Gentleman's Library

Please, step into my gentleman’s library. I don’t leave its leather-bound confines these days, and to receive a visitor is a rare treat indeed. Please, please, don’t be shy. Wipe your boots on the sable fur mat, set your cane in the well and cross the threshold to my kingdom.

Pray, sit down. Make yourself at home. Hang your hat on the elk antlers, the bronzed rhino horn, wherever you like. My gentleman’s library is your gentleman’s library. Only I must ask that you not remove the laminate on the sofa. We’ve been told it’s not gentlemanly. Don’t mind that shriveled woman there. She’s sound asleep. Simply pretend she’s not there. Instead, turn your gaze upon the marvels of my collection. What you see before you are the spoils of lifelong travel and the learned discernments of a private scholar. These mounted heads are trophies from my big game hunts on the Dark Continent. That folio there is the erotic diary of a 17th-century courtesan in the sultan of Brunei’s harem, a gift from the sultan himself. And here, adjacent to the wonder cabinet, betwixt my astrolabe and the collected works of Hume, is an original medical prescription written for John Milton’s gout.

For these treasures, I entangled myself in innumerable romances and intrigues round the globe. But I eventually grew weary of the world of men and retreated to the sanctuary of this library. Like the immortal Montaigne, I have consecrated the rest of my days to a life of the mind. If you look at the mantel, above the busts of Plutarch and Carlyle, you’ll see that I have inscribed for all posterity my vow to pursue knowledge strictly within these hallowed walls.

This vow has been notarized and carries with it the authority of the state of Indiana. Impressive, you say? Well, not only did the local government endorse my scholarly reclusion, they even honored me with a flashing jeweled bracelet to commemorate the deed. I have been instructed to wear it here, just below my sock garter and directly above my spats, and never to remove it. Fetching, isn’t it?

Behold, next to the fireplace, a complete collection of all knowledge, bound in gilded leather, befitting a man of my station. Every luminous pearl of wisdom from Heraclitus to Hegel–oh, forgive me. How rude I have been. I entirely forgot to offer you a beverage. And you must be terribly thirsty. I believe we have some claret in the cellar. Just a moment.

“Grandma, wake up! He-llo, Grandma! Up and at ‘em! Can’t you see I have a guest and that we’re both beyond parched? Be a dear and fetch us some claret from the cellar.”

“Now, Clarence, you know you’re not supposed to have visitors. The judge was very clear about that.”

“Grandma, please don’t tell me what to do when you’re in my gentleman’s library. That’s one of the rules.”

“Well, I thought we also agreed you weren’t going to fuss with my Reader’s Digests. Please put them back next to the fireplace before they get bent. Also, what did I tell you about putting your rocks in the linen closet?”

“You mean the wonder cabinet.”

“Sure. And, for the last time, stop writing ‘Collected Works of Hume’ on my Dean Koontz books.”

“Grandma! Just fetch the claret, would you?”

I’m sorry. She’s totally senile. I tried barricading her in the bedroom, but then I realized there would be no one to cook and tend to the scullery. After all, a gentleman must have his victuals. Now let me show you my volumes of Voltaire.

“Clarence, I didn’t see any drink called claret in the fridge. Just your usual Grape Tang. Now, make sure your friend doesn’t spill any on the sofa. That laminate is hard to clean.”

“I know, Grandma! Now would you mind–we’re trying to have an intellectual conversation about Voltaire.”

“Clarence, you know what the psychiatrist said. That Voltaire is what got you into all this mess in the first place.”

“I was just fighting for enlightenment against the blackguard clergy.”

“You exposed yourself to a nun, while shouting lewdly in French.”

“There’s nothing lewd about ‘ecrasez l’infame,’ Grandma.”

“There is when your wiener is hanging out.”

“Grandma, go to your room! You’re embarrassing me in my gentleman’s library!”

“You and your friend can visit until four, Clarence. Then my programs come on. Make sure you un-tape those cardboard animal heads from the TV by then.”

“Fine, Grandma, whatever. Just leave us alone.”

“Oh, one more thing, Clarence. Have you seen my gout prescription from Dr. Milton? I can’t find it anywhere.”

“I have no idea where it is, Grandma.”

I really must apologize. She’s quite the philistine. What’s that? You have to go? What a shame. Now, what was that you mentioned at the door about selling cookies? Never mind? Oh well, you can tell me about it next time.

Pumpkin Pie Famine

“There is definitely a shortage of pumpkins and it’s really due to a smaller yield this year. The pumpkin yield nationwide was down 70 percent, so that’s a huge reduction in what we’re used to,” said Vivian King of Roundy’s Supermarkets.

This is potentially bad news for pumpkin pie lovers like Pat Moore. Moore said that he just had pumpkin pie at his niece’s birthday and will be disappointed if the shortage prevents him from having more.

“We like pumpkin pie and everyone was commenting on how delicious it was, so it would be missed if there’s a shortage,” Moore said.

– WISN News, Milwaukee, “Bad Pumpkin Harvest Could Affect Thanksgiving Dessert Plans”

Sweet Jesus. Hide your children. Lock the door. Good. Now lock it again. If Pat Moore smells pumpkin anywhere near your family, he will eat them.

I don’t mean to be an alarmist, but I used to work with Pat Moore. He had the cubicle next to mine. Seemed like nice enough guy, into golf and boats, that sort of thing. We used to take smoke breaks together. But one time, I remember, we walked down to Roundy’s to pick up a pack of cigs, and while we’re walking through the store, Pat stops dead in his tracks and just stares at this bin of pumpkins. His eyes go all googly and he starts muttering to himself. Something about ample harvests, sweet round lovelies, and then all of a sudden he raises his arms and screams, “All my crusts shall be filled!”

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Someone’s always flipping out at Roundy’s. It’s just that kind of place. Besides, Pat seemed totally normal otherwise.

The next year Pat’s wife left him right at the end of October. So we decided to invite him over to our place for Thanksgiving, you know, to cheer him up. We figured if he got a load of my family, then he might not mind being divorced and completely alone.

Now, this was back in ’02, year of the Great Pumpkin Famine. As you well remember, it devastated everyone’s dessert plans. The cans of filling disappeared from store shelves in September. The pumpkin bin at Roundy’s stayed empty through October. Many pumpkin farmers jumped out their windows. Fortunately, most of them lived in ranch-style homes. But their state of desperation was not lost on us. Come the week of Thanksgiving we thought long and hard about how we were going to get by. We had heard reports of people making pie with nettles and shoe leather. My Estonian barber told me he had fought the Soviets for fifteen years in the Baltic forests subsisting solely on salted dog turds, which, he assured me, tasted just like pumpkin pie. But we swallowed our dignity and settled for blueberry filling. Sometimes we must be thankful for very little.

The day of Thanksgiving, my extended family rolled in. I say rolled because my Aunt Blanche, in the years prior to her stomach stapling, had to be wheeled in on a dolly, while cousin Elmer had taken to wearing roller skates to family events ever since his head injury. Uncle Poot arrived true to form, farting the national anthem and in his customary overalls whose baggy depths concealed loaded firearms.

Then Pat Moore showed up. He had a crazed look. He said he had just come from his niece’s birthday. “Guess what? They had pie there. It was pumpkin pie. I ate it. Little girls don’t deserve pumpkin pie. Pat Moore deserves pumpkin pie. We will be very disappointed if something prevents us from having more pie.”

Sure, I was a little unnerved, but I felt sorry for the guy. Everyone was hard hit by the pumpkin famine, I told him. It was only natural to be upset. And here I gently inserted that this Thanksgiving, given such dire circumstances, we would be concluding the meal with blueberry pie.

At that moment I saw the switch flip in Pat Moore.

We tried to proceed with the meal like everything was normal. But Pat just stared at his plate. Not even Uncle Poot’s racist jokes could trigger a reaction. Cousin Elmer, oblivious to the tension, chirped: “Hey, Pat doesn’t eat turkey. Just like Elmer. Elmer only eats ham!” Pat slowly looked up, his eyes swelling as they took in cousin Elmer’s orange protective helmet. “Pumpkin?” Pat intoned, raising his finger to Elmer’s head. “Pumpkin.” And with that, he dove across the table and, with a gruesome efficiency, tore poor cousin Elmer’s head clean from its shoulders and devoured it whole. By the time Uncle Poot had fetched his gun from his overalls, Pat Moore was gone.

In the days following Thanksgiving, brigands could be seen roaming the suburbs. Looting the wilting jack-o-lanterns from their neighbors’ doorsteps, lopping the hands off homeowners clinging to their gourds, plundering autumnal cornucopias in window displays, the pumpkin gangs ravaged the Midwest on their campaign of terror. Their leader: a man named Pat Moore, a savage man, a man like you and me, a lover of pumpkin pie. Give thanks that he doesn’t find you.

The Plight of Pure Genius

People often ask me how I got to be so smart. That’s why I carry a briefcase full of photocopies of the second chapter of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, “Why I Am So Wise,” his last moment of lucidity before the spirochetes churned his brain to butter. I let Nietzsche do my talking for me since I’m usually too busy philosophizing to answer people’s questions.

For example, just yesterday at the café I was lecturing a peasant on how best to raise his unruly children, whose horseplay was disturbing my moment of intense contemplation (whether to have crumb cake or lemon poppy seed loaf). The dim fellow asked me, “What makes you so goddamn smart, asshole?” At which point I plucked Nietzsche out of my satchel and said, “So glad you asked, dear man. Here, read this!” He mentioned something about joining him outside, perhaps for an al fresco reading, but I had already returned to my lofty meditations.

