Rémy
30, Nice, France
The first thing Rémy told me was “I’ll fuck you like a dirty whore.”
We drove to Alsace one summer afternoon, to a small and hilly forgotten village near the German border, a few kilometers north of Strasbourg. The sun entered every corner of the wide-open two-story house, bathing the worn-out couch, and an antique upright piano. Piles of books were scattered across the living room. The garden at the back didn’t have a fence, and ended where the bush started, somewhere beyond a river I could only hear. Rémy was visiting his mother for the weekend. He sat across the garden table and threw his backpack at his feet. It was the first time I spent time alone with my stepbrother.
He looked like a gothic warrior returning from battle down the pit of a heavy metal concert, armed with black boots, torn jeans, a Nightwish T-shirt and a long goatee.
His girlfriend passed behind him, caressed his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek. She was elegant and noticeably younger than he — an aspiring nurse with a baby face. “I love you, dirty slut!” he shouted in a spasm.
I was ten when I first heard about Tourette. In a TV film, a young French countess, wearing a long white summer dress, was swearing at the guests in the garden of her castle. The thought of that lady never left me.
Rémy’s piercing blue eyes were framed by thick eyebrows, strong cheekbones and long, wavy, light brown hair attached in the back, that fell below his shoulder blades. His intimidating look hid a kindness betrayed by the dimples in the corner of his smile. He opened a bottle of Kronenbourg and offered me one. “I was diagnosed with Tourette when I was twelve,” he said.
His mum had tried to reverse-engineer his symptoms and influence his subconscious by repeating kinder words like “love” and “nice” but that only partially worked. “It expanded my vocabulary rather than replace it,” he joked.
“Kids at school were merciless,” he continued, “and teachers were incompetent. My parents tried tutoring and specialised schools, but the outbursts of energy made it hard for me to focus. At sixteen, I dropped out of high school, locked myself up in an apartment in Strasbourg and played video games for two years. I found shelter in the gaming community. But it was lonely.”
“Whore!”
The realisation that this life didn’t lead anywhere he wanted to be, the lack of money and desire to be independent pushed him to look for a job. “Who hires someone without a degree who insults people?” he joked again.
Under these circumstances, Rémy qualified for a long list of government assistance programs in France, and I asked him why he didn’t make use of them. “I am not disabled, I can work,” he responded, with the assurance of someone who has nothing to prove.
Rémy loved animals. “A few weeks after being fired from a slaughterhouse, I replied to an online ad from a pet store that was hiring. I miraculously managed to hold back the swearing during the phone interview. I got everyone excited and could start the following Monday. The job was in Nice, eight hundred kilometers away from home. A few days later, I found a flat and moved my life south.”
“They fired me on my first day,” he said looking at the bottom of his beer bottle.
He was left half a country away from friends and family, in an apartment with no bed, and no job to pay his rent. With no apartment to get back to neither, he decided to give the city another chance.
“One afternoon,” he continued, “passing by the pizzeria down my street, I asked if they were looking for help. They weren’t, but hired me anyway. For deliveries. The job was meaningless, but the people changed my life.”
The place was a small restaurant owned by a Swiss French who employed Moroccans and Algerians. They were at the center of a tight immigrant community in which most people, like him, felt like misfits. In an unlikely alliance of dropouts, they grew closer, trading teases for racist jokes and Arabic swear words for death growls. They also introduced him to marijuana. “Vaping reduces the frequency of my outbursts,” he explained.
“The manager offered me a deal: he gave me three marijuana plants, with all the equipment to grow them, in exchange for two thirds of the production. In exchange, I could keep the rest for my personal use.”
“A few months later,” he continued, “I had an unlimited supply of free weed and a job working with friends.”
Unfortunately, this enterprise, too, came to an abrupt end.
For a few years, Rémy had been saving to join 70000 Tons of Metal, a heavy metal floating festival on a cruise ship that departed from Miami. A few days after he arrived in Florida, he got a call from the French police: his apartment had been vandalised. Cops had discovered the weed greenhouse and suspected him of running an illegal drug operation. Things became even more suspicious when Rémy explained he was stuck on a Heavy Metal festival cruise ship in the US, having lost his passport — all while calling the cop a “dirty whore.”
Three weeks later, he showed up at the police station where they sat him for interrogation in the large central office space, at the desk of the officer he’d insulted on the phone. He explained that the weed calmed him down, that he didn’t have any prescription, and that he got the plants and equipment from a friend. “I was so nervous that my outbursts got terrible,” Rémy remembered, milking his goatee. “The interrogation lasted barely five minutes, it was an incredible mess. In the end, they let me go without a warning, but they kept the weed.”
After five years at the pizzeria, Rémy qualified for a governmental retraining program. He was struggling to make ends meet and needed to switch careers.
“I discovered scuba diving watching Cousteau’s The Silent World,” he remembered. “It might sound like an unusual line of work for someone with Tourette, but I don’t have any attacks or spams underwater. I don’t swear, and the fish don’t listen,” he joked. “Underwater, everyone communicates using sign language,” he explained. “It’s the most peaceful place on earth.”
“What do you do when it’s not diving season?” I asked.
“I sometimes go back to the pizzeria,” he said. “But mostly, I work on my boat.”
“Your boat?” I asked surprised.
“Yes,” he said with a large smile. “A month ago, an acquaintance from the club donated his old boat to me. So I’m starting my own scuba diving business!”
Somewhere close to one percent of the population in western countries is diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. That’s more than the population of Lyon in France, and two million people in the United States. To me, Remy was an anonymous hero of our time, with hands marked by manual labour, a heart marked by struggle and a kindness so deep people gifted him sailboats.
“Every now and then, in bars, cafés and on the streets, strangers walk up to me and shake my hand,” Rémy said when I told him my admiration. “They don’t say anything, but I can guess in their smiles that they have a friend, a relative, or a son with Tourette who is hiding in a room somewhere, afraid to face the world.”
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