The Grand Tour pt 4: Toulon Postcard

photo by lentina_x.

Old sailors grounded in Toulon sit on doorsteps throughout the day, sipping beer in the mornings, biting their fingernails in the afternoon, tasting the dirt on their tongues. Their skin is deep brown and liver-spotted, tattoos of ships broken up on their withered arms. Cobblestone alleys lead crookedly toward the Mediterranean shore. Speakers hang over the streets, tangled in lines of wire and cable, bringing the streets alive with American sixties songs. In the farmers' market, hordes of tourists shout in broken French with the vendors, a tangle of hands shuffling honeydew melons and yellow plums and paprika. Further up the avenues, away from the shoreline, the streets grow quiet. In the squares, lovers mill about with entwined arms or sat in patio cafes waiting patiently for their drinks. A fountain stood in the center of a square, water trickling down a swell of moss and vines, dripping into a pool. A blackbird fluttered in the shallows, water beading its feathers.

We stay at the hotel Le Petit Chateau and wash our clothes in the boudoir with hand soap. Eating sandwiches of liverwurst, sardines, and tomatoes on a fresh baked baguette, Odlef sits on the windowsill looking out over the chaotic jumble of flats with red-tiled rooftops. In the afternoon we buy three bottles of chilled white wine, drink in the night and come alive; this is our daily ritual, to be followed by numb, wordless mornings. My life is something like water: without taste, bland, lacking intoxication, even here in France. That is why I reach for the wine bottle.

I write a postcard to a friend back home. There is too little space to cover everything going on, so I decide it best to describe only the items on the table in our room:
- crusts of stale French bread
- two husks of beach melon
- two plums from the farmers market (yellow)
- two half full bottles of white wine
- ashtray, filled (one pack)
- Paris guidebook (tattered)
- Rome guidebook (pristine)
- backpack strap (useful) and an American penny (useless)

I take Odlef’s spot on the windowsill and claim my perch four stories above the street. Sallows fly in circles above the fountain in the square. Church bells toll the evening vespers. Pickpockets withdraw from their day of work, street urchins laugh into the face of the coming night, and a dog kills a cardboard box.

The Grand Tour pt 3: Straw Dogs

photo by Samantha Decker.

Odlef and I follow a tour in a Paris guidebook in which you pretend you are walking through Montparnasse during the Lost Generation of the 1920’s. It is as though we are two starving nihilists who, armed with the guidebook, torch everything in the city while preserving only those great artifacts from Gertrude Stein’s Montparnasse. We see a new restaurant called the Hippo Grill; it does not exist. There is a café called Le Select, but at this hour in the tour guidebook there are no people. But I see the people, smoking, reading papers, making all of the correct motions of intellectuals, and yet we drop the curtain on their play; they do not exist.

We are poor and unknown. We smoke cigarettes on the curb outside of Closerie des Lilas. We cannot sit at the tables of Hemmingway and Fitzgerald. This is how we visit the cafes. This is our straw dog generation. Intoxicated on hunger, road fatigue, anonymity, and yet irrevocably present. Our goal is to become known, our ideas to become respected, or at least to have our presence affirmed, but according to the guidebook, we don’t exist either. There are only the ghosts of Ernie and Ezra huddled around a sidewalk table, and we are but the smoke from their cigarettes. What have we done to deserve our place at the table? Nibble the crusts of bread from the curb outside the cafés? Follow history from a tourist book and follow the movements dictated in a game of Simon Says? Perhaps Jim Morrison, too mythified and all too godlike in my eyes, said it best: “Where is the new wine, dying on the vine?” We need to kill our gods to take their seat.

The Grand Tour Pt2: Atlantic Crossing

photo by Just Plane Photography.

I am on the plane somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. Blackness fills the window; I have no fear of the ocean because I cannot see it. Yet it is there, those churning depths, those sharks and whales just below my body suspended in space, but right now I feel no nearer to the ocean than when I was lying in my bed in Iowa, imagining my Atlantic crossing. In fact, I was closer then. My room was dark. This plane is filled with light, stewardesses handing out blankets, and men with their shoes off to air out their stinking feet; this is my version of the Grand Tour, 21st century style.

How did I do it? How did I manage in one year to get thrown out of the Iowa writing program for mental indiscretions, move back home with my mom, and get signed up for this trip to Europe with a Dutch nobleman, Odlef? I paid for it myself, working a job that few people wanted at a local park, dumping garbage barrels, cleaning piss off of urinals, and waking up the drunks from the picnic tables where they had bedded for the night. More than the money, I had to overcome my natural Midwestern stoicism by staring off of that cliff face of doubt—and jump. Everyone tried to hold me back with that moral they held in such high esteem: stay home, stay grounded, and be realistic. But this was real. I imagined, I created, I formed in one flash of daydream this trip to Odlef’s Europe, and made it real. It was no different than writing a short story at the university, only I changed the medium. I became my own work.

I had to wait in Boston for a connecting flight. We were delayed because dense fog had had crept in from the harbor. Out of the fog rose boat masts, warped shacks, seagulls navigating the air above the waters. I saw a guy stranded at the same gate who looked altogether too much like me—same black leather shoes, faded jeans, unbuttoned flannel shirt and a tangle of bracelets around his wrists. He started up a conversation with me, the typical harmless banter of plane schedules and travel plans, until out of nowhere he interjected, “They shouldn’t cancel flights just because of a little fog. I think those people that are afraid to die should just die right on the spot, because they’re not really living, man.” Was this what I sounded like? Idiot, blowhard, self-important fraud. My Muses snickered from behind a potted palm while I ended our conversation at the first opportunity and tried to put some distance between me and my doppelganger. He was hard to shake. Now back on the plane, I’m thankful for assigned seats.

Odlef meets me at the Amsterdam airport. He has transformed himself once again after having left ISU. Back then he was a foreign exchange student, a fellow drinking buddy, a budding artist who, back home in the Netherlands, was a nobleman’s grandson and an economics prodigy destined for a career in global markets, but who in one year in the states took on charcoal life drawing, German philosophy, and Beethoven’s Sonata No.1 in F Minor on the piano in the dorm lounge. He grew his hair out just long enough to fit into a ponytail, tried to grow a scruff of blond whiskers on his eighteen-year old chin, and took to wearing long overcoats so that he looked like an extra in the movie “Wings of Desire.”

The young man now standing at baggage claim had shed his troubadour skin for neatly trimmed hair, a sport coat, white cotton shirt and a silk scarf tucked in at the neck. “Welcome to the mother country,” he says, holding out his hand, which I knock aside to give him a bear hug and a firm smack on the back. He grabs my bag in one hand and elbow in the other and marches us down the airport colonnade. “I’ve planned it all out for us: first, Paris. Then on to the south of France, La Cote d’Azure, then Florence, Rome, Budapeste—wait until you meet the girls in Budapest!” and like that, we pick up the thread of those college nights strung out on lack of sleep, too much Heidegger and too little Calvinism, a little weed and a lot of Grain Belt Premium Lager. Odlef whisks us out of the airport to the first of many train station platforms awaiting my next thirty days and nights of our tour.