The Flying Pork Knuckle

Advertising and Services: The Pork Knuckle Suits Up

2012-01-09T14:40:00.003+01:00

In 2009 I started The Flying Pork Knuckle to share some of the strange and quirky things I've experienced while living abroad. Most of these stories were written under duress or threat of punishment. My lovely wife has high expectations for me -- as she should. Since moving abroad in 2008, we've been to over 2o countries throughout Europe and Asia. Entertaining, witty and consistently sensible, here's what readers are saying about Noah Pelletier's writing:

"Brilliant choreography, yanked my head around and around...I was heart-sick and furious." -- Mary Sojourner, NPR commentator and author

"I was keeping track of my favorite lines ... but somewhere around the wet market I said f*** it, they're all good. Great stuff." -- Hal Amen, Editor, Matador Network

"This piece hits so hard -- and without any suggestion of a heavy hand. Awesome!" -- Jason, reader

A Word on Style

My writing style appeals to The Independent Traveler, someone searching for the ‘unique’ or ‘transformative’ experience. As a person who derives his online sense of identity through travel, I prefer "contemporary vagabond," a term like-minded travelers will identify with. A variety within, rather than outside, mass tourism, the contemporary vagabond is an informed consumer who appreciates transparency, both in what they read and advertising. In a world where 'reality' is prized yet hardly ever experienced, my readers have 'been there, done that' and, as a result, have a fine-tuned bullshit detector.

The FPK Difference

What separates The Flying Pork Knuckle from other blogs is that it goes beyond travel itineraries and photos, striving to capture the essence of something – the back alley graffiti, a struggling street artist, the local’s pub – one stumbles across during the journey. Rather than including photos of people and places, I’ve created illustrations to further communicate (exaggerate) my connection to the places I've been.

Advertise With Us

For an exciting list of options and ad prices click here
I am a regular contributor to Matador Network, the world's largest independent travel community, and my stories are often discussed by readers.

Rules or Some Such

2011-11-28T15:10:00.005+01:00

Every place has its rules, whether you’re in America or elsewhere. Break the rules, and the penalties can vary. Fines. Judgmental stares from others. Maybe you don't even know you are living by a set of rules. “I live by my own rules,” you say. Wrong. You are a textbook nonconformist. Take a hike.

An Example:
I’m from The Crystal Coast, North Carolina, and we like our barbeque. It's got to be made with spicy vinegar. That's the rule. But see what happens when you go to South Carolina and try the barbecue. They like it with mustard. Maybe you don’t like it. Heaven forbid--maybe you do. What next? The rule says you move the family to South Carolina. Change your facebook status to “Barbecue Treason.” So long. Enjoy the fireworks. Don’t forget to send your mother a birthday card.

As you may know I am Caucasian. On time I asked an African-American woman how she was doing and she says “I’m blessed.” I made the mistake of interpreting this as a competition, and proceeded to seethe in anger."I'm blessed too, damnit!" Her answer had a strange affect on me. I'd never heard it before. Maybe this particular woman grew up saying this her whole life.Imagine that.
My new rule is to think twice before jumping into a blind rage. Now I'm blessed, too.

I live in Dusseldorf. I play by German rules, without full knowledge of societal rules. But I'm learning. Here are some mental notes:

When you go out to eat with a German, they tend to keep both hands above the table. Keep one hand below the table, and they will be suspicious as to what you are doing with that hand.

Don’t look around like a stargazer when you’re walking down the sidewalk. People have made a point of knocking me with their shoulder, as if to say “stay focused, pinhead. The answers are not in the stone garlands and naked nymphs peering down at you from the buildings.”

If you’re an old man, wear brown shoes and walk with your hands behind your back. If you’re an old lady, buy a dog that looks like you, then dye your hair to match.

I used to live in China. I don’t know if I lived by their rules or not. As a white man, people stared at me. Basically my very existence was a spectacle. That's an exaggeration. Here is another.

Don't set the place on fire. Don't urinate on it to put it out. Fine. But who visited this scenic spot that made the sign necessary? Never mind. I know these people. Maybe this list started with 3, and gradually grew to 7. The problem, I believe, is that these restrictions are too specific.

I'm going to put a sign on my bathroom door. These rules have not been violated. They are purely for my entertainment. Here's what it will say:

Three seems to be enough, although I could narrow this down to one:

Be respectful to the surroundings and try real hard to keep your pants on in public.

2011-10-05T10:15:00.002+02:00

If you've ever wondered...

"how does a journalist remain fair and balanced?"

...then my new story in Matador Network is probably too hip for you.

read it here: Notes on Trying to be Famous

"I’d dream of performing to sold-out crowds. Because I was what music moguls called a “specialty singer,” my plan was to start small, singing backup for artists like Björk or Meredith Monk until being discovered."

Duck Hunting in America

2011-09-08T15:12:00.002+02:00

If you haven't read it already, hurry over to Matador Sports and check out my latest story

How to Shoot a Duck : ...Finding the juxtaposition between shotguns, camouflage, Larry the Cable Guy, and history....

"I didn’t notice the kick of the gun so much as the water rise up around him. When it settled, the duck was half submerged, floating like a ruined toupee."

Thank you for reading, and big ups to David Miller for another fantastic layout...

NEW!! Published in Matador Network

2011-08-29T16:35:00.000+02:00

This is my new story published in Matador Nights.

You can read it right here How to Feed Your Lover in Spain

Big ups to David Miller for another great editing job, and thank you, dear reader, for the great comments.

Notes From My Travel Diary: Going Topless

2011-08-24T13:42:00.003+02:00

On a summer afternoon in Düsseldorf, I went to the park and sat beside a willow tree with a steak sandwich and bottle of beer. An emerald lawn, a crushed brick walkway, hedges like walls -- no ultimate Frisbee tournaments happening here. After finishing my sandwich, I wanted to get some sun but was concerned about taking my shirt off. If there’s one thing I’ve learned after two years, it’s that Germans take their park-going very seriously.

There were an awful lot of stuffy pant / jacket combos and stern expressions. I could understand it if we were in a cemetery or locked in a conference room together, but this was a park. Who were these people? One woman was wearing black polyester pants and a quilted Chinese jacket. It looked like the sort of outfit Lady Mao might have worn while she typed up “The Little Red Book.” Which was worse -- enduring the critical stares from (mostly senior) passers-by or the shame of living with a farmer’s tan?

Fortunately the man sitting on a bench by the fountain made this decision easier. He was tanning, shirtless, but his belly spilled over his shorts in a way that made him look both naked and pregnant. A kinky tableau. As with most unfair comparisons, he made me feel better, not just about taking off my shirt, but basically about my existence. The sun felt good, and after taking off my shirt I decided to hike up my pants legs to my knees. But why stop there? Rest the beer bottle on your stomach, I thought. It’ll feel good.

And it did. Throw in a kitty pool, and you’d have a scene straight out the trailer park.

**

Notes From My Travel Diary: Kebab Allah

2011-07-07T05:21:00.003+02:00

Suzhou, China: Every Friday I’d pay the equivalent of thirty cents and ride the bus to Shi Quan Jie. This was a street in the old district, where the walls where whitewashed, and the roofs had sweeping slopes, upturned eaves, and ceramic tiles. Few of the buildings reached over three stories high. Large birch trees lined the two lane road, flanked on either side by bubble tea stands, black market DVD shops, and boutiques showcasing China’s puzzling take on high fashion.

On my way to find a wok, I stopped at a Chinese Muslim restaurant where everyone, including the child waiters, wore tight knitted caps. The menu was in Chinese, with English translations beneath it.

Some dishes sounded peaceful: “The hashed meat meditates.”
Some sounded dangerous: “The palace explodes the diced chicken rice.”
And others were downright spooky: “Digs up the beef red.”

The sun was shining. I walked to the take-out shack attached to the restaurant. The griller was just standing around with a blue filter cigarette in his lips when I arrived. I told him how many curried lamb kebabs I wanted in Mandarin. “Sanga.” I then held up three fingers.

He screwed up his face at me. Then he held up his hand, outstretched his fingers and said “Wooga.” Five.

Was this his way of telling me that I was too skinny? Perhaps, but something told me this offer was non-negotiable. I waited for my five kebabs at an outside table. The legs might have been rat-gnawed. It stood on an open area of hardened clay between the sidewalk and a canal.

For the first two minutes, the kebab griller tapped the skewered sticks of meat above the coals. Then he stepped away from the embers to catcall a girl clicking down the sidewalk in high heels. It wasn’t subtle, whatever he said, but she turned up her nose and kept walking. Real cool. He leered at her and then turned to me, thumbing in her direction as if to say Women, go figure.

The griller brought over my kebabs and a flatbread in a plastic sleeve that read “crusty pancake.” He went back to the grill station, picked up an old copper kettle and came back to sit across from me. I’d watched his assistant – the boy baking crusty pancakes – use that same kettle to brew a cup of tea just moments earlier. Steam was still rising from the spout.

I tore off a piece of crusty pancake, and when I looked up, the griller was sucking on the spout. He was really gulping it down, and, just when I thought steam might billow out his ears, he set down the kettle and belched.

After lunch, I pulled out my notebook to make a few notes, referring to him not as “the kebab griller” but as “Kebab Allah.”

Kebab Allah burned his sleeve on a coal.

Kebab Allah threatened his assistant with a bamboo skewer again.

I’m not saying the man walked on water; however, in its own special way, watching him work did have a purifying effect on me. And he made a pretty mean kebab.

How I Came Up With My Blog Title

2011-05-26T14:29:00.003+02:00

It wasn’t something we’d planned on, but after two years in China, my wife and I picked up and moved to Düsseldorf, Germany. It wasn’t the last place we thought we’d end up: Neither of us had ever heard of it. We arrived in Germany two months before our shipment. A microwave cooked our pizzas. Suitcases doubled as tables. At night we’d lie on the floor of our empty apartment, staring at the ceiling and wondering if the Universe had sent us here for a reason. Things could have been worse, but still, I was hoping for some sort of explanation.

A few months after settling in, Takayo and I attended a dinner party thrown by one of her colleagues. I sat across the table from Hans, a tightly-wound life coach from Berlin. He had arrived late, dressed from head to toe in Eddie Bauer, with a pair of Ray Bands dangling from his neck by a rubber tube. His gray moustache screamed 60, but he checked his phone with the enthusiasm of a teenage girl. We talked between incoming texts.

"Zo," he said, "do you have a favorite German dish?"

I told him “schweinshaxe,” or pork knuckle, cooked till crispy on a wall of fire. He seemed impressed, so I told him about Dan’s Old Farmhouse, a German restaurant in China, adorned with wagon wheels and thick-ankled waitresses.

“It got out of control,” I continued. “Everything was ‘pork knuckle' this and ‘pork knuckle' that. I saw pork knuckles in my dreams.”

He found this amusing. “You see what happened, don’t you? It was NLP: Neuro-Linguistic Programming. You thought about the pork knuckle again and again until—well, here you are.”

Hans sat back in his chair, seeming very pleased with his elucidation. I liked how simple he made it sound, but as it stood, this whole “flying pork knuckle” theory was a bit airy-fairy.

“So,” I said, “are you telling me that pork knuckles caused the school to lay off my wife so we could end up in Germany?”

“You would be surprised at what powers the mind is capable of.”

There was a watercolor hanging on the wall above Hans, a splashy bouquet of flowers bursting from a melted vase. As he spoke, I pictured it falling down and smashing over his head. The sound of breaking glass fills the room, and everyone looks over and sees Hans’ head bursting through the frame like a daffodil. Again and again I imagined this until—of course nothing happened.

“I ate a Hawaiian pizza last Christmas,” I said. “Now, where’s my trip to Honolulu?”
He had to laugh like hell at that, but the conversation was shot.

Usually, I make a point of giving people the benefit of the doubt. Ask the right questions, and folks will generally surprise you. Hans, however, struck me as the type who read medical journals, then, whenever someone sneezed, mindlessly named off some corresponding disease. You might think now here’s a guy that loves to hear the sound of his own voice. And he might be. The problem is—in the back of your mind—you know there’s a slim chance that he might be right.
And, oh, did I hate him for that.

So, what if I was wrong? Perhaps what we think about most does help guide, in unforeseeable ways, our direction in life. We internalize food. But does it also internalize us?
At the time, my wife and I weren't ready to leave China. There was, we felt, still more to accomplish. The pork knuckle, however, had other ideas.
Anyway, life is good. But still, I wonder what would have happened if we'd obsessed over an Ethiopian or Siberian restaurant. I’m sure they’re nice-enough places, but let’s be honest: things could have turned a lot out worse.

Bedtime for Democracy

2011-04-16T00:06:00.000+02:00

So Sarah Palin, the President of the United States, which was subject to repossession by China, enacted the “Word Tax” to keep the White House from going into foreclosure. Citizens living inside all city limits were taxed for both spoken and written word. This was tracked by a “Freedom Chip” which was implanted in the back of the neck. The procedure was mandatory and often performed at veterinary clinics. Only politicians and pornographers could afford to be treated by human doctors. Folks didn’t appreciate being treated like animals, but under the “New Patriot Act,” complaining was deemed a commodity, and thus taxable. Someone suffering a broken arm or stroke had to wait while, say, a guinea pig had a marble surgically removed from its anus.

The only folks that survived in the real world were the Field Dwellers. A Field Dweller was someone who lived in the country. Everyone was required to receive a Freedom Chip, but it wasn’t directly enforced. Those without Freedom Chips were considered “Persons with Non-Competencies.” The tax man could shut off your phone, internet, lights, whatever, but they didn’t come looking for you. Like most people, they were scared of the real world. Aside from bullying folks on social media, digital bank accounts or email, they were as harmless as housecats.

Technology helped us think beyond our brains, but the information slowly dried up. “Selectively cleansed,” claimed the government, but that didn’t keep folks from depending on it.

My days, I decided, were numbered. After receiving the letter from Brigadoon Animal Hospital informing me of my Freedom Chip appointment, I left town. After packing a suitcase, I drove South using back-country roads and spent the night in my car. The next morning, I remembered something from my childhood: a trailer colony in the middle of a dirt farm. Growing up, our family used to pass it when we took the short cut to Raleigh. I’d look out the window of our Chevy Blazer, surrounded by soy bean and cotton fields, before coming to the cross roads. For someone who grew up on the beach, out there seemed like the most remote place in the world. The stop sign was peppered with bullets. My dad didn’t even brake—he just raised his arms and yelled “rolling stop” as we blew right through it.

There were, I remember, four to six trailers at this intersection. They encircled a large, steel-beam radio tower that you could see for miles. Aside from the laundry drying outside, the trailers looked abandoned. I wondered why anyone would live there, and so close to a radio tower. It had been an obsession growing up, these freakish people committing horrible atrocities inside. But why that? Why not thoughts of more? More money; a bigger promotion? I thought of that as I drove toward the tower. The tenacious strive toward success. It was always just out of reach. I killed the engine before the stop sign. The fields were barren now, and stretched into the distance in each direction.

I was in insurance when the government began scaling back the economy. A few folks saw it coming. Our company sold all the ergonomically designed chairs and installed coin operated locks on the bathroom stalls. They traded my BMW company car for a Chinese sedan. They did, however, let me keep my company girlfriend, who was specifically designed to “enhance” my lifestyle: She was prone to debt, prescription drug-induced crying jags, and had breasts engineered to near perfection.

Thus did consumerism and procreation go hand in hand.

