AFTER I ELOPED with Klaudia, I was thrust into a home improvement job. I knew it was coming, it was all too expected, but at that glowing, early moment in the relationship, I was in a tender, giving mood indeed, and felt fine about sawing some wood or painting some windows. We went to a home improvement store in Estonia, which could have been Bauhof or Decora, to get some supplies, and Klaudia engaged in some friendly banter with the cashier, another woman who, like us, was inarguably middle aged. Klaudia was in a swell mood that day and she looked quite beautiful with her plume of blonde hair and red winter outfit. One could say there was an irrepressible five year old locked inside. I did admire this childlike side of her.
“And he’s going to renovate it all!” I remember her regaling the cashier, who typed all her orders up hotly with freshly manicured nails. Klaudia was standing on a chair, gesturing wildly. Someone had given her a mug of Decora coffee and she was taking tasty sips from it. At this moment, I said, “Stand right there, just like that!” I lifted up Klaudia’s red sweater and licked both of her breasts. This was done in plain sight of all the other shoppers. There was something wonderful about the contrast of Klaudia’s warm pink nipples and the harsh light of Decora. Or wherever we happened to be. Rather than feeling exposed or humiliated, Klaudia’s mood only soared. She laughed like a child and her blue eyes smarted with breast-licking joy.
“Men are wonderful,” said the cashier, typing away. “They lick your breasts and work for free!”
After we picked up our supplies from the back of the home improvement store, we went home, and Klaudia disappeared behind a door to discuss something important with her mother with whom she consulted on all important things. I looked around the room I was set to renovate. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched in 40 years. There were even old posters for Return of the Jedi on the walls. Dust on the windows, on the walls, strangling out the air. “Klaudia,” I called out to her. “Is it okay if I open the windows in here? I can’t breathe.” No response. They were still on the other side of the door. I only heard muffled voices. What were they talking about?
I began to move things out into the hallway to make room for the renovation. Slowly, devotedly. The first was a long plank of wood which might come in handy for a shelf later. I moved it out into the hallway, unfortunately scratching the old 1980s vintage wallpaper in the process. But when I set it down in the corridor, Köler, an old Viljandi dissident, turned up in his work clothes and snatched it at once. He wanted to use it for his own renovation project! Old Man Köler has been working on that pizza parlor on Tallinn Street for a decade now. I watched him disappear down the hall with Klaudia’s wood. I called out to her again, but she was behind the door, discussing something passionately with her mom. Would they ever stop?
MAPLE LEAF was one of Estonia’s top drummers. His real name was Vahtraleht, which means “maple leaf” in Estonian, but his nickname was Vaht, which means “foam.” He was, by his 39th year, a seasoned and accomplished percussionist, who had once jammed with Tony Allen, Fela Kuti’s drummer, and Damon Albarn, albeit on congas. He had lived in several communes and had even spent a stint in Trenchtown. His hair was long and maple-colored, as was his beard, and his skin a flawless milk white. Because of this, he was nicknamed “Mormon Jesus” by some of his American friends. He played in three or four ensembles. He changed girlfriends like lightbulbs. It’s not easy to go steady with a mercurial character like Estonia’s own Maple Leaf.
But then he died. It was in a terrible car crash in Germany. Every single vehicle in the crash was German made. I think a BMW collided with his little white Volkswagen. Surprisingly, he survived the impact, but then crawled out onto the autobahn, where he writhed in pain for some time, pleading with God. “No,” he cried. “No!” Then, with a final tapping of his fingers, he expired from this life, and attained musical immortality. His was the kind of face that was spraypainted on the facades of old buildings in Tallinn, Tartu, and Viljandi. The Estonians had always yearned for their own Viktor Tsoi and in Maple Leaf, this had at least been achieved.
In honor of Maple Leaf and his dramatic end, I decided to bake a kind of maple sugar cake. I brought it into the temple that had been erected in his honor. This had been constructed in the same pattern of an ancient Indian temple. I found it incredibly sad that Maple Leaf would no longer play drums anymore. And to die in a car crash in Germany, of all godforsaken places. But nobody ate my cake at the Indian temple. I guess they were just too consumed with grief.
