Читать книгу I'm Trying to Reach You - Barbara Browning - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTHE FIRST LINE OF MY NOVEL
I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.
When I heard the news, the first thing I thought was, “That’s it. That’s the first line of my novel. ‘I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.’ ” It seemed exactly right – odd, bizarre even, incongruous, an appallingly sad event viewed from an eerie state of helpless remove. It encapsulated all the feelings I’d been wanting to get off my chest, without having any actual story to attach them to.
I’d been toying with the idea of writing fiction – probably as a way of avoiding the real task at hand, which was my academic writing. Given the economic climate and the disconcerting contraction of the university job market, the old saw “publish or perish” was taking on a new urgency. It was making me a little anxious. So sometimes when I sat down at my computer, I’d find myself fantasizing about writing a novel instead.
That first line fell in my lap, but it was entirely true.
I was in Zagreb the day that Michael Jackson died.
I got the news in a text from Sven. “omg did u hear mj died.”
All I could answer was, “no way wtf?!”
It was 1 a.m. when I got the text. I went down to the lobby of the Arcotel where I was staying. I was there for an academic conference. It was the 15th annual meeting of PSi, Performance Studies international. The lowercase “international” is not really intended to distance the organization from any Marxist associations. But according to the official website, it’s a kind of self-ironizing deflation of any political claims the membership might make for itself. The field of performance studies is definitely left-leaning, but it tends to embrace its own failure. In fact, the conference’s theme that year was “Misperformance: Misfiring, Misfitting, Misreading.”
Still, while it can be self-deprecating, performance studies claims virtually everything as its object of study – from Indian classical dance and bel canto to the “performative” aspects of race, class, and gender. This is referred to as the broad spectrum approach. I locate myself on the more literal and slightly less fashionable end of the spectrum: I study concert dance.
I’d arrived in Zagreb that day, somewhat flustered. There’d been a little confusion with my bag at the airport. For some reason, everybody else from my flight seemed to retrieve their stuff without incident, but after they all filed out, I was still standing there waiting for mine. Just as I was heading to the Croatia Airlines counter to get some help, I spotted it circling around, alone, on an unmarked carousel with the little purple ribbon I’d tied on it for easy identification. It looked like a forlorn dog waiting for its owner. I have no idea how it got on that other carousel. I felt vaguely responsible even though it obviously wasn’t my fault.
Anyway, once I got to the hotel and ascertained that all my stuff was indeed in there, I collected myself, washed up, and headed out to check out the conference action. There was an opening reception being held at the Zagreb Youth Theater in the evening. The conference packet said there would be some wine and “traditional Croatian delicacies.” Also DJ Chassna would be spinning. Since I didn’t really know anything about the restaurants in town and I was trying to economize, I thought I’d call this party “dinner.” But when I got to the Zagreb Youth Theater, things looked a little bleak. Apparently quite a few people had opted out of the opening reception and the “turbo-folk” musical performance. There were a few confused-looking graduate students who’d evidently made the same “dinner” plans as me, plus some older members of the faculty of the University of Zagreb Academy of Drama Arts. There were two feuding factions at the Academy – postmodernists vs. social realists. Dan Ferguson, an acquaintance of mine working on a dissertation on the history of the flea circus, whispered this bit of gossip to me as we watched two paunchy, bearded guys tussle over a wine jug. That was apparently it for alcoholic beverages, though there were many cartons of lukewarm “juice drink.” Two long folding tables with paper spreads held plastic platters filled with what appeared to be triangular slices of Spam. There was a paper sign taped to the wall saying, in English, “CROATIAN MEAT SPECIALTIES.”
DJ Chassna was having some trouble with her sound system. She was pretty, pierced, with a cigarette in her left hand and a cell phone in her right, texting vehemently. Probably trying to get some technical help. She looked pretty pissed off. The soundscape in the lobby of the Zagreb Youth Theater, in any event, mostly consisted of those tussling drama professors, and the shuffling, coughing, and sniffling of graduate students wondering if Spam and lukewarm juice drink were really going to tide them over for the night.
