June 23 // gland and kirschwasser

What a century of molasses these last few hours have been. Things are so sleepy around these parts, why, it’s as if it’s been, like, 155 days! And yet here we are.

I suspect it’s evening by now, and can’t help but stop at the local patisserie for a little boost. A delightful old woman with an orange orchid in her hair greets us with a smile. “Two of everything!” we don’t tell her. And two of everything! she doesn’t give us. But we certainly swing a few flaky pastries — I’m a choux man, for sure — and hell, why not, that neon green thing as well.

As usual, we scarf down a few as soon as we get outside, including a particularly sweet maple thing of sorts.

Normally, it might be a crime to walk and eat in this part o’ the earth, but there’s literally nary a judge to scorn us on this streets as the dark begins to dusk.

Back at the hostel, we crack open the pastry box to find that last remaining sweet. Known out here as a gland, there’s a a penile fist of dough under that electric green frosting to be sure, and filled as it is with a particularly squirty, sticky, rum cream, you can bet your ass that the entendre is not lost on our heroes. Gland.

@2millman4

♬ original sound – Eric Millman

Amidst this glucotic wage of teenagery, it comes to our attention that we are not alone in the hostel. A tan man, most definitively not Yesterday’s Dutchman Named Daniel™, pops his head into this delirious kitchen.

Hair graying at his temples, his hide crinkled at the corners of a pair of two — count ’em — one-two¹ dead-set eyes, the man sashays into the kitchen in a very unseasonal orange sweater with all the verve and delicacy of an incontinent mule. Offering his hand, he is affable as can be and fully eager to spreken what proves to be a perfect English.

Never a good sign.

A lawyer in the twilight of his career, this man, having resided for mucho longtime in Paris, he is not quite retired, but has decided to spend his summer strolling across the country for reasons neither told nor asked (after stumbling through the emotional wringer with yesterday’s pilgrim, I admit I’m feeling a bit uncharictaristically markly in that I don’t quite mind sidestepping the conversation).

Instead, I insincerely offer the man a bit of our main course — “no thanks,” he says, preferring his wilted storebought pasta salad, thank bog — and instead begin shoveling potatoes, saucisson, and kraut onto the digesting Gland in my gut.

BY THE WAY: Leftovers! What a refreshing novelty when you’re on the road.

By nightfall, now a bit of sausage myself, my laundry drying peacefully in the alcove beyond the bathroom, I bid goodnight to Mark and gird myself for one hell of a night’s sleep. It can happen, right?

Itsawrong.

It must be midnight when I’m jolted awake. Our besweaterated friend, ol’ Fake Tan McFucking Esquire, seems to have received a phone call from his room across the hall.

This laugh! What terror, hearing it bouce off of the black terrazzo floor, stabbing at the neon foam of my earplugs like something that stabs. Like a knife! A laughy knife.

“Monsieur,” I plead. “We can hear you.”

And yet Monsieur does not stop. “Monsieur. Monsieur!” I fling my sandal against the door, but non. It continues for another ten minutes. Fifteen. Mon dieu. “Arrêt, s’il vous plaît,” I shriek like a boiled parrot. But on he continues. An hour. Ten hours. “Monsieur! The spelling of Monsieur is not intuitive!”

“Just ignore him,” Mark drolls, but I cannot. This injustice will not stand! Creaking from my bed, I feel my way through the dark hallway and knock on the thin wooden door of his Hell Chambre.

It is morning. A flimsy pillow is pancaked upon my head and my sheets have twisted and turned clean off the squeaky twin cot; Mark is dressed and ready to go.

“Hey buddy. How’d you sleep?”

“Shut up, Mark.”

In le kitchen, our lawyerly neighbor sits like a blissful baby, painting the yogurt from his bowl as if he hadn’t just subjected me to flelveteen hours of torture. “Bonjour, my American friends,” he shouts, sipping from cup of what I hope to be bitter, brutal coffee. I can’t respond. I can’t even look at him.

