Ted Walch
Chapter One - Finding the Kid
August 2018. Los Angeles. Dodger Stadium. The game is over. My former student, Jack Flaherty, now a starting pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals, threw a great game. I’m heading to greet him. Suddenly, another former student rushes toward me out of the departing crowd. “Mr. Walch. Mr. Walch. I can’t believe this. I was going to contact you. I want to show you something.”
His name comes to me. Trey. Cinema Studies. Period 8. Graduated three years ago. Must be in college now.
Without further prelude, Trey rips open his shirt, buttons literally flying. He’s eager for the reveal. And there it is, freshly tattooed just above his heart, the French title of a movie I teach: Les Quatre Cents Coups
In English, The 400 Blows. 1959. Directed by François Truffaut. The translation makes no sense. Les Quatre Cents Coups is a French expression, which simply means making mischief. Usually reserved for mothers to their adolescent children as they go out to play – “Cesse de faire les 400 coups.” Don’t get into trouble. Don’t make mischief.
And there was Trey, the kind of kid, like Antoine Doinel in the movie, who did get into trouble from time to time -- nothing serious, but just enough mischief to hold the boredom of youth at bay.
I looked at him with astonishment.
“Trey! What in the world prompted you …”
“I had to do it, Mr. Walch. That movie changed my life. You changed my life.”
Given the permanent addition to his body, I took Trey at his word. Little did he know that the movie had changed my life as well and that I was nearing the end of my own journey of making mischief with this movie whose title was stamped so near to his heart, a movie that had launched me on a journey not only to Paris but into my past and into detours and dead ends and surprising intersections. I had a tattoo of a different kind, yet one as near my heart as his: a drumbeat of memory that was to reverberate in ways just as surprising as encountering Trey at Dodger Stadium.
I grew up in Sedalia, Missouri, a town of 25,000 or so, just north of the Ozarks and home to the Missouri Pacific Railroad and Scott Joplin. I rambled Sedalia’s streets, as both Truffaut and his protagonist Antoine Doinel roamed Paris’s streets, looking for movies. They were my refuge. I could hide there – even from myself. That’s what an adolescent does...