This Spam situation may sound egregious, but it wasn’t unthinkable as far as I was concerned. I’d finagled a small research travel grant to get to the conference, but I was living that year on a badly paying post-doc at NYU, with no guarantee of renewal. My dietary choices were often influenced by financial considerations. That evening I made do, politely nibbling at the meat delicacies with a plastic fork, pretending to be hanging around waiting for Chassna to start spinning, even though it was pretty obvious the technical difficulties would be insurmountable. After a while, even those bearded drama professors abandoned their jug of Bull’s Blood or whatever it was they were tussling over. I wiped the corners of my mouth with a paper napkin and headed back to the hotel.
Despite my inauspicious entrée to the Zagreb scene, I was trying to appreciate the relative luxuriousness of my situation. The Zagreb Arcotel is a more upscale establishment than I was accustomed to, really – though it had a kind of Eastern European slight offness about it. Or maybe I was projecting. The rooms had hipsterish curtains and throw pillows decorated with black and white caricatures of iconic artists and intellectual figures both historical and contemporary. Richard Strauss, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Virginia Woolf – but also Manu Chao. There was somebody who looked a little like Slavoj Žižek, but it probably wasn’t. He was smiling.
There was also a figure that looked a little like Michael Jackson, but on closer inspection it turned out to be Egon Schiele.
I was using my cell phone to take this picture when it started to vibrate with Sven’s incoming text. I don’t know if I was taking the picture to send to Sven or if I just wanted to remember the moment – but my little exercise in documenting my Eastern European corporate hotel room suddenly paled in comparison. The text really threw me for a loop. I stared at it for a few minutes before sending my generically inarticulate response.
I’d had an uneasy feeling, ever since the luggage incident. But I’d been unprepared for something like this. Because of the time difference I was wide awake – especially after this news flash – and that’s why I decided to go down to the lobby of the hotel, where there were a couple of big flat-screen computers set up for guests. I settled into a comfortable chair facing one of them and typed in “michael jackson.” A flood of news items appeared. I quickly combed over the most recent ones and ascertained, more or less, the global response to the situation. It was immediately evident the scale of the catastrophe. I glanced up at the several conference-goers chatting on the couches and chairs scattered around the lobby. A few had cocktails. No one seemed to be registering this cataclysmic event.
I went to YouTube. This was, increasingly, my first resort in dealing with questions from the practical to the unfathomable. Of course the platform when it first emerged was a terrific boon to those of us who research live performance, but as you know if you’ve spent any time on the site, which surely you have, there’s all kinds of other useful information people share there. Also not so useful information, and opinions. Sometimes I’d find myself getting absorbed in the weird comments viewers would post on other people’s videos. Sven had recently begun ribbing me about the amount of time I was spending on YouTube. He wasn’t thoroughly convinced that it was “productive.”
My first thought was to watch a couple of Jackson’s music videos, but when I typed in his name an avalanche of MJ-wannabes popped up. I started clicking through them. The vast majority had posted their work long before his demise. Instructional moonwalk videos are a genre unto themselves. There were people trying to dance like him all over the world: in Singapore, Sidney, Slippery Rock, São Paulo. A few began or ended with little testimonials. There was a really heartbreaking one posted by a young guy from Belarus. It said, “Small dancing clip for Michael Jackson. I have no possibility to be in the USA. My communication is the Internet. I hope to you will be pleasant this video audition from Michael Jackson.” He was a pretty good dancer, and the production values on his video were surprisingly good. Some friends must have helped him shoot it. There was a lot of screen text in Cyrillic, but the official YouTube description was what I just typed, in English. It seemed so sad. He’d obviously invested a lot of hope in the possibility of MJ seeing this video and asking him to perform with him. Even though this had probably always been a long shot, his prospects for such a scenario had now clearly bitten the dust.
I sat there for two hours, from one until three, watching these wannabes. A few were genuinely virtuosic. Some were embarrassing. White people can be so unself-conscious. It’s offensive, charming, and pathetic, all at the same time.
One was very weird. At first I couldn’t figure out how it found its way into the “michael jackson” related videos playlist. It was called “modéré satie” – and indeed, it was set to Satie’s fifth Gnossienne – one of my favorites.
