Prague: Marijuana and the Czech Koruna

T'is the summer glow, I reckon, that's got the mind all a-flutter for some sweet, Czech cheeba.  A little something lingering from Santa Cruz maybe, that sweat sun and a cold beer sloshin' around in my belly that calls to it.  And it's almost too easy, especially with no packs on.  Packless, there's a flex in our step, and it pushes with all that strength accrued in our calves from dancing and trekking and grinding all over damned Europe.  It's good.  Our heads are chattin' off as we romp down the cobblestone streets, about our weekend in the Berlin forest and Devil's Hill and the high times, and Shahar, the Colorado Kid and the girls, and everything Mike is missing back in summer school.  And this city we're sprinting through in two days.  I wish we had longer in this grandfather of European kingdoms, on the skinny one-way streets lined with tiny Euro cars.  The buildings on both sides are just tall enough so that the sun may never touch the cobble, even at it's highest.  The shade's warm, and that's when my sweet Mary Jane's lips taste the best.

Back out in the busy Old Market square, we mosey around in front of St. Nicholas Church (Santa Church) and remember what Tony and Dajana had told us back Berlin, "You know, just look for some ghetto-looking black guys in the square."  "Yeah, they usually always have some."  Racist?  Kind of feels like it in the moment, but, sure enough, in no time, Max picks up the ambassador torch and makes eye contact with two guys in baggy jeans and Fubu jerseys.  In Prague.  In the summer.  He makes the motion of a joint and they both nod, smile, and come over.  We're just a trio of smooth river stones, and with tourists flocking like schools of salmon and swimming by this way and that, we tell them,  "Hey, we're from California and we're just looking for some marijuana."

"Oh! California girls! That is cool!" Oh, yay... And they tell us to wait for them under a tree with a bench circling it in corner of the square.  "We see you there in, uhhh, ten minutes, okay?" they say through a heavy Czech accent, "Eet well be, uhh, 380 koruna, okay?"  For two grams?  There's a chort of astonishment before we remember that the Budweiser's were like 23 koruna, and that the Czech koruna is kind of a bitch. A quick head calculation brings us to the conclusion that it's just about 20 doll-hairs.

"Okay," we say and stroll over to the shaded benches.  It's so exciting!  Nothing like the pre-drug-deal jitters.

[stop]

"Man, I hope it's good stuff and we don't get shafted," thinks Max aloud, and, not surprisingly, his thoughts mirror my own.  But when the FUBU twins stroll casually up to us and one hold's his hand out for the ole' shake-n-switch, it's on.  Grant shakes and now we've got a small baggy.  We all sneak a discreet look at his hand and nod acknowledgement, and the Berlin girls' shining stereotype scoots off and disappears into the crowd and around the corner.

Grant cracks the little baggy seal and we all sneak a sniff this time.  It's a promising scent.  Then I hear, "Absher?" from behind me and for a second I freeze at the criminality of our being at the moment.  When I turn, it's a laugh of nostalgic recognition and there before me are two old friends I hadn't seen since high school.  strolling the city Prague just as we are.  Bobby and Ryan, two rapscallion sons-of-bitches.  We all used to binge drink at expensive mansion house parties in the Los Angeles hills on weekends between those 8-3 school days.  A couple of LA wise-cracks, those guys.  There's old jokes, sarcasm abound, a quick catch up, intros to Max and Grant, and we make plans to meet in the evening.  That dastardly duo's got a bar crawl on the mind.

Late Afternoon Paris

[written in cafe by École Militaire on borrowed paper with a borrowed pen.  A blue pen.]


Is this blue?  Lindsay's a blue pen girl.   She's a sucker for hot wine with orange rinds and cinnamon.  And she's a Mac girl, but let's be honest, most girls are.  It's Steve Jobs' uncanny knowledge of the creative feminine and desire, I think.  He was a master.  And what's more, he knew it.  His clutch on the world will never quite let go, not anytime in the foreseeable future anyways.  This world of iPods and iPads and iPhones.  And iTunes.  And the might Apple.  Our generation is his dynasty, and he's not even here to watch us grow.  His old bucket of bones and flesh couldn't carry on with such a life.  The body of a true genius often suffers on it's balance with the mind.  The strong mind.  The strong mind overpowers the body, living through lifetimes, tenfold, who knows, bringing it's physical being along for the ride.  I don't know how he managed on for so long.  What a testament.  But maybe he knew how to carry on.  To endure through the ages so as to make time no gauge of existence.  So precious few have the words that ring through the decades, the achievements that we live by and because of.   There was Edison and his bulb.  There was Gutenburg with his press.  But I think Jobs was the diamond of them all.  Everlasting to another degree.  Because before his departure, he gave us one last creation to remember him by.  A voice with a name.  A faceless feminine of all knowledge, always there for you, to talk to you, to guide you.  And Siri is her nameo.  She's a being of no physical presence.  And still everyone knows her.  Millions talk to her everyday, and she talks to them.  She's getting to know them, like he never could.  RIP Steve Jobs.  Long live the diamond.


It's funny to me to think though, that (if you believe it be like those crazy scientists say) we evolved from much primer animals.  From things having sex in the water to things having sex on land, to things that smelled each other, that relied on the basis of instinct to survive, then began communicating through physical posturing, emotions, and then audio signals, and using tools, and convening and congealing into herds and civilizations and all the in-between's and mistakes along the way.  Curious that Siri should begin with civilization at her fingertips, our tools are her tools, our questions are her concern.  And she's evolving back the way we came maybe.  Or MAYBE these hot wines with cinnamon and orange rinds are just too AMAZING.

The Shepherd German

Shut up and write, bitch.

What the hell is this?  It's mornings when you wake up in a bed next to a cute freckly French girl batting green eyes.  And it coaxes a laugh after I kiss her "Good-bye," and "Good morning," and I'm stumbling down the stairs, five flights, into the bright, high-sunned, pre-noon Paris.  Well, that was nice.  Where the hell am I.

Yesterday's such an old memory, it seems.  A day after a night of stunning masters students of theater from all over, Oregon, London, Sweden, Algeria.  Their French is animated so it's easier to understand or, at least, to follow the conversation.  They're talking projection projects of the body like a hurricane, and it's all so fascinating.  And French theater-like.  The spliff and glass after glass of red wine help.  They sit and still move with a rhythm and telling hands and quick-wit expressions on their faces.  The Swedes talk in English, and I think they're my favorite.  Two sisters, one visiting the other from Stockholm with her boyfriend.  Like porcelain dolls with red lipstick and short, brown haircuts.  The sisters go on about their father, the clown, in the most delightful way.  Such a standard Swedish disposition, to be awash with delight and sarcasm.  And toting liter bottles of Heineken.  The boyfriend tell me he skates.  I tell him about the park on the beach in Venice.  He tells me about Terje and the epic snow they get in the mountains of Sweden.  I tell him of the times I went surfing in the morning and snowboarding in the afternoon back in Los Angeles, the shop, the sun, the weeds.  And it goes on into a night of fast talk talked smartly on silly subjects and living.  What a girl, this Elizabeth, for letting me sleep here on her couch.

And when I wake it's without the aches and hip-pains of floor sleeping.  It's refreshing, as is the coffee.  And the bread and the butter and the jam.  And nutella,  of course.  A small breakfast, but that's Paris.  What're you gonna do, except scarf it down and smoke a spliff, grab a notebook, and flush downstairs with Elizabeth in a sweater that's almost too thin for this day-cold in the sun.  I'm off to some old-timey English bookstore, cramped quarters and shelves stuffed and table-space piled high with dusty volumes and big photo-books and every kind of thing written in English, both new and old. Shakespeare and Company it's called and lovely Elizabeth tells me they let writers live there for free, and I still gots like three more weeks here, so why not.

But what's this, Elizabeth?  Your going to a chicken farm outside the city to look at an apartment?  Why of course, I'd love to come.  The bookstore can wait.  I want to smell fresh, country air, desperately, because it's been too long since that sweet breath of Santa Cruz.  And I love chickens.  So I hop on the metro with my new theater friend and we screech off to the fourteenth arrondissement to meet up with the landlord.  He's a jolly, middle-aged Asian man and he's driving us out to the farm with his six-year-old daughter in tow.  My French still sucks, and I'm high so I just sit in the back seat across from the shy-looking little girl and listen to Elizabeth and Mr. Landlord ramble away in French down the highway.  Try as I might, I only really pick up a few words and phrases, and by the time I've finally managed to figure one out, it's forgotten as I try to decipher the next.  And so it carries for forty-five minutes.  The sky's gone gray now, and the city's all but slid away.  It's the suburbs, but not in the way I usually picture the word.  It's not Westchester, or the Valley even.  These suburbs are old and European and eveything's got a look of chipped stucco and something that used to be nicer.  There's traffic Mr. Landlord takes his time shifting between first and neutral.  Crawling.  It crawls right by some small mansion of regality led astray, An old thing shoved between two other buildings with a worn wall and a rusted metal gate.  Past the gate, two sets of stairs split off to either side as the ancient house were higher up, about level with the top of the wall.

[stop]

"Don't got a lotta time, don't got a lotta time,'
Don't got a lotta time, don't got a lotta time,'
We came into the light, we were older than we've ever been."


