***
Eleven years later, in 1970, I was again lying on my back pulling a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, this time on foreign soil. Lying in the dirt of that backyard seemed like it was just yesterday but also felt like a million years ago. It was not so dark this time. It was more like dusk, except it was artificial; there were no windows in this cell.
It was a big cell. I think jail cells in foreign countries tend to be bigger than in the United States. Certainly, the conversation was different. I was the only American there, and from what I could hear, at best there were a couple of my fellow inmates who could speak some English—very deficient, broken English.
With no windows to guide my sense of day or night, I could only guess, and my guess was that it was night. Everyone has his own internal clock, and mine told me the meal cart should be coming soon. The cell—partly in light and partly in shadow, purposely I’m sure for the different whims of the variety of characters it held—was unusually noisy, almost as if it were starting to have a little heartbeat.
I was thinking about luck and what life is. Is a person’s life good or bad depending on his decision to go through this door or that door, down this street or another, or speak to this person and not the next? It’s certainly curious how life happens. Why we do the things we do? Is there a rhyme or reason to our decisions and experiences?
Carl and I seemed to have avoided a terrible outcome all those years ago. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if we had been caught. How lucky were we to have made that split-second, almost magical decision to run on separate sides of the huge hedge?
I began to ponder what a good friend told me about two months prior as we were going to go to sleep on a deserted beach off the coast of Spain. As I had found myself doing more than ever on this journey, we had been talking about the elusive meaning of life. We had both read some philosophic books recently; bumming around Europe lends itself to such luxuries. He had read more than I had. I remember one of his quotes from the French philosopher and writer, Albert Camus: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you only are looking for the meaning of life.” So many of us seem to want to find—or feel they must find—the meaning of life. Is there one? Is there a script we all follow or is life haphazard? Where are the answers? As I traveled, I wondered, do I even know the questions yet? I was wondering about a lot of things, wondering how I got here, wondering how this time would be different—because this time I did get caught.
How many split-second decisions does one make in one’s life? How many turn out OK and how many don’t? Are those moments the moments of being and feeling… lucky? Sometimes you escape, but sometimes you don’t.
Out of the corner of my eye, as I started to put out my cigarette, I saw movement towards me. The figure eyed the guard on the other side of the bars, straining to be nonchalant as he walked in my direction. He started to mumble something in German. But as he slowed down just a bit to walk by me, he half-whispered in stilted English, “We have plan; we break out of here tonight.”
Even though my mouth was closed, my eyes popped wide open and my mind yelled an earthshaking… “WHAT?!”
Paris
With great expectations in the spring of 1970,
on my flight from JFK through Iceland, landing in Luxembourg,
I wrote in my travel journal:
“My life will change this year
and it will never be the same again”
When or how I wasn’t sure,
but I knew the process would begin in Paris.
2.
Enchanté Paris
7:30 PM, April 8, 1970
The rain had been unrelenting, but at this moment I was dry and huddled alone under Café Le Select’s dripping awning. There were a couple of people inside, but as I looked down Boulevard Montparnasse and then over to Boulevard Raspail, it was quiet. Everyone was afraid of and fed up with the rain. It was the second time that I’d been in this famous café, dodging the rain, feeling each day more and more confident and Parisian.
“S’il vous plait, un Pernod,” I said and nodded to the waiter. I had only been here a couple of days, but almost instantaneously I sensed this was my city. I had never felt as excited, or for that matter as afraid of finally living in my own skin. As I flipped the collar of my corduroy sport coat up to protect me from the cool breeze, it was clear the waiter didn’t trust me to pour and make my own drink. As only a French waiter can, he made me feel inadequate and eager at the same time. I watched him place the cube of sugar on a petite spoon delicately resting on the rim of a small glass. There was no doubt he was being rude, but I could also see this was an art to him as he poured the Pernod over the cube and lit the sugar as carefully as Picasso would have added a dash of color to one of his paintings. After a long minute or two, he gently poured some ice-cold water, filling the glass halfway. And as I took a sip, that soothing licorice taste brought a smile to my lips. I gazed at the rainy mist slowly but persistently falling. I felt the nearby presence of Jake Barnes from Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and I also imagined Larry Darrell from W. Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge quite possibly ordering a Pernod here or up the street at Le Dôme or La Coupole. Even though I’d tried to read Maugham’s book several times and failed, if I’d watched the movie The Razor’s Edge on TV once, I watched it a thousand times. That film was one of the most important inspirations for my international adventure.
Jake in The Sun Also Rises was a correspondent for The New York Herald in Paris. His life, in the movie version, looked wonderful. Paris looked wonderful. As I watched him on his Paris streets, I started to envision myself there also. My vision, how I pictured myself, was very different from a lot of other young travelers coming to Europe at this time. I didn’t see myself as a hippie. I wanted to be the Tyrone Power of 1970.
I imagined myself always in suits. My Parisian friends would be also dressed to the nines. My acquaintances would probably be successful creatives in art, words and fashion. I would work for a prestigious ad agency. I’d create great ads. I’d probably be around beautiful French models so often that I would get to know most of them and date some. If you wanted to find me, you’d check Paris’s best restaurants, cafes or nightclubs. I would have a great apartment with views of the Seine and the Île de la Cité. I saw myself at sunset, as Notre Dame was bathed in a mystical yellow and orange glow, sipping a glass of perfectly balanced Cabernet as I opened my gold-stamped cigarette case with one hand and paused for a moment to decide whether to pick a Marlboro or one of the French Gauloise, for I always kept both on hand.
But Jake didn’t only know Paris. He traveled often. Most importantly, he traveled to Spain. I wondered about Spain. Yes, Paris had to be my first stop, but I didn’t know any French, while I did know some Spanish. I wondered, was Spain very different from France and especially Paris? Jake was so carefree, in control of himself and his city. He had fun wherever he went, whatever he did. I didn’t know if I would ever find out about Spain; I was just finding out about Paris, and the more I delved into the city, the way of life and the history, I realized that what I wanted to learn might take me not days or weeks but frankly (and I worried about this) years and years.
Larry Darrell’s Paris was different. His Paris was more serious. As the 1960s were ending, many felt an impulse to look back and analyze what different movements had accomplished and what more needed to be done.
The youth of the world was a group moving and flowing, not in one direction but many at the same time. During my college days, I witnessed the unrest of the nation that seemed to have had its start on college campuses around the country. Many of the firsts were at the University of California at Berkeley, student demonstrations that soon would hit directly or indirectly many colleges and universities from coast to coast. My campus activity was peaceful,