Downtown Los Angeles

LOS ANGELES—When you say, “Don’t worry about me, I’ll just jump on the subway” to someone in El Lay, you get one of the following responses:

“Excuse me, would you repeat that?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you’d already arrived in California.”

“What?”

“We don’t have a subway.”

“Nobody rides the subway.”

“Are you crazy?”

“You’ll get stabbed.”

“The subway doesn’t go anywhere.”

“Good luck with that.”

Suggesting you’ll be using Los Angeles mass transit—much less only mass transit during an extended stay in Southern California—ranks right up there with “I love Justin Bieber” as a phrase guaranteed to isolate you socially from everyone you meet.

I’ve told people that I’ll be taking the train into town from LAX—thereby sparing that person from the two-hour reality-show episode called “Picking You Up From the Airport”—only to have the native Angeleno say, “There is no train from the airport.”

Let me repeat that. They’re not telling me that they never take the train from the airport. They’re not telling me it’s a bad train or a slow train or an infrequently scheduled train. They’re denying the existence of any train at all. It’s happened more than once.

I say, “Do I need to send you the Internet link that tells you how to catch the shuttle to the Green Line?”

I realize it’s confusing, because the train station there is called “Aviation/LAX Station.” Unless you know what that means, you would never know that it’s the train station at the frigging airport.

Even worse than someone who has lived in Los Angeles for forty years and still has no idea that a train exists is someone who sort of half-remembers some information about a train from ten years ago that kind of maybe got built. Then you’re likely to get advice like, “Yeah, but they haven’t activated those stops yet. Those are just bus lanes.”

In which case you have to tell them that you’ve already taken the train three or four times and there were no buses in sight.

“Yeah, but that train doesn’t go anywhere. It just goes, like, to Compton.”

And then you have to tell them that, no, it will take me to the Blue Line, which will go straight north into downtown, where I can take the Purple Line out Wilshire or the Red Line into Hollywood or the Orange Line up over the mountains to Van Nuys. Or if I want to change at Union Station, I could get the Metrolink to San Bernardino or Lancaster or Oceanside. Or if I got really carried away, I could get the Amtrak to San Diego or Santa Barbara or Bakersfield. So starting down this Green Line journey is pretty much the opposite of the concept of “That train doesn’t go anywhere.”

“OK, the trains will be empty, though.”

No, actually, the Blue Line between downtown Los Angeles and Long Beach, to use one example, is almost always full.

“OK then, the trains will be dangerous.”

Well, uh, as a person who has ridden trains all over the world, I think the danger level would be described as maybe a “1” on a scale of 10. There are so many transit employees, vendors, and crowds of people that a mugging would be virtually impossible. The people on California trains are, in fact, a little too talkative—you can put that Kindle away—but it’s not menacing talk at all. It’s sort of, “Hey, man, you got smokes?”

Normally I wouldn’t make a big deal about people being space cadets—I’m not a car-hater and I couldn’t care less what transportation choice people make—but we’re talking about the city where people gripe about traffic all the time. New York has equally bad traffic, but it’s not that hot a topic of conversation since it’s assumed that you made that choice for yourself. You chose to get up early, take the Garden State to the Jersey Turnpike, then sit in the Holland Tunnel bottleneck and pay eight bucks for the privilege of driving your car into Manhattan so you can put it in the forty-dollar-a-day parking garage. The reason you’re not gonna gripe that much about how bad the various traffic situations were is that people already know what a douche you are since you could have gotten there quicker and with less hassle on the train.

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In Los Angeles it’s the opposite. The person who takes the train is the douche. And if anyone ever philosophizes about the subject, it’s to say something like, “Mass transit is no good for Southern California. It’s a car culture.”

Well, yeah, because people choose to ignore the multi-billion-dollar train and bus system that was built in the eighties and nineties. Los Angeles, like most big cities, became excited about mass transit in the seventies, got a boatload of money from Washington, and built a system that was pretty much operable by the year 2000. For a city with the kind of sprawl that El Lay has, it’s pretty amazing. I’ve used it. It works. Why does everyone deny that it exists?

Not that it doesn’t have major holes in it. For example, the most annoying traffic corridors are the ones that run east-west from downtown and Hollywood—Santa Monica Boulevard, Wilshire Boulevard, and Sunset Boulevard. And these are the corridors the LA master planners chose not to address in the subway system. The Purple Line runs from Union Station out Wilshire Boulevard and then stops dead at Western Avenue for some reason. Unless you’re going to Koreatown, the line is worthless. All they would have to do is extend it through West LA and Beverly Hills to Santa Monica and there would be mass celebrations by millions of William Morris agents, not to mention Wolfgang Puck, for taking all those Bentley-obstructing cars off the streets. As it is, the Purple Line is like a shuttle to the Wiltern Theatre, which I’m sure is very convenient for the manager of Tears for Fears.

There are other oddities. On certain lines, the train actually stops for cars. I know there are trolleys that stop for cars in most major world cities, but this is the same high-speed train that’s zooming underground in the downtown and Hollywood areas, then suddenly it becomes the equivalent of a 1938 streetcar? Trains should always have the right-of-way over cars. That’s sort of the point of being a train.

Another strange decision is the building of stations that are on concrete platforms several miles above the street. Most cities in the world have been trying to get rid of elevated train tracks for about, oh, a hundred years now. They disrupt neighborhoods, they’re eyesores, and they discourage commerce because there’s no place to put your newsstand, your Snapple kiosk, or your Pakistani lottery vendor. Elevated transit stations always end up with broken-down elevators, pissing off the handicapped, besides just being these imposing Roman aqueducts that nobody wants to climb up on in the first place. Los Angeles should have plenty of railroad right-of-way—it was laid out by Huntington and Stanford and all the other West Coast robber barons—but they seem bent on running the trains right down the middle of the freeway corridors, requiring you in some cases to clamber up into a scary-looking steel-and-concrete monkey-bar industrial maze that looks like something left over from an old episode of Mannix.

Still, the rail system is there, and if you combine it with state-of-the-art buses that are so sleek and quiet and cool that you’re likely to fall asleep in them, it can get you anywhere you need to go.

Three weeks ago Los Angeles announced to the world that they were about to face “Carmageddon.” The 405 Freeway was being shut down for construction at Mulholland Drive and so the world was going to end. These were similar to the apocalyptic reports we get in New York whenever President Obama comes to town and a bunch of streets and highways have to be closed down. And those reports always end with, “Alternate routes would be the 4 train, the B train, the PATH from Jersey City, or…”—you get the idea. And so “Carmageddon” was about to take place, and for some reason this was a worldwide story because I’m hearing these traffic reports on the opposite coast, and yet no one is saying, “So the alternate routes, according to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, will be the following extra express bus routes and more frequent rail departures throughout the western half of the county on the following lines….” Which would be, like, the sort of “duh” thing to do. Yes, you would have to take east-west routes and then cross the Santa Monica Mountains at some other canyon. You would have to go out of your way. But there was no mention of that sort of adjustment.

