|
21.2.05
PACING THE BIRD
Time and again we're at a table with the gun between us.
Each time we drop the bullet into the chamber and give the magazine a spin, betting that the chamber isn't loaded, that the threat to leave always appears to be an idle, a naked dare perhaps, which gets bolder with each argument. The end of the relationship is near enough to leave fingerprints all around us. The bets are mounting. True, the bullet isn't always live. And true, the threats are often idle, especially when unspoken, but there is that inevitable, unavoidable live bullet that will eventually find it's way into the right chamber and each time we point that threat at our chests (certainly not our heads because something must be left over when the mourning of another relationship's death has finally finished spinning in its own bile, coming to rest and hardening until it is just another scab to pick at, no longer fresh, no longer drawing blood, just chipped away, flicked off and left somewhere in the cavity of the wound. The head must be left to reason where the heart is left to regenerate itself in some magical metamorphesis. But there we are, two duelists alternately spinning the chamber and firing at ourselves until the relationship is finally killed.
*****
What is the probability of this certain end? We are combining elementary probability theory with applications, statistical theory with applications, and a little something about the planning of practical investigations in our tests. Each threat is a wounding probe of calculation. How far can it be pushed we reason, before the probabibility is sufficiently reduced?
NYC
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 5.3, Winter
The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.
-- Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory, ch. 1, sct. 1 (1955, rev. 1966)
I give myself a subconscious poke in the ribs with an inner elbow because it is half past seven and there are three of us, the bartender, myself and a woman, and I simply couldn’t recall when the last time was I’d been sat at a bar and there was no one else but myself, a bartender and a woman. An attractive woman at that. Not one rolling in off the street with pockmarks and reeking. Not the bartender’s girlfriend. Not some unbearable loudmouth with a potbelly and too much lipstick. The subconscious poke was a call to pull my head out of the habit in my glass and have a look.
The problem is, the first thought to cross the mind was I become aware of the way we are all positioned around this same bar, alone, is the necessity in addressing her presence. From that evolves the inner debate about how to address the necessity of addressing her presence. Should this provoke some elaborate conversational dance? Should I merely cough loudly or clear my throat?
I'll start up a perfectly innocent conversation with her, perhaps without bothering to think of the sequence our dialogue should go down in or perhaps scripting the exchange mentally to hear how it sounded raw in the ears.
Should being friendly be enough, or at least pretending to be friendly because I'm in a bar and I hate it when people just sit there like drunks stewing over some clownish inner turmoil which they make up in their own minds to appear artistic and tortured.
I prefer to address these introductions with a neat foreplay of the absurd. Why? I’ve been told this is like an artificial injection – absurdity is all around us and all the while we attempt these constructs of an alternative reality that better fits the fiction of our lives and these injections are needed to confirm that what we are busy ignoring all around us does indeed exist. There are times absurd, disjunctive questions or statements are necessary. Wondering how to address an attractive woman innocently having a drink on her own is an absurd situation. We are strangers. What’s in it for either of us to speak to one another? If either of us are open wounds does that necessarily mean the other does the bandaging?
"What do you think about the sea swells on the north coast of Madeira this time of year?" I finally ask haphazardly, in general of course, to neither of them in particular. The bartender is reading a paper and measuring the social tension subliminally. The attractive woman notices from the corner of her eye that I’ve turned, almost imperceptibly, towards her, shifting the balance of air in the room ever so slightly.
The intention is that the statement is left hanging there, like the interruption of obnoxious commercial air time in the middle of a radio show of classical music, to be plucked from the vine or ignored and left to rot. I’m asking one of them to take the responsibility of bailing me out.
If she says something, I’m expecting it will be something studiously unwitty in reply. Something concise, like
“Fuck off, dirtball.”
Instead, she acknowledges the game, perhaps out of boredom or perhaps out of curiosity:
"Why do you smoke filterless cigarettes? Don't you know how unhealthy they are?"
Yes, now there is a chessboard between us and whereas I’ve made an unusual entrée, like the Battambang Opening or the King’s Head Variation, she’s an unruffled opponent and appears to know her way around the pieces, so I downshift and the engine roars to life.
“I'll tell you what someone once told me and perhaps you will understand: I don't smoke cigarettes with filters for the same reason I don't drink my whiskey through a dish rag."
The bartender has glanced up from his newspaper by then. Over the years, he’s perfected a feigned disinterest. City life has worn a cynical path through his soul and the grounds surrounding that path have become littered with weeds and broken glass. Even if he’s noticed I’ve left her no clear follow up question, like why don’t I drink my whiskey through a dish rag, he wouldn’t betray it.
Her reply is wordlessly clever and the silence ratchets up the tension. Was that an official move? Am I on the clock? I repress a bead of sweat dying to break out on my forehead. A soft widening of the corners of her mouth, so subtle you’d barely notice if you weren’t staring intently for a sign, is enough encouragement. Or perhaps it is a smirk of condescension.
I don't like women who talk too much. I'll say that straight out because it doesn't take much. I'll start up a perfectly innocent conversation with someone, perhaps in a bar, and the next thing I know, I’ll be listening to an earful of unfocused nattering. Ironically, in the effort to avoid them, I invariably become the source of the unfocused nattering instead. If you have to be either on the giving or receiving end of unfocused nattering, honestly, which side do you prefer?
So, I try another tact because this match was exhausted from its onset if only because it wasn’t meant as an actual conversation, merely an aperitif to the actual conversation. How many courses we go through conversational before the main course is served is anyone’s guess.
I take a stab at the other end of it, as though walking all the way around her in a perfect circle to find out where the vulnerable opening lies.
“I’ll be playing a recital of Rembetika music in my flat later on this evening which you should consider yourself invited to.”
Is it incidental to signal the bartender at that point to join in on the fun, grandly order a round for all of us as though the bar were packed with customers instead of suffocating in its own air as one or all of us attempt to infuse the atmosphere with a predatory scent? Or it is a queue that we can all rest easy knowing it’s part of an unspoken joke, this conversation, my suggestion, the drinks, the Rembetika music? With a wave of the hand it no longer matters, the ice is broken, we are all in on the same conspiracy or not yet the conspiracy will overwhelm us nonetheless because if I continue forcing the plotlines we will all busy ourselves with attempting to ignore that anything had happened at all in the space of the last two minutes.
Of course, she doesn't want to come to my apartment to listen to anything. I don't even want to and so none of us even have to address it.
With the conversation going no where we’re safe but my grandiose invitation to a round of drinks for all of us is ignored. Unnoticed in those few seconds of inner turmoil is the fact that the bartender has disappeared to take stock of his disappearing wine cellar or stand in front of the bathroom mirror rubbing his face and staring into his tired eyes asking himself where he went wrong.
*****
"Is that what you do for a living?" she probes unexpectedly, her index finger slowly tracing an invisible line towards the tag embroidered across the right chest of my shirt which reads “Janus Janitorial Services" in fancy Cyrillic-looking lettering. “Are you a janitor or is it your own business?”
You see, just as I’d been hoping to avoid, this is the kind of conversation you can get with some women when you aren't busy keeping them off guard and keeping them from their natural predatory and nesting tendancies to categorise, rate and file you.
Men do the same thing with women but its based on a much simpler aesthetic, like the curve of a chin, the width of cheekbones, the eye colour and radiance, the inevitable the rack and ass comparatives of course; some men are unavoidably tit and/or ass men just like some women are inveterate lovers of shopping and seek men who can provide them unlimited resources to go forth and shop. My measure, in the scheme of men who can provide women with unlimited resources, is of course, nil and this measure is of course, as valid as wondering how efficient a baseball player is at hitting toasters thrown from moving vehicles because out of necessity or choice, depending on timing and your perspective, I long ago rendered the delusion of vast wealth a quick and painful death, pulled its plugs and tubes, let it die naturally by never pursuing it.
pretending to have some fascinating tip on the brewing Belgian beers or arguing to yourself out loud, taking both sides of the argument in fact, of the merits and demerits Plato's "Republic". You must come armed with bullshit as a deflector or suffer the consequences of . No one likes an unpretty truth. They prefer you lie to them.
I could lie through my teeth but then you get scraps of lies between them like small chunks of rotting meatloaf that went unbrushed for days. I'm not even sure I'd know what the truth is anymore regardless. I prefer lying unconvincingly.
"I bought this shirt at the Salvation Army because I have dependency imbalances and all sorts of emotional diseases and I thought this shirt would bring it all to an instinctive and subconscious conclusion. Sort of the opposite of feigning wealth and intelligence while mocking bystanders in an unemployment line."
"I don't think you're clever. I know you think you're clever and that making fun of my judgemental line of questioning is some strange way you have of pretending you are clever, but I think between you and I, standing here alone at this bar, we can speak in black and white. You are not clever. My manicurist is more clever than you in fact and she doesn't even speak English. The only reason I continue standing here is because I'm waiting for a friend of mine and it amuses me to watch you try and amuse yourself with your own delusional sense of intelligence."
Funny enough, the friend never shows up. Other people show up and every time the door opens bringing in the cold from the outdoors, letting in a few flakes of snow and bluster, we both look to see who it is and then I watch with increasing amusement as her anticipation inflates and then deflates like a irritable zit getting popped leaving an angry red blotch in it's place. Instead, we drink alot. Everyone comes in as couples, adopts tables to sit by candlelight, converse loudly, over the jukebox music and ignore us. I buy us drinks over and over again. The bartender is amused, watching the transgression.
"This one's on me" he smiles slyly, pushing my Bushmill over to me and her Amstel Light to her. Eventually, she makes me roll a cigarette for her and then eventually, because I'm chain smoking myself and then she starts to as well, I feel the beginnings of a repetition strain injury aching in my fingers, a youthful yet arthritic pain which can only be anesthetized by more Bushmill and more cigarettes until everything, the conversation, her hair, the chattering teeth outside waiting for a cab, the fumbled disrobing later on, the snores and even breakfast the next day becomes a blur. A dishevelled dream that slowly eases into a nightmare that involves my having to call her every day thereafter for a week to find out how she's doing and what her job is like and cooking dinners or eating out all boiling up, building to a crescendo of a romantic indigestion.
Fortunately for me, a few days later, Albert announced he was in town, fresh off the Amtrak, with a stand-up bass and no place to keep it. And because the last month had been one long cold spell and we were cooped up in my little studio breathing in each other's chain smoking, it was Albert's idea, once he sensed he was wearing out his welcome, that the two of us should take out musical act on the road, for him, off to Europe for the first time, a return to the home continent.
***
I sensed the jig was up when shortly after choking myself with the tuxedo tie, I was summoned to speak with Gonzo, the Uruguayan jefe of the restaurant and bar of this overrated, chrome polished mirage of a hotel. Gonzo looked sad. The bearer of bad news. We never knew each other well, thankfully. By the start of my evening shift, his daily hectics had already subsided. The day was nearly over. He would go back to his South American faux-aristocrat environs, the rose coloured furniture and obligatory paintings, eat a meal with the wife and kids, then sit in the living room sipping on a cognac while letting the day's annoyance to sweat out of him.
First of all, Gonzo wasn't the only person in the room. There was a man with a tight asshole overseeing the get together, a man feigning a combination of officious and thuggish, who pored over the open file in front of him as though he were dissecting state secrets.
Their opening salve was the report of a house detective. I didn't bother pondering aloud the use or the need for a house detective in a second-rate luxury pied a terre masquerading as a hotel. Clearly, some sort of problem had been brewing beneath the surface; something an insignificant night bartender like me wouldn't have concerned myself with, even had I been aware of it.
But the report of the house detective was lip-biting funny, comprised of an exchange between himself and myself one night a few weeks before wherein he'd commented aloud on the strength of the drink I'd just poured him. The narration was dry, but telling. As Gonzo read it, I tried to picture the man and the exchange in my head but I didn't need to as Gonzo recited verbatim the report; my laughing reply of pouring more vodka into his drink and following with the observation that I didn't care if he had the whole bottle, it wasn't my vodka. The indelicate banter that followed, disparaging the crassness of my environs, the shitty excuse for a bar, the recommendation of a better jazz combo a neighborhood away...it was a damning report. The antithesis of the employee of the month. The man with the morals of a communist border guard. It was all there in black and white. Gonzo barely breathed while my body trembled from the exertion of holding in my laughter.
The other man cleared his throat importantly and began his review of exhibit B, the case of the missing cash from my register which had disappeared one day and returned a few days later in full. It was a loan, I offered. To pay rent until the checks cleared. Also against hotel policy. It was a time of need. I don't quarrel with logistics when I'm fending off eviction. The money was paid back within two days, I noted.
