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Now, I don’t want to be the one who bears the bad news, but waiting for four hours in a cunting airport waiting room is enough, but only because of the fact we can’t enter the cocktail lounge on our own accord. Age, as time allows, is little more than an indication of our time on Earth. And I hope to have as little time on this godforsaken rock as possible, and I’d prefer if I didn’t remember much of it before leaving.

            We huddled among four chairs, sharing a Twix bar and muttering about how stupid we were for showing up so early. But my issue was with the security. They act as if I, a perfectly…somewhat sane boy would destroy one of their beloved planes. I have no interest in ruining your perfectly good flight by ramming it into a priceless landmark.

            But the trip through security was the ticket! Kent had gotten through unscathed despite his numerous metallic objects, like belts and piercings and rings, and so on. So I felt pretty damn secure going through. I removed my ankh necklace, watch, and shoes and tossed them in a bin and shoved them into the hungry mouth of the x-ray machine. Then I went through the detector, which decided, “Hey, I’m gonna f*ck this guy over and beep!” And so it did.

            My mind did a back flip and I face palmed right there. My belt! My damn belt. I quickly undid it and held it up to the elderly security guard, but he smiled and said, “Well, we gotta make sure.” And began his uncomfortable groping of every inch of my person. From behind me I heard Sam laughing like a hyena on pot. As the old man finished his perversion of innocence, I turned back to Sam and flipped him a rather thin bird.

            “Now, I may have forgotten to mention once we get to Salzburg…” I began, leaning into our grouping of four chairs in the waiting area. “I haven’t exactly secured a ride into Bad Reichenhall.”

            “Well, I’m sure there are buses.” Wyatt assured us. But I found his hope rather misplaced. This wasn’t exactly good news. I was a moron.

            “Sure.” I agreed, trying to lie like my father, an expert. It must have worked, as Kent went back to his iPod he had bought with stolen cash. He must have been some sort of genius on petty criminal acts. I began to wonder if he could hot-wire a car.

            Then I took a look at what I was reading: Time magazine. It would be my last English magazine for quite some time. Luckily I spoke and read fluent German and French. I knew Kent and Wyatt spoke some German, and Sam was Spanish by birth, so that was in order.

            Wyatt began going on about some jazz band that I had never heard of and whose members had probably died long before I was born. How futile, their existence. What to say to Saint Peter when they died…?

            “Yes, I played music.”

            “Well, then you’d best see Mr. Satan about that. I hear he has reservations.”

            I had often thought of challenging the devil to a contest. I could imagine the rewards, and the thrill of saying ‘I beat the MF-ing devil!’ Of course, then I realize…I have no skills.

            Gee, only a mere FOUR HOURS later, we were on the Lufthansa plane to…well, we had no idea. All I knew was we had a connecting flight to Salzburg, and we’d be landing somewhere in Germany prior. For some ungodly reason, the tickets we had decided to separate us into little islands of normalcy among a plane of bad Englishmen and loud Germans.

            I found myself seated next to a woman with a baby of say…a few months. Thing is, like the cultural phenomenon of complete movie clichés, the child simply would not shut its mouth. The screaming! The damn screaming echoing in the cabin, and my ears popping uncontrollably because I was the only one who didn’t buy gum in the lobby. As we reached cruising altitude, I thought quickly and as its mother looked away, I swiftly removed a Valium from my pill-box and flicked it in the boys mouth. I have to assume he swallowed it, as he was quiet for the rest of the eight hours. He was either asleep or dead, and I couldn’t be bothered.

            This is where Vertigo set in, as I was stuck in the center isle and couldn’t see out any of the windows to the left or right of me. I lost track of time as we passed over many a time zone. The large monitor hanging at the front of the aisle recorded that we were somewhere over Wales. I suddenly had the urge to suggest to my doom-mates a trip to go see good ol’ Nana in London. She was a woman thriving on her husband’s life insurance, flirting about with her new husband around the world. And because she bore my father, I hated her.

