Les Misdemeanors et Les Mushrooms

A story I wrote for the New York Press in 1998 from France.

Front Page, New York Press, Oct. 7-13 1998

It’s September, and Les Champignons are in season here in Southwest France.  It’s like mushroomville around here. People have been waitin’ for those succulent little suckers all through a dry, very un-fungi-friendly summer, but now their cars crowd the roadsides every morning after it rains. You can see the locals with their trunks open, pulling on Les Over le Calf Chasseurs Rubbaire, grabbing Le Baton de Marche and charging forth into the woods on the hunt like Newt Gingrich with a gleam in his eye and a president in his headlights. It’s a wonderful sight driving down wooded lanes around the Dordogne, affirming the notion that this part of the world is inhabited by a people who, if you asked them about La Moneeeca, would probably conclude le Crazy Americaine is trying to pronounce the name of some local Champignon.

What they’re out there looking for are Ceps, Les Penny Bun Boletus.  It looks like a mushroom drawn by R. Crumb – a cartoon of a thing, fat and paunchy at the stem and popped over like Mo’s haircut on top.  I’ve been out there looking for them, too, you understand.   Fired up with a dram or two of Provencal Rose (three bucks a bouteille – I paid through Le Schnoze for the same stuff back in Tribeca). I’ve been out there crashing through Les Boonies, swatting mosquitoes, diving into tangles of blackberry bushes that tore at my flesh like the teeny razor-sharp teeth of Le Grover Norquist, searching ever searching for Boletus Edulis, the lowly, dun-colored Cep, the goddamned Friar Tuck of fungi…

I’ve had a long and checkered past when it comes to Les Champignons. It goes back to the week after the 1972 Republican Convention. I had been down in Miami covering that buttoned-down bacchanalia for the late lamented Saturday Review, and I had a few days free before I had to be back in New York, and so it was that I found myself in a cow pasture in search of the Psilocybe Semilanceata, identified in learned fungi journals as the “Liberty Cap,” most appropriately, I might add. It’s a conical mushroom with a pale, yellowish top and purplish-blue spore, found in open grassland. A friend of a friend knew the location of a cow pasture filled with open grass, so we jumped into his Datsun and hied our asses over there one evening about dusk. Luckily, cows were nowhere in evidence, so the tall grasses where Les Psilocybe like to hide were abundant, as were Les Psilocybe themselves. We quickly packed a grocery bag full of the multi-hued little fungi and Datsuned back to the friend of a friend’s kitchen, where we put two large handfuls in a blender, added some Welch’s grape juice and whipped up a hideous purple fungi shake.

By that time, it was getting dark and a few neighbors had gathered, so we poured each of us a six-ounce jelly jar full and slapped it back and sat down to wait. It took me only a few moments to hurl up the first dose, so down went another jelly jar full. This time it stayed down. My host, a very wise hippie who dove the reefs off Miami Beach for tropical fish he sold to pet stores, suggested we take in a movie while we were waiting for Les Psilocybe to kick in. We loaded into the Datsun and headed for a theater. Time was of the essence, because Les Psilocybe were definitely spreading their magic across the old blood-brain barrier. By the time we made it to our seats, Les Psilocybe were in full song. The lights went down. The film came on.

It is difficult, as I sit here in the kitchen of a 17th Century farmhouse in Southwest France, to describe for you how profound “Planet of the Apes” turned out to be. Charlton Heston c’est moi! The monkeys were the Republican attendees of the convention I had just covered! Nobody understood poor Charlton just like nobody understood poor moi, and he was trying to escape from the oppressive monkey government, and they were persecuting the shit out of him, just like the oppressive Nixon government had persecuted the shit out of moi…

As we walked out of the theater into the fetid August Miami night, we had a dim understanding that we were under the influence of Les Psilocybe, but we couldn’t let go of the notion that out there in Hollywood, there was a stoned head sitting up in a canyon somewhere who fucking got it, who understood us. We were looking around at the other moviegoers…couples on hand-holding dates…moms and pops taking the kids out for a treat…and their faces were blank, uncomprehending. Had they seen the same movie we saw? Not a chance. I remember in the parking lot watching one man fishing in his pocket for his keys, turning up a pack of gum and a pocketknife and some change, cursing and digging back in there again. Finally, his wife reached into his jacket pocket and handed him the car keys and he unlocked the car and they got in and drove away, yelling at each other. And I was standing there watching them go, wondering what the fuck planet are they on?

