Autobiography of an Addict: Final Chapter

There’s a common misperception among many Americans that Europe is a vast pedestrian utopia full of smart, civic-minded liberals who ride around in trains sipping espresso and reading existential art criticism. They ride bicycles to publicly subsidize brothels and hookah bars where they watch Italian films with tragic endings between puffs of opium and Tantric massages. This is the society imagined by Americans who wish we could be as sophisticated about sex, drugs and oil consumption.

Well, maybe they are more sophisticated about sex, drugs and oil consumption, in that their philosophy of sex is, “Less talk, more action;” their attitude to drugs is, “Prison time? For that? Are you kidding me?” while petroleum is regarded as the substance that really needs to be controlled.

So yeah, they ride trains and bikes a lot more than we do, but the night I needed a ride back to my friends’ Paris apartment back in 1994, the Metro was closed, and what seemed like 20 lanes of traffic around the Arc de Triomphe at two in the morning were packed with economy-sized weapons of bodily destruction traveling at warp speed. Wherever it is Parisians need to get to in the wee hours of an August night, they are hell-bent on getting there as quickly as possible, and you’d better not get in their way.

The ride I hitched back to my friends’ apartment was with a guy hell-bent on getting to Marseilles and beating morning traffic out of town. There is nothing more stupid for a young woman to do, anywhere in the world, than to hitchhike. It’s the next best thing to putting an ad in the Soldier of Fortune magazine classifieds for serial killers and choosing a remote location for the final interview.

But I was stupid — probably thinking Europeans are SO much more sophisticated about abducting and murdering dumb American girls, they’d never just do it right out in the open like that. Marseilles-bound dude must have felt sorry for the dumb American girl, based on what he told me when he dropped me off: that I reminded him of his sister and he hoped if she ever did something that stupid in my country, a guy like him would be around to give her a lift.

My best chance for winding up in the trunk of a car, dashed.

Back in Knoxville, I considered ways to simplify my life rather than end it. I decided moving downtown was a good means to that end. These were the days of the late ’90s, just as the pre-dawn of downtown revitalization formed a dark blue membrane on the horizon of Knoxville’s urban consciousness. It was a great place to live if you had nowhere to go other than Harold’s Deli or a bar in the Old City. You could ride your bike at warp speed down Gay Street on a Saturday afternoon doing figure-eights and dodging tumbleweed. It was dead down there. The tall glass buildings on lower Gay Street strutted pitifully as a mock skyline while the ghost of the World’s Fair glimmered in a dull Sunsphere. But the real symbol of downtown was the despondent skyline of the McClung warehouses, years before they finally self-immolated.

So I still had to drive. Drive to work, drive to shop, drive the farthest to the mechanic to keep my car driving properly. All that driving drove my Jetta to an early death in 2003, and I got a new car, the last time in my life I will ever buy a new car, for it was some time after I bought the new car I realized that the wisest people live where they don’t have to drive, and the dumbest people buy new cars.

I had already bought a house. A used house, so to speak, used since 1935 in the northern-most reach of the so-called Downtown North area. It was on the bus line, and while I still drove anywhere relating to work or shopping, KAT was my transit to the downtown scene where I socialized. I got familiar with what you might call “bus life.”

Knoxville is still skittish about public transportation. It is regarded with something bordering on suspicion, if it is regarded at all. The people who use it tend to be university students, eccentric hipsters and down-and-outers who have lost their driver’s licenses and/or their livelihoods. Since I often rode the 22 on Broadway after dark, the ride could be rather surreal, and the scene was even a little intimate at times, like the time I was the lone passenger and the driver stopped the bus at an undesignated stop so he could use the men’s room in a dialysis center where some of his fares worked.

One big happy family, the 22 line was, in the days when I rode it. You may be wondering why I no longer do. Well, here’s a shocker for you: I’m jumping ship, baby. Moving back on the west side. Gonna gas up and burn oil, do what I can to use up the last drops of the smack of our society so we, the people, can ultimately get on without it. By the time that happens, I hope — I trust, even — there will be something like a rail service to haul us around. But if there isn’t, I’ll settle for canceling my gym membership because of all the biking and walking I will have to do.

You see, I’m moving in with a guy from Europe, and we’re gonna open a strip mall in Turkey Creek with an existentialist opium den, a café with nude wait staff and an art cinema specializing in Scandinavian themes on postmodern anxiety. Of course, it’s all on hold until those enlightened visionaries on county commission approve our zoning variance. And that will happen the day we have rail service to the moon.