Of course, I’ve never read Nietzsche. I wouldn’t want to contaminate the originality of my ideas. But I’m confident we’re on the same page, since Nietzsche, like me, was a misunderstood genius. Contrary to what most people think, being a misunderstood genius is not all free meals and hot oil rubdowns. Normally, I would just hand you the Nietzsche printout to explain my point, but I’ve run out of copies and Kinko’s has banned me from all California locations for Xeroxing my anus one too many times. So now I shall condescend to you, public, to share the plight of my prodigious intelligence.

I was bred to be a genius. That’s why my parents named me P.G.–Pure Genius. Well, technically, I was christened as Ralph. But after a year of witnessing my superior mind, and from the stories they tell, my amazing talent for eating nails, rubber bands and other household detritus, Mom and Dad had it legally changed. This new name was, for them, an endless source of pride and enjoyment. “Hey, Pure Genius,” they would shout, “Come open Daddy’s beer with your teeth.” Or, “Pure Genius, I bet you can’t drink a whole jug of anti-freeze.” Given my precocious intellect, I instantly mastered such activities.

The trouble started when I came of schooling age. Unlike my parents, who accepted my talents as a natural emanation of their own brilliance, the base and conformist world tried to break me. An incompetent doctor diagnosed me as a low-grade cretin. Clearly, the man could not see past superficial appearances, basing his diagnosis solely on my goiter, my lucky propeller beanie and my sardine-can shoes.

Back in those days, they tried to cure cretinism with corporal punishment. Here again, my learning prowess was apparent, as I quickly mastered how to take a lashing like a veteran sailor. I absorbed blows with the same zest I had for absorbing vocabulary words. Some geniuses, the slower ones, read widely; I read the thesaurus. It had all the good words in it, as well as the high quality, excellent, first-class, virtuous, noble, satisfactory and advantageous words. Pretty soon, I had traded up my vulgar colloquialisms for a mellifluous lexical arsenal, spoken in a cheeky East Midland accent. Needless to say, this led to only more beatings. At the age of 16, I decided to leave the third grade and light out on my own intrepid quest for knowledge.

After years of wandering, I arrived at Harvard. I had followed a frail-looking old man from the bus station onto campus, hoping to overcome him with my intellect and steal his wallet. But he was not as weak as he looked, and after considerable tussle, I retracted my claim to mental superiority and limped away. Nursing my wounds, I had a revelation. This man must be a genius, too. That was the only possible way he could have out-wrestled me. I realized this was where I belonged.

The Harvard admission director seemed shocked when I made my customary offer of sexual favors. I explained to him that this was how I had risen through the ranks of the merchant marines, how I had traveled the world and how I opened my first checking account.

“But anyone can open a checking account,” he said.

Flustered by this affront to my intelligence, I frantically displayed further evidence of my genius. I recited the thesaurus. I drew a really cool, but scary clown. I even strapped on my sardine cans and did a shuffle. Again, my genius went unrecognized.

So I came to Stanford. Here, I decided to forego the whole admission process. Instead, I have erected a perfectly habitable ivory tower of my own made from driftwood and coffee cups, right next to the Hoover Institute. It’s a one-man think tank called the P.G. Institute, and it’s open for business. Current projects include publishing an “Idiot’s Guide to Understanding My Genius in Three Easy Steps” and trying to recruit Condi Rice to come for a yearlong fellowship.

Selling Out

Dear readers, I’m feeling the pinch of the economy. In order to buy my weekly gruel, I’ve had to lease my column out to advertisers. Fortunately for you, not to the same advertisers that have leased out space on my forehead. Otherwise, you would be reading the words “Enjoy Scruggs’ Whole Meat Nuggets” for the next 700 words, without experiencing the pleasure of the adorable dancing nugget that wiggles when I blink.

Although I would like to take this opportunity to say that Scruggs, a family (style) farm operated by the Nihilex Corporation, has been producing the finest naturally flavored Whole Meat Nuggets that you’ve come to know and be strangely chemically addicted to since 1973. Of course, I receive compensation for the Scruggs Dancing Nugget I sport in two-tone color above my eyebrows. But I assure you there was no financial incentive for the Scruggs Super Bowl XXXII Nugget-Off glow-in-the-dark tattoo that shines through my underwear–that appeared after a hazy night out on the town in the company of two Scruggs Nugget employees with a vial of GHB and a penchant for prank tattoos.

Just so you know, I’m not the type of guy who goes around hurling reckless accusations of being slipped the date rape drug by Scruggs employees. But I know for a fact they did because they left this message on my phone: “Hey P.G., remember us? We’re the two Scruggs employees who slipped you the date rape drug. Yeah, and we tattooed that huge glow-in-the-dark Super Bowl Nugget-Off ad on your ass!”

Initially, I was considering litigation, but then Scruggs came to me with an offer I couldn’t refuse. They threatened to smash my fingers into splinters unless I agreed not to file suit. As compensation, however, they did offer to send me a shipping crate of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets and tattoo the Scruggs Dancing Nugget on my forehead. I told them that if they left the date rape drug out of it this time, we would call it a deal. I’ve always loved that dancing nugget.

But love and money are two different processed meat products. And while I may love Scruggs’ nuggets, Bickelmeyer’s pork berries pay the bills:

The following is a paid advertisement by Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries, a member of the Domicorp Group:

Do you know what’s in your nugget?…Scruggs, subsidy of the Nihilex Corporation, may look like your average God-fearing Midwestern mom-and-pop genetically modified industrial chicken farm, but what if we told you it was really a terrorist training ground, nourishing al-Qaeda one nugget at a time? What if you were to learn that Osama bin Laden has stayed alive all these years thanks to a steady supply of Scruggs Whole Meat Nuggets? That’s right, the nuggets you feed your family may be costing us thousands of innocent American lives.

Did you know Scruggs imports nuggets to a place called Venezuela, a SOCIALIST country? Did you know that socialism is a diabolical plot to rid the world of private healthcare, devised by a Marxist named Karl Marx and carried out by his Oriental henchmen Mao, Stalin and Barack Hussein Obama? Did you know Scruggs means “atheist” in another language?

Why support terrorism and the obliteration of democracy when you can enjoy a delicious freedom-loving, partially dehydrogenated Pork Berry brought to you by Bicklemeyer’s? The folks at Bicklemeyer’s have been cultivating pork berries right here on Main Street* for over 40 years. Our Old Country flavor tastes of a simpler time in America, when kids could play stickball on the streets and munch on a pork berry, without fear of being recruited into a terrorist youth organization or lured into a homosexual marriage. That’s because each pork berry is genetically infused with the spirit of Christendom. Yes, sir, when you bite into a Bicklemeyer’s pork berry, you’re consuming the blood of Christ.

Transubstantiation not enough? Well, after they come off the petri dish, we roll our pork berries in the American flag, sing “I’m proud to be an American” to them and press them between the pages of an abridged two-for-one edition of the U.S. Constitution and the Bible.

Our pork berries are what made Ayn Rand so wonderfully selfish. They’re what Rush Limbaugh gave up painkillers for. And they are the only partially dehydrogenated pork product that Glenn Beck dunks at tea parties.

Bickelmeyer’s Old Country Partially Dehydrogenated Pork Berries. Real American taste to die for!

*Main Street is what we call our industrial labor campus for children in Burma. Educating the community is a top priority at Bickelmeyer’s.

My Living Will

Dear reader,

Lately, my thoughts have been drifting toward swine flu. I find this alarming, since usually my thoughts drift toward encephalitis, botulism, and syphilitic brain-softening, in that order, right after I think about what I want for lunch, contemplate the good, and imagine a naked lady. What is this new fear in my hypochondriac closet of illnesses? It’s making me nervous. Only a sick person (perhaps someone with encephalitis!) would add a new disease to his litany of imagined infections. Granted, swine flu seems an upstart compared to a healthy neurodegenerative disease. And it’s so low brow. Even the newspapers scrawl about it. But, then again, the 1918 Spanish flu killed millions. And I have always been drawn to anachronism….

I’m sure this epidemic is nothing to worry about, but just in case, I’m writing a living will. Since you are the only person I trust, I am designating you to execute it. In the event of an emergency, please see to it that my wishes are carried out. Thank you, even though I despise you for staying alive and healthy longer than me.

Yours,

P.G.

----------------------

Dear Executor of my living will,

If you are reading this, then I am lying in a hospital bed in a completely leguminous state, no doubt stricken by one of the maladies I so feared. And you called me a hypochondriac. Looks like I really did have something to worry about after all. Just out of curiosity, what was it that got me? It was that dented can of lentils, wasn’t it? Or maybe a flesh-eating virus from riding the city bus that one time? I told you public transportation would be the death of me. Well, whatever it was, I’m not dead yet. I intend to drink up the dregs of life still floating in my inert limbs. And you’re going to help me.

Did you ever see that movie “The Bucket List”? I saw it on an airplane, and though I was feeling a little panicked and congested from all the microbes circling in those winged germ labs, I found it poignant (though poignancy is a common side effect of Dramamine). And it got me thinking; before it it’s too late, there are some things in life I want to do. Why should I be cooped up in bed comatose when there’s a whole world out there for me and my many tubes and breathing machines to explore? Carpe diem!

First, I’ve always wanted to go water-skiing. Before I fell into a coma, I refrained out of fear of pollutants. The Great Lakes seemed like one giant network of bed pans. I figured I might as well have gone swimming in a toilet. That was the old me. Now I want you to take me to Cleveland, strap some skies on my feet, tie me to a boat in Lake Erie, and let rip. Then I want you to take me swimming in a toilet.

Next, I would like to write a novel. The fancy kind where everyone talks about what a thundering talent I am, makes excuses for my fascist sympathies and infamous drinking problem, and writes me bootlicking poems on my birthday. First, put an eye-patch on me and carve a deep gash in my cheek—something that will leave a scar and give me an old world literary mystique. Then, they say to write what you know, so for a working title I’m thinking Portrait of the Artist as a Drooling Vegetable. Of course, this will require your help. I’ve devised an ingenious system of communication, where every time I twitch you start cycling through the alphabet and when I twitch again, you write down whichever letter you’re at. If I am not twitching, feel free to jostle me. I think this is going to be good.

