— Images from Keskpäevane Praam (Midday Ferry), a Soviet Estonian film, 1967.

IT WAS NEARLY TWO YEARS AGO when I met with some colleagues from a partner company at a business conference in Gothenburg, Sweden’s west coast capital. Known for its waterfront, architecture, and openness, Gothenburg sprawls along in an ever-welcoming air of freedom and tolerance, watched wisely over by a big nude statue of Poseidon at Götaplatsen. 

It was there that I met with several colleagues from their British office, including Nicola, a senior ranking manager, and Martin, the head of marketing. I encountered Martin at check-in at the conference, where he was telling his loved one Alex that he had arrived safely and that he would call him back. “Talk to you soon, babe!” Martin is married to Alex, you see, and they are both men. Night after night, we all went out together. As everyone else in our entourage was straight and female, that meant that I was the only person who was attracted to women.

This made for a wholly interesting experience.

Each night in Gothenburg degraded into a succession of restaurants and bars, and more alcohol was always just a snap of the fingers away. Such is the nature of international business meetings. It was amid this Scandinavian bakgrund that Martin, a spectacled, good-natured, gray-haired fellow of about 45 years who begins each morning with a jog, began to reveal the stories of his life. His awakening to his true nature began, of all places, in a public urinal in the Midlands sometime in the 1980s. He was about seven years old. By his account, it was amazing.

“How cliché,” he remarked. “Of all the places to figure out you are gay, I was in a men’s toilet.” 

It was a curious tale, to be sure, and it had me rummaging through long-discarded memories in the attic of my own childhood. When had I first realized I was attracted to women? Was it watching Madonna prance around to “Lucky Star”? Surely, I hadn’t come to the realization in any kind of public lavatory. Men’s lavatories smelled bad and were full of hairy men. It seemed the least “amazing” place I could think of. Because of this early encounter, Martin progressed to his membership in this alternative clan, the men who love men and not women. He showed me photos of a resort in the Canaries where only men dared venture. There were beaches and cafes where there were only men. Men swimming. Men eating. Men hugging. No women.

Only men.

For me, it was like a scene from a science fiction film or just an ominous bleak dream. A world without women. A sense of dread set in. Usually, in life, being alone with men was part of some kind of punishment. Organized sports, for instance. Or the army. Surely, at any moment, a belligerent coach or sergeant would appear and order these gay men to start doing crunches.

Other than drinking, Martin and Nicola would spend the evenings checking out men. Once they had their eyes on a particular waiter who wore a blue shirt and was in good shape. Nicola, a freckled, voluptuous Scottish woman, wore an open black shirt that left little to anyone’s imagination, with a silver sparkling necklace draped across the knolls of her breasts, as if to rule out any chance that they could escape my notice. Those breasts caused me real worry. How to avoid not looking at them? And yet my eyes were right there again, drawn along by their twinned magnetic tug. How could Martin not see this? Why was he gawking at a Swedish waiter when he was sitting next to this? Or them. Those. Her. You know what I’m talking about. Instead, he pulled out his phone to show me a photo of a royal guard he had taken in Stockholm. First he showed it to Nicola, then to me. “Just look at how beautiful this guard is. Isn’t he amazing?”

I didn’t know what to say. It was some guy in a uniform. The uniform looked uncomfortable.

“But what do you think about me?” I ventured. “Do I look all right?” They whispered to each other. “Not in that shirt,” said Nicola. “No one would be interested in a man wearing a shirt like that!” It was some black thing someone had gifted me ten years ago. I hadn’t thought anything about wearing it. Or anything else. They laughed harder. What kind of strange world did they live in? A world where Swedish waiters were sexy and Scottish bosoms were nothing to lose sleep over? A world where magic took place in public toilets? A world where shirts mattered?

It was Pride Month, and the trams of Gothenburg were festooned with rainbow flags. They shuttled this way and that, like imperial warships of old. One evening, Martin toasted the trams and rainbow flags with his beer. “One month, that’s all we get,” he said. “Eleven months out of the year, we live in shame. Some of our families are ashamed of us, even though they say they aren’t, and we’re also ashamed of ourselves at times. But each year we have one month.”

