“You getting off the train or not?” he asked. I told him, “No.” But I had to. Once I am on a train I have no desire ever to get off of it. He told me to have a good time in Cannes, that maybe we’d see one another in St. Tropez. I kept thinking to myself all the while he talked with me: “St. Tropez? How terribly postcard.” Cannes, on the other hand, seemed still real, despite that today it most definitely is not.
“You getting off the train or not?” he asked again. I should have stayed with him. I think I would have if I had not been stuck in a world of images that didn’t exist, in a relationship that was over but which I had decided to chase like a ghost, me the ghost and he the dead man. It was the story of my life for some years to come. If I had had the power to separate will from desire, love from lust, life from lost, maybe it’d been different. It wasn’t different, it was as it was and, nonetheless, it was interesting. Even frighteningly exciting. Brash, for sure. I was under a magnétisme animal and could not help myself.
Cannes was a weird dream, a sort of make-believe poshness for my imagination. I landed there and had sought out beforehand a small bed and breakfast and left my bags there. My bags: a stolen Eagle Creek weekender-backpack combo that I’d picked up at my job with Rand-McNally in San Francisco, and another plastic shopping bag with handles filled with guidebooks and a journal. Once the bags were checked, I sought out a café near the center of town. The Brasserie Legend Café sounded perfect: quintessential French faire in the French flame mahogany Neoclassical design that made me feel important, posh, as I said, like in a French film about some married couple in trouble on the French Riviera on a beautiful summer’s day—une belle journée d'été. The restaurant, five blocks or so from La Croisette, was the place of fine dining for plebs, most likely. But plebs in Cannes are far different from plebs in Liverpool or other. Expensive French cigarettes and gold: the plebs of Cannes carry their own trademark and it smells quite lovely at times.
But Cannes is where rooted in me came the feeling that one most definitely need not be rich to be gracious and fabulous. In fact, if one may be gracious and fabulous sans money, you are in fact God of all. To purchase your grace and fabulousness is the highest sin of foolishness known to living creatures. Own nothing and in fact, you own the world.
The French maitre’d greeted me, saw that I was alone, escorted me to a long rectangular table already full with French people and he sat me in the middle of the long table, next to a couple jabbering away in French. The long table sat ten and I was the tenth. I looked at the menu, everything written in French, ordered what I could make out: bouillabaisse ala haricot verte avec champignon, little langostinios, a side of hard-boiled eggs.
The woman next to me brambled on about nothing I could make out but her hair made me think of my grandmother: hair worked high atop her head, spayed to a fixed mauve. Her hair matched the wallpaper of the reastaurant or the rfestaurant’s wallpaper matched her hair. Gold trim around everything and lamps closer to being chadalliers than not, hung around the place. Only in France would one enjoy an average lunch on an average day in a setting out of a magazine for French interiors. My point being in all this is that this was a worthy addition to the fantasy I’d wished to live on my visit to Cannes, to feel surrounded by everything French and nothing of some place other. The lunch was French, the people were all French, the décor was undeniably French, and I, I was not, which made everything feel even more French than it might actually have been.
The film festival had just closed and Cannes held that post-party afterglow that I like so much. All the hullabaloo gone, the stars, the paparazzi, the fans; to me that’s the best time to visit a place. Primed then deflated, there was no one to interfere with my getting the best service possible in a place more desirable than most places in all of Europe. On top of that, I held my own personal fascination with celebrity; a kind of fascination with my ability to ignore it and to be my own tycoon of sorts, in Cannes where the rich and famous play—actually, they only come here out of ignorance—where I could afford to live and celebrate life comfortably even if I had come here to chase someone down. It took no time rather to forget about Roger though and immerse myself in French culture and French boys, and to enjoy myself on another level beyond my own obsessions. But Roger did remain ever in the back of my mind and the indulgences I took in Cannes were probably more to try to snuff out the thought of him than to actually enjoy the company I was with or the entertainment I was involved with. Whatever.
On an early afternoon on the main playa in central Cannes, I put my towel across the sand and lay on the beach to catch some rays and to play my part at doing what tourists and travelers do in such places as Cannes. Within an hour an older gentleman about fifteen feet from my feet begins to chat to me. First in French, then in German, then finally in English after I’ve led him in that direction. We chat about Cannes, where I’ve come from, that I live in Berlin at the moment and that I’ve come from San Francisco. Not more than twenty minutes in conversation and he invites me to have dinner with him at his home a couple blocks from the beach we are on. He has money, none of it in which I am interested.
Swallow.
God was one of the most unusual people I had ever met. Above all, God was gritty, looked like a mechanic bodybuilder but more prone to drug taking than to preserving his body or perfecting it for show. God communicated very little; he came in, set up his gear and mainly kept to himself while the show went on all around him. At the end of it, God just folded up his gear again, moved everything he had brought for the show back into his dented van and drove off alone, as if nothing that night, or any other night, had happened at all.
But a lot had happened that night: the cops had showed up and let us be, men in strange uniforms asking for the owner of the club and to know why on a Sunday night there were a couple hundred “kids” gathered there and, thought the two policemen didn’t say it, wondered why we all weren’t doing something else, like preparing for school the next day. But it didn’t really matter because everything was legit; the club was up to date on its permits, the music wasn’t so loud that it caused complaints from any neighbors, who were several blocks away anyway and probably rarely heard anything from the club at all. But when the cops showed up, God turned away as if he had had a warrant out for his arrest, or something worse, and God not only turned away but he walked away, quietly, to the back of the club and some dark corner and out of sight, really out of sight, like he had walked through the supporting wall that held up the roof. Poof, God was gone.
Tilt-a-Whirl began April 4, 1993 in the South of Market district of San Francisco at a club called the Trocadero. The club itself had been there since the sixties and had seen everything from drugged out hippy bands to drugged out metal bands. But it hadn’t seen the likes of the crew come to set up a morning rave party that began that Easter Sunday, Easter Sunday of April 4, 1993, 6 a.m. start time and running until 2 p.m. in the afternoon. The crew wasn’t exactly drugged out like the hippies that had come before and died out by speed consumption or heroine, or drugged out like the metal heads who seemed more hooked to cocaine and alcohol. The crew was into ecstasy before anything else, and the occasional balloon, and some pot, occasionally bumps of speed to get you through the morning, and maybe a few beers to settle the stomach and smooth out the rough edges of long nights and long mornings. But the crew was young, able to keep up with the times.
Max and Darla visited The Bigfoot Lodge, used to be The White Swallow, a gay bar from the sixties up to 2003. They recalled together the time they wound up at The White Swallow and Byron was sitting on the stool at the end of the bar. Drunker than a budgerrigger on nitrous oxide, he stumbled through their names calling them Morty and Deirdre and asking them if they wanted to spend the night at his house on Potrero Hill.
“Byron, another of those lost homosexuals from Minnesota stuck in San Francisco on booze,” Max said.
“Yah, unlike you who’s gay and stuck in San Francisco and from Minnesota. When are you going to get out of here, Max?”
“Well just waitin’ for the Big One to hit, then we’re all off to the promised land.”
“Oh Atlantis or something, huh? Right!”
Two months before Max had moved into the Grolsch Mansion on Clay Street. An 1889 Victorian built by a gold baron by the name of James Beard and bought by Tomislav Greenway in 1974, the Grolsch Mansion housed a turnstile of gay men from different walks. The house came together as a way for Tomislav Greenway to surround himself with gay men who looked like borders to keep up the otherwise prohibitively expensive estate but was really a way for Tomislav Greenway to find access to a larger community of gay men from different backgrounds who could add to Tomislav Greenways indefetigueable intrigue for studying the human condition of gay men who were strays from some other larger society.
“How’s the Grolsch Mansion, Max?” Darla said.
“Well, last Lunar Dinner Richard got up and said how he welcomed this full moon when the Queen of the Wet returned to water the land and begin the cycle of re-hydration to the thirsty and to dampen the hair of waifs and strays coming to Our Fair City By the Bay in Search of Fertilizer. He owns a winery in Napa, you know. He’s also an epidemiologist at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics. He’s a Harvard PhD. He’s a brilliant guy, I just haven’t figured out his sense of humor yet.”
“He’s just another Rich Queen in San Francisco who likes young boys, Max.”
“Well I’m not that young.”
“Young enough for somebody in their seventies.”
“He’s not that old.”
The Bigfoot Lodge was filling with all the usual after-work San Francisco dot com happy hour types. Max and Darla were on their fourth pint each and the CD jukebox was playing “Show and Tell” by Johnny Mathis. Pictures on the wall of United States National Parks now hung where images of birds used to be when The White Swallow stood as one of the oldest gay bars on Polk Street. No more Judy Garland playing and Cocksucker drinks—Bailys, coffee, cream—The Bigfoot Lodge served pints and Jägermeister and Cosmos. Timber paneling around the bar, the pastel shades of paint and old queens lining the rail were gone now, dead or down at the QT, one of two surviving all-gay bars on the Polk.
“So what are you going to do about a job?” Darla said.
“I don’t know but I do know I don’t want to go back to how these dot comers are living, stuck ten hours a day in a cubical staring at a computer screen and answering to some high tech bitch on wheels rolling in six figures and laughing all the way to the bank. I wish they’d all go home. We were here first and the City was better full of artists and dreamers and drug addicts. Now it’s account executives, speculators and drug addicts. Tell me, where do the children play?”
“Oh shut up. Cat Stevens is a member of the Taliban and there are no children in San Francisco. The ones that are left here are you and me, drinking beer and wondering what’s next. Times up. We’ve gotta go.”
Max and Darla walked out of The Bigfoot Lodge and got in Darla’s VW Jetta.
“Well, what do you think, The EndUp?”
“Sure, why not,” Max said. “But no speed. Let’s keep drinking but God no speed. I’ve gotta get a job one of these days.”
“Okay,” Darla said. “No speed. But an e would be great. Nothing like a job interview after a night out on e.”
“Well, maybe,” Max said.
We lost Jac entirely. The bar wasn't even that full but we lost him somehow. I'm not sure if I left with the other guy or if I left on my own to go to the Castro. Anyway, Jac told me in the morning that he met a guy and brought him home but that when they got to the front door of the house, Jac had forgotten his keys and so had to ring the bell, that the guy ran off because he didn't believe that Jac lived there, at the mansion. Grolsch Mansion.
Somehow Cartier must be brought into the fold, squatting its wares in a way of utterly clever sobriety, ripping down the walls of wealth leaving it bare, reconsidered. Choking on a diamond is such a painful process. You will be left with nothing but a memory that cannot serve you well. You must be taken out of yourself, bereft of merit and scourged by your own want. Money is killing us. This, my only thought as I tried to make it back to the mansion, up Grolsch Street, up, up, up, where no cable car had ever been, high as a fucking constellation.
Events
I left India’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram really early, like 5 a.m. After spending three days and nights locked up there I was well ready to get out on the streets of Pondicherry. Strict vegetarian meals − yogurt, rice, lentils, that was it. Craving a hard cup of coffee after all that shanti-shanti business I launched onto a coffee bar located on the second floor of a Chevignon Jeans shop, like Levis only French. The coffee bar was as western as you get with lots of seating room and clean tables with paper napkin dispensers, something unheard of almost anywhere else in the city. BBC News played on the overhead television.
I approached the wood counter and order a latte. The Tamil boy positioned himself behind the Italian espresso machine, the one that looked just like those everywhere in the States, like the front of a ‘50’s Chevy, running out luscious streams of thick black liquid and rising steam. While he spun the levers and assembled cup to saucer I turned and looked up at to the BBC. BAM! A plane flew into a skyscraper. BAM! Another jet hit the other skyscraper. I turned to the boy and ask him, bewildered, “What was that?”
“That, my friend,” his Tamil accent dipped, then continued, and his head cocked toward the television: “That is America!”
Little City
At eight, I lived in a world in miniatures. Not unlike most children, in the basement where I had spent my time, I had built a city of miniatures. In this miniature city, I was the mayor, but my name was different from the name my mom and dad had given me. My name as mayor of the miniature city was Gary, and Gary lived in the town’s only house. The house was yellow and white on the outside, red and black on the inside, the little yellow plastic walls repainted by a set of magic markers I used to create red and black striped walls all on the inside. Gary had a car, a lime-green Mercedes Matchbox from the local—and first ever in the world—Target store. The lime green Mercedes usually sat in the driveway of the yellow and white plastic house where all the town could see it. Since there was only one house in the miniature city, my young imagination placed all of the other residents outside the borders of the city’s central area, a six-by-six foot section of plywood that my dad had given me, and upon which I could build my miniature world.
My dad covered the six-by-six plywood with a piece of scrap of green carpeting like the kind found in the pro shops at golf courses or country clubs, a flat material designed for heavy wear and tear. The city was covered in beautiful green grass. For roads, I found a big roll of electrical tape and used that, making two lines of the shiny black tape side by side so that the roads were wide enough for my Matchbox cars to drive on them. With nothing but green carpet-grass over a sis-by-six section of plywood, electrical tape for new roads, and a house for Gary to live in with a black driveway for Gary to park his lime green Mercedes, I set out to build Little City, a refuge from the world around me.
The first business I purchased for the Little City came in the form of a plastic model kit from Target. The kit allowed me to assemble and glue together an automobile showroom and this became the city’s first business. Naturally, Gary owned the auto showroom. I began to purchase little people which were a little shorter than matchsticks, so that Gary would have some friends and so that his business also would have some customers in order for Gary to generate income. I knew that it took money to buy the model kits for the city, so I knew money is the thing that Gary needed in order to continue to build out the city. It was a kind of partnership between Gary and me: he had to do business with people in the city so that he could make more money and build more businesses. I appointed Gary mayor of the city and as the richest, most powerful person, he continued with me to build out Little City.
The town had a Lionel train set whose circular tracks traveled around the perimeter of Little City. On the edge of town, not far from Gary’s house, stood the City Zoo, filled with a set of plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic hippopotomus’, plastic tigers, little ceramic penguins that I got from my mother’s china cabinet, a set of plastic panda bears, a few plastic seals, and a green plastic fence that encircled all the animals and kept them under control. The town had a plastic firehouse and a gas station, both purchased at Target. There were plenty of cars—Corvettes, Cadillacs, various trucks, hot rods and a few little motorcycles. The town grew quickly and more people started to come to Little City, but only the one house for Gary, mayor of Little City, stood within the town’s borders.
At first, there were five or six other matchstick people in Little City for Gary to associate with and to become friends with. Gary kept his distance, however, and focused more on building and acquiring new businesses. At the time, the film “The Towering Inferno” was the big motion picture release of 1974the summer and I had gone to see it with my mom, dad and sister. Instantly, it became my favorite film and I had to have a skyscraper in the city that looked like the building that became the Towering Inferno in the film. Since my dad worked in the printing industry, he had access to useful materials with which to build objects that resembled what would become the Towering Inferno in Little City. He came home one day with a three-foot tall three-dimensional rectangular box that he had constructed for me at his work. Think of a milk carton’s dimensions but only this one was really long, tall enough to resemble a skyscraper in Little City. I took a thick black marker and drew lines down the length of the box and also perpendicular across it to resemble windows. The skyscraper, not only the tallest building in Little City but also the tallest building in the world, I placed in the very center of town. In the film version of “The Towering Inferno,” as the world’s tallest skyscraper burned, a lifeline cable had been extended from the burning building to another, shorter building next to it. On this cable, some of the occupants of the burning building were sent across over the cable in a metal fire rescue chair that carried them to safety to the other secure, shorter building. I had to have a building in Little City that served the same purpose as in the movie. I made a much shorter building out of a 2% milk carton. In the film, the shorter building had no particular identity, it was just a building, perhaps an office building. In Little City, I turned the milk carton into the Skyway Theater, one of the nation’s first multi-screen movie houses located on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, where I had watched “The Towering Inferno” with my family. I constructed a little sign above the building’s entrance that read Skyway Theater, as well as a large marquee above the entrance to the milk carton building with the names of the films that were showing written across it with my thick black pen. The films showing back then included “Shampoo,” “Benji,” and, of course, “The Towering Inferno.”
As time passed, the summer heat caused the plywood underneath Little City to warp. Over time, the six-by-six section of plywood began to warp upwards, so that the corners of this miniature world turned up towards the ceiling, making it a place that looked like it had been built in a kind of shallow bowl, or valley, and this warped-ness bothered me. Life went on in Little City, but the irregularity of the town’s appearance made me feel that my town was not working. The train tracks curved inward to the center of Little City and the train could no longer travel around the town without the little locomotive falling over and off its tracks, followed by the rest of the cargo cars that spilled over the surface of the warped town. Something was very wrong in Little City. I collected a box of large bricks and anchored each corner with a set of them, hoping that the weight of the bricks would “un-warp” Little City and things could return to normal again. It did not work. For a long time, maybe a year or more, Little City had been a success. Gary was a popular mayor, he sold plenty of cars at the dealership, the world’s tallest skyscraper kept the town in awe, the Skyway Theater offered all the latest hit movies, and the train ran on time. All the animals in the town’s zoo were happy. But when I found out that the bricks were not doing anything to correct the warping of the wood beneath the town, I began to lose interest in the place. By summer’s end, I staged my own “Towering Inferno.” The town, now in a state of disrepair, seemed abandoned. I removed the skyscraper from the center of Little City, took it outside, away from the house to an open field, planted the building firmly into the ground, and very ceremoniously set it on fire. I played the drama of the film in my mind as I watched my Towering Inferno burn; the white rectangular box and its drawn-on windows went slowly up in flames. I held a bundle of lit matches to the cardboard and gradually the flames overtook it, turning the white to brown and then black, and then as the flames burned through the cardboard, the burning edges of it lit up in a flaming glow like white Christmas lights, and slowly the awe of Little City was no more.
THE OLD GUARD
=
In Russia, it seemed the surface of all life had been coated by a tonic or turpentine meant to keep the color out. What was there behind this film or layer coating the objects, the images of life, was the truth of day-to-day existence. Reflect what had been Yugoslavia on itself and the tonic or turpentine only worked to keep the color out on certain aspects of daily life; the truth of day-to-day existence was rather an overcoat worn threadbare, revealing the more colorful under garments. In the last days of Yugoslavia, the overcoat shred to pieces on its own and the long silent grouping of republics flashed their own individual colors in order to demand an image of life that reflected the new tribe.
*
What is the quality of life? What makes the desert bloom?
East and West have always been different, but even more so, I think, in the twentieth century. In the West, the twentieth century has been dominated by products and consumption; but in the East - by East I mean Eastern Europe, Russia and the Slavic Republics - the national emphasis has been on ideas. Ideas arise from thinking and thinking requires time. The people of Europe have always had more time than Americans, especially in Eastern Europe where time expands to meet the task at hand, followed by a long strong coffee before and after. Before and after is when all of this thinking takes place and the further east you go, the stronger the coffee is. For a time it seemed to me like thinking came from the East. The writers I was reading, like Milosz and Petofi, seemed to insight thinking. But in the West, people were too busy buying to think about where their experiences were leading them; in the West, the free market convinced nearly everyone that you could purchase happiness, could wear it or sit on it or drive it, and thinking contributed nothing to the act of buying and the habit of consumption. In the East thinking flourished, even under Communism which, early in the century, imposed great restrictions on free thought and allowed just a few - the nomenclature - to define what kind of thinking was permissible in the new regime. This led the people to a political ideology that fooled nearly everyone, for a time, into the belief that the revolution would usher in justice and equality. But even under Communist dictatorship thinking happened, real thinking, the type of thinking that enabled the people to laugh, even at Communism, even in the worst of times.
For a time, Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, of Latvian descent, supported the revolution by creating films that glorified the workers. Films like "The Battleship Potemkin " and "October" were just what the early Soviets needed to bring the ideas of the revolution to the people by means of mass media. Artists like Eisenstein used ideas to change thinking which in turn motivated Bolsheviks to manipulate history by making class struggle a possession. As a critic of Eisenstein's work you can see that the revolution was not only over class struggle, but also art and politics over possession. But this aim was only temporary.
Once Stalin began his campaign of collectivization, which subsequently brought death to millions of peasants who worked the land, Eisenstein knew the direction Communism was taking and so turned his attention to other ideas, to Russia's past. Eisenstein began making films with historical subjects like "Ivan the Terrible," based on the sixteenth-century Russian ruler who was almost as tyrannical as Stalin himself. Eisenstein knew the revolution was over.
Stalin saw the similarities between Ivan the Terrible and himself. Soon Eisenstein was under the close scrutiny of Stalin and his watch dogs. He could no longer express himself openly through his art. Quietly, Eisenstein all but disappeared from Soviet cinema and soon died, at the age of fifty. The thinking of a few ushered in thought police who intensified politics. The result was politics over art.
It must have been terribly difficult to survive this history.
*
I graduated and moved back to Minneapolis for the summer but didn't want to stay there; got accepted to the graduate program at Stanford in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and took classes in that program for two years. Escaped Stanford on weekends and tried to stay out of Palo Alto as much as possible (those people are sick down there). I was pretty close to having enough graduating credits, but I was absolutely miserable at Stanford, couldn't stand the students there save for a handful of insane people like me, and I applied for a program and scholarship in Yugoslavia (before the breakup) and was accepted, and went for the summer to study Serbocroatian--now called Croatian and Serbian.
Within the first two hours of my stay in Zagreb, the capital of the Croatian Republic, I met a guy named Branko who became my partner for over three years (also confirming to the general Eastern European population that I am indeed, bent). At the end of an amazing summer spent traveling Yugoslavia, Hungary and CZ, I was offered a teaching position and taught at a private school (fabulous, brilliant kids aged 14-21) and for an energy firm (alcoholic workers, a blast!) and became a minor celebrity in Zagreb, due to the fact that I played a white polar bear puppet named Shaggy on Croatian television, on a program for English as a second language, to intermediate learners all across the country. I also got involved in radio over there and co-hosted English by Radio, and also recorded English commercials for Levis, that were used throughout Yugoslavia. At the end of that year, Slovenia had declared its independence from the Yugoslav Federation, followed by Croatia one month later. I awoke one morning and on my way to my teaching jobs, there was a tank outside my apartment building, of the Yugoslav Military (which had always been controlled by the Serbs), and within a few weeks everything in the country turned to fear and war. The US Embassy advised that I return to the US. I did shortly thereafter, returned to Minneapolis, and I helped my partner Branko (a crazy fucking bastard, too) get over to the US so that he could avoid being sent into a really shitty, semi-Holocaust war that lasted several years.
For a time, education could change the narrow courses of East and West. As a student I believed this, we all believed it, all of my friends at Stanford. We were liberal arts students who seemed to know this better than the others. But we were still mired between products and history.
We were after ideas but we were after material. In fact, we were dialectical materialists in a shopping mall, hating it. First World hatred. Such hatred is reaction against the suburban; trying to bring chaos out of order. In fact, armed with knowledge we were questioning, rejecting, changing with time. What we were really after was a third road.
After the standardized testing there were courses that slipped through our fingers. Like Soviet Foreign Policy. Skeptics thought Gorbachev and the Soviet reformers were just friendly Communists. This was like calling Kurt Waldheim of Austria or Jean Marie Le Pen of France friendly Nazis. These individuals are more complex. Gorbachev deserved his Nobel Prize, he was Socialism with a human face. To all the PC weirdoes, his visit to Stanford confirmed that Neo-Socialism was alive there. But who believed it? Soviet Foreign Policy and friendly Communists are now reformed and after material, and Neo-Socialism is an enigma.
Is our goal to control the future or perfect the past?
*
FAKING IT
A gay priest at Sunday evening mass and me, a circle of friends both male and female, playing holy. The rituals of our beliefs, but what of our beliefs. At the time, the beliefs we carried were for our self-preservation, to protect our names, offer us hope and opportunity, save us from lives of adventure. I turned my back on all that, and then at the turn of the millennium so had the larger world, turned its back on all the fear, the falsehood, the fantasies of good. Good men, good women, good deeds. The only good deed is love and we were not part of that love, so our deeds were meaningless.
Identity. The who what where why when of existence. Who are you and what do you do and where are you going and when will you finally arrive there. Little had I known that I was a kind of mad scientist creating my own monster that was myself. As Nikola Tesla envisioned near the end of his life, he believed he would be able to create a device that could photograph a person’s memories, to preserve those memories for life, of life. This story is such a photograph, painted in the way of words that will unfold to comprise who has lived, what has been lived, where, why lived in such an way, and when the memories can finally burn themselves out to reveal the deeper truth of a human condition.
*
The president said we won the Cold War. But who believed him? And what was the prize? Freedom? His fear of Communism was like our fear of fascism, as strong and as scary as anything, and not dealt with in a way that would diminish the fear and instead promote understanding on both sides, or at least on one side. No discourse, just denial. Denial of Realpolitik in action on a global scale. The Germans know how the Cold War was won. Das Geburt Einer Nation.
Many Americans did believe the president, just like they believe in possessions. Gorbachev correctly stated that the United States was the "initiator" of the nuclear arms race. In this respect, the United States is partially to blame for the misery of the people there, for shortages, for ecological disaster. The United States was a provocateur, and the Soviet leadership responded defensively by spending everything the people earned on nuclear arms. This, combined with a losing political ideology, is why they lack possessions. But the president blamed only the Soviet leadership, the nomenclature, and he believed himself. Many Americans believed it because they had no choice; they needed to hear that we were winning even though we were losing. If they didn't believe it there would be no justification for spending.
What would they do without their faith?
*
We wake up one morning and go to our closets and find that we have nothing to wear. The fact is, our closets are full of clothes. But we go shopping anyway. And those malls, so sterile, offensive, ready to send us home with the commodity. So we leave in disgust and go to shop downtown instead, where the buildings are older and characterized by brick and tiles rather than mere concrete blocks. But it's just the same activity in a different environment. So we go back to our books and find that we are living our own fears. Where is the quality of life?
I pick up the paper and find Gorbachev, the Russian, is coming. But this, too, is made into an event for selling material. Newspapers, T shirts, coffee mugs, wrist watches, Soviet flags. Buy now before history repeats itself.
*
The month of May has a certain magic, it can change the course of history by ending Communist power. It was May 1989 when Hungary expelled its long-standing Communist leader Janos Kadar; that same month Czechoslovakia elected Václav Havel president of the new Czech and Slovak Republics and several years earlier, in 1968, the Prague Spring of March had, by May of the same year, sent shock waves as far as Paris. The Czech and Slovak peoples had attempted to break from rigid Soviet Communism, signaling similar movements in Poland in April and May. Romania elected its first democratic parliament in May 1990 after the fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu. Communist Bulgaria fell apart in May, so too Albania. And it was May 1989 when Chinese students began the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square against the Communist government of China. Even Russian resistor Kerensky had his day in May, before it all began, when he became Russia's leader, however brief, five months before the Bolshevik takeover in 1917.
There was a man named Josip Broz, Marshall Tito who managed to defy all odds against him: Soviet Communism, Western imperialism, South-Slavic nationalism. He was a leader who created a nation between two different worlds, between the East and the West. When he died in May 1980 everything he created died with him and the world became smaller, people became bigger. May had become October, but the revolution had reversed its course. Ten years after Tito's death Communism died in most of the republics of Yugoslavia and free elections were being held, in the month of May. Communism was dead and red stars and hammers and sickles had become, in the consumer sense of the word, possessions.
*
Tito was the president of Yugoslavia for thirty-seven years. Yugoslavia seemed to me to be the most progressive of the East European nations. There the people lived with enough material to be comfortable, not deprived of the basics of modern living - telephones, televisions, wash machines, up-to-date music, imported wine and beer - unlike the republics of the Soviet Union or the rest of Eastern Europe, and it was not a gluttonous country, not like America. In Yugoslavia, especially in the north in Croatia and Slovenia, the economy was controlled by central authorities, but there was also a modest free market which maintained a standard of living higher than any other Communist nation. And with all of the changes taking place after the free elections of May, it seemed that a true democracy was about to be established.
Even the social scene was far more enlightened than in the other Central and East European countries. Foreigners were always welcome and Yugoslav hospitality overflowed; women had greater roles in business and government; gays and lesbians in Ljubljana and Zagreb had established their own organizations and were making political progress. Even though Croatia and Slovenia were controlled by puppet Nazi regimes during World War II, there existed less anti-Semitism than in other parts of Communist Europe and the Jewish community, especially in the capital cities of Ljubljana and Zagreb, received equal representation; and the arts were progressive and exhibited innovative theories and designs, from IRWIN and LAIBACH in Slovenia, theater in Croatia, folk dance in Serbia, multi-ethnic sporting competition in Bosnia and Hercegovina, literature in Macedonia.
In Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where access to the free-thinking West was now as easy, there still existed suspicion of foreigners; women were largely restricted to their traditional roles; gays and lesbians were still met by great hostility; and the arts were just beginning to emerge from heavy censorship. And in the Soviet Union, Romania and Bulgaria the situation was much worse. There the first concern of the people was getting a nice cut of meat on the table and a television in the living room. Foreigners, women, minorities, fashion, the arts received last consideration.
At the time of my departure Yugoslavia was next in line to be accepted into the European Community, next in line before Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Poland. In Yugoslavia everything seemed very positive and change was a constant factor. So I went to Yugoslavia with optimism and a need to break the American possession, to find experiences to shape a life.
It is May and the world opens at my feet; I see the world through my eyes, I hear the world through my ears. There are peoples I have never met, places I have never seen. There are other peoples who live differently than me, who possess values different from mine.
The quality of life? It all depends on the quality of the questions you ask yourself.
___________
THE ARRIVAL
=
Zürich is the aire apparent of Europe, it survived Europe's devastating wars and learned from them. The city attests to this with clean, quiet streets, graced by well-educated, multi-lingual, free-market socialists with qualities and standards of living unmatched in the world. Zürich's Franco-German lifestyle manages to balance Swiss society. Its social climate mixes relaxed elegance, found in France, and efficient order, found in Germany. You notice this rare combination in most places of Zürich city, in shops and boutiques, in restaurants, at the cinema, museums, in bars, virtually everywhere service is part of daily living.
(It's different in English-speaking countries. By comparison, London was much like San Francisco. I was shopping on London's Sloan Square and New King's Road in August of 1986 at all the shops you also find near San Francisco's Union Square, minus the big Macy's, I Magnin, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Those department stores frame Union Square and are mostly responsible for building San Francisco's reputation as one of the main shopping cities in the U.S. Sloan and New King's Road are similar to San Francisco's Post Street and Geary Street - just off from Union Square - the boutiques similar and the young people near identical, in their Fiorucci and leather jackets, Benetton and faded denim, Ionsdale.
That was in 1986, yet Post and Geary Streets are much the same today, full of young people dressed like that. Now in Zurich, in the old quarter of the city, the guys dress in sport coats and turtle necks, sometimes striped shirts and neck ties, and the girls wear turtle necks and jeans, sometimes long handsome brocade skirts, always topped off with brown leather coats or jackets or suede, and shoes that seem professional rather than rebellious - rebellious Dr. Marten's Shoes of London and San Francisco. Zurichers are fashionable but in an unconscious, nonchalant way. But it's not fashion that makes these differences between people of my generation. It's social. The main difference among my generation in London and San Francisco, and Zürich's old quarter, is an aire of confidence that radiates from the young Zürichers. They seem to have a clear sense of direction as they walk, converse, negotiate. It's like they have security, are already well-established in their careers, ordering Cognac in a handsome cafe, expressing thoughts and ideas rather than impulse and emotion. In London or San Francisco, in 1986 or just a few days ago, young people are generally reluctant to engage in specifics; thoughts of poetry, literature, history do not enter conversation. Rather, ordering beer in dive pubs - thought to be inverse-snobbery, therefore politically-correct - running conversations that revolve around dissatisfaction, lack of direction).
Zürich has confidence. The shops are there to give direction: coats and ties and turtle necks that you wear to look handsome in that particular, living cafe. San Francisco and London ask questions, hesitate. You buy your clothes and wear them anywhere. "Are you going out tonight?" "Yeah, I guess so." "Where are you going?" "I don't know. Just out."
