Picka Pocketoni

IT WAS JULY, and Hugh and I were taking the Paris Métro from our neighborhood to a store where we hoped to buy a good deal of burlap. The store was located on the other side of town, and the trip involved taking one train and then switching to another. During the summer months a great number of American vacationers can be found riding the Métro, and their voices tend to carry. It’s something I hadn’t noticed until leaving home, but we are a loud people. The trumpeting elephants of the human race. Questions, observations, the locations of blisters and rashes — everything is delivered as though it were an announcement.

On the first of our two trains I listened to a quartet of college-age Texans who sat beneath a sign instructing passengers to surrender their folding seats and stand should the foyer of the train become too crowded. The foyer of the train quickly became too crowded, and while the others stood to make more room, the young Texans remained seated and raised their voices in order to continue their debate, the topic being “Which is a better city, Houston or Paris?” It was a hot afternoon, and the subject of air-conditioning came into play. Houston had it, Paris did not. Houston also had ice cubes, tacos, plenty of free parking, and something called a Sonic Burger. Things were not looking good for Paris, which lost valuable points every time the train stopped to accept more passengers. The crowds packed in, surrounding the seated Texans and reducing them to four disembodied voices. From the far corner of the car, one of them shouted that they were tired and dirty and ready to catch the next plane home. The voice was weary and hopeless, and I identified completely. It was the same way I’d felt on my last visit to Houston.

Hugh and I disembarked to the strains of “Texas, Our Texas” and boarded our second train, where an American couple in their late forties stood hugging the floor-to-ceiling support pole. There’s no sign saying so, but such poles are not considered private. They’re put there for everyone’s use. You don’t treat it like a fireman’s pole; rather, you grasp it with one hand and stand back at a respectable distance. It’s not all that difficult to figure out, even if you come from a town without any public transportation.

The train left the station, and needing something to hold on to, I wedged my hand between the American couple and grabbed the pole at waist level. The man turned to the woman, saying, “Peeeeew, can you smell that? That is pure French, baby.” He removed one of his hands from the pole and waved it back and forth in front of his face. “Yes indeed,” he said. “This little froggy is ripe.”

It took a moment to realize he was talking about me.

The woman wrinkled her nose. “Golly Pete!” she said, “Do they all smell this bad?”

“It’s pretty typical,” the man said. “I’m willing to bet that our little friend here hasn’t had a bath in a good two weeks. I mean, Jesus Christ, someone should hang a deodorizer around this guy’s neck.”

The woman laughed, saying, “You crack me up, Martin. I swear you do.”

It’s a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. These two didn’t seem like exceptionally mean people. Back home they probably would have had the decency to whisper, but here they felt free to say whatever they wanted, face-to-face and in a normal tone of voice. It was the same way someone might talk in front of a building or a painting they found particularly unpleasant. An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn’t French. And even if I were French, it’s not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals. They happen to teach English in schools all over the world. There are no eligibility requirements. Anyone can learn it. Even people who reportedly smell bad despite the fact that they’ve just taken a bath and are wearing clean clothes.

Because they had used the tiresome word froggy and complained about my odor, I was now licensed to hate this couple as much as I wanted. This made me happy, as I’d wanted to hate them from the moment I’d entered the subway car and seen them hugging the pole. Unleashed by their insults, I was now free to criticize Martin’s clothing: the pleated denim shorts, the baseball cap, the T-shirt advertising a San Diego pizza restaurant. Sunglasses hung from his neck on a fluorescent cable, and the couple’s bright new his-and-her sneakers suggested that they might be headed somewhere dressy for dinner. Comfort has its place, but it seems rude to visit another country dressed as if you’ve come to mow its lawns.

The man named Martin was in the process of showing the woman what he referred to as “my Paris.” He looked at the subway map and announced that at some point during their stay, he’d maybe take her to the Louvre, which he pronounced as having two distinct syllables. Loov-rah. I’m hardly qualified to belittle anyone else’s pronunciation, but he was setting himself up by acting like such an expert. “Yeah,” he said, letting out a breath, “I thought we might head over there some day this week and do some nosing around. It’s not for everyone, but something tells me you might like it.”

People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American. France isn’t even my country, but there I was, deciding that these people needed to be sent back home, preferably in chains. In disliking them, I was forced to recognize my own pretension, and that made me hate them even more. The train took a curve, and when I moved my hand farther up the pole, the man turned to the woman, saying, “Carol — hey, Carol, watch out. That guy’s going after your wallet.”

“What?”

“Your wallet,” Martin said. “That joker’s trying to steal your wallet. Move your pocketbook to the front where he can’t get at it.”

She froze, and he repeated himself, barking, “The front. Move your pocketbook around to the front. Do it now. The guy’s a pickpocket.”

The woman named Carol grabbed for the strap on her shoulder and moved her pocketbook so that it now rested on her stomach. “Wow,” she said. “I sure didn’t see that coming.”

“Well, you’ve never been to Paris before, but let that be a lesson to you.” Martin glared at me, his eyes narrowed to slits. “This city is full of stinkpots like our little friend here. Let your guard down, and they’ll take you for everything you’ve got.”

