CADIZ (23-27 November)

Trying to be Ernest in Granada

I joked to Eleanor, who wanted to “putz around Spain” with me, “I’ll warn you that I have a homework assignment while we’re there.”

“What’s that?”

“I have to get drunk at least once. So that I can connect with Hemingway.”

“But of course.” She cackled. “And I shall join you.” So it was that in the last port of our study abroad program, I would finally spend some travel time with her.

On our first night we putzed through Cadiz, where, in the parlance of my pet author of the moment, we got “tight” on sangria, mojitos, and beer. Supposedly, I yelled at her for “not understanding men,” but it was all right. We still hopped a train to Granada the next morning. As I leaned on the window and stared at Andalusia, a cultivated expanse of trees and hills, a thought occurred to me that might have struck Hemingway as a bit too romantic. I wondered what would happen if I leapt off the train and figured things out from there. Maybe I would bring my duffel bag, but maybe not. I could live off the land, picking fruit and hunting bulls, and hiding out from the farmers the whole time, until I died out. They’d have their folk tales about me, after a while. “He just paces the countryside,” they’d say. “Steals five to ten quinces a day [which would be exaggerated from three to five], and sometimes? He kills a lamb with his long yellow fingernails and steals it away from the hillside.” El Americano Desconocido, they could call me, if they gathered as much of my background. To America itself, I would no longer exist. My family and friends would mourn me, of course, but I’d be too wrapped up in survival to mourn them all that much in return. Maybe that part was more in line with Hemingway – not caring too much about others.

Honestly, that thought didn’t last as long in my head as my greater ambitions for Spain: mainly, they were to “retighten” myself, and moreover, to woo my travel partner. She was damned attractive; one “couldn’t blame me such a hell of a lot.” I was convinced she wanted me, but in the fashion of a true Hemingway protagonist, I kept a detached veneer, to be broken only once she started coming on to me.
That never happened. She talked on about some boy she hadn’t seen in two years. She might love him, and wanted to know whether to buy a plane ticket to see him, and claimed to want my opinion about it. Throughout our first full day in Grenada, I moped. We sat at cafés all day, and my head rested above my elbows a lot. “Steve’s wallowing,” she teased. She didn’t think it was about her. Tightness fixed that.

We found a heladería that served alcohol. A dish of gumdrops came with our third drink of the night, a gin and tonic for her, and a rum and coke for me. She saw me getting sad again (which, honest to Ernest, I was trying not to do) and said something like, “It won’t keep happening. Just because one girl treated you that way doesn’t mean they all will.”

“Oh yeah? Well kiss me.”

“What the hell, Steve.” And so it began. In the first place, I was a misogynist. When I tried to humble myself, I was a “wallower.” “Did you know that when you get like that, the whole room can feel it, even without looking at you?” She was serious. And when I tried to get myself out of that, I was an asshole and a misogynist again.

By the time we were back at the pensión (where, notably, we’d slept in the same bed), I was crying somewhat, and she wasn’t looking at me. “I’m going back to Cadiz tomorrow,” she said. “You should try Cordoba, like you talked about.” And, taking the key and leaving the room, “Make sure to feel really sorry for yourself.”

While she was gone, I paced the room, stopping to look through window at the noisy city square, or to sit at the foot of my bed. I was completely sober by then. “To hell with you, Eleanor Silver,” I said.


She made peace when she came in that night. I asked if we were ‘amigos’ and she said, “Oh, yeah. Amigos. Don’t worry about it, go to sleep,” only to say in the morning, “I wonder how the weather is in Cadiz.” We marched down the spiral staircase, and in pidgin Spanish, I explained the basics of our situation to the lady at the front desk, and she agreed to hold my bag behind her chair until I made up my mind whether I was staying.

The two of us ate bocadillos across the street. I said, “She’s such a nice old lady.”

“Oh stop it.”

“What? I didn’t mean anything but what I said.” When we got outside, she hailed a cab and told me to have fun wherever I ended up.

Well, I thought, time to drop the romantics, harden up, and become a Hemingway man once again. I told the nice old lady, Voy a quedarme, si es posíble, and walked off to take in Grenada. With Eleanor, it had seemed nothing but a haze of bars, restaurants with bars, and cafés that were also bars. Now was the morning after. At a restaurant by the Arab Quarter, I had paella with a glass of Jerez and tightened my lip. “We can be academic about this, Steve.”


The one trait of Spain’s that plays a formative role in The Sun Also Rises is the in-the-moment, death-effacing bullfight. Alas, it is a dying art, and more prevalent up north, so I did not attend one. Instead, I saw flamenco on that Saturday night. Unlike the stoic bullfighter, the singer made wild arm gestures. She sang loudly from the start, favoring expressiveness to tunefulness. But I loved it. I clapped along, cheered, and was soothed. This was too emotive for Hemingway, but what had happened the next morning would have found him better.

On my Sunday morning stroll toward the Arab Quarter, I found an acquaintance of mine outside a church with two Irishmen, all sharing a large bottle of Alhambra Beer. I joined them and once again felt Hemingway’s spirit within me. We were foreigners, outside our element, doing nothing to blend in, preferring to drink and talk ill of others. Tony, with the ginger beard, said a few times, “Fuck Americans, fuck the Spanish, and fuck the Irish.” And I said, “Amen,” feeling a bit more careless at last.

