Now I hear that the night train is quite lovely. The beds are OK and you can actually sleep. Last year in Vietnam it was such a horror that whenever I hear that word I shudder. In Harlem Night Train is a cheap alcoholic wine-ish drink that only the most desperate drink. Too me.. it seemed consistant.
I opted for the day train which takes a little longer. Still you get to see the country. Plenty of it. It took 12 hours to go from Bangkok to Chiangmai. 8 across flat plains of the central highlands. The last four in the mountains. That is when I was happy to see out the window. In the north it seems that people take special pride in their railway stations. They are special little houses with pitched roofs, nicely painted and little, very well kept gardens. If there was not so much to see in so little time I would like to have visited one of these towns. One where not one single flip flop wearing back packer has set foot in.
The train itself was good enough. You could actually use the bathroom without gagging. I hear that on the bus it is like visiting one of the outer rings of hell. They had food service as well. You could eat it. They randomly gave out two kinds of meat, white or red. It didnt really matter. It tasted as if the choice was either dog or rat. Still, you could eat it.
At the station I stopped at the Visitors Information desk to ask about a hotel. The attendant led me out into a completely dark parking lot and asked me to wait in a broken down blue Van. Its amazing what you will do when you are traveling. You have to trust everybody.
The hotel I stayed at is called the Anodard. It is a beat up 1970s style with close to 300 rooms or so. The place was empty. I think there were maybe only 20 guests in the whole place. My room was large with wood paneling like the kind you see on the Brady Bunch. In fact I thing the Brady Bunch dad might have been one of the Architects on this project. His signiture style is everywhere. It has a beautiful swimming pool surrounded by tropical plants and a sort of Walt Disney-esq fake waterfall. Too bad you cant jump from it any more. There is a sign with several Thai words on it blocking the steps leading up. Under the Thai script it says simply "No" in english. Isnt it nice our language is so compact?
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
Sunday, July 31, 2005
The Wild Orchid Club
The Wild Orchid Club was officially disbanded last night. I was standing on the corner of Khaosan and Chakrapong roads. Emily and Tomec were silhouetted by the huge cheesy signs that celebrated the bars, restaurants, shops and guest houses of Khaosan. Just over Emily shoulder Lucky Beer and Silk Bar flickered with the intermittent pulse of the fluorescent tubes that powered them. It was hot and humid. It's always hot and humid in Bangkok and Emily was leaving tomorrow. She was on her way to Ayhudara, one of the ancient capitols of Thailand.
Carolyn had been the first to leave, then Katerine. Maria was disappearing. Tomec, whose visa would expire at midnight, was heading for the boarder tomorrow, hoping to be able to cross into Lao. The members of The Wild Orchid, officially The Wild Orchid Dinner and Cocktail Club were culled from the Wat Pho School of Traditional medicine. Wat Pho is the monastery next to the Kings Palace where the Emerald Buddha finally ended up. It has been a center of learning and medicine since the 18th century.
After Jenni left I spent most of an entire day hiding in my hotel room. In a city of 8 million, like New York, the feeling of loneliness is palpable. In a city of 30 million its a god damn brick shoved down your throat. Fortunately there is Star Movies. My hotel room might have been a dank, green cement, windowless, pillbox but it did have cable and Star Movies is Asia's answer to suicide prevention hotlines. I saw Die Hard one and two. Tears welled in my eyes during Father of The Bride. I saw a Christopher Walken film called Poolhall Junkies that I swear was never released in the United States.
I made a few forays out into the streets for food. I hated Khaosan. Jet lagged I wandered into the streets at 3am. The strip was filled with brutal Australian drunkards who were trying to force kisses on Thai hookers. Hadn't these guys ever watched television? Everyone knows the sacred rule of prostitutes. No kissing on the mouth. If they didn't know that, then they for sure didn't know that two out of five of the ladies they were groping were not even ladies but ladyboys. There was going to be a lot of blown minds tonight. I knew I had to do something. I was already thinking of getting a flight home. I always go through this. At first I hate to leave. Then I hate being there. Then I start having dreams where my cats can talk and are saying things like. "Where are you? Why did you leave us? Is there any better food around here?" Then something changes. I get hooked in. I find my rhythm. By the end I don't want to go back and as soon as I get home I am surfing the internet for airfares.
In my guide book they mentioned Wat Pho had a course in traditional Thai massage. That was it. It would kill two birds with one stone. I would meet people and it would give my days some focus. The next day (after watching a movie at three AM with Anthony Hopkins where he is a black man who looks white and ends up driving into an ice covered lake with a woman who talks to crows and whose husband is a psycho out to kill them both) I took a Tuk Tuk to the temple. I had to fight with three of them to get the price down to 80 bhat when I knew it should be only 10. The real humiliation came when I realized I could have walked there in ten minutes if I only knew my way around town or... Could read the Thai alphabet. First I visited the reclining Buddha. It is an immense golden statue imprisoned in a temple that can barely contain it. You can hardly get a look at it between all of the pillars. It was the night before the full moon so the site was swarming with Thai. They were praying, lighting incense, and dropping hundreds of coins in the scores of metal pots lined up behind where the graven image lay. One of the monks, in psychedelic orange garb, pointed me the way to the massage center. I got a brochure and asked about when courses start. "Anytime you liiike." The woman in white seated behind an ancient wooden desk cooed to me in that gentle Asian way. "Huh. Well, ah what about tomorrow?" "Yessss. How you liiike." "Say.. 10am? "Anytime between niiine and eleeeeven." I was beginning to wonder if she had any idea of what I was talking about. I had been raised within the much stricter organization of Bostonian Academics.
I made my way there the next day, walking along the massive white walls of the kings palace. It was nine am and already the sun was broiling. There were vendors under every tree. I had countless opportunities for noodle soup with fried fish balls, tropical fruits, rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves, CDs, DVDs (of films that hadn't even been released), images of king Rama I-IX and hand carved buddhas. A band of blind people played tinny Thai folk music their faces red with sunburn and their eyes glazed white. I was led by one of the monks to a side street outside the main temple compound of Wat Pho.
Everywhere out side the temple there were tiny shops filled with herbs and potions and charts of human anatomy. At the end of a grimy street, with a broken wooden dock that hung out over the Phrya, in a vaguely 1950s style medical building I filled out an application. The place was staffed with pretty young Thai girls in blue nurses uniforms. I took off my shoes and went to the third floor with my registration card. There was a small air conditioned hall there. The floors were made with six inch wide mahogany boards and lined in neat little rows with mattresses. Everywhere people were giving and receiving massages. My instructor was a middle aged Thai woman named Pornita. She asked us to call her Porn for short. Later when I knew her better I would mention that she might want to change her nick name if she traveled to the U.S.. That was where I met Emily. She was to be the first member of The Wild Orchid Club. Downstairs we would met Tomec and Katerina. Later we would add Maria and Carolyn.
For a week we became the Wild Orchid Club. We dined together, shared stories, discussed politics, evolved philosophies. Nothing official. It was just that nobody really knew anybodys last name or hotel, but somehow we always saw each other somewhere at some point and it was yelled from the bus or across busy streets.
"We meet tonight at The Wild Orchid, 7 o'clock!"
W.O.C. II
During our break on the first day of class Emily and I had lunch In a narrow ally way off the street. We each had a bowl of noodle soup with fried pork balls for 30 bhat a serving. It was made by an old woman who guarded the entrance to the ally. A narrow sliver of sunlight shone down on the collection of potted tropical plants she used to decorate the small place. We sat at a little card table on tiny red metal folding chairs. The old woman's associate, who blocked the other side of the ally with her shiny aluminum cart made us a fresh orange juice. Emily and I talked about massage and its healing power. Then the conversation drifted to the slippery slope of prostitution.
"I used to be a very naughty dancer." She offered in her thick cockney accent.
"Oh, I used to like to dirty dance too when that was in. Now I like Salsa." I said, not getting it.
"No, I mean I used to show my ta tas." She smiled at me and wrinkled her nose.
" I ran away to Greece when I was a teenager and got a job in a club there. Turned me straight off blokes. I even had me a lezzie girlfriend."
There was a pause as I let this new information soak in. She was barely 25 now. It was hard to imagine an even younger more petite Emily with her PiPi Longstocking braids and freckled cheeks on the stage of some sleazy disco in Mykonos. Now she was trying to make it as an actress in London. Massage was her fall back plan.
W.O.C. III
Katerina was the one who broke the mystery of the Thai mass transit system and effectively liberated us from the Tuk Tuks. She figured out by randomly jumping on buses that number 53 would take us to and from Khao San. The buses were framed like the ones I rode in elementary school. The 53 was painted a dark red. At some point the worn out floors had been replaced with six inch wide mahogany slats. They were patrolled by a transit officer in a military style uniform. They conductors often had more braids and ribbons then some 2 star generals do. They walked up and down the ailes clicking a metal cylinder that folded open on its hinges. They cylinders were all personally decorated with sparkles or decoupage and crammed full with coins bills and and neatly rolled tickets. Our bus wound it's way around the markets and temples before dumping us off directly opposite of Wat Pho.
It was me who discovered the public boats. While wandering around Phra Arthit I noticed a peer behind an outdoor bar. At the end of it was a dock and a boat schedule. I was able to decipher that it made its way up the Phrya to Tat Tien which is directly opposite Wat Pho. I told Katerina and she was all for trying it. We made a plan to meet the next morning. Katerina is a very serious young German girl. She has long blonde hair and translucent white skin. She could pass for an eighteen year old high school student but is in reality a 25 year old microbiologist. She got tired of being a stooge for the drug companies and took off for Asia to reassess her life direction. The next morning, while having breakfast where she resided at The Peachy Guest House I asked her. "So what's up with you and Tomec?" Tomec had put me up to this. He is a tall, handsome, curly blonde headed, Architecture student originally from Poland and completely terrified by Katerina's radiance. Everyone is.
"What do you mean?" She responded knowing perfectly well what I meant.
"He looks at you like he adores you. What do you think of him?"
"I don't think of him that way at all." Was her flat response.
W.O.C. IV.
When I made a proposal that we go to see a Thai movie Emily's response was the most adamant.
"I don't. I want to see a proper American movie with popcorn and big chairs."
The idea died with that, but on the last evening of the Wild Orchid Club, the day after Katerina left for home, Tomec asked me if I was still interested in going. Emily texted me that she and Carolyn were having beers at her hotel The Four Sons and watching movies "on the tele." Carolyn, an outer satellite of our club was with her. When we got there the chicks seemed perfectly content to be with their huge bottles of Singha beer and not moving anywhere.
I had asked a waitress at the Wild Orchid for a tip on seeing Thai movies and she wrote down the name of a place on a slip of paper in Thai script.
"Don't pay more than 60 bhat." She warned me. Hmmm. I wish me luck.
We got there for 80 bhat. Sometimes you need to remind yourself that you are arguing over fifty cents. We got tickets for a movie called "Thirty Years Later"
30 YEARS LATER
Director: Rutaiwan Wongsirasawad
Cast: Phairote Sangwaribut, Lalana Sulawan
Genre: Comedy
Synopsis: The sequel of the tophitting teen flick in the 1980s comes back after thirty years pass by. The couple of the decade no more need to fight against their fathers. This time however it is more chaotic because they need to help their daughter's love affair. They are just to realize that this new-age love is too confusing.
The theater was in a big mall and very modern. It was so white it glowed. It must take a small army to clean it at night. The cinema was on the third floor and over the ticket and concession stand on a curved wall were the three dimensional letters for Major Cinema. Really, that's what its called.
The seats were plush red and the carpet in multi colored stripes made it difficult not to tumble down them. Before the movie started we all had to stand to hear the national anthem and see a short featuring Rama IX. They never show him head on in this little film as he walks among a multitude of children, cripples and military personnel. He is always wearing these tinted glasses that make him look, well, creepy. If you mention him to anyone in Thailand the automatic response is.
"We love the king."
On the way back we decided to try getting on a bus. The Mall was closing and people and buses were swarming out front in what seemed to me a completely disorganized fashion. We ran to jump on one, anyone, and a girl grabbed my arm.
"Where are you going?"
"Khaosan"
"Not this bus, 192" Nice. We were going to have an easy trip.
On the way back Tomec was acting morose.
"what's the matter?" He looked at me with soulful eyes. I knew it was about Katerina. "Listen." I said. "Never listen to what women say. So much garbage comes out of their mouths. Watch what they do." That can be said about anyone really. Even though Katerina had verbally rejected Tomec, she spent all of her free time with him, and looked after him like they were partners.
"Slowly, slowly. Its a done deal."
"What should I do?"
"Don't worry about tactics. Just be around. Pursue. She wants you to prove yourself a little." That seemed to cheer him upe. We crossed the Chao Phrya and saw Bangkok by night. Wat Arun was lit up like a Vegas Casino. With the wind blowing through the open bus windows, the town didn't smell half so bad.
Carolyn had been the first to leave, then Katerine. Maria was disappearing. Tomec, whose visa would expire at midnight, was heading for the boarder tomorrow, hoping to be able to cross into Lao. The members of The Wild Orchid, officially The Wild Orchid Dinner and Cocktail Club were culled from the Wat Pho School of Traditional medicine. Wat Pho is the monastery next to the Kings Palace where the Emerald Buddha finally ended up. It has been a center of learning and medicine since the 18th century.
After Jenni left I spent most of an entire day hiding in my hotel room. In a city of 8 million, like New York, the feeling of loneliness is palpable. In a city of 30 million its a god damn brick shoved down your throat. Fortunately there is Star Movies. My hotel room might have been a dank, green cement, windowless, pillbox but it did have cable and Star Movies is Asia's answer to suicide prevention hotlines. I saw Die Hard one and two. Tears welled in my eyes during Father of The Bride. I saw a Christopher Walken film called Poolhall Junkies that I swear was never released in the United States.
I made a few forays out into the streets for food. I hated Khaosan. Jet lagged I wandered into the streets at 3am. The strip was filled with brutal Australian drunkards who were trying to force kisses on Thai hookers. Hadn't these guys ever watched television? Everyone knows the sacred rule of prostitutes. No kissing on the mouth. If they didn't know that, then they for sure didn't know that two out of five of the ladies they were groping were not even ladies but ladyboys. There was going to be a lot of blown minds tonight. I knew I had to do something. I was already thinking of getting a flight home. I always go through this. At first I hate to leave. Then I hate being there. Then I start having dreams where my cats can talk and are saying things like. "Where are you? Why did you leave us? Is there any better food around here?" Then something changes. I get hooked in. I find my rhythm. By the end I don't want to go back and as soon as I get home I am surfing the internet for airfares.
In my guide book they mentioned Wat Pho had a course in traditional Thai massage. That was it. It would kill two birds with one stone. I would meet people and it would give my days some focus. The next day (after watching a movie at three AM with Anthony Hopkins where he is a black man who looks white and ends up driving into an ice covered lake with a woman who talks to crows and whose husband is a psycho out to kill them both) I took a Tuk Tuk to the temple. I had to fight with three of them to get the price down to 80 bhat when I knew it should be only 10. The real humiliation came when I realized I could have walked there in ten minutes if I only knew my way around town or... Could read the Thai alphabet. First I visited the reclining Buddha. It is an immense golden statue imprisoned in a temple that can barely contain it. You can hardly get a look at it between all of the pillars. It was the night before the full moon so the site was swarming with Thai. They were praying, lighting incense, and dropping hundreds of coins in the scores of metal pots lined up behind where the graven image lay. One of the monks, in psychedelic orange garb, pointed me the way to the massage center. I got a brochure and asked about when courses start. "Anytime you liiike." The woman in white seated behind an ancient wooden desk cooed to me in that gentle Asian way. "Huh. Well, ah what about tomorrow?" "Yessss. How you liiike." "Say.. 10am? "Anytime between niiine and eleeeeven." I was beginning to wonder if she had any idea of what I was talking about. I had been raised within the much stricter organization of Bostonian Academics.
I made my way there the next day, walking along the massive white walls of the kings palace. It was nine am and already the sun was broiling. There were vendors under every tree. I had countless opportunities for noodle soup with fried fish balls, tropical fruits, rice cakes wrapped in banana leaves, CDs, DVDs (of films that hadn't even been released), images of king Rama I-IX and hand carved buddhas. A band of blind people played tinny Thai folk music their faces red with sunburn and their eyes glazed white. I was led by one of the monks to a side street outside the main temple compound of Wat Pho.
Everywhere out side the temple there were tiny shops filled with herbs and potions and charts of human anatomy. At the end of a grimy street, with a broken wooden dock that hung out over the Phrya, in a vaguely 1950s style medical building I filled out an application. The place was staffed with pretty young Thai girls in blue nurses uniforms. I took off my shoes and went to the third floor with my registration card. There was a small air conditioned hall there. The floors were made with six inch wide mahogany boards and lined in neat little rows with mattresses. Everywhere people were giving and receiving massages. My instructor was a middle aged Thai woman named Pornita. She asked us to call her Porn for short. Later when I knew her better I would mention that she might want to change her nick name if she traveled to the U.S.. That was where I met Emily. She was to be the first member of The Wild Orchid Club. Downstairs we would met Tomec and Katerina. Later we would add Maria and Carolyn.
For a week we became the Wild Orchid Club. We dined together, shared stories, discussed politics, evolved philosophies. Nothing official. It was just that nobody really knew anybodys last name or hotel, but somehow we always saw each other somewhere at some point and it was yelled from the bus or across busy streets.
"We meet tonight at The Wild Orchid, 7 o'clock!"
W.O.C. II
During our break on the first day of class Emily and I had lunch In a narrow ally way off the street. We each had a bowl of noodle soup with fried pork balls for 30 bhat a serving. It was made by an old woman who guarded the entrance to the ally. A narrow sliver of sunlight shone down on the collection of potted tropical plants she used to decorate the small place. We sat at a little card table on tiny red metal folding chairs. The old woman's associate, who blocked the other side of the ally with her shiny aluminum cart made us a fresh orange juice. Emily and I talked about massage and its healing power. Then the conversation drifted to the slippery slope of prostitution.
"I used to be a very naughty dancer." She offered in her thick cockney accent.
"Oh, I used to like to dirty dance too when that was in. Now I like Salsa." I said, not getting it.
"No, I mean I used to show my ta tas." She smiled at me and wrinkled her nose.
" I ran away to Greece when I was a teenager and got a job in a club there. Turned me straight off blokes. I even had me a lezzie girlfriend."
