Unlikeable Me Meets Lords of the New Church

“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.