But these damning evidences were not brought to my attention for the sake of firing me, Gonzo finally explained. Aha. The plot thickens. It seems certain bartenders or waiters have been stealing on their own: cutlery, table cloths, food, money, the hearts of patronesses. The works. Anything that wasn't nailed down. And it was my decision as to whether or not I would be terminated. If I cooperated with their efforts to find out who, specifically, was doing the stealing, it would be agreed that these two rather large oversights of conduct of mine would be overlooked given my otherwise spotless history.
So you want me to narc on my coworkers? I asked, rhetorically.
I stood up, offering my hand to Gonzo. While it's been an almost unconscionable delight working in this fine hotel, while it's been an experience for the scrapbook, the memories illuminating, see ya.
*****
Albert didn't look up when I came home. The headphones were on, the music was audible from the hallways and a half a case of Harp had already seen its way into the recycling bin. I didn't have any big speech intended but there was still the matter of announcing the resolution of our housing problems. We were clearing out. Splitting, running on the tab, smashing our eggs before the chickens were hatched.
Albert assured us we had money. As always, his insurance settlement was due within a few weeks, the baseball card collection had been sold of in its entirety for a tidy sum and there was always my savings.
So where are we going to start?
Albert, with all the spare time in the world on his hands, had the answer: The Euro2000 tournament starts in three days. Why don't we start in Brugges?
NETHERLANDS AND THE BEGINNINGS OF THE DEADBEAT CONSPIRACY
1. a’dam pub with professor and paintings
2. learning to roll drum
3. bicycles, stolen and bought
4. first night in marktzicht
5.
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1, page 81
"Oh senseless man, who cannot possibly make a worm, and yet will make Gods by dozens."
-- Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, Essays, bk. 2, ch. 12, "An Apology of Raimond Sebond" (tr. by John Florio, 1580). The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations
Drinking websites, twelve steps, signs of alchoholism, etc.
Opening line, opening night:
There's only one way to gain the locals' respect in a quick and tidy fashion: drink with them. Drink with them long and hard. Let them know you're one of them: impossible to budge from the stool, no last call that isn't "Too damned early", bond through the brotherhood (and sisterhood) of the drink.
The Netherlands. The Nether Regions. Low Country. Often I thought it could be a stage of hell and was so named not, as commonly held because it was indeed a flat and low country but because it arose from the nether regions of existence.
*****
..."All travelling becomes dull in exact proportion to its rapidity." -Ruskin, "Modern Painters"
Utrecht, June 2000
Albert begins a slow whine about his creaking knees, fresh out of the train from Antwerpen, stopping in the middle of the station's tides of passersby to mewl and set down his bag for a moment. It's almost too much to bear. An entire town to be eviscerated by our greedy, insatiable needs waits and a middle aged ache cripples him as if he were kicked in the balls. I make a rotten cabbage face, set down my bag and roll a cigarette, clenching it between my digits with unquenchable agitation before firing up the butane and touching it to the cigarette tip. I exhale a mind suddenly dull for its lack of curiosity. Will this be requiring immediate surgery? I ask, my eyes begin to race around the minor circus of food peddlers, discount record stores, blaring video screens and this tiring chatter of humanity around me. Should I be concerned? Should I consult the phrase book for the appropriate foreign phrases dealing with emergencies; "Will this require a thrombectomy?", "this food disagrees with my digestive system and is planning an uprising."? I spatter these questions out to Albert who already has the Winston in the yap, wincing from his knee pains and searching out a cafe or a pub to dull the aches.
Fuck you. He says this matter-of-factly, as though he'd just wished gesundheit to an old lady following a sneeze. He sees me like a sort of flying, buzzing insect around his face and ears, but instead of swatting, he picks up the bag again, nodding over to the station cafe where a gang of stragglers putter around their little round tables, pushing cigarettes into ashtrays, glasses to lips, weakly attempting to prop up the jowls with a feigned interest at every item of human flotsam floating past in a vaguely intoxicated dream. "I'm going to have a beer." And he sets off to cross the floor and find a table to unload himself, peel off the sport jacket and pork pie hat, loosen the knot of the tie and swallow some of the local brew. When he travels, he is like an old Southern Baptist dressing for Sunday sermons. Dignity distinguishes, he often complains.
If I don't follow him, it leads to a lot of confusion. We don't have a place to stay and if I wander off in search of one while he sits, beer after beer, getting groggy and oafish, he will be in no condition to be anything less than carried through the discrete lobby of some pension, drawing unwanted stares and stern consternation faces from the onlookers and proprietor. I must follow him, realizing as I do, that we will not stay here this evening. We will sit all afternoon in this very same station cafe, staring out the window at the rain, matching beer for beer, cigarette butt mounds growing like little anthills of civilization, nothing accomplished but enough sobriety to find the ticket counter and find some overnight train to ditch us off somewhere by morning's sobriety.
*****
Euro2000 was in full gear. We'd already had a heady week of bars and cities and football matches in Belgium, the co-host nation. We'd gotten caught up in the mini-riot between the Belgian police and the German and English hooligans. Actually, they weren't technically hooligans. The real ones, despite the pre-tournament hysteria, had by and large, been kept back in their respective countries. What was left was just the core of drunks and the core of riot cops itching for action.
We got into Charleroi on a morning train from Brussels. It was an fleeting industrial town, devoid of anything of interest, far away from refined humanity, a prison-like town far enough away from the action to hold a match between the two rival countries with the worst fan reputations in Europe. Throughout Belgium, measures had been taken, in a haphazard sort of way, to control the masses. The riot police were out in number a great deal, some cities restricted the sale of beer to only the legally weakest kind and there was the general self-vigilence that being aware of one's reputation preceeding one's arriuval was likely to fertilize. But not Charleroi. Their economy was so depressed, the local propriaters didn't care about hooligans. They just knew they drank alot of beer and would spend alot of money doing it.
The June sun was already bearing down us heavily by 9. As people began to arrive, the old town square was opened to numerous cafes and outdoor terraces which, of course, with nothing else of interest to do in such a dump, was the first place everyone headed out of the train station.
And people drank as though the world were about to end. The Germans and the English aligned themselves on opposite sides of the square, staking out their cafe terroritories, content to swill troughs of Belgian beer under the Belgian sun with the football match still another 10 hours away. Albert and I nabbed a pair of seats on the English side as their side already had the worst reputation and it seemed appropriate since Albert didn't speak any German beyond bier and knew England's football songs. The beer wasn't a gradual swell either. It began suddenly and swiftly, as soon as the overwhelmed cafe staff had been able to assemble themselves in the factory line type of service required for the sort of instant beer gratification that was demanded with the pounding of plastic tables and empty bottles.
By the afternoon however, the singing began, somewhere in synch with the level of intoxication on each side. Before long both sides were singing and chanting with equal passion, snarling and screaming with the sort of red-faced relish that they seemed so accustomed to under the conditions. The singing only heightened the tensions and not long after, someone tossed the first plastic chair in the direction of the other. It was impossible to tell from where it came since the first thing anyone noticed was a plastic chair whistling towards and coming to rest in the no man's land part of the square between us. It didn't matter really. The act was good enough. Soon chairs were flying across the square from all directions, followed in short order by the plastic tables and the Carlsberg umbrellas. The Belgian riot police, who for hours had been salivating like leashed dobermans at the prospect of trouble, didn't hesitate to jump into the fray with their riot clubs and mace. Following them was the water cannon.
The water cannon kind of snuck up on everyone. One minute there was chaos, with both German and English alike turning their assault on the riot police, fending off the blows and delivering their own. The burst of activity had come so suddenly, the best Albert and I could do in response was to stand up, holding our beers and watching as the water cannon aimed and unleashed its potent force, blowing people off of the pavement, flying in the air, smashing into tables and chairs, scraping along the ground. Despite the fact we merely observed from the vantage point of our beers, the eye of the storm rising around us, the riot police grabbed us as well, dragging us away from our beers like jailors and demanding to know whether or not we were English. Apparently, their orders had specifically been to sort out the English. Fortunately, we were able to produce passports proving we weren't and were released in time to have a few more beers once everything had settled down and the realization that the match was still to be played had settled in.
*****
We worked our way northwards. There was nowhere more appealing to go than Holland from that border. Around 11, we began subtle gesticulations at preparing ourselves to go on stage. Albert, exhausted by a combination of beer and the heavy ride trying to balance his stand up bass on the bicycle on the way here, was leaning up against one of the pillars in front of the stage, a Winston unmoving between his lips save for an occasional labial twitch and puff of smoke. His eyes opened when I got nearer. "All I know is that I'm not pedalling that fucking bass all the way back into town when this nightmare has finally concluded" he hissed with the cigarette bobbing up and down in his mouth. "No problems" I reassured. "I've already spoken with Jan about the bass riding back in their van with them. We'll be meeting with them at Fabriekzicht afterwards." Albert snorted and removed the cigarette to replace it with his mug of beer. "A little late now, eh? I'm so exhausted already I'll need another half dozen beers before I can stand straight."
The band ahead of us, electric violin, screeching guitars and a belchy, subterranean growl from the lead singer, were winding up their last song, building a crescendo, sweating beneath the lights while an overly enthusiastic group of junior high aged girls swung their arms and shook their legs, wild, tangled hair in every direction. The crowd was diverse enough but following music like this was a bizarre mix, an embarrassing fart of jazz to let leak out on their uninitiated ears. As usual, we had tried to prepare the talent pickers for the fact that we were talentless, inept, embarrassing. But the more we said that, the more convinced they became that we were really something special. Something unique out of America, an unspeakable hipness that would blind them all with its profound exuberance. Holding the sax, I looked through the crowd at familiar, expectant faces. Our friends of the last week, complete strangers in other lives a month ago and now we were going to humiliate ourselves with an unmatched zeal.
Once on stage, we'd planned on an elaborate verbal waste of time to get us through the early expectations. A note hit here and there for emphasis, but basically, a ridiculously elaborate history of the song piece, a virtual encyclopaedia of liner notes on a song we'd just rehearsed only two days before for the first time. By lulling them to sleep with the vocabularies and translations, the sheer enormity of the words and sentences to the point of incomprehensibility, the strange and unequally timed jazz number, completely original and completely without skill, would be an almost welcomed respite, no matter how bad it was. Billing ourselves as avant garde lent itself an automatic elasticity where this sort of performance art jazz was concerned. Simple chords, in a chaotic enough fashion, sufficed.
I could tell, a few minutes into the second number, that we had them right where we wanted them:
uncertain as to whether we sucked or we were great.
Logically, had we actually been great, the chances that we would be playing in this little neighborhood festival were pretty slim so for me, it left the door wide open to the idea that we sucked. Fortunately, Albert and I had worked with this incompetence long enough to have learned how to dress it up a little, enough to create that uncertainty. They sound like they suck, but they look like they know what they're doing. We'd perfected it through watching years of talentless musicians performing on MTV. While we lacked the pyrotechnics of talent, we were able to create enough sparks to get people to believe the burning was only a matter of time.
The last number involved getting the audience to participate, making noises that ran, more or less, in tune with Albert's thumping key notes over and over again. There's no doubt if we'd had a talented drummer, we could have really sounded like we knew what we were doing, but lacking the drummer, we used the audience. And of course, being one of the last bands to play, everyone was pretty drunk by the time we'd gone on. My vacant preambles on music history only made them drink faster. So by the end of the last number, we were all in on the conspiracy, the conspiracy that we'd created together. That's how Albert and I had come up with the name to begin with: The Deadbeat Conspiracy.
When it was over completely, we were such a hit, Jan was somehow able to fit both Albert, his bass, which he now carried around with him like his date, and I into the van along with the other guys in his own band. It was the space of being accepted, for whatever delusion they harboured. People were everywhere, crawling on top of one another, laughing, singing loudly over the stereo as we rattled along the canal in the van back into town.
*****
We wake up to a Fiat giving birth to painful horn honking, a determined bastard on the road outside presses down on the horn with the kind of persistent hand motion he could only have mastered in his pimply teenage years staring and drooling over back issues of garage sale Playboys. I raise my head and peer over the sprawl of bodies and limbs, the snores of hedonism so entrenched in the subconscious that even the dreams are haunted by strobe light scattered images of the previous night's piecemeal memory. No one else's sleep is even faintly disturbed. With a strychnine jointed grimace, I gather myself off of the floor, reassembled in a standing position, and take a sniper's peak out the front window to the annoyances below.
