I’m into day thirteen of my most recent sentence. I’m stuck in Paris waiting for my entry clearance visa to return to the UK to work. Yes, you need a work permit to legally work in the UK if you are American. I’m learning the hard way. I’m stuck in Paris and I truly feel frustrated at not being able to control my destiny. I have to wait patiently for higher powers to decide my fate. It’s an unsettling feeling. Last night I was chatting with my mom on Skype and I realized this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. I have been a prisoner in many places before.
To fully understand what I’m talking about we first have to define prisoner. Here I define it loosely. I mean I’m not a total criminal locked in La Zona in Panama or anything. When I say prisoner I’m talking about being stuck in a situation where other people control your destiny. Work in a way is a bit like prison but I would argue that if you really want to you could get up and leave work any time you want. I’ve heard, not that I know anything about it, that bad relationships and marriages are like prison sentences. Again though I would argue you can leave a bad relationship any time you want. Lacking the courage to leave a bad situation does not constitute a prison sentence in my book. The prison terms I’m referring to are situations that are forced on you by outside forces so work and relationships do not qualify.
So from deep within the 15th Arrondisement of Paris, at Charlie Birdie Café, I offer to cyberspace my five best places to be a prisoner. These are prison terms that unexpectedly shaped my view of the world and when they were finished they made me feel stronger for having survived.
The Bailiwick of Jersey
In 1994 just off a fresh year of slacking in my first of many French universities I hatched a plan with a friend, he was British so a mate, to go with him over the summer to work in Jersey. My mate and I had the perfect plan. He had worked many summers at one of these great majestic summer hotels on the island and said it would be no problem for me to get a job washing dishes with him. I wasn’t terribly excited about washing dishes during the summer but a nice job in a great hotel, on an exotic island even it was in the English Channel sounded like an interesting opportunity.
He was from Nottingham, England so he went home just after the semester ended while I waited patiently in France. I was fresh, young and green in terms of traveling. I still had my t-shirts, flip flops and shorts from high school. My beard was beginning to be real manly and I liked experimenting with its length. Some where I think I thought I was a Bob Marley inspired Indiana Jones character with a notebook, camera and paintbrush as my whip.
I left Nantes on a morning bus, for Mont St Michel. The ferry to Jersey runs regularly from the St Malo, the city next to Mont St Michel, to the island. I remember watching the incredible centuries old Abbey grow smaller in the distance as we crossed the Channel towards my new life and destination. I was very happy to be heading towards something different and exciting. I really thought a new European chapter my life was starting when I got on that boat.
Unfortunately when I got off the boat the local authorities had other plans for me. Guess what, I didn’t have a working permit for the island, so they wanted to send me back to France straight away. Sound familiar? In the end I begged to be allowed a few hours on the island just to discover it a bit. I walked the ports and the beaches. They were stunning. I walked the high rolling hills that spill into the sea. I walked the great cornice and the bay. I walked so much I was late for my departure appointment.
As I slowly made my way to the port I noticed police cars and cops whizzing about the city. It was as if a mad manhunt was on. As I dragged my flip flopped shoes back to the port I really wondered what could be going on. It turns out they were looking for me. When they found me I was treated like a real convict. I was hand cuffed, dragged back to the port, I cut my big toe, and put on the first boat back to France. It was humiliating. My prison sentence on Jersey lasted a little over eight hours. There were cops, sitting rooms, interviews and hand cuffs involved. Those guys obviously didn’t have much to do. As I road back to France sitting beside a police man I thought about how luck I was to get away from that place in one piece.
In the back of big rigs
Not long after my Jersey adventure I decided it would be a good idea to hitch hike to Stockholm from Paris, I had a girlfriend that lived in Sweden. I have many a memory of unfortunate prisoner status in the back of giant transport trucks as I rode from Paris, France through Germany into Denmark and finally 15 days later to Stockholm. It was a prison sentence of my own choosing but once I made the choice there was no backing out. I regretted making the choice at several rest stops, on many a late night in the back of trucks and definitely while standing with a pathetic “Stockholm” sign at gas stations.
I left France with a backpack, a walkman, a bottle of wine as a gift for my girlfriend and very little money. I had heard it was pretty easy to ride as a passenger in these trans European cargo trucks. Much like in the US the European highways are riddled with big rigs zig-zagging their way around the continent picking up and delivering the goods that keep these countries humming. It made total sense to me that those drivers would want company during their long international trips and I thought I could provide them with the positive energy they needed in the lonesome hours of driving.
Between Francfort and the northern German border I hopped on board a rig with two husky Germans. They didn’t speak a word of English. The only room they had on the truck was with the cargo and in the little bed in the back of the cab. I chose the little bed because I had been hitch hiking now a few days and a bed was what I needed. As soon I lay down to get some rest the man in the passenger seat tossed me a half dozen of very hard core German pornography magazines. This was before the internet. My young naïve eyes had never seen some of the strange oddities a couple can get up to when they are fully disrobed. As I tried to interpret what was going on in the magazines, the passenger tried to interpret my reaction to the pictures. I caught him once staring to intently at my body and I asked to be dropped as soon as possible. They obliged. The dropped me off on some road in northern Germany.
