The French Sailor Trilogy
The French Sailor
by
Steven Hunley
Jean Paul Belmondo was named after the actor. It happened because his mother knew the moment she was impregnated. She remembered right where and when. It was in the last-row of the little theater down the street when they were playing Breathless. With subtitles. That’s when they stopped reading and started making out. So Jean Paul. That was alright with him. After all, he wasn’t the only man with a French name living in Quebec. There were plenty of others, as the movie was quite popular.
When he walked downstairs that typical Canadian morning to eat, there was nothing, only a huge mountain of spinach left over from the night before. He unwrapped a cube of butter, stacked it on the pinnacle of the spinach mountain, put it in the microwave, and gave the button a push. It was done in two minutes.
Then he ate it. It wasn’t remarkable, him eating it all. That was just his way. What was remarkable was what happened next.
His right arm started to itch, then his left. His right forearm started to swell, then his left, then both at one time, though his elbows stayed pointy.
“Q’uest que ce?” he remarked, though I can’t be sure, it was in French.
A dark shape started to form on his skin marking his forearm. It was T-shaped stick with a curve and something all pointy on the ends.
Starting to dress, he slipped on the skinny jeans he normally wore. But somehow he thought,
“Il n’est pas bon.”
So he walked to his uncle’s room who was an ex-hippy who lived in Berkeley when he was an exchange student Francaise. In the back of the closet he found what he wanted, a pair of white bell-bottomed pants. Then he located a wide belt to match. He looked in the mirror.
“C’est bon,” he said to himself, as nautically as possible.
He went back to his room and found a striped long-sleeved shirt with no collar.
“Oui,” he said to the mirror.
Lastly he went to his brother’s room and stole his white sailor’s cap left over from French Halloween when he attended a masked ball as Marshmallow Françoise, or the Michellin man, I can't remember which.
Before he walked out into the sunshine, he pulled up the sleeve of his right arm and exposed the now perfectly formed tattoo of an anchor, like an Ed Hardy piece of human art.
He looked at himself in the mirror before exiting the door.
“C’est magnifique!” he announced to himself in a remarkedly Gaulic fashion.
He had an odd thought he’d drive to the docks. On the way he noticed that only skinny girls demanded his attention. The skinnier the better. He started wondering just where was it he could obtain a corn-cob pipe.
“Ou est le pipe cob-corn?” he said, while scratching his noggin and squinting his eyes. I have to tell you he pronounced it 'peep' cob-corn.
When he got to the docks and was looking for a likely ship, a man with a tie and bowler hat, a rather wimpy-looking man if you get my drift, started to approach. Somehow he knew that the man wanted to borrow money for a hamburger, and pay for it next Tuesday. He started to run willy-nilly to avoid him, and accidently ran off the end of the pier.
A giant brute of a man with arms like tree trunks who needed a shave caught him as he fell off the pier and saved his life.
When the para-medics tried to revive him they asked him who he was.
“I yam what I yam, and that’s all that I yam.” he muttered, and they took him away.
A week later when he got out of the hospital, the doctors told him he’d had an allergic reaction.
“And lay off the spinach,” was their professional advice, and the only one Canadian National Health would pay for.
“Mais oui,”he replied, and ended the story right there.
***
The Further Adventures of French Sailor
by
Steven Hunley
French Sailor was told by his doctors to give up spinach and told to eat plenty of fruit. He does. He eats bananas, tangerines, papayas, mangoes, limes and lemons. Tropical fruit. South of the Border type of fruit. It is almost December so the fruit from Mexico, Chile, and Brazil is all he can get. Again, fool that French Sailor is, he eats too much. He has a strange desire to wrap a napkin around his head, which he does at once. In it he places a banana, then one baby lime and one baby lemon for color. Then, for some odd reason, he puts on his mom’s lipstick, going over his natural lip line to widen and accentuate his lips. He looks in the mirror.
“Mon Dieu!” exclaims French Sailor.
French Sailor can no longer paint between the lines! When he realizes what he has done he erupts, “Sacre blue,” a typical French expression in a situation such as this.
Then he piles more fruit on his head and wraps a red towel around his butt and ties it in a knot near his hip. “Chica-chica-boom-chick,” he says to the mirror, though I don’t know why I’m sure.
He goes outside and joins an incredibly long conga line extending from his house to Hollywood, a distance of 3,353 miles, (or 5, 396 kilometers for our intrepid Frenchman) When Lucy, who is in the same line, which at this point has gone many miles too far, complains about her sore feet, Ricky replies,
“Stop crying Honey, what are a few extra steps when you’re dancing the conga? Here, take my Perrier and drink up."
“But, Ricky!”
