beautiful Belgrade

Snezana Eugenia Birckenwald-Lekic IV – I call her Snezi – is my friend in Belgrade. She’s lovely. They do not come lovelier. She would have been a duchess, a marquise or some such nobility in the great Austro-Hungarian line, but the Turks impaled most of them and the communist locked up the few that remained. And that was that. So instead, she’s an architect. Everyone in Belgrade is an architect.... an architect, an aspiring architect, or a livestock veterinarian. This makes sense: there is nothing more important to a Serb than his home (especially the size of his home) and the pork on his plate. You think I jest? I do not. However, my list is incomplete, I forgot one: there is his home, there’s the pork on his plate and there is his homeland. Nothing is more important... and more ambiguous. It has been cut up so often (cut-up, reshuffled, redrawn, divided, seceded, returned, usurped and bombed beyond recognition) that the Serb is rather confused about his “homeland” and his fellow “homelanders”. Snezana Eugenia, for instance, is of Montenegrin origin, but were she to go there now she would find mostly Russians. Smalltime oligarchs are buying up the coastline one plot at a time. Once the young Montenegrin has sold the waterfront cottage he inherited from his parents, he packs off to Belgrade to live the “good life”, which in Serbian means acting like the Russians he left behind, i.e. sitting out whole days in the cafés of “Silicon Valley”, downtown Belgrade, where flesh-and-blood blow-up dolls show their curves and wares to prospective sugar daddies. I missed the trip to Silicon Valley. I arrived a day too late. What a terrible shame. I am no sugar daddy myself, but I can still spot a good deal when I see one.

Snezi also had three friends over. There was Sarah, the buoyant, the wonderful Sarah Bananas, a recent émigré to Belgrade; and there was Penelope P, a nurse from south London who struck up much speculation about the hydrology of urine through the human body in these insane temperatures (it was 39 degrees Celsius!!!); I proposed that it must in part evaporate through the skin since none of it was coming out of the usual channels (in my case at least); Pen contested vigorously. And then there was a guy who went by the name of Francis M. An American. A man of few words, probably the only one of us who could bear the scorching heat. When I asked him about it he said he worked for the Chinese in southern Sudan. I said. What do you do? He said, What’s it to you. And we spoke of it no more. But we got along, and the next day, on a cruise down the Sava he offered to go into business with me, importing Davidoff Slims into Austria over the Danube. I have a man in Vienna with a warehouse he said. I told him I had to think about it, but when I asked him, why slims why not regular cigarettes, he looked at me like I was complete ignoramus and we spoke of it no more.

On Saturday night we had dinner on the river Sava on a splav – a floating bar, restaurant, entertainment platform and sanitary hazard (according to Sarah). We ate like Ottomans and sang Balkan classics from the repertoires of Lepa Brena and the more recent Turbo Folk. Arms flailing, foot a’stompin’, Great God I felt Balkan again!!! Sarah B proved a true siren, with middle eastern tremolo and all. We were fit for the Eurovision, I swear. Only Francis stayed quiet, preferring to practice his Cyrillic script on the back of beer coasters (maybe working out the Slims “business” model), but I could tell he was enjoying every minute, sipping on his peach schnapps with an unmistakable grin. Like a cat I took a liking to him.

At three in the morning Snezi’s friend Ivana showed up – a practicing architect and Slims smoker. I’ve met her before. She’s usually a fireball of Serbian verve, but this night she was more subdued, wracked by internal conflict over the events of the preceding hours: do you DO and then THINK; or do you THINK and then DO. The classic quandary that has defined Balkan history for the last six hundred years. But in true Serbian style she opted for the former and got down with the us til the sun rose over the Sava.

On Sunday morning, with only a few hours of sleep, I took the bus to Zagreb to visit my mom. Driving through Croatia on a Serbian bus felt like an incursion into enemy territory. I sat next to a war veteran, a chain-smoking Croat and self-proclaimed Knight of the Order of Holy Templar. He would not stop talking. The trip took almost 24 hours. It was an odyssey. I will tell you about it another time. Suffice to say that I was sad to leave Belgrade and especially the people of Belgrade. They say you either love them or you hate them – being a Croat, strictly speaking I cannot love them, so I hate them… but I love them – In any case, you have to give them one thing: they have an extraordinary sense of humor. Even their war criminals . By the time I got back to Amsterdam, Radovan Karadzic had finally been arrested by the Serbian secret service, having “evaded” them for thirteen years by masquerading as a long-haired, bearded practitioner of magnetism and alternative medicine… IN BELGRADE!! Psychiatrist turned psychopath turned homeopath. I couldn’t stop laughing. If I’d invented it myself and posted it as truth in this highly factual blog, no one would have believed it.

