You Changed My Life (11 page)

In the afternoon, at exactly two o'clock, I turn up the volume on the radio to listen to the news. I hear that police who were on a raid got trapped by a crazed gunman in Ris-Orangis. Thinking their colleagues had managed to blow down the door of the apartment where the guy was holed up, several heavily armed officers went in through the window. The nut was waiting for them. Being a former security agent, he was heavily armed, too. He shot first. That makes two fewer pigs in the pen. I'm not happy about it, but I'm not crying, either. I don't care. This world is messed up, it's full of crazies, and everything leads me to think I'm not the worst, far from it. I turn down the volume and turn on the TV. Charles Ingalls is sawing wood, his kids run across the prairie, Caroline tends the coals in the little house's fireplace. I drift off . . .

I'm living it up. Fleury is summer camp. Like Club Med, just without the sun or the girls. Those nice counselors, the guards, make sure nothing upsets us. Blows from nightstick,
insults, humiliation, I've seen all that in movies, but none of it since getting here. And as far as “bending over for the soap” in the showers is concerned, it's pure legend or fantasy, I don't know which one. I'm just sorry for the guards, because they're the ones sentenced to life here. They leave these gray buildings at night only to go to another that's not much better. The only difference is where the locks are located: theirs shut from the inside, protect them from bad guys like us they haven't locked up yet. Whether in here or out there, the guards live locked up. The inmates count the days until they get out, the guards count the years until they can retire . . .

When I got here, I counted the days, too. One week was enough to know it was better to stop, let the time pass, live every second without thinking about the next, like always . . . I became social, I knew how to earn the esteem of my neighbors. Between two cells, there's always a hole in the wall about three to four inches wide and waist high. It allows you to talk, pass cigarettes, and also let your neighbor watch TV if he doesn't have one. All you have to do is set a mirror on a stool so it reflects the image. The other guy has to watch in an uncomfortable position, his eye glued to the hole, and he has to lean his ear in to hear the dialogue, but it's better than nothing. Every first Saturday of the month Canal+ shows a porno. A few minutes before it starts, all the inmates drum on the doors, on tables, on the floor. Not to demonstrate some irresistible need to escape, for sure. So why? I don't know. I join in on the noise like everybody else. I crack up listening to the others, even if I wish they'd shut up most of the time. Fleury-Mérogis is never
quiet. Never. Except during the monthly porno. As soon as it starts, nobody makes a peep.

I figured out how to get away from the ambient noise by making my own music. It's inspired by films mostly.
Once Upon a Time in the West
came out two years before the blessed Abdel arrived on this Earth. Luckily, my favorite western comes on TV a lot and I never miss it. I learned the lines by heart: “I asked you to scare them, not kill them!” The cold reply from the other: “You're a lot more scared when you're in pain.” Or this one: “I saw three coats like this one at the train station this morning. In each coat was a man. And in those three men, three bullets.” The coolest! Sometimes I come across one of the silent films with Charlie Chaplin and laugh so hard that the guards worry about my mental health. I laugh almost as hard when I listen to the news on the radio or the TV. In Creil, three girls showed up at school wearing full veils, and suddenly the French think they're in Iran. They're panicking. The news is so pathetic, you're better off taking it as a joke.

It's already evening. The light and the TV go off by themselves after the second movie. It's already the end of the year, and I've pretty much done my time if you consider the suspension period. I must have gained twenty pounds lying around all year like an old pasha. It doesn't look so good on me, but I'm not worried. I know business is waiting for me on the outside, and I'll have to get back on top of my game, start right away, run fast and far. I'll lose the weight. In June, I confessed to everything I was accused of because I thought I'd see daylight a lot sooner if I went straight for the truth. In reality, I could
have just denied it, and they'd have let me out on parole until my court date. Maybe I would've disappeared, hidden out at a friend's or with family in Algeria. But I would've been wrong, because then I would have missed out on an interesting and not at all traumatizing experience.

On November 9, while I am lying on my bunk, I hear TV newswoman Christine Ockrent say that the wall that has divided Europe for twenty-eight years is coming down. All the news programs are repeating it over and over: the Iron Curtain is falling. Soon I see footage of people prying away cinder blocks and crawling over ruins. An old man is playing the violin in front of some graffiti. The East and West were totally separate from each other until now. It wasn't a story made up by Hollywood screenwriters, and James Bond, if he existed, would really fight Soviet spies . . .