Field dwellers didn’t have breast implants or bald pubic regions. These things had nothing to do with survival. Daily life revolved around the radio tower, or rather, what the tower provided. Grandma had an aluminum hip that intercepted phone calls late at night. Like I said, politicians and pornographers could afford to speak in whole sentences, and did so in great detail about anything they pleased. Overhearing an educated conversation like that would have cost five thousand dollars. That’s how much it cost to ‘unlock’ this particular radio channel. Even the rich weren’t granted total privacy. When the signal wasn’t great, we’d stick our ear directly against Grandma’s hip. This minimized the "tinny" sound so we could hear more clearly.

A low, steady hum was always present around the tower. The trailers would sometimes vibrate, but it didn’t vibrate people so much as it permeated them. We all sat in plastic lawn chairs in the back yard. Every meal was barbequed on an open pit, and little Joey would run barefoot from one trailer to the next.

“Momma says ‘the hummin’ is God talking to Himself while he’s doing his work.”

“Great Joey,” I’d say. “Now run over and fetch me a jar of moonshine.”

It was still strange to me, hearing folks talk about God. Aside from OMG, which was changed from Oh My God to Oh My Gosh, talking about God beyond the context of Freedom was forbidden and taxable. The pornographers discussed ways to implement God into film plots, but this was done subtly, usually by symbolism, since no one understood big words anymore. For most folks, acronyms were cheaper and conveyed most thoughts.

“God microwaves our home with his love and hummin’ powers.”

“Did your momma tell you that, Joey?”

When asked a question, Joey would sometimes gaze up to the red blinking light. I had no idea he was looking up there for guidance.

“I think about hummin’ and how come other places don’t hum.”

“How do you know other places don’t hum?” I said.

“Well…look at you. I beg your pardon, but you’re dumber than a stump.”

It was true. Aside from my 30 years of life experience, I was no smarter than this child. At ten years old, he rebuilt the carburetor in my Chinese sedan. He could kill, pluck and gut a chicken in 4 minutes flat. He even knew how to brew moonshine using an old copper milk can. He’d mix in the corn and water and whatever else, pausing every so often to gaze up at the tower.

Two if by Sea

2011-04-06T15:34:00.002+02:00

It was a late, sunny morning in October, and I was heading back into Düsseldorf from a doctor visit. On the train home, while making a list of chores, I missed my stop and ended up at the altstadt, the old quarter, where I found myself in a kiosk buying two large bottles of beer. Funny how that happens.

I wandered for a bit and wound up at this inlet canal about 100 yards from the Rhine. There were oversized stairs for sitting and watching folks pass by the boardwalk. The water wasn’t much to look at: Dark green with floating trash. Perhaps as a distraction, the city marooned an old ship right out in the middle. With bulging sides and a tall, wooden mast, it didn’t float so much as it slowly disintegrated.

Despite the nice weather, there weren’t a lot of folks out. There was a guy sitting 30 feet away from me, wearing a black jacket and sunglasses, the big kind that wrap around your eyes like a windshield. To passersby, we were just two Germans. “Slackers,” they might have whispered, “Couldn’t even wait till noon to crack a beer.” Of course, I never had that sort of problem when I lived in China. During my two years there, I didn’t need a tattoo across my forehead saying “Outsider.” What for?

Germany was different, though. I had the same pea coat and pale complexion as everyone else. “You blend in,” my wife said. And folks naturally thought I was German. That is, until I opened my mouth. How frustrating it must be to speak to someone, to reach out to a stranger, only to have them reply with “Uh…was?” The German word for what is our word for was, so basically I was asking them to repeat themselves, only louder. To save my hearing, my next bright idea was to inform people mid-sentence.

“—Let me stop you right there,” I’d say. I honestly thought they’d thank me with the breath they saved. Of course they usually just said “sorry” and walked away.

Two men appeared from behind the ship, navigating the harbor in a tiny row boat. They were wearing orange suits with electric blue strips along the shoulder. The rower sat in back as another man crouched at the bow, scouring the water with a ten-foot net. Their vessel meandered along, scooping up bottles and potato chip bags as they went, leaving a small wake in their trail.

Like many city workers, these men were large; not fat exactly, but big boned. I suppose a lifetime of beer and bratwurst lunches will do that, but, like the great manatee, there was a grace to their glide -- something almost…romantic.

I wanted to ask them if they signed up for this duty, or if the job was assigned on a rotating basis. Did they get to choose partners, and if so, how do they determine who rows and who scoops? Basically, what I wanted to know was: How do people wind up doing what they’re doing?

At the time these questions seemed relevant, but it was only because I couldn’t actually ask them. Even if I had spoken German, I probably would have talked myself out of it. Oh, don’t bother them. It’s basic psychology: We want what we can’t have. For most people, sunning by the water with a beer isn’t a bad way to spend a weekday. And, oh, I am one of those people. I was lucky to be out there; however, I’d be lying if I said that, in the back of my mind, there wasn’t a small part of me that wanted to trade in my beer for a pair of oars.

Party of One... Booze frenzy at the homestead

2011-03-28T14:24:00.003+02:00

Cape Carteret, NC

When I was thirteen, after much convincing, my parents left me home alone one Friday night. They and my sister went to Jacksonville to go thrift store shopping. After that, they’d get pizza at Tony’s and walk around the mall. I knew that’s what they’d do because that’s what we always did on Friday night. But now that I was a teenager, I had other plans: I would listen to 96.3, the Hot FM, and call a girl in Newport that I had a crush on. Also, I would make my first cocktail.

As soon as they pulled out of the driveway, I used a chair to reach the bottles in the cupboard: Goldschlager, Two Fingers tequila, Gordon’s gin, Myer’s rum (dark) and a bottle of something called port. I poured a shot of each into a clear plastic cup decorated with pink fish. The drink seemed kind of weak, so I topped it off with the port. That’s when it turned black. The gold flakes from the Goldschlager suggested wealth and sophistication, but overall, the drink came up a tad short: It looked like something that seeped out of a landfill. It was, I imagined, how the breath of a sleeping bum might smell.

But I’d gone too far to turn back.

I decided to step out onto the back steps. The sun was setting through the pine trees, and the bricks were warm under my feet. I pinched my nose, held my breath and began chugging.

I got one gulp down, then two…that’s when gag reflexes refilled my cup. Now the mixture was both black and bubbly. Getting it down became more of an exercise in determination rather than pleasure. I…will…drink this.

On the second try it stayed down, but my mouth was watering pretty bad. Had I burped now, it would have been all over. I went inside to search for a stick of Big Red, refill the liquor bottles with water and put them back in the cabinet.

Upstairs, I turned on the radio and lied against my pillow, watching the walls spin in a good way. Salt-n-Pepa’s “Shoop” came on, and then something else. I went downstairs and looked at topless women in my dad’s Easyriders magazine. Next I microwaved a Stouffer’s lasagna and fed our German shepherd, Zan. As the TV dinner cooled, I took the .22 rifle from the closet and shot it into the air in the front yard like Yosemite Sam. This scared Zan, so I took my lasagna from the microwave and ate it on the floor beside her.

I’d once heard that if you’re pulled over by the police while drinking, you should keep your answers short so they don’t smell your breath. “Yep,” for instance, would be ideal. That was the mindset I employed when my family returned from Jacksonville.

"Did you have a good time?"

"Yep."

"Did you feed the dog?"

"Yep."

"Did anyone call for us?"

"Nope."

Someone had called, but of course that answer would have required an incriminating response. More gum was chewed and breath was held during hugs. I don’t recall what I said before slinking back to my room; however, during the course of my furious one-man party, I never did call Andrea, the girl I had a crush on.

Carnival Beerdrinking in Germany

2011-03-13T11:46:00.001+01:00

My latest published story, Carnival Beerdrinking in Germany, at Matador Network is now online...

Click here to read it.

The events in the story happened last year, but I wrote it this year while celebrating Carnival at home here in Dusseldorf. Immersing myself in the festivities rubbed off on the story in a good way. The story is broken up into scenes, which is, after all, how we remember particular events.

The story itself was written under duress, finished at 4am on the eve of leaving for Paris, after having gone out drinking for Carnival. To be honest, I'm sort of amazed this thing took off at all, and yet, somehow it did. Big ups to David Miller for doing another great editing job. Enjoy!

Notes From My Travel Diary: Emerald Isle, NC

2011-03-07T04:01:00.000+01:00

I grew up in this little beach town. When you think of North Carolina, most people don’t think about islands, but that that’s where we lived -- Emerald Isle, North Carolina. Tourist flocked there every summer. The locals were mostly fishermen or cashiers or waitresses at all-you-can-eat buffets. But my father was a potter. He didn’t leave the trailer most days. He didn’t have to. The UPS man dropped off boxes of clay. My dad threw this clay in the work studio. Of course he didn’t really throw the clay, but that’s how he said he made the cups and bowls.

There was two sheds in the yard. One for tools, the other for the kiln. The kiln looked like a brick igloo with afterburners. They fired the clay so folks at craft shows could buy it. Dad kept throwing pottery until it filled the studio. A big show made the house go buzzz. You know the feeling you get the closer to Christmas? Anyway, he’d pace around before a firing, filling the kiln with all the uncooked pottery. One time the kiln blew up, but it didn’t really blow up like you think. The pottery just looked retarded. Mom talked about the poorhouse.

The kiln rumbled low and steady in the night. Outside, the shed is a big jack-o-lantern, glowing tangerine between the planks. Inside, my father was a maestro, tuning pyrotechnic gauges, stoking the dials of that thousand-degree symphony. His face look orange like an Oompa Loompa, except he got a moustache that curls up. My dad is five foot nine, weighs a hundred and forty pounds. But his tan Woolrich vest makes him look heavier.

One time a police come by, asked if dad was hiding a side entrance to Hell in there. Our across-the-street neighbors, a family of fat morticians, never batted an eyelash, but a mainlander renting a trailer up the road expressed his concerns.

“That thing runs on gas? If that thing explodes…” the man trailed off, his eyes fixed toward the kiln.

“Well,” said my dad. “It hasn’t happened yet.”

“The whole goddamn neighborhood would BLOW!”

“Blow?” my dad echoed, as if that was the last thing a gas-fueled contraption would do. “That’s not gonna happen.”

The man didn‘t argue. The struggle in his face said it all:

Gas oven + Hippie Potter = Boom.

The man reminded me of a house cat. Maybe he paced all night, downing wine coolers with a shaky hand, peering through the blinds every five minutes to the glowing shack that, given half a chance, would level the entire neighborhood. Inland folks had apocalyptic scenarios: Shark attacks, hurricanes, exploding kilns. I could jump off the roof with an umbrella, or lean too far back in my chair if I wanted to.

Dad said “just don’t do it at your grandmother’s.”

The Great China Hell-Freeze

2011-02-16T10:57:00.001+01:00

We lost reception at noon. Our pirate satellite was hooked up to the neighbor’s, our landlord, a stringy, ratfaced man with a bad stomach. Perhaps he was a drunk. Those violent, gurgling echoes from the toilet penetrated our walls each morning. The TV was out, but, fortunately for us, so was the landlord. Aside from my wife and me, nearly everyone in our building was traveling home for Chinese New Year.

The storm became serious. Peasant workers throughout Suzhou (having never seen snow before) set down their brooms and hosed the roads off with warm water. Predictably, their efforts resulted in the largest patch of black ice motorists ever encountered. Across China, thousands were stranded in train stations and airports. A rice barge navigating the Yangtze reportedly sunk after hitting an iceberg. It was a tragedy, but the details, like most second-hand information in China, were open to interpretation.

I hit the store before they closed, gathering the makings of a Survival Kit. The essentials: A bottle of Malibu, a bottle of Bacardi, and orange juice to ward off scurvy… also a case of Tsing Tao beer, Kahlua, and two fingers of powdered milk for bone health.

In what seemed like a good idea at the time—what seemed like a terrible idea in hindsight—my wife’s employers insisted on carrying out the New Year’s feast. We were bused outside Suzhou with scores of other foreigners to a plush, remote compound surrounded by whitened mud bogs. The staff offered us a steady supply of booze and food, in that order. In the Great Room, the evening air was filled with pidgin English speeches from The Board, slender girls swaying the centuries-old dance of Rainbow Skirts, and waiters trying to make sense of our mangled Mandarin requests.

There were drawings. I won a slow cooker. By the end of the night, the snow was falling harder than before. Or was it? Perhaps I hadn’t even won the slow cooker. For all I knew, I’d removed it from the kitchen. The only certainty, which was evident to everyone onboard, was the busses scattered along the road like tombstones. One bus had its ass in the ditch, the front tires clinging to the road like a beast pulling itself out a pit. Others had dug great moats while power-sliding into the bogs.

Our driver could have taken this as a warning, but that isn’t the Chinese way. I don’t claim to be an expert, but, from what I observed, in China it’s considered a weakness to adjust one’s driving to weather and road conditions. So instead of slowing down, our driver sped up, weaving between those frozen monuments with a disregard for safety that dazzled everyone onboard. It was fantastic.

To many this may sound reckless, but it’s important to understand that in China, this all-or-nothing mentality is engrained on every social level. Holding back is not in the playbook, so to speak. One commits to a particular character, and tries to steal the show for that brief moment when the spotlight is upon them.

This Is What I Do When You Post Pictures of Your Baby

2011-02-04T20:28:00.001+01:00

The weather here in Germany can be lousy. Thankfully, I have facebook, which allows me to keep in touch with friends back home.

A lot of folks are having babies now it seems. Some use photos of their baby as a profile picture. Which is fine, I suppose, but yesterday I caught myself doing something while looking at a baby’s picture. Perhaps everyone does this, but I always count the baby’s fingers and toes.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

I’m not saying I want your baby to have a hand or foot with six digits... But if it’s going to happen anyway, I don’t want to miss it.

You Getting a Hair Cut

2011-01-27T13:58:00.003+01:00

Düsseldorf, Germany

What color is it going to be this time? Orange? Red again, or perhaps green?

No.

You walk into the UniSex hair salon and see purple-haired Kevin sitting on the bench smoking a cigarette. You walk inside, and the glass door slams against the saloon-style ash bin propping it open. Ignore it. The door doesn’t belong to you anyway.

Kevin’s purple hair is standing straight up, and you can’t look at it without thinking of a troll doll. He says “Hallo,” and you say the same thing, staring too long at his plastic, spray-tanned face. Don’t worry. Anyone that has Sponge Bob Square Pants tattooed on his forearm is used to it. Thank God for people like this. You check out his left arm and see all three Power Puff Girls surrounded by stars. The details are dazzling.

He stubs out his cigarette and says “please sit anywhere.” It’s 10AM and every seat is open. The salon is 10 feet across and goes back like a bowling alley. Techno music is blaring, and there are wall-mounted flat screens between each chair. You sit down in the back, close to the hair washing station.

Kevin comes over and asks “Would you like a drink? Coffee?”

His English is terrible. Your German is worse.

“Nein, danke,” you say. “Wasser, bitte.”

Kevin calls out to the blonde with the fat ass. She stashes the broom and walks behind a curtain. There is an awkward silence. Kevin urges you over to one of the flat screens. He shows you pictures of men’s heads and says “What you like?” Except for the Turkish heads, the faces all look like you and Kevin: Skinny white boys. There’s a head that looks like it hasn’t been cut. The caption says ‘Surfer.’ You point to it, even though you don’t like to surf. Forget it. The blonde’s back with your water. You look her in the eyes and say “danke.”

Kevin wears plastic gloves that crinkle as he washes your hair. You didn’t shower before leaving the house today. Never mind. You’re going to shower when you get home anyway. Occupy yourself by looking at Kevin’s facial piercings. The ring on his lip seems like it would be annoying. Again, you’re grateful that not everyone is as boring as you.

