rhythmsong

A thought came to me through the air. It was mine when it reached me, but maybe not before. Not a thought, in fact, but a song, a rhythm that pushed my feet – tip tap – this way and that way, like those seven league boots – what are they called? – but smaller, smaller steps, many steps across town, hopscotch over the sprawled limbs of a junky underground, out into the open air, around a leashed Pekinese pressing out a turd on Peña, this way that way, this song – dada dada dum – on the corner one peso for a starveling, three for Fabian at the kiosk – excuso, perdonne – I go, I go, my feet – tip tap – the warm sun on my back, not an Argentine bone in my body, but I go those seven leagues unhindered here in busy busy Buenos Aires.

no use hands

No, Luis!… use chest for make move lady, yes. And for make stop her, no use hands… Intenshion, Lui, intenshion.

I despaired. Only Uri Geller, I thought, could get one of these (abstract) “ladies” gracefully around a dance floor. This was meant to be fun, not an exercise in psychokinesis.

My class was in Constitucion, in a windowless room lit with six compact fluorescents. I was dancing inside a fly-zapper to music… how shall I say, the music was like an old carousel – creaky, violins on one end, bandoneons on the other – turning in circles of sadness and suffering. I’m a Croat; we do not get together as a nation and bare our souls; we cry in private.

The compacts flickered. My mind flickered and then my attention drifted and I squashed his foot with my heel. Dagostino! he cried in my ear. First, I thought how inefficient these Argentines, four syllables to say, ouw! But then it occurred to me that, like their music, these people are just comprehensive in their suffering. I apologized with many syllables of my own, but he interrupted – No, no, dé music, Lui. Thees music are D’Agostino. Angel D’Agostino.

I understood and we carried on walking… yes, walking; this all we did in this dance class, we walked. We did laps inside the fly-zapper, no faster than the carousel, no slower than the carousel. And as I walked these crude circles with his hands on my chest – for make move lady – I thought of spoons bending and women – porteñas – melting in mi abrazo, my embrace: curious, Croatian, unlike the hairy-armed bracket of machos here, soft yet dangerous – yes – like the Aegean, like –

Luis, no use hands… wi’ dé chest… intenshion.

Yes, yes, intention, of course. But after so many more laps, he began to explain that tango is as much about standing still as it is about moving (unbend that spoon, Uri, can you do that?). Listen, he said pointing to Dagostino in my ear. Listen, yes…NOW!

Now what?

No move, Lui.

A violin cried, the singer waned and we stood still.

Briefly, finally, I was myself again, at ease, my mind in its habitual cadence: I thought of my backyard in Zagreb, the old shrub in the corner and the dead cat under the vines my friend Drago used to disinter every year on a specific day; he’d bring his own spade from his house and –

Now, Luis, walk… Luis!

… Luis!

LUIS!

Doblogango

I am rushing diarrhea pills across town to a friend in need. A British friend with British bowels (custard and marmalade). I am underground of course – I am so often underground these days I am starting to feel strangely unmammalian – but the air is no worse here than above, so…

wait… wait…

…he’s here!

Yesterday he sold mirrors, the kind with two sides: one for your face; one for blackheads that hide, and hairs you cannot see. Today it’s permanent markers. He drops them on your lap, walks away and returns moments later with a pitch in espagnol. “Everything you write with this marker is permanent,” he says of his permanent markers.

…but none of this is the point: The point is he’s got my hair, my teeth, my nose, my FACE. He even swings his arms like me. And in his voice there is that scratchiness – you know what I’m taking about – that scratchiness that is mine. Mine!

A bastard-brother in the southern hemisphere? A genetic experiment? A figment of my imagination??

…there he comes. Shorts, flip-flops, a nervous tick in his lip and a tongue that rolls a rickety R. I give him five, he gives me change. And with my own graceless gait he shuffles out at Bolivar.

Wait! Attend! Wacht! I say. But language fails me (not enough poly in that polyglot, Labas).

I skip Serbo-Croatian and go for broke – a gringo in a wagon full of porteños – I shout my name, LUI! – I shout it loud – LUI LABAS! And again, until he turns on his heels, the markers drop to the ground and he stands before me, my mirror image on the platform.

***

I have pressed my hand against this city, grimed my lungs with its air, missed its buses, digested its food, listened to its people, its traffic, its dogs… and now,

I’VE ARRIVED.

I write this in big letter – ARRIVED – permanent letters that go right through the page. Twice, therefore, I write it. Twice…

Once for him; once for me.

Porteñas

The city is quiet. The Boca Juniors are playing in Boca Stadium. All men are inside. All men.

On the corner of Callao and Juncal I’m breathing in a mixture of humid air and exhaust fumes, probably peculiar to Buenos Aires. I’m breathing unevenly, not from exhaustion, for I do very little these days, but from amazement. With a grin on my face I recall the streets of Zagreb and my eatery on Makarska, where I used to sit for hours sometimes to see a single beauty (and usually she was Serbian). But here, before me – it is breathtaking – not one, not two, but an endless procession of splendours, each one more beautiful than then next. And note, please: I have not sought out some special observation post to bear witness, like a red-faced Brit with binoculars gazing at gazelle in Kenya. This is an utterly ordinary corner, such as you will find in Boca, San Telmo, or San Cristobal. Simply, they are everywhere: green-eyed, hair raven-black, legs lustrous and tan, like a rare breed from an age-old, mysterious gene pool, as unDarwinian as the peacock, designed only to dazzle.

They are – and do not forget it or they will hate you for it! – the Porteñas.

On the corner of Callao and Juncal I take in humid air and exhaust, and my eye wonders… until

…there… she strolls like a ballerina, her sun-bronzed arms, like pendula mark the rhythm of this city. She does not see me. I do not exist. I am a pigeon. Less, part of the pavement below her feet. I follow her caramel toes.

… it is said these women could commit suicide by jumping off their ego. If it is true, this is OK. I will catch them at the bottom – maybe – and if feel like it, take them out for a coffee and a media luna… that’s a croissant.

Me llamo Luis Labas, y tu?

Buenos Aires

I landed here a few days ago. I dropped out of the sky of the southern hemisphere, fully dressed, in full possession of my senses, but far from my cot in Recoleta and without the language skills – polyglot though I am! – to negotiate an elegant arrival: I lost my bags, busted my phone and stammered and strained through this vast, enormous grid that is Buenos Aires.

