bike trip: 7

We got to the gray 2000 year old town of Tournai that evening. The center of town held early medieval gray stone towers. Blockish, unadorned, tall. We rode in to the town's main square, an open plaza of restaurant seating with a statue and fountains that shoot up out of the stony pavement, as the millenium old tower behind us belted out not a few notes of jolly clock song, but a deep and mysterious melody of bells that bounced off the red and blue and yellow sky back to the grey plaza in red shadows. This is Belgium, said the bells. A forgotten land in the annals of history, yet here have a Belgian people lived through the changing seasons and the slow centuries. Open your ears and heart and mind to Belgium. Its song is the song of man and man's civilization that persist to exist indifferent to your indifference. Our history is no less grand than Egypt, Rome, or Londinium. But you must turn off the main road to the quiet fields to hear the hauntingly beautiful piccolo bells blowing in Belgium.
Garth appeared so moved by the bells in the square that she might have cried had she not resisted enough so that she might form words. "Oh, that was so beautiful." While the bells rang, Paris looked so limply around the plaza, evidently not listening to the bells at all, that I feared he would interrupt their song with some vile, dissociated word. Luckily he waited until after Garth spoke to misidentify the statue in front of us.
"Look, guys, it's Joan of Arc," he said, pointing to the statue of a figure on a horse in the middle of the square.
"It's probably not Joan of Arc," I said.
"Yeah, it is," he said.
My argument was going to be that we were in Belgium, not France, and that if you peered closer at the statue, the figure depicted upon fighting horseback seemed to be a man. I began to worry that on some level, Paris was neither aware that we were in Belgium, nor that the statue was not one he had ever previously seen. I had told Garth on the first day that this trip would not go well for Paris if he imposed his prefabricated ideas of what he will see and feel over what the trip will turn out to offer us. Maybe now was the time to tell Paris that--no, no, not yet. So he's not paying attention to the statue. No point in calling him out right now. We're all having a good time, besides. It's a beautiful town on a summer's eve. Let's go drop our stuff at the campground, then come back into town and enjoy ourselves like real free, young people. Tonight, let's have fun. The day I call him out, it's gonna be a bad day.
We went to a campground. An actual paying campground. When I handed up my four euros and we set up our tent in a neat square yard, next to and across from identical square yards, I felt cheap. We were surrounded by tourists. How could we be sure to tell ourselves apart from them. we were safe and even walled in by tall bushes on three sides. But it was sensible for tonight as it allowed us to return to town with a lighter load with all bags and backpacks protected.

