Book Description

Rich Zubaty relates his adventures living and loving his way through 25 countries. Romance is glorious and frightening, stimulating and enervating, loud and quiet – a rare atmosphere beyond pleasure and pain. Romance is not about "feeling", it is about "being". It is about cooking monkeys on a balsa fire in the Peruvian jungle, catching sharks in a too-small boat, landing on uninhabited coral atolls, scraping bat droppings from your hair in a Honduran cave, cooking a slab of tuna on a beach in Marseilles, having raw animal sex with Asian girls in Paris and Thailand, singing Christian hymns with brown kids on the shore of a turquoise lagoon. Forgoing food and drink, radio, TV, speech, smoke – any and all sense distractions – on a ten day forest retreat in a Thai/Buddhist monastery – coming face to face with your demons. Romance is watching kangaroos scamper away from the lush grass around your garden when you go to pick tomatoes in New South Wales, burning your draft card and leaving the country when your government has lied to you, watching a young girl herding geese from your train window rolling across the golden plains of Slovakia, watching the swallows swarm around medieval castle turrets on the cliffs of Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia.Romance is escaping Prague hours before a Russian invasion, watching the birth of your son in a wood stilt hospital in Hawaii, and watching your daughter born on a mattress on the floor of the house you made with your own hands – a house you built with your brother, sleeping in a tent in the mud and rain, during the months of construction. Planting her placenta beneath a lime tree seedling and watching it, and her, swell with life.Romance is living with petty thieves in Paris and London, working as a ticket-taker in a strip club in Soho, stealing carrots from the Covent Garden market to survive, ordering a burger at Wimpy’s then sneaking out without paying, living with an English woman with a black baby who rips off all your money in a hash deal gone awry, flying from London to Toronto and sneaking across the U.S. border knowing the F.B.I. is looking for you.Romance is tracking rabbits in the snow, catching a live pheasant with your hands when it thought it was hiding, huddled in a clump of grass. Romance is catching a tail-dancing 200 pound blue marlin off the Kona coast of Hawaii, and another one off Bimini.Romance is falling in love again and again and again, so many times that it becomes obvious you don’t know what love is. And don’t care. Romance is being married to a woman who eats your soul...And then there's more.