Once in Sweden I convinced a stocky man to drive me to Stockholm in exchange for my walkman and a bottle of French wine. He obliged. It was late. I had been hanging around the rest stop for more hours than I could remember. I rode the first leg in the back of the truck hoping the crates and boxes wouldn’t tumble down onto me. At one stop the driver decided I had spent enough time in the back and offered the passenger seat to me. Relieved, I jumped at the opportunity. As soon as I sat down he warned me to not fall asleep. If I fell asleep, he said, he would kick me out of the cab. I did my best to stay awake for the next five hours. I stared blankly into the mid summer midnight dusk of the Swedish forest telling myself it would all be worth it once I got to Stockholm.
He dropped me off at three in the morning on the outskirts of the city. I fought off attacking hedgehogs, sleep and cold while trying to figure out how to get my girlfriend’s house. I realized then that I didn’t even have her address. I did remember the name of her neighborhood and I did have her telephone number. I found the train station, managed with some hopping of turnstiles to get on the first morning train towards my girlfriend’s house. It was a slow train. I watched the sun rise and change the color of the sky from dark blue, to pink, red and finally a bright light blue. It was beautiful. When I finally made it to her house, relieved and tired I thought my prison sentence was finished. She broke up with me on the spot.
Home
I know many may question this one but just hear me out. At first glance it may seem that I am betraying my own rules by adding “home” to the five best places to be a prisoner. Home is definitely not a prison for most people but it if you are a teenager. I added this because I realized while chatting with my teenage niece a few days ago that there really is no worse prison than being stuck in one’s home at the ripe age of 16.
I remember the feeling of the world being so unfair. So maddeningly and inexplicably unfair at sixteen, I had just received my driver’s license, I had all the right hair growing in the right places that proved I was rapidly approaching adulthood and my voice was really starting to sound like a man albeit with an occasional high pitch slipping in. From my view it was time for me to grab and assume my freedom. The only thing slowing my growing desire to grasp freedom by the horns was the incredibly annoying lack of anything really to do and the rules of grown ups.
The reality of boredom and imagination for passing away the hours didn’t fill my time as much as my rooted apprehension and suspicion of grown up rules. Why couldn’t I see my girlfriend when I wanted to? Who were her parents to limit the time we could spend together and gauge the amount of love we had for each other? What did they know? My parents were actually pretty slack because they were working all the time trying to provide me with enough money to fill up my bored moments but it was the parents of others who really grew tiresome.
I mean really! Could my friend’s lawn not wait another day? Did he really have to cut the grass today! We had big plans to do nothing. They were important and well laid plans of inactivity, chewing tobacco and talking about important things while popping zits on our backs. I couldn’t understand why his parents always insisted on his cutting the grass every week. God! Didn’t they realize it was only going to grow again?
There are thousands of hard time sentences I remember from the seemingly endless days and weeks from my teenage years. If there was a time when I really felt that others controlled my destiny more than I did it was when I was a teenager. Those feelings pushed me to travel. They forced me to explore the world. I left in search of freedom, experiences and stories. What I have found is that those days in my homely prison prepared me for a future life of unforgettable prison sentences. Thanks folks.
The Land of the Rising Sun
There really is no greater feeling of hopelessness, loneliness and life being completely out of your control than when you travel to a foreign land and foreign culture. Again this is a prison sentence by choice. It is something many of us choose to do and often. We are enamored with going places and losing ourselves in other languages, smells and rhythms. I’ve done this with quite a bit of regularity. There are the full package vacation tours where we willingly hand over control to activities trainers, chefs and cooks and hotel staff at resort hotels. I call these luxury prison vacations.
There are the places, bus and tour packages. During these prison sentences we join a chain gang of like minded folk on a bus that guides and maneuvers through medieval cities and natural sites stopping only for souvenir shopping and eating. We sign on for three days, five days a week or two to be lugged around countries and far off places safely, conveniently and grouped. These are moving prisons.
I have self selected the first two prison terms in my life but I much prefer the last category. I feel most at ease as the lone prisoner. I like traveling and discovering places on my own time, on my terms and according to my rules. Although I hand over a great amount of my freedoms to the dictates of local cultures and customs I still feel I retain a semblance of freedom of choice while I’m alone.
The strongest of these feelings manifested itself during my trips to Japan. It is a very frightening yet satisfying feeling to be lost and hopeless amid a million black heads. It’s empowering to conquer the mass transit system written completely in Japanese on your own. Its invigorating to slay the labyrinth of Akihabara electronic city alone and find the perfect gadget that you’ll never use. In my experience there is no better feeling than escaping alive and intact from the Land of the Rising Sun.
The city of Lights
Does this really surprise you? I mean where else can you really while away summer days typing up long winded, nothingness accounts of life in cafes? Is there ay better city to be held in against your own will? If you have a one I would like to hear about it email me here.