Paris was an exciting place, even when two policemen threw me against a wall on suspicion of carrying a bazooka near the Eiffel Tower.  It was almost midnight and I was returning from a dinner with friends where I had shared another fantasy while poring over large-scale maps of Caribbean islands.  Rolled up, those might have looked like a bazooka, I suppose.

The cops were nervous.  There was still war in Algeria, bombings in the city, and my draft notice soon appeared in the mail.  The politics of the time were not encouraging, the country was running out of draftees and the duration of active service was expected to increase.  I had no intention to sign up for non-com training and I could be stuck with the hoi polloi for perhaps thirty-six months.  Aye, aye aye.  So I bought a switchblade knife, just in case.  Next I went to Brentano's for an English-French dictionary and a stack of paperbacks by American writers.  Hemingway, of course, some crime novels and, bless his heart, Chester Himes' Harlem Series.  Yes, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson traveled the Mediterranean with me, but on the ship it was a translation of 'Mutiny on The Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall that made the crossing unforgettable.

After three months of training on the mainland and a train ride to Marseille we were bound for an overnight passage aboard something that looked like a tramp steamer.  I followed the multitudes down to cots in the holds, but as dusk darkened I turned around after entrusting my pack to a friend.  The situation was chaotic and I jumped a barrier, unobserved, then climbed a ladder and found a quiet platform under a light, just aft of the bridge.  Picture this: a beautiful, starry night, a ship rolling and humping offshore seas, hundreds throwing up in the holds, and me up there grooving with Fletcher Christian over the South Pacific.  By dawn I had finished the tale and retraced my steps to the stinking disaster below.  I found my friend with my pack and gave him the book.  You can't pay for this kind of adventure.

And you can't be lucky all the time.  We disembarked in Oran to crowded temporary quarters.  Me and my books, we had a reputation which hadn't been yet recognized as an inability to suffer fools gladly combined with a short fuse.  An overgrown idiot kid fancied nagging me when I was hard at work flipping pages of my dictionary.  One evening I lost it, I dropped the book and I went after him with a stool.  He ran out a door and slammed it back in my face and me, fool that I am I put the stool through that cheesy door.  Well, that's destruction of government property and I was soon bound to the stockade for a week without anything to read.  For amusement I was to share trips to the dump with another felon on the back of a truck after collecting the trash of the barracks.  Plenty of fresh air fortunately, but a chore, forever hiking pants without a belt and stumbling around in combat boots without laces.

The indoor part of my sentence was more entertaining.  The pokey had been built as a series of cells around an indoor exercise yard paved with stone slabs.  I was assigned a space with a bare bunk, a barred window without glass and a hole in a corner for a toilet.  I was pleased when a cigarette flew in through the window on my first afternoon there,  but I was rather miffed when they kept on coming.  In packs even.  I am going to be busted for that, I feared, but I cheered up at exercise time.  My door clicked open and while the turnkey kept on with his task, I saw a growing sea of friendly faces awaiting the day's distribution of cigarettes.  Convict management took over the task and informed me that my window happened to overlook a short section of a walk that could not be observed from the guard post, an accident of design that allowed friends to treat friends without reprisals.  Convict management also directed me to better not get greedy and smoke much of the bonanza.  "How could I," I said, "I wasn't allowed matches."  "Some guys eat cigarettes," they explained.  As the prisoners began their trek around the yard and a tighter group formed within, I saw how one of the slabs could tip and reveal in a small excavated cavity, you guessed it, matches.  Wow, I thought, it's just like the movies.  In retrospect I don't think there was anything secretive about it at all.  The whole setup must have been permitted to minimize rioting impulses amidst petty criminals like myself.  How could authorities fail to notice the clouds of smoke at exercise times?  For goodness sake, this was North Africa but there wasn't a fly about.

Later, in a trash collection detour I was led down a tunnel to a setup similar to my lodgings, except that it was underground and devoid of window views on cigarette storms.  That's where the real bad guys exercise, I thought, and they sure didn't have much trash to dispose off.  Thinking back, I was rather glad I had forgotten about my knife when I went after that kid.  I might have been a resident there for a long time.

NEXT IN PART THREE,  A RETURN TO STUDY.