A woman in a black leotard, her dark hair pulled back, was dancing a subdued dance in an interior space – her living room? There were some peculiar paintings on the wall. One of them appeared to depict Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon. The dancer wasn’t looking at the camera. Her eyes were turned down throughout her little choreography, which was also quite peculiar – not balletic, exactly, though oddly proper. She demi-pliéed in plunky time to Satie’s moderate little melody, alternately lifting her arms as if to mark the count. Her gestures became more and more idiosyncratic and mysterious, as though she were trying to communicate some information.
Perhaps I should pause to explain that I was at this conference to deliver a paper on semaphore mime in contemporary ballet choreography. I’m a former ballet dancer. I’m learning to say that. Like many male dancers, I started my training relatively late, and ours is not a line of work known for its longevity, so my stage career, such as it was, was pretty brief – and not particularly noteworthy. My longest gig was with the Royal Swedish Ballet in Stockholm. I came in under Nils Ake-Häggbom, and stuck around for as long as it seemed to make sense. I’m trying to transition into teaching, which is why I decided a few years ago to get a doctorate in performance studies, which led to the temporary and somewhat precarious post-doc I’ve already mentioned.
I was supposed to be revising my dissertation into a book. I had recently been granted a post-doctoral fellowship to support this project. The major revision I’d thus far accomplished was changing the title. The dissertation had been called, Semaphoric Mime from the Ballet Blanc to William Forsythe: A Derridean Analysis. By “Derridean,” I meant to indicate that even when a dance appeared to be relaying a very clear message, it was always already saying something altogether different. I knew that title might be a bit off-putting to a general audience, so the book was going to be: I’m Trying to Reach You. This seemed to have more crossover potential, although the manuscript was probably a little over-specialized for the lay reader, and maybe a tad theoretical. I knew I had to take out some of the extended endnotes, which had nearly the same word count as the actual text, but so far I’d only managed to excise a few commas. I have a slightly pathological attachment to the idea of the “hors-texte.”
So, it’s not exactly as though I believe in singular interpretations, like I could “get” this little Satie choreography if I only had a key. But the dance looked like a message in a bottle. It seemed to have some sort of secret code – the big mystery, of course, being what the hell it had to do with Michael Jackson.
Some of the references were pretty clear: the mudra-like hand gestures (“okay”), which morphed into antlers, and then something like a map of her ovaries; a little Charlie Chaplin walk, ending with a swat at her ankles; a delicate circling of her index finger over her head, as though it were a phonograph needle sounding the clunky little score. And then I saw it: looking down at her feet, she swiveled to the side, and discreetly moonwalked backwards across the floor.
It definitely wasn’t virtuosic, but it did have a hint of the uncanny, as the moonwalk inevitably does.
The video ended with her head still down, arms open in a gesture of apparent offering. Then it faded to black. I hit “replay.” And then again. Maybe I’d just listened to “Billie Jean” and “Smooth Criminal” one too many times. It’s possible I’d lost all my critical faculties. But at that moment, all I wanted to do was hear this moderate little piano solo, and watch this moderate little chamber dance.
The video had been posted by somebody called “falserebelmoth.” It had only clocked 6 views, and several of those, as you can see, were mine. I scrolled down to the comments. There was only one, from somebody called “GoFreeVassals”: “Kind, icy, slim one… I am raw with lament.” That was odd. And yet accurate – as a description of the dancer, and also the response she was producing in me.
I was staring at this comment when I had the disconcerting sense that someone was looking over my shoulder. By this time, all of the other occupants of the hotel lounge seemed to have made their way back to their rooms, alone or in pairs. Aside from a custodial worker vacuuming near the bar, I thought I was alone. I slowly turned to see who was behind me, and to my surprise, it was Jimmy Stewart. Of course it couldn’t be, really. Jimmy Stewart was dead. But this guy really looked like him – say, around the Vertigo period, or shortly thereafter. He was graying, but still rakish. He didn’t even look at me. He was staring fixedly, almost menacingly, at the flat screen of the computer I was using. He pulled some reading glasses out of his pocket and perched them near the end of his nose, leaning over my shoulder to read that weird comment. He was wearing a short-sleeved white dress shirt, neatly tucked into a pair of twill plaid tennis shorts. His white socks were pulled up, and he was carrying what appeared to be a teeny tiny tennis racquet in a case.