Becoming a famous novelist has made me realize how important family is. It’s the seemingly trivial moments— sitting around the dinner table, sharing stories by the hearth, sponging down my lifeless bed-sore body—that really count. That’s why I want you to move my body to my brother’s home and see to it that I enjoy three meals a day with his family. His wife Deb will see to my feeding and hygienic upkeep. As is my want in my helpless state, I’ll have French toast for breakfast, a roast for lunch, and chile rellenos for dinner, all piped down my food straw. See to it Deb stuffs the chiles herself, daily, right after she gives me my mid-morning undercarriage scrub. Every afternoon, the kids will tell me how school was. For the sake of their education, I’d like to make them legally obligated to answer in full paragraphs in proper Latin and German. And on the weekends, my brother won’t have to go through the trouble of looking for someone to share his season tickets. I’ll gladly go to every game with him. That should make up for his having been the favorite son.

Thank you. This coma has given me a new lease on life. My will is done.

p.s. Don’t pull the plug!

Malcolm Gladwell polishes a turd

This piece was published in When Falls the Coliseum and can also be read there.

A page from Malcolm Gladwell’s moleskine

I haven’t slept for days. No idea when I last ate. My mind is on fire. Synthesizing all that data has turned my head into a furnace. Seriously, my ears feel hot. Correction: It’s my hair that is on fire. I must have nodded off on the stove again. It looks like my snap decision to work in the kitchen today was one of those snap decisions with adverse effects. Which only confirms my thesis: Sometimes the decisions made in the blink of an eye have positive outcomes, though, in certain cases, the outcome is negative. That’s the “50/50 Effect.”

Or consider it this way. My great great-grandfather Clemens came to this country as an indentured servant in 1773, employed as a grease monger on the estate of a prominent Rhode Island rum merchant. The savage Highlander that he was, and Rhode Island winters being what they were, he acquired a habit of loitering in his lord’s kitchen and warming the underside of his kilt on the wood-burning stove. Kitchen loitering became a tradition in my family, passed down through the generations. Pair that with the fear of scissors that my mother instilled in me at a young age, a residue from the Great Scissors Uprising in Western Pennsylvania–as it turns out, all sons of Western Pennsylvanian mothers who grew up during the Great Scissors Uprising have wild unshorn hair. Then factor in the nearly 10,000 hours I have spent at the end of a manic streak dozing off in strange places.

Seen in that light, it wasn’t my guarana-fueled gut decision to put my notes in the oven and set my laptop on the griddle this morning that turned my hair into a flaming orb. It was the combination of unique opportunities, historical circumstance and habitual behavior that enabled me to make that seemingly idiosyncratic decision. That’s the “Other Stuff Besides You Matters Hypothesis,” which is all the rage these days in certain circles of corporate market–I mean, social psychology.

But how can we explain the meteoric rise of the Floofkin theory? In 1944, philosopher and accordionist Gabe Floofkin escaped Nazi-occupied Poland only to fall into the hands of the Russians. Under suspicion of espionage, he was sent to the gulag. There, under conditions of extreme deprivation and routine buggery, Floofkin developed his theory of burnished matter. Lacking writing materials, he commissioned a thief to tattoo it on his body with a rusty screwdriver. Two weeks later, Flookfin died from tetanus. But his legacy would live on.

Mysteriously, his frozen body wound up on a Vladivostok cargo ship bound for Brazil, fell off en route and, after months at sea, washed ashore on Venice Beach. The next morning, a lifeguard named Eugene Krik, originally from Odessa, discovered Floofkin’s theory inked across his chest in lewdly stylized Cyrillic. It read: “You can’t polish a turd.”

Within weeks, the Floofkin theory went viral. What started as amusing shower banter at the lifeguard hut quickly achieved critical mass and exceeded the tipping point, the point at which ideas become diseases and it is necessary to use the language of epidemiology to understand cultural change. From its Los Angeles epicenter, the Floofkin theory swiftly infected California, ravaged the Midwest and gave shingles to the entire eastern seaboard. Children in Cheyenne, grandmothers in Fort Meyers and news anchors on CNN all conclusively endorsed the Floofkin theory. As a result, turd-polishing plummeted, even in New Jersey. That’s a perfect example of the “Sometimes Ideas Spread Fast Effect.”

But the story doesn’t end there. As always, market research statistics have some really fascinating insights into how the world works–ones that just might overturn the Floofkin theory. The advertising industry has long disputed the Floofkin theory and has thrown a lot of money at the social science departments of major research universities to disprove it. Researchers at Yale have recently found that if you put a turd in a box and polish the box, 57 percent of consumers will consider the turd itself to be polished.

Which leads me to my latest thesis: You really can polish a turd. Except that you can’t. But sometimes you can if you put that turd in a box, polish the box and find some people who will believe that the polished box with a turd in it is, in fact, a polished turd.

On a Manhunt with Joe Arpaio

I had just put on my pajamas and taken off my face when the Sheriff battered down my door. “Lace up your boots. We have to hunt a man.”

“But I just took my face off,” I cried.

“Well, slap ‘er back on. It’s man-huntin’ time.”

This was to be my third manhunt since the Sheriff moved in across the hall last week. And as much as I had grown to appreciate a good manhunt, I really just felt like getting cozy with a chalice of scotch and some old episodes of “Murder, She Wrote.”

But I couldn’t tell the Sheriff that. I needed to buoy his spirits with a good manhunt. Some recent jurisdiction problems at work had made him melancholic. He also hated “Murder, She Wrote.” Jessica Fletcher’s crime-solving philosophy was anathema to him, and whenever he caught the muffled sounds of the show’s catchy piano and strings theme music coming from under my covers, he’d batter down the door in a rage, screaming about illegal immigrants. “The Mexicans did it! Not the jealous real estate agent! Those dirty illegal immigrants did it!”

I tried to explain to the Sheriff that this was impossible because there weren’t Mexicans, let alone illegal ones, in Cabot Cove, Maine, where Mrs. Fletcher did her sleuthing. But the Sheriff was beyond persuasion, busy bloodying my rug with his raw knuckles. “When will that old crone get it? We gotta build a giant wall to stop this murder spree in Maine!” he shouted, heaving his battering ram through my walls.

I don’t mind the Sheriff’s company, but I do wish he would leave his battering ram next door. If only because Lardbottom, my domestic partner, suffers from hypertension, and every time the Sheriff pays a visit, the flying door and drywall splinters spike his heart rate. Fearing for Lardbottom’s tranquility, I resigned myself to the manhunt. I put my face back on, made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and created a mix tape to put us in the right mood for hunting men. We drove into the Arizona night with hunger in our hearts and Hall and Oates on our stereo.

As the Sheriff had taught me, the secret to a good manhunt is surprise. Just as we had swooped from the rafters on an unsuspecting John Tesh mid-concert on our first manhunt, and waited for three hours in the sweltering backseat of Charles Barkley’s car during a promotional event at Footlocker on our last manhunt, we would disguise ourselves as American Idol contestants and pounce on an unwitting Ryan Seacrest on this manhunt. It was thanks to this kind of cunning that the Sheriff had hunted down dozens of famous men (and women on his womanhunts) and amassed his impressive collection of celebrity photos and autographs–or, as he called them, his scalps.

As usual, in route to our manhunt, the Sheriff pulled over anyone he reckoned was an illegal immigrant and threw them in the back of the truck. Some might call this reckless racial profiling. But, I assure you, the Sheriff employed the latest techniques in physiognomical and phrenological science. The occipital calipers he wielded so deftly had once adorned the desks of such legendary men of science as Count Gobineau and Josef Mengele. Of course, the calipers only confirmed what his nose already told him. According to the Sheriff, illegal residence in the United States had a specific smell. He said it was redolent of sorghum molasses, smoked birch wood and traces of artificial cherry.

We cruised through town, tracking the sweet scent of illegality. This particular night, illegal immigration must have been rampant, as the Sheriff found the smell on nearly everyone we passed. We filled truckload after truckload of illegal aliens, dressed them in pink lingerie and herded them off to jail. Meanwhile, Ryan Seacrest was wrapping up at the convention center. Our manhunt was slipping through the cracks.

I pulled out a sandwich and offered it to the Sheriff, hoping to calm his nerves. But he declined, unwrapping one of his own.

“What kind of sandwich is that?” I asked.

“Sorghum molasses and cherry jelly on smoked birch wood.”

Unfortunately, food seemed to aggravate the Sheriff only more. Seacrest was long gone and the Sheriff was returning from his manhunt without a scalp. In his impotent fury, he turned to immigration. He said the smell of it was everywhere, even right here in this car. On the way home, I caught him measuring my skull with his calipers.

By the time we got to the apartment, the Sheriff was beside himself. He had turned his suspicion on himself and was measuring his own skull. Then his gaze fell on Lardbottom, my domestic partner.

“What kind of cat is that?” he asked me, his eyes slowly coming aflame.

“…Mexican hairless,” I whispered. A tear rolled down my cheek.

The Club Man's Gambit

Beauty is the beginning of terror.

That’s what my Uncle Randy used to say. It always stood out among his other sayings, like, “Quick, ‘fore the government catches you,” a holdover from his bootlegging days, and “Dammit, Gladys, you’re one mean old cow,” a phrase of conjugal endearment. Only later did I find out he had learned it in a book of words by a deadbeat German with a sissy name: Rainy Mary Some-in-er-nother.