            The cabin began to spin. I have to assume it was in my head, because no one else seemed worried. Things had become a Wizard of Oz Technicolor. I panicked to get rid of the things I’m sure would be scurrying down the aisle. And so they did: a monster on wheels. I began to sweat. Was this jetlag or something far worse? I reached down into pillbox again and popped a Valium into my own mouth and swallowed hard. The next hour or so became a complete blur in my vision. Things melted together, and the next thing I knew, there was a tray of food in front of me on the pull out table thing.

            As far as my drug-raddled brain recalls, it was a platter of white chicken and a crusty roll. But then there was the cherry cheesecake, which did not fail to please. Shocked at the utter taste, I ate every last morsel. The blur stayed away for the remainder of the trip.

            Stepping out into the cold white airport, I saw that we were in Dusseldorf, Germany. Thing is, I thought we had died and gone to Purgatory.

            It was a white expanse, with windows for every wall and opaque plastic covers to everything. I soon stumbled into my travel mates and we exchanged a word or two before heading to security.

            “Did you finish that Swine Flu pamphlet we were given?” Kent asked.

            “Huh?” I asked, very confused.

            “Are you thick?” Sam asked. “They gave ‘em to us on the plane!”

            “Oh, sh*t.” I muttered, digging through my pockets for it. I must have written it in my blur of drug inducement. But then I felt it and took it out to find…I had filled it out, the thing is, I did it under the influence. I almost laughed at what I had written.

            “Oh, jeez.” Wyatt laughed, looking over my shoulder. “Location for the next two weeks: Your mom. Freaking A!”

            “I’m so getting sent back.” I coughed as we approached the gate for security. But that was when I noticed the security guards standing in front of a Swine Flu warning. They were dressed in full German army get-up, and they were holding a series of huge semi-automatic machine guns. I began to sweat again like I did on the plane.

            Oh, God, I thought, I’m going to die. Die here, and they’ll ship my body back home and mom will cry and Greg will say “I always knew that boy was trouble”. Then comes the lawsuit against Germany and the international incident report and then the missiles and the Third World War.

            I was fatalistic, sensationalist, and too afraid to care. I stumbled forward to the Visa stand and showed them my paper and my passport with a bored glance toward the guards. They were sentinels; made of stone and muscle and rage. Then, in a seemingly uninterested motion, the man stamped my Visa and waved me through.

            “Danke schoen.” He said.

            I smirked.

I would never forget that trip for as long as I live. Who would have thought four men in a stolen 1972 Chevy Impala could survive three months in Europe? After all, it was only an experiment at first. We were four empty souls stuck on a trip to manhood.

            “Yes,” we said, “this shall be our foray into true men!”

            But oh, how that came crashing down. It’s not as if I wished to say, it was the demise of American innocence, but it was a down shot to our hope. But by the end of the trip, we would know who we were as people. We were men. We were brothers. We were friends.

            It began two years prior to departure with my singular suggestion of the tired cliché of backpacking across that damned stretch of Earth the locals called Europe. Pity me; I hadn’t realized the interest men had in other worlds. After all, it was a land outside our own, with their own customs and languages. And of course, there was the lovely pastime of legal alcohol. Damned be our own country for such a high drinking age, in fact, the highest in the world, aside from Palau and Pakistan in some places. And we celebrate it more than firearms. Goddamn if we can’t have our rights to shoot each other’s faces off according to a 200 year old document.

            But after much speculation, we had narrowed ourselves to a group of four; each of us more disturbed than the last.

            First was our pretty little son of a hippie, Kent. See, Kent was a normal guy, but his parents were not. They were, as most call them, bat sh*t crazy. He was a poor little bastard; lost in a reality he didn’t want to live in. He wore what he could borrow from friends and buried his emotions in total rebellion from his semi-stoned parents. And these shirts were the epitome of rebellion: total metal and complete indie music. He pierced both his ears by himself (using little more than rusty thumbtacks and a crapload of paper towels), and ended up gauging them using a series of increasingly large metal screws he pilfered from a nearby construction site. I ask him upon his arrival to the airport in his father’s old Mustang how he was able to save enough for the trip. He replied simply,

            “Yard work and sweat.”