By this point, I was exhausted. I wanted to retreat back into my world, a world of women, a world of women who are neurotic and throw things at you even when you try to compliment them, or ignore you, or just do mysterious things you can’t begin to understand. The soothing motion of watery, emotional, curvy women. I was tired of rainbow flags, Swedish waiters, royal guards, men’s toilets, and ugly shirts. I wanted to feel comfortable in my own skin. In that moment, I understood how exhausted Martin must feel. As he said, for just one month out of the year, he could live openly in his world. The rest of the time he was forced to live in mine.

ONE THING I KNOW is that you write every day. You write every day and you’re on the sea. At the dawn of time, among the seaweed and mollusks, jellyfish and other invertebrates, in the yellow sand-wrapped prehistory, you were there under an ultramarine sky, with your cocoa skin and cocoa hair and cocoa breath and awful secrets, playing with small fish in the tidal pools, watching the light dance through the ripples like electricity, licking your fingers clean when the ice cream melted. In the gray spring I was there, standing aloof among the German graveyards, the lifeless lake waters, gray hobbled limbs of trees, gray weathered flowers of moss, cold and chill and grayed, thinking of the sands and of you and of your awful secrets and of the water. This is how we connect through time, like light dancing through gulf ripples, touching sediment and snails, then back up again, bearing sun and fossil fragments of eternity.

EVELYN WAUGH wrote a good novel, this is his first from 1928, and I especially enjoyed the first book within (there are three “books” or sections). His strength is dialogue and capturing the voices of his characters via dialogue. If the whole book had consisted of these lengthy dialogues, it would have been much the stronger. His descriptive writing can be grand, if restrained, but it’s more difficult to read on and on about, say, the house King’s Thursday, when really what we want is the dialogue between Peter and Paul, or Paul and Margot. Also, like Scott Fitzgerald in Tender is the Night (1934), he picks up the tempo toward the end, and introduces some forgettable characters into rather forced and forgettable scenes that could have been left out or minimally recognized. How many characters can we grapple with then? Who was who, what, and when? All together, I enjoyed The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold a bit more, but I will in no way say I did not enjoy nor learn from Decline and Fall. I was relieved to learn that Waugh actually did teach at a school in North Wales, and this was all not just the workings of his imagination, but rather a satire on his real life.

FAVORITE QUOTE: “Anyone who has been to an English public school feels comparatively at home in prison. It’s the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul destroying.”

TALLINN IN SPRING. Pigeons, sunshine, spring birds, even audible at the Baltic Station Market. I find myself seated at a small table within uncomfortable reach of others. There is this feeling that every person you pass, every person you see, every displacement of air, every surface you touch might or could be infected with the virus. The water at the port is pure blue, the Old Town is mostly empty but for some shadows and construction. Yet the Baltic Station Market is still alive with young mothers pushing carriages. Now and then a pretty something will flicker in and out of my peripheral vision. It is not I whom she seeks here. She is looking for a solid man, a regimented man, a man who is fit to breed. He must have a steady job, a decent wage, and be stable of mood and inclination. This is the man she seeks. Then she too can join the mothers at the Baltic Station Market. Then she too can feel the heft of Italian oranges in her palms. This man here is working on surrealistic fiction in a medium-sized handmade journal. On his maiden voyage to this land he was more or less engrossed in doing the same. There are even photos of it. Only a fool — a hull, as the Estonians say — would have children with such a man as this. Only a fool did, three times in fact. The eldest had her first glimpses of the world just around the corner from here in an attic apartment on Valgevase or Brass Street at the dawn of the century. In the evenings she now watches Japanese films with her sister and they comment on the male characters they find most appealing. I try not to pay attention. She has been pushing my buttons lately, trying to see how little it will take to shake daddy up. Maybe if she calls him this or that there will be another scene. I have shifted and assessed different strategies. First, a hard reaction, then a softer, more tolerant one. I had read somewhere once that what women most craved of all things was a man’s steady and unfaltering presence. That only by removing your presence from their lives would they take note of your absence and then, perhaps, reappraise your true worth. So when these button-pushing moments occur, I have often left and moved on to other things. What else can you do? Yet another article I read said this is the worst thing one could do. You should withstand these trivial arrows; this allows the child to feel she is safe in her obnoxiousness. In actuality, these outbursts are just mechanisms for her to test her safety. That was at least what another article said. I’m living things day to day, reflecting on strategy. Local ladies in fine hats are pushing carriages and they are talking about things. My story has gone nowhere. The other day, the girls were watching a show and I happened to pay attention to one of the actresses. “She looks nice,” I said, “but her butt is a bit too small for me.” “How can a woman’s butt be too small?” my daughter asked. “It was a joke,” I said. “A joke.” “You are objectifying women.” “You objectify men here all day long. You do the same thing.” “That’s different.” Maybe it is different. Maybe the best strategy is to just say nothing.

