A Theme Park for Writers

Come in, come in. Sit down. Thank you for coming.

Thank you for having me. What can I do for you?

Well, I've been thinking for a while now that what this planet really needs is a theme park for writers. And you're going to make that happen for me.

I'm ... not sure I understand. You mean, like a Hall of Fame that showcases history's best writers? Or do you mean a building where people can do serious work as writers themselves? Because I think both of those things already exist. So which one did you mean?

Neither. What we need is a place -- a whole, sprawling place -- where people can go, and live, and write.

Like a writers' colony. Don't those exist already too?

Yes. But they're too exclusive, and too expensive, and they don't have restaurants.

The ones in big cities do.

Sure, but they're still expensive and highly competitive and they still limit a person's choices for how, and where, and when to work. We need a place where writers can go and just ....

Let it fly?

Exactly. We need a place where writers can go and just let it fly. They have to feel like their time is completely autonomous. When they get up, they get up. When they want to write, they write. When they want to do something else, they can do that too. When they want to go to bed, they go to bed. And then the next day they can get up and do it all over again.

So this can't be a single building, or even a complex of buildings, but an entire locale that makes a person feel like his or her writing is the primary use of time. A sort of gigantic, open-air library. Doesn't a close friend of yours have a cabin way up in the woods -- someplace like Appalachian Tennessee, wasn't it?

North Carolina. But that won't work as a staple destination for a couple of pretty good reasons.

Such as?

Well, to begin with there's really no easy access to anything more cosmopolitan. That's kind of the whole point up there: you can write all day long, or go for long walks up and down the twisting gravel road, and anything else will take the best part of an hour. And since the restaurants in the area all stop serving at eight o'clock, that means a lot of self-catered dinners, or early nights.

Okay, I get it. So this place has to be a city. And it has to feel like a cosmopolitan destination and not just any old city. It has to feel smart. Like ... this.

Yes.

But a minute ago you said a "couple of reasons." Is there another?

Yes. I'm banned from going back to that friend's place in North Carolina because I'm a klutz and I keep breaking everything up there.

Ah. So you need a place that's in bad-enough shape, and/or offered anonymously, so that you can't fuck it up.

But it also needs to be okay with itself.

Ah, pre-broken but comfortable. Sort of like this.

Exactly.

Okay, so what about a city somewhere else in the Appalachians? Something like Morgantown, West Virginia? Talk about "pre-broken but comfortable with itself," am I right?

Not cosmopolitan enough. There have to be museums, and well-appointed libraries, and readings to go to, and those things have to feel like central aspects of being there.

Madison, Wisconsin?

Not big enough. Good scene as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far.

Well some of the most famous writers in the world come from the big Southern cities, like New Orleans. 

No, the place in question has to have shitty weather.

Um... and why exactly does the place in question have to have shitty weather?

To ensure productivity. Some people can write when it's sunny and seventy-nine degrees (or a hundred), but not everyone can. Some of us need a crappy day to go with our latte and our window-side seat, in order to do our best work.

Okay, so something more like ... this?

Yep.

Well it sounds to me like you're talking about the Upper East Side. The museum scene is ubiquitous, the restaurants are literally world-class, and there isn't a single thing -- not even a light fixture -- that isn't dirty and broken already, so your klutziness would disappear into the background noise.

No, New York isn't exotic enough.

Wait: you didn't say anything about that.

Okay, so I'm saying it now. This place, wherever it is, needs to feel alien enough that it resonates as a true experience. It can't be New York and it can't be Boston, which often gets suggested too. You know, the more I think about it, the place we're looking for really has to be in a foreign country.

Why? There are plenty of places outside the United States that feel less cosmopolitan, exotic, and alienating than New York or Boston. I mean. Duisburg Germany is less cosmopolitan, exotic and alienating than Dayton Ohio. Are you sure you're being honest with yourself about all of this?

No, of course not. But meting out different-colored money is something a person earns and deserves in his life once in a while. Besides which, if we're talking about a cosmopolitan experience, and at least part of the motivation is for the sake of its strangeness, there's no reason to think New York or Boston won't eventually feel a little ... too ... familiar. Remember, I grew up not far from both of them.

Okay, I'm getting it. So the place has to *feel* like it's a major departure from the familiar. Something like ... this?

Yes.

Okay, then how about London? The reading room at the British Museum is about as close to a Sun Records Studio for writers as a person is likely to find. You could even stay at that lovely little bed and breakfast just down the street on Gower that you liked so much.

Well ....

What is it now?

The thing is, some writers have really, *really* bad ADHD.

Most of them, if it comes to that. But what's your point?

Well, if we're going to designate an entire city as a writers' destination, wouldn't it make sense for the other people there to speak a different language, other than English?

Wait--what? I didn't follow that.

Well, if the residents of the city speak English, they'll form a natural ceiling on one's ability to concentrate on his own language arts. They'll be sitting at the next table of the restaurant, speaking the same language as the characters in his book.

And there's no way to just ... gosh, tune them out?

Not for some of us.