It’s a question I ask almost every day over here.  I’m sitting in an armchair by the gigantic fireplace with four-foot oak logs blazing away and spitting sparks and I’m reading the International Herald Tribune and staring at a front page photograph of Tom Delay and his pinched  face is wearing the smug little smile they’re all wearing in Washington these days, and I’m reading the story, and it’s packed with phrases like “constitutional responsibility” and “bi-partisan inquiry” and “lying to the American public,” and I’m thinking, what fucking planet are they on?

And then it comes to me: the whole thing about Le Beeell Cleeenton and La Moneeeca Lewinsky isn’t about “high crimes and misdemeanors,” it’s about mushrooms. There were those who partook of Les Psilocybe, and those who didn’t, and whether you did or didn’t pretty much described which side you were on back then, and which side you’ve been on ever since. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the so-called “culture war” set off by the 60’s has never ended. At this moment, right at this very instant, there are Republican hordes of pinch-faced little men in Washington who sat out the 60’s and never quite got over it. They are Les Hommes du Variety non-fuckey-pas dans le college, non-smokey-pas le marijuana, non-consummez-pas Les Psilocybe…this horde of cretinous little shits with jealousy hanging from their jaws in great gelatinous folds of floppy flesh, and they finally think they have come upon a wooden stake they can drive through the heart of the vampirous 60’s, consigning that decade and its moral degeneracy to the fiery reaches of political hell.

There’s only one problem: every time you turn on the tube and look at them, what you see is a facial sauté of jealousy and glee. It’s uncommon and disturbing, and it probably goes a long way toward explaining Cleenton’s high poll numbers. It’s like some weird bile boils inside them that produces Le Glee. You remember when Nixon used to go on the tube and say grave stuff and grin his way through it inappropriately? Same shit. I’ve seen Le Glee on Republican face after face after face. Gingrich, on those rare occasions when he steps before the cameras, looks like Penrod, like he just threw a rock and broke a window in the White House and got away with it. The only one whose face is devoid of Le Glee is Delay and I think I know why: hemorrhoids.

Cable news is killing these guys. How can anyone take them seriously when the image is so disconnected from the content of their words?  Try it.  Try saying these words: “Constitutional responsibility” with a shit-eating-grin on your face.  I mean, it’s like they bottled Le Grape Jus de Psilocybe and put a St. Emilion label on it and I’ve been drowned in the stuff.

But come on! It’s Le Saison de Champignons!  Huge, monciferous Ceps are out there in the woods, you fucking idiot! You fry them up in a little sweet butter with shallots and some chopped garlic, and it’s like way beyond Le Psilocybe! Your mouth explodes with the aroma of rotting wood and damp leaves and moss, and your teeth turn into monster trucks crunching crispy Ceps, roaring and hungering for more and more of the tasty suckers and the house smells like it must have smelled 300 years ago…damp with clotted rotten wafts of pigeon shit and fresh-killed hare…

When we run out of Ceps, we settle for Les Agaricus Arvensis, a fat little fungi with a marvelous, rotund white cap and brown gills.  Early in the morning, when the picking is good, they have a skirt hanging beneath their gills, dancing in the breeze, calling to you like a fungus hooker. And when we run out of both Ceps and Les Arvensis, it’s time for Les Agaricus Campestris, described in the books as the “field mushroom.” Les Campestris sprout overnight in the dew and poke above the grasses in nearby pastures. I drop my hands like front-loaders and scoop them up in massive quantities.