Ah, the days, a month through and counting.  And fuck, what've I got to show for it?  Some handful of dreary pages?  Nothing's finished, but  then again, when's it ever going to finish?  Not until that grand finale when the cymbals crash and the heavy curtain pulls.  When everything unfinished is left untouched because no one else is especially adequate to touch it and those hands a' mine won't be touching anything except that cotton breast pocket on my best suit.  While my eyes play behind closed doors in that eternal dream. 


I should finish what I can.  I owe the great trial that much at least, because I'd hate to think of what's to become of me if it's not given my all.  


What would the German Shepard think, peering over the wall from his perch on the high, fortress yard, with the two lonely trees dying on either side, leafless in that French winter coming.  As he's watching all the lives crawl by between first and neutral down the old ville streets.  They say he doesn't see in color, but maybe he sees in something else, not so black and white.  A vision of the spirit, I think, because his kind is always so reciprocal with their emotions, and always so revealing.  The sly ones anyways.  Like Marlee the tough mustached sea rat.  And maybe even that stupid Golden, Lizzie.  She's so pretty though, and such a whore.


The German is neither.  No so much pretty, but rather statuesque, and gravely so.  Much too grave for whoring.  And for a second right when he catches my sight, I see him not as the dog German, but as the vision of that ancient king, that Charlemagne framed so sadly between two dead trees, above a high, rust-iron gate, under a somber mid-day sky that casts no shadows.  I wonder it he looks at the ground on day s like this and forgets he exists, with no mirrored shadow to follow him around in acknowledgement.  Locked away in his dreary castle, with no one and nothing else but to read those spirits trudging by on the walk, and wonder at those closed souls on the road.  


He doesn't see me, and maybe that's better because I'm afraid of what those eyes might tell him now.  A desperate spirit to gawk at, wrought tired with determination, and perpetually bag-eyed.  


But I see him, maybe imagined now, but I'm quite certain he was there.  "An omen," some Alchemist character would say, but good or bad, in the details of such a thing I'm... what's the word... oh right, lost, as always.


Just keep swimming.  Who needs a boring old shepard-boy Alchemist to tell you how to sort it all out when you've got a talking clown fish to guide you.


[stop]

The chicken farm's lovely.  A little cabin with two rooms upstairs at the peak, squashed low in the corners by the sloping roof.  Downstairs there's a bathroom and a kitchen with windows looking back at an old garage.  And behind that, the chickens roamed free on a skinny stretch that stretched back for a ways, with a trampoline and a garden, and a little fort with a tree swing.  The four chickens flock, clucking, and the little girl throws seeds and old food from her city home about them on the damp ground littered thick with dead leaves.  It's frigid out.  Abysmal.  "I bet this place shine's in the summer, though," says Elizabeth.  I agree.  and we take some time on the trampoline to jump out the day, all of it.  What's been, and what's to come.

There's another girl living in the place right now.  And it's far as fuck from the city.  One and a half hours far by the RER.  Elizabeth tell Monsieur Landlord, she'll have to think about it.  But she loves it, I can tell.  She loves how it smells of wet leaves and forest air.  She loves the garden and the yard that reaches out forever.  And the chickens.  And the man's daughter throwing seeds and swinging from trees.  And the work-space is perfect.  It's just far.

She tell's him, en francais, that we want to take the train back, and he drops us at the station, "Au 'voir!" "Au 'voir!" The little girl waves shyly before the door's shut and the two, father and daughter, shuttle into the darkening afternoon back to Paris.

The trains.  But first, where's the fucking boulangerie.  Because my tummy's growling objections at it's neglect.    I don't think I've got another hour of traveling in me.  So we turn down the empty main street, and the town's a slow-paced old lady of a place.  A one boulangerie town and we find it in due time.  It's a short wait in line, all the time eyeballing pastries and tartes and sandys with wolf hunger.  "The apple ones," I whisper to Elizabeth in English and she orders.  We walk out chomping some pomme-filled pastries, lightly toasted to a dark brown on the top.  We're half-way to the train station, and we look at each other and nod agreement, and turn back to the bakery for some chocolate croissants because hell, we're starving, and that coffee, buttered bread, jam, and nutella breakfast is laughing us in the face.  The baker smiles amusement at our return.  It's a small-town wholesome amusement, endearing like my mother's.

At the station, Elizabeth buys a ticket and i hop over after her.  It's Saturday, and the train's especially slow, and the stops seems excessively long, and the car's packed, both up above and down below, but we manage to find seats across from one another by the window.  Still, my stomach's a-churning to the seconds' tick-tock, and ah, finally, after two hours we're onto the metro, and out above ground again at Cadet.

[stop]

To some cheap Lebanese sa ndwich shop by the metro stop.  "Ehm... les toilettes sil vous plait?" I ask the man behind the counter. He points.  Elizabeth laughs and orders for us.  "Something with meat," I tell her as I hustle into a little closet with a toilet in the back and piss an Amazon into the depths of that old porcelain.  It's a tingly one, with that indescribable euphoria behind my eyes after the shake.

"I got you the beef shawarma," she says, sitting at the closest table to the door.  Then she sips sweet tea from a small glass, and I see there's another one on the counter, and when I look, the old Lebanese man nods and makes a vapid show of presentation with his hand.

"Shawarma sounds bomb," I say, "et merci beaucoup" to the counterman as I take a swig from the sweet tea glass.  The sandwiches are done and we shoot the rest of our tea, "Au 'voir!  Merci!"  Nom, nom, nom, and it tastes so good.

[stop]

Back at Elizabeth's flat, we're both still chomping, and I get a slew of texts.  One from the ole' Lil, how I miss her so.  "Come to erin's Thanksgiving party thing.  Here's the address," it says.

"Shit, that's tonight, huh," I sound off to myself.  Elizabeth had invited me to a soiree of sorts, a college dance party in the south, and oh, how I love college dance parties.  But I promised, and Erin texts me as well, so I tell my gracious host and she takes it graciously, with a sarcastic air of drama because, after all, she's a student of the theater.  She understands.  She sees the conflict in my eyes, and we cheers beers.  And after she showers, we romp down to metro together and wish each other good nights.  What am I getting myself into.  I don't know, but I rarely do anymore, and I've come to accept the beauty of it.  The wandering.  The leaf in the wind of it all.  And I take my line and she takes hers.

Mine takes me to Convention.  In the south.  In the 15th.  Or the 14th.  It doesn't matter, really, does it.  And after some mild street finding, I'm at the address from the texts.  The pleadings.  And I pop in the door code and I'm in, and up three flights, and I'm there.  There's a pumpkin on the door, and I burst in.  Erin's there to greet me in a skinny hallway with three rooms on one side and a bathroom on the other and a kitchen at the end.  "Hi."

She has that look about her.  A look I only know too well.  It's a thing of puppy love, and I'm scared.  I hate to hurt, and I fear that hammer will come down soon enough.  But first, some wine.  In one of the bedrooms there's a mass of young undergrads from all over (a couple of Aussies and Frenchies, but all American girls, except for one belle francaise) and Lili's there flirting up some dashing, serious and cool, Swedish type.  His name's Victor.  She smiles at me, and I smile back, "Hey, is Rachel here?" That tall blonde gypsy queen.  I think I love her.  "Shh," she says at a tone below the party hum, and she hands me a cigarette under the muse of long lost friends (but it's only been three days), and I try to ignore those nervous side-long glances from Erin, that bright-eyed, young Midwesterner just trying to find herself in this French foreign land.  I almost feel bad.  But I play along, and follow the flow, and try to find that happy medium of wine-infused content amongst cigarette smoke and smoking by the chain in Parisian flats.

[stop]

I think I found it.  For a second, anyways.  Because by that time, I'm always just a few too over.  It's always so hard to hit that nail on the head, and once I know I'm over, I think hell, I might as well go for it.  Pass the wine.  Another cigarette, sil vous plait.  What are these, Marlboros?  Perfect.  I hear those are nice for a good head-buzz.

And it's like a Sex in the City episode in there.  Drunk hussies and sex stories, which are inevitable whenever Megan's Law comes up.  And it does for I don't know what reason.  I guess law is a more intriguing subject in an international crowd, especially when it pertains to sex.  America's sex laws.  Our offender database.  The website with the dots.  Enthralling, I'm sure, but before it has a time to fizzle, our dear Lili takes the stage with a definitive, pent-up, wine-sloshed anger about the subject.  "Whoa, Megan's Law?  Okay, hussies.  I need to tell this story..."  And it's the story of the Barnes & Nobles jerker, who was jerkin' it in the bookstore, while Lili was reading down the non-fiction aisle upstairs.  "Just wankin' it," and she's so animated.  With the kid's books one aisle over.  It's repulsive, and he's old, and he goes running downstairs, and her friend finds him on Megan's Law, with a picture and everything.  She's distraught, and wound-up, and, well yeah, she's pretty drunk.  She's definitely out-pacing me by a few glasses, that's for sure.  But hey, I got here late, what am I supposed to do.  This ain't some old college wine-chugging contest (well, I guess it was actually), not for me anyway. Silly undergrads.  I used to be so naive.  You drink slow, not fast, and that's how you last.  And that usually works, but you can only have so many wine runs.  After three, all bets are off, and it's turns to an Italian man hanging out down some street in the Roman summer.  Just jerkin' it in on his motorcycle, as girls walk by.  Every girl's got one, it seems.  Stories of the men in India, that just grab at Western women.  Everyone except the French belle.  She's just got green eyes and freckles and a smile I catch smiling at me sideways while I'm talking to Sezen.  "It's seven with a z," she says.

