We had just returned from a dusk climb up Solsbury Hill, that grassy lump of Peter Gabriel fame outside the ancient city of Bath, the song whose bum-bum-bum-balm-bomb-bum-balm-be-dum-bum always seems to pop into one’s brain at the oddest moments, when I heard the news about the Berlin Wall falling and in an instant I could see all the pictures I was going to take.

Two old women—sisters, I imagined—hugging each other after years of separation, the crumbling wall in the background; young Berliners screaming as they took turns swigging from a champagne bottle; and, finally, a confused East German soldier looking on, not knowing whether to throw off his uniform and join in the celebration or skulk backwards into a dark alley. This last one seemed a stretch perhaps, a bit too nuanced for a photograph that was still just pure fantasy, but as my brain tried to process these unfolding historic developments, I was swept up in the possibilities.

This is the way a photojournalist’s mind works. Like Babe Ruth pointing towards the outfield bleachers, we go into a story envisioning the photos we want to take first, and only after that do we begin the series of negotiations and compromises that lead to the photos we do take. The Berlin Wall! Fallen!! The champagne photo would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country; it was simply a matter of who got it on the wire first.

I could be in Germany in no time, hours before the older and more seasoned news photographers in Washington and New York could get their acts together. I’d have at least a day’s head start on them if I hopped a train for London immediately. In my mind, I could already see Larry DeSantis, the foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping photo boss at United Press International’s New York bureau, the legendary and decrepit wire service where I worked, the guy who had a hand in cropping the famous picture of John John saluting the casket, shot when I was not even a year old, finally learning my name and telling me I had “done good, kid,” the highest praise his Brooklynese vocabulary was capable of.

But first, negotiations and the compromises. They come so fast that the original thought doesn’t even stand a chance. I had climbed Solsbury Hill, after all, not by myself but with Louise Waylett, pretty Louise with the flaming hair, a girl I had met a year earlier as she looked for a map in the Trover Shop on Capitol Hill. Pretty Louise, who drove a red vintage Citröen, straight off the set of Alfie. (No one I ever knew drove a Citröen, certainly not on Long Island in the 1960’s and 70’s, where most people drove Buicks and Chevy’s.) As the television cackled on about the rapidly unfolding events in East Germany, the sight of Louise’s flowing red locks was getting in the way of my freshly impending Berlin Wall triumph. This just how John Wayne got sidetracked in The Quiet Man, I thought.

No sidetrack. This was my moment, that once in a lifetime chance where fate or serendipity or some combination of the two comes sailing through the window on an arrowhead, complete with the boing! sound as it firmly implants itself in the wall. Grab your things, I’ve come to take your home—isn’t that what Peter Gabriel sings in that damn song?

A year earlier, helplessly smitten by her charm, I could only dream of actually being in Bath with Louise. When I first saw her in the bookstore on the Hill, I had just come from a bike ride around the Mall and was wearing ridiculously tight Lycra cycling shorts, so goofy, I’m sure, that I cringe at the thoughts of panic that must have been racing through this poor British tourist’s mind. But somehow she had managed to looked past the shorts and here I was, marching through cow pastures on Solsbury Hill as the daylight faded. Just what I wanted, and yet mind was now unexpectedly wandering east across Europe. Louise, not being in the news business, wouldn’t be quite as torn up about the obvious decision that lay ahead. And as she went on about her netball team and our impending trip to visit the Roman Baths, my brain raced with ways in which to let her down. Ich bin ein Berliner and all that.

Ich bin ein Berliner. O Lost! as Thomas Wolfe liked to say. I was only a baby when John F. Kennedy mangled those beautiful words and my Long Island childhood, a place teeming with equally mangled words and accents, was the furthest one could probably get from the life and death drama of barbed wire and guard towers and iron curtains. Back in those days I was just the kid with the platinum blond hair and the John John haircut, the very same saluting John John whom Larry DeSantis, my cigar chomping boss, had helped transform from a negative in an enlarger in a darkroom to an icon for the ages. I was the kid whom the kosher butchers called Khrushchev, because they didn’t believe I could be Jewish. That platinum blond hair! they would say. He can’t be Jewish! That’s what I did during the Cold War.

Now, walking with Louise so many years later, little Khrushchev was all grown up. Though I had flown across an ocean to make out with a redheaded girl from Bath, a higher calling had been revealed. I would tell her of the photographer’s code, whatever that was, and of my duty to photojournalism, whatever that was. But first, another negotiation: dinner with Louise’s family in their cottage home in Wiltshire. Her dad is showing me his collection of wine labels, the labels he carefully removes from each bottle by soaking them in water and then placing them into a scrapbook, an oenological collection of places he dreams of visiting. I think of the scene in Breaking Away, where the mother shows her son her passport and explains that even though she’s never been anywhere, it gives her comfort to at least know she has one. I smile at Mr. Waylett. My passport will not meet the same fate. In a day or so, it will bear a new German stamp.

