‘frank’

I HAD A SON whose name was Frank. My mother did not approve of this name. “Why did you name him after my brother?” she asked. But her brother, who was also called Frank, did approve. “Good choice,” he said with a supportive wink. Frank looked nothing like me. He had blonde hair and was dressed in overalls. His features were so rounded and button-like that he resembled a doll. Like all boys, he got into trouble. When I brought him to the gym, he created a toboggan from the barbells and went sliding across the room. Such is the nature of sons.

The saddest thing about Frank is that I didn’t want him. I remember that long drive into the mountains. His mother was in the front seat. She was wearing a yellow dress and her legs were up on the dashboard. Her belly was already showing. The driver kept driving. I had no idea where we were headed. “But I don’t want to be with you,” I told Frank’s mother. “I didn’t want any of this.” “It’s too late for that now,” she said while reading Pere ja Kodu magazine. “You’re stuck with me whether you like it or not. “Please,” I said. She said, “It’s too late for that now.”

Through the windows I could see sheets of pines and stunning ravines. Frank’s mother told the driver to pull over. She got out of the car, opened my car door, and slapped me once across the face. Then she returned to the front seat, and we continued our journey. “It’s too late for that now,” she repeated to me. I just waited until we got to the next rest stop. Then I escaped into the fresh air of the mountains. It was years before they found me, by which time Frank had grown into a restless and busy boy. Frank was a good lad. None of it was his fault, you know.

the battle of narva

I WAS CAST to play “Charlie” in The Battle of Narva. Starring opposite me was Sandra, a young actress from the Ugala Theatre. I guess they couldn’t find any other Americans for the part, and the setup was preposterous. Who would have believed that an American disc jockey would have had a radio program in Narva in 1944, when the country was under Nazi German occupation, and about to be flattened by Soviet bombs and bullets? Maybe this “Charlie” was an Ezra Pound-like character, doing Axis propaganda? Yet he seemed like an easy-going lad, nothing like you’d imagine a Nazi collaborator American DJ would be. Maybe it was just a case of wrong place, wrong time? Maybe the Nazis didn’t mind a Yankee DJ on the Eastern Front? Wasn’t one of them a famous jazz collector?

I imagined Charlie was sort of like Chris’s character from Northern Exposure. The episodes of The Battle of Narva would open and close with Charlie’s musings on the state of the war. “But what even is war? What is it good for?” and so on. Maybe he would play some quality recordings from The Andrews Sisters (“Rum and Coca Cola,” anyone?), Bing Crosby, a little early Frank Sinatra. But I think Charlie was more of a hepcat, he’d spin sides by Quintette du Hot Club de France. “It’s morning in Narva,” he would say into the microphone, “and to get all of you Narvans and Narvettes started, I’ve got some ‘Les Yeux Noirs’ to brighten up your day.”

Then he’d cut over to the pure swing of Django Reinhardt. That’s how the people of Narva survived the war, at least until they didn’t. While I had the character of Charlie figured out, remembering the lines was hard. Sandra had so much more training. She would sit in the windows of cafes with the script open, memorizing her lines. I had mine before me, but I improvised too much. This provoked a soft-hearted lecture by the director, Bill Murray, who told me that learning one’s lines was a piece of cake, and that I should go easier on myself. “You just have to say the lines, man. Just say the lines.” He said this to me while they were preparing to film a street battle scene. There were all of these extras in Soviet and Nazi uniforms milling about in the city’s streets. It was a disturbing to see them making small talk.

escape

MORNING, MORNING. It was a school day morning, but not in May, all gray and windy like that day, but, yes, it could have been May, because such gray days can fall in May as they do in any other month of the year up here. Streams and rivers of students with backpacks flowed up and down the long sidewalks, the gravitational pull of an obligatory state education, up the steps of the old brick schools, middle schools, music schools, state kindergartens, and there stood Hanna-Heleena, who was waiting for me with storms in her eyes. When she saw me, lightning sparked and crackled. “You!” she shouted over the heads of the students. Her hair was cut in a fringe or bangs, straight across, and she wore a black coat. “Come over here now!”

That’s when I ran. I turned down a side street, which could have been Castle Street, and then found a small alleyway between two buildings, one I had never seen before. Gray walls on both sides, which led to somewhere else, into a trash-filled passageway, covered in graffiti and stinking of beer and urine, just as I imagined Lerwick might be on a Monday morning. I went through a doorway, and I could still hear Hanna-Heleena’s desperate calls for me. Where even was I now? Inside of a building somewhere. Viljandi, Lerwick. Lerwandi. I started to wonder if I would ever get out of this mess of corridors and hallways, until I saw light shining all around.