Not French but German is Zürich's lingua franca, also Switzerland's official language, though one hears occasional traces of French in the simplest contexts like in the supermarket, where your order might be counted in German, followed by a polite merci upon conclusion of the transaction. These qualities make the people of Zürich mild and mannered without great pretensions. Yet Zürichers have a strong sense of materialism, similar to the Italians: an assertive, polished dressing style, cosmopolitan eating habits, automobiles that reflect success, apartments that provide convenience and comfort. This is western Europe. But Zürichers live stylishly without the decadence found in cities like Rome, Florence or Milan.
Zürich has confidence. It is a city on its own, Switzerland a country on its own. It is diverse without disorder, ordered without sterility.
*
I left San Diego International Airport destination Zürich early in the morning, about 7:10 am. My mother brought me to the airport, always there to support me with her love and respect for my independence. My ticket aboard the now-defunct Pan Am Airlines was purchased, one-way from San Diego to Zürich, for $349.00, a student fare before high-season. The initial flight from San Diego to Los Angeles was a small propeller plane, holding no more than forty passengers.
The flight to Los Angeles was only about thirty minutes in length. The transfer flight to a 747 wide-body to New York was about four-and-one-half hours and uncomfortable, a bus in the air. I quickly made my connection to another 747 wide-body (what was wrong with the first one?) and took my seat next to a very large woman with big hair, dressed in silky multi-colors that shocked the wide, blue-gray design of the jumbo jet. I had no idea that I would spend three-fourths of the ten-hour flight talking with her, listening to her, about her devotion to Medjugorje, the Holy Sight in south-western Croatia where the apparition of the Blessed Virgin is said to have appeared on several occasions.
Mid-way into the flight I realized that more than half the passengers on the plane were going to Medjugorje. Mary Beth was in her late-sixties and said that she needed to make the pilgrimage to Medjugorje before her legs got any worse. She kept patting my hand as it lay there on the tray-table, telling me that "we have something in common: we have both been called to Croatia on a mission" - hers is to seal her spiritual life, to confirm her years of devotion to Christianity by coming closer to Christ's spirit borne of Mary; and mine, to open myself to the world and to nurture the spirit within, so she said. I believe her, Aqua Net and all.
Mary Beth had a glass of white wine before dinner, the plastic dinner. "Maybe you'll get married over there," she said. I didn't want her inside my head. I ordered a beer and felt guilty in her presence, my second already. Then I looked diagonally across the aisle and saw an elegant young man speaking seductive German to his traveling partner, die liebe. They were on their fourth beers already, Heineken. Dinner arrived and the film began.
I was feeling all warm and relaxed, until the film began. I was sitting there, my grandmother on my right, Europe on my left; comfort, right; desire, left; and then one of the worst examples of American popular culture starts flickering before us, "The Secret of My Success." I decided to concentrate on Mary Beth, her large breasts seemed to expand as she ate. She was so large, yet ate so little. Her wine shimmering and her dress shimmering, chicken breast and Aqua Net.
Her breasts were a large part of her. At times they almost moved on to her plastic tray of food, a meeting of breasts. Hers were definitely breasts, not "boobs." I have always hated that word, "boobs." It makes that part of the female body sound foul, ridiculous. Yet most of the women and girls I have known have always called their breasts "boobs." My mother, my sister, Angie Henley - the girl who was - "boobs," they would say. Chicken boob, I thought. The Blessed Virgin Mother has breasts. "The baby Jesus lay in the manger nursing from the Blessed Virgin's boob." It doesn't sound right, like "catsup." Ketchup. No matter how you looked at Mary Beth's chest, "boobs" would make them sound insignificant.
*
Landing at the airport in Zürich was smooth but left me tired, after more than sixteen-hours of transfers and flying. I quickly passed through passport control and went to the baggage terminal, where I waited for more than two hours, soon discovering that my luggage had been lost. Pan Am apologized, gave me one-hundred Swiss Franks (about seventy dollars at the time), and assured me they would deliver my luggage within two days. Two days in the same clothes in a city full of style and grace! I was frustrated to say the least. I was tired and set out to find an affordable hotel near the center of the city.
*
Leaving the airport which conveniently connects to the metro station, I was heading toward the trains that transport passengers to the city. Swarms of French high-schoolers are being herded toward the trains by their adult guides. I feel an urge to follow them, not knowing in which direction I should be heading. I knew that would only lead me to a youth hostel where I would end up sharing a large room with six or eight squirmy boys. Turning from their path, I wander around in a tired daze, buy a liter of mineral water, drinking it and managing to pull myself together and discover that I am in the heart of Europe, on my own. I went to transit information in order to inquire directions to the city center.
I entered the passage to the metro without paying, knowing that I could plead ignorance if I were caught because I neither spoke French, German, nor Italian, although I knew that much of the population of Switzerland speaks English as well.
*
I went ahead to the trains, finding a seat and soon discovering that I am sitting next to two couples speaking some Slavic language that I can't quite distinguish. I know they are not speaking Russian because I had studied Russian for three years, though several of their words are very near Russian, their strong accents telling me that they come from beyond western Europe. I know they were not speaking Croatian or Serbian, because I had just finished my first course in that language. But once again several words are very familiar to me, now sounding more Croatian than Russian.
The train reached top speed and emerged from the underground, the overcast sky bursting its cloudy-gray into the train's windows, casting a glowing light. I immediately savor my first glimpses of outer Zürich, tenements and factories near the train tracks quickly clip by. I r efocus on the couples, hoping to piece together enough information so that I can approach them in Russian. I gather that they will exit the train near the center of town. "Centar" is the key word they are using, a familiar word to many languages, so I quickly step behind them as they uniformly rise to leave the slowing train.
Standing very near to one couple, I utter a few words in Russian, hoping they would extract some meaning from similar words in their own language. "Excuse me," I say, "please tell me, where are you from?" They don't quite understand me and the man nearest me pays particular attention to what I say, wrinkling his brow and peering through his thick glasses, his mustache looks interested. I repeat the question and see a dim light flash in his head, then the same thing happens to his wife. They understand. They answer me in their own language, "We are from Prague."
Suddenly I am very excited because these are the first Czechs I have ever met and we managed to communicate. I am already in the East.
I feel like I am speaking with all of Czechoslovakia. Here, I thought, were people from a socio-economic reality I had been studying for several years. They feel like I had imagined. They, on the other hand, display no such enthusiasm. "I am from San Francisco," I say. "Are you Russian?" the man asks. "No, I am American." Instantly the man and his wife change their mood from dead-pan to the jolly couple from Prague. "AmEErikan!"
I guess they approve.
Not knowing particular Czech sensitivities - what I discovered several months later - that most Czechs hate the Russian language because of Soviet-style Communism that dominated their land for decades, I continue in Russian. I tell the two couples, one of them almost invisible, that this is my first visit to Zürich. Specially projecting my words to the couple with puzzled faces and wrinkled brows, I say that I need to reach the center of town, I hope they can help me. The man's wife says "o.k., (you are an naive American and will probably die without our help"). I regret this.
Exiting the train all together, the less interested couple float ahead, like deprived consumers, to a small chocolate stand, then toward the steps that lead to the light and the city. The other couple, my couple, point and gesticulate and explain to me, in Czech, in which direction I must go. They are not going in my direction. They want to be rid of me, but rid of me knowing that they have not neglected their duty. Slowly stepping backward, looking puzzled and interested in the woman in a pea-green sweater who is Czech, I watch her as she points toward an exit in the opposite direction, sharply jabbing her arm, alternately at me and then toward the exit, at me, then the exit, about fifty yards behind me. I stepped backward, looked at the exit, back at her arm, back at the exit, shouting "spasiba! spasiba?!" and turned to make my exit to the city of Zürich, Switzerland.
*
The Zürich Rothus Hotel is located just one block from the Zürichsee, or Lake of Zürich, in the city's bohemian district. Rooms and restaurants are cheaper there, shops are designed for a young, fashionable clientele without a lot of money. My room at the Rothus was the same. After checking in I went to my third-floor room to freshen up. I was so motivated to discover the city, but felt a bit ashamed knowing that I had been wearing the same clothes for twenty-eight hours, had ate in them, slept in them, sweat in them, and now, high from jet-lag, would continue to wear them for at least another day. I took a shower immediately, hoping to recover the fresh feeling that my clothes would deprive me. After my shower I put on a heavy splash of eau d' toilette and dressed and then left the hotel for a currency exchange, a newsstand, and a moderately-priced restaurant.
CANTON ZÜRICH
=
Good beer is plentiful in Zürich and I rarely missed a corner pub during long strolls down the cobblestone streets of the old section of the city. Finding a brightly-lit sausage stand where it was possible to enjoy a thick sausage with mustard and rye bread, accompanied by wonderful beer, I took in this German bad habit: too much meat, too much fat, too much carbohydrate-charged, high-calorie beer. Feeling slightly sated by the half-belly full, my jet-lag was nagging me to return to the hotel for a good rest. It was already past two in the morning, late morning back in California.
After a half night's sleep at the Rothus, I woke early and went to the hotel restaurant for a fine breakfast of juice, milk, strong coffee, rich dark bread, hard-boiled eggs, ham, and fruit. The chairs were cushioned with tapestry scenes of the countryside, the table simple and made of oak wood, sturdy and lasting. I enjoy this setting in the dining room and the older, accommodating waiter. On the table sat two newspapers, the Herald Tribune and the leading paper of Munich, Südeutches Zeitung, which made me think of my friend Egon Scotland, a journalist for the paper and with whom I had studied Croatian at Stanford University.
Together Egon and I watched Gorbachev enter the Stanford Quad, mobs of students there to greet him and tens of agents, from East and West, babbling in Russian and English. All that we could see was the top of his head, his birth mark, and even that required standing on the tip of our toes. Egon was scribbling a few words in his palm-sized notebook which would later turn into an article for his paper back in Munich. I was working for the Hoover Institution editing articles about this great event. We watched the birth mark move around the throngs of students, a pale planet with a red continent and some islands.
A brief glance at the headlines of the Herald Tribune and a third cup of coffee left me wanting for the streets of Zürich. I left with a salute to the waiter and a satisfied feeling, hoping that my gesture wasn't typical of the American.
*
A morning filled with visits to small museums, shops, and coffee bars is to me about the best way to spend free time in the city. I visited such places, as well as a few department stores, and an elegant sex shop, complete with marble floors, granite counter tops and hip, multi-lingual sales persons. Early afternoon taking photos and feeling acquainted with at least the old town section, I returned to a pub I had visited the night before. This pub was to be particularly memorable, not for its decor or service, but rather for the man I met while drinking a large stein of beer. His name was Gino Nemche, a resident of Zürich of twenty-two years. He was quite drunk.
*
Gino was the biographer of Herman Hesse, Jack Kennedy, and a biographer of Richard Nixon, although he lost the latter position because he was fired from his post as professor of English at Harvard University. Gino looked a lot like Larry King, though more handsome than Larry, without those suspenders. We talked about our studies - mine Eastern Europe; his Hesse, Kennedy, Nixon, and personal loss. He had been living in Zürich where he was able to maintain close contact with Hesse. But now that Hesse is long dead I got the impression that he is somehow lost, not quite sure of his place in Swiss society. He labored over Hesse and the Swiss, his green sweater flashing, his eyes flashing. "Why here, Herman? Why Zürich?" he said, taking a gulp from the stein. "The fucking Swiss are so fucking tight," he demanded, spit spraying from his quivering lips, dangerously close to my beer. "Fucking Switzerland for the fucking Swiss and all the rest is fucking piss, like this fucking beer! Superior." "Right," I said, enjoying my beer more and more with every four-letter word that he sputtered. Privately I hoped the bar tender didn't understand English. Yet Gino was quite joyful in the midst of his frustration. Was he on drugs? Yes. The beer is a wonderful drug. But his joyfulness also came from speaking English with a fellow America who listened to his blubber and wisdom (he was articulate).
Gino bought me a beer or two and he had several. Watching his eyes swell with the frustrations of his life, I wondered what really makes his life here so emotional. He no longer loves his wife, a fact that leaked out of him as he descended one of the peaks where he keeps Hesse. But that didn't seem to bother him. Was it his failures as a biographer? his lost fame or fortune? could the Swiss really be so awful? Superior? No. Perhaps lack of love? That was it. Perhaps he really loved Hesse. He saw a world in him and he wanted to touch him. Hesse was Narcissus and Gino was like Goldman but he's talking about a dead man; he's a living man. I think he wants to live but he doesn't know where to go from here. Now he's trying to win my affection. Typical Goldman.
Gino longs to be as great as Hesse, to live as fully as the great author, if
not in reality, at least in his own writing. Now this man is crying. It was the type of crying when you are a child and you've lost your mother in the store, face bunched-up and all red, like clown make-up. His tears were like diamonds, they glistened so.
About fifty minutes with Gino left me wanting again. What did I want?
Gino had been too emotional for my taste, though my emotions are there and, given to drink, cause the frustrations to magnify. I just wasn't his soul-mate at the time. Bottoms up and we were inching from the open-air bar and onto the cobblestones. The sun was setting and the Zürichers were finished with this shopping district, on their way home to refresh and to prepare for their return to this even livelier night district.
*
Shuffling cobblestones under shadows of five- and six-story buildings, Gino bunched-up again and all I heard was tearsKennedyZürichHesseZürichHesse-HermantearsJackPatDicktearHesseBeer. It was like a scary poem.
Was he so damn frustrated? Trying to piece together the snowflake puzzle.
Did he want my sympathy? Crying until his wife threw him out of the house. Surely Herman would send him on his way, and probably did.
Pathetic. I just wanted his inspiration as a drunk writer, thinking alcohol might be an ingredient to writing, like I thought it was for James Joyce. And now I had become his confessor.
Listening to him was becoming a sin in itself.
Trying to cheer him up, I was mostly smiles, he was all tears. I bid him adieu and told him remember, "life is more than smiles, and tears." He knew that. The Rothus in front of us, I turned to enter its shelter, without Gino.
*
I woke up with a start, after a confusing, jet-lagged nap, not knowing whether I was in Romania or Scotland. My senses somewhat gathered, I took a shower, dressed in black trousers, black shoes and a bright blue shirt, packed my bag and went to the lobby where my other two bags were waiting for me, dejected and overweight.
Looking at the settled, mild elegance of the lobby, I realized that I had been in Zürich for two days and that it was time to get on the train to Zagreb in order to be in Croatia for the beginning of my studies. I checked out of the Rothus and went to the train station, trying to remain composed as I meet strangers on the street, my bags so heavy they embarrass me.
I knew I had reached the "Belgrade Express" when I stumbled into this
young guy speaking Serbian, through cracked lips and tar-stained teeth, to a portly, haggard woman dressed in a tacky orange polyester dress, bearing a large orange nylon bag that bulged like it was full of onions. They clearly stood out next to the rows of trains heading for destinations like Paris, Milan, and Munich; those Westerners in pin stripes and linen. I took the liberty of asking him, "kuda ide ovaj voz," to which he responded, "BEOGRAD!" I knew I had found a friend. I never saw him again.
____________
TRAIN IN VAIN
=
I boarded the train at Zürich Central with my bloated bags, finding my coupé after passing through six cars, feeling like a rhinoceros passing through a garden hose. With the help of a Serbian- and Croatian- speaking young gentleman, we hoisted my bags to the top luggage rack above the seats and exchanged exhaustion, plunking down into our pea-green seats.
The train ride from Zürich to Zagreb was everything but "Express." The journey was over fifteen hours long and uncomfortable, but nevertheless made enjoyable by the company of the young guy with whom I shared my coupé. After a couple of hours of watching the rolling countryside, listening to my Walkman, and wondering whether this young guy was wondering about me and my story, as I wondered about he and his story, we struck a stumbling conversation in Croatian.
My Croatian wasn't very good yet, I had only studied the language for ten weeks at Stanford. He didn't know a word of English, which surprised me; I thought every European knew a few words of English. He didn't know a single word. Not even "hello," or "thank you." But we managed to communicate quite well.
We talked about usual things: he was from a small town in northern Bosnia, we both were twenty five, etc. We talked about unusual things: the changes taking place in Yugoslavia, the differences among the six primary ethnic groups there, Balkan politics, Soviet politics, Gorbachev, and we discussed why I decided to study in Zagreb.
The train ride is now soothing.
I immediately notice the difference in communicating with the "European." Though we are strangers, he sits much closer to me than an American would. He takes off his shoes to relax, we get deeper into conversation, spending much time in clarifying ideas expressed cross-culturally. After a couple of hours of talk, Miso now sits directly across from me, he places his feet on my seat next to me, about three inches from my left leg, his white socks clean and new. I feel comfortable - respect from him because I know he is sincere, uninhibited, unlike Americans. His blond hair is not what I had expected; his blue eyes like mine. Blond Bosnian boy. I had thought the influences in Bosnia were mainly Moslem, Turkish, dark hair and skin, suspicion, anti-western. He is somehow German, yet Slavic.
*
The night spent on this train was long, frequently interrupted by the various train conductors that checked the passengers' passports. Miso and I frequently exchange annoyances over this regimen. The Swiss border approaches along with the Swiss "passport controller." He was an upright gentleman, well acquainted with foreigners, and was more pleasant than the stern, mechanical controller at the border of Austria.
He glances at the passports, not giving much thought to our countries of origin, stamps them, or not, (Americans do no need a visa, which makes me feel uncomfortable in front of Miso) and bids us a pleasant journey. The same procedure happens at Austria's border. But finally, at the border of Yugoslavia, there is a rigid, callused, Communist-molded, crooked-feeling, passport controller who disturbs our early morning and imposes his authority on us. Yet one Yugoslav controller is not enough. We are met by two, and then a third.
They wear buffed-green uniforms and stiff-brim, red-starred caps on their square heads, jarring open the doors to your coupé, not requesting but demanding your passport. You are now in Yugoslavia.
"PASOS!" is the demand. It's like your passport not only confirms your identity, but also justifies it. They interrupt your enjoyment of the sharp Julian Alps, rolling fields, salmon-brick homes. As the head controller forced open the doors to our coupé, his girth preceding the rest of him, my Bosnian friend obediently handed over his Yugoslav passport as if it were an habitual identity check, which made me angry. I felt an urge to refuse my passport, but I thought that might lead me to even sterner Yugoslav controllers. The dark-haired controller with steel eyes looked into my naive American ones and said, "PASOS!"
I gave him my passport and he asked me, in Croatian or maybe Slovenian, to go to the front of the train. I got up, bid Miso a greeting amounting to "see you later?" not knowing if I would return. I left the coupé for the tight, wobbly passage to the front of the train, the moving train where rows of brown-clad, smoking Slavs loiter the halls of the train, like cattle cars. The controller kept prodding me on, further and further through the train, eight or nine cars; I had no idea where the front of the train began, nor what to look for. But he nudged me with the back of his hand, "dalje, dalje," a glint in his eye that translated either "We are going to murder your stupid American ass," or "Keep going, you naive American who would be better off in Italy."
Finally I could see that we had reached the front of the train, there were no more cars to pass into. Suddenly feeling cornered, I saw the back end of the engine car, a bright-orange color that contrasted the pea-green passenger cars. Ordering me to stand in the doorway of an empty coupé, the controller stood a couple of feet from me while the train traveled further east. All this time he held on to my passport. I was nervous. I was sure his sly smile under his stiff cap would mock me further. My bags still back in the coupé eight or nine cars away, I thought I would return to find everything stolen including my underwear, my Bosnian friend long gone.
*
Appearing like a stranger out of nowhere, a gray town sits quietly surrounded by brilliant sunshine and rich green hills . A few small factories so close to the train tracks you could touch them, white curtains dirtied by exhaust flap out of windows of small homes, strangers waving to strangers. The train station is now apparent by the sight of stray passenger cars standing alone, two, three, and four tracks away, abandoned. The name of the station scrolls before my eyes while the brakes screech sharply, G - L - I - N - A is the place. Steam and steel announce the first stop in Yugoslavia. I was prepared for death.
Coming to a complete stop, the train was disturbingly silent. The controller took my arm and led me out of the train, silently to the platform. Then he led me to a stairway in the middle of the platform that went down many steps to a dark passage, random puddles and train exhaust tangible to my senses. Walking through the dark tunnel, images of the film "Midnight Express" appeared in my head. At the end of the tunnel was an office marked Milicija (Police). Entering the police office, the controller twisted the brass knob and turned toward me, saying "wait here for a moment," his tar-stained teeth now visible by the light escaping the office. I stood outside the office and waited.
As I waited, I examined the door: a dingy mustard-brown color with a powder-smoked window that permits the light to cast a haze into the corridor on the other side. I stood there feeling guilty, guilty for being American, for being "rich," for wearing colors other than pea-green, brown, or gray. But most of all I was guilty of feeling privileged, knowing that I could leave this place if anything really serious happened.
Or could I? What could happen?
All at once the controller came out of the office, handed my passport to me and lead the way back through the damp tunnel, back to the train to Zagreb. While we walked back he began to take longer strides and quicken his step. I asked him "would it be all right to get a cup of coffee to bring on the train?" He replied, "ON THE TRAIN," not with exclamation, but in a strong, masculine voice, leaving no room for challenge, "ON THE TRAIN." But now I was confused. There was no dining car on the train, no cart service to the coupé, no services whatever. I knew it would be pointless to ask him where to buy coffee on the train.
Walking back through the train cars to my coupé, I looked at the stamp in my passport. There it was. A full-page stamp permitting my entrance to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. "GRATIS" was also stamped on the page, for that summer Yugoslav officials ruled to allow all visitors to enter the country without the usual twenty-dollar charge for a visa. There is something exciting about national stamps in your passport. Sure, that's what passports are for. And I always get a rush each time new stamp appears from a country I am visiting for the first time. I reached my coupé to find my Bosnian friend looking anxious, yet tired. I was so happy to see him, I wanted to hug him.
It has been a long trip and we are both very hungry. He stands up and goes to the window of the train and shouts at a pudgy man pushing a cart full of big steaming sausages, white and dark bread, bottles of juice and mineral water, cigarettes, and coffee. He asks me if I want anything from the cart, and I realize that the controller is at least partially human. I told Miso that I didn't have any Yugoslav Dinars, but that I would gladly give him dollars if he would oblige.
We each had two sausages, dark bread, juice, and I had a liter of mineral water. The train was still sitting at the station as we inhaled a noon-time meal at six-forty five in the morning. As I finished the last swallows of the bottle of mineral water, the train smacked and shook into motion and Miso let his wobbling head drift back to rest on the seat. We were about four hours from Zagreb.
*
My adrenaline was high and I didn't nap, I could sense the end of an arduous journey. Miso, on the other hand, was in another physical state and I watched him, his head bobbing from side to side, mechanically. He looked a little grubby now, in his black leather jacket with a mustard stain on the left lapel, his hair matted on one side from a bad night's sleep. The glorious mountains outside cruise by, their dark, rich evergreens like none I have seen before. The floor is a murky brown, something I didn't take interest in earlier.
The face of the baggage handler seemed to emerge from that same floor. He stood there below the doorway of the train car, his blue worker's coat unfriendly, abused. I struggled to lower my bags from the train's doorway onto his wooden cart. Miso quickly moved around me and jumped down to the station platform. Grabbing my bags one at a time from my tired hands, Miso aggressively stacked my bags onto the cart in a way that said "I insist on doing this for you though I will never see you again, my friend." The baggage handler began pushing his cart toward the station's main hall, one of the back wheels wobbling around in circles like it didn't belong to that cart. I turned to say goodbye to Miso. "Do vidjenja, stari," he said, calling me "pal," a very friendly gesture in this part of the world. "Do vidjenja, Miso. Vidimo se!" I said, "we'll be seeing you," though I know it isn't true.
____________
PARK TO PARK
=
The taxi was alien. Bald tires and silver patches of paint, a door that barely closed. The back seat was used for transporting large sacks of potatoes to the market (in Yugoslavia, ordinary passenger vehicles are used everyday for carrying sacks of vegetables to the cities' markets), so I sat in front. There was no "TAXI" light on the top of the car, which is why I hailed this guy. I thought he would be cheaper. Having exchanged money in the station hall, I paid the baggage handler fifty dinars. Two teeth stared back at me and said "hvala," thank you. I dropped into a spring-less bucket seat, a mound of cigarette butts at my left knee.
Zagreb's Glavni Kolodvor, or Central Station, is an elegant Austro-Hungarian structure that prominently stands before the proud statue of Croatia's King Tomislav, the statue itself standing before the entrance to Tomislav Square and Park. The driver (I think he was Gypsy) sat there waiting and puffing on a brown cigarette, the weather was hot and dry and I started to roll down the window as I sat in the taxi while he negotiated the traffic snarl before driving away from the curb of the station. Cranking the window open, the exhaust of heat and dust offered little reprieve from the rank smell of vinyl and ashes inside the car. A reprimand more severe than any I have ever received from a stranger entered my left ear and carried through my brain and down my right arm, forcing me to roll the window up again. "Propuh! Propuh!!" he scolded. This means "draft," and there is a universal belief in Yugoslavia that a draft coming into a moving vehicle through an open window, be it car, bus, or tram, causes the common cold. Even if it's 125° F. So most everybody drives around with windows rolled up, buses too. And if you should open a window on the tram, watch out! You could have the entire tram-load of passengers scolding you about the "propuh."
At first sight I wasn't sure if Zagreb looked more like the pictures I had seen of cities in Austria, or whether it resembled some place I imagined far off in Romania. We sped past the entrance to Tomislav Park, the statue standing high atop its base, the Yugoslav red star in relief on the front of the foundation. Within minutes we were at the entrance of Cvjetno Naselje, or Flower Settlement, my housing for the next eight weeks. Not a bloom in sight, nor flowers of any kind. Just many pleasant trees and a long, chalky sidewalk cutting a broad swath through the central courtyard that separates the various buildings. My Spartan dorm room at the "studenski dom" felt like a second-rate hospital room. I relieved my bags of the pressure they had been under for several days, searched for my shave kit and took a cold shower, though cold was not my choice. I decided that I must immediately find the center of town and discover how I got here.
*
So soon I meet a handsome young Yugoslav? I had read that Tomislav Square was a good meeting place, behind the Umjetnicki Pavilijon, the Art Pavilion, but I had not anticipated such a stroke of good luck. The park is a rectangle about four-hundred yards from the north end to the south and Tomislav square sits in the middle of the park. There in the middle of the square, suffering from lack of maintenance, was a fountain spraying six or eight water jets, about eight feet into the air, in random directions. The park smelled sweet, fresh flowers in bloom and trees fresh with new leaves, women in blue workers' coats with their hair tied up were tending the gardens around the fountain and near the pavilion. There were many people, old and young, with their dogs walking in the grass. There were dark skinned men who looked unwashed sleeping on the park benches and there were office workers sitting together with sandwiches, enjoying their lunch and watching the pigeons peck the graveled walkway that leads through the center of the park. The sun was bright and the park was illuminated with the light and the relaxation of mid-day; there was time for everyone there to enjoy moments of leisure in the late Spring. I walked past the statue of King Tomislav, the horse's testicles hanging there like jewelry, around to the east side of the park, spotting him loitering with his dog.
I took a seat on a step of the stairs that lead down into the park, a warm breeze blowing through the shade of the trees in back of me. I was wearing all black, black pants cut just below the knee, a black t shirt, short white ankle socks, black mock wing-tip shoes. Comfortable. I thought I might get noticed dressed like this. We connected. I glanced at him deliberately, about seventy meters away, eyes set on the subject but head turning, sitting there and turning my head like embarrassment, not wanting to be too conspicuous.
He had a definite aim on me, his eyes so dark I couldn't see them, black. He fussed to keep his dog tame, his flower print shirt cool, unusual, I thought, this is Eastern Europe. Sitting down, he pulls a cigarette and his dog - a mutt with dominant traits of a German Shepherd - lays down beneath the park bench. Not knowing how this process works in the new country, I walk across the park slowly, past the bench where he sits. Having walked from the east side of the park to the west side, I took a seat on the step directly opposite where I was sitting minutes earlier. The glancing at each other continues, he is very deliberate, knows what's going on. I become more persistent. I get up to walk across the park again and suddenly his dog is charging me, barking, and I take a step back as the dog strains the leash. "Do you speak English," he blurts, startling me more than the dog did. "Yes, yes, I am American," I say. "Don't worry, she won't hurt you," the dog now our liaison. "My name is Branko," he says. "I'm Mark." We shake hands and look into the eyes, not black but honey-brown, and take a seat together on the bench. "My dog is Rea." "Like Chris Rea," I said. "Yes, exactly," he responds, and Rea takes her place under the bench once again.
*
Zoran used to hit him. The first time he told me this I cringed, thinking that
Branko was weak to let another person do that to him. When I met him he was uninspiring, unlike Branko. Branko was more like Lovorka, his fag hag as I told her. She loved this grand title, she had never heard it before. She was to become our fag hag, Zoran would soon be out of the picture
Zoran was seven years older than him, and I was four years older, though that first day on the bench in Tomislav Park I told Branko that I was twenty one. He was twenty but would turn twenty one in two days, on Friday.
God he looked sexy in the bistro. He took me to the finest in the city, the bistro at the Hotel Esplanade, the best hotel in all of Croatia. He was dressed impeccably, an olive-brown suit made of summer wool, a crisp white shirt and a neck tie with a muted purple and gold paisley pattern. Sharp black Italian wing-tip shoes with a buffed gold buckle instead of laces. Cool. My erection seemed to back up all the way into my adam's apple, and I think the waitor noticed as he placed our drinks on the table.
We didn't hesitate because we wanted the same thing, each other. Two drinks each and a long stroll through Gornji Grad, or Upper Town, the proper name for Zagreb's historic old quarter, a long stroll that lead us to an elegant park where stands the Palace of Josip Jelacic, Croatia's famous nineteenth-century Baron who resisted the Communists in 1848. This was the place where I would experience my first luxury.
I was experiencing an entirely new reality, I was floating. He was unlike any other boy I had ever met. He wasn't part of the crowd I refer to as the shoppers---those boys who never stop shopping, shopping department stores for the latest wearable trends, shopping Uptown and ordering cappuccino and talking for hours about guys, clothes, being gay, shopping at night in the bars and always leaving with someone different. Branko isn't like that. Rather, he is between East and West, an inspiration, a third road? Somehow possession had not touched him, he is living from his mind and his heart, mostly through his heart.
I don't want to dissect Branko, but he represents more than the object of my affection, he also represents his country, Yugoslavia. He is different and his country is different. Yugoslavia was itself between East and West for decades, even centuries. Soviet-style Communism pushed hard into Central and Eastern Europe, but it didn't win in Yugoslavia, thanks to Josip Broz, or Tito, as he was popularly called, and therefore it didn't ruin the people the way it did in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And in Croatia and Slovenia especially a limited free market was allowed to coexist with the controlled economy of the Communists. There was a time when Croatia and Slovenia were on a par with Austria, cars and stereos and televisions were hardly ever in short supply and nearly everyone had a telephone. In the rest of Eastern Europe the people could only have dreamed of a material existence like that in Yugoslavia's north.
Yugoslavia was a Communist country, but more western, in many ways it was our Communist country, ours to influence, which in the nineteen-nineties became a major problem. As I had discussed with Miso on the train, Yugoslavia was changing.
We both took a piss near the palace, the deserted palace. The park was very dark, perfectly square in shape and surrounded by a very high wrought-iron fence, old and weathered and secure. Branko was pissing by one of the two pillars which support the roof over the entrance to the palace, I was pissing by the other. I desperately wanted to get my first glimpse of his cock. It was too dark. Standing there pissing on the palace, I imagined his uncut cock hanging happily outside of his summer-wool trousers, the stream of piss forming an arch toward the palace door, his black shoes supporting his thin legs and his legs firmly balancing his erect body.
This is my first night in Zagreb and I am here in this park with him. The kissing is powerful, long, deep, hungry, unending. His chest was so smooth, fresh, his white shirt giving way to darker skin than mine, a thinner body than mine. What it was like to reach into his trousers through the zippered-front and find there no underwear was perfect, just his erection and a moveable foreskin, a firmness and length and shape, arching slightly toward his body but not too much, perfect. Short brown hair with a few curls in front and his honey-brown eyes, dark trousers and dark skin, as I have said, a passionate boy as hungry as I am.