PLUS, it appears I have picked a strange time to come (although this, I can say, is out of my capable hands): It hasn’t stopped raining now for three days. THREE DAYS! And it’s been Biblical. Buckets. Sheets. Cats. Dogs (As Bee would say, strangé*). Yet, perhaps, this has been my only advantage here: in matters of rain I am a professional, I come from the place where it was invented. Holland is not a country, but a rain-scape, a delta caught in perpetual drizzle (at the very least). So in that respect – and only in that respect – I have the upper hand here over these crafty portenos (locals) as they sludge through puddles in waterlogged sneakers and look up stunned at the sky as though the Amazon has come to Argentina. Me, I am whizzing all over the place in my rain suit, in and out of the subte (subway), zigzagging through the city by foot and bus… umm… that is, when I am able to figure out the f!@$%ing bus route, which in Buenos Aires is something like solving a Sudoku puzzle spread over several pages, with instructions in a foreign language… and of course, in the rain.

In the meantime though, I have become adept at hand gestures and on occasion I have been able to make myself understood by corkscrewing my French into what must sound like an ancient dialect to people around here, no more Spanish than Friesian is Dutch, but it works (sometimes) and it has earned me, if not respect, at least some compassion amongst the kiosk owners and the bus drivers of this city.

Finally, I want to register a formal complaint: It has not been unusual for me to go to bed extremely late these days. EXTREMELY LATE. There is no print big enough, no font bold enough to stress this. At hours previously unknown to me, so late into the night that – when arriving home – morning sits at the end of my bed greeting me with a middle finger. That late. Now, I do not expect all the world’s activities to cease and all man woman and child to hush while Lui Labas sleeps, but for God’s sake – the rain-God, if it is he you believe in – please, silence your dogs!

Adios,
Lui
or, (in Buenos Aires), Luis

ps- if you are wondering what it is I am doing here, I will tell you…
…as soon as I know.

*(pronounced: stranjay)

economics of play

More than eighty feet underground on metro line 11, I’m heading east to a party on Rue des Rigoles – no jokes – and appropriately, I feel festive. Festive even if I have no reason to. The ground beneath my feet, just under the rails, is a morass, economic, geopolitical, blah-blah-blah. "The US alone is losing 30,000 jobs a day", Le Monde affirmed in italics this morning.

But now – a new Casio on my wrist and the Doobie Brothers in my ears – I laugh at these jobs, every one of them – so many per hour – because these are not jobs I want. Lui will not move to Detroit to handle car-parts and drink coffee out of a thermos... will not move to Florida to sell real-estate to old ladies with white sneakers... will not move to Arizona to mow lawns that shouldn't be there...

...the quartz on my wrist reads 23-hundred. I feel sharp when I hit the hour on the head like that, right when the bleep bleeps.

Still eighty feet underground, I think of other stints more to my taste, and in keeping with my sense of things and place in this universe, a zillion-zillion feet wide, as many high and deep, and as unknown as the territories of the human mind.

SO NOW – in no special order and off the bat, eighty feet down, near station Goncourt – I WOULD:

• dismantle oil tankers with marauding monks from the East: Bangladeshi, Thai and the like.
• clean up debris from satellites and other space-contraptions – a lonely but adventurous task... with perks: Russian cappuccinos on space station Mir.
• cook Balkan for the infirm but ultra-rich, bringing Croatian cuisine to Tokyo.
• pick berries in Jutland with types like Eve - sprightly and elfish - the Czech girl I met on the bus the other day (but I would pick any number of produce with her, zucchinis, leek, rhubarb, you name it, any type)...

Still eighty feet underground, station Belleville at hand, a dark-skinned man with an accordion and a set of uneven teeth sings a song about a lost land south of the Carpathians where women are aplenty, laughs are aplenty, the sun is bountiful and where – I deduce from his smile and the riddle of notes spiralling up from his instrument – there is no downturn, no boom-and-bust, only and ever the economics of play.

de la merde

I met my friend from Zagreb a few days ago – fifteen years in the offing – and he didn’t hold back one second. He asked me a thousand questions off the bat – hardly let me speak – one after the other, a floodgate unto himself – Lui this, Lui that, remember bleeh, remember blah – and he laughed with his arms and feet like he used. I had to rein in my friend and remind him that I had questions too, like why he had a scar down the side of his face, why his hands looked like worn gloves, and why the glint in his eye I used to count on to lift me up was now replaced by the gloss of melancholy.

We sat in a cafe on Rienößlgasse in the fourth. The air was smoky. He motioned to a woman in the corner and said she looked like my mother on a good day – a staple joke of ours – and I punched him in the arm. Then we drank from our coffees, smoked and finally, briefly, we were both quiet.

My friend survived the war in Bosnia. By a hair. He fought for a year and lived in a cellar on his own another two. Pointing at his face – not his scar – he said he left something behind over there… in the ground. Something – pointing at the floor between his feet – he will never retrieve. And then the gloss in his eye shimmered and his voice broke.

The more I looked at him, the more I thought of Brendan doing push-ups and benches presses insistently and continually back in Amsterdam – I don’t know why, maybe I just couldn’t fathom what my friend was talking about. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought of me and where I was going at this strange and irregular speed, on this strange course, as if strapped to the back of a wild animal…

… take now: It’s 9 PM. I’m on a train to Paris. A night train. The beds are up. Across from me there’s a woman – a school teacher – grading papers. A moment ago I saw her scrawl de la merde on one of them and then erase it with the rubber on the back of her pencil. She saw I saw and turned red on the spot, pursing her lips in a way only the French know how. I gave her my bunk – the bottom bunk – which was better than hers and I smiled to let her know that it’s OK – a 100% OK – that some things are truly shit and there’s no need to apologize for that. But she didn’t get it. I wanted to pen it with my finger across the misted window – DE LA MERDE – in big fat block letters – DE LA GROSSE MERDE – then I imagined these letters carved into the nose of the Great Sphinx, etched into the Coliseum, drilled across Fifth Avenue. C’EST DE LA MERDE, a city-wide exclamation! Unavoidable and unapologetic. And when I had everyone’s attention – heads of state, congressmen, mayors, chief magistrates – and all people below them – clerks, orderlies, “underlies” – I would laid it out straight and hard: Give my friend back what he lost! NOW! Or these are the only words you will ever read until the end of time.

Then I thought of my friend laughing with his hands and feet, and I smiled from my top bunk and patted the wild animal beneath me.

the siege

Funny how things creep up. I thought I’d stopped thinking about her; for weeks she hadn’t even occurred to me.

And then, there she was. First she knocked quietly on my mind’s door; she threw some pebbles and called my name. But the next day she began in earnest: she made demands, pitched a tent, and – without provocation, besides the natural workings of my brain – she laid a siege.