"I'll get the glue wine," I said. "I want to drink some glue." The only thing cheaper than the cheapest wine at the night shop was the wine-like drink used to make warm wine in winter, called by its German name, Glühewein. Paris bought a normal wine and Garth would share from our bottles. So here we were in Tournai, the night ours to enjoy.
We sat against the pillar of the statue in the main square. At the end of my pointing finger, I directed Paris's attention to the beard and manly brow on the axe-wielding fighter on horseback and to the name--Guillaume or Pierre or whatever. Whoever it was, it was not Joan of Arc.
"It looked like Joan of Arc," said Paris.
We sat and watched the different people file by. A gang of ruffians inquired if we had any "matos"--materials, materials for constructing a joint. Alas, no. Couples walked by arm in arm. There seemed to be a trend of people walking towards our left.
"They're going to the sexy club," said Paris.
"Monday night?" I said.
"Yeah, I saw it back there," said Paris. "Total sexy club. Garth, I wanna go to the sexy club. We should go to a sexy club on this trip. Oh my God, Amsterdam, oh my God. Garth, we have to go."
"We'll go to the sexy club," said Garth.
"Oh my God, Garth. Look!" Paris pointed to two young men, fashionably but casually dressed, heading towards our left. "Oh, the sexy boys are going to the sexy club. I wanna go!"
I drank glue.
"Oh my God, Garth. Aren't the boys in Belgium so sexy? I want a sexy Belgian boy. Oh my God, Garth. Do you remember the boys we saw on the way into town? Oh my God. Belgian boys are the hottest. We have to go to the sexy club. Do you promise, Garth, we'll go to the sexy club?"
I felt the red skin of my wrists. Still hot. I pressed them to my bottle to heat up the glue wine.
"Guys, this is so much fun," said Paris. "I love Tournai."
"Garth, some glue?" I said.
I passed Garth the bottle.
"You know, when I was in fifth grade, we had this police officer come to our school," I said, "to tell us to stay off drugs. His name was Officer Friendly. He came to speak in front of our class in full police blues, toolbelt, and gun. He told us a story about some boys who liked to sniff glue. Well, they died, so they were brought in for an autopsy. The examining surgeon stuck his scalpel to the boys' abdomens to cut them open and figure out exactly what caused them to die. But he couldn't even slice the scalpel through the boys' skin because they had sniffed so much glue that their bodies had become completely stuck together with all the glue in their systems. Couldn't even cut through their fleshy tissues, so much sticky glue. I told my parents about this fact some five years later and they laughed, saying it couldn't possibly be true. A body can't become stuck together from sniffing glue. Of course, by now I realize it makes no sense at all. But, oh, Officer Friendly, he lied to me. I was none to pleased about that.
"The next year, he was replaced by Officer Funk, who, during his monthly visits, travelled from class to class with a boom box blasting so-called fresh hip-hop tunes in the corridor. You could hear him passing all the morning until at last he came to your class. I remember one day he was going to tell us how cocaine is made. 'Filthy South-American Indian slaves,' he said--and I was paying full attention thinking I was gonna learn something fascinatingly exotic-- 'these filthy dirty indians gather the such and such plant into vast pits dug into the ground. They have no other way to crush the leaves that will become cocaine than by stamping it with their feet. Now would you want to lick somebody's stinky feet? I didn't think so. Now what hapens if you spend hours a day stepping on leaves with your bare feet? What do you think happens to their feet? Maybe they'll start to bleed a little?... Now these indians are slaves. That means no bathroom breaks. But they gotta go to the bathroom somehow. Where do you think they go? That's right. In the leaves. So now we got stinky feet, we got blood, we got poo-poo and pee-pee. What else do you think gets mixed in with cocaine?' He took suggestions from the class. 'Throw-up?' 'Sure. Throw-up.' 'Farts?' 'Yeah, maybe farts, too.' He looked around the class silently, building tension for the finale. 'Now if you're an indian, fartin', poopin', bleedin', peein', and throwin' up in the same leaves day-in, day-out, what do you think might eventually happen to this indian?... He might... He might... anyone?' The logic wheels'd been turnin' in my loaf o' bread and I figured I knew the answer he was looking for. I raised my hand and said, 'He might die?' Officer Funk claps his hands, 'That's right. He dies. But no one cares. No one's gonna clean up his body. So guess what else you'll find in your stinky feet, bloody, poo-poo, pee-pee, throw-up cocaine now?... Thanks for listening. Don't do drugs.
"He exits, stage-left, boom box blasting this fresh hip hop:

DARE to keep a kid off drugs
DARE to keep a kid off dope
DARE to something something something
DARE to give a kid some hope

"Officer Funk. What a scam artist. He probably wasn't even a real police officer. Oh and I remember at the end of our training we all had to sign a pledge saying we'd never do drugs. And for extra credit, we could write an essay about why we'd never smoke cigarettes. Side note. A girl from our class won the statewide essay contest against smoking. In high school, I saw her smoke cigarettes. And then last year she won the Miss Arizona contest and competed in the Miss America pageant."
"The poor indian," said Paris. "Nobody even cleaned up his body."

We rode home to the campground. Garth was astonished at my ability to ride with no hands. But she kept trying to stop me from doing it cause I was drunk, so she said. "But look," I said, "I'm riding with no hands... and I'm not falling down."
"Stop it, Finnagain," she said. "You're gonna fall."
"Nuh-uh," I said.

"Finnagain, where are you going?" said Paris.
"To the campground," I said.
"It's this way," said Paris, pointing a way that was in all ways the wrong way.
"No, it's no-ot," I sang.
"I don't think we should go this way," said Paris. "We were totally never here before."
"Remember that abandoned factory of horrors in film noir shadow that's on the way to the campsite?" I said.
"Yeah?"
"The one we're right next to?"
"Oh."

"Just take your hands off for one second," I said to Garth.
"No, I feel like I'm gonna fall," she said.
"No, just go along, feel your balance, then take your hands off for one seconds... then try for two seconds... then eventually... It's really not that hard," I said.
She took her hands off her handles for one second and slammed them back on.
"I thought I was gonna fall," she said.
"You'll practice. You'll see, it's not hard," I said.
"I don't know how you can do it, and turning right and left," she said.
"I saw the kids on my street do it when I was little and I thought it was so cool, so I tried it out, just like I'm telling you to do. See, look, it's so easy. No hands. Even though I'm filled with gluuuuuuuueee..."
I controlled the bike into left and right sways with no hands, like the bike itself was drunk.