The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: a tourist is an ugly human being.
—JAMAICA KINCAID, FROM A SMALL PLACE
AFTER MY ADVENTURES WITH OUTWARD BOUND I WANDERED WEST TO Southern California, where I briefly flirted with going to an exorbitantly expensive college but dropped out after a year, deciding that while getting massively stoned in dorm rooms and listening to Dinosaur Jr was fun and all, there were other avenues I wanted to explore. Leveraging my minimal outdoor skills and experience working with youth at risk in Florida, I got a job at a small private school in Los Angeles.
I’ve never traveled much. In my twenties—when most young folks satisfy their wanderlust by backpacking around Eastern Europe or Southeast Asia—I was busy trying to consume every beer and Jägermeister shot in Los Angeles, which left me little time for international escapades. Despite this lack of experience, I was chosen to help chaperone a middle school trip through Europe. My qualifications were a) I was male, thus balanced the gender equation as the teacher orchestrating the trip was Ms. Demott; and b) I had never murdered a middle schooler in cold blood. This second qualification is no small feat, as anyone who has spent more than an hour in a room full of twelve-year-old hormonal preteens can attest to.
I knew next to nothing about Europe. The itinerary was scheduled at an astonishing clip: We were to land in London and spend about twenty hours there, then be whisked south on a whirlwind tour of France, see Switzerland out the windows of a train, and finish in Italy with visits to Florence, Pisa, and Rome. All in seven days. The Grand Tour in a microdose.
I had been to France twice before, once as part of a high school French class I was in. My path to French V was paved with a level of astounding linguistic mediocrity. I could never, even if my life depended on it, speak in any tense other than pidgin present. My accent made me sound like I’d swallowed my toothbrush sideways and was trying to cough it back up while asking directions to the Metro. I couldn’t conjugate the third person plural of verbs, thus spoke to everyone in first person plural, “we” or “us,” a language shortcut that had me asking complete strangers questions like “Where can we go to the bathroom?” which sounded like an invitation it most certainly was not.
Astride in Paris, our rowdy group of American high schoolers craned our necks at the city around us. This was Paris, the most romantic city in the world, or so we were told. Nexus of European cosmopolitanism, center of intellectual enlightenment. If the world is your oyster, then Paris is the pearl. The city was laid out in all its glory before us, a million adventures to be had.
We immediately went to the nearest little shop next to our hotel, bought armfuls of beer and packs of smokes, and sat in our tiny rooms, drinking beer and smugly congratulating ourselves on our worldliness. One of the lessons I’ve learned from travel is that when you visit some far-flung place populated with provincial rustics, they seem quaint. When you travel and you are a provincial rustic, you look like an idiot.
Chaperoning the middle schoolers would be my third trip to the European continent. Besides the high school French trip, I’d gone to Paris when I was about five or six. My grandparents took our family on a barge trip down the canals of France. We slept, cooked, and traveled on a converted barge that visited little towns and villages. My memory of the barge is mostly taken up by a set of small metal Napoleonic soldiers I played with a great deal, mostly because that was the only toy on the boat. The barge was tight yet cozy, and I remember being quite content to line up Napoleon’s army in rank and file and then smash them with my grubby little fists.
One day during the trip the whole family rode bikes to visit the countryside. Vineyards and wine-tasting figured prominently in the day’s activities, and the adults grew progressively more cheerful and expansive about the wines they drank. I had not yet learned to ride a bike, so I had to sit, precariously perched, on my Aunt Ann’s handlebars. This was in the late 1970s, so helmets and general safety measures had yet to be invented. There had been a light drizzle all day. As our family zigzagged down the road, veins flowing with bonhomie and cabernet, we came to a long hill sloping down to the canal where the barge was docked. My aunt had been informed about how the rubber brakes on our dilapidated French bikes wouldn’t work at optimum levels in the rain, the principle of friction upon which they relied being subverted by water. The collective wisdom was that it was best to walk the bikes down the hill.
Aunt Ann pooh-poohed this notion (I think she may have actually said “pooh-pooh”) and invited me to saddle up on her handlebars and join her in a downhill ride back to the barge.
I gamely clambered aboard. Looking back, it’s a classic indication of an underdeveloped cerebral cortex.
She pushed off and we began coasting downhill, the wet pavement zizzing underneath us, a fine spray of water rooster-tailing off our tires. Tiny water droplets speckled my face. It felt good. All the adults had told us not to do it, and we were doing it anyway. To go against grown-up remonstration as a child? Manna from heaven.
As our speed increased, my aunt clenched the rusted old hand-brake levers. The prognostications of the rest of the family proved prophetic: The brakes simply emitted a squeal like a Gallic pig being goosed with a pool cue but did little to slow our bombardier’s dive.
Moments like this tell us who we really are. The bike rocketed downhill, and there was clearly no stopping it by conventional methods. The road ran diagonally down the face of the hill. To our right it dropped off steeply, to our left was a bank of scree and weeds. My aunt came to the harsh but necessary conclusion that the only hope of checking our rapid descent was through the application of rudimentary physics. As we shot down the hill, wind whipping back the hair from our faces, water stinging our eyes, she veered the bike into the bank. Because I was sitting on the handlebars, legs dangling, I was like a fleshy hood ornament when the bike suddenly arrested forward motion. I was catapulted into the prickers and gravel, slamming hard and tumbling to a stop.