You mean to tell me that in all your forty-six years of life, you've been quietly suffering from the intrusion-of-privacy that comes from not being able to tune-out the conversations at the next tables of restaurants?

Sometimes not so quietly. But yes. That's exactly what I'm saying.

Okay, this is getting weird, but I think it's also coming into focus. We're looking for a city, not a cabin in the woods, and the city we come up with has to offer a dingy, already-broken milieu, in a foreign country, where there's no way for the day-to-day humdrum to intrude because it's in the wrong language. Something like ... this?  

Yes, that's getting into the swing of the kind of city we're looking for. But it also has to have a good public transit system.

Um ... why?

So I can ride it.

And what would be the point of that?

Well, to begin with it would reinforce the sense of being in a cosmopolitan space. It would create an atmosphere of routine, but a routine that was also totally autonomous. I mean, there I'd be, with my little sack lunch ....

I can see it now: you being all writerly, while everyone else was just drudging back and forth to work. Won't you be just cute enough to kiss with your I-don't-have-to-go-to-work, all up in everybody's face on the public transit system. Oh, and you'll go everywhere right at rush hour, of course.

Yes.

So we need a city with something like ... this.

Yup.

Okay, what about Panama City? Doesn't your same friend with the place in North Carolina also have property in Panama? You also have a business partner there, if I recall.

Yes. But neither of those two are in Panama City, and the weather isn't nearly bad enough down there.

Oh, right; I forgot about that part. So, okay, what about Paris? I mean, Paris has got to be the perfect place for checking-off all of these criteria.

Well ....

What now?

Paris is really tough to get to. And expensive. And crowded. And most of the people who go there are intending to do much more active things in much the same way as with New York.

It sounds to me like what we're looking for is a big city with a shitty reputation as far as tourist draws are concerned, but not very expensive and not very difficult, and with a really good underside that visitors wouldn't necessarily know about. Particularly when it comes to fine, affordable meals like ... this.

Yes, that's what we're looking for. In a foreign country.

With writerly weather.

But where English isn't the primary language, yes.  

And with a handful of unusually outstanding venues in which to write. Like this. 

Yes.

Wow. This is going to be really tough. 

That's why I called you in here.

Well ... Asuncion is cheap. And they have a bus system. And restaurants. And bad weather.

Where is Asuncion?

It's the capital of Paraguay. 

Oh, yes. I remember hearing about it once or twice. And writers go there, do they?

Nobody goes there, asshole; I thought that was the whole point.

Well ....

What.

Well ....

You're afraid of Asuncion, aren't you.

... Yes. I am.

Oh my God in heaven; are you kidding me? So let me just see if I've got this straight: You want a writerly city, with bad weather, that's cheap and foreign and easy to get to, and alien enough to be a fresh substrate on which to create -- but not *so* alien that anything bad could possibly happen to you in a hundred years of walking around the sidewalks after dark with your hands in your pockets like the giant, cashew-headed goober you are. Like ... this.

Yes, exactly. Just like that.

You want five-star restaurants where you can order in English and pay a laughable pittance when they bring the check, but you don't want to hear English at the next table. You want a safe, efficient mass-transit system, and you want the money to be funny looking. And if anything bad *does* happen, you want to be able to scurry home on a direct flight with your tail tucked between your stubby little muppet legs. Did I miss anything?

No. That's about it.

Well that's a relief. For a minute there I thought you were going to make this tough.

So do you have any place in mind?

I ... might.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...

The Key Grip Completes His First "Real" Film

 

(Click the little "picture frame" icon in the lower-right corner of the view window to expand to full-size. Or follow this link to view the movie directly in youtube.)

A link to the associated Kickstarter campaign will follow as soon as the campaign itself goes live.

Cheers.

Dave O'Gorman

("The Key Grip")

Gainesville, Florida.

Click Here to Read More...

Travel Postcard: North Carolina (PART ONE)

"You're banned from going back there, do you understand me?" said a thick, British-accented voice into my telephone--a voice belonging to my long-suffering friend and colleague Harry, an accounting teacher at the college where I myself teach economics. It was the middle summer of last year.

"Yes," I said.

"--No, you don't," said Harry. "I mean it: You're banned. You'll never go back there again."

"Yes," I repeated.

"--You've consistently abused this privilege, and now you've done it for the last time. You're banned. From now on. Forever."

"I understand," I said.

"NO, DAVID, YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND," said Harry. "You *act* like you understand; you're *saying* that you understand; but you're only saying you understand because that's what a person says when someone he's just *royally* pissed off, possibly for good, tells him something, in the imperative tense, and then says 'Do you understand'!"

He took a breath.

"I'm telling you you're banned from going to my place in North Carolina, FOREVER. Do, you, understand?"

I paused. I clasped the edge of the table gently and shut my eyes. "Yes," I said.