There was a pause as I let this new information soak in. She was barely 25 now. It was hard to imagine an even younger more petite Emily with her PiPi Longstocking braids and freckled cheeks on the stage of some sleazy disco in Mykonos. Now she was trying to make it as an actress in London. Massage was her fall back plan.
W.O.C. III
Katerina was the one who broke the mystery of the Thai mass transit system and effectively liberated us from the Tuk Tuks. She figured out by randomly jumping on buses that number 53 would take us to and from Khao San. The buses were framed like the ones I rode in elementary school. The 53 was painted a dark red. At some point the worn out floors had been replaced with six inch wide mahogany slats. They were patrolled by a transit officer in a military style uniform. They conductors often had more braids and ribbons then some 2 star generals do. They walked up and down the ailes clicking a metal cylinder that folded open on its hinges. They cylinders were all personally decorated with sparkles or decoupage and crammed full with coins bills and and neatly rolled tickets. Our bus wound it's way around the markets and temples before dumping us off directly opposite of Wat Pho.
It was me who discovered the public boats. While wandering around Phra Arthit I noticed a peer behind an outdoor bar. At the end of it was a dock and a boat schedule. I was able to decipher that it made its way up the Phrya to Tat Tien which is directly opposite Wat Pho. I told Katerina and she was all for trying it. We made a plan to meet the next morning. Katerina is a very serious young German girl. She has long blonde hair and translucent white skin. She could pass for an eighteen year old high school student but is in reality a 25 year old microbiologist. She got tired of being a stooge for the drug companies and took off for Asia to reassess her life direction. The next morning, while having breakfast where she resided at The Peachy Guest House I asked her. "So what's up with you and Tomec?" Tomec had put me up to this. He is a tall, handsome, curly blonde headed, Architecture student originally from Poland and completely terrified by Katerina's radiance. Everyone is.
"What do you mean?" She responded knowing perfectly well what I meant.
"He looks at you like he adores you. What do you think of him?"
"I don't think of him that way at all." Was her flat response.
W.O.C. IV.
When I made a proposal that we go to see a Thai movie Emily's response was the most adamant.
"I don't. I want to see a proper American movie with popcorn and big chairs."
The idea died with that, but on the last evening of the Wild Orchid Club, the day after Katerina left for home, Tomec asked me if I was still interested in going. Emily texted me that she and Carolyn were having beers at her hotel The Four Sons and watching movies "on the tele." Carolyn, an outer satellite of our club was with her. When we got there the chicks seemed perfectly content to be with their huge bottles of Singha beer and not moving anywhere.
I had asked a waitress at the Wild Orchid for a tip on seeing Thai movies and she wrote down the name of a place on a slip of paper in Thai script.
"Don't pay more than 60 bhat." She warned me. Hmmm. I wish me luck.
We got there for 80 bhat. Sometimes you need to remind yourself that you are arguing over fifty cents. We got tickets for a movie called "Thirty Years Later"
30 YEARS LATER
Director: Rutaiwan Wongsirasawad
Cast: Phairote Sangwaribut, Lalana Sulawan
Genre: Comedy
Synopsis: The sequel of the tophitting teen flick in the 1980s comes back after thirty years pass by. The couple of the decade no more need to fight against their fathers. This time however it is more chaotic because they need to help their daughter's love affair. They are just to realize that this new-age love is too confusing.
The theater was in a big mall and very modern. It was so white it glowed. It must take a small army to clean it at night. The cinema was on the third floor and over the ticket and concession stand on a curved wall were the three dimensional letters for Major Cinema. Really, that's what its called.
The seats were plush red and the carpet in multi colored stripes made it difficult not to tumble down them. Before the movie started we all had to stand to hear the national anthem and see a short featuring Rama IX. They never show him head on in this little film as he walks among a multitude of children, cripples and military personnel. He is always wearing these tinted glasses that make him look, well, creepy. If you mention him to anyone in Thailand the automatic response is.
"We love the king."
On the way back we decided to try getting on a bus. The Mall was closing and people and buses were swarming out front in what seemed to me a completely disorganized fashion. We ran to jump on one, anyone, and a girl grabbed my arm.
"Where are you going?"
"Khaosan"
"Not this bus, 192" Nice. We were going to have an easy trip.
On the way back Tomec was acting morose.
"what's the matter?" He looked at me with soulful eyes. I knew it was about Katerina. "Listen." I said. "Never listen to what women say. So much garbage comes out of their mouths. Watch what they do." That can be said about anyone really. Even though Katerina had verbally rejected Tomec, she spent all of her free time with him, and looked after him like they were partners.
"Slowly, slowly. Its a done deal."
"What should I do?"
"Don't worry about tactics. Just be around. Pursue. She wants you to prove yourself a little." That seemed to cheer him upe. We crossed the Chao Phrya and saw Bangkok by night. Wat Arun was lit up like a Vegas Casino. With the wind blowing through the open bus windows, the town didn't smell half so bad.
Thursday, July 21, 2005
ladyboys
"How much did you pay?" The man smoking cigarette asked me. I was waiting for my driver. He had gone to the bathroom.
"40 Bhat for four stops." I said to the fat Thai man. He was sitting in a narrow slice of shade under a building ledge. He was dressed in slightly soiled white linen. Beads of sweat popped up on his forehead as fast as he could mop them up.
"That's a good price. How did you get that?"
"I was sitting under a tree on the other side of town. A woman came up to me and started chatting me up. She's a midwife at a hospital in Chang Mai. She made a list of places for me to go. Then she got me a Tuk Tuk and she made the price with the driver. What's the deal with the fish?"
"Special fish. They come here to the temple to feed. Only catfish, no other fish."
Past the buddies temple down a narrow ally between the out buildings there was a rusty metal dock. The pea green water there was roiling with catfish.
"I saw a young couple putting baby fish into the water. What was that?"
"What do you think?"
"Something to do with the full moon tomorrow? A special blessing for a baby or wedding or something?"
"Yes. Setting them free. In the next stage of life the catfish will be people. If they see you and remember you and you have no money, they may help you."
At the top of the ramp there had been a man selling food for the fish. I had bought a bowl and sprinkled it on the murky waters of the Chao Phraya. As each little nugget hit the water hundreds of fish vied for it, squirming one on top of each other. If one of them spotted me in their next life I was covered.
"This is a local temple. Not many tourist. Where else did you go?" He took a long drag on his cigarette pulling the blue smoke into his flat brown nostrils.
"I saw the Big Buddha."
The big Buddha is an enormous golden statue on a tiny little park. The key word being "golden". I sat on the grass there text messaging back home. The park is surrounded with small two story concrete houses one next to the other. Once brightly painted, now faded, each house has a porch awning. Scrawny cats prowled around the food vendors there. A mangy yellow dog came up to me and sniffed my hand. He looked at me with sad eyes, whined and then wandered away.
"Where to next?" The cigarette man asked.
"I don't know, some place called "Voglee."
"Oh, very special place, you saw it on TV?"
"No."
"No? Even if you have a million dollars you cant get into there without a membership card. I have a gold membership card." He held it up for me to see. "You know Armani?"
"Sure."
"They make all the suit for Armani. They make you an Armani suit for maybe $300. You get a special card and your measurements are on file for life. Every year you get a new catalog in the mail. This week they have a special promotion. For the first time they let tourist in for seven days. Today is the last day. Very good quality, 100 percent cashmere, I know I'm a lawyer."
The driver showed up looking relieved. We took off.
A Tuk Tuk is a little motorbike that has been outfitted with a metal roof and sides and two upholstered seats in the back. Every color of the rainbow is represented in broad stripes on its body and vinyl seat covers. The drivers are little hustlers and you cant trust them. They are forbidden by the government to charge any more than 100 bhat for any trip. They routinely try to get three or four hundred out of you. The local price is 10 bhat per trip. If they take you to a fancy shop, even only to look, they get a kick back of a full tank of petrol from the shop keepers. If you know this, sometimes you can bargain for a free trip.
I was fitted for a suit at Voglee. Then I went to the golden mountain. Later that evening I met up with Jenni. We had dinner in Khaosan, kind of a miniature sleazier version of Las Vegas. The backpackers and the whores go there to mix and mingle. Special extra strong drinks are available in all the bars. They advertise that they don't check IDs. I told her about my day.
"What do you want to do tonight?" She asked.
"Lets go see a ladyboy show."
She laughed.
"Well I figure you're a farm girl from Montana. You moved to Seattle and a few weeks out of college you're now an international business woman. You're already in the outer stratosphere. By now you must be up for anything."
"Ladyboys sounds fine to me." She reached for her purse.
"No, let me treat." I offered.
"No, let me expense it." She countered with a sly smile.
I had been trumped.
The ladyboys are Thai transexuals. So many tourists are fooled by them that the Thai women insist that there is a law that demands that they inform anybody who picks them up, of their gender transformation.
"I think they're just bitter." Jenni told me. "Some of them are more beautiful than any woman. And none of them have asses." Jenni is quite proud of her latina ass.
One Thai man, a self proclaimed playboy, told me that there are 10 million Ladyboys in Thailand or one sixth of the population. Hmmm.
The show was a rip off in style and tone of a Parisian cabaret. The dancing was lame. They did have wonderful costumes and the boys, albeit lip-synching, gave it their all. An Asian sensibility permeated all of the numbers. In one bit a James Bond type guy marries a virgin princess. He them proceeds to shun her for shall we say more experienced women. To please him she transforms herself into a vamp. He rejects her and forces her to once again don her wedding vestments. In the final moments of this tragedy she starts to shoot herself, and then shoots him.
After the show Jenni and I parted. We couldn't stop laughing at the show, especially the ending that featured three Asian ladyboy Marylins dancing in unison with a chorus line of boys with white tophats and tuxedos. I hugged her and kissed her cheek. She jumped into a cab. I rode back in a Tuk Tuk. The next morning she called me. Her boss was sending her to Hong Kong.
"40 Bhat for four stops." I said to the fat Thai man. He was sitting in a narrow slice of shade under a building ledge. He was dressed in slightly soiled white linen. Beads of sweat popped up on his forehead as fast as he could mop them up.
"That's a good price. How did you get that?"
"I was sitting under a tree on the other side of town. A woman came up to me and started chatting me up. She's a midwife at a hospital in Chang Mai. She made a list of places for me to go. Then she got me a Tuk Tuk and she made the price with the driver. What's the deal with the fish?"
"Special fish. They come here to the temple to feed. Only catfish, no other fish."
Past the buddies temple down a narrow ally between the out buildings there was a rusty metal dock. The pea green water there was roiling with catfish.
"I saw a young couple putting baby fish into the water. What was that?"
"What do you think?"
"Something to do with the full moon tomorrow? A special blessing for a baby or wedding or something?"
"Yes. Setting them free. In the next stage of life the catfish will be people. If they see you and remember you and you have no money, they may help you."
At the top of the ramp there had been a man selling food for the fish. I had bought a bowl and sprinkled it on the murky waters of the Chao Phraya. As each little nugget hit the water hundreds of fish vied for it, squirming one on top of each other. If one of them spotted me in their next life I was covered.
"This is a local temple. Not many tourist. Where else did you go?" He took a long drag on his cigarette pulling the blue smoke into his flat brown nostrils.
"I saw the Big Buddha."
The big Buddha is an enormous golden statue on a tiny little park. The key word being "golden". I sat on the grass there text messaging back home. The park is surrounded with small two story concrete houses one next to the other. Once brightly painted, now faded, each house has a porch awning. Scrawny cats prowled around the food vendors there. A mangy yellow dog came up to me and sniffed my hand. He looked at me with sad eyes, whined and then wandered away.
"Where to next?" The cigarette man asked.
"I don't know, some place called "Voglee."
"Oh, very special place, you saw it on TV?"
"No."
"No? Even if you have a million dollars you cant get into there without a membership card. I have a gold membership card." He held it up for me to see. "You know Armani?"
"Sure."
"They make all the suit for Armani. They make you an Armani suit for maybe $300. You get a special card and your measurements are on file for life. Every year you get a new catalog in the mail. This week they have a special promotion. For the first time they let tourist in for seven days. Today is the last day. Very good quality, 100 percent cashmere, I know I'm a lawyer."
The driver showed up looking relieved. We took off.
A Tuk Tuk is a little motorbike that has been outfitted with a metal roof and sides and two upholstered seats in the back. Every color of the rainbow is represented in broad stripes on its body and vinyl seat covers. The drivers are little hustlers and you cant trust them. They are forbidden by the government to charge any more than 100 bhat for any trip. They routinely try to get three or four hundred out of you. The local price is 10 bhat per trip. If they take you to a fancy shop, even only to look, they get a kick back of a full tank of petrol from the shop keepers. If you know this, sometimes you can bargain for a free trip.
I was fitted for a suit at Voglee. Then I went to the golden mountain. Later that evening I met up with Jenni. We had dinner in Khaosan, kind of a miniature sleazier version of Las Vegas. The backpackers and the whores go there to mix and mingle. Special extra strong drinks are available in all the bars. They advertise that they don't check IDs. I told her about my day.
"What do you want to do tonight?" She asked.
"Lets go see a ladyboy show."
She laughed.
"Well I figure you're a farm girl from Montana. You moved to Seattle and a few weeks out of college you're now an international business woman. You're already in the outer stratosphere. By now you must be up for anything."
"Ladyboys sounds fine to me." She reached for her purse.
"No, let me treat." I offered.
"No, let me expense it." She countered with a sly smile.
I had been trumped.
The ladyboys are Thai transexuals. So many tourists are fooled by them that the Thai women insist that there is a law that demands that they inform anybody who picks them up, of their gender transformation.
"I think they're just bitter." Jenni told me. "Some of them are more beautiful than any woman. And none of them have asses." Jenni is quite proud of her latina ass.
One Thai man, a self proclaimed playboy, told me that there are 10 million Ladyboys in Thailand or one sixth of the population. Hmmm.
The show was a rip off in style and tone of a Parisian cabaret. The dancing was lame. They did have wonderful costumes and the boys, albeit lip-synching, gave it their all. An Asian sensibility permeated all of the numbers. In one bit a James Bond type guy marries a virgin princess. He them proceeds to shun her for shall we say more experienced women. To please him she transforms herself into a vamp. He rejects her and forces her to once again don her wedding vestments. In the final moments of this tragedy she starts to shoot herself, and then shoots him.
After the show Jenni and I parted. We couldn't stop laughing at the show, especially the ending that featured three Asian ladyboy Marylins dancing in unison with a chorus line of boys with white tophats and tuxedos. I hugged her and kissed her cheek. She jumped into a cab. I rode back in a Tuk Tuk. The next morning she called me. Her boss was sending her to Hong Kong.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
bangkok
There was a hurricane over Taiwan. The plane bumped and ground its way down to the tarmac in Taipei. A pilot once told me that it would blow my mind how much these big birds can torque. My mind was blown.
We were late leaving Seattle. When I got to the airport only two gates were open. One for our flight and the other for a military flight. There were kids with buzzcuts camped out all over the place. These guys can sleep anywhere. And they do.
I met Jenni waiting to board. She is a jewelry designer out of Seattle. She goes to Bangkok to supervise her work on the production line. She knew how to change planes in Taipei and she let me tag along. After 12 hours in an airplane we were giddy. We were making impossibly bad jokes. It was another 5 hours before we would get to Bangkok.
After I dropped her at her hotel the driver brought me to mine. He was gone by the time I found out I was at the wrong place. Nobody seemed to know where my hotel was. The streets are not marked. Nobody was even able to agree upon what streets were called what. I was wandering around the Khaosan's back alleys delirious with the almost liquid heat that oppresses this city. Past shops piled one on top of each other. Past the squawk and roar of the street traffic. Then I found it. Steps from where I had started. I took a shower. Everything was going to be alright.
We were late leaving Seattle. When I got to the airport only two gates were open. One for our flight and the other for a military flight. There were kids with buzzcuts camped out all over the place. These guys can sleep anywhere. And they do.
I met Jenni waiting to board. She is a jewelry designer out of Seattle. She goes to Bangkok to supervise her work on the production line. She knew how to change planes in Taipei and she let me tag along. After 12 hours in an airplane we were giddy. We were making impossibly bad jokes. It was another 5 hours before we would get to Bangkok.
After I dropped her at her hotel the driver brought me to mine. He was gone by the time I found out I was at the wrong place. Nobody seemed to know where my hotel was. The streets are not marked. Nobody was even able to agree upon what streets were called what. I was wandering around the Khaosan's back alleys delirious with the almost liquid heat that oppresses this city. Past shops piled one on top of each other. Past the squawk and roar of the street traffic. Then I found it. Steps from where I had started. I took a shower. Everything was going to be alright.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
The Mountain
"We can get you to Paradise."
"That sounds good to me."
It was 8AM. I was downtown at the Sheraton. We were pulling out for Mt. Rainier on a Grayline bus. A tour bus. From the highway you can see the mountain. Ninety miles away and still bigger than any of the skyscrapers downtown. Big fat rain clouds were rolling in from the west. It was not a good sign.
What I would really like to have done was have been dumped off somewhere in the National Forest where I could have done some camping and hiking. If I could spend the night out there. If I could spend a night deep in the woods where a cellphone has never rung. If I could spend the night under those countless stars. I would wake up at 2 am stumble into the moonlight and hug one of those old growth trees. I never understood what people meant when they used "tree hugger" as a pejorative. I mean, who hugs trees? Now after seeing them I get it. This ancient organism. This towering pillar of living strength. You want to hug one. Its irresistible.
The Cascades are part of The Ring of Fire extending deep into South America. The bus was ice cold. It was like we were transporting fish. We stopped at little towns along the way. We bought snacks. We saw huge patches where loggers had clear cut the trees. We listened to the drivers stale jokes.
"Over there you see two kinds of cows, the ones standing and the ones lying down. The ones lying down we call 'ground beef.'"
Groan. Except the eight Japanese sitting on the left in the middle of the bus. They referred themselves to their guide books. Then came another.
"Those horses over there are considered 'outstanding in their field'". A louder, more gut driven groan rang up. The Japanese looked back and forth at their guide books and each other.
An hour passed. We had some more folklore and more history.
"See that snow up there? That's Indian snow. It's extremely rare."
"What's Indian snow?" I said, falling deep for it.
"Apache here and Apache there."
"Scheize!"