Back at work on Monday, at the xerox machine I had much time to dwell on my trip and on Francis M and his Davidoff Slims. It’s true that I like the word contraband and I guess I like the idea of saying, I deal in contraband, but that’s the problem, I like the idea and that’s about it. So for now I will leave it in southern Sudan with its originator. But who knows, maybe one day I will get a note from him written in Cyrillic with an offer I simply cannot refuse.

Ingrid Betancourt

Human beings can be beautiful beings. This week is the week of Ingrid Betancourt, the almost saintly, the beautiful, the spirited Ingrid Betancourt, six years captive in the Colombian jungle, whisked from hide out to hide out, shackled down with neck chains – punishment for her five escape attempts – a magnificent, courageous woman. She brings tears to my eyes. I’ve been dreaming of Ingrid Betancourt. At work I mouthed her name over the xerox machine. I sat with Fer Ruiz from payroll and gaped with him at her photo on his desk. For half an hour we sat in silence. I am awestruck, possibly in love, certainly in the thrall of Ingrid Betancourt. A hundred times I say her name and still it warms my heart. Tomorrow, on the bus to Belgrade, I will think of her and I will wonder, as I have been wondering all week, why we are not all like Ingrid Betancourt, beautiful and spirited human beings.

Goni's children

Goni’s oldest is 17, but he looks barely barmitzwa-eligible. He makes up for it in smarts though. The first thing he did when I came into the living room is put down his Torah-sized Sudoku anthology and quiz me on Balkan history: wasn’t montenegro part of greater serbia, why is kosovo not a legitimate nation-state and so on and so forth. Salomon, leave Lui alone, Goni said like to a four year old. I said, bring it on Sal and we did some more Balkan-back-and-forth until he was satisfied, NOT that I'm an ok guy, NOT that I'm unlikely to pull a Burt Reynolds on his mom and start slapping her around for fun, but until he was satisfied that I am indeed a Croat, a real Croat and not a crank. That was Sal. Then came Geraldine. A 19 year old doorslammer, a beautiful, mouthwatering doorslammer: black curls, black eyes, teeth like the inside of a coconut and her feisty tongue, a raspberry popsicle. I fell for her like a lead balloon.

Geraldine: Who are YOU?

Me: Lui, my name is Lui,

Geraldine to mother: Mom, he’s like three!!

Me: TWENTY three, I’m twenty three years old.

And that was that. She slammed the door on her way out. Sal looked up from his numbers and told me not to mind his sister, that she was just flirting. Goni’s bosom heaved. This was more than she could bear I could tell. So I left it at this. In the hall I kissed her and touched her gold pendant that spelled the four letters of her name, Goni, oh Goni, and I became intensely warm and excited. Then I heard a door slam upstairs and I left.

