A trip to the Old World
I'd just turned 20 in June of 1975, a few days after sophomore classes ended at Johns Hopkins, and was out on an all-night bender with several buddies at the bars near Baltimore's Memorial Stadium and then an after-hours club in Fells Point. The fact that my flight to Luxembourg (via Icelandair) was scheduled for departure at 9 a.m. was a footnote. Of course I'd make it on time! The notion that my oldest brother, whose two young kids I'd be minding on a month-long European journey, would be mighty steamed if I arrived at our hotel 24 hours late wasn't a concern. At the age of 20, you're king of the world, as a popular Steely Dan song at the time noted, and nothing gets in the way of immortality.
At 7 a.m., I meandered back to the rowhouse on 33rd St. I shared with four friends?although drawing a dingy, roach-infested basement for a bedroom, the $32 a month rent couldn't be beat. The reality of packing, finding my passport and traveler's checks in a heap of clothing, books and records, and hailing a cab to Baltimore-Washington Intl. Airport suddenly became apparent. After two minutes of serious thought about the predicament, the solution was obvious: I smoked a joint, finished off the last of my crystal meth and got down to business. Opened a beat-up suitcase, tossed in several pairs of dirty jeans, socks, t-shirts, boxers, 10 paperbacks, no controlled substances and eventually boarded the plane with two minutes to spare.
Who says youth is wasted on the young?
Generally, there's a five-year window in an adolescent or young adult's life in which he or she, regardless of IQ, affluence or street smarts, feels and acts like an Olympian. In retrospect, it's a dangerous period and it now causes me shivers to think of how many times friends and I could've pulled an Icarus and faded into oblivion. Whenever you read about a carload of kids crashing on a highway after a party, killing everyone aboard, it's a reminder what a life-and-death game of chance people casually play at that age.
My own catalog of risky business is long. During college, I cracked my head open once playing football while under the influence of excellent LSD. Smoked eight bong hits of PCP (passed off mistakenly as grass) and had visions of my funeral. Drove to Texas at 95 mph while nodding off because of no sleep. Blacked out once on a combination of uppers and booze and nearly walked through a restaurant's window. And hitchhiked from Boston to Baltimore, held captive by a maniacal perv who purposely weaved between cars on the turnpike just to scare me. Only when the cops stopped this wacko in Delaware, who's probably now dead or in jail, did I escape.
There's more, but you get the point. Besides, my sons read this newspaper.
Anyway, in today's parlance, it was an awesome summer.
After landing in Luxembourg, right on time, I wandered around the immediate environs and promptly got lost. My sense of direction is about as acute as Mike Bloomberg's fiscal policy, and so I ambled around for several hours, making occasional pit stops at strange pubs. At one point the realization that I'd left my passport and money at the hotel hit me. Only the room key and some pocket change were in my possession.
This was a problem, since the key had only a number and I didn't remember the name of the lodgings. So I went into several places, tried my key on room 417?amazing what you remember?and nearly got punched out twice by customers who didn't care for the fiddling at their doors. Luxembourg, fortunately, isn't colossal, and eventually I hit pay dirt and explained my tardiness away as an educational tour of the city. A few eyebrows were raised, but planning for our trip the next day to a village on the Rhine took precedence.
Currently, Germany's on my blacklist for travel, at least until Gerhard Schroder is booted from office?soon, I expect, with rising unemployment trumping his opportunistic anti-American rhetoric last fall?but it really is a magnificent country. Sure, a lot of Germans are fastidious grumps who don't care for children?which made my job harder in '75?but if you can ignore the rudeness and creepiness associated with the Third Reich, there's much to recommend. The Black Forest, for example, is one of the wonders of the world, about 100 times as impressive as Stonehenge, and Berlin remains the most outrageous city in Europe.
On our first day in Germany, we had a long lunch overlooking the Rhine, with a rare (to me, at least) wine the highlight of the meal. More memorable, however, was an epiphany later that night. I'd taken my niece and nephew to a fast-food joint for dinner while my brother and sister-in-law were about a half-mile away in some fancy restaurant. Three bites into an awful log of wurst, my brother appeared and took the three of us across the village to join them. He was excited to share a schooner of Pilsner Urquell with me. I'd never tasted anything like the Czech beer. It didn't matter that the bartender took five minutes to pull the draft, even as my tongue was hanging out. This beverage was in a league of its own, especially compared to my usual Baltimore diet of National Bohemian and Pabst Blue Ribbon.
