Escargot To Hell

The Parisian café. Oh, the imagery that thought stimulates. Intellectual conversations. Outrageous fin de siècle fashions. Les Deux Magots. Sartre. Picasso. Jake Barnes and his sotted friends bickering into oblivion. Skinny Gauloises hanging from skinnier lips, covering the room in a haze of white smoke.

I had dinner tonight at a café across the street from my apartment. Forget all your romantic notions. My apartment is right by the Eiffel Tower, so every establishment caters to tourists. The cafés look typical, but as soon as you see the English on the sidewalk chalkboard menus, you know you’re not in for the real thing.

I wasn’t planning on eating at a café: on my budget, dinner is cooked at home after a round of “pas cher” at the local grocers and butchers. But tonight, instead of cooking, I indulged in that non-culinary French passion, cinema. Consequently, all the shops were closed when I got home. I was starving, so a day old half-baguette and a slice of ham wasn’t going to cut it.

I had been told that pretty much any café or brasserie in my neighborhood had something tasty to offer, so I popped into Le Beaupre across the street around 9:30. The waiter was at the door.

“Bon soir, monsieur. Une table pour un?”

“Oui, monsieur.”

So far, so good.

No further.

I tried speaking French, hoping he’d speak French back. I don’t mind stumbling a bit, as I really am trying to learn the language. Nothing doing. He spoke in English, and even translated the items in the prix fixe menu, even though I knew what they were. For an entrée, I ordered the escargot. For a plat, entrecôte (rib steak). For a drink, half bottle of Côtes du Rhône.

The wine came first. Brainfreeze! It was probably 40 degrees. Fahrenheit. I’m sure he knew I was American after I tried to order in French, but did he really think I wanted my Côtes du Rhône to go down like a Slurpee? I was so insulted. I’ve been here for four weeks; can’t you tell? I'm not a tourist. I'm different!

Then the escargot came. They had me here. Last time I had it, the snails were out of their shells, drenched beyond recognition in a green mush of garlic, wine, and herbs. This time, they were in their shells. Now, I’m from Maryland. I’m not intimidated by a shell. Crabs, mussels, oysters, clams, shrimp—give me anything from the sea, and it will be slithering down my throat in three seconds. But this landlubber had me flummoxed. To make things more confusing, they had got out the specialty utensils. The tiny two-pronged fork was easy to figure out. With that, I’d stab the slothful straggler and slurp it down. It was the funky reverse tongs I didn’t get. As you squeezed the tongs, they moved out. This isn’t what I wanted. I wanted to hold the shell so I could pick out the snail, but it wasn’t happening with this contraption.

My Baltimore roots kicked in. When we see shells, we destroy. Hammer the claw. Pick off the legs. Hell, give me a walnut, too, I’ll break it into a thousand shards. I decided that I needed to stick the tongs into the shell, then squeeze, opening the shell so I could pick out the snail.

ZOOM! Thank god the dining room was nearly empty, or that projectile shell would have left one slimy bruise.

Eventually, I managed to pick the escargot out by holding the shell with my hands. When no one was looking.

Then the steak came. With fries. Not just any fries, but the incomprehensibly salty, burnt to a crisp and hollow on the inside type of fries you see in the typical suburban American diner where the men behind the counter have fake Italian accents and your best friend’s little brother is bussing tables. Don’t get me wrong, I love those fries. But I need ketchup, lots of ketchup, and I wasn’t about to ask after the waiter had scored a point on me with those ridiculous tongs.

The steak wasn’t very good. Come to think of it, neither were the escargot. I was getting upset. I’m not a tourist, damn it, I live here! I’ve been here for…um…four weeks! I see through this tourist trap crap! But I was starving. I’d only had a small sandwich. If I had been in Baltimore, I would have gone out for a burrito at Holy Frijoles or a cheesesteak at Never on Sunday. I ate every speck of this bleu plate special.

Since I had ordered the prix fixe, I still had dessert to look forward to. I ordered the chocolate mousse, knowing full well it would look like cat food. When I say look like, I mean it would have that ribbed, curdled consistency and still be in the shape of the can. I was right. On top of that, two finger-shaped cookies were sticking out of it, looking like they had been waterboarded in the mousse and left for dead. (Sorry, I know torture allusions are a little off-color right now, but goddamn if the terrorists or my government are going to take my metaphors away. The government has already taken our freedoms, and the terrorists have taken our safety. We must go on living, or they win! Besides, this meal was torture, seriously.)

Cat food it was.

This meal was an injusTICE! But of course I slurped down the mousse. Finally, I was ready to relax with a coffee and a cigarette. They couldn’t screw coffee up. I’d been in worse cafés than this already and still had delicious coffee.

Oh. My. God. They fucked up the coffee. The Côtes du Rhône had given me a brainfreeze, and now this coffee was leaving third degree burns from my lips, down through my esophagus, right down to—anyway, it also burned my beard out of its follicles. Even after ten minutes. Was this punishment? Was this an anti-American attack? “American national victim of scalding at Parisian café”?

I decided to be a good Christian—heh, heh—and forgive everything. I made nice with the waiter, even though he was cleaning tables, stacking chairs, bringing my check early, doing everything possible to let me know that I was the one keeping him late. I asked him—in English, since it seemed that’s all he knew how to speak—how exactly I was supposed to have used those utensils for the escargot.

“Oh, you just hold the shell with the tongs and pick the escargot out with the fork.”

Impossible! The harder you squeezed the tongs, the further they got away from the shell.

Ah, well, that’s the beauty of Paris, right? The paradoxes, the coquettishness—you only get so close, and then whoosh, the rug’s out from under you.

I wonder how long it will take them to find that escargot missile I shot across the room.