new horizons

Today I heard on the radio that somewhere out in some faraway galaxy a whole sun collapsed on itself like a souflé. It was getting too heavy for its own good, taking in more and more sun-particles and space dust and suchlike, sucking it up from everywhere until its own gravity was so overwhelming and its density so extreme that it just collapsed. Bang. And you know how much energy it released? More that the sun – our own little sun – ever will in its lifetime. But where does that stuff go? Does it go up in smoke? Does it go through cosmic stomachs, like a cow, from one to the other, from one universe to the next. Does it get filed somewhere as “spent”, boxed or pdfed? Or does it just sit out the rest of its days in darkness doing funny curvy things with space and time and light. Yeah, I’ve been thinking about stuff these days, broadening my horizons and such. Too much concentration during the Euro threatened my wellbeing. For two weeks my head was crowded with nothing else. There was only Arshivim’s cannonballs to goal, Luka Toni’s fakester tumbles in the penalty area and Ribéry’s tragic oh so tragic fall. I even fell for the only football player who looks like a woman, i.e. Emanuel Torres – i don’t know if it’s Emanuel, but that’s what I call him because it makes me think of Emanuelle with two Ls – a bullfighter a head taller than the rest, but with soft feminine features. It all really got started when the Dutch – the most powerful, the most explosive team of the tournament –were knocked out by eleven cheeky teenagers from Russia. It tore me apart. It was an affront!!!!! I became obsessed and from then on I could think of nothing else. And I mean nothing else, not even the message Goni left me on my voicemail Lui, it said, I may be forty years old. I may have two kids nearly your age, but I’m THEIR mother. Don’t treat me like I’m YOURS. Call me. I called her a week later, but mostly out of despair because I’d just finished watching Turkey fall against the Germans (ten blond falcons swooped down on their dark-skinned adversaries. It chilled my blood. Bastiaan Schweinsteiger is a weapon of war). I called Goni. I called her and hung up almost immediately. Why? It was a fair question, and I thought about it, and then I thought about Anna. I thought about Anna for a long time, like ten minutes, maybe more. I thought about her arms flicking up and her jangling bracelets and her deer-eyes. I got warm inside. And then I went out to find her. I left Brendan at home (since Italy’s disgraceful exit, Brendan has been conscpicuously quiet, pumping iron in his room. I like him this way: deflated). I went to the Waldorf hoping to see my stray deer. I showed up at twelve. There was just me and that black girl from Queen’s night– remember her: statuesque, amazonian. She was sipping a girl-drink with a guy at the bar. He looked like a posh deck hand from some millionaire’s marina. Blond, heavy diver's watch and a Macramé bracelet. I felt stupid so I left and went straight to Goni’s. I met her kids. I’ll tell you about it. Gotta go. Going to Goni’s. Gotta run. Oh, one more thing, guess what... Glendale S-pin won the counties. Bee kicked derriere big time. the Christel Verstraeten delivered. Oh, and one more thing, guess where I’m going next week. Guess.. BELGRADE!!! Gotta run.

Franck Ribéry

No man w­­­ith such scars on his face deserves to suffer ever again, but Franck Ribéry fell in the 12^th minute of the game and was carted off on a stretcher. After that, I watched in silence. I ate a bag of potato chips on my own, and at each Italian goal some of it came back up into my mouth as a cheesy soup. It is not because I am part French on my mother’s side. It is not because – as Julien says – there are only two truly European countries, England and France, and because England did not even qualify and France is now out, this is no longer a European cup. No, it is much simpler than all of that. Simply, I cannot stand – repeat – CANNOT STAND the Italian team. I loathe them, I detest, hate, despise... I…I… give me synonyms…language cannot translate the iron ball in my gut and the soup of chips in my mouth. It is a dangerous thought. It is with such thoughts that the Serbs and Bosnians fell out, put knifes to each others throats and called NATO bombers upon themselves. It is irrational… I accept that. And I accept that I have been harsh on Italians before, maybe unduly – I accept that they have made some worthy contributions: the tortellini has an interesting shape and indeed feels funny on the tongue; and the Olivetti typewriter was once a useful and widely used machine. All of this I accept, but in international football they are rodents, and they have now reached round two of Euro 2008, not gloriously like the Dutch lions, not courageously like the great checkered Croats, but through the cracks, with their front teeth, and their bellies to the ground where they play victim and plead for penalties. I hate, detest, loathe despise…. oh, and to make matters worse, I’ve got a live one in my house now. Brendan has suddenly come out as an Italian – his great great great grandfather, he claims – and he has been wearing his Matterazzi shirt at almost every game. You are just stupeed littul provocateur, Julian said to him the other night. His response: Bite me! What do you do? And what do you do when a guy who has seen no more football matches than there are fingers on his hands, who can’t tell the Czechs from the Swedes, when this guy fancies himself the expert and insists that the offside rule doesn’t count in extra time. What do you do? I said to him, when I need to know how to work out my triceps I’ll come to you, IN THE MEANTIME, do not volunteer any information. EVER! He threatened a head-butt and laughed like a fool. I nearly punched him because I am in a state of heightened alert. I watch every game. My phone is switched off – Goni hasn’t heard from me in over a week – and I am beginning to resort to rituals: I dumped two bags of macaroni, yesterday, and flushed a pot of pesto down the toilet, perfectly good pesto. And for the first time in a long long time, I prayed. I said, dear God, please dear God give SPAIN the strength to eradicate from this tournament, and possibly for good, the metrosexual, penalty-craving crawlers that have befouled the beautiful game.