*
"What about Zoran?" I asked. "He's a jerk, I'm going to break it up with him," Branko said. "Break it off," I corrected. "I'm sorry?" "The expression is 'break it off,' the relationship I mean." "Oh, I'm sorry, of course, I'm going to break it off with Zoran," he said, and I believed him. I thought this decision seemed rather sudden and I told him, "you seem to have made this decision very suddenly...."
"Oh, not really. The relationship has been a shit for a long time. We fight all the time and he hits me when he gets angry with me." I was angry inside when I heard this, not only at Zoran for harming the boy I love even on our first night, but also I was angry with Branko for letting it happen to him. "But why do you let him do that to you," it's weak of you, I thought. "I don't know, he's just the jerk!" he said, using the definite article. "He's a jerk," I said. "Yes, he's the jerk." He didn't get what I was trying to tell him. "No, no, Branko, he's a jerk, we use an indefinite article in English when we are describing a jerk in general," I added, and he asked me, our cocks still in each other's hands, softer now, after our climax, "but why not the jerk? He is really THE JERK!" "Yeah, I know he is the jerk, but if you say this it means that he is just the one and only jerk in the world, and there are many, many, many jerks in the world!" And he told me, "yah, but Zoran is really the jerk! He's the only one who can be such a fucker!" "Yeah, exactly, he is a fucker!" I agreed, the indefinite article as it should be. "But it doesn't matter right now, I just want to be with you," he said, or I said, it doesn't really matter right now.
Our kissing was strong again and wet, more wet, his tongue like an extension of his heart transmitting lust which came to me like something my mouth needed so desperately I couldn't stop trying to give it back to him. His tongue was feeding me and I needed more of him, " I want to eat you! every inch." And my first luxury, this night, the first night, my first night, our very first night, a beginning for me, my strongest feeling, the first feeling; his cock was my first luxury. We spent a lot of time talking that night in the park, and he sang a song to me by Kim Wild. Mostly I kept repeating how much I couldn't believe that this was my first night in Zagreb, how much this feels like fate. I looked up into the sky and saw a sparkling night, so many stars and such a big night sky, space seemed more infinite than it actually is. He looked up too and I would only imagine what he was thinking, not wanting to ask him because I don't indulge in the usual clichés, being here at this time with the American. The park was perfect on our first night but I wanted to wait for a bedroom to taste my first luxury. And he only teased me.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
=
The next morning I was introduced to Lovorka at Café Tin, a small coffee house where law students congregate and hours of intelligent conversation serve to justify neglect of the boring law books. It was the first morning and I was dizzy after last night's delight, it was far beyond anything I had anticipated happening so suddenly. I woke up late, at ten-thirty, even though the alarm was set for nine. Branko was waiting for me in the rain near the steps where we exchanged our first glances yesterday afternoon, the cruising glances which can actually lead to love. He was standing under his umbrella tapping his foot, I think he was afraid that I wouldn't show up because I was a half-hour late. His shoes were the ones I hate and I would tell him later, once we are comfortable with each other. "Sorry I'm late, the alarm didn't ring." I said, really sincere. "I was wondering if you were going to come!" his voice sharp, which surprised me, we are still, technically, two single people hoping to become lovers. Lovorka wasn't late and she was sitting with two people drinking midnight coffee, a guy and a girl whose names I don't remember, dressed in black, all three of them. "She is the perfect fag hag," I thought, "pretty and potentially lesbian, overweight but not fat, she dresses to look thinner than she is, really-red lips, dark eye make-up, pointed shoes. She would be our cover on more than one occasion.
*
The sun was shining brightly in mid-afternoon, the temperature was around eighty-five Fahrenheit and we were having sex in my dorm room at Cvjetno Naselje when a knock on the door interrupted us, made us panic and scramble for our clothes. "Just a minute, please," I said, not knowing who was at my door or for what reason. "Just a minute," a bit louder after the second knocking. "Put on your shirt too," I said to Branko. "Where the hell are my shorts!" I was looking everywhere but only found my shirt. I went to my still-packed luggage and grabbed a fresh pair.
A man in his late-thirties, balding, tennis shoes and light blue socks, jean shorts and a white-and-brown-checked shirt stood in the doorway. "Are you Mark Norby?" It was his mustache asking the question, and it was his eye glasses that wanted to know. My half-erection under my shorts, no underwear, didn't want to deflate any further, I couldn't get Branko's body off my mind. "Yess, Yes, I'm Mark. Come in." "My name is John Kelly and I am the assistant director of the Croatian program this summer." "Oh," I said, "This is my....cousin, Branko, he's from Zagreb." "Dobar dan, drago mi je" (good afternoon, nice to meet you), says Mr. Kelly. "Ah, Norby, that's not Croatian. Are you related to Branko on your mother's side of the family?" I fumbled a minute and quickly recovered, "yeah, yeah, Branko is my cousin on my mom's side. This is the first time we have ever met!" "Wow," he says, "this must be exciting!" "Yes, it really is," I said, wondering what could possibly follow.
He began his monologue in slow, paced words.
"I came to tell you a little about the program in Croatian language and folklore. Your classes will begin on Monday (it was Wednesday, that day) at eight-thirty in the morning. Breakfast is served from seven a.m. until eight-fifteen and then your classes will begin. Usually you'll have classes Monday through Friday, but sometimes we'll be taking trips to various parts of Croatia and we will leave on Thursday and return on Monday. The weeks that we don't take trips you will have classes on Saturdays, but Sundays will always be free. Our first trip will be next weekend to P-l-i-t-v-i-c-a National Park and we will also be going to a few small villages in the area of I-s-t-r-i-a. He spoke in long, pausing tones whenever he spoke Croatian.
"Evenings you will be free to do what you like and you can choose not to eat dinner with the group, but we ask that you sign a sheet by morning, located near the dining room - everything will be more clear later - so that the cooks know how much food to make. If you are vegetarian (I'm not, but who knows, I might become one very soon) there is not much for you on the daily menu. Yugoslavs eat a lot of meat and every meal has some meat in it, even breakfast. And, you may have already noticed, Yugoslavs drink a lot and there will be alcoholic beverages at many functions. So if you don't drink (I do drink) you will have to be very polite and tell them that you just don't drink alcohol. Maybe your cousin has already told you about most of the customs in Yugoslavia (who? Oh, yeah, my cousin).
"If you have any medical problems during the course, you can tell me or Bill Marsh - have you met Professor Marsh yet? (no) and we will provide medication or escort you to the hospital if that should be necessary. I see you have a single room. If you would like a roommate (I don't want a roommate) you can change rooms during the next couple of days. Some people like to have a roommate to help them study or just for companionship (I've already found my heart's companion!). And if you have relatives from other towns in Croatia you can have one of them stay in your room for a night or two, that's no problem (I have a cousin who will be spending most nights in my room, I hope!). Or if you would like to spend a weekend with family that you have in Croatia, just let us know a few days in advance so that we can plan your absence from the group for that weekend. We do hope that you'll be spending most of the weekends with the group, we will be visiting many very interesting places and we want you to learn as much as possible about the entire country.
"We will be having a welcoming dinner tonight at seven-thirty in the dining room and you will get more information from Professor Marsh at that time. Do you have any questions that I could answer?" "No, everything seems very clear, thanks," I said, in a ritual way. "O.K.," he continued, "I'll look forward to seeing you tonight at the dinner. It was nice to meet you Branko, I hope to see you again soon."
"It was nice to meet you," said my Branko with his hand on my shoulder. "See you later."
*
The next night was Branko's birthday party. I was invited but there was one small problem - the party had been planned before my existence and Zoran the Jerk would be there. Branko hadn't told Zoran anything about the new state of affairs via l'Americaine, there wasn't time or place. Branko decided that I could come as Lovorka's date. Yet there was one more problem - the program was having a dinner with the Mayor of Zagreb as the guest of honor and the dinner would run quite late. I couldn't take Lovorka as my guest because it was a dinner for the foreigners, strange, I had to be there. Branko and Lovorka worked out the plan and the small details. Branko told Zoran and the rest of the guests, eight others, that "Lovorka has a friend from America who is visiting Zagreb and will be arriving later. I arrived to the Croatian Writer's Club about midnight, my first time to the club, began roaming the large room for Lovorka, knowing that I couldn't just approach Branko because, after all, we are supposed to never have met before.
The place is truly a club. You enter the huge iron and glass double doors from Republic Square, pushing hard because these doors weigh a ton and have been a part of this building since its creation, maybe two-hundred years ago. You follow a long dark corridor and approach a wood and glass elevator, but you need a key to use the elevator so you take the stairway to the left of the elevator shaft. The elevator shaft is open, you can see the elevator cables strung down to the elevator that is below you as you walk around the open shaft, around the square staircase of marble steps that lead to the third floor where the entrance to the club awaits you. You see the sign Club of Croatian Writers and enter the wood and class double doors. You are met by a tall wall of framed writers, all of them men, great men of letters who have graced the club and left. Turning toward the entrance of the bar you see gold walls all around and twelve- or thirteen-foot velvet drapes of royal blue that drape gracefully from the corners, belted by gold ropes and large gold tassels that allow the gold walls to shine forward. You turn to the right and enter a large room with more gold walls and royal blue drapes that makes these walls feel like stages. The tables are wood and the chairs are wood and scattered around the room and the patrons scattered with their drinks and conversations and cigarettes. Then you see Branko at the head of a long table with many guests smoking and drinking, toasting the birthday boy.
*
Since I had only met Lovorka on that one brief occasion at Café Tin I wasn't able to recognize her right off. But I did recognize Branko. I lost myself for a moment and began to walk up to him as he sat there at the head, the table covered in a baby-blue table cloth and rounds of colored cocktails. He spotted me out of the corner of his eye as I began to approach him but did everything he could to keep his head down, without acknowledging me. Then I saw Lovorka's blood-red nails clutching a goblet as it tipped back into her throat. I nervously made my turn toward her and "Lovorka! How are you! I found you." I kissed her on each cheek and she told me to sit beside her, pulling a chair out from the table and handling the whole undercover scene with casual grace. Zoran was ugly.
Branko was nervous and his bow tie seemed to be laughing at him. Lovorka introduced us. "Branko, this is my American friend Mark that I was telling you about." "Yes, how are you. Nice to meet you." "It's nice to meet you, Branko." I made no special effort to make this appear like a first-occasion meeting. I really didn't care what Zoran would think if he knew we were seeing one another. After all, I was planning to live in this city for many months to come. I'm sure we would all meet again.
I was introduced to them all. Unbeautiful Zoran, Danijel the blond, Nina the artist, Zdeslav the greasy (his hair was perpetually slick), Milena the hair dresser, Tomislav-the-absolute flame, and someone, a girlish-woman with a lot of makeup, I don't remember her name. I paid most attention to Lovorka and increasing attention to Nina. Nina's head was sort of floating as some new age music held us all together as it played from the loud speaker above. She asked, "so what do you think of Zagreb?" I wanted to tell her that I think it is the most marvelous city in the world and that my first night here was, well, orgasmic! "Zagreb is so beautiful, it's a very romantic town. It looks much like Austria." "Yes," her head still floating, "many buildings in Zagreb were built by the Austrians." "Yes" "How long, Mark, have you know Lovorka?" ("What?" "What should I say?" "Who is Lovorka? Years? Yugoslavia?") "I've known Lovorka for a couple of years, when her father was in Austria." ("No!") "In Austria?" she pondered. "Lovorka, when were you in Austria with your father?"
Lovorka had been talking to Tomislav-the-absolute and hadn't heard a word. "A couple of years ago," I said. "You were in Austria, and we met, with your father, remember?!" "Oh yes, how could I forget! My father was in Vienna for a concert arrangement. We met in Vienna, Nina." And she turned back to the absolute. "Ooh, how interesting," Nina chirped. "But why were you in Austria, Vienna, Mark? Are you a musician?" ]
"No, no. I was in Vienna, because, my mother was visiting her cousin." ("No! I didn't say that!") "Oh? Your mother is Austrian?" "Yes, yes Nina, would you like another drink!?" "I would love another drink, Mark. Your mother is Austrian and you're going to buy me another drink!" Her head continued to float throughout this bastardized account of history.
A lull happened as we waited for the waiter to come with more drinks. Nina was drinking Campari and her lipstick had become the same color. The new age music was taking her to places beyond and she seemed to stretch her neck upwards and float a little higher this time, proclaiming, in airy, intoxicated speech: "Music. The international language!" How could I argue?
The drinks arrived and Nina grabbed the first red goblet from the waiters tray.
EXAMS, RAKIJE & SHAMANISM
=
We were introduced to the mayor of Zagreb, then to rakije before the exams. We were introduced to several officials from the Croatian government who had come to welcome us to Croatia and they were all very glad to toast us with strong Croatian liquor. We were welcomed not to Yugoslavia but to Croatia. We had just finished our breakfast, it was not more than eight-thirty a.m., and the mayor entered with an entourage of well-dressed bureaucrats who stood in the center of the dining room and began babbling in Croatian, telling us that we were welcome and that they were honored to have us as guests in their country. Honors given and taken, the mayor led us to the bar attached to the dining room where we were met by postured waiters and waitresses holding trays full of various cocktails, rakije, slivovica, brandy, as it were. Rakije is a specifically South-Slavic liquor which is made from grain and tastes stronger than vodka, with a slight sweetness to it. Slivovica, on the other hand, is a brandy made from plums and is even sweeter, less bitter. I chose rakije, rimmed with thick crystals of sugar that made the glass look like a margarita. But this was no margarita. The rakije went straight to my head, bypassing the hard boiled egg and corn flakes and entering my bloodstream, loosening my tongue and relaxing me before the exams.
Our placement exams for the beginning of our five-week Croatian language instruction, both written and oral, were scheduled for nine a.m. This was the first time I had drunk alcohol before an exam, but in Yugoslavia drinking is enjoyed (or abused) at all times of the day or night.
After the drink we waited to be called back to the dining room, one by one, for our oral exam in Croatian. Meeting my instructor Vera Krnajski, we discussed in Croatian very basic topics like the weather, which topics I have specialized in at University, which sports I play (mostly indoor sports, thank you), and the flavor of rakije - "malo je gorko, malo je slatko (a little bitter, a little sweet)," I said. Vera agreed and marked something in her notebook, probably noting that my eyes were bloodshot. "And how do you like Zagreb?" "Svidja mi se, ali to mi je malo cudno, neobicno (I like it, but it's a little strange, unusual)," she accepted my reply sincerely and revealed a small smile through her fading lip stick. I was hoping she wouldn't ask me if I had yet met any girls. She met Branko within a week because he was pervasive on the campus, always patiently waiting for me to finish classes or some group activity.
The written exam in Croatian followed and next day my results came and I was accepted into the second level. Margaret, my Croatian instructor at Stanford, had done a good job teaching me, my prior instruction in Russian certainly helped too.
We were sentenced to a daily, mandatory two-hour Croatian folklore program that accompanied the language instruction but bored most everyone. Learning Croatian dance, naive art and social customs through Croatia's thirteen-hundred year history was very interesting to me, but the presentation was weak, slow-paced and allowed no room for the usual discourse that you find in American classrooms. These were lectures and as students we couldn't challenge anything the professors were telling us, this just isn't done in this part of the world. Also, the tone of the lectures was ultra-patriotic, every word seemed to celebrate Croatia and the great Croatian people. The Croatian flag stood near the lectern, the old Yugoslav flag was gone, probably in the back room with the old text books on Marxist economics. Susan and Laura sat next to me during these tedious sessions, sharing my anxiety at the sun-drenched day on the other side of the greasy windows. It was summer and we wanted to play, we were in a foreign land and we felt like adventure. Susan loved to talk about sex as much as I did, Laura mostly giggled and squirmed her thin body in her seat as me and Susan made up scenarios of sexual liaisons that we thought might be happening among the group, and probably were. Hormonal pulses were rising to unusual levels, even our head instructor seemed to be pulsating who, at mid-fifty, spent a lot of time cruising the sophomore chicks. Susan would often confess, "I need a fuck!" Shame was not part of her social repertoire. But I am no one to judge; I was getting it more often than at any other time in life. I had a constant erection, even during these sessions, sitting between Susan and Laura, and soon learned the word for it in Croatian - erekcija - now my embarrassment in two languages.
*
That weekend in Plitvica National Park Susan and I talked a lot about sex, and a little about Shamanism. I was reading Carlos Casteneda and Michael Harner at the time and had brought Harner's book with me on the trip to Plitvica. "The Way of the Shaman" is a layman's guide to approaching Shamanism and Plitvica seemed to be perfect place in Croatia to reach both the inner animal (a talent of the Shaman) and to experience energy from the natural environment that surrounds us. Plitvica is a tourist haven and this would seem to negate the possibility of practicing Shamanic meditation. But actually the setting of Plitvica is isolated, deep canyons and trepid waterfalls cascade in all directions and make you feel, if you really try, as though you are the mouth of the river. Susan and I talked about Casteneda's work, about Shamanism, about reaching nature - not just visiting it but reaching it - and its importance. In Croatia I felt closer to being a Shaman than I had back in the US. Plitvica was a million miles away from anything, or anyone, even Branko.
There was a Gypsy village near Plitvica that seemed to be, from a distance, a real community. I imagined Harner's book on Shamanism written in such a place, surrounded by Indians that were lost in an industrial world, lost and simply trying to live together but not knowing if they can survive in the midst of production all around them. They are Indians, those Gypsies, and even though many of them live in burnt-out cars or in the back of old milk trucks, they are still Indians. And they are Shamans. What makes you think they are not? Is it because they beg on city streets, make their children walk like cripples in order to gain sympathy from normal folk and in turn gain a pocket full of change? Is it because their women are prostitutes? Is it because their men are pimps and pick-pockets and their daughters pregnant at age fourteen? Is it because their Grandmothers smoke cigars and drink too much? Does this mean they cannot be Shamans, that they cannot reach the inner animal and experience energy from nature? Of course not. These people were Shamans before Western civilization had a chance to co-opt its essence, before Western civilization itself. We have pushed them out of our lives because they refuse to adopt our habits, so they live in burnt-out cars. But they are together. They eat together, sleep together, fuck, sweat and shit together. We continue to sanitize our lives, pissing in automated toilets - we no longer have to touch the handle - in toilets next to a cascading waterfall. And there they are, pissing on the trees, living in their little village, next to Plitvica.
SLAVONIA, TERRA FIRMA
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On our way there we stopped in Karlovac, a small village no more than nineteen miles from Zagreb. We stopped at a small restaurant, a kafich, as they say in Croatia. We stepped down from the tour bus and entered and stood around the bar that greets you in the entrance. This bar is made of wood with a tin top covering the bar from end to end, about twenty feet. The air hangs heavy with smoke and the rural Slavs hesitate as they watch us enter, take a long drag from their cigarettes, reposition their bodies more toward the bar rather than toward each other; and now they are positioned toward the waitress hosting the bar, talking to her about the foreigners. We are foreigners and I don't like it. There is no way for me to show these men that I myself don't approve of being an imposing tourist, that I just want to come and go as they do, not making lofty judgments about the country which only has two brands of cereal rather than fifty in America. Fifty or more and more, in this example, is less.
We ordered our drinks and most of us went outside the cafe to the chairs and tables on the sidewalk. Laura, Susan and I remained inside the cafe and stood at the bar with the dark Slavs, their heavy clothes are dark (remember, it is summer) and I smell tobacco and fried food emitting from their coats and trousers. Chris Weaver is with us now, he is one of the group who became infamous, obnoxious in ways that I will tell you about later. We drank the local beer, Karlovachko Pivo, and talked about the goat cooking on the spit outside the restaurant.
"It's not a goat," Chris insists, "it's a lamb." "Then why does it have horns and the face of a goat?" I agreed with Laura, the animal roasting over the spit looks like a goat, it looks like the two goats chewing in the small pasture next to the cafe, just like those goats. "It's a goat, Chris. I should know, I grew up on a farm. I know what a goat looks like," Susan said with her usual assurance. "I grew up on a farm too," (you shouldn't believe this, coming from Chris. He is a liar like I have never met before, lying about everything to everyone. The only thing which is certain about Chris is that he is gay, and smokes too much. "They don't eat goats in Yugoslavia. They eat horses but they don't eat goats" (don't believe him).
Whatever that animal on the spit, it looked quite sumptuous, head and all. It cooked and made you think that it really is o.k. to eat animals. If this animal were cooking on a spit in the U.S. I wouldn't feel this way, I would think it were awful. But I was experiencing a new reality, some of us were changing with our experiences.
*
President Tudjman was elected president of Croatia in May 1990. Historian, former Communist, now Croat nationalist, President Tudjman now has one mission: to bring independence to the Republic of Croatia, to lead the republic out of forty-five years of Communism and to establish a Croat republic separate from Serb-controlled Yugoslavia.
Branko had said that President Tudjman looks like a rat, and he does. But looks are deceiving; he's actually a very hard working man trying to lead his republic to democracy and independence, never mind that he is a former Communist. I say never mind because you have to remember that, as in all of the former Communist-ruled nations, the only way to get ahead in society was by proclaiming oneself a Communist. Sure there are many people who didn't compromise their principles for Communist orthodoxy, but what would you do if you had lived under Communism? There were, don't forget, many good Communists; men and women who believed that Marxist theory, before its corruption, could actually produce a better, more equal and more humane world. President Tudjman was such a man.
All around Zagreb the political posters were beginning to fade, the constant summer sun beating the sides of the buildings where the posters hang made Tudjman's face there look like it was hesitating to come out from the white paint. A rat's face smiling in the fog. The posters had been pasted to the walls and are now peeling at the edges or have been ripped away by souvenir hunters, but you cannot remove these posters from the walls because the glue is too strong. His face will be pasted there until the sun makes him disappear or until the rain makes his colors melt into an abstract painting, just like the poster of him on the wall outside of Cvjetno Naselje, my dormitory. Some of the posters have been marked by spray paint with the Serbian Orthodox Christian cross, right across his face, the cross that the Croats say looks just like the Nazi swastika. It does look like the swastika, but this is not unusual; many religious symbols look like the swastika. And don't forget that the swastika was created by Christians and used to be a symbol as prominent as the Christian crucifix itself.
*
Meeting President Doctor Franjo Tudjman in Djakovo was less than inspiring, unlike Djakovo itself. It is a beautiful village in Slavonia where they raise Lipetzanner horses and each year host the Folk Dance Festival of Croatia, the largest festival of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe. We all met President Tudjman at the parade celebrating the beginning of the Folk Dance Festival, but our meeting was indirect because we were a group of forty persons and President Tudjman was there in Dakovo for many reasons, but mainly to show his support for Croatian tradition. We were there for the tradition, part of our Croatian language and folklore study, the course now in its second week.
We sat through hours of folk dancing in a large outdoor arena which had been used for this festival for hundreds of years. Susan and Laura were my close companions during most of the course and on long weekend trips like this one to Dakovo, they were my source of sanity. The group was so difficult at times, so typically American, never satisfied and always comparing their experiences here with "how it is back home." Susan and Laura didn't make such judgments, they are liberal and educated, open, admittedly bisexual, M.A.'s, interested in me and Branko and our relationship. However, Branko was always back in Zagreb during these weekend trips. Naturally he wasn't enrolled in the course, so we would be apart for several days sometimes. Laura took advantage of the distance between me and Branko, though I didn't know what her intentions were at the time. I just paid attention to the dancing. The men were quite sexy.
The most memorable dances were performed by the Lado Folk Dance Ensemble, Croatia's best, renown for their professionalism and original choreography. These dances are a tradition which have survived for nearly 1300 years and each one represents the different aspects of daily living of the Croatian people.
Dances marking nature's different seasons are the most popular form of expression and represent the cycles of life, the progression of a year, the passing of time. In spring, Croatia celebrates the season of new life with dances that represent planting and cultivating the land. In summer, warm weather and long sunny days inspire energies that celebrate the summer Solstice. In autumn, the cooling temperatures and changing color of the leaves are celebrated with dances that express thankfulness for the long-awaited arrival of the harvest. And in winter, the falling snow and quiet over the land are celebrated with dances that represent human togetherness. Even though it was mid-summer and the temperature was near ninety Fahrenheit, Lado performed dances from all of the seasons, with all of the different costumes. The heat of their winter costumes must have brought them near to death, heavy fur and wool hats, boots and even gloves.
Early evening found us mingling with Slavonia's elite, with their horses I was telling you about. The Lipetzanners were magnificent. These were the largest horses I had ever seen, their coats a rich gray or deep brown, their miens combed by their stylists, tails cleaned and shear and flowing with their movements, or else braided like the hair of their owners' daughters, horses trained to respond to the most subtle equestrian commands. I watched the horses parade the oval which is located just outside of the center of Dakovo. Both Laura and Susan were there and together we watched how these horses were trained. They leaped the gates so gracefully, as if floating over them in an effortless, perfectly-shaped arch, their hooves landing on fertile ground, slippers onto a Turkish carpet.
The next day brought us to Vukovar, a quiet village perfectly preserved, untouched by any war, cobbled streets and historic buildings, historic homes, villas from the times of Europe's wealthy aristocrats. There was no Communism in Vukovar, just a village that seemed to live in harmony with nature and survived time by remaining unto itself. Our stop here was short but it afforded us a healthy Slavonian meal at a restaurant that sits next to an open field and a shallow creek. At the door of the restaurant we were met by a Gypsy woman begging for a few dinars, she wore multi-colors, the typical Gypsy dress, a skirt wrapped in colorful rags, a bright orange shawl wrapped around her shoulders; she was wrapped all the way round her body, her shoes were black and scuffed, looked like she was born in them. I gave her a two-dinar note and entered the restaurant with Laura and Susan where we were me by an exquisite meal of cobanac, or lamb stew, boiled beef with fresh potatoes and carrots, cabbage salad, dark beer, dark coffee and a glazed tort for dessert.
There were no politics in Vukovar at that time, no hatred that one could see. It was a village as old as the hills surrounding it, as quiet at the forests nearby.
Osijek is the capital of Slavonia and the largest city in the region. Our stay here was two days and two nights, and the two most memorable sights in Osijek were the great Cathedral in the center of Osijek and the club named Tufna, small spot or stain. This bar was listed in my gay guide, although it was a mixed bar. Mixed is how I remember our night at Tufna. On this night Chris Weaver was our constant commentator on the virtues of Slavic men. I didn't need to be told, mine was back in Zagreb, clear of the categories which Chris created. "The men are dark and their personalities are dark, they are poets though many of them don't even know it." Chris thought he was quite philosophical.
*
When we returned to Zagreb it was the time of the annual Zagreb Smotra Folklora, the Folk Dance Festival of Yugoslavia, a festival which joined all the republics of Yugoslavia for the celebration of the dance. The festival would end every night with a bacchanalian bash that lasted into the early hours of the morning, sometimes until dawn. The Serbs were the most animated of the celebrants, dancing to the point of utter violence, singing in chorus the songs as old as the hills, smashing their glasses on the sidewalk after every finished drink. These people were not just celebrating, they were grabbing life by the throat and choking the last breath out of it. I sat with Branko close to the Serbs hoping to join in their celebration that seemed to surpass life itself.
__________
FARAGOSTA
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Faragosta is the Italian word for the collective holiday enjoyed every year in August by nearly the whole of Italy. Swarms of Italians land on the Croatian coast to the towns and villages of Dalmatia. Branko and I were taking our holiday on the dreamy Hvar Island during faragosta and the Italians everywhere like a colony had come to take over Croatia's pristine coast.
Hvar Island sits about ten miles from the Port of Split on the Adriatic Sea, the Jadransko More. The town where we took a room, Hvar Grad, is old, built by the Romans more than a thousand years ago. Perhaps this is why the Italians descend on the coast, especially Hvar Island, as if it were their own. Yet despite the traffic of tourists, especially these faragostans, Hvar Grad is perfectly preserved. There are no cars in the town, no industry except tourism, no pollution (except for the faragostan fag who, without the slightest thought, flicked his burning cigarette into the rich blue, crystal clear water as we were getting off of a small fishing boat that brought us to the Hell Islands which are a part of Hvar. I asked him "please, do you speak English? Good. Please, don't put your cigarettes into the sea," to which he quickly responded, mockingly, "oh, yah, Greenpeace, yah, Greenpeace." Then, turning to his lover, he laughed like Zha Zha Gábor and walked in the opposite direction from me and Branko, swinging his hips like a cheap cocktail waitress. I thought, "what the fuck does Greenpeace have to do with this?!).
Hvar Grad is small enough for you to walk from one end of the town to the other in less than twenty minutes. The town is surrounded by steep hills with low vegetation and a few winding paths where you can stroll to the top of the main hill to the Roman castle, which now serves as a museum by day and an expensive discotheque by night. There are many cafés in Hvar Town, as in all places of Croatia, and there are two sidewalk cafés near the harbor wall that cater to a mixed crowd of rich Croats, faragostans, and gays from all over Europe. One such café is called Sidro, or Anchor, the other is called Plus. And on hot summer evenings there is a nameless café bar with a tiny dance floor where the entire crowd is gay and spills out onto the stone street and to the harbor wall. The energy here was amazingly fresh, uninhibited, unexpected and the straight couples strolling by the crowd of dancing, kissing, oozing gay men paid no attention or they looked towards us as they walked by, simple smiles on their faces displayed not shock or displeasure but rather ease which said to us, "we are happy that you are happy." Hvar was the renaissance to us, a realization of many peoples with many values blending peacefully, without judgments, without fear.
*
One year later the hotels of Hvar began filling up with refugees from all over Croatia. The tourist season was virtually non-existent and Croatia had been plunged into a deadly war. Starving children arrived,without their parents, to the villa where Branko and I had stayed. They were fed, clothed, and sent to an orphanage on a neighboring island. And where were their parents? Maybe missing. Maybe dead. No one knew. Some of these children would be sent to Germany. Others would be sent to over-crowded refugee centers in Zagreb. All of them would know no peace in the first years of their lives.
*
Early our first day we went for a strong coffee with fresh whipped cream at Sidro. Branko and I watched the friendly waiters as they cleaned the bar, made the coffees, and moved about the small tables with continental grace in crisp white shirts and bow ties. We took to the Hell Islands (Pakleni Otoci in Croatian) soon after our coffee, hailing a taxi boat from an old Dalmatinac in his skipper's hat, next to his rickety boat for eight or so passengers. The water was as clear as blue crystal, reflecting brilliant sunshine in every direction. The old boat moved across the waves with purpose, catering to the paying tourists who enjoy this day that seems almost removed from life, mystical like the salt air and timeless like the cool breezes.
*
Branko insisted on sunbathing naked, it was, afterall, the popular form on the islands. I was still too inhibited to derobe my self entirely, so I wore my Speedo and, like an inhibited American, felt as though I was nearly naked.
BUDAPEST AND BELL-BOTTOMS
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Not everyone wore them of course, but they were prevalent. Even skin-tight shirts (I guess they were made of nylon or polyester, I don't quite remember because the last time I wore one styled like that was in the early seventies, I was six or seven years old, when those fabrics ruled) and unusually high platforms on big shoes. These fashions were worn mainly by people in their late-thirties to mid-fifties and often side burns had remained on the men, but they were not the latest fashion as in the West unless worn by young men. Young men in leather jackets and faded blue jeans and black shoes, the side burns were deliberate and even mocked the older generation who didn't know what was going on.
The gay scene in Budapest, Hungary was odd but full of texture. The bars that Branko and I visited were from another time, still clandestine though Communism was dead, as though Soviets would raid the bars at any moment and arrest the entire place for unnatural acts (of all the labels that gays and lesbians suffer, unnatural is the one that makes me laugh hardest). Mystery was the name of Budapest's most overt gay and lesbian bar and it was no mystery to us.
