American fiction -- 20th century; American poetry -- 20th century; Short stories, American
We got into Paris early in the morning in a long dirty station the
old man told me was the Gare de Lyon. Paris was an awful big town
after Milan. Seems like in Milan everybody is going somewhere and all
the trams run somewhere and there aint any sort of a mixup, but Paris
is all balled up and they never do straighten it out. I got to like
it though, part of it anyway, and say it’s got the best race courses
in the world. Seems as though that were the thing that keeps it all
going and about the only thing you can figure on is that every day
the buses will be going out to whatever track they’re running at
going right out through everything to the track. I never really got
to know Paris well because I just came in about once or twice a week
with the old man from Maisons and he always sat at the Cafe de la
Paix on the Opera side with the rest of the gang from Maisons and I
guess that’s one of the busiest parts of the town. But say it is
funny that a big town like Paris wouldn’t have a Galleria isn’t it?
Well, we went out to live at Maisons-Lafitte, where just about
everybody lives except the gang at Chantilly, with a Mrs. Meyers that
runs a boarding house. Maisons is about the swellest place to live
I’ve ever seen in all my life. The town aint so much, but there’s a
lake and a swell forest that we used to go off bumming in all day, a
couple of us kids, and my old man made me a sling shot and we got a
lot of things with it but the best one was a magpie. Young Dick
Atkinson shot a rabbit with it one day and we put it under a tree and
were all sitting around and Dick had some cigarettes and all of a
sudden the rabbit jumped up and beat it into the brush and we chased
it but we couldn’t find it. Gee we had fun at Maisons. Mrs. Meyers
used to give me lunch in the morning and I’d be gone all day. I
learned to talk French quick. It’s an easy language.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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