A very disturbed sophomore twitches and fiddles with varying degrees of urgency at his coat lapel, his nose, the side of his face, right pant leg, greasy hair. He looks like a fidgity third base coach giving bunt signals to a batter who has just stepped out of the box to adjust his cup. He looks hungover, or like a cat who just escaped from a washing machine. I can feel the fraying of his nerves from the window and the honking has only grown more urgent.
I open the front door and edge my head out, feeling the cold air tweezer its way through my nostrils giving me a mild headache like the kind you get from eating ice cream too fast. "Hey!" I yell inventively, gesturing an empty stab of malice. "What the fuck is going on?"
The honking stops immediately and the Fiat guy fixes his desperate, bugging eyeballs in my direction. He rushes across the lawn as though he were tossed from a moving vehicle and quickly arrives in front of me, reeking with the urgency of a man with overactive bowels. He flails out a sentence, which I can't understand because it isn't in English and looks at me expectantly. I shrug my shoulders. "Anastasia" he clarifies suddenly as though speaking to an embassy bureaucrat. "Where is Anastasia?"
Anastasia is half clad under a pile of parkas somewhere left of the kitchen, perhaps under the dining room table but I'm not going to tell this guy that unless I know a little more about him. The fact that he uses a car horn as a means of communication is not a good starting point. I squint at him suddenly, my memory comes back to me at high speed from around a sharp curve on two wheels and his face becomes vaguely evocative of some idiot's conversation I stumbled over somewhere in the post-twister trailer park of last night's festivities. Anastasia's face had parked itself somewhere in that memory, seated at a table where a half dozen of us had congealed, braying over each other with intoxicated opinions on over valued art and and the rise of the Euro. This guy had played a large role in the braying, his foreign service accented English constructing sentences of non-sequiturs and mangled inferences with such a lack of charm and dexterity that I couldn't now see how it were possible I'd have forgotten him, even for a few moments.
Anastasia was on her way to Prague in a matter of days. Later on I would live to regret it.
PARIS
revision to Diaries of Witold Kazersamski as the light of day scrapes across these stuttering eyelids and Witold recalls the first meeting with Anastasia:
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly curvy cobblestones streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a candelit club, seated myself and spotted what I immediately mistook for Edith Piaf, a temptuous little street singer dressed in a black, hand knitted dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a missing sleeve and waited patiently for her set. She'd just come in from outside the cafe, lighting a cigarette in the light rain, I'd followed her in. I'd followed her from walking through the red light district in full swing and with everything, the sex shows, sex shops and prostitutes clamouring for my attention, all the way from Place Blanche I'd followed her and I wasn't quite sure why other than something to do to pull myself out a nocturnal lagoon of listlessness than neither the drugs nor the drinking were able to overshadow.
I stood back up from the seat after I'd had a pull on a Kronenbourg and walked directly up to address her, considering as my opening , a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had a long history having being named after Howard Staunton who played it against Horwitz in 1847. Basically, it is a bold attempt to demonstrate that by giving away the central pawn White can show that Black’s first move is misguided because it exposes the king. In practical experience it scores well at club level where an accurate defence is awkward to play when White has a rampaging attack. Still, as I approached, I debated the merits of establishing early pawn control of the center, before quickly blurting out a breathless and disconnected dictum about "Le Bel Indifferent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith, perhaps still thinking it was her after all but being uncertain. She regarded me with a look of amusement, a carnival in her eyes, engaged, then disengaged, considering the rapid development of her own pieces.
"I will be going on shortly" she explained, nodding towards the tiny stage where currently sat an experimentational jazz trio who were still, it appeared to me anyway, tuning up their instruments. In all likelihood, what I mistook for tuning was the actual performance. I feigned interest for a moment but immediately extinguished any look of interest in the trio when it appeared she was inhaling again, preparing to finish a thought, it was difficult to discern. "Perhaps you would like to speak with me at a more opportune time, for example, when my set is finished? Perhaps in one hour's time or so?" The suggestion seemed reasonable. Through this second line of conversation I was able to discern an accent of sorts, one I most certainly could not pin down but an unmistakable butchering of grammatics which could only have come from a non-native speaker. I indicated my agreement, looking at my watch as though to synchronize the meeting with our current time zone and making a wordless gesture meant to convey that I grasped her idea and just after I'd Fred Astaire'd my way back to the table I'd left my Kronenbourg upon, I'd return to her to sit and wait. But she shook her head quickly.
"Please, not here. I cannot bear anyone but complete strangers witnessing my performances and since we have spoken and will be speaking later, I ask that you wait somewhere else...perhaps the Lily La Tigresse? I can meet you inside or just outside the entryway between one and one and a half hours from now...my name is Anastasia" her eyes were hopeful yet even within them, I could sense how immediate their clamp down would be should I dare ignore her request and seat myself at her table anyway. I looked at the watch again before realizing helplessly that it was still set on daylight savings time. Instead of embarrassing myself by clarifying the time or making note of the fact that other than the fact it was still dark out, I had no idea how close dawn was approaching, I decided to let fate play itself out further, recalling the dream I'd had only the night before on the train from Utrecht, of the discharge of the undigested remains of problems which had already been worked through spiritually.
"I'll wait until you get there." I noted, suddenly enthusiastic. The experimental jazz trio had morphed into one tune together, at the same time, something vaguely familiar before it hit me: The "West End Blues" 1928 recording performed by Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Fred Robinson, Jimmy Strong, Mancy Cara and Zutty Singleton. Or perhaps it was the jukebox. The room was far too smokey to discern the stage any longer. Anastasia was smiling at me blankly as though she knew I was already supposed to have turned around and left but in seeing me still standing there she had no idea what sort of smile to leave me with and had decided, at the last minute, to remain neutral. Had I remained standing there, I imagined there was quite a good chance her smile would melt, her eyes would hiss and a few strong-arms would grab me and dump me outside the door without further notice, back out into the spattering rain and the cold and the strangers.
"See you then..." I waved, turned on my heel, walked back to the table and grabbed the beer bottle, finishing it down in several slugs as I headed for the exit. Fate indeed. Whether or conversation went any further or not was entirely her decision.
**********
The Lily La Tigresse was a respectably seedy bar in the heart of the red light district. I'd quickly learned my way around the seedier aspects of rue Blanche so finding it wasn't difficult. Toulouse-Lautrec had once painted the surrounding area into a district of cabarets, circus freaks, and prostitutes and at this hour, with the remaining stragglers lurking and leering and salivating a dazed sort of enthusiasm as they passed and bumped into me and threw up in the alleyways, I could see his vision. I felt like I'd stepped into a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
While I waited, I thought about the things I'd lost forever due to my own carelessness or apathy, or by virtue of someone else's fuck up. I began to sketch a list of them, a dispassionate list because you had to become dispassionate about such losses in order not to let them gradually destroy you like the slow leak of air from the pinprick of a rubber inner tube. In the end, it is about denial and the acts and losses which deny you are like angry, self-loathing little people who derive great pleasure from denying you over and over again. The list grew impossibly longer as I thought about it further and stared past people seated around me as though they were ethereal, temporary visions. As I choked down an Anise aperitif served with water that I'd ordered solely to appear as though I knew what I was doing, I began to feel sickened at the losses and resolved to make up for the losses with gains. Monumental gains that dwarfed the world. Explosions of personal insights and epiphanies.
The list I'd begun to sketch had become a doodle, an incomprehensible, unhinged triptych growing darker and darker with each subsequent swoop of my recollection: childhood toys destroyed in fits of rage, writings and drawings ripped to shreds in frustration, musical instruments bent and dented beyond repair at the most subtle, corrective hints from strangers when I played on street corners, friends discarded because of distance or because they'd grown intolerant of appeasing me, lovers, dead in the heart, wilted, ashed and forgotten. An entire gawking collective of memories and strangers mocking me. My blood pressure was rising, I was sure of it. The Anise tasted terrible and the water was as warm as piss. However intrigued by Anastasia, I didn't know if I could bear it even another minute...
"So there, you've found your spot and look, you've even begun to sketch the customers!" Anastasia seemed delighted to see me, far more delighted than a stranger would be meeting another stranger after a few seconds of introduction and a completely blank history of conversation. But the cloud which had stuffed my head and my ears and was adumbrating everything around me passed suddenly and quickly as Anastasia removed an imitation velvet cloth coat with a fake fur collar and shook the rain from it before setting it down along the back of her chair. "May I have a look?" She attempted to remove the sketch from beneath my hands as she seated herself across from me but I kept my palms flat on the table, the paper snug inside.
"I cannot let anyone see my work until a piece is complete." I explained in an effort to imitate her need to perform only in front of strangers at the club.
"I suppose I should come to your "studio" to see some examples of finished products?" Her eyebrows were raised curiously, the habitual, beaten path lines of comers-on etched in the cynicism of her expectations.
"I don't have a studio here. I don't have an apartment or even a room for the night in fact. I just came down to wander. My plan was to return on an afternoon train to Amsterdam."
Thwarted by the miscalculation of her assumption she was slightly taken back, her cheeks pinkened, her pupils dilated slightly, perhaps as a reaction to the stress of having only recently performed. Strands of sweat still lightly tinged her eyebrows and even the nape of her neck was damp. I wondered what her voice had sounded like. I wondered what those other dark and anonymous faces had registered as she sang.
"You're leaving Paris already? My. I thought I'd be interesting enough at least for an afternoon..." she teased, smirking, took a cigarette from the pack she'd tossed down next to the ashtray and lit it quickly before the act registered in my brain and my hands could reach for my own lighter. Thwarted. She exhaled quickly, tracing an absent circle with her index finger in a small pile of salt that had spilled several diners before. I knew she wanted to witness me squirm from the discomfort of having been misinterpreted. I knew it was a little game she was playing with herself, but I wasn't feeling generous any more. Verbalizing the train ride had disemboweled a section of the dream yet again, reality had crept back. She was little more than a desperate urchin. She'd take me back to her apartment, finish me off with a bottle of Absinthe back in her rent-by-the-week apartment in some still seedier section of town, take off enough clothes for the later dream sequence to appear as though we'd actually fucked, then allow me to pass out before stealing my wallet, grabbing what few personal belongings she had in the room that she wanted to keep and then disappearing forever into the buxom night of Paris. I felt sick and lonely all at once, a wave of self-pitying nausea. I stood quickly, clearing my throat.
"Yes, yes, it all reminds me, it's coming back to me now...I need to get the tickets this morning to make sure the train isn't sold out."
"I'll go with you." She volunteered, dropping the cigarette to the floor and grinding it out with the toe of her shoe before standing. The top of her head barely reached my stomach. Suddenly she seemed harmless. "Besides, what do you know of the city? How will you find the station? Do you even know that you are to depart from the Gare du Nord and where you will find it?" Her questions ran along with her trying to keep up with me as I pushed out into the night air which I gulped with great relief and satisfaction, the dyspeptic dread finally departing as though I'd already showered and changed and was seated on a living room sofa with my feet up on the coffee table, a pipe in my mouth and the evening paper beside me.
"You were magnificent" I said suddenly, taking her by her tiny shoulders and looking down at her.
"How? What do you mean? Did you spy on me this evening?"
"Nothing of the kind. I meant to say, you are magnificent. I feel better already. Maybe I won't even bother with the train back to Amsterdam after all. What would you say if I told you that? What would you say if I said I wanted to stay a few days, or a week even? Would you let me hear you sing?" I began walking again without waiting for her reply. The night air had suddenly filled me with unassailable buoyancy. I kicked myself inwardly nevertheless for having made the decision to leave the horn behind. Now would have been the most appropriate time! I could have latched onto the banks of the Seine just as the dawn began and lent my own dissonant blaring to bounce off the hours and airs of Paris. All the while Anastasia followed behind, or as closely to my side as possible, double timing her half steps to my determined yet absent-minded strides as we went in no particular direction, street corner after street corner until she finally begged, in exhaustion, that we stop, that the incessant marching cease..."We are here." she seemed to notice aloud, pointing up at a smog smeared building. "My apartment."
Unlike how the dream sequence had played out in the train ride to Paris, we didn’t have sex or make love or do the business. We lay together in the same bed, half clothed, some half kisses between poetry we both recited without knowing their origin, subconscious regurgitations.
NOTA BENE: And on and on about how she refuses to sleep with him until he’s undergone a series of tests designed to earn her trust of him – how the first night even though they sleep together she won’t kiss him and on and on about the passion of the weeks that follow, the sexual torture, the fun despite it. This is their second meeting after their first meeting in NYC and a distance and time lapse between them whilst they have both gone off to live their own lives. Stansilav eventually getting fired from his job and leaving (BUT HOW DOES ALBERT GET FROM NYC TO PARIS WHILE WITOLD IS IN PARIS AND SUPPOSEDLY TRAVELING WITH HIM? CREATE SOME TEMPORARY DIVERSION: THEY PART FROM THE NETHERLANDS FOR AWHILE SO ALBERT CAN GO BACK TO NYC AND SIGN FOR THE REMAINDER OF HIS SETTLEMENT (AND WHY IS ALBERT WILLING TO SHARE HIS SETTLEMENT WITH WITOLD?)
