rotermanni sketch

I ARRIVED TO TALLINN and was again surprised (pleasantly) by the way the port area has developed. It looks like a real city. When I came here the first time in ’02, none of this was here. Now Rotermanni kvartal is as bourgeois as it gets. Why not shop for a new suit while listening to gurgling electronic music and sipping on a smoothie, or noshing on some fresh sourdough bread from RØST while imbibing a warm cappuccino with coconut milk? Everyone in the window advertisements is lean, beautiful, effortlessly wealthy, and has lots of sex, most likely in fine hotels or in the back of sports cars. If that’s not what life is about, then what is?

But despite all the trimmings of the nordic nouveau riche, one cannot escape the cold sea wind or the gray sky. Sometimes the sun does come out though. It is odd that we are supposedly considered under threat from the Russian Federation, as if they were going to lob missiles into the nearby H&M. You would like to think that all of these things would protect you, but they don’t. It did make me think though what an angry, regressive energy is Putinism. How could anyone long for a day when half of Europe was under surveillance and home arrest? Age is a factor. He’s a post-1989 headcase and never really adjusted. He wants it back.

And the reason I am bringing this up is that so much has changed in Tallinn, and in Estonia, since that time that the country is due a narrative revision. A rewriting of the story. The Soviet period is slipping away into the past. It’s like watching those last pieces of the Titanic slip into the ocean. How can you define the story of a country by referencing something that doesn’t seem to matter that much anymore? This place is Hanseatic materialism redux. I continuously feel like I am in a mini-Stockholm or some other such northerly place where men in glasses who part their hair on the side sit around doing business deals with a stiff upper lip while wearing scarves inside, and weary eyed women walk their small dogs in the morning, bearing a cup of coffee before them as if it was a flashlight or rosary beads and looking as if they don’t have time for anyone or anything and whatever you have to say to them, they really don’t care.

The Trump Files: A Review of the Bern Band’s New EP No One Wins, Part II

No, not that Trump.

If I had to pinpoint one moment when the ’90s began for me, it might have been seeing Jesus Jones’ “Right Here, Right Now” on MTV before heading off to play outfield in Little League. And if I had to pinpoint another moment, it was probably watching the introduction to the first episode of The X-Files on Fox, which debuted on 10 September 1993. A more unremarkable moment was probably watching Dave Trump and a friend storming into the locker room at Paul J. Gelinas Junior High School one morning wearing Soundgarden t-shirts and singing “Spoonman.”

This was probably the first time I even became aware of Dave Trump’s existence. He sort of stumbled through the door of my life like Kramer on Seinfeld and would always lurk after that. I do not know the provenance of this branch of the Trump family. I assumed some Irish or Scottish connection because of his remarkable orange afro, which has since either fallen out, been shaved away, or remains hidden beneath a series of ‘Jimmy the Newsboy’-style flat caps.

Trump was mostly soft spoken, observant and intelligent. He had an older brother who also lurked. He was there, at the edge of the 7/11 parking lot in his red truck, listening to The Clash. The older brother was supposedly responsible for introducing many younger kids in the community to good music. According to lore, students even older than him had given him crackly cassettes of groups like The Specials. There might have been a chain of musical command stretching back deep into the 1980s. Remember, as I said before, the internet at this time was nascent. These kinds of personal connections helped to guide one’s development.

How else would you hear The Specials in the early-ish ’90s? Those were the Ace of Base days. The Specials never guest starred on The X-Files. Or did they? Did Terry Hall get abducted?

“A Message to you, E.T.”?

I must have missed that episode.

Trump was even the bassist for a ska band. But on the new Bern Band EP he is solidly rock.

D. TRUMP: “Why rock as a genre? It allows us to pull from all our interests, leaving space for interpretation while giving us common ground to land on. There is an opportunity for each instrument to shine. For me, variety of genres has always been key and if you do choose to work in one specific genre, the challenge is to keep it interesting without being too frenetic. I want to find a contrast of tone or rhythm or emotion to enhance a song’s starting position. Sometimes it works, other times we circle back to the original idea. At a minimum, hopefully this pushes us to find the core of the song. That tension has been a central part of writing music with Brendan through the years: we can push each other in a direction that the other might not have initially intended.

Trump has been playing with Brendan Hackett more or less forever. They are bonded by common experiences, lots of them, and a near perfect ability to recall any line from Top Secret. In the early Oh-Ohs, they were in a rock group called Runna Muck, which made a rather dirty form of rock music. Later, Trump was in a group called War Pigeon with drummer Cody Rahn.

They specialized in songs about birds and conflicts.

According to Hackett, the trio actually cut some tracks between 2006 and 2008 called the Brendan and the Bandolero Sessions. Rahn and Hackett also worked together with Wendy Johnson in the Wendy Hackett Band, which was an alt-country outfit. The Bern Band developed out of a desire amongst Hackett and Rahn to rock out smelly dive bars on the Upper West Side. “Bern” was a nickname bestowed upon Hackett by Microsoft, which autocorrects his nickname “Bren” to Bern. The first Bern Band EP, Just Not Today, was recorded by the trio back in 2020. As you can see, their relationship and indeed its chemistry goes back much longer than that.

I actually filled in for Trump on some shows in the late ’90s with Hackett. We played the Allman Brothers’ “Statesboro Blues” and drunk Class of ’97 high school grads even danced on a deck. That’s about all I remember. I also remember that Trump was reading Welcome to the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut when we all went skiing back in ’96, and that was the moment when I first learned about Vonnegut. Like I said, those Trump brothers could turn you on to new things.

