijackers, part of the crew that crashed in Pennsylvania, was from Montpellier's Figuerolles district, a neighborhood that's largely "Arab," which is to say Maghrebi and Middle Eastern. One day, I was headed to the store and one of these crews, augmented by some police, had two young guys standing with their legs well spread, hands behind their heads, automatic weapons trained on their hearts. It's worth noting that these guys were dressed like any other young machos around here, not in djellabas with knit caps, and were clean shaven.

But I was of no interest to them, so I went home and made my sandwich.

It wasn't until later that I found out what had happened. The BBC reported that a member of the notorious gang of international jewel thieves, the Pink Panthers, had been arrested in Montpellier.

How close to my house was this? Well, if I could walk out the open window in front of me and continue for about 20 feet, I'd be at the window of the apartment vacated yesterday by a young Argentinian couple in the building on the corner of my street and the one where our alleged Panther was living. (It wasn't them, despite the coincidence: they really are Argentinian, right down to drinking yerba maté with the traditional straw and blasting tango music.) Unfortunately, it wasn't M. Gnaaagh Gnaagh, either; he was raving and fighting with his girlfriend last night, as usual. (Of course, if I were trying to hide out, I doubt I'd annoy the neighbors by throwing plates of food and packages of ham out the window, having loud fights with my girlfriend, and threatening to jump, either. The trick is to remain inconspicuous.)

I was actually glad to see all of this, though. I like to think that, as a former newspaper reporter and someone who's spent his life practicing journalism I observe what's around me. The wealth of detail above is perhaps a defensive reaction to this. Because, you see, a couple of weeks ago something happened that I still don't believe I missed.

There are, at either end of my block two bars where students (and, I guess others) go to drink. They drink a lot: these places cater to binge-drinking (or, as the Académie Francaise has ordered in the past couple of weeks, buvand express). One is a rather overdecorated French-themed place, with antiques and a huge plastic cow in the street, the other pretends to be a Spanish place, with light eats and, when it opened, flamenco. The noise coming from these places, because they're right in the street and nobody goes inside except in the winter and when it's raining, is unbearable. Fortunately my apartment doesn't face the street, so I only get a bit of it.

But imagine my surprise one day when I left the house and saw people at the Spanish place piling charred stuff in the street, blackened and covered with that greyish mist that comes from being sprayed with hoses. The inside of the place was a mess. It had been a serious fire, although my guess was it happened late enough that the bar was closed. It hadn't quite gutted the place, but it did take them the better part of a week to get it open again.

And I'd slept through the whole thing.

* * *

Once again, it's time for Montpellier's guitar festival, Les Internationales, which seems to have dropped "de la Guitare" this year. With a tired lineup like this (go check it out), I seriously would not have chosen a promotional graphic like this. 

Although who knows? Maybe France has made the truth-in-packaging laws stronger this year. 

"Starting Now, You Have Lost The Right To Stand."

Sorry for those with delicate sensibilities, but this story starts on the toilet.

Two weeks ago this past Sunday, I was seated on mine, and ready to get up. I stood, hit the button in the center of the tank, bent down to get my pants, and...almost passed out from lack of breath. I was hyperventilating like I'd just run for my life and my heart was pounding. It had come out of nowhere, but there I was, huffing and puffing. It passed soon enough, but I'll admit it scared me a little.

But only a little: my family has zero history of heart disease, and every time I've had a checkup that particular area has passed the test: a little enlarged due to hypertension, but otherwise strong. The aged alcoholic doctor I went to when I first moved here always told me I could have "one, two, manny women" and offered to write me a prescription for little blue pills. (I told him to write the prescription for the women first and we'd see if I needed the pills. He didn't get it.)