The decor was a mixture of mismatched patterns in gold and red. Large gold paisleys on a blood-red background; red velvet curtains behind the red booths that lined the interior on two sides of the bar; gold light fixtures attached to the walls of the corridor leading to the toilet, a red door leading to that toilet. Branko said "it looks like the inside of a coke can." It was a red place. The music ranged from late seventies disco (which, by the way, was the rage back in the U.S. at the time, but here in Budapest the disc jockey was playing it because his record collection hadn't caught up with the times) and a few hits by T-Rex, Michael Jackson hits like "Beat It" and "Billy Jean" readily available in most shops, occasional sounds from the early eighties new wave movement, songs from fly-by-night groups like "Men Without Hats" and "Men at Work," both groups from Australia, strange, I thought. Hideous.
The bar tender was a real flame. If only he was in drag, he would feel more comfortable, I'm sure. He's wearing a tight white shirt two sizes to small for him, a black clip-on bow tie, bleached blond hair and near-black eye brows, a lisp follows each of his words which seemed really weird in Hungarian. That lisp needed no translating, he was in charge of the bar and his lisp was his trademark.
*
On this night at Mystery we got very drunk on wonderful Austrian beer. It seemed so natural to get really drunk in this atmosphere, it was the only way to mesh everything together. From the unmarked door outside the bar I followed the host of the establishment and Branko followed me and after paying a bunch of Hungarian Forints for the cover charge we were led down several steps to the main bar. We were seated at one of the booths next to the bar and the table before us was covered by a red velvet table cloth (do you feel like this was an elegant place? I guess it was because there was so much velvet). The booth was a sort of "S" shape which allowed five or six people to sit on it, but with limited access to the table because the upper and lower parts of the "S" curved the way that made reaching the table impossible. Sitting with us at our table was a wrinkled man of about forty years in a tie (he looks about sixty, but in this part of the world the people age more quickly simply because their lives are more difficult. You would too). He was directly across from me and Branko, turned with his right elbow on the table watching the "clientele" enter the Mystery. To our right sat two short-haired, nouveau-Budapest lesbians dressed in as much black as their wardrobes would afford, their brown shoes give away the wardrobe's limitations. They worked in art galleries, I guessed. These two drank a lot, vodka and beer, a nasty combination. And to our left perched on the slippery vinyl sat a gender-bender who either didn't own enough female clothing to leave the house in full drag, or thought he looked good just as he was. He acts as though he thinks he looks good.
We exchange greetings all of us but no genuine conversation takes place because we don't speak Hungarian and they do no speak enough English. Just an occasional turn from the man and a grunt "American you are?!" "Yes, American." There was no need to explain that Branko is from Yugoslavia, Branko doesn't care to be such a close neighbor of this man. Also, Branko was beginning to tell people that he is from Croatia, Tudjman's politics were starting to work. But there is no doubt that these Hungarians know what and where Croatia is, both Hungary and Croatia were part of the Habsburg monarchy and therefore they share a common history. "America nice place," the man continued. Our half-drag giggled and put his closed fingers to his mouth and I wasn't sure if he was laughing at the man or at himself. "Yes, nice place. Have you been to America?" He wrinkled his brow and turned really Hungarian and babbled what I guessed was "I don't understand," but maybe I didn't understand. He soon turned to the side again and watched the constant flux of people heave in and out of the bar.
The dance floor of Mystery was located on the other side of the bar, behind a wall that separates the rooms. Where we were sitting was intended to provide more intimate surroundings for the guests, a place to exchange phone numbers or to just sit and watch the men and women who are homosexual. The dance floor was made of a polished tin, when you step on it it gives in to your weight and the thing sinks about a quarter inch. It seemed as though there may have been carpeting beneath the tin floor, that the tin floor was placed over the carpeting so that your feet can actually move to the beat. I Pictured shag carpeting beneath the floor. The walls in the dance room are all red and a large disco ball hangs in the middle and one white light casts light onto it which reflects white disco squares, cubed inches of light moving around in circles on the red walls.
At no time were there more than six or eight people dancing at one time. Either the clientele knew that the music was ridiculous or they simply don't like to dance on a crowded floor which might crease if it becomes overcrowded. Anyway, it seems most everyone is here to drink and the bar tender with that lisp is quick to pour. Branko said, as he looked about and wondered how we got to this point, "thank God I'm a Yugoslav." But remember, things are changing.
BETROFFENHEIT
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In my opinion, Munich reveals its unique character in the Lenbach Museum. The works of the artists in this museum come from many different countries but the artwork seems to reject this, instead revealing a message that all is bleeding into one. The Lenbach is a contemporary museum and it reflects Munich, a city which was devastated in the second world war and rebuilt to its modern state after allies freed the city. There is no evidence in Munich that Hitler waltzed in grand ballrooms and fed on Jew's flesh unless you really look at the modern buildings and ask yourself "why is this building or that building modern?" Then you realize that it is modern because everything around you was destroyed. And so the Lenbach Museum is a modern building where artists Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky and Alexei Yavlensky lead you through the modern century. However, their work does not report the crimes of this century; rather they convince through mood and paint that there was something more important happening than mass killings, something more important than horror and violence.
There were some who tried to live through it all by continuing their lives undisturbed, undisturbed by means of isolation and the underground. It was the new renaissance that has been ongoing since the birth of Jean Cocteau, when Orpheus began his descent into the nether world. Continuing shows in cinema houses in isolated places like islands went on undisturbed, filled with people who went unnoticed as they proceed to do whatever it is they are born to do, and to be, never forgetting their responsibility to one another, to rely on one another, even today.
There were eight horses standing proud decorated with white ribbons of lace trimmings and crystal beads that hung and wrapped them round their bodies and across their bellies and between their hind quarters and winding through their tails and into the anus and the beads also hung from the crowns on their heads. There are four royal chariots standing motionless behind the horses, but the horses and the chariots are not attached to one another. These chariots are made of a rich, polished gold like you find in great Roman cathedrals, the gold that was mined by slaves and cast into elaborate designs by slaves who sometimes died from the forced labor. The gold chariots are amidst an haze of dense midnight-blue and the foreground is a common sidewalk-gray color, the same texture as a common sidewalk. Atop the chariots stand ridiculous men: in the first chariot on the far left stands Pilot in royal Roman garb and he is wearing headphones and holding a Walkman cassette player in his right hand; in the next chariot to Pilot's left stands Adolf Hitler dressed in his usual military uniform and in his right hand he is holding a McDonald's hamburger, half of it still wrapped in its McDonald's hamburger paper. He is just about to take a big bite of the hamburger. The third chariot stands empty and the only sure thing we know about the owner of it is that he is an American man from the south who believes that the Holocaust was a hoax. Standing in the chariot in place of the it's owner is a totem pole with three heads carved into it. At the top of the totem pole is the head of Sammy Davis Junior looking at you with his glistening eyes and thin lips that seem to be singing "The Candy Man," and below, the head of Leonard Bernstein looking relaxed and dignified, as though he has just finished conducting the symphony; and below Leonard is the head of Robert Mapplethorp with a cigarette between his lips. In the fourth chariot stands a statue of a young man with a shaved head in tight blue jeans, a white t shirt with the word FRONT painted in red letters in the middle of the shirt contrasts a black leather jacket with zippers and an arm band wrapped around the statue's upper right arm, a red band with a white circle and a swastika in the middle of it. The statue is holding a clinched fist and is shaking it at the horses. There are many naked boys swimming in circles in a pool that is transparent and suspended before the chariots. Most of the boys in the pool have blond hair and their bodies are all very pail, even though you know that there are African boys and Indian boys and Japanese boys and Eskimos and purple Nigerians and even boys from Tirana and Tiajuana. The constant swirling in the pool makes the water turn red because some of the boys are bleeding and the constant motion makes the water and blood mix until the entire pool is red and all you can see is the many sets of blue eyes looking at the next boy as the pail skin of the next boy comes closer and almost close enough to touch. There is so much blood at one point that screaming no longer happens, just summary executions and more pail bodies thrown into the pool. The horses are spotted with blood and the lace becomes now more decorated, delicate patterns with little red specks of blood, the crystal beads reflect light and glisten and now the horses begin to parade slowly in a circle around the swirling pool and slowly they march into a slow gallop, their broad necks and wispy miens all uniformly moving horizontally around, surrounding the pool. The slow gallop continues with just the sound of hooves until very young children in the foreground clap their hands, pulling their small hands from their fathers and clapping at the horses that are decorated in the blood of the boys. The fathers look down at their children and see their little heads covered by their little wool caps with the little tassels on top and they think how lucky is my son to be here with me witnessing the horrors of artists. The swirling pool grows deeper and the bleeding resumes, but those blue eyes remain undisturbed through pain and insult and final death, those eyes remain honest and faithful, never crossing and never letting the blood enter them. But then the blood in the swirling pool turns to fire and the horses begin to prance, the edges of the lace trimmings become scorched by the flames which lick their sides, the crystal beads glow from the orange flames. The children run toward the fire but their fathers only run a couple of steps to pull them back; the heat is so great they stop and scream for their sons who run right into the fire giggling and flashing their young white teeth, their little hands outstretched and reaching for the horses, "horsy, horsy." Their little tassels are first to catch fire, the boys in the swirling pool have developed blisters and the fathers look at them and turn away as if they could help them but refuse because they don't agree with the boys. The little children just keep running until they are running in the circle with the horses and the horses begin to trample them, their little bones are crushed while their fathers scream from the top of their lungs from the horror. The swirling pool turns into a dance and the boys have now reached each other to join hands, they smile and kiss one another on each cheek as their feet fan the flames, they rise above the fire and ascend to the clouds above. The children never escape the hooves that trample them, their fathers will never forgive them. The lace burns away and the crystal beads glow like coals from the flames, burning into the flesh of the horses but the horses do not understand what causes their pain. They blame the fathers who are watching the crystals burn, they have already forgotten their little children who lye dead. The statue turns to the empty chariot and whispers "When will you return, will you kill them all, will there be killing for me?" The totem pole quivers for a brief moment; Hitler has almost finished his McDonald's hamburger; Pilot is rewinding the tape. Finally the horses collapse into piles of ashes but the crystals continue to glow for a while, quite brightly in fact, the crystals glowing their fiery orange mixed in with the ashes.
Next to this painting is a simple Indian from Brazil sitting cross-legged next to a straw hut. He is communicating as only Shamans do, reaching the animal and pure energy. He is a mediator between the arts and the public, a priest between spirit and man.
*
Egon and Christine Scotland had invited me over to their third-floor apartment on the Markt Square. Christine had prepared a delicious vegetarian meal and Egon, after I had been shown around the large apartment and been introduced to the two cats, went out to buy some weizen bier, famous German beer that nearly hypnotizes the senses, for the occasion.
We spent most of the evening talking history and the current situation in Yugoslavia, as well as the worsening situation in the Persian Gulf. Egon talked of his recent return from Turkey where he had been reporting on the plight of the Kurds. Soon we focused on Munich, the city only miles away from the Dachau concentration camp. Earlier that day I took a train to Dachau to see the camp for myself. It is a thoroughly nauseating experience to go to Dachau and see the photos of the victims; the bunkers where they slept in lice-infested beds, two to three per bed; the showers - actually gas chambers - smelling of metal and concrete, a most inhuman smell. Egon and Chris knew all about it and Egon was able to sum-up the feeling in just a few words. "And this all happened only fifty years ago."
Egon was preparing to go to Yugoslavia for his paper Südeutches Zeitung to report on the worsening situation there. We spoke just a few words in Croatian and Serbian, words we had learned in our classes together back at Stanford. They were both very interested in the nationality problems in Yugoslavia and were interested in my impressions of the brewing conflict. "The situation is like this: the majority of Croats want out of the Yugoslav union because they feel that under the central government in Belgrade they have been overworked, underpaid, overtaxed, under appreciated. And from what I can see living in Zagreb, this is largely true. There are many people in Zagreb who work very hard and are not paid much by western standards. These people complain that all of the tax money that is drained from their paychecks goes directly to Belgrade, which makes sense because Belgrade is the capital of Yugoslavia. But the Belgrade government, located in Serbia and controlled mainly by Serbs, does not evenly redistribute the tax revenues throughout the rest of Yugoslavia, to the other republics. Slovenes have the same complaints about the Belgrade government.
"As a result of lack of redistribution of tax revenues the other republics receive very little support for local public projects, for hospitalization, for education. Croats and Slovenes that I have talked with claim that Serbia hordes the tax revenues, sending large sums to private banks overseas. The Croats and Slovenes generally believe that Serbs are lazy, that they don't pull their fair share in Yugoslavia and that Serbia lives off the backs of Croatia and Slovenia. From what I have seen so far, Croats and Slovenes are indeed harder workers, the per capita income in Slovenia is around $7,500.00; in Croatia it is around $5,500.00; in Bosnia and Hercegovina around $4,000.00, in Macedonia around $2,800.00; and in Serbia and Montenegro the per capita income is about equal, around $3,000.00. Most of the highly advanced industries are located in Slovenia and Croatia. Serbs, on the other hand, claim that the reason for this is that the geographic region of the Serbian republic is mostly mountains and land which is not suitable for farming. Thus they have to rely on Slovenia and Croatia, especially Croatia's Slavonia region, where the land is very rich and excellent for farming."
We rattled on concerning the rise of nationalism all across Central and Eastern Europe, a concern that is felt especially deeply in Germany as the date of reunification approaches, on October 3. The skinheads of East Germany have gained numerous recruits in recent months and the fear is that the trend will continue and swell the population of Neo-fascists to greater heights, throughout the unified German state. "Everything in Germany," I asserted, "is approached with a superior effort behind it. The architecture, literature, the arts in general, manufacturing. In short, Munich is a living example of the greatness of the German people, of the dignity in work and living that serves as an example of unified effort. Your city vindicates life, brings it to a higher plane of existence. But there is also great danger in German unity."
"I know," Egon replied. "I returned from Turkey just last week and the Turks repeatedly called me a donkey. I never thought of myself as a donkey."
*
It was two months after our first night together in the park. We had returned to the park by chance, we were just out for a walk after hours of talk in some café and strolling very slowly we happened upon it, entering it through its rusted gate. It is empty again. We just move slowly over to the bench where we had consumed each other before and we keep moving, with purpose, right past the bench over to the side, near the children's sand box. We both step into the sand box at the same time and without saying anything, just looking at each other with our grinning mouths, we open the front of our trousers and each pull out our erect penis'. We begin to masturbate, slowly.
We are standing here jacking off next to the school house made of stone, the sand box beneath our feet. Silence composes the park and the palace stands there at the opposite end of the park, dark and silent like before, somehow wondering what it is we two boys are doing. The rusted gate creaks slowly back and forth, the trees with their wind-blown leaves hush that small voice and tell it to pay attention. Faster now we turn to each other and lay deep kisses into our mouths and our tongues meet, entwine, slide up and down. The night is moonless and overcast. We came onto each others' trousers and kissed again before stepping out of the sand box. This park is ours.
MASARYKOVA #3
=
The statue of Ban Josip Jelacic was scheduled to return to Republic Square, from whence it would be called Ban Jelacic Square, or more commonly amongst Zagrebers, Jelacic Plac , on October 17 (the word Plac adopted from the German Plaz). The name Republic Square was adopted when the Communists came to power and the statue of Ban Jelacic (Ban meaning Viceroy) was taken away, taken apart and put into storage in some remote place in Slavonia. Ban Jelacic was the leader of the Croatian resistance movement of 1848 against widespread Communist revolutions all across East-Central Europe, and the return of his statue and subsequent re-christening of Jelacic Plac promised to be one of the greatest celebrations in the history of Croatia.
I had just moved into my third apartment in Zagreb at Masarykova Ulica #3. The street had been named after the Czech writer Thomas Masaryk who, some fifty years after Ban Jelacic was resisting Communism, encouraged Croats living in Prague to join together in support of a union of Southern Slavs known later as Yugoslavia. I often wondered, as I peered out my window at the elegant Austro-Hungarian structures of Masarykova Ulica, if my street would be renamed, changed to whatever it was before it became the street of Thomas Masaryk.
Lenin Square had already been scheduled for a name change and would once again be called Kresimir the Fourth Square.
*
Many Croatian students had been living in Prague during the days of and Masaryk after they had been expelled from Croatian universities for protesting Hungarian leadership in Croatia. Those were the days of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Croatia had been placed under the aegis of Hungary's portion of the kingdom. It was the end of the nineteenth century and about two-hundred students had gathered to march toward Ban Jelacic Square to protest Hungary. Chants of "Glory to Ban Jelacic," and "down with the Magyars" (Magyar means Hungarian in most European languages) were heard as one student carried a Hungarian flag doused in kerosene and proceeded to set it afire.
Just a few days later I looked out my window, as I usually do in the morning, on a Saturday in October, and watched as about two-hundred Croats marched down Masarykova Ulica toward the newly-christened Ban Jelacic Square waving the new Croatian flag, the new coat of arms in the center on the background of red, white and blue. I thought of the day, October, the month that history will never forget, at least not in this part of the world.
*
The symbols of Ban Jelacic and the new Croatian flag became as pervasive in Zagreb as coffee and vodka. Miniature statues of Ban Jelacic were available in numerous shops, books written on his life appeared in all of the book shops. The Croatian flag was flown outside apartment windows, buttons with the flag in the middle were worn by members of all generations, and even the flag itself was worn - draped over the shoulders of young men, like a shawl, as they paraded around the city on Saturday afternoons, proclaiming the Croatian state.
Susan and I were busy working for Croatian radio at the time. We were at the station for our usual Friday morning show, pre recording, and Miso, our manager, asked us to think of a new topic for discussion contrasting current social issues in America with those in Croatia. Susan and I immediately knew what we would talk about: flags.
At the time, there was a big controversy brewing over whether it should be legal or illegal to burn the American flag as a sign of protest to American political policies, mainly foreign policies. Susan and I were at the liberal end of the spectrum and agreed that it should be legal to burn the American flag as a sign of protest to American political policies. We talked about this on our show and spoke freely of our disappointment with President Bush who, like most conservatives, believed that the flag is a sacred object. Conservatives like bush are surely the ones who created the myth that it is bad luck to let a flag touch the ground. To me its just a silly superstition.
Then Susan and I took a dangerous step and asked our listeners, at a time when the Croatian flag was certainly sacred, whether it should be legal or illegal for the Croatian population to burn the flag. I asked, "what would happen if a young man appeared on Jelacic Plac one afternoon and produced a flag, drenched in kerosene, and set it on fire? What would be the response of the observers of this form of protest? We look forward to your answers next week!" Susan and I sneered at each other and laughed because we already knew the answer. We just wanted to hear it on the airwaves, to provoke that patriotism and burn it. But this portion of our show was never played on the airwaves. Miso edited the tape and our questions were never allowed.
TITO OFF THE WALL
=
The Serbs are shaking in their boots. The Slovenes are shaking in their boots. The Slovenian elections are happening right now. It is December, 1990 and the people of the Republic of Slovenia are holding a referendum, going to the balloting booths to decide their future. Can anyone doubt the outcome? The Slovenes are voting whether to secede from the Yugoslav federation or not, whether to focus their political and economic attention within their own borders or whether to continue to relinquish power to a central authority. Can anyone doubt the outcome? The Croats will hold the same referendum next month, January, 1991. Can anyone doubt the outcome?
Even before this referendum the portraits of Tito started to be removed from the walls of the establishments of Slovenia and Croatia. Why, ten years and seven months after his death, were the portraits of Tito still hanging from the walls of the establishments of the Republics of Yugoslavia? Why did the removal of the portraits provoke fear amongst the pro-federation rulers of Yugoslavia? Answer these questions and you will know more about the Balkans than any other person in the world.
Tito's portraits appeared in every public building in Yugoslavia, and even in many private buildings. There were various poses: the traditional one of Tito as leader of bureaucrats of Yugoslavia, dressed in a dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and what appeared to be a silver necktie (this portrait was in black and white). This particular portrait was to be found in all classrooms of all schools - from primary to university level - placed prominently above the professor's desk, prominently above my desk at Varsavska School for Foreign Languages. Here he was a man of business, ready to take on the opposition and assert his principles, his white handkerchief in his breast pocket ready to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Then there is the portrait of Tito as a war general, perhaps the second-most prominent of all his portraits, found in post offices and banks, a brave Tito dressed in a dark brown leather bomber jacket, his wind-swept hair shows he is a man of action as he looks boldly beyond the frame of the picture to whatever mischief that may have been stirring in Yugoslavia, or mischief to come. This portrait made me think of Tito as an aviator, having landed his plane and just off the runway in the canteen, gulping brandy and cruising the bar for the closest large-breasted woman with whom he could share his tales of adventure.
On the coast and in many restaurants in the larger cities were the portraits of Tito near the seaside dressed either in his white naval uniform with medals on his breast, or in a simple, casual baby blue summer shirt, the blue waves of the Adriatic in the background showing the man at leisure.
His pictures started to come down in January, 1992.
*
Lenin Square has been re-christened The Square of King Kreshimir the Fourth, its nineteenth-century name, non-Communist and Croatian.
___________
MOSE PIJADE
=
The winter evening was dark and the air was fresh with the cool breezes of March. It is now just a few days after the conflict started in Pakrac, a mixed Croat and Serb town southeast of Zagreb in the rich region of Slavonia. On March 2, 1991 Yugoslav Army soldiers and Croatia's Specijalci, the newly formed Croat paramilitary units, confronted each other on the main square in Pakrac. The conflict began when local Serbs tried to take over the Pakrac police station, expelling the Croats and bringing the station and local police forces fully under Serb control. Naturally the Croats wanted the station returned to Croat control for Pakrac is, as one unit of the Specijalci told me, "a Croatian town that should be run by Croats." The Yugoslav Army stepped in to separate the mostly rioting Serb and Croat factions of what used to be a relatively harmonious village. Over the next several days Zagreb television, where I was working at the time, reported that four Croat Specijalci had been killed in the conflict, their faces mutilated beyond recognition. And now, just a few days after the incident in Pakrac began, I am giving an examination to my students at Mose Pijade, a modern school in the south part of central Zagreb.
I entered the classroom a few minutes late after being delayed on my way. There was a thick traffic snarl on Savska Cesta which takes me to Mose Pijade. On the way I found out that the military barracks just a few blocks south of the school had been brought under Yugoslav Army control, Croat Specijalci had been pushed out and the Zagreb police were hurrying to the scene. When I entered the classroom the students looked frightened, didn't know what was going on. My colleague Elisabeth Harrison was there and said to me, whispering in her assertive English monotone, "let's get this thing over with and get the hell out of here. There's something going on in the building downstairs and I don't trust this situation."
We distributed the exams and told the students to begin writing their compositions in English, telling them to work as quickly as possible without losing our cool. My heart bunched up and I didn't know what to think. The Yugoslav Army was taking control of the military barracks? What the hell for? I watched the students and wondered what was going to happen in this situation. I pictured soldiers dressed in the same colors as those worn by the passport controllers on my first trip into the country, the same bushy mustaches, the same demanding, uncompromising disposition. Suddenly an alarm sounded and I heard a scream. Someone came pounding on the classroom door and Elisabeth and I went together to open it. It was one of our colleagues from the school and she was breathing very heavily, told us to come out of the classroom and shut the door.
We left the students in the classroom, left them to finish their exams in the midst of this confusion, and a group of teachers was gathering to discuss what was happening. A few of the teachers, all women, were explaining all at once that Yugoslav Army units had occupied the basement of the building and were "performing routine military exercises." "In a school?" I thought. What the hell are "routine military exercises?" The director of the school approached and told us to go back into our classrooms and finish giving the exams within thirty minutes. The total examination time was supposed to have been ninety minutes.
Elisabeth and I went back into the classroom, every student looked up as we entered, now pail and worried. We simply told them to finish the exams as quickly as possible because we have to leave the building in half an hour. This was not an ordinary exam.
We managed to collect all of the exams in less than twenty minutes, the students were eager to get out of Mose Pijade before the Croatian police arrived in order to "take back" the school building. If the situation in Pakrac was any indication of the trend of coming events, then the English exam was of less importance. Getting to a safe place far from the Yugoslav Army was far more important, there would be time for English once the conflict is over. But it isn't over.
*
The following night classes resumed as usual. The whole town was quite shaken up though, the Croatian government was deciding whether to take stronger actions to force the return of the military barracks back into Croatian hands, or to let the Yugoslav Army have its way and play-out its role as the "only legitimate military force in Yugoslavia," as the news reported from Belgrade.
That night in class we discussed the situation and I asked my students what they would do if they were in the government's position. A few of them quickly rebutted and said, "What would you do? You are from democratic America and are the policemen of the world. What would you do if a fucking (yes, my students freely used this word) Communist military commander took control of your country and your own government was considering to let them stay? Would you let them stay?!" ""Well," I began, "you have to decide whether you are willing to fight for a democratic Croatia, or if you want to continue to be controlled by central authorities. It's like the verb 'to be.'
"'To be" is a thought, an action, a word, a movement beyond the prescriptions that are yours from society, any society, from birth to the day you die. You have to be something or someone, you have to do something if you are to survive. You must take an action or you will die. You must decide whether you will or you won't, and both sides of the decision derive from the verb 'to be.'"
"We already are," replied Marko Vrdoljak, his father was a government official. "We are Croatia, we are not Yugoslavia!" "They are not Yugoslavia, they are fucking Serbia! We are Croatia and we will always be Croatia! That's the meaning of the verb 'to be'!"
*
Then there was the vision, appearing by day over the roof tops like clouds preceding a storm, but these were not clouds. There was lightening, but it wasn't heat and light combining to form those frightening bolts that zig zag across the sky. It was fire, but it was not from burning embers or from a stove or oven. The clouds were blue and descended upon the city so ominously, telling of the struggle to come which no one would be able to stop and no one would be able to explain. The fire came out of barrels, but not from small barrels of a gun, but massive barrels of a cannon. A cannon mounted on wheels that was driven through the streets by men who thought they should be famous. These men drove the tank that led to another conflict, or perhaps the tank was the conflict. A tank on the quiet streets of Zagreb, passing the elegant villas of my neighborhood, passing children on their way to school.
*
Wednesday, 21 january, 1993 – Zagreb, Croatia
Late January and the war was building. Not just in the far eastern reaches of Croatia but also now in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where eventually the war would overtake much of Sarajevo and completely ruin its economy and civilized life there for some time into the future. In Zagreb though, the atmosphere of the entire city seemed always on the verge of New Year’s Eve, just like I had imagined wartime economies and societies of earlier times, the prewar days of Weimar, even. People were spending the money that they had, going out to dinner, to clubs, sitting in the Writers’ Club until 3 a.m. sipping Slavic whiskies and beer, talking endlessly about what was happening and ignoring as much as possible what no one was able to predict was about to come. It seemed forever midnight in Zagreb and that everyone, up to the little old grandmothers in their apartment windows, remained awake, and not just awake but also, alert.
Such was the mood in _______. The young, out all night in midweek with no plans for tomorrow, Branko and I counted among their numbers. The place itself was on the lower level of a building with some retail on the street level and apartments on the several floors above. Club _______ had a capacity of around a hundred-fifty people and no more, white tile floors, A long bar from the far end of the main lounge led to the dance floor and the DJ station, which was a wall of monitors, receivers, CD decks and cassette player/recorders.
Branko and I entered ______ at 20:30, early enough so that I coulod influence the DJ with my new electronica CDs from San Francisco. With the ecstasy I brought with me from the States, pills that Bojan had sent to me while I was still in Minneapolis, in a cassette tape case, which he had mailed from San Francisco; these pills I thought nothing about smuggling them in to first Germany, where my plane had landed, and then over the border by bus into Austria then Croatia. I was already by that time a little seasoned in taking ecstasy, but this would be Branko’s first. If I had had enough pills for the whole club, I would have gladly given them out. But as it stood, we had only ten pills between us, and Branko and I would spend the next few weeks taking them for the purpose of little ecstasy trips together, to enjoy deep escape within an atmosphere of escape itself. The club became our hideout for a couple months, until the novelty wore off and Croatia itself became a burden to live in.
Young Slavic men in their late teens and early twenties with young women dressed to kill. Each one wished to be removed form the aspect of groundedness. Branko and I, he 23 and I 27, were more equipped than any of them to really get ungrounded and quite simply, to fly. Lovorka and Bojan—a different one than my friend and supplier in San Francisco—arrived at Club _____ and shortly after their arrival Branko and I downed an ecstasy capsule each. We ordered drinks and took a table off the dance floor. The DJ alternated between his tapes and mine from San Francisco. The strobe lights flashed, the colored spots shown down and everything began to turn brightly murky and angled, as if onstage. Branko told Lororka that he and I had taken the pills and she tuned into us sharply, as if expecting but what I would not ever be able to tell. Remember, war raged outside western Croatia and many of these boys in the club that night, were candidates for military conscription. But not Branko, who had a doctor’s release, thankfully, and would remain in Zagreb free to live another life with me.
Lovorka continiually darted her eyes between the two of us, from Branko to me and back again. “Tell me when you are high, I want to know!” She held an interest in the two of us always and proved to truly be a good friend by showing an acceptance for who each of us was as an individual, and also who we were becoming together. “Tell me tell me tell me!” Lovorka said. “I must know. I want to see the chemical reaction in your eyes.”
She looked much like a vampire, a classic Bella Lugosi style always dressed in black. Her naturally pale skin meant that her choice of lipstick—blood red—determined that she looked a bit corpselike all the time. High black boots in the cold months and black patent leather shoes in the warm ones, she fit the mood of this fringe republic on the edge of Transylvania. “Tell me tell me tell me,” she said again, her voice itself a vampire’s drone of demand and inquiry.
The truth was then that the drug had hit me and I could clearly see that it had hit Branko, too. His eyes began rolling around and he held his cigarette in his left fingertips more lightly, as if the thing was there of its own free will and that his life was in the process of lifting off from the earth in flight. “I, I, think,” Branko said, stuttering and laughing at intervals and looking foppish yet cool. “I’m dizzy,” he said, twirling his right finger in the air to indicate that the room was spinning.
“Yes yes yes!”Lovorka said. “It is working, it is working!” While the “r” letters rolled thickly from off of her tongue, I could see the buzz of the place grow, filling up with many Zagreb young revelers, again, as though it was a great party to christen the coming of something great. Where the emotions of guilt and panic normally might fill any place on the edge of a war zone, alcohol and drugs assuaged both heart and mind as this night, and many like them, became a celebration of the now. While military conscription loomed over every young man in the club—some of them already having received orders of dispatch—this was our cabaret of the late Twentieth Century. Less outro-spective than the cabarets of World War I or World War II and more deeply trance-like, this cabaret was about two things: escape within, together. There in club ________, along with the drug, we celebrated a place beyond borders and without restrictions. Some sing, some dance, others perform magic tricks and still others, like Lovorka, fill the roll of MC of the night; this was an age where we held our talents close to the chest, hiding our hands in order to save them for a better day to come. Introspective, each one of us, in this place with each one of us seemingly united in friendship and peace, it was a space of perfect harmony.
In a war economy, spending is free; whatever has been saved is spent and this was the case for almost everyone in Zagreb that I could see, so much so that bread lines were beginning to happen and rations were growing more scarce. It seemed the norm was: spend freely, for no one knew what the next weeks might mean, and worry about that near future when it arrives. Much like taking a drug: focus on the high now and worry about the payback later. Payback, always a bitch, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The now, living for the moment, was everything. We’d all maybe be dead by next week, Zagreb bombed by the Serbs, and this moment spent in what other way, on worry, debate, or planning an exit strategy to get out of the country? Perhaps the latter would have been wiser. But then, the excitement of imminent danger wouldn’t exist for us. We humans, like our fondness for a summer storm, we like danger in manageable doses and for now, danger in Croatia was in fact manageable. Like the drug whose hangover would wear off in a couple days after the crash, the level of danger in Croatia still was predictable, for the most part, and there was the feeling always Croatia that because of the republic’s proximity to Austria, there was a safe, rich, well-armed western nation just a few hours away by bus or car. Some kind of escape was possible if the situation in Croatia degenerated more quickly than recent events inside the borders.
