AWAY OUT ON THE MOUNTAIN

I’m on the train to Arrezo. We missed the first train and left Milano an hour late. I spent the last half hour at the station leaning against a roughly hewn concrete abutment in the smoking area listening to the a loop of Italian commercials. The sounds of perfume, sex, generic jazz piano, a voice that I swear is David Thomas of Pere Ubu bellowing in Italian about a product called “pocket coffee“, something about Ben Stiller, and a few other sundry items rolled through my ears about fifty times as I chain-smoked Drum and stared blankly at the landscape of flesh and high fashion. I am tired and horny. I have either bruised or broken one of my ribs. I’m not sure how it happened, but it hurts to breathe. It took me about half an hour to find the toilets. I found them and had to pay 70 cents to use a filthy piss-soaked Turkish-toilet (this sadistic device, a mere hole in the floor that you are expected to squat over, has been a great source of constipation for me on previous European excursions). I was sad to leave France. I was just getting to the point where I could hold a rudimentary conversation in French. Now I’m in Italy and I can barely order coffee.
We arrived in Milano at 3 O’clock in the afternoon yesterday after 15 hours of train-rides. Midnight to 8pm was spent in a sleeper car. The car featured 4 prison-like bunks, two of which were occupied by a sneering late-middle aged French woman and her son. One of them was exceedingly flatulent and the unventilated car filled with the choking, noxious odor. I wanted to vomit. My contempt for humanity which had been curiously absent for the past few weeks had returned with a vengeance. I wished a neutron bomb would drop. I wanted silence. I wanted solitude. I got this. Needless to say, it was not conducive to quality sleep.
I had been staying up past sunrise writing in the previous days, so I prepared for the sleep-schedule flip by not sleeping on my last night in Toulouse. Nico had woken up at 10am and found me that morning bent over the laptop in a frenzy of caffeine and cloud of smoke. The lack of sleep put me into a seriously psychedelic frame of mind. We took a walk and we observed a waste bin that someone had poured beer into and it was leaking in a piss-like fashion from the bottom of the can. “Even the garbage is pissed” I noted, pulling the drawstring on my hooded sweatshirt tight. We walked a little further and Nico told me that he and a friend had been stoned one afternoon and had used powers of telekenesis to make a dog defecate. I’m generally skeptical about the supernatural, but I believed him.
We had breakfast with Nico, Celine and Marielle and drove into the Pyrenees Mountains to go hiking. On the way in we stopped to find a post office in Ville de Foix and stopped at a bar to drink some coffee. I was half insane by this point and I riffed non-sequitors with Celine who helped me translate them into French so that everyone could figure out what the hell I was laughing at. The bar had a real David Lynch vibe. The walls were covered with old yellowing photographs of hunters and their trophies. I wanted to steal the one which featured a maniacally smiling man surrounded by the gutted and bled carcasses of at least a dozen wild boars, but I looked around at who I would be dealing with if I got caught and thought better of it. The place was filled with strange old men getting drunk, one of them twitching and jabbering to himself while swatting at invisible pests. A poker game started up and I tried to convince Micah that we should get in on it. Micah was unconvinced.
Celine drove us up the mountain at high speeds on a narrow and tortuous road. There was no radio so we sang “Riders on the Storm” and I attempted to play a crude and skeletal rendition of “96 Tears” on a melodica that I had brought from the house. We found a trail about halfway up the mountain and started hiking down. Nico and I broke into a brisk jog for about a quarter mile of it. It was good to move fast, but I kicked a lot of crap up in my lungs. I hacked up mysterious and terrible things. Celine and I ended up in the lead for a bit. She found a rusty jack knife stuck in the wet earth and pretended to plunge it into my heart. As we descended, the trail got narrow and muddy. We struggled through it and found a clearing where we ate ham and cheese sandwiches and passed the melodica around. I played a Scottish pipe band march that Eric M. Armour had taught me on a drunken afternoon at AS220 back in ‘91 (I miss that bastard. He died of a congenital heart condition last spring, swilling single malt, eating chocolate and chain-smoking right up until the end) and Laurienne played a Herman Dune song.
The way back was tough at first, but I hit a stride that carried me up the mountain with relative ease. I moved further and further ahead of everyone until I was alone with my breath, heartbeat and footsteps, all pulsating in an insistent, hypnotic rhythm. I was a machine. I felt great. I was hallucinating from lack of sleep. The leaves swirled psychedelic patterns of orange and brown and sand colored snakes coiled in my peripheral vision. The forest buzzed with a dark and mysterious energy. I startled some deer and stopped to watch them cautiously slink away from me and into the trees. I had a brief Ragnar Redbeard moment and felt an urge to kill one of them with my bare hands and drink its blood. I resisted the urge.
The others found me waiting at the top, sitting on the car with a cigarette. We climbed in and drove to Nico and Celine’s nearby apartment in Ville de Foix to drink coffee. Celine taught me a few chords on the ukulele and I picked out a clunky version of “Bird on a Wire”. Afterwards we drove back to Mathieu’s place in Toulouse and Celine made dinner while I had her help me translate such useful phrases as “Donnez moi un Big Mac! Je suis un ambassadeur!” The nonsense continued until it was time to board the train. I was sad to go. The Toulouse kids had been very warm and kind. I hope to see them again.