D. TRUMP: I’ve spent countless hours digesting records with these guys. Driving in vans, sitting in dorm rooms, hanging by train tracks — we shared songs that informed each other’s passions and what drives our creative engines. I hesitate to get more specific as influence lists can be be too on the nose, meant to impress, or simply buried too deeply to be clearly heard in the music.

Trump lives in Seattle these days, having moved to the City of Spoonmen long ago. This has presented recording challenges for the bicoastal Bern Band, but ones that have not been insurmountable and, indeed, may have led to unexpected bursts of creativity in the studio.

In the previous part of this review, I remarked on the first two tracks on the EP. Now we shall explore the next two songs, “Slow Siren” and “Only Alright.” “Slow Siren” has foggy atmospherics. As I told Hackett, it reminded me of the autumn mist that wraps itself around the trees and inlets of Long Island where we all grew up, but might as well be inspired by the rainy weather at Trump’s newer home on Puget Sound. Trump was mostly responsible for this tune, I’ve heard. The song’s structure is familiar, but the Wall of Sound created is really inspiring. The tune trails off with what could be a wail of feedback, like a wind carrying the music away with it.

According to Hackett, Trump has become quite the producer since his orange afro, singing Soundgarden in the junior high locker room whilst reading Kurt Vonnegut days, and has become a sound chemist, sort of like the Beastie Boys were in their peak, Hello Nasty late ’90s period.

“Slow Siren” is just one potion from the lab.

“Only Alright” follows it right up with this really lovely slow number. I don’t want to overemphasize the Petty influence here — after all Tom was stealing left and right from Roger McGuinn of The Byrds — but man, it makes me sad to hear anything that sounds like Petty these days. “Sometimes the worst it gets is only alright,” well yeah, but that ain’t going to bring back Petty, Hackett. “And in the end, no one wins, we all lose …” Thanks a lot. Are you reading my mind? And the solo is just what you need, as sugartasty as a slice of pie at an Oklahoma truck stop diner.

Not like I have ever had one of those, but I have read about them.

B. HACKETT: (For) the album No One Wins, because it was started in COVID, we had nothing but time. I would demo the songs on a Roland 8-track (because I loathe computers) and send them to Dave, he would make comments and we would go from there. He would do the same, send me something he was working on and so forth. Then Cody and I would go to the studio (The Bunker, in Brooklyn) and record the drums and basic guitars together and then bounce the track to Dave who would add bass, or guitar or synth, et cetera. It was not an ideal way to work but we were able to really craft the songs. I have never been prouder of a group of songs we have done than this last endeavor.

C. RAHN: This music takes me back to late 60s and 70s rock sounds and everything from Deep Purple to The Doors to Led Zeppelin and that kind of energy informs the sounds I go for with the drums as well as how hard I hit, what embellishments I choose, and where I consider leaving space for the other guys to get out front and play. I want the performance to harken back to the music that influenced us as kids and display how it informed the music we make today.

D. TRUMP: I think we all get pretty introspective about our parts to a degree that people outside the project might not care about or notice. We talk about adding a bit of Nashville lead before the lyrics take us to Texas. What about if Lemmy played bass on an AC/DC song? Is the giant cowbell too big? Early Sabbath…but Ozzy was from Long Island. Is that backing vocal too Lennon-y? Yes, the big purple drum kit is essential to the sound. Was that too much or too little? I feel like we do this for ourselves. We’ve built a catalog of music going back about 18 years. That’s gotta be worth something.

SIDE NOTE: If you are a bass guitarist, you’ll need to hear Trump’s lines on this record. There is not one misplaced note. Those of you from the Jack Bruce “I’ll play what I want and clean it up later” school, take note. This guy knows what he’s doing. I do not say this lightly, or out of eternal gratitude for Vonnegut. Honest.

the trumpet player from barcelona

AT THE START OF MARCH, our cat Kurru started behaving strangely. Kurru is a striped female cat, aged about 17 years. She’s thinned out in her elderhood and doesn’t eat with the same enthusiasm she once had, but she is still quite active, when she’s not sleeping the day away on the kitchen table. From time to time, I’d find her staring out the window. The winter was ferocious and long, but with the warmer weather, she’d become less intimidated by the idea of going outside.

She would usually sleep through the night, but when March began, she became more active in the early mornings. At about six, she would start to make odd noises that are difficult to transcribe. Let’s just say that all of Estonian’s lovely vowels were represented, such as ä, ö, ü, and õ. “Äöüõ! Äöüõ!” This wasn’t your usual “meow.” It was different. Naturally, it got on my nerves and I would have preferred to slumber on in silence beneath my warm blanket. A few times I shouted at her to be quiet, and even threw a pillow at her. The cat Kurru then ran to the other window and continued with her cat’s lament. Then one morning I looked out the window and saw who she was talking to. There was a beautiful black male cat there, who was saying the same things to her in that same strange voice.

Our cat isn’t of child-, or kitten-, bearing age anymore. I think. She’s an old lady. Seventeen! This would be as if Meryl Streep or Helen Mirren got pregnant. Maybe it’s still possible, but it just doesn’t happen every day. But this reality doesn’t seem to make a difference to the other cats. Someone in the cat community has apparently spread the news that in this apartment — our apartment — lives a female cat. And so those male cats arrive at six in the morning and line up beneath our Kurru’s window. I can hear their agony through the glass. Cats apparently can’t masturbate. Or can they?

I don’t really want to know, but anyway, our cat has had to live with this constant torment, that the neighbor boys just won’t give up. Sometimes I think she even enjoys this little mating season drama. She is more waiting for it than fearing it. Sometimes the black cat is beneath the window, but other times there is a fat orange cat with a flat face that looks like Boris Yeltsin. These cavaliers are waiting, steadfast. They want Kurru to come away with them. They don’t seem to be ready to give up any time soon.

