all the angst, 20% fewer split infinitives.

My first visit to Europe was in 1966.  I was a teenager with more git-up-and-go than sense.

A friend an I flew to Lon­don (Heathrow) and imme­di­ately hopped on a train to Yugoslavia. We were going to meet some of my friends bud­dies there. They lived in a Com­mu­nist coun­try, and Yugoslavia was one of the few places we could all reach with­out too much hassle.

We met in Opatija, in what is now Croa­tia. While my friend was catch­ing up with his Com­mu­nist friends, I bus­ied myself dis­cov­er­ing the local breads and min­eral waters. I spent hour after hour swim­ming in the Adri­atic. You know those pretty urchins? They can really hurt when you step on them. Ouch.

The most com­mon lan­guage back then was French. My French really sucks. When I tried, they’d usu­ally just chuckle and ask me to go back to English.

I had two assets: a Eurail pass which gave me unlim­ited travel on the Euro­pean train sys­tem and a suit­case of Levi 501 jeans. The trip across the Eng­lish Chan­nel was bru­tal. Cross­ing that bit of water was almost a half a day, as I recall. They broke apart the train and loaded all the cars onto fer­ries to slosh from Eng­land to France. We took the Eurostar on a more recent trip. Cross­ing the Eng­lish Chan­nel through the Chun­nel was a whop­ping 13-minutes. It just isn’t such a big deal as it once was.

The Levi jeans were along because some­body said I could make spend­ing money on them. Holy moly, they were right. Back then 501s were some­thing of a rar­ity in Europe. It seemed like every­body wanted a pair, and they were will­ing to pay much more than I thought they were worth. I basi­cally ended up with an empty suit­case and a full wallet.

With the train pass, we didn’t have to worry about things like sched­ules. We rolled into Munich one after­noon and found the entire city was full. There was some kind of crazy con­ven­tion or event going on. Even the youth hos­tels and ma-and-pa room rentals were full. No wor­ries: Eurail Pass to the res­cue. At the ticket counter, we asked for the next sleep­ing car on the sched­ule. Our pass let us get a sleeper by pay­ing an upgrade from First Class. It meant that a fancy sleeper was cheaper than most hotels. And that’s how we came to visit Ham­burg. We hadn’t planned on vis­it­ing that place. It was my first “red light” dis­trict. (Who knew they existed for-real. Right?)

My friend took great pains to intro­duce me to what he called a Ger­man del­i­cacy: sweet­bread. His obvi­ous delight should have been a clue, but I’m a slow learner. I think “sweet­bread” is a high-follutin word for a cow’s thy­mus gland. I decided two things that day: first, I was going to make damn sure I knew what I was eat­ing before I ate it; and sec­ond, I was going to lay in a seri­ous plot to get my friend to eat some “calf fries” on our return to Texas. I’ll see your thy­mus and raise you a cojone or two. Ham­burg: such memories.

We went to the town of Bayreuth in Ger­many. It’s the home of a big Fes­ti­val of Richard Wagner’s operas. I’m not a fan of opera. If I were a fan of opera, I still wouldn’t like Wag­ner­ian operas. But we went because (a) my friend loved Wag­ner­ian operas, and (b) he loved tor­ment­ing my ears. Those things are so long that they break for food dur­ing inter­mis­sion. My friend dragged me to the stage door:

“Herr Bohm,” he told the guy at the stage door. “Ich bin ein Fre­und.” There were some more words, but I don’t remem­ber them. Any­way, in a few min­utes, this old guy walked up. They obvi­ously knew each other. Karl Bohm was one of the great­est con­duc­tors of Wag­ner­ian operas in his­tory, and my friend knew the guy. Not only did they know each other, but we ended up at a local restau­rant dur­ing inter­mis­sion. The two of them were rat­tle off things too fast for me to trans­late, so I just ate and drank beer. I don’t know if it was legal for a 15 year old to order beer, and I never asked. I just ordered it and drank. And drank. And drank. I missed the entire sec­ond half of the opera marathon because I was passed out up in a cor­ner of the fes­ti­val house.

Every­body has their own mem­o­ries of adven­tures. My mem­o­ries of Bayreuth have gap­ing holes.

