started running towards the dark. Within a few steps, I saw Carl stop to wait for me. However, three seconds later, Collins was yelling and running after us with the ferocity and mad zeal of an angry bull.
I yelled, “Head for Wynn’s.” It seemed invitingly dark on the side of their house.
Old man Collins was gaining on us as we approached the huge honeysuckle hedge running between Parks’ and Wynn’s yards. Without thinking, without talking, intuitively I went left of the approaching long hedge, and Carl went right. Both of us hoped to disappear into the black backyards.
Just as I was about to reach the end of the yard and another perpendicular part of the six-foot hedge, I thought I heard Carl yell, “Oh no!” But I had no time to ponder what that meant; I worried Collins was right behind me. All I could do was take a leap as big and as high as I could over the hedge, hoping I could clear it and that nothing would be waiting for me on the other side.
Thankfully, although I landed hard, I landed on flat ground. I froze, lying still and not even breathing. My heart was pounding like a locomotive.
As I was lying there, I could hear old man Collins yelling and calling Carl’s name, but the yelling was fading and moving away back towards the street. After a few minutes to make sure Collins was giving up and going back home, I called for Carl, hoping he wasn’t lying in the next yard beaten to a pulp.
“I’m OK, Paul, are you?” Carl replied. “You know, as we split up, Collins came after me. I jumped up on the stone grille by the hedge, and the only thing I could see was long pointy sticks looking back at me. I closed my eyes and hurled myself into them, hoping I’d get lucky and miss all of them. I’m lying amongst them now and still checking to make sure I haven’t impaled myself. Who would create something as evil as this?”
I responded, “It’s old Tony’s tomato garden, and those sticks have the tomato plants tied to them.”
We lay there motionless for a while in the dark. My breathing was almost back to normal as I pulled a pack of Winston’s from my pocket and lit up. Just about then I started to feel a raindrop or two hitting my face. As I took two deep inhales, I savored the by-then-familiar sensation of having gotten away with it. I was too young—and too cocksure—to imagine that there would ever come a time when I might not.
***
Eleven years later, in 1970, I was again lying on my back pulling a pack of cigarettes from my pocket, this time on foreign soil. Lying in the dirt of that backyard seemed like it was just yesterday but also felt like a million years ago. It was not so dark this time. It was more like dusk, except it was artificial; there were no windows in this cell.
It was a big cell. I think jail cells in foreign countries tend to be bigger than in the United States. Certainly, the conversation was different. I was the only American there, and from what I could hear, at best there were a couple of my fellow inmates who could speak some English—very deficient, broken English.
With no windows to guide my sense of day or night, I could only guess, and my guess was that it was night. Everyone has his own internal clock, and mine told me the meal cart should be coming soon. The cell—partly in light and partly in shadow, purposely I’m sure for the different whims of the variety of characters it held—was unusually noisy, almost as if it were starting to have a little heartbeat.
I was thinking about luck and what life is. Is a person’s life good or bad depending on his decision to go through this door or that door, down this street or another, or speak to this person and not the next? It’s certainly curious how life happens. Why we do the things we do? Is there a rhyme or reason to our decisions and experiences?
Carl and I seemed to have avoided a terrible outcome all those years ago. I can’t even imagine what would have happened if we had been caught. How lucky were we to have made that split-second, almost magical decision to run on separate sides of the huge hedge?
I began to ponder what a good friend told me about two months prior as we were going to go to sleep on a deserted beach off the coast of Spain. As I had found myself doing more than ever on this journey, we had been talking about the elusive meaning of life. We had both read some philosophic books recently; bumming around Europe lends itself to such luxuries. He had read more than I had. I remember one of his quotes from the French philosopher and writer, Albert Camus: “You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you only are looking for the meaning of life.” So many of us seem to want to find—or feel they must find—the meaning of life. Is there one? Is there a script we all follow or is life haphazard? Where are the answers? As I traveled, I wondered, do I even know the questions yet? I was wondering about a lot of things, wondering how I got here, wondering how this time would be different—because this time I did get caught.
How many split-second decisions does one make in one’s life? How many turn out OK and how many don’t? Are those moments the moments of being and feeling… lucky? Sometimes you escape, but sometimes you don’t.
Out of the corner of my eye, as I started to put out my cigarette, I saw movement towards me. The figure eyed the guard on the other side of the bars, straining to be nonchalant as he walked in my direction. He started to mumble something in German. But as he slowed down just a bit to walk by me, he half-whispered in stilted English, “We have plan; we break out of here tonight.”
Even though my mouth was closed, my eyes popped wide open and my mind yelled an earthshaking… “WHAT?!”
Paris
With great expectations in the spring of 1970,
on my flight from JFK through Iceland, landing in Luxembourg,
I wrote in my travel journal:
“My life will change this year
and it will never be the same again”
When or how I wasn’t sure,
but I knew the process would begin in Paris.
2.
Enchanté Paris
7:30 PM, April 8, 1970
The rain had been unrelenting, but at this moment I was dry and huddled alone under Café Le Select’s dripping awning. There were a couple of people inside, but as I looked down Boulevard Montparnasse and then over to Boulevard Raspail, it was quiet. Everyone was afraid of and fed up with the rain. It was the second time that I’d been in this famous café, dodging the rain, feeling each day more and more confident and Parisian.
“S’il vous plait, un Pernod,” I said and nodded to the waiter. I had only been here a couple of days, but almost instantaneously I sensed this was my city. I had never felt as excited, or for that matter as afraid of finally living in my own skin. As I flipped the collar of my corduroy sport coat up to protect me from the cool breeze, it was clear the waiter didn’t trust me to pour and make my own drink. As only a French waiter can, he made me feel inadequate and eager at the same time. I watched him place the cube of sugar on a petite spoon delicately resting on the rim of a small glass. There was no doubt he was being rude, but I could also see this was an art to him as he poured the Pernod over the cube and lit the sugar as carefully as Picasso would have added a dash of color to one of his paintings. After a long minute or two, he gently poured some ice-cold water, filling the glass halfway. And as I took a sip, that soothing licorice taste brought a smile to my lips. I gazed at the rainy mist slowly but persistently falling. I felt the nearby