When we got to Paradise the mountain was gone. We had two and a half hours to hit the trails or sit in the lodge and eat buffalo stew.
I headed up along the Skyline trail towards Glacier view. The Glacier, a vital part of Seattles watershed is almost gone. In the last half century it has shrunk into a rivulet. Its not hard to figure out. There. Not there. And still the Bushes and Cheneys don't get it.
I doubled back and headed towards Alta Vista. The wild flowers were in full bloom. The trailside was covered with delicate green bouquets dappled with blue and yellow and pink flowers. A patch of blue was heading our way. As I reached the crest the blue hit followed by a rain of sunlight. The mist dissipated and the mountain revealed itself. My mouth dropped open. The presence of it shocked me, rooted me to the ground. I glanced back and below me where the trails wound back to Paradise. Everyone had stopped. The hikers who had been scurrying back and forth like ants were all staring upward at the massive snow and rock covered cliffs who's pinnacle appeared to dent the sky.
I clamored back down in time to make the bus. We made one more stop at Nerada Falls. We made another at Jason's Ark where I had a piece of apple pie on a scale similar to the mountain whose shadow it was created in. We made our way back. Our cell phones blinked on. Highways wound together. And then we were back. Back in Seattle
"That sounds good to me."
It was 8AM. I was downtown at the Sheraton. We were pulling out for Mt. Rainier on a Grayline bus. A tour bus. From the highway you can see the mountain. Ninety miles away and still bigger than any of the skyscrapers downtown. Big fat rain clouds were rolling in from the west. It was not a good sign.
What I would really like to have done was have been dumped off somewhere in the National Forest where I could have done some camping and hiking. If I could spend the night out there. If I could spend a night deep in the woods where a cellphone has never rung. If I could spend the night under those countless stars. I would wake up at 2 am stumble into the moonlight and hug one of those old growth trees. I never understood what people meant when they used "tree hugger" as a pejorative. I mean, who hugs trees? Now after seeing them I get it. This ancient organism. This towering pillar of living strength. You want to hug one. Its irresistible.
The Cascades are part of The Ring of Fire extending deep into South America. The bus was ice cold. It was like we were transporting fish. We stopped at little towns along the way. We bought snacks. We saw huge patches where loggers had clear cut the trees. We listened to the drivers stale jokes.
"Over there you see two kinds of cows, the ones standing and the ones lying down. The ones lying down we call 'ground beef.'"
Groan. Except the eight Japanese sitting on the left in the middle of the bus. They referred themselves to their guide books. Then came another.
"Those horses over there are considered 'outstanding in their field'". A louder, more gut driven groan rang up. The Japanese looked back and forth at their guide books and each other.
An hour passed. We had some more folklore and more history.
"See that snow up there? That's Indian snow. It's extremely rare."
"What's Indian snow?" I said, falling deep for it.
"Apache here and Apache there."
"Scheize!"
When we got to Paradise the mountain was gone. We had two and a half hours to hit the trails or sit in the lodge and eat buffalo stew.
I headed up along the Skyline trail towards Glacier view. The Glacier, a vital part of Seattles watershed is almost gone. In the last half century it has shrunk into a rivulet. Its not hard to figure out. There. Not there. And still the Bushes and Cheneys don't get it.
I doubled back and headed towards Alta Vista. The wild flowers were in full bloom. The trailside was covered with delicate green bouquets dappled with blue and yellow and pink flowers. A patch of blue was heading our way. As I reached the crest the blue hit followed by a rain of sunlight. The mist dissipated and the mountain revealed itself. My mouth dropped open. The presence of it shocked me, rooted me to the ground. I glanced back and below me where the trails wound back to Paradise. Everyone had stopped. The hikers who had been scurrying back and forth like ants were all staring upward at the massive snow and rock covered cliffs who's pinnacle appeared to dent the sky.
I clamored back down in time to make the bus. We made one more stop at Nerada Falls. We made another at Jason's Ark where I had a piece of apple pie on a scale similar to the mountain whose shadow it was created in. We made our way back. Our cell phones blinked on. Highways wound together. And then we were back. Back in Seattle
Thursday, July 14, 2005
The bluest skies you've ever seen
The sun came out. I got to see one of those legendary Seattle days. The sky was crisp and clear like a blue apple. The air dry and warm. People were saying hello. Strangers.
"That's how they trick you into staying here." Raina said.
All I ever knew about Washington state before came from Here Come The Brides, Frazier and Sleepless In Seattle. I came here with those iconic cultural markers rooted into my subconscious. Needless to say. I never saw Bobby Sherman.
I took the ferry to Bainbridge island and Vashon island. I visited The Gaslight on Capitol Hill. I have seen and visited amazing bookstores. Stores with racks and racks and rooms and rooms of new and used books. Stores jimmied into the parlors and sitting rooms of old houses, run by ex-computer programmers with marvelously long unkempt beards. I swam in a fifty meter salt water pool. 1500 meters.
"Island suburbs!" Raina interjects. "You can have a latte outside of home depot."
As I walked to the bus I noticed that the Amityville Horror house had a string of broken Christmas lights tacked to the front porch. Some Mexicans were out there chopping down all of the weeds.
Beacon Hill is covered with these tiny little houses with lots of pointy roofs and windows. The hours must be very long when the days are short in places like that. I passed by some eight year old boys and one of them was saying to the other.
"See, that's the whole reason we all hate you. You're from Bellevue."
Bellevue is where the rich people live. Beacon hill is where broken Christmas lights hang above the door long after the yellow "Crime Scene Do Not Remove" tape has blown into the wind.
Raina's house is one of these houses. When you enter there is a long hall with hand painted fragments of text in 9 inch high letters that read.
"Everyone I see is missing something." piled on top of each other, repeated over and over again.
She has draped the windows in luxury fabrics, thick and pleated. As if she held a magic wand she has transformed this tired little working class home into her little paradise.
The truth is that Raina has created an amazing life for herself here. She traverses from the working class hamlet of Beacon Hill to the mansions of Bellvue with the ease and grace of an expert skier. She has spent her strongest years building a life here. Too bad the weather sucks.
On my way out to Vashon I saw Rainier. At ninety miles away the base blended seamlessly into the sky leaving the jagged rock and glacier to float above the horizon. It was calling me. I had to go there.
"That's how they trick you into staying here." Raina said.
All I ever knew about Washington state before came from Here Come The Brides, Frazier and Sleepless In Seattle. I came here with those iconic cultural markers rooted into my subconscious. Needless to say. I never saw Bobby Sherman.
I took the ferry to Bainbridge island and Vashon island. I visited The Gaslight on Capitol Hill. I have seen and visited amazing bookstores. Stores with racks and racks and rooms and rooms of new and used books. Stores jimmied into the parlors and sitting rooms of old houses, run by ex-computer programmers with marvelously long unkempt beards. I swam in a fifty meter salt water pool. 1500 meters.
"Island suburbs!" Raina interjects. "You can have a latte outside of home depot."
As I walked to the bus I noticed that the Amityville Horror house had a string of broken Christmas lights tacked to the front porch. Some Mexicans were out there chopping down all of the weeds.
Beacon Hill is covered with these tiny little houses with lots of pointy roofs and windows. The hours must be very long when the days are short in places like that. I passed by some eight year old boys and one of them was saying to the other.
"See, that's the whole reason we all hate you. You're from Bellevue."
Bellevue is where the rich people live. Beacon hill is where broken Christmas lights hang above the door long after the yellow "Crime Scene Do Not Remove" tape has blown into the wind.
Raina's house is one of these houses. When you enter there is a long hall with hand painted fragments of text in 9 inch high letters that read.
"Everyone I see is missing something." piled on top of each other, repeated over and over again.
She has draped the windows in luxury fabrics, thick and pleated. As if she held a magic wand she has transformed this tired little working class home into her little paradise.
The truth is that Raina has created an amazing life for herself here. She traverses from the working class hamlet of Beacon Hill to the mansions of Bellvue with the ease and grace of an expert skier. She has spent her strongest years building a life here. Too bad the weather sucks.
On my way out to Vashon I saw Rainier. At ninety miles away the base blended seamlessly into the sky leaving the jagged rock and glacier to float above the horizon. It was calling me. I had to go there.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Bad sushi
An old man with a huge dollop of drool hanging from his mouth is hovering above my table. He has a look on his pale, crinkled face like death is staring back at him, at the clouds in his watery blue eyes. The woman with the metal and plastic leg limps along behind him.
"Sold, sold, sold, all these are sold." She says, pointing to the pastel hued watercolors on the wall behind me.
I am drinking a cappuccino, praying that they will move on before a rivulet of his gooey spittle connects to the keyboard of my laptop.
Seattle has so many cute little coffee houses connected to the planetary hub that they have begun to advertise "wi-fi free" zones instead of "free wi-fi" for those sick of being encircled by a cadre of users staring into their monitors. The cafes are cozy. The tattooed hippie-chic baristas genuinely friendly. It is a wonder that Bush ever received a single vote here.
The bad sushi put me in a black mood. The weather was not helping. It is the principle cause of Raina's unhappiness Seattle. She ran over her various plots for escape. I nodded and tried to make comforting sounds. I try to remind her that misery will hover over you like a dark cloud if you let it.You have to wake yourself up. When I was dirt poor and sleeping on pee stained mattress in Brookline somehow I was never happier. I have learned that happiness is a state of mind not a state of being. But nobody wants to hear this..
We had spent the day visiting a series of scenic but heavily polluted lakes. Raina says that the duck crap is so bad that if you don't shower immediately after entering the water you end up with "swimmers itch." We found some sun and stretched out on an brocaded sheet with a heavy basket weave. Raina's lament went on.
I couldn't help thinking if a good humping might do her some good. If only she could let one of these bekerchifed Seattle guys with silver studs in their ears and snappy little beards into her life. But her standards. Way too high.
Raina lives just a stone throws from the corporate headquarters of Amazon.com. They are situated on a hill overlooking the city in a 1950s yellow-brick gothic hospital building. One expects to see a giant bronze statue of Dr. Kildare in the lobby. Everything is lush in Seattle. Everything is rotting. The rain is endless. The grey, impenetrable.
Raina sent me emails of yoga studios and art events weeks before I came. She cleaned like crazy. she organized a slot in her bathroom arsenal of beauty products for me to slide my tooth brush into. She made a special shade for my sleeping room before I came. As you draw it up it folds into generous pleats revealing a picture window, her overgrown lawn and a house she refers to as "The Amityville Horror."
"Crack whores are always passing out there." she says with evil glee.
She created my sleep chamber out of her sewing room. The bed is on top of a "cutting table" four feet off of the ground. It is draped in luxurious white fabrics, left over from one of her jobs I presume. It feels like I am sleeping on an altar but with no supplicants.
I went to bed with a stomach ache. Rice and squid battling each other in my lower intestine. I lay on my back breathing deeply trying to release my upper spine. Somehow I slipped off into a dream that I had forgotten to feed my cats. I had forgotten for days. I took the subway downtown from Seattle to New York City. When I got home one of the green plaster walls in the bathroom was caving in. It was filthy and a guest had taken a decorative hand weave from Bali and employed it as a bath mat. I had grabbed a fistful of her frizzy golden locks and was screaming at her when I heard a crash in the lobby. They were preparing a theater piece down there. The director, a Spaniard, was orchestrating dangerous stunts for his cast that involved cable's drilled into my ceiling. We argued and I awoke on the cutting table, with no idea of where I was.
"Sold, sold, sold, all these are sold." She says, pointing to the pastel hued watercolors on the wall behind me.
I am drinking a cappuccino, praying that they will move on before a rivulet of his gooey spittle connects to the keyboard of my laptop.
Seattle has so many cute little coffee houses connected to the planetary hub that they have begun to advertise "wi-fi free" zones instead of "free wi-fi" for those sick of being encircled by a cadre of users staring into their monitors. The cafes are cozy. The tattooed hippie-chic baristas genuinely friendly. It is a wonder that Bush ever received a single vote here.
The bad sushi put me in a black mood. The weather was not helping. It is the principle cause of Raina's unhappiness Seattle. She ran over her various plots for escape. I nodded and tried to make comforting sounds. I try to remind her that misery will hover over you like a dark cloud if you let it.You have to wake yourself up. When I was dirt poor and sleeping on pee stained mattress in Brookline somehow I was never happier. I have learned that happiness is a state of mind not a state of being. But nobody wants to hear this..
We had spent the day visiting a series of scenic but heavily polluted lakes. Raina says that the duck crap is so bad that if you don't shower immediately after entering the water you end up with "swimmers itch." We found some sun and stretched out on an brocaded sheet with a heavy basket weave. Raina's lament went on.
I couldn't help thinking if a good humping might do her some good. If only she could let one of these bekerchifed Seattle guys with silver studs in their ears and snappy little beards into her life. But her standards. Way too high.
Raina lives just a stone throws from the corporate headquarters of Amazon.com. They are situated on a hill overlooking the city in a 1950s yellow-brick gothic hospital building. One expects to see a giant bronze statue of Dr. Kildare in the lobby. Everything is lush in Seattle. Everything is rotting. The rain is endless. The grey, impenetrable.
Raina sent me emails of yoga studios and art events weeks before I came. She cleaned like crazy. she organized a slot in her bathroom arsenal of beauty products for me to slide my tooth brush into. She made a special shade for my sleeping room before I came. As you draw it up it folds into generous pleats revealing a picture window, her overgrown lawn and a house she refers to as "The Amityville Horror."
"Crack whores are always passing out there." she says with evil glee.
She created my sleep chamber out of her sewing room. The bed is on top of a "cutting table" four feet off of the ground. It is draped in luxurious white fabrics, left over from one of her jobs I presume. It feels like I am sleeping on an altar but with no supplicants.
I went to bed with a stomach ache. Rice and squid battling each other in my lower intestine. I lay on my back breathing deeply trying to release my upper spine. Somehow I slipped off into a dream that I had forgotten to feed my cats. I had forgotten for days. I took the subway downtown from Seattle to New York City. When I got home one of the green plaster walls in the bathroom was caving in. It was filthy and a guest had taken a decorative hand weave from Bali and employed it as a bath mat. I had grabbed a fistful of her frizzy golden locks and was screaming at her when I heard a crash in the lobby. They were preparing a theater piece down there. The director, a Spaniard, was orchestrating dangerous stunts for his cast that involved cable's drilled into my ceiling. We argued and I awoke on the cutting table, with no idea of where I was.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Flying
In the north of Iran, somewhere by the Caspian, is a tiny Caliphate. The Caliph who ruled this province wanted it to be the most modern in the Arab world. He constructed roads. He commissioned schools and hospitals. He built a tiny airport whose magnificent runway stretched towards the sea.
When the oil well that was the engine for all this change dried up, so did the governmental largesse. The roads cracked and heaved in the desert heat. The teachers abandoned the schools. The doctors their patients. The planes ceased to fly. The caliph was no longer beloved by his tribe. He became isolated and bitter.
He began to live a fantasy of what his kingdom might have been. He dressed beggars as dignitaries and paraded them about in broken down limousines. He held lavish dinners where the only thing served was figs and Cous Cous. He held international tribunals with elephants as judges and monkeys as the jurors.
When someone wanted to leave the caliphate they were forced to buy a plane ticket from the only, state run, travel agency. When the time came to leave they were led out onto the blistering tarmac where the graceful jet aircraft had long ago ceased to touch down. Once there they were beaten mercilessly.
The travelers returned home covered in bandages. The returned with fantastic tales of their travels. The told stories of dancing with the English Queen, riding on the backs of bulls in Spain and diving into the Atlantic from the nose of the Statue of Liberty.
So in this way, the wise Caliph, without a dime, out of sand and sea water, created a world as functioning and as normal as any.
When the oil well that was the engine for all this change dried up, so did the governmental largesse. The roads cracked and heaved in the desert heat. The teachers abandoned the schools. The doctors their patients. The planes ceased to fly. The caliph was no longer beloved by his tribe. He became isolated and bitter.
He began to live a fantasy of what his kingdom might have been. He dressed beggars as dignitaries and paraded them about in broken down limousines. He held lavish dinners where the only thing served was figs and Cous Cous. He held international tribunals with elephants as judges and monkeys as the jurors.
When someone wanted to leave the caliphate they were forced to buy a plane ticket from the only, state run, travel agency. When the time came to leave they were led out onto the blistering tarmac where the graceful jet aircraft had long ago ceased to touch down. Once there they were beaten mercilessly.
The travelers returned home covered in bandages. The returned with fantastic tales of their travels. The told stories of dancing with the English Queen, riding on the backs of bulls in Spain and diving into the Atlantic from the nose of the Statue of Liberty.
So in this way, the wise Caliph, without a dime, out of sand and sea water, created a world as functioning and as normal as any.
Thursday, September 05, 2002
Xenia
When I finally saw her it was hard to imagine what had happened.
We first met in Berlin a few years after the wall had come down. It was during that great crazy time when the world actually seemed like it was getting better. There was an explosion of club life as art in those days. They were springing up everywhere like weeds in the waste, in abandoned bunkers, in bombed out factories, in the bullet riddled back allies of block houses. You often had to pull back fences or climb down candlelit cellar stairways. Some moved every night carrying with them only their names. Some dug in deep and would become institutions.
We were in Eschlarock Rumpstump. It was in the hinterhaus at the end of a long damp ally in Mitte. It featured a twisting bar, lit from within where fish appeared and disappeared behind found scrap metal and knotty limbs. She was sitting on a table in the middle of the crowd. She had thick curly chestnut colored hair. Her skin had the rich amber hue of raw honey. She wore dainty white gloves and carried a tiny suitcase as her handbag. Her carriage was regal, like a princess. I knew she was a dancer.
I was sitting next to some shrill American girl. I kept thinking "Why am I sitting here, why don't I just go up there and talk to her." So I did.
I told her I liked her bag. She asked me where I was from. I said "New York" and she said
"It might be possible to have a conversation."
We found a table in the corner and I got us drinks. We talked about art and music and dance and dance and dance. She had never met somebody from New York. She had heard about it though. Growing up in the east she had been taught that New York was the center of all evil in the world.
At some point I got up to go to the bathroom. While I was there I panicked a little. I wondered if she would be there when I came out. I looked in the mirror. My beard was showing. I rubbed my face with my wet hands. "Relax", I thought, "she likes you. For whatever reason she likes you."
When I came back she tilted her head down and looked at me. "I want to go" she said. "I don’t want to be the last to leave."