Two days later I broke down. I called.

In my mind I was hopeful; at least, I felt worthy enough of the attention – I was the one besieged, after all – but in reality I was shunned like the plague. What a treacherous little machine we carry around.

Goni spoke to me in monotones,

This isn’t a good time, Lui.
Well, when is a good time then, tell me?
I have company.
Gon, when is a good time?
I have to go, Lui. Goodbye.

Under the yellow light of a payphone, a dial tone in my ear, I heard a hundred teenagers gather outside Discothek Danube behind me. I watched them, a lubricant mass, oily, gleeful, smitten with one another, candy-humans with cell phones, and I felt something… disgust maybe… who knows.

On the other side, in the distance, a huge catamaran filled with day-trippers from Bratislava steered across the river. A big white whale on the Danube. And I stood there with my dial tone...

… and that’s when it happened.

The me-of-me. The lover of Frankfurters and trapdoors. Over the sound of candy-human-chatter and ringtones, he showed up. The kid out-of-nowhere. The me-of-me. You must remember him. You must. Not a friendly grin this time, though, but a hard stare. And as he stabbed his finger in the air toward my chest and moved his chapped lips –

He was gone.

Just like that. But he said something, I know he said something – I swear to God – I just can’t remember what. It’s like waking up feeling something strange on your stomach only to discover it’s your own hand.

The dial tone. The whale. Everything was in place. Nothing had changed except that now the siege was lifted. Suddenly. Fully. The tents swept up. The ground cleared. Goni gone. And now the candy-humans made me laugh again and their ringtones dance on my feet.

If you saw a guy strolling down Hundertwasser Promenade with a woolly and a big grin – a huge grin – that was me. And if you were thinking about talking to him, if you thought of saying, hey what’s going on, what are you smiling about? you should have, he would have bought you a strudel and a wiener melange and told you all about it, and he would have liked it – Lui Labas – he would have loved it.

on a train to Dresden

On a train to Dresden I met a man from Budapest. He told me his mother was ill and he was rushing home as fast as he could. He would have flown, he said, but couldn't afford to now. Then he offered me a piece of meat from a long, dry sausage, like a beef-jerky, and said he was glad we were sitting together. His name was Nando. He was fat with gray stubble on his cheeks and he often got up to smoke a cigarette (in the toilets, I suppose). Earlier that same day I received a phone call from a friend I hadn't spoken to in fifteen years - fifteen years - an estranged friend and - at the time in Zagreb - my closest friend. He called me to apologize for something he had done, something I could scarcely remember. Between each word seconds elapsed; I could tell it weighed heavily on his heart. Now he lives in Vienna and I am on my way to see him. The day he called me, earlier that morning, I'd been sucked out of this universe through a wormhole or some such thing somewhere between Hamburg and Berlin, some aperture I knew not of that landed me neither here nor there, in a place both palatial and squalid like Caucescu's Bucarest. This is where I was when that phone call jerked me like a rope across space and hurdled me back. I think I felt my feet scramble to cover ground that wasn't there and my body adjust itself to a distance so enormous, so disproportionate...

I got your number from your mother, my friend said. I hope you don't mind.

A few hours later I was sitting next to Nando eating beef-jerky with a smile on my face as big as the distance I traveled. He told me about his work - he's a trumpet maker - and he showed me his hands and the results of working brass for so many years. But the yellow stains, I knew, were from the cigarettes, and the bitten-down nails from his mother ill in bed.

Sitting still, going hundred-ten, hundred-twenty miles an hours, with Nando playing a bit of trumpet for me with his lips, I thought briefly of the past, my lost love Goni, my dear friend Brendan, my comrade Fer, my illusion Anna, and also that wet and narrow city of Amsterdam. But only briefly, and then, the rope still firmly in my hands, I thought of everything else... of everything yet to come.

signing off

I’ve been absent my friends, but mostly in spirit, though. I’ve been here packing boxes, sorting cassettes, spoons, postcards… filling out forms, running errands and vacating from this place – my home! – all remnants of me. It has been an exercise both existential and physical (to be avoided if melancholy or faint of heart). What’s more, Brendan has been highly distraught ever since I told him. Believe it or not, but it pains me to leave this guy. As beefy, brutish and brash as he may seem, he’s the biggest kid of us all, and I’m sure he will double his bench-presses over the next few weeks to push back the emotion that is already visible in his face and manifest in his regular outbursts – Goddam you, Lui, Goddam you!

But here we are. December 25th. X-mas day. And as this strange, invertebrate year crawls slowly to a close, I’m on the point of departure, my life whittled down to its bare bones, the chaff out on the curb ready for collection. I have a few more phone calls to make and a dinner at a Chinese restaurant tonight, but to be honest, my heart isn't in it, I'm fizzing with anticipation, and my mind may be partly on its way already. Besides Goni’s extraordinary abruptness cutting me adrift, my head is clear and my heart unencumbered. I'm ready.

One final thing, though. You'll think me odd, maybe even pubescent – and you'd be right on that one, I’ve been sixteen for as long as I can remember – but the fact is, I would really, terribly like to see Anna just one last time before I go; my dangly-armed, deer-eyed Anna. After the Chinese tonight I will go look for her. I will put on my best shirt, spray my teeth with Vicks, gather my courage and - who knows - ask her out, buy her a drink, hold her hand, touch her arm, kiss her ears, feel her –

Cool it, Lui! Find her first; speak to her in your many tongues, amuse her with you body language, and whatever you do, stand straight and do not roll your eyes, that’s what old Croat’s do and you’re not an old Croat, you’re a young vigorous European on the cusp of a great adventure, a journey that will change you, and perhaps – if you are fully invested –change others too.

That's it!

I am Lui Labas, signing off for 2008, wishing you – and you know who you are, don’t make me call your name – wishing you THE year.

The year in which everything comes together. The year in which – even magically, if that’s what it takes – all the pieces fly effortlessly into place like a crashing vase played in reverse.

I wish it for you.
Your fondest admirer, your adventurer,

Lui Labas

Lui's list

What are you moping around for, Lui? Get off your butt, get out, get some action. You’re a free man, don’t you get it? You’re free! What more do you want?

I had no answer to this question. I was stumped. I drew a blank as I watched Brendan finish his protein drink.

Does this mean I have everything? Does this mean I am complete, whole and consummate? But I’m a Croat, that’s impossible! Everything comes to me riddled. Freedom especially. I love my problems – this is a matter of national pride – my barricades and my heads-of-state. Wall me in, throw me a clash or a confrontation. I’m alive only when embattled. Chaos tickles me. And freedom is a slippery product anyway. It’s colorless, it doesn’t talk to you, it doesn’t move until agitated. It’s like water: no one necessarily likes to drink it... until it’s taken away and then you think of NOTHING else.

