Mr. Romance Languages

And the story of le jeu le plus brillant de tous les temps

I'm sitting at a booth at an outdoor Austin coffee shop, finishing up a week of work on my laptop, and there is a couple sitting in the booth next to me.

The girl is your typical, sexy, tatted up Austin girl, with tribal looking wooden earrings that somewhat resemble a coil of hand carved razor wire looping through both lobes, and just enough eye liner to look damn hot without going overboard into trashy town. The guy is your typical douche.

They're speaking French. Actually it's more like a tutor-and-pupil session than speaking, and the girl is very much so the tutor. His French sucks.

The first thing I hear her say is "Zjuh, zjuh," really slowly. (It is impossible to phonetically write out the sound of the French word Je, which means I, a fact about le francais that this dude probably did not know about until three or four days ago.)

"Juh," he says. "Juh."

"No, you've gotta say it like this: zzjjjjjuuuh."

Not like jjuuudge.

"Maybe she's trying to teach him Serbian," I thought for a brief moment: like zzzzelja mi je pusta da ti svrsim u usta.

"Or Swahili." Nipe kikunde kimojjjjjja ili nitasizi na Muindaji.

And then came the flashcard session on how to conjugate the verb aller.

Mon dieu, does he sound le retarded.

They're in their late 20's, meaning it's not for some college class or something that they're sitting at a coffee shop at 3 on a Friday going over French verbs like "to be" and "to have" in the present tense. The girl clearly speaks French, and the guy, he just "wants to learn it." A hobby. 

Something to do besides work all the time, perhaps -- like what my neighbors Tony and Nicholas just did, splitting the Rosetta Stone Spanish between themselves.

But this guy is so bad; sure, it's never too late to learn a language, but that doesn't apply to 

everyone. It's too late for him.

But "Hahahaha, oui!" -- I'm hearing a lot of that coming from her. Because the guy is so damn charming. So clever. He's macking on this tutor girl, and clearly not really interested in learning French. But the girl has no idea. She does not realize at all that he is using this suddenly discovered desire to learn a foreign language (subtext: "I am so worldly and curious") as a pretext for running game on her.

It's a brilliant strategy, I must concede. I hate on the guy, because he really was a douche, but at least he had my full respect, like Greivis Vasquez from Maryland.

The Latin Stereotype

Then she goes to the bathroom, and the first thing he does is pull out his cell phone. He's dialing now.

"Bueno," I hear him say, in a Spanish accent so bad it is only rivaled by his French, "que tal?" (phonetically: kay tall?)

He's smiling that sort of fox-like, mischievous grin as he listens to the response coming from the other end.

Then something cheesy like, "Well then I guess we won't be able to hang out later and socialize with one another."

No question he's talking to a girl. You would never say that to a dude. Unless you have a crush on that dude. And this guy, he has a crush on Frenchie. But he's displaying the exact same persona while talking to what has to be a girl, but he's using bad Spanish in his game-spitting session this time!

Could it be...?

The test is now, because here comes Frenchie, sauntering back to the table. We make eye contact, but there is no smile proffered, because the other guy, he's the charming one. And he's sooo eager to learn French, remember? I'm just the one who previously tried to ask if I could share her booth -- because it really was the only place with an outlet where you didn't have to hunch over to type -- but she had smiled and said, "I would totally let you normally, but I have a friend meeting up with me."

And now that friend of yours is using the exact same tactic to try and get with another chick who is probably just as unsuspecting as you are that you're being lured into a trap by Mr. Romance Languages.

But I'm not sure yet; maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there was an intelligence failure at some point during the analytical process. We'll know based on what Mr. Iberia says about the phone call that he's wrapping up as she sits down.

"That was a friend of mine." (The exact description she'd given to me of who it was that was stealing my seat in the booth across the table from her.) "He --"

Stop it right there. He. Not two sentences in and I've already caught him in a lie. Who is this guy?

I want to yell out, "That was definitely a girl he was talking to, go Elen on his right to cell phone privacy!" But I don't.

"He has game nights at his house, and we'll go over there and chill."

"Oh, cool."

"Yeah, and we'll speak like bad French together, too, as a joke."

What, the, fuck.

"Oh come on!" I really want to yell this time, before gathering up my crappy laptop and the docking station that serves a required accessory if I desire to actually turn it on for more than 45 seconds, and marching back over to the booth to reclaim my right place at the outlet.

I speak better French and Spanish than this guy, anyway.

She buys it though, just eats it up, like a gourmet snail, and their flirtatious tutorial continues. I can see the verbs she is teaching him in my head, written in its six forms, in two rows of three: je, tu, il/elle/on; nous, vous, ils/elles/sont. For someone who only took French for one year in college, I'm not bad. This dude, though, actually says vooze once, as a stand alone word.

He isn't even really that good looking, and he's got a pretty annoying voice and a general cheesy presence. But they're paying the bill now and leaving together, and I'm still stuck in my little end table, hunched over and thinking about the story I'm going to write about the hot, tatted up Austin chick and the d-bag who was able to convince her he was the man just because he took the time to prepare some French vocab flashcards.

This dude, he may be running this same scam with all the romance language chicks. He's got French and Spanish on lock down; what's to say it's not the same story with Italian, Portuguese and oft-forgotten Romanian?

May be a douche, but I have to hand it to him: Mr. Romance Languages is a brilliant man.

But he still couldn't touch me if the girl in the booth had been Serbian, though.

And if she had been from East Africa, and saw my Swahili notebooks I have back at my place, she would be like a popsicle on July afternoon in Dar es Salaam.