Matt looked all stunned when Moose called him white, even more than he had when Moose and them got shut out of the Pizza Pie Factory. Nobody was really talking anymore. There was a McDonald’s a few doors up the way, so I said, “Royals with cheese, anyone?”
Sidi fired up his doobie, like he didn’t care who was watching. “I gotta finish my smoke.”
The rest of us went on in. Except Matt. He sat with Sidi on a green wooden bench.
McDonald’s restaurants in Paris are swankier than back home, more McBistro than McSupersize Me. Moose, Claude, Yasmina and me stood in line; Aïda went off to the bathroom. A ten-foot plastic Ronald looked down at us, his face a lot warmer than those of the two security guards standing by the cash registers. An Arab and a Brother, like at the Pizza Pie. They eyeballed us the whole time we were ordering. We took our grub to a bank of tables off to the side and sat next to three girls eating strawberry sundaes. Hotties. Brunettes, very French.
Through the glass, I watched Sidi extend the doobie toward Matt. Matt shook his head but said something to him; he looked like Moose does when he’s jawing at me about something I already know. Sidi didn’t respond, kind of ignoring him, looking off down the avenue. Then he hit the doobie hard and flicked away the roach. He got up and came inside. Matt followed. The security guards hawked them as they walked to where we were sitting.
Matt could be naïve, it was true. Like outside the Pizza Pie. Or with the riot cops up in Villeneuve. He couldn’t see that the cops weren’t interested in him, only in me and Moose, that they were leaving him be.
But he made a good point too—like right then. It wasn’t Sidi being North African, having the wrong zip code and whatnot, that had caught the attention of those two guards. It was that he was camped outside their glass doors smoking a doobie, straight up out in the open, for everyone to see.
Come on now. For real? How were they not going to be sizing him up?
Sidi sat next to Aïda, closest to the French girls.
“Want something?” Matt asked him.
Sidi pulled some coins out of his jeans pocket, tossed them onto the tabletop. “Bring me a strawberry sundae,” he said, kind of dismissive, and Matt moved off.
Sidi smiled a sleazy smile at the French girls. “They really do look good.” He was eyeballing the girls and not their ice cream. “Are they as good as they look?”
The girls ignored him, Aïda slugged his arm, but he still leered.
“Eh! I’m talking to you,” he said.
“No you’re not,” one of the girls shot back. “You’re slurring at us.”
I couldn’t tell who laughed first, the girls or me, but it was my arm that Aïda clutched. “Don’t get him started,” she whispered.
But it was too late. Sidi moved to a chair at the girls’ table. “You too good to talk to me?”
He grabbed the sundae of the one who had cracked on him and put a spoonful into his mouth.
“Give it back!” the girl said.
“You don’t look so superior now,” he said, his mouth full of pink and white ice cream.
“What’s your problem, espèce de grosse merde”—You piece of shit.
“Takes one to know one, and I can tell by looking at that tight bourgeois ass of yours that you’re a dirty little piece.”
Matt was off at the register, ordering. Moose and Aïda and Yasmina just looked on. Claude was picking at his food like nothing was happening.
The French girls gathered their stuff to leave, but Sidi pushed in close to the sassy one, blocking her in, his face only inches from hers. “We should go for a walk, just you and me.”
“Fuck off,” the girl said, now flushed and about to cry.
“Enough!” I said and reached over and grabbed Sidi by the sleeve.
He snapped it free.
“Come on, Sidi,” I heard Matt say, suddenly there beside us. The lady at the register called after him, saying he had left behind his order.
The three girls, ghost white, scooted off up the aisle and out the door.
“Stop making an ass of yourself,” Matt said.
Sidi turned from me and got all up in Matt’s face.
Moose and Aïda, Yasmina and Claude, they just looked on.
“Me? Making an ass of myself?” Sidi’s voice quavered. “Bitches talk down to me and you get their backs instead of mine?”
“You gave them all the reasons in the world to treat you like shit,” Matt said, all calm.
Sidi shook his head from side to side, disappointed-like. Then he grabbed Matt by the collar and drove him back into the wall!
“You think you can just come here, all grand seigneur, and tell us how to live?”
Matt’s a head taller, but Sidi has probably been in a jillion more fights. Matt, his collar bunched in Sidi’s fist, said, “Let go of me,” his voice still calm.
“You need to let him go,” I said—in English, to make my point.
Moose was there too then, but he was fronting up on me. On me! Like he was about to throw down.
Aïda, she was looking at her feet. Yasmina and Claude too.
“Qu’est-ce qui se passe, là?”—What’s going on here?
“Let’s go! Out, out!”
It was the security guards, both barking. One had Sidi by the scruff of the neck, the other had Matt, and we were all being ushered toward, then shoved through, the front doors. On the sidewalk, in the mass of moving people, we all gathered ourselves. But we were clearly of two camps: Matt and me, and the rest.
Matt stared at Moose, looking all puppy-dog hurt. “Moose?”
Moose smirked, then turned to the others. “You know how it is with les blancs”—with white boys—he said, like it meant me too. “Sometimes you just have to put them in their place.”
He started walking away. The others followed. Aïda glanced back at us as she left.
“Fuck you, Moose!” Matt shouted. “No wonder they call you racailles! If you act like scum, people treat you like scum!”
I grabbed him, held him back from following them, all the tourists on the avenue staring. “Come on, Matt,” I said. “It ain’t nothing.”
He pulled free of my hold. We watched them saunter off toward the RER. Sidi shot us the bird over his shoulder.
“Fuck this shithole,” Matt said and walked off in the other direction.