“You getting off the train or not?” he asked again. I should have stayed with him. I think I would have if I had not been stuck in a world of images that didn’t exist, in a relationship that was over but which I had decided to chase like a ghost, me the ghost and he the dead man. It was the story of my life for some years to come. If I had had the power to separate will from desire, love from lust, life from lost, maybe it’d been different. It wasn’t different, it was as it was and, nonetheless, it was interesting. Even frighteningly exciting. Brash, for sure. I was under a magnétisme animal and could not help myself.
Cannes was a weird dream, a sort of make-believe poshness for my imagination. I landed there and had sought out beforehand a small bed and breakfast and left my bags there. My bags: a stolen Eagle Creek weekender-backpack combo that I’d picked up at my job with Rand-McNally in San Francisco, and another plastic shopping bag with handles filled with guidebooks and a journal. Once the bags were checked, I sought out a café near the center of town. The Brasserie Legend Café sounded perfect: quintessential French faire in the French flame mahogany Neoclassical design that made me feel important, posh, as I said, like in a French film about some married couple in trouble on the French Riviera on a beautiful summer’s day—une belle journée d'été. The restaurant, five blocks or so from La Croisette, was the place of fine dining for plebs, most likely. But plebs in Cannes are far different from plebs in Liverpool or other. Expensive French cigarettes and gold: the plebs of Cannes carry their own trademark and it smells quite lovely at times.
But Cannes is where rooted in me came the feeling that one most definitely need not be rich to be gracious and fabulous. In fact, if one may be gracious and fabulous sans money, you are in fact God of all. To purchase your grace and fabulousness is the highest sin of foolishness known to living creatures. Own nothing and in fact, you own the world.
The French maitre’d greeted me, saw that I was alone, escorted me to a long rectangular table already full with French people and he sat me in the middle of the long table, next to a couple jabbering away in French. The long table sat ten and I was the tenth. I looked at the menu, everything written in French, ordered what I could make out: bouillabaisse ala haricot verte avec champignon, little langostinios, a side of hard-boiled eggs.
The woman next to me brambled on about nothing I could make out but her hair made me think of my grandmother: hair worked high atop her head, spayed to a fixed mauve. Her hair matched the wallpaper of the reastaurant or the rfestaurant’s wallpaper matched her hair. Gold trim around everything and lamps closer to being chadalliers than not, hung around the place. Only in France would one enjoy an average lunch on an average day in a setting out of a magazine for French interiors. My point being in all this is that this was a worthy addition to the fantasy I’d wished to live on my visit to Cannes, to feel surrounded by everything French and nothing of some place other. The lunch was French, the people were all French, the décor was undeniably French, and I, I was not, which made everything feel even more French than it might actually have been.
The film festival had just closed and Cannes held that post-party afterglow that I like so much. All the hullabaloo gone, the stars, the paparazzi, the fans; to me that’s the best time to visit a place. Primed then deflated, there was no one to interfere with my getting the best service possible in a place more desirable than most places in all of Europe. On top of that, I held my own personal fascination with celebrity; a kind of fascination with my ability to ignore it and to be my own tycoon of sorts, in Cannes where the rich and famous play—actually, they only come here out of ignorance—where I could afford to live and celebrate life comfortably even if I had come here to chase someone down. It took no time rather to forget about Roger though and immerse myself in French culture and French boys, and to enjoy myself on another level beyond my own obsessions. But Roger did remain ever in the back of my mind and the indulgences I took in Cannes were probably more to try to snuff out the thought of him than to actually enjoy the company I was with or the entertainment I was involved with. Whatever.
On an early afternoon on the main playa in central Cannes, I put my towel across the sand and lay on the beach to catch some rays and to play my part at doing what tourists and travelers do in such places as Cannes. Within an hour an older gentleman about fifteen feet from my feet begins to chat to me. First in French, then in German, then finally in English after I’ve led him in that direction. We chat about Cannes, where I’ve come from, that I live in Berlin at the moment and that I’ve come from San Francisco. Not more than twenty minutes in conversation and he invites me to have dinner with him at his home a couple blocks from the beach we are on. He has money, none of it in which I am interested.
Swallow.
God was one of the most unusual people I had ever met. Above all, God was gritty, looked like a mechanic bodybuilder but more prone to drug taking than to preserving his body or perfecting it for show. God communicated very little; he came in, set up his gear and mainly kept to himself while the show went on all around him. At the end of it, God just folded up his gear again, moved everything he had brought for the show back into his dented van and drove off alone, as if nothing that night, or any other night, had happened at all.
But a lot had happened that night: the cops had showed up and let us be, men in strange uniforms asking for the owner of the club and to know why on a Sunday night there were a couple hundred “kids” gathered there and, thought the two policemen didn’t say it, wondered why we all weren’t doing something else, like preparing for school the next day. But it didn’t really matter because everything was legit; the club was up to date on its permits, the music wasn’t so loud that it caused complaints from any neighbors, who were several blocks away anyway and probably rarely heard anything from the club at all. But when the cops showed up, God turned away as if he had had a warrant out for his arrest, or something worse, and God not only turned away but he walked away, quietly, to the back of the club and some dark corner and out of sight, really out of sight, like he had walked through the supporting wall that held up the roof. Poof, God was gone.
Tilt-a-Whirl began April 4, 1993 in the South of Market district of San Francisco at a club called the Trocadero. The club itself had been there since the sixties and had seen everything from drugged out hippy bands to drugged out metal bands. But it hadn’t seen the likes of the crew come to set up a morning rave party that began that Easter Sunday, Easter Sunday of April 4, 1993, 6 a.m. start time and running until 2 p.m. in the afternoon. The crew wasn’t exactly drugged out like the hippies that had come before and died out by speed consumption or heroine, or drugged out like the metal heads who seemed more hooked to cocaine and alcohol. The crew was into ecstasy before anything else, and the occasional balloon, and some pot, occasionally bumps of speed to get you through the morning, and maybe a few beers to settle the stomach and smooth out the rough edges of long nights and long mornings. But the crew was young, able to keep up with the times.
Max and Darla visited The Bigfoot Lodge, used to be The White Swallow, a gay bar from the sixties up to 2003. They recalled together the time they wound up at The White Swallow and Byron was sitting on the stool at the end of the bar. Drunker than a budgerrigger on nitrous oxide, he stumbled through their names calling them Morty and Deirdre and asking them if they wanted to spend the night at his house on Potrero Hill.
“Byron, another of those lost homosexuals from Minnesota stuck in San Francisco on booze,” Max said.
“Yah, unlike you who’s gay and stuck in San Francisco and from Minnesota. When are you going to get out of here, Max?”
“Well just waitin’ for the Big One to hit, then we’re all off to the promised land.”
“Oh Atlantis or something, huh? Right!”
Two months before Max had moved into the Grolsch Mansion on Clay Street. An 1889 Victorian built by a gold baron by the name of James Beard and bought by Tomislav Greenway in 1974, the Grolsch Mansion housed a turnstile of gay men from different walks. The house came together as a way for Tomislav Greenway to surround himself with gay men who looked like borders to keep up the otherwise prohibitively expensive estate but was really a way for Tomislav Greenway to find access to a larger community of gay men from different backgrounds who could add to Tomislav Greenways indefetigueable intrigue for studying the human condition of gay men who were strays from some other larger society.
“How’s the Grolsch Mansion, Max?” Darla said.
“Well, last Lunar Dinner Richard got up and said how he welcomed this full moon when the Queen of the Wet returned to water the land and begin the cycle of re-hydration to the thirsty and to dampen the hair of waifs and strays coming to Our Fair City By the Bay in Search of Fertilizer. He owns a winery in Napa, you know. He’s also an epidemiologist at the Haight Ashbury Free Clinics. He’s a Harvard PhD. He’s a brilliant guy, I just haven’t figured out his sense of humor yet.”
“He’s just another Rich Queen in San Francisco who likes young boys, Max.”
“Well I’m not that young.”
“Young enough for somebody in their seventies.”
“He’s not that old.”
The Bigfoot Lodge was filling with all the usual after-work San Francisco dot com happy hour types. Max and Darla were on their fourth pint each and the CD jukebox was playing “Show and Tell” by Johnny Mathis. Pictures on the wall of United States National Parks now hung where images of birds used to be when The White Swallow stood as one of the oldest gay bars on Polk Street. No more Judy Garland playing and Cocksucker drinks—Bailys, coffee, cream—The Bigfoot Lodge served pints and Jägermeister and Cosmos. Timber paneling around the bar, the pastel shades of paint and old queens lining the rail were gone now, dead or down at the QT, one of two surviving all-gay bars on the Polk.
“So what are you going to do about a job?” Darla said.
“I don’t know but I do know I don’t want to go back to how these dot comers are living, stuck ten hours a day in a cubical staring at a computer screen and answering to some high tech bitch on wheels rolling in six figures and laughing all the way to the bank. I wish they’d all go home. We were here first and the City was better full of artists and dreamers and drug addicts. Now it’s account executives, speculators and drug addicts. Tell me, where do the children play?”
“Oh shut up. Cat Stevens is a member of the Taliban and there are no children in San Francisco. The ones that are left here are you and me, drinking beer and wondering what’s next. Times up. We’ve gotta go.”
Max and Darla walked out of The Bigfoot Lodge and got in Darla’s VW Jetta.
“Well, what do you think, The EndUp?”
“Sure, why not,” Max said. “But no speed. Let’s keep drinking but God no speed. I’ve gotta get a job one of these days.”
“Okay,” Darla said. “No speed. But an e would be great. Nothing like a job interview after a night out on e.”
“Well, maybe,” Max said.
We lost Jac entirely. The bar wasn't even that full but we lost him somehow. I'm not sure if I left with the other guy or if I left on my own to go to the Castro. Anyway, Jac told me in the morning that he met a guy and brought him home but that when they got to the front door of the house, Jac had forgotten his keys and so had to ring the bell, that the guy ran off because he didn't believe that Jac lived there, at the mansion. Grolsch Mansion.
Somehow Cartier must be brought into the fold, squatting its wares in a way of utterly clever sobriety, ripping down the walls of wealth leaving it bare, reconsidered. Choking on a diamond is such a painful process. You will be left with nothing but a memory that cannot serve you well. You must be taken out of yourself, bereft of merit and scourged by your own want. Money is killing us. This, my only thought as I tried to make it back to the mansion, up Grolsch Street, up, up, up, where no cable car had ever been, high as a fucking constellation.
Events
I left India’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram really early, like 5 a.m. After spending three days and nights locked up there I was well ready to get out on the streets of Pondicherry. Strict vegetarian meals − yogurt, rice, lentils, that was it. Craving a hard cup of coffee after all that shanti-shanti business I launched onto a coffee bar located on the second floor of a Chevignon Jeans shop, like Levis only French. The coffee bar was as western as you get with lots of seating room and clean tables with paper napkin dispensers, something unheard of almost anywhere else in the city. BBC News played on the overhead television.
I approached the wood counter and order a latte. The Tamil boy positioned himself behind the Italian espresso machine, the one that looked just like those everywhere in the States, like the front of a ‘50’s Chevy, running out luscious streams of thick black liquid and rising steam. While he spun the levers and assembled cup to saucer I turned and looked up at to the BBC. BAM! A plane flew into a skyscraper. BAM! Another jet hit the other skyscraper. I turned to the boy and ask him, bewildered, “What was that?”
“That, my friend,” his Tamil accent dipped, then continued, and his head cocked toward the television: “That is America!”
Little City
At eight, I lived in a world in miniatures. Not unlike most children, in the basement where I had spent my time, I had built a city of miniatures. In this miniature city, I was the mayor, but my name was different from the name my mom and dad had given me. My name as mayor of the miniature city was Gary, and Gary lived in the town’s only house. The house was yellow and white on the outside, red and black on the inside, the little yellow plastic walls repainted by a set of magic markers I used to create red and black striped walls all on the inside. Gary had a car, a lime-green Mercedes Matchbox from the local—and first ever in the world—Target store. The lime green Mercedes usually sat in the driveway of the yellow and white plastic house where all the town could see it. Since there was only one house in the miniature city, my young imagination placed all of the other residents outside the borders of the city’s central area, a six-by-six foot section of plywood that my dad had given me, and upon which I could build my miniature world.
My dad covered the six-by-six plywood with a piece of scrap of green carpeting like the kind found in the pro shops at golf courses or country clubs, a flat material designed for heavy wear and tear. The city was covered in beautiful green grass. For roads, I found a big roll of electrical tape and used that, making two lines of the shiny black tape side by side so that the roads were wide enough for my Matchbox cars to drive on them. With nothing but green carpet-grass over a sis-by-six section of plywood, electrical tape for new roads, and a house for Gary to live in with a black driveway for Gary to park his lime green Mercedes, I set out to build Little City, a refuge from the world around me.
The first business I purchased for the Little City came in the form of a plastic model kit from Target. The kit allowed me to assemble and glue together an automobile showroom and this became the city’s first business. Naturally, Gary owned the auto showroom. I began to purchase little people which were a little shorter than matchsticks, so that Gary would have some friends and so that his business also would have some customers in order for Gary to generate income. I knew that it took money to buy the model kits for the city, so I knew money is the thing that Gary needed in order to continue to build out the city. It was a kind of partnership between Gary and me: he had to do business with people in the city so that he could make more money and build more businesses. I appointed Gary mayor of the city and as the richest, most powerful person, he continued with me to build out Little City.
The town had a Lionel train set whose circular tracks traveled around the perimeter of Little City. On the edge of town, not far from Gary’s house, stood the City Zoo, filled with a set of plastic giraffes, plastic elephants, plastic hippopotomus’, plastic tigers, little ceramic penguins that I got from my mother’s china cabinet, a set of plastic panda bears, a few plastic seals, and a green plastic fence that encircled all the animals and kept them under control. The town had a plastic firehouse and a gas station, both purchased at Target. There were plenty of cars—Corvettes, Cadillacs, various trucks, hot rods and a few little motorcycles. The town grew quickly and more people started to come to Little City, but only the one house for Gary, mayor of Little City, stood within the town’s borders.
At first, there were five or six other matchstick people in Little City for Gary to associate with and to become friends with. Gary kept his distance, however, and focused more on building and acquiring new businesses. At the time, the film “The Towering Inferno” was the big motion picture release of 1974the summer and I had gone to see it with my mom, dad and sister. Instantly, it became my favorite film and I had to have a skyscraper in the city that looked like the building that became the Towering Inferno in the film. Since my dad worked in the printing industry, he had access to useful materials with which to build objects that resembled what would become the Towering Inferno in Little City. He came home one day with a three-foot tall three-dimensional rectangular box that he had constructed for me at his work. Think of a milk carton’s dimensions but only this one was really long, tall enough to resemble a skyscraper in Little City. I took a thick black marker and drew lines down the length of the box and also perpendicular across it to resemble windows. The skyscraper, not only the tallest building in Little City but also the tallest building in the world, I placed in the very center of town. In the film version of “The Towering Inferno,” as the world’s tallest skyscraper burned, a lifeline cable had been extended from the burning building to another, shorter building next to it. On this cable, some of the occupants of the burning building were sent across over the cable in a metal fire rescue chair that carried them to safety to the other secure, shorter building. I had to have a building in Little City that served the same purpose as in the movie. I made a much shorter building out of a 2% milk carton. In the film, the shorter building had no particular identity, it was just a building, perhaps an office building. In Little City, I turned the milk carton into the Skyway Theater, one of the nation’s first multi-screen movie houses located on Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, where I had watched “The Towering Inferno” with my family. I constructed a little sign above the building’s entrance that read Skyway Theater, as well as a large marquee above the entrance to the milk carton building with the names of the films that were showing written across it with my thick black pen. The films showing back then included “Shampoo,” “Benji,” and, of course, “The Towering Inferno.”
As time passed, the summer heat caused the plywood underneath Little City to warp. Over time, the six-by-six section of plywood began to warp upwards, so that the corners of this miniature world turned up towards the ceiling, making it a place that looked like it had been built in a kind of shallow bowl, or valley, and this warped-ness bothered me. Life went on in Little City, but the irregularity of the town’s appearance made me feel that my town was not working. The train tracks curved inward to the center of Little City and the train could no longer travel around the town without the little locomotive falling over and off its tracks, followed by the rest of the cargo cars that spilled over the surface of the warped town. Something was very wrong in Little City. I collected a box of large bricks and anchored each corner with a set of them, hoping that the weight of the bricks would “un-warp” Little City and things could return to normal again. It did not work. For a long time, maybe a year or more, Little City had been a success. Gary was a popular mayor, he sold plenty of cars at the dealership, the world’s tallest skyscraper kept the town in awe, the Skyway Theater offered all the latest hit movies, and the train ran on time. All the animals in the town’s zoo were happy. But when I found out that the bricks were not doing anything to correct the warping of the wood beneath the town, I began to lose interest in the place. By summer’s end, I staged my own “Towering Inferno.” The town, now in a state of disrepair, seemed abandoned. I removed the skyscraper from the center of Little City, took it outside, away from the house to an open field, planted the building firmly into the ground, and very ceremoniously set it on fire. I played the drama of the film in my mind as I watched my Towering Inferno burn; the white rectangular box and its drawn-on windows went slowly up in flames. I held a bundle of lit matches to the cardboard and gradually the flames overtook it, turning the white to brown and then black, and then as the flames burned through the cardboard, the burning edges of it lit up in a flaming glow like white Christmas lights, and slowly the awe of Little City was no more.
THE OLD GUARD
=
In Russia, it seemed the surface of all life had been coated by a tonic or turpentine meant to keep the color out. What was there behind this film or layer coating the objects, the images of life, was the truth of day-to-day existence. Reflect what had been Yugoslavia on itself and the tonic or turpentine only worked to keep the color out on certain aspects of daily life; the truth of day-to-day existence was rather an overcoat worn threadbare, revealing the more colorful under garments. In the last days of Yugoslavia, the overcoat shred to pieces on its own and the long silent grouping of republics flashed their own individual colors in order to demand an image of life that reflected the new tribe.
*
What is the quality of life? What makes the desert bloom?
East and West have always been different, but even more so, I think, in the twentieth century. In the West, the twentieth century has been dominated by products and consumption; but in the East - by East I mean Eastern Europe, Russia and the Slavic Republics - the national emphasis has been on ideas. Ideas arise from thinking and thinking requires time. The people of Europe have always had more time than Americans, especially in Eastern Europe where time expands to meet the task at hand, followed by a long strong coffee before and after. Before and after is when all of this thinking takes place and the further east you go, the stronger the coffee is. For a time it seemed to me like thinking came from the East. The writers I was reading, like Milosz and Petofi, seemed to insight thinking. But in the West, people were too busy buying to think about where their experiences were leading them; in the West, the free market convinced nearly everyone that you could purchase happiness, could wear it or sit on it or drive it, and thinking contributed nothing to the act of buying and the habit of consumption. In the East thinking flourished, even under Communism which, early in the century, imposed great restrictions on free thought and allowed just a few - the nomenclature - to define what kind of thinking was permissible in the new regime. This led the people to a political ideology that fooled nearly everyone, for a time, into the belief that the revolution would usher in justice and equality. But even under Communist dictatorship thinking happened, real thinking, the type of thinking that enabled the people to laugh, even at Communism, even in the worst of times.
For a time, Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, of Latvian descent, supported the revolution by creating films that glorified the workers. Films like "The Battleship Potemkin " and "October" were just what the early Soviets needed to bring the ideas of the revolution to the people by means of mass media. Artists like Eisenstein used ideas to change thinking which in turn motivated Bolsheviks to manipulate history by making class struggle a possession. As a critic of Eisenstein's work you can see that the revolution was not only over class struggle, but also art and politics over possession. But this aim was only temporary.
Once Stalin began his campaign of collectivization, which subsequently brought death to millions of peasants who worked the land, Eisenstein knew the direction Communism was taking and so turned his attention to other ideas, to Russia's past. Eisenstein began making films with historical subjects like "Ivan the Terrible," based on the sixteenth-century Russian ruler who was almost as tyrannical as Stalin himself. Eisenstein knew the revolution was over.
Stalin saw the similarities between Ivan the Terrible and himself. Soon Eisenstein was under the close scrutiny of Stalin and his watch dogs. He could no longer express himself openly through his art. Quietly, Eisenstein all but disappeared from Soviet cinema and soon died, at the age of fifty. The thinking of a few ushered in thought police who intensified politics. The result was politics over art.
It must have been terribly difficult to survive this history.
*
I graduated and moved back to Minneapolis for the summer but didn't want to stay there; got accepted to the graduate program at Stanford in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and took classes in that program for two years. Escaped Stanford on weekends and tried to stay out of Palo Alto as much as possible (those people are sick down there). I was pretty close to having enough graduating credits, but I was absolutely miserable at Stanford, couldn't stand the students there save for a handful of insane people like me, and I applied for a program and scholarship in Yugoslavia (before the breakup) and was accepted, and went for the summer to study Serbocroatian--now called Croatian and Serbian.
Within the first two hours of my stay in Zagreb, the capital of the Croatian Republic, I met a guy named Branko who became my partner for over three years (also confirming to the general Eastern European population that I am indeed, bent). At the end of an amazing summer spent traveling Yugoslavia, Hungary and CZ, I was offered a teaching position and taught at a private school (fabulous, brilliant kids aged 14-21) and for an energy firm (alcoholic workers, a blast!) and became a minor celebrity in Zagreb, due to the fact that I played a white polar bear puppet named Shaggy on Croatian television, on a program for English as a second language, to intermediate learners all across the country. I also got involved in radio over there and co-hosted English by Radio, and also recorded English commercials for Levis, that were used throughout Yugoslavia. At the end of that year, Slovenia had declared its independence from the Yugoslav Federation, followed by Croatia one month later. I awoke one morning and on my way to my teaching jobs, there was a tank outside my apartment building, of the Yugoslav Military (which had always been controlled by the Serbs), and within a few weeks everything in the country turned to fear and war. The US Embassy advised that I return to the US. I did shortly thereafter, returned to Minneapolis, and I helped my partner Branko (a crazy fucking bastard, too) get over to the US so that he could avoid being sent into a really shitty, semi-Holocaust war that lasted several years.
For a time, education could change the narrow courses of East and West. As a student I believed this, we all believed it, all of my friends at Stanford. We were liberal arts students who seemed to know this better than the others. But we were still mired between products and history.
We were after ideas but we were after material. In fact, we were dialectical materialists in a shopping mall, hating it. First World hatred. Such hatred is reaction against the suburban; trying to bring chaos out of order. In fact, armed with knowledge we were questioning, rejecting, changing with time. What we were really after was a third road.
After the standardized testing there were courses that slipped through our fingers. Like Soviet Foreign Policy. Skeptics thought Gorbachev and the Soviet reformers were just friendly Communists. This was like calling Kurt Waldheim of Austria or Jean Marie Le Pen of France friendly Nazis. These individuals are more complex. Gorbachev deserved his Nobel Prize, he was Socialism with a human face. To all the PC weirdoes, his visit to Stanford confirmed that Neo-Socialism was alive there. But who believed it? Soviet Foreign Policy and friendly Communists are now reformed and after material, and Neo-Socialism is an enigma.
Is our goal to control the future or perfect the past?
*
FAKING IT
A gay priest at Sunday evening mass and me, a circle of friends both male and female, playing holy. The rituals of our beliefs, but what of our beliefs. At the time, the beliefs we carried were for our self-preservation, to protect our names, offer us hope and opportunity, save us from lives of adventure. I turned my back on all that, and then at the turn of the millennium so had the larger world, turned its back on all the fear, the falsehood, the fantasies of good. Good men, good women, good deeds. The only good deed is love and we were not part of that love, so our deeds were meaningless.
Identity. The who what where why when of existence. Who are you and what do you do and where are you going and when will you finally arrive there. Little had I known that I was a kind of mad scientist creating my own monster that was myself. As Nikola Tesla envisioned near the end of his life, he believed he would be able to create a device that could photograph a person’s memories, to preserve those memories for life, of life. This story is such a photograph, painted in the way of words that will unfold to comprise who has lived, what has been lived, where, why lived in such an way, and when the memories can finally burn themselves out to reveal the deeper truth of a human condition.
*
The president said we won the Cold War. But who believed him? And what was the prize? Freedom? His fear of Communism was like our fear of fascism, as strong and as scary as anything, and not dealt with in a way that would diminish the fear and instead promote understanding on both sides, or at least on one side. No discourse, just denial. Denial of Realpolitik in action on a global scale. The Germans know how the Cold War was won. Das Geburt Einer Nation.
Many Americans did believe the president, just like they believe in possessions. Gorbachev correctly stated that the United States was the "initiator" of the nuclear arms race. In this respect, the United States is partially to blame for the misery of the people there, for shortages, for ecological disaster. The United States was a provocateur, and the Soviet leadership responded defensively by spending everything the people earned on nuclear arms. This, combined with a losing political ideology, is why they lack possessions. But the president blamed only the Soviet leadership, the nomenclature, and he believed himself. Many Americans believed it because they had no choice; they needed to hear that we were winning even though we were losing. If they didn't believe it there would be no justification for spending.
What would they do without their faith?
*
We wake up one morning and go to our closets and find that we have nothing to wear. The fact is, our closets are full of clothes. But we go shopping anyway. And those malls, so sterile, offensive, ready to send us home with the commodity. So we leave in disgust and go to shop downtown instead, where the buildings are older and characterized by brick and tiles rather than mere concrete blocks. But it's just the same activity in a different environment. So we go back to our books and find that we are living our own fears. Where is the quality of life?
I pick up the paper and find Gorbachev, the Russian, is coming. But this, too, is made into an event for selling material. Newspapers, T shirts, coffee mugs, wrist watches, Soviet flags. Buy now before history repeats itself.
*
The month of May has a certain magic, it can change the course of history by ending Communist power. It was May 1989 when Hungary expelled its long-standing Communist leader Janos Kadar; that same month Czechoslovakia elected Václav Havel president of the new Czech and Slovak Republics and several years earlier, in 1968, the Prague Spring of March had, by May of the same year, sent shock waves as far as Paris. The Czech and Slovak peoples had attempted to break from rigid Soviet Communism, signaling similar movements in Poland in April and May. Romania elected its first democratic parliament in May 1990 after the fall of Nicolae Ceaucescu. Communist Bulgaria fell apart in May, so too Albania. And it was May 1989 when Chinese students began the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square against the Communist government of China. Even Russian resistor Kerensky had his day in May, before it all began, when he became Russia's leader, however brief, five months before the Bolshevik takeover in 1917.
There was a man named Josip Broz, Marshall Tito who managed to defy all odds against him: Soviet Communism, Western imperialism, South-Slavic nationalism. He was a leader who created a nation between two different worlds, between the East and the West. When he died in May 1980 everything he created died with him and the world became smaller, people became bigger. May had become October, but the revolution had reversed its course. Ten years after Tito's death Communism died in most of the republics of Yugoslavia and free elections were being held, in the month of May. Communism was dead and red stars and hammers and sickles had become, in the consumer sense of the word, possessions.
*
Tito was the president of Yugoslavia for thirty-seven years. Yugoslavia seemed to me to be the most progressive of the East European nations. There the people lived with enough material to be comfortable, not deprived of the basics of modern living - telephones, televisions, wash machines, up-to-date music, imported wine and beer - unlike the republics of the Soviet Union or the rest of Eastern Europe, and it was not a gluttonous country, not like America. In Yugoslavia, especially in the north in Croatia and Slovenia, the economy was controlled by central authorities, but there was also a modest free market which maintained a standard of living higher than any other Communist nation. And with all of the changes taking place after the free elections of May, it seemed that a true democracy was about to be established.
Even the social scene was far more enlightened than in the other Central and East European countries. Foreigners were always welcome and Yugoslav hospitality overflowed; women had greater roles in business and government; gays and lesbians in Ljubljana and Zagreb had established their own organizations and were making political progress. Even though Croatia and Slovenia were controlled by puppet Nazi regimes during World War II, there existed less anti-Semitism than in other parts of Communist Europe and the Jewish community, especially in the capital cities of Ljubljana and Zagreb, received equal representation; and the arts were progressive and exhibited innovative theories and designs, from IRWIN and LAIBACH in Slovenia, theater in Croatia, folk dance in Serbia, multi-ethnic sporting competition in Bosnia and Hercegovina, literature in Macedonia.
In Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where access to the free-thinking West was now as easy, there still existed suspicion of foreigners; women were largely restricted to their traditional roles; gays and lesbians were still met by great hostility; and the arts were just beginning to emerge from heavy censorship. And in the Soviet Union, Romania and Bulgaria the situation was much worse. There the first concern of the people was getting a nice cut of meat on the table and a television in the living room. Foreigners, women, minorities, fashion, the arts received last consideration.
At the time of my departure Yugoslavia was next in line to be accepted into the European Community, next in line before Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Poland. In Yugoslavia everything seemed very positive and change was a constant factor. So I went to Yugoslavia with optimism and a need to break the American possession, to find experiences to shape a life.
It is May and the world opens at my feet; I see the world through my eyes, I hear the world through my ears. There are peoples I have never met, places I have never seen. There are other peoples who live differently than me, who possess values different from mine.
The quality of life? It all depends on the quality of the questions you ask yourself.
___________
THE ARRIVAL
=
Zürich is the aire apparent of Europe, it survived Europe's devastating wars and learned from them. The city attests to this with clean, quiet streets, graced by well-educated, multi-lingual, free-market socialists with qualities and standards of living unmatched in the world. Zürich's Franco-German lifestyle manages to balance Swiss society. Its social climate mixes relaxed elegance, found in France, and efficient order, found in Germany. You notice this rare combination in most places of Zürich city, in shops and boutiques, in restaurants, at the cinema, museums, in bars, virtually everywhere service is part of daily living.
(It's different in English-speaking countries. By comparison, London was much like San Francisco. I was shopping on London's Sloan Square and New King's Road in August of 1986 at all the shops you also find near San Francisco's Union Square, minus the big Macy's, I Magnin, Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue. Those department stores frame Union Square and are mostly responsible for building San Francisco's reputation as one of the main shopping cities in the U.S. Sloan and New King's Road are similar to San Francisco's Post Street and Geary Street - just off from Union Square - the boutiques similar and the young people near identical, in their Fiorucci and leather jackets, Benetton and faded denim, Ionsdale.
That was in 1986, yet Post and Geary Streets are much the same today, full of young people dressed like that. Now in Zurich, in the old quarter of the city, the guys dress in sport coats and turtle necks, sometimes striped shirts and neck ties, and the girls wear turtle necks and jeans, sometimes long handsome brocade skirts, always topped off with brown leather coats or jackets or suede, and shoes that seem professional rather than rebellious - rebellious Dr. Marten's Shoes of London and San Francisco. Zurichers are fashionable but in an unconscious, nonchalant way. But it's not fashion that makes these differences between people of my generation. It's social. The main difference among my generation in London and San Francisco, and Zürich's old quarter, is an aire of confidence that radiates from the young Zürichers. They seem to have a clear sense of direction as they walk, converse, negotiate. It's like they have security, are already well-established in their careers, ordering Cognac in a handsome cafe, expressing thoughts and ideas rather than impulse and emotion. In London or San Francisco, in 1986 or just a few days ago, young people are generally reluctant to engage in specifics; thoughts of poetry, literature, history do not enter conversation. Rather, ordering beer in dive pubs - thought to be inverse-snobbery, therefore politically-correct - running conversations that revolve around dissatisfaction, lack of direction).
Zürich has confidence. The shops are there to give direction: coats and ties and turtle necks that you wear to look handsome in that particular, living cafe. San Francisco and London ask questions, hesitate. You buy your clothes and wear them anywhere. "Are you going out tonight?" "Yeah, I guess so." "Where are you going?" "I don't know. Just out."