AN EARLY BERGMAN FILM. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the scenes of postwar Stockholm, the smoky, grimy streets, the primitive eateries, cramped apartments. Working-class Sweden. And I enjoyed the archipelago, and the summery feelings of young love. And I especially enjoyed the “after,” after the summer, what happens to the young lovers who elope and breed. How Harry tries to be a good father, but it’s all too drab and boring for Monika, who wants excitement and affection and attention, and eventually deserts him and their young daughter. One thing it made me yearn for was a world without technology. A world where one just meets someone at a café, goes to a movie, kisses on a city bench, runs away and few seem to notice. Nothing is vibrating, chirping, there are no misread-unread messages or misinterpreted yellow smiling faces. That world I wish I was still in and long to get back inside of.

SOMETIME IN THE WINTER, I took a ride out to the woods outside of town. This patch of forest is nothing spectacular, some trails rising and falling, a waterfall in the middle. I almost never see people in these backwoods trails, though now and then there is a white van parked there on the outskirts, which I am sure is used for disposing of dead bodies or doing countryside dope deals. It seems like that kind of place. I went out there to get a woman out of my mind, of course. For days she had been pounding in my head like a furious migraine, and it seemed I could do nothing to rid myself of her spirit. No consultations with a bevy of psychologists, healers, and tarot card readers could alleviate the spell. I wanted her and I wanted her bad and I hated her for how badly I wanted her, and I hated her for making me want her when she was nowhere to be found, invisible to me, and maybe even oblivious to my aching want for her. Of course, I didn’t hate her though. I loved her, if such desire could be called love. The hatred or frustration was actually for myself, the aspect of myself that couldn’t be suppressed or controlled. The part of myself that belonged to her. That part of me that she knew she possessed. There I was, lost in the woods, looking for solutions that couldn’t be found, looking for an escape, a way out. It was inescapable though. With a look, she could make me lift heavy objects, loan her money, give her rides, and — most dangerously — significantly increase the Estonian population. One cannot underestimate the life force that flows through the male body when aroused. It is this energy that led men to erect the pyramids in the sands of Ancient Egypt, or to board ships to circle the globe. The same otherworldly force that makes the waves roll or the heavenly bodies spin. We are at its mercy. So why are we always told that we have a choice? Or, even worse, that we create our own realities. Nonsense. There is give and take, but you can’t really expect me to believe that when a woman’s spirit starts to incubate within your heart that you have a choice. The most infuriating aspect is that many women are aware of the control and sway they have over their men. They know they are inside before we even wake up to this new dawn. They know they have us dancing on their fingertips. They revere and worship the strong man, who doesn’t give up so easily, but only because he has not given them what they want just yet and, oh, how they want it. “Women maintain a variety of energetic connections,” one of these faith healers admitted to me. “They know when someone is close, and they know when someone is far. They can sense it.” They do. How many men haven’t experienced a situation when, shortly after a breakup, while meeting with some new interest, suddenly their phones start to vibrate and ring, because their former partner senses — somehow, miraculously — that their man is slipping away. Even more curious are the cases of the women who leave their men and take on new lovers, but keep the old partner around just in case he is needed to screw in a lightbulb or fix a broken appliance. It is not so much about love, is it? It’s about some kind of intangible telepathic control. Which is not to demonize women or make them out to be manipulative. Not at all, I say. I think it’s just the way things happen, and they are probably just as much at the mercy of their own gravitational forces as we are. They can’t control the men they pull, either but, for whatever reason, they keep on pulling them in like fish. Why do they always pull certain men, while those they desire remain beyond their reach? There are no easy answers, but I continue to study these things out of  curiosity. In my study of blues music and folklore, I learned that in the Deep South long ago, Black and Indian women used to carry pouches around their waists that would dangle near their genitals. Into these sacks — called nation sacks, for the Indian nations that wore them — they would have keepsakes of the men they wanted to control — a lock of hair, or some personal item like a ring or coin. This is how they kept their men under their influence.  It occurred to me in the woods that day that there were probably multiple women out there walking the land who were carrying pieces of my soul in such little charmed bags. Yet I decided not to resist in the end if only because it was exhausting. Maybe being possessed isn’t worth the fight. It’s better and easier to surrender. And sometimes, you must admit, it does feel wonderful to be possessed.