            Yes, the man of the American dream, and son of a pair of hippies. He worked for his right to escape the cruel harsh reality of home.

            And as I thought, I realized that this escape was my idea in the first place. It was my plan to run and hide from the sad truth. I wanted it to leave, too, and I know it. But I was in denial; a man without a mission and without a true place to sleep. And I supposed we would find it in Europe eventually. It’s all a matter of planning.

            I took a quick look at Kent’s two check in bags: a regular bit of luggage, and another being his acoustic guitar case. I smirked and remembered my own case strapped to my back like some sort of African child…before Madonna adopts it. That was the plan: play for cash.

            We were soon joined by the third member of our calypso clusterf*ck: Wyatt, a man raised on pure jazz and parental ignorance. He was a self-thinker: a man who refused to believe the lies fed to him by the mainstream association. He loved unread books and unseen television shows and dared to play devil music on his beloved Stradivarius trumpet. He was a man. A real man. Not your pick up the kids from their mothers because she’s a controlling b*tch, man. I could only wait for him to impregnate the girl of his choosing and watch as he raised them to be the real people. A new generation of hope, I hoped.

            “Hey, how ya doing?” he asked, flicking his index fingers at us upon approach. I smiled. I like the cut o’ his gib.

            “Just great.” I replied as lamely as possible. He nodded with his unkempt stubble bobbing upon his glorious chin. He was always a handsome one with his perfectly thick hair and pretty eyes. If he was a girl, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself, I thought. But that was too odd for me. I must be the one that IS the psycho. The schizophrenic little thing, I am.

            We were soon joined by the fourth and final: Sam. He was the little drum master who had experienced every Technicolor dreamscape imaginable, with a bit of ecstatic alcohol on the side. He’d woken up in gutters, beds, the woods, and even in a walk in meat freezer, unaware of what or where he was.

            They say when you crack your back after consuming acid, you get a little bit more, because it’s always hiding there in your spinal fluid, waiting for the perfect job interview to make you leap up on the table and rip off your pants and wave something in the boss’s $50 hair cut.

            At least, those are the rumors. Sam smiled at us with a wicked grin. He was dressed in a tan La Migra t-shirt and clean jeans. I had to wonder what he has planned for our little excursion.

            “You don’t have anything in your bag, right?” Kent immediately asked. Sam shook his head and laughed.

            “Not a chance, mi amigo.” Sam replied.

            I had never been friends with these three boys standing before me. I had never asked for their numbers, or been to their homes, or eaten dinner with them, or even had an extended conversation. They were strangers in my eyes. Little men with big dreams and small balls. The closest I ever came was a sleepy little speech next to a booze induced bonfire with Kent. And even if we connected, would we care when we were sober? That’s the thing about alcohol. You’re a different person when you’re intoxicated. If only someone could have told me that before my first time drinking.

            Her name was Erica, my name was Duke O’Connor, the Irishman. I had created him in one of my insomnia-induced bouts of insanity. He was charming; rational. All the things I am not. I wanted him to be. I wanted to be him. She loved him, and I told her I was him. He was I and I, his inner voice. But his outer voice was deep and stimulated with an Irish brogue. Her voice was high and beautiful; angelic. I would never be able to get my mind around her hair. Her natural hair color was a dark, mysterious brown, but she dyed it blonde. Why, I was unsure of, but since that night we had a decent, drunken conversation, I had been madly in love with everything she was, and everything she did.

            But these thoughts fled as we reached check in. The man with the German accent took my ticket with a smile and a kind ‘how do you do?’. Then, as if interrogating my intentions on going to a German speaking country, he asked:

            “Where are you going?”

            I stopped short. My brain farted and my eye twitched slightly. YOU ARE HOLDING MY TICKET, YOU TELL ME! My mind was screaming death metal lyrics at volume 11 Spinal Tap amplifiers.

            “Du hast mein Pass.” I said calmly. “Sagt mich.”