Around the World in 80 Dates (11 page)

There was only one person in the café when I arrived. Sunk low in his chair, huge booted feet propped up on the table, a young man with long, greasy hair slouched with his eyes shut and his mouth open. The serving staff stood tensely behind the counter, watching him with open hostility, outraged at the bad manners, worse attitude, and unforgivable hair.

This could not be William.

I don't know why I even bothered thinking that, because I instantly knew that it was. This heavy-metal dating disaster was “shy,” “normal” William. And from the look and smell of his T-shirt, he hadn't been home since the Metallica concert the night before.

Rather than feeling worried or intimidated, I felt like someone's mum arriving home unexpectedly to find her son blowing off school and reading Dad's hidden stash of porn.

Walking over to where William sat oblivious to my stern judgment, I gave the staff an
I'll deal with this
look. Putting my bag and coat on the table next to William's feet, I sharply rapped on the sole of one of his boots. His eyelids flickered, his brow creased, but he continued to sleep, the studs on his jacket rising and falling gently with each deep breath.

“William,” I said crisply. This time his eyes snapped open and he looked around in alarm, completely disoriented, clearly not recognizing where he was. “William,” I repeated, this time a little more gently but still with a
wait till I get you home, young man
tone to my voice. He blinked twice and blankly focused his gaze in my direction. Like being behind a student driver waiting and waiting to pull out on a busy roundabout, sometimes you have to give them a nudge or you'll be there forever. “William!” I shouted, knocking him hard on the shoulder.

Pausing as if manually connecting brain with body, William shambled into life. Crashing his legs off the table onto the floor, he stumbled to his feet. As the chair toppled over noisily behind him, the counter staff flinched collectively. The smell of cigarettes and alcohol was overwhelming. William looked at me uncertainly: He knew he was expected to speak but was obviously having difficulty knowing exactly where he was and what he was meant to say.

I revved my engine and shunted him into the oncoming traffic.

“William, I am Jennifer,” I said briskly, Mary Poppins suddenly my default personality.

“Yes?” he asked dully. Something about this sounded familiar; he just needed more time to work out what.

“I am a friend of your sister Lorna's. She arranged for us to meet.”

William was suddenly completely in the moment, totally lucid, and very much awake. “Hey,” he said slowly, looking at me attentively as if seeing me for the first time. “You're that chick going round the world banging all those guys,” he reported matter-of-factly. I sensed all movement behind the counter come to an abrupt halt; the kitchen staff stopped watching William and—like spectators at Wimbledon—collectively turned their attention to me, their faces alight with frank incredulity and wonder.

Although the café was designed to foster the lively exchange of ideas, I doubted very much that this was what they had in mind.

“William,” I said witheringly, summoning all the dignity I could manage, “I am not—as you say—‘banging guys around the world.' I am on a quest, traveling the world in search of my Soul Mate.” I snorted at the ridiculousness of his statement, as much to convince the staff in the kitchen as William.

“But you bang some of the guys, right?” he asked hopefully.

I rolled my eyes. I didn't have the time or energy to explain the niceties of my Odyssey to some teenage boy optimistically and inappropriately awash with hormones. With a dignified sniff, I picked up my bag and coat. Casting a disdainful eye in the direction of the counter staff, who by now had given up all pretense of rearranging the chocolate cookies and were openly following our conversation, I thanked William for meeting me.

“I'll tell Lorna you looked, ummm…” I struggled for a suitable description. “…well.”

William just stared at me, his unwashed face puckering into folds of exasperation as he realized I was going, and he was not coming with me. “Maaan,” he groaned in frustration, “I only came here because I thought I was going to get laid. I'm telling you, there is no way I am ever doing my sister a favor again.”

Doing my sister a favor?

Whatever did he mean? I was the one on the mission of mercy here. Had Lorna given him the impression
I
was the one who needed help? Her desperate friend destined to end up Internationally Single, but if he could help make up the numbers, at least there'd be a shag in it for him? Could she really have said that?

I never got the chance to ask, because William, like a child who's been told “No more
Robot Wars
until your room's tidy,” had already stomped out of the café and up the street, without so much as a backward glance.

I raised my eyebrows and let out a long, steadying breath. That, I said to myself, was what happened when you dated a Viking. Giving the kitchen staff an
at least wait until I am out of earshot
look, I left the museum for my hotel, where I packed and left for Denmark.

 

The man sitting in front of me on the plane to Copenhagen was easily the most nervous flyer I've ever seen in my life. He puffed and panted through gritted teeth like he was flying Air Lamaze. At one point I was woken by him shrieking, “Oh, my God!” involuntarily, before returning to his steady panting.

No one watched the film; we all watched him.

I shouldn't have taken this as a bad omen, but I did. I was in an ugly mood. I still felt irritated, less by how William had been and more by what Lorna might have said. Although I only had two dates in Copenhagen, I'm afraid to say I didn't feel in the mood for either of them.