Crystal Verstraeten

Ask me where I went, it’s Saturday, ask me, you’ll never guess. I went to Luik. You heard of it? Probably not. If you’re into child-molesters and micro-breweries it’s really cool, otherwise... Just kidding. Kind of. Remember Marc Dutroux. He’s from there – or was it Charlesroy? Anyway, whatever, this whole place’s a ratnest. And when the locals catch one guess what happens – you didn’t hear about that? The biggest police botch-up in the history of Belgian criminal justice. Steve McQueen escapes. James Caan escapes, these sorts of people escape, even Serbian war criminals , but Pdfs they don’t escape. They’re too dumb. Only in Luik they escape. You know what luik means, the word luik, it means trap-door or escape hatch. I’m serious. So ask me why came here on a Saturday morning, why after a week of hard work, taking shit from Branson for the Turkishbath thing, why I got up at 6 to take the train to go to Luik, why I didn’t stay in bed with Goni. I’ll tell you. My sister lives in Glendale, that’s in LA; she hooked up with a vibraphonist on tour in Belgrade back before the bombing. I hear nothing from her for months, for months, and then two days ago she calls and she says I need this favor, Lui. Can you pick up something for me in Belgium. Her name is Bee – my sis – she’s in a bowling league called Glendale S-pin. I said, no way. She said, I need this ball, Lui, the county finals are coming up. I need it. I said, Forget it. She said, darn it little brother! I said, it’s just a ball Bee. Don’t you have balls in LA? She said, It’s not just a ball. It’s THE ball. It’s a Crystal Verstraeten. So it turns out that beside brewers and felons they have special craftsmen down in Luik. You can’t mail order from De Gebroeders Verstraeten, you have to pick up in person. So I walk up to the counter to this old dude. The name tag reads Coen Verstraeten, but think John McCain, think shoulder pads and this kind of man-corset thing. I say to him, the Crystal Verstraeten for Labas, Bee Labas. He says Kryst’lverstraet’n, like a single word, almost Hebrew, which kind of freaked me out and he hands me a box and I hand him a small fortune and I’m thinking show me this friggin’ ball, show me, so I look in the box, and I can’t believe my eyeballs: it’s big like a bowling ball, it glistens, it’s round, but it’s golden, it’s all gold colored, so I say, sir, I asked for the CRYSTAL Verstraeten, this one’s gold. And then I got funny, I said, look under Bee, sir, Bee Labas, not R-Kelly. Hahahaha and I had to laugh thinking of R knocking down pins with his crew. But then Coen kept calling me Mr.Kelly – Mr.Kelly this, Mr.Kelly that, and I figured out that his daughter’s called Christel - so it’s Christel not crystal - and I got the whole deal, but I could barely understand him, and he freak me out ‘cause he spoke a strange tongue, like ancient Luik, the tongue of child molesters and micro-brewers, and I thought, get me the fuck out of here, so I just took off and left the box on the counter. I schlepped this golden cannon ball all the way across Luik to the station and when I got home Goni was gone. So Bee, you better kick some county butt next month.

provoke and pursue

Balkan people are expert at getting involved, getting in the middle of things, things that don’t concern them, shit-storms and squabbles alike. We’ve done it for centuries. We invented the world-class scrape. It should be in my blood, but these days – fuck-a-duck – I’ve been languishing, spectating and generally feeling sorry for myself. First Anna, always at arm’s length, then in Rome Francesca’s cold shoulder, and now Brendan and his friggin’ fraulein. I’ve been playing all these in the back of my brain like little youtubes. It’s pathetic. But there’s only so much of this shit I can take lying down. The worst thing that can happen to you is nothing. This is a fact. Get slapped, kicked, scratched, jilted anything and you’re ahead, you’re in business. Nothing is worse than nothing. So I tell you, get your foot in the door, stand your ground, piss on it if stays shut. For the past week I’ve been hitting all fronts, like a swivel gun, all sides take a hit. I call it provoke and pursue. Ask me the time and I’ll tell you my life story, step on my toe and I’ll get in your face. I’m Balkan again, I’m everywhere and constantly changing, I’m kaleidoscopic. Branson - pdf-man - wanted his reports bound and ready by two – bang!– No can do, sir. So he says (goatee agape) excuse me? And I say, I’m going to the turkish bath (you have to come up with that shit on the spot, though, there’s no time to think.) He says, Ben je helemaal gek geworden! So things escalate, so what! you roll with it, and you stick to the plan, you drop everything and you go to the sauna. Because it’s monday and mixed-gender there’s just you and a Jewess named Goni, plump, Sephardic, bejewelled, and as you throw eucalyptus water on the coals, she says, my, my, you’re a skinny young man, you must eat more – swivel and strike– skinny? maybe, but multilingual and able-bodied. And you wink at her. You wink so she can see you right through the steam in the turkish bath. That’s how you do it, kaleidoscopic, always adapting. And the next day you don’t wait, you call Goni first thing. You say, Shalom, and she says, hi there, and you say, ok, Goni, let’s go eat!