There was hardly any point in standing up for myself with one of my closest friends this agitated and calling through a gravely I/P line all the way from Panama. I wasn't happy about being banned from visiting his place in North Carolina -- a mountainside pond with a lazy gravel loop-road and a pair of engagingly different-feeling structures cut into the hill above it, one a big comfortable house, the other a rustic little cabin -- but at that moment my chief concern was the possibility that, if I couldn't calm him down somehow, my friend might actually have a heart attack. Anyone who knows me even a little will tell you that, if ever there were a human being capable of transcending the generally euphemistic expression, "You're going to give me a heart attack," it is I -- and for his part Harry's prideful lack of exercise and his lifelong predilection for beer had left him unusually primed for just such a reaction.

But still it seemed unfair that the two of us would've slid this far down the rabbit-hole of anger and helplessness over something as trivial as a little run-of-the-mill pornography.

For some years before, as Harry took his hard-won summers off from teaching to remove himself to an equally fetching place in Panama, the two of us had enjoyed an understanding by which I would be permitted unlimited access to the North Carolina place whenever it wasn't otherwise rented, in return for serving as the property's de facto superintendent. I would string-trim the steep hillsides and cut the fallen limbs across the loop-road and make sure the plumbing was working properly and clear the submerged opening of the clever little PVC spillway he'd constructed for the dam, and in return I could stay there whenever and for however long I wished, provided nobody with money was in line ahead of me.

To this point it had all worked very well. I've often told my students that the best way to own a boat is to know someone else who owns a boat, and this improvised little saw only gets truer when the boat in question is four acres of taxed-out-of-sight clay and rocks with bad perk and a fractious, spring-fed water supply. In the fistful of years since we'd been granted the entire summer's reprieve from teaching, I'd been to the place perhaps a dozen times, to his two. I'd installed a new water hydrant when the old one had cracked from freezing, and I'd cut and removed a small tree that had fallen across the road. I'd written several bad chapters of a bad book, and almost gotten myself killed in a sudden thunderstorm on a high ridge-line between Deep Creek Campground and Clingman's Dome. I'd cooked some scandalously good steaks over a simple campfire, and downed an immodest quantity of beer. I'd slept inside with the windows all thrown wide open, outside on the deck, and down the hill in a tent. I'd even taken to referring to the place, with a certain class of non-mutual friends of ours, as "My place in North Carolina."

...This last bit surely was my big mistake.

Last summer, at the height of the mountaintop vacation season, I brought some friends up to share the experience with me. This much was harmless enough -- provided, that is, that the friends in question could be persuaded to dispense with the Eternal Struggle For Chopping Dave Down To Size long enough to heed my impassioned pleas that we must leave the entire place "hotel-room clean" when we left. Harry had already explained to me over his skype-phone that a veritable rabble of paying customers were arriving immediately after our departure to stay in the main house, where my friends were.

I relayed the significance of this news in several different grave and leaden language-choices to my friends, both before we left home and after we got there. And the friends in question reacted in that very particular festival of ways that have become a permanent feature of all my friendships: aggrieved ascent, followed by grinning, not-quite-sarcastic eye-roll at my charming insistence on taking myself too seriously, followed by a series of join-ins to help me finish the sentence in unison ("--HOTEL-ROOM CLEAN, DAVE"), followed by all other persons involved conspicuously making it a point of not actually doing whatever it is that I've said so grimly is so important to me so many times, just to prove once again who's really in charge, here.

At eleven-thirty AM on the day of our adjournment to an eight-hour drive back to Gainesville, Florida, there had been a grand-total of zero effort undertaken to leave the main house, where my friends had been staying, hotel-room clean. A dishwashing cycle was absently started at 11:45. The first of two unavoidable loads of laundry were distractedly initiated at 11:50. Floors were still to be swept. The fold-out bed was still folded-out. The television was on.

For a long interval of silence I was too apoplectic to think through exactly how big and complicated the dilemma was, here. I had asked these friends of mine to please, please, just this once, take me seriously, and do this thing, this one thing, this only thing, the one and only thing I'd made it a point to specify over dinner last night and in the car the day before and at lunch the day before, that I need you to do for me, please. And they hadn't done it. As, per, fucking, usual. ...That was all I had for it, at that moment.

And then, gradually, a specific and tricky little wrinkle began leaking into my consciousness, and the farther inward it leaked, the more difficult a problem to solve, it seemed: Having stalled on the hotel-room-clean bit for so long, my friends had implicitly guaranteed that, after cleaning the house together, we would also be together at the trunk of the car when the time came to do the packing. I had anticipated that I'd quietly load my own belongings from the cabin while the cleaning rituals were transpiring inside the house -- thus permitting me to surreptitiously bury at the front of the trunk a moderately sized ziploc storage bag of pornography, much of it visible and instantly identifiable through the translucent-blue sidewalls of the bag, as though watching a dirty movie through one side of a pair of 3-D glasses.

Since I couldn't now pack in the absence of my friends' attentions, I couldn't now pack the porn at all. I'd have to hide it. Correction: I'd have to hide it well enough that the incoming customers of the place would have no chance of finding it. Fortunately this would be a straightforward proposition of re-stowing it someplace inside the cabin -- since the incoming party wasn't going to be using the cabin.