My mood was not improved by getting soaked on the way to Christiania. It was dead in the water by the time I'd finished dating Lars.

Christiania was on the site of an abandoned military barracks on the edge of Copenhagen city center. Taken over by squatters in 1971 and declared a “free state,” it was now home to around eight hundred people, with another seven hundred–odd who worked within the community.

Christiania was a self-governing, car-free society that functioned as a collective. It ran its own school, recycling programs, and small businesses that catered to both residents and the tourists who flocked here (mainly to buy the pot openly sold on “Pusher Street”).

Its very existence was a challenging expression of civil liberties. I had loved the sense of community I got from living in a housing co-op in Leeds when I was a student. Could my Soul Mate be found in this community?

My date Lars had just split up with his girlfriend. His friend Vessie, who was a friend of my friend Kirk, thought it would cheer Lars up to meet me. I have no idea if it cheered Lars up, but it depressed the hell out of me. “I'm only here so I don't have to be on my own at home,” he told me bluntly the second we met.

Our date consisted of three hours walking along Christiania's muddy paths in the pouring rain, as Lars poured his heart out. His girlfriend had left him for someone else; he was a good guy who couldn't catch a break; she'd never appreciated him, he was too good for her; what was so great about macho guys anyway…?

Regardless of the fact that Lars had just been dumped, to me he seemed one of those people who had a horrible, negative attitude anyway. When we parted company, I felt like asking for his ex-girlfriend's phone number just so we could go out for a drink together and bad mouth him.

I slept badly after my date with Lars. His negativity weighed on me and made me feel despondent about my own chances of success—not because he had been unlucky in love but because I feared I might be unlucky enough to have another seventy-one dates just like him.

But my next date was with Paul, a chef who worked in one of the “It” restaurants in Copenhagen. We'd both been too busy to talk or email, but my friend Georgia had arranged for us to meet on the Kissing Bench at Tivoli Gardens, the Victorian amusement park full of old-fashioned rides, street orchestras, and beautiful flower gardens. It was one of my favorite places and I knew it would cheer me up.

But four hours later, as I sat solo on the Kissing Bench in the pouring rain, I realized that rather than being cheered up, I was being stood up. Paul was a no-show. I shouldn't have been as upset about it as I was, but I took it really badly and very personally: Not only did he not want to see me, he couldn't even be bothered to let me know he wasn't coming. Too embarrassed to get in contact with Georgia and too wretched to do anything else, I went back to the hotel, ran a hot bath, and cried.

Date #12—The Gallic Date
in Paris, France

I love Scandinavia: Like the Netherlands, its people seem liberal and smart without making a big deal about it. In complete contrast, the French national identity has an air of disdainful elegance, like old money at Ascot. But the back-to-back dating disaster in Copenhagen, preceded by William in Stockholm, made me sincerely glad I was heading for the complicated cosmopolitanism of Paris. I needed a complete change of scene and atmosphere.

The last time I had come to Paris was Kelly's and my four-year anniversary. After extensive nagging, he'd agreed to go to the Buddha Bar. Apparently, the beer was too expensive, the staff too fashionable; it hadn't been a great success.

If I hadn't been traveling for the purpose of dating, I think I might have resented that so many cities around the world seemed to contain little Kelly booby traps—painful or irritating memories that exploded out of nowhere. But I was determined not to be one of those people who stayed involved with the bitterness longer than they'd been with the person who'd actually caused it.

And if I step off my martyr's pedestal for a moment to be honest, Kelly wasn't the only man I thought of when I came to Paris. Wild, sexy, and dead…I also had a thing going on with Doors singer Jim Morrison. Over the last five years I must have visited his grave, just inside the eastern edge of the Périphérique, half a dozen times, either to make programs or with friends.

I've always been fascinated that Jim Morrison—a parallel—Elvis: sexy, iconoclast gone to seed—ended his days in Paris. Erotic and playful as he, Paris was also cultured and subtle. As the Lizard King became the Lard King and tired of himself, maybe that was what drew him here.

I suspect that as a boyfriend, Jim Morrison would have been an absolute nightmare: unfaithful, self-indulgent, and often cruel. But he was also a lithe sex god who created the sound-track to my teen years, and the affinity I felt with him ran deep. I decided to spend the day with him at his grave in the stately Père Lachaise cemetery, to try to pinpoint the attraction.

Père Lachaise was the most visited cemetery in the world and had been a fashionable address for the afterlife since its inception in 1804. It was Napoleon who converted what was originally a slum neighborhood into a vast cemetery, arranging to have Molière reburied here at the “launch party.” Its reputation as the in place for the over crowd thus established, its million residents now included Gertrude Stein, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Pisarro, and Proust. But as you made your way up from the metro, the proliferation of signs, maps, and memorabilia overwhelmingly pointed to Jim Morrison being the grave célèbre here.

