Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 1: Three months that shook my world.
Madonna’s “Borderline” reached #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in June 1984. It was re-released in Europe in 1986 and did quite well on the continent, so I cannot rationally explain why the song was such an earworm for me during the run-up to my inaugural voyage in 1985.
Into the mid-1990s, out of nowhere “Borderline” invariably would play on the radio whenever I was packing my bag for a trip. Indeed, different strokes; lightweight ear candy to some, symbolic prelude to others. “Borderline” still is a favorite song of mine, and it always prompts a smile. From serendipity alone, it became a handy theme song for my early European trips.
(Radio? It’s an increasingly antiquated music dissemination device.)
I didn’t pick the song; it picked me, because that’s the way music works. Borderlines are for containment, and also for crossing. To reiterate, I had an easy life growing up as a white middle-class male in the ‘burbs, with no wars to go fight, compulsions to attain vast wealth, or serious romantic ties.
As this narrative proceeds, I’ll be appending songs that I associate with the trip. This isn’t to suggest they’re all preferred tunes; many are not, although all of them evoke a place and time during the period I was away, whether as background music or free association.
Let’s do a two-fer Thursday. You probably didn’t know that Harry Caray’s singing career was launched not in Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs, but at “old” Comiskey Park at the behest of Bill Veeck, owner of the crosstown Chicago White Sox.
Did I mention Comiskey Park? What a coincidence.
My good friends Bob Gunn and Kevin Dougherty drove me to Chicago a day ahead of my flight. We stayed at a chain hotel near the airport and ate gyros at a restaurant in Greektown. Only six days later, I’d actually be in Greece, and to be truthful, the suspense and anticipation were killing me.
Maybe a few crappy beers at a big league baseball game would help to calm my nerves.
The Cubs were playing in San Diego, which had lost the 1984 World Series to Detroit. However, the defending world champion Tigers were in town for a weekend series against the South Side’s customarily woebegone White Sox at the venerable (and foredoomed) Comiskey.
Had I suggested to the crowd that almost precisely 40 years to the day a White Sox fan from Chicago would be elected Pope (in 2025) after the Pale Hose captured a title (2005), ballpark security probably would have carted me off to the closest rubber room, causing me to miss my European trip altogether.
(However, be forewarned; the papacy makes a cameo appearance in the travel tale to come).
Granted, baseball had little to do with my impending European matriculation, but the game is a useful segue that illustrates the way one’s mind can sometimes play tricks with incomplete memories, because for decades afterward, I remembered the game as (a) taking place on May 11, a Saturday afternoon, (b) being televised nationally as the NBC Game of the Week, and (c) resulting in a win for the Tigers thanks to a shutout by their ace, Jack Morris.
As the esteemed Meatloaf once crooned, two out of three ain’t bad.
At some point years later amid the internet’s helpful availability, I consulted Baseball Reference and was utterly flummoxed, because as it transpired, Morris pitched on Sunday ― at night, not during the day ― and he was the losing pitcher, victimized by a shutout hurled against the Tigers by Floyd Bannister of the Pale Hose.
- Sunday, May 12, 1985: Detroit Tigers at Chicago White Sox
- White Sox beat Tigers (4-0)
- Attendance: 21,216
- Venue: Comiskey Park I
- Game Duration: 2:29
- Night Game, on grass
- W: Floyd Bannister (2-3) L: Jack Morris (4-4)
How could this have been on Sunday?
My photos of the game clearly were taken in broad daylight. And wouldn’t it have made more sense to drive to Chicago on Saturday morning, attend a day game, then hit Greektown before concluding the day in the ‘burbs? This way Bob and Kevin could have dropped me off at the airport on Sunday, and had time to return to Louisville for work on Monday.
Something didn’t jibe. Could there have been a mistake?
