Me Part 2

I had to write a longish bio for an upcoming online book promo. Since I’m too lazy to write a blog today, I thought I’d offer a three-parter on me me me me me me. This is part two.

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My family moved to the United States when I was ten. By age sixteen I had written a series of short stories in English—my chosen writing language—on the unfairness of society and the tribulations of being an immigrant. I wrote songs, poetry, essays, fiction, a play, and complicated letters to an imaginary friend who, I think, got bored. One day he left.

 

I struggled through both American high school and the curriculum of a French lycée. I went on to attend Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School but dropped out when offered a copyboy position with the Washington Post.

 

In time I became an in-house free-lancer specializing in the nascent hippy movement. I wrote about radicals, Yippies, Black Panthers, drug dealers, thieves and scammers, bikers and rock stars. I was in the newsroom during Watergate. I participated ever-so-slightly in the scandal’s coverage by fielding telephone calls from Martha Mitchell, the demented wife of Richard Nixon’s duplicitous Attorney General, John Mitchell. I left the paper after a noisy disagreement with the then-editor, Ben Bradlee, who did not approve of a story I had written for the Sunday Post about being a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War.

 

By then, I had written Bike! Motorcycles and the People Who Ride Them. Harper & Row published it, but unfortunately, the book hit the shelves the same week as another bike book that became an overnight classic—Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I got a shining review from Rolling Stone, did a quick book tour, and some radio and television talk shows. My future as a writer was assured.

 

I free-lanced compulsively. I wrote for newspaper and magazines both here and in Europe. I produced short television documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and authored weekly columns for Le Devoir, Montreal’s leading newspaper, and other publications. I had regular shows on Radio Canada and Radio Romane. I got married and divorced. I learned how to play the guitar and the Dobro and played in blue grass and rock ‘n’ roll bands. I was commissioned to do a tourist book for Washingtonian magazine. I traveled cross-country to help a French reporter for the Le Figaro newspaper write a series of articles on American youth. In short, I had a blast.

 

 

Gérard and Me

There are only two French people in the world, me and Gérard Depardieu.

I say this with a degree of certainty because every time I turn on the French channel on cable, there he is—Gérard jeune, Gérard vieux,  Gérard in his 30s mince come un fil (thin as a thread), Gérard in his 40s balaise (hefty), Gérard now abolument gigantesque, (absolutely gigantic), Gérard en Francais, en Anglais and for all I know Gérard en Farsi.
Personally, I like Gérard. No one will mistake him for Maurice Chevalier and start singing "Sank 'eaven fur leetle gurls." Looks-wise, he’s no Alain Delon, though he might give Jean-Paul Belmondo a run for his Euro.  He has become, somehow, so quintessentially French that the whole image of the average Frenchman has changed from the baguette-carrying, beret-wearing, and Gauloise-smoking rotund little guy to the frighteningly overweight cro-magnon-lout-in-a-cheap-leather-jacket-who-likes-to-punch-people. I think this is a positive development. Enough of Pepé Le Pew, I say.

 
I like Gérard as an actor, too. He mumbles like Brando, postures like Newman and has the kind of grin that made Cruise famous. Also, he's pretty wide-ranging—from Cyrano de Bergerac to Georges in Green Card, and I suspect his nose needs its own visa when they both travel.

Gérard and I share a few similarities.

• He was in Les Miserables. I have read the book.
• He was born in France in 1948. I was born in France two years earlier.
• We are both males.
• He starred in Green Card. I had a Green Card.
• He owns an island in the South Pacific. I own some worthless snake-infested land in South Virginia.
• He speaks English. I do too, and better than he does.
• He likes saucisson, smelly cheeses, and boudin. I do too.
• He once spent $5,000 in a trendy New York club.  I once got lost in New York.
• He's gained a lot of weight. So have I (but to be fair, he has gained way more than I have.)
• He smokes Gauloise cigarettes. I stopped smoking Gauloise cigarettes 13 years ago.
• He once drank a $1,000 bottle of Scotch whiskey in three hours. I once drank a $5 plastic liter-and-a-half of Popov vodka (from New Jersey) in an evening.
• We both have large jaws. I got mine from my grandmother. I don't know about Gérard.
• His mother told Depardieu that she had tried to abort him with knitting needles. My mother almost aborted me when she fell off her bicycle at seven months pregnant.
• We both like Johnny Haliday a lot.
• We both wish we could have starred opposite Catherine Deneuve (actually, Gerard did, but it was in Potiche, possibly the worst French movie ever made. And I include Last Year in Marienbad in that statement.)
• He studied dancing under Jean-Laurent Cochet. I have danced once in the last 15 years.
• He is scheduled to play disgraced International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss Kahn. I worked at the World Bank, which is across the street from the IMF.
• He peed in the aisle of an airplane when the bathroom was occupied.
• I.... No, I never did anything like that.

But anyway, Gérard and me, we're almost twins.