Not French but German is Zürich's lingua franca, also Switzerland's official language, though one hears occasional traces of French in the simplest contexts like in the supermarket, where your order might be counted in German, followed by a polite merci upon conclusion of the transaction. These qualities make the people of Zürich mild and mannered without great pretensions. Yet Zürichers have a strong sense of materialism, similar to the Italians: an assertive, polished dressing style, cosmopolitan eating habits, automobiles that reflect success, apartments that provide convenience and comfort. This is western Europe. But Zürichers live stylishly without the decadence found in cities like Rome, Florence or Milan.
Zürich has confidence. It is a city on its own, Switzerland a country on its own. It is diverse without disorder, ordered without sterility.
*
I left San Diego International Airport destination Zürich early in the morning, about 7:10 am. My mother brought me to the airport, always there to support me with her love and respect for my independence. My ticket aboard the now-defunct Pan Am Airlines was purchased, one-way from San Diego to Zürich, for $349.00, a student fare before high-season. The initial flight from San Diego to Los Angeles was a small propeller plane, holding no more than forty passengers.
The flight to Los Angeles was only about thirty minutes in length. The transfer flight to a 747 wide-body to New York was about four-and-one-half hours and uncomfortable, a bus in the air. I quickly made my connection to another 747 wide-body (what was wrong with the first one?) and took my seat next to a very large woman with big hair, dressed in silky multi-colors that shocked the wide, blue-gray design of the jumbo jet. I had no idea that I would spend three-fourths of the ten-hour flight talking with her, listening to her, about her devotion to Medjugorje, the Holy Sight in south-western Croatia where the apparition of the Blessed Virgin is said to have appeared on several occasions.
Mid-way into the flight I realized that more than half the passengers on the plane were going to Medjugorje. Mary Beth was in her late-sixties and said that she needed to make the pilgrimage to Medjugorje before her legs got any worse. She kept patting my hand as it lay there on the tray-table, telling me that "we have something in common: we have both been called to Croatia on a mission" - hers is to seal her spiritual life, to confirm her years of devotion to Christianity by coming closer to Christ's spirit borne of Mary; and mine, to open myself to the world and to nurture the spirit within, so she said. I believe her, Aqua Net and all.
Mary Beth had a glass of white wine before dinner, the plastic dinner. "Maybe you'll get married over there," she said. I didn't want her inside my head. I ordered a beer and felt guilty in her presence, my second already. Then I looked diagonally across the aisle and saw an elegant young man speaking seductive German to his traveling partner, die liebe. They were on their fourth beers already, Heineken. Dinner arrived and the film began.
I was feeling all warm and relaxed, until the film began. I was sitting there, my grandmother on my right, Europe on my left; comfort, right; desire, left; and then one of the worst examples of American popular culture starts flickering before us, "The Secret of My Success." I decided to concentrate on Mary Beth, her large breasts seemed to expand as she ate. She was so large, yet ate so little. Her wine shimmering and her dress shimmering, chicken breast and Aqua Net.
Her breasts were a large part of her. At times they almost moved on to her plastic tray of food, a meeting of breasts. Hers were definitely breasts, not "boobs." I have always hated that word, "boobs." It makes that part of the female body sound foul, ridiculous. Yet most of the women and girls I have known have always called their breasts "boobs." My mother, my sister, Angie Henley - the girl who was - "boobs," they would say. Chicken boob, I thought. The Blessed Virgin Mother has breasts. "The baby Jesus lay in the manger nursing from the Blessed Virgin's boob." It doesn't sound right, like "catsup." Ketchup. No matter how you looked at Mary Beth's chest, "boobs" would make them sound insignificant.
*
Landing at the airport in Zürich was smooth but left me tired, after more than sixteen-hours of transfers and flying. I quickly passed through passport control and went to the baggage terminal, where I waited for more than two hours, soon discovering that my luggage had been lost. Pan Am apologized, gave me one-hundred Swiss Franks (about seventy dollars at the time), and assured me they would deliver my luggage within two days. Two days in the same clothes in a city full of style and grace! I was frustrated to say the least. I was tired and set out to find an affordable hotel near the center of the city.
*
Leaving the airport which conveniently connects to the metro station, I was heading toward the trains that transport passengers to the city. Swarms of French high-schoolers are being herded toward the trains by their adult guides. I feel an urge to follow them, not knowing in which direction I should be heading. I knew that would only lead me to a youth hostel where I would end up sharing a large room with six or eight squirmy boys. Turning from their path, I wander around in a tired daze, buy a liter of mineral water, drinking it and managing to pull myself together and discover that I am in the heart of Europe, on my own. I went to transit information in order to inquire directions to the city center.
I entered the passage to the metro without paying, knowing that I could plead ignorance if I were caught because I neither spoke French, German, nor Italian, although I knew that much of the population of Switzerland speaks English as well.
*
I went ahead to the trains, finding a seat and soon discovering that I am sitting next to two couples speaking some Slavic language that I can't quite distinguish. I know they are not speaking Russian because I had studied Russian for three years, though several of their words are very near Russian, their strong accents telling me that they come from beyond western Europe. I know they were not speaking Croatian or Serbian, because I had just finished my first course in that language. But once again several words are very familiar to me, now sounding more Croatian than Russian.
The train reached top speed and emerged from the underground, the overcast sky bursting its cloudy-gray into the train's windows, casting a glowing light. I immediately savor my first glimpses of outer Zürich, tenements and factories near the train tracks quickly clip by. I r efocus on the couples, hoping to piece together enough information so that I can approach them in Russian. I gather that they will exit the train near the center of town. "Centar" is the key word they are using, a familiar word to many languages, so I quickly step behind them as they uniformly rise to leave the slowing train.
Standing very near to one couple, I utter a few words in Russian, hoping they would extract some meaning from similar words in their own language. "Excuse me," I say, "please tell me, where are you from?" They don't quite understand me and the man nearest me pays particular attention to what I say, wrinkling his brow and peering through his thick glasses, his mustache looks interested. I repeat the question and see a dim light flash in his head, then the same thing happens to his wife. They understand. They answer me in their own language, "We are from Prague."
Suddenly I am very excited because these are the first Czechs I have ever met and we managed to communicate. I am already in the East.
I feel like I am speaking with all of Czechoslovakia. Here, I thought, were people from a socio-economic reality I had been studying for several years. They feel like I had imagined. They, on the other hand, display no such enthusiasm. "I am from San Francisco," I say. "Are you Russian?" the man asks. "No, I am American." Instantly the man and his wife change their mood from dead-pan to the jolly couple from Prague. "AmEErikan!"
I guess they approve.
Not knowing particular Czech sensitivities - what I discovered several months later - that most Czechs hate the Russian language because of Soviet-style Communism that dominated their land for decades, I continue in Russian. I tell the two couples, one of them almost invisible, that this is my first visit to Zürich. Specially projecting my words to the couple with puzzled faces and wrinkled brows, I say that I need to reach the center of town, I hope they can help me. The man's wife says "o.k., (you are an naive American and will probably die without our help"). I regret this.
Exiting the train all together, the less interested couple float ahead, like deprived consumers, to a small chocolate stand, then toward the steps that lead to the light and the city. The other couple, my couple, point and gesticulate and explain to me, in Czech, in which direction I must go. They are not going in my direction. They want to be rid of me, but rid of me knowing that they have not neglected their duty. Slowly stepping backward, looking puzzled and interested in the woman in a pea-green sweater who is Czech, I watch her as she points toward an exit in the opposite direction, sharply jabbing her arm, alternately at me and then toward the exit, at me, then the exit, about fifty yards behind me. I stepped backward, looked at the exit, back at her arm, back at the exit, shouting "spasiba! spasiba?!" and turned to make my exit to the city of Zürich, Switzerland.
*
The Zürich Rothus Hotel is located just one block from the Zürichsee, or Lake of Zürich, in the city's bohemian district. Rooms and restaurants are cheaper there, shops are designed for a young, fashionable clientele without a lot of money. My room at the Rothus was the same. After checking in I went to my third-floor room to freshen up. I was so motivated to discover the city, but felt a bit ashamed knowing that I had been wearing the same clothes for twenty-eight hours, had ate in them, slept in them, sweat in them, and now, high from jet-lag, would continue to wear them for at least another day. I took a shower immediately, hoping to recover the fresh feeling that my clothes would deprive me. After my shower I put on a heavy splash of eau d' toilette and dressed and then left the hotel for a currency exchange, a newsstand, and a moderately-priced restaurant.
CANTON ZÜRICH
=
Good beer is plentiful in Zürich and I rarely missed a corner pub during long strolls down the cobblestone streets of the old section of the city. Finding a brightly-lit sausage stand where it was possible to enjoy a thick sausage with mustard and rye bread, accompanied by wonderful beer, I took in this German bad habit: too much meat, too much fat, too much carbohydrate-charged, high-calorie beer. Feeling slightly sated by the half-belly full, my jet-lag was nagging me to return to the hotel for a good rest. It was already past two in the morning, late morning back in California.
After a half night's sleep at the Rothus, I woke early and went to the hotel restaurant for a fine breakfast of juice, milk, strong coffee, rich dark bread, hard-boiled eggs, ham, and fruit. The chairs were cushioned with tapestry scenes of the countryside, the table simple and made of oak wood, sturdy and lasting. I enjoy this setting in the dining room and the older, accommodating waiter. On the table sat two newspapers, the Herald Tribune and the leading paper of Munich, Südeutches Zeitung, which made me think of my friend Egon Scotland, a journalist for the paper and with whom I had studied Croatian at Stanford University.
Together Egon and I watched Gorbachev enter the Stanford Quad, mobs of students there to greet him and tens of agents, from East and West, babbling in Russian and English. All that we could see was the top of his head, his birth mark, and even that required standing on the tip of our toes. Egon was scribbling a few words in his palm-sized notebook which would later turn into an article for his paper back in Munich. I was working for the Hoover Institution editing articles about this great event. We watched the birth mark move around the throngs of students, a pale planet with a red continent and some islands.
A brief glance at the headlines of the Herald Tribune and a third cup of coffee left me wanting for the streets of Zürich. I left with a salute to the waiter and a satisfied feeling, hoping that my gesture wasn't typical of the American.
*
A morning filled with visits to small museums, shops, and coffee bars is to me about the best way to spend free time in the city. I visited such places, as well as a few department stores, and an elegant sex shop, complete with marble floors, granite counter tops and hip, multi-lingual sales persons. Early afternoon taking photos and feeling acquainted with at least the old town section, I returned to a pub I had visited the night before. This pub was to be particularly memorable, not for its decor or service, but rather for the man I met while drinking a large stein of beer. His name was Gino Nemche, a resident of Zürich of twenty-two years. He was quite drunk.
*
Gino was the biographer of Herman Hesse, Jack Kennedy, and a biographer of Richard Nixon, although he lost the latter position because he was fired from his post as professor of English at Harvard University. Gino looked a lot like Larry King, though more handsome than Larry, without those suspenders. We talked about our studies - mine Eastern Europe; his Hesse, Kennedy, Nixon, and personal loss. He had been living in Zürich where he was able to maintain close contact with Hesse. But now that Hesse is long dead I got the impression that he is somehow lost, not quite sure of his place in Swiss society. He labored over Hesse and the Swiss, his green sweater flashing, his eyes flashing. "Why here, Herman? Why Zürich?" he said, taking a gulp from the stein. "The fucking Swiss are so fucking tight," he demanded, spit spraying from his quivering lips, dangerously close to my beer. "Fucking Switzerland for the fucking Swiss and all the rest is fucking piss, like this fucking beer! Superior." "Right," I said, enjoying my beer more and more with every four-letter word that he sputtered. Privately I hoped the bar tender didn't understand English. Yet Gino was quite joyful in the midst of his frustration. Was he on drugs? Yes. The beer is a wonderful drug. But his joyfulness also came from speaking English with a fellow America who listened to his blubber and wisdom (he was articulate).
Gino bought me a beer or two and he had several. Watching his eyes swell with the frustrations of his life, I wondered what really makes his life here so emotional. He no longer loves his wife, a fact that leaked out of him as he descended one of the peaks where he keeps Hesse. But that didn't seem to bother him. Was it his failures as a biographer? his lost fame or fortune? could the Swiss really be so awful? Superior? No. Perhaps lack of love? That was it. Perhaps he really loved Hesse. He saw a world in him and he wanted to touch him. Hesse was Narcissus and Gino was like Goldman but he's talking about a dead man; he's a living man. I think he wants to live but he doesn't know where to go from here. Now he's trying to win my affection. Typical Goldman.
Gino longs to be as great as Hesse, to live as fully as the great author, if
not in reality, at least in his own writing. Now this man is crying. It was the type of crying when you are a child and you've lost your mother in the store, face bunched-up and all red, like clown make-up. His tears were like diamonds, they glistened so.
About fifty minutes with Gino left me wanting again. What did I want?
Gino had been too emotional for my taste, though my emotions are there and, given to drink, cause the frustrations to magnify. I just wasn't his soul-mate at the time. Bottoms up and we were inching from the open-air bar and onto the cobblestones. The sun was setting and the Zürichers were finished with this shopping district, on their way home to refresh and to prepare for their return to this even livelier night district.
*
Shuffling cobblestones under shadows of five- and six-story buildings, Gino bunched-up again and all I heard was tearsKennedyZürichHesseZürichHesse-HermantearsJackPatDicktearHesseBeer. It was like a scary poem.
Was he so damn frustrated? Trying to piece together the snowflake puzzle.
Did he want my sympathy? Crying until his wife threw him out of the house. Surely Herman would send him on his way, and probably did.
Pathetic. I just wanted his inspiration as a drunk writer, thinking alcohol might be an ingredient to writing, like I thought it was for James Joyce. And now I had become his confessor.
Listening to him was becoming a sin in itself.
Trying to cheer him up, I was mostly smiles, he was all tears. I bid him adieu and told him remember, "life is more than smiles, and tears." He knew that. The Rothus in front of us, I turned to enter its shelter, without Gino.
*
I woke up with a start, after a confusing, jet-lagged nap, not knowing whether I was in Romania or Scotland. My senses somewhat gathered, I took a shower, dressed in black trousers, black shoes and a bright blue shirt, packed my bag and went to the lobby where my other two bags were waiting for me, dejected and overweight.
Looking at the settled, mild elegance of the lobby, I realized that I had been in Zürich for two days and that it was time to get on the train to Zagreb in order to be in Croatia for the beginning of my studies. I checked out of the Rothus and went to the train station, trying to remain composed as I meet strangers on the street, my bags so heavy they embarrass me.
I knew I had reached the "Belgrade Express" when I stumbled into this
young guy speaking Serbian, through cracked lips and tar-stained teeth, to a portly, haggard woman dressed in a tacky orange polyester dress, bearing a large orange nylon bag that bulged like it was full of onions. They clearly stood out next to the rows of trains heading for destinations like Paris, Milan, and Munich; those Westerners in pin stripes and linen. I took the liberty of asking him, "kuda ide ovaj voz," to which he responded, "BEOGRAD!" I knew I had found a friend. I never saw him again.
____________
TRAIN IN VAIN
=
I boarded the train at Zürich Central with my bloated bags, finding my coupé after passing through six cars, feeling like a rhinoceros passing through a garden hose. With the help of a Serbian- and Croatian- speaking young gentleman, we hoisted my bags to the top luggage rack above the seats and exchanged exhaustion, plunking down into our pea-green seats.
The train ride from Zürich to Zagreb was everything but "Express." The journey was over fifteen hours long and uncomfortable, but nevertheless made enjoyable by the company of the young guy with whom I shared my coupé. After a couple of hours of watching the rolling countryside, listening to my Walkman, and wondering whether this young guy was wondering about me and my story, as I wondered about he and his story, we struck a stumbling conversation in Croatian.
My Croatian wasn't very good yet, I had only studied the language for ten weeks at Stanford. He didn't know a word of English, which surprised me; I thought every European knew a few words of English. He didn't know a single word. Not even "hello," or "thank you." But we managed to communicate quite well.
We talked about usual things: he was from a small town in northern Bosnia, we both were twenty five, etc. We talked about unusual things: the changes taking place in Yugoslavia, the differences among the six primary ethnic groups there, Balkan politics, Soviet politics, Gorbachev, and we discussed why I decided to study in Zagreb.
The train ride is now soothing.
I immediately notice the difference in communicating with the "European." Though we are strangers, he sits much closer to me than an American would. He takes off his shoes to relax, we get deeper into conversation, spending much time in clarifying ideas expressed cross-culturally. After a couple of hours of talk, Miso now sits directly across from me, he places his feet on my seat next to me, about three inches from my left leg, his white socks clean and new. I feel comfortable - respect from him because I know he is sincere, uninhibited, unlike Americans. His blond hair is not what I had expected; his blue eyes like mine. Blond Bosnian boy. I had thought the influences in Bosnia were mainly Moslem, Turkish, dark hair and skin, suspicion, anti-western. He is somehow German, yet Slavic.
*
The night spent on this train was long, frequently interrupted by the various train conductors that checked the passengers' passports. Miso and I frequently exchange annoyances over this regimen. The Swiss border approaches along with the Swiss "passport controller." He was an upright gentleman, well acquainted with foreigners, and was more pleasant than the stern, mechanical controller at the border of Austria.
He glances at the passports, not giving much thought to our countries of origin, stamps them, or not, (Americans do no need a visa, which makes me feel uncomfortable in front of Miso) and bids us a pleasant journey. The same procedure happens at Austria's border. But finally, at the border of Yugoslavia, there is a rigid, callused, Communist-molded, crooked-feeling, passport controller who disturbs our early morning and imposes his authority on us. Yet one Yugoslav controller is not enough. We are met by two, and then a third.
They wear buffed-green uniforms and stiff-brim, red-starred caps on their square heads, jarring open the doors to your coupé, not requesting but demanding your passport. You are now in Yugoslavia.
"PASOS!" is the demand. It's like your passport not only confirms your identity, but also justifies it. They interrupt your enjoyment of the sharp Julian Alps, rolling fields, salmon-brick homes. As the head controller forced open the doors to our coupé, his girth preceding the rest of him, my Bosnian friend obediently handed over his Yugoslav passport as if it were an habitual identity check, which made me angry. I felt an urge to refuse my passport, but I thought that might lead me to even sterner Yugoslav controllers. The dark-haired controller with steel eyes looked into my naive American ones and said, "PASOS!"
I gave him my passport and he asked me, in Croatian or maybe Slovenian, to go to the front of the train. I got up, bid Miso a greeting amounting to "see you later?" not knowing if I would return. I left the coupé for the tight, wobbly passage to the front of the train, the moving train where rows of brown-clad, smoking Slavs loiter the halls of the train, like cattle cars. The controller kept prodding me on, further and further through the train, eight or nine cars; I had no idea where the front of the train began, nor what to look for. But he nudged me with the back of his hand, "dalje, dalje," a glint in his eye that translated either "We are going to murder your stupid American ass," or "Keep going, you naive American who would be better off in Italy."
Finally I could see that we had reached the front of the train, there were no more cars to pass into. Suddenly feeling cornered, I saw the back end of the engine car, a bright-orange color that contrasted the pea-green passenger cars. Ordering me to stand in the doorway of an empty coupé, the controller stood a couple of feet from me while the train traveled further east. All this time he held on to my passport. I was nervous. I was sure his sly smile under his stiff cap would mock me further. My bags still back in the coupé eight or nine cars away, I thought I would return to find everything stolen including my underwear, my Bosnian friend long gone.
*
Appearing like a stranger out of nowhere, a gray town sits quietly surrounded by brilliant sunshine and rich green hills . A few small factories so close to the train tracks you could touch them, white curtains dirtied by exhaust flap out of windows of small homes, strangers waving to strangers. The train station is now apparent by the sight of stray passenger cars standing alone, two, three, and four tracks away, abandoned. The name of the station scrolls before my eyes while the brakes screech sharply, G - L - I - N - A is the place. Steam and steel announce the first stop in Yugoslavia. I was prepared for death.
Coming to a complete stop, the train was disturbingly silent. The controller took my arm and led me out of the train, silently to the platform. Then he led me to a stairway in the middle of the platform that went down many steps to a dark passage, random puddles and train exhaust tangible to my senses. Walking through the dark tunnel, images of the film "Midnight Express" appeared in my head. At the end of the tunnel was an office marked Milicija (Police). Entering the police office, the controller twisted the brass knob and turned toward me, saying "wait here for a moment," his tar-stained teeth now visible by the light escaping the office. I stood outside the office and waited.
As I waited, I examined the door: a dingy mustard-brown color with a powder-smoked window that permits the light to cast a haze into the corridor on the other side. I stood there feeling guilty, guilty for being American, for being "rich," for wearing colors other than pea-green, brown, or gray. But most of all I was guilty of feeling privileged, knowing that I could leave this place if anything really serious happened.
Or could I? What could happen?
All at once the controller came out of the office, handed my passport to me and lead the way back through the damp tunnel, back to the train to Zagreb. While we walked back he began to take longer strides and quicken his step. I asked him "would it be all right to get a cup of coffee to bring on the train?" He replied, "ON THE TRAIN," not with exclamation, but in a strong, masculine voice, leaving no room for challenge, "ON THE TRAIN." But now I was confused. There was no dining car on the train, no cart service to the coupé, no services whatever. I knew it would be pointless to ask him where to buy coffee on the train.
Walking back through the train cars to my coupé, I looked at the stamp in my passport. There it was. A full-page stamp permitting my entrance to the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. "GRATIS" was also stamped on the page, for that summer Yugoslav officials ruled to allow all visitors to enter the country without the usual twenty-dollar charge for a visa. There is something exciting about national stamps in your passport. Sure, that's what passports are for. And I always get a rush each time new stamp appears from a country I am visiting for the first time. I reached my coupé to find my Bosnian friend looking anxious, yet tired. I was so happy to see him, I wanted to hug him.
It has been a long trip and we are both very hungry. He stands up and goes to the window of the train and shouts at a pudgy man pushing a cart full of big steaming sausages, white and dark bread, bottles of juice and mineral water, cigarettes, and coffee. He asks me if I want anything from the cart, and I realize that the controller is at least partially human. I told Miso that I didn't have any Yugoslav Dinars, but that I would gladly give him dollars if he would oblige.
We each had two sausages, dark bread, juice, and I had a liter of mineral water. The train was still sitting at the station as we inhaled a noon-time meal at six-forty five in the morning. As I finished the last swallows of the bottle of mineral water, the train smacked and shook into motion and Miso let his wobbling head drift back to rest on the seat. We were about four hours from Zagreb.
*
My adrenaline was high and I didn't nap, I could sense the end of an arduous journey. Miso, on the other hand, was in another physical state and I watched him, his head bobbing from side to side, mechanically. He looked a little grubby now, in his black leather jacket with a mustard stain on the left lapel, his hair matted on one side from a bad night's sleep. The glorious mountains outside cruise by, their dark, rich evergreens like none I have seen before. The floor is a murky brown, something I didn't take interest in earlier.
The face of the baggage handler seemed to emerge from that same floor. He stood there below the doorway of the train car, his blue worker's coat unfriendly, abused. I struggled to lower my bags from the train's doorway onto his wooden cart. Miso quickly moved around me and jumped down to the station platform. Grabbing my bags one at a time from my tired hands, Miso aggressively stacked my bags onto the cart in a way that said "I insist on doing this for you though I will never see you again, my friend." The baggage handler began pushing his cart toward the station's main hall, one of the back wheels wobbling around in circles like it didn't belong to that cart. I turned to say goodbye to Miso. "Do vidjenja, stari," he said, calling me "pal," a very friendly gesture in this part of the world. "Do vidjenja, Miso. Vidimo se!" I said, "we'll be seeing you," though I know it isn't true.
____________
PARK TO PARK
=
The taxi was alien. Bald tires and silver patches of paint, a door that barely closed. The back seat was used for transporting large sacks of potatoes to the market (in Yugoslavia, ordinary passenger vehicles are used everyday for carrying sacks of vegetables to the cities' markets), so I sat in front. There was no "TAXI" light on the top of the car, which is why I hailed this guy. I thought he would be cheaper. Having exchanged money in the station hall, I paid the baggage handler fifty dinars. Two teeth stared back at me and said "hvala," thank you. I dropped into a spring-less bucket seat, a mound of cigarette butts at my left knee.
Zagreb's Glavni Kolodvor, or Central Station, is an elegant Austro-Hungarian structure that prominently stands before the proud statue of Croatia's King Tomislav, the statue itself standing before the entrance to Tomislav Square and Park. The driver (I think he was Gypsy) sat there waiting and puffing on a brown cigarette, the weather was hot and dry and I started to roll down the window as I sat in the taxi while he negotiated the traffic snarl before driving away from the curb of the station. Cranking the window open, the exhaust of heat and dust offered little reprieve from the rank smell of vinyl and ashes inside the car. A reprimand more severe than any I have ever received from a stranger entered my left ear and carried through my brain and down my right arm, forcing me to roll the window up again. "Propuh! Propuh!!" he scolded. This means "draft," and there is a universal belief in Yugoslavia that a draft coming into a moving vehicle through an open window, be it car, bus, or tram, causes the common cold. Even if it's 125° F. So most everybody drives around with windows rolled up, buses too. And if you should open a window on the tram, watch out! You could have the entire tram-load of passengers scolding you about the "propuh."
At first sight I wasn't sure if Zagreb looked more like the pictures I had seen of cities in Austria, or whether it resembled some place I imagined far off in Romania. We sped past the entrance to Tomislav Park, the statue standing high atop its base, the Yugoslav red star in relief on the front of the foundation. Within minutes we were at the entrance of Cvjetno Naselje, or Flower Settlement, my housing for the next eight weeks. Not a bloom in sight, nor flowers of any kind. Just many pleasant trees and a long, chalky sidewalk cutting a broad swath through the central courtyard that separates the various buildings. My Spartan dorm room at the "studenski dom" felt like a second-rate hospital room. I relieved my bags of the pressure they had been under for several days, searched for my shave kit and took a cold shower, though cold was not my choice. I decided that I must immediately find the center of town and discover how I got here.
*
So soon I meet a handsome young Yugoslav? I had read that Tomislav Square was a good meeting place, behind the Umjetnicki Pavilijon, the Art Pavilion, but I had not anticipated such a stroke of good luck. The park is a rectangle about four-hundred yards from the north end to the south and Tomislav square sits in the middle of the park. There in the middle of the square, suffering from lack of maintenance, was a fountain spraying six or eight water jets, about eight feet into the air, in random directions. The park smelled sweet, fresh flowers in bloom and trees fresh with new leaves, women in blue workers' coats with their hair tied up were tending the gardens around the fountain and near the pavilion. There were many people, old and young, with their dogs walking in the grass. There were dark skinned men who looked unwashed sleeping on the park benches and there were office workers sitting together with sandwiches, enjoying their lunch and watching the pigeons peck the graveled walkway that leads through the center of the park. The sun was bright and the park was illuminated with the light and the relaxation of mid-day; there was time for everyone there to enjoy moments of leisure in the late Spring. I walked past the statue of King Tomislav, the horse's testicles hanging there like jewelry, around to the east side of the park, spotting him loitering with his dog.
I took a seat on a step of the stairs that lead down into the park, a warm breeze blowing through the shade of the trees in back of me. I was wearing all black, black pants cut just below the knee, a black t shirt, short white ankle socks, black mock wing-tip shoes. Comfortable. I thought I might get noticed dressed like this. We connected. I glanced at him deliberately, about seventy meters away, eyes set on the subject but head turning, sitting there and turning my head like embarrassment, not wanting to be too conspicuous.
He had a definite aim on me, his eyes so dark I couldn't see them, black. He fussed to keep his dog tame, his flower print shirt cool, unusual, I thought, this is Eastern Europe. Sitting down, he pulls a cigarette and his dog - a mutt with dominant traits of a German Shepherd - lays down beneath the park bench. Not knowing how this process works in the new country, I walk across the park slowly, past the bench where he sits. Having walked from the east side of the park to the west side, I took a seat on the step directly opposite where I was sitting minutes earlier. The glancing at each other continues, he is very deliberate, knows what's going on. I become more persistent. I get up to walk across the park again and suddenly his dog is charging me, barking, and I take a step back as the dog strains the leash. "Do you speak English," he blurts, startling me more than the dog did. "Yes, yes, I am American," I say. "Don't worry, she won't hurt you," the dog now our liaison. "My name is Branko," he says. "I'm Mark." We shake hands and look into the eyes, not black but honey-brown, and take a seat together on the bench. "My dog is Rea." "Like Chris Rea," I said. "Yes, exactly," he responds, and Rea takes her place under the bench once again.
*
Zoran used to hit him. The first time he told me this I cringed, thinking that
Branko was weak to let another person do that to him. When I met him he was uninspiring, unlike Branko. Branko was more like Lovorka, his fag hag as I told her. She loved this grand title, she had never heard it before. She was to become our fag hag, Zoran would soon be out of the picture
Zoran was seven years older than him, and I was four years older, though that first day on the bench in Tomislav Park I told Branko that I was twenty one. He was twenty but would turn twenty one in two days, on Friday.
God he looked sexy in the bistro. He took me to the finest in the city, the bistro at the Hotel Esplanade, the best hotel in all of Croatia. He was dressed impeccably, an olive-brown suit made of summer wool, a crisp white shirt and a neck tie with a muted purple and gold paisley pattern. Sharp black Italian wing-tip shoes with a buffed gold buckle instead of laces. Cool. My erection seemed to back up all the way into my adam's apple, and I think the waitor noticed as he placed our drinks on the table.
We didn't hesitate because we wanted the same thing, each other. Two drinks each and a long stroll through Gornji Grad, or Upper Town, the proper name for Zagreb's historic old quarter, a long stroll that lead us to an elegant park where stands the Palace of Josip Jelacic, Croatia's famous nineteenth-century Baron who resisted the Communists in 1848. This was the place where I would experience my first luxury.
I was experiencing an entirely new reality, I was floating. He was unlike any other boy I had ever met. He wasn't part of the crowd I refer to as the shoppers---those boys who never stop shopping, shopping department stores for the latest wearable trends, shopping Uptown and ordering cappuccino and talking for hours about guys, clothes, being gay, shopping at night in the bars and always leaving with someone different. Branko isn't like that. Rather, he is between East and West, an inspiration, a third road? Somehow possession had not touched him, he is living from his mind and his heart, mostly through his heart.
I don't want to dissect Branko, but he represents more than the object of my affection, he also represents his country, Yugoslavia. He is different and his country is different. Yugoslavia was itself between East and West for decades, even centuries. Soviet-style Communism pushed hard into Central and Eastern Europe, but it didn't win in Yugoslavia, thanks to Josip Broz, or Tito, as he was popularly called, and therefore it didn't ruin the people the way it did in Poland and Hungary and Czechoslovakia. And in Croatia and Slovenia especially a limited free market was allowed to coexist with the controlled economy of the Communists. There was a time when Croatia and Slovenia were on a par with Austria, cars and stereos and televisions were hardly ever in short supply and nearly everyone had a telephone. In the rest of Eastern Europe the people could only have dreamed of a material existence like that in Yugoslavia's north.
Yugoslavia was a Communist country, but more western, in many ways it was our Communist country, ours to influence, which in the nineteen-nineties became a major problem. As I had discussed with Miso on the train, Yugoslavia was changing.
We both took a piss near the palace, the deserted palace. The park was very dark, perfectly square in shape and surrounded by a very high wrought-iron fence, old and weathered and secure. Branko was pissing by one of the two pillars which support the roof over the entrance to the palace, I was pissing by the other. I desperately wanted to get my first glimpse of his cock. It was too dark. Standing there pissing on the palace, I imagined his uncut cock hanging happily outside of his summer-wool trousers, the stream of piss forming an arch toward the palace door, his black shoes supporting his thin legs and his legs firmly balancing his erect body.
This is my first night in Zagreb and I am here in this park with him. The kissing is powerful, long, deep, hungry, unending. His chest was so smooth, fresh, his white shirt giving way to darker skin than mine, a thinner body than mine. What it was like to reach into his trousers through the zippered-front and find there no underwear was perfect, just his erection and a moveable foreskin, a firmness and length and shape, arching slightly toward his body but not too much, perfect. Short brown hair with a few curls in front and his honey-brown eyes, dark trousers and dark skin, as I have said, a passionate boy as hungry as I am.