Confused, I realized that the airline flight itinerary was the final arbiter. What day of the week did I actually leave? As an inveterate hoarder, paperwork probably still existed in a box somewhere, and it did, proving conclusively that we attended the Saturday day game, and assuredly did NOT see Morris pitch.
- May 11, 1985: Detroit Tigers at Chicago White Sox
- White Sox beat Tigers (7-4)
- Saturday, May 11, 1985
- Attendance: 33,636
- Venue: Comiskey Park I
- Game Duration: 2:56
- Day Game, on grass
- W: Richard Dotson (1-1) L: Juan Berenguer (1-2)
So, why is it that for at least two decades I continued to believe that we had witnessed a Morris shutout? I might transposed the outcome of Sunday’s game with Saturday’s, and somehow mistaken Dotson’s shutout for one that Morris never threw.
But how did I even know the details of the Sunday night game prior to conducting research at Baseball Reference all those years later? After all, I was already in the air when it started. Plainly my brain went AWOL on me.
At any event, on the game’s 40th anniversary (May 11, 2025), it finally dawned on me to search YouTube. A few keystrokes later, I learned that the matchup we saw was indeed the national broadcast of NBC’s Game of the Week; what’s more, someone had thoughtfully videotaped it; and right there it was on the web, available for reliving any time I please.
So far I haven’t, even if one might consider viewing to be closure. A few years ago, I asked Bob what he remembered about the weekend.
Although it’s been more than 30 years, I can remember it as if it happened only … er … more than 30 years ago.
We attended the White Sox-Tigers game at old Comiskey. We sat near one of the obstruction posts drinking vast quantities of cheap beer while two brown suits wearing dark sunglasses sat out in the right field bleachers keeping an eye on Roger … at least that’s what we thought at the time. (1)
We stayed at a cheap hotel next to the airport. Later that evening we ate at an even cheaper Greek restaurant. Roger went to bed early while Kevin and I continued drinking.
As we were returning to our hotel room, which was on the first floor, we looked through the window and saw Roger stretched out on the bed as if he had been prepared for a funeral pyre. He looked more like a corpse than someone who was still breathing. His pallor was very pale with greenish tints on the edges.
I don’t believe Roger enjoyed flying back in those days. We drove him to the airport the next day where, if I’m not mistaken, he was taking nips from a half pint bottle of schnapps. The rest, they say, is history.
As usual, Bob’s memory is reliable. In those days I emphatically did not enjoy flying; my most recent previous flight had taken place in 1978. The trip budget did not permit beverage purchases on the flight, which passed without sleep, although the mandated brief layover in Reykjavik allowed for the acquisition of wee little bottles of Brennivín (“Black Death”) as a surreptitious substitute for breakfast.
However, once safely on the ground in Europe, I barely drank at all for the first month. This is one of two relatively odd twists that stand out about the inaugural European expedition in 1985.
First, given a lifelong compulsion to write, and considering the ample down time at my disposal while waiting for trains, seated for long hours inside them, resting in hostel common areas after a hard day’s touring, or just perched atop park benches watching the procession of life’s rich pageant — in short, with so many spare minutes to harness, I managed to commit almost nothing of it to paper.
Only snippets and random observations survive, albeit with a fairly accurate day-to-day record of my progress. Why? Was it laziness on my part? I suspect the real issue was sheer sensory overload. It was too much to process. When you’re a wide-eyed rube from the Hoosier outback challenged by the simplest of daily tasks in a strange land, not to mention utterly transfixed by scenes of wonderment you’d previously only dreamed about, it’s terribly easy to lose the thread.
I know what you’re probably thinking, so hear me now: any disorientation I may have been experiencing had nothing to do with a high volume of alcohol consumption, which brings me to a second observation: drinking was kept to a bare minimum while abroad in 1985, at least compared with my default proclivities prior to departure.
In the beginning, there were only stray beers here and there. The first was a can of Oranjeboom from the Netherlands, which came and went on the fourth day aboard the ferry from Brindsisi to Patras. Then in Athens, I drank an Amstel or Carlsberg, maybe two, with each evening meal.