How come they never give up?

***

But enough about cats! I actually wanted to talk about music today and Barcelona. And not just about music, but about a certain musician. At the edge of our town dwells a certain family of considerable means, they are nouveau riche — as far as I know they lack an aristocratic pedigree — but they have learned to live like the old rich live, to sleep in the best hotels, to drink the best wines, to appreciate fine art, travel, and the good life. Some time ago, these travels brought the mother and daughter of the family to Barcelona, where they stayed in an exclusive hotel suite. From the windows, one could look out on all that Barcelona had to offer.

The mother of the family is a little older than me, a mature, beautiful and intelligent woman, who wears wonderful clothes. Her daughter is about 20 and is studying international affairs in Geneva. She has blond hair and has a good sense of humor. She’s also quite playful and likes to make jokes, like a puppy, I guess. It’s always fun to pal around with her. For me though she has always just been my friend’s youngest daughter. She has never been anything more.

This is an important fact, because one night she met a man who is about the same age as me. A little younger, but not much. This happened when they decided to visit a Barcelona jazz club called “Tony’s Swing Club.” In the band, there was an American who sang and played the trumpet. I don’t know where he really was from, but I like to think he came from New Orleans.

“I’m sorry,” my friend’s daughter said some time ago when she told me about him, “but that trumpet player looked a lot younger than you.” “Does he have three daughters,” I asked in response. “No, he has no children,” she answered and added, “and he’s never been married either.”

“Well, that’s why he looks so young,” I said. “Give him three daughters and a rough divorce and let’s see how young he looks.” “Yes, it’s hard to say what he’s done in his life,” the young lady agreed. “Apparently he’s just been playing the trumpet.”

He definitely played the trumpet and quite well. So well that my friend, the young lady’s mother, invited him to their hotel for a private concert. And that almost 40-year-old musician from New Orleans went along, of course. I don’t know what he looks like, but I imagine something like Harry Connick, Jr. At the hotel, he serenaded them. Maybe he performed something from the Louis Armstrong songbook. “And I say to myself, what a wonderful world …” The woman and her daughter sat and watched and listened. When the concert was over, they applauded.

Later they all drank some good Spanish red wine.

“I thought that musician was interested in me,” the mother of the family acknowledged to me later. She really is an attractive woman and charismatic, and these kinds of women are known to often drive men crazy. “But then I understood that he was actually in love with my daughter.”

I don’t know if this revelation disappointed her. The woman will soon turn 50. The daughter is in her early twenties. But, to borrow a line from the American President John F. Kennedy, “the torch was passed to a new generation, a generation born in this century.” Unfortunately, the musician’s young muse wasn’t interested in him. The trumpet player was sad about it, but he still didn’t give up.

***

Quite the opposite. A few weeks later he arrived to Estonia. Officially, he was here to attend a music festival, but he really came for the young lady. I have a hard time understanding just what exactly he was after. Love? That this young lady — half girl, half woman — would respond to his interests? But what would become of the young lady’s career in international affairs? Or did he want to marry her? Or maybe just to steal a kiss?

Here, I admit that I’ve had similar experiences. Because of that, I can tell you that he had no idea what he wanted. Sometimes a woman’s spirit gets so deep inside of you, it’s hard to exist without it. It takes over your whole body and soul. It’s even hard to breathe. It’s hard to think. It’s hard to be. It makes men do stupid things, not on purpose, but because if they don’t buy those plane tickets or send that love letter, they will go insane or explode. It’s such a big ball of energy, like crashing waves on a stormy ocean.

The waves will flow, whether you like it or not. The only question is how to navigate them.

This time, when my friend’s daughter’s musical suitor appeared in Estonia, she was quite direct with him. She told him all kinds of nasty things and then blocked him on every channel.

“I told him that I was sad that he was so old and had accomplished so little in his life,” the young lady told me. “I didn’t mean it, of course. I just wanted him to leave me alone.”

With a broken heart, the trumpet player dragged himself back to Barcelona. Maybe he even cried, as I have cried. Maybe he wrote to her, as I have written to women. Maybe he even lied to himself, as I have lied to myself.

“She was too young.” “She wasn’t the right one.” “Who wants to be with a woman who is still in college?” the trumpet player lied to himself. He went back to his jazz club, met some Spanish woman named Maria, got drunk and wound up in bed with her. But all through the night he spent with Maria, he was haunted by a tiny Estonian plika.

It’s not so easy to free yourself from a woman’s spirit.

In the morning, he grabbed his smartphone and tapped out some sentences to her and pressed send.

“Does he still write to you?” I asked the young lady recently. “No,” she answered but then whispered, “actually, he does, but I don’t respond. But, yes, he still writes.”

“See,” I said. “Some people just don’t give up.”

***

There are a lot of stories like this and I hear them all the time. Most women are tired of these characters. A real man should be like a Cleveron robot who goes where you want him to go and then says something when you press a button. When you say, ‘Don’t write to me,’ he won’t write because he’s a good robot.

But some still write. And not just men. Women too. This has become my strange hobby. I ask friends if their suitors are still writing them, or if they have given up. I am trying to understand their psychology and my own. I have a friend who left her partner long ago because he was smoking too much pot. She blocked him everywhere and told him she never wanted to see him again. The reasons for the split were clear. But the man kept on calling, until his number was blocked too. “I don’t understand what his problem is,” the woman said. “Do I really have to spend my whole life with my ex-boyfriend haunting me?” That guy just won’t give up though. He is stuck inside a prison he built for himself, where his thoughts spin round in circles. With all channels blocked, maybe he might send a message by carrier pigeon?

“Sometimes it seems to me that when a woman falls in love, it’s nice, but when a man falls in love, it can be catastrophic,” a famous Estonian singer once told me, who is considered to be something of a love expert.