But back to Brendan: You’re a free man, don’t you get it? You’re free! What more do you want?

I’m a roving engine of curiosity. My actions are stopgaps and my thoughts are scarcely within my control. Far from the flowing dress of the Buddhist monk, my life is an ill-fitting jumpsuit. So I am truly flabbergasted, and grateful too, that it can feel so comfortable at times. HAHAHAHA!

But anyway, things can be better, of course... so with Christmas in mind, I made a small list:

1. a svelte redhead with freckles and pink gums

2. a skinny cat with a tail-kink and a haughty eye

3. a live grizzly you can scratch and pat on the back

4. the legs of a sprinter

5. the eyes of lynx

6. the swiftness of a lizard

7. a houseboat moored off Dubrovnik

8. a small Balkan province in the Benelux

9. a rucksack full of gold bouillon

10. and lastly - as a matter of course - a carte blanche for this and adjacent galaxies

(this list is not exhaustive... feel free to add liberally).

Switch

Whining and moaning is un-Croatlike and unbecoming a man of your heritage. Snap out of it! He said. I wanted to ask, what heritage are you talking about, thinking he must have it confused with his own Ottoman lineage, but seeing as his name was Switchblade I thought it best to keep quiet and not interrupt. He assured me "Switchblade" is not an epithet, but his real name. I suppose it must be a common name in Turkey; there must be many young Switchblades in Istanbul; perhaps there are Turkish ministers and heads of state called Switchblade – how else do you explain this. And perhaps it is not written, Switchblade, but şviçblüd, or some such Turkish script. I nearly asked him to write it on a beer coaster, but his eyes sent out darts to let me know I had belabored the subject long enough . He concluded by saying that once we are friends I could call him Switch, but the suggestion was clear: do not do so until I tell you to.

Switchblade trades in fanciful, near-imaginary financial products meant to bamboozle and – in his words – throw sand in the eyes of the competition. He owns a loft in Soho, a bar in Amsterdam and sixty thousand head of livestock somewhere on a Turkish plain. He is an imposing figure. He drinks cognac and speaks his mind. We met last last night in what turned out to be his own bar, called – you will not believe it – The Ol’ Switcheroo.

Lui, what were you doing in a bar on your own, without Goni or Brendan? You ask.

I will not beat around the bush, I will not shrink from the truth – that too is un-Croatlike – Goni broke up with me. That's it. Full stop. That’s how fast it went. She called me from the airport on her way back from Haifa – at the f*!$@ airport– evidently keen, to finalize this little “procedure”. I asked her: Why? Why now? Why so sudden? Is it 'cause I’m broke? 'cause I’m unemployed? 'cause I’m too young? Her answer was unequivocal,

Yes.

But then I thought about it and I got confused. “Yes” what? What are you saying “yes” to? All of them? And then she was really unequivocal,

Yes

In an act of savage spitefulness I retracted the two line of verse I wrote for her last week and I told her she wasn’t the worth the credit on my cell phone. But an hour later I got weak at the knees and I called her at home hoping to convince her to change her mind and to tell her I could get a job easypeasy and that I’m not as young as she thinks (I was prepared to lie and forge documents). Alas, I got no further than her personal firewall, her pesky eighteen year old daughter Geraldine, who snapped at me in Hebrew and told me to take a hike.

This is unconventional. This is not a break up worthy of the Western World. This is an eviction. I feel kinship with the Palestinians. And do not tell me things could be worse. DO NOT! Of course they could be worse! I could be thirsting in the deserts of Yemen; I could contract a disfiguring disease; I could be trampled by hooligans or crippled by polio. So what! Let me feel like shit. I was outmaneuvered, outflanked, emotionally gutted and I came down to The Ol’ Switcheroo to drown my sorrows. I will not apologize for that.

Anyway, after the whole heritage thing, Switchblade swirled his cognac, looked me dead in the eye and said: Fight back you chump! and then he lay his free hand on a lush thigh to the right of him. I’m not sure what he meant, but it conjured up images of Brad Pitt in a dark corridor beating a man to a pulp. I’m sure he meant this figuratively (please God!). Switchblade is not a bad person, but I’m thankful for the civilizing effect of his entourage. The “lush thigh” I mentioned belonged to a mysterious, dark-eyed, raven-haired nymph by the name of Sofia von Spitzenwald – blue-blooded, maybe German, maybe Austro-Hungarian; germanophone in any case. And on the other side of him, a chocolate-colored splendor stroked a Mojito and on occasion voiced her dismay in Portuguese as she was forced to lift, again and again, Switch’s heavy hand from her thigh.

The next day I woke up in my own bed with cognac on my breath... And truly, that is all I remember.

teckels and pizza

I walked Goni’s teckel, picked up his turds, did the wash, split a pizza with Bren, and thought positive thoughts. I thought about light years and how many miles that makes, and I watched Chuck Norris fight the enemy in Delta Force. Zombie, enthusiast, geek, buff, introvert... a strand of each coiled into a hairball: that’s me these days. Kicked around and wind-blown. From introspection to Chinese cookery to being sleepy and lovelorn for my beautiful Goni. She left to Haifa this week to see her mother. I wrote her a poem: Your toes, islets / Your fingers, ridges/ Your arms a bay around my beating heart... then I got stuck rhyming Adriatic for my Balkan-theme (ecstatic? aromatic?).... and thinking of home I decided to call my mother in Zagreb. We talked about me, about Bee in LA, and then she let me rail against the new prince-elect across the Atlantic –

I’m restless! Have you noticed? I started jogging today. I got tights and a timer. I did laps and checked my pulse. Bren said to stick to one sixty to burn fat. Bren, I’m skinny as a rake. But he insisted. He’s the only guy I know who can talk and do push ups at the same time. He's the only guy I know who can use "triceps" and "Patriot Act" in the same sentence. I laughed like a crazy man, and then I stopped!

Get serious. We are on the cusp of something. The world is on a razor’s edge. Every day is momentous. Every day is the day. I could do a hundred things. I could save the downtrodden in Brazil like my friend Jeru. I could fight the Japanese whalers on the Pacific. Or I could go dark, break rank, conspire and sabotage the Machine. It can’t be about teckels and pizza. It can’t be about Chuck Norris. And if it’s about light years, then show me how!

