I graduated college in 1990 with a degree in studio art and not the faintest clue how to put it to use. So after skipping town, I decided to backpack through Europe, largely solo, for a month and a half. I left soon after graduation, traveling on the cheap, and quickly dropping the bit of weight I'd added over four years of beer and late-night pizza.
It was a fairly lonely time, but I fancied myself an artist and a writer, and figured solitude and thought went part and parcel with being a creative person.
In college, due to both my love for Jack Kerouac's persona in On the Road, and a used-clothes-buying habit, my friends called me Sal. I liked the name, the chance to have a persona slightly bigger than myself.
Like Kerouac's Sal, I was excited by life and on a quest to discover all it had to offer. I talked to strangers, visited friends, slept on floors, ate and drank, read voraciously, wrote pages and pages of songs and poems, sketched a bunch, and mostly had a great time.
And then I got sick.
Somewhere between Salzburg and Munich, I managed to pick up Salmonella and Rotavirus, and by the time my night train from Munich arrived in Paris, I was sick as a dog.
It was early morning (maybe 6), and I had no place to go. I hadn't been to the Louvre on my first pass through the city weeks earlier, so I went there, figuring it'd be empty right when it opened. Alas, the Louvre, as you might imagine, doesn't open quite so early in the morning. But it was a warm enough June day and so I laid down on the edge of a fountain by I.M. Pei's then-new ziggurat façade.
I'm usually a bit of a fussy sleeper, but I passed out proper right then and there, lost in the emptiness of the plaza. When I woke, hours later, there were hundreds of people milling around me, in a line that snaked through the plaza, waiting for the doors to open.
I made it through the museum, barely, and for the next day or two — knowing full well that they contained some of the city's finer public restrooms — I gamely toured many of the city's finer museums and subsisted on take-away Cantonese Rice (which I still love and which still comforts me to this day), bread, and water.
Finally, unable to keep in food any longer, and with my fever skyrocketing, I hunkered down in a crappy one-star hotel in the garment district. For more than a week, as the parasites went about their business, I was
delirious and dehydrated and went without food for long stretches
(days, not hours). I alternately burned and shivered, slept and could
not. Looking back on it, it seems far less like Salmonella and far more
like what a long heroin withdrawal must be. I awoke one night certain that I was going to die in that hotel room, and
I earnestly wrote down a last will and testament so I could fall
asleep again. Clearly, it didn't come to that, but in many ways, it was the
most frightening and defining period of my life.
When, finally, I threw in the towel and changed my plane ticket to come home a week early (best $50 change fee I've ever spent), I weighed 20 pounds less than I do when healthy, and looked every bit as strung out as Brad Davis in Midnight Express. Still, instead of being tossed in a Turkish prison, shockingly, I passed through Customs at JFK without a second glance.
I hadn't been to a doctor in four or five years, so I went to my childhood pediatrician, who took one look at me and whose first words to me (in the pinnacle of bedside manner) were, "Wow. You look like shit." He sent me down the hall for the lab to run tests on my blood, urine, and stool, and a few days later called with the results.
The worst thing about Salmonella is that there is no curative magic pill; they just let it run its course. And run it did. It was several weeks before I felt better, and another month just getting my strength back. In the meantime, the board of health called my house (to make sure I understood the health risks of Salmonella and that I had no contact with the public food supply), and I moved back to my college stomping grounds for a final summer before real life set in.
Slowly, I recovered, and I did stomp, working my old bartending job and living in a garage-top apartment I had sublet from my acting professor — who left his old tube amp for me to use when the guitar-playing muse struck me. It did, as did many other muses. It was a magical summer, post-college and stress-free, but I was serious about life and its prospects. I had no idea what that fall would bring, yet I had nothing but optimism. I could paint and I could write. Neither paid well (and they still don't), but I was Sal Paradise, dammit, and — clad in beat Salvation Army garb — I had outlived Salmonella. I was alive, and healthy, and at the top of my game.