THE THIRD FLOOR of the psychiatric clinic was the musical floor. It was here that different patients were enrolled in a new kind of orchestral therapy. Nobody knew much about it, but Rory Lapp said that he just had to see it. “I think it might give me some inspiration,” he said.
Because of this, we broke into the hospital.
The first obstacle was the chain-link fence, which was easily overcome. Someone had forgotten to attach two pieces of fencing, and we slipped between them. Then came the highly guarded doors to the clinic. But an absent-minded orderly had left one of these ajar on a smoke break. We entered the building and began to climb the white stone steps. At times we were passed by mental health professionals in white coats, but they were so lost in their work, staring at the files of some patient, whether on a clipboard or a tablet, that they didn’t notice the two Estonian writers creeping around the highly off-limits clinical musical therapy ward.
At last we reached the top floor. Here the patients indeed roamed the halls, but some clenched violins, violas, and cellos. So this was the musical floor of the psychiatric hospital? And this was musical therapy? We looked around. “You know, I really have to say that I’m disappointed,” Rory said. “They don’t play or anything. I was expecting a concert.”
At this moment, an alarm began to sound to alert the hospital that it had been breached. We ran down the stairs and out a back door, into a crowd of local citizens. The back side of the hospital opened out onto the walking streets of a city that looked very much like Tartu. Police sirens could be heard nearby, and I understood that the entire hospital was being cordoned off. Rory and I quickly stole some tan jackets from a coatrack outside of a riverside café and blended away into the crowds.
A NEW FORM OF TRANSPORT, the Stockholm swing. It functioned as a kind of ski lift, except nobody was there to ski. Rather it glided along a set route through the city, like a funicular or cable car. Each swing could fit three people. Upon arriving to Stockholm, I shared my swing with Rory and Ella. We were lifted over the city, and Ella disembarked somewhere in Norrmalm to hunt for shoes for her collection. Ella owned at least a hundred pairs of shoes.
Rory had set up an interview with a local literary journalist. A young woman who must have been in her first year of university, and whose questions were delivered with a trembling uncertainty. I sat there outside a bakery with a coffee, naturally, answering her questions, as if I even knew the answers to them. The young woman wore simple, dark clothes. She had her brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She was Swedish. I have no idea how Rory knew her.
There must have been something in my drink, because I became incredibly sleepy after that, and was invited back to the journalist’s apartment, where I promptly fell asleep on her wide bed. During my sleep, I was awakened by a bouncing, and opened one eye, only to see Rory rather aggressively making love to her about a foot away from my elbow. She naturally surrendered, letting out light, excited gasps. I closed my eyes and pretended it was a dream.
Later, after Rory and the young Swedish literary journalist had parted ways in a Stockholm street, I confronted him. “She was only eighteen,” I told him. “Just a young woman of eighteen! Consider it, a man of your age. You should be ashamed of yourself!” Rory was impeccably dressed and feigned confusion. “What are you talking about?” he shrugged, his blue eyes smarting, as if he was entirely perplexed, baffled. “It was just a bad dream. You were dreaming,” he said. “She was just eighteen,” I repeated. “A bastard like you had to take advantage of her!”
After that, I suppose you could say Rory Lapp and I had what later would be termed “a disagreement.” He went his way and I went mine. I caught a passing Stockholm swing and rode it all the way to the harbor. The ships to Estonia left from a pier near an old imperial fortress. It had long since been abandoned, but in recent years had been repurposed with cafes and boutiques. Such were the ways of effete Europeans. It occurred to me there, descending the steps toward my ship, that I had once been married, and had walked these same steps with another person. A person whom the world would have called “my partner.” But I was all alone now. Ella had her shoes, Rory had his young Swedish journalist. I just had my old knapsack.