Thus it was, in mild but increasingly simmering consternation at the whole stolen-power-chops-Dave-down-to-size business -- as, per, fucking, usual -- that I pulled out one of the drawers in the cabin's bookcase bed, placed the ziploc bag in the bottom of the drawer, covered the bag with my own dirty laundry until the drawer was level to the top with obviously unwashed clothes, and then carefully rearranged the accent furniture in the bedroom, in such a way that this particular drawer couldn't even be opened without moving a moderately heavy end-table and the moderately heavy vase of flowers set on top of it. Then I went to the main house and did all the things I'd said a dozen times it was so important for us all to do. Then we left.

About eleven-thirty that evening when we got home, my message-light was blinking. It was Harry, asking me to call him back on his skype line, so I did. "Just want to let you know, David," he said calmly, almost absently, "that my friends will be staying in the house and cabin a little longer than they'd previously arranged, so you'll have to stay away from the place up there for an extra weekend."

Wait. What? The house and the cabin? The friends were staying in the house, and the cabin? I took a long, steadying breath. "Your friends are staying in the house, and the cabin?" I said, finally.

"Oh yes," said Harry. "Far too many of them for just the house. But it's okay if you didn't get the cabin all the way to hotel-room clean when you were up there just now, because they're going to use the cabin for housing all the kids."

My heart did a little soft-shoe on my small intestines. And if you're thinking that it doesn't belong anywhere near my small intestines, well, you're right: It doesn't. "When are they all due to get there?" I finally managed, barely above a whisper.

"Tuesday evening," said Harry. Two days' time. Forty-some hours.

"I'm going to have to call you back," I said.

"Everything okay up there?" said Harry.

"Yes," I lied, "I just have to call you back. Tomorrow morning okay?"

We agreed that I would call him back in the morning. Frantically I tried to think, but it was in that rootless, bugs-beneath-an-upturned-log kind of way that never actually gets a person anywhere. I could drive all the way up there, in the middle of the night, and all the way back the next morning -- risking an accident or a major breakdown. And anyway there was a key that I was supposed to hand-deliver to a go-between, and I couldn't very well do that if I were on the highway someplace north of Atlanta.

I could ask the daughter of a friend-of-a-friend to go over to the cabin from her place in nearby Bryson City and... well, wait a minute, that's not going to work on any number of levels, now, is it.

Or I could risk it: I could hope against hope that I'd done a good-enough job of hiding the porn, that even a cabin full of fractious young boys wouldn't root around in the drawers beneath that bed, and find it. Which seemed awfully unlikely, at that moment.

The only thing left for it was to come clean. I would tell Harry exactly what had happened, and then I'd ask him if he wanted me to go up there and get the porn, or if he wanted instead to warn the family that their impressionable young children might be about to stumble upon the mother-lode of bad influences. Stealing myself, I called him back, reaching only his skype voice-mail. "Harry," I said in my message. "I'm going to need to keep the key, and hide it up there someplace. Please call me back," I said. "It's important."

I put the phone down. I panted. I thought. Someone would have to feed my cats. It'd be a very long, very ugly drive up there, and an even longer and uglier drive back. What else could I do?

At once it hit me: Another set of friends, Randy and Kana -- a husband-and-wife team of traveling artists with whom I'd shared many embarrassed and apologetic favors over the years -- were at that moment driving back to Gainesville from Pittsburgh. If I could reach them from the road, give them intelligible directions over the phone, and if they could find their way into the cabin using the backup key that was tricky to find and even trickier to use, I could offer them the chance to overnight up there in return for doing me this biggest of embarrassed and apologetic favors.

I called. My friend Randy answered. I explained to him the whole thing. "Let me get this straight," said Randy, not yet openly cackling. "You hid the porn beneath a drawer full of dirty laundry?"

"Yes," I said.

"--And then you moved the end-table and the flower vase so that the drawer can't be opened?"

"Yes," I repeated.

"--And now you want someone to break into the place and take it out, because you still think someone's going to find it?"

"Yes," I said a third time.

There was a moment's pause while the amusement of the situation washed over my friend like an unexpected shaft of sunlight on a grey day at the beach. "You are totally, certifiably insane," he said, finally.

"No, Randy, don't tell him that," said Kana in the background. "Tell him we'll go, and then when we get there we can leave out a bunch more porn on the coffee tables and the countertops where everyone can find it!"

"Wish I'd thought of that," said Randy. "Look," he continued, "just calm down, David. You always do this. You decide certain things are going to happen, then you get yourself all carried away with these huge, long chains of consequences that are all going on inside your head."

"I guess you're right," I said.

"--And you're always way better-off just not taking any action at all," he continued. "Just stay put and everything will be fine." He paused. I heard the highway noise beneath the van. I allowed myself a small exhale. "I mean, for God's sake, David, you've hidden that porn where an FBI SWAT-team couldn't find it."

"Okay," I said and, thanking him sincerely, hung up. It was a wonderful thing, really: For that brief moment I was awash in the same shaft of unexpected sunlight he was. I'd messed up. I'd shown exceedingly poor judgment. But now everything was going to be fine, anyway. I allowed another exhale, this one somewhat less modest. Everything was going to be fine. So it was kind of too bad, really, that at that precise moment Harry returned my previous phone-call.

