I don’t know how it started. But at some point all I ever wanted to be was tan. I worked toward that goal with the same kind of round-the-clock dedication as a medical intern. When someone would compliment my tan I would thank them with a sense of pride more befitting a violin prodigy or Oscar winner. Not someone whose only accomplishment was lying in the sun nine hours a day.
I grew up in the ’70s before we had suntan lotion. It might have been found in some households, but it was mostly seen as a luxury item more commonly used by idiots who had nothing better to do with their money. Who in their right mind would want to cover up the sun? I think the highest SPF at the time was 2. Any sun product we did have was basically a form of oil or butter. More suited to cooking the skin than protecting it. The thought of blocking the sun’s rays as nonsensical as swimming in a down coat. Parents didn’t put sunscreen on babies or children either. They didn’t even watch them when they went into the water. You pretty much had a fifty-fifty chance of returning safely from a trip to the beach. We sat out exposed to the elements all day like shipwreck survivors or lizards. If the sun didn’t kill you, the ocean would. Some days I’d get knocked down and dragged by the waves so many times I’d stagger out of the water looking like I’d just been mugged. My mother barely glancing up from her Peter Benchley novel. She oddly stayed in the shade. Protected her skin like Greta Garbo (think Nicole Kidman), which was quite unusual for an Italian-American woman in the ’70s, who were more likely to be a shade of crisp bacon for the months of July and August. But not my mother. Always under an umbrella with a book and a hat while my sister and I sat in the sand as the sun blisters rose up on our shoulders and arms like Bubble Wrap. Popping each tiny bump as little droplets of water dripped out. The new skin raw underneath. Then burning that layer, too. My T-shirts coated with enough dead skin at the end of each day to make a wallet. There were years where I still had a tan at Christmas.
But it wasn’t until I reached college age that I truly started perfecting tanning. The beginnings of what would later become an art form. A tan was no longer just something that happened to me by the end of the summer; it became my job. A job that I took very seriously. Had I pursued my studies with the same kind of vigor I brought to tanning I could have graduated magna cum laude from Harvard instead of with a B.A. from Hofstra.
For some reason, while I was in college in the ’80s on Long Island, students wore shorts year-round. No matter that our winters rivaled Winnipeg. I don’t know if this is something that college students still do. I no longer go to colleges because they make me feel old. There’s nothing that can disabuse you faster of the notion that you’re still young than walking onto a college campus once you’re past forty.
“Oh, my God, they’re all children,” I said to myself the last time I visited one. I had no idea. I thought I was the same when I was in college as I am now. An adult. But I was about as similar to an adult when I was strutting around the campus grounds as one of the squirrels. A barely formed little half-wit who was under the delusion that he was a grown person. Do professors spend the whole day laughing at their students? I would. Walking around, so cocky, like they know it all, when in fact college students are nothing more than high school students with three less pimples.
Any day that would hit above sixty degrees I would strip off my shirt and lie out on the quad grass as if I were in St. Tropez. One year it was particularly warm during spring break and I laid out each day like I was clocking in to shift work at an automotive factory. “Oh, shit, I’ve got to go,” I’d say the second the sun was over the grass, as if someone were waiting to dock my pay if I missed even one minute of prime tanning time. By the end of that spring break I was so tan everyone thought I’d been to Cancun. The awe on their faces when I replied, “No, I just stayed on campus.”
“You got that tan on campus?!”
“Yep.” The achievement in my mind only that much more impressive, considering I hadn’t left Hempstead, Long Island.
As college came to a close and most of my fellow graduates began to plan for their careers and futures my immediate objective was to determine how to stay tan year-round. Hopscotching from summers at the beach to winter breaks in the Caribbean and Mexico, spaced out enough so that as one tan faded another was ready to take its place.
My first order of business after graduation was taking the typical backpack-through-Europe trip. No Scandinavian countries for me, thank you. I didn’t have one precious day to waste in soggy Copenhagen. The thought of needing an umbrella was enough to make me sick. No, this was to be a trip of Mediterranean delights. One where the chance of sunshine each day hovered at around 98 percent. If it was a country where I couldn’t get by with only shorts and a tank top, I wasn’t interested. I take all the money I get from my graduation party. (The only reason I had one. Collecting envelopes from my relatives as though I’m manning the register of an express lane. “Next!”) I’m going to start off in Spain and then five weeks later meet up with my friend Sal in Greece. Sal is also Italian-American and gay, and we had previously been involved for about five minutes. But with all the drama that young, gay Italians on Long Island could infuse them with. Acting out our shitty little soap opera for each other until we got bored.