Anyway, in the ensuing week, this came and went. It was always a bit of a chore climbing the stairs to this third-floor (second, as Europeans measure it) apartment, but there were times when I'd have to stop and catch my breath while walking to the store. Still, I made it to the market and back on Tuesday without incident, and I did it again on Saturday, adding on a short walking tour of the town for some friends from Texas who stopped in. Once, though, I had to stop and regroup during the tour. Mid-week, I'd gone to E and J's for a simple dinner of lentils and sausage so that E (who's Swiss-German) and I could complain that the French just Don't Get sausage (J's a vegetarian, and so had no opinion). Sunday, though, was really bad. Just sitting up in bed meant a pause for breath, and I took it real, real slow. Tomorrow, I told myself, I'll call the doctor and make an appointment. I was almost out of blood pressure pills anyway, so it made sense.

Monday was pretty bad, too, so when I called I asked for a same-day appointment and the doctor told me she could see me at 5:15. So in I went, via the cash machine so I could pay her. A ten-minute trip took a half-hour as I poked up the hill, pausing every now and again to catch my breath. I still got to the appointment on time, and she was only 15 minutes late seeing me. The blood pressure was okay, she listened to my heart, and then started asking questions. "You must go to La Peyronie to the Urgences," she said. I had no idea where this was, nor did she have a clue how to get there on the tram, but we finally figured out that it had its own tram stop on Line 1, the one that stops by my house (although it took a phone call: I'm amazed at how many people here drive places). "Do I have time to stop at my apartment and..." "NOW!" she said.

So I shuffled down the hill and discovered there wasn't a bill-changer on the ticket machine. I walked over to the bakery on my corner and asked the gal at the counter if she could change a five. "Into what?" she asked. I told her I'd settle for two twos and a one. Ticket bought, I got on the tram at full rush hour and headed off to La Peyronie.

Whose emergency entrance was not visible from the tram-stop, I discovered. I painfully crept towards the main entrance, stood in line with a bunch of other people, and was re-directed to the right place by a fast-speaking woman. Fortunately, an African aide outside repeated the directions more slowly, and I shuffled on. I talked to someone at admissions, and was whisked onto a gurney. Not long afterwards, I wsa wheeled into a room where I was checked with a stethoscope for any immediate danger and then left lying there. It was 6:30.

Soon, a couple of young guys appeared, their whites bearing a sewn-on badge that said "Étudiant." It was quickly determined that I spoke French if I were spoken to slowly enough for me to understand what was being said, and some questions ensued: I told them my symptoms, answered family questions  (no history of heart problems, no diabetes), and, mostly, waited. One of the students was an olive-skinned guy with tightly-curled hair who spoke excellent English. "Yeah, I'm getting good at it because when I graduate and get my MD, I'm gonna go to the States and get rich because there aren't any taxes." Lying there in the heart of socialized medicine, quite certain I'd be well taken care of, I bit my tongue. I wanted to tell him this was like moving to France because the women were prettier, a real "yeah, but.." moment, but said nothing. (My sister, who's a medical professional, laughed when I told her this: "He probably doesn't now that he's going to have to go through his residency all over again if he does this!" He also proudly told me he was a Libertarian and I told him that was okay; he'd grow out of it).  He produced a huge Samsung smart-phone from his pocket. "You want to contact anyone?" Ah! E and J could get the word out. I gave him their name -- couldn't remember the e-mails -- and he searched. "Not in the white pages," he said. Hmmm. "What about Facebook? You have an account?" Another excellent idea. But...couldn't remember my password. It began to dawn on me how dependent I was on my computer being able to remember all this stuff. "Okay, I gotta go." And he did, to be replaced by an actual doctor (they wear red plastic badges) who seemed angry.

Actually, he seemed German, with red-blonde hair and a flushed complexion and very brusque manners. He set up at a computer in the room and asked some more questions as a couple of other students appeared to observe. I believe some blood was taken. He jumped up and left the room. Eventually he came back. He asked some more questions, which I answered as well as I could. One was whether I'd taken a long airplane flight recently, and I remembered my trip to San Francisco at the end of October, and being wedged into a window seat, unable to escape due to a couple of immobilized gigantic Russians who blocked my way to the aisle for nine hours. Finally, he asked me my weight. I didn't know. Really, I didn't: I don't have a scale at home, and I've always figured that as long as I didn't resemble a zeppelin or my weight wasn't causing me health problems, and as long as I was eating moderate portions of good food, I was okay. I'd slimmed down a lot since I'd moved here, and I figured that was good. "You don't know your weight?" he asked, incredulous. Well, no, I... He jumped out of the chair and left the room, saying something on his way out.

