10. The War with Monsieur LeClub: Part I

Monsieur LeClub is a scurvy dog, swabbies. I've mentioned before that he likes the bad techno, and he likes it loud and late. 

Remember me?

What you may not know is that my partner in crime, the Skipper to my Gilligan, the Geena Davis to my Matthew Modine in Cutthroat Island, does not suffer such things lightly. I would recommend you click that link and watch that trailer, for not only is it a sterling example of the "no idea what the plot is about just explosions and kissing" school of thought regarding trailers, but it's also how I want you to envision the coming tale. 

First off, she's got difficulties sleeping, and not only is the bass-thump coming through Monsieur's walls impossible for her to tune out, but the mental cringing that accompanies waiting, wondering if the thump will start will keep her awake.

Two, she don't take shit. Monsieur LeClub, however, has quite the sense of entitlement and a lack of...something involving empathy and decency. With both of our vessels plying the close-quartered waters of our floor, rigging-scraping is inevitable and full-out broadside cannonades are possible.

Come with me after the break(ers) to watch the hot naval action unfold.

The first imbroglio occurred mere days after our arrival. Monsieur le Club's thumping was keeping us awake one evening. It wasn't all that late, but jet-lag still had us sleeping at wonky times. Megan went to go speak to him. When she asked him to turn the volume down his response was, “Oh, sorry! I was in the kitchen and couldn't hear it, so I turned it up.”

The kitchen, ladies and gentlemen. You've read about our Petit Bateau and its dimensions, yes? We were still in lifestyle shock about the entirety of our living space suddenly being smaller than our bedroom in the US had been, and this guy tells us that his apartment is large enough that he must turn his music up in order to hear it from the kitchen! We'd thought all the apartments up here were the same size, all of us crowded into our little holes. But no, turns out we just got the tiny one.

Not long after this initial attack, Megan came down with The Sickness. The Sickness deserves its own entry, but that will have to wait, maybe forever; it is Megan's story, (and this thing here is mostly about me) and in order to fully explain would involve divulging details that Megan doesn't want shared and you, Dear Reader, probably don't want to know. Megan wanted to think it was the Rotavirus.

This plus puking. Lots of puking.

Suffice to say that Megan was a twitching mess, burning with fever yet shivering with cold, her only respite when she could exhaust herself into sleep. And one evening during all this Monsieur breaks out with the boom-thumpa.

Now, I am no foe to techno. Megan is not a huge fan- except for the songs that grab her (what she would call “good techno”)- but it is not music for relaxation. And that's what my first mate needed. In truth, I should call her captain, but I like how “first mate” sounds. It's got layered meanings, you know? Maybe we're each others' first mates, with no true captain. But in this situation, Megan couldn't go speak to Monsieur about his music. She's laid out with the French super mal de mer. So she wrote him a note for me to deliver.

I am not a confrontational man. If I was here in France by myself (why the hell would I be doing that? That's crazy!) I'd never have said boo to this guy, I'd have just sucked it up. And I'd even been voicing those feelings to Megan prior to the onset of her plague, that maybe we should just deal.

But now she was super not okay and she needed me to do this. Sack up, Sternbergh, as an ex-Marine ex-neighbor might have said. I took the note and headed out the door. The bass was louder out in the hallway. It wasn't deafening, but like the reverse of an establishing shot of a club in a movie, with the music booming at first and then it fades away when the characters start talking.

You only need to watch til about :35 or so to get what I mean. Though

 don't forget to check the right of the screen at :20 for some latex grab-ass.

I knocked on the door, preempting the part where he can't hear it by knocking really loud the first time. Omigod do I sound pissed now? Damn. That's not my way.

Monsieur le Club opened the door. “Bonjour, monsieur,” I began and then thought Crap. Right out of the gate I've screwed it up. It's night time. I shouldn't be using bonjour, I should be bonsoir-ing him. And Monsieur? He's, like, fifteen years younger than me. But what do I call him? Petit Garcon [little boy]? That sounds insulting. Jeune homme [young man]? Then I'd sound like I was trying to double my age instead of his. Meanwhile, he's standing there, looking at me. I started blurting.

“Uh, je m'appelle Nat. Ma femme Megan, elle est malade. Je ne parle pas beaucoup francais, mais j'ai un papier de elle.” I had worked out with Megan a better way to essentially say, “Hi. I'm Nat and my wife Megan is super sick. I don't speak French but here's a note she wrote.” But I got flustered and flubbed it. I got the basics but I'm pretty sure I sounded like an idiot. I held out the piece of paper. He took it, said thank you, and closed his door. The music from his apartment got quieter.

The first couple skirmishes had gone in our favor. The FS Club de Danse now knew that the USS Petit Bateau plied these waters, too.

Ahoy, there! STFU!

Megan convalesced. The Sickness ebbed. Again, it was a terrible time, a tempestuous ailment in whose stormy waters Le Petit Bateau threatened to founder. But that is a tale for another time, perhaps. Perhaps not, though. S'personal.

At any rate, as Megan's storm subsided, another vessel made itself known: Russian Revolution, the young Polish girl next door. Remember her? Likes to listen to bad American music? Hey, instead of Russian Revolution (which is a misnomer because she's not Russian, remember?), how do you feel about Polecat? Does that seem too inherently derogatory, or at least more derogatory than French Barbie or Monsieur le Club? Meh. Whatever. I'm going with Polecat.

To make up for any insult, she gets to be Catwoman.