mind and body

I’m going crazy. They come home after midnight, they have a snack and a drink in the kitchen. They think they’re being quiet because they whisper, but they only whisper half the time and then they forget the sleeping Croat next door, and they forget that I can hear them when she says stuff like not zuh pepper grinder Brandon, followed by bursts of laughter leaving me baffled as to what the hell is going on. And then, just as I’m about to fade, when there is a chance I may fall asleep again, it begins in earnest: a fifteen minute crescendo, a spiraling Germanic moan – jaaaa, ach Brandon nicht so schnell.... I told Brendan about this, I said I need my sleep, Brendan I work now, I’m a working man but he said, dude it’s a sign she’s getting more comfortable with you, it’s a good thing. This would be true if she were a wild beast and we shared a cage together. She’s not getting more comfortable Brendan, she’s just getting more cocky. After that no more seriousness was possible for days. Hahaha, she sure as hell is, man. Hahahaha! What a stupid sack of muscles. Nevertheless, I am deeply envious. If I do not sleep it is not only because the noise disturbs me, it is also because such noise sets in motion things which set other things in motions, some mechanical, some mental, until mind and body are in alliance, one reinforcing the other, and my hands become mere puppets. I ended up at my computer on a dating site looking at a girl from StPetersburg - most of them are Russian or Ukrainian, which is quite acceptable - but when I tried to read her description (the result of instant internet translation) my mind and body disengaged and I was left completely limp. Oxana writes: “It is pleasant to me when hands, mind and an eye estimation (needlework, work on a computer, minigolf, or simultaneously two employment) are involved.

ze gurls and ze smoke

I’m broke. They were suppose to give me a one week advance, but they didn’t. So I went down to payroll and met Fernando Ruiz. He’s the payroll guy. He’s also argentine – or is it argentinian – anyway he’s from argentina. He’s been with this company for over thirty years. “Can you believe it,” he said. No. I could not. Thirty years in that cramped little office doing pay roll shit. “I cannot Mr. Ruiz”. “Call me Fer,” he said. And then he got started, he said he escaped persecution from the military Junta in his country back in the seventies and he pointed to a picture in a frame on his desk. He talked about torture chambers and hyperinflation. Thousands disappeared, he said. But Fer, what about my advance. “Be patient; it will come. I worked my way up from the mailroom.” My advance, Fer, not my advancement. So I got that sorted out. They paid me, and last night I went out with Julien – we go for find ze gurls and ze smoke – a French guy from Briançon. I call him plan B ‘cause he’s never plan A. Brendan had a date with that German girl from queen’s night. I hate him. I hate his muscles. I hate the fact that his legs are too skinny for the rest of his body cause he's too busy loving his pecs (I have two words: Michael Douglas), I hate that when he goes out the whole friggin’ apartment smells like Armani Attitude. And I especially hate the fact that he’s from Portland and gets all these European “chicks”. My chicks. Whatever happened to that good old anti-american sentiment in the early days of Iraq. Hello! They’re still there with guns. Where'd it all go? I’m a full-breed European and when I go for find ze gurls I never do. I see a problem there.

my queen's day

A couple of days ago was Queen’s day. I’m a republican through and through, but this was a wonder. I spent two days in bed recovering. Croats, Serbs, Bosnians look to the north and weep! I saw a whole nation united in revelry, yokels and aristocrats alike. A whole nation, not just the north or the south, a whole nation draped in a single color. Orange socks, orange pants, orange leggings, orange sweaters, orange hats. You name it. Orange orange orange. A whole nation chanting – it is said – in honor of their queen. This is a wonder. Never mind that she was up north in Friesland where they speak a strange patois and want statehood; never mind that she was completely dressed in pink, marzipan pink (who advises this woman!), it is nevertheless a wonder. And when I am awestruck, when I am fascinated with the world and its peoples, when my amazement cannot be contained, I drink. I drink like a fucking crazy-man. So very fortunate was it, therefore, that everyone around me was drinking too. Huge quantities. These Dutch guys – I swear – are like Albanians. And at two fifty a beer I was robbed in broad daylight of all my hard-earned xerox-money and potential future-xerox-money too (if Branson will have me back; I worked exactly 1 day, then came this). But my amazement did not stop here, because out onto the streets people poured out their belongings on blankets and tarpaulins, a whole bunch of crap sold at throw-away prices, a sea of bric-a-brac, nick-nacks, stuff-no-one-wants, old toasters, yin-yang balls, The Human League on VHS. And children too, hundreds of them flogging their junk, their skills and their tricks, some legitimate, some highly questionable: I stuck my hand in a black box full of fuzz in the Vondel park and this ten year old charged me a Euro (I swear, these friggin’ kids you give ‘em an inch... I’m not gonna say it... I’m just gonna say: Lord of the Flies). To be fair though, there were some wonders among them too, a young Britney-lookalike banging out the Goldberg Variations on her Clavinova like she was MSNing her girlfriends. Amazing, wondrous stuff this day. The marzipan queen should have been on her knees.