One of the medical students knew I hadn't heard or understood it. "Starting now," he said, in English, "you have lost the right to stand." I started to scoot up on my elbows and he put his fingers on my chest, firmly pushing me down. "Non," he said.

*  *  *

The rest of the night was a blur of medical technology: a set of x-rays, a scan in a futuristic-looking machine with an attendant who was full of jokes and jovial about his horrible English, which he insisted on speaking, blood being drawn and whisked off to labs, and a glucose drip being attached to my left arm. Finally, I was wheeled onto an elevator and taken to a room. It was 3:15. "I bet you're happy to finally be able to get some sleep," the nurse said as I rolled from the gurney into the bed, my arm still attached to the drip. I was, but it eluded me for a while. Finally, it came. 

The next morning, I was raised slightly into a sitting position, and breakfast was served, along with a heapin' helpin' of pills. I was given a cup of coffee, a couple of biscottes (rusks), a pad of something that looked like butter but couldn't have been, and a little serving of a jam-like substance. Looking at the pills, I asked if there were some juice to help me wash them down. The servers were surprised, but went to check the cart. "We only have apple juice, is that okay?" Sure, I said, not really liking apple juice that much, but realizing that I hadn't actually had anything to eat in several days: I'd cooked dinner on Sunday, but it smelled and tasted awful (another reason I felt impelled to call the doctor), and, for the first time in a long time, I threw it all out, thinking of my diminishing cash reserve. There'd been a bowl of cereal on Monday morning, but that was it. I was ravenous, but would have to do with biscottes. And the apple juice was great. It was also the last I'd see. 

Not much happened. I was alone in the room, which was nice. Since I couldn't get up, I had to pee into a pistolet, which looked like a turtle with a trumpet for a head. I dozed. There was lunch: a boudin noir, which was something I'd never had before, and couldn't really figure out because it was, shall we say, not of the highest quality. Alongside was some cauliflower in bechamel sauce -- utterly tasteless -- and mashed potatoes. 

But I didn't get to finish it. At one point, a trio of women swept into the room with a computer station. One was wearing the red doctor's badge, tall, elegant, exuding a centeredness and a calm that was palpable. One of the most beautiful women I've ever seen, although way above my pay-grade. She was followed by two younger women, a round redhead and a thin, bird-like woman who'd examined me earlier, all business and just a bit tense. The tall doctor sat on a table bolted to the wall across from the foot of my bed, and, like in a Renaissance painting -- the lighting was right for this, too -- the redhead arranged herself facing the doctor on one side, the bird-woman on the other. "Aha," I said. "The Judgement." They laughed. "Right," said the doctor. "Tell me about the patient." Bird-woman rattled off the presenting symptoms, the treatment, and at one point said "The patient, Mr. Ward EDMUND," (that's how names are presented in France) "is an agreeable American writer and radio journalist" (I swear I'd never mentioned this to anyone, and wondered if she'd Googled me) "and speaks reasonably good French." The doctor thanked her and it was the redhead's turn. "The patient, according to his x-rays and scans, has a pulmonary embolism, which is being treated with medication." She then turned to me and asked me if I knew what this was. I told her I thought so, but she brought a piece of paper over to the bed and started drawing. 

(You'll have to click this, and even then it might not make sense). "You have your heart, the right side and the left side. Your embolisms are blood clots which are sitting in your lungs, making the transfer of blood and oxygen difficult. We are dissolving them with medications." 

I thanked her and she resumed her position next to the doctor, who was the next to speak. "In order to observe your progress, we're going to want to keep you here for about a week." "A week? But..." "I'm sorry, but it's necessary." Crap. And me without any way to contact anyone. "Is there someone here we can contact for you?" Again, I brought out E and J, and again, she searched the Internet for them and came up dry. This was bad. I had come directly from the doctor's office and now realized that not only had I not packed a little bag with necessaries in it, but my glasses were on my computer keyboard and even if I'd had something to read, I couldn't have done so. And a week like this? What was I going to do? "We'll be moving you this afternoon to another building," she went on. "I'm sorry we couldn't find your friends." And with that, she stood, and the three of them departed. 