I wonder what planet I was living on before Fleur-Mérogis. Shut up in my cell for the last six months, I have discovered the world. Ridiculous, I know. Here the guards call me “the tourist” because I take everything so lightly. I have that casual look like the guy who's just passing through.

By the way, I've done my time, I'm out of here. Thanks guys, I had a good rest. Here I am, ready to dive back into the big bath of whatever. In Berlin, at Trocadéro, Châtelet-les-Halles, in the basements of Orsay, it seems like everywhere it's the same dump. And if I have to go back to Fleury, well . . . I'll go back.

It only took me a few weeks . . . just a handful of days and
nights and I didn't have time to get bored. As soon as I got my shoelaces and watch, I was back in business. There were more and more portable CD players around near the Eiffel Tower, and some truly inspired engineers had worked hard to perfect the quality of video recorders, which were, by the way, lighter and lighter. In Algeria, the Islamic Front was starting to ruin all the fun; my brother, Abdel Ghany—Belkacem and Amina's other “son”—took advantage of it to come back to Beaugrenelle. He hadn't gotten his papers, but he needed to make a living: I took him on at Trocadéro. There I found out some guy named Moktar had helped himself to my turf. I smoked him out with the help of some faithful allies by letting him know he needed to be gone, pronto. Moktar got to my brother and used him to scare me. Always the chicken, Abdel Ghany warned me: either I gave up the turf, or he'd get the brunt, my sweet brother.
He hadn't come back to Paris for this . . . I thought about my favorite movie,
Once Upon a Time in the West
: intimidate, don't assassinate . . . I chose from my African network, the tallest, the thickest—the best armed—Jean-Michel. Together we paid a visit to my rival. The latter was surrounded by ten of his goons, some who'd worked for me in the past, and a cute brunette.

“So Abdel, that's how you come to see us, alone? Are you suicidal or just crazy?”

“I'm not alone, see?”

Jean-Michel takes out his BB gun and all of the peons disappear, all except for the girl, who's now curious. We left Moktar in his underwear, shaking with fear and cold in the middle of the Droits de l'Homme esplanade. I've described how people calmly changed platforms when a fight broke out in the metro. There at the Palais de Chaillot, they backed up the same way, barely surprised by the show. The girlfriend followed us. We never saw Moktar again.

I'd just gotten out of prison. I was legal, I was responsible, in the eyes of the law, for everything I did. For the first time in my life, there was no more judge, no counselor, no teacher, no parents. No more adults reaching out their hands to try to guide me and filling my ears with their good advice. If I had wanted to be the new Abdel after my stay at Fleury-Mérogis, I would have had no problem finding someone to help me. I'd just have had to ask. Belkacem and Amina didn't turn their backs on me: when they came to see me in the visitation room, just before I
got out, they gave me a hard talking to, just like parents should when their son screws up. I waited for their speech to fizzle out . . . I was still oblivious.

My heroes always came out on top. Terminator got hit, but he kept standing. Nobody could beat Rambo. James Bond dodged bullets. Charles Bronson barely cringed when he was hit. It's not that I identified with them: I just saw life like a cartoon. You fall off a cliff, you're flat as a pancake, you get back up. Death doesn't exist. Worst-case scenario, a bump pops up on your forehead and stars circle your head. You bounce back fast from everything, and then you make the same mistakes all over again.

I didn't do anything differently. I reclaimed my turf at Trocadéro. I didn't notice that the cops were keeping an eye on me, and once again, I never saw them coming. Are we going back? Okay, let's go.

France is a marvelous country. It could have given up, consid
ered me a lost cause to myself and everyone else and let me sink into delinquency. Instead it decided to give me a second chance to behave like an honest young man. I took it. In appearances, at least. France is a hypocritical country. As long as you're discreet, it lets every kind of fraud, rip-off, and traffic slide. France is accomplice to all of its worst citizens. I took advantage of that, shamelessly.

A few months before the end of my sentence, an educational counselor got interested in my case. He came to see me, all friendly, and offer me a way out that didn't include theft and assault: a profession. Where school failed, Justice and its special emissaries thought they could succeed.

“Mr. Sellou, we're going to find you an internship. Starting next month, you'll leave Fleury-Mérogis and go be transferred to a semi-free center in Corbeil-Essonnes. You'll need to go to your place of work every day and go back to sleep at the
house every evening, except for weekends, when you can go back home to your family. We will evaluate your situation several times throughout the course of your internship and then decide what happens next.”