The day of the speech. Green trees and heaving bars. I would be wearing the strange neon frock that would designate me as a member of the Académie before the day was out. I would be joining Andre Malreaux, Eugene Ionesco, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Louis Pasteur, Jacques Cousteau, Alexis de Tocqueville, Henri Poincase, Agnes Varda, Claude Levis-Strauss, Jean Cocteau (I can easily imagine Picasso teasingly saying, ‘Why, look! You finally got your immortality, Jean’), Alain Robbe-Grillet (briefly), Valery, and Tuscon. When I told an American tourist what I was doing, he asked if I was joining the French Masons. I assured him I wasn’t.
I had taken a job after I got off the bus with a particularly forgiving mechanic who went by the name of Luc Royer. My gravitational tug towards cars of any kind gave me something of a shield when — if I let my hand run along the side of a Ferrari Spyder or a Dodge Coronet and the owner said, “Hey! What are you doing?” -- I could reasonably claim to be interested in it for the shop. My networking-by-proxy gave Luc a stake in keeping the police at bay, though he could only do so for so long.
part 1 /