There were few street lights in Mitte and so it was dark. We walked down cobblestone streets lined with 19th century row houses that had been so gleefully shot up by Russian solders. Leering gargoyles, maidens carrying sheaves of wheat, billy goats all with ears, noses and bellies pock marked by bullet holes. Never repainted and never cleaned they had turned a uniform urban grey.
She told me she had a little balcony. She said it wasn't far and perhaps we could have a coffee there. We walked up past the Ferhnsee Turm towards Fredrichshain. For a North American it was hard to imagine that any place outside of Moscow had been named Karl Marx Alle and that made it wonderful.
I don’t think we even managed to turn on the lights. Inside the door we found each others lips and began tearing at our cloths. I was sucking on her tit when she said she wanted me inside her. I fucked her hard and then she pushed me on my back and fucked me. She came with a violent shaking her nipples flushed and hard, her nails digging into me.
I remember looking at her. She was examining her body in a nimbus of morning light. Slender, lithe, brown with no tan lines, shadows of intensity passing like clouds across her brow. I thought "This is it."
What "it" was, was not much. Her moods shifted in violent reversals. She could cling to me like a child and then stare into my eyes with equally intense hatred. One night she woke me with her fists screaming that she didn't love me. In the morning she sucked me hard, mounted me and then rode herself into a dizzying orgasm. She curled into my arms and said.
"Everything is OK now."
It was time to get out.
She made one request. She asked me not to forget her. I didn't. I wrote to her. She wrote back. She found a boyfriend and moved to Stuttgart. Her place in the east was empty and I was invited to use it whenever I was in Berlin. I did.
On my way back from Malaga I received a message from her. She would be in Berlin. She would meet me at the airport. It had been years since we had seen each other.
There was nobody waiting for me at the airport. Shoenfeld is so small, there are bigger bus stations in the midwest. I took the train. When I got to her place the lights were out. I found her in bed. She was groggy. She had called the airport. I told her it didn’t matter. She invited me under the covers. We found each others lips. I caressed her hair, her face her hips, her breasts. She turned on her back and drew me inside of her.
Something was funny. Her breath tasted of alcohol and cigarettes. Her body felt different. I would find out in the morning. She had gotten fat. Not the nice kind of curvy female fat either. Her legs and arms were still skinny but her belly hung out like someone who had been hitting the bottle. She had deep wrinkles around the eyes and jowls under her chin. Her skin was a pasty, yellowish hue. She had transformed herself. From twenty four to thirty she had gotten old.
She brought me brochen and coissants for breakfast. She made rich black coffee with fresh hot milk. She knew I liked Yogurt and fruit and she carefully peeled and cut apples for me while I slept. There was a newspaper too, because Americans like newspapers at breakfast.
I washed her hair for her. This tub had been her pride. It had a separate heater. In the days when we were all struggling with these shitty electric showers or none at all she had always been able to soak in a tub of hot water. An unimaginable luxury for a dancer from the east.
We played Patanque in the park. She told me her story. Her boyfriend and her had never connected sexually. After the first few months he never wanted to do it. This was a girl who liked to fuck and knew how to do it. The eastern girls had been blessed with a hundred years without the church and it had made a difference. They were notorious. She learned all about his world. He knew nothing of hers and so she left.
I was feeling cruel. I told her she should have stuck with me. We could have been raising kids by now. She asked me how she would have survived in New York. I said we would have made it somehow, together, lots of people do. Then she asked me what would she have done in New York. I looked at her like she was nuts.
"You could have danced."
That hit her. I should never have said that. I could see it in her eyes. New York is the dance capital of the world and she had missed it.
She was supposed to meet me later that night but she never showed up. I smoked cigarettes and drank beer in a cafe by the canal. I spent the night on the floor of Johannes kitchen. Lena kept crying and nobody got much sleep. I took one last walk around Prenzlauerberg. I went by the wasserturm and Kastanian Alle. So many cool little cafes and bookshops and used furniture stores. There used to be nothing.
I knew I was in trouble. The second I walked into the airport. The curteous guy told me ever so nicely that the French Pilots were on strike. From Berlin to Paris was ok, but Charles DeGaule II was a disaster. There was a mob at our gate. The rest of the airport was empty. Even the shops were closed. They were trying to put everyone they could onto this one flight going to New York. Just get them out of Paris.
I ended up sitting next to a Danish biologist. He was supposed to get to Mexico somehow. He had been frantically trying to get out of the airport for ten hours. He kept cursing Air France. He had a blanket wrapped around him like a funeral shroud and his breath stank. Every few minutes I kept giving him another mint otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stand it. The headphones didn't work. We only had one movie anyways, Spiderman. It came in in French in one ear and english in the other. Danny Elfmans beautiful soundtrack was like a crackly arc of static between the two. The only good thing about the flight was the conversation. People in Europe believe that every single one of us Americans support Bush and his shitty war. Can you believe it? Like all of us are stupid. Still, it was Air France and so there was plenty of wine. I told the Danish guy, lets just get drunk, it's free and it will take away the pain. It did.
When I got back to New York, Xenia called me. She didn't ask me what she really wanted to ask. Instead she asked me not to forget her. I promised her I wouldn’t.
We first met in Berlin a few years after the wall had come down. It was during that great crazy time when the world actually seemed like it was getting better. There was an explosion of club life as art in those days. They were springing up everywhere like weeds in the waste, in abandoned bunkers, in bombed out factories, in the bullet riddled back allies of block houses. You often had to pull back fences or climb down candlelit cellar stairways. Some moved every night carrying with them only their names. Some dug in deep and would become institutions.
We were in Eschlarock Rumpstump. It was in the hinterhaus at the end of a long damp ally in Mitte. It featured a twisting bar, lit from within where fish appeared and disappeared behind found scrap metal and knotty limbs. She was sitting on a table in the middle of the crowd. She had thick curly chestnut colored hair. Her skin had the rich amber hue of raw honey. She wore dainty white gloves and carried a tiny suitcase as her handbag. Her carriage was regal, like a princess. I knew she was a dancer.
I was sitting next to some shrill American girl. I kept thinking "Why am I sitting here, why don't I just go up there and talk to her." So I did.
I told her I liked her bag. She asked me where I was from. I said "New York" and she said
"It might be possible to have a conversation."
We found a table in the corner and I got us drinks. We talked about art and music and dance and dance and dance. She had never met somebody from New York. She had heard about it though. Growing up in the east she had been taught that New York was the center of all evil in the world.
At some point I got up to go to the bathroom. While I was there I panicked a little. I wondered if she would be there when I came out. I looked in the mirror. My beard was showing. I rubbed my face with my wet hands. "Relax", I thought, "she likes you. For whatever reason she likes you."
When I came back she tilted her head down and looked at me. "I want to go" she said. "I don’t want to be the last to leave."
There were few street lights in Mitte and so it was dark. We walked down cobblestone streets lined with 19th century row houses that had been so gleefully shot up by Russian solders. Leering gargoyles, maidens carrying sheaves of wheat, billy goats all with ears, noses and bellies pock marked by bullet holes. Never repainted and never cleaned they had turned a uniform urban grey.
She told me she had a little balcony. She said it wasn't far and perhaps we could have a coffee there. We walked up past the Ferhnsee Turm towards Fredrichshain. For a North American it was hard to imagine that any place outside of Moscow had been named Karl Marx Alle and that made it wonderful.
I don’t think we even managed to turn on the lights. Inside the door we found each others lips and began tearing at our cloths. I was sucking on her tit when she said she wanted me inside her. I fucked her hard and then she pushed me on my back and fucked me. She came with a violent shaking her nipples flushed and hard, her nails digging into me.
I remember looking at her. She was examining her body in a nimbus of morning light. Slender, lithe, brown with no tan lines, shadows of intensity passing like clouds across her brow. I thought "This is it."
What "it" was, was not much. Her moods shifted in violent reversals. She could cling to me like a child and then stare into my eyes with equally intense hatred. One night she woke me with her fists screaming that she didn't love me. In the morning she sucked me hard, mounted me and then rode herself into a dizzying orgasm. She curled into my arms and said.
"Everything is OK now."
It was time to get out.
She made one request. She asked me not to forget her. I didn't. I wrote to her. She wrote back. She found a boyfriend and moved to Stuttgart. Her place in the east was empty and I was invited to use it whenever I was in Berlin. I did.
On my way back from Malaga I received a message from her. She would be in Berlin. She would meet me at the airport. It had been years since we had seen each other.
There was nobody waiting for me at the airport. Shoenfeld is so small, there are bigger bus stations in the midwest. I took the train. When I got to her place the lights were out. I found her in bed. She was groggy. She had called the airport. I told her it didn’t matter. She invited me under the covers. We found each others lips. I caressed her hair, her face her hips, her breasts. She turned on her back and drew me inside of her.
Something was funny. Her breath tasted of alcohol and cigarettes. Her body felt different. I would find out in the morning. She had gotten fat. Not the nice kind of curvy female fat either. Her legs and arms were still skinny but her belly hung out like someone who had been hitting the bottle. She had deep wrinkles around the eyes and jowls under her chin. Her skin was a pasty, yellowish hue. She had transformed herself. From twenty four to thirty she had gotten old.
She brought me brochen and coissants for breakfast. She made rich black coffee with fresh hot milk. She knew I liked Yogurt and fruit and she carefully peeled and cut apples for me while I slept. There was a newspaper too, because Americans like newspapers at breakfast.
I washed her hair for her. This tub had been her pride. It had a separate heater. In the days when we were all struggling with these shitty electric showers or none at all she had always been able to soak in a tub of hot water. An unimaginable luxury for a dancer from the east.
We played Patanque in the park. She told me her story. Her boyfriend and her had never connected sexually. After the first few months he never wanted to do it. This was a girl who liked to fuck and knew how to do it. The eastern girls had been blessed with a hundred years without the church and it had made a difference. They were notorious. She learned all about his world. He knew nothing of hers and so she left.
I was feeling cruel. I told her she should have stuck with me. We could have been raising kids by now. She asked me how she would have survived in New York. I said we would have made it somehow, together, lots of people do. Then she asked me what would she have done in New York. I looked at her like she was nuts.
"You could have danced."
That hit her. I should never have said that. I could see it in her eyes. New York is the dance capital of the world and she had missed it.
She was supposed to meet me later that night but she never showed up. I smoked cigarettes and drank beer in a cafe by the canal. I spent the night on the floor of Johannes kitchen. Lena kept crying and nobody got much sleep. I took one last walk around Prenzlauerberg. I went by the wasserturm and Kastanian Alle. So many cool little cafes and bookshops and used furniture stores. There used to be nothing.
I knew I was in trouble. The second I walked into the airport. The curteous guy told me ever so nicely that the French Pilots were on strike. From Berlin to Paris was ok, but Charles DeGaule II was a disaster. There was a mob at our gate. The rest of the airport was empty. Even the shops were closed. They were trying to put everyone they could onto this one flight going to New York. Just get them out of Paris.
I ended up sitting next to a Danish biologist. He was supposed to get to Mexico somehow. He had been frantically trying to get out of the airport for ten hours. He kept cursing Air France. He had a blanket wrapped around him like a funeral shroud and his breath stank. Every few minutes I kept giving him another mint otherwise I wouldn't have been able to stand it. The headphones didn't work. We only had one movie anyways, Spiderman. It came in in French in one ear and english in the other. Danny Elfmans beautiful soundtrack was like a crackly arc of static between the two. The only good thing about the flight was the conversation. People in Europe believe that every single one of us Americans support Bush and his shitty war. Can you believe it? Like all of us are stupid. Still, it was Air France and so there was plenty of wine. I told the Danish guy, lets just get drunk, it's free and it will take away the pain. It did.
When I got back to New York, Xenia called me. She didn't ask me what she really wanted to ask. Instead she asked me not to forget her. I promised her I wouldn’t.
Friday, August 30, 2002
Ciao Bella
Ciao Bella!" from a balcony and have it be completely sincere and real. I just had mine.
I spent my last night in Barcelona with Daniella and her friends. These Italians, they can go into a kitchen where there is nothing and come out with something wonderful. We drank and ate and smoked and listened to music. Daniella performed a Moroccan belly dance. At midnight the girls put on their make-up.
We wandered around the forbidden areas of the Barrio Gottico,down twisting streets so narrow you could touch either side, through hidden plazas where the addicts slept, past skinny drug gangs on motor scooters, by big black barking dogs and gypsy beggars with babies at their breasts. I asked Cosima if it was dangerous. She looked me in the eye and said "Of course, I live here."
We started to dance. We were at the bar where Xavier worked and the drinks were plentiful and free. She asked me if I would and then held out her hand. Soon we were kissing shamelessly on the street, in doorways, on the beach. We were touching everywhere. Daniella appeared on the back of a motor scooter with some spanish boy and as it whined away into the dark, yelled back to Cosima that the apartment was free. I had the most peaceful sleep I ever have had in her arms.
When I woke she was already dressing. Her English is not so good nor my Spanish either. I asked her if we would meet again and she said that she would think about it. I figured she was done with me. I went to the balcony in time to see her disappearing down this narrow medieval alley. She walked like a queen. "Cosima" I yelled. Ciao Bella.
I spent my last day at the beach. When I returned to get my bags Daniella told me that Cosima had come to say goodbye. There was an old 78 on top of my bags entitled Sueno de Amor". I called her and somehow it was decided that she would see me off. We had a mad dash through the jammed subways to the train station. There on the platform we kissed along with three other couples before the train began to pull out. Still holding her hand I jumped on. "Will you come to New York?" "Vale, Vale!" .... ok ok
I spent my last night in Barcelona with Daniella and her friends. These Italians, they can go into a kitchen where there is nothing and come out with something wonderful. We drank and ate and smoked and listened to music. Daniella performed a Moroccan belly dance. At midnight the girls put on their make-up.
We wandered around the forbidden areas of the Barrio Gottico,down twisting streets so narrow you could touch either side, through hidden plazas where the addicts slept, past skinny drug gangs on motor scooters, by big black barking dogs and gypsy beggars with babies at their breasts. I asked Cosima if it was dangerous. She looked me in the eye and said "Of course, I live here."
We started to dance. We were at the bar where Xavier worked and the drinks were plentiful and free. She asked me if I would and then held out her hand. Soon we were kissing shamelessly on the street, in doorways, on the beach. We were touching everywhere. Daniella appeared on the back of a motor scooter with some spanish boy and as it whined away into the dark, yelled back to Cosima that the apartment was free. I had the most peaceful sleep I ever have had in her arms.
When I woke she was already dressing. Her English is not so good nor my Spanish either. I asked her if we would meet again and she said that she would think about it. I figured she was done with me. I went to the balcony in time to see her disappearing down this narrow medieval alley. She walked like a queen. "Cosima" I yelled. Ciao Bella.
I spent my last day at the beach. When I returned to get my bags Daniella told me that Cosima had come to say goodbye. There was an old 78 on top of my bags entitled Sueno de Amor". I called her and somehow it was decided that she would see me off. We had a mad dash through the jammed subways to the train station. There on the platform we kissed along with three other couples before the train began to pull out. Still holding her hand I jumped on. "Will you come to New York?" "Vale, Vale!" .... ok ok
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Nightbus
I have learned that life if you split it open has as many possibilities as a fig has seeds. I have learned that you can dance all night only if you sleepall day. I have learned that the moon is not just the moon but "La Barca""The Ship", also the word for cone as in ice cream. I have learned that a beautiful woman is even more beautiful if she lies brown and naked and oiled in the sun as if she is being roasted for a feast. And above all I have learned that I have been smoking way too much hash.
I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while Tunte and I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.
They come from England with their perfectly bred daughters to mate them off to the proper people. Both the mother and daughter are so fine and so stylishly dressed you could go either way. But the girls slip away at night to fuck Spanish men. Everyone is fucking spanish men mainly because it is so hard to fuck a spanish woman that they mostly all go either way.
I was having no luck until I talked to a Norwegian bartender at The House of Silk. He told me it is possible to have something with Spanish girls, but only after you have met their family. They wont even talk to you unless you prove yourself by following them around for days like a dog. The English girls are all sluts. Then he pointed out two Morenas at a table, slender, lovely, a blonde and brunette, sisters.
"Have a go with those two, they're not typical Chicas, tell em there will be Chupitas at the bar soon"
That was how I met Alithia and Marta.
They were both studying to be ecologists and intent on saving the world. We talked in spanish, in english, in spanglish. We argued about politics, we laughed and we danced like mad people. They rolled one fat joint after another of hash mixed with tobacco. At five or so in the morning. Alithia took my arm. Her black arabian eyes pierced right through me. She told me that if I came back tommorow I would find her and then they disappeared into the moonlight.
I found Tunte passed out under a table. We walked along the marble promenade past palm trees, past the light of the full moon which glistened like broken glass across the Mediterranean. We found Shatzie in a smoke filled gay bar where Andaluisian men, shirtless in blue jeans danced to the rhythmic clapping of their peers. I left those two there and completely disoriented stumbled around for an hour before making it the two or three blocks I had to go to reach home.
In our tiny room with my bed one foot from the door I fled this world in a haze of hash dreams until Shatzie stumbled in. I screamed when I saw him.
We had to be out of there by noon. We managed to wake ourselves up and get to the car. At the airport I kissed the boys good-by. I was on my own again. It was time to get out of town. I had no place to stay and no chance of finding one. Except in Barcelona. Tunte had arranged it all with his friend Daniella. The only problem was getting there. It is 1064km away. It is the end of summer and everyone is traveling. There were no seats on the planes. There were no seats on trains. But there was a bus. They told me you can always get a seat on the bus because nobody wants it.
It is a fourteen hour ride to Barcelona on this shitty bus. At one time someone had had a vision of luxury and comfort but now the seats are all broken, the TV's hang mute, the drink holders and dinner trays lie useless like vestigial organs. You ride all night, in the cold, in the mountains. We stopped at one place called The Hotel Zurich where the driving team had beers and sandwiches. It was in some dusty forgotten town filled with freaks and the hopeless. A mother with her retarded son played cards with her parents. A old man in a tattered yellow and black outfit which included matching two tone shoes sat with his elderly blind dog in his
arms. I asked the fat woman at the bar who had a face like a sunburned Wayne Newton
"where are we"?
"A la Frontera" "At the Frontier". I couldn't imagine what she meant. We were in Spain, miles from any border that I knew of, but apparently here in the mountains the people of Andaluicia consider Alicante another country.