That was what my Spain most shared with Hemingway’s: it could have been anywhere, as long as it was unfamiliar enough to get buried in. There had to be that sweet prospect of escape. Only, that’s wrong. Just in the second chapter of The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist, Jake Barnes, says to cloud-headed Robert Cohn, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another. There’s nothing to that.”
By the time I was in bed that night, I’d realized that I was guilty of the highest crime of irony: I had romanticized Hemingway.

Oh, to have several drinks and be tight in Europe. Ah! And for a woman to storm out on me, and to say to her, “You and your kind can go to Hell!” It’s fun, isn’t it? But it was no better than hopping off of the train to the wilderness of Andalusia; it was every bit as sensational and pointless. My utilization of so much rum and my brashness with Eleanor was not too different from Robert Cohn’s pathetic attempt to shake hands with his beloved Lady Brett’s bullfighter, and I got little less than a death threat in return. “We could have had such a damned good time,” I had thought – gallivanting around this merry city, arm in arm, doing all the rest. And as it was, I was living the writer’s life, left alone because I’m temperamental and misunderstood, and therefore brilliant.

Indeed, it was “pretty to think so.”

_______________________________________________________


I think this is pretty too.


My last drink of the voyage: a glass of Jerez that I bought for the equivalent of a dollar. Alas, one gets what one pays for.

DUBROVNIK (14-18 November)

A Young Ghost of the New Dubrovnik

Ado says he knows a kid with epilepsy who claims the ability to read minds and might be a ghost. It wouldn’t be such a stretch, since their home city of Dubrovnik is supposed to be stupendously haunted. He met the kid in a place spookier than the village quarries or even the island of Lokrum – it was behind the abandoned hospital, which the Serbs bombed back in the ‘80’s.

Whenever he has a free evening from studying, Ado meets with his hipster friends at the Klub Orlando, their bar and concert hall hidden in the woods just behind the hospital. He met the kid there, and when it turned out that he lived in the old hospital with the vagrants, Ado felt obliged to visit him now and then, to watch him play crappy old video games and just sort of ‘be there.’ When he came over only a week ago, the kid said to him, “I think I’ll go to America.”

This was a funny idea to Ado, who doesn’t like places like America to begin with – though, he’d admit, that’s only because he associates it with things like powdered coffee and awnings with brands of soft drinks on them. Nonetheless, he decided to humor his odd friend. “How long will you be in America?”

“800 days.”

“And what are you gonna do there?”

“I’m gonna sleep.” That was the last time Ado saw the kid.

Until then, on almost every afternoon before happenings at the Orlando, Ado would find himself alone in an ex-operating room with this kid, who said he was epileptic but never seemed to have seizures. He walked past the vandalized cobblestone on the streets and in the parking lot, tagged with names of British rock bands and slogans like “Punk’s Not Dead.” Only three years ago, Ado reminisced, the whole Dalmacian coast was practically deserted, at least compared with now. From what his professors said to each other about the Bologna process, at least schoolwork was going to become less ridiculous and exam-oriented, more like England or Spain. At this time in the afternoon, he needed a coffee and a study break. He took his coffee faster than he liked, and his “study break” felt something like babysitting.

The kid would sit on a beanbag playing Tetris as though the world consisted of nothing besides him and the blocks falling across the television screen. He clicked the controller’s buttons rather quickly, and that sometimes gave Ado rhythmic ideas for his songs, which were atonal and mostly fashioned after those of Sonic Youth. All the same, he felt less inspired by the kid’s ferocity and more uneasy. He wondered whether he should shut the door, but wouldn’t do it because he wanted to be able to leave. Still, leaving the door open seemed rude. The kid had reached level two one day, and just as the blocks were starting to drop faster, he paused the game, swung his head to face Ado, and said, “Just go ahead and shut the door.” Then he resumed playing.

That night, Ado caught himself wondering something stupid – could this kid be a ghost? Imagining him, pulling on the pockets of his gray hoodie, eyes so sunken the tops of his cheeks were blue, it was too easy. Just easy enough to nag at Ado’s dreams, but still stupid enough for him to feel silly about it the whole time. If he were a ghost – which is stupid and not true – he would start repeating himself. He’d say the same things to Ado: “Shut the door,” and “I know how to read minds” and eventually something about the past would work its way into the loop. “Tito was poisoned,” he might say, “they just don’t want you to know.” He could be a different sort of ghost: one who eats frozen pizza while watching a bumbling news anchor on his little brown television. Maybe his loop would start to sound like a commercial. Instead of asking him to drink Nescafe, the boy could offer him the controller and watch him play Tetris. He could tell Ado where he was thinking of putting the next block, and then tell him where he should really put it. He saw him standing there in the off-white tiled room, under a laundry line. It really was easy to think of him as a ghost. But this was the time of night when it was equally easy for Ado to think that his real father was some hillside wanderer from Osojnik. His dreams seemed to last long that night.

The next day, after he was done with Tetris, the kid said to Ado, “I know what you think.”

“As always,” said Ado.

“You think I’m a ghost.” This was a little true, Ado realized. “Well, I am.”

Ado raised his eyebrows and nodded. “It’s late,” he said. “I’m going up to the club. Staying here?”

“I think so. I have to make travel plans.”

“See you later.” It was dark, and the lights outside the club glowed so that most of the wall art was visible. He had met the kid’s mother and older brother. If he wanted, he could run back to the door and ask either one of them, “How old is your boy?” And they would look at him funny and say, “12,” or “13,” or however old he actually is, but they wouldn’t say, “Our boy is dead.” That really is silly, Ado thought.