You’d have to suffer from Le Fungi Alergie to pass them by.  Take a picture:  down the hill, past the gravel drive, around the corner of “Le Mas,” the house of Le Mayor du St. Julien de Crempse, in a pasture bordered by a field of feed corn still drying on khaki-colored stalks, there’s a pasture Le Mayor is giving a rest.  His milk cows are in a little pasture just over the hill, and they will be returning to this pasture soon.

I know this because I’ve been studying Le Mayor’s rhythms when it comes to his cows.  Fat and happy, they are moved to fresh pastures when Les Grasses get about nine inches high.  My Campestris pasture is approaching its ninth inch, and I sit here at night praying for the rain which will spring Les Campestris from the earth.  And yet, if it rains, Mon Pasture will grow past its ninth inch, and Le Mayor will move his milk cows, and when he does, his milk cows will eat my mushrooms and Le Saison des Champignons…at least Le Saison des Campestris, will be over.  Five more days is all I ask, Monsieur Le Mayor!

Je suis like Cleenton before Les House Republicans on bended knee.  It has occurred to me during the time I have spent in St. Julien de Crempse, a village of 25 families about 90 miles east of Bordeaux, that there is something basic and wonderful about boiling down the essence of life to the Vendage – the harvest of the grapes – and Le Saison des Champignons. The pace of life in the village is catching. The farmers in the village get up before dawn and rarely get home before dark, but there is still time for a two-hour lunch and a one-hour nap. The rest of the Dordogne is on an even gentler time clock. It’s like there are two Sundays a week, since most of the Dordogne is closed up on Monday. You had better do your shopping on Saturday, because you’re looking at two days with no butcher, no baker, no hardware store…you can still get gas and maybe a boulangerie or two remain open from nine until noon to sell a few baguettes, and then bang! Slam shut the doors.

The rest of the week, stores open at nine, close at noon, reopen at three, close around seven. Le Lunch, by the way, is actually a three or four course meal, plus at least a half-liter of wine and maybe a little Firewater du Poire.

Doctors in the good old USA are contributing juicy quotes to wishful-thinking articles in The New York Times about the diets down in the south of France… lots of red wine, lots of goose fat (we’ve been through four big jars in four weeks), lots of foie gras, lots of pork, lots of fatty duck and very little heart disease.

Duh. USA docs wouldn’t have patients with heart disease if everybody opened for business at nine, closed at noon, reopened reluctantly at three, close the shutters at seven, and spent every hour apres le noon half-drunk and half-asleep. It’s a miracle the locals find the time between drinking, eating, napping and fucking to marche after Les Ceps…but of course they do, because Le Saison des Champignons is matched in importance only by only Le Football and Clint Eastwood movies.

The other day I was walking along Rue de Resistance in Bergerac (wishful thinking…Vichy collaboration with Les Nazis was pretty much the rule during WWII) when I passed two tight-lipped turds in bad charcoal suits and skinny black ties. I was wondering what a couple of Republican political operatives were doing there when I saw a little nametag perched on one of the turds’ skinny chests: “Elder Smith.” Mormons on a mission to convert Les Heathen du Bergerac. One of the turds spied me and smiled. “Pardon,” he began hungrily, but I quickly brushed past him.  