Your feet? ‘Quel Domage.’ It means ‘what a pity’. See, Honey? The French, they have a word for everything. The English? They search for words.”
He dances to the west coast nonstop to a beat provided by Xavier Cugat, playing Chiquita Banana, setting a record and getting a passing mention in the Guinness Book of World Records.
In Hollywood he is touted as the “Brazilian-butted Bombshell” though in reality he is a French sailorman, not Brazilian sailorwoman. He becomes neurotic trying to decide which persona to use, but patriotism wins out and he returns to Quebec.
“Vive La France,” he is reported to have said when he left, his Gaulic nose quite prominent. It seems he gave up fame and fortune to live a simpler life.
When he finally got interviewed by Walter Cronkite, and Walter asked him why he did it, the translation was this: “A sailor’s life is the life for me.” Though it may be pointed out, one can never fully trust a translation, they sometimes are, like life itself, full of misunderstandings and confusion. French Sailor understands this in a perfectly Gaulic sort of way, which is to say not in an intellectual fashion, but by experience.
For such is the life of French Sailor.
***
The Continuing Adventures of French Sailor
by
Steven Hunley
Jean Paul the aforementioned French Sailor was running out of things to eat. He wanted something he hadn’t had in a long time. A Crepe Suzette. But he knew from experience, and believe me he had experience, that there were none available in Quebec. Not one. He felt sorry for himself.
“Pourqoi moi?” thought Jean Paul, for he thought his most delicious and sad thoughts in French.
A solution appeared nearly as fast as the problem. He booked passage on the Queen Mary to LeHarve. He would find a good crepe in France.
The voyage across the Atlantic left French Sailor with little to do, and time on his hands. So in the hold of the ship, where there was room for such things, he built a time machine, a skill that many French sailors possess but talk little about, for security reasons.
To Interpol it is a “well-know” secret, but a state secret none the less, like the recipe to good croissants.
When he reached LeHarve, the machine caused tremendous problems with the customs officials. They insisted it was built in the United States and should be taxed. The captain pointed out that it was not on the cargo manifesto, and must have been constructed by Jean Paul as claimed.
Finally the red tape was overcome by a bottle of red wine (chardonnay) which was consumed by all. Jean Paul placed his machine in the trunk of his rented Citroen, where it was such a tight fit he complained,
“Mon auto est plus petite.”
He proceeded to Nantes to find a good crepe. There he rented a garage.
Before setting out to see the sights he gave the time machine a spin. Nothing seemed to happen. He decided to go out on the street to check the time in the nearby clock tower.
“Quel heure est-il?” he wondered in Canadian French, which considering the time zones only confused him more.
On the street he ran into a man named Jules, who was lost in thought and didn’t pay attention where he was going. After they both got up and dusted themselves off, Jules took him to lunch, where they ate crepes until they were full. Then they went out for a walk.
“Venez avec moi,” Jules said.
He did. It took longer than expected.
They went first from the earth to the moon, though the initial shock of being shot from a canon nearly knocked French Sailor from his seat. Fortunately he’d fastened his seatbelt. When they got back and announced that the moon was not made of Swiss cheese as previously thought, but of Gruyere, they rocked the socks off scientists at the Academie Francaise.
Still, patriotic French astronomers were pleased with their findings. They now view the moon as a source of national pride and are planning to paint it like the tri-color to celebrate.
Then they went around the world in seventy-nine days and set another record. This was followed by a trip beneath the waves in Jules’ submarine boat, which lasted some 20,000 leagues, however far that is. Here however, Jean Paul became ill proclaiming,
“Je suis le mal de mar,” which is a common complaint among the sailors of France. The Emperor himself complained of it when the Duke of Wellington shipped his defeated derriere off to Saint Helena, right after Waterloo.
Finally, Jean Paul the French Sailor had had enough.
“C’est tout,” he announced, and returned to Quebec on the next ship.
Where would he go next, this French Sailor? To Morocco? To IndoChina? To Senegal? To any of the former colonies?
What would he do? Each French fries? Play the French horn? Have a slice of French toast? Open a French laundry? Wear French cuffs? French-kiss his Apache-dancing girlfriend named Madame DuFarge on Bastille Day? Devour a slab of Canadian Bacon on a hot tasty croissant? Make a crulier? What’s a crulier anyway? Maybe I mean crullier? You know, those little hot squiggly pastries? Make French vanilla ice cream instead? Or drink a cup of French-roast coffee?
I’m running out of expressions Francaise.
He was sure to have more adventures, because a man has to eat, and French Sailor is a man, that’s for sure.
©Steven Hunley 2012
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Originally Posted by MANICHAEAN