Sure enough, later that day I got a visit from two guys who wheeled me into an elevator and outside into an ambulance, my first. "We're taking you to St. Eloi," they said, and right away I felt better. 

* * * 

I first encountered St. Eloi at the Petit Palais in Avignon, back when my friend Suzy was researching her book about girls and horses. Like all of her friends, I was constantly on the lookout for horse-related stuff to pass on to her, so as I wandered around this small museum attached to the much more famous World Heritage Site-cum-concert venue, I was arrested by a small painting of a guy holding a horse's leg in his hand, with the horse standing in the background stoically bleeding and waiting for it to be reattached. When I got back home, I searched for a copy of the painting to send her, but without luck. (You can at least read about this miracle on his Wikipedia page, but without the bleeding horse with its bland expression, you're missing a lot). So when we stopped at St. Eloi hospital, I figured a place named for a guy who could chop off a horse's leg and then reattach it probably knew a thing or two about fixing bodies. (I didn't, however, realize he was the patron saint of goldsmiths and metalworkers). 

Once again, I found myself alone in a double room. 

Home

My glucose drip was replaced by a machine that held a huge hypodermic that was verrrrry slooooowly injecting me with anti-coagulant. It weighed a lot, given its size, and it had to go everywhere with me. It was a pain in the ass and a pain in the arm. Wednesday afternoon, I got a roommate, or "neighbor (voisin)," as the French put it, a big guy about my age with a salt-and-pepper moustache whose nocturnal noises reminded me that this was the pulmonary ward. The next day, they took him off for a while and he came back and started packing. "They took it all out of me. It was disgusting! Agggh! But it's good now," was what he had to say about it. 

I fell into bad sleep habits. With nothing whatever to do, I think I discovered the basic principles of meditation, a state that wasn't sleep but where I wasn't really "there," either. It had its points, I have to say. Awakened from one of these states by a nurse or somebody entering the room, I realized I'd formed a systematic plan for what to do in case anyone did contact me somehow. I grabbed the piece of paper on which the redhead had sketched my heart and lungs and began to write. Another time, I found myself having made some connections in a thing I'd started just before heading off to the doctor's office on Monday. And I rehearsed some of the stuff I'd write here. But mostly, it'd be dozing and staring at the wall. 

The patient is bored.

On Thursday, a social worker came to see if she could help, carrying a pile of papers which dramatically illustrated the word "caseload." I carefully wrote out a short message to be e-mailed to people -- a friend in Berlin, my agent, my producer at Fresh Air, a couple of people on the Well -- who could start spreading the message that I was alive and well. I drew her a map of where E and J live and she recognized it immediately -- "Oh, I live just around the corner!" -- and said if she had time she'd stop by there. Friday morning, the phone rang, which was weird since I hadn't subscribed to the phone service. It was a guy in Paris who was the friend of someone on the Well, calling to see what was up. I outlined the situation and he said he'd relay the info, and if I was still in the hospital on Tuesday, he'd hop a train down to see what was what. I thanked him and sat astounded at how information gets out these days. 

I was getting out, too. Seeing how bored I was, one of the porters, the guys who help clean the rooms and hump beds and so on, said "Why are you just sitting there? You should get up and walk around." "I'm allowed to do that?" I asked. "Sure! It's good for you!" Well, hell, let's go! I had to put on my shoes over my compression bandages, but I strode around in a circle, doing the circuit of the not-all-that-big ward a couple of dozen times. (I'd been disconnected from the slow-injector several days earlier, although the faucet-like thing it had been attached to was still with me). Most of the residents I saw were quite elderly, and one shocking thing I saw was an old woman sitting up in bed, a table in front of her on which rested a bottle of some kind of liquor and a bottle of mineral water and two glasses, from which she sipped alternately, her eyes fixed straight ahead, probably on the television. 

