Loser

I found it in the library’s culled CD stack and slid a dollar bill into the slot of the wooden collection box on the wall to claim it as my own.  It was a purely nostalgic purchase tied to the first song listed on the back of the case, “Loser” by Beck.  The album came out in 1994, the year I graduated from college and left with a friend to drive to his home on Staten Island where we spent a few days taking ferry-driven jaunts over to Manhattan before I flew out solo from Newark to explore Europe for the summer.  

A quarter century has passed since that trip and I am now less than a month away from turning fifty.  My hair is receding from the high tide mark of my 20’s and my beard is mottled with gray like dried moss on a beach.  I realize only now how surprisingly similar I looked back then to the picture of Beck on the back cover (see below): thin Caucasian male, long wavy hair nearly shoulder length, and a penchant for long sleeved t-shirts.  

***

I landed at Gatwick Airport outside of London with my Army surplus backpack full of power bars, a change of clothes, a book or two, and wearing my trusty pair of Birkenstock sandals.  The customs official was a young attractive female who looked me up and down as a straggly American washed up on the shores of her island.  Her presentation started out professional but quickly transitioned to curt when I was not playing the game right.  

“Where will you be staying?” She asked.

“Uh, all over I guess.”

“How long do you plan to stay?”

“Uh, I’m not sure.”  I wasn’t expecting these types of questions.  I was time and itinerary-free, not thinking that might be a problem.

“Where will you be leaving from?”

I seriously wasn’t stonewalling her, but she stopped after that question when it became clear I would simply be wondering throughout England and Europe with no plan of where I would go or when I would be planning to return to the United States.  She looked at me, looked at my passport, stamped it and handed it back to me with what might have been a kind of exasperated grin.  As the Bryan Adams song says, I was “young and wild and free.”

There was a week or two in London then Paris before I started to realize that Western Europe was draining my money too fast and so I got a bus ticket to Bratislava, Slovakia where my best friend from college, Shane, was working with a group of other college students to spread the gospel of free markets with some Jesus sprinkled on top for good measure.

During the month I spent there we visited a club or two to include one that was an old bunker burrowed into the base of a mountain, like a large cave with curved walls that likely served as an air raid shelter during the Communist era.  It was known as the “U Club” (the U pronounced like in “zoo”).  There was a live band and a middle-aged plainclothes policeman who was drunk and asking us if we were there selling drugs.  We had a hard time convincing him that we were there just to have fun.  We yelled back and forth over the music, half in English and half in what Slovak Shane could muster after having lived there for about a year.  He finally decided to leave us alone when he spied a very attractive young female on the dance floor who was gyrating in a kind of ecstasy with her eyes closed.  He sauntered off to dance with her despite the fact she was ignoring everyone around her.

Another person I remember from the U Club was a young lady who spent much of the night staggering around with a drink in hand, a Bohemian caricature trying to be the center of attention.  At some point she was lying on her back half on and half off the stage where the band was playing.  Her head and arms dangled upside down, like a rag doll tossed onto a countertop in danger of falling off.  We saw her again a week or two later in one of the city plazas, drunk and calling out for “vino!” always a young man watching out for her like a reluctant bodyguard.  Such a sad, lost soul.

And then there was “Charlie’s”, a club named after Charlie Chaplin that sported his likeness in a large black and white mural over the entrance.  It was night and there were a lot of people milling around the front of the building to include a young man named Boris.  Boris was from Poland, prematurely balding, and eager to rub shoulders with us American expats (well at least my friend was an expat.  I was more of an interloper).  He brought us into his confidence and talked about how dangerous it was these days in Eastern Europe with the fall of the iron curtain.  To emphasize his point he waved us in closer in a kind of conspiratorial manner and pulled his jacket back to reveal a revolver tucked into his pants.  Shane and I exchanged a brief look of alarm and quickly came up with an excuse as to why we had to leave, but Boris was not so easily dismissed.  He insisted we should meet up again and to placate him we agreed to a date, time, and place to hang out again.  With this we parted and disappeared into the crowd.

At some point we made our way into the club where the music was pumping so loud you had to yell at people to be heard.  Shane and I got separated briefly and when he found me again he had an Asian college student in tow.  He was pointing to her and yelling something that ended up being “she’s Korean!”  I’d spent two years in Korea and he thought this would be a great way to make a connection with an attractive stranger.  We put our heads close to each other and yelled out a conversation in which I learned she’d been adopted as a baby by a Swedish family.  She did not speak Korean nor had she visited Korea.  “I’m Swedish,” she said matter-of-factly.  I encouraged her to visit Korea for no other reason than I thought she should.  We did not “click” which I now realize was because I was trying to force her into a category that she didn’t really fit in to and so we melted back into the mayhem in opposite directions.

That’s when the song dropped.  It was “Loser” by Beck.  I instantly felt my head bobbing as I started hopping in place to that funky phat beat and a silly grin spread across my face.  My long wavy locks bounced and whipped as my head swung from side to side and my body spun.  It was a kind of abandon to lose myself in a song at a time when I was far from home and trying to find myself.  Self-consciousness fell away.  After all, I was a loser, baby, so why don’t you kill me (Boris?).

Speaking of Boris, we did not meet him at the agreed upon rendezvous spot and some time later we were unfortunate enough to run into him again.  He was visibly upset and told us it was “not cool” to promise to meet him and then not show up.  I do not remember how we extricated ourselves from Boris a second time but I do remember it was exceedingly awkward.  It seems Boris was the loser and “you can’t get it right if you can’t relate” as the song says.

***

Now my balding head bobs in a nerdy Subaru with Loser bumping on the speakers while scenes of my small midwestern town slide by outside the windows.  Snow is in the forecast.