The next stop was at a super sleek ultra-contemporary place called Autogrill. Perfectly modern with modern graphics and food content. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of Gypsies, all of their belongings roped onto the hoods of their cars. They were sleeping on the pavement
next to them. One felt as if they had been passing through this way for thousands of years and that something had always been in this spot, but instead of being able to get figs and flat bread, water, one could now get pasta with pesto and orange Fanta. And Sangre de Torro, but you could always get Sangre de Torro.
And finally, Barcelona
I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while Tunte and I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.
They come from England with their perfectly bred daughters to mate them off to the proper people. Both the mother and daughter are so fine and so stylishly dressed you could go either way. But the girls slip away at night to fuck Spanish men. Everyone is fucking spanish men mainly because it is so hard to fuck a spanish woman that they mostly all go either way.
I was having no luck until I talked to a Norwegian bartender at The House of Silk. He told me it is possible to have something with Spanish girls, but only after you have met their family. They wont even talk to you unless you prove yourself by following them around for days like a dog. The English girls are all sluts. Then he pointed out two Morenas at a table, slender, lovely, a blonde and brunette, sisters.
"Have a go with those two, they're not typical Chicas, tell em there will be Chupitas at the bar soon"
That was how I met Alithia and Marta.
They were both studying to be ecologists and intent on saving the world. We talked in spanish, in english, in spanglish. We argued about politics, we laughed and we danced like mad people. They rolled one fat joint after another of hash mixed with tobacco. At five or so in the morning. Alithia took my arm. Her black arabian eyes pierced right through me. She told me that if I came back tommorow I would find her and then they disappeared into the moonlight.
I found Tunte passed out under a table. We walked along the marble promenade past palm trees, past the light of the full moon which glistened like broken glass across the Mediterranean. We found Shatzie in a smoke filled gay bar where Andaluisian men, shirtless in blue jeans danced to the rhythmic clapping of their peers. I left those two there and completely disoriented stumbled around for an hour before making it the two or three blocks I had to go to reach home.
In our tiny room with my bed one foot from the door I fled this world in a haze of hash dreams until Shatzie stumbled in. I screamed when I saw him.
We had to be out of there by noon. We managed to wake ourselves up and get to the car. At the airport I kissed the boys good-by. I was on my own again. It was time to get out of town. I had no place to stay and no chance of finding one. Except in Barcelona. Tunte had arranged it all with his friend Daniella. The only problem was getting there. It is 1064km away. It is the end of summer and everyone is traveling. There were no seats on the planes. There were no seats on trains. But there was a bus. They told me you can always get a seat on the bus because nobody wants it.
It is a fourteen hour ride to Barcelona on this shitty bus. At one time someone had had a vision of luxury and comfort but now the seats are all broken, the TV's hang mute, the drink holders and dinner trays lie useless like vestigial organs. You ride all night, in the cold, in the mountains. We stopped at one place called The Hotel Zurich where the driving team had beers and sandwiches. It was in some dusty forgotten town filled with freaks and the hopeless. A mother with her retarded son played cards with her parents. A old man in a tattered yellow and black outfit which included matching two tone shoes sat with his elderly blind dog in his
arms. I asked the fat woman at the bar who had a face like a sunburned Wayne Newton
"where are we"?
"A la Frontera" "At the Frontier". I couldn't imagine what she meant. We were in Spain, miles from any border that I knew of, but apparently here in the mountains the people of Andaluicia consider Alicante another country.
The next stop was at a super sleek ultra-contemporary place called Autogrill. Perfectly modern with modern graphics and food content. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of Gypsies, all of their belongings roped onto the hoods of their cars. They were sleeping on the pavement
next to them. One felt as if they had been passing through this way for thousands of years and that something had always been in this spot, but instead of being able to get figs and flat bread, water, one could now get pasta with pesto and orange Fanta. And Sangre de Torro, but you could always get Sangre de Torro.
And finally, Barcelona
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Alive!
I have learned that life, if you split it open, has as many possibilities as a fig has seeds. I have learned that you can dance all night only if you sleep all day. I have learned that the moon is not just the moon but "La Barca" "The Ship", also the word for cone as in ice cream. I have learned that a beautiful woman is even more beautiful if she lies brown and naked and oiled in the sun as if she is being roasted for a feast. And above all I have learned that I have been smoking way too much hash.
I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.
I screamed when I saw him. He was leaning over me burnt and red with dark sunglasses like some poorly briefed technician at Los Alamos. It was five in the morning. It was Neshta and he had brought home a spanish boy. They made ficky ficky in the bathroom while I tried to pretend sleep. These are the whores of Marbella.
They come from England with their perfectly bred daughters to mate them off to the proper people. Both the mother and daughter are so fine and so stylishly dressed you could go either way. But the girls slip away at night to fuck Spanish men. Everyone is fucking spanish men mainly because it is so hard to fuck a spanish woman that they mostly all go either way. I was having no luck until I talked to a Norwegian bartender at The House of Silk. He told me it is possible to have something with Spanish girls, but only after you have met their family. They wont even talk to you unless you prove yourself by following them around for days like a dog. The English girls are all sluts. Then he pointed out two Morenas at a table, slender, lovely, a blonde and brunette, sisters. "Have a go with those two, they're not typical Chicas, tell em there will be Chupitas at the bar soon"
That was how I met Alithia and Marta.
They were both studying to be ecologists and intent on saving the world. We talked in spanish, in english, in spanglish. We argued about politics, we laughed and we danced like mad people. They rolled one fat joint after another of hash mixed with tobacco. At five or so in the morning. Alithia took my arm. Her black arabian eyes pierced right through me. She told me that if I came back tommorow I would find her and then they disappeared into the moonlight.
I found Braulio still dancing away as if in a trance. We walked along the marble promenade past palm trees, past the light of the full moon which glistened like broken glass across the Mediterranean. We found Shatzie in a smoke filled gay bar where Andaluisian men, shirtless in blue jeans danced to the rhythmic clapping of their peers. I left those two there and completely disoriented stumbled around in circles for more than an hour before making it the two or three blocks I had to go to reach home.
It was time to get out of town. We had to be out of there by noon. We managed to wake ourselves up and get to the car. At the airport I kissed the boys good-by. I was on my own again. I had no place to stay and no chance of finding one. Except in Barcelona. Braulio had arranged it all with his friend Daniella. The only problem was getting there. It is 1064km away. It is the end of summer and everyone is traveling. There were no seats on the planes. There were no seats on trains. But there was a bus. They told me you can always get a seat on the bus because nobody wants it.
It is a fourteen hour ride to Barcelona on this shitty bus. At one time someone had had a vision of luxury and comfort but now the seats are all broken, the TV's hang mute, the drink holders and dinner trays lie useless like vestigial organs. You ride all night, in the cold, in the mountains. We stopped at one place called The Hotel Zurich where the driving team had beers and sandwiches. It was in some dusty forgotten town filled with freaks and the hopeless. A mother with her retarded son played cards with her parents. A old man in a tattered yellow and red outfit which included matching two tone shoes sat with an elderly blind dog in his arms. I asked the fat woman at the bar who had a face like a sunburned Wayne Newton "where are we"?
"A la Frontera" "At the Frontier". I couldn't imagine what she meant. We were in Spain, miles from any border that I knew of, but apparently here in the mountains the people of Andaluicia consider Alicante another country.
The next stop was at a super sleek ultra-contemporary place called Autogrill. Perfectly modern with modern graphics and food content. The parking lot was filled with hundreds of Gypsies, all of their belongings roped onto the hoods of their cars. They were sleeping, covered in ornate fabrics, on the pavement next to them. One felt as if these people had been passing through this way for thousands of years and that something had always been in this spot, but instead of being able to get figs and flat bread, water, one could now get pasta with pesto and orange Fanta. And Sangre de Torro, but you could always get Sangre de Torro.
At last I got to Barcelona. Someone from the bus helped me with the train. I found Daniellas place which by the way is on d'Estruc 12. It is very cozy here. I slept for fourteen hours straight. Today Anabelle comes and I will get to do some fucking.
Monday, August 19, 2002
Marbella
I want to live in spain. In a town, not too big, not too small. A place like Granada with its narrow twisting streets opening into secret plazas. I would get a little room in the old town and eat figs and oranges for breakfast. I would do yoga under a palm tree. In the afternoon, when its too hot to go outside I would close all the shutters and peck away at my laptop.
We are in Marbella now. Shatzie and Tunte are at the beach. We never call Neshta,"Neshta", we call him "Shatzie" and he in return calls everybody Shatzie except for Barolio. "Shatzie" is something like "darling" in Deutch."Tunte" is more like faggot. We call Barolio "Tunte" when he does things like forget where he left the car keys and we have to take his bag away from him and dump the entire contents into the street.
I decided to stick with the boys. I was going to go to Sevilla and then on to Barcelona. But I will stay with them and go to Africa tommorow. Just for the day. We will take a ferry to Moroco and see something really different. Besides Barolio knows an Italian girl in Barcelona who rents rooms and he is trying to arrange something for me. She is in Milan right now but they are trying to figure something out. Cell phones make everything possible. They fly back to Hamburg on Sunday and then from Malaga I will take the night train north.
We were lucky to get a room in the old quater. Three beds crammed into this tiny little space. There are no real windows, they all open up onto tiny shafts that look directly into the other rooms, or like our bathroom window which opens up back into our room. It is run by this fat old gay named Juan. Juan has an overgrown nose as brown and as wrinkled as the mountains that surround this village. His legs are covered with little sores. He had a special offer for me. He said I could stay with him in his apartment for 12euro per night. I said no, its ok. He said if I wanted to I could also come down and watch TV with him.I told him thanks. Still, everything is clean and its cheap.
There are many beautiful men and ladies in this town. They lie near naked on the beach during the day, then dressed in white, promenade the town in the evenings. Everything is opulent casual. There is so much money here that one central park, filled with tropical trees and plants, is entirely paved in white marble. Shatzie, of course, loves it.
We are in Marbella now. Shatzie and Tunte are at the beach. We never call Neshta,"Neshta", we call him "Shatzie" and he in return calls everybody Shatzie except for Barolio. "Shatzie" is something like "darling" in Deutch."Tunte" is more like faggot. We call Barolio "Tunte" when he does things like forget where he left the car keys and we have to take his bag away from him and dump the entire contents into the street.
I decided to stick with the boys. I was going to go to Sevilla and then on to Barcelona. But I will stay with them and go to Africa tommorow. Just for the day. We will take a ferry to Moroco and see something really different. Besides Barolio knows an Italian girl in Barcelona who rents rooms and he is trying to arrange something for me. She is in Milan right now but they are trying to figure something out. Cell phones make everything possible. They fly back to Hamburg on Sunday and then from Malaga I will take the night train north.
We were lucky to get a room in the old quater. Three beds crammed into this tiny little space. There are no real windows, they all open up onto tiny shafts that look directly into the other rooms, or like our bathroom window which opens up back into our room. It is run by this fat old gay named Juan. Juan has an overgrown nose as brown and as wrinkled as the mountains that surround this village. His legs are covered with little sores. He had a special offer for me. He said I could stay with him in his apartment for 12euro per night. I said no, its ok. He said if I wanted to I could also come down and watch TV with him.I told him thanks. Still, everything is clean and its cheap.
There are many beautiful men and ladies in this town. They lie near naked on the beach during the day, then dressed in white, promenade the town in the evenings. Everything is opulent casual. There is so much money here that one central park, filled with tropical trees and plants, is entirely paved in white marble. Shatzie, of course, loves it.
Saturday, August 17, 2002
Schatzie
You always see him with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He is over six feet tall. Even at night he wears black sunglasses. You can tell he was once muscular but his white skin is now slightly pudgy with fat. He has been walking around without a shirt for days now, the crack of his ass showing above his black italian pants. His skin is completely burnt red from the waist up.
We have been roaring around aduluisia for days now in this shitty little fiat that never seems to burn any gas. We have wound round the treacherous mountain roads to Ronda, a town so pristene in its ancient Spanish Morocan style that standing on Puento Nuevo you fell like you have been captured in a painting. We have eaten tapas next to an unending row of Dali statues, girded by palm trees, on a marble plaza in Marbella, a town so grossly rich it would embarrass the citizens of Las Vegas. We have darted in an out of the narrow streets of Granada, we have seen mountains and vistas and moorish castels. We have eaten sunripened figs off the tree, we have seen bulls, blood pounding high off thier black hides, slaughtered by prancing toredors dressed completely in pink and still, he never takes off his sunglasses.
The other day as we sat on our balcony, with Barolio singing, smoking hash he had copped from some Turk in a DJ bar for the international set in Benalmadena he squinted at me and said "Rene, we ave to find you a voman, dis life for you vithout a voman is no good¨"
Barolo just rolled his eyes...
"Shatzie, Rene can take care of himself"
But I was already gone, in a haze of wine and hash, half dreaming, half laughing, listening to Salsa on the porno channel and slipping away.
besos
rene
We have been roaring around aduluisia for days now in this shitty little fiat that never seems to burn any gas. We have wound round the treacherous mountain roads to Ronda, a town so pristene in its ancient Spanish Morocan style that standing on Puento Nuevo you fell like you have been captured in a painting. We have eaten tapas next to an unending row of Dali statues, girded by palm trees, on a marble plaza in Marbella, a town so grossly rich it would embarrass the citizens of Las Vegas. We have darted in an out of the narrow streets of Granada, we have seen mountains and vistas and moorish castels. We have eaten sunripened figs off the tree, we have seen bulls, blood pounding high off thier black hides, slaughtered by prancing toredors dressed completely in pink and still, he never takes off his sunglasses.
The other day as we sat on our balcony, with Barolio singing, smoking hash he had copped from some Turk in a DJ bar for the international set in Benalmadena he squinted at me and said "Rene, we ave to find you a voman, dis life for you vithout a voman is no good¨"
Barolo just rolled his eyes...
"Shatzie, Rene can take care of himself"
But I was already gone, in a haze of wine and hash, half dreaming, half laughing, listening to Salsa on the porno channel and slipping away.
besos
rene
Thursday, August 15, 2002
La Blanca
Hey
We decided to call her La Blanca. She was brown and wirey and had long black hair. She wore a traditional flamenco dress, all in white. It pressed against her breasts revealing a faint discription of her areolas, hung on her slender waist for quite a while before itflared around her long legs. There was a single blood red rose in her hair. Best of all, she rode to and from work on a little yellow motorized scooter.
When she danced, she danced with all of her heart and you could feel it. We stayed there for hours in this little beachside restaurant surrounded by palm trees, listening to the ocean and the castenets and the sorrowful singing of the guitarist. We drank three pitchers of sangria. We watched the moon rise above the jagged cliffs. Barolo said that he might cry. I was on the verge myself. I don't get the feeling that Neshta cries much.
Earilier, when Barolo and I were by ourselves, he told me that Neshta had been raised in a very wealthy family in Sarajevo. When the war started soilders had forced their way into his parents house and cut his mothers throat in front of him. His father and sister survived. So when he gets a little moody we don´t bother him.
Barolo is Brazillian, he never gets moody. In the mornings when we have dark arabian coffee with hot milk in a cafe, he sings to us, just under his breath, while I try to read spanish newspapers and Neshta keeps an eye out for interesting men.
We met in Torre del Mar. When I got to the airport in Malaga they told me that because of the Feria there were no rooms anywhere at all within 30km of the city. Malaga is a great hidious mass of a city. It is as if someone took 100 Miami´s, piled them on top of each other and dumped them along a narrow strip of land between the oceans and the mountains. I found my way to the bus station and got out of town. I ended up 25km north of there in a tourist office where they were listening to the same story I had been hearing all day. Completo, there is nothing, go away. They lived in Hamburg and so we all spoke german. We decided our fates were no less miserable alone than seperate and besides I spoke better spanish, and they had a car.
We drove for hours going to town after town, twisting through narrow medieval streets looking for tiny pensions which we hoped sombody had forgotten about. I spoke with old ladies who sat in doorways, who greeted us like lost friends and wanted to know our histories. I petted their cats, tickled babies feet and still at midnight we had nothing. "Maybe tommorow" they said. I was thinking the beach might be our only friend.
We decided to head back to Malaga and from there north to Sevilla. We ate fresh, whole fried fish, drank wine in some little town, and had our first taste the rich black coffee that we would all come to love so dearly in the following days. Somewhere on the outskirts I saw a hotel and said to Barolo lets give it one more try. Neshta chain smoked cigarettes and looked out the window. I talked to the old man inside. He told me no right off. I asked him if he knew of anything anywhere. I told him we had been looking all day. He asked me where I was from. I told him and he bent a little. He said he could give us two rooms for one night only.
The next day we went back to Torre del Mar to see if any of our tommorow possibilites might materialize. I talked with this girl in a hotel for half an hour, told her my life story, complemented her english, her dress, her hair, her mother. The old lady interupted. She knew of an apartment in town, not one of her´s but a friends. We were in luck.
Our place has two little balconies and a kitchen. Barolo and Neshta are in one room and I in the other. We are a short walk to the beach.
We took a day trip to a place farther up the coast and found a paradise. Nurja. It is an old city completely painted white to fight off the fierceness of the sun. There is lush palm vegetation and the mountains come right up to the azure ocean. The beach is filled with the brown and the naked and at night, if you walk along the carterellas, you can watch La Blanca dance.
Besos
Rene
We decided to call her La Blanca. She was brown and wirey and had long black hair. She wore a traditional flamenco dress, all in white. It pressed against her breasts revealing a faint discription of her areolas, hung on her slender waist for quite a while before itflared around her long legs. There was a single blood red rose in her hair. Best of all, she rode to and from work on a little yellow motorized scooter.
When she danced, she danced with all of her heart and you could feel it. We stayed there for hours in this little beachside restaurant surrounded by palm trees, listening to the ocean and the castenets and the sorrowful singing of the guitarist. We drank three pitchers of sangria. We watched the moon rise above the jagged cliffs. Barolo said that he might cry. I was on the verge myself. I don't get the feeling that Neshta cries much.
Earilier, when Barolo and I were by ourselves, he told me that Neshta had been raised in a very wealthy family in Sarajevo. When the war started soilders had forced their way into his parents house and cut his mothers throat in front of him. His father and sister survived. So when he gets a little moody we don´t bother him.