I get to thinking while she's talking.  "That's strange," I say to her, "I think if it were turned around and I caught some girl gettin' all DJ down there, I mean, yeah weird.  But compliment, thanks.  Talk about a self-esteem bump.  Sexy, kinda."  And the red-bearded Kiwi (Sezen's boyfriend) to my side agrees.

"Yee, if I saw that, I wouldn't feel too bad about myself.  It's not so aggressive, I think," and so, of course, we both go through the motions in our head and in the air above our crotches with our hands, laughing.  "Yup," he says, "It's got a different feel for sure...  Softer, I'd say."  And I agree.  It's the woman's touch, soft and cute, not aggressive and dark like our's.  It's poking, not choking.

"Well, I suppose it is quite an aggressive posture.  Not attractive in the least," says Sezen.  She's a banker, a student of finance.  "It's different with someone you're intimate with, though."

"Really?  I mean, I come out of the shower and she's gotten started without me.  I think that's much more appealing for the guy, than if it were flipped around on the girl, right?  I can't imagine getting a little slap in while I'm waiting, or while she's watching even.  That's weird. "  And I'm drunk, glancing whenever out the window at the Paris streets below.  Weird to think I'm here, really.  Silly weird.  Erin catches my eye for a second before I look away, and it's back to Sezen.

"Well, it depends if I know the guy."

"I should hope you know the guy," I laugh, "He's in your bed wankin' it while you're taking a shower."

"No, I mean if I'm seeing the guy, or if he's just some random," and she smiles at the Kiwi.

"True," he says. "Relationships change things."

"I'm sure they do," says I.

"Well, have you ever been in a long term relationship?" inquires Sezen.  And oh, how I hate this corner I always find myself in.

"Well, no."

"You're kidding.  A good-look guy like you's never had a girlfriend?"  It's always a shock when a girl hears it.  A surprise I don't know whether I value anymore (not the way I did in high school, anyways, when it always gave the girl a challenge).  That shock's more a glare from myself now.  Right in the face, as I see it.

"'fraid not," I shrug.  And she slowly works at the nails in the coffin lid, always prying.  Always questioning, and drunk-intrigued.  I think maybe she gets me.

It's a small room.  Erin's room, in fact.  Just a big bed, a closet, an old bureau with a mirror, and a pair of chairs.  Everyone's spread out on the floor and bed with wineglasses and ash-trays and cigarette butts and legs and limbs abound abound.  Sezen and I talk sitting in the chairs by the bureau, talking passion, and she's got me going now with these damned wine refills.  She's intent, probing, and when I say something she latches onto, she takes the mike, "Wait, what's wrong with girls not wanting to have sex right off the bat?  I'm not sure I follow."  Perhaps I've touched a nerve in my drunk ramblings.  And everything sways and double-focuses as the cigarette smoke and cheap wine play tricks on my mind.  I'm floating in the chair now.

"Oh, there's nothing wrong with that.  I respect that.  It's when a relationship pivots on sex that I think is funny.    Some girls are all, 'I only have sex with my boyfriend.  It's something for a committed relationship.  It's something special.'"  I do my best dumb-betch accent.

"But it is something special," Sezen retorts.

"Okay, maybe it is special to some, but it can't be so special to everyone now can it?  We're all different here and, as such, we probably all see it in a little different light," I say, and she half-nods a calculating agreement.  "The problem is," says I, "is that when a girl does that, she, unwittingly or not, makes it all about sex.  For the guy, anyway.  Isn't she?"

"I don't know.."

"It's the end goal though isn't it?  It's the carrot at the end of the stick she's holding in front of some jackass as she wraps him around her finger.  And then when it all goes down, then what?  That silly girl thinks that all this time this boy was falling in love with her, being ever so charming, bending head over heel, when really, he just a wanted the sexy time.  And I just a need some more wine." And like that, my cup's filled again, but I can't imagine who from.  I think it's Erin because her eyes are desperately trying to dance with mine.  Mais non, I don't want that.

There's a vauge dawning on Sezen's face, "Ok well, that's just stupid.  I'm not like that."

"Well, good."

And then a drunk French-Canadian with beard and glasses and an air of esteem about him, he tells us all the French theory of love, one hand with a wine glass, the other in his tweed jacket pocket.  It has to do with Russian dolls, the kind you pull apart and pull apart, just to find another smaller one inside.  "You see, to the French," (he's so haughty) "love is like a Russian doll.  There will be many until we find the one.  It's not romanticized like with you Americans."  Meanwhile Lili's macking hard on her new undergrad beau she's been playing footsies and handsies with all night.  "You see, it something that we approach knowing that it's going to end," says Frenchie.  "And it goes on like this, the love doesn't last and we get bored.  Until we don't anymore.  And when that time comes, it is truly special.  We don't try to make things work.  It just does when it does.  And in that tone, we're never distraught by a break-up, only lovingly surprised when things last."  What a douche.  But I suppose that's the way it is with me, maybe.  And inside, I hold onto to what he says, even though his words sounded so arrogant.  But hey, he's French.  What do I expect?

Everyone chimes in with their thoughts, Sezen, the Kiwi, Erin and the French girl beside her, laying back casually on the bed with her legs crossed. It's mildly interesting, just not enough so to remember, especially with another cigarette and my glass empty and on it's side on the carpet floor.  I just listen, eyes darting back and forth as the conversation continues.  They pause every now and then on the freckly French girl on the bed, and she smiles and looks down her shirt at me, head cocked to the side, whenever they do.

"So then what's your type, lone ranger," and it's Sezen and she's address me once again, but I'm to silly to realize it for a second.

"Hmm?  What's that?"

"Your type, your type.  What kind of girls do you like?" she reiterates.

"Haha... really?"  And it's funny to me because just yesterday I'd been Elizabeth had asked me the same question.  And the answer had come quite easily then, although maybe at least a little misogynistic sounding.  But then again, Elizabeth was a student of the theater at a cut-throat theater school, and she preferred things acute and to the point, I think.  Or at least she understood things that way, which is handy because that usually how I tell things.  And I don't think she saw me as a misogynist.  But will Sezen?  I'm not so sure, and already I'm drunkenly trying to word it just right.

"Yes, really," she says.

[stop]

"I guess to put it concisely, I like bored model types."  And everybody laughs.

"Oh, really," says Sezen between drunk chuckles.  "But isn't that every man's type?"

"Hmm.  Well, I guess so."  And I guess she's right, but is my type really everyone else's type?  "When you put it like that, anyways.  And what's wrong with that?"

"Um, for starters, it's a cop-out.  And it's a bit lofty, don't you think?  Maybe that's why you've never had a girlfriend jackass.  I mean... bored models?  C'mon, haha.  You're ridiculous."

"Ok, ok.  Maybe I shouldn't put things so concisely.  What I meant was that I'm deftly attracted to bored-looking model types."

"Oh, yeah?"  Still laughing.

"Yeah.  I need a body that fits with mine, tall and slim, and I need a girl that's too bored to try.  It's something you see in her pretty model face though.  In the way she carries herself.  In the way she talks to people.  She's not nervous.  She's not self-conscious.  And she kind of looks like she's stopped caring because well... she probably has.  She indulges in comfort, and she's frankly open and quirky funny and animated and there's nothing left except a pretty frame, a nonchalant confidence, and dreary eyes that casually scan a room for something to intrigue them.  But things rarely do, really, so she has that polite conversation tone to carry on small-talk in the interim.  I love finding that, and when I do, I desperately wish to catch their focus, as long as I don't have to try too hard, because if it doesn't come naturally, it's a bit unnatural, isn't it?  Whoa, how long have I been talking..."  Because I realize I've just described someone I'd just met.  Well, not just met, but here in Paris.  And I look around.  She's friends with Erin, in fact, but she's not here.

Lili had stopped macking in the corner and was now sitting on the Erin's bed beside her.  She's wasted. "You're crazy," she says.

"Yeah, well..." I shrug and I try to avoid Erin's gaze yet again.  But Sezen's starring me down hard like she's trying to make sense of it all, looking over my whole face with her eyebrows furrowed for the slightest second, and I can tell the gears are grinding behind her eyes.

"I think I know what you're talking about," she says.  "You really need to meet some of my friends.  There's one that'd be right up your alley.  She's beautiful."

"Oh, really?" says I, and I we keep up the conversation for as long as I can as Erin's eyes burn a hole in my temple.  Then, "Oh my, what time is it?"  And I pull out my phone and it's almost 1:30 in the morning.  "Shit! I need to catch the metro!  I have to go guys, it's been a pleasure.  Thanks for the wine."  I stand to leave, lean with one arm on the chair's back for a second and decide to take my time getting my jacket and my scarf because holy hell, I'm wasted.

The quiet French girl suddenly perks up, "I need to take the metro too!  How much time do we have?"  By now, everybody's getting up for good-byes, for hand-shakes and double-kisses.

"Not long," I say with a smile as I wrap my scarf around.  "I'll race ya."  And she laughs.

[stop]

Elena (the freckly French darling with green eyes) and I make for the door, and Lili grabs my arm, pulls me close and tells me to stay with a head tilt and a backwards eye point and Erin standing behind her.  "You have to," she whispers close.  Except I don't.  And I don't want to.

"Are you staying?" I ask.

"Yeah," in (drunk) serious tone.

And Erin chimes in with a puppy-dog look, "There's plenty of room here to sleep."