I probably shouldn't have been shocked. Shortly after the guy who'd had the disgusting stuff removed moved out, M. Lopez moved in. A short, balding guy in his early 50s with a doughy body, he was in for the second or third time. From what I heard of his intake interview, he'd had problems that had resulted in the loss of a significant amount of vision in one eye and was on all kinds of medication. He spoke a little English which he was happy to try out on me, and let me know that his sister was headed to Chicago, or Madison, because her son was graduating from high school there. He was bored, too, and really wound up. Every hour or so, he'd put on some clothing under and over his gown and slip out for a cigarette. His panic when he couldn't remember where he'd packed them was impressive. Now, if I'd had a blood-vessel go out of business, partially blinding me, I think the cigarettes would be the first thing to go. And if I'd just be re-hospitalized for phlebitis, that also would have been a signal. 

Lopez' nighttime noises made the other guy's fade into insignificance. On his first night, he let out a long, high note that made me wonder if we'd hear any more of the Haydn trumpet concerto, but the action moved to his nose and throat, which also made impressive noises. He also sometimes called out, and although it was hard to understand most of it, there were cries of "ne touche pas!" and "arrête!" ("Don't touch! Stop!") in there. When the nurses came in the morning to take temperatures, the first few days he'd wake up confused and frightened and it would take him a minute to figure out where he was. 

Things took a turn for the worse for me on Friday, when his sister showed up and paid for a television subscription for him. But not, I should add, headphones. Soon it would be the weekend, and football. 

But then, on the flip-side, at one point someone came in and told me that I'd be going home on Monday. Then someone else told me that I'd have tests on Monday and go home on Tuesday. Seeing as how there wasn't much stimulation, just going anywhere was fun, and one day I was taken to a dark corner of the ground floor (I was one up), where a skinny, harried young woman had a machine with a screen and a bunch of controls, and wielded what looked like a Lady Schick razor, on which she kept spreading goo. This was electrolytic jelly, and she prodded my legs up and down. The right one passed, but she found a small clot in the left one. "It's just a little one," she said. "Ah, so no big thing," I replied. "No, it's only the size of the one you just had in your lungs," she shot back. "We'll get it with the drugs, don't worry." 

On Saturday, a miracle occurred. There was a knock on the door in the early evening -- I'd just finished dinner -- and there stood J. They'd gotten worried, called the central hospital number, and I'd been found in seconds. E, however, had been willing to do the research, but was creeped out by hospitals, so he stayed at home. I dove for the list of stuff to do, and J took notes. At last, tomorrow I'd have glasses and my iPad, so I'd have reading material! And so it came to pass on Sunday morning. I was overjoyed, both by the human contact (E had come for the second visit and was surprised at how nice the place was) and by the fact that long after they left, I had the New Yorker, and Wired, and William Shirer's Berlin Diaries, which I'd been in the middle of, not to mention a few versions of Angry Birds and the never-ending cribbage game. And on Sunday, Marie de Montpellier paid a visit with her cell-phone, which has unlimited calling to anywhere, and we called a guy on the Well whose number she had and I gave him the news. 

The iPad and the word getting out helped a lot, because definitive word came down: I was being tested on Tuesday and, if everything was okay, released on Wednesday. My news was better than Lopez'; he was being transferred to a cardiac ward soon, which terrified him. He made some phone calls. He cried a little. He kept smoking. His sister returned, and saw a copy of the New York Review of Books on the table. "Ah," she said, "you read English!" Lopez gave her a wry look and said "He's American, you know." There was an awful lot of football on Sunday (seven hours non-stop), some on Monday, and more on Tuesday (two matches). When it was over, Lopez couldn't bear to turn off the television. I learned to roll over and try to sleep, but along the way, I got to admire the striking skills of Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who plays for Paris St. Germain, and has some arcane ability to teleport into just the right location to receive the ball and kick it into the net. I'm no sports fan, but the cat's uncanny. 