“Change”

Ever heard of Zbigniew Brzezinski? Most people haven’t. He was the guy in charge of national security under president Carter back in the seventies when the US was fighting Russia in Afghanistan and funding the mujihadeen (today’s Al Qaida) to do their dirty work. A less known fact is that he is the co-founder of the Trilateral Commission together with David Rockefeller (who’s name seems to pop up everywhere, except in mainstream news). I wish I could tell you more about the Commission, Lui, but its handpicked members are sworn to secrecy so I guess we’ll have to take Zbigniew’s word for it that its aims are peace on Earth and goodwill toward Man. Why shouldn’t we, he’s done so many wonderful things already. Let’s see what light breeze of change he will blow into US foreign policy. I can’t wait.

Are you serious?

Yes, I’m serious. And what about Paul Volcker? remember him? No, he’s not dead, he’s 81 years old; young, energetic, the picture of hope and vitality in this new age of “change”. He was Federal Reserve chairman under – guess who? – president Carter. Ha, ha, ha this is so much fun, I wish I could cast this movie myself. And guess what, he’s also a Trilateralist. And guess what he did when the US was plunged into a major economic crisis after the oil spike in the late seventies.. Everyone was strapped for cash, no one could get a lone to save their life, and guess what mister chairman did? (Such foresight, so much common sense!!) Did he increase the money supply, did he try to stimulate the economy? No, that would be boring. He ratcheted up interest rate up to 20%! The economy imploded. And now it looks like Mr.Volcker is set to become Treasury Secretary! Why, you ask? Especially now at this time of economic crisis? Because he did such a friggin’ good job as fed chairman?

Brendan, who came up with this plan? Are they stupid, or this intentional?

Wait, wait, there’s more... Rahm Emanuel. Sweet, gentle Rahm. Chief of Staff under President Clinton. The image of composure and poise? Forget it! Not only is he known for his flighty temper, he’s also heavily, heavily pro-Israel. His father was a member of Irgun, a Zionist group that even the New York Times has labeled as a terrorist organization. Like father like son? No, I don’t believe that – look at me – but for God’s sake, Lui, to set this man up as chief of staff – that’s a very, very important position, he’s virtually co-president, he structures the president’s agenda, he essentially frames the issues for him – to set this guy up as chief of staff at a time when tensions with the Arab world are at an absolute boiling point, and when the question of Palestine is indisputably at the heart of this conflict, that, my friend is plain and simple provocation! Nothing short! And Lui, these are just some of the upstanding gentlemen that are suppose to represent a "breath of fresh air" in US politics. So forgive me if I don't drop to knees before the savior just yet.

Again, are they stupid or this intentional?

Well, one guy said – I forgot who – he said, “consistency has never been the mark of stupidity. If they were merely stupid, they would occasionally make a mistake in our favor.”

Delta Romeo Unicorn

Lui Labas, where are you going with your life, where are you steering this vehicle, you haven’t thought things through, you’re not in Zagreb anymore.... you don’t have a clue? Are you on drugs?

What!?

Delta Romeo Unicorn –

No, no, I got it, of course I’m not on drugs.

Well, you sure act like you are. The world isn’t arranged to suit your little whims, Lui Labas, you have to start taking things seriously. You have to start facing reality.

I am serious. I’m dead serious. I look people in the eye. I tell them straight when I don’t like something. I’ve been serious since I was five, my friend. Five. I was going to be a tennis star – Bjorn Borg, James McEnroe – nothing could stop me, I played like my life depended on it. Me and the wall. Grit and determination. Sweat on my brow. All of that. I am serious. I’m too serious. That’s my problem.

It’s John. It’s John McEnroe. Common, Lui. And what about Goni?

Yeah, what about her?

You should get married. You can’t keep roaming around like a gypsy. Buy a house, get settled, have some kids? You’re great with kids.

How do you know? Man, who the hell are you?

My name is Louis.

Well Louis, if you don’t mind, fuck off!

What!?

Foxtrot Unicorn Charlie …

whale-man and the Emilians

This week was not a week. It was a series of hours strung together, a loose-knit thing full of holes I slumped into like a hammock. No work, no ideas, no conversation except Brendan’s odd outbursts on the state of the economy and my state of inactivity (you’re a friggin' sloth, Lui, he said working his dumbbells).

I did have one conversation. I went out for coffee around the corner on tuesday and a huge man – four hundred pounds of burgers and sweat – a whale of a man, an American with a big t-shirt - we are not alone, it read - struck up a conversation. What’s going on, how’ya doin’? Where ya from? and so on, but quickly he began in earnest:.. we're on an asteroid my friend, we’re on an asteroid barreling through space, a clump of sediment and water and plants and microbes and–

Ok, ok… we're barreling through space, go on…

that's right, and every couple of millennia, he said shifting his paunch from one knee to the other, a planet comes within our “reach” quoting with this fingers, an unknown, an unacknowledged planet nested in gravitational fields. That's right my friend, and this planet – but then he stopped – what’s your name?

Lui.

Gluey?

No, LUI.

…this planet, Lui, this planet is not uninhabited, repeat, NOT uninhabited. A donut disappeared into his mouth as he waited for a reaction.

None came. This guy’s a nut, I thought. But he continued and every time he said Earth he poked my arm as if I was partly responsible for our asteroid's trajectory, always adding, barreling through space, keen to remind me that even though he could barely move himself, he was still “moving” on a galactic level.

Back in my hammock I couldn’t help but think of whale-man and his planet of humanoids. Millions, he kept saying, millions of ‘em. I thought of them so much that gave them a name. They're called Emilians, they’re about 4 feet tall and they’re a pesky, irascible bunch of backbiters. And I suspect they are walking among us as I speak. Emilians are avid collectors of EVERYTHING. They collect, they jar, they categorize and they store everything this side of the galaxy, and then they meet somewhere on vast open plains, hundreds of thousands of them, and they trade like a bunch interplanetary geeks gone awry.

You really have too much time on your hands, Lui, Goni said when I told her on the phone. Go do something, for God's sake, please go do something!.

... my hammock swayed.

I couldn't stop thinking about what I would collect if were Emilian. What would be my specialty, how would I stand out as a four-footer.

I quit

as bluntly as that, without preparation or preamble...