You sit there facing the mirror. Fangs of moisture drip onto the nylon cape. Kevin slips into his rhinestone-studded holster. It is packed with razors, shears, combs, and scissors. He seems taller, moves faster. Kevin removes the scissors and spins them around his index finger like a gunslinger. You feel your body tensing up beneath the cape. Relax. You look over to a flat screen. A corpse is getting her hair cut before a live audience. The assistants had already pulled some paper mache guts from her belly. After each snip, the mad scientist pulls the scissors back and twirls them like a gunslinger. The crowd is going wild.

You look to Kevin's hand. He holsters the scissors, pulls out a straight razor. Your head leans as he pulls your bangs forward. His other hand is spinning the razor blade like a sideways helicopter. Bits of your bangs fall on your lap. Take a chance. You open your eyes just a crack, enough to see the letters tattooed across the back of each finger...

Ice Cream Boy

2011-01-19T17:51:00.002+01:00

Istanbul, Turkey

The boy was standing under an awning just off the sidewalk, which sloped uphill toward the Blue Mosque. Short, and looking neither old nor young, the boy was holding an aluminum utensil that looked like a crowbar. Although it was December, the weather was sunny and mild and Takayo and I had talked about getting some ice cream earlier. As we approached the boy, he immediately began stirring one of the three holes in the big, metal box.

"Where you from?" he said.

Since arriving in Istanbul three days earlier, I’d been asked that question at least 50 times. It was mostly slick-haired vendors waiting outside rug shops or restaurants. As a conversation starter, it has a singular knack for stating the obvious. Yes, we may be strangers on the street. But before I try to separate you from your money, let’s discuss race, shall we.

“I’m from the States," I said. “Do you have chocolate?”

“You from England?"

"No,” I said, “the States. Chocolate?”

“Australia?”

I’m pretty sure I would have kept walking if he hadn’t looked so peculiar. I mean, nobody has ever stopped me in the street in, say, Frankfurt because they were dying to know where I was from. Then again, so long as I don’t open my mouth, I’m pasty enough to pass as German.

“No,” I said. “Not Australia.” I should have just lied and said yes, but instead, I uttered the one word I was trying to avoid: “America."

I don’t remember when it started, probably after moving to Suzhou, China, but if a salesperson asks where I’m from I’ll say “the States” instead of “America.” It’s not that I’m ashamed to be an American – far from it. I prefer saying America, but the fact is I’m tired of getting stuck with the America price.

In Istanbul, much like China, unless there’s a barcode, price is negotiable. A pair of underwear might cost as much as a tee shirt. And, depending on the mood of the shop keep, a tee shirt might cost the equivalent of a week’s worth of groceries. I don’t know why, but saying “the States” is anticlimactic. It just doesn’t have the same ring to it as “America.” Coincidently, it’s the same sound a cash register makes.

The boy’s eyes lit up as soon as I said it. "Ohhh,” he said. “Ameeeerica.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“Obaaamaaa."

Because there’s no single person to blame, I blame television. After all, TV shows are dubbed into every language. It seems silly to think that all Americans live like they do in sitcoms, but, when we hold up the mirror, is it much different than the belief that all Asians know karate? I’ve seen street fights that would have made Bruce Lee turn in his grave, but I haven’t stepped foot on American soil since Obama’s been president. Nothing against him or his politics; it’s more a matter of logistics.

“Yes,” I said to the ice cream boy. “Obama.”

“Obaaaamaaaa,” he repeated, reverently.

“Yes, Obama. Now make me a Chocolate cone.”

He used the crowbar and began dipping the ice cream onto the cones. He handed Takayo hers first, and then held out mine. When I reached for it, as a joke he pretended to drop it. The boy had a singular talent for making me feel uncomfortable. I stared at his hand. He had dirt under his fingernails.

Next, he stuck the ice cream in my face like a microphone and said “here, taste it.” Perhaps this was some kind of ancient Turkish custom. Here, my brother. Let us lick each other’s ice cream.

In spite of tradition, I took my cone and paid him the equivalent of seven dollars. As we walked away, above the sound of passing cars and his crowbar clanging inside of the ice chest, I heard the boy softly chanting "Obama...Obama…Obama."

They Came from the North Pole

2010-12-21T22:48:00.000+01:00

There were no chestnuts roasting on an open fire, or quivering bowls of figgy pudding in our home. We simply took the food-based Christmas carols at their word. Instead, each season my mother would prepare what she called “Cajun Christmas.” Ham hocks were lowered into giant pots of collards, Dixie beers were chilled, and shrimp heads were pinched off into vats of boiling gumbo. The downside to living in what was essentially Paul Prudhomme’s kitchen was that I had to lie whenever someone asked “Did you eat enough turkey?” Rather than trying to explain Cajun Christmas in the checkout line at Kmart, I made up tryptophan antidotes.

“Oh, sure,” I’d say. “We all woke up with mashed potatoes in our hair.”

High school provided me with another unique holiday tradition. I knew a girl named Nicole. Both friendly and attractive, she stirred the sort of thoughts that earned me a lifetime membership on the naughty list. No matter how cold it was, each year she’d come to school dressed in this Mrs. Clause getup – or was it Mrs. Clause’s naughty niece? It might have just been the sleeve off a regular-sized Santa suit. Anyway, she completed the outfit with an elf hat and a pair of white patent leather high-heeled boots. In the school yearbook, she was voted most likely to be shown a mistletoe belt buckle.

I was walking behind Nicole one day when she was wearing the outfit. The hallway was packed, and two girls walking next to me were talking about the Nicole.

“Where does she think we are a strip club,” said the one in flannel.

The other girl said “Looks like Santa’s Little Slut left the North Pole.”

Considering where we were, I thought the comment was well aimed. However, the girl that said it didn’t have a whole lot of room to talk. She was wearing black lipstick, and had a large permanent marker X drawn on her forehead. Flannel girl was laughing now, but Doom Girl’s face was scrunched up as if Rudolph took a shit in her cornflakes. It’s funny the things our brain chooses to remember. I haven’t seen Nicole since high school, and I can no longer quote Shakespeare, but for whatever reason, that girl’s comment has stuck with me ever since.

Last year was my first Christmas overseas. In a spirit similar to Cajun Christmas, my wife and I celebrated Tropical Christmas in Ko Samui, an island in the Gulf of Thailand. A political protest had shut down Bangkok’s airport the week before, causing many tourists to cancel their plans. Locals tried to make Westerners feel at home by decking the bars with red and green tinsel, fake trees, and cardboard Santa faces. While walking to the beach one morning, we stopped to watch a hotel employee risk his life by climbing a full-grown palm tree to string some colored lights.

I woke up early Christmas morning and placed our presents under the tree, a short, potted palm on the communal patio. A Thai maid stared at the presents as she passed by, and it made me wonder if folks wrapped presents here. When Takayo woke up, we got dressed – bathing suits and flip-flops – and opened our presents under the tree. Hers was a cashmere sweater. Mine was a wool shirt.

“This is like a bad joke,” said Takayo.”

“That Santa has some sense of humor,” I said. Both presents were from my mother.

At a suckling pig restaurant in Lamai Beach, our Christmas dinner came out clenching an apple between its jaws. We walked to an Aussie bar after dinner and took a table overlooking a side street. The pink neon signs down there read Huggies, Boom Boom, Backdoor something-or-other… Half of that sign was missing. There was a lot of scooter and foot traffic. Three Thai women stood outside Huggies. They watched the passing traffic, and occasionally cat called “Hello!” or “Yoo-hoo!” The women all had black hair to their waists, and wore tight red dresses, red high heels and red elf hats with a furry white ball on the end.

A silver fox with a little round belly pulled his scooter over. A working elf walked over to him, whispered something into his ear, and then jumped on back. Her hair waved goodbye as they drove out of sight. Another elf came out from the bar to replace her. This one was dressed all in satin from her breasts to her thighs. Because she was so tall, I pegged her for a ladyboy. I had to laugh like hell when the next silver fox pulled up.

“It’s like a feeding frenzy out there,” said Takayo.

I was taking a sip of beer at the time, so I couldn’t answer. But what could I have told her? That I was flooded with Yule-time memories? That it actually felt like Christmas for the first time since we’d arrived? Rather than trying to explain some distant teenage infatuation, I leaned toward her and said the first thing that came to mind.

“Looks like Santa’s Little Sluts have left the North Pole.”

Making Logos

2010-12-08T13:41:00.008+01:00

My sister lives in Cairo, Egypt. I spoke to her on the phone recently. She said, amongst other things, that when books and movies are imported into Egypt, someone edits out the pigs. The government actually pays someone to do this. She is a teacher, so they may be especially thorough with nursery rhymes and children's stories.

What does this mean?

Old MacDonald had a farm e i, e i, ooo
and on that farm he had a --- e i, e i, ooo
with a --- --- here and a --- --- there,
here a --- there a --- everywhere a --- ---

In movies such as Charlotte's Web and Babe, she said, the entire movie plays out with the pig pixelated or blurred out. Now, I don't know about you, but it seems like a talking pink blob would somehow be more obscene.

I must admit, my first instinct was "If they blur out the pig, isn't that like saying Allah made a mistake?" I don't necessarily believe that's true, though. People make mistakes all the time. You can add that to my growing collection of Famous Last Words.

My sister went on to tell me they cut out kissing scenes between non-married couples in movies too.

"You think Babe was bad? I tried to watch Love Actually -- didn't understand anything."

Sure, it might disturb the plot a little, but in this respect I understand where they're coming from.

For more Unnecessary Censorship:

Unnecessary Censorship Sesame Street Edition

Glen the Butcher

2010-12-02T17:38:00.009+01:00

When I was twenty, I made a terrible mistake and wound up working as a butcher’s assistant in Marlton, New Jersey. It was my firt time abover the Mason-Dixon Line. My friend Fran arranged something with the manager. I'd get paid under the table. The manager introduced me to Glen the Butcher. From the moment he opened his mouth, I already knew I hated him.

“So, what ’cha know ‘a, Noah?”

Glen the Butcher laughed. He was squat and round like a deer tick. The manager and I nodded like oh yea, that’s the stuff.

Glen the Butcher kept on. Glen the Butcher wheezed. Glen the Butcher hacked. Squishy coughs. He doubled over now, gave it all he got. He had purple veins on his head.

The coughing fit ended as quickly as it begun. He stood up with a lit cigarette dancing below his mustache.

“Come on then.” Glen the Butcher was on the move. A seductive finger of smoke lingered, pointing that ‘a way.

I met him at the swinging door. The walls around us were plywood, had a row of heavy white aprons with orange-pink stains hanging. “Now, all joking’s aside,” he said in a thick Jersey accent, “you never worked in a meat shop before, right?” I said I hadn’t. He stepped closer, still smoking. “Let me tell you’s something. People’s get fingers cut off ‘n hands chewed the fuck up in tha meat grinder all the time. All kinds of stupid shit happens ‘n here.”

I bowed my head, considering what kind stupid shit would happen to me.

“That said,” he continued. “I don’t want’s no silly shit going on like those fuckhead friends a’ yours over in tha deli.” I nodded, but he wasn’t quit finished.

“Now, I don’t know’s why they keep giving me people that don’t know nothing, but that’s what they do. So, from now on, your name isn’t No-ah. I’m gonna call you No-Nothin because that’s exactly what you know until I tell you what to know. You don’t do nothin. You don‘t know nothin -- Until I tells you. Got that?”

With this sparkling introduction out of the way, I slipped into one of the stiff cotton jackets. A blue insignia on the left breast read: Frank

The meat room air was cool, left a metallic taste in the back of my throat. Glen the Butcher showed me the meat grinder and meat locker. The meat locker was almost empty. Meat hooks hung from chains. They looked like Spanish question marks; sounded like wind chimes. I imagined Glen hanging from one, his legs kicking like a swimming pig.

For my first task, I stood at the business end of a bone saw catching meat in a plastic tub. The job was menial, and required complete attention. I kept my meat coat clean. Glen worked quickly, and to my surprise, quietly. But then someone rang the assistance bell. It drowned out the blood-splattered radio in the corner. It wasn’t so much a ring as a grinding clatter. The meat room became a Pavlovian experiment.

The bell did not make Glen the Butcher salivate, however. It made him curse, curse, curse. He stabbed his carving knife into the chopping block. He turned to the window overlooking the grocery store. An attractive housewife had rung. Glen stormed over in these black rubber boots and dropkicked the door.

“Today, a Marlton butcher was arrested after bludgeoned a woman to death with a T-bone steak. Details at eleven.”

That’s what I thought I would hear. But stepping onto the sales floor transformed Glen the Butcher. He greeted the woman, listened and reciprocated. He even engaged in light banter. He brought a twin-pack of steaks back into the meat room. The smile quickly melted. He was seething again, mumbling. Bits of his psychotic rant tangled with the music on the radio:

“Gold bricking…”

DON’T STOP

“…maggot princess…”

BELEIVING

“…spoiled little bitch”

HOLD ON TO THAT FEELING

Glen the Butcher packaged two individual steaks, and brought them to the swinging door. Glen the Charmer walked onto the sales floor, placed a single steak in the woman‘s cart, and waved good-by.

After Glen the Butcher’s bi-polar escapade, I slipped on a kidney and dropped a tray of ground beef. I was scooping it into the pan when Glen the Butcher caught me. I thought he would unload a case of knives, but he just told me to run it back through the grinder.

I spent New Year’s Eve morning labeling 50 pounds of steak. But I entered the wrong code into the labeling machine. Top round sirloin was ringing in the New Year. It cost as much as pig rectum.

That afternoon, the real butcher’s assistant -- the person whom I’d replaced -- showed up. He was Glen the Butcher’s son. He hadn’t come to work in four days. He looked like hell.

Glen the Butcher looked at him as if he’d just pushed the bell. “Where ’da hell have you been?”

“I had some things to take care of,” said Butcher Jr. in a backwoods Jersey accent. “Who the hell is he?”

I’m the guy they pay under the table to pick up your slack. Surly Glen the Butcher would stick up for me.

“Who, this guy? He’s nobody. And neither is you. Now re-price this meat.”

Although Glen the Butcher had placed me in the same category as his drug addict son, I decided nobody was a step up from No-Nothin. I slacked off a bit after Butcher Jr. showed up. By the end of my shift, Frank’s meat coat was still spotless. However, before I left, in what felt like a gruesome rite of passage, Glen smeared his bloodied hand across my chest.

“There ‘ya go. Get some blood on ya. Now you’s a real butcher!”

I walked into the deli to see Fran, trying to pretend like I wasn’t swathed with blood. He couldn’t stop laughing. The straight-laced woman waiting for cold cuts looked apprehensive. Maybe she’d never seen a real butcher before.

Notes on Going to See Mao Zedong

2010-11-25T23:53:00.000+01:00

If you haven't checked out my latest story on Matador Network, Notes on Going to See Mao Zedong, you can read it HERE.

"With a half-mile of folks standing side to side and butt to loin, a woman in a plaid shirtdress filed me back with her cane. It seemed unintentional, and at the time I thought nothing of it. But the folks behind us smelled blood in the water."

Big ups to the sultan of stoke, David Miller, for his fine editing work.

Noah

A Preview from: My Moving Diary

2010-11-24T11:15:00.008+01:00

2 January, 2008. Raleigh, NC: “I don’t think you can fly into China on a one-way ticket,” the woman at the Delta check-in counter says. Her vest has these sad plastic wings pinned on.

“Are you saying that I can’t get into the country, or that I need to buy a return ticket?”

She thinks for a second. “I don’t know,” she says. “How long do you plan on staying in China?”