* * * 

Which sort of leads to the last part of this long post. The teamwork displayed by everyone at St. Eloi was awesome. On one end of the scale was the elite doctors 'n' ducklings parade, a doctor followed by a string of medical students. All very polite, all very reserved. The trio I observed before I moved was exceptional by their camaraderie; for the most part, there's a strict hierarchy. But on the other end are the day-to-day folks. Medical students are one thing; nursing students quite another. We had some excellent ones, the best of whom was Super Marie, a skinny dyamo of about 30 who entered a room with the force of a controlled nuclear explosion. With Super Marie, stuff got done. Got a question? You'll get an answer. Need something? You'll get it or find out why you can't have it. Somebody forgot something? They'll be running into the room very shortly, embarrassed. I've been stuck with more needles in the past week than in the past 20 years combined, and anyone who was under Super Marie's supervision did it with the minimum pain and as quickly as possible. There were also the crews who served the food, changed the beds, cleaned the bathrooms, and so on. Here, the star was Island Girl, whom I'm pretty sure was North African, but with her brown skin, long black hair, and rounded figure, reminded me of one of Paul Gaugin's Polynesian maidens. She also spoke pretty good English, which sort of embarrassed her because none of her peers came close. (There was an African gal who I named Miss Miami because when she found out I'd lived in Texas, she said "Yeah! Texas! Dallas! Miami!") 

Oh, and the food. It ranged from wretched to edible, most often leaning toward the former. It didn't help that utensils seemed to be distributed sort of randomly, although only Lopez managed to be served a meal -- three times -- without any at all, which caused him to surge out into the hall yelling for the servers. Maybe I can save a thousand words with a picture of my last meal there: 

Not all visible, but the printed menu describes what's there. Most often, there was a vegetable soup made from unknown and unstated vegetables. Here there were cucumber slices in watery yogurt. The pork was gristly, the peas and carrots canned but not as bad as you'd think. There was a choucroute garni one day that was pretty good and one day Island Girl came in with dinner and announced "It's a fish with a West Indian sauce. You're going to like it!" and she was right. "Sauce Rougail," says the menu slip, and I'm going to look it up, because my guess is that a non-hospital version could well be worth the time, and I want to eat more fish these days, for some reason. Worst dish, besides steamed potatoes with no seasoning, which also came with that fish dinner, was a puree of some sort, made from unidentifiable vegetables with a decidedly nasty taste. And lots of it. Gack. 

* * * 

A last round ot tests halfway across the small city that is the University of Montpellier Medical School (the oldest in Europe, and a testament to the amity between the Jewish financiers, the North African Muslim sailors, and the French Christian merchants who ran the spice trade here and provided money, scientists, and property in which to build the institution over 1000 years ago) and I was good to go. I was provided with instructions for outpatient care (which includes shooting myself up in the belly twice a day with anticoagulants, which has proven to me that I'm braver than I thought, although Super Marie's example that it could be done fairly painlessly helped), the news that my next appointment at St. Eloi would be at the end of February to check that all was cool before I attempted to fly to Austin (although I'll probably do this in two phases as it is, because I'll probably need to stop in New York), and after that meal pictured above, I sat and waited three hours for my papers to be ready. Stepping out into the cold air in my thin jacket holding a bag with all my stuff in it, I couldn't wait to get back here to The Slum and see what I'd missed.  A lot, as it turned out. And not so much. 

* * * 

What Happened: Frequent International Fliers Please Read. On my way back from California, unlike when I flew Barcelona-Atlanta and waited a couple of hours before flying to San Francisco, I got a direct flight SFO to Paris, nine hours. At the ticket counter, I was told that as a gift from my frequent flyer program, I'd been "upgraded" to a window seat. I've avoided window seats practically forever, because the curvature of the aircraft means less headroom, and there are usually two people between you and the aisle. As I said above, this time, the two were an immense couple, Russians, flying SFO to St. Petersburg, and they necked a handful of pills before takeoff and passed out. I managed to get to the bathroom once, but that was it, and they spread out as they slept, cramping me into the wall. Somehow, I managed to get to sleep, but woke with a pain in my right leg. Sore muscle, I told myself, and although it took longer than usual for the pain to go away, it did go away. 

