It was two months after my twentieth birthday and my father was driving me in his Cadillac Coupe DeVille from my parents’ upper middle class split-level house in suburban Roslyn, Long Island to JFK Airport in Queens. I was going to get on my Icelandic Airlines flight to Luxembourg, with a stopover in Reykjavik, to begin my first attempt to create a life for myself on the other side of the pond. I had an open return ticket that cost four hundred dollars – that was a lot of bread – and was good for one year. I had just graduated with my bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Cornell University at the absurdly precocious age of twenty. I was two years younger than my classmates because I had skipped two grades in school when I was very young. It was the Cold War and the Space Age. America needed little math and science geniuses. My parents did not consider the psychological consequences.
For my anticipated misadventures, hippie wanderings, and longshot try at getting settled somewhere in Europe, I had a small backpack. It had very few items inside: one extra pair of jeans, two shirts and a sweater, many underpants from Macys following the advice of my mother, six pairs of socks, a few novels, and a book of anarcho-Marxist theory to read, a spiral notebook, two felt tip pens, and a toothbrush. My dental care was very poor during that period of my life. I went weeks without brushing my teeth. Later I would need a full round of periodontal treatment to heal my gums and coax my mouth back to health.
I wanted to travel as lightly as possible. I had a cotton-filled blue sleeping bag which rolled up and fit into a weatherproof green nylon cover. I had no idea where I would be sleeping – in youth hostels and cheap hotels, in train station waiting rooms and on beaches. There were living room floors waiting for me, offered by hospitable people I would meet along the way.
I left New York with twelve hundred dollars in traveler’s checks in my pocket. It was not much but it also was not nothing. My rough plan was to spend one hundred fifty a month, mostly on food to stay alive. There would be almost no funds for anything else. At that rate, the money would last about eight months. Some of the twelve hundred bucks were from bar mitzvah presents. When I was thirteen years old, I had endured that ritual ceremony of Judaism, memorizing in Hebrew portions of the haftara from the Old Testament, singing them loud in a cadenced chant on a Saturday morning in April at the podium on the stage of the synagogue. Some of my travel money was from summer jobs delivering packages and painting houses.
I had subsisted on nearly nothing as a college student and gave hardly any thought to money. I lived in the bubble of the university campus. My parents paid my tuition, which in the 1970s was only about three thousand dollars a year for an Ivy League education. I looked forward desperately and hopefully to the end of all the disciplined studying which had consumed my childhood and teenage years. All that I had in my mind was my fantasy of limitless freedom. I wanted to not study and not have a job, to be away from all institutions with their organizational bureaucratic procedures. I wanted to ramble, like the song by the Allman Brothers or like Jack Kerouac in On the Road. On a Greyhound bus, on a jet plane, on a train southward through Italy, on the side of a highway with my thumb stuck out. Disillusioned by the Vietnam War, inspired ideationally and in sensibility by 1960s counterculture, and having read many French and European poets and novelists, I wanted to get out of America.
My father had very little understanding of why I was going to Europe. My parents were from the “silent generation.” There was no communication. They were not able to talk with me about anything that had to do with life. They wanted me to pursue a money-making profession. They actively opposed my choice to study the humanities. It was Saturday the third of July 1976, the day before the maximum mega-spectacle of America’s bicentennial celebration. It would be two hundred years to the day since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There would be fireworks everywhere, especially on TV and in all media, endless self-praising self-congratulations about the greatness of America. I had intentionally bought my plane ticket to Europe for the day before the extravaganza. Time to go. My father was very happy to drive me to the airport in his air-conditioned car. It provided him with a couple of hours of respite from the henpecking demands of my mother. He balanced being king at work and valet at home.
It was hot and muggy in New York and on Long Island, afternoon temperatures near ninety degrees Fahrenheit. The daily news from nowhere was that North and South Vietnam were reunited into one country. There was an attempted coup in Sudan. A deadly terrorist explosion in Argentina. The U.S. Supreme Court declared that the death penalty was OK.
“The Mets have a good team this year,” said my Dad.
“You mean those lovable losers of baseball don’t suck as usual,” I said.
“They still have some of the spirit of 1969. The World Champion Miracle Mets. And the 1973 team that went to the World Series. Jerry Koosman is having a great year,” he replied.
“Yes, he is. He is my favorite pitcher because he is left-handed like me. I remember when he was 11-2 [eleven wins and two losses] in the first half of his rookie year in 1968, and before the Mets were any good at all. This current eight-game winning streak feels good. I wonder if they can keep it going. They’ve never won more than eleven in a row in their history.”
“How are you going to follow the Mets in Europe?”
“I can read the International Herald Tribune. They have a good sports section. But they report on the game from the day before yesterday. They show the League Leaders but not the batting averages and stats of all players like the New York Times does on Sunday.”
“Your mother and I went to Europe once. You should go to Venice and see the old Jewish ghetto. It’s still well preserved. Write us letters or send us a postcard.”
“I will do all of that. Bye Dad, I love you.” I got out of the car, one leg at a time, grabbed my small backpack and sleeping bag, returning from the cocoon of Cadillac heaven into the dust and grime of the physical world. I still had a few hours until my flight. I was planning to sit in a lounge and read George Orwell’s early novel Keep the Aspidistra Flying about the banality of English middle-class life. I walked past a man in a sweater holding a little girl in his arms as they looked together through a window at the nose of a Jumbo Jet. My mind was asking itself about the broader historical context of what had brought me to where I was standing now.