Instead, people were being told to stay home.

Now. The only reason people would be told to stay home is that the city’s leaders—the people who presumably approved the funds for the excellent mass-transit system and built it to its present state—are the same people who say, “The train doesn’t go to the airport.” I know it’s hard to believe, but what other explanation could there be? Nobody needed to stay home. You would only think that if you were proceeding from the assumption that there is no alternative to car travel. It’s like the entire city grew so enamored of medical marijuana that they forgot they have trains and buses. Then, when they occasionally remember that they do have a mass-transit system, they invent phantom criminals who are getting ready to reenact The Taking of Pelham 123, only worse because Denzel Washington is not here to save us. Actually, the most sinister thing that happens on the Blue Line is illegal Snickers sales, no doubt terrifying the first-time riders cutting the umbilical cord that ties them to Bel Air.

Which is fine with me, because I can stretch out on the shuttle on my way to the secret LAX Station.

Actually, on this trip, I’ll be leaving from Burbank Airport instead of LAX, a decision that causes my friend to apologize for not being available that day to take me to the airport because…

I interrupted. “The train goes there, too.”

“But I looked on the map.”

“It’s a different train. It’s the Metrolink.”

“Oh.”

Los Angeles people, listen up. If you ever need to get anywhere fast, whether you’re in the Valley or South Central or Santa Monica or Long Beach or downtown, just email me. I’ll be in Greenwich Village and I’ll tell you which train or bus to take.

Nancy Grace

NEW YORK—I tried. I really tried. I wanted to be the only person in America who didn’t know anything about the Caylee Anthony murder case.

I intentionally avoided it whenever it would come on cable TV. I have such an aversion to that caterwauling condescending public scold of a schoolmarm named Nancy Grace that I took Headline News Network off my remote control so that it automatically skipped to the next channel anytime I was surfing. Sometime in the past year they apparently gave Nasal Nancy a 24-hour show dedicated to the reinstatement of flesh-flaying, foot-roasting, and iron-maiden impalement for all criminal defendants. Her acolytes spread Nancy Graceisms all over the Internet through articles predicated on the idea that innocent victims’ blood has morphed into vengeance-blogging directed by the Almighty. But as I said, I managed to step aside. Whenever someone would post a photo of Casey Anthony with some slogan like, “Look at this slut partying while her baby is dead,” I would move onto the next subject or delete the email without answering.

And then when they finally got through the investigation, the arrest, the years of pre-trial hearings, the actual trial, and the verdict, I thought I was finally safe.

How wrong I was.

Not only is Casey Anthony still on my TV screen, but Nancy Grace has migrated to every other network so she can keep talking about it even if you have your remote control set so that you never have to listen to Nancy Grace.

The thing is over, people. She’s not guilty. Not guilty means what it’s always meant. It doesn’t mean innocent; it means not proven guilty. Give it a rest.

I don’t get the “party slut” emails anymore. What I get now are the “Caylee’s Law” emails. Vote for Caylee’s Law. Go to your Congresspeople and tell them to pass Caylee’s Law. Caylee’s Law says that if your child is missing and you don’t report it, you’re guilty of a crime. If you’re planning to kill your child and hide the body and spend a lot of time covering up the crime, you won’t be able to do that anymore because at some point you’ll slap your forehead and go, “Damn! I can’t hide this body! I can’t destroy evidence! Caylee’s Law says I have to report the kid missing right now!”

It’s the most meaningless addition to the criminal statutes since “hate crime” laws. Those were invented under the assumption that if you simply murdered your wife or husband or business partner, you probably didn’t hate them, but if you yelled, “You stupid wop!” right before pulling the trigger, your obvious Italophobia should qualify you for 30 extra years. Every decade or so some collective insanity runs through America’s various legislatures and we suddenly have a raft of statutes dedicated to making sure that nobody wearing dark gloves and fleeing in a white Bronco on a Friday afternoon ever again goes free for lack of DNA evidence in a double murder case in Brentwood. And we call it the “Justice for Nicole Law.”

There have been lots of comparisons to the O. J. verdict, which makes no sense to me because that verdict was widely celebrated, not reviled. I was on the #6 subway train when the O. J. verdict was announced, and there was universal cheering and shouting and hooting about “O. J. is innocent! O. J. is innocent! They let O. J. go!” Unless I’m missing something, the Casey Anthony verdict has inspired the opposite response. There were people fainting on the streets outside the Orange County Courthouse. There were mobs massed outside the jail when she was released, holding up placards reading “No Justice For Caylee!” in their non-pitchfork other hand. When her SUV pulled away from the jail last weekend, they had one of those traffic copters chasing her down the freeway like it was a high-speed chase! For all I know the copter pilot is still on the case. I know that “Casey sightings” have been bandied about the Web. Reporters have filed stories about mysterious women seen boarding private planes in the middle of the night, begging the question, “If you were able to prove that Casey Anthony was in a particular place at a particular time, what exactly would the story be? That she’s still breathing?”

Like most reporters, I spent my early years hanging around courthouses and covering murder trials, and there is almost always a rabble outside. Sometimes the rabble is there to ensure “justice” for the dead person—justice being a term that everyone in a courthouse constantly uses for reasons that have an inverse relation to the Aristotelian meaning of the term—and on some rare occasions the rabble is there to ensure “justice” for the unfairly accused defendant.

So what are we taught to do in Journalism 101?

Acknowledge and ignore. Acknowledge that the rabble is outside. Write about it if it threatens to contaminate the jury. Ensure that we the media don’t become part of the story.

I never went to journalism school anyway, so I wasn’t around when they apparently added Journalism 102, which can be summed up by reporters’ attitudes at the Anthony trial:

STIR UP THE RABBLE! TELL THEM HOW RIGHT THEY ARE! GET IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STORY AS AN ADVOCATE FOR JUSTICE BUT DON’T QUOTE ARISTOTLE!

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I actually heard trained professional journalists saying things like this: “Many people believe that Casey Anthony literally got away with murder, including this reporter.

Julie Chen, news anchor on the CBS daytime series The Talk and wife of CBS president and CEO Les Moonves, broke into tears when she reported the verdict. She couldn’t continue with the newscast, so the regular panelists helped her out, all agreeing that her reaction was justified.