This was no twisted muscle. I'd developed phlebitis, deep vein thrombosis, a very common malady related to immobility and pressure. The above-mentioned Suzy e-mailed me this morning to say she knew of two other people, personally, to whom this has happened. I've flown internationally for years, not frequently, but pretty often, and never had anything like this happen before. It's not a factor of age, apparently, but of immobility. It's also not heart disease: the chances of this recurring are, well, the chances of it occurring in the first place. But it's nothing to play around with: that clot could have gone to my brain or my heart. It's just that, as I understand it, it usually goes to the lungs first. 

* * * 

Thanks to all, especially those who designed the French health care system. I haven't gotten my bill yet, but I'm thinking it'll be around €3000 or less. As my sister confirmed on the phone yesterday, I'd be into five figures by now if I were in the States. It's too bad my native land doesn't recognize health care as a basic human right. Here's hoping that changes sooner than later. 

The Window Up Above

It really has been far too long since I've posted here, but I have the same old excuse: the book  proposal I thought I'd have out of here in June has dragged on and on and, although I'm about to move on to another part of it, it won't be finished any time soon. This isn't the sort of thing that demands frequent appeals to the Muse and transfigurative blasts of inspiration, although there are times I wish it did. No, this involves dull, hard work, assembling pieces and putting them together just so, and then finding more pieces to assemble. Books cover the tiny work area I have here in The Slum, and other documents come and go. Odd Web pages lurk in tabs on my browser until I realize I don't need them any more and then click them away.

Personal life? Not so much, even considering how little I had before. I sit at the desk and e-mails come and go. Not long ago, a friend in Texas, a dozen years younger than myself, died while at the dentist's. Last week, a friend here tried to commit suicide. These things, I figure, are better left unshared in the details because there's nothing edifying in them, just sad. One pleasant thing was seeing E and J again after a summer that left us all prostrate and uninspired, and we celebrated our first car trip by duplicating part of it, going to the Tomato Festival in Clapiers, a suburb to the northwest of town. Eric the Tomatologue was there, as usual (he'd done an earlier one this summer in the square by St. Anne's church here in town), but he didn't have any tomatoes for sale, for some reason, just a bunch of peppers. No problem: I picked up a kilo and a half from a woman I recognized from the Tuesday market and made an astoundingly delicious gazpacho out of it, some of which still exists in the refrigerator. And there was a fresh-tomato pizza last night which could have been better if I'd used more acid fruits than I chose. Ah, well.

No, mostly, this is my day:

A window. It's across the courtyard my windows mostly look out on. But there are stories there, too.

As I noted in one of my very first posts here, there's a 19th century former hôtel particulier, or large private house, across from me. As I noted recently, there have been some changes. A couple has moved in on the ground floor, which has been unoccupied for ages and ages, and have been renovating the huge apartment there, as well as putting out a bunch of potted trees to sort of mark off their territory from the violin-makers' area. Upstairs, a couple with a daughter have taken over the former Alliance Francaise, and heavens knows where that's gone. There is, however, one window to the right of that large space, and that's what I look out on.

When I first moved here, there was almost nothing going on there. Then a rather melancholy-looking young woman moved in, and I'd see her from time to time, opening or shutting the shutters. After a while, she acquired a boyfriend, a wiry, Spanish-looking guy with an out-of-control explosion of curly hair that verged on being an Afro. He looked like a nice guy. Maybe he was: after a while of his being around, they vanished. The next regular visitor to the apartment was a guy who looked like a really unpleasant minor French bureaucrat, very pleased with himself. He brought women there, and, in a reversal of how these things usually go, the sex noises coming from the window were all his: "Ouiiiii, ouiiiii, ouiiiiiii, OUIIIIIIII!!" He sounded like the little piggy, going oui oui oui all the way home, actually. But that wasn't the worst thing about his sexual encounters: he liked to do it to music, a mix-tape of the Gypsy Kings and Queen which he played loudly. I felt sorry for his women, except that the fact that they were with him already signaled they had serious problems with taste.