It was just behind some taped-up windows, streaming around their cracks, creating bright boxes of sunshine. I could no longer hear Hanna-Heleena. She must have lost track of me somewhere in this maze. Then I heard the voices of school children just beyond those windows. I was getting closer to an exit point. I came to an old wooden door pushed on it and came out at the top of a staircase that led down into a school atrium. It was dark in the school. The children were dressed in blue uniforms. They sat silently, mostly in the atrium, though some were playing table tennis. Sombre teachers observed the stranger as he came slowly down the steps. When I got to the front of the school, I could see that it opened up on a city front that was very close to a seaport. There were wooden ships in the harbor. Out the doors of the school I went, into the never-ending blue gray of a school day, but at least I was free.

sixty-nine

SHE WAS A WOMAN, a woman who was born in 1969. She was the Class of ’87. She was older than me. She was a Nixon baby. Maybe she was born a few hours after her parents watched Midnight Cowboy, starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman. Maybe she had been conceived after her parents had returned home from watching The Graduate.

She had lived and she had experienced life. All of this living and experiencing, she had found, had left her with profound insight and wisdom that was mostly completely useless. And all of the creams, treatments, and procedures available could not negate the fact that she was slowly disappearing into the oblivion of time like a blood orange sun sinking into the murky Pacific off of Santa Monica.

I found her very attractive. She had lovely brown hair, smart blue eyes. Even her most melancholy moments were as rich and as delicious as a pineapple cake. I didn’t think a thing of her being as old as the Moon Landing. But finding a place for our affair proved difficult. We had so many commitments; we found no place for our trysts.

People just did not approve. Wherever we went, we were always on the run. I sought sanctuary and at last, after scouring the neighborhood, I found an old house with a staircase leading down into a cellar. This underground lair was a workshop with tools on the shelves and sawdust everywhere.

She curled up in the corner and pressed her head against her knees. She closed her eyes, breathed. All of this running, just for peace and security. “You know,” she said. “I just don’t think any of this is worth it.” The stairs began to creak next. The old man who owned this house was coming down to saw some wood.

An old man with white hair and a mustache who looked like Wilford Brimley, because we both knew who that was. He would probably be less kind about finding out his workshop was being used as a love nest. But where could we go? There was no way out. We could hide there, behind some shelves. Maybe he wouldn’t see us?

We both knew there was no escaping Wilford Brimley. He would find us anywhere, wherever that was. It was just a matter of time. “This is all pointless,” she said. She looked tired. She was.

skylights

THE CITY OF TALLINN was encased within a kind glass bubble or atrium and had been for the entirety of its existence. I had only learned about it on a cool, rainy day when I was walking through the Town Hall Square, and I looked up to see a man dangling from the top of a wobbly ladder, trying to close one of the many skylights that had let in the rain and soaked the houses.

I soon learned that while some of these skylights had been discovered, not all were accounted for. Ladders rose up all across the skyline like cranes, but no one could ever really keep the rainwater out. The 18th century blueprints of the sky of Tallinn were kept at the imperial archives in Saint Petersburg, but nobody had been allowed to see them since the war started.

Two women friends though were able to sneak their way into the Russian Federation by disguising themselves as patriotic Russians and got into the dusty archives, from which they retrieved the prints. These were beautifully sketched in black ink on parchment, and quite bulky. It was no easy task for Peter’s architects to have designed the sky above Tallinn, then called Reval. One wondered if these windows to the elements had already been partially crafted during Swedish rule, and if the Imperial Russians had just improved upon their plans.

The city did need water, it needed water for its parks, its trees and plants, flower gardens and so on. But Tallinn was also getting excessively saturated by the rain, and there needed to be a better way of controlling it. Otherwise we would all be wearing raincoats all year round, when it wasn’t snowing. The two women friends met me on the second or third floor of the Viru Keskus shopping center with the blueprints for the sky. They were really quite excited about the theft of these highly guarded documents. They unrolled them on the floor of Sportland.

After that, I went to work with an Estonian who looked like the actor Tambet Tuisk and maybe was him, closing up the skylights. Now that we had the plans, we knew where each one of the windows above Tallinn was located. The city had special ladders made for the job.