PIE IN THE SKY, gauzy cotton carpets, glides the plane toward Riga, the sun shining on its golden wing tip. In some places the clouds pile up like sand, mountains, valleys, crevasses, river deltas, a whole air world stacked on top of the land world. The self is a similar sort of shell game. Now you see it, poof! The Gulf of Riga, container ships slowly chugging somewhere with their cargo.
A poster for a play in Kranj, Slovenia. It’s only two hours by plane from Riga, Latvia, to Slovenia.
Upon arrival …
Kranj, Slovenia. #47 on this street or ulica is colored squash yellow, pumpkin orange, old chain-linked fences, weathered stones and concrete, pedestrian murmurings, grape vines, ivy vines, alpine balconies, a trumpet playing somewhere, a bicycle cycling something, whirrish whir displacing air. #16 on another ulica is painted hope-pink. Lekarna is a pharmacy and jaune santiarije is a public toilet, and ne must mean no, because that’s what a woman keeps saying to her dog.
Outside the bookstore, the sellers are smoking and sipping wine and saying something like koushka and Naked Lunch costs 16 euros inside, and outside a building under construction and covered in scaffolding a worker is yelling out “Matjas!” Later, the receptionist at the hotel informs me that the word I heard was kučki, which means two small dogs in Slovene, and prosim is please, of course, of course, a kuža is just a doggie, like the Estonian kutsu.
The next morning…
Each morning in Ljubljana is cool and foggy, until the sun burns off the mountain valley moisture.
I DON’T KNOW what to say about Ljubljana, I have trouble spelling and saying the name. Slovenia has Mediterranean elements, Alpine elements, South Slavic elements. I like the way the language looks on signs and billboards and theater posters. In a funny way, it reminds me of Lithuanian, only because of the length and special characters (these languages are far removed). (Vzgojiteljica is ‘kindergarten teacher’).
Reading some genetic studies of the Slovenes, conveniently featured on their Wikipedia page, I learned that they are closer to Czechs than to “real” South Slavs, like Bulgarians and Macedonians. The language? I know nothing. Prosim (please, thank you) gets you everywhere in Slavic land, and “Cheers” is the familiar na zdravje… I forget at times what a vast hunk of Europe is populated by Slavs of all flavors, the Poles, the Slovenes, the Croatians, the Slovaks, the Bosnians, the Serbs, the Ukrainians, and then those more niche groups, like the Ruthenians. Or were the Ruthenians the Ukrainians? Try the Rum Raisin Slavs, the Butterscotch Pecan Slavs, while you’re at it. They’re out there somewhere, inhabiting some valley …
Bear in mind, at times people are just as at a loss when it comes to the Estonians, so they can be forgiven when it comes to distinguishing all of these cultures and subcultures. It takes time to study up on Slovenia.
During breaks from workshops, your intrepid writer wandered aimlessly around, writing more nonsense.
ANYWAY, this is a lively city. People are outside in the evening, riding bikes, strolling, talking loudly. It’s by population smaller than Tallinn, but even on its finest summer days, Tallinn just isn’t as lively. People just seem to pour into restaurants and out of supermarkets. A lot of Slovenians are tall, even taller than me, and there is a subset of the guys with really frizzy, nappy hair, which they grow out, so that they look like Thulsa Doom’s henchmen from Conan the Barbarian. Some of them cut it short and ride around on electric scooters wearing puffy black vests or jackets. The Slovenian girls are ranging in packs and talking loudly. Their jackets are also puffy.
How funny that for them, Ljubljana is the world, and they are having modern day street romances by the dozen, and breaking up, and someone is dating someone in Kranj, or someone moved to … where do Slovenes even move to? Probably Vienna. Yes. They split up, and she moved to Vienna for work. Broke his heart in two. All of this drama taking place in this foggy basin, people made born and lived, day by day in Slovenia, and the world shuffles by, barely taking notice.
The hotels (I’ve been spoiled) have retained some continental grace. Very Grand Budapest Hotel, the concierge is overly eager to help. In Estonia, they are too busy texting their friends, or just don’t want to make eye contact at all. There’s no, “Yes, sir,” “Anything else. sir?” Estonia could use a little more Monsieur Gustave H, I think. But who am I to judge?