I'm actually moving to China, but two different people told me not to say that. This is what I say instead:

“I’m just going to roam around the country for a while.”

“Um, OK, you can figure this out when you get to JFK. Have a good flight.”

JFK Airport: I check into Air China, get my boarding pass, and keep my mouth shut.

Air China: I’m the only White person boarding the plane. Oops – there’s one more. The plane is a double-decker. I’m downstairs. Everyone around me is speaking Mandarin or shouting Mandarin. I have a window seat. I sit down and watch people in the aisle shove each other from behind.

There's an impulsive air onboard. As we taxi down the runway, a man stands up to rummage through the overhead compartment. The stewardess storms over and berates him. I mean she lets him have it. She points to his seat, and yells at him like a dog. The man looks away like a dog, too.

“No! Bad!” I imagine her saying. “You know what you’ve done. Now sit!”

I half expect her to bust out a choke collar.

The man behind me has his knees in the seat, talking to the man behind him. They’re using ‘outside voices,’ even though they’re close enough to play patty cake. The captain comes over the speakers and speaks Chinese. I look out the window to make sure we’re still in America.

I eat a Xanax. We are prepared for takeoff.

Somewhere over the Arctic Circle: I wake up feeling naked. The overhead lights are off. My wedding ring is gone. I use my iPod as a light and search the floor. A knot tightens in the pit of my stomach.

I search my immediate area before hitting the flight attendant CALL button. I still have a pretty good buzz on; otherwise, I don’t know if I would have done that.

The girl comes over. “I lost my wedding ring,” I say.

She shakes her head. She doesn’t speak English.

At this point, I don’t know why this surprises me. I point to my finger, tapping the spot where my ring used to be. No luck. I point to the ring of the man beside me. He’s asleep. Everyone’s asleep. She’s trying real hard to understand what I’m saying.

In a last ditch effort, I point to my ring finger again and say “Poof!”

Poof is a magical word to this flight attendant. It gives her clarity. And not only that, it gives her the power to disturb sleeping passengers without remorse.

The woman in the aisle seat gets it first. The flight attendant prods her on the shoulder. She comes to with a jolt. I’m standing. The flight attendant’s standing. We’re both looking at her. Before she can figure out what’s happening, the flight attendant launches an interrogation on missing jewelry. The woman looks around like a chameleon, muttering the Chinese equivalent of “No, no, no.”

I feel awkward about unleashing this flight attendant, but it’s out of my hands.

She’s jostling the passengers in the row behind me now. Their reading lights are turned on for them. Their faces recoil. They’re ordered to search the floor. The man in the window seat is still asleep. When he comes to, he is very confused. The passengers beside him have their heads between their knees. This, coincidentally, looks like the crash landing position. The man looks to the flight attendant, but she offers no relief. She is using her outside voice in a dark plane somewhere over the Arctic Circle.

By this point I am freaking out. What will I do, I think, wait until the plane lands?

The nervous man doubles over now. There is a commotion. He comes up, pinching my ring between his fingers.

Getting Even

2010-11-17T14:36:00.002+01:00

So here I am, again, standing across from the mailman. Actually, it’s a mailwoman. The woman’s in her fifties, fair skinned with a curly, round head of hair. She’s not looking at me, but I’m looking at her and thinking This is a broad who’s played life by the rules. I’d never say that of course.

Maybe it’s just the uniform rubbing off on me. It’s one of those sky blue, Government Issue two-pocket oxfords. What a mouthful, and for what? The thing’s practically wearing her, and yet, I can’t stop staring. There are four plastic pens in the left pocket; three blacks, one blue. The blacks are crammed into a corner, but the blue one, the misfit, is hovering over Nipple Territory.

The mailwoman lets out a sigh. It’s for me. Her colleagues look over, but they know the score. Beads of sweat are rolling down my back. After seven minutes, she’s still counting the three-pound-bag of change I tendered as payment. There was some regular change on top, a few 10 and 20 cent pieces, but now it’s down to the nitty-gritty: The 1 cent pieces. Back home we call them pennies. The European ones are even smaller. You can’t spend them as fast as they come in unless you’ve got a motive.

I found a motive two hours earlier. I rode my bike over to pick up the package my mother sent from the States. She sent it two weeks before my birthday, and now, a month later, I get a memo in the mailbox. It’s in German. I don’t know what it says, but something about the layout seems to communicate: It’s your lucky day. I left my apartment and cut through the park, taking the cemetery trail to the 704 line. The Deutsch Post is further up on the right.

There were only two people in line. When I reached the counter, I handed over the memo and the woman went back and found my package. I asked her if she spoke English in German. She said “yes,” in a way that reminded me of rainbows. “Great!” I said.

She asked for my ID. I told her sorry, I didn’t bring it, and recited my mother’s address instead. She looks carefully at the package, which she hadn’t handed over yet. She raised an eyebrow. It was good enough for her.

She scanned the package and gave me another test. I wouldn’t be able to charm my way out of this one. To take home my package, my birthday present, I would have to pay 33 Euros and 56 cents. The package, it seemed, contained items the German government wished to profit from. It was a business tactic based upon the popular model of consumerism: I desired the package more than the money.

This tactic was also, coincidentally, based upon the model of ransom. Ransom is the practice of holding a prisoner or item to extort money to secure their release. Most cases of ransom involve kidnapped people, but not always.

I am reminded of an incident where thieves broke into the tomb of Argentine president Juan Perón. They weren’t looking for gold or jewels. They wanted the president’s hands. This was no arbitrary detail, however. Perón's hands were viewed as a symbol of national power. The thieves sawed them off. Newspapers worldwide ran stories on the Hands of Perón, as the incident became known. As the story unfolded, it was also made public that the thieves removed another type of symbol: The president’s genitals. They requested $8 million to return the hands. It wasn’t made clear whether or not the genitals were included in this deal. It didn’t matter. The government refused to pay the ransom, and the items were never recovered.

My situation was a matter of ransom disguised as customs charges. Be that as it may, I wasn’t going to react as the Argentine Republic had. I was willing to pay the Post’s ransom.

But I was not able. I had 20 Euros on me. When I told the mailwoman this, she understood. I had never incurred customs charges on a package before. I made it quite clear that this charge was unexpected. She whisked my present back into the bowels of the Deutsch Post. I walked out to my bike empty handed, ruing my ill preparedness. While peddling home, however, those feelings of self-pity turned to anger. I would, amongst other things, plot revenge on the post office.

The only question now was "how?"

We're Chugging Right Along

2010-11-08T12:42:00.001+01:00

I've published another story on the Matador Network called Hitting the Skids on Emerald Isle.

"A lot clearing business, a man named Brian, and life in a trailer —

C Noah Pelletier describes growing up in a family of Beach People."

Nick Rowlands, editor of Matador Life, did a great job working behind the scenes with this story.

If you haven't checked it out yet, you can read it here.

And please leave a comment!!

Where do I fit in, exactly?

2010-11-07T19:14:00.000+01:00

Germans have the damndest ideas of a good time. Haul in a wiener wagon and a beer truck to any open area and folks will get dressed up in autumn-colored shirts and corduroys and drive their Audi’s or Mercedes station wagons as fast as they can to get there, honking horns and shouting to pedestrians along the way. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this, but much like accordions and lederhosen, the novelty wears off rather quickly.

What doesn’t wear off so quickly is the German’s sense of moral resilience. You might, for example, find yourself standing with others at the crosswalk of a long, deserted street, waiting for the signal to turn green. Crossing the street may look safe, but the people around you will literally hiss if you cross prematurely. And folks are hesitant to speak to each other even at the park – that is, unless you toss a Frisbee too close, and then even an old woman will make a fist and curse your ever-loving soul. Many people leave the house, I’ve decided, just to ensure that things are in order. When they’ve finished inspecting the outside world, they come home and find still more things to correct.

I moved to Düsseldorf in the summer of 2009. Shortly after arriving, I met a Kiwi who was kind enough to give me a bike. The thing was beat up, “Cursed” he called it, and showed me where he broke his wrist. He wished me better luck with it.

There was a long bicycle rack in the parking garage under my apartment building. Many of the bikes were sick with flat tires or rusted chains. I found an open space and wedged my front tire between the brackets. All was fine until a month later, at which point I found a note stuck to my handlebars. Actually, note wasn’t a strong enough description. This was an official document typed in perfect MLA format, folded into thirds, and sealed in an envelope. No detail was overlooked.

I couldn’t read German, but the implication was clear: There were many spaces, but this one was his. The whole thing was, I felt, a tad ridiculous. I put the letter back into the envelope and, when I returned from the store, stuck it back onto my handlebars. There didn’t appear to be assigned spaces on the rack, so I went home, hoping the situation would blow over. The next afternoon, I found my bike propped up against a cement pillar near the end of the rack, the letter still attached.

This glimpse into my neighbor’s psyche was interesting, but to think that everyone handled matters in such a passive aggressive manner – that was disturbing. I tried to imagine things from my neighbor’s point of view. To do that, I gave him legs which were as hairless and thin as sign posts. His face was bony, but healthy, and it glowed before the pale blue screen of his computer. I imagined a tall, slick brow that furrowed easily, and a tongue which poked out from the corner of his mouth when he typed. The voice in his head, which sounded like my own, told his soft, pink fingers to type this: “Re: Bike Parking.” Did he use spell check? Certainly. He would save this letter (for future reference) in a folder labeled “COMPLAINTS.”

I brought the envelope upstairs to my own computer and attempted to translate it. Still, I couldn’t stop wondering what kind of man would go to such lengths. The more I dwelled upon it, my mind searched for more reasons to dislike him. What was his private life like? Was he married? If so, what was it like to make love to this man? From his letter, I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly tender. No, with him it was all about control, so I imagined his wife lying under him like a wounded sparrow, twitching in cold, rhythmic sync with the clock on the nightstand. That probably wasn’t fair of me, but aside from the letter, I didn’t have a whole lot to go on.

It’s a funny thing, passive aggression. I used to think myself above it, but when you have enough free time on your hands, the stuff spreads like the dickens! For a minute there, it was almost like having a secret admirer, but instead of possible romance, there’s misdirected resentment. When I went down two days later and saw his shiny new bicycle sitting in my old spot, I almost let the air out of his back tire. That’s my idea of fun, but it would have been childish, and far too obvious. Instead, I parked my bike a few spaces down the line. That was nine months ago. There haven’t been any new complaints yet, but the suspense is killing me.

Crushed Birds and Bricks of Hash

2010-10-28T22:47:00.000+02:00

My wife and I touched down in Copenhagen. We got in late, went to bed without dinner, and awoke starving. We traveled in relative anomimity. Not even my parents knew that I was leaving. Maybe it had something to do with the latitude or the curvature of the earth up in Denmark, but the sky was a brilliant blue. The other shades somehow seemed obsolete.

We followed a band of Chinese tourists to City Hall Square. Electric beer and fast food signs glowed in the distance. One of the guys wanted to show off for the camera. He charged toward a flock pigeons, which were eating bread crumbs fed to them by an elderly man. Hoping to cause a great scatter, the Chinese boy stomped toward the unsuspecting birds with his shiny black shoes. They didn't understand the rules of his game. Many birds were stomped unmercifully.

My wife and I were on a pilgrimage to fine breakfast. Our search brought us to a nightclub-ish café called Tight. We walked inside and ordered what we loved: A bowl of chive-infused scrambled eggs, bacon, and a wide, shallow cup of coffee. A couple of guys were hunched over a laptop at the table next to us. One of the men was holding a credit card as if it were something very fragile.

“She’s an American,” the guy said to the waiter, “works for some consulting firm in Chicago.”

They discussed the possibility of her still being in the city, and what should be done with the card. The man handed the credit card and laptop back to the waiter. The men then paid their tab and left. I talked to the waiter, a Frenchman. Actually, I found out that he was one of the owners when my wife went to the restroom. “The other two owners are in Nepal. They’re at base camp now, preparing to climb Everest.”

I myself had never been to Nepal, or even France for that matter. Nevertheless, I liked the vibe in this city. The streets had a wide-open feel similar to Vienna; however, the colorful Rococo apartments reminded me of Amsterdam. Perhaps too, it the bikers, and their cold, serious faces whizzing by us on the sidewalk. This hodgepodge of references ended when we reached the Free City of Christiania.

As Faulkner had mentioned, “all of a sudden, you cross over.” The gate was an ode to tribal chic: Two hand-carved totem poles with a curved wooden plank running across the top. Gold lettering spelled out the word “Christiania.”

Shortly upon entering this gate, we realized that it promised a meticulousness the commune itself failed to contain. My initial reaction was like a child in some forsaken candy store.

Christiania was a military zone originally, its large empty buildings a haven for homeless squatters. These people couldn't afford homes.

Back in 71’, inhabitants of the surrounding neighborhood broke down the fence surrounding Christiania, which opened the floodgates, as they say. That’s how it started, but then…it became a movement. Not exactly a takeover, but given the lack of affordable housing at the time, utilizing this military ghost town must have seemed like a pretty good idea.

We veered to the right, walking alongside a tall brick graffiti warehouse lined with sick and dismembered bikes. There were parts of a playground somewhere in the trees and bushes to our left. Nobody was out there. This little freak village was still waking up. The smell of coffee was in the air. Leashed and unleashed dogs frolicked. Having grown up in an area with both coastal and military influences, something about the utility buildings and layout made everything feel familiar.

You can find Christiania on all Copenhagen tourist maps. In fact, we could hear the garble of commerce through the trees in the distance. But something about this place didn't strike me as touristy at all. In my experience, tourist dollars tend to change a place -- cheapen it, oddly enough -- while prices skyrocket. Usually, I imagine old rich white men getting their rocks off counting stacks of money.

But I didn’t get that here. Not in Christiania.

No, it seemed as if the artists and others who lived within this commune preserved the past. Within these walls, we were in fact not in the EU, the European Union. We passed an old keelboat sitting like a tombstone at the edge of a yard. It was just part of the landscape – in a sense, part of the people.

Your typical municipality is selective in what they keep, or as is usually the case, in what they throw away. As my wife and I walked arm-in-arm, I had a sneaking suspicion: If the city of Copenhagen had their way, they’d bull-doze this whole goddam place. It was all so quirky.

We arrived to Pusher Street, where we had heard the sounds of commerce earlier. This was where it all went down. There were rows of ramshackle huts, some draped with camouflage. These huts sold marijuana, marijuana cigarettes in protective vials, and hash.

Compared to the coffee shops in Amsterdam, the vibe that I got was this: “Sketchy, man.” My expectations, however, were irrelevant. It was a mellow scene, a place where like minded people could sit and enjoy themselves without fear of judgment. Many people wore house slippers. Many enjoyed the sun.

A sign at the top of the street read “No Photo!” All of the signs in Christiania were hand painted. We obeyed this sign, although stealing a photo would have been easy enough.

In 2004, the police jazzed themselves up with an idea: They were going to HALT the cannabis trade! Their brilliant plan was to destroy Pusher Street's marijuana huts. Their plan worked in the sense that there were no more marijuana huts on Pusher Street. Marijuana, of course, was still as common in people’s homes as espresso.

One such hut is preserved forever in the National Museum of Denmark. The curators recreated the display best they could. They replaced bricks of hash with old terracotta tiles. They must have known that the job fell short. To remove all doubt, someone came along and stapled a sign to the hut:

“Of course, these are NOT real drugs.”

As obvious and disappointing as this was, I found a bit of interesting information. The official currency in Christiania is the Løn. There is the “Fed” (fat, 1 gram) and the “Klump” (lump). Both are coins. Their names/values allude to quantities of hashish.

