\"They did it to me in the forest and it hurt like hell. It took a long time to heal, too. My dad wasn't exactly thrilled by the idea, since we weren't Muslims, but after I went out and had it cut, there wasn't much he could do about it, was there?\" Thomas, our innkeeper from the Capo Verde islands, was telling us about his circumcision at age fourteen in Senegal while we were eating breakfast. He did it to get dates, he said, since none of the local girls wanted anything to do with his foreskin, and he illustrated his subsequent success to us by thrusting his hips in suggestive pantomime.
I heard many other chapters in the Thomas story, like how he moved to France for his studies, met a French girl who left him after sixteen years of marriage. Aside from running St. Symphorien's only bar/restaurant/hotel entirely by himself, he is a martial arts instructor, though his teaching is limited to theory since having some obscure problems with his stomach. For his next vacation he's returning to Senegal to marry his childhood sweetheart, who's also just finished a sixteen-year-old relationship. I could have stayed listening to his stories --told in an inimitably animated fashion---all day, but it we wanted to reach Bordeaux before lunch.
On our way out, Thomas introduced us to another guest: a youngish half-French, half-American guy who was born in Hawaii and now works selling and installing high-tech laser carrot graters. Is St. Symphorien the weirdest place in France? The road to Bordeaux was pretty boring. Most of it was through the same scruffy pine forest we'd seen yesterday. I was dragging seriously, for some reason or another, and Fred decided he wanted to break the St. Symphorien-Bordeaux speed record. I pleaded for him to stop in the first village with a bakery, where I chewed on an apple slipper (chausson a pommes; Fred calls them \"apple socks\") and tried to feel more energetic.
While doing this, I watched the steady trickle of customers walking out with their three-franc baguettes, wondering how a village baker manages to make a living. As we approached Bordeaux, the traffic became seriously irritating, causing us to opt for a calmer, more circuitous route through the Graves vineyards and an endless suburban maze of roundabouts and housing projects. The closer we got to the town center, the scarier the traffic got. We saw a couple of accidents on our way into town, including a car that had managed to run straight into a bus. At Place des Victoires, we stopped to get our bearings and met three older American guys touring France on their bikes.
They weren't particularly friendly, but I envied their relatively light loads. A little further, an anal French cycling enthusiast criticized the angle of my seat and gave us some addresses of bike shops where I could get my wheel fixed. It didn't take us long to score a room in the pedestrian zone that constitutes the heart of the oldest part of Bordeaux. And that was when it happened. We were loading our bags into the elevator when the closing door slammed right onto Fred's nose. It made a horrible sound, and I knew right away that we had to call a doctor.
When the doctor finally arrived (one of the finest services in France is called SOS Medecins, kind of a roving emergency room that comes to you), all he could say was \"Ce n'est pas evident,\" and give Fred a prescription for x-rays at a nearby clinic. The radiologist there showed us that Fred's schnoz was truly broken, though not severely. It would heal in a couple of weeks, he said, and all that could be done in the meantime was to smear cream on it. I endured a boondoggle of my own (an admittedly less painful one) searching for a replacement rim for my bicycle.
From one bicycle shop to the next, I carried my damaged wheel through the crowded streets of uptight Bordeaux. People looked at me as if I was the incarnation of the plague, the essence of bad taste. Though both shops had said over the phone that they had the part, all it took was one look to elicit the usual French response of \"Non, c'est impossible.\" For cocktail hour we went to a queer bar called \"l'Alibi.\" As per usual in France, we were treated like invisible men inside; no one would return our looks or smiles; only the bartender so much as acknowledged our existence.
I broke the ice by broaching a subject very dear to the French, asking the barman very loudly, \"Where's a good place for dinner?\" At this, a small committee was urgently formed at the end of the bar, and after much hushed deliberation, an emissary was sent in the form of a middle-aged fashion victim who introduced himself as Denis. Denis instructed us to go to a place called \"Les Graves du Parlement\" and drew us a very elaborate map to get there. When I told him I'd come back and slap him if we didn't like the food, he got all excited.
Dinner was more serviceable than spectacular, but we were entertained by the antics of the many homo passersby, many of them dressed in the outfit du jour: black and white plaid pants and bright red hiking boots. (\"C'est la mode,\" identically-dressed Denis explained to me later, exhibiting an astounding lack of imagination). The Spartacus guide informed us that another bar called \"Le Moyen Age\" (The Middle Ages) was the oldest gay bar in France. Could the editors been referring to demographics? In any case, the bar was appropriately named; we were the youngest customers by at least two decades. We sat down next to an anglophonic trio who actually said \"hello\"
to us. Chris and Graham were Brittanic, and the hysterically flamboyant Michael was American. All three worked on the \"Silver Cloud\", a big cruise ship we had noticed earlier in the harbor. We weren't surprised when they told us they were the entertainment; Michael and Chris were singer/dancers while Graham just sang. They (actually Michael, since he seldom let his Brit companions get a word in edgewise) enlightened us as to the strange culture of working on a cruise ship. I found it rather fascinating, and Michael's strongly voiced biases had me practically crying with laughter. He referred to gay men as \"mary's\"
and used \"chicken\" as a term of endearment (as in \"We haven't been to a mary bar since Genoa, chicken, and what a hellhole that place is.\"). All the noise we were making was eliciting decidedly unfriendly glares from the sullen French patrons, so we led our new friends back to the Alibi to shake that place up a little. I caused quite a drama when a French boy I was talking to accidentally burned my arm with his cigarette (If you remember to ask, I'll show you the scar), which caused me to jerk and spill some beer on both of us.
Showing absolutely no concern for me, the boy went into a total tizzy fit over his shirt smelling like beer, which angered me enough to add to his misfortune. This caused a general gasp from the bar at large, and for a while I felt like persona non grata, pleased with myself for breaking some rules in this city so obsessed with decorum. One French boy who would talk to me after the incident was an adorable nineteen-year-old student of Italian called Florial, whose sympathy, I suspect, stemmed partly from his being a virulent anti-smoker himself. He said that Bordeaux was famous for its pretentiousness and its \"faux-bourgeois\"
(a concept that was reiterated verbatim the next day by a taxi driver, who also confirmed my suspicions that Bordeaux drivers are among the rudest in the known universe). At three o'clock or so our singer/dancer friends tried to entice us to accompany them to a nightclub, but we were both dog-tired, so we dragged our smoke-and-beer-reeking selves back to bed.