***
Who was I when I was here 23 years ago? Am I still him at all? What has become of all that? Well, there’s no need to dwell on it. Yesterday went into yesterday, like krill into the belly of a baleen whale, and I don’t recall it all, nor should I.
***
The long way up the castle hill. This photo snapped accidentally while talking to my daughter on the phone.
THE LAST TIME I was in Slovenia, it was ’02. A lot of time has elapsed since then, but it doesn’t feel so far away. It hasn’t yet taken on the glow of nostalgia. I didn’t have a phone then, and nobody really knew where I was, although my father said he could track my movements according to the bank statements that were mailed home. It wasn’t a big issue.
I did have a journal with me, so somewhere in my closet, buried underneath all of my other journals*, I can find out more or less what happened, but since I have not retrieved these memories since about that time, I only have some recollections of the bus station, the hotel, some cool-looking teenagers sitting in a park, the church, the river, and not making it up the hill to the castle (which repeated again this time, as I did not hike all the way up. Maybe it will take 23 more years to get there?) And of course the trip to the caves, which are called jama in Slovenian, which means crap or bullshit in Estonian. But that’s about it. Maybe some more will resurface. I was only 23 years old the first time.
Enough about that. In Slovenia, when you walk into a shop, the shopkeepers will often greet you with “dan,” which means, “day,” as in “good day,” dober dan. I was thinking that if your name happened to be Dan, this would be a good city to live in, because every time you went to the supermarket or popped into the bookstore, the sellers would address you personally. “Dan!” Or imagine the unsuspecting Dan who ventured into Slovenia, only to hear strangers saying his name to each other. He walks into the bookstore, but all the girls keep saying his name, or maybe he thinks he’s hearing things. Onset schizophrenia.
“Dan,” they all whisper. “Dan, dan, dan!”
The city at night, more restless wandering awaits.
ON A SATURDAY NIGHT, Ljubljana was fairly lively into the late hours, though most boutiques and stores closed their doors by 9 pm. I wonder about these pretty faces through the windows, the Slovenian yuppie set, who do they work for, where do they get their nice sweaters? Some clubs remained open, and I heard all kinds of fun music from the speakers, including Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg’s “Deep Cover,” followed by some vintage Michael Jackson (pre-Off the Wall, maybe Jackson 5?) and then Tom Jones’ rendition of “Burning Down the House,” followed by Lipps Inc.’s 1980 hit “Funky Town.” A guitar player was singing “Creep” by Radiohead but he couldn’t hit those Thom Yorke high notes.
There were also decent restaurants open late, serving fried seafood, Indian curries, and kebab, which is what you need if you want to get some deep sleep. In the earlier part of the evening, I attended a traveling Flemish production of Medea’s Children with Slovenian subtitles. I think I understood a few phrases in Flemish (their expression for “please,” alsjeblieft, is the same as it is in Dutch) but Slovenian was impenetrable. It looked like a cat had run across the keyboard. (Where are you from is od kod prihajaš? and thank you is hvala!) I was reminded of the fake “Eastern European” language from Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence (where the Estonian word for hand, käsi is taught by the concierge to the little Swedish boy in the hotel).
Ingmar Bergman employed a fake “Eastern European language in his 1963 film Tystnaden or The Silence.
And then he writes…
Oh, the melancholy sorrow of the pretty youths and sorrow over missing my own pretty youth, long gone and burned away, but can it be resurrected, just like the actress cries on demand for the camera, her cheeks wet and so sincere, the tenderness of lovely youth, and afterwards an after party of salami, prosciutto, Slovenian theatre life, as if I ever knew what I was doing ever.
The next day
Across from here we had a good lunch of fried fish, potatoes, drenched in a yummy creamy garlic sauce.
