I've received word that a guy wants to get back in touch with me. We graduated from Stavanger American School together in 1980, and then we headed for Greece to cavort with the naked tourist girls. There's a horrible Darryl Hannah film called Summer Lovers that illustrates what we had on our minds, though to be honest, I wasn't especially eager to hook up with loose German, Swedish, and British chicks. Casual sex was never my thing. On the rare occasions that I slept with someone, I always fell in love with her. Our Greek vacation was—for me—an emotional suicide mission. But we bought our Eurail passes, and I borrowed someone's big, red backpack, and we hopped on the train.

It was fun being free and eighteen. Clueless about what do with my life, I was very happy to put my secondary schooling behind me. We drank a lot of beer on the ferry from Norway across the North Sea to Denmark, and then things went south. We headed south, to West Germany, but what I mean is that the trip became torture for me. My alcoholism was still a few years in the future, so I didn't want to spend all my time drunk. Also, for my companions freedom meant freedom from bathing. All they were interested in was being dirty and visiting the red light districts and beer halls.

We checked into a German campground, and after a night of drinking, we caught the last bus back. Though we had no money, the driver very kindly let us on anyway, since we were the only passengers. We sat in the very back, and five minutes later, one of my companions puked up two gallons of Astra that flowed all the way up to the driver's seat. He looked down, saw the amber river, pulled over, and screamed at us to clean it up. So we took off our shirts and pushed the beer, Bratwurst, and bile out the bus doors.

One of my companions had a boombox, which he used to play Fleetwood Mac's Tusk endlessly. He and the other three would repeat each line of each song in a spoken chorus, like cultists chanting a prayer. I'd never seen anybody do that. It drove me crazy. When I finally asked them what the hell was going on, they told me it was the fastest way to learn the lyrics. That meant that soon they'd all be singing! For some reason I can't abide people ostentatiously singing along with their favorite bands, like in some godawful, cheese-fest road movie. I spent a week fighting with chanting, drunk, horny, unpleasant people who stank and intensely disliked me for my prudish ways.

It all ended when my traveling pouch was stolen on the train going through Yugoslavia. I sat by the door in the compartment, and when I woke up in the morning, my pouch was gone. I later learned that Yugoslavian train bandits equipped themselves with knockout gas, if you can believe it. Someone quietly slid open the door, gassed me, and then cut the neck strap of my pouch and eased my valuables out of my shirt. My Eurail pass, traveler's checks, money, and passport were gone.

The conductor spoke only Serbo-Croatian, so when I pantomimed that I had no ticket, he went and got a police officer who pointed an AK-47 in my face. A Yugoslav watching the scene asked if any of us spoke German. The guy who wants to contact me did, so we set up a daisy chain of translation: me, my companion, one of the only two friendly Yugoslavs who ever lived, and the cop. It took an hour for the cop to write out his report. He gave me a copy and told us to detrain at Belgrade and go to the American consulate, which we did.

At first the consul general—who was a clone of Kenneth Starr—refused to help me. "How do I know you are who you say you are?" he asked. "You have no identification!"

"Well, then I'm going to die," I told him.

He got very huffy and forced my four companions to swear out affidavits that I was indeed Thomas Wictor, threatening them with the full power of the US government if they were lying. I was sent down the street to a photographer who used a Matthew Brady view camera that made eight-by-ten glass plate negatives when the brass lens cap was manually removed from the wooden box for a few seconds. I took the photos of me looking terrified—I was actually beyond terrified and had entered a previously undiscovered dimension of fear—back to the consulate, and the consul general himself angrily completed my passport on the office typewriter in regular black ink. 

At that time the State Department used special typewriters for passports. They created broken lettering in green ink. My new passport looked as if a seventh grader had done it. The consul general then glopped white glue on the photo, slapped it into the passport, and embossed it with the Great Seal of the United States. Right across my face, so now the photo was unrecognizable. The glue squished out from under the photo and drooled down the page. I wiped it on my jeans to keep the passport from being glued shut.

The consul general told me that the next day, I had to go to the headquarters of the Yugoslavian State Security Service to get an exit visa so I could leave the country. Always interested in military and paramilitary matters, I knew he meant the secret police, the dreaded UBDA. He typed a letter in Serbo-Croatian on blank stationary—no letterhead or stamp. Refusing to tell me what it said, he threw me out. My four companions each gave me some money, shook my hand, returned to the train station, and went on to Greece and the rest of their lives. I took a taxi to a campground the consul general recommended. It was closed for the season, of course, with grass four feet high.

However, the night watchman was a friendly young Yugoslav who spoke English. He let me stay for free and gave me a pack of cigarettes that tasted like Kleenex. We discussed Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, and Mark Twain until dusk. Then I lay in my sleeping bag, hidden in the grass-jungle, awake all night, smoking Kleenex-flavored cigarettes, listening to the wind, and trying to shake the conviction that soon after the sun rose, I'd be killed.

At dawn the night watchman called a taxi. When the driver found out that I wanted to go to the UBDA headquarters, he and the watchman had a shouting match that went on for half an hour. The watchman showed the driver the letter the consul general had given me; the driver finally yanked open a rear door to the cab and jerked his head at me to get in. I waved goodbye to the second of the only two friendly Yugoslavs who ever existed. He seemed on the verge of tears.