PRAGUE
**************
from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 2, page 1732
...there was a lasting odour of doubt for months thereafter. Albert's despondent drinking blossomed for days at a time before wilting into empty political rhetoric and finally, asleep, snoring on the sofa, the burnt-out tip of his Winston still clenched between his index and middle finger. It rained for two weeks straight. A cold, gusty rain that turned the middle of August into an aura of bleak autumn dying into its winter that kept even the Shot Out Eye out of walking distance for several days in a row. Then we'd hire Jiri to take our pitcher and run up to the corner pub for a fill. Jiri lived above the corner pub and often hung out in front of the Europa Hotel trying to convince tourists into guided literary tours of the old town. When we needed something, we'd stick our heads out the window and yell down at the corner. Since most of the time, Jiri was standing in front of the Europa Hotel smoking, practicing German from a Prague Guide phrase book auf deutsch.
We'd already read all the few paperbacks we had in the room twice. The cassettes and cds had been played raw. Albert had the stand up bass and I had the horn and once in a while, when we'd had just the right balance of beer, cigarettes and instant coffee we cooked using only hot water from the tap. There was a high-headedness, a mystical dizziness, a general gnawing of boredom like a bone ground within our teeth, a perpetual gloom punctuated by the open window and the hail hitting against the whipping drapes. It wasn't necessary to have been in Prague. A prison anywhere would have suited just the same. We'd outspent our monthly allotment in one week and were stuck for three more living on nubs. Well, it wasn't as bad as scouring the rainy streets for cigarette butts to roll. We had enough left over for several liters of beer, a kilo of sausage, two cups of tepid instant coffee and 11 cigarettes apiece each day for the rest of the month but nothing else. Albert was still decompressing from 12 years of intense television vision and the fact that the only source of entertainment in English he could get was listening to BBC, which he hated and ranted and raved about to no end some evenings, only served to raise the tensions, as though the 11 cigarette per diem didn't create enough tension as it was.
On Sundays we went to the neighborhood theater, a large garage-sized building down a winding driveway from a main apartment house with dirt floors and folding chairs run by a wide bodied and hard boiled old fat lady who grabbed at our crowns without preamble more than a grunt without looking up, nodding her head behind her in the general direction of the film. There were never more than three or four people inside. It felt like going to a state fair peep show, creepy and oily. The movie was always terrible. It was as painful as going to church and so in our roundabout way, we were paying our dues along with religious humanity, suffering along with the rest of them in solidarity but skipping masses and seances wherever they arose.
In many ways, it was the lack of events that made it most difficult. We lived like dogs, waiting for hours in anticipation of a ten minute walk or another plateful of the same smoked sausage with the same jar of horseradish. Then, just as abruptly the pleasure had begun it ended and the wave of euphoria receded and it was still raining and it was only two in the afternoon and there were only 3 cigarettes left. When it wasn't raining, I went out, no matter what time it was. I walked from one end to the other, fast and fogged with the anticipation of reaching the end, turning around and going back, outrunning the trams, looking into the windows with the old women staring back down at me. Fear of cultures clashing, the monuments against the sledgehammers, the pain against the pain free, the eyes of those old women seeing everything and knowing nothing more than the human nature of their neighborhood, while I didn't even know the nature of myself, the unpredictable actions were unnerving. There was no oasis and no abyss and the movement was meant to keep one afloat in between the two.
*****
One night I was finally able to convince Miroslav to allow us to open for a blues band scheduled to play the following Saturday evening. Most of the regulars in the Shot Out Eye had heard us play and were still confused enough about our talents that they hadn't formed a solid opinion against us yet. The illusion was still working and so long as Miroslav felt assured that our playing wouldn't spawn a mass withdrawal from the pub, he was willing to let us try and entertain.
It seemed quite natural to show up at 1:00 when he opened. Albert dragged the bass onto the bus and we rode down as soon as we woke up.
"You know you're not due to play until 10:00 o'clock, don't you?" he asked, still groggy, vaguely annoyed. Albert, with his arm around the bass case as though it were a drunken comrade, pushed past Miroslav and dragged the case behind him. "I've been in that fucking apartment for eleven days straight. I need a shot of slivovice and a beer as soon as humanly possible."
While we drank beers at a leisurely yet steady pace, we played a best out of five chess tournament against each other. As people began filtering in, we used a clock and played one round after another of speed chess too fast to think, our hands a blur, our eyes, disinterestedly staring into thoughts only the robotic movements of our hands could decipher. The music was already louder than normal. It felt like a Mexican peyote seance with painted faces and dancing in between beers, hopping from foot to foot on the way to the bathrooms, trying not to spill the beer in the hand.
By six o'clock, we were already too impatient to play our normal route of slow and off key, the anti-jazz we wanted to portray it as, too hip and out of place to be anything but they might cautiously consider genius while at the same time weighing the distinct possibility that we had no idea what we were doing. The usual lengthy preamble, the encyclopaedic history of a few nonsensical stanzas thrown in around a chorus I'd lifted out of the obituaries in the local paper, Dnes, had to be shortened considerably given the language barrier. So we had to play more music and talk less, leaving us with considerably fewer options at our disposal. There were the three set pieces we'd learned in Holland. We knew snatches of more traditional standards, snatches we would blend in all together haphazardly, like a tribute to musical sound bytes without any cohesion. But it was stunning. No one knew what we were saying, not even ourselves. I sang Berlitz lines from six different phrase books. I sang obscure American curses, commercial jingles, lines of Edgar Allen Poe. Whatever came into my head with the same organization of watching shit blow across a street on a windy day. Lyrical flotsam. Musical jetsam. By the end of the set, it was clear we'd fooled them. Miroslav slapped us on the back and handed us another shot of slovovice.
"I'm relieved my friends. You didn't spoil the party. You didn't drive them away. We've witness a musical miracle!" He laughed loudly and bitterly but it was all a show. He liked the sound of it. A musical miracle in the Shot Out Eye. The jazz vagabonds stuck in Prague, unable to extract themselves from a hedonistic scrum, had shown a modicum of worth for the first time in its two month existence. We weren't malingerers and leeches after all, not another pocket of touristic resistance to squlech. Now he wanted us to meet some of his friends. Now he stopped by our table and joined us for a beer, signaling to the waiter for another round. Now we'd never fucking leave.
*****
A few weeks later I'd finally scored a job at the American Business School teaching remedial English to a bunch of Serbian economics majors. Once in awhile, I'd have a few beers in the train station next to the school with Marshall, the American who ran the school's library, a patchwork collection of donated textbooks from military bases, socialist non fiction, and a smattering of Updike and detective novels that reflected his own taste's more than the students'. The school was a converted barn that reeked of cabbage all day long. The caretaker and his wife living on the ground floor and the stench of her gastrointestinal meals that made the thought of food unbearable. During breaks, I would go outside with the students and smoke cigarettes. For the most part, I was ignored. I didn't like them very much myself and I think they sensed that. There was something about their aura of third world privilege that turned my stomach. They'd come here to find their peasants to look down at. There were plenty where they'd come from, but it must have gotten boring, mistreating the same servants over and over again. These kinds of people needed variety. Fresh faces to sneer at. But I was an anomoly. I wasn't one of them and I didn't step in from the scenery. I'd come from another planet. They didn't know what to make of it. I sensed that if I'd cursed more, if I thrown yankee slang around in confusion parables about lust and capitalism, they might have warmed up to me a little but it was impossible. Each class was an endurance test. All I could think about was getting out, sneaking back on the tram, and riding around town reading my copy of one of the library's crappy novels for the third time. The other teachers were even worse than the students. They ran the spectrum from pudgy, collegial buffoons from England to psychodramatic liberal arts graduates from large metropolitan areas in America. Everybody qualified to teach it seemed. What were my qualifications after all? A few forged documents xeroxed at a local printers? I could have been a mass murderer on the lam for all they knew. It really didn't matter. As long as the students didn't complain about you, you were fine and as long as you let the students waste their time in whatever way they say fit while giving them the illusion of teaching them something meaningful they could manipulate in the future, they were satisfied.
*****
Hradec Králové Jazz festival, cahier 1, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski October-November
Mikhail was a little droopy eyed as he stared at me over the chess board. We were hunkered down in the smoke clouds inside U Vystrelenyho oka, racing through .51 glasses of Mestan beer that kept coming and coming interrupted only on occasion by a shot of Absinthe. Mirek and Miroslav, from Uz Jsme Doma, were trying to interrupt our already wobbly match by shouting about Kafka and black humor over and over again in different accents. Uz Jsme Doma, I'd already been assured, had fomed in 1985 in defiance of the Communist regime when they played music that was considered antisocial by the government, and for more than four years they performed in the Czech underground. Mikhail, on the other hand, was a jazz guitarist who worked in a music store part time and played around town with a variety of people who adhered to him and then fell away. Only the month before, we'd tried a quintet that failed miserably. Mikhail was really the only studied musician of the bunch. That's why he played around so often. Attracted hacks left and right then shedding them like a winter cold.
Mikhail kept staring at the chess board as if the longer he stared the longer the possibility would exist that the pieces might somehow rearrange themselves to his advantage. His crewcut drenched with the sweat of nausea. HIs face was mangled by a vague vertigo. He was no Zbynek Hrácek, for sure. I was up two pawns, a rook and a bishop. Mate, under the influence of less Mestan, would have probably been less than three moves away. My brain was lost, veering off the fox chase and running for the hills and I'd be lucky if I mate was discovered at all. Mikhail pushed his finger out at his pieces and knocked the king over. "Are you quitting?" I demand about the speculative king down resignation. He looks at me deeper with those droopy eyes and shrugs. "There is nothing for me here." he comments, finishing off his glass and standing up. "Why don't you come with me to the Hradec Králové Jazz festival? I am already playing and maybe there will be time for you on an alternative stage somewhere..." He raises his eyebrows. "somewhere where they won't notice you" He whispers clandestinely.
**********
A few days later Mikhail, Albert and I are sitting on cold benches with a few bottles of beer at a suburban bus depot waiting for a ride to Hradec Králové. A few old ladies and a school teacher going home for the weekend are waiting with us. The isolation is deafening. "So did you hear more about our performance?" Albert grumbles, lighting a no filter Start cigarette, coughing, red-faced and veins popping up in his forehead and looks expectantly at Mikhail. "Absolutely!" he nearly shouts, relieved to have a topic of good news to break the soul dragging silence hanging over us. The old ladies and the school teacher look over at us, accessing the level of our intoxication or insanity. "I've spoken with Jiri about it and he is convinced we can promote you as some sort of expatriot avant garde jazz duo of blinding importance. He likes your name, Stalin's Mother. He thinks it will draw people at least through the duration of a beer, no matter how horrible you sound." Mikhail says this matter-of-factly as though our ineptitude is so understood that even we should be convinced of it.
"Well, it's a relief that I didn't lug this fucking bass with me for nothing" Albert growled, giving the 6'5 tall bass carrier beside him an unfriendly jostle. He'd pissed and moaned about it ever since he woke up that morning. "This is going to be one heavy fucking thing to drag around with me all weekend." he began while the coffee was brewing. "Jesus christ, this thing is heavy!" he exclaimed when we'd gotten on to the street and were headed for the tram. Getting it onto the train at rush hour brought even more frustrated fury, angry stares, bitching and complaining and cursing in languages no one was going to bother to try and understand. His only consolation was the kiosk where he bought several large bottles of beer. "What a nightmare" he sighed finally, gratefully gulping his first mouthful.
************
We got into Hradec Králové as the sun was setting. The first matter of order of course, was to stop at the first pub we found, instruments and all, and kill some time with the locals. Mikhail was from the neighborhood, knew alot of the people coming up to our table, introducing us as a "puzzling jazz duo", a "once in a lifetime chance to see jazz taken to its furthest parameters." We were in short, musical geniuses. That got us alot of free beer. Everyone who came to the table bought us a beer of welcome and it wasn't long before everything was quickly dissolving again into a Thompsonesque hallucination.
The dictum from Nietszche goes along the lines of what doe not kill me makes me stronger. Under that premise, I've been growing stronger every day of my life since, to date, nothing has killed me yet. On the other hand, there have been plenty of moments when, placed in situations which seemed to at least hint at death, no strength was gained at all. The event would barely register, other than in the cosmic realm of possible outcomes, where one death resulted somewhere else for your having escaped.