Walking up to Orlando alone was always spooky, in the way that made Ado feel privy to something very hip. Tonight he felt a little out of it. He walked slowly, almost dreading the top of the stairs. To his right, on the wall of the hospital, he saw the single word, “Tito.” On the brick wall to his left, he saw another anarchy “A.” There was a crushed Fanta can by his feet, which he almost kicked but chose to leave alone. The air by the club, Ado noticed for the thousandth time, is much thicker than it is on the shore by Lokrum. It’s the cigarette smoke, but it’s also something to do with these two places, the ex-hospital and the Klub Orlando, sharing such a small space. And, of course, there’s always pollution.

When he had finally traversed the 100 feet across the parking lot to the stairs, Ado remembered the act they had lined up for tonight. It was a hip-hop group from Split. He could already see them in their loose-fitting sweaters and khakis, striking tough poses through the machine-generated smog, and hear the clumsy beats from their tiny synthesizer. They would wedge their rhymes into those beats, shove them between pulses, and switch from Croatian to English whenever it was more convenient. “Let’s just go up there,” he told himself. “Let’s just get on up there.” And he did, but he walked even more slowly up the stairs. He could see through the woods at each side of him. He could always see a building, everywhere he went, and there were always lights on the buildings, and this irritated him on that night.

“Hell, okay,” he said aloud, with no one listening. “I’m a ghost too.”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It’s time to come clean. Ado told me this story over coffee in Dubrovnik. I have to admit that all he really told me of the narrative were his few interactions with “the kid.” He also proclaimed a love for Sonic Youth and strong distaste for commercialism, but it behooves me to confess that I am imagining a whole lot for him in terms of his connection to his ghost. It might be obvious to the reader that when I describe Ado’s walk from the hospital to Klub Orlando, I am really only talking about my own experience making a similar walk. The best way I can think of to relate to you the distance between the above story and my actual experience is to relay how I told the story to a bartender at Klub Orlando.

The bartenders were two young ladies of about 18. The way Orlando is run, they had to have been volunteers. After being granted my gin and tonic in a teeny plastic cup, I said to the prettier of them, “Ingleski?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m here researching a ghost story.”

“Oh yeah?” We were shouting to each other above the house music, but there wasn’t a crowd.

“A guy I talked to said he knew this kid who lived up in the hospital who could read minds.”

“Okay, sure.”

“And then he told him that he was a ghost.”

“That’s crap.”

“I don’t know, this place is kind of spooky.”

“Yeah, but don’t listen to him. It’s crap.” She laughed a little when I explained the kid’s plan to go to America, but it wasn’t a heavy enough laugh to tell me that she was all that interested in hearing more. I guess that ghosts are about as fun as tourists: okay in small doses at certain times, like a midnight campfire or a quick bar-side spectacle, respectively. But other times, it’s nice to keep them out of the way.

ISTANBUL (7-11 November)

Some day, this entry will be the home of my unfinished essay about hipsters (which, I swear, will have to do with Turkey). For now, enjoy a couple of pictures:


(taken by the shoe rack outside of a mosque)


(by the New Mosque/Spice Market complex)

PORT SUEZ (29 October - 1 November) / transit SUEZ CANAL (2 November) / ALEXANDRIA (3-4 November)

An American's Infidelity

The morning we disembarked in Alexandria, I saw one of my fellow American travelers, a young rabbi-in-training, leave our ship wearing a big blue and white skullcap. ‘He’s not a stupid guy,’ I thought, ‘so why does he think it’s safe to flaunt his faith in such an Islamic city?’ I, on the other hand, would have been perfectly happy if shop owners, falafel chefs, and cab drivers were to look at my beard, albeit curly and red, and think, ‘He must be a Muslim.’ Then again, I’m a godless Westerner.

What’s more, I’ve always felt a certain freedom from identity in cities. So many people around, and nobody knows who I am. Of course, in places like Egypt, my whiteness inspires certain obvious presumptions. “Five pounds, show you all city?” “You buy souvenir? Shirt like hers? Same-same?” “You wanna get high?” But even within my imposed role as a dumbstruck tourist, I have the inestimable power of lying to strangers. Where from? Canada. Scotland. Let’s try Wales. Fair day, gents.

Maybe it’s unpatriotic of me, but when a little boy carrying a shrink-wrapped [towel hat] runs up and says, “See-you-later-alligator-in-a-while-crocodile-how-now-brown-cow America’s the greatest!” I don’t want to pat him on the head. I just blush. Would that boy ever say that Egypt (or Musser, as they call it) is the greatest, even to a non-customer? Not if the most popular film in his local cinema is Silent Hill, I’d have to guess. A manin his 20’s accosted me outside of Biblioteque Alexandrina asking to discuss America. He immediately admitted that the only president he knew was George W. Bush. He asked if I liked Michael Jackson. So by all means: Cheerio, governor.

But one Alexandrian evening, something troubled my comfort with assuming all of these identities, and brought to mind the man in the skullcap I had seen that first morning.

Walking back to port, I noticed a tunic hainging from a display rack on the sidewalk. It was a luxurious shade of brown, with three false buttons lining the center. How elegantly goofy it would look on me, I thought. A great idea for the next costume party. I stopped to admire it, and my traveling partner Lucy, said, “Oh, are you gonna get it?”