While they wobbled in the wind, and though I was terrified of heights, it was quite breathtaking to look down, hundreds of meters below us, and spot the Finnish Embassy on Toompea, or the little toy spire of Mikaelskyrkan or Saint Michael’s Church below that. When we reached one of the windows, we could see it was ajar and water was pouring through. I reached out, took it by the handle, and thrust upwards. The window sealed silently against the white clouds of the sky. One down. So many more to go.

high water

WE WERE SEQUESTERED in Ülejõe, near the Konsum parking lot, on account of some grave and rising health threat. Rory Lapp was the first to undergo screening and then he was released to return to his schedule. I think Rory was able to get over the bridge, I remember only glancing at him from behind, in his blue jeans and orange vest, but maybe he stayed behind, I don’t know. The sun was sinking into the river by then and the waters were rising.

When I went into the first tent for assessment, a young woman, dark hair and freckles, used a metal implement about the size of a match, a kind of awl, to pierce my skin and remove a small piece of flesh, just as the Lakota did during their Sun Dance ceremonies. Then she took this offering to the creator and instead of securing it in a tube for further analysis, she tasted it, ruminating and focusing on its flavor, as if that could tell her something about my overall state.

“Yes,” she said, nodding and tasting, “Yes, it’s just as I thought.” She never told me what it was.

From the main, brightly lit medical tent, I was led outside. The river waters were even higher, they were overrunning the high banks and running down into this part of the town, creating rapid whirlpools and swirling eddies. I watched as an old orange Volkswagen Beetle was swept away by the high waters, its owner just able to get out before the car was lost for good. High up on the riverbank, I could hear my Krishna devotee neighbors talking while this went on.

They were laughing and toasting the flood.

And then I was brought into a temporary tent, where it seemed like a dozen strangers were trapped in the sticky darkness. One of them, Alma, a blonde civil servant I knew from town, a few years older than me, seemed to jump me at once, crawling on top of me. She said, “Oh, good. I have always wanted to do this to you.” That’s how I wound up making passionate love in the darkness of a quarantine tent. There was a lot of sweating, blending, fusing. I pressed up against Alma’s hair, her ruddy, blushing face. It was rich and cathartic, but the situation gave everything a kind of menacing portent. What else do you do when the world reaches its end?

of dogs and cars

IN A PARKING LOT with Hendrik Hendrikson, James Simmul, who was probably the only Estonian I knew named James, and a talented bass guitarist at that, and small toy car and a dog. Hendrik was talking about an upcoming game night to be held at the old cultural palace. I was barely paying attention. He was originally from Massachusetts and just old enough that he could have been, had he so desired, a member of New Kids on the Block. This made me always look at him strangely, trying to imagine him side by side with Donny Wahlberg and Jordan Knight. Was Hendrik Hendrikson the sixth New Kid? How many of them were there even?

They kind of wandered off after that. The house was an old hospital that had been converted into an commercial building, with a white facade and vague Stalinist and Federalist elements, with ivy growing around the columns in front, and a pale blue visible beneath the chipped paint of the exterior. I heard there was a concert happening at the castle ruins, or maybe near the old manor house? Hendrik Hendrikson and James Simmul roamed off into the crowds, which left me, an Australian sheepdog named Lou and a toy car that I could fit inside of.

This was sort of like my daughter’s toy car, except that it had a front and back seat and a trunk. It was made out of cheap plastic. So cheap that when I tried to back out of the parking lot, with Lou in the back, the steering wheel came off and it rolled to a halt between two very pricey vehicles, which had obviously been leased and indebted their pretend “owners,” a BMW and a Porsche. Oh, the anxiety of watching that car land in the middle, stopping against a wall.

The dog was unharmed, happily panting in the back, and I reinserted the wheel in front. Leaving this parking lot was turning out to be harder than I thought. But I knew my parents place was up the road apiece, and I would just have to navigate that tricky three-way intersection before it would just be shady country roads all the way back to the homestead. The hook that held the back of the toy car shut had come off too, so I jammed the doors together, the dog in the back, and began my tedious journey. Then my daughter Lucinda came running out of the bushes, clad in her overalls, looking almost like I did when I was that age.

“Daddy!” “What the hell are you doing hiding in the bushes?” I hoisted her into the trunk with the dog, and we set off. It was getting evening now, I was worried about rush hour traffic. I wasn’t sure where this place was. The house had all kinds of strange businesses operating inside of it. A New York-style deli on the right. A Soviet-style hospital on the further right.

