More Ancient Anecdotes

After college I spent a few weeks working a crappy restaurant job in New York, in one of those places that reeks of failure: you know the whole enterprise is going to collapse soon, it's futile, and the owners and investors and managers know it, too, so they hover over you unhappily, and yell at you if you put more than an ounce and a half of liquor in a shot class. Then I bought a plane ticket to London, where I worked another crappy restaurant job and bought a motorcycle.

I’d never ridden a motorcycle before: the first one I tried was the one I bought. But it seemed easy enough. It was a Yamaha RD250, and it was a two-stroke, though I didn’t know what that meant at the time. It meant that the thing was basically a dirt bike: it revved very high very quickly, and had great torque, which made it perfect for zipping around the city; but it was like riding a chainsaw, which made it terrible for touring, which is what I planned to do with it.

I spent a few weeks getting used to it. I promised myself that I would ride especially carefully at night, never in the rain, and never when I was drunk, and within about a week I was riding it drunk at night in the rain, because I was 21.

A friend from school was doing research in Cologne, and I decided to visit him, so I called him and got his address, and packed a few things in plastic bags, which I attached with bungee cords to the seat behind me; and I rode out to Dover, arriving at sunset and catching a ferry to Hook of Holland, which left at about 11 and arrived at dawn. I thought I’d get some rest on the boat, but I couldn’t sleep at all, not one wink, so when I set out down through the Netherlands that morning, I was exhausted; and then it started pouring rain, and it rained the rest of the way, so I was cold and wet and very tired, and I cut through Belgium by mistake.

I didn’t speak a word of German. I feel like I should tell you this now. I got to the edge of Cologne late that afternoon; I had my friend’s address jumbled in with all the wet clothes and things strapped to the back of the bike, but I was close to hallucinating by then, I was soaked and utterly numb from my thighs to my navel, and I was goddamned if I was going to stop and get it out. Anyway, I remembered him telling me that he lived on one of the city’s main streets, and the name was a long German word that began with the letter E. So I got off the highway, hit the ring road and started into the old city, where I quickly hit a T-junction, and found a sign that said ‘Einbahnstrasse’ over a large black arrow.

“Finally, some luck,” I decided. “That’s the very street he lives on.” So I set off following the arrow, only to hit another T-junction with another sign, bearing the same name. I followed that one, too, and hit a third T-junction. Same sign, but I kept on. This happened a few more times, I had probably covered about half the city by then, but at length I stopped and, for the first time in 36 hours, thought. I knew what ‘Ein’ meant, because everyone knows what ‘ein’ means. I knew what a ‘strasse’ was, because everyone knows what a ‘strasse’ is. ‘Bahn’ was a little trickier, that one took me a good 30 seconds, and then I remembered that I’d ridden into town on the ‘autobahn’. And that was the exact moment when I first realized that I was too stupid to live, and too stubborn to die.

I took a train to Berlin and a subway to East Berlin, just to see what it was like (it was beautiful, if you weren’t German), and I went into a Party bookstore there and bought a copy of Mayakovsky’s poems, with Russian on the left side and an English translation on the right. I still have it today.

Then I went back to Cologne, fetched my bike, and rode to Paris to visit another friend. In a youth hostel there I met a British girl from Bath, and the next night we went up to the roof to get to know each other much better. We were just at a most intimate moment when suddenly a few groups of Mirage jet fighters flew in close order, screaming low overhead. They’re terrifying things, those jets: they make a phenomenal amount of noise, and you can see the ring of their afterburners when they angle up into the sky. A few moments later we heard a series of explosions across the city. We had no idea what was going on, we figured it was the End of the World, and if it was the End of the World, we should probably have a look, so we disentangled ourselves and peered over the rooftop wall. There were fireworks going off, all over the city, huge blossoms down by the Eiffel Tower: it was Bastille Day. And that was the exact moment when I first realized that being too stupid to live but too stubborn to die was going to be just fine for the foreseeable future.