If only Uncle Randy had been there to offer those wise words last Monday. Then I would have known that the beautiful gift in my mailbox was not to be trusted. Instead, when I saw that card emblazoned with my name, I shrieked with joy, “I’ve been admitted to the club!” Thanks to my remarkable display of character, wealth and sartorial taste, I had become a card-carrying member of the West Coast’s most prestigious organization: Safeway.

I don’t even remember how I got to the store, I was so ecstatic. I vaguely remember driving, but I am certain I do not own a car, especially one with a baby in the back.

The doors to Safeway opened before me, no doubt sensing the club-member pheromones I was emitting. Inside, the fruit looked riper, the Cheez-Its cheezier, even the pock-marked baker had a charming Gallic air about him. Every Muzak tune on the loudspeaker was my favorite song.

As I danced my way through the aisles, it became clear there were two kinds of people in this world: club members and non-members. You could smell a non-member from the other end of the store. They slouched, were usually deformed, had a mucous-like film covering their hands and were improbably flatulent. The more respectful ones bowed and groveled when a member passed by. The others just growled and stared at their betters with desperate eyes.

At least these clubless hordes were forced to pay a higher price for the foodstuffs they clawed off the shelves. But, really, I began to wonder whether having to suffer their presence were a violation of my member privileges. What right did they have to nourish themselves on my groceries in my club?!

These questions sent me marching in indignation to the meat department. I couldn’t let the riffraff feast on the precious flesh of animals, particularly not the meat that had been collected caringly from the feces-ridden floor and put mindfully through a rusty grinder for me and other club members to enjoy at 88 cents a pound. I grabbed all the ground beef I could fit in my cart and made for checkout.

I’ll spare you an account of the emotion I felt when they swiped my club card. Let’s just say the $6.57 I saved on groceries was only half as valuable as my sense of belonging.

Back at home, I slipped into my Members Only tracksuit, put on some thumpin’ club music and whipped up some club sandwiches, along with 16 pounds of rare hamburger meat and a sleeve of club crackers.

An hour later, the trouble started. I felt a rumbling in my gut, followed by swelling in my ears. I tried to cure it with club soda and lime, stirred with my Safeway club card. Then I blew a gasket.

The E. coli sent my sphincter and all 16 pounds of rancid hamburger through the back of my track suit. The bacteria attacked my softening brain, sending me to seizure country.

I came to in the hospital parking lot, paralyzed from the teeth down. The hospital had refused to treat me because, apparently, I didn’t have what they referred to as “health insurance.” They must not have seen my club card, which, at the time, was in my mouth to prevent me from swallowing my tongue.

Now, drooling on my benumbed body crumpled on the asphalt, I felt like a non-member.

Suddenly, a mustachioed man wearing a skull cap, stropping belt and a straight razor appeared from behind the hazardous waste bin, hoisted me up from my wretchedness, and brought me to a door marked by a moving candy cane pole.

Inside was a bustling scene of combs and cauterized flesh, the floors wet with blood and barbicide.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Welcome, poor man, to the barber-surgeon local No. 37,” said my barber savior. “We are an ancient guild. Once the beacons of modern medicine, we were forced underground by doctors. Now we ply our trade in secret, treating those infirm or in need of a trim. We are the shadow public option, healthcare for the clubless.”

Just as I was about to protest and show him my club card, he kicked my inert body into a spinning chair and lathered up my sideburns.

“Don’t you worry, young fellah. Let me give you a good bloodletting whilst you browse the nudie magazines.”

And there, as the lifeblood drained out of me while I stared into the swirling centers of two areolae, I again felt like a club man.

My Red Book

Curse you, Carl Jung! Just when the world was ready to forget about you, you unveil your sordid little Red Book.

For nigh on half a century, deep in the gold brick-lined vaults of Zurich, lay the tales of your vaunted vision quest. Meanwhile, your modern acolytes were busy alchemizing your high-falutin Nazi-sympathizing Swiss sorcery into one big, mealy-mouthed, touchy-feely, rainbow massage crystal to cure the world of its cosmic pain. Your legacy seemed right on track for an ignominious whimper of an end.

Then, all of a sudden, the New York Times announces the long-awaited publication of the “holy grail of the unconscious,” a tale of a psychiatrist’s struggle with psychosis, a modern man of science conversing with ancient demons and a personal discovery that would transform our understanding of the human mind. Now the salivating Jungians are dusting off their Ouija boards and polishing their monoliths, priming for personal revelation and an orgy of “Aha!” moments.

Well, I’ve got news for you, C.J. (I know your spirit is present. I can smell its foul pipe tobacco). You are not the only one with a secret diary detailing the mysteries of the unconscious. I, too, have cut new swaths of wisdom into the tangled jungle of the psyche. Everyone already knows about your break with Freud on the eve of World War I and the personal crisis it precipitated. Boring! But how many people have yet to read about my break with Dr. Leaky McNuds in those ominous summer months of 1997 and the voyage of self-discovery that ensued?

I had been a devoted disciple of McNuds for five years, enjoying the role of confidante and heir apparent in his elite circle of rogue urologists. He called me his “golden shower child”–potty jokes being a staple of the urology community. Naturally, I was flattered and my affection for my mentor was sincere. I saw McNuds as a sort of Old Testament prophet of the penis, thoroughly free from illusion or propriety, and committed to probing the depths of our field from sac to tip.

The tension between us began with a conversation one evening in McNuds’ study. We were discussing the significance of maladies arising from overzealous shaking when at the public urinal. McNuds was convinced that the act betrayed a repressed sexual wish. When I suggested that there might be a less sexual and more sincerely spiritual meaning to the gesture, perhaps akin to the waving of a sorcerer’s wand to purge the soul of evil spirits, McNuds stared at me, aghast. I knew then that if I were to pursue my own urological convictions, it would cost me my friendship with McNuds. And it did.

The last I saw of McNuds was at an uro-analysis convention in Indianapolis, a sausage fest, as it is called in the parlance of our discipline. I delivered a paper on Ancient Egyptian twisticles, wherein I remarked that Amenhotep IV’s scrotal contusion resembled the wracked state of contemporary McNudsian urology. McNuds fainted and, in a fit of guilt, I leapt from the podium to catch him. After depositing my fallen idol on the couch, I hobbled away, having just suffered a mild scrotal contusion myself, never to see him again.

Needless to say, I was drummed out of uro-analysis. Left virtually without a pot to have someone piss in, my livelihood collapsed. And it was then, in those sweltering summer days of 1997, during the great fen-phen epidemic, the fall of the Woolworth’s empire, the secessionist parliament of Scotland and finally-- the spark that set off the powder keg-- the death of Princess Diana, that I lost my mind. The ground beneath me seemed to open up and swallow me. I became trapped in the labyrinthine trenches of my own besieged brain, bombarded by poisonous shrapnel-filled thoughts.

There I was playing cards with a diffident proto-urethra and an ancient testicle from Carthage, worrying over my lost sanity and my pair of fives, when the hoary Carthaginian leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I am a nut, but you, my son, are perfectly sane. Go, engrave these trials on rune stones in a Gothic hand and illuminate them with instructive anatomical mandalas.”

I realized the only way I could maintain my sanity was by recording my phantasies, converting the crazed ravings of a castrated urologist into an epic poem about the male organ’s journey through all seven dimensions of spirit with his medieval guide Phallus Mundus. Phallus Mundus led me to these depths within my self, where I struck upon my revolutionary theories of the collective bladder of mankind and the Ur-pubis.

And as soon as these rune stones are hauled up from my grandmother’s basement in Joplin, Mo., where they have been kept safe all these years, I am confident they will be a penetrating stream of insight into the stagnant waters of urology.

This piece can also be read at http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1033602

How it is Written

My first piece as a weekly columnist for the Stanford Daily ( you can also read it on the Daily's website: http://www.stanforddaily.com/cgi-bin/?p=1033130 ).

My summer bath had just gone from tepid to fart-warm, when I heard a rustling at the door.

I assumed it was the village hoodlums, no doubt angling for a peek at my unrobed flesh beneath the crack. “Fie, horse thieves!” I shouted, sheltering my nether regions behind my well-worn copy of Eat, Pray, Love. “Away with your wretched tom-peepery!”

To my chagrin, it was the mailman. Said he had an important delivery for me, marked urgent from the Oval Office. It read:

“Get out of that sordid tub and do something for your country! War is still raging, health care still failing, and there you are shriveled as a washerwoman, searching for enlightenment, aroma therapy, and a fab recipe for pesto. Your nation needs you. Take up that pen and write on a weekly basis, until your stomach bleeds! Sincerely, Barack Obama, the President.”

Right away, I had a sneaking suspicion that the letter was not actually from Barack Obama, but my grandpa. He’s always talking about doing things until your stomach bleeds. Seemed like a dead give-away. Only after I stuffed the letter down the drain did it occur to me that my grandpa was no longer living. An ulcer took him from us five years ago. Which meant the letter really was from the president!

In a panic I fished it out, but all the ink had been washed away. All that remained was a sequence of letters that formed the nonsensical words “Stanford Daily.” I took this as an auspicious sign, searched the internet for direction, and was guided to the very publication you now hold in your hands. I swore on the American flag and the pickled remains of my grandfather’s anomalous organ that I would write for this “Stanford Daily”— until the blood gushed from my innards.

At the time I was mystified by this strange series of events. Only later did I piece it all together. There is a chance that one Zed Shwarma, alleged student and editor of the “Stanford Daily,” wrote the note on the back of a sheet of Stanford Daily stationary as a sick joke, hoping to swindle me into submitting a weekly column to his newspaper. But the more likely scenario is that my grandfather’s ghost blackmailed President Barack Obama into writing the letter, and Obama, to avoid rumors that he was being haunted by my grandpa, set Shwarma up as the patsy.