There is something about being slightly drunk on a bike that envelopes the rider in a mist of assumed invulnerability. Perhaps it’s the joie de vivre, or the looseness of the joints. Either way, Aunt Ann was more or less okay, as was I, minor cuts and bruises notwithstanding. Shaken, but more or less whole. We’d narrowly avoided a decent maiming.
Aunt Ann was not through, however. She was not about to let near disaster deter her from being contrary, a disorder I believe I inherited. She picked herself up, righted the bike, and asked me if I wanted to try again. I got back on the handlebars, which tells you something about my decision-making capabilities. We careened down the hill once more, spectacularly crashing again at the bottom. Tant pis
My experience of Europe, therefore, was bound up in those memories—a young boy subject to the whims of adults, and a teenager so wrapped up in self-consciousness he couldn’t see the forest for les arbres I was relieved, then, years later as a chaperone on the middle school trip, when we arrived on the continent, to see that as part of our tour we’d be riding on one of those big, gaudy buses you see careening around the world near popular tourist destinations. And this may make me sound tacky, but there is something to be said for traveling through Europe on a big coach bus. Like many Americans, I was happy to have Europe pre-packaged and served to me like a convenience store snack.
The tour was a blur of English and French tourist locales and jet lag. As part of the package, we had a tour guide named Brian, an affable Brit whose snaggle-toothed smile and thick accent charmed all of us. He seemed utterly at home in the world regardless of where we went, happily chatting in French at the restaurants where we ate lukewarm ratatouille and Ms. Demott and I snuck glasses of wine at lunch.
Eventually, after days of speed-tourism, our massive tour bus rolled into Rome. Obviously, I am not the only one who has walked through Rome until my feet ached, transfixed by visible layers of history. Seeing the Coliseum in the gloom of the evening is such a fixture in the zeitgeist imaginings of archaeological history that to say anything about the experience practically demands cliché. But it was pretty cool, and I felt—as just about everyone has before me—the stretch of history all around me, the weight of time in that place.
The kids wanted to hit the city. They wanted excitement, they wanted danger. They didn’t want to simply sit in the lobby of the shabby hotel we were staying in playing cards. They cajoled and pleaded and begged, and finally Brian admitted that, yes, there was a dance club nearby that allowed teenagers. The kids riotously cheered, hormones flooding their bloodstreams at the thought of shaking their groove thang at a European discotheque. Brian led us out, and we walked through the darkening streets of Rome, passing little cafes and narrow streets and the odd Parthenon.
The discotheque was a subterranean room, black walled and strobed with flashes of light and some of the worst music I’ve ever heard. It wasn’t particularly busy at that hour, but the place was maybe a third full. The kids immediately began buying Cokes and heading out to the dance floor to twirl and shake and twist about. Ms. Demott and I positioned ourselves away from the dance floor against the wall, smiling grimly as the kids shrieked and bobbed to the pounding sounds of Europe’s latest pop hits. Then Brian wandered by, and the students—who by this point had fallen in love with his sarcastic English wit—rushed him and dragged him out onto the floor. I thought he’d demur, as we were, offering a no, no, no thank you. I don’t dance But I was wrong.
He hit the dance floor with the confidence of a matador. As he neared the knot of American middle schoolers amid the Euro masses, his step became a jerky, robotic duck waddle. Dances with names like the jitterbug, the Spongebob, and the Dougie exist. This one, if it had a name, would be called The British Explosion. Syncopated, sharp arm movements—with index fingers pointing like guns—were incongruous with a rapid, campfire-extinguishing step I immediately nicknamed “the logger stomp” in my head. There was a vibrating quality to Brian, a kind of full-body seizure. He was somehow able to simultaneously stick out his tongue and bite his lip with the classic white man’s overbite. I don’t know how he did it. It was as though he’d just emerged from deep in the wilderness and had never before seen other humans or heard music, and was tapping into some primal, ecstatic spirit that caused his body to convulse and shake. His movements seemed closer to a medical condition than a dance. It was the sort of awful dancing that makes the viewer feel embarrassed for the dancer.
And yet, he owned it, with such absolute confidence and joy. The kids screamed and clapped, their eyes shining bright and mouths wide open in the happiest leering grins I’ve ever seen. They howled and cheered, and Brian just went at it harder, committing himself mind, body, and soul to the most horrific dancing I’ve ever seen.
Walking back to the hotel late that night, the kids talking way too loudly as we made our way through the streets of Rome, I thought about The Spectacle of Brian. I thought about how Ms. Demott and I, pillars of respectability that we were, had just sat off to the side. I looked at the shining faces of the kids, the way they shoved and jostled and pushed each other as we wandered back to the hotel, their faces sweaty and flushed and happy.
After about an hour of shushing and shooing, we got the kids into their rooms. Ms. Demott headed off to bed, and I wandered back down to the deserted lobby. I stared out the window, and realized that I felt bad for not dancing. When would I ever be in Rome again? Or Europe for that matter? I’d chosen decorum over fun, boringly staid New England stolidness over exuberance and joy.
I headed back out into the streets and wandered around. Eventually, I found a little nightclub. Upstairs was a small cafe, and I ordered a beer from the zinc-topped bar. Birra, I said, brutally botching the accent. The bartender sighed and put down a bottle of Peroni. I went down to the cavernous gloom of the dance floor, located beneath the ground floor in a kind of bunker. It was much smaller than the one we’d visited previously, and practically empty.
I am not a good dancer. But I stepped out onto the floor, left my dignity back along the wall in the shadows, pointed my fingers, and shook my moneymaker. Because there are two types of people in this world: those that dance, and those that wish they had.