And now here I am, twenty-two, with my backpack, boarding a plane to Madrid (a charter airline so low budget the flight attendants wore their own clothes), where I am to meet my friend Laura, who is just finishing up a semester abroad in Edinburgh (another wet city I pass on). I send a letter to Laura weeks ago with my flight information and she sends me a letter back saying she’ll meet me at baggage claim. This was the equivalent of texting then. It was slow but efficient.
On a hot summer afternoon I arrive in Madrid, where we are to spend a few days seeing the sights. But after one morning of museum-going I’m already getting itchy. The sun is blazing outside and I’m at the Prado looking at Goyas like a dope. Since Laura and I have no firm plans over the next weeks I suggest we take off the next day for Seville. A city more suited to lazing by swimming pools than Madrid. Ideally, I’m looking for someplace where I can see the sights from a lounge chair. I don’t let her know quite how manic I am about my tanning hours. I realize I will sound insane enough in short order, so I do my best to pretend that I’m normal. That I, too, am traveling to see every European artwork and cathedral I have ever studied and not to lay out until my skin is the texture of a Louis Vuitton handbag.
We spend a week traveling through southern Spain. Staying in youth hostels or rooms that we rent. But I want to go even farther south than Spain. Someplace where the heat is strong enough to knock you unconscious. I have always wanted to go to Morocco ever since seeing The Man Who Knew Too Much when I was a child. Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day travel to Marrakech, where their kid gets abducted and Doris Day has to sing “Que Sera, Sera” to get it back. I always remembered how exotic and fabulous it looked. The kind of backdrop that could provide both international intrigue and sun strong enough to get the job done. We find a youth hostel in our travel bible, Let’s Go Europe (I know Morocco’s not in Europe, but it was in the book, so calm down. I will return at a future point in this essay to the topic of Let’s Go Europe. I cannot overstate its importance), that we are told is frequented by Peace Corps volunteers and that also has a rooftop sunning deck. I can’t think of anything more ideal. I’ll probably meet some gorgeous, selfless, farm-fed midwestern volunteer who’s on a weekend holiday. Swapping stories half-naked on plastic loungers as we leisurely sun ourselves in one hundred and ten–degree heat.
Laura and I take the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier. I should mention that Laura is fair-skinned and at this point in our travels still appears to be blissfully unaware of the true purpose of this trip. I tan myself on the ferry as we play cards. One deck of cards is like traveling with Netflix. Hours of entertainment right at our fingertips. And we met people while traveling, too. Collected them like matchbooks. Each new person an exciting adventure. I would talk to anyone. Of course now this sounds like the most awful thing in the world. I’m constantly maneuvering myself through life to be the farthest away as possible from people. If I can hear your voice you’re too close. But then, having been an adult for all of one minute, other people were still a novelty. “You live where? What’s that like? Do you want to share our room tonight?” Somebody I met ten minutes ago could inspire a fiercer loyalty than any I feel today for people I’ve known for over thirty years. “We have to wait for Jean-Louis and Colette!” I’d find myself insisting on numerous occasions while traveling when in my twenties. The names would change but the devotion would not.
On this particular ferry ride, Laura and I meet a woman from Sweden. The fact that she happens to be on line in front of us for café con leche is apparently enough to bond us for life. We tell Sigrid about our youth hostel and suddenly the three of us are inseparable.
“Where’s Sigrid? We’re not leaving without her!” I can remember nothing of Sigrid aside from her name, I’m assuming she had a personality. All I can recall, though, is including her in everything. We must’ve liked something about her. Although that wasn’t exactly a prerequisite when meeting people while traveling when you’re twenty-two. I’m sure now I probably would have found her insufferable after two seconds. But what did I know then? I’d spend hours talking to strangers. Asking them questions. Learning about their lives. Today I can think of nothing that would fill me with more dread. Maybe I met enough people over the years to realize that they just start repeating themselves after a while. So you’re never really meeting someone new. Just another version of someone else you know. “I already have one of you,” I often find myself thinking while talking to a person I’ve just met.
But twenty-two-year-old Gary is a Chatty Cathy. He adores new people. Can’t get enough of them. Will start a conversation with a doorknob. (Occasionally, twenty-something Gary still comes out when traveling—“Oh, hey, what’s your name, where are you from?”—and then fifty-something Gary swats him back down. “Are you out of your mind!?”)
