Intro

The wind was tearing through his hat, rustling the straw and biting his face. The snow was falling sideways. And there he was freezing: A battered leather briefcase, crummy leather gloves, and a black jacket that he’d scored in Sweden for twenty bucks.

He squared his scaly shoulders and looked around.

He was in France, on a bridge that was covered in snow. To his left was a cavernous drop of hundreds of feet to a frozen river, to the right: same thing. He was in the middle of the road, in the middle of December, at midnight and no one was around. Behind him, the Swiss border was closed.

Jimmy had a briefcase and a bottle of gin. He gnashed his pointed teeth in the chill. He was so tired he was delusional. He had been on the road for over twenty-four hours. Hitchhiking. Blitzing Europe. Trying to migrate from Sweden to Spain in one shot.

They’d dropped him off at the border about an hour earlier, and he started walking across this bridge for a place to catch a ride out of sight of the guards. No cars were coming through, so he turned back, and by the time he got there, the border was locked down.

He was stuck.

This is what you get when you drop all attachments. You never know where you’ll end up. This is what you get when you surrender to the fates, like a sailor at sea. You get adventures. You get a taste of the universe. And sometimes, you get stranded.

He stood there for about an hour. He turned blue. His fingers were freezing. This was no place for our lizard. When, suddenly, a brown delivery truck pulled up. This dude jumped out, in grey trousers, with his urchin hat in his hands, like something out of David Copperfield. He ran sprite-like to the guardhouse and picked something up. He punched in a code on a keypad and the gates slowly opened. Jimmy chased him down in the sleet.