Prologue
In 1979 Rick Steves published his first edition of Europe Through the Back Door, with seemingly no sense of the double entendre. In the decades since, with his keen sense of tepid American travel interests and an easy Ned Flanders affability, he has become a juggernaut of guidebooks. To my dismay, my colleague Jennifer has picked up his latest release for our business trip. She’s very excited.
A lover of plans and painstaking detail, she has prepared for each of us a binder — no, I’ll say it: a bible — for the two-week trip through our offices in London, Munich, Milan, and Madrid. Schedules of meetings. Maps. Directions to and from airports. Cost estimates. List of contacts and emergency numbers. The blood type of each person traveling in our party. For a business trip, there’s no person you’d rather partner with; you have places to be, deadlines to meet, and landings to stick — and goddammit, she will ensure it happens. But when the day’s last meeting ends and you cab your overdrawn brain back to the hotel, she remains in gear.
And so it is. Equipped with a photocopy of Rick Steves’s meticulous walking tour through Madrid’s Plaza Mayor, she drags us through every segment, stopping to point out each notable sight that Steves has recommended. You may be thinking, cathedrals, monuments, palaces — how lovely! How helpful! But the “sights” often seem nothing more than whatever happens to exist twenty paces from the last. “Aha! Here it is. This sewer grate was installed in 1806 during the reign of Charles IV,” she reads, pausing to savor the accomplishment. “Okay, moving on.”
I shuffle along two paces behind, shoulders slumped, eyeing the outdoor cafés and bars, the patrons in slingbacks and spaghetti straps leisurely enjoying spritzers and espresso in July’s evening sun, free of plans, free of must-dos. They could at any point, like bubbles, simply rise and disappear — to some sunlit terrace elsewhere, some lover’s bed sloppily unmade.
After dinner it’s my turn; I take us on a random pub crawl. I outpace Jennifer on the drinks, but only by a hair. She can turn it off and let loose when the time comes, when she has scheduled herself to do so, all wildness kept within its proper compartments, all chaos kept on leash.
I, on the other hand, want only to wander and explore, haphazard beyond the few needed tickets and reservations; to discover not just unknown parts of the globe, but insights into myself, little torn-away bits of my identity that were somehow blown far and wide, into the deserts, the mountains, the thronged bazaars and Chinatowns. These are questions only answered by going far from home: How do I respond to the world? Where do my jigsaw edges fit within it?
I relish getting lost, and the subsequent thrill of slowly reorienting myself, only to get lost again. A vague sense of purpose and direction is enough. The sea is to the east. I think I’ll head that way. I do my best not to ask for directions, not because I’m a man in the worn-out trope that wives love to tell, but because I enjoy the uncertainty. I like not knowing what the hell I’m doing, and I often don’t.
I’m fine with this. My fellow travelers aren’t always the same. “Do you know where we’re going?” my friend Jim asks as we walk through the winding paths and bridges of Venice. “It’s this way,” I reply, “just up ahead.” He’s put his faith in me, albeit tentatively. It’s late in the evening, in the brief emptiness that befalls the city in January, its usual crowds holding out for the holidays or any warmer month. “It should be just past the plaza up there,” I reassure him. It’s not quite freezing, but close, and he needs to pee. We’ve been walking for fifteen minutes, and he’s been reminding me that he needs to pee for ten.
“Oh, shit,” I interject, suddenly stopping. Jim’s eyes narrow in on me. He’s thinking something rude or obscene. “That plaza shouldn’t be there. I, uh, think we’ve been walking in the opposite direction.” Now he hates me. He pictures my body sinking into the tar-black canal, the fog of my last breath disappearing in the cold night air.
It’s fine, though; he won’t piss himself. We’ll make it back to the hotel — now thirty minutes away — in plenty of time. Two days from now, though, neither Jim nor Venice will be so lucky: he’ll soil an alley by throwing up something foul from his lunch. When that moment comes, I want to tell him to vomit into the canal and let the slow tide pull his stomach contents out to the lagoon. It’s cleaner that way. But he no longer has patience for any of my directions.
Seven years later, I’m in Venice again with a different friend. He and I meander for several hours, stopping for whiskey and a cigarette whenever an attractive café or bar happens to be nearby. He understands my wandering ethos. We’re in no hurry to be anywhere; simply being in Venice is contentment enough. Back at our hotel, the clock winding toward midnight, we look out at the narrow walkway four stories below, at the rats that make a nightly event of scuttling back and forth, black dots moving to and fro over the glossy paving stones. The alleys and canals are now theirs. Do they know where they’re going? Are they, too, simply becoming lost and then found, lost and then found?
The following chapters are the stuff of memory, and as such, they have the same fuzzy texture and arbitrary logic, the same disregard for chronology. Memories spring to mind out of place, triggered at random from the sight of a poppy, the smell of spoiled meat, or a wayward train of thought, often richer in sentiment than in form and with a capricious choice of details. To borrow the imagery of Salvador Dalí, their clocks soften and droop out of proportion. Moreover, however upstanding the memoirist, memories themselves have no allegiance to truth, but are filtered and reconfigured through experience, emotion, hindsight, and even rank delusion. But I’ve rendered my memories herein with as much fidelity as I can muster. To any friends featured in these pages, if you find my details out of sorts relative to your own distortions, please forgive me: my clocks have all melted.
Names have been changed to protect the innocent — or, in one or two cases, the very guilty.