It might have been more. I’d been advised by veterans of European travel to drink Fix, a brand of old-school Greek lager, and sadly couldn’t find any, learning much later that the brewery had closed permanently in 1983. Happily a brand revival occurred in 2009, and in 2022 I finally got my “fix” in Athens, where the former main brewery building had since been transformed into the National Museum of Contemporary Art.
It turns out that my 1985 place of lodging, the Marble House Pension, was only a few blocks away from the Fix brewery. Because I kept walking uphill toward the Acropolis, not downhill toward the brewery-cum-museum, I never saw it.
Yes, an Efes Pilsen or two came with the kebabs and stuffed tomatoes in Istanbul, and retsina (white wine dosed with pine sap) poured freely on the boat from Greece back to Italy, yet nothing remotely approaching drunkenness was allowed to annex my consciousness until finally I let loose one evening in Rome with a group of fellow budget travelers, who’d uncovered 2,000-lira (one dollar), 2/3 liter bottles of Carlsberg at a bar down the street from our pension.
Admittedly a few days later in Pecetto (a village near Turin in Italy), I drank beer, some wine and wee bits of local grappa with my cousin Don and his buddy Scott, and soon after that was the schnitzel-bigger-than-your-plate joint in Vienna (Puntigamer draft?), and the glorious Augustiner beer hall in Salzburg.
Of course, we mustn’t neglect those Hofbräuhaus nights in Munich, and numerous pints of Guinness in Sligo while watching Live Aid at the bar. Admittedly, there was too much vodka on hand in Leningrad, but my Australian friend Mark drank most of it, which is why HE vomited, not me.
My point is that 15 or so excessive nights out of a total of 88 comprised a fairly nondescript consumption log, verging on scandalous teetotalism, for the sort of professional drinker I fancied myself to be at the time.
This relative sobriety owed largely to an innate caution. I had qualms about letting go of myself in an unfamiliar environment, especially at night, when I’d often be walking long, unfamiliar blocks back to bed. As an oversized male, I wasn’t tremendously worried about being attacked or robbed, but rather stepping into an open manhole, falling off a bridge or being struck by a speeding bicyclist.
Also, to reiterate, money for partying simply did not exist, and I had no choice except to hoard the funds I had at my disposal. Concurrently, it became quickly evident that Europe was no different than America when it came to higher on-premises beverage markups, and as the days passed, my thoughts increasingly shifted to corner shops and markets, where less expensive beers could be purchased and carried a few blocks to a park bench or grassy knoll (with a view.)
A camp cup and Swiss Army knife did the rest.
My budget was sacrosanct and parsimony quickly became a habit; fortunately for me, the guidebook mogul Arthur Frommer proved slightly mistaken in quoting a $25-a-day figure. With the Euro as yet a far-away dream, the 1985 dollar was at an epochal (and ultimately misleading) level of strength against continental currencies, and the final calculation came out to about $19.50 a day for just shy of three months away, not counting expenses up-front: flights, the Eurail pass and the Leningrad coach tour.
Had Frommer been correct, I’d have been in a bit of a quandary, because stepping off the return flight in Chicago on August 8, I had exactly $100 remaining on my debit card.
We return now to mid-May, outbound, 1985.
There was the requisite 45-minute Icelandair stopover at Keflavik for souvenir shopping (read: duty-free tobacco and booze), which afforded my first official steps upon something resembling European soil, but in truth, the first-ever amble across this continent’s historic ground took place at the Luxembourg airport’s international arrivals terminal.
After passport control and customs, I spotted an “exchange” window. Exhausted from a sleepless night, I turned and asked a fellow passenger in the queue whether I should get French francs or the Luxembourg variant.