I got the car going, but then I lost control of the steering wheel again, or rather it came off in my hands, one of the wheels fell off, and the whole car drove headfirst into a stone wall at the other end of the parking lot. Somehow I was in two places as this happened. I was in the driver’s seat and I was behind the car watching it happen, two vantage points at once. Huh?

When I woke up, I was in the hospital in the dark. Maybe I had hit my head? It felt kind of sore. Or maybe those were the drugs wearing off? I found my pants on the floor. Outside the door, I could hear the audio from an Estonian television news program. Priit Kuusk was looking very serious and saying serious things about Ukraine and Russia and drone bits. I had to get out of this place. I knew they were going to probably restrain me, or put me through some formal process, some bureaucracy to get out of it. But I needed to find my dog Lou and my daughter Lucinda and they might still be out there waiting patiently in my little toy car. My pants not even buckled, I was already out the door. We were going to make it, little toy cars be damned.

the lavazza coffee vending machine

THE LAVAZZA COFFEE vending machine was temporarily out of order. A small dark-haired woman was busy with a screwdriver, installing some new buttons and features. Soon it would be possible to get pastries and croissants. The new installation panels showed an eye-watering array of colorful treats. As such, there would be no coffee for me. “Come back soon,” she said.

The common area of the hostel, in which the machine was located, was dark. Someone had turned out all of the lights. There was always this musty smell in there, the smell of hostels. A long bar in the corner. It was sort of like a rock club crossed with a hostel. The only light came from behind the bar, where wine glasses dangled and thick bottles of whiskey glowed gold.

Back in the room, my father was tapping into a laptop. He was wearing a green t-shirt. “Don’t you want to go see some museums while we’re here in Amsterdam?” I asked him. Surely, if we were in the Dutch capital, we could see a few Van Goghs in the process. But he just kept working and reminded me that I should be working too. I was supposed to cover the Olympics in Scotland in a week or so too. What lasting impact would the games have on Edinburgh?

I went back out into the common area to see if the machine was fixed, but it was even in a greater state of reconstruction. There were wires and panels everywhere, and the small dark-haired woman was at work with her screwdriver, putting everything in place. She had on a white sweater, glasses, her hair was braided. She was quiet. Focused. Diligently at work.

Back in the room, my father was gone, but a young woman with a backpack had arrived, asking if she too could spend the night. Who was I to protest? She had blonde hair, a silent, unassuming character. Wore a plaid shirt. Probably from some place like Idaho. She took a seat on one of the bunks and water began to flow into the room. Was it water from one of the canals? Soon all of the dirty old bedding was soaked and there were pillows floating by.

In the common area, the Lavazza coffee vending machine was at last in order, but the button for a straight black coffee was now missing. There were tropical cocktails to be had, rich, creamy pastries and doughnuts, but not one simple black coffee. This was bad. Was I really going to get a flat white? Or maybe I would have to do the impossible and leave the hostel? Surely a good cafe was located just down the way at the foot of some bridge. Just a few steps.

Back in the room, the water had subsided and the carpets had dried. The bedding had all been replaced. I was face to face with a woman dressed in gold, who looked like Madeleine Kahn when she played the Empress Nympho in History of the World, Part I. It’s hard to describe the lovemaking process. I don’t really remember that part, only that at some point it was sensual overload. Her golden dress, and that curly hair. It was everywhere, all over me, from every corner, I was absorbed into her delicious essence. “But you’re older than my mother,” I told Madeleine Kahn. “This can’t be happening. This just can’t be happening.” “Oh, it’s happening,” Madeleine Kahn said while sucking on my ear. She was also dead but it didn’t seem to matter.

supermarket

IN THE SUPERMARKET, it seemed as if I couldn’t find anything. Long aisles full of goods, but the ones I wanted or was in search of eluded me. That supermarket was so vast that even the section I was in could have accommodated a whole neighborhood of Beijing or Mexico City. And between these rows of canned goods and leftover Easter merchandise flitted Dulcinea.

I would catch a glimpse of her at the end of the aisle or turning a corner, some locks of her gold hair, her gray pants, but she never acknowledged me. Still, she must have seen me, because only a woman who was purposefully making sure to move in such a way, to avert her gaze in such a way, to turn her torso just so, must have seen the person she was working so hard to avoid. Was this how things would stay between us? Just like this? But I was right here.

