My Personal French Teacher; ma vie en rose

In high school, I studied Latin so I could talk to dead people and the Pope. (He and I used to chat on the phone a couple of times a week, I really miss those phone calls.) When New York University refused to recognize my high school Latin as a Foreign Language, I signed up for a French course, but I got thrown out of Language Lab. At the end of the First Lesson ("le stylo du ma tante," etc.), I heard a man with a very thick French accent say into my headphones:

VOICE: Thees eez ze end uv-u dee tape.

So I repetee into the microphone:

BOB: Thees eez ze end uv-u dee tape.

VOICE: Reewind-u dee tape.

BOB: Reewind-u dee tape.

But I didn't realize that Zee Professeur was in Zee Back of Zee Lab listening to me on his headphones, and he was pas amusee, and threw me out of the Lab, and I never went back.

Later I tried to take Italian, and this professore taught me many interesting things (spoglierello = strip tease), but he neglected to tell us that he was really Siciliano (he sucked as a biochemistry professor, so NYU recycled him as il professore d'Italiano), so for the next thirty years I would order maniGOTT (manicotti) in Italian ristorantes sounding exactly like Lucky Luciano or Frank Nitti, and not understanding why the wait staff was cringing and nervous. (But they always brought me my pasta very promptly and asked me if everything was okay, I got no complaints.)

But in those days, I actually had a Private French Tutor, and he taught me a particularly magnificent dialect of Parisienne. I would sit for hours in le dark Arte Cinema (The New Yorker and the Thalia) listening to him teach me this wonderful French, and I have a pretty good ear for lingos. So I speak French just like he does.

(In those days you could smoke cigarettes or Whatever in the dark New York City Arte Cinema, in the balcony.)

Amazingly enough, all those hours listening to him and watching him -- maintenant I LOOK just like him, too! So this photo of my French Teacher is aussi le fiche du MOI!!!

That's my American girlfriend. I don't work, I just hang out in cafes all day with my gangster and demimonde and pimp amies. She buys my Gauloises and supports me by standing in the middle of the boulevard all day in a tight t-shirt selling the International edition of the New York Herald-Tribune to passing automobiles. She's young and beautiful and she adores me, but I treat her comme le merde. Later, after I shoot le Gendarme, she betrays me to les Fliks, and I am sent to Devil's Island and forced to do hard labor in the jungle for the rest of my life. But I make Zee escape on a home-made raft made of coconut shells avec my fellow prisoner Americaine Steve McQueen.