Now I was a stinkpot and a thief. It occurred to me to say something, but I thought it might be better to wait and see what he came up with next. Another few minutes, and he might have decided I was a crack dealer or a white slaver. Besides, if I said something at this point, he probably would have apologized, and I wasn’t interested in that. His embarrassment would have pleased me, but once he recovered, there would be that awkward period that sometimes culminates in a handshake. I didn’t want to touch these people’s hands or see things from their point of view, I just wanted to continue hating them. So I kept my mouth shut and stared off into space.

The train stopped at the next station. Passengers got off, and Carol and Martin moved to occupy two folding seats located beside the door. I thought they might ease on to another topic, but Martin was on a roll now, and there was no stopping him. “It was some shithead like him that stole my wallet on my last trip to Paris,” he said, nodding his head in my direction. “He got me on the subway — came up from behind, and I never felt a thing. Cash, credit cards, driver’s license: poof — all of it gone, just like that.”

I pictured a scoreboard reading MARTY 0 STINKPOTS 1, and clenched my fist in support of the home team.

“What you’ve got to understand is that these creeps are practiced professionals,” he said. “I mean, they’ve really got it down to an art, if you can call that an art form.”

“I wouldn’t call it an art form,” Carol said. “Art is beautiful, but taking people’s wallets… that stinks, in my opinion.”

“You’ve got that right,” Martin said. “The thing is that these jokers usually work in pairs.” He squinted toward the opposite end of the train. “Odds are that he’s probably got a partner somewhere on this subway car.”

“You think so?”

“I know so,” he said. “They usually time it so that one of them clips your wallet just as the train pulls into the station. The other guy’s job is to run interference and trip you up once you catch wind of what’s going on. Then the train stops, the doors open, and they disappear into the crowd. If Stinky there had gotten his way, he’d probably be halfway to Timbuktu by now. I mean, make no mistake, these guys are fast.”

I’m not the sort of person normally mistaken for being fast and well-coordinated, and because of this, I found Martin’s assumption to be oddly flattering. Stealing wallets was nothing to be proud of, but I like being thought of as cunning and professional. I’d been up until 4 A.M. the night before, reading a book about recluse spiders, but to him the circles beneath my eyes likely reflected a long evening spent snatching flies out of the air, or whatever it is that pickpockets do for practice.

“The meatball,” he said. “Look at him, just standing there waiting for his next victim. If I had my way, he’d be picking pockets with his teeth. An eye for an eye, that’s what I say. Someone ought to chop the guy’s hands off and feed them to the dogs.”

Oh, I thought, but first you’ll have to catch me.

“It just gets my goat,” he said, “I mean, where’s a policioni when you need one?”

Policioni? Where did he think he was? I tried to imagine Martin’s conversation with a French policeman and pictured him waving his arms, shouting, “That man tried to picka my frienda’s pocketoni!” I wanted very much to hear such a conversation and decided I would take the wallet from Hugh’s back pocket as we left the train. Martin would watch me steal from a supposed stranger and most likely would intercede. He’d put me in a headlock or yell for help, and when a crowd gathered, I’d say, “What’s the problem? Is it against the law to borrow money from my boyfriend?” If the police came, Hugh would explain the situation in his perfect French while I’d toss in a few of my most polished phrases. “That guy’s crazy,” I’d say, pointing at Martin. “I think he’s drunk. Look at how his face is swollen.” I was practicing these lines to myself when Hugh came up from behind and tapped me on the shoulder, signaling that the next stop was ours.

“There you go,” Martin said. “That’s him, that’s the partner. Didn’t I tell you he was around here somewhere? They always work in pairs. It’s the oldest trick in the book.”

Hugh had been reading the paper and had no idea what had been going on. It was too late now to pretend to pick his pocket, and I was stuck without a decent backup plan. As we pulled into the station, I recalled an afternoon ten years earlier. I’d been riding the Chicago el with my sister Amy, who was getting off three or four stops ahead of me. The doors opened, and as she stepped out of the crowded car, she turned around to yell, “So long, David. Good luck beating that rape charge.” Everyone onboard had turned to stare at me. Some seemed curious, some seemed frightened, but the overwhelming majority appeared to hate me with a passion I had never before encountered. “That’s my sister,” I’d said. “She likes to joke around.” I laughed and smiled, but it did no good. Every gesture made me appear more guilty, and I wound up getting off at the next stop rather than continue riding alongside people who thought of me as a rapist. I wanted to say something that good to Martin, but I can’t think as fast as Amy. In the end this man would go home warning his friends to watch out for pickpockets in Paris. He’d be the same old Martin, but at least for the next few seconds, I still had the opportunity to be somebody different, somebody quick and dangerous.

The dangerous me noticed how Martin tightened his fists when the train pulled to a stop. Carol held her pocketbook close against her chest and sucked in her breath as Hugh and I stepped out of the car, no longer finicky little boyfriends on their overseas experiment, but rogues, accomplices, halfway to Timbuktu.