Locals are paid in Løns, which, in all sincerity, might explain the dismal clean-up effort within the walls of Christiania.

We walked past Pusher Street to the Stadsgraven, a lovely unmolested recreational area. Looking out over the water, it was hard to believe that we were in a major city just moments ago. I wondered if this was what they were fighting for -- a place to swim in the short Denmark summer. Perhaps, but like my friend Faulkner said, “There’s something else, something more.”

Artistry, in many ways, is shaped by battles, both internal and external. One doesn’t need to pick up a paintbrush to prove that he or she is an artist. It’s how we live. With the right instincts, simply being in a place where individuals – truly free individuals – can live together in a way that reflects them is an art unto itself.

Airplane Bottle

2010-10-25T17:26:00.000+02:00

After speaking with a representative, Noah walks away from the Tax-Free Refund counter at Kastrup Airport in Copenhagen. Voices from a loud speaker echo off the walls in a language he doesn’t understand. Noah is thirty-years-old, dressed in a pair of gray slacks, camel hair sweater, and a black cashmere jacket he had custom made while living in China. He stuffs an envelope containing a receipt from ECCO shoe store into his jacket pocket. Takayo, his wife, walks beside him with her hands in the pockets of her long black coat. She is wearing a brand new pair of shoes.

Takayo: You should have lied to that woman.

Noah: Yea, I know. You think I’m losing my touch?

Takayo: Maybe. How badly did you want that $25?

Noah: Not that bad, I guess. I wonder if they’d consider it tax fraud.

Takayo: Dunno. You should try it though. Let me know how that works out for you.

Noah: I definitely should have lied to her -- for the principal.

Takayo: It doesn’t matter if you’re an American. You live in the EU; you’re not entitled to get the tax back.

Noah: I know, but it would’ve been nice to blow that money in duty free. I still like to consume like an American.

A digital sign hangs down from the three-story high ceiling by the gate entrance.

Takayo: 10 minutes?

Noah: What? Is that a long time?

Takayo: This is a first world country. It should not take ten minutes to get through security.

Noah: We still have two hours before our flight.

Takayo: And we’re going to need it to go shopping in duty free.

TSA agent: Express lane! Checks passport and boarding pass. Right through there, sir.

Noah: Which one of these lines looks the least incompetent?

Takayo: Probably the last one. Jesus. I wish people would learn how to travel.

Noah: How hard is it? You put everything in your jacket pockets, take off your jacket, and put it in the damn bin.

Takayo and Noah begin transferring items from their pant pockets to their jacket pockets.

Takayo: Look at the woman up there. She’s filled up two bins. Dead serious.

Noah: You think she’ll get though the metal detector without it going off.

Takayo: Yea, right.

Noah reaches into back pocket, retrieve a small bottle of vodka. He quietly unscrews the cap, takes a swig.

Takayo, turns around, sees the bottle: What the hell are you doing?

Noah: I have to get rid of this. It’ll never get through security.

Takayo: Are you serious? That’s so embarrassing.

Noah: Flying makes me nervous. I could say that, right? Timidly: ‘Flying makes me nervous.’ That sounds believable. Takes another swig.

Takayo: No, it sounds low class.

Noah: People drink in airports all the time.

Takayo: Yeah, in the bar. No one wants to stand next to the guy chugging vodka in the security line.

Noah: I’m not chugging. And nobody’s looking at me. Besides, I’ll get through the metal detector without it going off.

Takayo: I hope they detain you.

Noah takes one last swig, walks over to trash can and drops bottle in with a clank, accidentally kicking a baby seat on the floor in the process.

On the Water's Edge

2010-10-21T11:30:00.005+02:00

They only came to Emerald Isle in the summertime. Weekend traffic stretched past the bridge out to Cape Carteret. No leaving the island those days. The license plates said NEW YORK, MARYLAND, OHIO -- places I had only heard about on television. And the people had strange accents, too. My sister and I practiced mocking them on rides home from the grocery store. “Yankees,” my mother called them. The Yankees ate at the restaurants us locals didn’t go to. And just like their cars, the Yankees lined up outside of that grease trap, Jordan’s, every night for all the deep-fried sea life they could eat. We could smell the commotion across the street from our porch. I tried to imagine what went on in there: “Hey, one of youz deep fry my napkin!” From a knot in the fence, I could see the cooks urgently smoke around a filthy screen door.

Golden girls and grumpy old men strolled the beach at sunset, their oxford shirttails flapping behind them like Old Glory. Our family would walk down to the Bogue Inlet Pier to watch the rod ’n’ reelers. Their catch of the day, garnish really, floated belly up in catch buckets. My parents would urge me over to each one. I once saw a flounder as large as my chest.

You couldn’t go bare footed on the pier. There was a red line painted on the wood. Past that line, the fishermen didn’t give a squat about their hooks. They balanced their priorities in this order: Smoking, drinking, and fishing. There was a sense of camaraderie between the anglers, and it was never more apparent than when somebody hooked up. “Give ‘em hell!” They’d shout down the line. They didn’t give a squat who heard them, neither. This was their domain.

And, if the Yankees wanted to come out and watch a man with creature blood jellied upon his waders, well, why not put on a show? In those moments when the rods curled down toward the sea, locals and tourists could stand side-by-side, forgetting our differences -- if only for a moment -- as we watched man exercise his dominance over Mother Nature.

NEW!! Published on Matador

2010-10-08T20:09:00.001+02:00

If you haven't checked out the new "Notes on Turning 30" you can check it out here.

Big ups to Matador editor David Miller for another great layout.

Takayo and I will be in Copenhagen on Monday, searching for the vibe and other interesting things to bring to light, and hopefully exploit for monetary gain here on The Knuckle.

We're looking to expand, and we're always on the lookout for new material. Leave a message after the beep...

Birthday Scene from a Dairy Queen

2010-10-05T12:58:00.006+02:00

I feel compelled to take you, dear reader, on my journey back to school. The Art of Creative Non-fiction is the name of this UCLA online course. It's a two year writing program. By the time I'm finished, I should be right smart good.

Don't worry, it's won't be boring. Although I'm taking the school work more serious than in the past, I'm taking myself less serious than ever before. The Flying Pork Knuckle motto remains the same: To keep readers from twiddling their thumbs.

Homework is posted once a week.

Week 1 Exercise:
Write a "snapshot essay," a short piece built entirely on the information you can gather from a single photograph and the memories it evokes.

****

There is no frame on this one, no writing on the back. My mother and Uncle Rick are standing side-by-side, their hands upon their brother’s right shoulder. Pictures of ice cream hang on the wall behind them. “Peanut Buster,” says the poster by Uncle Rick’s head. Without a shred of doubt, these images are the work of a professional. Maybe you never thought of ice cream as sexy before, so let me fill you in on a little secret: In certain circles, the Peanut Buster is on par with pin-up girls.

Uncle Danny sits before a blue rectangular cake with white icing piped around the edges. It’s his birthday, it seems – he’s smack dab in the middle of the picture, cheeks glistening like king baby. The birthday boy wears an orange button-up shirt, a goatee, and the silver medallion swimming in his chest hair makes me think of Santorini.

My father is seated to the right. He is tanned by winter migrations to Puerto Rico, and his hair is lighter than I’ve ever seen it. It looks fabulous. My mother’s hair, draping down behind him, is of a similar shade, but it’s not from the sun. Hers has been intentionally altered by something called a beauty technician.

To the left, Grandmother Mary has her arm around Uncle Danny. She’s wearing a new shirt. It’s lime green, and to tell you the truth, I don’t quite know what to think about it. She never knew a camera that liked her; always closing her eyes at the last second. They’re open here, but there’s a daffy little smile on her face. She’s medicated.

“Happy pills,” my wife calls them.

As I look at my grandmother in this picture, I am a little embarrassed to mention that she reminds me of the Great Florida manatee. It’s not that she’s large – her BMI is within the healthy range for a woman her age – but darned if she doesn’t look content.

Old and Cold

2010-10-01T17:10:00.000+02:00

****

When I hear the sound of water running in the bathroom, I know it is time to get up. Shower alarm, says the voice. There’s a sheep’s skin under my bare feet. The voice calls this a “thank you” mat. My thoughts are organized, as if going through a checklist. I slip into a blue Brooks Brothers dress shirt. It’s wrinkled and the collar is sticking up on one side, just the way I like it. I walk into the kitchen and fill the electric kettle. By now my morning erection has subsided, so I head into the bathroom to urinate and dump yesterday’s coffee grounds from the French press into the toilet.

My wife is in the shower, but we don’t speak. A thin plastic curtain stands between us. She is engaged in her own ritual. In the kitchen, I rinse out the coffee pot, put toast in the toaster and get the Lavazza coffee, cream cheese, and soy milk out of the fridge. The water has stopped boiling. I dump some fresh grounds into the pot, bring it up to my nose and inhale. As I pour the water in, I’m twirling the pot, making a coffee tornado in the bottom. There’s an almond-colored layer of foam at the top, and I know it is good.

The toast has popped up. I take a knife and spread cream cheese onto one slice, and mash the other on top. Once the sandwich is bagged, I grab a bowl and pour in some oatmeal with a little water. One minute and ten seconds. That’s how long I microwave it for. I stand there with my back against the counter, eating a banana, waiting for my wife to emerge from the bathroom. She’s fully dressed, with towel-dried hair.

“Happy birthday,” she says. “You’re thirty. Can you believe it?”

I say yes, I can believe it, but really, I don’t know if I can. At least not right now. She checks her email, and I bring over the coffee and her oatmeal.

“You already have 16 happy birthday posts on your facebook wall,” she tells me.
I look on, sitting beside her on the couch. She reads out names and posts.

“Happy birthday from Iraq,” she says, quoting my college friend Jay. “’Noah, your uncle Ray wishes you a happy birth day.’ That’s a very direct birthday wish.”

“I think he really meant it,” I say, thinking about my uncle in Blairsville, Georgia.

Takayo finishes her oatmeal and hands me the bowl. I make oatmeal for myself with that same bowl while she dries her hair. One minute and ten seconds later, the microwave bell goes ding and I pull out the bowl and let it cool. I go back into the fridge for her lunch box: Broiled butterfish, sticky rice, and sautéed carrots. It was last night’s dinner. I pack it and the cream cheese sandwich into her purse.

When the hair dryer goes off, Takayo comes out, sits back down to the computer, and drains her cup of coffee. “I’ve got to go,” she says. I help straighten her coat collar and hand her the purse. She puts on her shoes and stands by the door. “Happy birthday,” she says. “You’re old.” I kiss her goodbye, and wait for her to turn around and wave one last time before walking down the stairs. She turns, waves, and heads down the stairs, just like always. I close the door.

After breakfast, I skim over my notes from the past two days, looking for an angle. There are two notebooks containing two different, yet similar, styles of handwriting. One person, I think, operating in two states of mind. The larger notebook contains my actions and intentions. I think back to the email I wrote to my wife, saying that I was going to Amsterdam for the night. The post-wave trio, Future Islands, was the headlining band at De Club Up. That train was comfortable, and fast – the type of speed you pray for when you’re fleeing the scene of a crime. For two hours, I read Vonnegut and scribbled away in my notebook:

“I devoured a burger patty, no bun, and zucchini parmesan leftovers. I have a pretty good idea where ‘Future Islands’ are playing tonight…I’m still not sure if I’ll be able to get the interview…sent Sam, the singer, a message online, but haven’t gotten a reply back yet. They are young and on tour overseas…who knows, just write the hell out of it and save the details for later…the whole thing’s the story…”

I look up from my notebook to the computer screen. Fifteen new happy birthday messages are now on my facebook wall.

“Happy birthday from Scotland,” Faulkner writes.
“Happy birthday Flying Pork Knuckle,” says Nirav.

I walk into the bedroom, pull on a pair of jeans, and wrap a cashmere Burberry scarf around my neck because I am cold. Like an old man. Old and cold.

Recipe of the Day

2010-09-27T14:31:00.001+02:00

I like going through my old diaries. Much of it's just details about people and places, but every so often I find something useful. Here, take this recipe for bum sundae:

I drew this while living in China. PC it is not, but then again, I've never been much of a drawer. This seemingly obsessive fascination with bums was a strange period in my life. I stood at bus stations around Suzhou, listening to street people play the erhu. There was a certain mystique surrounding them, which drove the idea home: I was a long way from home.

The poor looked old timey, quilted. It was, of course, a bit of illusion--a way of raking in more money, and I was happy to oblige. They did not give the impression of being "between jobs" or "homeless." They had simply chosen a roll, and lived it to the fullest.

The idea for the bum sundae is a celebration of sorts. There is the imagination, and then there are human boundaries. By blurring the distinction between the two, the result is something deliciously mischievous.

It's Raining Outside and I'm in the Forum

2010-09-24T14:44:00.007+02:00

No new writing projects to speak of this week. My brain has been on the fritz, quiet -- mimes in the form of god on high. Yea, right, something like that.

Last week’s contest win raked in $300 cash, free tuition to MatadorU travel writer’s school, and bragging rights. That’s what I’ve been doing, writing some “evergreen” articles (ie. “How to…” and “…101”). That sort of thing.

The online school has a forum where you can post your work and have others tell you how brilliant and special you are. The idea is to judge the words, not the person. I was expecting the teachers/editors to be harsh, kind of like an S&M arrangement. For a writer, the payoff is pretty much the same. Many authors provoke feedback with their posts. "Here's the story. Now let's have it!" Rarely do they get the full-on kick in the gut they requested. Perhaps Takayo’s straightfoward brand of criticism has rubbed off on me.

The problem is everyone receives a hodgepodge of positive advice. I know it’s a school, a place where mistakes are supposed to be made and learned from. They do that. However, my comments come across like a hyperactive perfectionist. A typical comment for a story might be “What the hell are you talking about, and why hasn’t anyone ripped this piece to shreds yet?” Of course, I never say that. The grim reaper comes early. No more days on the couch in your underwear. We're all walking on the dreams of writers in this forum. I’ve found it works best to tread lightly, praising a single element or turn of phrase, and then let them have it.

I met an American writer named Alan when I was living in China. He offered to read one of my stories and edit it, so we met up at a Starbucks. It was a ten-page essay about an experience I had with a fundamentalist Christian militant. He flipped through it, and chuckled. “Ok,” he said. “You can write.” It was a neutral statement, but back then, I considered it a notch on my bedpost. I blew the statement out of proportion, and let it permeate the nebulous regions of my mind. I had the time.

He returned the story two weeks later with copious highlighter marks and side notes. There was no talk of potential. Just doing, and re-doing.

If a story can be likened to a dinosaur skeleton, as Stephen King states in On Writing, mine was still half-covered by layers of dirt. Sometimes you need a shovel to uncover it. Other times you need a horsehair brush. You pick up tools along the way.

Over time, Alan’s comment took on different meanings. When he first handed the story back to me, I remembered his comment, and it felt mocking. Months later, I found myself using those very words after reading another writer’s work. Funny how that changed.

So, I’m on the forum, offering my trade secrets to anyone who will listen. The thought has occurred to me: Perhaps my ideas aren’t so good. Outside the safety of the forum, perhaps I'm just stumbling, aimlessly. After all, not too long ago I too coupled adjectives with adverbs, scouring each line with heroically bloodshot eyes.

But I’m not an editor – my comments don’t show up illuminated in orange – so people take my comments less seriously. Which is a good thing. Many people are afraid of making mistakes, and, as I have learned in a recent Ken Robinson TED speech, "mistakes are the basis of creativity."