"Oh..." sigh, "that's all right," I say with a forced smile.  "I'll just catch the last metro."  And I follow Elena out and we race down two-flights of stairs, laughing, with one more to go.  But wait.

"Wait," says Elena, and she backs into a corner on the landing between the first and second floor.  Smiling and facing our feet.  With her eyes closed.  Shaking her head slowly to a rhythm that her whole body followed.

Perhaps it's from the night's chain smoking.  Or the barrels of wine.  Or the two flights flat sprint, or all of the above.  But I'm short of breath on that landing and breathing deep.  When I come up to her asking, "Are you ok?" and lean down to try and meet her gaze, I get close, and the next thing I know, her arms are around me, pulling me closer, into the corner, and my arms are around her, my fingers locked in her hair, and I'm breathing from her lips with heavy inhales as she breathes in.  She wraps a leg around me, and she spins me against the wall.

My phone rings.  She take's it out of my front pocket, and pulls away to look at it.  And with a small French gasp, "It's Erin," she says.  She's nervous as she hands the phone to me, still ringing.  "You can't tell her," says her whisper.  "Oh, please?  We work together at the school.  And I think she likes you."  You think?  But there's a desperate, pleading look on her face, like the girl who just broke mommie's vase.  Yearning for empathy.

So I smile back at her and "I promise," I say, and take the call.  Erin says that she's mixed a drink for me, and it's waiting, and I have to come back up and take it.  Quickly.  "It's gotta be quick though, seriously.  Just one.  I can't miss this metro."  Elena's kissing my neck ever so softly.

"Just one more for the road," says Erin.  "I promise."  Click.

"Your hands are so cold," Elena's holding them to her face, palm to cheek, moving them back and forth, and nuzzling my fingers with her nose.

"I know, right?  Okay," I say.  "I just have to go and take one drink upstairs and I'll be back.  And you... You just wait right here, yeah?  Don't leave me, please.  I'll only be a second" She nods, looking at me nervous, and biting her nails out of habit.

[stop]

Back up two flights.  Goddammit.  Through the door with the pumpkin, and Sezen's in the hallway.  Lili's there too.  "Where's Erin?" I ask.

"In the kitchen."  So I walk to the end of the hall into the kitchen, and there she is.

"All right.  Where's this drink at?"  And I'm as chipper as possible.

"Uhm, I have to make it still," says Erin and she quickly grabs a bottle of gin and a pair of shot glasses.

"Oh... no wine?"

"Yeah, we ran out.  I'm sorry."

"That's okay.  I'm too drunk for gin though, and I really can't miss this metro.  Maybe another time, yeah?"

"Uhm..."

"Yeah, another time," I say, and I hug her and kiss her on the forehead and turn heels and bolt back down the hall to the door.

Sezen grabs my hand first, "Wait.  Where are you going?  Stay."  And there's urgency in her eyes.

But I laugh, "I can't."  And I pull free.

Then Lili get's me just outside the door in the stairwell.  "Stop.  Go and kiss her.  You need to go back there."

"Uh... No, I don't.  Plus the French girl's downstairs waiting for me, tehe."  Oops.

Her eyes widen "Are you..." I can't not smile.

"But don't tell Erin," I cut her off and turn to go, but she grabs my arm one last time.

"If you leave here tonight, you can't stay at my place anymore," she whispers close in my ear, and I don't see it as a bluff. I see it as a threat, and I'm taken aback for one second and mull it over.  Really?  But I don't care right now, and I call it anyway.

"That's all right," I say with a kiss on her cheek, and I'm gone.

[stop]

I fly down the stairs and Elena's waiting in the foyer, just standing in the middle of it, watching me stumble down the last flight and approach.  Closer.  Closer still, and then her eyes fire green and her lips part with a French gasp and we're against the wall again.  Her hands up my shirt, holding me.  The cold on her fingertips wakes the skin, a feeling alive after a long slumber, and my soul rustles to.

When we hear the steps on the staircase, I look up to see Lili's legs and the bottom of her blue, hussy-fur jacket descending, and we bolt like kids startled in a hide-n-seek, out the door and down this street, then that street, sprinting.  Running hand in hand.  On drunk legs and a brisk Paris night's air.  It burns the lungs to laugh,  maybe from the cold, or maybe from the cigarettes, but we can't help it.  At least I can't.  Running for seclusion down late Paris streets in the tow of some French belle.  What am I doing.

We're not even running towards the metro.  We've missed the last one anyways, so we stop at a corner on a small quiet street and she slips into personas.  There was Natasha the street-walker.  "You should arrest me, officer.  I'm being bad.  You need an officer name.  Like Cliff."  Then the innocent French doe, "Where am I?  Who are you?"  with a blase curiosity as she pulls her head back, arching her hips into mine.  "What is your name?"

"Me?  I'm Elena.  Oh, pardon.  Je m'apelle Elena," I say with a smile at the game.

"Elena...? But that is my name."  It's an Audrey Hepburn innocence in her tone, like she's already thinking of breakfast.  "Give it back to me..."  She coaxes with persuasive neck kisses.

"Hmm.  Fine, fine.  You're Elena.  You're Elena," because the feeling's so wonderful, and the way she accents words is exciting.

"But then what is your name?"  Elle dit entre bisous.  "What is your middle name?"

"Ah, well my middle name's Brian."

She pauses, "But... then what is your first name?  Are you Brian Brian?" and she laughs at it.

"Oh, mais non.  George Brian."

"George, mmm," she smiles and pours her eyes into mine.  "I like this."  Her hands move up my shirt again to my chest.  "It is sexy, I think."

"Ha! George is," I'm not convinced.

"Yes."

"More than Brian?"

"Mmm, yes."

"Well, call me George then."

"I will then."  Oh, the French.  She grabs us a cab to her place.

Flims: Life on a Mountain

We leave Zurich early.  My head's still ringing from the night before and, while we're packing up for the first time with Mike on board, I can see it in everyone's eyes that their's are too.  The sun's still behind the clouds on the dawn of this new chapter, and we all pack into Stephii's little Ford Fiesta-looking stick-shift with all our bags, and she cranks that thing into gear, and it takes off onto the Swiss highway with everything in the metric system.  Three of us haven't been in an automobile for nearly a month and being squished in there in the backseat between Max and Grant brings a little pang of nostalgia to my soul, to everyone cramming into the old Explorer back home in Santa Cruz on some Thursday to the bars.  Ten heads?  No problem.  We're only four heads here in Swissy-land.  And Stephii, of course.

[stop]

Jonesin' and it feels great.  Mike cranks down the shotgun-side window manually because that's how Stephii do, straight manual, gunning up the Alps, past aqua-blue, still mountain lakes.  And all the waterfalls feathering lazy down the green slopes and wet cliffs, black in the summer sun, rising slowly around valley on both sides.  I want to live here.  A soft sea of clouds, bleached white, washes into the peaks out yonder.  Lord, don't let me be dreaming, because this is just too beautiful.  It makes the heart beat slower, and the blood pumps with joy at the fresh air it's breathin'.  It's blowing in from Mike's window and blasts me in the face in buffets, and it whips past my ears so it's all I hear.  Thank God I's a got my sunnies because I hate to eye squint.  With those bad boys on, it's a puppy dog's heaven, zoning out in a tongue-lolling euphoria from the feeling of speed on my skin.  What is this wondrous countryside we've stumbled upon, of clear-water waterfalls, and lakes, and greens and mountains and crisp blue skies, this Zion, this Shangri-la, like on of those yellow-paged, ageless fairy-tale picture-books come to swallow us whole.  It's a dive in, willing, for me, and there's a tiny voice that whispers through the wind telling never to leave.  It's enchanting, this place.

Paris: The City of Love

Stop kissing everywhere.  Stop holding each other while you walk.  That's not comfortable, and don't just keep walking on with that second-guess in your step, just trying to synchronize the beats of the heels as your so sure the ones of your heart are.  They're not.  Or if they are, how strange that is to me.  Are you living her life, or if she living yours?  Because there's definitely a feeding off the other.  And in Paris, it's everywhere.  There's a feeding off everything.  The "Babe, I love you," looking at the Eiffel Tower, en Francais, en Anglais, en Allmand, however you want it.  And a kiss just so she knows for sure.  It's the gooey love I can't stand, but maybe because I've never understood it.

Let me be your everlasting light
Your train going away from pain
Love is the coal, that makes this train roll
Let me be your everlasting light


I've never understood it.  That giving of the self, to grow so attached.  That feeling's lost on me.  Maybe it's something of a growth in the other direction.  Towards the solidarity of a life on my own.  With close friends and passing relations.  Nobody's going to get that close, of that I'm reluctantly certain.  But we can always hope can't we?  For that shining star at the top of the Tour Eiffel with the world an ant farm as I hold her close and she squeezes back, gliding so high above it all that nothing else matters anymore, and that beam of light into the night reaching around towards the horizon, ellipsing right above to hit every point on the line, that beam is just ours to share.  I'll probably never be up there.  In that chocolate ganache of true romance above the city.  But at least I know what I want.  It's particular.  It's peculiar.  It's something special in the way I see her.  Something different.  Something comfortable.  It has to be.  Until then though, let me just sit here in the park Champs de Mars with my friends, high as a Parisienne disposition on dry Barcelona weed.  We all have our sunglasses on.