I went for coffee and ended up veering left and then left again into my boss’ office. I stood there for a moment wondering what it was I came to do, but when Branson looked up from his desk, when I saw his goatee twist into an expression of irritation, when I heard the words, Labas, wat wil je - what do you want – it was beyond my control. I don’t think I said I quit – or the Dutch equivalent – I said something else, but I can’t remember, the shock in Branson’s face was overwhelming. He remained silent but his eyeballs spoke to me in unmistakable terms: how the hell, HOW THE HELL, will a miserable Croat with no qualifications to speak of survive in this world that is all tooth and claw, that is all Darwinian and that is now on the brink of economic collapse; how the hell do you expect to manage Labas? And this is when I wished to remind him that if the world collapsed on itself and darkness descended on man and all his machines there would be no need for office supplies, and thus no need for a chump such as him to order them and keep inventory. I think I laughed – I must have, what else could have provoked his arm to spasm as it did, and the coffee to flow across his desk and the obscenities from his hairy lips. I left him mopping his keyboard, soggy Kleenex in hand.

Since I have no desk of my own I had none to clear, and I guess could have left the building promptly, but I wished to say farewell to my beloved colleague Ratface, the undisputed, week-on-week winner of most-intensely-annoying-co-worker. I have been unkind to him in the past, calling him a Nazi genetic experiment, and I thought I might make him happy by telling him I quit, but when I did he lapsed into a state verging panic: but… but what are you going to do? he asked, as though my announcement shot a beam of light into a dark chasm in his soul. I don’t know, I said, and left him gazing blankly at his empty Outlook calendar. Adieu Ratface, Adieu.

And of course I couldn’t leave without saying goodbye to my trusted friend Fer Ruiz at payroll, the soft-spoken subversive, the armchair Che. He was sad and I let him plead with me in earnest: where was he going to find “a receptive ear and vociferous heart in this house of cards” (his words, he’s Argentinean) . I gave him a big bear hug and I said, I’ll see you in Buenos Aires my friend. And that was that.

Luigi Gonzaga

That was me in the mid 1500’s. I was a good looking lad then. A bit effeminate, but good haircut... what happened? you might ask.

My name (and this is sheer coincidence) was Luigi Gonzaga. I died young and was made a saint posthumously – or beatified, as they say – but I run ahead of myself. First – against my father’s wishes, who preferred I become a soldier or a marquis in a long line of fat and opulent noblemen– I entered the Jesuit order. I worked tirelessly for the poor. I gave up every penny and it is said that at the height of my selflessness I carried a moribund man twenty miles into Rome, a plague-ridden man, a dead man. I died two weeks later of the same disease.

You will ask, how the hell do I know this? You will ask, how does a man who xeroxes for a living – a Croatian national who xeroxes for a living in a business park on the outskirts of Amsterdam, how can such a man have this kind of profound historical “memory” – that is, if you got past the first hurdle that it could be me at all. In any case, you will pronounce me a fool, or at least you will think it, and you will laugh nervously. But I will laugh too. I will laugh louder than you and longer, and then I will laugh again, and at that moment you will be silent and you’ll think fuck, is this guy serious?

I’m dead serious Brendan, that’s me. Ok, I’ve changed a bit. I don’t carry dead guys to Rome on my back anymore, but that was me. I swear.

Lui, dude, the only thing you got in common with this guy is that you're dating a Jewish girl.

He’s a Jesuit, Brendan, JESUIT, not Jewish.

Then you're really talking out of your ass. Stop being crazy, you’re scaring me.

Then why are you laughing?

I just know. I know in my bones. And you want to know how I know? You want me to tell you how? I’m going to tell you, but expect no hocus-pocus, expect no mysticism, expect no illumination, no smoke-breathed apparition with a message of "information"…Simply, I recognized him. That’s all. Like you recognize a man on the street, like you recognize a friend in a crowd. I recognized him because we were friends – what I mean is, I liked who I was, and I don't just mean the good guy in sandals, I liked my whole attitude, my game plan, my set of principles, I liked the calluses under my feet, I liked the chunk of cheese and bread in my satchel, I liked travelling light, I liked my haircut, and especially, I liked pissing off my dad. In short, I liked ME under the Gonzaga rule. It is much later, in subsequent centuries - especially recently - that I developed my cynicism and miniaturized self-esteem. I had no such issues at the time.

But now you raise your eyebrows, and you ask, but how did you find him then? On Facebook? And you smirk. And I tell you it straight.

In a book, Goni, at the library. He was on a postcard in a book.

What? Come on Lui, you have to do better than that…

That's where I found him. A random book. I opened it and there he was.

What book?

What difference does it make? It was random.

It makes a difference. If everything in your account can be random except him, it doesn’t work. What book?

Don’t get smart Gon, I just know, alright.

You’re telling me you were a 16^th century blue-blooded, Italian saint. Excuse me for being sceptical... Luigi… tell me what book!

No… find your own book.

panic

This whole bail-out is a goddam fraud. We’re being conned, Lui. We’re being taken for a fucking ride. We’re getting screwed with our hands tied. This is a country-wide gang rape. We’re getting butt f-

I got it Brendan, I got it. But then he went on about the consolidation of finance, about the tri-lateral commission, about the banking elite engineering bubbles and panics so they can swoop down like vultures and pick out the juiciest bits while the assembled dumbasses of the world are corralled in a pen of bewilderment. That would be us, the supposed dumbasses, the guys who don’t know a security from an interest rate, who think Goldman Sachs is a department store and Ben Bernanke a brand of ice cream. When I mentioned that all this smacks of conspiracy theory, every muscle in his body spasmed and he retorted, they sold fucking "krokets" to the entire world and called them t-bone steaks, Lui, don’t tell me about conspiracy theory. (A kroket is Dutch, it's all the ugliest pork and beef offal –innards, eyeballs, brain, spine – ground up into a revolting goulash and then packaged in a neat little schnitzel that costs practically nothing).

I had to give it to him, you got a point Bren.

Then he went on: And now I have to watch the secretary of the treasury and the chairman of the federal reserve prostrate on the floor of the congress, begging nakedly for 700 billion dollars to "fix" (with his fingers) the friggin mess their own friends engineered. That’s 700 thousand MILLION, Lui, that’s ASTRONOMICAL, that’s like Alaska in dollar bills.

Ok, ok, Bren I got it... just cool it with the all homo-erotic stuff.

But it wasn't just Brendan. Yesterday Goni showed me a small coffer filled with gold coins, and in her closet a piece of luggage, packed, ready to go. Just in case. Just in case what? I asked her, where are you gonna go? but she couldn’t answer. She had no idea, she just mumbled... the economic crisis... it’ll cripple us... send us back to the stone age... remember recent history. She’s Jewish, it’s understandable. But I xerox for a living, I staple stacks of papers together, I file and plastify, I follow orders, bring coffee and eat sandwiches for lunch. Hurtle me back to the stone age and I may be better off. I’ll till the land, eat cabbage and red beet, and love women with wide hips.

