When Lowell turned thirty-nine years old, he finally gave in to the notion that the life he had cultivated had little significance. The thought had slowly metastasized in the back of his mind over the past dozen or so years, until he could no longer continue to ignore it. When at last he surrendered, the feeling of relief was surprisingly palpable to Lowell, like shrugging off a heavy backpack after days of hiking. He liquidated a few investments; sold off his house at a tidy loss; cashed in his chips.
Lowell had a contentious ex-wife and a teenaged daughter who had long ago taken her mother’s side. He had endured a monotonous job for seventeen years at a logistical engineering firm where he was tasked with ensuring steel conduit arrived at point B from point A in a tightly choreographed fashion. He often told people he was in construction to avoid the tedious explanation of his actual career. All of these things he was able to slip off, like shedding a jacket that had worn through at the elbows.
For the first time in years, Lowell was actually excited with the prospect of having nothing to look forward to. He had no metrics by which his success would be measured. Instead, he was determined to live a life utterly free from reflection and self-examination. He bought a one-way ticket to Amsterdam where he had resolved to do nothing but drink and revel in his hopeless freedom. He would follow without complaint where fortune guided him until his money ran out, and that would be the end of it.
It was early May when Lowell arrived in Amsterdam, and he found a room overlooking the Vondelpark near the center of the city. The room was cozy and white with a tiny living area sporting a couch and a coffee table. By the bed was a desk where Lowell could spend his days writing if he wished. He had vague aspirations toward writing a novel to keep himself occupied during the daylight hours: a post-existential treatise on the folly of the day-to-day twenty-first century middle-class middle-American lifestyle. It would be a black comedy. But Lowell also knew well enough that he felt very little compulsion to do so due to the very ennui born of the folly of the day-to-day twenty-first century middle-class middle-American lifestyle that had set him on this journey in the first place. Instead, Lowell had occupied his first days in Amsterdam availing himself of the various tourist destinations. He checked off the Rijksmuseum, the Anne Frank House, and the Van Gogh museum in his first weekend in the city. By the time he could spin the kilometer to mile conversion in his head as easily as calculating a tip, he had grown bored of most of the sex shows and brothels of the red light district, where fifty Euros would be good for fifteen minutes with a flexible Russian girl who fucked with the same urgency a cab driver displayed fighting crosstown traffic, and a similar amount of contempt.
The bathroom sported no shower, but instead had a free standing bathtub that could be filled from a spigot that jutted out from the wall and drained by means of a pipe that disappeared into the floorboards. Lowell found it wonderfully old-fashioned. He had avoided it for the first two weeks of his stay, preferring to shower in the common bathroom at the end of the hall during the quiet afternoons when his were the only footsteps throughout the building. He hadn’t taken a bath since he was a small child, mildly repulsed by the idea of stewing in his own sludge, but in the bright light of the late morning, the bathtub looked pristine and inviting when the sunbeam splashed through the window. A bath was slowly working its way up Lowell’s intentionally brief to-do list.
By the beginning of his second month in Amsterdam, Lowell was determined to avoid settling into a routine. He went for a morning jog along the canals every day, but always took a unique route, turning at random until he felt he had reached a halfway point, then returning by the same path on the opposite sidewalk. Much of Amsterdam reminded him of New Orleans, a city where hedonism and self-destruction was the order of the day. That had a certain appeal to him, but he also found it tiring. He felt he must constantly be on his guard from those who would try to rob or fleece him. He did what he could to strike a balance between Amsterdam’s foreign pleasures and local lifestyle. He tried as many restaurants as he could find, and spent the evenings with a different bottle of wine or a few glasses of liquor to lull him off to sleep. Most days, he would type a page or two in his novel after deleting most of what he had written the previous morning. He began to spend less time working in his room, and more time in the local coffeeshops, sipping on a cappuccino or smoking a cone with one hand while he hunched over his laptop, composing long letters to his ex-wife that he would never send, gloating over what he felt was his hard-won happiness.
Lowell discovered to his great astonishment that he loved marijuana. He had been completely square in his youth and never touched the stuff for fear of it making him stupid or a crazed addict. At this stage of his life, he gave not a shit for the potential consequences of drug abuse, and had found a few American students who were only too happy to show him how to roll a joint, even showing him how to role a cone with a cardboard filter and enough herb to share with them all. At the coffeeshop, he built up a rapport with one of the waitresses, who began to hook him up with better weed at better prices. Soon after came pills and powders, some of which he had never heard of. Cocaine and ecstasy, sure, but also uppers, downers, muscle relaxants, painkillers, drugs with numbers, psychedelics, poisons, all fair game to Lowell who had vowed to relinquish control in favor of the path put in front of him.