A block away, I thought about going back and asking them what they thought they were doing trying to convert a people who have been through about four or five religions over the past 1800 years, finally settling on a rather non-observant Catholicism. What have you got to offer folks who eat, drink, fuck and nap all day and live to be 90, and still they’re eating, drinking, fucking and napping all day?  What are you going to tell them?  Let’s hold off on drinking that marvelous inky black coffee, and by the way, drinking a bottle of Pecharmant every day at lunch and another bottle at dinner and a couple of Pernods and a pack of Galoises with your pals down at the local Tabac ain’t such a good idea either?  And how about those afternoon naps and illicit sex?  Maybe they ought to knock that shit off, too, along with hitting 140 kph on the local one-lane roads with more curves than La Moneeeca is a no-no, too…

What the fuck are you going to tell them next, you little Utah turds?  They should stop riding their bikes, stop watching soccer, stop following Formula 1 racing? How about laying off that triple cream cheese and a stick of butter a day? I should have marched my ass back up Le Rue de Resistance Which Didn’t Really Happen and told those two turds in their ill-fitting suits to take their act back to Orrin Hatchville and leave these frogs alone. But nooooo…I’ve been here so long I’ve actually started acting with the impeccable manners of the French. You get Madamed and Monsieured and Mercied and Bon Journeyed and Au Revoired to death, and it’s catching.  Drink enough wine, eat enough mushrooms, sauté enough goose fat and glom enough foie gras and you even start thinking French.

The manners of the French of course dictate their opinions about Le Fiasco dans Washington.  What you hear in the Dordogne is that Les Politicians Americaine should leavez-fucking-alonezvous Le Beeell Cleeenton.  The opinion of the French is amazingly similar to the opinion of the American public.  It’s what happens when manners extend beyond the personal to the political, as indeed they should.  People who have a lot to hide tend to have good manners because good manners help to keep things hidden.

Which explains at least in part L’attitude Francais about Beeell Cleeenton.  This is a people with one hell of a lot to hide. Let’s not even discuss the legendary French toleration of adultery, and let’s leave aside for the moment Le Collaboration avec Les Nazis during WWII.  I mean, the shit that went down for real around here was when they had to pick sides between the Franks, the Visigoths, the Vandals and the Huns, not to mention your occasional Moor.

To this day, you can tell which side people were on in the names of the villages, many of which date back more than 1,000 years.  I mean, these battles we’re fighting in Washington over Beeell’s dick and Moneeeca’s mouth, his suck-ass lying and her suck-ass whining and Leenda Treeep’s suck-ass betrayals…all of this shit was played out in spades centuries ago in this region, when sometime after King Louis IX ceded this area to the English conquerors, and Philip the Fair retook it and ceded control to a feudal lord by the name of Brantome, who enjoys a village named after him to this late date. Brantome had a brother he didn’t get along with, who had a social climbing wife called Jacquette de Montbron. Jacquette flew into a tantrum and called to a halt the rebuilding of a medieval fortress that was her home when the word came down from Paris that Catherine de Medici was going to cancel a visit. Even to this day, her fortress stands unfinished, a monument to French royal pique.

Naturally, upon her death, one of her sons started a war with Catherine de Medici which went on for years and spent the lives of thousands of peasants. At the end of the war, those who had taken the side of de Montbron had to make peace with those who took the side of de Medici. This kind of side-taking and peace-making has been going on for centuries in France. One civilization marches in and subjugates another civilization until yet another civilization comes in and subjugates Les Previous Subjugators.

Through it all, the peasants – the ancestors of the people who live in this village of St. Julien de Crempse – made their accommodations with one conqueror after another. Call it capitulation, call it collaboration, call it what you want.  It was survival, which probably goes a long way toward explaining why it took until WWII and the Nazis for the question of “which side were you on” to travel beyond the confines of the villages around the Dordogne. 

And so when the infamous war criminal and Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon was on trial this year over in Bordeaux, the trial wasn’t really about what he had done. Neither his war crimes nor his collaboration were in dispute.  Everyone agreed that there was a rounding up of Jews who were put on a train to the camps and Papon was in charge.  The most important “evidence” put on by both the prosecution and the defense came not from survivors of the death camps but from historians. Collaboration with conquering hordes has a longer history in France than money, and if you can get a handle on that idea, you can understand something of why Beeell Cleeenton is not a villain or a hero in France, but someone just like them: a person with something to hide.