“Well, that would depend on where you are, wouldn’t it?” he replied, with a surliness borne perhaps by his own sleepless transatlantic night, or more likely an upbringing filled with pain and betrayal, as suggested by an unmistakable New York City urban accent.
Nonplussed, I waited silently in line and when my turn came, swiftly shoved an immaculately clean traveler’s check through a tiny aperture, waiting to see what sort of money would come sliding back, and hoping I wouldn’t have to answer complicated questions in an unknown local dialect. The teller motioned toward my passport and yawned. Luxembourg francs appeared. Another fresh new ritual had been transcended.
Further ahead, the baggage conveyor disgorged my spanking new Service Merchandise “athletic club” gym bag. Lacking backpack convertibility, it boasted a handy shoulder strap—and one of the strap’s connecting loops had been ripped beyond repair from the fabric, presumably by the baggage sorting claws. Henceforth the strap was useless, subsequently altering my shoulder bag into a one-dimensional hand-held suitcase.
So be it. I emerged into a covered plaza, followed the signs for an airport bus bound for the central train station, and paid the driver with Luxembourgian francs. A fast ride through the suburbs followed, and then the bus glided into its parking space at the stylish old Gare (train station). I bounded out, at long last, into a stereotypically busy, sunlit street with sidewalks, bicycles and cafes populated by genuine Europeans.
All well and good. Wow! I’d made it overseas intact. Then came the nagging question: what next?
Somewhere in Luxembourg City an officially sanctioned international youth hostel awaited with my reservation, facilitated well in advance by international mail, eager to house me. How to get there on foot?
I buy a city map, or risk abject humiliation by asking directions of a possibly non-English speaking passer-by?
A helpful Internet kiosk was out of the question, seeing as the information superhighway had yet to be invented by Al Gore. Ditto smart phones, Uber and e-scooters.
But providentially, looming right in front of me, was a large signboard that turned out to be a map of the city, undoubtedly erected as a public service for ignorant foreigners like me who were exiting the train station in a state of confusion. Walking toward it, I abruptly stumbled and looked down to see the arm of a person dressed in a decently clean suit, passed out drunk in the shade of an adjacent fountain.
My first Euro wino! Fragrant and snoring, he was no help at all. Luckily the map showed exactly where I was, and where I needed to go, which looked to be no more than two kilometers (a mile and a quarter) in a straight line.
Easy enough on the face of it, except the street names defied easy memorization, and more importantly, straightaways seemed to be illegal in Luxembourg City. The map failed to show the city’s irregular topography, spilling across ridges, rivers, ravines and hills, and contoured not unlike certain corners of West Virginia.
In the end my 20-minute scenic hike took almost two hours, mercifully ending only after I’d made almost a complete sightseeing circle, lost AF, chancing to pass a pole sporting various directional signs, one of which was the familiar hut-and-tree logo pointing the way to the youth hostel. It had taken so long to perform my simple arrival tasks that the hostel already was open for afternoon hours.
I checked in without difficulty, located my assigned bunk in what would become a completely filled 12-person dorm room, declined both a shower (a mistake) and an institutional dinner of noodles and mystery meat (not a mistake), never once considered drinking a beer, and proceeded to sleep 15 hours straight through until morning, when after a continental breakfast, it came time for the short 20-minute trek back to the station to validate the rail pass and board my first European train.
I told myself there was a method to this madness. But would it really be possible to get from Luxembourg to Greece with a Eurailpass?
I was about to find out.
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 3: Growing up in Greece with Henry Miller.
(1) The two men in question, stiffly clad in outmoded suits, looked so out of place that we surmised they were KGB, or perhaps Bulgarian operatives. This mildly amusing joke became side-splitting after several beers.
(2) A note on the photos: This installment’s views of Luxembourg actually were taken in August, when I returned for the flight home. The cover photo was taken in Clervaux, a small town north of Luxembourg City, which I just now realize is only a few miles away of Houffalize in Belgium, home of the Achouffe brewery (think: gnomes).