Either way, I’ve been roped into this writing business—if you can call it that. I always thought writers were scandalously rich and famous, dated movie stars, and drew tens of thousands of adoring bare-chested fans to watch them kick a ball around a field for ninety minutes in matching shorts and socks. It turns out none of this is true. Well, at least as a writer you get to eat donuts all day, ride around in a car with loud sirens, and shoot bad guys, right? Nope. The lies we teach our children….

So, what is it really like practicing the world’s oldest profession? Well, for starters, you have to wake up at five in the morning because that’s when the creditors in Delaware start calling. This is not so bad, since I can use the steady rhythm of the phone rings to structure my work day. For example, rings 1-100, scream into pillow. Rings 100-200, eat breakfast. Rings 200-1000, prepare to write. Rings 1000- 1500, cry into pillow. And at ring 1500, I dry my eyes and wet my throat with gin.

And that’s when the real writing starts. I often do my best writing completely unconscious. Sure, sometimes I wake up in a black linen sack full of tarantulas in a cemetery outside Juarez. Occasionally I receive mail from the Navy demanding recompense for a battleship I have no recollection of sinking. And there is the infrequent coming-to in the white light of the airport detention cell after having removed my pants mid flight. But every time, I emerge with a column of limpid prose written in gravy stains on my undershirt. If only my cleaning lady would stop washing my undershirts, I’d have some truly great writing to offer you.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep spending hours staring into the abyss of my soul reflected in the computer screen, listening to my wife nag me about how she doesn’t like to be called my cleaning lady, and wondering what in the world this job has to do with getting paid to have sex with strangers. I’ll add word after excruciating word, and pray to a hybrid deity of President Obama and my deceased grandpa that it see fit sooner rather than later to fill my stomach with blood.

Until then, I hope you enjoy this column!

El Camino Aragones

We were already tired of the word camino before we started this camino-- a residual psychic pain from the 800 km we walked on the Camino de Santiago two years ago. A medieval pilgrimage route across northern Spain that arose in the 11th century in honor of the apostle St. James and helped fund the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Moors, the Camino de Santiago de Compostela is a now popular hiking route for "pilgrims" of all denominations. We had already hiked the major route, the Camino Frances, in its entirety from St. Jean Pied de Port to Santiago de Compostela out of a heathen piety for frugal and challenging adventure.

On the whole, it was a wonderful experience, and we had been seduced by the act of traveling on foot. Not only did it prevent the ennui that is endemic to other forms of tourism, it was also cheap! Of course, you have to be willing to get up obscenely early to walk 15 miles before noon in hopes of getting one of the last remaining bunk beds only then to wait in line for the shower behind smelly old people with horrifying foot lesions; and some nights, instead of sleeping, you may lie in bed listening to a chorus of lumberjacks slowly suffocating themselves on their own soul-destroying snores. And after a few days on the camino, even though you found it charming at first, you may start to cringe at the 300th utterance of the phrase, "buen camino, peregrino." But the camino gives one both an immediate sense of purpose and accomplishment, not easy things to come by these days, especially in the height of summer vacation idleness. So it was decided that while we were in Spain this summer, ostensibly working on projects but feeling ever dissolute, we would walk the auxiliary route of the Camino de Santiago across the Pyrenees, the Camino Aragones.

We started from Oleron St. Marie, in the green foothills of the Alps, about 70km from the Spanish border. We hiked in France for two days, seeing only one pilgrim, a toothy Barcelonan named Paco, with whom we shared drinks and conversation in the tiny gray medieval hamlets that broke up the long stretches of green hill pastures and shady forest paths. The first day was wonderful and memorable, mostly because that morning, upon crossing the medieval bridge into the village of Eysus, we were welcomed by a giant white Pyrennean mountain dog, Le Patou.

I have never seen a dog like this in my life--like a snow white Newfoundland, but with the majestic bearing of a lion and the expressive eyes of a chimpanzee. Le Patou, whom we alternatingly named Excelsior, Seltzer, and Dunder, became our guide for the next two hours, even stopping to wait for us when we fell into conversation on the side of the road with a man from Zaragossa. This man was ecstatic to meet us upon learning we were from San Francisco because he was planning a trip to there in the fall but he had heard so many stories about the hills of our fair city (and had, like every other Spaniard I´ve met, seen the movie Bullitt, apparently the SF equivalent of The Wizard of Oz for Kansas) and had a wife who was not keen on walking up hills. After we assured him there were taxis and his wife would survive, he shook my hand, kissed Marissa, said it was settled, he was going to San Francisco, and hoped to see us in October at the Hotel Donatelo. We continued on the road only to find our shepherd waiting for us around the bend.

After about 10k and two towns later, Dunder finally deserted us for a romp in the creek. We were relieved, thinking we had marched off with a Eysusian villager's prized chien. But when we arrived at the Auberge in Bedous that afternoon, we found a brochure with a picture of our dog, titled 'Le Petou'. It read: 'Important Notice to Walkers and Hikers: In the course of your walk, you may encounter the local guarding dogs. These are large white dogs whose task is to guard the flocks.... Keep yor distance: beware of acting in ways that may seem harmless to you-- trying to feed, pet or photograph a 'pastous' (all of which we did). The guarding dogs may interpret this as an attack.' Clearly we had met a pastou in search of a flock, and perhaps one constitutionally unfit to maintain one, given that he responded to our 'threats' with panting affection.

Day two was perhaps the worst hiking day of our lives, though fairly vivid, and in retrospect, pleasant. We ascended the French side of the Pyrenees, a supposedly 35 km hike, all up hill. This would have not been a problem if that is what had happened. But unfortunately, the signs were terribly marked on the French side of the camino, especially in this section what with the dense forest and ever imposing mountains. We ended up getting off-trail at least 5 times that day, once which took us on a route through a militant-looking flock of mountain goats and back to the same town we had departed an hour before.

The day got hotter. The camino kept dumping us onto the highway, which was often shoulderless and, needless to say, curvy. There were signs for long stretches assuring us that the camino in fact followed the highway at this point, so on the highway we stayed. Then somehow we missed the turn-off (as we were later told in Spain, like everyone does) and stayed on the highway until we reached the car tunnel through to Spain not open to pedestrians. A border guard filled our water (which had just run out) and pointed us in the direction of the road to take us to the mountain top border town of Somport just on the Spanish side, our destination. What he didn't tell us was that it was another 8-9 km up a steep mountain. But I suppose we were to learn that anyway. Just as we were nearing the peak, with only a few km left to go, thunder began to rumble and, only minutes afer Marissa had speculated that the trip could have been worse, it started to pour. We arrived in Somport soaked, nearly incoherent, and full of black bile for the French and their "c'est la vie" signage.

Things got much better the next day as we were back on Spanish soil, where the yellow arrows were abundant, even gratuitous, as though Spain were drunk on its own superior sign-making abilities and did not want to forego any sign-placing opportunities-- rock, tree, or idle pilgrim-- to shame France. We hiked down the mountains into the rocky foothills and arrived in Jaca, a handsome ski resort town with a huge pentagonal star-shaped fortress. We ate well in Jaca that night, probing such Aragonese novelties as deep fried hard boiled egg with bechamel, and caviar-coated sheep's milk cheese.

Day four was grueling, hardly any towns, very hot, with a stunning arid landscape reminiscient of northern Arizona. Giant rippled gray sand dunes called 'margas'- the remnants of a shallow sea that had covered Aragon some 25 million years ago. I hadn't gotten much sleep, thanks to a pack of Spanish ladies who snored like wild pigs. Instead I spent the night lying in bed, sharpening my walking stick and dreaming of pilgrim murder. My mood that day seemed to match the environment. We were in a land of ghost towns. Literally. They had been abandoned since the 60s, and had been repopulated with boar and elks. We ended the day in Artieda, which technically was a town, but it hardly seems fair to other towns to call it that. A set of brown medeival buildings clustered high up on a tiny meseta, overlooking a milky turquoise lake in the distance, Artieda could have been charming if only it had life. Aside from the Albergue--the only source for bed or food in town-- the only thing that showed a sign of life was the ancient widow in the abandoned street whose 'buenas tardes' sounded more like a death rattle than a greeting.

It was at this point in the hike that my accumulated blisters had rendered my left foot virtually unusable. The ball of my foot had become an open wound. No bandages would stay on. A strange stroke of bad luck, considering my right foot was more or less intact, as were Marissa's two feet. She had been plagued by debilitating blister on the first Camino and now it was my turn. But Marissa is tough, and we were dead set on Santiago then. I am not tough and this time we didn't really care if we arrived in a town (Puente la Reina) that we had already hiked to a mere two years ago. So we decided the next morning, as I was limping some distance behind Marissa, that the camino would be better if it ended for us that day, in Sanguesa. We hiked/hobbled the last 30km into the rather unimpressive town of Sanguesa, which struck us as a paradise because it had a restaurant, a bar, and a pharmacy. And the next morning we caught a bus to Pamplona and a train from there to San Sebastian, the pearl of the Spanish North, where we healed ourselves beachside by day and by night found redemption in heaping plates of pintxos and a steady stream of rosado.

In 5 days, we had logged about 180 km or 110 miles, a little over 20 miles a day. No Catholic absolution or fancy latin certificates for us this time, but enough exercise to feel like excorcism. Surely we're better people now, right?

Letter from Madrid, July 17

Dear F.,

We have just come from drinking jars of beer and watching the whores on Calle de la Montera. Say what you will about the world´s oldest institution (one desperately in need of renovation), it's hard to find a more piquant blend of sensations than the taste of cold beer on the palate, the pathos of the downtrodden, and the sight of corroded butt cheeks hanging out of a pair of jean shorts. Grotesque, you say? Well, grant us this one last indulgence, for tonight is our last night in Madrid. And where we´re headed, there won't be such urban spectator sports.

