“Lords of the New Church”
Elena, one of the
Wiccan girls from Santa Cruz, was petite and beautiful, she had long blond hair
and contrasting dusky dark skin, almond eyes, high cheek bones, and a soft
reassuring voice and presence. She wore
gypsy belly dancer outfits and talked about spiritual things that I pretended
to understand. She wanted to go to Toulouse to see a band called “Lords of the
New Church”, and I was up for anything. The train ride was four hours long.
Toulouse was on the way to the south of France, like Bordeaux it was another
bustling industrial University town. The
buildings were pinkish brick and the busy town had more of a zesty, relaxed
southern feel due to Toulouse LaTrec paintings and murals everywhere. We drank wine on the train with our bread and
cheese. There were soldiers on the train trying to chat with us, so when they became loud and raucous, we were in our
element.
We determined that
the bar that the band was playing in was way out of town and that no public
transportation could take us there. A
sympathetic bartender suggested we go around to certain bars and just see if
anyone was going and if they would drive us, or perhaps we could hitch-hike. A bar scavenger hunt- sounds fun! So we went around to bars, and I got drunker
and drunker. We met a man who looked
like a blond David Bowie and told him our plight. He laughed heartily and happily agreed to go
on an adventure with us. We told him
about the band and how we couldn’t get out there without someone to drive us,
and he said coquette-ishly, “Is that an invitation?”
We both kind of liked him, but we
were being mature and neither of us were thinking that making a move on him
would be a good plan.
He drove us out to
the bar. The band was some punk rock/
new wave thing and I didn’t really care for it.
Elena was swaying back and forth, her eyes half closed, enjoying her
moment. I determined that the best
course of action was to keep drinking.
The David Bowie look-a-like was watching me, and as he told me about his
sister, we moved over to the bar to talk.
Somehow I was on
the ground out in a field with the band gathered above me. “What’s this girl doing here?” they asked
each other, in English.
“My father owns this field,” I
lied, because I didn’t want to seem like I was so drunk that I passed out in a
field behind the bar. The earth felt
comforting, with the stars above twinkling, it was a pleasant place to fall
asleep.
“Come on,” they said, “get in the
van.”
The van was right-hand-drive and
they were having a hard time figuring out how to drive it. “Lemme do it, I can do it,” I muttered,
climbing over the driver.
“Get her in the back, please” one
of the long haired new wavers said.
They got me back to the hotel which
was a fancy American one unlike the places we usually stayed. They had several rooms and a long hallway in
which to continue partying. The leader
of the band who looked like one of the Ramones, was telling me about his girl
friend, Martha Quinn the VJ from MTV. I
told him that he was pretentious and I didn’t give a shit who he was dating, he
should be with her instead of talking about her because she was famous.
He gave me a sip
of his drink, but I didn’t know that it was Barcardi and Coke. I didn’t eat sugar so I didn’t want to drink
the coca cola. I spit it back into his
drink. I felt like I was being punk rock
and he wouldn’t mind.
“That’s it,” he said, “Give her to
Lofty, get her out of here.” They
laughed insinuatingly, and I was carried off to the big bouncer’s bedroom. I was a little scared, as I wasn’t really
sure I wanted to be “given” to a big bouncer.
The room was dark, and the big bouncer was fortunately asleep. There was an extra twin bed. I fell straight
asleep in it.
I woke up with the
sun and saw the sleeping giant bald man in the next bed, which made me decide
to leave right then. I made my way to
the road, pulling burrs out of my hair.
Lucky for me the black motorcycle jacket was good for sleeping on the
ground. I was laughing to myself because
the burrs in my hair were really funny.
A French man in a truck came along quickly. He took me straight back to Toulouse. I handily found the house of the David Bowie
Look-alike where he and Elena were so glad to see me.
“I knew you were
with the band,” Elena said, “We looked for you everywhere.” She was
disappointed in me, that I would get so drunk and just disappear, but she didn’t
want to scold me. She treated me as if I
were a grown-up and let me do what I do.
I had to tell her that the band were jerks anyway. The David Bowie look-a-like took us to an
open-air market with African artifacts, the noise and smells of which were not
helping my horrific hang-over. The tiny
bottles of orange juice that they served in bars did nothing for me, and I was
homesick for the giant weekend brunches we got in Santa Cruz, with eggs and
cheese and vegetables and sour cream and buckets of coffee that just kept
coming, and the fact that everyone in the restaurant was someone that I knew
and they had all been copiously drinking the night before.
Our scavenger hunt
tour guide caught a glimpse of how bad I must have felt and took us to a
fabulous rose tinted church which was being remodeled and was totally empty,
completely devoid of pews and altars and decoration, with a hundred foot tall
ceiling. I was ennobled by the space, completely in awe of the years and years of prayers and tears that this sacred place had seen. The light streamed in the
windows in dusty shafts that looked like they were bringing prayers back from
heaven to us here on earth.