The usual things that you write about when you have an unpopular verdict are timeless. They haven’t changed for a hundred years. I guess I need to put them down here, since very few other journalists have pointed them out since the verdict, but it goes like this:

1. The American system is set up so that we would rather see the occasional guilty person go free than a single innocent person be punished.

2. “Reasonable doubt” is a legal concept requiring acquittal. As soon as the reasonable-doubt standard is reached, the defendant must go free.

3. Juries are always instructed not to expose themselves to, or be influenced by, anything that’s not introduced into evidence. In this case Judge Belvin Perry did an outstanding job of keeping the jury totally immune from the media circus, the street circus, and the Nancy Grace Scolding Schoolmarm Circus. In other eras Judge Perry would be getting back-slapped by his colleagues for pulling off the impossible, because there wasn’t a single spot on that jury, not even an alternate.

4. “Not guilty” does not mean innocent. “Innocent” is a concept for theologians, and most of them have said it doesn’t exist anyway.

5. Juries don’t vote guilty in a death-penalty case unless all questions have been answered. They hate ambiguity and loose ends. Don’t knock this unless you’ve been there.

There’s always a rabble, and there’s almost always a feeling on the public’s part that the jury got it wrong. This happens even when the public agrees with the verdict. The jury got one thing right but missed three others. The verdict is correct but the sentence is too light. The sentence is correct but it’s for the wrong reasons.

That’s why the public doesn’t get to decide.

If we were in Russia, the state could appeal the acquittal. If we were in France, there would be secret ways an acquittal could have been avoided. If we were in many other countries around the world, you could bribe some people and cause a retrial.

And I’m hearing all the “buts.” I know about the “buts.” But what about her claim that her child was kidnapped by Zanny the Nanny? But what about the duct tape? But what about all Casey’s lies about her job? But what about the smell of death in the trunk? But what about the chloroform Google search? But what about that “Bella Vita” tattoo? But what about her lies about Caylee’s paternity? But what about the fact that she was partying during the months Caylee was missing?

I know all this. So does the jury. The jury is not wrong. The way it works here, the verdict is the verdict. It can’t be wrong; it’s the verdict. I’ve explained this all my life in various contexts, but never before have I thought it was necessary to explain it to reporters, much less to reporters who are also lawyers, much less to a new reporter/lawyer mutant species called Nancy Grace.

What’s going on here is a return to the law that was practiced in pre-Christian medieval Europe when a defendant’s fate was placed in the hands of the Avenging Kinsman. The dead person’s Avenging Kinsman—the wife, the husband, the mother, the father, the guy who won the paternity suit so he could file wrongful death—was allowed to kill the offender with his own hands, usually after a number of interested locals (those people on the Orange County Courthouse steps) had gathered evidence and presented it as fact. This was so there would be exactly one dead person on each side of that ledger in our minds that keeps track of who might have “gotten away with murder.” If the ledger is askew, you end up with Hatfield-McCoy cycles of revenge killing.

Fortunately in the 15th century the Brits kicked the Avenging Kinsman out of the courtroom and said henceforth we would have a prosecutor representing the state’s interests. The jury would no longer be the people on the courthouse steps who have an express interest in the trial; it would be their opposite—people who knew nothing about the case at all. In other words, they wiped out “victim’s rights.” The victim’s feelings were something for a priest or a psychiatrist, but not for a courtroom.

What we didn’t realize is that Nancy Grace would enroll at the Hildegard of Bingen School of Law sometime in the late 20th century and bring it all back.

Ripley's Believe It Or Not! Museum

NIAGARA FALLS, ONTARIO, CANADA—I’m in awe of Niagara Falls. Not the actual falls. Sure, that’s intriguing for about five minutes as you stare down into the churning misty canyon and wonder what it would be like to kill yourself.

No, what I’m talking about is the Canadian city of some 80,000 people, swelling to approximately eighty million on Canada Day, the day I unfortunately chose to traverse the Rainbow Bridge and plunge myself into the gridlocked wonderland known as Clifton Hill, or, in local Chamber of Commerce parlance, the “Street of Fun.”

Anyone who uses the phrase “Street of Fun” to promote tourism is either painfully naïve, destined to go the way of Wigwam Tourist Courts and Harvey Hotels, or so exceedingly brilliant that they’ve co-opted the term “fun” as a peculiarly Niagara Fallsian state of euphoria, almost as though to say, “You think you’ve experienced fun? Oh, yeah? Real fun? Do you know what fun is? WE GOT YOUR FUN RIGHT HERE, PAL.”

Niagara Falls, Ontario’s wise fathers fall into the stupendously brilliant category.

I’m a lifelong student of tacky American popular culture. There may not be anyone in the universe, living or dead, who has visited more snake farms, highway gift shops, all-you-can-eat cowboy buffets, carnivals, prairie-dog preserves, and bait-and-switch museums run by grifters and con men than I have. I’ve seen Rock City. I’ve gone down into Meramec Caverns’ murky depths to witness the stalactite light show with the original recording of Kate Smith singing “God Bless America.” I traveled the old Route 66 six times. I’ve paid money to see mummies, pygmy horses, bug-eyed freaks, Jesse James’s pistol, and, at the Texas State Fair, the Abominable Snowman. (It was three dollars and worth every penny.) So when I make the following statement, it’s based on a lifetime of accumulated wisdom:

Niagara Falls is the greatest tourist city in the world.

This is not an opinion. This is something I have scientifically proven. This is based on sophisticated metrics that I’ve refined and developed over the years, algorithms and indices that precisely measure the intensity of sign clutter, hucksterism, shamelessness, price-inflation, neon, and junk-food availability at roadside attractions from St. Augustine, FL (Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, anyone?) to McMinnville, OR (the Spruce Goose exhibit). And based on what the charts tell us, no tourism center has ever scored a perfect 10. Not even Tennessee’s Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge nexus, the “Appalachian Alps” resort area where millions of southerners have not only enjoyed the Dollywood amusement park but have munched on a pink fudge log while browsing in a psychedelic Christian T-shirt shop. That area scored an amazing 8.5, ranking it roughly on the same level as Myrtle Beach, SC; Branson, MO; and Solvang, CA, which received a .3 bonus for being the only Danish-themed tourist trap ever devised.

So no one has ever approached a 9, much less a 10. Until now.

Niagara Falls is a perfect 10. You might as well put a giant picture of Clifton Hill next to the word “Mecca” in the next edition of the Rand McNally Road Atlas, because you will never match this.