Then, for the longest time, there was nobody. At one point, Mme Merde's young son was pitching a fit, which, in his case, usually also involves pitching some toys, and he threw a couple of metal cars out the window at amazing speed. One of them went through the upper right-hand window, which finally got patched up with what looks like paper. And then, this summer, there was somebody. First, two Algerian-looking women opened the shutters and the window to let some air in, and after a while I could see them cleaning the place. After that, several young women in their 20s appeared. And, the following Sunday, disappeared. Then the Algerians were back, and then more young women, speaking Spanish, and hanging their underwear in the open window, since they'd washed it in the sink. And then, on Sunday, they, too, disappeared and the Algerian ladies were back. Finally, I got it: either the melancholy young woman or the sex maniac had the lease on the place and was renting it out as a vacation apartment.

This was confirmed by the next batch in there, the oddest ones yet. I actually caught them moving in, six young gay men and one young woman, who turned out to be from the rental agency, because I didn't see them until the day they (finally) left. These guys seemed intent on disproving every stereotype that gay men get saddled with: that they have taste in clothing, that they have taste in music, that they're sensitive... But there was something else going on, I realized one evening when the one black guy (who had a goatee bleached white) was moving something across the floor. It was one of those stands they use in hospitals to hold sacs of fluid which are administered intravenously. I thought I was seeing things, but there's a no-smoking rule in the apartment, and one by one, the boys would appear, shirtless (you could hardly blame them: it was during our heat-wave and it was in the 90s), on the windowsill to indulge, and one day I noticed one had a brown elastic surgical bandage wrapped around him, which clearly showed the outline of a tube leading to his stomach. They'd sleep late, go to the beach (they, too, washed their stuff in the sink, and beach towels and bathing suits hung on the windowsill), then, about 10pm, go off to the bars, returning at about two or three in the morning, apparently deaf, because although their talking to each other was never quiet (and the room does echo), it was louder in the middle of the night. The heat made it much harder to get back to sleep after they finally settled down.

And then, on a Sunday, after an all-night party, they went, the Algerian ladies were back, and the next day a guy and a young woman who might have been his daughter and might not showed up, saw me typing, shot me looks of total disgust, turned the lamp on, and never showed up again. The lamp was on for three days and the Algerian ladies showed up again. Next up were a huge, disheveled woman and her daughter, a carbon copy 30 years younger than her, who talked to each other in a language I couldn't identify. And now there are two middle-aged French couples who stare at me from time to time. One of the guys actually smiled. And one of them went berserk last night when some drunks were making a hell of a racket somewhere and yelled at them to shut up. The courtyard is actually the negative space defined by a bunch of different buildings on four different streets, and although I, too, was awakened by these clods, I couldn't tell exactly where they were. And what is it about French guys that makes them sing -- or attempt to sing -- when they get plastered? There are two bars on my street (but The Slum has, as one of its few selling points, the fact that it doesn't face that street) which specialize in binge-drinking students, and every night a song -- sometimes "Happy Birthday," but just as often not -- gets bellowed into the night air at maximum volume. It's worse on Fridays and Saturdays, of course, and, if the presence of medical students trying to sell candy pills and the number of broken eggs on the ground yesterday is anything to go by, the centuries-old traditions of the start of the school year are upon us.

Of course, that also means that the winemakers are harvesting the grapes (tiny crop this year, which could mean good wine, but higher prices), the tomatoes are getting harvested, too, and soon the markets will have different stuff in them, just like always. Fall lasts a long time here, and it's always a nice time to wander around the countryside. But I don't mean to rush things: I'll happily enjoy a few more weeks of summer now that the heat's broken.

And I won't just be doing it here: Wednesday I head off to Barcelona for a couple of days to cover an art show for the Austin Post, and I'll also be blogging my art and food adventures in the city and seeing if Gaudí really does rub me the wrong way, as Robert Hughes' book Barcelona makes me think might happen. No matter: there are some frescoes I've been waiting to see since 1967 in a museum there, and some grocery shopping to do. And yes, I'll have my camera along. So the pace will pick up some, promise.

And then it'll be back to this: