8. Metro update: now with more Brute Squad!

Metro Update: Oh. My. God. If you ever go on the Metro, HOLD ON TO YOUR TICKET. They do not tell you this. Only in a couple of stations do you need your ticket after the initial entry; in most cases, once you pass through the little entry machine it is just a worthless slip of paper. But keep it, O My Dear Ones. Listen to this cautionary tale.

You may see used tickets strewn all over the ground in the Metro and outside the stations, but God help you if you try to leave the station at an exit that has been chosen to have officials checking tickets that day, or that hour, or whatever.

We fell afoul of this. Coming up out of a stop, heading for the exit, we were stopped by a gang of about half a dozen folks in green blazers, like ruffians from a private school. They said some stuff that I didn't understand (it being French and all) but I heard billet in there somewhere, and I had seen some folks ahead of us showing their tickets. Oh crap. I have a tendency to stuff things in my back pocket. Sometimes at the end of the day I'll have a butt pocket full of receipts, wadded up kleenex, a funny-looking pebble, that kind of thing. We call them ass-records, from when I pretended that I would keep receipts from restaurants in order to keep tabs on our budget; this was years ago. 

In Le Petit Bateau there's no room for that kind of thing; critical mass for useless stuff is quite small, so I've been trying to train myself to throw away useless things, like used metro tickets, as soon as I'm done using them. But this time I have it; I stuck the ticket in the ass-record file before I could remember not to. I show the lady confronting me my ticket and plod on. But wait! Megan tossed hers away.

We tried to explain how we totally paid. I showed her my ticket- why would I pay and Megan not? Megan said we'd only been here for a short time and hadn't known about this ticket-screening deal...no good. We showed them that we had other tickets (buying them ten at a time is much cheaper than one by one). Still. A 25-Euro fine. Twenty five euros! That's, like, almost $35! We had not budgeted for unexpected fines for not actually doing the thing we were accused of doing. Megan tried to plead her case, trying to appeal to a sense of logic, a need for a first-time warning for poor Americans, to have a heart, anything. I burst out with, “But we are so small money! This is so big expensive!” I meant to say “we have so small money”- still not very good but better than what I actually said- but my verbs got tangled in the heat of the moment. I got no cute points from the lady at the head of the green-jacketed gang, although Megan told me later that it was awesome. Futile, but awesome.

You know what else is futile? Resistance.

Finally, Megan said she didn't have that much money. We were at the tail end of our current bunch of cash and were getting ready to go to an atm soon. The lady whips out her ticket book. Bad ticket, like a traffic ticket ticket. For some reason this makes our blood run cold. Can we get deported for Metro violations? Yes or no, it does little for international relations or the already-less-than-stellar opinion that the French have of Americans if it goes down in some file somewhere that “an American was ticketed today for not being able to present her ticket upon request. On a related note, her male companion had atrocious French.” So Megan takes out her bank card. There's a brief moment of hope when they're not sure that their card reader can take Megan's American card; French ones have these chips in them, while ours require that swipe. But no, this reader has multiple ways to takes its pound of flesh.

While the transaction is going through, Megan asks, "Where is this rule? We have never seen a sign telling us to hold on to our tickets." A large gentleman and another lady at the back of the pack of green-blazered goons both pipe up that it's on that sign right there, pointing over to an instant photo booth on the other side of the exit gates. Once the card is run and and we're free of them we storm over to the photomat and look around and eventually see the giant poster that has all the rules of the Metro, crammed together in 8-point font. 

It's all right there; all you need is a magnifying glass (not provided).

At first as we pore over the rules we find nothing. The whole section on tickets: nothing. But then, down at the bottom, under the section that says, “penalties of infraction” or something is the description of what just happened to us. 

That part under the you're-in-trouble red heading

 In fact, we could have been charged forty five euros; apparently having the extra tickets did us some good. It also adds in there somewhere that ignorance is no excuse. I wonder if they go around in green-jacketed packs like that so as to keep each other honest, so that no one gives in to the pretty lady with the horrified eyes and her male companion with his atrocious French and lets them off with a warning.

In hindsight, some things present themselves. We should have let them give us a ticket, given them our Davis address, generally played fast and loose with the Metro cops. Probably wouldn't come back and bite us in the ass, right? I've seen several people slip by the entry gates by smushing up against their buddy real close so they can both fit through the thing before it locks again. More often folks just leap them. I've seen them do it Parkour-style: hop-leap-land-keep walking; Indiana Jones-style: grab the arm of the door and slide beneath; and obvious and deliberate style, where a lady hangs her bags on the arm, demurely hops up onto the turnstile, steps over (keeping her skirts gathered properly), and lowers herself, gathers her bags, and walks off. 

At each entry place there's a window where someone sits, supposedly to help or sell tickets, but it's rare that I've seen them talking to anybody. I've seen people leap the turnstile in full view of those folks behind the glass; they never do anything. This is probably why the green goons are there in the first place. It also explains the time we saw one of the officials yelling at a group of girls who were heading for a train, yelling, “You were leaving, right? Weren't you? Come back here!” The girls sassed back at him, but they had that teenager look that says, "I know I'm being bad but you can't catch me at it." At the time it made no sense, but now...we should have turned around at the sight of the green jackets. Or just let them give us a ticket.

But there was this one time I saw a guy leap the ticket gate. He was dressed somewhat nicely, in a sport jacket and a tie, clean jeans, nice shoes. As soon as he landed, this other guy materialized out of nowhere. Dark suit, built like Iggy Pop with Michael Stipe's hairdresser, shoulders and nose like some sort of scavenger bird. He sidled up to the man like butter and took his arm. “Monsieur,” he says, cool and calm, and I don't know exactly the rest of what he said, but it had the sense of “We know what you did. It was seen. Please come with me.” And he led him away, through a door in the tiled wall. Gone.

In the Star Trek: The Next Generation first-season episode “Justice”, Wesley accidentally commits a harmless crime on a planet where crime is almost nonexistent because all infractions, no matter how minor, carry the death penalty. Picard tries to rationally find a way around the Prime Directive, while Beverly gets pissed at him for not just going down there, phasers blasting, to get her son back. Ultimately, that's essentially what happens; he shows up next to Wesley in front of his tribunal/execution, says sorry but I can't let you do this, and everyone beams back up. What's the planet going to do? There's a gorram Galaxy-class starship in orbit with this Shakespeare-spouting bald guy literally calling its shots.

 It's a diplomatic mess that damages relations with that planet for who knows how long, but Wesley didn't die.

Meanwhile, the scantily-clad cops as they prepared the painless kill-syringe for Wesley, and the green-jacketed gang as they fined us, both said the same thing: “Ignorance of the law is no excuse.” 

I think ST:TNG's costuming department was
high a lot. I mean, look at Wesley's sweater!

And Megan and I had no Jean-Luc Picard, no Federation flagship to save us. (A question: I know I've heard the Enterprise-D referred to as the Federation flagship before, but I thought a flagship had an admiral on board. What gives? O thou Trekkier-than-me, help me out) So we paid. We're 25 euros poorer, but there's also no chance that we'll see authorities pouring into our courtyard, climbing the 111, breaking down the door to Le Petit Bateau and dragging us off behind tiled walls, either.