Prague: The Real Budweiser

We catch a train.  One of the last ones out of Berlin to Prague that late afternoon.  Zach took off with Corinna and Dajana and Toni to Belgium for his last few days before flying back to Boulder.  The girls kiss us on each cheek, and we do the same, and hi-five "fare thee wells" to the Colorado Kid.  He leaves me with a book he's finished already, All the Sad Young Literary Men. What a champ, that guy.  But hey, we're going to the Czech Republic now, Eastern block almost, and sleeping off the festival for most of the ride.  Just one or two transfers, and we arrive at Prague Central a little after 1:00 in the morning and the place is empty and our footsteps bounce off the high ceiling as we shuffle down stairs and out the glass door entrance.  A guy's holding it open waiting for us to leave.  Outside it's Monday morning, and the city's dead.  No host.  "Well... we made it guys," and we all look at each other.  Max and Grant look spent.  I'm sure I do too.  Grant locates the nearest hostel on his phone, and we hump off with our packs into the late, late Czech night.  Of course, we get lost for about twenty minutes because all the roads are forking and splitting off this way and that.  When we finally find it, tucked away around the backside of some building on whatever street, I don't even care how much the bed costs, and I don't remember.  "Three beds, please," and we sign some shit and take our keys up to our room on the third floor with a fiending anticipation of this pack not being on my back and my head pillowed.  In the room, the motions seem mechanic.  Put pack in locker.  Walk down hall to brush teeth.  Come back, unwrap pillow and sheets.  Take off pants and lights out.  And as my ear's on the pillow, top bunk, eyes closed, I hear the Nation of Gandwana still thumping in my mind, and I drift off.

[stop]

Morning comes when we wake up, and there's some breakie supplies downstairs in the tiny lobby.  Wolf down the bread and cheese, and some milk and cereal with some Aussie girls, and then it's time to go romping.  Exploring in the most Tom Sawyer sense of the word, just walking towards the center with no map, towards the old shit.  I love it.  Prague castle looms on the hill in our minds (we've seen pictures, obviously), across the Vltava and Charles Bridge.  We'll get there, eventually.

Walking Prague is like walking back in time.  Half the city's older than our country, five times over, the buildings are so Gothic-old and wise.  The ones that you remember anyways, humming with that dull violin of history that still shrieks with spires and rusted-green and -grey bronze gargoygles abound to the blue skies of the day, perfectly-clouded fleets of lovely puffs that danced all at once into the slow west in rhythm.  Together now, past the Powder Tower all goth-ed out and reeking of age,and  across the old market square, by Tyn Cathedral towering over the thin facade of young building around it.  And the old man in bronze with his rop all green from time and white from birdie doo, birdie doo from a bygone time.  Around old Town Hall and the Astronomical clock and down some ancient cobblestone streets and ah, there she is.   Pausing for a moment on the far bank of the River Vltava, the castle catches a frame of itself between the shore tower and baroque statues.  It's one of the first buildings, definitely the most striking, to look physically daunting, like some fearsome fortress.   The hum of the crowds dim, just for a second, and try to imagine how it must've been, some wretched foot-messenger walking through the city with a message for the Emperor.  Across Charles Bridge, the castle's a straight shot up the hill, sitting on it's natural throne, towering over the land.  From the grand, old stone staircase wrapping up the hill, we can see all of old Prague, red-roofed with tiles, stretching out before us, The new city with it's blacks and grays, and it's skyscrapers lay off to the distant south down the Vltava.  It's a puff up the stairs.  Thank god we didn't have any weed with us, because doing it high would suck.  At the top we're greeted at the castle gates by two Gothic kings, I'm assuming, with a huge sack of hair on his balls beating the crap out of what looks like some helpless medieval peasant on one side, and on the other, stabbing another with his mighty sword of stone.  Very welcoming.  And the guards don't move from there little barber-shop-stripe painted guard-boxes, they don't move a muscle, and we walk through.  Walking out into the courtyard, the Cathedral kinda jumps up at you.

[stop]

It's this monstrous old hunk of twisted, intricate Renaissance-goth wonder.  Preserved in Prague's castle courtyard, some relic of the past, and the "oohs" and "aahs" sound off in my mind.  That beauty of old.  My feets are in that marching mood though and we're soon off, through the castle gardens, back down the hill on the back side, and across the Vltava.  It's beer time.  We've earned it with all this walking.  We pass the opera house and it's golden, angel chandeliers of old-timey street lanterns.  It's a quick pass, back through the centuries, back to the present, and we find a cafe with seating outside and plop down, and all order bottle of Budweiser.  Oh, no American Budweiser though.  This is some antique Czech recipe, and it's crisp, and it's flavorful.  As I sit there, the clouds shuttling over the single tree in the square and the high flat-buildings around us, I try to think of my last red-canned American Budweiser with an ankle on my knee, leaning hard in the metal chair.  From the retrospect, from the old Santa Cruz days, the memory sticks to the top of my mouth with a taste as if someone pissed in the Keystone.  I gotta wash it down with that old Czech original.  I love it here, thing's are just better over here, even without the amenity of knowing what's going to happen next.  It's so beautiful, and the age of it all is refreshing, cognizant the Redwood mountain air, and we start a-hankerin' for that good spliff high.

Zurich: Elevator Clubs and the American Way

Oh, we’re raging tonight.  Raging with Stephii and Marcia, two Swiss lovelies that had crashed on Mike’s couch for two or so months last summer.  They’re rad chicks.  Stephii’s lives in a little mountain town, Flims,  in the Alps by Luzern.   But she drove into Zurich tonight to rage with Marcia, who lives here, and to take us away to the Alps in the morning. 

But first things first.  We make Sara and her brother dinner, the usual, pasta with chicken and veggies in tomato sauce.  It’s so simple and still, it never gets old.  And we just keep getting better at making it.  Grant grills and spices the chicken, and Max and I chop away at the onions and garlic and zucchini and whatever other crunchy clues (green peppers, maybe?) there are to be strewn in.  Mike boils the pasta.  Daunting, I know, but hey, he just got here.  Give him a break.   It turns out delectable, as always, and the six of us can barely shove it all in our tummies.  Better to cook a lot than a little, I think, especially on the road.  Just in case though, we got a bunch of wine and whiskey at the market to wash it all down.  Properly though, with drinking games.  We teach them Fuck the Dealer and King’s Cup and a hippy-bohemian game with a penny and a lighter that Corinna taught us back in Berlin.  It’s a good one.  There’s a bowl, and on top of that bowl there’s  a piece of newspaper pulled taught  over it by a rubber band.  The penny goes in the middle, and the objective of the game is to burn a hole in the paper without the penny falling in (to the bowl, that is; pay attention).  It’s a wild game, one that keeps you on the edge of your seat as the flame burns fast or slow, or you don’t blow it out hard enough.  And whoever loses has to drink from a cup in which everyone’s put a little of their own.  Or a lot of their own.  Regardless, it’s a bottoms up affair, and by the time we’re all out of booze, there’s shreds of burnt newspaper everywhere, burnt precisely so that Sara’s living room and the table look like a pyro’s studio space.  And Max smokes one (three, really) more cigarettes on that balcony over Idaplatz before we leave the siblings to a quiet night of recovery (Sara has work in the morning) from the alcoholic hell we just put them through.   Off gallivanting towards the bus that will take us to Marcia’s with a whiskey warmth in our soul and at the back of my mouth, and a silly, stutter swing in our step.  It’s Mike’s first proper drunk in the Old World so we go, and we go hard. 

From the metro stop that Marcia tell us, it takes a little while for us to find our way to her flat.  No surprise there.  And really no hurry.  Just traipsing down quiet Swiss streets with the streetlights burning clean white.  The streets turn to green-grassed walk-paths between three-  or four-story (American stories) apartment buildings and sprawling lawns.  It’s a late weeknight, so when we catch the slightest wind of loud music, it must be Marcia so we follow it, that muffled bass, and before long there’s laughter and shouting as well.  Haha! Her neighbors must hate her.

Lord knows she doesn’t care though.  Stephii the mountain fairy loves to snowboard.  It’s her passion, and she kills it.  Marcia kills it at raging.   We knock on the door and she drags us in and I don’t think thirty seconds pass then she’s shotguning a beer with us in the kitchen and grabbing us all another.   In the living room, there’s kids playing beer pong (we taught them how to play that summer last).  Stephii gets us all to drink tall cans of this god-awful concoction called Desperado.  It’s a beer-tequila mix with a hint of sugary lime, not something I’m particularly keen on trifling with, but what the hell, why not.  The night’s getting dirty.  And sloppy.  And after we finish our Desperados with a cringe, it’s back to the bus with Marica and Stephii and their fun Swiss friends that love because we’re from California and we surf and they think we invented beer pong.  We don’t bother correcting them.  Why would we?  We just ride, standing, trying not to fall about at each stop, hooting big teary-eyed laughs from all the forgettable hilarity of drunk night metro musings. 