There are times when the dying seems to be a gradually progressive motion as you could, if the mood fit, allow yourself a prolonged battle against the armies of depression. Those are the times when being alone feels the same as being around people because the people are just objects you cling to keep away the dread and panic and little to nothing of what they are saying is registering with you.
When Albert finally demurred, when he'd had enough, grown ill from the constant drinking and home sickness, it took him only a few moments upon reaching that realization, to decide he was going back. At first, I was secretly elated. After all, Albert had become like a sore that wouldn't heal. When he wasn't complaining, he was sleeping and when he wasn't sleeping, he was drinking, which, of course, led to the bitching and then to the sleeping. Traveling with him had become such an endeavor that we'd been rooted in Prague for several months solely in order to avoid relocating, uprooting, starting all over again. It was an easy city to lose track of time in. Hours became weeks and as one month passed into the next, it felt as though we'd only been awake for a few days at a time.
Without having made a conscious decision about it, I realized that even as Albert was planning his departure, I knew there wasn't going to be much left for me in Prague either. There wasn't going to be much of a future for The Deadbeat Conspiracy with just my beer coaster lyrics and lousy saxophone playing. So the question was, failing the excuse of touring around Europe playing music, what the hell was I going to be doing there?
Naturally, it was only a few days after Albert's departure that my descent into the daily dying began in earnest. It was only a matter of time before cash supplies dwindled and being stranded would be a fact of life instead of a romantic luxery. You can worry about money to no end when there is still a little left but once it begins dwindling down to nothing, the concerns seem to evaporate. What difference does it make? You are ready to surrender anyway. You are ready to sit motionless for days eating nothing, getting no visitors, falling asleep with every attempt to read or think.
"Suppose…" I spoke slowly, choosing my words with care, "all of a sudden, just like that," and I snapped my fingers, "we quit drinking? I can pour what's left of that little bottle down the drain and we can start from there. We make a resolution and stick to it, see, stay sober from now on, make a fresh start."
Albert stretched, stifling a yawn before placing the lip of the pint to his lips.
"We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman" Albert noted briefly, replacing the pint between his gnarled fingers with a cigarette.
Anastasia chimes, perhaps disgruntled: "We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice."
I'm appalled: "Why wont we sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt? Why wont we note the nocturnal vibrations of our wanderlust through drinks and despair?"
*****
SCENE AT THEIR MINOR CONCERT DESCRIBED BY AN INTERESTED ONLOOKER
No matter how thoughtful or inspired much of modern jazz is it is increasingly difficult to find musicians who don’t take themselves too seriously – the weight of history and the pressures of constant innovation fighting the fun at every step. One might do well to scan the horizon: the humor apparent in European jazz – Han Bennink tossing wooden kitchen spoons Misha Mengelberg’s way – has been well documented for some time, whether Americans have chosen to listen or not. No such fussy stuff here then, either, as Deadbeat Conspiracy a strange trio with meaty chops rips through a blistering set of high-octane, solo-intensive jazz; the muscular breadth of ideas matched only by the unadulterated exuberance of their execution. Anastasia X and crew have little truck with the spate of style wars currently fashionable, relying instead on the untested yet euphoric water of spontaneity. Often with a capital S.
Thankfully, then, it is with a certain audaciousness that Deadbeat Conspiracy comes out of the gate with fists raised, tempo topped out, tone tightened to an off-kilter acidity, and tongue-tying technical intricacies wrapped in the folds of every phrase. If not the most subtle approach, it is rare to find an opener with as much instant adrenaline delivery as “Señor Dada,” pistons pumping with sheer verbose force. In a sense, it is reminiscent of a bebop aesthetic in which flat-out fluency had to be proved first before one was given credence on a bandstand; in another very real sense, however, Anastasia X is a consummate enough singer to avoid the pitfalls such bop-based flurries inspired: the mindless, mile-a-minute mechanics of too many straight ahead discs on the market today If Witold comes out of a lineage anchored by Coltrane’s emotional urgency, it is motivated by the revolutions of Jackie McLean’s harmonic keening and tempered by the florid eloquence of Benny Carter’s supple resolutions. On the song "Señor Dada,," “Carpal Tunnel Syndrome,” and most of all on “Mussolini” – the most startling virtuosic displays of the day – Witold is tethered around a pole of high tension, clearly inspired by his material and musical companions, playing the game of statement and substitution with such alacrity that the smile is nearly visible spreading across his breathless mouth.
Witold also acquits himself nicely, if less joyfully, on the slower numbers that add pacing to the show. Flanked by Anastasia X and Albert aan de Baas, Witold is able to surrender to a variety of moods, adding a much needed respite from the all-out assault launched during the disc’s most inspired moments.
Deadbeat Conspiracy of sympathetic soldiers is no exception to the club, offering challenging compositions attacked with a straightforward ingenuity, openness and outright joy. If not the most starling release of the year, it ranks among the most enjoyable, proof positive that stern-faced, bulky jazz music can snap to smiling, svelte shape in the hands of the right practitioner.
Wireless Mothers of Jesus
In other words, they only listen if
they've finished talking,
authoritative claptraps, saliva lips,
causing droopy eyes,
changing channels make believe
if they're
outside all day in cafes, sitting
sculpted into leather beneath
the sun, the old Madonnas
on cellphones, cellulite sweating
into the vast universe of important rules
they ignore in all their chatter.
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 1.3
The truth of the matter is, since we invested so little time in practicing, not wanting to ruin the momentum, the blossoming fraud of our performances, both on the stage, on the Charles Bridge, in alleyways, hiding from the local police, we had plenty of time to polish our drinking skills. In many ways, it was a test of wills for both of us. What joy we took in watching the waiters scurrying around with handfuls of beer glasses, four handles of four glasses in each hand like two fists of beer punching out towards us whenever our glasses began to take on the image of running low. And certainly we didn't care at all as he marked more little slashes across our scorecard that served as an indication of our bill. Everyone got these little slips of paper and you could always tell, by a glance at the slip of paper of another, just how far along they were in their journey to intoxication by noting how many little slashes they had scratched onto their slips of paper.
Everywhere we went, we drank until the pub closed. There were times, of course, when the pubs didn't close at all. The bartender would doze off sometime after four or five in the morning and we would still be seated, blathering away, drinking the beers, refilling them for ourselves when the need arose. How many Prague mornings we watched sailing over the top of the Vlatava River as we drank our beers, unconcerned, all but oblivious.
You might wonder what purpose it all served: we would have laughed long if you'd have asked us. Purpose? But then again, we might have settled down and told you that we were constantly embarking on an effort to forestall the future. Our days didn't operate like the majority of the people around us. We had nothing to do. No place in particular to go. We were working up a beery theory of the meaningless of time around us. We were burning hours like a pyro lights matches one after another, just for the sheer pleasure of it. We wouldn't be provoked by watches, by history, by futures. We were languishing in a sort of beer o'clock time frame in a hedonist city filled with well-meaning, yet futile drunks. The hand we were dealt. We weren't partaking in the pissing and moaning of life. We weren't comsumed with grocery lists, petty fears about dirty laundry, or wondering where our last meal went. Regardless of the question, the answer was always concise: beer.
The 24 Hour Party
There aren’t any alarm bells that go off when the body’s had enough. We could abuse ourselves five days and nights out of seven and a two day holiday of sofa camping, automotonic television, radio blaring simultaneously, stains accumulating, plates and pans piling up over the kitchen landscape like the blemishes of a skin rash on smooth skin, would be enough, ultimately, to recharge.
When enough’s enough, the signs are subtle yet persistent. The taste of tobacco goes bad and each consecutive roll up perpetuates, in a cycle interwoven of masochistic nihilism, the sense that each roll up is in and of itself a death sentence. It isn’t, of course. But the taste buds need a break. More salt and grease to scratch out the nicotine grime of the palate, like spraying twelve hour oven cleaner in your mouth and letting the foamy particles to do their work
And if it isn’t the tobacco, it’s the vague fatigue of the mind. Sluggish and feeling decades older within days is the way your thoughts shuffle along through the hours. Disjointed and yet feeling collective at the same time. Conversations we’d throw out into the middle of the front room, talking around the empty Chinese takeaway cartons and newspapers, would fold up and blow away before they’d been answered.
I’d go outside and marvel that society was still going on around me. Within the flat, one entombed world existed, punctuated by bouts of another reality going on outside the windows, television news, sirens down the road, the tram’s bell and the grinding of metal on metal as it executed its left turn on to STREET IN ZIZKOV.
Once outside the flat, it came at me in multi dimensions; the odours, the pattern of pedestrian footwork dancing around each other, sotto voce conversations briefly revealed in the brief seconds of passing them. You could be aware of yourself and hope at the same time you were blending in as anonymously as passersby. Who were all these people anyway? From whose wombs did they spring and why?
Usually the premise for leaving the flat was replenishment. Food stuffs, drinkable liquid, toilet paper. Walk past a few pubs and restaurants hoping none of the usual drunks saw you and climbed down from their stools or got up from their tables to chase you down the street inviting you to join them.
You can only mask alchoholism with social drinking for so long. Gradually, the drinking hours lengthen and deepen. And one by one, your compatriots drop off, to eat, to sleep, to coax sexual performances out of their partners, sometimes just to get away, and as these compatriots peel off like dead skin, the pool of drinkers grows smaller until it is merely a puddle of drunks who will carry the task on enthusiastically past dawn.
It is surreal to still be awake and drinking, a survivor of the night before, as workers scurry through their early mornings. If you happen to be trapped on the street, moving from one after hours dive to another, when these commuters let themselves from their houses and head off to the collective misery, it is like being trapped in a maze of somnambulists. Try talking to these people as they march on to their destinations: not a single one will give you the time of day. They are all either disgusted or envious when you confront them with beery breath, dressed in last night’s clothes, as though you were a temporary hallucination of theirs they wanted desperately to avoid facing, shake them from their heads and refill the subconscious with the inner nattering of daily preoccupations.
*****
Typically, on the nights no class was scheduled, I’d leave the office in the afternoon, take the tram back to Zizkov, always keeping a watchful eye out for the tram ticket warden, jump off and head immediately for a café. There was no dinner scheduled. There were no household items to purchase. There would be the paperback or a notebook for company. Set up camp at a table and then, watch the marks on the paper tab scratched off, one by one, beer after beer.
The café itself was of no consequence. I never spoke to the patrons. I never looked around except to stare out the window. I would drink the beer, chased with cigarettes, taking notes, writing letters, occasionally reading from whatever booked I’d nicked out of the school library that afternoon. But for the most part, I’d compose novella length letters to Anastasia, recording the minute details of the day, forcing the obligatory, devotional ramblings out of my pen as though they were written with my own blood through an eye dropper.
And when those events had been exhausted, a few more pints to round it off and then back to the flat. Albert would already be there most afternoons. He worked sporadically, picking up odd jobs around the neighbourhood. Moving and lifting, a scrape and paint job, renovation work that entailed moving rubble, brick and mortar in a wheelbarrow from the inside of a gutted frame to the dumpster in the street.
When he worked, he’d be sat there in the front room, still covered in whatever combination of dust, dirt, grease and paint that had clung to him during the course of the day. The headphones would be on, a small litter of beers would already be on the coffee table and floor and the room would be heavy with the haze of his smoke. Depending on what he was listening to, he’d either completely ignore my entrance as though it were just part of the hypnotic trance of the music that was banging into his eardrums, or take the headphones off and click the speakers back on so we’d both be covered in the music.
My days aren’t tough. Academic life, even the poor excuse for it at the College, was a phantom life in a physical world. Albert’s existence, the fact that he’d been out in the real world, shovelling, hauling, getting down and dirty, merely underscored the ghost-like existence I felt at the College. The only dirt I carried home with me from work was in my head, the filthy thoughts about Croatian co-eds in short skirts and long legs. There was no sense of self-respect in teaching there. It was like whoring in a cheap brothel. You got what you paid for. We weren’t paid much and in turn, we weren’t very astute teachers. There were no standards as there were in the physical world Albert pushed himself through for half the pay.
Albert knew it as well. It was a great theme for his pontifications whenever he’d get foamy-mouthed about the state of the world. Look at you, he’d say as I came through the doorway, my fingernails still reasonably clean, my clothes still reasonably fresh. How do you know you’ve even been working today? You look the same coming in as you did going out. Your shirt isn’t even wrinkled. Didn’t you sweat all day? Wasn’t there even a moment of intellectual anxiety enough to leave furrows of philosophic thought in your brow? You’ve taught future bureaucrats and landowners how to maintain their claw-hold on the throats of the working public, how to bleed them of their pay, how to tax them, how to feel slightly cultured while doing it. You’ve spent the day perpetuating a sick lie.
