Recollections

There is just too much to write.

Too many things happened in too many places with too many people under too many elaborate circumstances for me to attempt a narrative. I cannot; I will not. Think of this instead as a pile of what hit the editing-room floor of my memory: a madcap collage of the last six weeks of my life.

I met a couple guys in the tiny hilltop town of Biassa, which is somewhere near the Cinque Terra. The Cinque Terra is a place you really should look up.
These two guys were named “P.J. and Clyde” and were documentary filmmakers from the Bronx. They’d been wandering southern Europe for about a month, surreptitiously taking pictures of the awe-inspiring moustaches they encountered there. They had about three digital cameras apiece, straining with the digital weight of hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of moustaches.
“Look at this one,” they said to me. “It looks like a fucking topiary.”
“Christ,” the other guy said. “Where’s the one that looked like an exhaust manifold? You have to see this shit, it will change your life.”

I was stranded in Venice during a transit strike and met a revoltingly well-groomed little Canadian guy who volunteered to let me stay with his sister in Vienna. I gladly accepted, since by then my plans were (as expected, admittedly) in a smoking ruin and I had no idea where I was headed.
Unfortunately, he didn’t stay when we finally hit Vienna some eighteen hours later: he just introduced us in the middle of the Westbahnhof train station and hopped the next ride to Munich. I thanked his sister and her scruffy boyfriend profusely and offered to take them out for a drink.
“We’re vegetarians and we hate beer,” she said.
I stared at her.
She stared at me.
I stared at her boyfriend. He stared back.
Silence descended. Crickets chirped. Somewhere very far away, a monkey gibbered and threw a handful of its own shit at another monkey.

They turned out to have a small studio apartment just on the Ring, near the big Soviet monument. And that meant they slept in the bed and I slept on the floor next to the bed, which made for some rather awkward nights. On the last night, I came back rather late (it’s a long story) and found some badly-bearded backpacker sleeping in my place on the floor. I stood there for a few minutes, gaping and thinking, “Did…did they think he was me?”

They were asleep and were still sleeping when I got up the next morning and went to Bratislava. I will never know.

In both Florence and Venice I stayed in these sort of campground things—pretty much the only imaginable intermediate step between a shitty hostel and actually sleeping on the ground with the rowdy hobos. These places consist of a lot of semi-permanent tents with two tiny cots in them, all packed together in places that are quite distant from the parts of the city you (and everyone else) actually want to see.
In those rude and vulgar places, I overheard these astonishing things, while lying on those murderous cots, trying to sleep and ignore the bugs:

Female voice (in German-accented English): Say something dirty to me.
Male voice: Kitchen.

Australian female voice: Have you slimed yet?
Male voice: Mmmffpphhff.
Female voice: Wank it in me shitter!

Male voice: Baby, my dick is vast and crooked, like the Soviet sickle.

Low-budget hobo travel is an interesting study in the extremes of the human experience. In Vienna I attended some sort of outdoor festival (I was told by several people that it was the largest in Europe, with fourteen stages and two and a half million people—at first I doubted, but the evening convinced me). I have no idea what they were celebrating, except that it seemed to involve a great deal of Eastern European gypsy ska music and wanton, aggressive debauchery on a scale I had never before imagined. It took place on a long island in the middle of the Danube: the metro stop, of course, was at the far southern end, whereas the stage where I was supposed to meet people was at the far northern end, some five-plus kilometers away. The afternoon walk up the island was pleasant: the 2 AM walk back, wading ankle-deep in the unspeakable bodily fluid cocktail of two and a half million people was hellish. I will not speak of the things I saw there, lest you never sleep again.
The next night in Vienna, I saw Mozart’s “Magic Flute” at the Opera House and met the best girl in Europe.

My first night in Paris started at a fancy-dress dinner party at the house of the father of my friend M. M will never read this, but out of respect, he will remain nameless, because after the pleasant chit-chat, the dinner-party conversation, the excellent food and better wine and so forth (in fact, about ten hours after, so that we’re clear) M leaned unsteadily over to me and slurred something about how I’d drank all the scotch.
I squinted up from the New York Times crossword puzzle I was doing to where M and his two friends were sprawled on red velvet couches with no less than five hookers on their arms, took in the large Slavic pimps and bartenders leering at us from the dark recesses of the basement hellhole, considered the small forest of empty bottles of €300 champagne and wreckage of overflowing ashtrays and the other assorted detritus of young men trying to slowly kill themselves, and realized Aw, Christ, I’m the soberest one here. It’s up to me to drag these fools out of here before they either get shanked or crabs.
“Trevor,” M slurred, “this is the craziest night.”
“Man,” I told him, “this is a pretty regular Wednesday for me.”