I didn’t have time to answer before a stubble-faced man in plaid galloped out of the shop and asked that ubiquitous question: “You like?”

“This? Um, yeah.”

“Sixty-five pounds.” (So about $13US.)

“Hm.” In his eyes, I didn’t see a propensity to bargain. “Let’s see.” He took a pole from behind the rack and lowered the tunic into his free hand, offering it to me. I was trying to judge whether I’d trip over it when another familiar question came: “Where from?”

Lucy beat me to it. “America.” So much for that game.

“Yup,” I said, because Why fight it?

Immediately, the man asked, “What is your faith?” I don’t recall this surprising me at the time, but on the walk back, Lucy would call the inquiry “pretty rude,” and now I believe I agree.

Again, Lucy answered first, tucking her wavy black hair back into her headscarf as she said, “Oh, no faith. Secular.”

The man shot a look to the sky and dropped his head three times. “Nature. This is the nature.” Of Americans, I assume he meant. Of Westerners in general. Of those to whom The Enlightenment holds positive historical significance. ‘She stole my answer,’ I thought, ‘and it seems to be the wrong one. Do I want to answer it correctly? Maybe I feel brave.’ By now, he was focused on me, arm crossed, eyebrows raised as if to say, “Well?”

“Jew,” I said, and then, to assure myself that I said it on purpose, “Jewish.” This probably seems like a strange and stupid thing to do. Why should I have chosen such an occasion to be honest about my identity? Why, especially, when it was only a half-truth (as my father is Roman Catholic, and as I am a secular and therefore godless Western man) and when I knew the half truth to be an unwelcome response? The answers to these questions would elude me for the rest of my stay in Alexandria. Even now, I must say that it was a needless and therefore stupid thing to do.

When I told the man I was a Jew, I did it carefully. In my own defense, I was sure to appear bashful about it, even though I was giddy at the chance to say it. I turned toward my left shoulder. I paused and pursed my lips. I turned toward my right shoulder, turned back to make eye contact, pressed my fingertips to my heart, bowed my head, and made my confession quietly.

His response was predictable: he squinted his eyes, shook his head, and tisked at me. In my chest, I felt that gasoline flood that one usually gets after working very hard on an essay, only to have it returned with a “C minus” on it. I closed my eyes for a moment so that I couldn’t glare.

To his credit, the man decided to lower the price of my tunic by five pounds. “Special price,” he said, “For you. Welcome to Egypt.” After we left, Lucy said that he hadn’t made eye contact with her at all after she told him she was faithless. I’m bad with eye contact, but I imagine the same was true for me, after that initial tisk-tisk.

As we gained distance from the shop, I remembered my grandmother’s Polish cuckoo clock, the reedy voice of my cousin David as he recited for his Bar Mitzvah (versus the baritone crackle of Jared’s), my Hillel advisor’s private counsel when I’d come to her with romantic troubles, removed as her words were from the actual idea of “G-d.” Finally, I remembered a few days before the winter holidays when I was thirteen, and over the kitchen counter repeating to my mother I had learned in Freshman Honors English: “Mom, I’m agnostic.” I remembered her saying, “Oh Steve, please believe in God,” but I knew she’d let me believe as I pleased. As I felt Egypt growing dark and chilly, I remembered how it felt to know that.

The brown tunic now hangs in my closet next to my nice button-down shirt and slacks. I plan to wear it with a yarmulke.


A Quarter to Suez, 60 Days West

When did midnight pass the second
Tuesday of August? Two
hours before La Guardia, several
nautical miles from now,
that night has been contaminated.

Chennai’s dusty cement
block steam curdles
from your Fairfield lips
above your stiff little chin, as
dead as Buddha.

That moontan of yours is
so Alexandrian I could have
invited you to the carnival
by the citadel (and I can
just see your scarf-
swallowed head
now). The sweater you wore is
green coconut
chutney. It sparks
a peppery sting
inside my face.

You speak of the Pizza Hut
across from the Sphinx, but that was
two months
later
and it was me.

Did we bicker over mixed-up
files, guards in
Yangon/Rangoon? Was
the ocean blue-green
or yellow-brown
the next morning? Is
the Old World dying yet?

It coughs blood whenever anything moves.

onboard CHENNAI to PORT SUEZ (20-28 October)

(This is a place-holder for some pictures I have.)

CHENNAI (15-19 October)

(I'll put pictures here soon!)

Here is the Taj Mahal

We’ve signed our names to love poems since junior high school. The hearts above the i’s came to barb-shaped points on their bottoms to snag the reader’s skin, but now we know better; though symmetry is an architect’s pet, the flitting of flowerpeckers and sunbirds follows loops unlike the fanciest Spirograph – these aquamarine and yellow and brown-black blurs see myriad shutters flash, and even this spikes their flight. Our letters are white with dim-blue lines, our words all in ballpoint ink, but in a shallow pool, they would turn to yogurt, left unconsumed by our most adored.

__________________________________________________


It Was Danesh

“My friend,” the man said as we stepped from the cushions of his black rickshaw, “You mustn’t think like all people are so bad. I understand – you come here from England, you feel you cannot trust people. But they are not all bad like that. My name is Danesh.” He granted me a quick but soft handshake.

“Well, yes. Dennis. Very good. I’m Steve.” Getting the credit card from my wallet, I was now hiding US dollars from the man’s view, “You see, my companion and I do have a certain traveler’s weariness within us. I’m sure you can imagine what we’ve been through in Chennai.”

