Le Pipi Rustique

the damnest people happen upon, when one is in dire need of relieving himself from having consumed too much of the grape.
bad timing is something at which we’ve always excelled.
we were somewhere in Bouches-du-Rhone trying our best to live the life Provençal–the French antidote to the vida-loca–when yours truly (and his kidneys) could stand it no longer and pulled over the little Renault in order to water the beautiful, Mediterranean flora.
in the middle of perhaps the longest emittance of human urine at a stern, steady flow, we heard a shotgun being cocked.
a little hobbit of a man, clad in rubber boots and leather vest, approached slowly.
“tout contrevenant sera abbatu, les survivants poursuivis,” he said.
“yea, heh?!” yours truly mustered, not familiar with the local dialect, zipping up.
“you fool,” she shot at me from inside the minuscule auto, “this is no dialect; it’s perfect french. he said: ‘all trespassers will be shot; survivors will be prosecuted.'”
MERDE!!
indeed.
chronos strikes again.
“but kind monsieur…”
but nothing.
mus es sein?
es mus sein!
but wait. a stroke of merciful luck. we have chocolate!
after what seemed like an eternity of explanation and bargaining, our grumpy landowner cum soldier of fortune agreed to let us go with our lives, but not without extracting a price first. monsieur Poullet, it seems, had a tremendous sweet tooth (as most frenchmen tend to have) and in exchange for our measly excuse for lives, he…uhm…relieved us of our small sack of miniature almond joys and mounds. we haggled tooth and nail for those bloody candies, but in the end msr. Poullet held the gun and drove the tougher bargain.
we jumped into the decrepit little Renault, thanked him profusely for his understanding, put the baby in gear, and hightailed it out of there, glad to have escaped both with an empty bladder…and a prolonged insignificant life.