Christophe…et j’ai crie

My youth was largely occupied with his top hit,…”sur le sable mouille”.

War-time Vietnam: coffee shop, coffee shop and coffee shop whose attendants would change their AKAI reels with Lobo (side 1), Christophe ( side 2) then others. Followed the 80/20 rule, 80 per cent of the time, the top two ruled.

French language languished, but not completely: a lycée here, a copy of Le Monde there.

On any given day, we could still find French bread much easier than hamburger. and Citroen over Chevrolet. Then all of a sudden, the third C arrived: C-rations flooding Saigon with Pall Mall and peanut butter neatly in a box, can opener included.

Back to Christophe….et la mer. He sang about love and loss, the sea and existential suffering.

And we gorged it down, while upheavals all around us.

A classmate lost his eye out in the front. Many, myself included, skipped 10th grade to delay the inevitable mandatory draft.

We switched from French to English as our Second Language. The power of the purse, of gun powder and prestige of leader of the free world.

Then everything collapsed. Perdu. Aline, et j’ai crie…pour Elle revien.

Loss. Never to regain. New norm. New shores. New faces and friends.

“Hey, can I crash at your place for the night”? Stranger would take me in, as on a snowy night in Harrisburg, PA, just because I said “Chao” in Vietnamese.

We were lost souls, without directions home.

Hair and the road were long. My first earning went to a cassette-tape player, so I could record songs from home (others would have shot-gun weddings that kept the refugee-camp chaplain so busy) with one of Christophe’s in the mix. Two Sanyo recorders – one to play back, the other to record. An army barrack’ washroom at night turned makeshift studio with “natural” hissing sound. But it was comforting knowing sound from home could finally be captured – like message in the bottle floated at sea: “Il faut me crois, la vie est belle, et Notre histoire, peut continue”.

Oh mon amour, I long to be with you once again. If only for a fraction of a second. To roll back the tide, rewind the tape. Hear it again. And again.

Like Lucy who swipes the screen so fast, decades would lapse in seconds.

Then I turn and look at the news: my idol is dead of COVID-19. Aline, et j’ai crie….pour Elle revien. Oh mon amour…un autre vie, t’attend la bas.

A friend once said that there were something in Alain Delon’s narrating voice. Something in the drinks, in those chocolates. Perhaps the Devil. Or maybe Life in full swing.

But I know with all my zest I once lived with Christophe songs lurking in the background; bombs exploded in the distance… and we lived as if there had been no tomorrow.

R.I.P. Christophe chanteur français. 1945-2020.