I felt a little self-conscious, and also, frankly, put out by Jimmy Stewart’s evident disregard for my personal space. I turned back around and clicked the browser closed. When I glanced back over my shoulder again, Jimmy Stewart was gone. I glimpsed him heading out into the Zagreb night with his tiny racquet gripped firmly before him. He carried it like a threat.
I went back up to my room, brushed my teeth, and put on my pajamas. I texted Sven (“xoxoxo”), climbed into the big, flat hotel bed, stared for a minute at the dark, and then went out like a light.
There was something of an international incident the next day. PSi, despite its self-abnegating tendencies, appeared to have provoked some local tensions. It had nothing to do with those feuding drama professors, who were ultimately – even the postmodernists – regular “theater people,” not the kind that leaked out into the streets confusing your average Joe about the blurry boundaries between “life” and “art.” No, the incident had to do with another set – a group of conceptual artists whose work was being reenacted by an ensemble of actors for the benefit of conference-goers. Their effort, they explained, was not to rewrite the “official” narrative of performance art in Croatia, which, they explained, didn’t really even exist: the recent period of political instability and competing state ideologies had only allowed for an unreliable trail of “legends, lies, accusations, cli-chés, etc.” So who knows if any of this is true, but they were ostensibly reenacting the work of people like:
* Sandra Sterle, who, in 2008 supposedly performed Nausea, in which she deliberately vomited to the tune of “Dalmatianac nosi lančić oko vrata” (“A Dalmatian Man Wears a Chain around His Neck”).
* Siniša Labrović, who in 2007 reputedly performed Artist Licking the Heels of the Members of the Audience, drawing attention to a Croatian proverb implying subservience, though this act was held to reposition Labrović in a position of “psychological supremacy.”
* Marjian Crtalić, who is said to be, even today, performing a work in progress – 8 years and running – called Living Dead (Globalization of the Subconscious). This piece involves the daily clipping of his hair and scratching of his scalp with his fingernails. “The artist,” we are told, “has amassed a multi-year collection of deposits of hair, water and sebaceous fluid from his scalp that is now approximately the size of a tennis ball.” According to the organizers of the reenactment, Crtalić has developed a “paranoid attitude towards his own thoughts and feelings as ‘products of a globalized identity “colonization.”’ This is further present in the need for purity in the frame of ‘my own demented obsessive-compulsive boosting of my own deficiencies.’ ”
None of these recent works, however, seemed to be causing a problem – it was rather the reenactments of two (ostensible) seminal figures from the 1970s that were wreaking havoc in the streets of Zagreb.
* In 1971, Tomislav Gotovac is said to have performed Streaking, which perhaps needs no explanation. Ten years later, he reportedly performed Lying Naked on the Pavement, Kissing the Pavement (Zagreb, I Love You!) – Homage to Howard Hawks’ ‘Hatari!’ He was basically streaking again, but this time he’d shaved his head and made out with the sidewalk. He was arrested for disturbing the public order.
* Almost exactly twenty years later, Vlasta Delimar, a contemporary of Gotovac who had also been big in the ’70s, reputedly performed Walkthrough as Lady Godiva, which could, I suppose, itself be construed as a kind of historical reenactment. Anyway, Delimar was also arrested. A lot had happened in Croatia since the ’70s, but in the realm of naked performance art, it seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.
So, surprise. The 2009 reenactors of both Gotovac and Delimar, bringing to life a questionable and politically contaminated art history for the benefit of a raggedy assortment of foreign intellectuals housed at the local corporate hotel, were also arrested. I didn’t actually see the arrests taking place, but I heard about them as soon as I arrived at the U. of Z. Faculty of Architecture, which was where most of the academic panels were taking place. It made me feel sad and vaguely responsible, but someone pointed out that maybe getting arrested was also a part of the “reperformance.” I wondered, though, if they thought they might have been protected by their association with visiting international scholars. But maybe that was just a manifestation of my own projection of a paranoid attitude toward Croatians’ thoughts and feelings as “products of a globalized identity ‘colonization.’ ”
Anyway, the incident seemed to get blown over fairly quickly, but it haunted me throughout the day.
