Never having been on an Ocean Ferry before, I must admit I was uncertain about how to behave on one. I'd walk right up to the smudged glass doors that opened out onto the wind-washed deck but I'd content myself with merely peering through them at the blackness that seemed to rise up in an infinitely gentle curve above the ferry. Then I'd pace the concourse, and cross a median, to the other side of the ship, and peer again, as tantalized by the outside as an insect in a jar. I was troubled by the paranoid fantasy that opening a set of these large double doors would set off an alarm, but then some sloppily dressed Russians with a moon-faced child in a slick red raincoat pushed through these very doors, squeezing by me, sauntering in from the prow of the ship, and set off no (audible) alarm.

It was fantastic out there. I was in California-style shorts, but bundled in a rubberized rain jacket, which features a hood, and it was perfect in the chilly weather of the Baltic. I had sweltered in the train from Stockholm wearing this jacket, and felt like a fool to have even brought it, but now I was vindicated. I was cozy and self-contained.

I had with me a British magazine…style and music and movies…and I found a deck chair beside a pair of teenage girls and settled in under the flood lights, and I set about reading, or pretending to, running my fingers over the pictures but being too distracted to pay attention to the text. We were the only ones out there, the teenaged girls and I. They were singing perfectly foreign pop songs in touchingly high and imperfect voices, and I couldn't have been more delighted.

One was blonde and sweetly unremarkable and the other had her hair pinned-up and cheaply dyed a beet-red color that had been some kind of proletarian fashion statement in this part of Europe for fifteen years, and I relished the naïve energy that they blessed the prow of the ferry with. A thread-thin line of lights were dimly apparent on the German side of the water, looking like a hairline crack in the black flesh of the sky. The stars above us, unfortunately, were as invisible as anything at the bottom of the Baltic. But that didn't keep me from being exhilarated.

In fact I thought of another moment in which hand-made music and the night and bright lights had blended similarly to thrill me with a sense of life's possibilities: a time in London, ten years before, when I'd been crossing Leicester square on a Saturday night and I'd happened upon a combo of bryl-creamed street musicians…a sax and an upright bass and a guy thwacking a snare drum with brushes…playing the theme from A Hard Day's Night in 5/4 time with un-ironic verve. Couples in white dinner jackets and evening gowns were flowing over the cobble-stoned square in droves, with British pomp-and-shyness, and London suddenly swung for me, if only for five minutes, but what a five minutes it was.

Which in turn triggered other nostalgias, telescoping backwards towards the source of my libido, and took me back even further, to another night, set back in time by the distance of yet another decade, during which, at a tender age, I'd found myself standing at a bus stop, waiting for my girl (she's married and motherly and showing gray now), when some guy with slicked-back Rome-black hair and an intrepidly large nose had had the nerve, while wearing (again) a white dinner jacket, to be strumming a nylon stringed guitar and singing Stand By Me to his patrician looking date, who struck me then as being trapped between the conflicting emotions of being humiliated by, and falling in love with, the gesture.

Romeo was perched on a big wooden flower box in front of a MacDonald's there at the intersection of Hennepin and Lake in Minneapolis, c. 1980, on a muggy summer night that was fraught with mosquitoes, and crushingly ordinary, except for the fact that John Lennon was still walking the Earth that summer, and the devil had yet to introduce us to cell phones or compact discs.

I was ten or eleven and you were still to be born.

Born with prescient prematurity in Los Angeles, California, to a handsome and irresponsible jazz disc jockey and a former dancer of great beauty, Shawn Casselle liked his city of birth so much that he left at the age of three, never to return. Between that grand exit (with his rogue of a father but one step ahead of irate concert promoters), and the writing of this blurb, he has lived, worked and loved in Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Brooklyn, London, Berlin, Hamburg, San Diego and Stockholm. Passing as quickly as possible through these wonderful cities, he has found the time to meet and sometimes befriend such diverse humans as Black Panthers, globally famous boxer-cum-poetasters, Czech Theater Groups, Art World Luminaries, the Crown Prince of St. Helena, eponymous heroines of culturally iconic folk songs, Grammy winners, house painters, freemasons, undertakers, hair stylists, cover girls, and electric razor repairmen. He has been detained on suspicion of bank robbery, politely applauded by Lillian Hellman at a literary lunch, kissed by an S.S. officer's daughter, and had lyrics to several songs of his praised by Frank Zappa

'If his music is half as brilliant as his lyrics,' said Zappa, 'he doesn't stand a chance in the music business.'