I'm an optimist.

I end in verse,

Beam me to Belaruse,
Give me an ox and a plow
And let those vulture loose.

on the moon

The world is fantastical. A torture-strained septuagenarian and the Governor of Grizzlies are rising to the pinnacle of power. The global economy is a pyramid scheme about to collapse. And the weather, once predictable, has become a dysfunctional family of poltergeists. This world makes even a Croat blush. Opportunism, cronyism, staged wars, backroom deals and fat oligarchs sheltering millions in pickled sharks and other installations, artistic or otherwise. I laugh at this world, HA HA HA HA, I sit on the moon in a crater and I laugh HA HA HA HA until reflux reminds me of the moonburger I ate at noon, and then I stop, but I’m lovin’ it, so I’m laughin’ anyway HA HA HA HA. This is giant. This is comedy of the greatest, grandest order! And then I think of the Dark Knight, what he would have done in this riddled, counter-riddled, convoluted story of spiritual doom, meteorological cataclysm and economic meltdown; would he have been honorable and hyper-complex, would he’ve died, then resurged with bigger guns, would he’ve struck at the core of this maze-of-a-plot, at the control centre where heads of state and financial shadow-men pull strings and sip on $100 espressos. And that’s when I remembered that the Dark Knight netted the equivalent of Kenya’s GDP, and that it kept whole nations in its moronic, bullet-strewn trance and I roll with laughter until moon-dust covers me head to toe.

But do you not grieve for the downtrodden, Lui? Do you not feel for them?
"The downtrodden”!!! HA HA HA HA. “The downtrodden” laugh and play cards on the curbs of Port-au-Prince, too poor to buy toxic baby milk from China, too busted up to worry about THE PLOT. And the one dollar they hold in their hand will be, as one guy said, “birdcage lining” sooner rather than later. So no, I don’t. They can trade chickens for bread. We can’t. And no, Mrs. Palin, I will not write Lui is an impertinent little spoilsport a thousand times. You’ll have to come and make me, but since you only got your passport last year, the moon may be too exotic for a first destination. And to Barack I say, you are a well-spoken man, and intelligent beyond your years. But tell me, tell me really.. who do you love Barack?? And then he looks at me intelligently and he says, it's WHOM do you love, Lui, WHOM . And I laugh a big laugh from deep inside my gut until moon dust rises up all around me in a haze like the teleportation-halo that brought me here in the first place. And then I settle down again in my crater and take a big slurp from my gallon of Coke and look down to watch the advancing hurricane… Gustave, Ike, Jeronimo… tell me, I lost track.

Bee Labas

Bee’s here!! I scarcely believe it. It’s been more than 5 years! My sister Bee! She flew in from LA this morning. Long hoped for. Then half expected. But definitely last minute. This is great. This is doubly great. This is greater than great.

I picked her up at Schiphol this morning. She skipped into the arrivals hall, trolley case in tow, with her halo of frizzy hair and her golden league jacket wrapped around her waist. LUI, she shouted like a skinny space-bird and then she skipped onward to greet her glowing brother. This is great. This is doubly great. She’s great. . Lui and Bee. Brother and sister. Once inseparable. Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. The bald spot on the back of my head is from a rake she combed my hair with when I was ten. But her greatness is galactic, so I forgave her.

She’s staying in the guest room. It’s small, but so is she. Brendan’s still injured, stretched out on his back from his carnal experiments with Katrina. Note: I take this as a gesture from God. There is no doubt he would have hit on my sister one way or the other - feel this tricep, go ‘head , go ‘head – and then there is no doubt that that would be the last muscle he flexed for the rest of his life. Quiet Croat turns vengeful, knife-wielding Sicilian.

But in truth, Bee needs no assistance at all. She’s all tap-dance, waffles and feta-cheese, when all’s well, but if you cross the line (the lion, as she says) that’s it. It’s over. First the eye-venom (figurative as yet, but who knows how that will evolve.. ) then the projectile-to-crotch: flip-flop, sandal, clog, wristwatch – and her aim is frightening. You stand no chance.

Bee’s galactic– intergalactic – she’s on loan from a better place, a place gold-laced and light-footed. I would take ten more bald spots to the head just to have her here a little longer.

Ratface

Zere weel always be rat in ze wurld, Julien said.

To Julien, rat - like fish - is plural. He was talking about Ratface, my detested co-worker. I call him Ratface because he looks like a rat... but tell me, is it a coincidence that he also acts like a one? Or is character genetically prescribed preordained blah blah blah. Bullshit. He’s a rat because he likes being a rat. You come in five minutes late – bang! – not the early bird are we Labas. You forget to do something – bang! – hello, are we awake in there? You’re just doing your job, just minding your own business, –bang! Ratface has an angle – gee, we aren’t very ambitious are we? Always WE. Never you. And always unoriginal. Ratface never improvises. To my face he calls me Labas, but sloppily and strangely and he knows it. To others he refers to me as onze Balkan vriend (our Balkan friend), but do not be deceived, he’s a multi-layered rat, a rat with depth, a cunning, loose-boned little creature liable to slink under your monitor to check if your “doing work” (gmail, huh?). He has a pen he always plays with, prodding the wax in his ear, and he takes eon-long breaks. God knows where, doing God knows what. I suspect him. I suspect this man. The other day I begged Fer Ruiz from payroll to give me some dirt. Anything. He refused, calling me out on my Pinochettian tactics. He was right. So I dropped it. Then last night, after a long rant, Goni said to me,

If he upsets you so much just stick some stuff in his soup.
What’d you mean, Gon, like poison?
No, not poison. Of course not.
Well what are you talking about then, cheese?

She meant poison. She totally meant rat poison (go Goni!). Imagine shaking a box of that stuff into his minestrone.

Gee Ratface, are we having a nice lunch?

Brendan's Back

The first thing Brendan said to me when he called from the airport,

You won’t believe it.
Tell me.
I fucked up my back.
Serious. What'd you do?
What do you think?
I don’t know, lifting weights or something.
No, think man!!

How do you pull a muscle in bed? How do you pull a muscle so bad you can't carry your own bags? Just how athletically do you need to go about it? And who could accommodate such athleticism?

What’s her name?

What’s it matter.

I don’t know, what’s her name?

Katrina.

She German?
No man, like the hurricane, dude.

And then he explained.
And I understood... in theory.

I hate him, but boy I’m happy he’s back!

I'm crazy about moving objects...

