I arrived back in Paris this evening to several visitors in my apartment. Nick, a friend of mine from Kansas City, had been studying law in Ireland for the past month. He was passing through Paris during a multi-week, multi-city post Irish law class European tour and was joined by two other students. They had previously navigated their way through the Cinque Terre of Italy and Interlacken, Switzerland, the photos of which were enough to convince me that at some point in my life I needed to visit both.
While Nick and company had arrived the night before, another, more unwelcome visitor, had already come and gone. Here is how the greeting went as I dropped my luggage off in the hallway of my apartment:
Christian: “Bonjour, and bienvenue a Paris!”
Nick: “Hey Christian, what’s up? Do you have a cat?”
Christian: “No, no Parisian cats for me.”
Nick: “Oh. Well, something shit on your floor.”
The rogue defecator of June 25 had struck again! I cursed appropriately, then cursed some more upon discovering that the mysterious guest – henceforth dubbed Sinister Guest X – had urinated wildly on a stack of CD’s sitting upon the floor. With just one, presumably long bathroom break, Sinister Guest X destroyed all those little pamphlets which accompany a compact disc case. As if not being able to read through the song lyrics or find out who the artist wanted to thank wasn’t bad enough, several of the cases themselves were, to put it politely, beyond repair. I would have felt bad for my dishwasher to even try cleaning them.
A psychology class I once took in college mentioned that human beings operate according to a series of scripts, which dictate how one is to act in a given situation. For example, there is a restaurant script we all abide by. We walk in, we are seated with menus, a waiter or waitress comes by to take our drink order, and so on. But I tell you this: no previous life experience has provided me with a nice script on how to proceed with Sinister Guest X. Perhaps if I owned an insubordinate house pet I would be better prepared. With a lack of options – and closing my balcony doors during a Paris summer with no air conditioning is definitely *not* an option - a bounty was placed upon the head of Sinister Guest X. The first of my guests to capture Sinister Guest X and club it without mercy would receive a crisp 20 euro bill.