One of my male friends though said that it’s programmed into the culture. “Women play hard to get. Are they flirting or not? In films we often see how the main characters hate each other at first but become lovers in the end.” This happens in many old and new movies, he noted.

“What else do people have left, when they can’t even believe in love?” asked another friend rhetorically, who has become a well-known actress. “People like to believe that they know what’s best for them. And if this good thing is this girl who tells you no all the time, they still believe that she will say yes in the end. That she will finally see the same things that you see, and that a happy ending still awaits.

“For me, the most interesting thing is that we still think we know what’s best for us,” the actress went on. “I certainly don’t think that I know what’s best for me. Life knows best. And if life doesn’t offer me that boy I want, then naturally he’s not the right one for me. That’s why I don’t pursue people in such a way.”

According to this actress, some people just don’t listen to life, but she acknowledged the game of love can be confusing. “Especially when all women supposedly want you to compete for their hearts,” she said. “Then you have to figure out if you should still compete for her love or just leave her alone.”

***

I don’t know what became of that trumpet player from Barcelona. It’s possible that he’s still performing in the same club. Or maybe he’s moved on, to Madrid or Paris. Maybe his heart was so broken that he moved back home to New Orleans. Maybe he met a nice person along the way and they’re now married and expecting a daughter. Maybe he doesn’t look so young anymore. If he still thinks of that Estonian girl, maybe she has inspired him to play the blues only better. Maybe his solos are more emotive now, more intense, richer and deeper. Maybe when he sings, his voice cracks as if he’s about to cry. Maybe it was necessary for him to get his heart broken, so that he would get to the next level.

In this way, pain can be a blessing. As I have found with my own pain. I could of course write about the person who broke my heart. I could write about her until the end of my days. Novels, short stories, and poems. Some part of this experience won’t ever leave me, no. Part of my heart just won’t give up on her.

I find myself still thinking of her, especially in those early mornings at first light, when the cat goes to the window to give her cat’s concert. Our sturdy, mature feline awaits her suitors on the other side of the glass. It’s terrifying sure, but also a little thrilling.

And there she sits. She sits and she waits and she never gives up.

An Estonian-language version of this piece recently appeared in Edasi.

‘How Silly Can You Get?’ A Review of The Bern Band’s New EP, No One Wins, Part I

A scene from 1984’s *Top Secret*, starring Val Kilmer as Nick Rivers, an endless source of inspiration.

I WAS PLANNING to write something beautiful and majestic but I ran out of time. I’m thinking about that Zelda Fitzgerald comment, how Scott’s progress on Tender is the Night was being anthologized in Encyclopaedia Britannica. In this case, I can’t afford to wait nine years. The Bern Band will have come out with several EPs or albums by then.

What is this then? A loose attempt to review The Bern Band’s latest EP No One Wins. Free jazz. For some reason, each time I try to write about this EP, I start thinking about the movie Top Secret. According to Bern Band singer, guitarist, everyman Brendan Hackett, this film introduced him to adult silliness, but there is just so much more to it. I feel like this film defines our philosophy toward life. I cannot yet articulate how though, but it’s all there in the “How Silly Can You Get?” or “Skeet Surfing,” or, “What? Do I have to hear again what a great cause you and Nigel are fighting for? My only cause is my music.”

… is my music, is my music, is my music.

There is something haunting about that film, if only I know that I can repeat any line of it to Brendan, or bassist Dave Trump, and maybe even the drummer Cody, and I will get the following line repeated back.

“They’d have enough salt to last forever.”

“What phoney dog poo?”

Thirty-one summers ago, at a time when Billy Joel ruled the airwaves with “The River of Dreams,” which was his Long Island take on “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” Brendan and I lived probably our last summer as non-musicians. We spent that summer watching goofy movies like Top Secret or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Essential learning for teenage boys. We made ridiculous movies with a camcorder that I hope have long been lost and will never be found. He might have had an acoustic guitar by then. I’m not sure. But by that fall, I had my bass guitar and we were playing. That might have been our last boyhood summer. Ninety-three. In those days, ahem, you heard music on the radio or in movies, or maybe your older sibling might have hipped you to some groups (which is how I wound up with Led Zeppelin IV). I remember working for Brendan’s uncle and hearing “A Day in the Life” on the radio. This was the only place you might hear it, unless your parents had some vinyls lying around, or you could scrape together some money to get a CD. This was a deluxe investment, because CDs were supposed to survive everything.

Even nuclear war.

That $11.99 or whatever at The Wiz on Long Island in 1993 went far.

So that is the sort of technological and musical milieu from which we emerged. After that we were musicians and half-men. We started playing music at a tender age, 13-14. You can’t really start bands any younger unless you go to one of those camps, or you’re a four-year-old guitar virtuoso on YouTube. This is important, because it shows that we got the bug so early. I say we, but Brendan of course took it as far as a person can go with it, and he’s still taking it there. He is in his car, driving to that musical future. I do find it kind of funny, because one aim of this group is to make the kinds of songs we heard on the radio growing up. But not “The River of Dreams”. No. Other tunes that might become apparent upon listening.

***

The first song on No One Wins is called WTLF. I don’t know what that stands for. Maybe, “What the living fuck?” Or is it loving fuck? A living, loving fuck? It could be, but it also seems too easy. It also looks at first glance like the name of a Long Island radio station. WBLI. WALK. WTLF. The kind of station that used to play the so-called classic rock that has served as the raw material for this musical project. For the Bern Band are definitely recyclers, but they make something new. They are up-cyclers. They are digging through the trash, spinning gold from memories of old Heartbreakers, Cheap Trick and Thin Lizzy records.

