The Way Things Are Going

By Peter Brown,

Special Correspondent

LONDON, March 1969 — It’s often said that when the world conspires to make a fool of you, you have no choice but to enjoy the ride. I don’t know who first said that — presumably Sonny Bono — but it rings true, as it applies to the curious case of my good friend — whom we shall refer to, for reasons that will become apparent, as The Other Fellow — and his unfortunate odyssey across Europe in pursuit of marriage, of all things.

Now, marriage itself isn’t a strange concept in the abstract; the institution has been around for millennia. But when a man in a state of semi-permanent bewilderment, no fixed haircut and near-constant hysteria sets his sights on it, as my friend did, the entire notion begins to look more like a grotesque mockery of the human condition than the solemn, sacred union it was once intended to be.

Let me set the scene: The Other Fellow is in Southampton — yes, Southampton, that grizzly haunt of steamships and shipping clerks, the sun setting behind the docks and casting an eerie tie-die glow over the whole scene, the kind of place where you’d expect to see a giant squid rise from the water and slap you across the face for good measure. He is waiting for a ferry to the Continent, which, for reasons only known to the authorities, he was not allowed to board. The man in the mac, as my friend would later describe some plodding bureaucrat, said, “You’ve got to go back.” Which, I am told, our hero did, after much fruitless gesturing and frantic pleading.

Apparently, the authorities had no time for his far-fetched story about trying to escape to Holland or France. They sent him packing without so much as a stamp on his passport, which left him bereft of immediate Channel-braving options, but certainly no less optimistic about the possibilities of the wedding that had already begun to loom large on his horizon.

“You know, they didn’t even give us a chance,” said our eagerly affianced Other, feeling rather sorry for himself as I have observed he often does. “Christ, you know it ain’t easy. The way things are going, they’re going to crucify me.”

In a fit of desperation, and presumably to get away from whatever gnawing humiliation had been inflicted upon him, my friend and his beloved boarded a flight to Paris. Now, why Paris, I couldn’t tell you, but I suspect it had something to do with an impression he held that in Paris, anything could be made to work. Not that I have anything against Paris — the City of Lights and copious dog faeces — but the combination of his peculiar temperament and the city’s decadent charms promised disaster, as the days that followed would prove.

My phone call reached the “honeymooning” couple at a modest café down by the Seine, where I advised my friend — undoubtedly still carrying that distinctly unshaven, borderline hysterical look about him — that they could get married in Gibraltar. “Near Spain,” I added, cognizant of his never having been much of a student of geography.

Privately, so far as I could tell, the only thing more absurd than the notion of marrying anyone in Gibraltar was the idea of my friend marrying anyone at all. He was fresh off a messy public divorce, as was his wife-to-be. But there he was, flushed with a kind of manic enthusiasm that can only be generated by too much thinking about something that shouldn’t be thought about at all.

I’m not an expert in the matrimonial arts, as my own sorry history in that department makes abundantly clear, but I did advise him with all the faux encouragement I could muster. “You’ll make it, old fellow. You’ll make it okay.” That was the extent of my intervention. A pragmatic suggestion, perhaps a bit cynical, but given the circumstances, it seemed like sound counsel. In any case, it was exactly what he wanted to hear.

From Paris, the journey took an inevitable detour to Amsterdam, a city that — though famous for its calm demeanour, picturesque canals and legal access to both transactional sex and mood-altering psychoactive drugs — has a particular knack for driving people slightly mad, particularly if they have already been driven somewhat mad by Paris. I joined them as they took up residence at the Amsterdam Hilton — a hotel so well-kept that it seemed almost a shame to demean it with our presence. For days, we confined ourselves to our room, discussing matters of profound indifference, while the journalists, drawn to us like moths to a flame, continued their relentless pursuit of absurdity.

One reporter, clearly fascinated by the spectacle, asked the celebrity couple the obvious question — “Say, what you doing in bed?” — to which my friend, only half aware of his own state of mind let alone the presence of the world press, replied, “We’re only trying to get us some peace. Saving up your money for a rainy day. Giving all your clothes to charity. Last night the wife said, ‘Poor boy, when you’re dead, you don’t take nothing with you but your soul.’ ”

Of course, it wasn’t really peace they were looking for. And certainly not to take vows of poverty, which would have involved ditching the plush apartment on Bank Street in New York City’s West Village. What they wanted, what they really wanted, no less than the newspapers, was a story. Attention. And as anyone who has spent more than ten minutes in a press room will tell you, the easiest way to get a story is to be a story. And they were certainly that.

After a few days of this nonsense, we embarked on the most curious leg of our journey — a mad dash to Vienna, where we found ourselves munching on chocolate cake from a bag in some back alley. Why Vienna? Why chocolate cake from a bag? Don’t ask me, because I was just along for the ride. But if you know anything about the Austrian capital, you know it isn’t exactly the place one goes when looking for clarity. I was relieved, in any case, that the bag was too small for the bride to climb into, a practice she liked to indulge before gobsmacked audiences while writhing and caterwauling. Bagism, shagism, dragism, madism.

Somehow, in the midst of the absurdity, the press decided that the whole affair had taken on mystical proportions. “She’s gone to his head. They look like two gurus in drag,” one reporter wrote in his column, a remark that might have had me in stitches if I hadn’t been so absorbed in my own futile attempt to make sense of the madness unfolding around us.

Finally, with what I could only assume was a mixture of relief and resignation, my friend made his way back to London. A quick plane ride, accompanied by a sack of 50 acorns (you were expecting maybe the Addams family?) and a meeting with the press awaited him. They greeted him like an old war hero returning from a distant battle, their cheers echoing in the confines of Heathrow.

“We wish you success! It’s good to have the both of you back!” they shouted with that faintly ridiculous, certainly hypocritical enthusiasm that only journalists can muster when confronted with a man they’ve written a thousand critical words about but can’t quite fathom.

At this point, however, I was rather inclined to believe that they understood the couple perfectly. For the whole affair — the grand tour, the tumultuous trip to Gibraltar, the madcap pilgrimage through Vienna and Amsterdam — had become a circus in the truest sense: the spectacle was the thing. The process was what mattered, not the result. The calling for peace, not peace itself. As for my mate, well, let’s just say he had learned nothing at all. But at least he seemed, for the moment, content to ride the wave of confusion that had gotten him this far.

“Christ, you know it ain’t easy,” he mumbled, with a trace of existential despair in his voice. “The way things are going, they’re gonna crucify me.”

With that tone of resignation, it almost sounds like he’s expecting it to happen some day.

Peter Brown is a regular contributor to the London Times, covering everything from high society weddings to the wild affairs of middle-aged men abroad. His next column will examine the curious case of a famous rock drummer who died at 32 after overdosing on pills prescribed to help him sober up.