Cutback

xii

Paris to Lyon, May 2015

Look, I know what you're expecting here: Another story about how Errol's life has forked off dramatically from mine in the years since we came back from Europe. He's famous and in movies and I'm watching him through a telescope and all that good stuff. Or maybe it'll be a formative illustration about what's made me the co-dependent, obsessive mess I am (cue my mother).

But I don't really have anything to say about either one of those topics right now, so do you want to hear about the time Errol bit me instead? It was the morning we arrived in Lyon and it was the happiest day of my life.

We'd left Paris early under the gauzy fog of hangovers potent enough to slow time, where every thought and movement felt like firing up an engine. The night before—which may help set the stage—we had gotten back early after an evening weaving between the sidestreets of the 13th arrondissement, where we'd stumbled into Chinatown and sampled chicken skewers, Asian beers we'd never heard of and fried donuts that stained our fingers with hot sticky sugar. Errol bought cigarettes and we made ourselves lightheaded, smoking around Paris like we were French.

We were woefully over budget so we bought cheap beer and returned to the hostel on a packed Metro where we had to stand the entire time.

Errol, being Errol, found a group of Australians a few years older than us in the hostel common room and they started chatting and drinking, drawing me reluctantly into the conversation the way Errol had done in theater class. There was Mozzy and Blake and Sure or Shore, a name I could never quite decipher from behind their thick twangy accents no matter how many times I heard it.

"We're on holiday seein' a bit of the continent," Mozzy told Errol, sloshing around a crude vodka soda he'd made in a plastic cup.

"From Brizzy," Sure, added, and let that hang there for a moment until I forced the word "Queensland" out of my mouth to show we weren't complete idiots but rather the kind of Americans foreigners always wish there were more of.

Blake and Sure disappeared for a moment and returned with a poker set, an ingenious way to make friends I realized, and for the rest of the night we played cards and drank until the beer had lubricated my mind enough and I started asking them about Australian film, Silverchair and Midnight Oil, Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull, Surfer's Paradise and all the tidbits of Australiana that I'd picked up on the internet throughout the years while Errol was busy getting laid and learning how to socialize with other Americans. The Australians ate it up, feeling their egos boosted like they had a culture worth talking about. They loved it—or more accurately, me. They loved me.

When Mozzy got up saying he had to piss like a racehorse, I took the opportunity to tell the table about the man we'd seen urinating across the street the other day, and the Aussies—a people who have never met a crude generalization they couldn't get behind—started laying into "those Frenchies" pissing themselves all over the city, and how dirty Paris was, while a silent Errol bored a thick, icy glare into the side of my head just as I slapped down two pair—Aces and threes—and raked the pot toward me, tossing a cheap red chip worth €1 at him in the most condescending way possible to huge laughs.

"Good on ya, mate," Shure said, clinking his beer to mine. "And Surfer's Paradise is awlright, but the best breaks are in Greenmount by Gold Coast—heaps better."

For once, Errol had little to say all night, keeping his dark autumn eyes fixed on his cards, while I drew the Aussies ever deeper into the depths of cultural esoterica, as if proving a point to him, as if saying, "See, I was perfectly happy to spend the night alone with you, but if you're going to insist on talking to strangers, this may be the result."