They take the banana leaves of 1970s rock and press them into exquisite high end 2020s musical goods.

Years ago when I was toying with the idea of becoming a music journalist, like David Fricke or Lester Bangs, god forbid, I remember someone saying that the riffs on a Weezer record were “hot dog plump.” But here, I would say the guitars are “peanut butter chunky.” This is the nuttiest, chunkiest, thickest variety of peanut butter rock guitar there is on the shelves. The song itself feels a bit off balance or disjointed, but in a good way. There are these tunes like WTLF that you need to listen to 25 times just to fully “get.”

The second track on the new Rolling Stones album is like that, “Get Close to You.” Every time I listen to it, I hear something new. But what does WTLF stand for anyway? Maybe these are weird chord names. I think Jefferson Airplane had a track called DCBA-25, which was a make of LSD on the streets of the Haight, but Paul Kantner also used to inform his chord changes. Or was it the other way around? Is there a variety of WTLF acid? Winnipeg Toronto Laval Fredericton. Were these stops on a Canadian tour? WTLF, indeed.

The next tune on the record is called “Misery.” This one could have had its own MTV Buzz Clip back in 1994. The chord changes are that familiar, but in a comfortable way, and the vocals are perfect. It’s one of those songs you already know, just from the first few seconds. It’s as if Soul Asylum and the Wallflowers decided to jam and invite Mike Campbell to play lead. In a way, and I am not afraid to say it, but that’s what this album reminds me of at times. It’s as if it’s a lost Heartbreakers project, but without Tom.

I know how much Brendan worshipped Petty. I used to play “Last Dance with Mary Jane” in a band with him in junior high school. That was probably one of the songs we learned to play so long ago. Did I have to sing? Maybe not. Maybe it was “King” Jim O’Rourke doing the singing on that joint? I remember playing that tune on a deck somewhere and kids coming through the woods to listen to us, somewhere on Long Island. But, anyway, King Petty is dead, and someone needs to step into the vacuum. There is just a hole there. Someone needs to pick up the flag and take this thing forward. Who better than Brendan to feel that hole and to try to fill it with his own music? That’s what music is anyway. Torches are passed. We pick them up and carry them forward in our own ways. The ending of this song is memorable. What I like about this EP is that there’s so much to explore. But I’m not done exploring this subject. There is more to come. We need to talk about Dave Trump, ska, Kurt Vonnegut, Seattle versus New York, and other things.

We’ve only talked about two tracks on the EP!

There is more to write about. But we shall get there. You will see.

nightfall

THE APARTMENT had a balcony. That much I remember. I remember the waning light and the curtains that moved with a light sea breeze. The bed sheets were dark, so dark that when night fell all was dark. It was Linnéa’s apartment, and then at some point she came home. I couldn’t see her in all that darkness. I could only hear her voice. She was talking about something, quite engagingly. There was some self analysis, a few projections and forecasts. She has this kind of crystalline voice that gets inside you and blows around you like a cool wind. Linnéa got into bed after that. I couldn’t see her, but I could feel her body pressing against mine. I could feel her legs, her warm bottom and her hair, which was everywhere.

For a moment, the wind picked up and the curtains parted. I could see her gold hair laid out across a pillow. And then there was that pink breast. It seemed to be the perfect shape, it was as soft as a cloud or as a dream, and sweet as passion, and my hunger for it even surprised me. I was still slurping on that thing until first light broke, and just one of them. Linnéa only looked down at me with pitying curiosity, as if she was an avid bird watcher. “You’ve been waiting to do this for a long time, haven’t you?” said Linnéa. “There’s no shame in it. It’s in your heart.”

müra and jura

THEN I WENT TO TALLINN where Linnéa was waiting for me in her office with colleagues. She was dressed in black and admonishing me for all my shortcomings in life. This dressing down went on for some time, considering there was so much wrong with me. Her colleagues seemed to enjoy the show, particularly the moment where I cracked and simply said nothing and nodded as I was verbally undressed and assessed. I cannot say that it was a good feeling.

Later, Linnéa felt sorry and invited me over for tea. She was wearing her national folk costume, the one with the big funny hat, and looked like a print from some Estonian-themed matchbox. Linnéa was sharing her apartment with two other women and her daughter. It was sort of like Full House, starring Linnéa as the Bob Saget character around whom all other stories turn. She told me then that she loved me, that under all of the müra (noise) and jura (nonsense) was love.

“Don’t you know that I really love you?” she said, gesturing in her national folk costume.

This time I actually believed her.

Linnéa left after that to take her daughter to her ex-husband’s apartment and I left to take the train back to Viljandi. But walking down the sidewalk toward the Baltic Station, I realized that my feet were very cold and wet. I had left my shoes behind at Linnéa’s apartment! How could that even happen? Who forgets their shoes? When I got back, all of the lights were out. I could hear someone stirring in bed. Maybe it was her? I searched around, and at last found my shoes beneath some piles of national folk costumes. Then I slipped them on and ran toward the station. The train was about to depart and I just made it through the doors before they closed for the last time. The long train south was thick with passengers. It was standing room only.

you made me into a dream

A DREAM TO SOME, a nightmare to others. The month rolled in, full of fog and gray misunderstandings. And then one night in bed with Lata, I recognized the very moment when everything had turned wrong, and where my main path had diverged from the River of Good Intentions. Lata was dressed in black and tried to comfort me, but it just kept on flowing and flowing, and there was no turning back. Years of unresolved feelings came spurting out. For weeks after that I was a mess. I was riding the trains. How did it even happen? I likened it to the kalima, the orange Saharan sands that drift across the blue sky of the Canaries. Maybe it was spring or maybe it was the sun. Or maybe it was just another kind of cracked awakening.

