In 1987, I was twenty-one, freshly dropped out of college, rapidly growing disillusioned with my chosen failed avocation as a latter-day hippie, and, with substantial financial assistance from my folks, who I guess were hoping it might help me gain some perspective and possibly inspire me to come back ready to return to school—I flew to Europe, planning on meeting a friend at the Coliseum in Rome at three o’clock that afternoon—this is before cell-phones, kids: he’d spent a semester abroad in Germany, and I had a postcard with a date and time, and that was it...no real back-up plan if anything went wrong and one of us couldn’t make it—like, for instance, if I got bumped off my flight...ended up in Clipper Class on a later one—goblets of champagne, caviar on fine china and big, comfortable seats that stretched out for sleeping not quite balancing out the fear of being on my own so far from home, in another country, with another language...though I’d traveled by myself all over the U.S., somehow that sense of unfamiliarity...of being a foreigner in a foreign land...an actual alien rather than simply alienated...all on my own...was terrifying....
As it turned out, I was a few hours late, but Robert stuck around....we hitchhiked south, leaving backpacks with an ancient crone who might have shared bawdy stories from the days of Nero and Caligula to explore Pompeii...climbing over walls and through windows with broken bars in the city that slept for millennia...where Pink Floyd played for nobody in 1971....then catching a ride with some guys who, despite an almost complete language barrier, treated us to feasts in Rome and Venice before leaving us to swig down bottles of wine costing seventy cents a pop along the stately edges of St. Marks...then, joined by a girl whose name I never learned to spell, after the Neil Young and Crazy Horse show in Verona, to trek down through Yugoslavia...all one country, then, hammer-and-sickle flag so strangely above us at the train stations...this, the Reagan era, still, nuclear armaments poised...then down to Greece, and the Cyclades...more men hitting on us in the course of a week than in the entire three months I’d spent in San Francisco just before...finally camping out in a field on a chilly hot night above a blue and white monastery, apparently abandoned, a few miles outside of a tiny fishing town on the far side of Paros...the whole area inhabited apparently only by us and some goats, and not many of them, tempers long frayed, irritation blossoming in every available patch of psychic dirt....I climbed by myself to the top of the rocky peninsula alone, and, in the morning, back in the town, watched the two of them board a bus, heading for a boat to Crete...a final plea for me to join them and they were gone.....
Ended up sitting on some rocks by the harbor for a long, long time that morning and afternoon—probably eating the usual processed cheese and ripped off hunks of a loaf of bread bungi-corded to my backpack—there long enough to be sunburned so badly I had to turn the lights off to take off my shirt in the days that followed, in a tiny $3 cold water villa up among the hobbled goats in the hills above St. Stephen’s Beach where naked French girls came up from town for a quiet swim...but days to come didn’t matter right then, finding myself finally so truly all alone in a foreign country, willfully abandoned far from the tourist sights no less...exactly what I’d been so afraid of three weeks before, so far from the places I’d grown up, so far from anyone who’d known me, from all definitions imposed or claimed....here no one knew or cared about any of that...few, if any, I guessed, spoke my language...knew any of the words I’d been called...in the country of Odysseus, I was set free, adrift on the rocky shores of myself....
A friend always tells me when I’m being Zen-like and irritating...particularly when, just after yoga class, I seem unable to form a solid opinion about where we should go for beer...wanting simply to flow along with others’ plans like a babbling brook...or something...and I appreciate that.