Tomorrow, while Madrid is only beginning to register its hangover, we will be headed for the frontier--first by train to Jaca, Aragonese mountain town at the foot of the Pyrenees. Then hopefully by bus, of whose existence the internet only gives vague and conflicting reports, to the French town of Oleron St. Marie, about 60km across the border. From there the following day, we will begin the Camino Aragones, a 120 mile connector road to the main route of the Camino Frances we hiked two years ago. We aim to do it in 7 days, across mountains, ruins, dense forest, purple sand dunes, and cave churches, arriving in Puente la Reina in the afternoon of the 25th to catch a short bus to Pamplona, where we will eat Navarran pintxos (tapas) from one end of the bar to the other.

But first, before we don our pilgrim's cloak and fill the old calabash with walking brandy, a final reflection on this dissolute city is in order. Consider the question posed, rather melodramatically, by Jose Ortega y Gasset, the fellow whose papers I have been rifling through for the last four weeks, in his first breakthrough work Meditations on Don Quixote: "Good god, what is Spain?!" The same should be asked of Madrid. Why are all these people in the streets at all hours of the day and night, except for those magical hours of nightly stillness during the brightness of day from 2-5, when you could hear a cat yawn? What are they doing in the streets? Ostensibly nothing. There is one street in La Latina that is legendary among M. and me because every night of the week one can see people--families, bachelors, rentiers-- literally standing in the middle of the street-- not drinking, not even leaning, just talking.

Wherever one goes, one is sure to hear talking. A Spanish teacher years ago told me that more than three seconds of silence for Spaniards is unbearably awkward. I don´t believe I've ever heard such a long pause as that in Madrid. And I read this week in a newspaper article in a Fascist organ, Arriba España, from 1944, that Spaniards regard the food and drink at a table really as a garnish for the true feast--conversation. So there you have it-- Spanish sociability--yet another legacy from Francoism.

The national pastime of loitering, which is consummately executed, calls to mind a conversation I had over lunch (in fact, as I recall, it was difficult to eat my meal, given the constant nature of the conversation) with a philologist named Filipe. Filipe, whose professional obligation is to be fascinated with language and its cultural significance, told me one of his favorite idiomatic phrases in Spanish was "Me voy en la calle" (which too literally translates into "I'm going into the street") because only the Spanish people could express such a sentiment as leaving, but to no particular destination, which was equivalent to going out in the street. When I told him that the phrase 'I'm going out' exists an English, he was crestfallen.

But Filipe had all sorts of ideas that expounded to me over lunch. Latin America is a stupid name that comes from 19th century French and Italian cultural imperializing aims adopted by pretentious Venezuelans, which is why it should still be called Hispano-America. Bulgarians are terrible students. And Polish people 'se ahoga en un vaso de agua' ('would drown in a glass of water') brilliantly referring to their life-as-a-constant-crisis mentality. Filipe had things to tell me. But then again almost all Spaniards do.

The flair for pedagogy abounds, as it must in order to give people fodder for constant conversation. Which is why Filipe and his colleague Jorge engaged in a passionate polemic about Spanish ham after I broached the topic, hoping to give myself time to slurp up my heretofore neglected gazpacho. Salamanca vs. Badajoz. Clearly, but what about Granada? Oh, that´s the white pig, totally different breed, stick to the subject. From there, we surveyed fruits and the ideal seasons for eating them. Figs were a subject of much controversy. Finally, after August was settled as the ideal month for fig-eating (despite my revelries during June consumption), we finished the meal with a discussion on the legacy of Stalin in Russian letters. The Russian woman at our table hardly got a word in, as Filipe and Jorge weighed in as adamantly on Uncle Joe as they had on legs of pork. I would have been curious to hear what our Russian friend I. would have said, given that she had told me earlier that day that I bore a striking resemblance to Holden Caufield and/or Tom Sawyer.

If pedagogy fails, there's always gossip. In the library where I spent my days reading old letters and newspaper clippings, a stream of constant gossip spoken in low murmur and occasionally climaxing in a passionate shout could be heard among the library employees, chiefly by a woman who reminded me of a painted candle of the virgin Mary that is slowly melting. If her coworkers ever had to go to the bathroom or take a lunch break, she would quickly fill the silence with a phone call. Sometimes I think the same conversation begun with a coworker would continue on the phone with an entirely different party.

I realize now that I haven´t really told you much about Madrid. But since there is an Indian man in the computer stall next to me laughing like a madman, and I can't be sure he's watching something funny and is not just, in fact, a madman, I'll have to let a single trait speak for the city and its millions in entirety: most bars and cafes in Madrid have dark vermouth-- on tap! They drink it at midday and it is one of the greatest things, aside from my wife, to come into my acquaintance in the last few years.

I´ll drop you a line either on the camino or when we arrive next Saturday in Pamplona.

Yours,

P.

Letter from Portugal, July 10

Dear F.,

Madrid has been reborn for us, thanks to our well-timed escape to Portugal. Before we left, this city was slowly boiling us alive, like frogs put in a pot of tepid water, unable to perceive the gradual increase in heat until before long their muscles have become lumps of dessicated flesh fit only for forks. Fortunately, our strict regimen of jumping jacks and knee bends had kept our legs primed for just such a death-defying leap-- out of our shit-box room looking out onto a window well of despair, out of our air mattress that was like sleeping on tied logs while floating down the Mississip, out of our borrowed befilthed apartment filled with the ghostlike presence of its tenants, out of a Madrid sizzling with too many bodies, too much dust, and too many words. These are the feverish dream-thoughts that flit across our eyelids as the burnt black landscape of Castile flit across the window of our train.

We awoke in a green land, wet with opportunity, silent before the dawn. We were in Portugal, where Mediterannean meets Atlantic, where Ulysses crashes into Moby Dick, where the sharp blades of Castillian Spanish are swallowed by the Slavic-sounding throats of Portuguese, where the Visigothic garulousness of Spain turns inward upon itself into the melancholic sweetness of the Lusitanians.

From the sation in Lisbon, we proceeded straight to Sintra, a mere 40 minutes away by train, though it feels like a distant land. A Canadian woman of middle age, Yukon-raised, and employee of the Vancouver police department, talked to us on the ride up. She was spending five months traveling all over Europe, two days here, two days there. She was determined to see the Europe that had been denied to her up until now. Reclaiming a lost youth. It became clear talking to her that backpacking loses its charm with age, though she didn´t seem to think so.

Sintra charmed us instantly. First, because on a windy stone road just outside of town we found our hotel-- an 18th century manor house situated amid lush gardens and overlooking the valley. Marissa again deserves credit for her sound online booking skills. She never lets me forget the one time I booked us a room in a pension in Munich with no floor. But what she fails to acknowledge is that what it lacked in flooring it more than made up for in bleary-eyed vagrants and easy access to the strip clubs.

In this tiny town, there is a veritable variety pack of palaces, a flavor for each member of the family: cool ranch moorish fortress, nacho cheezy 19th century Romantic palace, or spicy barbecue 15th century Manueline castle. First on our menu was the latter, King Manuel´s place, who gave his name to the peculiar portuguese 15th century achitectural style 'Manueline'- a Christian appropriation of Muslim design with earthy colors, tiled walls with geometric designs, painted wood ceilings, expansive patios and fountains, and the like. The real highlight was the kitchen--a massive double room with over a dozen stoves and instead of a ceiling, a pair of fifty foot cones with openings at the top to serve as chimneys, which makes the palace look like there are two giant boobs on one end of it. I suppose I´ll have to show you the picture. Later in the afternoon, we visited the Moorish fortress atop the hill. It was in a splendid state of disrepair, thanks mostly to the efforts of a 19th century British architect who modified the ruins to induce the perfect aesthetic experience of the historical sublime.

We recovered at a patio cafe in town, where we doodled on the paper table cloth and discovered the wonders of vinho verde, a young dry white wine from northern Portugal with a hint of carbonation--something you should consider adding to your sparkling drink arsenal. As we drained the last of our bottle and capped our pens, an Austrian woman at an adjacent table who had been peering over our shoulders time to time asked if she could take a picture of our table cloth. When I told her she could have it if she wanted, she became ecstatic, showed all her friends her new acquisition, and assured us our work would have a prominent place in her home. So if you ever find yourself in Salzburg, look up Frau Anita and you can see the grease stains and ink marks of yours truly.

Dinner that night in Sintra was, as I have lately become fond of saying, a revelation. A small bistro called Tulhus, which apparently referred to either the medieval granary upon which the current foundations of the restaurant rest, or the hole in the middle of the floor that lets you peer down into the remains of the medieval granary. Before we even ordered, we were brought a plate of thinly cured ham (like Spanish jamon serrano or Italian prosciutto), two small wheels of soft sheep's cheese, a bowl of olives, a basket of bread, and some packets of garlic butter and tuna paté. This surely would have sated us, but since we felt obliged to order, we asked for fish. We were given a heaping silver platter of whole grilled dorada, trout, and sardines, garnished with enormous green beans and bright yellow potatoes. And of course more vinho verde to wash everything down.

In the name of digestion, we inquired about the famed digestif of Portugal, ginja, a brandy made from a black cherry-like fruit native to Iberia. The fruits are actually still in the bottle and with each little shot, you are treated to a few brandy-soaked cherries waiting thoughtfully at the bottom of your glass. The owner offered us the remainder of his bottle and sent us into the night radiant from within.

On the way home we stumbled across a fashion show in front of King Manuel´s Palace, exhibited by tall horse-like women in absurd garments surrounded by even more absurd-looking people in more banal garments. Marissa took photos of the models and the musical interludes of opera arias and fado ballads, until we were asked to leave because my bobbing yellow melon kept blocking the television cameras.