“Fuck that motherfucker,” I say, fuming back into the room, throwing tomorrow’s jersey into my compression sack at full force. “Where’s the hell’s my phone charger?”

“You already packed it.” Mark sits on the edge of his bed, counting his daily vitamins. Popping one after another, then tipping a few thousand chia seeds into his cheek, he fingers a particularly bulbous capsule from his bottle, holding it up against the morning light. “Well well well,” he says, “would you look at that.”

I collapse onto the bed, my thighs slick with sunscreen, I fill my lungs with yawn. “Today’s the day,” I ask/offer?

“I think it is?”

“Hmm.” I fish out a few green-browns from my prescription bottle. “Well, see you later,” I say, and we pop away.

/|\

It’s a bit over 40 miles to our next stop. The roads are flat, young, and slick, passing hedgy suburbs like Ailleville (which translates, I think, to “Go Town”), along the horrific-sounding called Nigloland, onward to Bar-Sur-Aube, birthplace of Charlemagne Emile de Maupas².

About an hour.5 southeast of Brienne, Bar-Sur-Aube is especially unlike the last few hours of farmland through which we’ve suffered in that is clearly a tourist town. Centered as it is around a freshly-tarred Faubourg de Belfort, it is lovely stone buildings and comely village vines and signs that urge one to stop one at the many Caves de Champagne up ahead.

I find Mark pulled over under a road sign that offers no shelter from the stark sunlight, and he seems to be looking at his phone? “Champagne lunch, champagne lunch,” I pant/rant. “We’re here. We gotta do it.” He nods slowly, saying nothing.

Continuing a half mile along the Faubourg, it dawns on us that we missed our torn and detour back to the D13, which brings us past a Toyota dealership, a business park, and the positively dormant village of Fontaine. I catch up to Mark a bit easier than usual, and shout through the wind. “Where the hell are the wineries?”

“Yeah,” he says. Are we on a highway? We don’t know where we are. Did we eat breakfast? How is it already one-o-clock?

My phonemap brings us an hour through overflowing nothingness in pursuit of — you guessed it — what seems to be the only open restaurant in the province. “We’re almost there,” I say, and yet Mark doesn’t cast the slightest bit of doubt or concern. Interesting.

As the clock approaches two (deux), we light upon a chalky parking lot. On our left, a retired bicycle, its basket overgrown with flowers, stands guard under a verdant trellis. Amidst the ivy, a burgandy-red sign spells out A La Table de Claudine in white letters. Tables! De Claudine! And they’re full of people!

A handsome woman with close-cropped hair, high cheekbones, and the vague curl of a grin on her chin whooshes out from the bar, balancing a bounty of beers on one tray and a platter of cheese on the other to an intergenerational party of 8, inspiring a mud-wet adolescent Golden Retriever to bubble up from under the table.

Once the goods are dispensed, our hale matron gestures us to take an open two-top and I steal a peek at the lunch menu: three courses for €15. That’ll do. The puppy jumps up onto Claudine’s lardy apron with a whimper, flapping her tail recklessly as Claudine scratches her behind the ear. It’s like that fucking Seurat painting.

As much as I hate to give them credit for anything, there really is something about the menu at classic French bistro³. “Mark,” I squeak. “They have Alsatian kirsch⁴ for €2.40! And look, champagne by the glass! Riz marinière! And a coq au riesling! Mark better not get the same thing as me.

“I’ll get the same thing as him,” he says.

“Damnit, Mark.”

He sets down the menu and sighs hard. “Oh my God…”

Before he can, Claudine sets down two coupes of champagne, a bottle of Coke, and one kirschwasser. I hold my tiny shot glass up in the air as Mark rests his head on the table, moaning.