SLOVENIA HAS MIXED/uncomfortable feelings about its southern neighbors, let’s call them that. Someone asked a friend something in Serbo-Croatian, which was taught to all Yugoslav school children prior to 1991 as a common state language. Old-school nationalism, everyone in a single geographic box, speaking the same language, believing in common myths that link their heritage with a mystery genetic component (it’s in our blood) while rooting for certain football teams, praying for Olympic glory, and engaging in armed border conflicts in cultural gray zones, seems antiquated and kind of silly. Yet this was the solution to the imperial collapses of 1914. Come feel the nationalism!
The same Ottoman Empire that once ruled over much of the southern Balkans also ruled over what is now called Israel and Palestine. But up here, this was all Austro-Hungary, Ljubljana is thus a provincial capital of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. It’s odd, I think, that nobody is trying to resuscitate this particular empire these days. The Russians are still crying about theirs and “their ancient land” but the Austrians are, well, I am not sure what they are up to. Maybe bodybuilding. Or skiing. Maybe their beer is just better and so they have fewer complaints.
And just like that, it’s over …
Back in the north woods of Estonia, where the land is green indeed.
AFTER LEAVING the mountains around Slovenia and Austria, ‘Europe’ is one big dusty plain of farms, roads, and shiny grain silos, and the occasional large settlement.
This rolls straight up into southern Latvia where things get woodsier north of the Daugava river, and Estonia is even more swampy and green. Also the road, farms, town pattern is less observable, in Estonia it looks like some giant sneezed and the houses went all over. A very dispersed settlement.
That river is the Jägala, I think. Do you know that in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, the Russians also tried to conquer this region? But that they lost and badly? And that even then the Swedes and Poles supported the governments in Estonia and Livonia because they didn’t want Ivan as a neighbor?
Some things never change.
A compilation of journal entries (in italics) and Facebook-Instagram posts from a recent trip to Slovenia.
Later, I uncovered my journal from ’02, only to discover I was mostly focused on creative projects and my relationship when I was in Slovenia, and barely wrote about the trip at all.
ON THE WAY to the airport, we stopped at the intersection of Liivalaia and what they call the Tartu Highway. We were opposite of the Stockmann department store, by the Laura beauty salon and a striptease club called Virgins. We were about to hike up the hill to the airport. It was a sunny, dusty day, and from that vantage point, the airport looked like it was a floating mirage, gleaming tall and white. It loomed up over us like the old Police Administration Building from Dragnet, the old home of the LAPD. Don’t you remember that old voice over? “This is the city: Los Angeles.” But we were not in Los Angeles. We weren’t even going there.
We had tickets printed out for a Ryanair flight to Italy or Spain. Whatever one it was, it made no difference. And we were late. I was traveling with my eldest daughter and youngest daughter, the eldest one barely a teenager, the youngest one maybe five years old. “What time is it?” I asked the older one. She looked at her wristwatch, a Swatch. “It says it’s 10:20,” she said. “Damnit,” I said. “We might miss the flight!” She had on a backpack, but the littlest one tugged along a pink-colored Barbie suitcase. The suitcase sputtered over the stones as we went.
Thus we began the hike up the hill toward the airport, traffic whizzing by from all directions. There, by the turn off for Lasnamäe, the littlest one dropped a toy down a long flight of steps. I was surprised by how steep those steps were, they descended for meters and meters, or yards and yards. She expected me to retrieve it. She was crying about her toy. I stepped down onto the first step and noticed that the stairs were not secure. Rather they started to wobble and bend, like they were made of a soft, pliant rubber. The steps had a gummy, candyland quality.
With the next step, I noticed the upper steps started to fold over the lower ones. And by applying my body weight, I could easily make the top of the staircase arch and bend in such a way, as that I could retrieve my child’s lost toy and then spring back up to the Tartu Highway. Imagine a young tree branch pulled downward then released. The steps bent in just such a way. With a few movements, the toy was in my hands, the bendy steps had bounced back into place, and we were on our way. The half Estonian child was happy, if only for a few minutes.