As the taxi neared my destination, I saw fewer and fewer civilians in the streets. They were gradually replaced with rifle-toting cops until it looked like we were in an entire city of police with assault rifles. The cabbie pulled over and yelled at me to get out, pointing to a building a block away. When I tried to pay him, he snatched a bill from my hand, made a U-turn, and peeled off.

I walked toward the brooding, hulking, murderous-looking building. Cops with AK-47s lounged around all over the steps. They stopped talking and watched me approach. I picked out the one who seemed the least vicious and handed him the consul general's letter. He read it, barked something, and two cops grabbed me by the arms. I was frog-marched into the building, down four flights of stairs to the basement, and into a tiny room with only a desk, a typewriter, a goose-necked lamp six feet tall, and what looked like a wooden electric chair.

They took my backpack, sat me in the electric chair, and left me there. I noticed that every surface was painted glossy battleship gray. I knew why: That would make it easier to clean.

Three hours later, the door opened. An older man with glasses and a young man who looked like a model came in. The older man sat at the table with the typewriter, and the model put the goose-necked lamp in front of me, adjusted it, and turned it on. A blinding light as hot as a death-ray cooked my face. Both men lit cigarettes, and as I thought of Kowalski's interrogation in The Day of the Jackal, the model circled me. I could hear but not see him.

"THOMAS!" he suddenly screamed. "HOW DID YOU GET INTO YUGOSLAVIA WITHOUT A PASSPORT?"

"I had a passport! It was stolen on the train!"

The model spoke to the typist in Serbo-Croatian. It sounded like sarcastic, whining mimicry of what I just said.

"Neh, neh, neh," the typist said, waving his hand and shaking his head. He typed a few lines.

"THOMAS! DID YOU SELL YOUR PASSPORT?" the model screamed. "DID YOU? ANSWER!"

"No! Of course not! Why would I do that?"

"QUIET, THOMAS! YOU DO NOT ASK ME QUESTIONS!"  He picked up my new passport and shook it at me as if it were a porn magazine he'd found under my bed. "WHERE DID YOU GET THIS FALSE PASSPORT? DID YOU MAKE IT YOURSELF?"

"No! The US consul general made it, but he was an idiot! He hated me!"

The model screamed, I blubbered, the model translated, the typist sneered and typed, and I sweated, prayed, and trembled. After four hours, a cop brought in my backpack, and the model stamped my passport with an exit visa. He said I had twelve hours to leave the country.

"What happens if I don't make it out of the country in twelve hours?"

"YOU WILL BE ARRESTED! NOW LEAVE, THOMAS! GO! GET OUT!"

I left, somehow found the right bus to the train station, somehow bought a ticket, somehow had my first meal in over a day, and made it to the Austrian border with eighteen minutes to spare. Piece of cake. My right eyeball swelled up and protruded an inch from its socket in some kind of stress-induced attack of ocular hives, but that's another story.

Here's the point of this screed: When I was having my photo taken with the Matthew Brady view camera, the consul general told my four companions that I would almost certainly be arrested, thrown in prison, and made to disappear. Tourists were selling their passports to Yugoslavs for thousands of dollars, and the UBDA were cracking down. They would very likely make an example of me. I would cease to exist. All four of my traveling companions commented on the makeshift look of my new passport, yet nobody said a thing about what the consul general had told them about my probable fate. They all just shook my hand and continued on to Greece.

From Austria I went through West Germany, Denmark, and back to Norway. That passport gave me trouble at every border. The guards called the US State Department each time to make sure I was genuine. And I was. A genuine clown. Catastro, Clown of Unending Misfortune and Misjudgment. The consul general had made me that fake-looking passport to teach me a lesson in...what? Showing respect to His Excellency? Had I disrespected him by begging him to save my life?

When I got home, I couldn't tell if it was eight in the morning or eight at night. Mom informed me that it was the beginning of a brand-new day. She served me a hearty breakfast, and then Dad carried my passport out to the garage and burned it to ashes with an acetylene torch. He called the State Department and swore on a stack of Bibles that he'd taken it to work to show his colleagues the latest stunt his moronic son had pulled, and the passport had accidentally fallen into the john. Tragic. I was sent a new, real passport in two weeks. This one had green ink, but it used the same Yugoslavian terror-photo.

A year later, one of my traveling companions filled me in on my close shave with the UBDA. He laughed as he told me.

I'm not much in the mood to reminisce about BEING LEFT TO DIE in a brutal communist dictatorship. However, I will say that in 1999 I had the great pleasure of seeing NATO jets bomb the building where I was interrogated. Unfortunately, I wasn't circling overhead in an AWACS or watching from down the street. It was footage that CNN broadcast. I can still feel the heat from that lamp on my face and hear that model-handsome secret police officer screaming at me. It didn't happen thirty-three years ago; it happened yesterday. In some ways it's still happening.

You won't miss anything if you don't end up reconnecting with me. That's my message to just about everyone from my past. Several people have made attempts to renew our acquaintanceships, but our paths have diverged. I live a life that almost all of you will find incomprehensibly limited. I like to think it's specialized, but whatever. All I care about now is art, tranquility, signs, improvement, solitude, and laughing. I'm a contemplative, a monk, a weirdo. Forget about me.

But buy my books! You won't regret it.