Published Dec 25, 2011

Back in December 1982 a Paris-bound train approached the Rhine Bridge into Koln. A dark dawn sky shod the winter morning sky. Building lights rimmed the overflowing river. I sat on the left side of the DeutscheBahn passenger car. The six-seat compartment was all mine. Few people took the midnight milk train from Hamburg. It stopped at every station.

Two bags lay at my feet. They held everything that I hadn’t wanted to leave in Hamburg. That northern city lived on even less light than Koln. The nightclub at which I had worked was in a slump. The pimps of the Reeperbahn had driven away our ‘good’ customers. The owner had said that they spent money, although he hadn’t paid my commission for the last two months.

SS Tommy was the owner’s muscle.

Two days earlier the blonde bodybuilder presented a bill for 10,000 Deutschmarks about $6000. The itemized bill listed my intimacy with a bikini model in detail. I was thinking free love. Hamburg wasn’t that kind of city. I handed over SS Tommy the keys to my BMW 2002, which I had crashed orange sets car a week ago in a forest north of the city. It wasn’t going anywhere without a tow.

The train crossed the bridge and the silhouette of the medieval cathedral loomed out of the murk. Thousands of workers and hundreds of skilled artisans had spent over a hundred years erecting the massive monument to Christianity. The US Eighth Air Force had conducted bombing raids on the city during World War II. The generals said they avoided targeting the cathedral, but aerial photos show that everything around the gothic structure had been leveled and the towers bore the scares of bombs, showing that those masons and workers knew how to build something to stand the passage of time good and bad. It had survived the bombing raids of World War II relatively unscratched and served as a beacon to the faithful. I was not one of them, but I respected the beauty of its grandeur.

The train stopped in the station. I pulled my hat over my face, fearing that SS Tommy had notified his Gestapo compatriots in Cologne about a fleeing American. The doors closed without a rush of Zuhalterei and the train pulled out of the station. Paris was eight hours away. I already had arrived to safety.

The color of the sky was gray.

All over Europe, but Paris was a city made for that color.