*****
I’m playing a chess match against Mikhail on the picnic table outside the Shot out Eye and the table is getting beerier as the hours go on. First one to win four matches wins and we’ve already been through eight matches without conclusion. It’s almost dark outside and the board is lit by candles around us. A few stand there in earnest, holding their beers, staring down at the table like gods overseeing a battlefield massacre.
*****
Most of these events won’t register as memory. Either they’re fed through a haze and don’t have any durable qualities or they become enlarged, poster-sized in the subconscious. They don’t stick for very long as they aren’t really memories at all, just events. Not unlike the walls of a construction site that get covered in concert announcement and new released music advertisements, glued up and then covered over, ripped down, graffiti’d on, spat at. No one remembers what poster was up two weeks ago. And similarly, I can’t remember what happened to myself two weeks ago. It’s not like we sit around a table reminiscing constantly like, remember this, remember that? No one cares because whatever it was, chances are it will be repeated in some form or another later in the day or that week or perhaps the next month and for a moment, a tiny light of recognition might go off and sputter out.
The tendency is to filter events so that they become almost unrecognisable save for those tiny moments. There is no filing system in our memories. It’s all scattered around on the inside like a hotel room that keeps having new guests without a maid to come in and clean up afterwards so that one person’s layer of existence left behind is quickly covered by the next and so on.
Is this how royalty greets the well-wishers that come, one by one, for a handshake and a few words? Imagine all the people who have the highlight of their life, “I’ve met the King and here is the photo-moment to prove it”, hung on the wall of their front rooms for all guests to ooh and aah over whilst the King has absolutely no recollection at all of having ever met them.
You hang out with your core, the regulars who join you at the table and the conversations begin again as though they’d never left off in the first place.
*****
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be an answer eventually. I hadn’t expected to just run into her outside the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there. Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to take the train here immediately.
*****
Albert wasn’t pleased with the addition of a new flat mate. We’ve barely any room in here as it is, he cringed, waiving his paw around the smoke-filled air of the studio.
But she can cook and she can sing, I rationalised.
Well, I don’t like this at all, he growled. Not at all. This is a fucking disaster.
*****
For several days, it was a lot of walking on eggshells. After all, Albert had found the flat and flats weren’t all that easy to come by. Especially not a cheap one like this. If he deemed the breach severe enough, he might just threaten us with having to find our own place and considering that despite work, the disposable income I disposed of so quickly came in large part from Albert’s personal injury account, this wouldn’t have been a good development at all.
How to pacify Albert was our theme for days. Anastasia suggested sleeping with him but the looming love triangle might prove even more daunting than finding our own flat.
In the end, it was several nights later, after Anastasia had joined us on stage for the first time, that Albert was convinced. The tension eased. Yeah, what the fuck, he explained. She’s a good cook and she even does the dishes afterwards.
*****
At the Shot out Eye, it was a bit of an event when Anastasia arrived. Not only was her presence a little breathtaking in the background of our norm, but her conversations never flowed with any of the others previous. It was like someone riding a bicycle in the middle of a tank parade. For weeks, we had complete strangers trying to join our table, lining up for the opportunity hours in advance, sometimes merely to get a glimpse of Anastasia.
After the first night she’d joined our performance performing the vocals, word spread quickly. Within weeks, we’d had offers for gigs all around Prague, and from as far away as Bratislava and Budapest.
*****
So what are we going to do with all these offers?
The three of us were sat in the train station café just outside the Anglo-American College and the vote was split.
Albert was sick of Prague, he insisted. After so many months, it should be time to move on. Prague was like quicksand and we were sinking rapidly. He had to get out and see something else to pinch himself awake again.
Anastasia was sick of road tours. I’ve been on the road for six months and only just arrived in Prague a few weeks ago. I just want to settle down for a few months, collect my wits, find some sense of foundation, even it is just temporary.
My vote was a necessary abstention. I couldn’t side with Albert for risk of driving the newly arrived Anastasia away and I couldn’t side with Anastasia because my poverty level salary at the College wouldn’t afford the two of us our own flat without Albert’s personal injury fund to sustain us.
If I side with staying in Prague, I asked Albert, what would you do? If you are sick of Prague and merely want out, where would you go?
He puffed on his cigarette for several moments in silence. I can stay another month, but that’s it. Either we hit the road together or I hit the road alone.
*****
We didn't need a doctoral thesis to validate it. No one understood anything we said anyway, and we didn't understand them either. It was the perfect relationship.
Of course, when Anastasia would tire of whoring in Amsterdam, she inevitably made her way back to Prague to stay with us and that, I submit, was the only time Albert or I had to defend ourselves or our theories.
"You guys look like you haven't left this place since I left" she would comment like a disapproving den mother over a scout troop.
"Is that supposed to pass as dialogue?" Albert would ask. Then Anastasia would make a big show of ordering a bottlr of Moravian wine in a hideous castration of the Czech language, the waiter would look at her blankly, trying to decipher a translation, to what the fuck is she talking about? Albert had mastered the beer vocabulary. He'd even taken the trouble to learn grammatical agreement, depending on how many beers he was ordering, but beyond that, he knew nothing of the language and never bothered to try. But, like all linguistic dilemmas, it was easily solved when he would bring her a beer instead. They're all out of Moravian wine, I'd explain.
From the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 3.2,
...Is it ever possible? Were we merely illusionists with a talentlessness so relentless that it almost became convincing. What else could explain our presence on these stages, night after night, noisy pub after noisy pub? Was it stunned silence at something so horribly awry, they synapses misfired over and over, convincingly? We certainly couldn't believe it ourselves. And by some strange psychological victory, we'd been able to convince the others. Or confused them beyond healthy criticism. We began to accompany ourselves with three foot high inflatable chess pieces and had two volunteers play out famous matches on a 5 x 5 bedsheet painted as a chessboard. More confusion. The lyrics continued lifted out of foreign language obituary pages and stories of local interest plagerized as stanzas in a bizarre, low key baritone that sounded like scratching sandpaper with a two euro coin. Most importantly, the sax and the bass continued to play as basic and few chords as possible, applying repetition and sometimes extremely slow tempos to cover our lack of skill.
But a style that began with extremely minimalist tendancies slowly began to emerge as a spectacle large enough to divert attention from our increasingly frantic fear that eventually we would be found out. When Anastasia joined us with her compositions, her overbearing bossiness and clarinet, we responded with the chess matches recreated on stage, a few interpretive dancers we'd lifted from their classes with promises of popular relevancy, and a harp player.
translated song text:
Under Oath
I begin with placing my hand (or either foot)
on a thick volume of paranormal books
and swear, over and over again, inventing
a new glossary of the terms and bylaws of swearing:
under oath I swear I will never
under oath I fear I will fester
zoo oath, plutonium oath, preminatory and
philistine oath, sublime oath,
oath eat oath, our oath who guards in herrings,
one oath, under new management,
indispensible yet yellowing in the teeth.
I begin with touching myself lovingly
and growing old until the stone is chipped away.
I raise myself, I steal from myself,
I crouch and hide in myself, relieved that
there is still enough space in the cubby hole,
still enough wings in the stealth.
under oath I run from bad films, gone fishing
the subtitles read, garbled and off speed.
Down by oath, under the old oath tree.
I swear I will, I swear I won't, this oath or that,
I forget which oath has the most flavoring,
the hand upon the bible of food coloring,
the oath or the oath that began it all,
oath is dead, or bodily injured.
I will play this commercial for you in the middle of the oath:
Vote for Oath. Truth can't be trusted.
Have them put up party decorations.
Welcome Oath!
Wipe your feet on the oath.
Have some of this 1973 Chateau Oath.
Join us for dinner oath.
Fall in a hot vat of oath.
Melt the oath candles, sing the oath songs,
choreograph the oath dances.
Swear it on a stack of records
and play each of them daily.
The oath is not to be forgotten.
Someday, there will be books written
and the oath will be famous
and the oath will be all over the internet
and the oath will rule,
so swear it. Under oath,
between oaths, a few days before oath.
Oath your teeth with every meal.
So, I swear I will, won't I?
I swear it. Under oath.
I won't swear under anything else,
I swear.
what a prize for beauty:
brave flesh
bent to
desiccate phonemes
for the deaf interpreter
who hears bodies missing.
The corpses are sent packing,
demotic fights in whispers
in the ears of hate syndicate funerals.
The poultice shrug for death,
obsolete are angels in firestorms,
mercies for cheap at firesales
blueprints for the undertakers to connect
the bodies arrived
haunting wave goodbye
second guess the air you breath
while heaven takes a bow.
ROME AND IN PURSUIT
page 116, cahier 3, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I arrived at Rome Stazioni Termini as dawn was breaking. Outside, the neighborhood sweltered with pickpockets and gangs of thieving children. Signore Antonio Pignatelli was supposed to meet me here and was nowhere to be found. A typical scene. I pulled out my tobacco and was just beginning to roll a cigarette when an English speaking cretin stepped toward me, calling my name gently. In his hand was a small cardboard sign that bore my name. He attempted to shake my hand, claiming he was Chuck, sent by Mr. Pignatelli to pick me up since Mr. Pignatelli had been delayed. Chuck appeared to be in his early thirties, sporting an unhealthy complexion, puny frame, round shoulders and a surprisingly prominent paunch. His hair, which looked as though it has been cropped by a pair of blunt shears, was very greasy. I could have filled a mason jar with the grease in his hair. His clothes were total grunge. A dirty nylon rucksack was crumpled at his feet like an abadoned baby. I wondered out loud why Antonio Pignatelli had sent such a seedy and slovenly looking guy to meet me. "I'm the only guy he could find on such short notice who speaks English as my native tongue." he explained as he picked up the rucksack and led me by the elbow toward a cafe where we could sit for an espresso and some bread while we waited for Antonio to arrive.
As we sat there, another broken-English-speaker, who must have overheard our conversation, scuttled in from off the street toward us like a cockroach toward a pile of bread crusts and sugar. "'Allo, my name is Jirko" he stammers and then asks us if either can spare a few euros for some paintings of his. He asks us both but of course, he is speaking only to me. Chuck doesn't look like he has any money. He looks like he'd be as likely as Jirko to be panhandling, perhaps more so. Jirko's lustreless hair matted in some kind of grease, or perhaps it is turpentine, judging from the smell. His fingers are paint-stained, the nails long and filthy. He too has a rucksack and from this one, he pulls out a few vague, almost hallucinatory charcol etchings, explaining all the while that he lives in a squalid condominium on the slummy eastern fringes of the city where he rents a small, damp room in the basement; broken down into the submission of poverty teaching haphazard english classes, giving black market tours of Rome to wary english language tourists charging 2 euros for an hour per. I wave him off, spitting to the side of his shoes and looking out for the waiter or someone to chase away these vagrants. Others are beginning to take notice, their vagrant, gypsy antennae picking up the scent of money in the neighborhood at this early hour.
Finally, Chuck loses his apathetic demeanor and waves the butter knife in the direction of Jirko and a few other slowly approaching vagrants. "Get away fuckers! Liberty is not a release from all law, from all restraint! Crawl back into your sewers and gutters! Stay away I warn you or this distinguished gentleman with me will be forced to brandish his fire arm and fire it at you indiscriminantly!"
He flops down next to me, smiling but a little sweaty. The sidewalks have cleared. "One thing I've learned" he begins, lighting a cigarette and flagging down the waiter impatiently, "is that the consumerist impulse, even in junkies, drives us all toward personal satisfactions that we never quite experience without a solipsistic sense of loneliness hounding us. We may need love and self-opening in order to achieve genuine intimacy and commitment with even a few others."
The waiter arrives glancing at us and having heard the shouting, relieved but curious as to where the vagrants disappeared to. Chuck smiles, "You see?" he demands of the waiter, lighting a cigarette and coughing heavily. "John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, that no one has a right to interfere with me for my own good, but only to prevent harm to others” is now generally accepted. The streets are clear of riff raff. So bring us a pair of espressos, a bottle of Pernod and perhaps a few chunks of bread, rapidamente! senza ritardo!
Chuck continues, puffing on his cigarette proudly like a pimp. "Signore Pignatelli has been looking forward to your visit. I don't expect this delay should be long. He's had some difficulties lately with potentially destructive ideals but frankly, I think the worst is over. If he hasn't arrived within the half hour, I'll take you to a fine pensione I know of only a few blocks from here."