So Polecat had two friends from her homeland come visit her. As far as I know her apartment is like ours, a tiny little room, eight meters square. These three stayed up late in there, night after night, talking loudly. Along with that, all of a sudden our bathroom was always being used. Up until now we had thought that our apartment was the only one that didn't have its own bathroom. Nobody appeared to have ever used it besides us. But now every morning seemed to have a stream of girls going from Polecat's room down the hall to the bathroom. I went out to pee in the morning and there'd be some girl standing there in her PJ's, refusing to make eye contact, waiting for some other girl in her PJ's to finish peeing. Polecat stopped playing bad music, at least, but they talked and they laughed as only excited groups of young ladies can laugh. It came right through our shared wall and out her window and in through ours. For a couple nights this went without comment from us, a rollicking party boat bumping up against our dock. But finally, one night Megan went and knocked on their door. The girls got real quiet. Megan knocked again. Nothing. Finally she came back in.

By now we were getting tired of using the swivel guns. From below decks we're hauling up the 24- and 32-pounders and wheeling them up against the gunwales, tapping the big powder kegs. Megan writes Polecat a note, a shot across her bow, asking nicely for her and her friends to try to be quieter. Later that night, when they are not, she snaps at them out the window; this light fusillade calms them down.

But then, plunging out of the fog one evening, Monsieur le Club launches a devastating broadside: he throws a party.

We've had some questions before about Monsieur LeClub's source of income. He has friends that stop by, stay for only a few minutes, and then leave. Remember, ladies and gentlemen, that he lives just down the hall from us. If you were going to see a friend, but in order to do that you'd have to climb one hundred and eleven steps, would you just stay for a couple minutes? Call me cynical, but when someone has frequent just-drop-in visitors, especially ones that go to some effort to do so (evidenced by the panting we hear as they pass by on their way to his door), I start to think that maybe this person is providing something desired and illicit. Now, of course, I know some people that like to spend eight days climbing El Capitan and sleeping in a nylon hammock nailed into the rock a thousand feet off the ground, so I'm not saying people won't do difficult or crazy things for fun, but Monsieur LeClub and his friends don't look like the rock-climbing type.

So when we heard several people going past our door to show up at Monsieur's, the number was a bit surprising but that was it. But then more showed up, chattering past our door, gasping for air from the climb. Then some more.

Then the music began. We were in the process of turning in for the night, beds unfurled and teeth brushed. It was Saturday, but when you're broke in a town of priciness and without a passel of pals to provoke partying, it's just another night. And Megan and I had been out doing something that involved a lot of walking all day; was that when we had walked across Paris to the Eiffel Tower? Whatever it was, we were tired. Megan didn't like the idea of essentially telling Monsieur's whole troupe of guests to keep it down, so we just killed the lights and tried to go sleep.

We didn't. I think I managed a state that was near-meditational, but the incessant bass and the arrhythmic rise and fall of shouted conversation made true sleep impossible. At some point Megan spoke from the darkness, “Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

At this point in our time in Le Petit Bateau we didn't have phones. There were no clocks, either; to tell time we had to either power up one of our computers or turn on the cell phone I brought from the US- for just this purpose- which I kept turned off because the battery was about to die and I didn't bring a charger.

Megan lit up her laptop: just after midnight. We'd been lying there in the dark for over two hours while Monsieur's FS Clube de Danse battered us with its party cannons. 'Bateau was in turmoil. Megan finally rose in an explosion of blankets and thrown-on clothing, stormed out the door. I heard her pounding on LeClub's door and an exchange of French in the hallway. Then she was back.

“What'd he say?” I say sleepily. I was trying to hold on to the half-somnolent state I was in, hoping maybe it'd take over completely.

“When he opened the door all I said was, 'Monsieur LeClub, seriously?' [Actually, she used his name, but for some reason I'm going to let him stay anonymous to you] And he said, 'I put a note downstairs that I was having a party! Don't worry; it's over at 12:30.' He's got until 12:35 and I'm calling the cops.”

Le Petit Bateau weathered the next half hour, but it was hard. We were taking on water, the sails were a mess, we had a warp core about to breach...pick your metaphor. We were tired. But shortly after 12:30, the music died, the people tumbled out amidst shouts and laughing...and it's then that we realized that Polecat was at it with her friends, cackle cackle shrill squeal.

This is still a "naval" engagement. And later Riker does refer to the Defiant
 as a "little ship." Little ship = Petit Bateau. Eh, EH? Get it? Don't mock me.

A hard night, ladies and gentlemen. The next day, though, shadow-eyed and mean, we raise our tattered flag and roll out our guns. Already wedged between Polecat and Monsieur le Club, all we have to do is open fire.

Come Monday we spoke to La Guardienne, the building manager, about the party and Polecat. It's then that we learn that she's Polecat and not Russian Revolution. We also we learn that Monsieur LeClub has been spoken to before in the past about his noise. La Guardienne says she will speak with him again. Our cannons were loaded, fuses lit.

I am going to by-gods run this naval battle theme right into
 the ground. Or sail it right to the bottom, rather.

And that's where I'm going to call it for this week, ladies and gents. Megan and I are going to Berlin for about a week tomorrow to see a friend and have a late Thanksgiving hoo-rah. If I'm on it while we're there I'll be writing a blog entry about that, but if I'm not on it and having too much fun I've got part deux of this tale here all set to go for you when I get back. Til next week!