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| " Listen, pigeons! LISTEN!! I'm not gonna kick you, OK? I promise, I'm not..." THWACK! "Matt!! Matt, I got one!" Mursch's baritone was thunderous and low. Born of grade D cigarettes and twilight inebriation, it leapt forth out of his mouth, past the kebab sauce drying in his beard. It echoed through the deserted boulevards of 4 am and took wing. It bounced off the grime that had replaced the paint on the outside of the indistinguishable high rise apartments. Wholly inappropriate, I thought. But perhaps it is not my place to speak of propriety. I'm wearing a woman's blouse that appears to have been a garishly upholstered ottoman in its past life and smells like it has passed on to its next one. | | |
| Emilia's raven hair contrasted sharply with her pale flesh. Her teeth had a permanent reddish-brown stain to them, blood that had dried perhaps. She laughed loudly when you spoke of something serious and stared at you without pity when you told a joke. I was morbidly fascinated with her. We met on Halloween Night. The next evening, All Soul's Day, we had our first date. I gave her a stolen rose and we drank wine in a cemetery among votive candles whose rays illuminated the wide, mad eyes of the Virgin Mary painted on the candles' glass walls.
We continued seeing each other until one night she invited me to stay at her place. We sat on her bed and looked through pictures of her friends smiling on a lakeshore when she burst out in tears, cried something about being lost, curled into a ball and fell asleep.
After that night, she never returned calls or text messages. Since I never saw her she became "ghost" in my phone and then in conversations with friends. I wondered if she was still alive. Or if she ever was in the first place.
"So you're alive?" I met up with her again. She called while Mursch and I were discussing rifle-butting people to death in Sarajevo. We swung around to a bar named Beautiful Dog, and there she was, inexplicably with form and shape. I inquired as to her life status. She, tellingly, never answered, instead choosing to kiss me repeatedly.
With Mursch around, my Polish vocabulary had withered. I was left only the most basic ideas in grammatically incorrect constructions. Even so, I made all these ideas pure cheese, all sloppy lines in primary blue and yellow and red and it worked.
"I forgot how good you taste." Cheese.
"Did you miss me?" asked she.
"Could I do not it? Why had you not have ever called me?" stumbled I.
She looked away towards the bar for a few minutes. This pause was not out of guilt, like I had thought, but of intense thought and translation. In the first English I had ever heard her use, she uttered,
"I wanted, I want... beautiful soul."
I took this to mean she had been searching for a beautiful soul to consume, but couldn't find one and had to settle for mine. I was fine with this arrangement; I didn't even check my pockets to see if my soul was still on me.
But then she stood up, asking me when I was returning to America and telling me she would see me before then. I got up, hugged her and agreed that we would meet again, knowing that we wouldn't. And then she walked out of the room with the same eyes she always wore, the mad eyes of a saint painted on the glass of a votive candle.
Meanwhile, Mursch was endearing himself to the ladies at the table next to us.
"Matt, I'm trying to tell these Polish broads that women have no common sense. Translate, please."
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| Country Music. Its divine inspiration alights peculiarly among hillbillies of the Appalachian states, all-night truckers in the Deep South, and lonely cowpunchers riding fences in the West. Yet on occasion, Art will smile upon the uninitiated. And so it was that night in Moliere Cafe's wine cellar. While horse hooves clip-clopped in the streets above, underground a crowd hung on the high, lonesome sound of Hiroaki Murakami, he of Kyushu Island, Japan.
Heeere in the twiright, Ro, I see her. Brue eyes crying in rain.
Though his tongue never quite navigated around the L's of the song, his voice conveyed nothing but a core of soul to everyone gathered under the arched, jagged stones of the cellar. As Idaho Geoff and I accompanied him on guitar, I could sense something miraculous, maybe the spirit of Willie Nelson moving in him.
Then I remembered that Willie Nelson wasn't dead yet. Huh. That in itself was miraculous. If I could, I would ask Willie how he managed to stick around this long.
"Matthew James," Willie would probably tell me, "if I'd have thought that I would make it to this age, I would've taken better care of myself."