Finding Jim Morrison's grave was quite tricky: Père Lachaise still had all the winding avenues and tree-lined boulevards from the days when people lived (rather than died) here, and it was easy to get lost. Getting lost wasn't such a hardship, though, as the cemetery was a moving and beautiful site: Tombs varied from Art Deco Egyptian pharaohs and larger-than-life muscular bronze angels to austere black granite obelisks, painstakingly scrubbed mirror-clean by stooped middle-aged women every single day.

Like Cemetery Number 1 in New Orleans, this was a place where the living had an ongoing relationship with their dead. And nowhere was this more true than at Jim Morrison's grave.

I was grateful for the short shadows cast by the broad trees as I walked through the cemetery looking for Jim Morrison. It was only 10 a.m. but the sun already probed like a dentist's drill, burrowing ruthlessly into the top of my head. The air was hot and still; a raven perched on the marble head of a weeping Madonna watched me balefully as I marched by full of purpose. My backpack was heavy with bottled water, the Doors biography my sister Mandy bought me when I was fifteen, sunblock, and other bits to get me through the day. The bag bunched my cotton skirt up at the back, but sweat glued it to my legs, preserving my modesty in this place of rest.

Around the corner of a wide boulevard, in a spot hidden among the headstones and next to a large tree trunk, I found Jim. Or, rather, the crowd around Jim.

Three nineteen-year-old boys were camped on one of the tombs, the ubiquitous backpackers' banquet of plain French bread and Orangina spread before them, plus an assortment of boxed CDs and Walkmans. Two were baseball-capped, fresh-faced Americans, the other a baggy-sweatered, straggly-haired Frenchman. They had one set of headphones between them and were taking turns, passing it around like a joint.

“ ‘L.A. Woman'…that's my favorite song. Maaan, this song is amazing,” said the first young American, transported by the music in his headset. Suddenly a furious Frenchman burst from between the trees and marched over:
“Ce que faites-vous ici?”
he bellowed. “What is wrong with you that you are sitting on the burial place of the dead eating your lunch? Have you no respect?”

The boys quailed and looked uncomfortable. The Frenchman, too agitated to remain still, angrily paced on the path a few feet away. The two Americans turned frowning to the French boy. “Man, was he talking to us? What did he say?”

The French boy shrugged sullenly.

Back on the path, the Frenchman became incandescent. “Ah,” he snorted in disgusted English. “Tourists! What do you know?” and he stormed off, leaving clouds of dust hanging over the gravel path in his wake. The teenage boys left maybe half an hour later.

In the five hours I stayed by or near the grave, around a hundred people visited. The Frenchman was right to say that the tourists were insensitive, but he was wrong to say they lacked respect. It was the very reason they were here: out of love and respect.

Jim Morrison's grave was unimposing. A plain, squat headstone stated without fuss that James Douglas Morrison lived from 1943 to 1971. The grave itself was a shallow granite frame around a sandy pit, maybe three by six feet.

Every mourner stepped up to the grave with a sense of the theatrical, individual players each featuring in his or her own one-act drama. A group of Latino boys in gang insignia silently regarded the grave, their heads bowed in fresh grief as if Jim Morrison had died yesterday, not thirty years ago. The tallest of the group took a bottle of bourbon from his bag. Passing it between them, they each took a swallow. Taking an extra swallow, the leader then poured a measure directly onto the grave before placing the bottle gently on the headstone. Standing straight, he touched two fingers to his heart, his lips, then the headstone. One by one each of the gang repeated the sequence. Ritual completed, without a word they turned and walked away.

A midwestern couple in their forties pointed to the grave and poignantly told their three teenage children: “When we were your age, he meant everything to us. We wanted you to meet him.”

Finding a lull in mourners, I put down my bag and walked over to the grave myself. It wasn't just bourbon bottles, half-smoked joints, and cigarettes; the grave was full of poems and dedications. As I read the dedications, I wondered why I—and all these other people—nurtured such enduring love for Jim Morrison. The Love Professor had described successful, healthy relationships as ones in which our positive traits are reflected back by our chosen partner. By choosing Jim Morrison, were we claiming some part of his creative, sexual vitality as our own? By liking Jim, were we saying we were like Jim?

Or could it simply be that we didn't want to forget how good it felt to be young, passionate, misunderstood, and alive? Music is a powerful memory and mood trigger, and Jim Morrison was a Door that took us back to that time and state.

There was also the fantasy element. The Love Professor said we all had to know and nurture
the real me
to be truly happy. But I loved fantazising about the
imaginary me,
the person I could but never would be. Apart from traveling, the best time for this is at the start of a relationship: Unhindered by routine or too much information about the other person, you imagine both of you doing all the things you've always dreamed of. You see yourself going horse riding every weekend (you've never been on a horse in your life) or taking a Spanish evening class together (you miss enrollment). Fine, what does it hurt to savor the thought you'll get a chance to do all these things, whether you actually do them or not?