Lucky for me, I am diametrically drawn to mistakes. Nothing serious; I've never lost a finger, or woke up next to a farm animal. These are labeled under "accident," which, I believe, is the basis of "genius." I'm not quite there yet. Besides, I don't think my wife signed on for that. In the meantime, come to the forum and you can find me, talking about life and creativity in ways that I can only dream of regretting.

Notes From a Trailing Spouse (Transparent Narrative Contest Winner)

2010-09-20T09:11:00.000+02:00

It's been a good weekend...friends from the US in town, Alt beer, plenty of pictures, and oh, yes, ... pork knuckles.

Friday kicked off with an email from Matador editor David Miller, informing me that I had won the Transparent Narrative Contest in Traveler's Notebook.....

"Well-crafted, funny and immersive. I can see why you won the contest."

"This is one of my all-time favorites on TNB. I laughed out loud several times, and I really felt like you let us get inside your head. I loved the honesty of this piece, and I could definitely relate to the identity reformation/loss that you experienced."

"...great wording and very transparent. You have a way of luring the reader in and keeping him/her there."

Read the Story Here:

http://matadornetwork.com/notebook/notes-from-road/notes-from-a-trailing-spouse-transparent-narrative-contest-winner/

Activating the Power of Feng Shui

2010-09-17T13:44:00.000+02:00

It wasn’t odd to return from school and find the couch against a different wall. Paintings in our home were hung and changed with the regularity of underwear, and large, handsome cabinets were dragged in to house an ever-growing china collection. As an artist, my mother could pull off the eclectic. Concerning the styling of our home, guests didn’t have to look farther than the front door, which was painted purple and emblazoned with the words “Cest la vie.”

However, a period of great change took place when I was in middle school. Strange words were being thrown around, the likes of which I’d never heard before. It started with chi, or rather, transforming straight chi into curing chi. Before my sister and I had time to mull this over, we learned that our staircase and kitchen was located in the wrong place. There were poison arrows to contend with in the living room, and wind chimes to be hung in the bathroom. From what we could gather, our mother had been possessed by a gay ninja.

Like all of my mother’s interests, feng shui became a priority in making ours a happy home. Not much explanation was given, aside from the fact that our home would continue to work against us if immediate action wasn’t taken. My sister and I took it in stride, keeping our bedroom doors closed until the chi ran its course.

A recent trip to the library raked up these memories. Like always, I scoured the new arrivals, but one book in particular caught my eye. The author was pictured on the front, wearing a silk cheetah jacket, bright red lipstick, and the type of gold chain preferred by Halloween pimps. She was in fact a respected feng shui expert, and as I flipped through the pages, some the phrases brought me back. I checked the book out, figuring it might be interesting to try and figure out just what the hell my mother had been talking about.

My apartment in Düsseldorf is a small one bedroom place with parquet floors. There is a rack for shoes in the foyer, and above this is a carved Thai bird mask that, as the saleswoman put it, “scare evil spirit.” Entering the living room, there is a hand-painted Chinese table that came from a furniture store in Suzhou, the teakwood carvings I found at the Chatuchak weekend market in Bangkok, and a red and white Oriental rug which was made in Ghana, but bought on sale at a department store here in Germany.

There are two large windows in the living room. One of them faces the kitchen, and the other faces the front door. Our bedroom is situated between the living room and bathroom, which is tucked away in a windowless interior corner of the apartment.

This is what someone might see as they enter the apartment. I used to see this too, but not any more. The thing about learning something new is that once it’s there, you can’t unlearn it. I’ve always pictured information like canned vegetables – you can forget about them, even take them for granted, but they still takes up space in the pantry. Upon inventory, I realized that what I’ve been stocking up on recently isn’t exactly applicable to daily life: Ankara is the capital of Turkey. Gift is the German word for poison. This might be useful for someone who goes to quiz night or accepts candy from strangers, but that person just isn’t me anymore.

I also wasn’t the type of person that incorporated feng shui into my life. At least, I didn’t used to be. But it did happen, and with surprising quickness. It started with a few pages a night while Takayo watched a catty reality show on the couch next to me. It featured rich and powerful women who – against better judgment – surrounded themselves with social adversaries and vast quantities of strong drink. Though arguments sometimes took to the streets, the inside of these homes revealed a serenity its owners just couldn’t quite seem to absorb. And like a headlock, those carefully decorated rooms appeared to wrap around and embrace its occupants, no matter how much of their hair had been ripped out. Because we didn’t have a mansion yet, I figured that I could feng shui our apartment in a snap.

I walk through our home, studying the items Takayo and I had collected throughout our travels. The objects themselves had not changed, but my perception of them, in relation to energy flow, had.

The bedroom was completely out of whack. As soon as I walked in I noticed daggers, or books, flying toward me, cutting into my good luck. To solve this, I pushed the shelf to the other sided of the room so that it did not face the bed, which, I noticed, was also facing an inauspicious direction. I turned it around and backed the headboard against a solid wall to “support a sense of security.” There was a lot of clutter under the bed, so I boxed it up (along with some items on the shelf including a riot-squad gas mask), and brought it down to the storage room.

Things were looking better, but it wasn’t there yet. The yin components, calmness and quiet, should prevail in a bedroom, but we were getting an awful lot of yang energy from the lamppost across the street. Because I didn’t have the power tools to install a curtain rod, I simply covered the window with tin foil and taped it into place.

When I was finished with the bedroom, I stood in the doorway. The author might have called this a “quantum leap of improvement,” but I had too much momentum to stop now. I proceeded to the front door, where I encountered a whole new batch of problems. The entry way was too dark and didn’t promote happy energy. As for the bird mask, it was supposed to go over the doorway, but there wasn’t enough room. A poison arrow greeted me from the edge of the Chinese table, so I covered it with a Balinese silk shawl.

Past the poison arrow, I noticed something worse: The front door faced the window directly, so all of our chi energy had been flying right out the window. I had been keeping a basil plant in front of the window, which corrected the problem to an extent, but I made a pesto sauce for dinner two nights ago, so now we were back to square one.

And that seemed to be the main problem I encountered with feng shui. You can’t make all the changes at once, and even if you try, something is always overlooked. The book claims that items such as wind chimes can help correct “stagnant” chi, but there comes a point where you just can’t go further. The feng shui faux pas in our apartment seem obvious to me, but of course, fretting over such things defeats the purpose.

I’ve come to grips with the window, but that doesn’t mean it’s not on my Shit List. Not by a long shot. One of my favorite quotes from the book says:

“If you are not fated to become a big tycoon, feng shui may make you rich, but not seriously wealthy! And if your home enjoys good feng shui you will find yourself becoming more busy.”

So long as I don’t confuse the words busy and compulsive, this whole feng shui thing might actually be lucrative. A Tiffany chandelier in the foyer would certainly attract good luck chi, and a Van Gogh would enhance the happy energy of the front door. Of course, this wouldn’t be a magic cure-all for all of my problems, but it would be a step in the right direction.

My New Article Published in BootsnAll

2010-09-07T13:29:00.000+02:00

I've been traveling and writing a lot lately. It's good to come back and see a published article.

In this story, I lose my hearing in Bali. Please, click the link below and let yourself succumb to a journey back to the five senses...

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-09/the-irrigation-bali-indonesia.html

Knife wielding author/world traveler/ and oh yea, chef, Anthony Bourdain was featured in the main article.
Give it a read.

On A Couch In Spain

2010-08-31T16:33:00.000+02:00

We arrived to Cala Major at 11 PM. Our agent drove us to the apartment and set our suitcases on the sidewalk. The smell of frying beef hung in the air.

    “Listen to the forks hitting the dinner plates,” I said to my wife.

Our apartment was decorated by a soul tangled up in flamenco. The walls were sponge-painted pastel yellow, green, and orange. A small arched doorway opened to the living room, which overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. In the right frame of mind, it was like vacationing in rainbow sherbet.

We loved the place, but it was an ergonomic nightmare. The bedroom pillows were flatter than Western omelets, and piebald with fluids from the dreamers before us. A couch cushion deflated minutes after sitting down, and the stools in the kitchen were taped and missing foot bars. It was thrilling in the Russian roulette when-you-gonna-break-your-coccyx spirit, but that only lasts so long.

It took two weeks – our necks were stiff, our skeletal structures out of whack. We moved like bats on the floor of a cave. Of course, that’s an exaggeration. Since I don’t live in abject poverty, I tend to complain about minor inconveniences: Cheap couches, gnats, smelly feet. Thankfully, small annoyances are all I have. Perhaps you’re the same way. Because you’re capable of reading these words, you’ll probably never starve to death. In that sense, you’re privileged. In fact, folks like us are more likely to die from suicide. Isn’t that funny? I’m not saying that suicide is funny. I’m just saying, if you did off yourself, you probably wouldn’t have to do it on an empty stomach.

Last year we stayed in a hostel one block away from this apartment. The room was slightly bigger than the box spring. My wife was taking college courses, same as this year. I hung out on the bed, reading essays by Emerson until the afternoon heat compelled me to the topless beach at the bottom of the hill. With my toes in the sand, I would read or take notes on human activity. One day I was sitting on my towel with a can of San Miguel. A seaside café was blaring obscure 80’s music. A small, nude child was digging a hole in front of me. I was wearing tortoise-shell shades, feeling nostalgic.

This year, one of my back-home friends died, probably while I was sitting on that same topless beach, feeling, amongst other things, nostalgic. His name was Michael, but I called him Bach. I met Bach in a cinderblock bungalow in Atlantic Beach, about 8 years ago. Time flew by and over the years our lives became intertwined. It did not require a compelling dose of courage for me to pick up the phone and call him. I’ll never forget where I was when I heard the news. It’s incorporated in the title of the story.

Naturally, our first instinct is to reject bad news. Disbelief stands up in our defense, but it too slinks away. With acceptance comes the need to notify others. It’s strange, but I’ve always found a sort of dark pleasure in this. Perhaps I should have been an anchorman. I tried to make some phone calls over the computer, but I was borrowing wi-fi from a neighboring apartment, and the connection was lousy.

So I had pictures and memories. Of course, memories are not static. We give them life through imagination. They change over time, become larger. The dual mind remembers more than the single mind. The two synergize, relying upon each other to fill in the blanks. With our dual mind shut down, the issue became this: detangling the overall experience of “knowing him” – to pull out and examine specific memories, strand by strand.

So I stretched out on the couch and remembered…

    I didn’t remember much from our first meeting. I wasn’t good at documenting my thoughts and actions back then. Fast-forward a few years. What stands out was riding the Jaguar. It was parked in his garage. Bach’s parents were out of town, and the car was parked in such a way that if it was moved, his father would know. We preferred that he not find out.

There were four of us, and each was responsible for marking the coordinates of one tire. I had the back left. Bach drove, and even with Three-6-Mafia in the stereo, we could hear the roar of that engine as we set out in search of, what else, The American Dream. The windows were down and the AC was up. Girls stared. Almost everyone did. They couldn’t help but eyeball that 80 mph blur barreling down Millionaires Lane, its tires all screeching rubber and smoke. Good clean fun. We returned the Jaguar, gassed and in pristine condition, to its rightful spot in the garage.

Some may remember Bach’s apartment in Raleigh. He was enrolled in school, pretending to be a student. I was in town for a job interview and ended up crashing for five days. There was a massive novelty check nailed to the wall in the amount of one million-some-odd dollars, courtesy of a fishing tournament. When I woke up on the couch, it was the first thing I saw. My interview was on a Wednesday, but I would never get the job. Of course, neither of us knew that. Bach surrendered his bed the night before my interview.

“Get some sleep,” he said, “I’ll take the couch.”

It was 3am when a terrible clatter awoke me. Creeping down the stairs, I half expected to see burglars ransacking the place. Instead, I saw Bach fussing over a stove full of sizzling pots and pans. The kitchen and living room were shrouded in smoke. The stereo was on, as was every other light in the house.

I was going to sneak down and scare him, but something stopped me. Peering through the haze, what struck me was the calmness in Bach’s face. The punk music had no effect on him. Curiously, I kept watching. Cooking is a sort of ritual, requiring some internal dialogue, but he did not talk to himself; at least not verbally. His movements were deliberate, almost to the point of seeming childlike. I sat quietly and observed a moment in time: one man cooking a pre-dawn feast, as his unemployed guest looks on, secretly.

     These two experiences were shared by a few and one, respectively. Even before he died, I thought about these times more than others. What did it mean? I wondered.

The answer my brain gave me was this:

I would no longer see or talk to my friend, either face-to-face or over satellite transmissions/fiber optics.

For reasons that I cannot explain, that was the answer. True as it was, this response clearly lacked any emotional wallop. Am I in shock, or am I disconnected?

This was an interesting question. Shock is temporary. I knew that much. However, can you plug a disconnected feeling back in? Perhaps “plugging in,” in the emotional sense, meant communicating with the universe through your soul. Here is one such effort…

Because death (more specifically, relating death to a loved one) is a touchy subject, I’ll use the term “wormhole” hereafter, instead of “death.” Both are heavily theorized, but more importantly, most folks aren’t that passionate about what may -- or may not -- be on the other side of a wormhole.

So, if Bach were here now, this is what I would say:

A wormhole is the urethra of God. As you travel through it, secrets of the universe appear in the form of rubble -- go forth and fertilize the unknown.

     Perhaps the living will find this more insightful:

People keep giving even after they enter the wormhole. We share stories to rejoice the times we had, and to help keep the memory alive.

Dedicated to the memory of Michael Register Bach.

I, Novice: My (Shortlived) Career as a Door-To-Door Salesman Part 2

2010-08-25T15:45:00.001+02:00

We hit a cold spell after our first sale. “My husband will be home tonight,” they’d say, or, “not today y’all.” One wiry man let us in and listened to our presentation, but in the end, he decided against it. “A membership wouldn’t do much good,” he said. “They’re fixing to repo my car next month.” I suggested parking it around back. He chuckled, and then bowed his head.

We approached a home that, aside from the clunker in the driveway, seemed utterly abandoned.

    “I don’t know, Ray. I get the feeling these people want to be left alone.”
    “That car looks unreliable. We’ll never know until we try.”

The man’s heart skipped a beat whenever he saw an old jalopy. I understood that. But this house was a different story. The weeds in the yard were waist-high, and the shrubs growing over the entryway screamed go away. But Ray didn’t listen. He pulled back a curtain of branches, allowing me to squeeze through.

Shortly after knocking, we heard something bellow deep within the house. A minute later, a large unshaven man in a severely loose robe opened the door.

    “I don’t give a shit…oh, yea…hold on.” He cradled the phone under his belly and looked up. “What ‘cha selling?” The house smelled like week-old cheese and dog kennel. This bouquet was the essence of squalor. There were boxes in the living room, and the walls were bare. He could have fled the neighborhood in three minutes flat.

    “Hello there. My name’s Ray and we’re telling the good folks in your neighborhood about our…little motor club.” Ray embraced the folder.

     The man ashed his cigarette on the carpet. “How much?”
    “We have options to fit your budget, some for just seven dollars a month. Perhaps we can come in and--”
    “NOT INTERESTED,” he shouted, and then slammed the door.

Ray gave me this tight grin that said well, at least we tried. We guarded our faces from the shrubs as we crawled back out of the entryway.

Ray and I came across a home with a manicured lawn and a Japanese sedan in the driveway. When we knocked, dogs started yapping inside. A woman opened the door and smiled. She shushed the critters and scooted them back with her foot.

    “How are you today? I’m Ray and this is…um. . .”

Ray had forgotten my name again. This time I interjected, “Noah,” but at the same time, Ray blurted out “Kyle.” We glanced to each other, and then Ray plastered on a smile.