"What have you done," he said, coolly.

"Well," I said, stammering just a bit with this second sudden reversal. "Okay. I'm going to be completely honest with you about this," I said, "but I've spoken to someone else about it, and he thinks it's going to be okay."

"What have you done," said Harry.

"It's not a huge deal," I said. At once I realized that I didn't quite know how to continue. Verbal articulacy is a two-edged sword for me and always has been: I can say things on the spur of the moment that would come across as too leaden and too stentorian for a PBS documentary, but I can't always actually make myself understood very well, especially on-the-fly. It is for this reason, I suppose, that I've gravitated toward professional teaching. Works kind of the same way that all navymen in the world don't know how to swim. Or at least that's what I tell myself.

"It's just that," I continued, haltingly, "I didn't think your patrons were going to use the cabin, as well as the house, and so I left something in the cabin that could cause both you and I some considerable trouble if it were found."

And with that, my dear and cherished friend of a dozen years, went off in my ear like a small atomic bomb. "ARE YOU INSANE?" he bellowed. "HAVE YOU ANY COMMON SENSE AT ALL?" he screamed. I shut my eyes, wincing a little with each staccato syllable of invective. He was loud. He was profane. He was completely unhinged. It was then that I received my ban.

"Harry, I'm truly sorry," I said. And I was. "I'll make it up to you. I'll drive up there and get it."

"You're damn right you will," said Harry. He collected himself, slightly. "I swear, David, you truly are a galling little twit," he said, his British accent now thick with satisfaction and resolve. "You would have me risk losing that entire property to seizure, just so your friends don't have to watch you load your nasty habits in your car?"

Wait. What?

"Lose your entire property?" I said. "Harry, did you think I meant to say that I left drugs up there?"

"Well, I dunno, David: Isn't that what you JUST, BLOODY, TOLD ME?" said Harry.

"No," I said. "Or at least it's not what I meant," I said. There was a silence between us on the phone. Harry sounded quiet, pensive, ready for anything but calmer, now. "Harry," I began again, tentatively, "when I said I'd left something up there, and it could get us both in trouble, I meant with your patrons--not with the law."

"Oh, Jesus, David, are you talking about pornography?" said Harry.

I allowed that I was.

"Good God, David, why ever didn't you say so in the first place? I think everyone should see more pornography. What else has been going on up there; do we know if we're getting a raise this year? When's convocation?"

We spoke for another ten or fifteen minutes, completely amicably. He never formally retracted his ban, and I never formally asked him to. When the time came for me to retrieve the cabin-key, I drove to the appointed spot and it was there. We've never spoken about this whole thing again, since. I'm sure where he's concerned it would be completely un-necessary. Randy had been right, in the end, as he nearly always is (except when it comes to calculating the jet-lag between here and Tokyo, but that's another column). On this day, he'd been as right as I could ever have wanted him not to be, about anything including how to calculate the jet-lag between here and Tokyo. I'd undertaken a series of radiantly bad decisions, amplified at each turn by a self-perpetuating cycle of ginned-up anxiety until even the most obvious aspects of the thing were as invisible to me as a Klingon warship. I'd acted stupidly, childishly, rashly, and then stupidly again -- and in the end, I'd needlessly jeopardized the sanctity of one of the dearest and most important friendships I have. And all of it for no particularly good reason.

As, per, fucking, usual.




***TO BE CONTINUED***



Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...

Afternoon Coffee, Cambodian Style

I’d been traveling in Cambodia for six days, Phnom Penh for two, when first the absence of any proper caffeine infusion truly came home to roost—in the form of a whanging headache. A hot morning had given way to a hot afternoon, and lunch had been predictably devoid of sugar or other recognizable stimulants. I suppose it’s one of the great clichés of developing world travel, but it bears repeating anyway: You don’t know how much you depend on such things as coffee, until they’re suddenly very hard to come by.

I had in my company a “guide”—a sort of hired valet that a western traveler in Cambodia ends up with before properly asking for him—named DaVann, whose job was ostensibly to determine what it was that I wanted or required, and make it happen. In reality most Cambodian guides spend most of their time pitching a series of practiced itineraries through the most frequently visited stations on the local tourist circuit, among them the Toul Sleng (“S21”) interrogation facility, the killing fields of Cheoung Ek and, perhaps somewhat improbably, a pay-to-play firing range where, for the modest sum of $300, the interested westerner may blow up a live, full-grown cow by means of rocket-propelled grenade. Not much of this was going to happen, this day, with this head—and some of it wasn’t going to happen at all. “Where we go now?” said DaVann, a toothy grin pasted on the back of the question as he leaned across the table to chuck me on the shoulder.

"Coffee," I said. "Please," I added. "Hurry."