I don’t remember getting to the club.  That’s not true.  I remember being in front of that office-looking building and bulky Swiss bouncers in sharp suits shooing us with Swiss-French (or Swiss-German?) onto a snazzy, glass elevator going up the side, six stories, I just don’t remember getting off that caterpillar bus we took back into the city.  Spotted recollection.  But the good stuff sticks.  When we walk into the club, it’s this monstrous ballroom sized thing, just a huge dance floor, a bar, and a DJ.  It’s dark with lights strobbing our slowed retinas.  And the girls are beautiful and full of dance, and we move with everything we’ve got.  Grant and Max and Mike are still getting drinks at the bar, but I only swing back to it for some water when my swaying starts swaying too hard, and my knees start tickling.  We’re there forever because when your drunk, dancing never gets old, just more difficult, like a mind’s challenge to the body, and I don’t think any of us are the type to shy away from that.  Until the music stops that is.  And the lights come on, the bright squinting ones that push you out and down the elevator.  Out on the street at who knows what time, but everything’s closed.  And we’re drunk and rowdy and talking loud, American English so that some of the club-goers littering the sidewalk shoot us funny looks, and turn back to their friends to laugh. 

Mike sees it, makes eye contact, and nods up in their direction, “What’s up, bitch.  Yeah, you Swiss motha fuckers, laugh it up.”  It’s probably the whiskey.  Or maybe the Desperados, but Mike and Max are set on fightin’ words.  Boisterous, drunk English words of daring and hot blood, like outside some douche club on Sunset, and there’s four of the Swiss button-downs, so Grant and I know we’re in if anything goes down.  Except we’re in Zurich and there’s a divide, a language barrier.  One-sided though, because more likely than not, they understand most of what Mike’s yelling and Max behind him, and just taunt them with Swiss in a jeering tone, as Grant and I roll eyes and hold back. 

Nothing comes of it though, and Stephii grabs the first cab she can, and we pile all in and I question,  “Hey, honey, d’ya think KFC’s still open?”  Sometimes when you’re wasted (check), you gotta play the stereotype, I guess.  No big.  

Paris Sans L'Amoure

I'm not so difficult, I think.  At least I sure as hell hope I'm not.  Just depressed by the odds, I guess.  The knowledge of what I know I want, of all that I'm interested in.  That laugh that sends the heart a-flutter, haha.  It doesn't come often enough, and now when it does, it's so quick and short-lived.  Unfulfilled as always.  But let's try to turn that around, shall we.  

It's a girl.  The tall blonde whimsical kind.  Not French.  An American this one, from Oregon.  The kind that wants to dance in the living room and blast the Black Keys 'til the speakers blow out.  She's an electric breeze.  Like fire on dry ice, a cool white hot.  An undergrad in Paris, still in the honeymoon of life before shit starts getting all real.  She's intriguing to me like so few are.  Life the four-leaf clover you'd pick up and say, "Huh, well would look at that."  Then a strong wind catches it and carries it away, and she falls to the grass again down the way.  Maybe a leaf's missing then, and you never find her again.

Sometimes I hate this city, especially sitting here a la Champs de Mars.  There's that cheesy love in the air that smells like old gouda.  That boring love, the hand in hand walk or the arm over the shoulder.  How uncomfortable.  I need an excitement in my soul with a passionate lust, and a mellow love.  A spliff love that has us both dancing by ourselves, and a look at one another, daunting with a sly grin.  A sly one.  This girl of the West, from Salem, seems sly to me.  In her post-modern jackets and daring eyes.  Rachel.

Berlin: Molly in the Old World

We're, all of us, to spend the night at Corinna's family's house out in the Berlin suburbs for a good-old fashioned rager before the festival.  Nation of Gandhwana, a roll off the tongue, mmm, the sound of it sings on my lips on the bus out.  Corinna's place is a quaint little thing down a pretty street, with a quaint little yard bordered with eight-foot hedges on all sides, and a kiddie pool, and a big kitchen next to the porch, and a story above and a basement below.  There's already about fifteen young, from-all-over ruffians inside when we arrive, and we meet 'em all, and throw down shots and cheers beers, "Prost!"  The long-dreaded New Zealander is playing a bit o' the old ultra-minimal (from some beat-up, scratched iPod) on the house speakers.  And he keeps them coming.

"Just a taste," he says, "of the feast tomorrow."  He's already properly baked, so are most of them, our gracious hosts, the Irish blokes we met at the park that first day (that we thought was our last), the guy with the Molly and everything else, and all the other young Germans coming to the festival with us.  We try to catch up.  Our drinking tolerances have all taken off since we'd come into London, two weeks ago.  Yikes.

But we get there, and the empty bottles of beer and tequila, vodka, wine and Jack start piling up on the dining room table and the table outside.  The ash trays are all stacked with butts and roaches.  One more beer, and Grant, Max, Zach and I are romping/water-bathing in the tiny kiddie pool in the yard.  It's whatever time, after midnight.  Just chonies, we forgot our boardshorts.  And Max doesn't want wet chonies, so he just backs in bare-assed and starts chasing us.  After we're dry it's down to the poolhall in the basement for a standard, booze-fused billiards tourney.  Grant and I are teamed, and we loose, "Ah, shucks," but as we're watching the rest of it unfold, Molly-guy brings out the goods and shows us, and it's all brown and crystal-y.

He tells us that's because it's pure and amazing, and when we take it, we'll wrap it in little strips of rolling paper before we pop it so there's no nasty taste on our tongue.  No capsules from the Farmacy out here, I guess.  He's shows us the rest, and he's pretty stocked.  A handful of e-hits.  Some speed.  A lot of speed, actually.  The Colorado Kid snorts some with the Germans, and later he's jumping around the room he's sharing with Grant and Max, and they tell me when I wake up the next morning that he stayed up all night and ran outside to howl at the sunrise.  Me, I'd laid myself down in an empty little kid's room upstairs with a twin-sized bed beneath me, blacked-out, some time before that.

Montpellier: The French Persuasion

We have a fair few days in that city.  A vacation town on the southern coast where all the girls that pass you on the street are French and pretty and come from all over the country.  They hold themselves differently, and some of them, the prettiest ones, wore those pants I adore so much that look like MC Hammer's, except with sex appeal.  Up to that point in our travails we had contended, quite unanimously, that the prettiest, the most beautiful samples of the female form resided in Denmark.  Copenhagen in the north, where the sun only sets for a short spell, where the girls all rode by on their bicycles, perfectly bronzed like some Victoria's Secret's summer campaign.  They're slim statuesque and delicate, naturally gorgeous, and a look from them sends the heart flying.

This is different though. Something's still flying, but it's a touch lower.  It's their swagger, I think (or whatever the female version of swagger is), a sexiness ingrained in their culture for generations.  A sharpness, an attitude, and an urgency, physical, that shies the heart in it's shell but wakes the loins.  Excites passion.  And when they pass us by, we can't help but to turn and watch them walk away and fade into the busy sidewalks.  French women hold a power over men that I think no others can boast.  They control our gaze with the simplest tap of a cigarette, and they brush it off with a quick hair flip.

Too bad we're just a poor, half-broke quartet of malnourished Americans.  What the hell would they want with us.  "Life is sheet, get to know thees," Max says with a french accent and a curt bow to Robin Williams' stand-up routine.  His courtship with cocaine in the 90's truly brought some gems to the surface.   And we laugh with an "Ah, ouai!" and try to forget the swaying hips and the fast walk disappearing behind us.  An occurrence that happens way too often in Montpellier.  Oh, les filles francaise de la Sud.  Je t'adore.


It's a quaint city, small, not really many tourist attractions, but it's by no means tiny.  One can still spend days getting lost down the stone paved streets, and drink his fill at the summer wine festival on Fridays.  We do it all.  We drink shit wine sitting on stone down Rue de such-and-such in the late night with three flirting, drunk Czech girls, just passing through like we are. We sit on the steps of Le Corum, behind the band, and booze-dance our Friday away, eyes closed, in the embalming summer darkness.  We book tickets to Unighted in Nice.  We take the bus down to the beach to dip into the Med once again.  The beaches are topless, but the only ones seeming to abide are much too old for it.  Like old wrinkly balloons whose helium's gone sour.  Ugh.  Not giving a fuck is so often wasted on the elderly, and always, it seems, at the most inopportune moments.  But the sea feels good in the sunlight, and we splash, and dive, and play like dolphins, and race, and fake-rescue each other from sharks (Grant's a lifeguard, so we know the proper fake-rescue techniques).

So refreshing.  I think the salt water is something I'll always need in life, because when I'm in it, all that weight of living sinks through my shorts and it's lost to the current, and I come back to shore ten times lighter, even with the salt and water hanging off me until I shake, shake, shake it like a wet dog.  Montpellier is a vacation from our travels.  A little R&R.  We're here for two days.

Zurich: Whores

When we get into Zurich it's raining.  Awesome.  We had given Mike the address of the Sara, our host for a couple days in that city of quiet, neutral elegance.  She gave us the number of the bus to take from the station as well, but wouldn't you know it, as soon as we get off we're lost as a bat, without a map, and Grant's phone's out of batteries.  We run about and around in the drizzling rain, and Scooby's saying, "Ruh, roh Shaggy," in my head.  Finally, we duck into a little boutique on a corner selling kiddie toys, and the kind lady inside gives us directions in broken English and finger-pointing.  It's almost noon when we get there, and there he is.  Mike Killam.  Sitting ever so casually at the cafe on the ground floor, looking out over a  with an empty cup of coffee like Monsieur Valentine (I came in listening to a Spoon).  He's been there since around eight he says, and we're a sight for sore eyes.  We hug it out as to be excepted and necessary, and go around the corner down an alley and smoke a spliff with some the Czech weed from Prague.  Mike, the gentleman that he is, had went ahead and bought a sixer of some cheap Swiss canned beer.  And we just chilled like old time in that corner between between the wall and the alleyway, all lined up, the four of us.  Talking about where we'd been and what we'd done, and the States, Santa Cruz.  Mike had moved into the Western house with BB and Boom right before we'd left (the King Street house's lease was up).  And we filled each other in.  But this is now.  We're in Zurich, bitches.  Max and I are broke, but the table with the map on it hasa fourth leg now.  And we're all stoked, and ready to rage.  Maybe a nap first though, everyone's head's all fucked from traveling and different time zones and luggin' all this luggage around.