There it was in the wind, a streak of hazy yellow over the horizon.

It was whispering in a woman’s voice, “you made me into a dream.”

At the start of the winter, I had one last encounter with Dulcinea. She had jumped me by the airplane factory and cut out my heart with an icicle, if only to free herself from my stubborn love. And for a while after that I wandered. It was a dark, hard, peripatetic life. I slept under eaves and in back alleyways. I met other strangers afflicted by various maladies and misfortunes. I was one of them. Lost, cold, and heartless. But the thing is — my heart grew back. At first, it was just a tiny beating red lump. Then as big as an apple. She must not have cut the whole thing out. A small shred of tissue had been left behind. It regenerated. Whatever freedom she had sought, or tried to retrieve, it had all horribly backfired. Whatever spell she had tried to undo, she had doubled it. I wondered what happened to the old cut-away heart.

The new heart was even more powerful.

Then one morning, I understood that all along, I had only wanted to give life to her. I wanted her to bloom and blossom with life. I wanted to see her as rich and flowering with life as the jungles of India. This idea made me very happy and later on, when a Nepali woman asked who I was, I told her the story. The Nepali woman listened, and seemed to understand everything.

She nodded and said, “We must remain true to our ideas.”

tiny sparks

THOSE WERE WEIRD NIGHTS. One night I went to Dubai, which happened to look like the freeway in California. There were motels with green swimming pools and chain restaurants serving up greasy fare. The bus was there to take some Estonian soldiers to the war. They were all geared up and camouflaged. But at a sandy rest stop outside of San Bernardino, or the Dubai equivalent, while they were standing around smoking, I took one last look at the boys and slinked off toward some cluster of desert trees. Yes, I felt like a coward, but so what?

On another night, an Estonian woman I know kept telling me about her love for her ex-boyfriend, Charbel, who was Lebanese. From the outside, she was a beautiful soul, and had a beautiful appearance too, but when you looked inside this soul of hers, you realized she was still smarting from the breakup. She loved Charbel and not me, which was OK, but I could never understand what one could love in either of us. What was there to love about men? We had no breasts. We had no hips. We had no life-giving powers. We also lacked the ability to see into souls. Well, most of us. We were just our lonesomeness and our hobbies and our thoughts and our hard, sinewy muscles. It seemed like a losing proposition, to waste one’s love on a man, but she had loved one at least, and his name was Charbel. The Lebanese had hurt her.

The weirdest moments though came in the early mornings. Again, I saw the sparks in the apartment. These were tiny bursts of light, almost like the glow of a firefly, but they moved through the air slowly. It was almost like the tip of a cigarette, yet with no cigarette and no hand to hold it. It traced a snaky path through the air and then it faded into the air of the room. It was there long enough to hold my attention. It was strange enough for my mind to register it and to understand that it was unusual and that I really had seen nothing like it before. That tiny light tracing a path through the air. I saw the sparks two times. Were these those ghostly orbs I have heard so much about? But they didn’t seem to be orb sized. Smaller. Whatever they were, I could not make sense of them. They seemed neither threatening to me nor benign. They were just naturally manifesting. I made a decision to contact a ghosthunter.

Maybe they could provide some explanations.

charlie watts’ iced coffee

IT WAS ARRANGED that I would do some field work with another anthropologist from the initiative. We were dispatched to a viewing platform at night. From there, we would make observational notes about human behavioral patterns. I had never worked with this woman before. She had brown hair, glasses, and blue eyes. She was not exceptionally pretty but not unattractive either. The first thing she said when we got on the platform was, “We should just get this part out of the way.” With that, she inserted her hands under my shirt and into my trousers and began to feel around. It was as much an inspection as an introduction. At times, she squeezed me, but not too hard. I just lied back and let her explore me. It wasn’t unpleasant.

After work, I went to a nightclub where they were playing Prince. The cut was “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” off of 1983’s 1999. Igrayne was at the bar with some of her friends. She was wearing a loose, open blouse and her golden hair was pulled back in a braid. She was sipping some awful fruity drink, and her light eyes were funeral black from midnight romps with surly strangers, angst, anguish, hangovers, and other bloody nightclub stories. “I want to kiss you,” I told Igrayne. “But we’re just friends,” she said. “This is all just friendship. That’s all this is.” At that, I began to lick her neck in a very friendly, neutral way. “This is just friendship,” I told her. “We’re just friends.” It felt good to kiss Igrayne’s warm neck. My daughter of course happened to walk by at this moment, a little distressed by the whole scene. “Daughter,” I said. “Meet Igrayne, your new stepmother.” They stared at each other curiously, like furry forest animals.

I slipped out the back door.

The tiki bar was up on the jungle plateau outside the town. Only a single dirt path led up to it. It was built of jungle wood, and drew a certain kind of crowd, mostly Hells Angels and Satanists. It was dark when I finally got up there. At the bar, I ordered a drink that came in a coconut that had been carved to look like a human skull. I was standing at the bar when I noticed a familiar man coming my way through the dark. It was none other than Charlie Watts, the late drummer of the Rolling Stones. “But Charlie, you’re dead,” I said. “Not here, I’m not,” he answered. He was tan and his hair was still brown. He wore a t-shirt, jeans, and sandals. He said, “Would you mind holding my drink? I’ll be right back. Just need to do some things.”

“Sure, Charlie,” I said. There I stood at the tiki bar, holding Charlie Watts’ iced coffee. I stood there for a long time. I imagined he had gone to find a bush, or was having some words with the owner of the bar. But Mr. Watts never came back for his iced coffee. It was in a clear plastic cup with a straw, and the ice cubes were melting. They clinked around inside the brown liquid like shards of glass. It looked as if he had bought it at Starbucks. I waited and waited and walked around the tiki bar and called out into the jungle night, “Charlie! Charlie! What about the coffee?” But Mr. Charlie Watts never came back for his melting iced coffee.