By noon I was coming down, though. And by evening I was fighting all out to stay on my feet. Brendan managed to drag what was left of me to the Waldorf in the Jordaan – not the hotel, but the thirty square meters of hip & hype, congregation point of Amsterdam fashionistas, stylists, typographers, streetologists and suchlike (where are the friggin’ doctors in this city!!!) . I obliged ‘cause I know Anna goes there with Fred and some her friends. She showed up after midnight and I practically fell over myself trying to get a shot of her outside. Big sad eyes, arms flicking – the usual. Not a blob of orange like the rest, though, just a couple of armbands jangling and charm, so much fucking charm it kills. But drunk as a rut, no way was I gonna show myself un-enhanced. So I went and enhanced myself as best I could. Brendan was sweet-talking a German “chick” and I slinked (slunk??) up to her friend by the door, a stupendous beauty – dark-caramel, Amazonian in stature, a killer – she says, “are you going already?”(Full accents!). I was stunned. “In fact I am not.” I said. But she wasn’t talking to me. I didn’t see the blond giant ahead, but being a head taller than everyone else I don’t think she noticed that I slipped my arm practically around her to wave at Anna outside, fully enhanced. And this was my last move before I retreated and slumped irretrievably. All I recall, with Brendan standing nearby, are the words (spoken with a slight German accent) “but you are so muscular”.

pdf

I’m back. I’ve put it behind me. Francesca. Rome. And when I was back all I could think was give me something!! Give me something flat. Give me a plastic bag. Give me something dull. Something without taste and smell. No tango. No machiatos. Give me a coffee in a paper cup. Something zero, something without culture and style, without "penetrating eyes" and foreign accent. And damn it! you know what, I got it.Yesterday was my first day on the job. I work in a office now. None of this shuffling around with plates and cutlery anymore. And I discovered what kind of assistant I am too. I’m everyone’s assist. I assist people’s assistants. I spent the morning manning the xerox machine, and then I filed a man’s files. His name is Douwke. That’s a name. He asked me where I was from, I said, Croatia, he said, Sarajevo? I said Croatia without blinking an eye and he got it. A Richard Branson type with white teeth, a goatee and kind of constant half smile. He was quick to observe that in Dutch “Lui” (pronounced as single syllable) means lazy. Je zult twee keer zo hard moeten werken – fucker– you’ll have to work twice as hard. Ha, ha, ha, that’s funny, ‘cause Douwke in Slovenian means dagger, but it also the fuzz on a man’s scrotum. I didn’t tell him that because it’s not true, but I would have. When I was done with his files he said, do you know data entry? I said tell me and I’ll do it. He talked about pdf files. He said, you take these pdf files and you print out these pdf files and with these pdf files you gotta do this and that with these pdf files. He said it so much I was loosing it, I was straying, I was hearing something else and I got this terrible, this totally horrible disturbing image, Richard Branson in a cellar with a bunch of kids all scared and scratched, which is the most horrendous shit you can possibly think of. Pdf files he kept saying. It’s a highest order of magnitude of evil. If murder is 1, ethnic cleansing 7 – and I know ethnic cleansing, I'm Balkan – this shit is easily 10, 15, maybe 20. It’s down there with shit that’s so evil just thinking about it is criminal. Just thinking! Lui! Yes, sir! Get with the program, he said, (or the Dutch equivalent). Richard Branson scratched his goatee and looked at me funny, and I said, give me the files sir and I’ll do it. And he said, I can’t give you the files they’re pdf files.