Sara, our host meets us in due time  and leads us up five flights of stairs to her flat, and we thank her graciously and pass out.  on folding mattress pads in the living room.  Get up in a couple hours to get booze.  We're drinking with Sara and trying to figure what to make of the night.  She tells us the Red Light District's not far.  Well, there's nothing else really happening on the Wednesday night, and, hell, we may be poor, but at least we're drunk.  Zurich's red light's a different feel than Amsterdam's, definitely, still's bathed in red from the street lights and all the neon, just different, maybe it's the lack of those canals I now always firmly associate with prostitution at it's most decadent, but hey, it's a Wednesday night so who knows.  The girls in the windows are... eh, and the windows that are open are few and far between.  But there's these girls hanging outside the bars, decent lookers, with a predator's eye though, and when we walk by, one of them strokes Grant's chest.  And it's all we can do to just hold in our laughter until we're well on down the sidewalk.  But these bar's are everywhere, and every now and again we'd see some bar-fox walk out and into the nearest hotel with some drunk stud of a man in tow.  Incredible.  There's always time to stop and appreciate that.  Especially since I'm  stoned, drunk, and broke, and there's no danger of going for it.

Home in Paris

It's a cute, not some congenial, heart-felt nostalgia.  A collection of red leather, and dark-stained weathered tables with the corners worn, and an iron horse-head sculpture melting under the diffused light from the '80s modern fixtures hanging from the ceiling.  It's empty in the high afternoon, and the beer they serve is Foster's Australian.  Cooped up in the corner between old flowery throw pillows, there's nothing more to do than to write, listening to the eccentric American and French pop songs they have playing in the place, and watch the bundled city walk by in the sun outside.  It's fucking freezing out there.

Lili's still sleeping off last night, so here I am.  The quiet soft-spoken American boy becoming acquainted with reality wishing, nonetheless, that one of these doe-eyed French girls takes me away in her arms, away to forget about it all.  To knock the pencil out of my hand and throw excitement deep into my chest because it's been too long, and this bored indifference is just watching life by.

Berlin: Chance encounters from Colorado

Crush a bit, little bit, roll it up, take a hit.

We've got just one last spliff left from Amsterdam.  Packed up tight in a little plastic tube with a stopper.  Nobody's feeling to light and springy afterthat tour-de-force drinking performance we put on last night.  In the bright light of day pouring in through the windows maybe it wasn't such a good idea (probably was though).  Check out's at 12:00 though and we already slept in too late.  The spliff will have to wait.  It's gonna have to happen tonight though I fear.  And then we'll be out of weed.  Sadface.  Kid Cudi shed a tear for us.  Oh, well.  What's important now is that we find a place to stay for the night because this backpack's killing me.  So we put the weed situation on the back-burner and we fly downstairs to check out just before noon.  We hand in the keys.

"Thank you!  Have a nice day now," the lady at the desk is very cordial.

"Actually, do you guys happen to have any room in a room for three tonight as well?" Fingers crossed, boys.

"Let's see..." and she fiddles with the keyboard for a minute and scans the screen seriously.  "Ah! We do in fact!"  Score.  So we check back in, pay the twenty euros each, and get new keys.  The new room's on the same floor as the last one, except's it down the hall farther and in the corner.  It's a tiny room with just two bunk-beds shoved in.  But it's cozy, and it's all our own this time, with an extra bed.  Not to shabby.  Let's gets some breakfast.  Or lunch?  What time is it now?

"Who cares, let's get something cheap as hell though.  These hostels are killing me."  So we trot out to a street with food places on it and start price shopping.

"I want meat."

"Me too."

"Me three."  And right on that decision, a window comes a-passing by and inside behind the counter there's a thick bolt of sizzling on a vertical rotisserie.  The counterman shaves slices off for some sandwich.  Yes, please.  And it's only three euro for a sandwich and some fries.  It's so cheap! And it's so good.  After chomping that doner up, we head back, but when we're up in the room again, it's not just ours anymore.

[stop]

He looks young.  "How old are you, kid?"

"Eighteen."  His name is Zach, and he's just graduated from high school in Colorado, and he's doing the whole back-pack around Europe thing by himself.  Wouldn't have tagged him as eighteen though.  I think he's maybe a year or two younger than us, not four.  But there you go, I'm a horrible age guesser.  "Been out here just about a three weeks now," he tell us.  He was in Madrid while we were in Amsterdam for the Final, and he tells us of the wild parties and the dancing in the streets after the final whistle.  What a savvy little dude.  And all he's got to keep him company is a pack as big as mine, and a guitar and a case.  "Got this in Madrid actually," he says pulling out the six-string classical.  Strums a song or two out, and he's good, and we all immediately like him, and likewise, I think.  He tells us of senior year of high school, all the dances, the house parties, the binge drinking, the timelessness and his fondest memories, and it sounds not all too unlike senior year of college, but we tell him about it anyways.

Then, "Hey, I was gonna go down to this flea market I heard about down the streets a ways.  It's only open Sundays.  Wanna come with?"

"That sounds sick.  Let's do it."  So we romp off with our new friend, down the dry summer Berlin streets, the sun so high in the sky.  Grant, always the navigator, plots our course on the phone GPS.  It's a lazy Sunday, it seems, and for a while we're the only walkers around.  A lone car passes us on the thoroughfare to nowhere , every now and again.

[stop]

Amazing.  It's like nothing I've ever encountered, and we weren't even high.  Then again, I've never even been to a swap meet before, but I imagine this was something a bit more magical.  It's a dry-grassed park, half covered by a city of tents, aisle after aisle of stands selling every kind of trinket you could imagine.  It reminds me a little of Venice Beach, and walking down the boardwalk past all the shanty stores, and pipe shops, and cheap(-ish) grilled food.  It's different though, these people are craftmen, collectors.  Zach stops at a stand of all old cameras and guitar equipment, and handles an old Super 8 film camera, feeling the weight and looking through the eyepiece.  Then he picks up an old Gibson and strums a few chords through a baby belt-amp.  This place has everything from hand-made wallets to hand-made door knobs and cabinet knobs.  Whole booths full of old records in rows of milk crates.  And old VHS movies.  Antique lamps, old furniture.  Art prints and leather belts.   Grant buys a watch from this hip cat with some long blonde artsy hair selling t-shirts and old watch-heads on custom, new-age colored leather bands.  As he's setting it, I peruse the stand across the way selling sunglasses.  They're cheap like Venice sunglasses, only ten euro, but they've got a better weight to them and when I find a pair to replace my old Malcolm X sunnies that broke in Amsterdam, the nice, fit-looking old German women behind the desk gives it to me in a little plastic bag with a cleaning cloth and a candy.  A candy for crying out loud.  And before we get on our way, she offers to tighten them.  and she tightens all our sunglasses while she's at it.  What a gal.  "Spanks!"  We each end up buying little woodblock magnets (you know, for the fridge) with icon portraits hand screened on by the artist who is there selling them.  The bigger, wall-sized ones are pretty rad, but they're more expensive and I definitely don't have any room in my bag for something like that.  None of us do.  So we stick to our puny fridge magnets (still real sick), I get one of Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange.  Max gets Bob Dylan, Grant get, uhm, I don't know... Forrest Whitaker?  Who knows.  I think Zach gets Johnny Cash.  Shuffling through the aisles, Max finds a wallet for Monster, and I find a curious case of rings that's piqued my interest, one in particular.  It's a simple thing made of nickel, six euro.  On my finger, it's a band of fringed-circle, sun-shaped silver nodes on black with a silver border.  I've never had a class ring, never won any championship.  Never been the kind of guy to wear rings even.  But I'm drunk on the sobriety of the day so far and this Berlin summer scene.  I really ought to write all this down one day, I tell myself.  This ring will remind me to do that.  That's what rings do right?  Yeah...  Anyways it's really fun to spin with my thumb while it's on.  Sold.  "Six euro?  Here you go.  Danke schoen."

[stop]

We romp through a city a little while longer, then it's back to the hostel, to the bar, the one in the basement this time.  It's a quite dive-y kinda place.  And we all take a seat at the bar, the four of us, and get lit with the Colorado Kid.  It's just drinking games and watching the cheesy horror movies being projected onto one of the walls.  There's so much blood.  And limbs being sawed off.  Hilarious.  It's a slow night, Sunday, so the bartender joins in for a couple games of Fuck the Dealer and spouts off the names of the old movies playing in the background.  He's seen 'em a hundred times.  He closes up shop early, and we head back up to the room, a little lighter than before.  A little looser.  We weren't smashed like the night before,  but we sure feel good.

"So Zach..." Max's fingers are fumbling with the spliff test tube.  "We got one last spliff from Amsterdam.  You wanna come burn it down with us?"  There's a split second's silence when we're all waiting for it.

"Yeah, man."  So we go downstairs and around the block, take a seat at a park bench on the corner, and spark that shit in the lonely amber light of city streetlamps.