*
"What about Zoran?" I asked. "He's a jerk, I'm going to break it up with him," Branko said. "Break it off," I corrected. "I'm sorry?" "The expression is 'break it off,' the relationship I mean." "Oh, I'm sorry, of course, I'm going to break it off with Zoran," he said, and I believed him. I thought this decision seemed rather sudden and I told him, "you seem to have made this decision very suddenly...."
"Oh, not really. The relationship has been a shit for a long time. We fight all the time and he hits me when he gets angry with me." I was angry inside when I heard this, not only at Zoran for harming the boy I love even on our first night, but also I was angry with Branko for letting it happen to him. "But why do you let him do that to you," it's weak of you, I thought. "I don't know, he's just the jerk!" he said, using the definite article. "He's a jerk," I said. "Yes, he's the jerk." He didn't get what I was trying to tell him. "No, no, Branko, he's a jerk, we use an indefinite article in English when we are describing a jerk in general," I added, and he asked me, our cocks still in each other's hands, softer now, after our climax, "but why not the jerk? He is really THE JERK!" "Yeah, I know he is the jerk, but if you say this it means that he is just the one and only jerk in the world, and there are many, many, many jerks in the world!" And he told me, "yah, but Zoran is really the jerk! He's the only one who can be such a fucker!" "Yeah, exactly, he is a fucker!" I agreed, the indefinite article as it should be. "But it doesn't matter right now, I just want to be with you," he said, or I said, it doesn't really matter right now.
Our kissing was strong again and wet, more wet, his tongue like an extension of his heart transmitting lust which came to me like something my mouth needed so desperately I couldn't stop trying to give it back to him. His tongue was feeding me and I needed more of him, " I want to eat you! every inch." And my first luxury, this night, the first night, my first night, our very first night, a beginning for me, my strongest feeling, the first feeling; his cock was my first luxury. We spent a lot of time talking that night in the park, and he sang a song to me by Kim Wild. Mostly I kept repeating how much I couldn't believe that this was my first night in Zagreb, how much this feels like fate. I looked up into the sky and saw a sparkling night, so many stars and such a big night sky, space seemed more infinite than it actually is. He looked up too and I would only imagine what he was thinking, not wanting to ask him because I don't indulge in the usual clichés, being here at this time with the American. The park was perfect on our first night but I wanted to wait for a bedroom to taste my first luxury. And he only teased me.
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY
=
The next morning I was introduced to Lovorka at Café Tin, a small coffee house where law students congregate and hours of intelligent conversation serve to justify neglect of the boring law books. It was the first morning and I was dizzy after last night's delight, it was far beyond anything I had anticipated happening so suddenly. I woke up late, at ten-thirty, even though the alarm was set for nine. Branko was waiting for me in the rain near the steps where we exchanged our first glances yesterday afternoon, the cruising glances which can actually lead to love. He was standing under his umbrella tapping his foot, I think he was afraid that I wouldn't show up because I was a half-hour late. His shoes were the ones I hate and I would tell him later, once we are comfortable with each other. "Sorry I'm late, the alarm didn't ring." I said, really sincere. "I was wondering if you were going to come!" his voice sharp, which surprised me, we are still, technically, two single people hoping to become lovers. Lovorka wasn't late and she was sitting with two people drinking midnight coffee, a guy and a girl whose names I don't remember, dressed in black, all three of them. "She is the perfect fag hag," I thought, "pretty and potentially lesbian, overweight but not fat, she dresses to look thinner than she is, really-red lips, dark eye make-up, pointed shoes. She would be our cover on more than one occasion.
*
The sun was shining brightly in mid-afternoon, the temperature was around eighty-five Fahrenheit and we were having sex in my dorm room at Cvjetno Naselje when a knock on the door interrupted us, made us panic and scramble for our clothes. "Just a minute, please," I said, not knowing who was at my door or for what reason. "Just a minute," a bit louder after the second knocking. "Put on your shirt too," I said to Branko. "Where the hell are my shorts!" I was looking everywhere but only found my shirt. I went to my still-packed luggage and grabbed a fresh pair.
A man in his late-thirties, balding, tennis shoes and light blue socks, jean shorts and a white-and-brown-checked shirt stood in the doorway. "Are you Mark Norby?" It was his mustache asking the question, and it was his eye glasses that wanted to know. My half-erection under my shorts, no underwear, didn't want to deflate any further, I couldn't get Branko's body off my mind. "Yess, Yes, I'm Mark. Come in." "My name is John Kelly and I am the assistant director of the Croatian program this summer." "Oh," I said, "This is my....cousin, Branko, he's from Zagreb." "Dobar dan, drago mi je" (good afternoon, nice to meet you), says Mr. Kelly. "Ah, Norby, that's not Croatian. Are you related to Branko on your mother's side of the family?" I fumbled a minute and quickly recovered, "yeah, yeah, Branko is my cousin on my mom's side. This is the first time we have ever met!" "Wow," he says, "this must be exciting!" "Yes, it really is," I said, wondering what could possibly follow.
He began his monologue in slow, paced words.
"I came to tell you a little about the program in Croatian language and folklore. Your classes will begin on Monday (it was Wednesday, that day) at eight-thirty in the morning. Breakfast is served from seven a.m. until eight-fifteen and then your classes will begin. Usually you'll have classes Monday through Friday, but sometimes we'll be taking trips to various parts of Croatia and we will leave on Thursday and return on Monday. The weeks that we don't take trips you will have classes on Saturdays, but Sundays will always be free. Our first trip will be next weekend to P-l-i-t-v-i-c-a National Park and we will also be going to a few small villages in the area of I-s-t-r-i-a. He spoke in long, pausing tones whenever he spoke Croatian.
"Evenings you will be free to do what you like and you can choose not to eat dinner with the group, but we ask that you sign a sheet by morning, located near the dining room - everything will be more clear later - so that the cooks know how much food to make. If you are vegetarian (I'm not, but who knows, I might become one very soon) there is not much for you on the daily menu. Yugoslavs eat a lot of meat and every meal has some meat in it, even breakfast. And, you may have already noticed, Yugoslavs drink a lot and there will be alcoholic beverages at many functions. So if you don't drink (I do drink) you will have to be very polite and tell them that you just don't drink alcohol. Maybe your cousin has already told you about most of the customs in Yugoslavia (who? Oh, yeah, my cousin).
"If you have any medical problems during the course, you can tell me or Bill Marsh - have you met Professor Marsh yet? (no) and we will provide medication or escort you to the hospital if that should be necessary. I see you have a single room. If you would like a roommate (I don't want a roommate) you can change rooms during the next couple of days. Some people like to have a roommate to help them study or just for companionship (I've already found my heart's companion!). And if you have relatives from other towns in Croatia you can have one of them stay in your room for a night or two, that's no problem (I have a cousin who will be spending most nights in my room, I hope!). Or if you would like to spend a weekend with family that you have in Croatia, just let us know a few days in advance so that we can plan your absence from the group for that weekend. We do hope that you'll be spending most of the weekends with the group, we will be visiting many very interesting places and we want you to learn as much as possible about the entire country.
"We will be having a welcoming dinner tonight at seven-thirty in the dining room and you will get more information from Professor Marsh at that time. Do you have any questions that I could answer?" "No, everything seems very clear, thanks," I said, in a ritual way. "O.K.," he continued, "I'll look forward to seeing you tonight at the dinner. It was nice to meet you Branko, I hope to see you again soon."
"It was nice to meet you," said my Branko with his hand on my shoulder. "See you later."
*
The next night was Branko's birthday party. I was invited but there was one small problem - the party had been planned before my existence and Zoran the Jerk would be there. Branko hadn't told Zoran anything about the new state of affairs via l'Americaine, there wasn't time or place. Branko decided that I could come as Lovorka's date. Yet there was one more problem - the program was having a dinner with the Mayor of Zagreb as the guest of honor and the dinner would run quite late. I couldn't take Lovorka as my guest because it was a dinner for the foreigners, strange, I had to be there. Branko and Lovorka worked out the plan and the small details. Branko told Zoran and the rest of the guests, eight others, that "Lovorka has a friend from America who is visiting Zagreb and will be arriving later. I arrived to the Croatian Writer's Club about midnight, my first time to the club, began roaming the large room for Lovorka, knowing that I couldn't just approach Branko because, after all, we are supposed to never have met before.
The place is truly a club. You enter the huge iron and glass double doors from Republic Square, pushing hard because these doors weigh a ton and have been a part of this building since its creation, maybe two-hundred years ago. You follow a long dark corridor and approach a wood and glass elevator, but you need a key to use the elevator so you take the stairway to the left of the elevator shaft. The elevator shaft is open, you can see the elevator cables strung down to the elevator that is below you as you walk around the open shaft, around the square staircase of marble steps that lead to the third floor where the entrance to the club awaits you. You see the sign Club of Croatian Writers and enter the wood and class double doors. You are met by a tall wall of framed writers, all of them men, great men of letters who have graced the club and left. Turning toward the entrance of the bar you see gold walls all around and twelve- or thirteen-foot velvet drapes of royal blue that drape gracefully from the corners, belted by gold ropes and large gold tassels that allow the gold walls to shine forward. You turn to the right and enter a large room with more gold walls and royal blue drapes that makes these walls feel like stages. The tables are wood and the chairs are wood and scattered around the room and the patrons scattered with their drinks and conversations and cigarettes. Then you see Branko at the head of a long table with many guests smoking and drinking, toasting the birthday boy.
*
Since I had only met Lovorka on that one brief occasion at Café Tin I wasn't able to recognize her right off. But I did recognize Branko. I lost myself for a moment and began to walk up to him as he sat there at the head, the table covered in a baby-blue table cloth and rounds of colored cocktails. He spotted me out of the corner of his eye as I began to approach him but did everything he could to keep his head down, without acknowledging me. Then I saw Lovorka's blood-red nails clutching a goblet as it tipped back into her throat. I nervously made my turn toward her and "Lovorka! How are you! I found you." I kissed her on each cheek and she told me to sit beside her, pulling a chair out from the table and handling the whole undercover scene with casual grace. Zoran was ugly.
Branko was nervous and his bow tie seemed to be laughing at him. Lovorka introduced us. "Branko, this is my American friend Mark that I was telling you about." "Yes, how are you. Nice to meet you." "It's nice to meet you, Branko." I made no special effort to make this appear like a first-occasion meeting. I really didn't care what Zoran would think if he knew we were seeing one another. After all, I was planning to live in this city for many months to come. I'm sure we would all meet again.
I was introduced to them all. Unbeautiful Zoran, Danijel the blond, Nina the artist, Zdeslav the greasy (his hair was perpetually slick), Milena the hair dresser, Tomislav-the-absolute flame, and someone, a girlish-woman with a lot of makeup, I don't remember her name. I paid most attention to Lovorka and increasing attention to Nina. Nina's head was sort of floating as some new age music held us all together as it played from the loud speaker above. She asked, "so what do you think of Zagreb?" I wanted to tell her that I think it is the most marvelous city in the world and that my first night here was, well, orgasmic! "Zagreb is so beautiful, it's a very romantic town. It looks much like Austria." "Yes," her head still floating, "many buildings in Zagreb were built by the Austrians." "Yes" "How long, Mark, have you know Lovorka?" ("What?" "What should I say?" "Who is Lovorka? Years? Yugoslavia?") "I've known Lovorka for a couple of years, when her father was in Austria." ("No!") "In Austria?" she pondered. "Lovorka, when were you in Austria with your father?"
Lovorka had been talking to Tomislav-the-absolute and hadn't heard a word. "A couple of years ago," I said. "You were in Austria, and we met, with your father, remember?!" "Oh yes, how could I forget! My father was in Vienna for a concert arrangement. We met in Vienna, Nina." And she turned back to the absolute. "Ooh, how interesting," Nina chirped. "But why were you in Austria, Vienna, Mark? Are you a musician?" ]
"No, no. I was in Vienna, because, my mother was visiting her cousin." ("No! I didn't say that!") "Oh? Your mother is Austrian?" "Yes, yes Nina, would you like another drink!?" "I would love another drink, Mark. Your mother is Austrian and you're going to buy me another drink!" Her head continued to float throughout this bastardized account of history.
A lull happened as we waited for the waiter to come with more drinks. Nina was drinking Campari and her lipstick had become the same color. The new age music was taking her to places beyond and she seemed to stretch her neck upwards and float a little higher this time, proclaiming, in airy, intoxicated speech: "Music. The international language!" How could I argue?
The drinks arrived and Nina grabbed the first red goblet from the waiters tray.
EXAMS, RAKIJE & SHAMANISM
=
We were introduced to the mayor of Zagreb, then to rakije before the exams. We were introduced to several officials from the Croatian government who had come to welcome us to Croatia and they were all very glad to toast us with strong Croatian liquor. We were welcomed not to Yugoslavia but to Croatia. We had just finished our breakfast, it was not more than eight-thirty a.m., and the mayor entered with an entourage of well-dressed bureaucrats who stood in the center of the dining room and began babbling in Croatian, telling us that we were welcome and that they were honored to have us as guests in their country. Honors given and taken, the mayor led us to the bar attached to the dining room where we were met by postured waiters and waitresses holding trays full of various cocktails, rakije, slivovica, brandy, as it were. Rakije is a specifically South-Slavic liquor which is made from grain and tastes stronger than vodka, with a slight sweetness to it. Slivovica, on the other hand, is a brandy made from plums and is even sweeter, less bitter. I chose rakije, rimmed with thick crystals of sugar that made the glass look like a margarita. But this was no margarita. The rakije went straight to my head, bypassing the hard boiled egg and corn flakes and entering my bloodstream, loosening my tongue and relaxing me before the exams.
Our placement exams for the beginning of our five-week Croatian language instruction, both written and oral, were scheduled for nine a.m. This was the first time I had drunk alcohol before an exam, but in Yugoslavia drinking is enjoyed (or abused) at all times of the day or night.
After the drink we waited to be called back to the dining room, one by one, for our oral exam in Croatian. Meeting my instructor Vera Krnajski, we discussed in Croatian very basic topics like the weather, which topics I have specialized in at University, which sports I play (mostly indoor sports, thank you), and the flavor of rakije - "malo je gorko, malo je slatko (a little bitter, a little sweet)," I said. Vera agreed and marked something in her notebook, probably noting that my eyes were bloodshot. "And how do you like Zagreb?" "Svidja mi se, ali to mi je malo cudno, neobicno (I like it, but it's a little strange, unusual)," she accepted my reply sincerely and revealed a small smile through her fading lip stick. I was hoping she wouldn't ask me if I had yet met any girls. She met Branko within a week because he was pervasive on the campus, always patiently waiting for me to finish classes or some group activity.
The written exam in Croatian followed and next day my results came and I was accepted into the second level. Margaret, my Croatian instructor at Stanford, had done a good job teaching me, my prior instruction in Russian certainly helped too.
We were sentenced to a daily, mandatory two-hour Croatian folklore program that accompanied the language instruction but bored most everyone. Learning Croatian dance, naive art and social customs through Croatia's thirteen-hundred year history was very interesting to me, but the presentation was weak, slow-paced and allowed no room for the usual discourse that you find in American classrooms. These were lectures and as students we couldn't challenge anything the professors were telling us, this just isn't done in this part of the world. Also, the tone of the lectures was ultra-patriotic, every word seemed to celebrate Croatia and the great Croatian people. The Croatian flag stood near the lectern, the old Yugoslav flag was gone, probably in the back room with the old text books on Marxist economics. Susan and Laura sat next to me during these tedious sessions, sharing my anxiety at the sun-drenched day on the other side of the greasy windows. It was summer and we wanted to play, we were in a foreign land and we felt like adventure. Susan loved to talk about sex as much as I did, Laura mostly giggled and squirmed her thin body in her seat as me and Susan made up scenarios of sexual liaisons that we thought might be happening among the group, and probably were. Hormonal pulses were rising to unusual levels, even our head instructor seemed to be pulsating who, at mid-fifty, spent a lot of time cruising the sophomore chicks. Susan would often confess, "I need a fuck!" Shame was not part of her social repertoire. But I am no one to judge; I was getting it more often than at any other time in life. I had a constant erection, even during these sessions, sitting between Susan and Laura, and soon learned the word for it in Croatian - erekcija - now my embarrassment in two languages.
*
That weekend in Plitvica National Park Susan and I talked a lot about sex, and a little about Shamanism. I was reading Carlos Casteneda and Michael Harner at the time and had brought Harner's book with me on the trip to Plitvica. "The Way of the Shaman" is a layman's guide to approaching Shamanism and Plitvica seemed to be perfect place in Croatia to reach both the inner animal (a talent of the Shaman) and to experience energy from the natural environment that surrounds us. Plitvica is a tourist haven and this would seem to negate the possibility of practicing Shamanic meditation. But actually the setting of Plitvica is isolated, deep canyons and trepid waterfalls cascade in all directions and make you feel, if you really try, as though you are the mouth of the river. Susan and I talked about Casteneda's work, about Shamanism, about reaching nature - not just visiting it but reaching it - and its importance. In Croatia I felt closer to being a Shaman than I had back in the US. Plitvica was a million miles away from anything, or anyone, even Branko.
There was a Gypsy village near Plitvica that seemed to be, from a distance, a real community. I imagined Harner's book on Shamanism written in such a place, surrounded by Indians that were lost in an industrial world, lost and simply trying to live together but not knowing if they can survive in the midst of production all around them. They are Indians, those Gypsies, and even though many of them live in burnt-out cars or in the back of old milk trucks, they are still Indians. And they are Shamans. What makes you think they are not? Is it because they beg on city streets, make their children walk like cripples in order to gain sympathy from normal folk and in turn gain a pocket full of change? Is it because their women are prostitutes? Is it because their men are pimps and pick-pockets and their daughters pregnant at age fourteen? Is it because their Grandmothers smoke cigars and drink too much? Does this mean they cannot be Shamans, that they cannot reach the inner animal and experience energy from nature? Of course not. These people were Shamans before Western civilization had a chance to co-opt its essence, before Western civilization itself. We have pushed them out of our lives because they refuse to adopt our habits, so they live in burnt-out cars. But they are together. They eat together, sleep together, fuck, sweat and shit together. We continue to sanitize our lives, pissing in automated toilets - we no longer have to touch the handle - in toilets next to a cascading waterfall. And there they are, pissing on the trees, living in their little village, next to Plitvica.
SLAVONIA, TERRA FIRMA
=
On our way there we stopped in Karlovac, a small village no more than nineteen miles from Zagreb. We stopped at a small restaurant, a kafich, as they say in Croatia. We stepped down from the tour bus and entered and stood around the bar that greets you in the entrance. This bar is made of wood with a tin top covering the bar from end to end, about twenty feet. The air hangs heavy with smoke and the rural Slavs hesitate as they watch us enter, take a long drag from their cigarettes, reposition their bodies more toward the bar rather than toward each other; and now they are positioned toward the waitress hosting the bar, talking to her about the foreigners. We are foreigners and I don't like it. There is no way for me to show these men that I myself don't approve of being an imposing tourist, that I just want to come and go as they do, not making lofty judgments about the country which only has two brands of cereal rather than fifty in America. Fifty or more and more, in this example, is less.
We ordered our drinks and most of us went outside the cafe to the chairs and tables on the sidewalk. Laura, Susan and I remained inside the cafe and stood at the bar with the dark Slavs, their heavy clothes are dark (remember, it is summer) and I smell tobacco and fried food emitting from their coats and trousers. Chris Weaver is with us now, he is one of the group who became infamous, obnoxious in ways that I will tell you about later. We drank the local beer, Karlovachko Pivo, and talked about the goat cooking on the spit outside the restaurant.
"It's not a goat," Chris insists, "it's a lamb." "Then why does it have horns and the face of a goat?" I agreed with Laura, the animal roasting over the spit looks like a goat, it looks like the two goats chewing in the small pasture next to the cafe, just like those goats. "It's a goat, Chris. I should know, I grew up on a farm. I know what a goat looks like," Susan said with her usual assurance. "I grew up on a farm too," (you shouldn't believe this, coming from Chris. He is a liar like I have never met before, lying about everything to everyone. The only thing which is certain about Chris is that he is gay, and smokes too much. "They don't eat goats in Yugoslavia. They eat horses but they don't eat goats" (don't believe him).
Whatever that animal on the spit, it looked quite sumptuous, head and all. It cooked and made you think that it really is o.k. to eat animals. If this animal were cooking on a spit in the U.S. I wouldn't feel this way, I would think it were awful. But I was experiencing a new reality, some of us were changing with our experiences.
*
President Tudjman was elected president of Croatia in May 1990. Historian, former Communist, now Croat nationalist, President Tudjman now has one mission: to bring independence to the Republic of Croatia, to lead the republic out of forty-five years of Communism and to establish a Croat republic separate from Serb-controlled Yugoslavia.
Branko had said that President Tudjman looks like a rat, and he does. But looks are deceiving; he's actually a very hard working man trying to lead his republic to democracy and independence, never mind that he is a former Communist. I say never mind because you have to remember that, as in all of the former Communist-ruled nations, the only way to get ahead in society was by proclaiming oneself a Communist. Sure there are many people who didn't compromise their principles for Communist orthodoxy, but what would you do if you had lived under Communism? There were, don't forget, many good Communists; men and women who believed that Marxist theory, before its corruption, could actually produce a better, more equal and more humane world. President Tudjman was such a man.
All around Zagreb the political posters were beginning to fade, the constant summer sun beating the sides of the buildings where the posters hang made Tudjman's face there look like it was hesitating to come out from the white paint. A rat's face smiling in the fog. The posters had been pasted to the walls and are now peeling at the edges or have been ripped away by souvenir hunters, but you cannot remove these posters from the walls because the glue is too strong. His face will be pasted there until the sun makes him disappear or until the rain makes his colors melt into an abstract painting, just like the poster of him on the wall outside of Cvjetno Naselje, my dormitory. Some of the posters have been marked by spray paint with the Serbian Orthodox Christian cross, right across his face, the cross that the Croats say looks just like the Nazi swastika. It does look like the swastika, but this is not unusual; many religious symbols look like the swastika. And don't forget that the swastika was created by Christians and used to be a symbol as prominent as the Christian crucifix itself.
*
Meeting President Doctor Franjo Tudjman in Djakovo was less than inspiring, unlike Djakovo itself. It is a beautiful village in Slavonia where they raise Lipetzanner horses and each year host the Folk Dance Festival of Croatia, the largest festival of its kind in Central and Eastern Europe. We all met President Tudjman at the parade celebrating the beginning of the Folk Dance Festival, but our meeting was indirect because we were a group of forty persons and President Tudjman was there in Dakovo for many reasons, but mainly to show his support for Croatian tradition. We were there for the tradition, part of our Croatian language and folklore study, the course now in its second week.
We sat through hours of folk dancing in a large outdoor arena which had been used for this festival for hundreds of years. Susan and Laura were my close companions during most of the course and on long weekend trips like this one to Dakovo, they were my source of sanity. The group was so difficult at times, so typically American, never satisfied and always comparing their experiences here with "how it is back home." Susan and Laura didn't make such judgments, they are liberal and educated, open, admittedly bisexual, M.A.'s, interested in me and Branko and our relationship. However, Branko was always back in Zagreb during these weekend trips. Naturally he wasn't enrolled in the course, so we would be apart for several days sometimes. Laura took advantage of the distance between me and Branko, though I didn't know what her intentions were at the time. I just paid attention to the dancing. The men were quite sexy.
The most memorable dances were performed by the Lado Folk Dance Ensemble, Croatia's best, renown for their professionalism and original choreography. These dances are a tradition which have survived for nearly 1300 years and each one represents the different aspects of daily living of the Croatian people.
Dances marking nature's different seasons are the most popular form of expression and represent the cycles of life, the progression of a year, the passing of time. In spring, Croatia celebrates the season of new life with dances that represent planting and cultivating the land. In summer, warm weather and long sunny days inspire energies that celebrate the summer Solstice. In autumn, the cooling temperatures and changing color of the leaves are celebrated with dances that express thankfulness for the long-awaited arrival of the harvest. And in winter, the falling snow and quiet over the land are celebrated with dances that represent human togetherness. Even though it was mid-summer and the temperature was near ninety Fahrenheit, Lado performed dances from all of the seasons, with all of the different costumes. The heat of their winter costumes must have brought them near to death, heavy fur and wool hats, boots and even gloves.
Early evening found us mingling with Slavonia's elite, with their horses I was telling you about. The Lipetzanners were magnificent. These were the largest horses I had ever seen, their coats a rich gray or deep brown, their miens combed by their stylists, tails cleaned and shear and flowing with their movements, or else braided like the hair of their owners' daughters, horses trained to respond to the most subtle equestrian commands. I watched the horses parade the oval which is located just outside of the center of Dakovo. Both Laura and Susan were there and together we watched how these horses were trained. They leaped the gates so gracefully, as if floating over them in an effortless, perfectly-shaped arch, their hooves landing on fertile ground, slippers onto a Turkish carpet.
The next day brought us to Vukovar, a quiet village perfectly preserved, untouched by any war, cobbled streets and historic buildings, historic homes, villas from the times of Europe's wealthy aristocrats. There was no Communism in Vukovar, just a village that seemed to live in harmony with nature and survived time by remaining unto itself. Our stop here was short but it afforded us a healthy Slavonian meal at a restaurant that sits next to an open field and a shallow creek. At the door of the restaurant we were met by a Gypsy woman begging for a few dinars, she wore multi-colors, the typical Gypsy dress, a skirt wrapped in colorful rags, a bright orange shawl wrapped around her shoulders; she was wrapped all the way round her body, her shoes were black and scuffed, looked like she was born in them. I gave her a two-dinar note and entered the restaurant with Laura and Susan where we were me by an exquisite meal of cobanac, or lamb stew, boiled beef with fresh potatoes and carrots, cabbage salad, dark beer, dark coffee and a glazed tort for dessert.
There were no politics in Vukovar at that time, no hatred that one could see. It was a village as old as the hills surrounding it, as quiet at the forests nearby.
Osijek is the capital of Slavonia and the largest city in the region. Our stay here was two days and two nights, and the two most memorable sights in Osijek were the great Cathedral in the center of Osijek and the club named Tufna, small spot or stain. This bar was listed in my gay guide, although it was a mixed bar. Mixed is how I remember our night at Tufna. On this night Chris Weaver was our constant commentator on the virtues of Slavic men. I didn't need to be told, mine was back in Zagreb, clear of the categories which Chris created. "The men are dark and their personalities are dark, they are poets though many of them don't even know it." Chris thought he was quite philosophical.
*
When we returned to Zagreb it was the time of the annual Zagreb Smotra Folklora, the Folk Dance Festival of Yugoslavia, a festival which joined all the republics of Yugoslavia for the celebration of the dance. The festival would end every night with a bacchanalian bash that lasted into the early hours of the morning, sometimes until dawn. The Serbs were the most animated of the celebrants, dancing to the point of utter violence, singing in chorus the songs as old as the hills, smashing their glasses on the sidewalk after every finished drink. These people were not just celebrating, they were grabbing life by the throat and choking the last breath out of it. I sat with Branko close to the Serbs hoping to join in their celebration that seemed to surpass life itself.
__________
FARAGOSTA
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Faragosta is the Italian word for the collective holiday enjoyed every year in August by nearly the whole of Italy. Swarms of Italians land on the Croatian coast to the towns and villages of Dalmatia. Branko and I were taking our holiday on the dreamy Hvar Island during faragosta and the Italians everywhere like a colony had come to take over Croatia's pristine coast.
Hvar Island sits about ten miles from the Port of Split on the Adriatic Sea, the Jadransko More. The town where we took a room, Hvar Grad, is old, built by the Romans more than a thousand years ago. Perhaps this is why the Italians descend on the coast, especially Hvar Island, as if it were their own. Yet despite the traffic of tourists, especially these faragostans, Hvar Grad is perfectly preserved. There are no cars in the town, no industry except tourism, no pollution (except for the faragostan fag who, without the slightest thought, flicked his burning cigarette into the rich blue, crystal clear water as we were getting off of a small fishing boat that brought us to the Hell Islands which are a part of Hvar. I asked him "please, do you speak English? Good. Please, don't put your cigarettes into the sea," to which he quickly responded, mockingly, "oh, yah, Greenpeace, yah, Greenpeace." Then, turning to his lover, he laughed like Zha Zha Gábor and walked in the opposite direction from me and Branko, swinging his hips like a cheap cocktail waitress. I thought, "what the fuck does Greenpeace have to do with this?!).
Hvar Grad is small enough for you to walk from one end of the town to the other in less than twenty minutes. The town is surrounded by steep hills with low vegetation and a few winding paths where you can stroll to the top of the main hill to the Roman castle, which now serves as a museum by day and an expensive discotheque by night. There are many cafés in Hvar Town, as in all places of Croatia, and there are two sidewalk cafés near the harbor wall that cater to a mixed crowd of rich Croats, faragostans, and gays from all over Europe. One such café is called Sidro, or Anchor, the other is called Plus. And on hot summer evenings there is a nameless café bar with a tiny dance floor where the entire crowd is gay and spills out onto the stone street and to the harbor wall. The energy here was amazingly fresh, uninhibited, unexpected and the straight couples strolling by the crowd of dancing, kissing, oozing gay men paid no attention or they looked towards us as they walked by, simple smiles on their faces displayed not shock or displeasure but rather ease which said to us, "we are happy that you are happy." Hvar was the renaissance to us, a realization of many peoples with many values blending peacefully, without judgments, without fear.
*
One year later the hotels of Hvar began filling up with refugees from all over Croatia. The tourist season was virtually non-existent and Croatia had been plunged into a deadly war. Starving children arrived,without their parents, to the villa where Branko and I had stayed. They were fed, clothed, and sent to an orphanage on a neighboring island. And where were their parents? Maybe missing. Maybe dead. No one knew. Some of these children would be sent to Germany. Others would be sent to over-crowded refugee centers in Zagreb. All of them would know no peace in the first years of their lives.
*
Early our first day we went for a strong coffee with fresh whipped cream at Sidro. Branko and I watched the friendly waiters as they cleaned the bar, made the coffees, and moved about the small tables with continental grace in crisp white shirts and bow ties. We took to the Hell Islands (Pakleni Otoci in Croatian) soon after our coffee, hailing a taxi boat from an old Dalmatinac in his skipper's hat, next to his rickety boat for eight or so passengers. The water was as clear as blue crystal, reflecting brilliant sunshine in every direction. The old boat moved across the waves with purpose, catering to the paying tourists who enjoy this day that seems almost removed from life, mystical like the salt air and timeless like the cool breezes.
*
Branko insisted on sunbathing naked, it was, afterall, the popular form on the islands. I was still too inhibited to derobe my self entirely, so I wore my Speedo and, like an inhibited American, felt as though I was nearly naked.
BUDAPEST AND BELL-BOTTOMS
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Not everyone wore them of course, but they were prevalent. Even skin-tight shirts (I guess they were made of nylon or polyester, I don't quite remember because the last time I wore one styled like that was in the early seventies, I was six or seven years old, when those fabrics ruled) and unusually high platforms on big shoes. These fashions were worn mainly by people in their late-thirties to mid-fifties and often side burns had remained on the men, but they were not the latest fashion as in the West unless worn by young men. Young men in leather jackets and faded blue jeans and black shoes, the side burns were deliberate and even mocked the older generation who didn't know what was going on.
The gay scene in Budapest, Hungary was odd but full of texture. The bars that Branko and I visited were from another time, still clandestine though Communism was dead, as though Soviets would raid the bars at any moment and arrest the entire place for unnatural acts (of all the labels that gays and lesbians suffer, unnatural is the one that makes me laugh hardest). Mystery was the name of Budapest's most overt gay and lesbian bar and it was no mystery to us.