The false ghost of Willie Nelson would not be the last phantom to visit me that night. After losing the guitar and the crowd, Mursch and I went above ground for a pack of smokes, strange Euroblend smokes that played hell with his throat. We went subterranean again to meet up with Mic "Wielkolud" Polczynski and discuss what form our lam would take. We threw around words dangerous and exotic. Words like Amsterdam, Dubrovnik, Hepatitis, Thirteenth Century Italian Villa, Cinqueterra, Zagreb, Batman, rifle-butted to death, Sarajevo. Mic told us how he had witnessed a swat team in Sarajevo attempt to break up a twelve-man brawl at a discotheque, only to have the combatants join up with each other mid-punch, confiscate the rifles of the swat team, and proceed to rifle-butt a swat guy in the head until blood spewed. Mic did not stay in the club to find out if the swat team made it. Mic recommended Sarajevo.
"You guys should also go to a place called Batman, Turkey," Mic suggested.
"What's in Batman?" I asked.
"Umm...the place is called BATMAN, MATT!"
"Oh."
"BATMAN!" (puts his pointer fingers behind his head as if to simulate ears)
We were weighing whether or not to visit sunny Sarajevo (Mursch seemed underwhelmed by the idea of hanging out with rifle-butters; I thought it might be advisable to befriend these gentlemen, have them on our side just in case our future revolution turned violent as revolutions tend to do) when my phone rang, telling me I had a call from 'DUCH', a word that meant "ghost" in Polish. | | |
| It was a Wednesday. Maybe. The last sunrays of afternoon sprawled out on the dirt and parquetry underfoot and I awoke still in my jeans to ask these pointed questions of them:
"Why did I go to sleep in you last night?"
"Why does my tailbone feel to be shattered into fine crystals?"
"Why can't you or any of your brethren make my ass look good?"
"Where did you take us last night after midnight and how did I get home?"
"Who chewed up all this food and why did they decide to put it down into you, my dear Wranglers?"
The jeans played dumb; I changed into a spare. A wooly red-haired beast woke up in the bed at the far end of the room, about 3 feet away. It was Mursch. "HMMMMPH," he offered in voluble Manatee. Mursch. I had forgotten he was here.
But yes, he was here. He had come on a train some twelve hours late because he plied himself with too much booze, missed his phantom connection in Berlin, curled up in ball on one of the train station's benches. A German transit officer probed his intentions with successive billy club jabs to the ribs but this was no use. Mursch's ability, his need to sleep is ever-impregnable. It has its own heft, inertia, gravitational pull, ZIP code and will not be moved.
But he arrived all the same as a bowling ball to my porcelain. In his leaden bags he carried his fortress of slumber, a tendency to speak to people as if they were short-order cooks, dipsomania and irreverence and he imported this all into a world I had carefully constructed, a regimen of traveling light, sleeping no more than 5 hours a night, strict adherence to all traffic laws and a puritanical abstention from all forms of spirits. An ideal citizen struck with a bedlam-raising hound on the scent of What Could Possibly Be Next.
So we ventured out to the beer basements of Krakow to rediscover what we still held in common. It presented itself at the bottom of Pint #4:
"So. Agriculture, huh?"
"Yeah, Agriculture," he confirmed.
"Agriculture."
"NO, I do not have a job lined up; NO, I have no idea what I'm gonna do with an agriculture degree; No, I do want to entertain the prospects..."
"Easy. I was," I said, " just asking."
"What about you?" he volleyed. "What will this time in Poland do for you?"
"I have no idea."
"Christ. The Real World."
"Yeah, I know."
And more than several glasses emptied. And we both, on some level, came to understood ourselves as fugitives from it all. The ignominy of PTA boards, advice on daycare and healthcare providers and mortgages that lay in wait. We would duck across national borders until I figured it out, how to rescue San Antonio from the gated-community takeover by the Dallasites on the Northside, how to market the Tejano/Alt Country band I would start with Stewart Walther. Mursch would figure out what he needed to figure out. We would start a revolution.
"Can there be dancing?" he asked.
"Huh?"
"I don't want part of any revolution unless there's dancing."
"Fine, there'll be dancing."
There would be no dancing. Not with the revolution starting in Poland. Poles can't dance.
We left the pirate bar where we had been and headed for a karaoke bar in a tent; "I Want It That Way" would not sing itself after all.
And that was what the far extent of my memory. My broken tailbone and the food(?) in my wranglers begged for explanation. Mursch filled in some of the holes. I had given him a tour of the town square, replete with historical context. We slipped into an all-night grocery store and broke beer bottles. We walked home and I locked myself in the bathroom. My neighbors found me asleep, sitting in our common room. Interesting. This still didn't explain who put the food in my pants and the multiple fractures in my coccyx
But this explanation would have to wait. For it was already Wednesday afternoon and I had to prepare myself for the country music gig later that evening with my Japanese crooner friend pictured here, in the top left corner:
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