viktor_haag | Writer's Block: Public Transit Nightmare

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On Friday December 20th in 1985, I left my billet in southern France on the morning train, heading to Paris to make a connection with a train to Dieppe for a ferry on to the UK (two week Christmas holiday to anticipate). Somewhere in transit, Parisian labour luminaries decided to mount a metro strike. When I arrived in Paris at Gare de Lyon (or d'Austerlitz, I don't remember which), I had been in France for five months and was equipped with rather detailed directions on how to use the metro to get from Gare de Lyon to make my connection at Gare du Nord. Luckily the timing of the trip had left me with a few hours to spare in Paris, so I still had the ability to make my connection, but as for the leisurely few hours of shopping, that went directly out the window.

Smack in the middle of rush-hour, on a Friday afternoon, the week before Christmas, and I had to make my way across the face of downtown Paris without being able to make good use of the metro as planned.

At first, I got on a bus (I remember thinking this was the right thing to do, so I must have had some way of knowing that the bus should have been taking me in the correct direction; perhaps I asked the bus driver? I don't recall), paid my whatever-the-fee-was-in-francs and joined the crowd of standing room only packed business commuters. As you can assume, most of these Parisians were in a completely foul mood, what with the delays caused by the rush-hour and the strike.

The streets were jammed. I recall only three things about this bus trip.

First. I remember vividly looking out the window of the bus and seeing several youths crossing the street by walking on hoods of cars. The streets were a sea of metal. There was much shouting from the drivers about this behaviour. The pedestrians realized they had nothing to fear from the motorists.

Third. I remember a half an hour later getting off the bus and assessing my progress as a few hundred meters. I looked back and could see the street signs near the stop where I had got on the bus. At this point, I grimly shouldered my pack and set out on foot to walk the miles on to get to Gare du Nord. I stopped for directions once, and got them from a very sympathetic and friendly Algerian couple who ran a tabac. These were the nicest, politest people I met in Paris. Ever.

Second. During that half hour while I stood jammed on the bus, there stood near me an elegant Parisian business woman with bronze hair, a cream silk blouse, and an elegant dark orange business suit. I remember the cream silk blouse vividly, so she must have been carrying a coat over her arm. She might, or might not, have been wearing pearls. In short, she might have stepped right out of a Bunuel film: she had the look and the manner of an elegantly beautiful, and tremendously repressed, upper-middle class Parisian business-man's wife. After a few minutes of watching the back of this woman's chignon, and enjoying the view, a noticed a somewhat dishevelled, somewhat unshaven man nudging his own way through the bus' packed crowd trying to get closer to our heroine. His head was bobbing up and down every now and then, as some times people do, when they're enjoying themselves and the little tune playing through their minds. He had on a crew-necked sweater and a green cotton jacket (maybe surplus type? it was hard to tell: in those days, army suprlus was fashionable, so you could get style look-alikes off the rack that had never even thought about anything rougher than a weekend sale at the department store).

Nothing of substance happened for about five minutes, until our heroine happened to look over to the side of the bus where the man was standing. Something un-verbal passed between his gaze and hers, and then she looked down.

With no embarrassment and no shock at all, she suddenly looked annoyed and put out and in the raised, angry tone you would use to yell at the kids who had been playing knock knock ginger on your block on the evening you were occupied mounting a dinner party for your husband's clients, she said, "Well that just won't do! What do you think this is, sir, a public sauna!? No, this just won't do at all! Put that thing away and stop acting like such an ass! Do you think we're all here impressed by your little dirty tricks!? Put it away this instant!"

With that, she turned away, and looked the other way. No red face evident at all. Others nearby looked on with horror, boredom, anger, irritation, disgust. But that was the last attention our heroine paid to the matter.

Shortly after that, the man left the bus to a scattered round of jeers and applause. I don't recall whether he was hounded off the bus, yelled at by the bus-driver, whatever.

Shortly after that, I got off the bus. I had my own further pain to navigate through. But there was something about the lady's attitude that buoyed my spirits: if she could put up with, and dress down, an idiot flasher on a crowded city bus, then surely I could also put up with the annoying inconvenience of a metro strike and make it to my destination on foot.

I have hated Paris ever since.