I was thinking about the trials of Papon and Cleeenton one day as I followed an old logging trail deeper and deeper into the woods, poking at the leaves and moss with my Baton de Marche, searching for the elusive Cep when I came upon the skeleton of an old WWII era truck, turned on its side and covered with brambles and vines. It was eerie. The village of St. Julien de Crempse suffered a brutal massacre on the 9th of August in 1944, when the local Nazi commander ordered that all men and boys over the age of 13 be rounded up and shot, in retaliation for the sabotage of a Nazi train that had been headed north laden with men and materiel to reinforce Nazi units in retreat from the D-Day landing at Normandy. Twenty-eight were killed that day, shot at the edge of a ditch immediately in front of the house in which I sit writing this, just down the hill at the edge of the pasture where I go hunting for Les Campestris. I couldn’t find any markings on the truck skeleton, they had long since rusted away, so I couldn’t tell if it was German or French. But the sensation was like stepping back in history. You could see the truck loaded with German soldiers making its way down the logging trail, looking for the hiding place of the men who sabotaged the train, and you could see an ambush and a firefight, and you could see them torch the truck and melt into the dense woods that hide men and their motives and their morals as easily as they hide the elusive Cep.

I’m thinking about a the side of a building we had seen up in Brantome. Somebody in centuries past had taken a Roman ruin and made it the north wall of his house, and right there on the outside of the wall, you could see the outlines of that ancient Roman civilization – stone steps leading up to a vaulted Chambre du Sleep, and below it, the remains of a beehive shaped baking oven.

And I’m thinking if a war 50 years in the past seems like a long time ago, how about 15 fucking centuries?  

Are we young as a nation, or what? Think about it for a moment. The World Wars we fought in the 20th Century to save the world from the scourge of the Nazis were pimples on the ass of history. It’s no wonder that the trial of Maurice Papon was greeted in France by a cross between a yawn and a frown. They’ve seen it all before, only worse. The only thing that really upsets the French is the invasion of their privacy – and when you think about it, that’s the way it should be. You can’t get around the idea that’s why the French forgive Beeell Cleeenton so easily.  Here in the cradle of one civilization and the dumping ground of about five others, they have figured out at least this much:  Even Le President is entitled to a long lunch, a short nap and a quick fuck.

Every peasant farmhouse around here sports a satellite dish, even the ones with only a cold water tap and a 40-watt light bulb hanging from the ceiling over the kitchen table.  You know as you walk past dim rooms behind half-open shutters that these people know down deep in their bones the downside of modernity.

This is indeed a strange moment in American political history, when Les Politicians a’linterieur Le Rocade (the Beltway) find themselves so vibrantly at odds with Les Citizens a’lexterieur Le Rocade.  A poll of the members of Congress today would be so upside down with the country they allegedly represent as to be either ridiculous or historic or both.  It’s like the public has seized on Beeell Cleeenton like a political Mark McGwire…no matter how many times he strikes out, so long as he hits home runs, we’re going to back his redneck ass.

How do the Republicans cope?  How do you be Dick Armey, or Tom Delay, or Newt Gingrich?  I’ve got a couple of ideas, but I ain’t going to tell ‘em here, and I ain’t even gonna sell ‘em, because I am Le Frere du Beeell Cleeenton.  I am very truly le Inhaleur du Fumes du Marijuana, I am absolutment Le Recepteur du Psilocybe avec Les Grape Jus, and I am en faveur de Les Tres Heur Lunch, et Le Takeur du Napp, et aussi Le Fuck dans L’apres-midi…

I highly recommendez les touts experiences to les Republicans Gingrich, Lott, Armey et DeLay.  But you know what?  If they did it all, the lunches and the naps and the fucking, they’d have been on the phone and je ne sais recallez pas any of it the next day. 

That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?  Memory and manners?  If you don’t recall the past, how can you enjoy repeating it?

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