We spent about a week in Denmark, mostly in Copenhagen, where the kids and I took long walks before settling in at a lunch spot to eat hot dogs and kill hours in front of the slot machines. My five-year-old nephew was appointed chief helper, ferrying cups of beer and change to my stool, as my niece tried to figure out the percentages of amateur gambling. At the end of the day, meeting back at the hotel, a sanitized version was given to their parents, who'd been touring castles and museums. All three of us knew this diversion was too much fun to get nipped in the bud. At first, I found it astonishing that the bartender would pour glass after glass of Tuborg to my pre-kindergarten nephew, but hey, that's Scandinavia for you.
One day my brother and I visited the main Carlsberg plant, feigning interest in the elaborate brewing process and getting smashed on the 12-ounce samples produced every 20 minutes. We got back to the hotel, and my sister-in-law had her rolling pin out in force, since we were both in no immediate condition for a planned excursion to Tivoli Gardens, but it was worth the fleeting tsouris. Anyway, after a nap we did have a wonderful time at the amusement park, especially after I threw a miniature golf game to my brother, who does not care for losing at such matches, whether it's badminton, croquet, horseshoes or bocce. Frankly, I don't either, but purposely blowing the last three holes gave me brownie points with my sister-in-law?and erased that earlier bad behavior at the Carlsberg factory?since a grumpy Papa Bear, losing to his baby brother, wasn't a pleasant prospect.
In Amsterdam, I took the kids for a tour of the red-light district, on the condition it was a hush-hush project, and tried to hide my amazement at the storefronts where ladies of the night (and morning) were on display. I bought a chillum for smoking hashish back in the States, and passed off the purchase as a peculiar souvenir. This subterfuge reminded me of a summer day in '67, when my brother Doug and I spent a few hours in the East Village, and he stopped in a head shop to pick up some screens for his pipe. When I questioned why he'd pay a quarter apiece for screens, he muttered an incomprehensible answer, and I was utterly confused. For about a year.
Our last stop in Europe was Paris, where we arrived after an all-day drive, crabby, tired and without lodging reservations. My brother was completely confused by the city's roundabouts and crazy cabbies, which only added to everyone's frustration. After being turned down at half a dozen hotels, my sister-in-law finally came back to the car and informed the kids and me that we were set. The Hotel Meurice was way beyond our budget at $100/night, but that didn't particularly concern me, especially when I peeked at the suite the porter reluctantly showed us. It was the first time I'd ever seen a mini-bar, and naturally I thought the contents were on the house. The kids and I quickly emptied it, while romping around a large living room filled with small statues and paintings.
A few days later I returned to Baltimore, where my living conditions were more spartan. The lease on the rowhouse had expired, so I lived in the attic of my school newspaper building, climbing a ladder at night to sleep on a mattress, and taking a cold shower in the basement each morning. I wrote and read during the morning, sold beer and hot dogs at Memorial Stadium during Orioles homestands at night, and smoked a lot of pot. Money was tight, so I subsisted on quarts of beer and 99-cent corned beef sandwiches. It was illegal for a student to actually live on campus property, so I had to lie still as a refugee when security guards entered the premises. By the time officials had figured out my ruse it was September, and I'd found a legitimate apartment.
The lone downside of that summer was my failure to make headway in pursuit of a woman I knew from Hopkins' sister school, Goucher. My buddy Joe?a cool conservative who was my only friend in ROTC?and I went to Georgetown one evening with a bunch of classmates to see a band at some small club. On the way home, the gal in question gave me a ride back to Baltimore, and things were working out nicely until I puked all over her car. We remained good friends during college, but that incident put an end to any romantic notions.
Otherwise, there was little to complain about. I'd traveled, hung out with fellow vendors after O's games, parked cars at the Hopkins faculty club, lived for free, worked diligently on my journalism, read the Village Voice, Boston's Real Paper and seven Dickens novels, spent a few days on the boardwalk at Ocean City and planned for my upcoming editorship at the Hopkins News-Letter.
Awesome.
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