Now, if recognizing the preciousness of certain taken-for-granted daily amenities is the first cliché of developing-world travel, then surely the juxtaposition of things too hard to come by, against things too easy, is the second. In Ban Lung—a dusty town of barely a thousand people in the remote northeastern jungles of this war-ravaged country—it is possible to book same-day travel on not one but two different airlines, to and from the capital, for fifty bucks, but it isn’t possible to get a hotel room with a working air conditioner. On the island of Ko Chang, in the Gulf of Thailand, it’s possible to buy pizza, rent movies, obtain a cash advance from a credit card, make a satellite telephone call, and have six stitches sewn into one’s arm after crashing one's rented motor-scooter, but it isn't not possible to have laundry returned at the end of the day that isn’t wringing wet. Under the circumstances I might have been forgiven for thinking coffee a tall order—given that I’d been offered none since crossing into the country. But for DaVann, this was the easiest command he’d been given in a good while.

“Okay!” he literally shouted, thumping the table as he rose—and just like that, trailing a festival of dust and un-muffled motorbike exhaust, he shuttled me off—down one of the town’s countless unpaved side streets, and straight to the front door of a dingy and half-lit storefront about a dozen blocks to the seedier side of town. As we idled up, DaVann described the place in exactly this way, saying, “Okay! We stop at Vietnamese coffee shop, okay!”

“You speak Vietnamese?” I asked, climbing off the bike.

“Enough,” said DaVann, winking.

“They speak Khmer?”

DaVann grinned at me—not as meanly as I might have thought. “Not much,” he said.

Having been rent repeatedly and tragically by wars, first brought upon it by outsiders and then of its own internal and vastly more gruesomely efficient designes, afterward, Cambodia is these days essentially a colony of Vietnam. In December of 1978 it was invaded by the nascent military power in the region, officially for the purposes of ending a series of opportunistic border incursions but really for the purposes of ending the rump genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge. As with most such supposedly noble military campaigns, however, matters got significantly more complicated when Pol Pot and his followers quit the capital city in March of ’79 and melted into the jungle:

The Vietnamese, following the playbook of their Soviet benefactors, simply didn’t leave. Today one out of every seven residents of Cambodia is actually Vietnamese, not just in terms of ethnicity but in the sense of holding Vietnamese citizenship and caring not a whiff for Cambodian immigration policies. Over half of the businesses in Cambodia are owned by Vietnamese. One, single Vietnamese woman owns twenty-five percent of the real estate of the entire country. The Prime Minister, Hun Sen, carries a Vietnamese passport, and his ruling party, the “Cambodian People’s Party” or just “CPP” is staffed at its highest levels entirely by Vietnamese civil servants, many of whom go “home” to Vietnam on weekends. It wouldn’t be surprising that tensions sometimes run high between the two groups—and that I might therefore have thought twice about being driven by a Khmer guide to a Vietnamese shop. Never mind: Coffee had been promised when we got there.

In the event, no one at the shop paid us the tiniest heed—in fact I eventually had to walk to the counter to place our order, though by all accounts, this was business-as-usual. DaVann assured me that Khmer patronize businesses owned by Vietnamese every day. So, we did just that: the two of us idly sipping our coffees, not really paying much attention to anything, including each other, for some time. Personally, I was enjoying the shop television, which at that moment was showing “Die Hard 3: Die Hard With a Vengeance,”—this particular copy having been dubbed into Khmer and then subtitled, absurdly, back into English.

I was particularly taken with the way the reverse-translators were handling the delicate subject of all the adult language in the picture. During a tense moment in the first reel, when Bruce Willis said to Samuel L. Jackson, “No, I wasn't going to call you a N———, I was going to call you an asshole,” the English subtitles in our local copy of the film reported the line as, You know, I was just thinking that you aren't a very nice person. This was such great fun that I might have been content to sit there and watch the rest of the picture, but for the strange sounds I kept hearing outside on the patio. Throughout my first and second cups of authentic Vietnamese brew, whenever the explosions and translated expletives of the movie abated long enough to permit it, I continually noted the voice of a young, attractive-sounding female, calling out similar-sounding phrases in an obvious, telegraphed sing-song. To wit:

“bee - YONN - bee - HIGH!”

(pause)

“bonn - bee - SOTT!”

(pause)

“TONE - bee - HIGH!”

(pause)

…And so on. After about twenty minutes of this—just as arch-villain Jeremy Irons’ character was quoted saying, I have always respected your elders, but today you shame them with your dishonesty—I leaned over to DaVann, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “what the heck is that?”

“What the heck is what?” he said, earnestly. “The movie? Isn't it American?”

“Yes, yes,” I said, shaking my head, “the movie is American, and—may I say—it’s plenty terrible enough without you guys helping to make it worse. What I meant was, what the heck is that lady yelling about?”

Consider my surprise when it turned out that she, and about a dozen other people, turned out to be playing a Vietnamese gambling game so arrestingly similar to bingo that I see no reason to refer to it by its local name. The cards, the funny little wood discs with numbers painted on them, the money piled in the middle of the table—it was as immediately recognizable as bingo could ever hope to be, when stripped of the bulky highlighters and the mashed-potato smog of a thousand forlorn cigarettes. It had come to this, apparently: I'd spent close to twenty-four hours locked inside of aluminum tubes the size of a guest bathroom, and here I was sitting in Whapeton, North Dakota. These people were playing bingo.