I attended a paper on “Peter Sellars: Snake-Oil Salesman or Enfant Terrible?” and another on disruptive audience members. Nobody in our audience was particularly disruptive, though I’m sure a few of us were contemplating the possibility while listening. In the hallway afterwards I ran into Dan Ferguson and a couple of other acquaintances from NYU, and they invited me to lunch, but I just wanted to grab one of the conference box lunches and head back to the hotel to work on my own paper, which I was presenting that afternoon.
It was the same old same old, of course – failures of communication in Forsythe. The ways in which the dancers could appear to be misfiring with each other, but ultimately the dance itself was forcing the viewer to face the absence of meaning.
I know, doesn’t sound so upbeat, does it?
I still wanted to tinker with it a little. I gave Dan my cell number, though. He said they’d located the one gay bar in Zagreb and were planning to head over there in the evening. That sounded interesting. I don’t mean I was looking for action. It seemed more like research. In fact, I pretty much always feel I’m doing research.
I had to wait a few minutes at the Arcotel for one of those computers to open up. I had my paper on a flash drive. Once I got to work, I spent about twenty minutes moving some of those commas around. I looked at this phrase: “brutal propulsion, contorted mouths, buckling limbs” – backspaced, typed: “brutal propulsion, mouths in contortion, limbs in collapse.” Propulsion and contortion sounded too much alike. Tried again: “limbs akimbo.” Silly. “Scattered limbs.” One step over the line: too violent. “Limbs limning…” – uh oh, my addiction to grammatological figures was popping up again. Maybe I had it right the first time. My gaze wandered, vaguely, to the right of the screen, and slowly the hotel bar came into focus. “Oh shit,” I thought. “It’s him”: Jimmy Stewart, wearing that same manicured tennis outfit from yesterday, or at least a similar one. In the light of day, he was wearing shades – mirrored, with aviator frames. He seemed to be sipping an iced tea. As I stared at him, he slowly turned his head to face me directly. I’m pretty sure he was staring back at me, though with the shades it was hard to tell. He stood there for a minute or so, fixedly, and then gulped down the rest of his tea, tossed a handful of kuna onto the bar, grabbed his tiny racquet, and headed out into the streets of Zagreb.
I looked back at my paper, unnerved. I’d written the first draft two and a half years ago. I’d just managed to move a comma or two, but it clearly wasn’t going to be much improved before my panel at 3:00. This reappearance of Jimmy Stewart also wasn’t exactly helping my concentration. I saved my changes, closed the document, and ejected my flash drive. I hesitated for a moment, and then opened up the Internet browser, heading straight for YouTube. I typed in “michael jackson moonwalk modéré satie.” Up she popped: the tiny dancer. I watched her quietly sink and rise in her mechanical little demi-pliés, with her little mudra-hands hanging at odd angles off her wrists. I watched it again. Evidently somebody else had, too: it was up to nineteen hits. I saw from the clock on the corner of the screen that it was really time for me to be heading over to the Faculty of Architecture to test my a.v. before my panel. But I couldn’t resist quickly scrolling down to check on the comments. There was a new one, from “quothballetcarper”: “Not bad, little lady. Keep practicing.” To which falserebelmoth had responded, in a language as peculiar and indecipherable as her choreography: “And I sneered – softly – ‘small’!”
I got to my assigned room at 2:50, a little out of breath. I was supposed to be presenting with two other people – the prominent dance theorist Niels van der Waals, and a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin named Amanda Trugget. Amanda was trying to figure out how to open her file on a PC. She was a Mac person. There was a tech guy assigned to the room, but he didn’t seem to understand her question. She looked pretty nervous. When I introduced myself she said this was her first conference presentation. She had braces. I helped her figure out how to access her PowerPoint file on Isadora Duncan. Then I checked my own Forsythe images. Quite a few people were gathering around the door, but after chatting and peaking in, they all filed discreetly into the room next door. At about 3:05, someone shut that door, and you could hear the muffled sound of their panel beginning. Amanda and I settled into our seats, and the U. of Z. tech guy politely took a seat at the back of the room. In the awkward silence, Amanda and I flipped through our notes, smiled at each other, and checked our cell phones. I texted Sven: “low turnout wtf?” He texted back: “ :( ”
At about 3:20, I stuck my head out in the hallway, and saw a sign taped to the door. I guess I’d missed it on the way in. It said, “Unfortunate news Professor van der Waals is unable to attend conference.” Well, that would explain the quiet migration away from our panel. I explained the situation to Amanda, and she started to cry, softly. I told her I’d be happy to listen to her paper. She pulled herself together, and began reading in a tremulous voice. When she got to the line about how Marinetti had rejected Duncan’s “childish sensuality” in favor of “the ‘cakewalk’ of the Negroes,” she looked up at me with an awkward grimace, her lips stretched painfully over all that orthodontic hardware. I nodded encouragingly, indicating that I understood this wasn’t her own word choice. Amanda forged ahead, stoically.