"What exactly are these 'difficulties' you speak of?" I ask with only a vague sense of curiosity. The espresso has arrived and it's aroma overtakes me, overtakes the smell of pigeons and unwashed sidewalks. Train station neighborhoods always smell the same. Like poverty and ammonia mixed with illicit sex and stale urine.
"Well, I'm no shrink, but I think he has to stop looking for salvation to come to him from somewhere else, from above. Instead, I suggested to him only yesterday, he should seek to reconcile with reality. After all, there is no external measure of the meaningfulness of our lives and practices. He wallows in his insignificance, the meaningless of his life, and it paralyses him at times with terrible fits of depression. I slipped him a mild amphetamine sulphate. I'm sure he'll be ok in a little while. Then he'll come to pick you up and everything will continue on as planned." Chuck stared at his fingernails awhile as I thought about how Mr. Pignatelli's affliction might affect his ability to help me locate some leads about Anastasia. It didn't look good. I cursed loudly to myself, much to Chuck's surprise, who took up a defensive Yang Tai Chi position on the other end of the table.
"Sorry about that. I'm just a little annoyed at having come all the way from Kaunas and a meeting with the pianist Vyacheslav Ganelin regarding a concert to be performed in the Siberian city of Sverdlovsk, only to find out now that Mr. Pignatelli is suffering from some sort of dysthymia or bipolar disorder. I was urgently counting on his assistance."
"Don't worry about it." Chuck assured, picking up his rucksack and rifling through it for a few scraps of paper which he handed over to me. "These are the remains of the records of his therapeutic foster home stay. It suggests only a minor depressive disorder brought on by the ill-advised use of estrogen which he'd hoped would improve the somatic and mild depressive symptoms but in the end, only seemed to fuck up his system worse. He should be completely recovered in a matter of days, perhaps weeks, but for the time being, so long as he's jacked up with a little Japanese shabu or alot of caffeine, he's fine for long periods of time. Whatever he's supposed to help you with, I'm certain he'll be functional for long enough periods of time to assist you. Believe me, if he couldn't, he wouldn't have invited you here."
Just then there was a jaunty horn honking from the street as a dioxazine purple Alfa Romeo 156 GTA pulled up to the curb with Antonio's delicate hand waving out the driver's side window. He lept from the car, the engine still idling, and shouted out greetings to both of us. "Witold! Chuck! What great fortune that I've finally found you! I was caught up in an accident with a chestnut roaster and got caught up in the irrisistable, musky fragrants of the chestuts on Via Nazionale and then stopped for a few moments of reflection where Mussolini used to harangue the crowds from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia. I feel like a tourist again! What a morning!"
He quickly grabbed my bags and tossed them into the trunk of the Alfa Romeo and motioned me into the passenger's seat. "Chuck!" he screeched. "Meet us at the New Mississippi Jazz Club on Borgo Angelico tonight around 10! Bring Adriana and Camelia with you!" As I carefully folded my legs in the passenger seat, Antonio fell in behind the steering wheel, yanked the car into gear and floored it, yanking me backwards. We were on our way to what Antonio told me in very speedy explanation was his September home in Rome. First, a quick bite to eat, a few bottles of wine, a nap and then we would get down to business...
random page sifting, cahier 2, from the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski:
I knew the 19 hour ride on the EuroNight car from Roma Termini to Budapest-Deli station was going to be an exercise of endurance, a tag team of piecemeal and useless conversations with peripatetic strangers wandering through the hallways of the cars at all hours having nothing in their own lack of imagination better to converse about than the weather we were unable to experience and an international goulash of political expostulations and petty griping.
When I was able to elude the strangers, I'd stare into the blackness of what seemed an endless, dispassionate tenebrosity Emilia-Romagna countryside staring back at me. For hours I did nothing but chain smoke and cleanse my palate with warm cola. There was, of course, the Buescher Aristocrat, but the moment I'd touch the reed to my lips and begin even the faintest alternations of strident and mellow tones the neighboring passengers erupted into immediate and obdurate, brick wall protests of noiselessness and sleep.
Having anticipated this, especially for those long hours with nothing but the chain smoking and the warm beer preventing me from sleeping, I'd brought along a bookbag gorged with internet cafe printouts on subjects ranging from the Mandelbaum translations of Dante's Purgatorio to obscure American government statistical guidebooks. Nevertheless, the journey was doomed to bring with it an unendearing sense of time and layers of peeling consciousness, through the cosmos and back again all the while fraught with the bristling chaos of the Anastasia restrospective slipping in and out of my vision which could not be escaped.
By the time we'd pulled into Bologna Centrale for a long layover, as a diversion, I'd already begun a laborious, ball-breaking study in thought about time travel and how it could, in some instances, mirror regular, geographic travel. I still had the internet printout of the U.S. Department of Labor Handbook of Labor Statistics measuring the value of money back then using the consumer price index calculated by some strange index of prices paid by Vermont farmers for family living (2002 Price = 1850 Price x (2002 CPI / 1850 CPI).
Taking that equation, I spent many bouncy hours on the rails calculating things like how my 10 cents in 1833 would be worth around $2.00 today until my head hurt. Why 1833, I'm not sure. It seemed to hold some symmetry for me which couldn't be rehearsed. By dawn, as we crept toward the Austrian border, energized by a few swigs of grappa from the flask inside my rucksack, I'd figured that if I take $200 of today's money and travel in time to 1833, I'd have the today's equivalent of about $4,000 to work with.
I wasn't sure where this line of thinking was going to take me. Wishful thinking for four grand was one thing but wondering what I reason I'd have to be on a train a place that wasn't even yet called Budapest yet in 1833, disquisitive about what the hell would be going in 1833 and what my role in it would be. Slowly, wishing I'd printed out deeper history of the breadbasket of the Habsburg Empire, the weaving and rolling had its somnolent effect and it wasn't long before I'd fallen asleep to the lullaby rocking of the train as we moved through the Kärnten province.
Either waking from a dream, or thrust into the middle of it, (difficult to discern through the haze of the morning fog), it seemed Balzac was seated next to me, smirking noiselessly, but staring openly.
"Good morning" I muttered unsteadily. He looked a little dishevelled himself, a little pudgier than the Louis Boulanger portrait, wild-haired and determined, staring me down his little moustache twitching like the whiskers of a rodent. It was as though I'd interrupted him in mid-conversation with himself as he continued pointing out that while he wasn't deep, he was "very wide" and how he would create a new style of realism by portraying the present.
Thinking quickly, I remind him that Georg Lukács was to say that he'd passed "from the portrayal of past history to the portrayal of the present as history", and christ, Lukás wasn't even born until 52 years later.
Balzac barely paid me any attention. He went on, giving elegies on the irreparable decay of good society and his idea of linking together his old novels so that they would comprehend the whole society in a series of books.
He gives me a copy of Le médecin de campagne, which he said he would publish that year in Paris. I thumb through it quickly about a doctor who has given up his mistress and then learns that she died giving birth to his son and then decides to devote his life to working with the poor. "Geez," I tell him, shaking my head, "why are you guys in 19th century France always portraying the peasants as degenerates and cretins? What kind of predictable sociopathological discourse is this?"
Balzac stares at me a moment, a vague disgust in his eyes as he speaks: "An idiocy of rural life. The rural population was helpless. They needed rational authority which they did not themselves possess, to improve their situation. They were like children. They were hopelessly backwards and required massive state intervention to bring them up to the modern age." he clears his throat and continues: "Besides the plot, regard how l am interested in the lives of typical, every day people, like an anthropologist. I don't care about these common histories of nations and political and public figures the world scribbles on about without definition and contrast...Do not all these solve the difficult literary problem which consists in making a virtuous person interesting?"
*********
1833 was also the building of the "Petõfi" Bridge and when Strauss' father was taking his first concert trip to Budapest.
How many Forints would four grand be? How much pörkölt and gulyás?
It didn't matter. I was going solely for Jazz Days, headed in September for Debrecen where they held Hungary's top jazz festival. Of course, I was hoping Anastasia would change her mind and meet me there. It was a daft hope, devoid of reality.
character sketch for shot out eye scenes:
Czech novelist, humorist, prankster, natural storyteller, and journalist, creator of the satiric masterpiece The Good Soldier Schweik. Hašek was with Franz Kafka one of the key figures of literary Prague, but more colorful and blasphemous. Once Hašek was prevented from throwing himself off the Cech's Bridge (Cechuv most), he founded a political party called The Party of Slight Progress Within the Limits of Law, and spent the cash collected from this activity in his local pub.
--And so on that memorable day there appeared on the Prague streets a moving example of loyalty. An old woman pushing before her a bathchair, in which there sat a man in an army cap with a finely polished Imperial badge and waving his crutches. And in his buttonhole there shone the gay flowers of a recruit.
--And this man, waving his crutches again and again, shouted out to the streets of Prague: "To Belgrade, to Belgrade!"
(from The Good Soldier Švejk)
Jaroslav Hašek was born in Prague the son of a failed high-school teacher. His father died from drink when Hašek was thirteen. When his widowed mother could do nothing with her son, a pharmacist, Mr. Kokoska, eventually took an interest in him. Hašek was educated at the Prague Commercial Academy, from which he graduated at the age of nineteen. He got a job at the Slava Bank, but was fired - he was already drinking heavily.
also:
We are bored in the city, there is no longer any Temple of the Sun. Between the legs of the women walking by, the dadaists imagined a monkey wrench and the surrealists a crystal cup. That’s lost. We know how to read every promise in faces — the latest stage of morphology. The poetry of the billboards lasted twenty years. We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the sidewalk billboards, the latest state of humor and poetry:
Showerbath of the Patriarchs
Meat Cutting Machines
Notre Dame Zoo
Sports Pharmacy
Martyrs Provisions
Translucent Concrete
Golden Touch Sawmill
Center for Functional Recuperation
Sainte Anne Ambulance
Café Fifth Avenue
Prolonged Volunteers Street
Family Boarding House in the Garden
Hotel of Strangers
Wild Street
And the swimming pool on the Street of Little Girls. And the police station on Rendezvous Street. The medical-surgical clinic and the free placement center on the Quai des Orfèvres. The artificial flowers on Sun Street. The Castle Cellars Hotel, the Ocean Bar and the Coming and Going Café. The Hotel of the Epoch.
And the strange statue of Dr. Philippe Pinel, benefactor of the insane, in the last evenings of summer. Exploring Paris.
And you, forgotten, your memories ravaged by all the consternations of two hemispheres, stranded in the Red Cellars of Pali-Kao, without music and without geography, no longer setting out for the hacienda where the roots think of the child and where the wine is finished off with fables from an old almanac. That’s all over. You’ll never see the hacienda. It doesn’t exist.
The hacienda must be built.
All cities are geological. You can’t take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
These dated images retain a small catalyzing power, but it is almost impossible to use them in a symbolic urbanism without rejuvenating them by giving them a new meaning. Our imaginations, haunted by the old archetypes, have remained far behind the sophistication of the machines. The various attempts to integrate modern science into new myths remain inadequate. Meanwhile abstraction has invaded all the arts, contemporary architecture in particular. Pure plasticity, inanimate and storyless, soothes the eye. Elsewhere other fragmentary beauties can be found — while the promised land of new syntheses continually recedes into the distance. Everyone wavers between the emotionally still-alive past and the already dead future.
We don’t intend to prolong the mechanistic civilizations and frigid architecture that ultimately lead to boring leisure.
We propose to invent new, changeable decors. . . .
Darkness and obscurity are banished by artificial lighting, and the seasons by air conditioning. Night and summer are losing their charm and dawn is disappearing. The urban population think they have escaped from cosmic reality, but there is no corresponding expansion of their dream life. The reason is clear: dreams spring from reality and are realized in it.
The latest technological developments would make possible the individual’s unbroken contact with cosmic reality while eliminating its disagreeable aspects. Stars and rain can be seen through glass ceilings. The mobile house turns with the sun. Its sliding walls enable vegetation to invade life. Mounted on tracks, it can go down to the sea in the morning and return to the forest in the evening.
Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams. It is a matter not only of plastic articulation and modulation expressing an ephemeral beauty, but of a modulation producing influences in accordance with the eternal spectrum of human desires and the progress in realizing them.
The architecture of tomorrow will be a means of modifying present conceptions of time and space. It will be a means of knowledge and a means of action.
Architectural complexes will be modifiable. Their aspect will change totally or partially in accordance with the will of their inhabitants. . . .