Let’s break it down according to the ten standards on the Joe Bob Briggs Roadmaster Tourist Attraction Scale.

Witness the splendor:

STANDARD NUMBER ONE: Any great tourist center must have a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is tourism’s sine qua non. In the 19th century it would have been called a Museum of Oddities, and then, as now, it was always a place where the exhibits might or might not be authentic, but the key factor is this: You would never consider entering such a place, much less paying for the privilege, if you weren’t on vacation. People do many insane things on vacation—purchase sombreros, paraglide behind power boats operated by ex-cons, eat at restaurants that revolve—but the Number One insane thing they do is suddenly decide that they really, really need to see that exhibit about the Chinese baby with two faces or the miniature giraffe that makes a noise like a referee’s whistle. I don’t even start to consider a town worthy of ranking unless it has a fully functioning Ripley’s, preferably on the main drag.

Niagara Falls not only has a Ripley’s, but it has one of the biggest Ripley’s in the world, with seven hundred artifacts and a giant artificial King Kong climbing off the building’s side, plus one of those virtual-reality movie theaters where your chair moves up and down and sideways to induce nausea as you watch various maniacs go over the falls in barrels.

In this, as in all the categories that follow, Niagara Falls records a perfect score.

STANDARD NUMBER TWO: There must be fudge.

Fudge, like oddity museums, is a product consumed only on vacation. It is occasionally mailed to children by eccentric aunts, but for the most part it’s an impulse buy that’s likely to be regretted within the hour. There’s this moment at which everyone says, “We must consume enormous chunks of virtually pure sugar congealed into bricks,” and at that moment you enter the fudge store.

The Fudge Factory is a neon-lit circus of fudge, brittle, taffy, toffee, jelly-based candies, and, since we’re in Canada, chunks of maple syrup prepackaged as snack bars guaranteed to overload your carb supply to the point where you’re singing speed-metal karaoke—which, by the way, is also available on the Clifton Hill strip, with the performers being projected onto the street via high-definition screens. If that’s not enough fudge for you, you can also visit the Swiss fudge store in the Fallsview Casino. (A cheesy casino is not necessary in a tourist town, but it does enhance your score. Niagara Falls has two of them.)

STANDARD NUMBER THREE: Wax figures must abound.

No doubt at some point in your life you’ve visited a wax museum, and there’s a good possibility that it was a Tussaud’s wax museum. What you may not realize is that there are three varieties of Tussaud. The original Madame Tussaud’s is in London, and all of its offspring with “Madame” in the name are descended from the woman who served in Louis XVI’s court, making death masks of executed aristocrats before establishing her permanent museum in the Baker Street Bazaar and, since 1884, in Marylebone Road. There are Madame Tussaud’s museums in a dozen cities around the world, including New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Washington, DC, but not, alas, in Niagara Falls.

What you have in Niagara Falls is a Louis Tussaud’s museum. I don’t wanna say that Madame Tussaud’s great-grandson was a slacker, but if you look at, say, the wax version of Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Louis Tussaud museum and compare it to the Governator in a Madame Tussaud museum, you’ll see that one looks like a constipated Robert Goulet who’s been electrocuted with a blow dryer, while the other one looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. (The third Tussaud’s museum is the Josephine Tussaud’s museum, which exists only in Hot Springs, Arkansas, thanks to a contract with a London beeswax company signed by Madame Tussaud’s great-great-granddaughter in 1885. They have an all-wax depiction of the Last Supper that’s been responsible for several conversions to atheism.)

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STANDARD NUMBER FOUR: There must be a live-entertainment venue featuring acts that haven’t been seen on prime-time television for at least two decades.

My favorite example of this sort of venue no longer exists. The B. J. Thomas Theater in Pigeon Forge, TN, underwent a name change, and now the “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” superstar is a touring act only. But my fallback choice for best retro live-entertainment venue ever is the Yakov Smirnoff Theater in Branson, MO. Smirnoff is the Soviet-era comic (“What a country!”) who not only survived glasnost and the Berlin Wall’s destruction but still does live shows that sell out at 35 bucks a pop.

Can Niagara Falls compete in the retro-entertainment sweepstakes? I have two names for you from the current lineup at the aforementioned Fallsview Casino showroom.

We have Sinbad.

And, even more impressively, we have Herman’s Hermits.

I rest my case.

STANDARD NUMBER FIVE: All tourist cities must have a resident “internationally famous” magician who is not internationally famous.

The resident magician—and usually his lovely assistant—are probably doing illusions on a grand scale, the sort of stuff that David Blaine and Criss Angel are known for, the kind of tricks that experienced magicians call “box jumper” acts, a form of magic that reached its apogee in the form of Siegfried and Roy. Basically this means the guy looks good in a suit and the girl looks good in a body stocking but they have an amazingly well-equipped facility. These are original shows—nothing retro about them—that rely on stagecraft and quite a bit of flash powder.

Welcome to the Greg Frewin Theatre. Greg dresses all in black, works with Siberian tigers, and levitates various members of his hot-body all-female dance team. Yes! Again, a perfect score.

STANDARD NUMBER SIX: There must be a water park overrun with screeching children.

I think this one is fairly self-explanatory—who has not feared the yellow water in the kiddie pool?—but Niagara Falls has not one, but two “family fun time” water parks: the Great Wolf Lodge water park, featuring a thousand-gallon bucket that “tips from the treetops” (dad will love it!), and the Fallsview Indoor Waterpark, featuring six-story waterslides and direct tunnel and hallway connections to three huge hotels, guaranteeing a constant stream of swim-suited urchins somersaulting and whining outside your room at all hours of the day and night. It doesn’t get any scarier than this.

STANDARD NUMBER SEVEN: Nevertheless, you do need a haunted house.

In simpler times, a “haunted house” attraction would have been a spooky shambles of a frame house surrounded by local legend, preferably one involving a murdered child from the 19th century who still roams the attic. But in 2011 we can’t wait around for real estate to crumble, regardless of how many subprime-mortgage foreclosures we have. When people say “haunted house” today, they don’t even mean an actual house, except in the old carnival sense of “fun house.” What they mean is a dark, cavernous maze full of high-tech gadgetry and minimum-wage college students trained to scare the bejabbers out of you every time you round a blind corner. So successful are these attractions that they now have their own trade association and hold annual conventions dedicated to the fine art of devising ever more devious means of inducing hysterical states just this side of heart attack while avoiding messy litigation.

