October 6, 2017:
It was brave of me to stay behind. A day on my own in a foreign city while my schoolfriends and our drunken chaperone moved ahead to Paris. I wanted to see The Jam at The Rainbow.
I found the train to Dover, lugging thirty pounds of mostly books through confusing streets, collecting strange looks from spivs and workers who'd apparently never seen an American hippie before. The weight: two volumes of Braudel; Ulysses; Ellmann's bio of Joyce; the Blue Guide; Euripides; Aristophanes; a huge catalog from the 1979 Post-Impressionism show at London's Royal Gallery bought as a gift for the GF; Art and Experience in Classical Greece; Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations; Plato; a myth anthology; and, I think, The Interpretation of Dreams. We all carried Braudel and the Blue Guide; I went the extra mile with the others. Not a good idea. Today I bring an entire library on an iPad. This is better.
On the ferry I talked racism with a City man in gray and bowler. Grandly he educated me: "Some people believe the wogs begin at Calais." Gotcha.
In Paris with burning entrails I tried and failed to trace my comrades' movements. Drunken chaperone had agreed to meet at Deux Maggots. A kindly woman cabbie directed me. I walked there from the Gare du Nord, about three-and-a-half miles with all that weight. They were not present, so I walked to their hostel, closed for nighttime curfew. Wandered the neighborhood looking for affordable lodging, but the one open hotel was far, vastly out of my league. Back at the hostel I threw rocks at windows, shouting, "Hey Fubar College!" Until just as police were taking notice, a friend heard, opened a window, and called down. Saved by good ears.
The GF and I were having a rocky time. I remember a stealthy sexual reunion in sleeping bags on the floor while the others slept. That might have been the last time, or nearly the last, for most of the trip. In hindsight, it might have been wiser to do the entire thing alone.