When I was twenty-four, and visiting Paris for the first time, I was in a train station—Gare de Lyon, it probably was. With my fiancé, I was enjoying a cafe au lait, when a man sitting next to me began speaking to me urgently, in French—of which I knew none.
The man had many scars on his face, and wore an eye patch. But intense and sincere was his approach that I assumed good motives and constructed a possible scenario to make it make sense.
The waiter! I decided. He’s trying to shortchange me! And this nice French pirate-turned-good-samaritan is trying to alert me!
Although I had conjured this situation in an instant, I still felt compelled to enthusiastically agree with the pirate before turning my wrath on le garçon.
“Oui! Oui!” I shouted gratefully to the pirate, furiously nodding my head to show I understood.
At which he produced and handed to me a great big brick of hashish—perhaps to buy, perhaps to transport.
“Non! Non!” I shouted, shoving the hash back into the pirate’s filthy hands and grabbing my startled and now giggling girl, to go.
A long way of asking: Whatever happened to all the guys with eye patches? When I grew up, seemed like one out of about 50 men wore an eye patch (and nobody but truckers and ex-sailors wore tattoos). Now, nobody has an eye patch, and everybody with any artistic spirit at all has a goddamn tattoo.
It’s hard to adjust, you know?
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