“Well, there are people already starting to do just that. Maybe you could also.”
“Maybe I could.”
Not long after, they left. I ordered another beer and watched it begin to rain again as I let my mind drift. What was happening? Was I really thinking about going to Afghanistan? Was I thinking I could buy some coats and drag them 1,000-2,000 miles across the earth and then sell them? This was exciting, but was it also crazy? Was this me? Was I thinking about, well…I guess, maybe some would call it…an adventure? Was I just a regular guy? I don’t think regular guys wake up most mornings and say to themselves, “I’m going to have adventures.” Regular guys get up in the morning and go to their jobs, pick up some groceries on the way home and then spend the evening looking at a baseball game on TV, take the dog out for a quick walk and then go to bed watching Johnny Carson. Remember, I’m the guy who wanted to get a job, albeit a pretty neat job, in Paris and live here and do the things most would do living in a large international city. Hopping on one of the world’s most glamorous trains and traveling halfway around the world to negotiate and buy pounds and pounds of exotic coats and then lugging them back to London, a city I had yet to visit, was not regular-guy stuff. As the rain continued to fall, I tried to look through the raindrops for some clue…some hint of what I should do. Was this thinking just too wild? Who was I to think I could start a business out of nowhere with no research? My dad was a corporate guy; we weren’t an entrepreneurial family. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I did not know the clothing business at all, I didn’t even know how to begin to find out. This was feeling more and more half-baked.
Then I remembered. Paul, you’ve already experienced half-baked with your plan of coming over to Paris in the first place, cold, unprepared and thinking you could end up with some great advertising art director’s job and have a life out of a Hemingway novel. Remember how well that has gone so far.
How could I ever decide? And if I decided that any idea like buying coats in Afghanistan should be way off the table and decide against it, then what? Do I just give up and go home? I had miscalculated on how much French I would have to know. It seemed I’d never learn the language quickly enough to get a job. My savings wouldn’t last that long. So, what then? Stay a couple more weeks here or maybe travel a little to one or two more countries and then go home? Is that what life is? Daydreaming about big things, big adventurers, but ultimately coming back to reality and letting those ideas disappear in puffs of smoke? Hmm? I continued to daydream as I watched the rain fall.
Twenty minutes later I was bounding up the stairs in the Hotel Namur and knocking emphatically on Doug’s door. Yelling, “Get up, fucker, I’ve got it; we’re going to be rich!”
Opening his door and looking somewhat annoyed but intrigued, he said, “What is going on? How much wine have you had tonight? And what do you mean rich?”
“OK, sit down and give me some of that wine you’re drinking and hold on to your hat; I’ve come up with the idea of ideas. If you are up for it, tomorrow morning we are going to get tickets on The Orient Express headed for India. When we get to India or maybe Afghanistan, we are going to—now hold on to your socks—we’re going to buy as many sheepskin coats as we can. Then we are going to lug them back to London, sell them and then we are going to be rich.”
“You are incredible. You come knocking on my door with not one outlandish idea, but three out-of-this-world ideas. Why in a million years do you think we could do that? But I’ll give you credit, you’ve got a mind-blowing kind of wild imagination. Did someone give you some pot or hashish on top of your wine tonight?” Doug shook his head.
“I met this German guy and girl, they were coming back from Moscow, and they had these beautiful coats that you and I have been noticing here in Paris. He told me this guy who sold them the coats had recently bought them in Afghanistan and that he only paid about $5 for each of them. The German guy then says he knows he could sell them in London for about $250 each. Listen, we could pool our money and buy, say, 200 coats, sell them and pocket $50,000!”
We stayed up the rest of the night. With no plan of his own going forward, Doug eventually saw the enlightened wisdom of going to India and Afghanistan to buy coats. He started to get very excited. I don’t know how much wine we were drinking; we were getting loud, and there seemed to be empty bottles rolling around the room everywhere.
“The first thing we have to do is buy a map. How are we ever going to find our way to the East, to Afghanistan to India or even maybe ‘to meet the Czar?’” I finally put forth.
“It’s easy, we just go to the Champs-Élysées and turn right and ride the rails towards the rising sun.”
“Imagine,” he said. “The Pyramids, Mecca, Masada, and then to the shores of Babylon. Think of the mystery, the adventure of it all.”
“That’s right. Then after that, all that’s left is to climb a mountain and look down the other side to Afghanistan just sitting there waiting for us…it will be easy, you’ll see,” Doug related, nodding and handing me another bottle of wine to open.
As I continued to drink into the night long after Doug dozed off, I was concerned with my financial situation. I boarded my Icelandic flight with exactly $900. I’d watched my spending in Paris, but this city was a killer; everything cost more than in the US. I wasn’t sure how much the Orient Express would cost, but it didn’t matter—we were going, end of story. But the reality was that we better strike it rich quickly with this idea. I knew that not every city was as expensive as Paris. But every city would cost something. I was guessing I’d leave Paris with $600-$700 in my pockets. Afghanistan was a long way away and probably an even longer way back, as we would have to find a way to transport all those coats.
From meeting on a plane a matter of days ago, to going into international business together, my relationship with Doug had evolved quickly. My companion, a writer by trade, also had the feeling that it was his time to see Europe. As New Yorker, his manner was much more aggressive than mine. He was one of the over 500,000 who had lived through and been deeply affected by his experience at Woodstock in August of 1969. It had been great to have a companion in my first days overseas. I was incredibly lucky to have someone to commiserate with, laugh with, eat and drink with, and, of course, someone to translate until, day by day, I got more comfortable with communicating—sort of—in a foreign land. We got along and were both wide-eyed about all we had seen so far.
We rose the next morning to a sunny day and made our way through the French Quarter to buy our Orient Express tickets. Nothing seemed to be easy, even with my companion’s ability to speak some French. It took forever, and at the end of the experience, I was hoping more than knowing that we were scheduled for the right train. What I did know was that we were now set to leave Paris in a couple of nights and, implausible as it may sound, we were going east. “Going east to meet the Czar”, as Jim Morrison would say, voyaging to some of the world’s most exotic and unknown lands. And I couldn’t help but imagine the trip, journeying through many of the capitals of Europe to those somewhat secret lands of Eastern Europe, then to Constantinople with its history and then the land of the Crusades and the Middle East and eventually, I could barely say it, Asia, and adventures halfway around the world.
And those adventures started on the world’s most interesting train, The Orient Express.
I wondered if I would be in a train coach with European royalty, or possibly a movie star from Italy. Might I pass a spy from Berlin as I walked down the hallway to what I was sure would be a fabulous dining car filled with some of the most interesting people in the world?
The day passed slowly as we walked the Champs-Élysées, that avenue of avenues that ends with Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, so massive and beautifully positioned. Along the way I bought a map, what would be the first of many maps, I thought, as this one only showed Europe to Istanbul. I say “only” a little tongue in cheek, as the map, laid out, covered a large café table and made Istanbul look thousands of miles away, even though, as best we could discern from the ticket agent, the ride from Paris to Istanbul was only about a day and a half. Buying a train ticket in a railroad station is one