Niagara Falls has not one, not two, but six fully functioning haunted-house attractions, including the plot-heavy Nightmares Fear Factory (a vengeance-seeking Victorian businessman named Abraham Mortimer roves the halls of his abandoned coffin factory), the mildly confusing medieval-themed Mystery Maze, the Horror Manor, the House of Frankenstein, the kill-two-birds-with-one-stone Haunted House of Wax (on the American side), and the one considered the scariest by aficionados of the genre, Screamers House of Horror, in which a Freddy Krueger lookalike stands outside to beckon you in and, once inside, hissing snakes wrap themselves around your legs and you watch your own severed arm crash to the floor as Jason Voorhees materializes before you clutching a machete.

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STANDARD NUMBER EIGHT: Any world-class tourist attraction must feature either a boat, a train, a monorail, or a Swiss ski lift that goes nowhere.

In Chattanooga, for example, this would be the Chattanooga Choo Choo, which is actually a trolley that runs in a circle and is a particularly inane invention since the term “Chattanooga Choo Choo” was invented by Harry Warren for his 1941 song about the train that left from Track 29 at New York’s Penn Station en route to the Deep South. (In other words, there was never a choo choo in Chattanooga, just a train that passed through there.) Warren also wrote a song about Niagara Falls, but you would never know it because the song’s name is “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” This is why Buffalo rhymes with “Oh oh oh,” but the key lyric is “To Niagara in a sleeper/There’s no honeymoon that’s cheaper/And the train goes slow….” Unfortunately, the tradition of running off to Niagara Falls to: A) get married; B) honeymoon; or C) sneak around has apparently fallen into abeyance in recent years, although you can still get married aboard the famous boat-to-nowhere called the Maid of the Mist.

The Maid of the Mist is a rather ungainly ferry that for 165 years has made perhaps the shortest journey of any vessel in the world. It goes from a dock on the Canadian side to a point about 1,000 feet upriver where it sits in the basin underneath Horseshoe Falls, groaning against the current, while everyone gets wet in their souvenir Maid of the Mist raincoat. And there’s a fairly convoluted legend about the vessel’s namesake, an Indian maiden who was virginally sacrificed by being tossed over the falls to assuage the Thunder God, and then there’s something in there about a giant water snake, and supposedly her spirit is trapped behind the plumes like Jimmy Hoffa is trapped in the Giants Stadium end zone.

Niagara Falls and the Maid of the Mist once again outpoint all comers, surpassing even the lameness of the painfully cute San Francisco cable cars and the Catskill Mountain Railroad.

STANDARD NUMBER NINE: There must be a long-running IMAX film that sucks but has its own permanent theater.

Most tourist towns have some kind of natural attraction that they can cobble into an IMAX film experience, usually by strapping the camera onto helicopter struts and flying over a bald knob or a pear orchard while shooting at 96 frames per second so that when they run it at normal speed you feel like you’re skydiving. This thrill lasts for about, oh, two minutes. By the third time you see the effect, you’re sated, and then all that’s left is the dreaded narrative sequences, which tend to be body-painted summer-stock actors portraying Native Americans in loincloths who say things like, “When the white man brought Thunder Clap Smokestick, the spirit of Wise Rabbit left this land.” IMAX films always have to be written like a National Geographic documentary devised by peyote-smoking hippies, usually with a lot of underwater close-ups of back-stroking otters. If you have a good budget, you can hire Morgan Freeman to talk at the beginning and the end: “Some people say that north-central Iowa is God’s country. Others say it was made by the Devil. I guess that’s where the story of Silas Haverstreet begins….”

The Niagara IMAX Theatre has none of these problems. Besides the fact that the falls’ roar can be magnified a thousand times until it makes the floor rumble, plus the fact that they’ve acquired all the footage of every daredevil stunt in Niagara Falls history—including the ones where people didn’t survive—you don’t even need most of the high-def bells and whistles. By positioning themselves as champions of old-school Niagara stunts—for the record, 15 people have gone over the falls in a barrel and 10 have survived—Niagara IMAX is an activist for future Jackass-style behavior. For example, no one has crossed the falls on a tight wire since 1910, even though that was the preferred stunt in the 19th century, but Niagara IMAX and—get this—the city’s mayor support the efforts by Nik Wallenda, seventh-generation member of the Flying Wallendas, to change New York and Ontario’s laws so that he will be allowed to tightrope-walk across the gorge.

Forget your roller-coaster lookalikes. In IMAX land, Niagara Falls rules.

And finally…

STANDARD NUMBER TEN: Any great tourist town must make you believe that you are honoring God, country, and mankind by being present at these attractions.

This is where I have mixed emotions about Niagara Falls. I feel that the genius that created Clifton Hill and the 200-some-odd attractions around it—this P. T. Barnum confection, this seething mass of cacophonous, headache-inducing arcades, carnie games, and larger-than-life animatronic fun-manufacturing madness—should rightly belong to us. Why is this on the Canadian side? Since when do the Canadians do anything tacky? Don’t the Canadians scoff at us for precisely the low-rent redneck attitudes enshrined in Clifton Hill’s very pavement? There’s also a town called Niagara Falls on the American side of the river, and when you go looking for roadside attractions, what do you find? Two well-tended parks of the sort that have signs explaining the local sturgeon’s migratory patterns and one ugly Indian casino surrounded by vast asphalt parking lots. Otherwise: zero! Nada. Except for the aforementioned Haunted House of Wax, there’s nothing to see, nothing to do. It’s a New York town that makes you yearn to be in Rochester.

I gotta give it to the Canucks—they know how to do the whole patriotism thing. They sell Royal Canadian Mounted Police Stupid Hats in the gift shops. They sell maple-leaf sweatshirts. They sell stuffed-animal moose pillows and gourmet maple syrup. There are Bangladeshi women—for some reason the Indian subcontinent is overrepresented in Niagara Falls—who emerge from shops wearing “I Heart Canada” hoodies with Canadian flags tucked behind their ears. Somehow the Canadians reached out and snatched the falls away from us.

Niagara Falls even has a theater that has been hosting the Oh Canada Eh? musical revue for the past 17 years. The show features a singing Mountie, a singing hockey player, and a singing Anne of goddamn Green Gables. They do seven performances a week and tickets range from 30 up to 70 bucks, which used to be a bargain because it’s Canadian dollars, but the American dollar’s decline means that the Canadian dollar is now worth…a dollar. That alone is humiliating. Those are Branson numbers. Those are Myrtle Beach numbers. Those are—gulp—Gatlinburg numbers. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Dolly Parton booked into the Fallsview Casino showroom any day now. Robert Ripley, the creator of the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! comic strip, was an American. Ripley’s owner today, the Jim Pattison Group, has annual sales of $7.2 billion and is one of Canada’s largest private companies.

