Editor's note: Long-time Queen Anne & Magnolia News reporter Russ Zabel died two years ago in April. Peter Havas, Russ's close friend from their European boarding school days, wrote this account of early Zabelian life and times set in the late 1960s. Last year Russ's sister Robin sent Havas a portion of her brother's ashes in a postal envelope, and Havas and his old friend took a last tour of the City of Light before parting at the Seine.
"I'm in love." Russ said, his hands stuffed into his jacket pockets.
"You're what?" I asked.
"In love."
"You'll get over it, you always do." I said.
"No, I mean it," Russ said again.
"I'm glad." I replied.
"No really; I'm really in love."
"She's over there…" he said, nodding through a halo of Marlboro smoke toward the dance floor where our classmates and various locals were gyrating in sexual frenzy.
"Which one?" I asked, now vaguely interested. It wasn't often Russ actually consolidated the object of his desire into the form of a real person.
"The brunette."
We were standing on the balcony of a hotel overlooking Lake Lugano in southern Switzerland during our Senior Prom, indulging in smoking, the only legal vice allowed at the school, while those around us were formulating a plan to sneak a bottle of booze someone had sequestered aboard the bus past the chaperones.
Russ and I had not bothered with clandestine bottles. We had freely shown the chaperones the backpack full of oranges we'd brought with us to munch.
The head dance floor dick, Mr. Woods, had even said he wished more students would take their health seriously and eat more fruit than candy. He didn't know we'd already injected our hooch into the oranges and were getting progressively plastered with each break. By the time Russ fell in love, I figured it was either the Vodka talking, or he'd OD'd on Vitamin C.
I took another look into the murky squirm fest on the dance floor and thought I saw the object of Russ's lust in a clinch with one of our dorm mates. She was, indeed, very attractive, in a dark Latin way: Slender and tawny, like Sophia Loren in "Boy on a Dolphin."
"Oh, yeah." I said. A masterful riposte considering the number of oranges I'd eaten.
"She looks hot. What's her name?" Innocent enough question I thought.
Russ rambled a concatenated series of syllables that sounded like an exotic pasta dish. I nodded sagely.
"Really? I said. Can you spell that?"
"I don't think so." Said Russ.
"So, Romeo, if you're in love with her, why is she dancing with that fool?" Another reasonable question I thought. By now I was feeling pretty mellow.
"She said she doesn't want to be obvious, but she wrote me a note. She's invited me to her house after the party."
Russ waved an orange stained fist clutching a soggy piece of crumpled paper in my face. The look on his face was a lottery winner.
"See? Here! Here's her address: Via Montallo, in Como."
"How you gonna get there?" I asked, by now past master of the reasonable question.
"I don't know, we'll walk." He said looking at me like I was nuts. "Cover for me at the dorm, I'll be back before dawn," he continued, dropping his voice to cement the conspiratorial atmosphere that now surrounded us like our cigarette smoke.
"No you won't." I said. "Como's in Italy."
Those little interstices when reality hits us with lead-pipe effect are watershed moments that are, fortunately, few for most of us. Russ actually recoiled. But for the railing, he would have fallen backwards off the balcony into the lake some 50 feet below. His face progressed from calm confidence to drunken horror.
"COMO'S IN ITALY?" he shrieked. He didn't follow the pasta princess home and his look alone told me never to mention it again.
Over the next 40-odd years, I stayed in touch with Russ, during his travels and travails: when he tried a one-man invasion of Tibet, and when his mother passed away. We stayed in touch when he thought he wanted to grow outside the Queen Anne & Magnolia News, and when he realized that the paper fit him just fine. We wrote to each other every couple of months, sending scraps of material for editorial perusal, approval, critique or just because we thought the other would like to read something that didn't come from his own pen.
He called me last year, early on, and said he had finally gotten clear of his most recent emotional quagmire and thought he'd finally line up some bucks and come to Paris so we could meet again, swap drunken lies, distorted memories of events we had yet to live, and tales of bawdy derring dos.
He was as good as his word: he did come over. Much diminished. Instead of meeting him at the airport with a drink and a kiss to both cheeks, I picked him up at the post office. He looked different, more angular than I'd remembered him.
What the hell, I thought, we can't always look our best. I took him to lunch anyway, and introduced him to my friend/brother Prosper Keating. We had wine and steak with pepper sauce and oily fries. Prosper and Russ got along as I thought they would: Prosper admired his work, reading blurbs from the Zabel Times( The Zabel memorial section published by the Queen Anne & Magnolia News - editor). Russ took his praise in stoic silence.
When the bill came, we all slapped our pockets and Russ, conveniently, didn't have any for once.
Russ had said he'd wanted to see Paris from a motorcycle, so I gave him the royal tour: We passed the Eiffel tower, the National Assembly, the Louvre. For fun I pointed out the whores at the Port Saint Denis and the drunken bands of Yugoslav "Eco tourists" decorating the subways grids. He took in everything.
When it was time to say goodbye, I took him down to the Seine, along the banks of the Quai des Celestins. There we parted ways. I tried to tell him it was too cold for a swim, but he insisted.
I wanted to give it a sense of occasion, but I had nothing to read and was running dry on pithy quotes, so I found an old book of Tao, and read him a passage about everyone of us being light and energy, and another short chapter from the Triumph motorcycle repair manual (steering bearings if I remember correctly).
It seemed to do the trick and he slipped silently into the river, mixing with all the other spirits of this great city, off on yet another journey - maybe a one man invasion of Valhalla this time. It occurred to me as I fired up the bike and rode away: "It took me 40 years to tell that bastard I loved him. He better not be gone for good."
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