At several points during her presentation, my mind wandered. I was replaying that weird video in my head. I don’t think Amanda noticed. I was careful to maintain the appearance of rapt concentration.
When she concluded, the tech guy and I applauded. Then, to reciprocate, I read my paper. Amanda, too, had an expression of polite engagement, but by the end, even I had lost interest. I came up with one lame question for her – the year of publication of the Manifesto of Futurist Dance – which she answered (1917). She asked me what I thought the phrase “Fiction (as wish)” meant in Forsythe’s Sleepers Guts. It appeared as a projection in the background of one of my slides. I started rambling about how, for Derrida, dance has to precede writing… But Amanda’s face was clouding over and I let myself trail off. The tech guy was already winding up the cables from the microphones, so Amanda and I just smiled limply and clapped for each other’s good manners. We gathered up our belongings in silence and each headed for the gender-appropriate restroom. I don’t think it was because we had to pee. I think we both just wanted to get away from one another. It was nothing personal. After washing my hands, and drying them, I stuck my head out into the hall. Seeing no sign of Amanda, I took off for the Arcotel.
Maybe now you will understand why I’d been toying with the idea of writing a novel. It’s not that I don’t enjoy academic writing, and it’s not like I want to be the next Stephen King. Honestly, I love the idea of a paper with an audience of one. Well, two if you count the tech guy. It really had more to do with that question of Amanda’s.
That evening someone from the conference organized an impromptu session in the lobby of the Zagreb Youth Theatre where conference attendees could process Michael Jackson’s death. Maybe “organized” is the wrong word. I noticed there were not a lot of people of color at this conference. The motley crew that assembled in the lobby of the Zagreb Youth Theatre seemed unsure about whether they were there to speak, or to listen. Someone did, however, read aloud the brief statement issued by the performance artist Reverend Billy (of The Church of Stop Shopping) on his website. It was quite moving. It addressed MJ directly, and encapsulated the extreme beauty and disfigurement of the artist as the logical conclusion of advanced capitalism: “We created you and you created us. I am proud and I am ashamed.”
Dan Ferguson texted me that night at about 10:00: “@ gbar mesnicka 36 upper town.” I looked up the address on the little map of Zagreb that came with the conference materials. It looked like a doable walk, so I headed out on foot. It was a beautiful evening. Zagreb is a fairly quiet town – not really known for its nightlife. The weather was pleasant, and aside from a few sour-looking elderly pedestrians, most of the people I saw seemed to be teenaged couples making out on benches. They were very workmanlike about this. There was not a lot of laughter or conversation. On my way up into the Upper Town, I stopped in front of St. Mark’s Church, which they say dates back to the 13th century. You wouldn’t know it – big chunks of it were destroyed and then replaced after various catastrophes, both natural and man-made. The roof has a mosaic of the Dalmatian, Croatian, and Slavonian coats of arms. In the evening light it looked as if it were made of Legos.
I turned the corner and walked up the hill on Mesnička Street. It was very quiet, and apparently mostly residential. When I got to number 36, I wondered if I’d made a mistake – or if Dan had. It looked like a regular row house. But then I saw there was a doorbell with a discreet label saying “gbar.” I buzzed, and almost immediately a middle-aged guy with a crew cut opened the door and nodded me in. There was a rainbow-colored neon sign over the bar, and they were playing VH1, relatively quietly. It was dark and air-conditioned. Aside from Dan Ferguson and his three other friends, the only other people in the gbar were the man who let me in, a young, hot guy staring at the video screen, and the bartender, who was a woman. She was also young and good-looking, with spiky hair and a pierced lower lip, but she was very serious. Dan, however, introduced her as though she were already a friend. “Gray, Zlata. Zlata, Gray. Zlata makes a mean Thirsty Lesbian!”
