Road to Elsewhere, Excerpt #31*: Channeling Claude Monet, Ghosts, and Cheap Red Wine, at the Gare Saint Lazare in Paris

My early experiment in vagrancy.

AS I WOULD ONE DAY TELL MY SONS: There are as many examples to follow—good and bad—as there are ways to follow them. My response to my alcohol-free upbringing by teetotaling Yankees was to behave irresponsibly myself. In high school I took advantage of back-to-back study halls to gather my henchmen and drink 7-oz. Miller ponies in the woods. In Paris, where wine was a subsidized public utility, I was intoxicated both by the cityscape and vin du table. 

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On September 5, 1978, less than a week into my stay in Paris, I noted on my calendar “je suis ivre avec mes amis américains!”

That is, I was enthusiastically (but ungrammatically) drunk with a bunch of Americans in Paris. We went out for cheap dinner and cheaper wine, and plenty of it, at a restaurant called Cerise, where they advertised an all-you-can-drink wine deal. In the group, we rapidly morphed t…