    “Noah,” he said, “that’s right. Today, Noah and I are telling people about our…little motor club. May we come in?”

    “Um, no. My husband’s not here--I mean, he‘ll be back shortly. Just me and the dogs.” She laughed nervously, slowly edging the door shut.

    “I understand. You see, I live just down the road here. I’m your neighbor.”
    She relaxed a little. “Oh, you live in the neighborhood?”

Ray had told several people that he was their neighbor, but no one had questioned his definition of the word until now.

    “Well, no,” he said. “Not this neighborhood, but you can trust me. I’m your neighbor. I’m your friend.”

The heat had finally gotten to Ray. When he asked the woman for her phone number, she closed and bolted the door. He still had that half-crazed look in his eye, so I suggested that we take a break.

My becoming a door-to-door salesman was a result of disorganization, or, as my father called it “piss poor planning.” The rent was due, my savings account was drained, and my parents threatened to take back the car if I didn’t find a job. When I answered the want ad, it hadn’t occurred to me that selling an intangible service to strangers might be difficult. I just wanted my parents off my back.

On the ride back into town, a country song came on the radio. The singer claimed to be a hard-working man who didn’t have a lot, but was glad for what he had. I dismissed him as a complacent, Mountain Dew drinking hick. To be fair, it wasn’t a bad song. I just wasn’t in the mood to be patronized.

Quirky as he might have been, Ray was a terrific salesman, and though I wasn’t always brimming with gratitude, that country singer was right: I was lucky to have him as a mentor.

When he parked alongside the ditch that morning, I couldn’t understand why Ray wanted to sell there. Suggesting neighborhoods with more money only led to a polite “yes, but” rebuttal. Perhaps he thought his scars would make them nervous. I had to accept that for Ray, selling in a certain type of community was like talking with neighbors. Those were his people. The words didn’t always come out right, but it didn’t matter: The story of Ray’s life was written upon his forehead.

I, Novice: My (Shortlived) Career as a Door-To-Door Salesman – Part 1

2010-08-23T13:41:00.001+02:00

We met up at a burger joint down by the hospital. Ray ordered a combo meal, ketchup, no cheese. It was my first day of work, a clear, humid August morning. The company didn’t offer leads – just mentors, so we sat down to devise a plan. Ray whipped out a pen and started sketching a map onto a napkin.

    “I drove by this neighborhood yesterday,” he said.

Although he was seventy, Ray had the gusto of a man half his age. More obvious, however, was the scar running down the middle of his forehead. My initial reaction was “hatchet attack,” but that type of blade was too precise. Like his scar, Ray’s voice was soft. It reminded me that we were in North Carolina.

    “We’ll start here, and work our way in.” In his eagerness, the pen tore through the schematics.

    After Ray dumped his tray, we walked out to his big turquoise Pontiac. He had to clear some debris from the passenger seat. The dashboard was covered with envelopes, and inspirational notes stood up like tombstones from the center console. “Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.” Ray fired up the engine and pointed it toward the outskirts of town.

The neighborhood was comprised of boxy, one-story homes. Ray parked beside a ditch and killed the engine. When I opened the door, I heard the sound of crickets.

I’d studied the material in my sales kit at home, but Ray said he’d do all the talking until I got my feet wet. “Write up the invoice,” he said, “just to get a feel for closing.” We approached the first house on our napkin map. Ray pushed the doorbell. When that white-haired woman answered, I became a door-to-door salesman.

    “How are you today? I’m Ray and this is……”

Sometimes Ray would pause before finishing a sentence. He said it helped keep the client involved. Unfortunately, this was no dramatic pause. Ray had forgotten my name. He blurted out the first thing that came to mind – his toddler grandson.

    “…Kyle. Kyle and I are telling people about our little motor club.”

When Ray said little motor club, he squeezed the faux leather folder in a way that could only be described as “cutesy.” Apparently, it piqued the woman’s interest. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

    “Why don’t you two come in? My husband’s around back in the woodshop. He carves widgets now that he’s retired.”

The woman actually said widgets, but more surprising, Ray’s wily brand of charm had gotten us inside. We sat down on the couch. When she stepped out the back door, I leaned over to Ray.

    “Don’t forget to keep calling me Kyle.”   He nodded solemnly.

When the woman returned, she introduced us to her husband and we all sat down. Ray unzipped his folder and began...

    “I’ve got a special story to tell you about our…little motor club, and how they helped me when I needed them. I was driving down the road one day just minding my business – as a matter of fact; it was just up the road a ways. I remember rolling the windows down ‘cause boy if it wasn’t hot.

    “Anyways, I saw this young lady walking on the side of the road, and she was wearing a pair of…hot pants. Those shorts were bright orange and up to here! She looked so good from behind that I just had to see her face. Well, I looked into my rear view when I passed and boy – she was the prettiest thing you’ve ever seen. When I glanced back at the road, there was a Mack Truck in front of me.” Smack! Ray socked his palm with a fist. “I hit right hard, too.”

Ray extended his arms, giving the couple a chance to examine them.

    “The doctor said this one went through the windshield.”

They leaned in closer. Long white scars covered his arms like a map of World Rivers. Next, he ran an index finger down the gash on his forehead, courtesy of the steering wheel.

    “When I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. An ambulance carried me to Memorial hospital . . . right here in town.”

The woman seemed genuinely concerned. She now had one – possibly two, brain damaged strangers sitting in her living room.

    “And you know who paid me $100 each day I was in the hospital?” Ray asked.

    “Uh, the motor club?” she said.

    Ray nodded. “And do you know who paid to have my car towed to the junkyard after that…terrible accident?”

    “The motor club?”   She said. The widget maker nodded.

    “That’s right, our little motor club. And do you know who’ll do the same for you if – heaven forbid – you become involved in an accident?”

    “The motor club.” She stated.

    “You’ve got it!”

The folder contained images of unfortunate events, along with member benefits in the form of service and monetary assistance. There were no hot pants pictured in the sales kit. I got a rush from hearing that woman say yes.

I filled out the invoice, double-checked it, and showed her where to sign. She had already written a check, but when she squinted at my signature, I knew the jig was up.

    “Noah?” She said. “I thought your name was Kyle.”
    “Well…it is,” I lied. “Kyle’s my middle name, you see. But on paper, for tax purposes, I have to use my legal name.”

Her fingers turned white clamping down on that check, but I kept smiling and she eventually loosened her grip. Ray presented a membership sticker and offered to put it on their station wagon. “We like to put it on the left side of the back windshield.” The woman shrugged and told him that it was fine. We thanked them both and walked out to the drive way.

    “The glass has to be clean,” Ray said, “or else the sticker will peel off.”
He glanced over to the house, and then spit on the car. Using the meat of his fist, he rubbed an area the size of a grapefruit before mashing the sticker into place. His hand was filthy.
    “Well, that’s one down.”

We walked over to the next house and pressed the doorbell. When they answered, Ray was still wiping his hand on the inside of his pant leg.

The New Trend: Man as Trailing Spouse - Part 3

2010-08-18T17:26:00.001+02:00

I can’t speak for all stay at home spouses, but it wasn’t a matter of not wanting to work; it kind of just turned out that way. Four months after moving to Suzhou, I applied for a job teaching hotel employees business English. It seemed like a great opportunity for both sides: They wanted someone with a business degree, and my schedule was wide open.

The hotel was still under construction when I arrived for the interview. The staff was working in an underground bunker until the 700-room mega hotel was complete. A girl named Nina, a Suzhou native, lead the interview. She was professional, but hip, dropping some slang on me as I followed her down the hallway. “So, you enjoy golf, huh? That’s cool.”

We came to a steel door. When she opened it, there were twenty future housekeepers sitting quietly, all of them donning identical mint jumpsuits. “You have twenty minutes to teach the class,” Nina said, and took a seat at the back of the class.

“Nee how,” I said. This was answered with blank stares. “Can anyone say ‘hello?’” Nothing. Their shyness was astounding. When a young man coughed, I turned to him abruptly. “Can you count to three in English?” That wild look in his eye said it all: Had there been a window in the room, I’m sure he would have dove through it to escape. His classmates stared at the floor. It went on like this until I counted in Mandarin.

“Yi, er, san. One, two, three.”

Slowly, they started to answer when I called on them.

As it turned out, they could count to infinity in English. “And what is this,” I asked, pointing to yet another number on the whiteboard.

     “Five hundred eighty-seven thousand, six hundred twenty-nine,” they mumbled in unison.

Convinced that they knew more than they were leading on, I spent the remainder of class preaching to them like an alien, divulging secrets of the future.

     “When the people call, they will demand extra towels.”

Nina called me the next day. She fed me a line that I’d heard from disgruntled girlfriends, but not interviewers. “Can we still be friends?” Of course, this soft rejection was her way of ‘saving face.’ They say the Chinese strive for harmony similar to the way Americans idealize freedom. It didn’t seem like a win-win situation at the time, but then again, it never does when you’re the one being dumped.

Poker Night

The expat circle in Suzhou was tight. Although many of my wife’s coworkers had my email address, they insisted on relaying messages through her.

“Travis walked past my classroom today,” she’d say.
“What did he have to say,” I’d ask.

She’d throw back her shoulders and mimic their husky instructions. “‘Tell your husband: Poker, Thursday night. Peace out.’” After a long day alone, it was strangely refreshing to see a small Asian girl imitating a 200 pound rugby coach.

Guys Night took place in the dining room of a pizzeria on Shin Do Street, a popular foreigner district. The owners didn’t mind us gambling, so long as we kept buying half-liter bottles of Tiger beer. The majority of us were from the US, with the others hailing from Canada, England, New Zealand, and Australia. Conversations were centered on disputes in game rules, work complaints, and drunken hedonism.

One guy, lets call him Richard, used to embark on epic, one-man benders, disappearing for days at a time. He would invite us to join him, but we weren’t that stupid. No one could keep up with him. The police once found him passing out somewhere – a park, perhaps. Not even Richard knew. Apparently they searched his pockets and found only a business card. When he finally came to, Richard was in the middle of the school courtyard, wondering, most likely, if he had a class to teach. Of course, it was Sunday, so he probably just stumbled into the nearest bar.

It was the juxtaposition that intrigued me. Outside of work, their lifestyle wasn’t much different than, say, your average touring funk band. Someone was always on the verge of a divorce, recovering from a motorcycle crash, or coaxing some fatally attracted ex off their balcony. I knew the characters, followed their stories, and rooted for them when they were down. Their stories never ceased to amaze me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if their lives were this hectic back home.

Travelers tend to be open minded when it comes to natives, but when we see “our kind” maneuvering outside the norm, lets face it – house rules are in effect. I’m not saying that everyone was a train wreck. Those just happened to be the stories I remember best. Most of the people I met were decent and hard-working; but drama observers, nevertheless.

My wife’s coworkers eventually started emailing me about Guys Night. We became friends, and I enjoyed their company. When it was time to cash in my chips, however, that unspoken fact still remained. I wasn’t one of them.

When I held up the mirror, that reflection – that reversal – was my everyday situation. White people were the minority. A woman worked while the man stayed at home cooking and cleaning. It was Bizzaro World with chopsticks - and I liked it. So what if somebody thought of me as a trailing spouse.

     So, there’s that word again. Trailing. But I've decided not to attach feelings of resentment or inadequacy to it. I don’t focus on the adjective. I’m busy living the verb.

The sunny side of trailing my wife is the memories we make together all over the world. It means tropical breezes in Bali, sweating over a bowl of Tom Yum in Thailand, getting lost in the hutongs of Beijing, and having someone to confide in when no one answers the phone back home. The roles are many, and I couldn’t be happier with what I do. It takes courage to follow your compass, especially when it’s pointing in an ambiguous direction.

Society accepts the stay at home wife/mother as an institution, but man as “housewife” seems to be a burden that many women aren’t ready to take on. Male pride perpetuates, and often achieves, this illusion of “man as provider.” Women deserve equality, but once they have it, where does it end?

In their great, determined push toward equality, suppose the scale tips too far to the other side, beyond equality. A society run completely by women would be a very different place. Government would change. They have that supporting, nurturing sense of control people always seek when they screw up. Even war might become a thing of the past.

I’m not saying that everything would be perfect. Finding a decent plumber would be a nightmare. But what the hell? You can’t win them all.

So, perhaps it’s time to slide over and let someone else take the wheel. We’ve had a decent run, guys, and there’s nothing wrong with being domestic. Just think of it as being a kid again. As long as you finish your chores, you can go bowling, play golf, or start that novel you’ve been meaning to get around to.

In fact, that’s what I’m going to do now…right after I clean the bathroom.

The New Trend: Man as Trailing Spouse - Part 2

2010-08-16T17:01:00.000+02:00

I covered the walls of my cubicle with pictures. Throughout the day, I’d stare at the beach or a desert, subliminally talking my brain into a traveler state of mind - at least, that’s how it seems now, through the benefit of hindsight.

I didn’t know the universe was going to drop some serendipitous solution down the pipeline.

I was on my way to becoming a company man. However, both of my parents worked from home growing up. Perhaps this shaped my perception in some way. Wasn’t I rebelling by holding down a job that required punching a timecard? Nice try, but my parents didn’t try to live vicariously through me. They didn’t urge me into the arts. Life was my call. The cubical, and my skewed perception of it, was my own creation.

That’s where I was when my wife was offered the China job. The timing seemed perfect, but the voice of my Conscious wasn’t so sure. “Let’s weigh our options,” he said.

I weighed my options, and then there was the voice of my big hairy Ego. A character in his own right, he planted himself in the back seat of my mind. Loath to back down from a challenge, he had his own brand of logic, turning ideas of reality upside down, coaxing me away from the comforts of the crowd. What are you going to do, circle the Taco Bell drive-thru for the rest of your life?

The thought of getting married, quitting my job, and moving overseas was terrifying. But it was also exciting. Wasn’t that a strange thing? Though I didn’t realize it at first, climbing this terror barrier would lead to the death of my Ego. The epitaph on his tombstone reads:

HE QUIT HIS JOB TO BECOME A HOUSEWIFE

It didn’t take long to adjust to my new role in China. My mother taught me to cook from an early age, and thanks to that summer job at the Piggly Wiggly, I knew my way around a grocery store. As for chores, my mother retired herself from laundry duty when I began to smell like teen spirit. My sister and I had to clean our own bedrooms and bathrooms growing up, as well as wash the dishes and the family car. A lot of my friends didn’t do that, but hey, it was the only way my parents would fork over the allowance.

These habits made my transition to housewife somewhat familiar. I was back in a chores-for-allowance system in our two bedroom apartment in Suzhou. I remember my first pilgrimage to the neighborhood wet market. There were fresh fruit and veggie stalls, eggs and tofu.

I was doing alright until I needed meat. The options were a tad unnerving. Aside from live chickens, there were shallow aquariums packed with turtles, toads, and mysterious ribbon-shaped creatures. Folks pointed to the animals in this doomed pet shop, and walked away with plastic bags that quivered from within. And how could I forget the disemboweled pigs hanging from meat hooks, and my friendly neighborhood butcher, swathed elbow deep in blood, smiling back at me? Good times.

            I eventually got used to the smell of blood in the air. With my chores squared away and my wife at work, I strode through the streets of Suzhou with an enthusiasm not unlike Alice on a mushroom binge in Wonderland. The bus rides were packed, the sidewalks were pebbled, and all of the storefronts and pagodas were powdered with dust. Everything looked so different, but apparently, so did I. Folks stared at me all the time, and from behind my tortoise shell shades, I secretly admired the attention.