THERE WAS A FURNITURE SHOP up by the train station where some local entrepreneur had set up his business in a converted old barn. The walls were made of round field stones and the roof had been built and maintained in the old-fashioned style. It was there that I acquired a swivel armchair, plush and upholstered, and then began to push the chair into town on its wheels. This was tedious, but I covered the ground quickly, passing the Konsum and then the Maxima. By the Old Cemetery, where poets and war heroes are entombed, a car pulled up.
It’s hard to say what kind of car it was. It looked like an old black Buick, but I could be remembering it wrong. There were two women inside, both blondes, both about five or so years older than me. One had shorter cropped hair and wore a blue tank top. She was at the wheel. The other had shoulder-length hair, she sat in the back. She wore looser, more colorful, bohemian clothing. The one with the longer hair said, “Hey there, can we give you a ride?”
I said, “But there’s no way my chair will fit in your car!” The longer-haired just smiled. “I bet it’s a perfect fit.” And it was. The chair fit perfectly in the back seat. I sat in the back next to it and the two women sat upfront. When we went to turn at the roundabout toward town, we made another turn and drove into the forests. “We’re leaving for Italy tomorrow,” the driver announced to me. “And you should come with us.” I was hesitant at first. But seeing as two women were willing to give me a ride to Italy, I decided to go. What was there to lose?
The house was situated deep in the woods. It belonged to the woman with shorter hair. She told me her name was Ingrid and that the house had been built by some forefather in the 19th century. There were crooked stairways going to different levels inside Ingrid’s house, and she gave me a room on the top floor, one with windows on every side. There was a large, comfortable bed with a thick blanket in the room and all of the linen and bedding was white. I slept up there alone in Ingrid’s house that night, but when I woke up, she was already in bed with me and we made passionate love. I remember the way the light caught on her eyes the most. Ingrid had sun-kissed skin with lots of freckles. I felt her smoothness everywhere.
Later we got in the car and began our long sojourn south. It would take days to get to Italy, but at least I had good company. Ingrid was at the wheel again and her companion, who was called Astrid, was seated beside me in the back seat. Astrid had on a pair of red pants, some yellow kummikud or boots and a loose-fitting white blouse, held together at the top by a ribbon. A plastic bucket and a knife. She told me we were going to go mushrooming. “But what happened to Italy?” I asked. Astrid just smiled at me, as if I was the dumbest person she had ever met. “Did you really believe us?” she said. “You’re more gullible than I thought.”
Ingrid left us at the edge of a pine forest and went to run some errands. I followed Astrid into woods. Deeper and deeper we went, until I began to worry that I couldn’t remember the way back. I wondered if I would make love with Astrid, just as I had made love with her friend in the morning. It would be interesting to know Astrid, just as I had known Ingrid. I was developing a real taste for these neurotic older women, each one more delicious than the next.
Astrid moved from spot to spot, peacefully filling her bucket with chanterelles and birch boletes. Her fingers became grimier and dirtier from the slaying of many mushrooms. Something drew me to her, a kind of terrifying but enchanting vibration. I could no longer speak, I could no longer think. I was caught up in some strong energy field. The woods began to hum with it and glisten, as if they had for the first time been penetrated by sunlight.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Astrid said to me. “Like what?” I asked. “You’re looking at me as if I was a kohupiimakorp. Do you want something?” I approached her and undid the ribbon to her shirt, exposing her pink chest in the air of the forest. Then I licked her like I was licking the cream off a pastry. “This is all I really want,” I told her, in between licks. “Just this.”
ALL I REMEMBER is that she came into the apartment, closing the door behind her. She began speaking to me at once, in a somewhat worried and anxious tone. Her work was getting to her. Some of the patients at the mental hospital were career criminals and psychopaths, although they did not term them as such. They could be quite seductive and build up a rapport with even the most seasoned psychologists. “They get under your skin,” she had told me. “It’s hard to wash them off.” She had scrubbed and shampooed her luscious blonde hair in vain.
There she was in the cold glow of a kitchen light. It was evening now in Estonia, the darkness was settling in earlier and earlier, and we all knew which way things were heading as the last days of summer faded away and the equinox breathed its first fall-time breathe. She was still talking there in the kitchen, but her cadence was so fast I had a hard time following her. She had on that button sweater of hers, the soft one, and the light made it look only more cloud-like and gauzy, up from the skies. “I’m sorry things are so tough at the mad house,” I said.