And if I was shacked up with someone as crazy and unstructured as Jim Morrison, surely the conversation would be elevated above whose turn it was to put the kettle on, or how bad Saturday night TV was these days. His energy would inspire and stretch me.

Yes, yes, I'm a feminist, too: I know I shouldn't need to be in a relationship to do these things, but it makes it easier.

So, how much of my love was about Jim Morrison and how much was about me? Did I imagine a relationship with Jim's juju would allow my as-yet untapped potential to be the coolest, smartest, sexiest person on earth to be realized? Was I interested in him as a person or just for what he could do for me?

But I was pulled from my introspection by two Australian women walking over to where I was sitting. “Aww, I'm really sorry to disturb you,” one asked awkwardly, “but would you mind taking our photo? We want to see what we look like post-Jim.”

I smiled as I took the camera: Whatever ego issues I was suffering from, I was clearly not suffering alone. The girls stood on either side of the grave and smiled into the camera as I took their picture.

Amanda and Luciana were both in their late twenties and spending the summer visiting France and the U.K. When I told them I was here to date Jim and why, they both squealed their approval. “Oh, I know why you would want to do that,” Amanda burst out, squeezing my arm in emphasis, “he was really gorgeous, really wild, too. Sexy and crazy.”

Luciana sounded far more downbeat. “Men aren't like that anymore,” she observed ruefully.

They asked me some questions about my journey. Was I going to Sydney? I confirmed I had several dates lined up there. “Oh, good luck,” Luciana said bitterly. “And trust me, you'll need it finding a man there.”

This shocked me a little, as Luciana was gorgeous: a voluptuous, curvaceous “Italian” figure topped with a glossy cloud of curly brown hair and fantastically trashy earrings. She saw me noticing her figure and looking surprised. “I dressed up for Jim,” she said with a sly smile. Amanda laughed, picking up on my
you get more attention away from home
theory: “You know, you're so right,” she agreed. “It is just incredible how much more the guys notice you here. And in a good, fun way, not sleazy.”

Luciana chipped in. “Like those guys last night,” she said excitedly, nudging Amanda. “We were walking past some steps and these guys were just hanging out. Anyway…” Luciana and Amanda were both in fits of giggles by now. “…when they saw us, they called out, ‘You are beautiful, come and kiss us.' It was so nice, so cheeky and flattering. It'd never be that way at home.”

We all sighed together, thinking about how much fun cheeky guys could be.

And that made me realize: As much as I enjoyed the fantasy of Jim and the life I'd have with him (if, you know, he wasn't dead), I actually liked the life I already had. I had fun being me; I didn't want to morph or be molded into someone else. What I needed was to find someone else like me: a Soul Mate I could relate to.

And I wanted fun with cheeky guys. I wanted to laugh and feel sexy. It was time to bury my dead and make a date with the living.

I was booked into a hotel in the Marais, my favorite Parisian neighborhood. Touristy in parts, the area was mostly elegant and couture but, thankfully, its relentless chicness was softened by pockets of pretty squares fringed with pungent
fromageries
and cafés stocked with casually fantastic pastries.

I rushed back and changed in a hurry: I had an hour before my next date.

Showered and dressed in my new baby-blue linen top (I had spotted a gorgeous boutique on the corner of my street and raced in on the way back from the metro), I took the short walk from my hotel to the Place des Vosges. This elegant square of houses dated back to 1612, and among its former residents were Richelieu and Victor Hugo. The park at its center was once used for dueling; tonight it would be used for dating. This was where I was to meet Olivier, Date #12.

 

I was very curious about Olivier. He seemed extremely French: flawlessly educated and virulently contemptuous. He worked in the French film industry and would leave long gaps between emails since he (and he described it with pulling-teeth loathing) had to be at meetings everywhere from Brussels to Cannes. His emailed photos were taken from about five hundred yards away, the only discernible features a crazy mop of dark hair and severe horn-rimmed glasses.

I was curious about him, but didn't feel I knew or had developed much of a rapport with him. He admitted in one email he could “
stay mute and prostrated for hours, not even noticing someone is sitting by my side…depends on my mood.
”

This might have made me nervous but for the fact that the date had been set up by my friend Muriel, a smart, exuberant Frenchwoman living in London. I knew any friend of hers was going to be worth meeting.

It was a warm early summer's evening and the pavement cafés were already full of loquacious Parisians enjoying the sunshine and unhurriedly sipping glasses of red wine (the French were restrained enough to order wine by the glass—to the binge-drinking Brits, this felt about as logical as buying a house by the room).