love and conjunctivitis in Rome

Pink-eye. You haveknow it! It sucks. It's the worst. For three days Rome reached me through a watery lens, and always from behind a bunker-sack of puss in my eye. But on this foreign soil, ancient center of the universe, I was doubly afflicted: I fell in love, or I should say – in the spirit of Italian football – I was down and then kicked in the groin. I’m still in love now. It’s a scientific fact. I deny it, but my stomach insists that I am, and my mind was been screening her, back to back, twiddling her hair, sipping Chianti at the bar at Cascabelito. What did I see? I saw nothing. Pink eye or not: Rome was neither Colosseum nor Pantheon, neither pasta nor pizza, Rome was wholly and entirely Francesca. I’m a sucker, a Balkan sucker and I hate it.

Quaker Oats put us up in a dump near the main station, Termini, concourse of Roman riffraff. Night one – under the pretext of meeting “chicks" "ASAP” – Brendan insisted we go to a tango salon . What? That’s right, that’s his embarrassing hobby, not mine. I have no part in it. No part in flowy pants and wing-tips. It’s a lot of fiddly footwork and sissy cross-steps and such. The women lean against you (this I appreciate), and then you glide them around while they appear – if all goes well– entranced. Francesca only just started. She was there with her friend Rosangela, a decent dancer. Francesca danced once, struggled and was never asked again. The men in all their swarthy elegance and facial landscaping are brutish and wasteful: all these beautiful, beautiful girls just sidelined. I was disgusted. I would have danced the “Bulgarian squat” with these angels. I’d, I’d... it kills you!

Anyway, the upside is that I got to talk to her, i.e. I got to speak words to her – she speaks no French, no English, no Dutch, no Serbo-Croatian. Mi deo!. Language was barred. My main asset frozen. What to do? I touched her hand, she withdrew. I touched her arm, she recoiled, but on Brendan’s advice I stayed steady, operating under the assumption that “no” in Italy comes – like gelati – in a vast array of flavors, and this “no” was no plain vanilla, no rich chocolate, this “no” was all pistachio. It said, “I’m not sweet, not at first, but just you wait.”

I didn’t wait. I fell while it was still salty. And so it remained.

Day two we had scooters: Brendan and Rosangela ahead on theirs, her arms clasped around his American build. Francesca on the back on mine, and Rome spread out like a fan of postcards in her hand, pointing right, pointing left – destra, sinistra – but never touching me. Not once. My loins ached; my Balkan heart quivered. Ruins, aqueducts and statues shorn of genitals, all mere props in this tragedy.

Brendan wore his linen pants, said ciao all the time, and abandoned his Starbuck latés for machiatos. A fool. He’s from Portland, he works at K-Swiss in Spaarnwoude. By Sunday I hated him like you hate a Serb; I hated his whole Quaker Oats coupon scheme, I hated this place and I hated the food, the endless permutations of pasta: rolled, cupped, stuffed, tricked, spun. What does that do to the taste? Answer me! What? What did you say? Italian food is so much more than pasta and pizza??? Show me! And no cold tomato soup in a glass, and none of those turds of white putty they swear by lunch and dinner. Show me! I’m open. I’m from Zagreb. We eat porc. We it straight and on a stick, but we don’t have a culinary high horse. I’m ready to accept. Make me believe. Make me something. Dazzle me with basil and Parma ham. Do it. I’ll even allow pesto. But please, not another feat of geometry. What’s next, the double helix tortellini?!

I left early on Sunday. I was done. Quaker Oats was cheap and flew us Ryan Air out of Ciampino, the hooligan hub. I sat in the lounge watching Richard Quest... before he got caught with meth in Central Park, his balls in a Roman sling (haven’t your heard? this is not a joke This is dead serious. The new Airbus will never be the same). I sat there trying not to think of her, my beautiful Francesca. I sat on the ground, gutted, like discarded cannoli.