How can this be happening? We invented Vegas, for God’s sake. They have stolen our heritage.

Janette Sadik-Kahn

NEW YORK—I used to ride a bicycle in New York when it was still the Wild West out there.

We cyclists were so hated by cabdrivers that a lot of them—and I’m sorry to be racist about this, but it was always the Middle Eastern guys—would try to see how close they could get their front bumper to your rear wheel, so that if you were doing, say, 20 miles an hour, which is not uncommon if you’re hustling, you’d be in constant fear of your foot slipping off the pedal and causing a slight slowdown, which would get your bike flattened like a pita and your body churned into tahini paste.

The problem was, if you had to bail out of a situation like that—let’s say a sadistic Russian limo driver is pushing your ass up First Avenue and you’re waiting on that second wind to kick in and it’s not kicking in and the United Nations headquarters building is looming on the right and they have a security cordon on the left and they’ve got police vehicles and security vans and all kinds of spooky Men in Black bullstuff forming an obstacle course so that you’re afraid of, among other things, snipers—let’s say you’re in that situation and the Russki is not gonna let up, he’s not gonna slow down, you know he’s gonna run that gauntlet like Smokey and the Goddamn Siberian Bandit, then you have one choice and it’s not pretty.

What you’re gonna do is you’re gonna take the curb like Evel Knievel going over the Snake River Canyon—hopefully with more success than he had.

First, you need to execute as much of a complete 90-degree hard right turn as you’re capable of at that speed, which means you’re immediately gonna be in danger of going into one of those long slides underneath somebody’s car that ends up getting a million and a half views on YouTube. But if you do stay vertical and hit the curb straight-on, you’re gonna need to jerk your handlebars straight up so that you can avoid taking a header and making your spine a permanent part of the 12-foot UN security fence.

Then, when you’re actually on the sidewalk, you probably need to avoid hitting any babies in strollers or legless street performers, because at this point your principal liability is no longer physical but legal. Bring the bicycle to a complete stop as quickly as possible and ignore the half-dozen people who will now be yelling, “Get that bike off the sidewalk! You can’t ride on the sidewalk! What idiot rides his bike on the sidewalk?”

Pay no attention to these people who hate you almost as much as the Russian limo driver does. You’ve achieved your purpose. You’ve saved your life. Now your gaze should go immediately back to the limo, because you’re gonna watch him until he’s out of sight. What you’re hoping for is that he’ll get all gummed-up in traffic at the next red light. If this happens, you’re gonna make the most aggressive move a bicyclist ever makes. You’re gonna find a lane that goes straight to that red light. You’re gonna put your bicycle directly in front of his stopped car. You’re gonna rest your foot on his front bumper. And you’re gonna look into his eyes. You’re gonna do that for five seconds. I personally don’t like using the single-finger salute. Most bikers do use it, but I prefer the five-second stare—five seconds in which he wonders whether I’m going to block his car from proceeding. If you wanna add a little flair, you can get off the bike and check your tire. And if he has a livery license, stare at his license, too, as though you’re memorizing the number. I’m not gonna turn him in; I don’t have time to go to whatever bureaucratic hearing they have in whatever Brooklyn hellhole they have it in, but I figure I get four, five days of him wondering whether his phone is gonna ring.

Like I said, that’s how the situation was in the days of yore.

In 2007 Mayor Bloomberg appointed a new transportation commissioner named Janette Sadik-Khan, and she made it pretty clear pretty quickly that she was opposed to permanent spinal injury and brain-squashing on the city’s streets. This woman is a goddess. She has done more for the cyclist in four years on the job than anybody did in the previous one hundred. By sheer force of personality she’s managed to install 250 miles of dedicated bike lanes on the New York street grid.

Let me pause for a moment and repeat that:

In one of the world’s most notoriously bureaucratic cities, where it takes two years of hearings and community board meetings to get a new swing set on the park playground, Janette Sadik-Khan has authorized enough bicycles-only pavement to stretch from New York to Washington, DC, and beyond. By comparison, in the bike-crazy city of Austin, Texas, they have something called the Lance Armstrong Bikeway Project. It was authorized in 1999 and they still haven’t finished it, and when they do it finish it, it will be…six miles long.

So this woman is a rock star. If I knew where she lived—and I’m sure it’s somewhere bicycle-friendly, since she sometimes bikes to work at City Hall—I would organize the old bike-messenger gang, the guys who used to stack their bikes on the last subway car and talk about how much we hated the sneering Pakistani cabbies, and we would deliver her morning frappuccino in a spill-free thermos. I would volunteer to go scratch out the name of Robert Moses on every monument they’ve ever erected to him and pencil in Sadik-Khan’s name instead. I’m in awe of Janette Sadik-Khan, and one reason I know she’s doing the right thing is…

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Everybody else hates her.

Cindy Adams, the doyenne of New York Post columnists, calls her “the wacko nutso bike commissioner.” (This is especially nefarious since Sadik-Khan’s mother was herself a Post reporter.) A group in Brooklyn is suing her over the bike lane she put on Prospect Park West. She gets routinely booed at town hall meetings. City Hall people who have clashed with her call her “Chaka Khan,” and they definitely don’t mean the “I Feel For You” Chaka Khan, so you have to wonder if they really mean Genghis Khan. Mayor Bloomberg constantly gets buttonholed by people demanding an explanation as to why there’s so many friggin’ bike lanes everywhere and what’s he gonna do to control his transportation commissioner.

Why the heck do people hate bicycle lanes so much? I’ve been asking random people this question for a week, and you get the impression that a lot of folks who have never navigated a bike through the city consider the bike lanes elitist, hipsterish, and just fruity in general. The average man on the street gets especially annoyed by cycling gear, like pointy orange DayGlo helmets and purple thigh-enhancing spandex pants, as though the bike lane is some kind of Easter Parade for Tour de France wannabes named Esteban.

I think you have to be insane to ride one of those skinny-wheeled racing bikes on Manhattan’s streets, especially if you’re hunched down over handlebars set lower than your ankles, but people do it and if one of ’em got bird-dogged by a lead-foot Yemeni car-service terrorist, I would be the first to ride up and tap the guy’s side mirror and get him to back the frack off. But the new bike lanes make that unnecessary. We don’t have to go vigilante on these people anymore. If you put your big yellow ass in that bike lane, you’ve already got a major fine and a possible loss of your taxi-driver license.