Those were rough nights in Paris. We never got home before ten in the morning, where we would pass M’s mother and sister on the stairs or in the kitchen, stinking like a distillery, coated in grime and secondhand nicotine and Christ probably doesn’t even know what else, because I don’t recall that guy partying too much. After four mind-withering nights and shellshocked days, it all culminated with four of us running pell-mell up the through the Right Bank on the morning of Bastille Day. There were camera people everywhere: apparently the Romanian coverage of the celebration prominently features me kissing a French girl in the middle of the Champs d’Elysee, one of her feet in the air, neat lines of tanks flanking us on either side, and the Arc d’Triomph directly behind us.

There were other things in Paris. Clubs we got thrown out of, smoky bars we drank in and talked about the sorts of things you talk about in smoky bars in Paris. There was a fancy garden party at which I got to use the entirety of my French on a gorgeous Estonian girl: Mon francais et un catastroph mais votre décolletage et tres bien. Through a thicket of incorrect pronouns, molested vowels, and missing conjugations, that means something along the lines of “My French is a catastrophe but your cleavage is very good.” I tell you, they were swooning in the aisles. I went to Versailles, where they have a room called “The Drawing-Room of Plenty,” and that left me hoping greatly for a “Closet of Conspicuous Opulence” and perhaps “Toilet of Being Absurdly Goddamn Rich.”

I met L at the Opera in Vienna. We were sitting on the stairs inside, waiting to be shown to our places and she asked me the time. We exchanged pleasantries and jokes and life stories and she agreed to a drink afterwards at a pub on the beach of the Danube canal.
My heart tumbled like the stock exchange when a Republican gets elected.
L is younger than me. She is the mayor of her village in Flanders. She speaks Dutch, French, English, German, Latin, and Greek. She is about to write her thesis (on an obscure Austrian author whom she knows personally) and will then have a Masters in both German and English, after which she will go for her doctorate in International Relations in Antwerp. She plays a tiny accordion.

“Have you seen the film Before Sunrise?” she asked me.
“I haven’t.”
She smiled. “You’re in it right now.”

We went to Bratislava together the next day. On the train she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Are you happy?”

We had known each other nineteen hours.

Later: “I’m not,” she answered. “But not because of you. I have a boyfriend.” Of course you do, I thought loudly. I have never met a single woman in my life.

She lives in a large, rambling student house in Leuven, a lovely university city east of Brussels, which was pillaged and burned by the Germans in 1914. She smuggled me into one of her friends rooms, since the girl was home for the summer and that’s where I stayed while I explored what may one day be my adopted country. L showed me around Brussels, around Leuven, and around the particulars of finding the best fries (since the Belgians invented them, after all) in the world. She told me her right eye is slightly lazy, but the only way you notice is that when she laughs, her eyelid blinks with astonishing speed: it gives the impression she is winking merrily, and it is the world’s most endearing mannerism.

I offered her my hat at the train station in Leuven. My hat is important to me; I have had it at least half a decade and have a number of rousing stories about where and how I got it; none of them are true. Some of you may remember when I got it, but none of you know how, and I assure you I will never tell. It has, however, been through a great deal with me, and if anything I own carries any sentimental value, it is that hat.

She wouldn’t take it. She liked me less in Belgium than in Vienna, when I was more mysterious, more romantic: an unshaven American familiar with the history of the Hapsburgs and The Third Man, who can walk into a sushi joint and order in Japanese (abominable Japanese, but she doesn’t need to know that), who has a passport full of stamps and a head full of stories. In Belgium I had become more ordinary; worse, I was plotting the next few years of my future and (I have been told) I tend to get very quiet and even more facially placid than usual when I’m plotting. She was stressed about her thesis, and I was there at an inconvenient time. Her boyfriend was less than pleased: he apparently saw me from a distance and spent the next three days hiding from me. She liked me less in Belgium and wouldn’t accept the hat.

I met a South African abalone salesman in Florence named Hannes Human, which raises the possibility that he may be an alien in disguise who has failed miserably at being inconspicuous. We had an elaborate discussion about Averroes.

As I mentioned, the strange thing about traveling the way I do, low to the ground and with precisely zero amenities, is that your life oscillates between abject poverty and astonishing opulence. On the one hand, you grow accustomed to significant periods of time without food or sleep, and you begin to conceive of sitting up all night on trains with several loud Turkish men to be a normal weeknight. On the other hand, you spend your days in Versailles or Schönbrunn or the Hofburg or the Basilica of St. Peter’s. You are utterly dependent on the good graces of others, often complete strangers, yet you are perennially alone. Your solitude does not bring privacy, however, and despite the common grandeur which surrounds you, you grow inured to the feeling of unwashed hair and unwashed clothes, to cold showers and scrubbing yourself with dish soap, since that’s all you could find. It is a strange existence, that of the modern young nomad, where transnational travel is easy, but getting from the damn train station to wherever you’re staying is a feat of Herculean proportion. It is not for everyone, or even most people, but it is the best and worst of life compressed, and without it, in my estimation, one misses out on pinnacles of the human experience which are not otherwise available.