“Oh, Chennai.” He nodded briskly, for I had proven his point. “The drivers in Chennai, they have the Mafia. But you are safer here.”

“Very good. Well, I’m off to the money-changer.” Rose was already up the stairs from me, at the strip mall’s ATM. What a white girl with dreadlocks looks like to Indians at an Agra ATM, it occurred to me, I’ll never know. “Quite a pleasure to speak with you though.”

There was no pleasure for me, I thought, not since I’d set foot in Chennai, the port that steams white people like rice and eats them alive. On our first day in the city, I was already hearing rumors of rickshaw drivers waving rocks and sticks at underpaying passengers. My first Indian rickshaw, supposedly bound for T. Nagar Market, had dropped Blakely and me at a silk shop by the beach, for which service the driver asked 500 rupees. I could only think of the shipboard gossip that Blakely had shared with me on the ride, and shaking, cast into the man’s big hand a bill equivalent to $10. “Each! Each!” he said, but we walked away, continuing to discuss a matter that would later distract me into paying another rickshaw driver 900 rupees to get us back to our ship. Refusing people requires energy.

So when this particular rickshaw waited for Rose and me, carried us back to our hotel, and accepted whatever money we gave him (about a dollar), I said aloud, “Dennis is a good guy.” And by golly, he was. He proved this each time he met us at the Clark’s Hotel gate.

In the face of colleagues who would cheat, mislead, and even scold us, Dennis was pretty nice. Rather than extort from or threaten us, he negotiated with me a reasonable fare after having brought us where we asked to go. At no point in my dealings with Dennis did I suspect he might pick up a brick from the ground and throw it at me.

Dennis’ relentless maintenance of this status quo afforded me the luxury of thinking about things while traveling. As we approached a local bazaar, I felt free to wonder about what it means for one to learn from a girl to kiss with his eyes closed, and then for one to hear “things” about her. Cows wandered the streets and people scarcely made room for them. This was the sort of atmosphere in which one keeps his hands in his pockets, but when Dennis said to us, “Check the price tags of wine bottles before you hand them to the cashier,” I thought, “I’m going to be okay here.”

Dennis deserves more credit than I’m giving him. He did not have to warn us about the wine. He also did not have to tell me where I could buy a sitar – I like to think that he intuited from the shape of my beard that I was a musician. He was under no contract to introduce me to the sitar salesman, a stocky plaid-shirted man with a moustache and pink hair by the name of Jony Kalra, who just happened to have one left-handed sitar in stock. Actually, Dennis’ record in his self-presumed role of chauffeur is, as I might say to him, “splendid.”

The last time he gave me a ride, I had the sitar in tow. It was the only time he did not acquiesce to whatever price I set. In my haste to get the thing to my cabin, I grabbed a 50-rupee note from my pocket and said, “Is that enough?”

He said, “Not really.” He had his reasons for demanding higher compensation, but at last his singsong accent was lost on me, so I made up my own reason: Dennis is a good guy. It’s not as though he restored my faith in humanity, because I don’t even know Dennis. I don’t know if he still visits his mother, or whether he says hello to beggars, or if he’s faithful to his girlfriends. All he did was drive me places. He was only running a business. But he was running a good business, and was being honest about it, so I nodded and handed him another dollar.

Dennis appeared to me one more time. Our bus was headed for the train station, and it had stopped at a local Pizza Hut. I was grumbling about my simple desire for curry when, in the twilight, by the motorbikes, there he was. “Hello, Steve,” he said, perhaps the only time I heard my name from him. This hit me with some difficulty. I thought about him waiting by the hotel, following the bus in his black rickshaw, just hoping that one of us wanted to go somewhere else. The desperation I imagined made it difficult for me to say, “Hi Dennis.” I said it with a little grin, but then I fled into Pizza Hut for my personal pan.

Later on the bus, Rose told me she’d had tea with Our Man while I’d been eating. He had said to her, “Now you are not a tourist,” and paid for her cup. “Such a spiritual guy,” she said. “Just really – he gets it, you know?” She showed me a Maya Hotel business card on which he had written his email address. “So,” I said. “His name was ‘Danesh.’” Rose nodded slowly, her glassy eyes aiming past my shoulders as I shrugged.

onboard YANGON to CHENNAI (13-14 October)

Man Overboard

No sooner did my door close behind me on the way from Global Studies this morning than I heard the sharp bing-bong sound from the intercom. It was quieter than usual, as if the speaker in our cabin’s ceiling might have shorted out, but I heard a tinny Eastern European accent declare, For exercise, for exercise, for exercise. Starboard side. Man overboard, man overboard, man overboard.

The first part of the declaration must not have registered, because I immediately began to wonder who might have gone over the rail. The Indian Sea has been calm today, so I felt it had to be a suicide attempt. Murder, because of the difficult getaway, was unlikely. My portside window wouldn’t help solve this mystery, so my imagination roamed free.

I caught myself hoping it to be Jess Alvarez, an acquaintance from early in the voyage who won’t talk to me anymore and won’t say why. Her cropped blackened hair and trendy square-framed glasses made me feel proud that she ever talked to me in the first place. But when I asked her what she’d done in Japan, it was “Oh, this and that.” After two weeks of such evasion, I asked if we could talk. She said “No,” and then, “I don’t want to speak to you, can you please respect that?” We have Gamelan rehearsal together on odd days at sea, and every odd day she avoids eye contact and I worry about whether I’m some sort of creep.