I said, with as much enthusiasm as I could muster, “Oh, really?”
Zlata just stared, waiting for my order.
“Is there something you recommend?”
Zlata said, with nary a hint of a smile, “We have two specialty cocktail, Thirsty Lesbian and Double Penetration. Thirsty Lesbian is wodka. Double Penetration has two kinds alcohol. I recommend beer, Zlatni Medvjed.”
I looked at Dan’s glass. It had a pink liquid in it that I guessed might be sweet. The TL. I considered asking for more information on the DP, but since I wasn’t really in the mood to get hammered, I went with Zlata’s recommendation.
Dan introduced me to his friends, who were all, like him, ABD. Sometimes I feel a little old in these situations. I went back to graduate school as what they euphemistically call a “mature” student, but these days a lot of doctoral students are fresh out of their undergraduate institutions. All three of Dan’s friends, two guys and a girl, were gossiping about some confrontation that had occurred at the plenary that day. I try to steer clear of academic gossip. I have one of those little figurines of three monkeys next to my computer at home: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. I tried to engage Dan in a separate conversation. We didn’t have to apologize for missing each other’s paper because we’d been scheduled in the same time slot. I asked him how his had gone.
He said, “Do you want the blow-by-blow?”
I said, “That sounds like one of Zlata’s cocktails.”
Turns out almost nobody showed up for his panel as well. Then we realized the gbar was also virtually empty. It was a little sad, and a little funny.
Dan and his friends wanted to stay to see if things would pick up after midnight (doubtful). After I finished my beer, I excused myself, awkwardly hugged everybody, walked back to the Arcotel, texted Sven about the names of the cocktails (answer: “:)”), brushed my teeth, and turned in.
The next morning I made the mistake of eating the wall decorations at the Arcotel. It seemed like a good idea at the time. My room, and presumably all the other rooms, had a decorative metallic apple holder on the wall near the desk, stocked with two Red Delicious apples. It was stamped, in English: HAVE A NICE DAY. I’d been looking at these apples for the last two days. I felt one. Definitely real. I figured they had to replace them anyway, so I might as well eat one. I washed it. I took a bite.
It was a shocking mouthful of mealy mush.
This incident made me ponder: my somewhat distressing financial situation; the notion of “decorative” food; the ubiquity of the English language and the global implications of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe; what the maid might think when she found this mealy apple with a humiliating bite taken out of it in the trash can; if I’d been tipping her appropriately in kuna; what it would be like to be a hotel chambermaid in Croatia; biblical representations of paradise and temptation; sexuality and sin. Sven.
I was still hungry, of course. I hoped there still might be some muffins or something over at the conference site. I’d let myself sleep in, feeling my experiences of the day before exonerated me of much responsibility in regards to attending other people’s panels. In fact, when I got to the U. of Z., there was some burnt coffee and a bowl of apples in remarkably similar condition to the decorative ones at the Arcotel. Maybe this was just the way they ate apples in Zagreb. Somehow that made me feel better.
I attended a late-morning panel on performance and new media. There was a guy who introduced himself as a “witch doctor” and he compared the manipulation of avatars in cyberspace to the use of voodoo dolls. That was a little disturbing. But then a woman gave a pretty rousing talk in defense of “collective solipsism.” She showed photos of an “Air Sex” competition, an installation by Sophie Calle, and an interesting YouTube video of a 12-year-old girl doing the SpongeBob SquarePants dance in her San Antonio bedroom.
This video made me think of falserebelmoth – another small, almost embarrassingly intimate domestic chamber dance.
I really liked that SpongeBob SquarePants dance. But the business about voodoo dolls had left me a little unsettled.
When the panel was over, I grabbed another boxed lunch and headed back to the hotel. I made a bee-line to that computer that I’d started to think of as “mine,” and pulled up the performance that I’d also started to have kind of proprietary feelings about. It was up to thirty-three hits. So mine would make thirty-four. This time, though, I couldn’t seem to focus on her dance. I was watching her shadow moving across the wall behind her. Sometimes it danced right out of the frame, but then she’d dance it in again. I’m not sure why it would make me so anxious every time her shadow disappeared.