Past collectivities offered the masses an absolute truth and incontrovertible mythical exemplars. The appearance of the notion of relativity in the modern mind allows one to surmise the EXPERIMENTAL aspect of the next civilization (although I’m not satisfied with that word; I mean that it will be more supple, more “fun”). On the bases of this mobile civilization, architecture will, at least initially, be a means of experimenting with a thousand ways of modifying life, with a view to an ultimate mythic synthesis.
A mental disease has swept the planet: banalization. Everyone is hypnotized by production and conveniences — sewage systems, elevators, bathrooms, washing machines.
This state of affairs, arising out of a struggle against poverty, has overshot its ultimate goal — the liberation of humanity from material cares — and become an omnipresent obsessive image. Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit. It has become essential to provoke a complete spiritual transformation by bringing to light forgotten desires and by creating entirely new ones. And by carrying out an intensive propaganda in favor of these desires.
We have already pointed out the construction of situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilization will be founded. This need for total creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space. . . .
Chirico remains one of the most remarkable architectural precursors. He was grappling with the problems of absences and presences in time and space.
We know that an object that is not consciously noticed at the time of a first visit can, by its absence during subsequent visits, provoke an indefinable impression: as a result of this sighting backward in time, the absence of the object becomes a presence one can feel. More precisely: although the quality of the impression generally remains indefinite, it nevertheless varies with the nature of the removed object and the importance accorded it by the visitor, ranging from serene joy to terror. (It is of no particular significance that in this specific case memory is the vehicle of these feelings; I only selected this example for its convenience.)
In Chirico’s paintings (during his Arcade period) an empty space creates a richly filled time. It is easy to imagine the fantastic future possibilities of such architecture and its influence on the masses. We can have nothing but contempt for a century that relegates such blueprints to its so-called museums.
This new vision of time and space, which will be the theoretical basis of future constructions, is still imprecise and will remain so until experimentation with patterns of behavior has taken place in cities specifically established for this purpose, cities assembling — in addition to the facilities necessary for basic comfort and security — buildings charged with evocative power, symbolic edifices representing desires, forces and events, past, present and to come. A rational extension of the old religious systems, of old tales, and above all of psychoanalysis, into architectural expression becomes more and more urgent as all the reasons for becoming impassioned disappear.
Everyone will live in their own personal “cathedral.” There will be rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love. Others will be irresistibly alluring to travelers. . . .
This project could be compared with the Chinese and Japanese gardens of illusory perspectives [en trompe l’oeiI] — with the difference that those gardens are not designed to be lived in all the time — or with the ridiculous labyrinth in the Jardin des Plantes, at the entry to which is written (height of absurdity, Ariadne unemployed): No playing in the labyrinth.
This city could be envisaged in the form of an arbitrary assemblage of castles, grottos, lakes, etc. It would be the baroque stage of urbanism considered as a means of knowledge. But this theoretical phase is already outdated. We know that a modern building could be constructed which would have no resemblance to a medieval castle but which could preserve and enhance the Castle poetic power (by the conservation of a strict minimum of lines, the transposition of certain others, the positioning of openings, the topographical location, etc.).
The districts of this city could correspond to the whole spectrum of diverse feelings that one encounters by chance in everyday life.
Bizarre Quarter — Happy Quarter (specially reserved for habitation) — Noble and Tragic Quarter (for good children) — Historical Quarter (museums, schools) — Useful Quarter (hospital, tool shops) — Sinister Quarter, etc. And an Astrolarium which would group plant species in accordance with the relations they manifest with the stellar rhythm, a planetary garden along the lines the astronomer Thomas wants to establish at Laaer Berg in Vienna. Indispensable for giving the inhabitants a consciousness of the cosmic. Perhaps also a Death Quarter, not for dying in but so as to have somewhere to live in peace — I’m thinking here of Mexico and of a principle of cruelty in innocence that appeals more to me every day.
The Sinister Quarter, for example, would be a good replacement for those ill-reputed neighborhoods full of sordid dives and unsavory characters that many peoples once possessed in their capitals: they symbolized all the evil forces of life. The Sinister Quarter would have no need to harbor real dangers, such as traps, dungeons or mines. It would be difficult to get into, with a hideous decor (piercing whistles, alarm bells, sirens wailing intermittently, grotesque sculptures, power-driven mobiles, called Auto-Mobiles), and as poorly lit at night as it was blindingly lit during the day by an intensive use of reflection. At the center, the “Square of the Appalling Mobile.” Saturation of the market with a product causes the product’s market value to fall: thus, as they explored the Sinister Quarter, the child and the adult would learn not to fear the anguishing occasions of life, but to be amused by them.
The main activity of the inhabitants will be CONTINUOUS DRIFTING. The changing of landscapes from one hour to the next will result in total disorientation. . . .
Later, as the gestures inevitably grow stale, this drifting [dérive] will partially leave the realm of direct experience for that of representation. . . .
The economic obstacles are only apparent. We know that the more a place is set apart for free play, the more it influences people’s behavior and the greater is its force of attraction. This is demonstrated by the immense prestige of Monaco and Las Vegas — and of Reno, that caricature of free love — though they are mere gambling places. Our first experimental city would live largely off tolerated and controlled tourism. Future avant-garde activities and productions would naturally tend to gravitate there. In a few years it would become the intellectual capital of the world and would be universally recognized as such.
IVAN CHTCHEGLOV
1953
MEETING ANASTASIA:
From the sweat-soaked pages of the Diaries of Witold Kazersamski, cahier 8, page 312, after Albert leaves.
The kiosk around the corner from my flat finally removed it's hand-printed cardboard and water-logged "Back in Fifteen Minutes" sign after 3 long weeks. The fat, pinched face of the old Ukranian woman which had occupied the kiosk window during the summer months has been removed by state officials apparently, replaced with a pretty Latvian woman who wears far too much make up and doesn't smile, not even when she is in pain. I went there this morning, shocked that it had reopened, and fully prepared to ransack the inside for whatever seasonal fruit might be in stock and a few bottles of watered down vodka. She didn't greet me when I rang the service bell, continuing, instead, to smoke rancid black tobacco cigarettes and eat crudely sliced slabs of raw herring while staring at me blankly.
"What have you got in stock this morning?" I demanded, fingering the stolen food stamp coupons in my pockets and the rusting spare change I'd picked up from the fire escape the night before when looking for the cat. "Nothing" she said, crusts of black bread falling from the corner of her mouth as she continued to stuff oily pinches of raw herring into one side of her mouth while puffing on the cigarette from the other side of her mouth. The whole thing was beginning to disgust me. I hadn't had breakfast yet, my stomach was still burning acids from drinking on an empty stomach the night before and I hadn't even seen the morning's headlines. I rang the service bell again, repeatedly and with rancor. "Don't tell me nothing!" I demand, slamming my fist on the counter. "What possible reason would this kiosk have for reopening if there was nothing in stock?" I thought it was a sensible question but apparently, the Latvian woman didn't. She laughed aloud, more food chunks falling out of her mouth, half masticated and dripping with drool. "Who do you think you are?" she demanded suddenly, slapping her own meaty paw on the counter. "You want everything on credit, another bottle of beer, another stale crust of bread, another fresh ear of corn? Show me your money!"
I counted to ten and inhaled deeply, thinking for a moment about how Ernest Renan, the famous French historian and archeologist, would respond. He once said "As a rule, all heroism is due to a lack of reflection, and thus it is necessary to maintain a mass of imbeciles. If they once understand themselves the ruling men will be lost." I decided not to think, exhaled instead and spat on the sidewalk. "Perhaps I can make it worth your while," I hinted slyly, thinking of the machete I still kept in my bathroom for emergencies. "I know where to get my hands on some controlled bleeding experiment videos." The Latvian looked at me skeptically. I could tell she wasn't interested, but I could also tell that she was wanted badly to go back to her privacy, her eating binges, her cigarettes and that by looking at me, she had a sneaking suspicion I wouldn't be easily put off. When she tried to slam the kiosk window shut on my fingers, I jerked my arm up and blocked it, wagging the index finger of my other hand in her face. "Please madam. I have good reason to believe I'm experiencing a Subarachnoid hemorrhage and frankly, if I don't get some fresh fruit, a few eggs and this morning's newspaper, I can't guarantee you're going to come out of this interaction with any teeth left to chew those disgusting nodules of raw herring with, if you know what I mean..."
She muttered to herself, cursing under her breath. "It is people like you who drove that poor woman who used to run this kiosk before to an early bankruptcy and possibly to her grave. No one pays for anything in this neighborhood. Don't any of you have jobs? How do you live with yourselves?" She seemed genuinely concerned and irritated but her demeanor was relaxing. She set down her raw herring and bread, ground her cigarette out in a dead cactus plant beside the window and motioned for me to enter through the small opening of a side door. "You may take one egg, two pieces of stale grapefruit, one onion and a bottle of Somalian apple wine but as for the newspaper, you are on your own. They never delivered any copies this morning."
With great relief, I burst through the opening without waiting for her to finish her sentence or begin a new lecture. People like this want to bend your ear all day if they think they can get away with it. When I stood back up from my knees, finally inside the kiosk, I got a full look at the fire hydrant body of the Latvian. It wasn't a pretty sight, unexercised, poorly washed, blotchy in places with some sort of infectious rash with open sores. She had draped a wool blanket over her shoulders to keep off the cold but otherwise wore only a pair of combat boots and pajama bottoms with peanut butter and strawberry juice stains all over them. Her breasts hung like fleshy stalactites which began at her sternum and sagged down to her ribs, unappealing and moist with sweat. She looked like the fat peasant woman in Diego Rivera's "La Molendera". I repressed a surge of bile that nearly erupted from the back of my throat and went to work rooting through the bins of stale fruit and rotting vegetables.
I was able to emerge a few minutes later from the kiosk, grateful for the fresh figs I'd pocketed on the sly when she was writing down my bill on a chalkboard. The thought of my departure, now that I had what I wanted, caused a brief sensation of regret in Latvian's heart. I could tell. She grimaced as though she'd been punched in the stomach. "You've stolen my prized figs!" she screeched suddenly, trying to grab at me through the kiosk window. I jerked away, laughing as I skipped down the sidewalk toward the bus stop. I had to move on. The public library would be open again in a matter of hours and there was still the matter of the bottle of Pernod to filch from the cafe around the corner before I attempted to board the bus and fight my way through the last vestiges of the late morning rush hour tide. Once I had the Pernod, I could bribe the bus driver to take me past the last stop to the public library and then my afternoon of figs and Mozart could begin.
We could feel the time in one place had concluded even though we could have allowed it to unwind further, beyond it’s logical conclusion. We could have taken it further than the distance, it wasn’t a question of stamina, it was a statement, whispered from some unidentified location in the eons of time and experience reminding us gently that it was time to move on.
How do you know when you’ve stayed in one place as long as you are likely, as long as it is feasible, as long as it is still edible, slippery on the palate, as long as you can still masticate it and find flavour?
You might call it some forbearing of momentum. When you smoke a joint, for example, there is a period of time when you have no concept that the perspective with which you view everything and the brain itself is catapulted by the (look up marajuana’s effect on the brain) a consciousness that you are actually high escapes you for a period of time, as though you are capable of flying and actually are until the reverie is broken, you realise that you are indeed flying (hey, I can’t do that!) and suddenly, there you are, falling at a rapid speed because of gravity. That’s how you know it’s time to leave a place. When you wake up one morning and realise to yourself that you aren’t supposed to be there and staying would only cause the reality of gravity to bring your splattering to the ground.
In our particular instance, the reason Albert had met someone in Amsterdam one night who suggested he might be able to find a series of gigs for us throughout Eastern Europe. “The Eastern Europeans, the Slavs in particular, with their morose melancholic myopia of life, are particularly susceptible to jazz, perhaps even especially so, YOUR kind of jazz.”
So, the man in question, Petr Kalenov, pressed a card of his little (PRAGUE/KRAKOW) nightclub in Albert’s paw and left the pub, disappearing in the mosaic passageways of the red light district in search of the appropriate whore for twenty minutes of magic.
“So what do you think?” he demanded as we were watering our livers with a rapid succession of Oranjeboom – “I’ve about had it here anyway. These coffee shops have no real interest for me and well, I’ve tired of whores and brothels and women who have interest only in your future as a subservient husband in a yuppyland paradise. I’m ready for women who toss themselves at you at the mere gargle of an American accent, young women who don’t care about your qualifications or your earning potential. Young women with exotic accents. Shall we call it a day here and move on finally?
I was sceptical of course, but this scepticism was a selfish one based upon a sudden fear clutching at me about this unlimited supply of hash and marijuana that would suddenly disappear. I was fearful of leaving behind a language I was just only then beginning to learn, a place where I thought I’d once been born and had
2:16 AM
|