If she were to have attempted suicide, that would place the charge of craziness entirely on her. Suddenly, I thought, I’m not a creep; she’s just got problems. The boat tilted portside, and my bed shifted beneath me where I sat. My cheeks flushed for guilt and I hoped that even if it was Jess, she got onboard safely.

Next, as though to punish myself, I imagined that it was Emily Morris. One evening a couple of weeks ago, Emily invited me to her cabin, where we made out to the sound of Lost In Translation from her laptop, stopping only a couple of times for the really funny parts. She hasn’t spoken to me much since, except to say hello, but the prospect still put my breakfast in my throat. I was already distraught that things seemed to be ending so soon. To see her pale frame tossing around the blue expanse, her stark red lips submerging, never to resurface – my skull burned at the thought.

Looking out my television-shaped porthole, I saw a little orange lifeboat bobbing along. No one was climbing into it. A man in a white uniform closed the door of the vessel and I lost interest – the situation was normalized. I later heard from a friend that it had been a dummy after all, and felt sort of silly.

YANGON (7-12 October)

A Token of Thanks

I don’t remember how there came to be ten of them, but the woman at the wok who must have been their mother counted “One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. Ten thousand kyat.” I paid her, still thinking I’d get something in return – a spring roll? Some rice? But the little squadron led me away; the money had been for them.

There were no kyat in my pockets when the shuttle dropped me into Yangon. My intention had been to stroll the market, spot a few things (a bowl of coconut noodles, a teak Buddha, a longyi, which is essentially a Burmese kilt), and then exchange the proper amount of money. After all, I know my spending habits, my propensity to leave a record store with five CD’s, none of them the one album I meant to buy, and though the American consumer’s Myanmar is a muddy Dollar Store, I wanted to be careful.

It began with two of them, heaving wallets of postcards up to me, hopping once in a while, yelping, “One dollar! You buy.”

“No,” I said. And it was all I said. For about a block. But then they started pointing to their mouths, pouting and raising their little eyebrows, and Oh aren’t they precious? and What kind of corn-fed American bastard doesn’t even help feed starving children?

But there were still no small bills in my pocket, dollar or kyat, and I really didn’t want a postcard, so I said, “I have no money?”

They persisted: What kind of corn-fed American bastard doesn’t carry money? “Only one dollar! Very hungry! You buy.”

“No” became, “I’m very sorry. No. I can’t.”

As their prisoner, I had now walked three blocks. A third kid with darker skin than the first two held up his postcards, and my first kid tried to shove him away, shouting, “No!” They were ruthless, I now saw, and with some guilt, I began to hate them. Even so, pushing them away was no keen option. We passed dogs with scabs and vendors in their faded longyi hawking entire fried quails and their skewered eggs. The kids just kept yelping.

“No postcards,” I finally said, three or four times intermittently with their pleas. And then, “I really don’t have any money. None. I’m not lying.”

“You change at hotel.” So they turned me around and led me back a few blocks, all five or six of them now. The doorway was large, glass, and clean. Once I leapt through it, the air was cool, linoleum lay beneath my feet, and the few men and women around me were fully clothed. I said to the clerk, nearly whispering, “Some children led me here. They want me to change money. I think it might be a good idea anyway.”

“Yes, how much?” He spoke delicately, with professional detachment.

“Here’s a twenty.” I sat on a cushioned wicker chair for a couple of minutes until he counted out a chunk of 1,000 kyat bills. It was hard to close my wallet.

As I crept back out, I didn’t see them right away. I wish I’d run. Within a minute, they were back upon me, no longer waving postcards. Representative, a young boy with neat hair and a dirty green US Army shirt, said, “Come.” In my mind, disobedience was no longer an option; I had developed Stockholm Syndrome.

At some point – maybe it was before the hotel, chronology is tough to pin when you’re in a maelstrom – the littlest girl, her hair so scraggly it looked braided, held up a tiny toy dinosaur skeleton. A styracosaurus, I remember from my childhood books. “Present,” she said. “No money, you take.” I smiled and thanked her. Finally, some gratitude, I thought, tucking it into my left pocket. And how sweet of her anyway!



We turned a corner and arrived at the wok. I handed over the 10,000 kyat for a lot of reasons, none of which were present in my mind.

I gave the money because they needed it more than I did, even though my parents had given me much of it, and I would feel awful about myself if I used up my spending money prematurely, which I eventually did. I gave it because the kids had won my heart, even though they were mean to each other and pushy with me, and I didn’t like them at all. I gave it because charity is important, even though I am encouraging these kids to be pushy brutes who might never get a job besides selling postcards and annoying tourists.

They didn’t leave me alone even after I gave that money. They wanted more. “They’re fighting,” one said, waving his arm backward. “You give to everyone, or they fight.” I eventually escaped through the hotel to an alternate exit that the clerk showed me – My own Harriet Tubman, I thought.

When I got back to the shuttle stop, I saw my friend John walking toward the market. I pointed my umbrella at him. “John,” I said. “Listen to me. Do not look at the kids. Just ignore them, or they will own you.”

“Oh yeah,” John said, “I was out earlier. What you have to do is try to sell them something. ‘You like umbrella? How much? You buy later.’ Confuses the hell out of em. But actually, what I started doing was handing them these little dinosaur toys.”


