The Paris Review

Fabian

One morning my first summer in Berlin, I woke up alone in a park with a piece of sweaty plastic wrap around my forearm. I still had the tattoo. I still didn’t have my keys.

Fabian had given me the tattoo lying in his bed the night before. We met in a club thirty-six hours earlier, on Sunday afternoon, after I tried to pick up his roommate, a brooding Austrian boy with shoulder-length blond hair who was sitting alone away from the dance floor. He had a homemade tattoo of a sword on his wrist. His roommate had made it, he said, and did I want to meet him? They both turned out to be straight, and we spent the rest of the day dancing together and sharing our drinks and our cigarettes and whatever else we had.

Another Sunday afternoon dancing at the same club, a Portuguese friend stopped me and asked, “Americans come here for the freedom, right?” Another Sunday there, a Scottish boy asked me if I moved to Berlin “just to have fun.” Usually in these situations I say, “I guess so.” Nobody with pupils that size could have patience for a real answer. Read More »

Read part 1 here and part 2 here.

I had only just started stepping to and fro under the shifting blush of light-emitting diodes, and with only the most pitiable amount of rhythm or flair, when a strawberry blond officer of the Wellington Police crossed the dance floor, tapped my shoulder, and asked me to come outside. My first thought was that, at last, I was getting hit on by someone who had their own car. Then I prayed, “Please, please be arresting me for writing about my impressions of the South Island.”

Since arriving, I had not suffered so much as one evil eye in the world’s southernmost capital city (the closest being when I somewhat brusquely thrust a five-dollar note, the front of which shows the grinning profile of explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, at a middle-aged Chinese fruiterer at the Vivian Street open-air green market; she glared at me and my bag of ripe apricots). A peachy, pacific place. What could I have done to attract this sun-damaged arm of the law, aside from describing the kea parrot as a “bastard”? Being a bastard myself, I have nothing but affection for the kea. Had my two-step been so criminal?

“Slow night?” I said.

He asked how much I had been drinking. I managed a modest guess, adding, as he copied the details of my driver’s license onto a clipboard, that I worked for the university.

“And how long have you been here?” The officer pointed his pen at the indefatigably thumping club.

“About two minutes.”

He sighed, embarrassed by his task (a random check, I would later learn), and wrote my two minutes down on his official paperwork. “All right. You wanna head back in?” Read More »

In Rome, I was cocky and competitive and altogether my usual self because the apartment we’d rented for the night was completely white—sheets, pillows, towels—and much bigger than expected, with a cow’s head mounted on a wall and great, familiar coffee and I might as well have been in Istanbul or Moscow or New York or the many other places I had lived and worked, and I was thinking, after all that, how hard could Italy be? What’s the big deal? Yet that concern about experience or mastery or difficulty was to miss an essential point. That a good thing doesn’t have to be hard.

At the pub downstairs, the guy my wife knew knew from Baghdad was telling my wife how to get into Syria. I sighed, feeling everything retighten. A light rain fell as we passed through the piazza, and I saw cops and I stared at their guns. Under heat lamps, we hefted tall glasses of blood-dark wine and when we ordered the final carafe, all this big talk about the usual terrible things, there was nothing to do but float home on a red river. Read More »

Read part 1 here.

On the table, next to an incomplete, five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle meant to show a pair of docile horses, a magazine calls my name. It calls to me with bold yellow proclamations in sans serif (“MY MAGIC WEDDING!” “THE FROCKS THAT ROCKED AND SHOCKED”), photo-framing pink boxes, and a rogues gallery of fame-brushed faces. This is the rope bridge, heavy with gossip, across which your sunburnt correspondent has teetered for the last two weeks—over howling, hungry rivers with names like Little Devil and Charming, further and further into a land where the bone marrow of J. R. R. Tolkien is used to fashion everything from high-grossing puberty allegories in 3-D to cheeky airline safety videos. This is Woman’s Day, New Zealand’s number one weekly magazine. The date is December 31, 2012, and, according to the mag’s house astrologer, manic Mars is moving smack-dab into my center stage.

Read More »

Liane de Pougy, Paris, 1890s.

We’re out this week, but we’re re-posting some of your favorite pieces from 2012 while we’re away. We hope you enjoy—and have a happy New Year!

Dear Friends,

There are moments I suspect we are not living in the Golden Age of Travel.

I speak as someone who enjoys nearly everything, mind you, from the novelty of sipping in-flight tomato juice to the thrill of meeting the passenger in the next seat. But even I (a half-wit, apparently) found last Tuesday’s flight to Portugal less than easy going.

We cut it close; my traveling companion, Matthew, was late to meet me and the result was the sort of last-minute dash that’s both exhilarating and draining. I was allowed in an accelerated line for irresponsible travelers but found myself behind a man who not only seemed in no hurry but had to remove three pieces of heavy jewelry, one at a time, each time the metal detector went off. He did so with an infuriatingly sanguine smile. I hated and envied him. Passengers were boarding when I sprinted up, some ways ahead of Matthew. The gate, C71, and the plane were absolutely crammed with some forty assorted kids, ranging in age from about eleven to fifteen. One of their chaperones, a hearty lady in a tracksuit, explained to me they were on their way from Indiana to an international cheerleading competition three hours outside of Lisbon. When I arrived at 29A (aisle) I discovered the middle seat, intended for my traveling companion, was occupied by a tween of some thirteen years. She and her friend regarded me with terrified bravado. “If you’re sitting here,” one of them said quickly, “you should know that we have to sit together. We’re roommates.”

Read More »

In the aisle of the Boeing 737 sardine tin, a wild-eyed, whiskered man—late twenties—held up the smooth flow of Seattle-bound passengers with frantic attempts to stow his carry-on. The impedimenta in question seemed to yours truly a destination-appropriate one: secured to his bulging backpack with yards of duct tape, a skateboard jutted. As he stooped to unwrap the thing, provoking more than a few pursed lips from the jammed queue, he bickered with the flight attendant.

“Can’t I just keep it in my lap?”

“If you can’t fit it in the overhead compartment, you’ll have to check it plane-side.”

Read More »