But then I gaze over at Louise, a Cotswolds fantasy to a kid who grew up gawking at the girls waiting for the special bus to Our Lady of Mercy, and have to remind myself about the Wall falling. Berlin, remember??  Berlin. Berlin. Berlin. Berlin.

Eighteen years later, I’m wandering through an enormous mall in a city I despise, searching store after store for a pair of designer jeans. They’re not for me, these jeans, but for my friend Greg, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning photographer. He wears a specific brand, Lucky Brand, and I have agreed to help him in his elusive quest.

Agreed is a lie. Greg has dragged me from my hotel room in Paris, Don Quixote now in the service of Sancho Panza, so that he might save me from myself, one photographer rescuing another. We have both come to Paris, you see, as refugees of a dying profession, photojournalists who have traded in decades of expertise to lecture wedding photographers in some nondescript ballroom.

This is not the Paris I thought I’d end up in, the city of Cartier-Bresson and Capa and Magnum but rather the hotel in Las Vegas of the same name, of slot machines and heavy couples in shorts drinking strawberry daiquiris out of enormous plastic Eiffel Towers. In this Paris, photographers don’t gather in small cafes to discuss existentialism and Satre. Here, folks talk about cornering the high school “senior” market and new and improved ways to alter a photograph in Photoshop—alter it so much, with so much texture and softening, and then some more texture to boot—that a picture of a blushing bride, say, no longer has any connection to the photographic world I once knew, not to mention the real world I still inhabit. A convention of wedding photographers, I laugh to myself. Dante was one circle short.

Knowing this makes me long for a drink, but the truth is I have never been drunk in my life. Maybe it’s the reason I didn’t survive in the news business. So, unable to drown my misery in a bottle of Captain Morgan’s, I sit in my hotel room and do the next best thing, repeating “What have I done? What have I done?” over and over in my underwear. Greg senses my predicament and, thinking he might distract me from my Paris nightmare, commands me to assist him in the search for those Lucky Brand jeans. And so here we are, one slightly overweight balding guy dragging his feet as he watches another slightly overweight balding guy try on denim.

O Crap! Has it all come to this? The wars, the one-on-one shoots with Jennifer Aniston, the days spent covering important events on the South Lawn of the White House—all for a wedding photography convention? Those nights at the Los Angeles Forum, processing film from a Lakers’ playoff game in a converted employee lunchroom as Jack Nicholson noshed on a sandwich a foot away. I remember worrying I would drip stop bath on him and forever be known as the guy who burned a Hollywood legend. “Nice picture, boys,” he would tell us in that Jack Torrance voice, the crazy writer from the The Shining, and then retreat back to his chicken salad. Or the two months in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, driving around with another photographer so hardened with cabin fever that he would purposely drive up to a group of burqa-clad women and bellow, “Evening, ladies,” like he was Barry White or something. You’re going to get us all killed, Joe! I would squeal from the back seat and we’d all burst into hysterical laughter. So many assignments, so many moments. Crawling through a newly discovered Egyptian tomb (my claustrophobia going to eleven), hanging out of helicopters over earthquake-ravaged freeways (my fear of heights going to eleven), shooting that perfect game thrown against the Dodgers (not to worry, I love baseball). I remember the sadder times, too, the quiet church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania mourning an entire group of local students lost on TWA Flight 800, or the dazed residents of Oakland trying to understand the magnitude of the fire that had just ravaged their community.

These things once seemed important to me. But as I walk with Greg through this enormous mall, where people mill about the courtyards waiting for the fashion shows that are staged every half an hour for no real reason other than to dazzle folks with a fashion show, just like the people parked in front of the Bellagio with those Eiffel Tower daiquiris waiting for the fountain to come alive with Lee Greenwood’s Proud to be an American, I’m not sure what I’m doing anymore.

As we pass the Gap, the once hip clothing store chain, I can’t help but notice a gigantic advertisement dominating the store. There, towering above the Gap T’s and Gap cardigans and Gap polo’s, is an enormous photograph of young men and women screaming as they hold a champagne bottle atop a crumbling Berlin Wall.

I stare at the picture for a fleeting moment—Ralphie in A Christmas Story after he finds out that his Little Orphan Annie secret decoder ring is nothing but a shill for Ovaltine—and smile. The fall of communism, chewed up and spit out as a pathetic advertisement for teens who weren’t even born. For a second, I’m back on Solsbury Hill with Louise and her fire-red hair.

“Did you ever do that presidential trip to Berl…,” Greg starts to ask and I cut him off mid-word. “Nope, I’ve never been to Berlin,” I say, and we continue on our quest for pants.