I kissed her after that. The psychologist undid all her buttons and soon I was touching her other buttons. My hands were guided by some instinct, I knew just where to push, just where to pull, just how to conjure ecstasy. And then, mid-kiss, her eyes opened and she recoiled in a kind of befuddled plot-twist horror. “We never agreed we could do that!” she stammered at me. “We never had agreement to make love!” “But, but …” My voice trailed off, but it sounded distant, as if it was echoing back from the end of a tunnel. Calamity, despair. All I had wanted to do was take the edge off, to make her feel blissful. I still did. Even as she pushed me away.
VERY WELL THEN, I’ll make up your room. Yours can be on the first floor. The house is never completely empty, but you’ll have your own entry way, your own door. I’ll give you your own key. The room will be fully furnished, in fact you’ll never suspect that it ever belonged to anyone else or was used for any other purpose. Your room will be as cozy and warm as cozywarm can be, there will be a soft, broken-in, long and lovely blue couch that you can fold out into a bed, and shelves lined with books from any writer who ever wormed their way into your heart: Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir, Anaïs Nin, Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.
There will be an old-fashioned floor lamp in the corner that you can turn on with the tug of a chain, and a pot of sweet peppermint, camomile, or fireweed tea that has been steeping for ages, and yet whenever you take a cup, it’s always at the right temperature and is never too weak nor too strong for your taste. This will be the little room I make up for you in my heart. From here, you can come, go, and inhabit me. You can put your black stockinged legs up and stretch out, set your tired hands behind your sleepy head, drowse and admire the wallpaper.
I WAS SEATED with Igrayne at a round table at a restaurant in Tallinn. She was to my right, drinking a coffee, looking at me. Her hair was open and rested loosely around her shoulders. I was nursing an espresso in a black cup. I think I still liked Igrayne in spite of all of the juicy cleavage photos she had posted on Instagram. I’m not sure why I still liked her. I had met a lot of people, but there was a kind of comfort with this one. Igrayne had led a rather messy life, and that messiness was familiar. It was as if we met just like this, now and then, and relaxed.
There were other people at the round table, but these people were mere acquaintances. A large screen in the corner showed some kind of sporting competition, but this was also vague and obscured, distant. It could have been cross country skiing, tennis, or the Tour de France. Several nosy old ladies though found our table and did not like the sight of me sitting next to this young lady, or rather were distressed by the very idea of it. “You should be ashamed!” one of the nosy old ladies said to me. She was wearing a brown corduroy coat. Indeed, toxic masculinity and the pedophilic lifestyles of the rich and famous dominated the news cycles. Surely, I was just another B-level celebrity who had once sent Jeffrey Epstein a birthday card.
“We don’t have such a big age difference,” I told the nosy old woman in the brown corduroy coat. “When I was born the US president was a Democrat, and when she was born, the president was also a Democrat.” Two Democrats. This prompted some discussion and analysis among the trio of nosy old ladies. I heard different names being tossed around. “Truman.” “Johnson.” “Roosevelt.” “Kennedy.” “Woodrow Wilson.” They stood there and eyed me evilly.
“Did you really need to make this so complicated for them?” Igrayne said to me. “Once again you’ve gone and turned everything into a fucking history lesson.” “It’s not so hard,” I said in my defense. “Who even was president when you were born?” she squinted at me. “Carter,” I said. “The correct answers are Carter and Clinton.” “Nobody remembers Carter,” she said. Igrayne frowned. Her coffee cup was empty. A server came by and replenished our drinks. By this time, some of Igrayne’s other twentysomething friends had joined her and were seated at the table. They were the class of … Who knows when. 2015? Something unknown, unusual. They had tracked the careers of every former member of One Direction, even that one who leapt to a tragic death. But my presidential trivia had done the trick. The village gossips had disappeared.
north! 