By the Smoke and the Smell by Thad Vogler

Author:Thad Vogler [Vogler, Thad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780399578601
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2017-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

NORTHERN IRELAND

BUT I WAS YOUNG AND FOOLISH

As a younger man, I lived near a castle in Northern Ireland for about six months, at an age when six months is a long time. I landed there after a first attempt to escape the restaurant business; I’d been working behind the bar at a restaurant I’d helped open called One Market, near the Ferry Building in San Francisco. Strapping, in my mid-twenties, I never dreamed food and beverage was my career. I rented a cottage in the tiny seaside town of Portrush with Julia, my then-girlfriend with whom I’d bartended, and my English friend Harry who was a student at Ulster University in the town of Coleraine. Julie and I had arrived at Portrush under dramatic circumstances. To digress further, we’d been living in Paris in a hotel that paid us room and board to hand out fliers at Gare du Nord to backpackers and other budget travelers. We’d meet the morning and afternoon trains from Amsterdam and choose our targets. Because of experiencing the frustration of the stack in my left hand not diminishing because no one will grab the single flier in my right, as though they were falling victim to a con by taking a fucking piece of paper, I’ll always take a flier when handed one now. Anyone who arrived at the Hotel de Belfort with one of our fliers in hand that entitled them to a discounted “traveler’s rate” would also earn us a few francs on top of the room and board we were guaranteed. We would learn at the end of the day from Mohammad or Bathshir, the North African guys who ran the hotel, how many backpackers we’d caught and they’d give us our francs.

Between the two trains, we had several hours to ourselves. I would generally pass them in Chez Jeannette, a proletariat lunch counter and café with a majestically deteriorated belle époque interior including a twenty-five-foot pounded tin ceiling and nicotine-drenched canary-yellow walls. I rolled tobacco then and would pass the few hours until the next train working on horrible, thinly veiled autobiographical short stories. If I had the francs, I’d eat a baguette with ham and cornichon served on a plate only half the size of the sandwich. I’d look discreetly up from my notebook and felt-tip pens to consider the workmen having their bread with a draft Kronenbourg at the counter. They wore work caps with brims and thick, dirty atelier coats, booted feet on the brass rail, hanging on tightly to the bar top with both hands as though they might fall over backward when throwing their heads back to laugh at the saucy woman who made the sandwiches. This was only twenty years ago, but Paris felt more provincial then, supporting its workers and small café owners who gave the town its timeless cadence. What Parisians did they’d been doing for hundreds of years in roughly the same way, eating the same foods, drinking the same beverages.

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