5th Job, 7th Major, 17 Nights and My 1st Passport

I broke up with Cameron, the nicest guy on earth and my first serious boyfriend, on a rainy Tuesday in May. Several things happened at once. I quit my fifth job. I changed my major for the seventh time. I moved in with my friend Jane in the gloomy Richmond District, where I never slept. I spent about the next 17 nights on a mattress on a floor in a flat in the Haight Ashbury that was occupied by a pothead, a recluse, and classmate of mine from Creative Writing 101. I was anxiously waiting for my first passport to arrive.

It was six months after the Quake of ‘89. I want to blame the way that natural disaster shook my whole world for the spastic way I was behaving. Either that or I want to compare myself to a fault line, to say that Cameron and I were like boundaries along the San Andreas, pushing up against each other until we ultimately split to move in opposite directions. But neither of those things is really true. I was 24 and indecisive. I still wanted something unusual to happen to my life.

IN my life.

No. TO my life.

Steve and I would drink beers together in an on-campus pub after class every Monday. He’d call me an editorial goddess and tell me I was beautiful. I may have bought an open-ended ticket to Germany because of his story about hitchhiking around Australia for half a year. The night before my flight, despite the fact that he was moving to Britain to be with his true love (a neurotic English girl named Emma), he made love to me for 12 hours (ah, youth). Then he borrowed his stoner friend Hurley’s car to drive me to the airport where we both wept and he told me he loved me and was devastated that he would never see me again. I cried all the way to Frankfurt.

In Vienna, I met up with Laurie, who’d been to Europe before and had picked up the affectation of calling her Backpack her Rucksack. Plus, she had an Agenda. We got mad at each other in Budapest and started traveling with a 38-year-old graphic designer named Wolfgang who drove around in a Mercedes milk truck. We ducked and dodged his repeated attempts to nail one (if he couldn’t have two) American girlfriend(s), and this made us all the grouchier. I don’t remember what anything looked like because it rained constantly and none of my pictures turned out. We bickered through southern Hungary and across Yugoslavia. In drizzly Dubrovnik, Laurie got on a train to Romania and from there, Wolfgang and I headed for the border.

He got mad in Trieste because it was the World Cup and we were in a cafe with 800 or so Italians and the US was playing Italy on TV and I cheered when my country miraculously scored. He complained about my poor judgment but really, he was just mad because I wouldn't let him kiss me. The next day he dumped me in someplace called Punta Sabbioni, where I jumped on a ferry boat to Venice.

A tip for first-timers to Europe: When you are pining away for a guy who is spending the summer with his true love in England and you get dumped by a passionate German, do not, I repeat, DO NOT go to the most romantic city on earth (unless you want to experience a depression as deep and murky and stench-ridden as the Grand Canal). You will not be able to remind yourself that you wanted something unusual to happen. You will not see that this definitely qualifies.

I spent one awful night in horrible Venice, sharing a room with some sorority girls who totally convinced me that it never rained in Greece. In the morning I boarded the first of two trains that would take me all the way to the bottom of Italy in the shortest amount of time. At 10:00 p.m. in the Brindisi train station I was told the next boat for Athens left at midnight and that I would have to walk ten dangerous, scourge-ridden blocks to get to the marina. “Dis guy protect you,” the station attendant said, gesturing toward a tough-looking Italian about my age with a bright orange rucksack on his shoulder. He had a toothpick that he rolled from side to side in his mouth.

“Okay,” I said, shrugging.

We were halfway to the marina before he told me his name was Alex and that he was finishing a year of studying architecture in Florence. All of this in perfect English because - oh yeah - he was in fact a Mexican-American from San Francisco. I was still unseasoned enough a traveler to consider this coincidence extraordinary, so I stayed up all night with him on the deck of the Hellenic Mediterranean ferry. We drank his two bottles of homemade Sicilian wine and he told me all about his fellow exchange student, Karen, another future architect from California. He was looking for her, having heard she was staying on some island somewhere in Greece.

As we disembarked in Athens in the sizzling hot midday sun, Alex asked me if I wanted to share a room with him. Since I was already pining away for someone who was in love with someone else, I figured I didn’t have anything to lose.