Then I saw her, fully, from the back, the whole fish. She was inspecting different loaves of Estonian rye bread for consistency. I traced out her silhouette. Now was my chance to break down the emotional and physical walls between us. That hair, those curves, that smell. Her. Dulcinea. She was there. I was here. And I loved her so. This was the strong stuff. The bright lights of the supermarket beaming down. She read the ingredients and took her bread and was on her way, turned a corner, hurried off. But would she one day see me? One day would she?

vance

AFTER VICE PRESIDENT JD Vance returned from his trip to Tallinn, it was said that a great change had come over him. No one was quite sure what had catalyzed this right-on-time midlife crisis onset, but it could have been the sum of experiences. Maybe it was viewing the Anton Corbijn retrospective at Fotografiska, or merely watching men and women the same age as him engaged in stirring table tennis matches in the many yards and alleyways of Telliskivi. Maybe it was his first taste of a delicious VLND Burger. Nobody knew what had caused it.

The changes were visible. The Ulysses S. Grant-inspired beard was the first to go, followed by that sharp suit he had worn when famously lecturing Zelenskyy. After the Tallinn trip, Vance had started wearing a pale blue, long-sleeve shirt that read TALLINN on it. The shirt was one-size too large, which gave Vance a billowy, college-freshman-getting-over-his-hangover look.

It was this changed Vance that I encountered at the Elliott School of International Studies in Washington, DC, a few weeks later when I went to retrieve a few books I had left behind in the student lounge during a six-week crash course in Baltic Studies. I went into the sparse, multi-level area, climbed a set of stairs and found the books in the corner where some older couples were sitting around and chatting. One of the women, with dyed blonde hair, wore a pink dress, the amount of cleavage visible was on the level of the grotesque. Who were these people?

It was then that I noticed a van pull up outside the school, and Vance and his entourage — a mix of press pool, Secret Service, and Hillybilly Elegy fans — follow him in. With his pink, cleanly shaven face and TALLINN long-sleeve t-shirt, it occurred to me that Vance was starting to look more ex-boyband star than vice president. He came into the lobby and was mobbed by students. Then he told his followers that he needed a rest and sat down on a couch across from me. I was nervous. What could I tell Vance? Was now the time to do some lobbying on behalf of the Baltics? What would Kasekamp say? How would he handle this? I decided to play it cool, to let him do the talking, to make him think that I was his friend. If I came at him with some slogans, he was more likely to tune me out. For whatever reason, the president had not yet turned on Vance, despite his new look. Perhaps after having alienated the British and Italian prime ministers and the Pope, he had decided that annoying the man who could make him redundant with one flip of the 25th Amendment was not the best idea.

“Well,” Vance said. “I came to hear your ideas.” Something about that Ohio drawl made “ideas” sound like “odors.” His put his hands on his thighs, leaned in. “You want to smell our odors?” I asked. Vance gave me a strange look. I gave him a strange look. It occurred to me that I might be tripping. Had I been dosed? How else to explain the weird 1950s couple in the student lounge, especially the woman with the pink dress and obscene cleavage. What was going on?

I noticed some other students in the back, leftwing university alumni, familiar to me from my undergraduate days. They began to circle each other. I was mortified. They were going to mess up my lobbying on behalf of the Baltics. We had Vance right here in the palms of our hands. He was becoming one of us, the seventh friend, so to speak, in addition to Ross, Phoebe, Joey, Monica, Chandler and Rachel. Or was JD Vance the replacement for Chandler? All we needed to do was give him some good coffee and his transition to the light would be complete. And those boneheads wanted to insult him? To my amazement, they began singing a familiar song. It was “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the Disney anthem. One of the protestors had even dressed up like Mickey Mouse in Fantasia and was dancing on the hands of the protestors.

“Anything your heart desires will come to you!” Mickey shouted down at JD Vance. I clasped my hands over my eyes. I was certain that I had been drugged. None of this could be true. But when I looked back, I saw that JD Vance was crying. The impromptu singing of the Disney song had moved something in him. “I love that song,” he said. “I just love that song.” Vance turned to me and said, “I’m staying here with you guys.” Happy collegiate faces surrounded him, encouraging his big change. Someone shouted out, “Get this man a latte with coconut milk!”

“No, sir,” said James David Vance, shaking his head. “I ain’t ever going back to the White House.”