It leaps, gnaws, yelps, salivates and scatters urine all in a matter of second as if DOG’s mind is a ball of conjoined wormholes that can shift it from licking its scrotum to pawing MASTER GREAT AND BOUNTIFUL in a single wag of the tail. And just as quickly it returns to the world, the WORLDINFINITE, infinitely sniffable, infinitely distracting, everything in it filled with the potential of play, a ball, a stick, a bum, a turd, a blade of grass, a buzzer-bee, WHAT’S THAT- WHAT? A MOVING OBJECT? I’M CRAZY ABOUT MOVING OBJECTS I AM A MOVING OBJECT. The wagging stops. The mind is suspended. Hind quarters bounding, thorax thrust out like a canon ball. DOG is a moving object. It lunges and goes. Suddenly out of nowhere something small but sharp like a tack shakes DOG to the ground and a force beyond it presses its nose deep into its crotch. Gnaw. Growl. Gnaw... and then it bounds back up, buoyant, again a vehicle of fascination with WORLDINFINITE, especially everything that belongs to, is thrown by, or extends from MASTER GREAT AND BOUNTIFUL HOLDER OF BISCUITS AND THE LIKE...

I sat in the grass in the Vondel park a couple of days ago and I looked at this dog with incredible envy. I don’t have the intellect for calculus. I don’t have the patience for history. I don’t care about economics. So I can add up 12 and 12. So I speak Serbo-Croatian. So what? I'd like my mouth to water too from time to time, and I'd also like to behold with the same unbreachable wonderment a bouncing ball, a blade of grass, a buzzer-bee... like DOG.

Lee the Palestinian

Ten thousand dead, he said, and he pulled me by the sleeve, pulled me so close his face was like A Fistful of Dollars, like Lee van Cleef, pocked and greasy, and his breath a barrel of old herring. A hundred thousdand dead, he said – the numbers rose by order of magnitude – What are you talking about man, but I knew what he was talking about. I was waiting for Goni outside the Israeli embassy. I knew he was a palestinian, with his scarf and his placard, I knew he was fighting the impossible fight, the fight he would loose, the fight that has shamed us all for over half a century. Gimme a cigarette, he said, and I gave.

Since tuesday I’ve been purging evil from my heart. On tuesday I killed. With the wheel of my bike I rode across a pigeon's back. The little rat didn’t get out of the way! Its job is to get the out of the way. A life-long training prepares it to GET OUT OF THE WAY. My wheel tore across him. I heard a shreak and a violent flutter of wings. My heart stopped and then... then evil descended.

Gimme your life, Lee said. I balked. You can borrow it... and then he showed me his teeth and laughed a laugh full of herring. Evil was waning in me I could feel it. When Goni appeared we were still laughing, but she saw his scarf and his face and immediately, with her eyes, she sentenced him and scolded me (la mère Goni!). Then later in the car she said,

“You know he’s crazy, right?”

“He’s not crazy.”

“He’s crazy, Lui.”

“Gon, he’s not crazy. That’s too easy. Maybe he’s just tired that his mom has to sleep in a tent. Maybe they bulldozed his whole village while he was out with his brother. Maybe his brother was bulldozed too because he didn’t have the reflex, because he didn’t have the fucking reflex to get out of the way.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. Just drive.... and watch the birds.”

the me of me

This week was existential. I nearly caved-in…and then I didn’t.

Everyone’s gone: Goni’s in Haifa with Sal and Gerry, Brendan’s in Portland, Julien in Briançon, Bee’s unreachable in Southern California, the rich are in Juan-les-Pins, the poor in buses to the Costa del Sol. Only the Serbs are in Serbia and the Gazans in Gaza. The office too was deserted, a barren showroom of desks and printers. The xerox hummed sullenly and I stood by with nothing to do. I even missed Branson’s “helpful advice”, his goatee and his gleaming white teeth. This was a wasted, useless week. A dangling-chad on the calendar. I missed people. I just missed them. So I turned inward. I turned to the me of me. The I’s I. The moi en moi. I turned and I turned and then I saw something that cheered me up. I saw a kid who needs a haircut, a broke kid with funny teeth and a goofy smile. I saw a kid who likes Frankfurters and toast, Croats and Jewish girls, a kid who’s mostly sympathetic, except with snobs and “worldly” types. I saw this in a flash, faster than you can say “kid”, faster than the cyclotron in Geneva. It came to me like a rapid dispatch from within the me of me. It came so fast I almost missed it (the moi of moi is an impatient, flashy thing, not to be toyed with). And when I saw him, I liked him immediately. I liked him like I like secret tunnels, trap doors and distant cousins. And then, without further ado, in another flash I turned outward, fully outward: I grabbed my empty wallet, I grabbed my sunglasses and I went out. I went out onto the streets of Amsterdam, the sun on my back, like a crazy, disheveled cat looking for something to do.

in praise of women

The intestine is three kilometers long, coiled in your stomach is three kilometers of tubing (I exaggerate. Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know, look it up). Food has to worm its way out past a dozen “car wash” stations where it is sprayed and “secreted” upon. And it must undergo various metamorphoses – metamorfeces – before it can be expelled. So, it is no wonder that somewhere along the way things can go horribly wrong. Usually, I’m what you call a “Bangladesh-type” (flash-floods and landslides), but since Belgrade –

but this is not what I want to talk to you about. Yesterday was 27 degrees. It has been upwards of 25 for the past week. In Holland this means something. Women – previously unseen, undetected women – have been coming out by the thousands. Dressed down, legs bare, open back, tanned shoulders, cleavage and toes. It’s a banquet! I start in the train in the morning with the same book, the same page, the same paragraph – When the world was a forest of pines... – and then SHE sits across from me, crosses her legs, squishes her flip-flop between her toes and avoids my eye studiously. Quickly an I-pod, book or magazine emerges and she is no longer “available for questions”. It doesn’t matter, though, it doesn’t matter who’s sitting across from me and whether she’s nice to me or not, because they all have something. Even when they don’t, they have something. They have fine fingers, funny fiddly fingers, pearlish nails, freckles on their hands and arms, baby fat around their shoulders, a collarbone like a sandy ridge, or a long beautiful neck strung with beads, or they talk funny, in little fruity tidbits, or they run their hands through their hair like they’re on boat off Capri, or they just breathe nicely, softly, regularly, the same air I breathe, or, or, or (Holy mother of God!) it is simply their smell – not cosmetic, but human – that is completely inebriating! Serbian, Italian, Dutch, German alike, it is an endless lexicon of detail, as long as this damn book I will never finish – when the world was a forest of pines...

One day they will recognize me. Not as the Apollo they all seek, but as their greatest, their most devoted fan... all of them, these women of the world!

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.