The decor was a mixture of mismatched patterns in gold and red. Large gold paisleys on a blood-red background; red velvet curtains behind the red booths that lined the interior on two sides of the bar; gold light fixtures attached to the walls of the corridor leading to the toilet, a red door leading to that toilet. Branko said "it looks like the inside of a coke can." It was a red place. The music ranged from late seventies disco (which, by the way, was the rage back in the U.S. at the time, but here in Budapest the disc jockey was playing it because his record collection hadn't caught up with the times) and a few hits by T-Rex, Michael Jackson hits like "Beat It" and "Billy Jean" readily available in most shops, occasional sounds from the early eighties new wave movement, songs from fly-by-night groups like "Men Without Hats" and "Men at Work," both groups from Australia, strange, I thought. Hideous.
The bar tender was a real flame. If only he was in drag, he would feel more comfortable, I'm sure. He's wearing a tight white shirt two sizes to small for him, a black clip-on bow tie, bleached blond hair and near-black eye brows, a lisp follows each of his words which seemed really weird in Hungarian. That lisp needed no translating, he was in charge of the bar and his lisp was his trademark.
*
On this night at Mystery we got very drunk on wonderful Austrian beer. It seemed so natural to get really drunk in this atmosphere, it was the only way to mesh everything together. From the unmarked door outside the bar I followed the host of the establishment and Branko followed me and after paying a bunch of Hungarian Forints for the cover charge we were led down several steps to the main bar. We were seated at one of the booths next to the bar and the table before us was covered by a red velvet table cloth (do you feel like this was an elegant place? I guess it was because there was so much velvet). The booth was a sort of "S" shape which allowed five or six people to sit on it, but with limited access to the table because the upper and lower parts of the "S" curved the way that made reaching the table impossible. Sitting with us at our table was a wrinkled man of about forty years in a tie (he looks about sixty, but in this part of the world the people age more quickly simply because their lives are more difficult. You would too). He was directly across from me and Branko, turned with his right elbow on the table watching the "clientele" enter the Mystery. To our right sat two short-haired, nouveau-Budapest lesbians dressed in as much black as their wardrobes would afford, their brown shoes give away the wardrobe's limitations. They worked in art galleries, I guessed. These two drank a lot, vodka and beer, a nasty combination. And to our left perched on the slippery vinyl sat a gender-bender who either didn't own enough female clothing to leave the house in full drag, or thought he looked good just as he was. He acts as though he thinks he looks good.
We exchange greetings all of us but no genuine conversation takes place because we don't speak Hungarian and they do no speak enough English. Just an occasional turn from the man and a grunt "American you are?!" "Yes, American." There was no need to explain that Branko is from Yugoslavia, Branko doesn't care to be such a close neighbor of this man. Also, Branko was beginning to tell people that he is from Croatia, Tudjman's politics were starting to work. But there is no doubt that these Hungarians know what and where Croatia is, both Hungary and Croatia were part of the Habsburg monarchy and therefore they share a common history. "America nice place," the man continued. Our half-drag giggled and put his closed fingers to his mouth and I wasn't sure if he was laughing at the man or at himself. "Yes, nice place. Have you been to America?" He wrinkled his brow and turned really Hungarian and babbled what I guessed was "I don't understand," but maybe I didn't understand. He soon turned to the side again and watched the constant flux of people heave in and out of the bar.
The dance floor of Mystery was located on the other side of the bar, behind a wall that separates the rooms. Where we were sitting was intended to provide more intimate surroundings for the guests, a place to exchange phone numbers or to just sit and watch the men and women who are homosexual. The dance floor was made of a polished tin, when you step on it it gives in to your weight and the thing sinks about a quarter inch. It seemed as though there may have been carpeting beneath the tin floor, that the tin floor was placed over the carpeting so that your feet can actually move to the beat. I Pictured shag carpeting beneath the floor. The walls in the dance room are all red and a large disco ball hangs in the middle and one white light casts light onto it which reflects white disco squares, cubed inches of light moving around in circles on the red walls.
At no time were there more than six or eight people dancing at one time. Either the clientele knew that the music was ridiculous or they simply don't like to dance on a crowded floor which might crease if it becomes overcrowded. Anyway, it seems most everyone is here to drink and the bar tender with that lisp is quick to pour. Branko said, as he looked about and wondered how we got to this point, "thank God I'm a Yugoslav." But remember, things are changing.
BETROFFENHEIT
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In my opinion, Munich reveals its unique character in the Lenbach Museum. The works of the artists in this museum come from many different countries but the artwork seems to reject this, instead revealing a message that all is bleeding into one. The Lenbach is a contemporary museum and it reflects Munich, a city which was devastated in the second world war and rebuilt to its modern state after allies freed the city. There is no evidence in Munich that Hitler waltzed in grand ballrooms and fed on Jew's flesh unless you really look at the modern buildings and ask yourself "why is this building or that building modern?" Then you realize that it is modern because everything around you was destroyed. And so the Lenbach Museum is a modern building where artists Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky and Alexei Yavlensky lead you through the modern century. However, their work does not report the crimes of this century; rather they convince through mood and paint that there was something more important happening than mass killings, something more important than horror and violence.
There were some who tried to live through it all by continuing their lives undisturbed, undisturbed by means of isolation and the underground. It was the new renaissance that has been ongoing since the birth of Jean Cocteau, when Orpheus began his descent into the nether world. Continuing shows in cinema houses in isolated places like islands went on undisturbed, filled with people who went unnoticed as they proceed to do whatever it is they are born to do, and to be, never forgetting their responsibility to one another, to rely on one another, even today.
There were eight horses standing proud decorated with white ribbons of lace trimmings and crystal beads that hung and wrapped them round their bodies and across their bellies and between their hind quarters and winding through their tails and into the anus and the beads also hung from the crowns on their heads. There are four royal chariots standing motionless behind the horses, but the horses and the chariots are not attached to one another. These chariots are made of a rich, polished gold like you find in great Roman cathedrals, the gold that was mined by slaves and cast into elaborate designs by slaves who sometimes died from the forced labor. The gold chariots are amidst an haze of dense midnight-blue and the foreground is a common sidewalk-gray color, the same texture as a common sidewalk. Atop the chariots stand ridiculous men: in the first chariot on the far left stands Pilot in royal Roman garb and he is wearing headphones and holding a Walkman cassette player in his right hand; in the next chariot to Pilot's left stands Adolf Hitler dressed in his usual military uniform and in his right hand he is holding a McDonald's hamburger, half of it still wrapped in its McDonald's hamburger paper. He is just about to take a big bite of the hamburger. The third chariot stands empty and the only sure thing we know about the owner of it is that he is an American man from the south who believes that the Holocaust was a hoax. Standing in the chariot in place of the it's owner is a totem pole with three heads carved into it. At the top of the totem pole is the head of Sammy Davis Junior looking at you with his glistening eyes and thin lips that seem to be singing "The Candy Man," and below, the head of Leonard Bernstein looking relaxed and dignified, as though he has just finished conducting the symphony; and below Leonard is the head of Robert Mapplethorp with a cigarette between his lips. In the fourth chariot stands a statue of a young man with a shaved head in tight blue jeans, a white t shirt with the word FRONT painted in red letters in the middle of the shirt contrasts a black leather jacket with zippers and an arm band wrapped around the statue's upper right arm, a red band with a white circle and a swastika in the middle of it. The statue is holding a clinched fist and is shaking it at the horses. There are many naked boys swimming in circles in a pool that is transparent and suspended before the chariots. Most of the boys in the pool have blond hair and their bodies are all very pail, even though you know that there are African boys and Indian boys and Japanese boys and Eskimos and purple Nigerians and even boys from Tirana and Tiajuana. The constant swirling in the pool makes the water turn red because some of the boys are bleeding and the constant motion makes the water and blood mix until the entire pool is red and all you can see is the many sets of blue eyes looking at the next boy as the pail skin of the next boy comes closer and almost close enough to touch. There is so much blood at one point that screaming no longer happens, just summary executions and more pail bodies thrown into the pool. The horses are spotted with blood and the lace becomes now more decorated, delicate patterns with little red specks of blood, the crystal beads reflect light and glisten and now the horses begin to parade slowly in a circle around the swirling pool and slowly they march into a slow gallop, their broad necks and wispy miens all uniformly moving horizontally around, surrounding the pool. The slow gallop continues with just the sound of hooves until very young children in the foreground clap their hands, pulling their small hands from their fathers and clapping at the horses that are decorated in the blood of the boys. The fathers look down at their children and see their little heads covered by their little wool caps with the little tassels on top and they think how lucky is my son to be here with me witnessing the horrors of artists. The swirling pool grows deeper and the bleeding resumes, but those blue eyes remain undisturbed through pain and insult and final death, those eyes remain honest and faithful, never crossing and never letting the blood enter them. But then the blood in the swirling pool turns to fire and the horses begin to prance, the edges of the lace trimmings become scorched by the flames which lick their sides, the crystal beads glow from the orange flames. The children run toward the fire but their fathers only run a couple of steps to pull them back; the heat is so great they stop and scream for their sons who run right into the fire giggling and flashing their young white teeth, their little hands outstretched and reaching for the horses, "horsy, horsy." Their little tassels are first to catch fire, the boys in the swirling pool have developed blisters and the fathers look at them and turn away as if they could help them but refuse because they don't agree with the boys. The little children just keep running until they are running in the circle with the horses and the horses begin to trample them, their little bones are crushed while their fathers scream from the top of their lungs from the horror. The swirling pool turns into a dance and the boys have now reached each other to join hands, they smile and kiss one another on each cheek as their feet fan the flames, they rise above the fire and ascend to the clouds above. The children never escape the hooves that trample them, their fathers will never forgive them. The lace burns away and the crystal beads glow like coals from the flames, burning into the flesh of the horses but the horses do not understand what causes their pain. They blame the fathers who are watching the crystals burn, they have already forgotten their little children who lye dead. The statue turns to the empty chariot and whispers "When will you return, will you kill them all, will there be killing for me?" The totem pole quivers for a brief moment; Hitler has almost finished his McDonald's hamburger; Pilot is rewinding the tape. Finally the horses collapse into piles of ashes but the crystals continue to glow for a while, quite brightly in fact, the crystals glowing their fiery orange mixed in with the ashes.
Next to this painting is a simple Indian from Brazil sitting cross-legged next to a straw hut. He is communicating as only Shamans do, reaching the animal and pure energy. He is a mediator between the arts and the public, a priest between spirit and man.
*
Egon and Christine Scotland had invited me over to their third-floor apartment on the Markt Square. Christine had prepared a delicious vegetarian meal and Egon, after I had been shown around the large apartment and been introduced to the two cats, went out to buy some weizen bier, famous German beer that nearly hypnotizes the senses, for the occasion.
We spent most of the evening talking history and the current situation in Yugoslavia, as well as the worsening situation in the Persian Gulf. Egon talked of his recent return from Turkey where he had been reporting on the plight of the Kurds. Soon we focused on Munich, the city only miles away from the Dachau concentration camp. Earlier that day I took a train to Dachau to see the camp for myself. It is a thoroughly nauseating experience to go to Dachau and see the photos of the victims; the bunkers where they slept in lice-infested beds, two to three per bed; the showers - actually gas chambers - smelling of metal and concrete, a most inhuman smell. Egon and Chris knew all about it and Egon was able to sum-up the feeling in just a few words. "And this all happened only fifty years ago."
Egon was preparing to go to Yugoslavia for his paper Südeutches Zeitung to report on the worsening situation there. We spoke just a few words in Croatian and Serbian, words we had learned in our classes together back at Stanford. They were both very interested in the nationality problems in Yugoslavia and were interested in my impressions of the brewing conflict. "The situation is like this: the majority of Croats want out of the Yugoslav union because they feel that under the central government in Belgrade they have been overworked, underpaid, overtaxed, under appreciated. And from what I can see living in Zagreb, this is largely true. There are many people in Zagreb who work very hard and are not paid much by western standards. These people complain that all of the tax money that is drained from their paychecks goes directly to Belgrade, which makes sense because Belgrade is the capital of Yugoslavia. But the Belgrade government, located in Serbia and controlled mainly by Serbs, does not evenly redistribute the tax revenues throughout the rest of Yugoslavia, to the other republics. Slovenes have the same complaints about the Belgrade government.
"As a result of lack of redistribution of tax revenues the other republics receive very little support for local public projects, for hospitalization, for education. Croats and Slovenes that I have talked with claim that Serbia hordes the tax revenues, sending large sums to private banks overseas. The Croats and Slovenes generally believe that Serbs are lazy, that they don't pull their fair share in Yugoslavia and that Serbia lives off the backs of Croatia and Slovenia. From what I have seen so far, Croats and Slovenes are indeed harder workers, the per capita income in Slovenia is around $7,500.00; in Croatia it is around $5,500.00; in Bosnia and Hercegovina around $4,000.00, in Macedonia around $2,800.00; and in Serbia and Montenegro the per capita income is about equal, around $3,000.00. Most of the highly advanced industries are located in Slovenia and Croatia. Serbs, on the other hand, claim that the reason for this is that the geographic region of the Serbian republic is mostly mountains and land which is not suitable for farming. Thus they have to rely on Slovenia and Croatia, especially Croatia's Slavonia region, where the land is very rich and excellent for farming."
We rattled on concerning the rise of nationalism all across Central and Eastern Europe, a concern that is felt especially deeply in Germany as the date of reunification approaches, on October 3. The skinheads of East Germany have gained numerous recruits in recent months and the fear is that the trend will continue and swell the population of Neo-fascists to greater heights, throughout the unified German state. "Everything in Germany," I asserted, "is approached with a superior effort behind it. The architecture, literature, the arts in general, manufacturing. In short, Munich is a living example of the greatness of the German people, of the dignity in work and living that serves as an example of unified effort. Your city vindicates life, brings it to a higher plane of existence. But there is also great danger in German unity."
"I know," Egon replied. "I returned from Turkey just last week and the Turks repeatedly called me a donkey. I never thought of myself as a donkey."
*
It was two months after our first night together in the park. We had returned to the park by chance, we were just out for a walk after hours of talk in some café and strolling very slowly we happened upon it, entering it through its rusted gate. It is empty again. We just move slowly over to the bench where we had consumed each other before and we keep moving, with purpose, right past the bench over to the side, near the children's sand box. We both step into the sand box at the same time and without saying anything, just looking at each other with our grinning mouths, we open the front of our trousers and each pull out our erect penis'. We begin to masturbate, slowly.
We are standing here jacking off next to the school house made of stone, the sand box beneath our feet. Silence composes the park and the palace stands there at the opposite end of the park, dark and silent like before, somehow wondering what it is we two boys are doing. The rusted gate creaks slowly back and forth, the trees with their wind-blown leaves hush that small voice and tell it to pay attention. Faster now we turn to each other and lay deep kisses into our mouths and our tongues meet, entwine, slide up and down. The night is moonless and overcast. We came onto each others' trousers and kissed again before stepping out of the sand box. This park is ours.
MASARYKOVA #3
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The statue of Ban Josip Jelacic was scheduled to return to Republic Square, from whence it would be called Ban Jelacic Square, or more commonly amongst Zagrebers, Jelacic Plac , on October 17 (the word Plac adopted from the German Plaz). The name Republic Square was adopted when the Communists came to power and the statue of Ban Jelacic (Ban meaning Viceroy) was taken away, taken apart and put into storage in some remote place in Slavonia. Ban Jelacic was the leader of the Croatian resistance movement of 1848 against widespread Communist revolutions all across East-Central Europe, and the return of his statue and subsequent re-christening of Jelacic Plac promised to be one of the greatest celebrations in the history of Croatia.
I had just moved into my third apartment in Zagreb at Masarykova Ulica #3. The street had been named after the Czech writer Thomas Masaryk who, some fifty years after Ban Jelacic was resisting Communism, encouraged Croats living in Prague to join together in support of a union of Southern Slavs known later as Yugoslavia. I often wondered, as I peered out my window at the elegant Austro-Hungarian structures of Masarykova Ulica, if my street would be renamed, changed to whatever it was before it became the street of Thomas Masaryk.
Lenin Square had already been scheduled for a name change and would once again be called Kresimir the Fourth Square.
*
Many Croatian students had been living in Prague during the days of and Masaryk after they had been expelled from Croatian universities for protesting Hungarian leadership in Croatia. Those were the days of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and Croatia had been placed under the aegis of Hungary's portion of the kingdom. It was the end of the nineteenth century and about two-hundred students had gathered to march toward Ban Jelacic Square to protest Hungary. Chants of "Glory to Ban Jelacic," and "down with the Magyars" (Magyar means Hungarian in most European languages) were heard as one student carried a Hungarian flag doused in kerosene and proceeded to set it afire.
Just a few days later I looked out my window, as I usually do in the morning, on a Saturday in October, and watched as about two-hundred Croats marched down Masarykova Ulica toward the newly-christened Ban Jelacic Square waving the new Croatian flag, the new coat of arms in the center on the background of red, white and blue. I thought of the day, October, the month that history will never forget, at least not in this part of the world.
*
The symbols of Ban Jelacic and the new Croatian flag became as pervasive in Zagreb as coffee and vodka. Miniature statues of Ban Jelacic were available in numerous shops, books written on his life appeared in all of the book shops. The Croatian flag was flown outside apartment windows, buttons with the flag in the middle were worn by members of all generations, and even the flag itself was worn - draped over the shoulders of young men, like a shawl, as they paraded around the city on Saturday afternoons, proclaiming the Croatian state.
Susan and I were busy working for Croatian radio at the time. We were at the station for our usual Friday morning show, pre recording, and Miso, our manager, asked us to think of a new topic for discussion contrasting current social issues in America with those in Croatia. Susan and I immediately knew what we would talk about: flags.
At the time, there was a big controversy brewing over whether it should be legal or illegal to burn the American flag as a sign of protest to American political policies, mainly foreign policies. Susan and I were at the liberal end of the spectrum and agreed that it should be legal to burn the American flag as a sign of protest to American political policies. We talked about this on our show and spoke freely of our disappointment with President Bush who, like most conservatives, believed that the flag is a sacred object. Conservatives like bush are surely the ones who created the myth that it is bad luck to let a flag touch the ground. To me its just a silly superstition.
Then Susan and I took a dangerous step and asked our listeners, at a time when the Croatian flag was certainly sacred, whether it should be legal or illegal for the Croatian population to burn the flag. I asked, "what would happen if a young man appeared on Jelacic Plac one afternoon and produced a flag, drenched in kerosene, and set it on fire? What would be the response of the observers of this form of protest? We look forward to your answers next week!" Susan and I sneered at each other and laughed because we already knew the answer. We just wanted to hear it on the airwaves, to provoke that patriotism and burn it. But this portion of our show was never played on the airwaves. Miso edited the tape and our questions were never allowed.
TITO OFF THE WALL
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The Serbs are shaking in their boots. The Slovenes are shaking in their boots. The Slovenian elections are happening right now. It is December, 1990 and the people of the Republic of Slovenia are holding a referendum, going to the balloting booths to decide their future. Can anyone doubt the outcome? The Slovenes are voting whether to secede from the Yugoslav federation or not, whether to focus their political and economic attention within their own borders or whether to continue to relinquish power to a central authority. Can anyone doubt the outcome? The Croats will hold the same referendum next month, January, 1991. Can anyone doubt the outcome?
Even before this referendum the portraits of Tito started to be removed from the walls of the establishments of Slovenia and Croatia. Why, ten years and seven months after his death, were the portraits of Tito still hanging from the walls of the establishments of the Republics of Yugoslavia? Why did the removal of the portraits provoke fear amongst the pro-federation rulers of Yugoslavia? Answer these questions and you will know more about the Balkans than any other person in the world.
Tito's portraits appeared in every public building in Yugoslavia, and even in many private buildings. There were various poses: the traditional one of Tito as leader of bureaucrats of Yugoslavia, dressed in a dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and what appeared to be a silver necktie (this portrait was in black and white). This particular portrait was to be found in all classrooms of all schools - from primary to university level - placed prominently above the professor's desk, prominently above my desk at Varsavska School for Foreign Languages. Here he was a man of business, ready to take on the opposition and assert his principles, his white handkerchief in his breast pocket ready to wipe the sweat from his brow.
Then there is the portrait of Tito as a war general, perhaps the second-most prominent of all his portraits, found in post offices and banks, a brave Tito dressed in a dark brown leather bomber jacket, his wind-swept hair shows he is a man of action as he looks boldly beyond the frame of the picture to whatever mischief that may have been stirring in Yugoslavia, or mischief to come. This portrait made me think of Tito as an aviator, having landed his plane and just off the runway in the canteen, gulping brandy and cruising the bar for the closest large-breasted woman with whom he could share his tales of adventure.
On the coast and in many restaurants in the larger cities were the portraits of Tito near the seaside dressed either in his white naval uniform with medals on his breast, or in a simple, casual baby blue summer shirt, the blue waves of the Adriatic in the background showing the man at leisure.
His pictures started to come down in January, 1992.
*
Lenin Square has been re-christened The Square of King Kreshimir the Fourth, its nineteenth-century name, non-Communist and Croatian.
___________
MOSE PIJADE
=
The winter evening was dark and the air was fresh with the cool breezes of March. It is now just a few days after the conflict started in Pakrac, a mixed Croat and Serb town southeast of Zagreb in the rich region of Slavonia. On March 2, 1991 Yugoslav Army soldiers and Croatia's Specijalci, the newly formed Croat paramilitary units, confronted each other on the main square in Pakrac. The conflict began when local Serbs tried to take over the Pakrac police station, expelling the Croats and bringing the station and local police forces fully under Serb control. Naturally the Croats wanted the station returned to Croat control for Pakrac is, as one unit of the Specijalci told me, "a Croatian town that should be run by Croats." The Yugoslav Army stepped in to separate the mostly rioting Serb and Croat factions of what used to be a relatively harmonious village. Over the next several days Zagreb television, where I was working at the time, reported that four Croat Specijalci had been killed in the conflict, their faces mutilated beyond recognition. And now, just a few days after the incident in Pakrac began, I am giving an examination to my students at Mose Pijade, a modern school in the south part of central Zagreb.
I entered the classroom a few minutes late after being delayed on my way. There was a thick traffic snarl on Savska Cesta which takes me to Mose Pijade. On the way I found out that the military barracks just a few blocks south of the school had been brought under Yugoslav Army control, Croat Specijalci had been pushed out and the Zagreb police were hurrying to the scene. When I entered the classroom the students looked frightened, didn't know what was going on. My colleague Elisabeth Harrison was there and said to me, whispering in her assertive English monotone, "let's get this thing over with and get the hell out of here. There's something going on in the building downstairs and I don't trust this situation."
We distributed the exams and told the students to begin writing their compositions in English, telling them to work as quickly as possible without losing our cool. My heart bunched up and I didn't know what to think. The Yugoslav Army was taking control of the military barracks? What the hell for? I watched the students and wondered what was going to happen in this situation. I pictured soldiers dressed in the same colors as those worn by the passport controllers on my first trip into the country, the same bushy mustaches, the same demanding, uncompromising disposition. Suddenly an alarm sounded and I heard a scream. Someone came pounding on the classroom door and Elisabeth and I went together to open it. It was one of our colleagues from the school and she was breathing very heavily, told us to come out of the classroom and shut the door.
We left the students in the classroom, left them to finish their exams in the midst of this confusion, and a group of teachers was gathering to discuss what was happening. A few of the teachers, all women, were explaining all at once that Yugoslav Army units had occupied the basement of the building and were "performing routine military exercises." "In a school?" I thought. What the hell are "routine military exercises?" The director of the school approached and told us to go back into our classrooms and finish giving the exams within thirty minutes. The total examination time was supposed to have been ninety minutes.
Elisabeth and I went back into the classroom, every student looked up as we entered, now pail and worried. We simply told them to finish the exams as quickly as possible because we have to leave the building in half an hour. This was not an ordinary exam.
We managed to collect all of the exams in less than twenty minutes, the students were eager to get out of Mose Pijade before the Croatian police arrived in order to "take back" the school building. If the situation in Pakrac was any indication of the trend of coming events, then the English exam was of less importance. Getting to a safe place far from the Yugoslav Army was far more important, there would be time for English once the conflict is over. But it isn't over.
*
The following night classes resumed as usual. The whole town was quite shaken up though, the Croatian government was deciding whether to take stronger actions to force the return of the military barracks back into Croatian hands, or to let the Yugoslav Army have its way and play-out its role as the "only legitimate military force in Yugoslavia," as the news reported from Belgrade.
That night in class we discussed the situation and I asked my students what they would do if they were in the government's position. A few of them quickly rebutted and said, "What would you do? You are from democratic America and are the policemen of the world. What would you do if a fucking (yes, my students freely used this word) Communist military commander took control of your country and your own government was considering to let them stay? Would you let them stay?!" ""Well," I began, "you have to decide whether you are willing to fight for a democratic Croatia, or if you want to continue to be controlled by central authorities. It's like the verb 'to be.'
"'To be" is a thought, an action, a word, a movement beyond the prescriptions that are yours from society, any society, from birth to the day you die. You have to be something or someone, you have to do something if you are to survive. You must take an action or you will die. You must decide whether you will or you won't, and both sides of the decision derive from the verb 'to be.'"
"We already are," replied Marko Vrdoljak, his father was a government official. "We are Croatia, we are not Yugoslavia!" "They are not Yugoslavia, they are fucking Serbia! We are Croatia and we will always be Croatia! That's the meaning of the verb 'to be'!"
*
Then there was the vision, appearing by day over the roof tops like clouds preceding a storm, but these were not clouds. There was lightening, but it wasn't heat and light combining to form those frightening bolts that zig zag across the sky. It was fire, but it was not from burning embers or from a stove or oven. The clouds were blue and descended upon the city so ominously, telling of the struggle to come which no one would be able to stop and no one would be able to explain. The fire came out of barrels, but not from small barrels of a gun, but massive barrels of a cannon. A cannon mounted on wheels that was driven through the streets by men who thought they should be famous. These men drove the tank that led to another conflict, or perhaps the tank was the conflict. A tank on the quiet streets of Zagreb, passing the elegant villas of my neighborhood, passing children on their way to school.
*
Wednesday, 21 january, 1993 – Zagreb, Croatia
Late January and the war was building. Not just in the far eastern reaches of Croatia but also now in Bosnia-Hercegovina, where eventually the war would overtake much of Sarajevo and completely ruin its economy and civilized life there for some time into the future. In Zagreb though, the atmosphere of the entire city seemed always on the verge of New Year’s Eve, just like I had imagined wartime economies and societies of earlier times, the prewar days of Weimar, even. People were spending the money that they had, going out to dinner, to clubs, sitting in the Writers’ Club until 3 a.m. sipping Slavic whiskies and beer, talking endlessly about what was happening and ignoring as much as possible what no one was able to predict was about to come. It seemed forever midnight in Zagreb and that everyone, up to the little old grandmothers in their apartment windows, remained awake, and not just awake but also, alert.
Such was the mood in _______. The young, out all night in midweek with no plans for tomorrow, Branko and I counted among their numbers. The place itself was on the lower level of a building with some retail on the street level and apartments on the several floors above. Club _______ had a capacity of around a hundred-fifty people and no more, white tile floors, A long bar from the far end of the main lounge led to the dance floor and the DJ station, which was a wall of monitors, receivers, CD decks and cassette player/recorders.
Branko and I entered ______ at 20:30, early enough so that I coulod influence the DJ with my new electronica CDs from San Francisco. With the ecstasy I brought with me from the States, pills that Bojan had sent to me while I was still in Minneapolis, in a cassette tape case, which he had mailed from San Francisco; these pills I thought nothing about smuggling them in to first Germany, where my plane had landed, and then over the border by bus into Austria then Croatia. I was already by that time a little seasoned in taking ecstasy, but this would be Branko’s first. If I had had enough pills for the whole club, I would have gladly given them out. But as it stood, we had only ten pills between us, and Branko and I would spend the next few weeks taking them for the purpose of little ecstasy trips together, to enjoy deep escape within an atmosphere of escape itself. The club became our hideout for a couple months, until the novelty wore off and Croatia itself became a burden to live in.
Young Slavic men in their late teens and early twenties with young women dressed to kill. Each one wished to be removed form the aspect of groundedness. Branko and I, he 23 and I 27, were more equipped than any of them to really get ungrounded and quite simply, to fly. Lovorka and Bojan—a different one than my friend and supplier in San Francisco—arrived at Club _____ and shortly after their arrival Branko and I downed an ecstasy capsule each. We ordered drinks and took a table off the dance floor. The DJ alternated between his tapes and mine from San Francisco. The strobe lights flashed, the colored spots shown down and everything began to turn brightly murky and angled, as if onstage. Branko told Lororka that he and I had taken the pills and she tuned into us sharply, as if expecting but what I would not ever be able to tell. Remember, war raged outside western Croatia and many of these boys in the club that night, were candidates for military conscription. But not Branko, who had a doctor’s release, thankfully, and would remain in Zagreb free to live another life with me.
Lovorka continiually darted her eyes between the two of us, from Branko to me and back again. “Tell me when you are high, I want to know!” She held an interest in the two of us always and proved to truly be a good friend by showing an acceptance for who each of us was as an individual, and also who we were becoming together. “Tell me tell me tell me!” Lovorka said. “I must know. I want to see the chemical reaction in your eyes.”
She looked much like a vampire, a classic Bella Lugosi style always dressed in black. Her naturally pale skin meant that her choice of lipstick—blood red—determined that she looked a bit corpselike all the time. High black boots in the cold months and black patent leather shoes in the warm ones, she fit the mood of this fringe republic on the edge of Transylvania. “Tell me tell me tell me,” she said again, her voice itself a vampire’s drone of demand and inquiry.
The truth was then that the drug had hit me and I could clearly see that it had hit Branko, too. His eyes began rolling around and he held his cigarette in his left fingertips more lightly, as if the thing was there of its own free will and that his life was in the process of lifting off from the earth in flight. “I, I, think,” Branko said, stuttering and laughing at intervals and looking foppish yet cool. “I’m dizzy,” he said, twirling his right finger in the air to indicate that the room was spinning.
“Yes yes yes!”Lovorka said. “It is working, it is working!” While the “r” letters rolled thickly from off of her tongue, I could see the buzz of the place grow, filling up with many Zagreb young revelers, again, as though it was a great party to christen the coming of something great. Where the emotions of guilt and panic normally might fill any place on the edge of a war zone, alcohol and drugs assuaged both heart and mind as this night, and many like them, became a celebration of the now. While military conscription loomed over every young man in the club—some of them already having received orders of dispatch—this was our cabaret of the late Twentieth Century. Less outro-spective than the cabarets of World War I or World War II and more deeply trance-like, this cabaret was about two things: escape within, together. There in club ________, along with the drug, we celebrated a place beyond borders and without restrictions. Some sing, some dance, others perform magic tricks and still others, like Lovorka, fill the roll of MC of the night; this was an age where we held our talents close to the chest, hiding our hands in order to save them for a better day to come. Introspective, each one of us, in this place with each one of us seemingly united in friendship and peace, it was a space of perfect harmony.
In a war economy, spending is free; whatever has been saved is spent and this was the case for almost everyone in Zagreb that I could see, so much so that bread lines were beginning to happen and rations were growing more scarce. It seemed the norm was: spend freely, for no one knew what the next weeks might mean, and worry about that near future when it arrives. Much like taking a drug: focus on the high now and worry about the payback later. Payback, always a bitch, was the last thing on anyone’s mind. The now, living for the moment, was everything. We’d all maybe be dead by next week, Zagreb bombed by the Serbs, and this moment spent in what other way, on worry, debate, or planning an exit strategy to get out of the country? Perhaps the latter would have been wiser. But then, the excitement of imminent danger wouldn’t exist for us. We humans, like our fondness for a summer storm, we like danger in manageable doses and for now, danger in Croatia was in fact manageable. Like the drug whose hangover would wear off in a couple days after the crash, the level of danger in Croatia still was predictable, for the most part, and there was the feeling always Croatia that because of the republic’s proximity to Austria, there was a safe, rich, well-armed western nation just a few hours away by bus or car. Some kind of escape was possible if the situation in Croatia degenerated more quickly than recent events inside the borders.