language skills

Went to an employment office today, a specialist one for foreigners down near Leidseplein. This is a good thing as I am exceptionally foreign. I went through my skill set with a girl that looked about sixteen. She was friendly. With two fingers she typed in everything I said. I think she was new. I named a whole bunch of stuff. I said, I like people, I’m good with people. I said, give me a room full of people and I’ll talk to them, I’ll talk to all of them. And I can row, I said, I used to be a rower. She said, that’s a sport. I said, in certain circumstances it’s a skill, a valued skill. She nodded – friendly girl, very friendly – and she said, global warming? And I had to give it to her, I hadn’t thought of that one. Clever. H&M head to toe, but clever girl, and friendly too. Woodwork, I also said. Like furniture? No, balsa wood, you know the really light stuff - I used to make all kinds of structures, mini rigs, rockets and stuff like that. She meant language skills and computers skills, of course – way too friendly this girl. I thought, you want languages, I’ll give you languages: one, two, three, four (that makes me a polyglot, you know that) Serbo-what? she said. Croatian, I told her and I gave her a sample, completely vowel-less and deeply Cyrillic. I think she was impressed. She made a phone call and she kept saying enthusiaste jonguh, zeer enthusiaste jonguh. It was nice of her, but I've never liked that word, enthusiastic, and she wouldn’t have used it if she’d known what it makes me think of: gymnastic, every time. So when she offered me a job as assistant-something-or-other, in my mind I had one of those muscly guys with big crotches caught in the cross-bars. It took me a second, but I focused and I accepted. and there you have it, again gainfully employed. I tell you, I never ceased to amaze myself.

coquilles saint-jacques

Just two things. I ran into Anna at the station this morning and I got fired my first day at the restaurant. Both are good. The restaurant sucked. They specialize in Coquilles Saint-Jacques. The owner is a dutch lady who calls herself Veronique. Her real name is veronica. She has big hands and she knows everything about France, stuff french people don’t know and don’t care to know. She was surprised that I’d never heard of the tiny hamlet in Picardy where she spends her summer holidays, so imagine the shock when I asked her if Coquilles Saint-Jacques are not in fact just small mussels. “Are you french?” Are you dutch?

– Did I mention I ran into Anna at the station? Arms flicking, you ok?, big sad eyes. He didn’t mean to. She meant Frederic, her boyfriend who pushed me out of a fucking window two days ago. She kills me. She’s a frightened animal and a killer all in one. Young. Frail. Old-school Reeboks, all 80s, all tight and dangly and trinkety. Big sad eyes that make you feel guilty just thinking about her. She’s gotta to be too young.. no?

I served people from the wrong side. I did something with the wine that pissed off this old guy, a guy with a wine cellar, a guy that takes this shit super serious. I was evil. This was injurious stuff to him. He took this home and discussed it with this bone-skinny, Burberry wife. Veronique fired me in the kitchen in front of the staff. It was a pathetic show of force. No one cared. And nor did I. Brendan called as I was walking out. I didn’t mention it. He won tickets to Rome for two. He’s been sending in Quaker Oats coupons; he’s been doing it for a year. We’re going. We’re going to Rome. The Rubicon!!

Day one

I fell out of a window last night, a third floor window at a party in the Pijp in amsterdam. It could have killed me. The trip down took forever but the impact did virtually nothing. My ribs are bruised and I have a blinding headache, but that's it. I'm all granite. An old lady on the first floor called an ambulance but I told her I was fine. She was on her balcony, I was in her yard with her cat. She'd called the police way before because of the music; then I fell, and then she called the ambulance on the same number. I was drunk - no, I was on my way. The party stopped after that. I came back up all tough like "where's my drink" but Harold said 'We kappen ermee', which means we're stopping in dutch. It scared the shit out of everyone. Everyone started whispering and patting me on the back It was accident - loosely interpreted, it was an accident. Frederic's girlfriend was there. Anna. She's half Yugoslav. She's a fucking beauty. I couldn't stop looking at her, like when a tv's on in a bar and someone's talking to you or when you see a beautiful animal in the wild, that's how , not drooling, not erect, not like stripping her down in my brain , just looking, kind of in awe, kind of in wonder. She has these big sad eyes, and these arms that kind of a flick up when she's talking, like the end of a cat's tail. I was sitting by the window. This dutch guy was telling me about his trip to Sao Paolo and how cool it was being real in the favelas. I know frederic, he's always around. He's a designer, like a furniture designer. He's a joke. He has one of those aluminum briefcases, one of those really thin ones. He loves aluminum. He designed a chair called Obtuse, because it's all long and stretchy, you know like obtuse angles - how clever - it won a prize. The chair is also aluminum. Obtuse also means moronic. He told me to stop looking at Anna but I ignored him and kept looking at her arms flicking up. I was just sitting on the sill. The window was open. I don't know if he realized what he was doing.
Fucking headache. Tomorrow I start a new job at a restaurant in Amsterdam West. I won't mention the name. If it sucks I want to be able to speak freely. I'll mention the name when the time comes.