Barolo is Brazillian, he never gets moody. In the mornings when we have dark arabian coffee with hot milk in a cafe, he sings to us, just under his breath, while I try to read spanish newspapers and Neshta keeps an eye out for interesting men.
We met in Torre del Mar. When I got to the airport in Malaga they told me that because of the Feria there were no rooms anywhere at all within 30km of the city. Malaga is a great hidious mass of a city. It is as if someone took 100 Miami´s, piled them on top of each other and dumped them along a narrow strip of land between the oceans and the mountains. I found my way to the bus station and got out of town. I ended up 25km north of there in a tourist office where they were listening to the same story I had been hearing all day. Completo, there is nothing, go away. They lived in Hamburg and so we all spoke german. We decided our fates were no less miserable alone than seperate and besides I spoke better spanish, and they had a car.
We drove for hours going to town after town, twisting through narrow medieval streets looking for tiny pensions which we hoped sombody had forgotten about. I spoke with old ladies who sat in doorways, who greeted us like lost friends and wanted to know our histories. I petted their cats, tickled babies feet and still at midnight we had nothing. "Maybe tommorow" they said. I was thinking the beach might be our only friend.
We decided to head back to Malaga and from there north to Sevilla. We ate fresh, whole fried fish, drank wine in some little town, and had our first taste the rich black coffee that we would all come to love so dearly in the following days. Somewhere on the outskirts I saw a hotel and said to Barolo lets give it one more try. Neshta chain smoked cigarettes and looked out the window. I talked to the old man inside. He told me no right off. I asked him if he knew of anything anywhere. I told him we had been looking all day. He asked me where I was from. I told him and he bent a little. He said he could give us two rooms for one night only.
The next day we went back to Torre del Mar to see if any of our tommorow possibilites might materialize. I talked with this girl in a hotel for half an hour, told her my life story, complemented her english, her dress, her hair, her mother. The old lady interupted. She knew of an apartment in town, not one of her´s but a friends. We were in luck.
Our place has two little balconies and a kitchen. Barolo and Neshta are in one room and I in the other. We are a short walk to the beach.
We took a day trip to a place farther up the coast and found a paradise. Nurja. It is an old city completely painted white to fight off the fierceness of the sun. There is lush palm vegetation and the mountains come right up to the azure ocean. The beach is filled with the brown and the naked and at night, if you walk along the carterellas, you can watch La Blanca dance.
Besos
Rene
Monday, August 05, 2002
Berlin Beat
The Berlin Beat or The Berlin Bang or Berlin Bang Bang, something like
that.
While I have been here in Berlin I have met an unusually high number of people working on music projects. There are lots of educated, artistically oriented people here who have no jobs. The unemployment rate is 17%. They still have access to computers purchased in better days. In the last two years there has been a spate of new software that allows anybody to have a home recording studio with an array of synthesized instrumentation. Being Berliners and basically anti-social they don't mind cracking the codes and freely distributing this software. They have already accepted "techno" culturally, unlike the US. They have a techno-club infrastructure and audience already established. They are many good engineers and media strategists. They are highly competitive. There is lots of rain and crappy weather and they love to work.
There are so many projects going on that I think there will be a big bang in Berlin. Naturally out of all these people there will be a small percentage that will be good and an even smaller percentage that will be great. Still the numbers from what I see must be so big that this will still be significant.
If you are interested I could give you many phone numbers to get you
started.
ok?
rene
that.
While I have been here in Berlin I have met an unusually high number of people working on music projects. There are lots of educated, artistically oriented people here who have no jobs. The unemployment rate is 17%. They still have access to computers purchased in better days. In the last two years there has been a spate of new software that allows anybody to have a home recording studio with an array of synthesized instrumentation. Being Berliners and basically anti-social they don't mind cracking the codes and freely distributing this software. They have already accepted "techno" culturally, unlike the US. They have a techno-club infrastructure and audience already established. They are many good engineers and media strategists. They are highly competitive. There is lots of rain and crappy weather and they love to work.
There are so many projects going on that I think there will be a big bang in Berlin. Naturally out of all these people there will be a small percentage that will be good and an even smaller percentage that will be great. Still the numbers from what I see must be so big that this will still be significant.
If you are interested I could give you many phone numbers to get you
started.
ok?
rene
Tuesday, July 30, 2002
hairydancers
Ive settled in here nicely now. I am taking german lessons twice weekly. Its almost as painful as being your own dentist.
Mostly lots of swimming in nice lakes. Johannes has a dacha in the country that we go to. I always thought of a dacha as some place that you flee to when there is a coup, but actually its a cottage on a lake. Almost everyone in the former east had access to one. Now they are selling them to people in the former West. They are actually quite happy to be rid of them. They want to vacation in Vegas. My music projekt with Johannes goes slowly, but I have written some nice tunes.
I saw an old musikkomodie on tv yesterday. It was made in technicolor on a wide screen format in 1961. The soundtrack was just like an Elvis Presley film only in German with a German sensibility. Of course there were lots of cool cars and girls in beehives and bikinis. Except for the language difference the big giveaway was that whenever there was a big dance number and one of these 1960 girls wearing frosted lipstick raised their arms they had hairy pits. Often much darker than the hair on their heads.
I head to Malaga next week. Not much money left and I dont know
anybody. The perfect combination for adventure.
Hope you are having a great summer.
Rene
Mostly lots of swimming in nice lakes. Johannes has a dacha in the country that we go to. I always thought of a dacha as some place that you flee to when there is a coup, but actually its a cottage on a lake. Almost everyone in the former east had access to one. Now they are selling them to people in the former West. They are actually quite happy to be rid of them. They want to vacation in Vegas. My music projekt with Johannes goes slowly, but I have written some nice tunes.
I saw an old musikkomodie on tv yesterday. It was made in technicolor on a wide screen format in 1961. The soundtrack was just like an Elvis Presley film only in German with a German sensibility. Of course there were lots of cool cars and girls in beehives and bikinis. Except for the language difference the big giveaway was that whenever there was a big dance number and one of these 1960 girls wearing frosted lipstick raised their arms they had hairy pits. Often much darker than the hair on their heads.
I head to Malaga next week. Not much money left and I dont know
anybody. The perfect combination for adventure.
Hope you are having a great summer.
Rene
Saturday, July 20, 2002
Schmetterlingen
There were butterflies in the hallway today.
It rained everyday last week in Berlin. I held on to my New York warmth for a day or two, but then it got me, this shivering, bone tingling, chill. People here were wondering if it was the end of summer, or the end of the world.
There was no point in even looking at this dissappointing sun and so it was avoided. Like everyone I stayed out all night. Berlin time is essentially New York time, you just slide on over. One gets home at six am, which is midnight back home and then sleeps until two which is eight, normal.
There were rumors all week that summer would come back sometime late Friday. It did. There were so many party opportunities for Saturday it was hard to choose. I went to look for one a DJ friend had organised in Monbijou Park, a little green near Hackesher Markt. They had started playing at noon and had promised to go through the night. The party was held in this swimming park, with a very modern low slung white building and a nice grey plaza. there was green and trees and little candles in paperbags every where. You could see the Ferhnsee Turm between the trees reflecting in the glitter blue of pool. The DJ was playing very cooling summery music. There was a grill and a bar and lots of pretty Berliners. In the distance, down by the river you could hear music and screaming, something wild was going on down there.
I tried to talk to a few people but the atmosphere was too cool, too hip. Finally I went to this one really freaky looking girl covered in tatoos and piercings who nobody else was also talking to. We tried to get the dancing started but nobody joined us. I complained to her that I couldnt find my friends.
"You know, she said, there´s another party going on by the spree, maybe that´s where they are."
I split thinking she might be right. She was. I met Ellen and her friends there on a blanket. There were no bathrooms. There were bottles everywhere. A completely haphazard array of candles. People making out. The wild party. It was free, and all different kinds of people were dancing, dancing very hard by this murky green canal. We made it until dawn, until 5, until 6, until the DJs gave up. This party wasnt getting any smaller, as people left other clubs, it grew and the dancing got harder.
Ellen and I rode bikes home. I slept until two and then fled the city to my friends dacha in Brandenburg. After the train I had to bicycle 24km on bad eastern roads to get there through arbored streets and cobblestone villages. I didnt know the way. I had to ask, but I made it. I went for a swim on a pretty little lake, had a barbecue. Talked, had great inspirations and slept.
The next day we swam again across the lake and back. I made my way to the train, this time on a longer but better route. I rode down the magnificent Karl Marx Allee, the Fernsee Turm again, farther, more silvery, pointing towards the kosmos. I had dinner on Simon Dach Str. In the grimness of the week before it had been empty. Now the cafe tables were full up and down. On a Monday. People were smiling, loosening up, phone numbers were exchanged.
This morning I did the wash. On my way out there were butterflies fluttering in the hallway. Rusty, yellow, black green and brown making it, fufilling it, and then dying on the sunlit windowsills.
Finnally, summer in Berlin
Rene
It rained everyday last week in Berlin. I held on to my New York warmth for a day or two, but then it got me, this shivering, bone tingling, chill. People here were wondering if it was the end of summer, or the end of the world.
There was no point in even looking at this dissappointing sun and so it was avoided. Like everyone I stayed out all night. Berlin time is essentially New York time, you just slide on over. One gets home at six am, which is midnight back home and then sleeps until two which is eight, normal.
There were rumors all week that summer would come back sometime late Friday. It did. There were so many party opportunities for Saturday it was hard to choose. I went to look for one a DJ friend had organised in Monbijou Park, a little green near Hackesher Markt. They had started playing at noon and had promised to go through the night. The party was held in this swimming park, with a very modern low slung white building and a nice grey plaza. there was green and trees and little candles in paperbags every where. You could see the Ferhnsee Turm between the trees reflecting in the glitter blue of pool. The DJ was playing very cooling summery music. There was a grill and a bar and lots of pretty Berliners. In the distance, down by the river you could hear music and screaming, something wild was going on down there.
I tried to talk to a few people but the atmosphere was too cool, too hip. Finally I went to this one really freaky looking girl covered in tatoos and piercings who nobody else was also talking to. We tried to get the dancing started but nobody joined us. I complained to her that I couldnt find my friends.
"You know, she said, there´s another party going on by the spree, maybe that´s where they are."
I split thinking she might be right. She was. I met Ellen and her friends there on a blanket. There were no bathrooms. There were bottles everywhere. A completely haphazard array of candles. People making out. The wild party. It was free, and all different kinds of people were dancing, dancing very hard by this murky green canal. We made it until dawn, until 5, until 6, until the DJs gave up. This party wasnt getting any smaller, as people left other clubs, it grew and the dancing got harder.
Ellen and I rode bikes home. I slept until two and then fled the city to my friends dacha in Brandenburg. After the train I had to bicycle 24km on bad eastern roads to get there through arbored streets and cobblestone villages. I didnt know the way. I had to ask, but I made it. I went for a swim on a pretty little lake, had a barbecue. Talked, had great inspirations and slept.
The next day we swam again across the lake and back. I made my way to the train, this time on a longer but better route. I rode down the magnificent Karl Marx Allee, the Fernsee Turm again, farther, more silvery, pointing towards the kosmos. I had dinner on Simon Dach Str. In the grimness of the week before it had been empty. Now the cafe tables were full up and down. On a Monday. People were smiling, loosening up, phone numbers were exchanged.
This morning I did the wash. On my way out there were butterflies fluttering in the hallway. Rusty, yellow, black green and brown making it, fufilling it, and then dying on the sunlit windowsills.
Finnally, summer in Berlin
Rene
Monday, July 15, 2002
Prenzlauerberg
I am here in Berlin. The plane was half full and still nobody died. The flight was actually quite wonderful. Air France really knows how to do it. Everyone has one of those little interactive active matrix screens. There were several movies to pick from, all kinds of music, games and shopping.
I watched The Majestic first, a movie that died in the theaters so fast they had to put it in a ditch and throw lime on it. I figured if the French had chosen it there must be something to it. I loved it. No, I really loved it. Jim Carrey turned in his first top to bottom solid serious performance. I always thought that in the hands of the right director he could be a great actor. The cimematography and art direction worked flawlessly together. I think that the 50s will be Americas touchstone period. It is the age that defines us, like Victorian England or Medieval France. The script held no surprises but was expertly written with lots of poetic flourishes. The dialog was genuine and workable. I cried four or five times.
Then I watched most of Charolette Gray. It was ok. Fantastic locations, south of France... cant be beaten, well told story, good acting. I just wasnt really in the mood.
The dinner was two or three notches above the usual 3 mile high fare. What makes it all work is the style in which it is presented. They have the nicest plastic ware I have ever seen. The glasses say to you, "I'm not crystal, but let me remind you of the beauty of real glass." There was a decent selection of wines, champagne. I put on a mild buzz, listened to a dicerning selection of Jazz and did the crossword in The Herald Tribune.
Charles De Galle 2 is the modern architecture equivalent of a peoples palace. It has soaring glass and steel ceilings that float skyward. Everything is clean, moving foward and into the future. My connection to Berlin was turned back because of bad weather.You cant fly nowadays without god or terrorists trying to kill you.
I finnally made it. All is gemuetlich in my Prenzlauerberg flat.
More to come
Rene
I watched The Majestic first, a movie that died in the theaters so fast they had to put it in a ditch and throw lime on it. I figured if the French had chosen it there must be something to it. I loved it. No, I really loved it. Jim Carrey turned in his first top to bottom solid serious performance. I always thought that in the hands of the right director he could be a great actor. The cimematography and art direction worked flawlessly together. I think that the 50s will be Americas touchstone period. It is the age that defines us, like Victorian England or Medieval France. The script held no surprises but was expertly written with lots of poetic flourishes. The dialog was genuine and workable. I cried four or five times.
Then I watched most of Charolette Gray. It was ok. Fantastic locations, south of France... cant be beaten, well told story, good acting. I just wasnt really in the mood.
The dinner was two or three notches above the usual 3 mile high fare. What makes it all work is the style in which it is presented. They have the nicest plastic ware I have ever seen. The glasses say to you, "I'm not crystal, but let me remind you of the beauty of real glass." There was a decent selection of wines, champagne. I put on a mild buzz, listened to a dicerning selection of Jazz and did the crossword in The Herald Tribune.
Charles De Galle 2 is the modern architecture equivalent of a peoples palace. It has soaring glass and steel ceilings that float skyward. Everything is clean, moving foward and into the future. My connection to Berlin was turned back because of bad weather.You cant fly nowadays without god or terrorists trying to kill you.
I finnally made it. All is gemuetlich in my Prenzlauerberg flat.
More to come
Rene
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
The day after the world changed
It is eerily quiet here in harlem. There are no cars on the streets. There are few ambulances. All of the bridges and tunnels have been closed. I went for a rollerblade in the park. It is sunny and mild. The sky is a clear blue. There is a feeling of great sadness everywhere. We still can see the smoke in the distance. Everybody will know someone who is dead. There is nothing to do but wait.
There was a dance festival this week at the Twin Towers base. In Ten days they were presenting ten world class dance companies. All for free. I had gone there several times already. After one concert I had a drink with a friend at the top. Afterwards we wandered around the plaza. The weather had been hot and crisp, perfect summer days. After the Ballet Trocadero I had sushi with friends there along the hudson. We looked out at the yachts and into the lives of the very rich.
Having worked at the World Trade Center many times I had never liked it. I used to call them the twin towers of world hatred and greed. But, the more I traveled the more I realized how special they were. Venice has it’s Riva degli Schiavoni. Paris it's Eiffel tower. Rome has Constantine's Arch . Here in New York we had these magnificent skyscrapers. The will it must have took to build something like that. All last week I was telling my friends. "You have to go there. This dance festival is really something special and the location is unbelievable. You turn your head up and you can barely see the top." The day before yesterday the weather turned stormy. That evenings show was canceled. I went down anyways. I don’t know why. I rode the A train downtown and stood there at the base. I looked up at them in the rain and thunder. Then I went home.
I used to be a food worker there years ago. We had to be there at seven thirty in the morning. The kitchen staff had to be there at six. Most of us were actors, dancers, musicians, painters, you know, the type of people who never have a serious job. People who didn't really fit in anywhere. Besides us, most of the people there that early in the morning were black and latino, maintenance workers, cleaning people and the like. In fact the whole building was filled with shitty jobs. And thusly filled with so-called "minorities" to do them. I know people who work there. Nobody close, but I can see their faces. They are people who were just trying to make enough money to live.
Just last year I was working at 1 WTC on the 89th floor. I quit that job because the boss was an asshole. He never showed up until ten. The rest of them, they had to be in by nine, they are most likely dead. They tell us not to be afraid. But we are afraid. They tell us not to be angry. But we are angry. They tell us that life must go on as if everything were normal. But it is not normal. Nothing is normal. The towers are gone. A great shadow remains. They have won something. The question is, what?
There was a dance festival this week at the Twin Towers base. In Ten days they were presenting ten world class dance companies. All for free. I had gone there several times already. After one concert I had a drink with a friend at the top. Afterwards we wandered around the plaza. The weather had been hot and crisp, perfect summer days. After the Ballet Trocadero I had sushi with friends there along the hudson. We looked out at the yachts and into the lives of the very rich.
Having worked at the World Trade Center many times I had never liked it. I used to call them the twin towers of world hatred and greed. But, the more I traveled the more I realized how special they were. Venice has it’s Riva degli Schiavoni. Paris it's Eiffel tower. Rome has Constantine's Arch . Here in New York we had these magnificent skyscrapers. The will it must have took to build something like that. All last week I was telling my friends. "You have to go there. This dance festival is really something special and the location is unbelievable. You turn your head up and you can barely see the top." The day before yesterday the weather turned stormy. That evenings show was canceled. I went down anyways. I don’t know why. I rode the A train downtown and stood there at the base. I looked up at them in the rain and thunder. Then I went home.
I used to be a food worker there years ago. We had to be there at seven thirty in the morning. The kitchen staff had to be there at six. Most of us were actors, dancers, musicians, painters, you know, the type of people who never have a serious job. People who didn't really fit in anywhere. Besides us, most of the people there that early in the morning were black and latino, maintenance workers, cleaning people and the like. In fact the whole building was filled with shitty jobs. And thusly filled with so-called "minorities" to do them. I know people who work there. Nobody close, but I can see their faces. They are people who were just trying to make enough money to live.