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Spiderman practices Mahayana Buddhism.

HO CHI MINH CITY (27 September - 2 October)

The Vietnamese people love their television.


My Little Brother Wandering Vietnam



In Cantho, it occurs to me that dogs without owners are more like cats. They slink past the frying pans and trinket merchants on the sidewalk under Vietnamese mist, a daily occurrence that they probably don’t notice on their disheveled fur. They’re some form of terrier, I think, but terriers always seem to be waiting for a human to give them something to do. These dogs are likely sniffing for spring roll scraps or a dropped chicken’s foot.

I’m watching them from the carriage of a cyclo with Lin, a fellow English-speaker and American, and we only trust the man on the bike because we’ve already paid him. As tourists, we have intuitively segregated ourselves from the townsfolk, confident that every one of them wants nothing less than all that’s in our wallets. Buying the “One-Hour, Show-You-All-City” package for forty thousand dong a head (≈$2USD) seems to have been a good investment, if only because it gives us an excuse not to buy more Mekong Delta postcards or coconuts with straws in them. These things, tempting in the sunshine, become sinister in the cloudy dark.

We’ve been riding fifteen minutes, and I’ve finally managed to stop looking back at our hotel. But that’s only because the bridge we’ve rolled onto is lined on both sides with teenage couples on their motorcycles. They’re parked just above the river, each guy cradling a girl in his lap, whispering things I’ll never understand. I’m reminded that I’m sitting next to a girl, but quickly forget. Lin is only a friend, after all, and so quiet. There is barely a moon in the sky for these lovers to admire; the clouds spread the few glimmers of moonlight into amorphous fuzz, difficult to look at because of its slightness.

We reenter the cityscape, a larger mass of amorphous fuzz, runny neon strings replacing dull yellow-white. I don’t know what the signs are asking me to buy because they all jumble together as motorcycle traffic clears up and our cyclo man grabs speed. The one symbol I can make out is a red and white noodle chef who cooks five strands of yellow vermicelli that keep on disappearing, but he cannot express surprise at this because he has no face. I am not hungry, I decide, and hope that Lin would say anything if she wanted food.

But speaking of hunger: a young boy ends up following our cyclo for a long time.
He doesn’t start after us right away. First he looks up at our carriage, not imploringly like some Sally Struthers commercial, but with slight curiosity (even though I’m sure he sees these things every night). All he says is “Hello.” He is, more or less, my 13-year-old brother Matt in a dusty brown shirt. He could as easily be saying “Uh, hey,” as Matt always does. He could be wondering if I want to play his new baseball video game with him, but instead he probably wants one of us to buy a miniature fan for the equivalent of 50 US Cents. Only he doesn’t hold anything up like the others – no nail clippers, no pointed hats. As far as I saw it then, he might have had a Game Boy in his pocket for me.

For the first block, he just walks behind us at four-fifths our speed. We don’t notice him until Lin looks back, remembering how cute he’d been.

“Aw, look,” she says.

“Aww.” I don’t turn for long at all; I know what’s there. Another block passes.

“Oh no!” says Lin. “Look.” There he is.

“That’s sad.” And it is, I think. This time I turn for longer, and there is nothing desperate about his face. He’s straight-eyed – curious, I think. He could just want to know if I’ll burn him a copy of my Weezer album. And I smile, because I haven’t thought about home like that for weeks.

Two blocks later, he’s running. We haven’t even sped up much. His shaggy black hair waves like streamers. Is he wearing shoes? I can’t tell. Can he keep track of where he’s coming from? Heck, I hope so, for his mom’s sake. From what I can see of his face, he’s not so determined to catch us. He’s just curious about us, that’s all. He could even be running to us because he’s bored. But Lin doesn’t think so.

“What do we do?”

“It’s up to you.” A sweet kid, I think, But well, we’re on a cyclo right now. Vietnamese dong doesn’t often come in coins, so I don’t have any cash to throw out to him unless I want to get into my paper money. And I don’t want to get into my paper money. I just want to find something beautiful about all of this neon and all of these dusty sidewalks. I want to think about the dogs acting like cats and about the kids looking like my brother. But now he’s only a couple of bike-lengths away. “I mean, I don’t know.”

“Well I feel bad.” She files through a shiny black purse.

“Yeah, me too.” I’m still looking back at him. The curious little kid isn’t running anymore; we’re stopped now. He walks around to the other side of the cyclo, to Lin, who gives him a Fun Pack of Oreos, and then he runs away faster than he ran to catch us. Lin smiles at me, rolls her eyes, and shrugs.

The kid was like a cat too, running like that. Probably just excited for the cookies.

HONG KONG (21-24 September)

(The hills of Guilin - maybe I'll figure out how to describe this excursion adequately when I have more time.)

Pigeon Flowers

“You should do Kowloon by yourself tomorrow,” Blakely tells me. “Intentionally, so you can’t be disappointed if people leave you behind.”

Maybe because our Bird’s Nest Egg Soup is so fruit-sweet, or because her librarian glasses lend professionalism to her prescription, I buy it. We’ve discussed loneliness for some time, I see, because Hong Kong Hot-Pot has emptied, the black-clad wait staff making themselves scarce. We leave only because it’s late; the rest of the conversation, conducted as we wind through Nathan Street, cuts out every third sentence.