It goes without saying that we split the cost of a card. And we won—on the very first play, we won. The woman calling the numbers lifted the ashtray and handed us the enormous pile of money underneath, beaming at us as DaVann slowly and methodically divvied up the loot. We won, we won—well, we won about a dollar a piece, actually, but it surely felt like a lot of cabbage when dispensed in the form of quasi-worthless Khmer currency, fresh from a community kitty that hadn’t been ours a moment or two earlier.

I tucked my half of the booty in my pocket and called it quits—watching with mild discomfort as DaVann played his share down the toilet, one fifty-riel note at a time. After watching about a dozen games, sneaking peaks at the crazy movie translations from time-to-time, the shop proprietor suggested that I draw the numbers. Now, I don't speak Khmer and I don't speak Vietnamese. I don't speak French, either, but that hasn't stopped me from thinking that I speak French, so we agreed that this would be the language I'd use to call the numbers.

The two of us were lucky to get away with our lives.

See, the problem is, the stakes are pretty high to these folks—fifty riel may be barely more than a cent to a westerner on holiday, but to the typical person in Cambodia, it's like a five dollar bill, proportionately speaking. You put some oafish American klutz who claims to speak French in charge of calling the numbers, he calls even one of them incorrectly—and you don't get your money. Tends to piss a person off. And frankly, you would be amazed how easy it is to confuse swah-sont seesse (66), with swah-sont sez (76), when placed under that kind of pressure. I was amazed by this fact twice.

Once we were a safe distance away from the angry mob chasing us, we settled back down at our established favorite haunt for dinner. Two days in the city, and already I was a regular. Indeed, DaVann, the waitress and I were chatting idly—as old friends—when a campaign van pulled up, its bullhorn booming out the garbled election promises of the CPP. This was the summer of 2003, and the country was at the time deeply distracted with the earnest and important work of putting itself through the sham of a rigged election. We watched in muted fascination as scores of young volunteers in matching T-shirts disgorged from the back, then watched with something not unlike astonishment as the youths fanned out in a quietly disciplined and ominously efficient manner to wallpaper the neighborhood with leaflets. One of the canvassers, a twenty-something female with a degreed-looking way about her, pranced over to our table and tried to hand me a brochure.

Managing a polite smile I waved my hand at her as she approached, saying, “I'm not Khmer citizen.”

“It's okay,” she said, smiling, “you can vote anyway.” She said this without a whiff of humor or irony. You can vote anyway.

“But I won't be here,” I said, wondering how a ballot from an American on vacation would be counted in such matters—and not certain I wanted to know the answer.

“Still okay,” she said, by this time sitting in the chair next to me and grinning. “You take absentee ballot to America, you mail back, we count vote.”

“But I don't know anything about Khmer politics,” I said, thinking this the decisive resolution of the matter. The girl's smile only got wider.

“Neither does anyone else,” she said.

I took the leaflet.

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Travel Reflections: Sarajevo

My innkeeper, Faraz, rubs an afternoon nap from his eyes as I apologize a second time for bothering him. He is of the best tradition in such things, not really an innkeeper at all—at least not a modestly paid desk clerk who can’t be trusted to know of which he speaks—but rather the eldest son of a man fortunate enough to own a home with a long row of bedrooms down a chilly hallway with a toilet and a basin at its end. He owns his advice to me as he owns his city: implicitly, unthinkingly, dispensing his thoughts across a threshold leading rearward to a strange-scented and chaotic living quarters, having opened the door just enough to lean through it in his sock feet. The pause he enters into when I ask him where I should have dinner is oblique, pointed away from me and at the floor—at once earnest with intent and casually offered, as though no one else had asked this question of him before.

Ten minutes later through a chilly nightfall across streets of gently sifting snow, I am at the eastern end of the central city, the Bascarsija, where Ottomans and Europeans once haggled over the staples of greed and power, and where today the scars of a fresher and bloodier form of haggling have been plastered over like stubborn memories: bullet holes and mortar craters primed and painted and left to show, as if what happened here could be displaced from one’s mind as easily as a passing windstorm in the American Midwest. That’s where we found Betty Johnson’s mailbox the next morning; this over here is where the Nesic family was blown to pieces in their beds by a rocket-propelled grenade.

At the time of the Bosnian independence declaration in 1991, more than a million people lived here—the Bosniaks—nestled together in a long, oval-shaped valley surrounded by the cupped hillsides of the Bosnian Serbs. Within weeks of the declaration the Serbs had effectively seceded from the secession; for three nightmarish years they hurled mortars and grenades down onto the streets of this once grand and prideful city from a range too near to miss. Tonight the few straggling shoppers with whom I share the pedestrian street seem not to notice the scarred facades—but this, I realize all at once, serves only to heighten the pathos. They don’t notice the bomb craters and the bullet holes because they’re used to it all, and just how could that be possible?