Laura, Sigrid, and I arrive in Tangier and transfer to a bus that will take us on to Marrakech. What I imagine the youth hostel to look like and what it actually looks like are two very separate things that share no common ground. My Club Med fantasy replaced with a concrete structure that appears plucked directly from East Germany. We stay in slablike rooms and share a hallway bathroom. But there is a roof deck (decades before they were made famous by millennials) that looks out over the medina. And it is gorgeous. Suddenly, I’m in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Snake charmers and dentists, musicians and food stalls all jammed together in one great big outdoor plaza. And us looking out over it all. There are plastic chairs and tepid beers and the sun is setting and there are Peace Corps volunteers. Just like I had read about in Let’s Go Europe. (A book that held more adventures than any one life could contain. A new edition came out every year. Thousands and thousands of places to see, stay, eat. I don’t know why, but it was infinitely more exciting arriving at a hotel you read about in Let’s Go Europe than at one you find online.) And we all mingle. Like the most perfect college party you could imagine in the most extraordinary location. The heat a balmy ninety degrees as the sun dips behind the Atlas Mountains. My fantasy not so far off after all.
The next morning, we go to a local market and get fresh juice and about ten minutes after that I’m in the shared bathroom of our hostel with the worst diarrhea of my life. I spend the next several days in a fever dream going from bed to toilet (I use the term loosely) to bed again. “Que Sera, Sera” indeed. Laura and Sigrid come and go, checking in on me periodically. And in the rare moments when I am completely lucid all I can think is, I’m losing my tan. This fear propels me back to health. I refuse to sweat several weeks of sun off me on a mattress no thicker than a Kleenex. Once I have enough strength I’m lying flat on my back on the roof, letting the sun roast me like one of the rotating chickens in the medina. Laura wonders if this is wise. I tell her to mind her own business, I’m fine. So what if I lost ten pounds in two days.
After a week of mostly shitting, it’s time to leave Morocco. And one last time we are on the roof. And I talk to a boy. And he’s in the Peace Corps. And he looks like I want him to look. And I ask questions and we laugh and we drink and it’s hot. And he introduces me to his friends, and I, to mine (“You’ll LOVE Sigrid!”) and the night goes on and nothing happens. And I still wonder why.
We part with Sigrid once we get back to Spain. We exchange addresses. Promise to visit. Miss her terribly when she’s gone. And then a few days later it’s like she never existed.
Laura and I make our way through Spain and the south of France and Italy. Picking up various Gustavs and Fleurs and Lorenzos along the way. I forgo trips to castles and museums in order to sun. Still secretly trying to make up for my lost days in Morocco. Until it’s time for Laura to now depart and for me to head to Greece to meet Sal. Laura, still pale, still unaware of the real reason for this trip after over a month. Bless her.
I have a week on my own before Sal arrives and I ferry to Corfu, where I meet two young women traveling together, best friends Jen and Diane. And we rent a very cheap apartment from a woman holding up a sign as we arrive on the dock. And it’s a few blocks from the beach. And there’s a kitchen and we cook dinners. Wouldn’t it be nice to be that uncomplicated again? To cook dinner with someone I don’t know. To share a home. To be close. If for only a short while. It’s like a dream I’m surprised I still remember. Maybe the truth is they annoyed me. And it was a cheap way to travel. And they were company for a few days. A way to get me from one part of my trip to the next. This is all possible. But that’s not how I remember it. I remember laughing with Jen and Diane and talking late into the night and packing lunches to bring to the beach together. And going to an outdoor movie starring Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor. And buying bags of figs that we leave in a bowl on the kitchen table. And I tell Jen and Diane that I’m gay. This somehow is still cause for an entire evening’s worth of conversation at twenty-two. And for this week we are a small family. And I am grateful that there was no email or Facebook or Instagram to keep us in touch with each other. Trying to hold on to something that has already dissolved like cotton candy the second it’s over. Some things are meant to last a week when you’re twenty-two. They are not meant to be held on to. They rot and curdle when kept past their expiration dates. I don’t remember their faces now. Only the feeling.
I meet Sal at the airport in Athens. (Again, letters exchanged, a text that takes four weeks to come through.) He walks right by me with his backpack. “You’re so tan! I didn’t even recognize you!” Good, I think, I’m halfway there. We spend five weeks traveling through the Greek Islands. In my mind I am trying to re-create the movie Summer Lovers, where Peter Gallagher and Daryl Hannah have a threesome with a random French woman. It’s not the threesome I’m trying to re-create so much as the freedom. There is nothing more wonderful than spending a summer going from island to island in the Mediterranean when you’re young. Nothing comes close. We rent little rooms in each place—Paros, Crete, Santorini—and Sal makes us breakfasts and we ride mopeds, spend hours in the sea.
I don’t meet a boy on this trip, though. This bridge between college and the rest. I don’t fall in love. I don’t anything. We spend our final night in Mykonos. Another dinner with people we have just met. Still feeling the warmth of the sun on my face at midnight.