It was the second week of June 1994 that I embarked
on my second sojourn to Europe in as many years. The previous year I had won a trip to England
sponsored by Parade Magazine and Newspapers in Education titled YOUNG COLUMBUS
and it changed my life, augmented my periphery of the planet, made me want to
sop this atomic-pointillist experience called life in a different way. When I left in 93 I had never flown and the furthest I had been
from the social gravity that was my hamlet abutting the Illinois river was
Washington DC. I attended a high school below the hill, in the lower income
section of town. It was lower ACT scores, lower expectations, the sociological
flotsam and jetsam, the downtrodden dregs of the 309 area code.
This trip I had paid for myself. My sisters were
members of a treble choir touring Europe and I tagged along. My mother and my
grandmother went as well. I had
autonomy. I had freedom. I was sixteen years old. I would aimlessly amble by
myself down the cobbled side-streets of Amsterdam, lost in the labyrinthine
circuitry of canals, the pine- pungent waft of cannabis hung in dissipated
tufts a block past Anne Frank’s house, bicycles blitzing past in agitated vigor
as if with wings. With Morrissey and Tori Amos serving as my emotional rod and
staff I had just vaulted over sophomore year of high school. I had written
maybe 10 poems. I was journaling. I was trying to figure out the pulse of the
planet of which I somehow found myself an inveterate part. I was still an
ardent athlete, reminding myself that next year was going to be my year. I was certain
that once I graduated high school I was going to study art history in college. I made it a salient
point to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, lost in the penumbras of Rembrandt’s
Night Watch. We would also hit up Germany and end with London but it was Paris
I most wanted to see. I wanted to walk along the Seine and pretend I was
writer. I wanted to bask in the Pompidou and the Musee D’orsay and romp around
the Louvre. I wanted to ride the Metro and fleetingly fall in love with the
rushed sight of the dark haired French girl of my dreams who was inopportunely
riding a train one car over, her head bent over a copy of Being and Nothingness. I wanted visit Jim Morrison’s resting
place, smiling with delight upon
discerning that someone wrote Hello Morrissey on Oscar Wilde’s grave at Pere
Lachaise. I wanted to spend hours idling
in café’s with guillotine-inspired lumbar wrenching chairs scratchy inky
thoughts in a journal purchased from Shakespeare &co drinking string coffee
in diminutive cups, not giving a care to the outside world at all.
I stayed at a youth hostel called the FIAP. It was
flooded with some high school and mainly college students form all across the
planet. There were college kids studying
at the Beauborg and at the Sorbonne, a beautiful girl with black hair and white
skin who had the most prominent cheekbones I had ever seen who was a writer and
smoked nonstop. Her friends were all artists and we sat in the lobby, smoking
non-stop. I lied about my age. I told them I was a freshman at William Jewel in
Kansas City, the only liberal college I was aware of since my best friend mark
from the Young Columbus program studied there. Somehow there was about 100 kids
on holiday from Scotland and one of them fell hard-core head over Doc Martens
in love with my sister Beth even traversing to America (twice) in hopes of
finding her again.
 |
| The author w. his Italian friends. FIAP hostel, Paris. June 1994 |
There was a bevvy of Nigerian track athletes who
would snap pictures with a disposable camera and had the whitest smiles I have
ever seen. Out of the International mélange it was cadre of Italian kids that I
somehow found myself hanging out with.
One kid looked just like Slash from Guns-N-Roses. He had long hair. He wore
tattered jeans and shirts that looked like they were culled from the latest exhibition
at the Musee d’art Moderne.
The coolest kid I have perhaps ever met.
And he smoked like there was no tomorrow.
I don’t speak Italian and the Italians didn’t speak
any English so we conversed in what remedial French we had both derived from
our studies. I tried telling the Italian
lads that I was from Chicago only they just looked at me with a nonplussed look
sewed into their lips. Finally, I said Chicago, you know, Michael Jordan ,
pantomiming that I was shooting the ball from above the arch. They exploded
with their arms. From then on I was known as ‘Jordan!!!’ whenever they saw me
and they would pantomime shooting a vicarious ball from a vicarious free-throw
line as well. One night Slash sent a girl named Deborah (pictured above) into the closet sized den of my hostel. Deborah also smoked incessantly and spoke absolutely no englais or francais. She sat on the lip of my bed for an hour and I held her palms as if reading her palms in reverse. She left and never spoke to me during the rmainder of my time in Paris, rolling her eyes in my direction the time we scrambled into each other in the lift as if she was coerced to be civil to me at a divroce hearing.
When Italian
Slash offered me a cigarette and I amicably waved my hand back in refusal he
looked at me as if diagnosed with an irrepearble social deformity.
“You don’t smoke ceeg-gar-rett? Pourqoui?”
I accepted a Marlboro Red and choked down knowing somehow
my career as an inveterate smoker had convened.
When I came back to Peoria I knew I was a smoker, at
least socially. Every time I fired up a cigarette I felt like I was back in
Paris, even though P-town has more white trash than you could bundle up with a
handful of Tazwell county Twist-ties, somehow I was pack in Paris, with my Italian friends, in love with the classy
writer down the hall, not sure what to do with Deborah who didn’t speak any English
on my bed, unsure what to do, just knowing that I was going to find a café table
a few blocks south of the Pompidou, flap open my notebook and drain everything inside of me in inky poetic
slants—oh, and that I’d also be smoking along the way.
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