So that’s not the real reason people don’t like the bicyclists. The real reason is that the guy on the bike is going faster than you. He doesn’t have to stop for anything. Some of the best bike lanes are right up against the curb and protected from auto traffic by a row of parked cars. This was an innovation dreamed up by Jan Gehl, the city of Copenhagen’s former master planner and now consultant to Janette Sadik-Khan.

Which only reinforces my opinion that she’s a genius. When I was a 19-year-old college student, I used to bike 22 miles roundtrip from Albertslund, Denmark, where I lived, to downtown Copenhagen, where the university was, without ever riding on a public street or—get this—even crossing a street with automobiles. In the greater Copenhagen area they have dedicated bike interstates. These roads are about 15 feet wide and they go under and over the automobile roads. So Janette Sadik-Khan went and found the guy that designed that system, gave him a consulting deal, and now they’re finding all these new ways to separate cars from bicycles.

Result: Bicycle ridership has doubled in four years, and pedestrian deaths are lower than at any period in a century.

I’m not saying that Janette Sadik-Khan is not a hipster. She’s also the person who closed down five blocks in Times Square and put out lawn chairs. She commissioned nine bike racks that were designed by—OK, this is embarrassing—David Byrne. She’s a big fan of those giant rocks that look like granite Wonderbras; they’re called bollards, and they block off streets with them and use them for anti-terrorism security around important buildings. She likes to close streets around the Broadway plazas (Madison Square, Herald Square) and put out epoxy gravel and metal chairs like we all live in the friggin’ Jardin des Tuileries.

So OK, yeah, she’s a yuppie and a hipster. I still love her. She’s not afraid to mess with the delivery-truck drivers, who are second only to cabbies as the bicyclist’s natural enemies. She understands the simple principle that the average bike weighs 20 pounds and the average car weighs four THOUSAND pounds. That’s 4,000 pounds of metal that mangles the bicyclist at the same time it’s protecting the automobile driver. So I don’t care if that bicycle guy is doing headstands on his seat and bouncing his bike off the hood of your car—you’re still flat wrong if you get even remotely aggressive toward him while safely ensconced in your armored attack vehicle.

In the old days, if you messed with us and we had to chase you down, we would have just broken off your antenna. But now Janette is gonna get all Chaka Khan on your ass, and she’s bringing the Talking Heads.

Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn

NEW YORK—About once every hundred years the French nation presents America with a monumental gift.

In 1781 it was 29 warships, 3,200 sailors, and 4,500 soldiers who hooked up with George Washington at Yorktown and blasted General Cornwallis to smithereens.

In 1886 it was La Liberté éclairant le monde, the monstrosity of a sculpture that we couldn’t pronounce and so came to be known as the Statue of Liberty.

In 2011 the French gift to America is Dominique Gaston André Strauss-Kahn, the savior of tabloid journalism as we know it.

Strauss-Kahn—or “Le Perv,” as he’s universally known now that the New York Daily News beat out the New York Post in the heated competition to assassinate his reputation in the fewest possible headline characters—is currently being held under 24-hour armed guard in a $14-million townhouse on a street named after that great libertine and lover of all things French, Benjamin Franklin, and I can say with some assurance that we’re planning to keep Le Perv on Manhattan Island for a long, long time.

Strauss-Kahn has already done more for the economy than all the stimulus and bailout money lavished on Wall Street over the past three years. Just when the American journalism industry seemed on the brink of disaster, with publications failing left and right, Le Perv has become the tabloid story that will end up paying for at least 50 new Rupert Murdoch employees alone. Already le scandale de la femme de chambre threatens to eclipse both the Michael Jackson Moppet-Fondling Trial and the Conspiracy to Kill Princess Di as the greatest evergreens of the past 20 years. You might have to go all the way back to O. J. Simpson to recall an ever-evolving story this hot, but this one is much better: O. J. was unknown in Europe and too much of a West Coast crybaby anyway. “DSK” not only reverberates in New York and Paris, but we have Schadenfreude abounding in London and every Third World capital the International Monetary Fund ever held hostage.

What’s strange is that Strauss-Kahn and his supporters, including a wife the tabloids invariably describe as a “millionaire journalist” (implying she’s the equivalent of an aristocratic FedEx delivery man), don’t seem to understand what’s going on.

Here, let me help.

First of all, his name alone is an enchanted forest of easy bigotry: “Dominique Strauss-Kahn,” even without the “Gaston” and the “André,” is simultaneously French, German, Jewish, effeminate (as opposed to the more masculine “Dominic”), hyphenated, privileged, wealthy, and evocative of the burly lyric-baritone rapscallion in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical who beats street urchins and feeds them gruel. Add to this the fact that he was until recently the head of the IMF, regarded by farmers in Iowa as a Fifth Column of the Trilateral Commission, then that he’s a card-carrying socialist who, as a youth, was a card-carrying communist, and you have a prepackaged Hungry Man Dinner for every Francophobe with a laptop. If the name were any easier to pronounce or remember, it would be used as the villain on a Disney World thrill ride:

Enter the dark caverns of the Strauss-Kahn IF YOU DARE, then experience 5g of centripetal power as the highest, longest, fastest, and most insane German roller coaster in the world beats you up like a West African domestic!

Of course, we would have to vary the theme at Disneyland Paris.

Meanwhile, Le Perv has obliged the media by occupying a “house arrest” residence that: A) has only one entrance; B) has only one tenant (Le Perv and family); and C) requires constant visits by delivery people, all of whom are happy to describe their encounters and/or what they delivered. The Post has, of course, established a permanent bureau on the street outside. Speaking of those deliveries, early choices included Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, skinless chicken breasts, and Poland Spring water, but later ones involved $300 takeout from gourmet restaurants that would have delighted Marie Antoinette. Thanks to the Post, we know that Le Perv failed to tip the deliveryman on a six-bag grocery order. Why? There can only be one reason: because he’s French!

Finally we have, in one human being, the essence of everything we love to hate about the French. Strauss-Kahn is not merely a dirty old man with a Pepé Le Pew accent—although he is that—but he’s a punching bag for every American waiter who ever got stiffed by a French tourist and every American tourist who ever got snubbed by a French waiter. When Strauss-Kahn was hauled before the magistrate for his bail hearing, he showed up with an army of lawyers and made faces throughout the proceeding as though to say, “I am being paraded before the rabble.”

Yes! cried the press corps. He has no clue where he is! He’s going to play the role to a T! Vive la France!