Just last year I was working at 1 WTC on the 89th floor. I quit that job because the boss was an asshole. He never showed up until ten. The rest of them, they had to be in by nine, they are most likely dead. They tell us not to be afraid. But we are afraid. They tell us not to be angry. But we are angry. They tell us that life must go on as if everything were normal. But it is not normal. Nothing is normal. The towers are gone. A great shadow remains. They have won something. The question is, what?
Wednesday, August 22, 2001
Gasping
I flew to berlin yesterday. I flew in the prettiest little jet you have ever seen. A really cute, curvy fat little plane. This happy little chubette soared above the clouds and into the sunshine. I had a short stop-over in Stockholm. Both Helsinki and Stockholm have very small, calm, clean, ultra-modern airports. People drink espressos and read the paper in stylish cafes of glass, metal, pressed wood and fabric. It is a big change from the grim filth of New York.
I went swimming at the olympic stadium before I left. There is a big sauna there. There was a sauna at the corner bar too. This is Finnland. Fathers come into the saunas with their daughters. Sometimes they are toddlers, sometimes they are as old as seven or eight. On Sundays especially, slippery little naked tow-heads are running around everywhere. The attendant in the men's changing room is a woman. Yesterday there were two twenty-something year old women in there with us nude men. They were leading a pack of about fifteen 5-6 year old boys. Nobody was raped, nobody was murdered, nobody was arrested.
The Nordic peoples have this gasping thing. Especially the women, but sometimes the men too. Instead of saying yeah, or uh-huh, or mmm, they gasp. For an American like me this was very disconcerting. I kept thinking I had, through mis-speaking, altered a word into something really offensive. I kept looking around to see if something bad was happening just over my shoulder.
I went on one last boat ride. Pia-lissa took me around to see the parks she has designed. They are building new cities all over Helsinki. It is so tiny that there was never really that much there. If almost anyone moves there they have to build a new building. Then we took a ferry out to suommolinna. a little island fortress in the mouth of the harbor. we sat on rocks, watching the big boats come in, reading the paper. then dinner in town. now i am back for a final week. here in berlin.
I went swimming at the olympic stadium before I left. There is a big sauna there. There was a sauna at the corner bar too. This is Finnland. Fathers come into the saunas with their daughters. Sometimes they are toddlers, sometimes they are as old as seven or eight. On Sundays especially, slippery little naked tow-heads are running around everywhere. The attendant in the men's changing room is a woman. Yesterday there were two twenty-something year old women in there with us nude men. They were leading a pack of about fifteen 5-6 year old boys. Nobody was raped, nobody was murdered, nobody was arrested.
The Nordic peoples have this gasping thing. Especially the women, but sometimes the men too. Instead of saying yeah, or uh-huh, or mmm, they gasp. For an American like me this was very disconcerting. I kept thinking I had, through mis-speaking, altered a word into something really offensive. I kept looking around to see if something bad was happening just over my shoulder.
I went on one last boat ride. Pia-lissa took me around to see the parks she has designed. They are building new cities all over Helsinki. It is so tiny that there was never really that much there. If almost anyone moves there they have to build a new building. Then we took a ferry out to suommolinna. a little island fortress in the mouth of the harbor. we sat on rocks, watching the big boats come in, reading the paper. then dinner in town. now i am back for a final week. here in berlin.
Friday, August 17, 2001
Delicious Herrings
I am in helsinki now, staying at my friend pia-lissa's apartment. i met her in paris two years ago. she is a tall curvy very sophisticated finn. too bad she is engaged to be married.
She is staying with her fiance and the only thing that keeps me from tearing apart her room to look for dirty underware to sniff is all the other pia-lissoids strutting around in the hot helsinki summer bake-off.
I have to make a definate plan to be here next midsummer, the solstice. that is high mating season for finns.
I had a nice little affair in with a doe-eyed russian from oddessa that i met in a salsa club in copenhagen and another with a museum guard/gym enthusiast i met at the palace in stockholm. but still no fish in helsiki. the danes call them 'delicious herrings'.
She is staying with her fiance and the only thing that keeps me from tearing apart her room to look for dirty underware to sniff is all the other pia-lissoids strutting around in the hot helsinki summer bake-off.
I have to make a definate plan to be here next midsummer, the solstice. that is high mating season for finns.
I had a nice little affair in with a doe-eyed russian from oddessa that i met in a salsa club in copenhagen and another with a museum guard/gym enthusiast i met at the palace in stockholm. but still no fish in helsiki. the danes call them 'delicious herrings'.
Thursday, August 16, 2001
Attack
I have been appalled to read in the International press about a recent poll undertaken by the American media. This poll through the doubtless manipulation of data purports that the American public believes that 30 days is too long for a vacation.
thinly disguised as an attack on george bush this meritless besmirchment of the 'rene calvo philosophy' has not gone unnoticed.
wouldn't it be a nicer world if we all said 'no' to august? we have only one life. in that life we have perhaps 100 summers. how many of those are gone already? how many are left? a very finite number.
let the business men close the coffers. let the soldiers lay down their arms. let the children run naked on the seacoast. let us all breathe in the richness of life.
helsinki, finnland
thinly disguised as an attack on george bush this meritless besmirchment of the 'rene calvo philosophy' has not gone unnoticed.
wouldn't it be a nicer world if we all said 'no' to august? we have only one life. in that life we have perhaps 100 summers. how many of those are gone already? how many are left? a very finite number.
let the business men close the coffers. let the soldiers lay down their arms. let the children run naked on the seacoast. let us all breathe in the richness of life.
helsinki, finnland
Saturday, August 04, 2001
Thunder Flies
I was covered with tiny black flies on my way into Ketteminde the other day. I had to stop my bike and dive into the near freezing ocean to rid myself of this creepy pests. The farmers call them thunder flies. They say that they are a sure sign of heavy weather. They were right. By morning it was pouring.
Later the sun came out. We drove to the south of Fyn (foonin) the middle island in the Dansk archipelago. There we visited a castle owned by some young lord. He needed the money so anybody could go. He has a picture of himself in full armor on top of a 1910 Harley. He is no historian. He had hundreds of vintage cars in his barn. There was a real moat. It wasnt too interesting. It was just another castle. He did have a maze in his garden that was truly baffling. We cheated to get out. There was a tower in the middle. People were yelling directions to their friends who were hopelessly lost in that green tangle. When I got up there I realised it wasnt high enough to give anybody any real perspective. Their instructions, which sounded so convincing while I was wandering below, were actually meaningless. So I started yelling random instructions. Keep turing left and you'll have it! The key is to make a left turn at the right place! Turn right when there are no turns left! Like rats, they obeyed the tune of the pipers.
The best thing is the beach. There is a museum here in Ketteminde called the Johannes Larsen Museet. There is a new wing that is ok. The best though is his house and studio. It is one of the most beautifully cozy houses I have ever been in. The walls are covered with paintings. Every stick of furniture, every book, every pot every pan every glass are like an interlocking piece in a picture of warm refinement. His studio, where the larger works are hung, has the most lovingly rendered portraits of this tiny fishing town. Nudes wander the beaches in the dazzle of an eternal summer sun glittering against the waves.
Life is so peacful here. As I raced home trying to beat the setting sun, I passed a blazing barley field. There are flowers everywhere.
Wednesday, August 01, 2001
Shooting monkies in a barrel
I am in Denmark right now. Denmark is a bunch of islands on the Baltic. Who knew? I am on the middle one called Ulan or something like that. I am staying in a farmhouse with the thatched roof and sheep and all that. We are surrounded by barley fields. During the day the farmers burn them.
There is a beach resort nearby called Ketteminde. Minde is a big word around here. It means memory. So this place is a kind of romantic recollection of Kette whoever he was. There are a lot of towns around here with minde for an ending. Oddly enough the most familiar danish expression in America is 'Husker Du', which means 'do you remember'.
The girls are friendly enough but they are mostly teenagers. Its a family resort. So no pussy here. I did have a nice affair in Copenhagen with a Russian woman I met at a Salsa club. I was the mambo king there (sadly enough). There was a horde of blondes there with hungry looks on their faces. It was like shooting monkies in a barrel.
Getting to Copenhagen was kind of a disaster. I got a ride with mitfahrtzentral. I drove with this old former-east german who looked like a Tolkien character. He worked at the Berlin Wasserbetrieb, This place is so obviously an old Nazi building. They had replaced the swastika which hung over the grim entrance with an upbeat eco-friendly symbol. when I asked him about it he said 'What?' I said you know the Nazionale Socialists, the NAZI party, HITLER. He gave me this blank look and said 'I dont know anything about that'.
When we were well on the way this guy told me, 'by the way, im not going to Copenhagen'. Now it was my turn to say 'What?' 'Yeah' he said and explained he was going to this little town in the north of Denmark where his sister had a beach house. Then in a grand display of generosity he offered to swing by the outer edges of Copenhagen and let me off in some one goat town. There he shook my hand and wished me luck.
The guy in the gas station in Bellerop tried to help me get some money so I could get on the train. He said to just buy some gum or something and he would give me as much cash back as i needed. this town was so far out of the world economic system that the machine didnt recognise master card. He told me to chance it on the train. If I see men in black shirts 'take off!'
Luckily they are still not going crasy with checking for tickets up here. I got into town dog tired and managed to find a hotel without too much problem.
So after a few days there I made my way out here, the middle of nowhere. I am just having some beach days and doing a lot of biking. The days are long and warm. There are barley fields everywhere. The water is ice cold. The danish tits are out. Life is good.
There is a beach resort nearby called Ketteminde. Minde is a big word around here. It means memory. So this place is a kind of romantic recollection of Kette whoever he was. There are a lot of towns around here with minde for an ending. Oddly enough the most familiar danish expression in America is 'Husker Du', which means 'do you remember'.
The girls are friendly enough but they are mostly teenagers. Its a family resort. So no pussy here. I did have a nice affair in Copenhagen with a Russian woman I met at a Salsa club. I was the mambo king there (sadly enough). There was a horde of blondes there with hungry looks on their faces. It was like shooting monkies in a barrel.
Getting to Copenhagen was kind of a disaster. I got a ride with mitfahrtzentral. I drove with this old former-east german who looked like a Tolkien character. He worked at the Berlin Wasserbetrieb, This place is so obviously an old Nazi building. They had replaced the swastika which hung over the grim entrance with an upbeat eco-friendly symbol. when I asked him about it he said 'What?' I said you know the Nazionale Socialists, the NAZI party, HITLER. He gave me this blank look and said 'I dont know anything about that'.
When we were well on the way this guy told me, 'by the way, im not going to Copenhagen'. Now it was my turn to say 'What?' 'Yeah' he said and explained he was going to this little town in the north of Denmark where his sister had a beach house. Then in a grand display of generosity he offered to swing by the outer edges of Copenhagen and let me off in some one goat town. There he shook my hand and wished me luck.
The guy in the gas station in Bellerop tried to help me get some money so I could get on the train. He said to just buy some gum or something and he would give me as much cash back as i needed. this town was so far out of the world economic system that the machine didnt recognise master card. He told me to chance it on the train. If I see men in black shirts 'take off!'
Luckily they are still not going crasy with checking for tickets up here. I got into town dog tired and managed to find a hotel without too much problem.
So after a few days there I made my way out here, the middle of nowhere. I am just having some beach days and doing a lot of biking. The days are long and warm. There are barley fields everywhere. The water is ice cold. The danish tits are out. Life is good.
Wednesday, November 01, 2000
The Name Game
We sit in our cubicles. We face our monitors. We see no one and no one sees us, but we hear. Periodically we hear a smoke scarred voice over the intercom. It's a name. A name with no face, no history and no meaning. And so we invent meaning. These are the names and these are their stories.
Violet Swinton, midwestern American poetess circa 1980's. Noted progenitor of the "House Wife Rage" movement. Currently friend and trend analyst for the Hillary Clinton senate campaign.
Solvig Johnson, Olympic ski champion, suffered devastating injury during the 1972 pre-trials in Munich, went on to win gold, silver and three bronzes, imortalized by director Werner Herzog in his short film *Blood and Snow*, never walked again.
Linda Ciccarelli, Fifth and youngest Marx brother, Left the team in 1938 (during a bitter split) to pursue a Broadway theatrical career. Claimed the talkies were a *fad* and would ultimately degrade the act. Died, unknown, from liver faliure in 1983.
Seville Vazquez, little known surrealist juggler, Attended the Acacemy of Beauxs Arts in Paris along with contemporaries Luis Bunnel, Salvador Dali, and Garcia Lorca. Died in 1968, of smoke inhlation during a fire at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City
Nadi Hadir, failed assassin of Indira Ghandi at a 1978 political rally, was torn apart by the crowd within minutes, wrote several anti-religious polemics denouncing India's rigid caste system, subject of a small bronze sculpture in Moscow's Red Square.
Eric Dickman, 80's porn star, aka Eric Cockman, Dick Swainfold, Vlad Porkster and Heavy Juicyshlong, frequent actor in Russ Meyer features, killed when his Porche 900 roadster errupted in flames at a Las Vegas parking lot during a coke deal gone badDominic Viola, assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seji Ozawa, mimimalist composer, thrilled audiences and enraged critics during a Bartok festival in Budapest when a small pebble taken from his shoe *sang* for an uninterupted 9 hours.
Michael Roberts, highly decorated WWII naval officer, credited with planning the unexecuted Operation Shoestring, a brutal scorch and burn invasion of Greenland, suffered an anuerism on VJ Day during the formalities of the Japaneese unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri and was unable to afix his signature, a Universal bio pic, starring Tom Hanks is slated for December release, 2006
Ahmed Gh'rael, Born Richard Smith, obscure jazz drummer and small time drug dealer, In 1957 he converted to Islam while doing time in Joliet. Was tragically murdered in the prison laundry three weeks prior to his release.
Su Yung Chen, 14th century Manchurian philosipher, first among the ancients to propose that seemingly arbitrary and brutal acts of God were, although somewhat misguided, intended as benevolent, was repeatedly struck by lightning during her decent into insanity.
Violet Swinton, midwestern American poetess circa 1980's. Noted progenitor of the "House Wife Rage" movement. Currently friend and trend analyst for the Hillary Clinton senate campaign.
Solvig Johnson, Olympic ski champion, suffered devastating injury during the 1972 pre-trials in Munich, went on to win gold, silver and three bronzes, imortalized by director Werner Herzog in his short film *Blood and Snow*, never walked again.
Linda Ciccarelli, Fifth and youngest Marx brother, Left the team in 1938 (during a bitter split) to pursue a Broadway theatrical career. Claimed the talkies were a *fad* and would ultimately degrade the act. Died, unknown, from liver faliure in 1983.
Seville Vazquez, little known surrealist juggler, Attended the Acacemy of Beauxs Arts in Paris along with contemporaries Luis Bunnel, Salvador Dali, and Garcia Lorca. Died in 1968, of smoke inhlation during a fire at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City
Nadi Hadir, failed assassin of Indira Ghandi at a 1978 political rally, was torn apart by the crowd within minutes, wrote several anti-religious polemics denouncing India's rigid caste system, subject of a small bronze sculpture in Moscow's Red Square.
Eric Dickman, 80's porn star, aka Eric Cockman, Dick Swainfold, Vlad Porkster and Heavy Juicyshlong, frequent actor in Russ Meyer features, killed when his Porche 900 roadster errupted in flames at a Las Vegas parking lot during a coke deal gone badDominic Viola, assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seji Ozawa, mimimalist composer, thrilled audiences and enraged critics during a Bartok festival in Budapest when a small pebble taken from his shoe *sang* for an uninterupted 9 hours.
Michael Roberts, highly decorated WWII naval officer, credited with planning the unexecuted Operation Shoestring, a brutal scorch and burn invasion of Greenland, suffered an anuerism on VJ Day during the formalities of the Japaneese unconditional surrender aboard the USS Missouri and was unable to afix his signature, a Universal bio pic, starring Tom Hanks is slated for December release, 2006
Ahmed Gh'rael, Born Richard Smith, obscure jazz drummer and small time drug dealer, In 1957 he converted to Islam while doing time in Joliet. Was tragically murdered in the prison laundry three weeks prior to his release.
Su Yung Chen, 14th century Manchurian philosipher, first among the ancients to propose that seemingly arbitrary and brutal acts of God were, although somewhat misguided, intended as benevolent, was repeatedly struck by lightning during her decent into insanity.
Friday, September 01, 2000
My Cellar
Last night I dreamed I was in Paris. Maybe because I was watching this movie "The Man in the Iron Mask" with Leonardo DiCaprio. I got it at the library for free (my lowest possible watching category). Stunk.
My dream, wasn't a story dream. It was more like a collection of images and objects. A nocturnal knick-knack shop. I was floating in the middle of it, this face, that cafe, The pool in the Latin quarter, The globe at La'Villette, and of course, Celeste, surrounded in her atelier by the giant nudes she had painted of herself. Paris.
I awoke snug, in my four-poster bed. I was warm. I was cosy. I was mildly aroused. Then a distant odor made its way to my nose. It all came flooding back into my consciousness. The basement. There was a very bad smell down there. I pulled my beloved down comforter up over my head.
I can verify that my basement has not been cleaned since the 1890s. I have made photographs in case there is ever a legal inquiry. I found farming implements down there. I found a horse's bridle. The ancient putrid detritus that filled the corners was over six inches deep. For decades rain had been seeping in through the back wall. Everything that wasn't rusting was rotting. At one point some zealot, in a deranged effort to contain that growing horror, had boarded up the windows. Now the breakdown of all matter could continue unabated.
And yet there was life down there.
If you gazed heavenward, there was a forest of green-grey fungi, clinging to the ceiling looking like a still from a Mariner fly-by. Dancing in a feat of arial mastery, thousands of vicious red spiders had spun their webs. In an attempt to clear them I went to pick up an axe and the handle disintegrated in my hand. I was the last person to see it in its original form, and I was the first to see the mother creature, who had brooded inside, scurry off. Life festered underfoot too. In one corner was a pile of creosote panels. The top few crumbled, the bottom six had been turned into earth by a swarm of white worms.
We have rats up here which, when they perish, will leave behind larger skeletons then those displayed in the dinosaur wing of the Museum of Natural History. One of the buildings behind me is being cleaned out by the city. They are trying to get rid of these rats. Great black men, who can find no other employment, do the work. They play cards and fight and curse each other in my back yard thicket. Above them, numerous birds sing.