I am at the “wrong” end of the city, perhaps an hour’s walk from the Opera hall with scarcely twice that time at my disposal. At last I have found the restaurant: narrow, half lit, a soot-blackened front casting its shadows across my expectations. No, wait, the door is open, the air thick and comforting and warm. A young man beckons me through the entryway, and again I find myself presuming the company of a proprietor’s son—but how could I know? Is it simply his manner, there before me in his spattered apron: part over-eager sideshow huckster, part mafia-quiet surety of his circumstance? Do I disgrace him with the impudence of such ideas, or venerate him for their inherent tinge of envy? If either is apparent he betrays no sign as he leads me up the fractious pinewood stairs, past the scarred whitewash and muted steel of the kitchen and through a notch in the ceiling no bigger than an attic-hole, to the shoebox diorama that is his upstairs dining space: six tables long, one table wide, low-ceilinged, low-lit, empty.

It would take more than idle speculation to pique the young man’s temper, of this I have no doubt as I take my seat and requisition my beer. He has earned his mafia-quiet surety (if not his sideshow hucksterism) by the simple fact of his survival. I pour the beer slowly when it arrives; there is little room for fractious impatience in a place that has seen such stoicism, little room for inflexibility, little room for pettiness, here. And at last it is this, the true drama that I am so fortunate to have been spared in my so often comically melodramatic life, that brings me short: It could’ve been this way on so many other occasions, but wasn’t—absent the ghastly history of a place where people had, and continue to have, genuine problems. It could’ve been this way a thousand times; it could’ve been this way with parents; it could’ve been this way with bosses and professors; it could’ve been this way with friends.

It could’ve been this way with Rachel.

It could have been, she could have authored, a chapter in my life when nothing much mattered that was past or future: acceptance without pity, affection without context, a companionship without label, purpose or agenda. I could’ve ridden carelessly in the fickle currents of her interest, could’ve spent the rest of my entire life savoring our first, my first, the gray-green light of the bedroom, the curiously specific way that her expression had opened to me, just before her body—how it had seemed to me the way it might have seemed to lie down before God, blinking and mesmerized, beholden and terrified. I could’ve been grateful for that alone, instead of insisting that it mean anything, after.

The darkness outside the window is surprisingly opaque. Wood smoke trails up the stairs after me, suffusing the alcove. There are today about 700,000 people in Sarajevo, though the ramshackle trams and dreary hillscapes afford as much proof as the pock-marked facades downtown that this will never be a place of international communion again, never again a crossroads—never again host an Olympics. Sarajevo is a city whose back has been broken. Still its people carry on. They run restaurants. They answer the doors at guesthouses. They cope.

In a way it’s fitting that I should find myself cloistered this evening in a bistro such as this, its unselfconscious mishmash of checked tablecloths and Ottoman artwork and sad little Hapsburg-era flourishes in the architecture, pondering the destinies of my ambitious young applicants. It is fitting since, despite a coddled bourgeois existence in a country always so far from war (even war of its own doing), it is my own destiny that has seemed so often to elude my shrewdest efforts at direction. There are so many self-contained vignettes from a brusque and testy past, that should in recollection look just like this one—when I should have sensed the gift of spontaneity, the joy of missing some event across town. How much more rewarding, how much more textured could the archive of my past now be?

It could have been this way with Gerry.

There could have been joy in every cranky phone call, a treasured poignancy in every exasperating argument. In Ames, when he picked fights over matters neither of us could possibly have cared about for longer than the classroom lecture that had incited them, I could’ve nodded in his direction and chucked him on the shoulder and savored the very fact of his continued presence in my life. Later, when he began calling me socially, it could’ve struck me as the most natural thing in the world, instead of taking me repeated explanations to accept. In Las Vegas, when he first suggested that things might happen between us—things I could never have imagined until the very moment that he was speaking them—I could’ve responded with warmth and gratitude in the presence of such fearless friendship, so unconditional. So trusting. I could’ve needed less convincing.

It could have been this way with Gerry? Surely it must have been this way with Gerry—the stubborn, impulsive, short-tempered friend for whom the plan had always been to leave us all too young, drowning in a hospital bed in the unsympathetic clutches of cystic fibrosis. How could I have missed so many organic moments in the company of someone with so few of them to spare?

The sea bass arrives, now—conveyed to me up that same, almost comically narrow and fidgety flight of stairs. There is no music, no comment from the waiter, no bon appetit. This, I understand as I pass the first morsel of fish between my lips, tangy with the salty crust and lemony flesh beneath—this is Sarajevo. Not all of Sarajevo; not any Sarajevo. Not tomorrow’s Sarajevo or, more to the point, yesterday’s Sarajevo, either. But mine: A sheltered moment to understand the wisdom of adaptability, the folly of control—the envy one can feel for those who’ve improvised a path to happiness when all around them was destruction and despair. My Sarajevo: A battered little restaurant at the far end of the Bascarsija, a place hard to find and harder to choose. A missed ballet. A cold night, a falling snow, wood smoke—solitude. A plate of fish.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida
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