After enjoying another day and night in Sintra in much the same fashion, we returned to Lisbon, a city beautiful in all its salt-washed decrepitude. It is the antidote capital to Madrid. If Madrid is an fried pig innard dropped in a double shot of espresso, Lisbon is a dose of laudunum stirred into a pot of honey. It seems every building is decaying, their colorful tiles being eaten away in even more sublime fashion than 19th century British architects could have contrived.

The old Arab quarter has small and twisty alleys that rival if not outdo even the Albacyin quarter of Granada, providing barely enough room to squeeze by the grannies sitting on footstools in their doorways, having conversations with their neigbhors five feet across the cobblestones. Even the graffiti in Lisbon is deteriorating. Some alleys harbor random pieces of trash-- a diaper, a broken record, an puddle of pasta and tomato sauce-- as though the inhabitants still flung their chamber pots out the window onto the street.

This sense of disorder, somehow charming (save the diaper), together with the smell of sea air and sun-bleached plazas makes Lisbon feel like a colonial city. And indeed, in post-colonial Portugal, the empire has colonized the metropole. There is a strong African presence, Brasilian music floods the streets, Goan restaurants (which also strangely offer Italian food) abound, even the occasional Macaoan. Lisbon, which had sought its imperial destiny out at sea, the very sea that comes right up to the main 3-walled Plaza do Comercio, now seems to be shaped by the returning tide. It seems like an interesting place to be.

Now, if you´ll excuse me, I have a belly full of callos a la madrileña (tripe in the Madrid style) that apparently wants out. It bids I write not one more word.

-P.

Letter from Madrid, July 1

Dear F.,

Samiluisa and I have colonized Madrid. These madrileños believe we are gods, given our uncanny resemblance to the twin beasts of heaven whose coming was foretold in their book of myths. But I think all the reverence is going to Samiluisa´s head. She´s falling under ever greater delusions of grandeur and yesterday she coerced a Spanish hidalgo to lick the ´tween parts of her toes. Today at breakfast she refused to sit on anything less than 33 velvet cushions stolen from Phillip II´s palace at El Escorial and she stirred her cafe con leche with the finger bone relic of Saint Jeronimo.

I´m not sure how much longer the natives will acquiesce to her wishes. Fortunately, there are many riches in Madrid-- the fruits of a similar historical encounter some centuries ago, I´m told-- so our fall from divinity is not yet imminent.

But, as for me, well, my disillusionment has come swiftly. It happened yesterday, when Samiluisa, in a fit of vanity, mistook my own godly countenance for one of the brutish native folk´s and shouted at me in a most appalling manner to attend to her. To which I replied, perhaps rashly, `No, I will not carry your golden chalice filled with this morning´s evacuations to dump out the window upon these simple life-loving people!´

Since then, I´ve have fled her narccistic tirades for the solace of Spanish letters. I have been granted asylum at the Fundacion Jose Ortega y Gasset, a most congenial institution housed in private home with ample gardens in the haute bourgeois Madrid neighborhood of Salamanca.

My keeper, one Sra. Uña, is a helpful grandmotherly sort, reassuringly dowdy yet no stranger to the afternoon beer. Not only does she track down documents, she has insisted that we researchers crash multiple receptions at the Fundacion to partake in free food and drink. The archives of Don Pepe Ortega are rich, but I hope not too rich, with sources for me to scrutinize. Yesterday I spent the day reading through Ortega´s correspondence with his German friend and philologue Ernst Robert Curtius. I find reading the letters of dead people a most rewarding endeavor, even with someone as lame as Curtius.

When Samiluisa does not bid me carry her feces, we remain on the best of terms and have spent the better part of the week strolling the gnarled and pulsating streets of Madrid, day and night. Madrid is a fine walking city, small in geographical size, packed with food, people, and the visible architectural strata of many centuries of trying to look powerful. Yet there are a few caveats to this claim, which seem to increase with the temperature. There are construction projects all over the city, trying to stimulate the economy, and at the very least, grinding up filth into the atmosphere. You would think the city is recovering from a recent carpet bombing attack.

We are staying in a room in R.´s old apartment on the plaza Tirso de Molina, in the Lavapies neighborhood, formerly the district of late 19th century urban misery, now with 21st century poor Chinese, Arabic, and African immigrants but not much misery. The location is ideal, with two outdoor cafe-bars on the plaza, one for our morning coffee and baguette with tomato, the other for our 1 am nightcap cerveza. The universe is in order.

We´ve settled more or less into a routine that is built around the archives for me and itinerant doodling for S. during the day, segueing into running, drinking, eating, eating, and more drinking at night, concluded with a nice sweaty read before bed in our shitbox room on a comically awful air mattress.

This morning we went on a long run in the parque de buen retiro (good rest park)- the much need lungs of Madrid, which, unfortunately, are filled with dust. Which means you can enjoy the post-run ritual of blowing black snot out your nose. We did.

Tomorrow we´re visiting the flee market called el Rastro (the trail), thus named for the trail of blood that the slaughtered animals used to leave on their cartride back from the abbatoir. Now I fear the the slaughtered animals have been replaced by pig-faced tourists, whose bulging fanny packs perhaps give off the same scent of fresh blood that once stained the cobblestones.

Yours,

P.

The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 1)

The following chronicles a trip I took to a music festival in Serbia in the summer of 2006.


Part 1

We were waiting for the bus that would take us to Guca. It was pouring in Belgrade and had been for the last two days. Underneath the awning of a café in front of the St. Marko cathedral, we watched the rain and contemplated spending the next four days at an outdoor music festival cold, wet, and muddy. Not what any of us originally had in mind when I had first announced to my friends that I was going to the heartland of Serbia this summer to the tiny town of Guca to attend the world’s largest balkan brass band festival.

Instead, we had entertained visions of sweet rakija-drenched Dionysian revelry, of banquets turned riots, dinars plastered to our sweaty foreheads as trumpets blasted themselves righteously out of tune right into our ears. Of course, our visions were by and large direct plagiarisms of the images in Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), a film (and soundtrack) we had all been trying for years to internalize into our daily existence. As a result, we had too much riding on this experience to be foiled by inclement weather. We were expecting bliss, heartache, insanity, and apotheosis—a condensed version of Serbian history in four days of music—rain or shine.

There was a time in my life when I would have wished for a deluge to wipe out all my outdoor brass band obligations. In fact, the words ‘brass band’ still made me a little queasy. They dredged up unpleasant high school memories of the three years I spent dressed like a Prussian dragoon armed with a trombone, glide-stepping into artful maneuvers across a football field while blasting out large ensemble arrangements of “Earth, Wind, and Fire” songs. It was miserable degrading business and it, along with the long captive hours in my father’s car listening to his Sousa tapes, soured me on the whole genus of brass instrument music forever more, so I thought.

In the interim, I had discovered the world of gypsy brass band music from the Balkans. An ensemble of two or three flugelhorns, a pair of euphoniums, a tuba, a snare drum, and occasionally a trombone create a sound so explosive, it feels like a volcano has erupted in your heart and frenetic dancing is the only way to cool the molten lava coursing through your limbs. Plaintive, manic, melancholic, and exuberant all at once, this music rouses whatever passions lay dormant beneath your civilized crust.

I got my first taste of this music in “Underground,” which features a frenzied brass band on the soundtrack and literally running through the scenes of the film--chasing cars, floating on banquet boats, getting shot at (watch the opening scene here). Shortly thereafter, I got my hands on an album (“Live in Belgrade”) by Boban Markovic, the universally hailed king of gypsy brass-- or cocek, as they call it in the Balkans-- the same man, it turned out, whose band was running through “Underground”. For months, “Live in Belgrade” was the only CD in my car. I would play it at deafening volumes so that I could feel the tuba bass line pulsing through my butt cheeks. Eventually Boban had to be rotated out of the car, not because I grew sick of him, but because he made me drive like a maniac. I felt urges to steer the car into buildings or off bridges to match the climax of a song. I decided to limit my fits of Dionysian ecstasy to the dance floor.

The cult of the trumpet in central and southern Serbia dates back to the early nineteenth century, when the legacy of the Ottoman imperial military brass band (the oldest known brass band in history) was appropriated by Roma musicians who integrated the brass band into social life by performing at weddings, funerals, baptisms, banquets. The brass band continues to be a fixture of such rituals in Serbia today.

My initial plan to go to Serbia and just loiter around graveyards and churches in hopes of catching a genuine gypsy band soon gave way to an even better plan. A few laborious minutes of internet research introduced me to the brass band festival in Guca, where, every year at the end of August, this otherwise unassuming village in the valley of the central Serbian hills is flooded for five days with non-stop music and celebration.

The Dragacevski Sabor, The Assembly of Horn Players in the Dragacevo region of central Serbia, began as an underground subversive meeting of musicians in 1961. In the former Yugoslavia, Tito repressed folk art, music, and any cultural expressions that stirred regional or national sentiments in the multinational union of South Slavs. Now, with nothing to keep the lid on great spectacles of ethnic expression (including chauvinism), the festival in Guca has grown continually in popularity, attracting over 300,000 visitors last summer.

If I wanted to catch Guca before it became a de rigeur stop on the Balkan itinerary of all American travelers, I had to act fast.

Jesse and I left the others with the bags and went inside to have a coffee. In the time it took him to go to the counter and order two cappuccinos, he managed to have the waitress fall madly in love with him. As I learned over the course of the next week, this was a routine part of life for Jesse.

The waitress approached the table without the cappuccinos, but with her friend whom she had elected to do her bidding in English. “She want to take picture with you,” said the friend to Jesse. He politely obliged and put his arm around what had to be the homeliest girl in all of Serbia (a true rarity, considering Serbian women are generally gorgeous). She looked at the camera with her one non-lazy eye and her three-toothed grin and then ran away with a squeal of delight to fetch our drinks, which, according to her friend, she insisted on paying for, provided, of course, that Jesse would look her up when he returned to Belgrade. This romantic entanglement, in addition to saving us about sixty cents on coffee, also helped keep my mind off nagging fears about the arrival of the bus.