We hit Bel­gium and the Nether­lands and Yugoslavia. In Italy, we spent sev­eral weeks going through cathe­drals and muse­ums. In Aus­tria, we got up into the bell tower just before noon. If you haven’t heard humon­gous bells sound­ing out the Angelus from a dis­tance of a meter or two, it’s some­thing you won’t soon for­get. I learned two things that day: first, you can’t hope to stay stand­ing when the bells are that loud; and sec­ond, my trav­el­ing com­pan­ion had a total mean streak.

In Aus­tria, my friend took me to the apart­ment of an old friend of his: György Ligeti. I didn’t know the guy was famous. I just thought he was a really old guy. Ligeti was a com­poser, but he never did music you could hum or under­stand. Ligeti once com­posed a piece for pipe organs where you put lit­tle weights on all the keys and selec­tively remove them one at a time. It was a kind of inverse music. The trou­ble was that they picked a pipe organ in Lübeck in East Ger­many. It was a famous organ, and Ligeti’s music blew out some of the organ’s guts. This famous organ was designed by a short-sighted engi­neer who didn’t think some­body like Ligeti would try to have every pipe blow­ing through­out the song. Ligeti was asked to leave Lübeck.

At Ligeti’s apart­ment in Vienna, his wife served us ice cream. She apol­o­gized because it was Thurs­day. My friend had to explain it to me. It was an “ice cream Thurs­day” (sun­dae). Inter­na­tional puns can be tricky on the best of days.

So a cou­ple of years after this trip, I saw Stan­ley Kubrick’s mov­ing, 2001: A Space Odyssey. As the cred­its rolled, I saw “György Ligeti” scroll across the screen. He wrote some of the music for the movie. Cool, I know this guy! His was the weird wonky stuff you can’t hum or whis­tle. Nobody ever tapped their foot to a Ligeti cre­ation. What­ever. I wrote to Mr. Ligeti and told him how happy I was to see he was branch­ing out into the­atri­cal music. He wrote back that he knew noth­ing of the mat­ter. Appar­ently Mr Kubrick thought he could slide the music through with­out pay­ing for it. It ended up in court. Ligeti sued. Who­ever owned the rights to Johann Strauss’s Blue Danube and Richard Strauss Also sprach Zarathus­tra also sued. This was all from a stu­pid con­grat­u­la­tions let­ter from me.

Years later, I saw a note in the news­pa­per that Ligeti finally set­tled with the movie com­pany. I wrote to him, sug­gest­ing that a finder’s fee would be jus­ti­fied. I asked him if I would get a cut. Mr. Ligeti wrote back, say­ing that what I got from the trans­ac­tion was his gratitude.

Humph! Artists.

We almost went to Venice, but there was a thun­der­storm rag­ing when our train rolled into the sta­tion. That much water in a thun­der­storm: we begged off and stayed rolling.

In Paris… yum. There were cathe­drals and all the famous build­ings. We did the Lou­vre for three or four days, and we weren’t even close to being fin­ished walk­ing through it.

One evening, we decided to catch a bal­let. It was Blue­beard by Michel Fokine, not my favorite but we could afford the tick­ets. Dur­ing inter­mis­sion, I met the most adorable French guy. He was about my age (15) or there abouts. And he was stun­ningly sexy as so many French men are. I was smit­ten to the point that I com­pletely missed the sec­ond half of the bal­let. And for the next few days, the French boy and I were insep­a­ra­ble. I wanted to fig­ure out a way to immi­grate, but my evil/mean travel buddy told me that my col­lec­tion of Levi 501s would prob­a­bly run out before I was able to learn enough French to get a job. (Bitch.)

It was a glo­ri­ous few days in total lust with my French pas­try. We ran and skipped and kissed through the windy streets of that city. Great fun.

Back at our youth hos­tel, there was a phone mes­sage for me. This was a time when calls between France and the USA were dif­fi­cult and expen­sive. It had to be my French boy toy because he was the only per­son who knew where we were staying.

Nope. It was a phone mes­sage from my mother. She reminded me that the streets of Paris have eyes, and that she expected me to act with the deco­rum of a proper 15 year old.

From that day to the day mom died, she refused to tell me how she knew.

I’ve been back to Europe sev­eral times. Some­how none of the sto­ries are as whacked as 1966 when I was 15.