Lest you think I’m exaggerating, just a few examples from the first two weeks of Strauss-Kahn coverage:

No merci for Le Perv (Daily News headline when bail was denied)

FROG LEGS IT! (Post headline when bail was granted)

Boor de France (Daily News describing his encounter with the Sofitel maid)

Le shot de mug (Post caption under the official police photo)

What Gaul! (Post describing his claim the sex was consensual)

His defenders in Paris—including Jack Lang, best known in the US for being the culture minister who instituted quotas limiting the number of American movies that could be shown in France, thereby making the world safe for Gérard Depardieu psychodramas filmed with a fisheye lens—were outraged by Strauss-Kahn’s treatment, beginning with his Perp Walk, which I thought was quite mild by Manhattan standards. Apparently Le Perv failed to avail himself of any shaving utensils that might have been available at the Special Victims Unit in Spanish Harlem, where he had spent two days being vacuumed for DNA and trotted out in a lineup so that the maid could ID him. When you’re 62 and have thinning white hair and bags under your eyes on a good day, you don’t really wanna go before a hundred cameras without your La Roche-Posay facial moisturizer treatment.

But DSK fans were even more incensed by the fact that he spent several days on Rikers Island, even though the warden made sure he had a private cell, probably so that no one from the Aryan Brotherhood with a snake-eye-dice tattoo could shank him into the kind of pain zone normally only experienced by directors at a Cannes Film Festival press conference. The implication was that diplomats and/or aristocrats and/or rich French guys should be released to the Hotel Pierre security staff or something, not made to share Sloppy Joes with guys named Flava Loaf Skinny Trigga. They were assuming that there must be some other jail for Europeans pulled off Air France jumbo liners ten minutes before they would have zoomed into international airspace, bound for Polanskiland.

Again, there was apparently no understanding that this was a lose-lose for Strauss-Kahn no matter how the justice system ended up dealing with him.

And yet.

And yet we do have this little thing called the presumption of innocence. This means that, no matter how French you are, we will allow you to be treated as American in the courtroom, and we won’t use your Frenchness against you. To prove it, I’m going to take Strauss-Kahn’s lawyers at their word when they say that the sexual encounter in Room 2806 of the Sofitel on 44th Street on Saturday, May 14, 2011, was “consensual,” and we’re going to go through each stage of the…what should we call it?...The Encounter.

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Fortunately we have two sources of information as to what may have happened that day. One is the actual indictment. Another is the account an NYPD detective gave to the Times shortly after the alleged victim was interviewed. We’re going to take this chronology, emotionally transport ourselves into the mindset of a $2,000-an-hour defense lawyer laboring to secure Strauss-Kahn’s freedom, put the best possible interpretation on every factoid, and we will even include in our reckoning an overriding mitigating circumstance similar to cases where the defendant is mentally retarded—namely, that Strauss-Kahn is French. (This will primarily serve the purpose of resolving the major unanswered question, i.e., “What was he thinking?”)

Voilà! La séance commence!

Close your eyes and imagine the Gaumont logo and ineffably sad accordion music as the title comes up full:

LA RENCONTRE
Un Film d’une Liaison Triste

Part 1: Le Rendezvous
At 12:01 p.m. a 32-year-old Guinean woman uses her security key to push open the outer door of the Imperial Suite, singing out, “Housekeeping!”

Strauss-Kahn, down a hallway and apparently showering, hears the voice and thinks, “Ah! A lilting female French accent from West Africa! Guinea, if I’m not mistaken! De Gaulle never should have granted independence! They’ve maxed out their Special Drawing Rights, but perhaps they’re here to negotiate the favored-nations loan rate for the additional $550 million since 2008. I must investigate at once!”

Part 2: La Seduction
La femme assumes the $3,000 suite is empty and proceeds down the outer hallway, checking the conference room, the living room, and the bedroom, at which time she encounters l’homme nu, or what is known in this country as a buck-nekkid dude dangling his stuff as he busts out of the bathroom. She shrieks as he rushes toward her, misunderstanding his intentions.

Strauss-Kahn, totally smitten by la belle jeune femme noire, takes advantage of her temporary disorientation to wrap her in his arms and fling her onto the king-sized bed, thinking, “We are soulmates! I saw it in her eyes! She is an African Anouk Aimée and I am Jean-Louis Trintignant in his prime!”

Cue the Francis Lai musical score for Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman as the two figures twirl on the bed and he tries to remove her pantyhose, then gently grasps her groin area in a heedless act of la passion de l’amant fou.

Part 3: L’Interlude
La jeune femme effrayée fights her way free and bolts from the bedroom, but Strauss-Kahn has seen this kind of coy behavior before and he’s stricken with remorse. “How could I, the Great Seducer, have miscalculated so egregiously?” he asks himself.

“Ma chérie! ” he calls after her. “You are not from Guinea-Bissau? You are from Guinea-Conakry? I am so ashamed!”

Strauss-Kahn then chases her down the hallway, cuts off her escape, bolts the door, and begs her to understand that he mistook her accent for the lesser of two French colonial possessions. He then drags her back to the bathroom, protesting that she doesn’t understand the stress of a man burdened by a life of boring international conferences at which the most attractive woman is likely to be Angela Merkel. Does he see a softening in her attitude? A glimmer of understanding?

But then again, he has no choice. He’s entranced as much by her cotton/polyester-blend high-necked square-collared official maid’s uniform as he is by her blazing eyes, tearful now as she breaks down in apparent agonies of overwhelming passion.

Part 4: Le Point Culminant
Strauss-Kahn knows what he must do. He must show her the meaning of “French.” He places her head in a position that would constitute a Criminal Sexual Act in the First Degree at the moment that her mouth touches his manhood were it not for the fact that by now their lovers’ passion is heedless and abandoned. He goes for it a second time, adding another possible ten years to his prison term, according to District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., who is of Scottish, not French, origin and therefore doesn’t understand the subtleties of l’orgasme.

Once the tender assignation has been consummated, la jeune femme once again runs for the exit, this time knowing that her life has changed.

Part 5: Le Dénouement
The lovers are spent. In the afterglow she runs to tell her manager. He dresses quickly and checks out of the hotel.

La mélancolie.

La vie est un mystère.

As Strauss-Kahn heads for JFK Airport, he wonders, “What was her name?”

As she heads to St. Luke’s Hospital, she wonders, “What was his name?”

C’est l’amour.

But they both know it can never be. He will spend the next few months wearing an electronic ankle bracelet and protected by his jealous millionaire-journalist wife. His abandoned maid(en) will think of what could have been.

On Monday, Strauss-Kahn was arraigned on seven criminal counts, and during his walk from the car to the courthouse steps, he had to pass by a large group of hotel maids shouting, “Shame on you! Shame on you!”

Which, if you think about it, is kind of hot.