I had reserved seats on this bus through the festival’s official website, which offered transportation from Belgrade to Guca and back, as well as accommodation in Guca in a private home. This reservation had been a source of some anxiety for me, as the only way to reserve the ride and room was through a wire transfer of 200 euros to a Belgrade bank account belonging to a man named Vuk Brankovic. I was initially reluctant to send my money down the pipe to Serbia in hopes that two months later a guy in a van would simply roll up in front of a church in Belgrade and tell me to hop aboard. Was the private bus to brass band festival gimmick the Serbian version of the Nigerian millionaire scam? Somehow, I managed to swallow my skepticism and went ahead with the reservation.

Shortly thereafter I read in a book of Serbian history that Vuk Brankovic, the man who I had I just made several hundred euros richer, was the name of the most notorious arch-villain in Serbian history, a Kosovar Count who betrayed his fellow Serbs at the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, helping to usher in a near half millennium of Ottoman domination. Granted, the Vuk Brankovic of 600 years later was not the same man, but why had his parents named him after the infamous betrayer of the Serbian nation? It would be like an American couple naming its son Benedict Arnold—actually, no one would really balk at a guy named Benedict Arnold, as most Americans, unlike Serbs, are either ignorant or indifferent to both their national history and history in general. Serbs, though their historical education is severely distorted by nationalist propaganda, remain avid students of their largely fictional past.

Upon this discovery, paranoid thoughts arose in my mind with renewed vigor. Had I just been betrayed by Vuk Brankovic, thereby unwittingly repeating the vicious cycle of Serbian history? Had the myths of the Balkan past ensared me, too? Was ‘Vuk Brankovic’ a rhetorical wink to fellow Serbians to warn them off this scam that was intended clearly for ignorant Americans, as revenge for our bombing of Belgrade in 1998? Or worse yet, if I was so stupid as to actually come to Serbia, would Vuk indeed show up in his van at the appointed time and place and then have his chetniks bound and gag me, abscond with me to a remote dungeon beneath Kalmegdan Fortress and then enjoin me to feast on my own entrails as they spilled from my freshly split gut?

Imagine my relief then, when amid a bustle of backpacked travelers, in walked Vuk Brankovic. He looked slightly unhinged as I had imagined, but in a benevolent way, maybe because he was wearing a Guca Festival tee-shirt that fit him like a night-shirt and gave him the appearance of a hairy toddler. As usual, my American media-poisoned nightmare fantasies proved illusory. Belgrade was a charming city, Serbians there were cosmopolitan and friendly, and Vuk Brankovic was not a fourteenth-century mountebank. My name was on his reservations clipboard marked paid and his grim torture van was just a shiny charter bus.

Vuk had a wild libertine twinkle in his eyes, accented by a red skin infection that had taken hold of his right eyelid, a scraggly blond beard, and yellow teeth that looked like they had been placed in his gums by someone with a tremulous hand. He swaggered over to our table and commanded us not to hurry. “Please, please. Bus will wait. What you must do is to relax and enjoy. Relax and enjoy, this is imperative!”

Not wanting to offend, I discretely spit my mouthful of coffee back into the cup, intent on relaxing and enjoying it at least three or four more times. Just as the coffee was beginning to taste more like me than it, my girlfriend Marissa came in and told us the bus was leaving. Jesse winked goodbye to his Belgrade sweetheart, we grabbed our bags, and ran out the door.

The bus was filled with mostly Germans and French, with a handful of Spaniards, Brits, and Americans. Any Serbians or people from the neighboring Balkan countries would either drive themselves to Guca or take the regular bus, which stopped in the nearby town of Cacak, just on the other side of the mountain from Guca. The ride, though rainy and winding, was pleasant enough. The most exciting aspect was the insane Serbian film shown on board. It was a vehicle for a leggy blond Serbian pop star who traveled with her thick-mustachioed band of buffoons through an endless cycle of comic embroilments and slow motion song-and-dance numbers. We speculated that the film had all the classic tropes of Serbian comedy—the guy who is repeatedly gang-raped by nymphs, the obese guy in the gym who puts weights down his pants, and the guy who hijacks buses. We couldn’t help but wonder whether bus hijacking was a common event in Serbia.

The rain subsided as we descended into the valley south of Cacak. Evening sunlight fell onto the plum tree-covered hills in the east. Soon, the faint gurgling of distant brass began to trickle through the open windows of the bus. We had arrived in Guca.

The Gypsy Horns of Guca (part 2)

Part 2

Our group was an amalgamation of three distinct cells that had merged in Belgrade. There was Marissa and I, who had flown to Belgrade from Prague, after having spent the summer in Berlin. There we met my friends from New York, Aaron and Noam, and their friend Jesse who had spent the summer on a Rotary Club grant in Ismir, Turkey. They came by way of Bucharest, where they had picked up tales of gypsy cigarette-smuggling and extortion on the long train ride.

Aaron, Noam, and Jesse stayed in the home of a friend of a friend of a friend who happened to live in Guca, while Marissa and I lodged in a rented-out private home. The owner of the house, a pretty young Serbian woman named Jelena gave us the key, set down a decanter full of homemade rakija on the porch table (a plum brandy, also known as slivovic, that fuels the Slavic world), and bade us good night. Over the next four days, she would sneak back up to the house in the mornings to drop off breakfast (which ranged from delicious egg and potato tortes to rather hilarious and slightly grotesque hot-dog filled croissants) and refill the decanter.



After a few rounds of rakija with our new housemates, a middle-aged German couple from Stutgart and two British guys who came to Guca to make a documentary and do some field recordings for the BBC, we reunited with Aaron, Noam, and Jesse for dinner at the café run by their lodgers.

Right away at dinner we knew our time in Guca was going to be worth the trip. The beer came in 2 liter plastic bottles. The innkeepers were warm and doting, and eagerly recommended we try the pizza. Soon our table was covered with freshly baked ketchup and mayonnaise pizzas. In any other context, this most likely would have been revolting, but our 64 ounces of pivo washed it down wonderfully and when the innkeeper checked back to see if we liked her cooking, we expressed our satisfaction unequivocally and assured her we would bring her recipe back home.

As we feasted on our condiments, a roving band wandered up the street searching for patrons. We called them over. To announce yourself as a patron and signal that you want the music to continue, you slap a moistened dinar bill to your forehead. This activity is great fun on its own, not to mention the music it generates.

Immediately, our pleasant dinner turned into frenzy. Dancing erupted, horn bells blasted in faces, money was plastered onto foreheads, flagons of pivo were raised aloft, and passersby joined in the revelry (and no doubt ogled our pizzas). A trumpeter got down on his knees and started serenading Marissa’s ovaries. And when they didn’t obey the rhythm of his trumpet, he directed her hips with his hands. I tipped him an extra ketchup-stained dinar for his efforts.

From there, the night became one indistinct series of increasingly drunken table concerts at streetside cafes and in various tents. Long tables under giant white tents filled an entire town block. These tents are the heart of the festival and were often even wilder than the three main performance stages, as dozens of bands would roam from tent to tent playing for individual tables to the benefit of all. It was not uncommon to have up to three bands blasting away in one tent, creating a beautiful dissonance and ecstatic feeling of being blown apart.

At one of these tents, late into our first night, a table of giant stern-looking Serbs in double-breasted suits were paying for the music and looking rather indifferent to it all, when the leader of the group (of gangsters, we surmised) spotted Marissa on the dance floor and made an elaborate display of giving her a rose. Sure that in Serbian gangster culture that this act meant this man had just bought my girlfriend and demanded my rendering in a vat of acid, we slinked out of the tent scene, beating an erratic retreat in case we were followed.

We found refuge in makeshift outdoor club playing Euro dance music. Apparently this scene was produced by the Serbian MB beer, purveyors of fine two-liter lager, given that many of the women were dressed as scantily clad cowgirls bearing the MB brand across their chest. Many of the men were shirtless, beefy, moronic types. “Looks like your typical American frat party,” I said.
“Yeah, except for that”, said Noam directing us to the speaker in the corner where a bare-chested man with a woman on his shoulders in a military cap was waving a giant Serbian flag.

This wasn’t the first display of Serbian nationalism we had seen. In fact, the flag-waving would have seemed innocuous if we hadn’t already noticed at the souvenir stands, where, amid toy trumpets and guca paraphanalia, hung tee-shirts with heroic pictures of Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, the infamous Serb leaders who commanded the genocidal campaigns of the Bosnian War. Beneath their pictures were slogans in Serbian that said things like, “We will never surrender them,” referring to the UN warrant for their arrest for war crimes, including the infamous Srebrenica massacre (where more thousands of muslim men and boys were marched out of town, executed, and buried in a mass grave).

And throughout the weekend, it seemed more and more people were sporting the Serbian sajkaca, a v-shaped military cap that has come to be a symbol of national identity with an especially nationalist political bent, given its association with the nationalist Serbian paramilitary group, the Chetniks. The Chetniks were originally created in WWII to fight the Axis powers and later fought with the Nazis against Tito’s partisans, the Allies, and all non-Serbs who stood in the way of an ethnically pure Greater Serbia within the kingdom of Yugoslavia. Along with their vision of an ethnically cleansed utopia, the Chetniks were revived during the wars of the nineties, and now serve as an image of mobilizing nostalgia for Serbian nationalists.

This overt nationalist element, seen in a context in which it did not appear controversial but banal, even kitsch, lent an eerie air to what was ostensibly a peaceful, albeit boisterous, music festival—an ethnic music festival no less, supposedly centered around music made largely by Roma musicians.