My Alone Day begins at 7:15, with light rain advancing just in time for the holiday. Umbrella slung across my shoulder, I pace the three blocks of Hankow Road. Were I functionally illiterate and in New York, I might see the same road. At the corner bakery, whose name is in kanji characters, I spend $6 HKD on what I take to be a Coconut Tart, but scooping it into my mouth reveals it to be a mealy little Chicken Pot Pie. Tides of people rush all over the sidewalk, so I dance to keep afloat. In front of a closed seafood restaurant, a woman with short tufts of hair and holds out a Tupperware bowl with bony arms, and I presume that, like in New York, it means, “I need your money.” I drop in 50 Hong Kong Cents, which is almost nothing. After a block, I dance back to offer her the rest of my pie, but she shakes her head. Good call.



Just as I start to fear squandering all of Alone Day on this city business, I notice Kowloon Park. Across the street, beside a Mosque with a banner that reads, “Greetings of the Holy Month of Ramadan,” an archway atop a giant white staircase grins at me like an Indian tailor outside his shop, and bears English underneath the kanji bubble characters saying, “WELCOME TO KOWLOON PARK.” I don’t see a price on the sign, so in I go. Parks, after all, are ideal Alone places.
Down a dirt path, I pass the “Roof Garden,” as a white plaque declares it. Under the Roof Garden, beneath a wooden awning, a lot of brightly robed women kneel in circles. One I can’t pick out from the crowd sings a slow melody in gloomy Harmonic Minor. It’s a scene I’m sure I’ve watched on National Geographic, and seeing it in person doesn’t make me feel any more a part of it, as a reddish-haired boy dressed in black, trying not to take out his camera or hum along to what is obviously sacred.

To divert myself, I tread the slippery marble stairs to the Roof Garden. There, a man with slick hair and slacks squats by a bench feeding a hundred pigeons.

The pigeons are outnumbered by the breadcrumbs. They don’t fight, and as if to reward their civility, the man smashes up more bread. He smiles at me for a second. I stand on the third step taking inventory: there are several types of pigeons, like white-with-brown, gray-with-green, etc; one sparrow is hopping through them; after all of these birds, wooden benches and green trashcans lie evenly planted on the sidelines of the curvy brick path; there are willow trees, and grass of course, but no real garden – not unless pigeons count as a grimy, airborne flower. The singing continues below.



Once the man takes his umbrella and man-purse from the bench and drifts to the closest trashcan, I decide that I can step onto the path. The pigeons don’t seem to hear the Ramadan Song as I do; they just keep on grazing. I start to scribble this into my notepad but forget about my own umbrella, which swoops from my shoulders and scatters the pigeons a full curve-and-a-half from their pasture.

I’m not sure why I start to run from them – I almost feel like they’re another Hong Kong native, and I’m trying to reciprocate whatever gestures they make so that I at least look like I’m trying to fit in. When I realize what I’m doing, I’m halfway down the steps. The orange-robed woman by the staircase and her yellow-robed little daughter are staring at me. I can’t look back at them long enough to get whether they’re offended or befuddled by me, or both, but I do with them what I’ve done with the pigeons, which brings me back to the Roof Garden, now short of breath.

As soon as I reach the top, the slick-haired man smiles again. It’s not an Aren’t You Silly smile, or even an Everything’ll Be Fine smile. He just smiles, toothlessly only because I now see that he has no teeth, elephant eyes squinting a little, holding it only for a moment so that it isn’t too much, but long enough that I can smile back in time. He calls out something I don’t catch, and I chuckle and nod. As he leaves, I take his place on the bench, and the pigeons come back.

Alone Day has brought me no great epiphanies. I’ve thought up things to say to people I’ve missed lately, but only for the instants of quiet afforded me amidst Hong Kong din. This will be the day’s central ceremony – listening to the now-distant Ramadan, watching the pigeons not because I find them beautiful but because I know that pigeon-watching is a thing that a person can do when he’s alone in public. I look behind me through the slight afternoon rain at a faceless, dull gray apartment building, and think, “This is the holiest day in my religion.”

onboard KOBE to HONG KONG (17-20 September)

____________________________________________________________________

Speeding Away from Shan-Shan the Typhoon

I heard things plop to the ground, but I didn’t see them – I’m pretty sure everything in my cabin stayed in place, even though my roommate and I have stuck all manner of knickknacks from Japan to our walls. I had a bunch of music on my speakers, all new Japanese CD’s – Punk, J-Pop, one revved-up cover of “Train In Vain” by a band called Ultra Brain.

Laying in bed, reveling to the thrashes of Guitar Wolf, I felt something push against the wall then retreat, then push again. Of course I knew the ship was rocking – how could my inner ear forget? – but my first thought was sex. I thought, “My neighbor’s having sex and I’m right here feeling it. How will I look at her tomorrow morning? And why is it that everyone seems to have sex, but I’m always laying in bed listening to foreign pop?” But it probably had more to do with the rough sea after all.

I slept more or less like always. I even remembered a dream. In the dream, I was watching Snakes On A Plane. I was at the end part, where Samuel L. Jackson and Keenan from All That land the plane, and Samuel L. Jackson says, “Left! Turn this big motherfucker left, Troy!” And then I woke up, and my watch’s alarm was about to go off, so I shut it and got up. I felt like saying, “Alright already” out loud so that Morning could hear me, but my roommate was still around, and that would have been awkward.

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Oregon Trail -- "Did anyone get Dynasty yet?"