The other morning, I approached them. I stood around for awhile sizing them up. They can©ˆt be making much. Their shoes looked like they had been made in a Chinese prison. I pitched them an offer. "How'd you like to make a little side money?" I said. "$100 bucks to empty out my cellar." They sent the little squat one down to check it out. The one who never gets to sit at the table. The one with a sour face, always standing by the broken Ailanthus stump. I showed him the way. We came back and he told the big one the job was "ok". The big one wiped his mouth, wiped it on his greasy green shirt and squinted at his cards. "After I finish this hand we'll do it" he grunted, his impossible girth leaned back, straining the tiny, child's chair which bore his huge black ass.
They tore through that mess. They were rushing in an effort to beat out the foreman©ˆs return. So of course, something went wrong. Someone, somebody, must have banged into the live feed on the boiler. Water came pouring out the back and from every radiator up and down the house. I must have run those stairs a thousand times. Rescue Plumbing? They don©ˆt rescue people in Harlem. I called everyone I knew. Nobody, nobody, nobody could help. Finally I just had to start shutting things down. I turned every knob I could find in that jerry-rigged maze of pipe. As the water crested my shoes, it stopped.
After awhile the plumber showed up. He explained to me what was going on. I began to service the boiler regularly, emptying the rusted gunk that had built up inside the system for god knows how long. I had unboarded-up the windows, stopped the leaks and shoveled out bags and bags of rubble. I was starting to feel on top. Then the oilman came.
It was getting cold and I needed oil. The gage was on empty. I called the oilman. He figured that I had a 275 tank (everyone has a 275 tank) so I could take 200. He figured wrong. A big part of an oilmans job, it seems, is directing irate drivers around his truck. While he was busy doing this he missed the whistle. Gallons of oil flooded into my basement. Oil. Have you ever noticed that most detergents only promise to "fight" oil? they never say anything about winning.
For weeks, the house reeked of oil. If you stood still long enough, you could taste it.
Still, things are slowly shaping up. There's air down there now and when the sun is pointed right, light. The mold is dying. The stench of fuel has dissipated. I©ˆm still running around fixing radiators as they burble up brown goo, but you can hang out on the ground floor now, without having a fatal allergy attack.
For now, everything is ok.
My dream, wasn't a story dream. It was more like a collection of images and objects. A nocturnal knick-knack shop. I was floating in the middle of it, this face, that cafe, The pool in the Latin quarter, The globe at La'Villette, and of course, Celeste, surrounded in her atelier by the giant nudes she had painted of herself. Paris.
I awoke snug, in my four-poster bed. I was warm. I was cosy. I was mildly aroused. Then a distant odor made its way to my nose. It all came flooding back into my consciousness. The basement. There was a very bad smell down there. I pulled my beloved down comforter up over my head.
I can verify that my basement has not been cleaned since the 1890s. I have made photographs in case there is ever a legal inquiry. I found farming implements down there. I found a horse's bridle. The ancient putrid detritus that filled the corners was over six inches deep. For decades rain had been seeping in through the back wall. Everything that wasn't rusting was rotting. At one point some zealot, in a deranged effort to contain that growing horror, had boarded up the windows. Now the breakdown of all matter could continue unabated.
And yet there was life down there.
If you gazed heavenward, there was a forest of green-grey fungi, clinging to the ceiling looking like a still from a Mariner fly-by. Dancing in a feat of arial mastery, thousands of vicious red spiders had spun their webs. In an attempt to clear them I went to pick up an axe and the handle disintegrated in my hand. I was the last person to see it in its original form, and I was the first to see the mother creature, who had brooded inside, scurry off. Life festered underfoot too. In one corner was a pile of creosote panels. The top few crumbled, the bottom six had been turned into earth by a swarm of white worms.
We have rats up here which, when they perish, will leave behind larger skeletons then those displayed in the dinosaur wing of the Museum of Natural History. One of the buildings behind me is being cleaned out by the city. They are trying to get rid of these rats. Great black men, who can find no other employment, do the work. They play cards and fight and curse each other in my back yard thicket. Above them, numerous birds sing.
The other morning, I approached them. I stood around for awhile sizing them up. They can©ˆt be making much. Their shoes looked like they had been made in a Chinese prison. I pitched them an offer. "How'd you like to make a little side money?" I said. "$100 bucks to empty out my cellar." They sent the little squat one down to check it out. The one who never gets to sit at the table. The one with a sour face, always standing by the broken Ailanthus stump. I showed him the way. We came back and he told the big one the job was "ok". The big one wiped his mouth, wiped it on his greasy green shirt and squinted at his cards. "After I finish this hand we'll do it" he grunted, his impossible girth leaned back, straining the tiny, child's chair which bore his huge black ass.
They tore through that mess. They were rushing in an effort to beat out the foreman©ˆs return. So of course, something went wrong. Someone, somebody, must have banged into the live feed on the boiler. Water came pouring out the back and from every radiator up and down the house. I must have run those stairs a thousand times. Rescue Plumbing? They don©ˆt rescue people in Harlem. I called everyone I knew. Nobody, nobody, nobody could help. Finally I just had to start shutting things down. I turned every knob I could find in that jerry-rigged maze of pipe. As the water crested my shoes, it stopped.
After awhile the plumber showed up. He explained to me what was going on. I began to service the boiler regularly, emptying the rusted gunk that had built up inside the system for god knows how long. I had unboarded-up the windows, stopped the leaks and shoveled out bags and bags of rubble. I was starting to feel on top. Then the oilman came.
It was getting cold and I needed oil. The gage was on empty. I called the oilman. He figured that I had a 275 tank (everyone has a 275 tank) so I could take 200. He figured wrong. A big part of an oilmans job, it seems, is directing irate drivers around his truck. While he was busy doing this he missed the whistle. Gallons of oil flooded into my basement. Oil. Have you ever noticed that most detergents only promise to "fight" oil? they never say anything about winning.
For weeks, the house reeked of oil. If you stood still long enough, you could taste it.
Still, things are slowly shaping up. There's air down there now and when the sun is pointed right, light. The mold is dying. The stench of fuel has dissipated. I©ˆm still running around fixing radiators as they burble up brown goo, but you can hang out on the ground floor now, without having a fatal allergy attack.
For now, everything is ok.
Sunday, December 01, 1996
Letter to Xenia
My Dearest Xenia:
Or should I say “The Fabulous Miss Xenia” as Stephan calls you (remember him? he was the one who let me stay in the “monks bunk”). I am not sure why he refers to you in this way. I guess you made a big impression on him. Stephan and I are in constant touch via E-mail. It’s a great way to keep up because it is totally effortless. No stamps, no post office, you just push a button and it returns itself to the person who sent it, like an electronic homing pigeon. now we are trying to rig our computers so that we can talk and see each other live. It is called C-U C-Me technology.
So your sister has arrived. You should get a big African tribal mask. Then if she has any boyfriends over that you don’t like, you can frighten them off in the morning.
Things have been Ok here. I don't have many plans for Christmas. I have a few invitations for New Years and that should be good. I am mainly working and trying to get my video project off the ground.
We experienced another set back this week. The guy I was negotiating with for the space turned out to be a total fraud. He was stringing me along hoping to get me to commit to producing his project. I am the king of getting people to work for free and I guess he figured that out. The thing is I only get people to work for free, for me. Me Me Me!!! When push came to shove he had no authority to lend out the space. I am now dealing with the person who is really in charge. Unfortunately we have to cancel the shoot until late January at the earliest. I also started hunting around for some other options and have had one good meeting so far.
I went to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving. My intention was to go to Chelmsford, the town where I grew up. I got a “knock knock” from my best friend in the forth grade a few weeks ago. We hadn't talked in over ten years. He found me on the internet and we started e-mailing each other and had made plans to meet up again this past weekend at our 20 year high school reunion. I took a bus up north, they have movies on the busses now, an excellent innovation. I stopped over in boston on the way and spent a night at a friends apartment. The next day I came down with a really bad case of the flu. I was so sick and weak and crazy that I couldn't go anywhere and had to cancel all my appointments. I didn't even make it to the reunion.
It was pretty much the worst Thanksgiving I ever had. A four and a half hour bus trip to nowhere... to a porcelain banquet table. Yes, it's just a little cough now, but one week ago this microscopic invader had me on my knees.
I did have some interesting fever induced delusions. I wrote some of them down.
1. My body is the crashed jet liner from "The Lord of The Flies" Each aching muscle is the complaining voice of a child passenger. The real torment begins when they started arguing with each other.
2. I have to get up. I have to escape. I Rene Calvo alone know the secret to the Kennedy assassination. There were 3 Lee Harvey Oswalds! How else can you explain the contradictory sightings prior to Dallas? The triangulation crossfire in Deely plaza? A small highly trained contingent from the legion of Oswalds being bred by ex-nazi scientist in Brazil. Why? Kennedy would have given the Israelis jet fighters. the Israelis would have bombed Cairo where an ancient order of Egyptian masons that funded Hitler are headquartered. They would stop at nothing to keep their cabal intact. even... poison. I can't move!!!
3. I am a toy. a plastic toy. but it's OK, it's good plastic.
These are the memories I will
treasure from the Thanksgiving
of “96”.* *Available on video cassette
Johannes was here for a visit in October. It’s always fun when he’s in town because he is like
a guy who has just gotten out of prison. He runs around calling people, going to parties, chasing girls and staying out all night. He was never home once before 3 am and he got up every day with me at nine. I bet he is still sleeping back in Germany. He bought tons of corny shit (and a few good tapes and CD’s). On my birthday I celebrated “Pesto Fete 96”. I took all the basil from my
garden and made a quadruple batch of Pesto. I invited over a few close friends and we drank wine, ate pesto and cake and talked until late.
Johannes and I went roller-blading in
central park a lot. There were some rainy days but they never lasted. It was nice skating in the fall. The park is empty and the road is clear. You can really zoom along. The air was a little cool so you didn’t get over heated. Johannes also helped me fix my skates. Now they’re like rockets. I still go to the park now when it’s sunny. But it’s impossible to find
anyone who wants to go along.
During Johannes visit Halloween came and went. We attended two parties also went to the Greenwich Village Parade. I made my own costume. Here in America they used to put pictures of lost children on the side of milk cartons. They had headlines like “if you see this child call 1800-MISSING”. I designed a big milk carton on my computer and pasted it to poster board. Then I cut a hole where the face of the child went, so that when I put it over my head, my face showed. I got great reactions. I got so bold that I jumped over the police barricade and joined the parade. I would go from policeman to policeman looking lost, making a little play. People were laughing like crazy.
I have been working the last two weeks in a new place, Merrill Lynch, a big financial corporation. The graphics are really boring. We call it the “Name Badge Institute of America”, since most of the time we get stuck making name badges. There are however 3 good things about this job. 1. They have huge windows facing New York Harbor and there is a beautiful sunset behind the Statue of Liberty every day. 2. They have a really great cafeteria, with international cuisine and low low prices. 3. The people there are pretty nice and they all love me and want me to work here forever.
Why do they love me?
I worked here for a week over a year ago. There was this woman, Michelle, who was complaining all the time about how boring her job was and how her life was in a rut. Well, it happened to be leap day. That extra day you get during leap year. (We call it Sadie Hawkins Day) On this day you’re supposed to do something out of the ordinary. So I asked her “What would you do, if you could do anything”? She replied that she would like to be an apprentice at Milton Glaser’s studio. So I said that didn’t sound so hard. I picked up the phone and dialed information and got the number. Then I called and asked to speak to the studio manager. When the manager got on I handed the phone to her and said, “Go ahead, ask”. Her face had turned bright red and she could barely speak but she managed to make an appointment. A year goes by and when I return to this job I’m like some kind of local hero. I’m the guy who changed Michelle’s life. Everyone I meet there says “Oh, so you’re René, we’ve heard all about you!”. They look at me hopefully, tell me their problems, like maybe I have some magical power to change their boring lives.
The good thing is that I can do no wrong (within reason, I suppose murder is out). I come in late every day. I’m lazy. I talk on the phone and still they don’t fire me. So I guess I have to hang out here for a while.
anyways. I guess it serves my purposes for now. I spend a lot of time here working on scripts and making phone calls and using the facilities to make brochure type stuff. I hope all is well with you and you are healthy and happy. Anytime you want to visit New York give me a call. I think you would love this city, especially the dance scene. I’ll give you a call so we can work out the fax thing.
Love René XXXOOO
Or should I say “The Fabulous Miss Xenia” as Stephan calls you (remember him? he was the one who let me stay in the “monks bunk”). I am not sure why he refers to you in this way. I guess you made a big impression on him. Stephan and I are in constant touch via E-mail. It’s a great way to keep up because it is totally effortless. No stamps, no post office, you just push a button and it returns itself to the person who sent it, like an electronic homing pigeon. now we are trying to rig our computers so that we can talk and see each other live. It is called C-U C-Me technology.
So your sister has arrived. You should get a big African tribal mask. Then if she has any boyfriends over that you don’t like, you can frighten them off in the morning.
Things have been Ok here. I don't have many plans for Christmas. I have a few invitations for New Years and that should be good. I am mainly working and trying to get my video project off the ground.
We experienced another set back this week. The guy I was negotiating with for the space turned out to be a total fraud. He was stringing me along hoping to get me to commit to producing his project. I am the king of getting people to work for free and I guess he figured that out. The thing is I only get people to work for free, for me. Me Me Me!!! When push came to shove he had no authority to lend out the space. I am now dealing with the person who is really in charge. Unfortunately we have to cancel the shoot until late January at the earliest. I also started hunting around for some other options and have had one good meeting so far.
I went to Massachusetts for Thanksgiving. My intention was to go to Chelmsford, the town where I grew up. I got a “knock knock” from my best friend in the forth grade a few weeks ago. We hadn't talked in over ten years. He found me on the internet and we started e-mailing each other and had made plans to meet up again this past weekend at our 20 year high school reunion. I took a bus up north, they have movies on the busses now, an excellent innovation. I stopped over in boston on the way and spent a night at a friends apartment. The next day I came down with a really bad case of the flu. I was so sick and weak and crazy that I couldn't go anywhere and had to cancel all my appointments. I didn't even make it to the reunion.
It was pretty much the worst Thanksgiving I ever had. A four and a half hour bus trip to nowhere... to a porcelain banquet table. Yes, it's just a little cough now, but one week ago this microscopic invader had me on my knees.
I did have some interesting fever induced delusions. I wrote some of them down.
1. My body is the crashed jet liner from "The Lord of The Flies" Each aching muscle is the complaining voice of a child passenger. The real torment begins when they started arguing with each other.
2. I have to get up. I have to escape. I Rene Calvo alone know the secret to the Kennedy assassination. There were 3 Lee Harvey Oswalds! How else can you explain the contradictory sightings prior to Dallas? The triangulation crossfire in Deely plaza? A small highly trained contingent from the legion of Oswalds being bred by ex-nazi scientist in Brazil. Why? Kennedy would have given the Israelis jet fighters. the Israelis would have bombed Cairo where an ancient order of Egyptian masons that funded Hitler are headquartered. They would stop at nothing to keep their cabal intact. even... poison. I can't move!!!
3. I am a toy. a plastic toy. but it's OK, it's good plastic.
These are the memories I will
treasure from the Thanksgiving
of “96”.* *Available on video cassette
Johannes was here for a visit in October. It’s always fun when he’s in town because he is like
a guy who has just gotten out of prison. He runs around calling people, going to parties, chasing girls and staying out all night. He was never home once before 3 am and he got up every day with me at nine. I bet he is still sleeping back in Germany. He bought tons of corny shit (and a few good tapes and CD’s). On my birthday I celebrated “Pesto Fete 96”. I took all the basil from my
garden and made a quadruple batch of Pesto. I invited over a few close friends and we drank wine, ate pesto and cake and talked until late.
Johannes and I went roller-blading in
central park a lot. There were some rainy days but they never lasted. It was nice skating in the fall. The park is empty and the road is clear. You can really zoom along. The air was a little cool so you didn’t get over heated. Johannes also helped me fix my skates. Now they’re like rockets. I still go to the park now when it’s sunny. But it’s impossible to find
anyone who wants to go along.
During Johannes visit Halloween came and went. We attended two parties also went to the Greenwich Village Parade. I made my own costume. Here in America they used to put pictures of lost children on the side of milk cartons. They had headlines like “if you see this child call 1800-MISSING”. I designed a big milk carton on my computer and pasted it to poster board. Then I cut a hole where the face of the child went, so that when I put it over my head, my face showed. I got great reactions. I got so bold that I jumped over the police barricade and joined the parade. I would go from policeman to policeman looking lost, making a little play. People were laughing like crazy.
I have been working the last two weeks in a new place, Merrill Lynch, a big financial corporation. The graphics are really boring. We call it the “Name Badge Institute of America”, since most of the time we get stuck making name badges. There are however 3 good things about this job. 1. They have huge windows facing New York Harbor and there is a beautiful sunset behind the Statue of Liberty every day. 2. They have a really great cafeteria, with international cuisine and low low prices. 3. The people there are pretty nice and they all love me and want me to work here forever.
Why do they love me?
I worked here for a week over a year ago. There was this woman, Michelle, who was complaining all the time about how boring her job was and how her life was in a rut. Well, it happened to be leap day. That extra day you get during leap year. (We call it Sadie Hawkins Day) On this day you’re supposed to do something out of the ordinary. So I asked her “What would you do, if you could do anything”? She replied that she would like to be an apprentice at Milton Glaser’s studio. So I said that didn’t sound so hard. I picked up the phone and dialed information and got the number. Then I called and asked to speak to the studio manager. When the manager got on I handed the phone to her and said, “Go ahead, ask”. Her face had turned bright red and she could barely speak but she managed to make an appointment. A year goes by and when I return to this job I’m like some kind of local hero. I’m the guy who changed Michelle’s life. Everyone I meet there says “Oh, so you’re René, we’ve heard all about you!”. They look at me hopefully, tell me their problems, like maybe I have some magical power to change their boring lives.
The good thing is that I can do no wrong (within reason, I suppose murder is out). I come in late every day. I’m lazy. I talk on the phone and still they don’t fire me. So I guess I have to hang out here for a while.
anyways. I guess it serves my purposes for now. I spend a lot of time here working on scripts and making phone calls and using the facilities to make brochure type stuff. I hope all is well with you and you are healthy and happy. Anytime you want to visit New York give me a call. I think you would love this city, especially the dance scene. I’ll give you a call so we can work out the fax thing.
Love René XXXOOO
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