That was when I felt a presence again just over my left shoulder. I knew exactly who it was. I closed the browser just as the dance was ending and sat there with my hand on the mouse, refusing to turn around and acknowledge him. My heart was beating. I’m not sure if I was afraid or angry.
Jimmy Stewart said softly, “Hm,” and strode past me and out the big glass doors. The handle of his miniature racquet was jutting out of a small beige backpack. I watched him check his watch, look up and down the avenue, and then flag down the approaching tram. I think he was looking back in my direction as the car carried him away.
On my last afternoon in Zagreb, I decided to skip all panels and meander through the city. The weather had turned slightly overcast. This seemed like an appropriate backdrop to all that Habsburg architecture. I was lamely trying to pick up a word or two of Croatian from the signage in the store windows. It seemed that every 20 yards or so there was a hair salon, and these were marked with the word “FRIZER” or some variation on that term. Like, FRIZERSKI, which was probably the adjectival form. It was odd there was evidently such a preoccupation with hair styling, because despite all that professional attention, most people’s hair looked terrible. Croatian people didn’t strike me as a particularly unattractive people, but there was definitely a styling problem. Even the more intentional looks seemed badly misguided. It was strange because in many other ways they struck me as quite cosmopolitan.
I took a picture on my phone of one of the posters outside a “FRIZERSKI SALON” and sent it as a text to Sven with the message “the zagreb hair situation.”
Then I thought that would be a pretty good name for a band. The Zagreb Hair Situation.
Sven didn’t text me back. Maybe he was sleeping.
That night I stayed in, watched a little CNN, and turned out the lights at 10:00 p.m. I had an early flight the next morning. When I got to the airport, however, I found out that my 7:00 a.m. Zagreb-Frankfurt flight on Croatia Airlines had been canceled – no explanation. That meant I’d be missing my Lufthansa FRA-LHR-JFK connections. They gave me a roundtrip taxi voucher, a voucher for a night at the airport Westin Hotel, and vouchers for two meals. They rebooked me for a flight out at the crack of dawn the next day.
The employees of Croatia Airlines were not particularly apologetic. First that weirdness with my bag – now this. I was also a little concerned that Sven hadn’t answered my last couple of texts. I sent him another one, explaining, in brief, my situation. I wondered if he’d misplaced his phone. The thought crossed my mind that it might be something worse. But it probably wasn’t. I didn’t want to add to the drama by sounding worried, so I wrote, somewhat flippantly, “living large: spam on voucher + night @ airport hotel!” I thought I’d start worrying in earnest if I didn’t hear from him by the morning.
My taxi driver to the Westin was very nice, in an understated way. In fact, I thought it was possible that he was a little attracted to me. He asked me if I was married, and I said, “No, you?” He said he was divorced with a 16-year-old son. He said his name was Brna, and he gave me his card. He agreed to take me back to the airport the next morning at 5:30. Feeling that Brna, at least, was on my side helped me relax a little.
I momentarily contemplated inviting him up to my room – I mean, not really, I was just kind of joking with myself, but I did consider how funny it would be to turn up in New York with Brna. I imagined Brna eventually meeting Sven. I thought to myself, “If that did happen, we’d probably all get along.” I remembered my massage therapist, Ellen, telling me once, “I like Eastern European men. Their depression can be very charming and they’re not obsessed with happiness which is linked, I believe, to a more relaxed idea of what breasts need to look like.” Ellen is great.
I ate dinner at the buffet at the Zagreb Airport Westin. In truth, the food was not bad. Before I went to sleep I read a little bit from a book on queer theory that enthusiastically quoted the somewhat unfashionable psychologist Silvan Tomkins: “If you like to be looked at and I like to look at you, we may achieve an enjoyable interpersonal relationship. If you like to talk and I like to listen to you talk, this can be mutually rewarding. If you like to feel enclosed within a claustrum and I like to put my arms around you, we can both enjoy a particular kind of embrace. If you like to be supported and I like to hold you in my arms, we can enjoy such an embrace.”
Just before I turned out the lights, I got a text from Sven: “sorry. bad day :(better:/ miss you.”
I just answered: “xoxo.”
Early the next morning, at the crack of dawn, Brna drove me back to the airport in silence. I gave him the last of my vouchers and we thanked each other. The rest of the journey was uneventful.