“You know, I’ve always been intrigued by kirsch. It’s just not something you see in the states. Do they even drink it in Paris? Are we even close to Alsace⁵? I wonder if it’s related to the Kir at all. Now that’s a drink that fascinates me, the Kir. It’s what the depressive writer drinks in Amelie, remember? Mark? ‘He scribbles for my nibbles.’ Remember? And I love the little Kir glass, and that neon purple color, but it’s actually disgusting. I really wish I could like crème de cassis. That’s all it is, just crème de cassis and white wine, I think, right? It’s super sweet. This, though,” I say, sipping, “oh yeah, totally unrelated. Nope, not sweet at all. Holy shit, it’s strong! Is this even an aperitif? Maybe you’re supposed to order it after a meal. Kir apres, kirsch despuis? Who knows. Oh, but the champagne! We should drink it before it gasses out. Mark, look, it’s all about the size of the bubbles, see how tiny they are? Mark. Look at the bubbles, look how tiny they are. That means it’s good quality. I think. Mark.”

“I’m fucking gonna…I’m gonna puke.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see the Golden Retriever stands at the feet of her beer-swilling kin, spinning in place before settling on her hind legs staring right at me. Right into my soul.

“Chien. Bonjour,” I say with my eyes.

“Human, hello,” it responds with a nod. Surprisingly good English for a telepathic dog.

Claudine returns with the first course: a modest rice dish with tiny shrimp and bits of squid and a few veggies in the mix and now I’m staring at that. Something warm crawls up the back of my neck.

I look back at Mark. He looks at me. “I’m fucked up,” he says. We laugh like stoners in a stoner movie.

Lunch continues with a bony, marrowy chicken stew with what I assume poached tomatoes and cherry peppers pop and ooze all sweet and acidic. Not a single vomit.

Dessert, roulade of sugar-powdered choux dough wading in a shallow yin-yang of raspberry coulis and vanilla sauce and armed with little more than a swimmer’s cap of crème fraiche sprigged with mint. Nein spucken!

Claudine sets a tray of cheese onto the table, just an oozing mess of greens and yellows and whites and farts and flies, but still, not a single vomit.

I’m certain Claudine knows, and I’m certain she’s enjoying our struggle. “Cafe?”

“Oui,” we say in unison.

The bathroom is covered in signs with what I presume are funny sayings, and they all seem to be breathing; the sink is a robot and I urinate for what might be two-hundred minutes.

Outside, Mark appears incapable of moving, so I settle the bill with cher Claudine. Covering my urine-soaked spandex, I stake an aattempt at small talk, but it dribbles down my chin like, “mlau blau brttt baaaarg.”

I am officially now a 500 pound bag of berries and chicken bone and insomnia and gland.

It is 3:30pm and we still have 21 miles to go. Pas de problème.

1. Note: some authors might have opted for the word “pair” in this case of eye count. As synonyms, either word technically would work when the number is equal to two. Should the subject’s skull contain more eyes — or less, for that matter — this word would no longer be appropriate. Exercising my poetic license, and in the interest of simplicity and succintness, I’ve opted to stick with “two.” ↩︎
2. Apart from his excellent name, Maupas is noteworthy for being Paris’ proto-Fascist Chief of Police during the coup d’état of 1851. Maupas’ infamously cruel treatment of the opposition was instrumental in Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s revolution against his own regime(?), transforming Napoleon’s cousin from President to Emperor Napoleon III while establishing the Second French Empire. ↩︎
3. Albert Dauzat suggests that the word “bistro” (suggesting a certain booze-forward, low-class French diner), sprouts from bistouille, a word from Northern France referring to a poor man’s cocktail of espresso spiked with cheap eau-du-vie (similar to what Italians now call a caffè corretto, or “correct coffee.” ↩︎
4. Crystal-clear and strong-as-feck, Alsatian kirchwasser is distilled from black Morello cherries and is typically used to soak the sponge of the black forest cake. ↩︎
5. We’re around 150 miles due west of the region of Alsace, which shares a border with Germany and Switzerland. Hence the wasser in kirschwasser. ↩︎