[stop]

The next morning we're out on the streets again, all packed up, and Zach's along for the ride.  The Wombat's fully booked, so we snag a map of all the hostels in the city from the front desk and go hostel hunting.  After the first three we huff into, it's not looking to too good.  Everywhere's fully booked, damn tourist season.  We all take off our packs to sit on outside our last failure.  "Well shit, guys," says Zach.  "Now what?"

I just want to get rid of this stupid pack that's collecting sweat by the shirt-damping pool on my back.  "We could go to the train station and put these bad boys in a locker for now," I suggest with a slap of the bags.  Goddammit, Berlin.  We need to get out of here.  And we didn't even see anything really.  Worst case scenario, we sleep in the station tonight.

"Hold on, guys," Grant's busy on the phone, the only one between the four of us.  "I just got an email from couchsurfing bitchess."  Max and I jump to our feet.

"What's it say?"

"What's couchsurfing?" asks Zach.  And we explain the whole magnificence of the thing to him, offering your couch and sleeping on others.  Sure beats the hell out of hostels price-wise.  And what's more, according to Grant's phone, we've just got ourselves a host in Berlin.  There's a phone number in the email and we call it and ask if Zach can stay too.  It's three girls living a couple metro stops away, and they oblige most graciously.  The Berlin metro system is like that girl that's always already drunk at the bar.  She's so easy.  There's no set of turnstiles demanding a paid ticket.  We just hop on and never pay for anything.  And she can take you anywhere and everywhere, and she takes us there.

So just like that, a night in the station turned into two couches and a few spare beds to sleep on.  Toni and Dajana both come to the door of the building when we ring them again from outside.  Their place is on the first floor, and it's massive.  High ceilings, a kitchen sharing a big living room, a handful of huge bedrooms and two bathrooms.  It's not lavish, not by any means, but it's cozy.  And homey, and it feels a little like Western.  Nobody's home.

"Come on, we'll meet everyone at the park!"  Everyone?  So we fling all our bags into the spare bedroom with it's two old queen-sized mattresses squeezed together, Grant and Max call dibs.  Fuck.  I'll take the couch I guess, I don't mind.  Beats that hard, dirty Central Station floor, that's for damned sure.  As soon as we're bag-less, we turn heel and follow our two barefoot German flower-girl hosts, Toni with her brash, blonde head with one side shaved, and Dajana with the long, fiery red locks, dyed so.  They're both just about our age, and their English is pretty spot on.

[stop]

The park's not too far, but we take a quite break at the liquor store to buy some beers in the bottle.  The ones with the star on the cap are only fifty cents.  Yes, please.  We each grab two.  Or four, whatever, it's not important.  The important thing is that when walk out and continue on to the park, Grant and Max and I all crack one of those fifty cent bad boys and treat ourselves to a little refreshment on the go, and nobody looked at us twice because it was legal, and nobody cared.  There's really no likewise comparison, no equal feeling to walking down the hot sidewalk with an open beer in your hand.  Or romping through the soft, yellow grass of the public park, playing frisbee with new friends, and your buzzed, and if you ever feel it waning, you just pick up another beer.  And we don't even throw away the bottles.  We just leave them all huddled together in grass.  "Are you sure?"  I ask Toni.

"Oh yeahh, this is fine.  Someone will come pick them up."  What?  Okay, I don't question it, and sure enough, later, when I turn around to look at the mess of bottles we've set aside, it's just empty grass like they were never there.

"Wow, that was fast."

"See!  This is normal.  The homeless people come and take them away and recycle them.  They get twenty cents a bottle.  And they don't get smashed down and made into new bottles like in America." Toni's accent is funny and German and trails off into a high pitch every few words.  It's lovely, and I tilt my head at the innocence of the sound.  It reminds me of the way we speak English as a kid, when we really don't care what other people think because, well, it really hasn't occurred to us to do so.  She goes on, "The beer companies, they just wash them and reuse them, and put a new cap on them."  Get it together, America.  That's how a recycling program ought to run.  Twenty cents a bottle?  That's crazy.  "Yeah, some people live off it, actually."

[stop]

I think getting drunk in the Berlin's my favorite.  In the park with the sun out and my shoes off.  And the soft breeze as the afternoon thickens.  We're with new friends now.  Toni and Dajana introduce us to their friends from Ireland and their other roommate Corinna.  A regular tribe, we are, standing in a big circle on the public meadows and throwing the frisbee soft and high so it catches at the top of the arc, for a second it seems, before floating back down for an easy snag.  But as the beers empty the snags are getting harder.  It's all right though, and what's this?!  Toni pulls out a pouch of tobacco and little baggie of weedsies and starts rolling up a spliff right there in the grass.  Heaven couldn't have conceived a more perfect day, and we all give up the frisbee throwing for a bit to indulge in the sweet, sweet German cheeba.

"What's that?" I ask as she starts breaking up some brown squishy shit to cap off the spliff before rolling it.

"Oh, it's hashish.  This is okay, yeah?"  Of course it's okay, Toni.  It's better than okay.  It's downright lovely, and she rolls it up tight with the steady fingers of a seasoned vet, lights it in a flash, and it's puff, puff, pass.  We're in a small circle now, sitting, half laying out lounging, half Indian style, chatting each other up like old friends.  About California and Santa Cruz.  About the music.  About Lovefest and EDC.  About Coachella.

"Ah! You come to Berlin at the right time then!" says Corinna.  "There is always a festival here!  We just went to this one.  It was at a, how you say, airport?  No, it was abandoned, this airfield.  And there were stages in all the hangers and we camped for seven days and didn't take showers and the electro never stopped."

"Wait, what do you mean it never stopped."  I'm intrigued.

"Oh! There is always music playing.  Well, it was supposed to only be four days, but all the DJs stayed for three more days and kept playing.  You silly Americans always stop the party so early."  The girls laugh at us, mocking.  But hey, they're right.  We're prudes over in the States.  "Actually, there is one this weekend also, and we are going.  Nation of Ghadwana.  It's only two days though, minimalist techno.  Stay and come, yeah?!  It's only twenty euro!"

Whoa.  We thought we'd leave in the morning, but our ears our pricked now.  A week in Berlin?  And some crazy German techno fest?  Excuse me, minimalist techno fest, whatever that means.  Group huddle.  We talk it out, and it takes all of a minute to decide.  Why the hell not.  And Zach's in too.  And after that, there's a certain tingle of excitement in our tummies as to what the coming week has in store for us.

[stop]

Yeah, we do it all.  Spend a whole day romping around Brandenburg Gate and the Reichtag with it's great glass dome.  And Checkpoint Charlie with the guard always on watch.  And SS Headquarters.  And the Wall-turned-mural-masterpiece for freedom.  There's such a sense of rich history, of stark divisions, and a war ravage like nothing in the US.  A lot of it's rebuilt, but at the same time, a lot of it's left just as it was back then, a reminder.  The people of this city, those who saw it all, God, I can't imagine what it must've been like.  To have had life unfold as it did before their eyes, the fight, the struggle, the evil, the courage, on such a grander and more desperate scale than it is now, in the West anyways.  The present to them must be so tranquil and muted in comparison, and we're just strolling through it like some history book with an iPhone soundtrack.  Skinny dipping in their old river Spree, drinking their cheap beer and eating doners.

One day we chance upon some crazy museum exhibit in the belly of a building downtown that shows sleek, sophisticated automobiles at ground level, which is why we enter in the first place.  But then, what's this?  There's a downstairs and it beckons to us, so we slide on down the escalator and proceed to have our minds blown.  There's a sand cyclone that you sit in the middle of, and a pool of some crazy metallic fluid that spins and twists, and pricks and takes shape like a crazy black Christmas tree, There's a corridor of tiny computer fans, hundreds of them, and they move when I move.  In a room off to the side (oh, you'll like this), one of the most mind-bottling musical contraptions I think I've ever seen.  About four feet by ten feet, and chest-high, it's an dim, neon-lit amalgamation of brandy and wine glasses in a row, and a marimba keyboard, and bass drums below, and in the middle of this sweet, robot-organized behemoth there's something shooting ping-pong balls at the keys in rhythm, and the glasses are all spinning with little robot fingers touching them on cue.  And it's some three minute long trance-y island fusion instrumental.  The source?  Just three simple notes entered on a laptop computer.  And voila, robot Beethoven.  Hal Mozart.  It's a wonder.  Such a wonderfully chance coincidence assuaged by man's natural want to oogle over nice cars.  That night, Toni cuts Zach's hair, then mine and Max's.  She's quite good, taking some off the sides and back and blending it all nicely.  I'm stoked.  Zach's stoked.  And Max wants to look like Fernando Torres, so Toni goes super short on the sides, and a lot off the top, and when it's wet, eh, maybe there's some semblance.  But Max's hair is curly and poofy and he ends up with a euro-trash, fluff mo-hawk. "It's a style that says who cares," Max quotes with his hands situated in front of his face, "it's only f-f-fashion."  Very Zoolander.  And Tom the Brit (another flatmate who's always working in the day), is in the corner laughing his Brit laugh and drinking his bottle of the sweet, green liqueur with a toothpaste taste.

Then, like that, we find ourselves drunk and high, lounging in a park again.  We always do, it seems.  And this time it's just Grant, Max, and I, and Zach and Corinna, and a fellow couchsurfer, our friend Shahar.

[need weeds, ugh]