No, Charlie never did come back.

return to tallinn

IT WAS A FEW WEEKS LATER that I returned to the capital, taking an evening train to Liiva, so I could spend the night on a friend’s couch before an early morning TV appearance.

The logistics of getting from the provinces, the periphery, to the capital city, are at times challenging. There is no way to be in Tallinn that early other than to drive, and who wants to drive to Tallinn from the South during January blizzard weather, though this is often done?

I barely slept and was afflicted by a profound melancholy all night long, and found myself yearning for elusive feminine comfort, and sort of clutching my pillow, only to have a half dozen horror stories replay in my mind, as if warning me to be careful of what I wished for. I didn’t mention a word of it to my friend as we drank coffee in his kitchen at 7 am. Nõmme is probably a coveted place to live, and expensive, though I haven’t asked about prices, but it’s just like Tähtvere in Tartu or any other place in this country. You look out the window and you see other windows, and maybe other people behind those windows, but you barely know who they are, and you probably never will, and the city mindset is, why would you care to know?

This is how people think. In 1968, the American soul group Sly & The Family Stone released a song called “Into My Own Thing,” and it seems that everybody here these days is into their own thing everywhere. Especially in neighborhoods like Nõmme, where the houses are separated by plots of fenced-off land and large, view-obscuring trees. This is a quiet suburb, where one can be left alone, mostly, to read his books and drink his coffee alone and be into his own thing. In the morning, I ordered a Bolt to take me to the Postimees House, across from the Sikupilli shopping center. My friend told me that only the criminally insane shop at Sikupilli. He also said that a real writer would walk through the snow and not take a Bolt.

“I guess I am not a real writer yet,” I told him.

When he asked me what I planned to do in Tallinn, I told him I was going to visit Kopli.

“Why would you even do that to yourself?” he asked.

“Because I feel like it,” I said. “I haven’t been there in 20 years.”

***

AFTER MY INTERVIEW, I headed into town with snow and ice blowing in my face. I had breakfast at Must Puudel, the Black Poodle, right off the Town Hall Square. This café was only recently introduced to me by an old friend. I don’t know these things, you know, where to go to Tallinn, where to eat, who has the best coconut macchiato. I usually go to Reval Café in that big yellow building across from Sõprus, the one that also houses the Vallikraavi Bar and that looks like it should be in a Wes Anderson movie. That might be my favorite building in Tallinn and I aim to study it. I often go there and eavesdrop on conversations, but this time I chose Must Puudel, because I had read an article recently that said that Estonia’s slowburn economic crisis was causing regular Must Puudel patrons to skip cake and just order coffee, so I decided I would patronize the place and help them out. Of course, I was dreaming that I would meet someone interesting or that something interesting would happen. Maybe an archaeologist might need someone to help him find some treasure, or a woman would dump all of her marital problems on me in a bid to get me into bed and to forget about her personal life.

These things just don’t happen in cafes anymore. Not to me. They happen on Messenger, maybe, and people come into cafes and just sit there behind their computer screens and try to look busy, which is what I was doing. I did manage to befriend a cultural organizer from Rakvere, who said she likes a good day in Tallinn. She doesn’t want to live here, she says, but she enjoys these moments, an early morning’s coffee at Must Puudel, with the snow outside. One of those orange Omniva delivery carts had wheeled up beyond the window and the mailman was out delivering to the nut sellers and karaoke bar owners. Or so I imagined. I do love those Omniva delivery carts. The last time I was in Tallinn, I even took a picture of one.

***

AND THERE I WAS, waiting from Tram No. 1 to take me out to Kopli at last. I usually dodge this tram whenever I go to walk around Kalamaja, but here I was, getting aboard. All I could remember about the old place was the adjacent gray sea, and the burned wood houses, the result of many drunken winter heating mishaps. I used to teach English to a kid who lived out there years ago, whose mother was from Narva, and I used to pass the old burned out Kopli houses and marvel at them. When you are away from Estonia, you forget about this indigent element, living on the margins of the city, warming itself by a wood-heated furnace. You forget about these ghosts of alcoholism, desperation, frostbite. How many souls has this city swallowed up like little tins of salted fish? The troubled father of a friend’s boyfriend was out in the streets during the most recent cold snap and froze to death. It’s strange, but somehow you learn not to look, to obscure your own vision, to forget about the burned houses of Kopli.

Yet there they were again, with open windows. Nobody bothers to live in them anymore. At least not officially. The Kopli tram was mostly empty, and the only people I noticed speaking to each other were a girl of maybe 12 years with dark hair and dark eyes, and a boy who was a little older. She was sitting in his lap and talking to him in her purple parka. Maybe they were a couple? When we got to the last stop, they both got out. I was certain they were Russians or Ukrainians, but no, they were speaking Estonian to each other. They looked like they could have been Japanese, or at least the Ainu who live in Hokkaido, Sakhalin, or some other place.

Not all Estonians look like the little blonde girl on those Anneke chocolate bars.

They hung around in the snow for a moment and then dispersed to wherever they came from. This was their Kopli life. It happened every day, and I only got to catch a glimpse of it. For just these moments, our paths had crossed. The tram had the name of a popular Estonian folk group called Curly Strings on it. Their most popular song is probably “Kaugses Külas,” “In a Faraway Village,” the refrain of which is, “to get tan by the second of June.” In Kopli, even on Kopli Beach, in January, that hope is a faint dream. The kids on the Number 1 tram don’t talk about getting tan. I have no idea what they were talking about. Maybe K-Pop or Pokémon.