An Estonian version of this column appears in the April 2021 issue of Anne ja Stiil.

FEW REMEMBER HOW a young Eddie Murphy starred on Cheers, way back in those early seasons that nobody watched. Long before Woody Harrelson and Kirstie Alley joined the cast, there was Eddie Murphy in his red leather suit from Delirious, working the Boston bar with Sam Malone (Ted Danson), barking, ‘Yo, Sam, you better serve them muthufuckas quick or I’ll bust yo’ ass,’ or giving him love advice (‘If it was me, bitch be gettin’ fucked’). But then the slow decline, the drug habits, the unscrupulous characters turning up at the bar, Charlie Murphy, Rick James (‘I’m Rick James, bitch’), not to mention Murphy’s unrequited love for Shelley Long, so throbbing and painful that he quit when she did. And then we were left with Cheers, just Cheers, Cheers with Norm, Cheers with Cliff, Cheers with Lilith and Dr. Frasier Crane. Cheers, where everybody knows your name and they’re always glad you came. “Cheers is filmed before a live studio audience.” It wasn’t the same bar without Eddie though. Just not the same.

“You have seen them/ the ones who feed the pigeons/ cutting the stale bread/ with their thumbs & penknives/ the ones with old pocketwatches/ the old ones with gnarled hands/ and wild eyebrows/ the ones with the baggy pants/ with both belt & suspenders/ the grappa drinkers with teeth like corn/ the Piemontesi the Genovesi the Siciliani/ smelling of garlic & pepperoni/ the ones who loved Mussolini/ the old fascists/ the ones who loved Garibaldi/ the old anarchists reading L’Umanita Nova/ the ones who loved Sacco & Vanzetti/ They are almost all gone now/ They are sitting and waiting their turn/ and sunning themselves in front of the church”

— from “The Old Italians Dying,” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 1919-2021

YESTERDAY WAS independence day, but a mix or combination of the two. Estonia’s takes place in dreary doldrum winter, the 24th of February, America’s in hot and humid July, the 4th, but this one was the Estonian celebration but in the hot summer. There was an old white house, with many floors and rooms, and there was a crowd of people there. Miss Cloud and the Designer were there, but they ignored me, and I eventually stumbled into a bedroom with a rather lean, classical beauty, tanned from head to toe, who was reading some kind of artbook, perhaps a Matisse or Modigliani collection. She was completely nude, with a towel wrapped around her head, and I attempted coitus but no dice, she just yawned and kept on reading about Matisse, and I dismounted and withered away. Later, I found myself in a nearby house when a tornado swept across the land. I could see its plumes of wind, and the sky lit up white as the house vibrated. I locked myself in a bathroom with another woman, and we dislodged the large wooden door and turned it into a sled. We used this door-sled to escape from the house in the midst of the white whirlwind. July had turned back to February and there was snow on the landscape. We rode that sled all the way back to the first house, like Timothy Dalton and that cellist in The Living Daylights, where the long, lean, and ultra-bored Matisse lady lied sprawled in her bed, gently turning those pages, as if nothing was amiss. We debated returning the stolen door-sled, but decided against it. There had been so much devastation because of the great tornado. Nobody would even notice that it was gone.