***

SO THAT WAS MY DAY, my big Tallinn day, spent walking around, kind of aimlessly. I had a few interviews for some stories I was working on, and walked between the various cafes where they were scheduled. I was supposed to meet Igrayne at the Reval Café on Pärnu maantee, which is the area where the Bronze Soldier riots were most fierce during that tense night 17 years ago. I wonder what happened to those kids who got arrested and spent the night in D-Terminal. They probably all got jobs, or have done something else with their lives. What else is there to do? Loot shops in perpetuity over some war monument? Would the same thing happen these days? Maybe not. Tallinn has just changed, and even the Bronze Soldier is a distant memory. Everything is fading into this new city. It is changing and renewing day by day. I even noticed that the notorious fast food kiosk had disappeared from the corner across from the Tallinn Central Library, and that the place where it stood had been overtaken by Swedbank.

As long as I had known Tallinn, that fast food kiosk had been there. Even on my first day in town, which was 29 August 2002, it was there. At some point, during the early Ansip years, I think some Swedish tourists tried to pick a fight with me there while I waited for french fries at about 2 am. There had been a second time, many years later, while staying at the Hotel Palace, when I was awakened multiple times in the night by the loud sounds of disagreements, climaxing with the crash of shattered glass and the howl-cry of anguish in the Finnish language, which is the most terrifying language, spiced with words like vittua and perkele. But it was all gone now. Yesterday. People accuse me of living in the past, but I need at times to catch up with the present. It takes time. You can’t just wipe it all away, clean slate. The kiosk used to be here. When I referred to the place in discussions with a friend, she called it the löögi-öögi burgeri koht.

This means something like, the hitting-vomiting burger place. Alas, it is no more.

Just a memory.

***

I KEPT WAITING, as I said, for some kind of adventure to present itself in Tallinn, but nothing really happened that day. Later, at Fika, talking to another journalist, I related my frustration. “You know, you get off the train in Bangalore, and already you are accosted by a rickshaw driver who wants to take you somewhere, or you see a dead dog lying in the middle of a street, or a beggar sleeping in a carpet, and things happen. The bus breaks down and you have to walk, but in Tallinn, things just happen predictably.” My friend, who is an Estonian and has lived here for almost 30 years, agreed and nodded. He’s a few years older than me, but has this good-natured boyish quality to him, though he does have a few wrinkles now. He recounted sad stories of programmers who washed up in Tallinn from places like Egypt or Indonesia and couldn’t make any friends. None at all. They suffered through seasons of silence and introversion and gave up. This has been changing though as more expats arrive and befriend each other. Once, I said, I happened to encounter a whole table full of Irish women sitting at a café. There were enough Irish women in Tallinn to fill a whole table. One had come for love.

“How do people even fall in love in Tallinn?” I asked my friend. My uncle, for example, had met his wife on a train in New York. It seemed like the natural kind of place where people met each other. They sat across from each other and talked and then exchanged numbers in those days. But I can’t recall ever having met anyone on a train in Estonia. It just didn’t happen.

I felt like I was locked outside of everyone else, but maybe that wasn’t Tallinn. Maybe that was all of us, disappearing into our own private digital worlds. It was just compounded by the city’s northern aloofness, which at first can feel soothing and wonderful, but later starts to haunt you, gives you a raw, melancholic feeling. Sometimes too much fresh air can hurt your lungs.

The city of Tallinn can hurt you in that same way.

“That’s just how it is,” my friend said. People meet at parties, he said. They do meet.

***

AT NIGHT, I took the Number 3 tram out to the Koidula stop in Kadriorg. Somehow, I had forgotten all about Kadriorg that day. For a lot of people, Tallinn is Kadriorg. It’s Kumu and Nöp. It was here, up a few streets, that I met another friend, who was seated behind a desk, running a dress shop like some character in one of those old Ibsen plays. She had a calculator in front of her, a computer, and a long yellow measuring tape. It was all arrayed before her, and it was very quiet and still snowing. She has three children now, and one of them had left some bits of cookies on her blue dress. She had white-blonde hair, big blue eyes, and looked tired.

After she closed up her shop, we walked to a cafe. One variety of homemade hummus cost €17 per kilo. Some organic meats were more than €40. These high-end goods are for people who think they have the money to afford them, I was later told, but all throughout my day, I had actually sensed the lingering trace of poverty. Even in the Solaris supermarket, I found myself gazing in wonder at a yellow truck full of Navelina oranges and green grapes, and marveling at piles of Costa Rican bananas and Polish and Dutch apples and pears, only because I can recall that 20 years ago in Tallinn, Stockmann had the only supermarket that sold Italian mozzarella, and it felt like luxury. Now you can buy three varieties of mozzarella at any corner shop. Those old post-Soviet poor days were done. These were the days of €17 hummus.

After dinner, we walked through Kadriorg and stared up at the windows of the houses. I liked Kadriorg, with its big houses, its shortcuts between them, it’s slanty roofs. It’s like a big fishing village. One of those windows is where my friend lives with her family, her husband and children. Other friends live behind other windows in houses nestled behind fences or right on the street. Behind one window, the naturalist Fred Jüssi is still living, perhaps drinking hot tea.

My friend is my age, 44, almost to the month, and we are both experiencing that brief midlife hangover moment. It seems this is the moment in life where you either give up, or you get going. I’ve known Tallinn for a long time now, so long it feels like eternity. So many things have happened here, I can no longer remember them all. But I am not giving up just yet. No, I am merely catching my breath here, taking stock, remembering, processing, and understanding. The only real choice is to keep moving forward. All feelings of hopelessness will be renewed. And just as old broken cities are made new, so too can people reinvent and restore themselves.