This went on until the cold of winter forced me back inside. Like so many housewives, I struggled to find creative ways to pass the time. I revisited the classics I neglected to read in high school, wrote long emails to friends back home and attempted new recipes. This got me through the winter, but I was still wrestling with this new identity, trying to figure out who I was, and what I should do.

Return of the Ego: It’s baaaack…

The idea came to me one morning while I was watching CNN. “I’ve got it! I’ll write a novel.” Of course, it seemed logical. Just look at where I was. Surely people wanted to hear my story. I just had to write it down and WHAM bestseller. After all, I was a risk taker. I was frigging Hemingway!
You, dear reader, can see where this is going.

            In my defense, I was spending a lot of time alone in a strange place. After two weeks, it dawned on me that I was in way over my head. My ‘life story,’ if you could call it that, was a disturbing 50 page screed. Was everyone’s life as awesome as mine? Hell no. I was going to tell all; from childhood fetishes to erratic college benders.

The problem, aside from delusions of grandeur, was that my words weren’t so compelling the next day, after my “genius high” wore off. All I wanted to do was write the literary interpretation of a shotgun blast through the pants of the American Dream. Was that so complicated?

            Apparently so. Before long, the thought of writing made me want to do anything else. A routine trip to the bathroom could turn into a six-hour cleaning jag. In these states, I’d tackle one room after the next, deriving a twisted sense of self-worth through a deliriously sparkling toilet bowl. When I was finished, I’d stand in the doorway and take a deep breath, admiring perfection in a moment in time. Unlike my static written persona, the real me was acting crazy. Those oddly-labeled chemicals probably had something to do with it, but as long as I accomplished something, I didn't care.

As it turned out, neither did my wife. “Ooh, clean,” was all she said. Then she’d close the door and flush a day’s worth of work down the drain.

The New Trend: Man as Trailing Spouse - Part 1

2010-08-12T15:17:00.003+02:00

“So, what do you do?”

When asked this, most people talk about their job – how they spend their waking hours. It’s a straightforward question, unless you delve to deep. What does anyone really do? Often it’s just small talk, but no one wants to get into a metaphysical probe at a clambake. So I play along.

“I am a trailing spouse.”

It’s something you don’t often hear a man say, but it’s catching on. So what is a trailing spouse? Basically, my wife took a job and I followed her. She’s the bread winner, and I’m all right with that. It’s the title that’s never agreed with me. Trailing. The adjective makes me think of a short-legged dog, struggling to keep up with its master. It's the same mental image. And this invariably spawns the next question.

“So what do you do?”

Our situation is like a NASCAR team. While my wife’s out there burning up the tracks, I' behind the scenes, keeping parts stocked and the engine running. And like a pit crew, the roles are countless: Husband, chef, maid, butler, travel companion, bug squasher, barista, grocery runner, repair man, listener of grievances…just to name a few.

Of course, I don’t go through the entire list. I’m usually interrupted by a sigh, or, if the listener has a decent poker face, a tight-lipped nod. Man should work; man earns money, I hear telepathically. But I reject that, at least for right now.

"This opportunity is too good to pass up. I’ll quit my job and follow you."

That’s how it began. The words came easy at the time, as if I were merely stepping out to the corner market. I’ll pick up a carton of milk…and while I’m at it, I’ll quit my job and move to

China

with you. And then reality sunk in. The decision would rake up every illusion of manliness I had. Take a look around: This wasn't in harmony with the concept of “Man as Provider.” Thinking about it made my stomach knot, but it was exciting. I wasn't just giving up a job; I was diving into the shallow end of a new life.

Of course, my wife never asked me to do this, nor did she expect me to. It’s just one of those things: you fall in love with a person, and the next thing you know, you’re having a Vegas wedding and moving half-way around the world to a communist country.

There’s no question that I love my wife, but there were other factors at play. I enjoyed my job as a medical claims adjuster, for instance, and it’s not a bad way to earn a living, but spending nine hours a day in a cubicle just wasn’t my passion. Oddly enough, I believed in what my wife was doing more. As a special needs teacher, she seemed to exude purpose, and there is a certain allure to being around someone that knows what they want out of life.

I’ve didn’t have a clear vision concerning my career, and maybe that’s why I was so willing to abandon ship. I used to get this restless feeling at work. “There’s got to be more than this,” I used to say, and when it became too much, I’d sink a bag of weed to the bottom of a shampoo bottle and fly out to Utah, say, and to spend a week wandering the desert alone. Back then I called it a "Vision Quest," but a more accurate description might be "intellectual restlessness."

In those profound moments under the sun, I saw clearly. What felt like a hectic work schedule was merely dazzling my brain – like junk food – providing it with no lasting nourishment. My brain was hungry. I was grateful for the money, but that underlying sense of tension, like a steadily rising hunger, did not mesh with the nine-to-five frame of mind. I wanted to – no, I needed to – get away from Big Brother (as my manager called it) if I was going learn more about myself.

I’m not saying that the lone desert approach was particularly intelligent, or even original, but experimenting with my surroundings just happened to be my style of approach. I just listened for the call, and when it came, I went to where it needed me to go.

Long Distance Ham

2010-07-30T13:28:00.000+02:00

I call my grandmother granny. I call her in North Carolina once a month. I listen to her on speakerphone, and my wife likes to eavesdrop. I moved overseas three years ago. Granny wants to know if they have collards at my new home in Germany. When I say no, she switches gears to turnip greens. Turnip greens. Sure, I tell her, oh yeah, even though I’m not actually sure. I’ve never needed to ask “What’s the German word for turnip greens?”

I’m not the type of guy who needs a turnip green translation.

Granny lived in the last house on a quiet street in a neighborhood called Little Wood in the town of Little Washington. She worked for the state, but now she is retired. Granny sold her home a few years back. My uncles used to proceeds to move granny into a nursing home. The proprietors called this place a retirement manor, which commanded a more respectful position in the community. It was just down the road in Tarboro.

Our whole family was there to help move her in. We had lunch at a bar-b-que joint called Hog Heaven. Just like always. Grandma usually got the bar-b-que platter, with collards and hush puppies, but since it was a big day we ordered family style. A whole pig is cooked in an oversized barrel around back. When the pig is cooked, a man chops the meat with a cleaver and sprinkles it with salt and spicy vinegar. Hog Heaven. It’s a family restaurant. We hugged and waved goodbye to granny before leaving the retirement manor.

Not long after we left, perhaps a few weeks, granny had some trouble at the home. I asked my mother, but the details escape me now. I was in college. All I can remember from the period is the phrase crying jags. Those words have taken on a whole new meaning to me now. The thought of seeing granny in a full-blown crying jag leaves me hollow inside.

The folks at the retirement manor politely asked granny to leave. The feelings, it seemed, were mutual. I couldn’t be there to help her move out. My Uncle Danny and his partner Joe found granny another rest home. This one was close to the hospital in Little Washington. It was closer to home. Heck, it was home.

The building is one story, spread out in wings with long white hallways. On my first visit, I saw a nurse smoking in the courtyard, taking a breather. My granny takes a Percocet every evening at five. She’s happy at Wooded Grove. Even the name is safe and padded. A lot of the residents at Wooded Grove ride a wheelchair around. When I visit granny, there’s always folks parked in the hallway outside their rooms. I try to acknowledge each one of them with a smile, even if they aren't quite all there. As I pass them, it’s kind of hard to not feel like I’m walking in a parade.

My granny’s skin is shiny like the leaf on a silver dollar tree now. She keeps a pump bottle of Lubriderm lotion next to her recliner, along with a box of Kleenex and the remote. Her La-Z-Boy chair can levitate her to her feet at the touch of a button. It faces a small television that was made in 1997. She watches all the shows on Channel 7, the local NBC affiliate. The crew down at WITN is friendly on-air and off. They don’t say anything risqué on the air, or get arrested for drunk driving. Their behavior in public supports the station’s tagline which is “News you can trust.”

I did my internship at WITN during college. I followed the promotions manager, Shawn, around the station like an information sponge. People at the station valued his mind. Basically, his job allowed him a lot of time in a dark room filled with high-tech computers. Shawn made the 10, 20, or 30 second clips that keep folks jazzed about WITN between commercials. “Marvin Daugherty,” says a voice, “When weather happens in Eastern Carolina, he’s there.” During the taping, I held up a large piece of tin foil and marshaled the light into Marvin’s face just right. He nailed it in one take.

Shawn and I brought the tape over to the promotions room. “There’s a formula for making these,” he said. “The stations are very specific. A lot of the time it’s the same video, just different words.” The only thing I noticed was different ties. He shuffled the effects. Three large computer screens consumed our field of vision, and when the ON-AIR light came on at five, it was almost like riding a space ship to Ordinary.

Sometimes I rode my Harley-Davidson motorcycle to the TV station and parked it in the front spot reserved for bikes. It was not frequently taken, and I imagined the news team inquiring as to whose bike it was. Then I thought of how I’d get a weather girl on the back of it. She’d stop me in the hall. “Hey, are you the guy…” As fate would have it, I crossed paths with chief meteorologist Marvin Daugherty instead. His favorite song is “Take the Highway” by the Marshall Tucker Band. His favorite food is spaghetti, and he likes to sit on his back porch and watch nature. He’s a household name in Eastern Carolina.

During a break one day, Shawn asked me to walk outside with him. He wanted to sponge some knowledge from me about my motorcycle. I explained to him how I stretched the gas tank, added a hyper charger, and switched out the stock mufflers for a pair of long shot exhaust pipes. I handed him my helmet and said, “Take it for a spin,” but he declined. Shawn told me how a runaway car smacked into him while he was riding a motorcycle one day. The helmet saved my life he said, and then he leaned over and showed me an old crescent shaped scar on his scalp. “I’ll never ride a motorcycle again.” The man is lucky to be alive.

Years later, I would bring my wife to meet granny in the nursing home. My wife was my girlfriend at the time though. Granny’s neighbors lined the hallways with their wheelchairs like always. I waved like we were in the parade. When I introduced the two, granny had trouble pronouncing my wife’s name. She had never heard it before, but she gave it a good try anyway.

My wife’s name is Takayo.

I took some pictures of Takayo sitting with granny on the arm of her La-Z-Boy. I was sitting in a motorized wheelchair, which I joyride through the halls every time I visit. The speed knob has a range of slow as a turtle through rabbit. For me, it’s more of a game than a means of conveyance. The joke is to crash into the wall a few times, and then feign whiplash. Granny smiles but I only do this in her room. I am respectful to the other residents. Granny keeps a walker next to her chair as well. The tennis balls on the bottom of it glide her across the floor.

The last time I talked to granny I was in Spain. She asked me how I like it here, and I told her about all the great ways we were spending our time. Granny asks me if they drink iced tea over here. I tell her they don’t, and talk about espresso instead. She can’t believe they don’t drink iced tea. She likes to know what I am eating wherever I am in the world. Meat’s a hot topic. I told her about the kangaroo, rabbit, and zebra meat I had at a restaurant in Düsseldorf, and walking along the Rhine with a belly full of African game.

I told her about Spanish Serrano ham and the little café that I occasionally frequent in the morning time. I had her on speakerphone, but her phone connection has been lousy since last year. My uncle disconnected granny’s LAN line and gave her a cell phone. I didn’t hear from granny for a while. Apparently she treated the phone like a moon rock. Uncle Danny eventually set up her voice mail, but, being granny, she didn’t know how to access her messages. I heard this message a lot. My uncle’s voice comes across resonant, somber, like the after hours recording at a funeral home. “We can not answer the phone at this time…” It’s not at all like his normal, engaging self.

Because granny lives in a nursing home in the woods by the Little Washington hospital, the phone signal is week. Whenever I call, she tells me to wait a minute, “I have to go over and sit by the window.” I wait. “Hold on,” she said. I gripped the couch. She sits by the window and asks me what it’s like here. I tell her how tan the people are, and how we love the sunny weather. She asked me about food and I talked about ham sandwiches and coffee as I looked outside my balcony.

“Are there colors over there?” She asks. The connection interrupted her mid-sentence.

“Colors,” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

Takayo looks up from the article she’s reading.

“Well, there’s…blue…and red…” The question temporarily blew my mind.

“Do they have collards,” she said clearly. Oh. I told her that they did not have collards here in Spain, but again, I’m not altogether sure if this is true.

“Do they have turnip greens,” she asked.

“Sure granny, they’ve got turnip greens. They’re up to eyeballs in them.”

Over Soup in Budapest

2010-07-15T15:02:00.000+02:00

I was fishing through a bowl of soup in a bar in Budapest. The waitress, a solid built brunette, didn’t so much take my order as make it for me. “This,” she said, pointing with her pen. “It’s traditional soup. You like.” It wasn’t bad, but there too, it’s hard to screw up a bean. Takayo and I found the traditional food in Budapest similar to that of Prague. If communism left a mark in Eastern Europe’s culinary world, it took the form of chunky soups.

It was a late lunch, and our table overlooked a residential street. Three men were trying to load window frames into the European version of a Ford Fiesta. The frames, like so many in Budapest, were handsome, six-foot tall formations. The two men in paint-splattered coveralls were being directed by the potbellied guy in the belly shirt. None of them seemed to have a clue as to what the other was doing. It was like watching the Three Stooges at work, minus the sting of an open-handed slap to the face.

We were lucky to have the show. Takayo and I were on our second week of vacation, and for the time being, our conversation had run out of steam. The men tried cramming the heavy frames in, first this way and then that. There was a crunch, and the workers winced. “Don’t worry about it,” I imagined the fat man saying. “I’ve got spray paint at home.” The men set down the frame and formed a semi-circle, discussing possible solutions for this life sized puzzle.

We were on the Buda side of the Danube, which, unlike the larger buildings of Pest, has more of an old-world feel to it. There was a sign on the wall that read: NO SPITTING ON SIDEWALK. $5 FINE. This was a novelty sign from the States, of course, from the days when every man on the street wore a fedora. There were honest deals to cut and butchers to over-tip, or so the old movies would have us believe. Who even had time to spit on the sidewalk? There was the town wino, but he was already locked up. Where were all the manual laborers? You know, the people for whom these no spitting signs were meant for?

When I was growing up, the family business was a three-hundred unit trailer park. I got to meet a lot of their employees, many of whom lived right there in the park. My father was always working alongside deeply tanned men, their skin often the same texture as their boots. It was only a matter or time before work followed my father home.

I remember walking outside one morning to find, what smelled like, a massive shit grave in our yard. The septic tank that lay four feet underground was backed up. Some workers from the park helped him dig the massive hole, but some time after prying the lid open, my father’s keys fell from the breast pocket of his Acapulco shirt into the raw sewage. And they would have sunk to the bottom, had it not been for the alligator case, which was surprisingly buoyant. My dad fished the case out with a shovel and flung it onto the grass like a drowned rat. After the ordeal, the men stood in a semi circle, their eyes fixed on the hole, discussing their next move.

Takayo and I had finished our soup, but the Caesar salad we ordered hadn’t come out yet. There was a gap in the wall behind my seat, which separated the dining room and kitchen. Our salad was waiting at the prep table. There was nobody around. To pass the time, I told Takayo the story about my father’s keys. The men outside were still strategizing, which somehow made the story seem more relevant.

But it was like that. There was always heavy pieces of equipment that needed to be moved, or dug up.

Some of his tenants thought it was clever to flush pork chop bones down the toilet. What they didn’t realize was that pork chop bones are unhealthy for plumbing. The trailer suffered the equivalent of a massive stroke. The tenants fled town shortly after their idea, and toilet, backfired. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen my father use a Ditch Witch.

By the time our salad arrived, the men had the frames off the street and loaded into the hatchback of the car. Ropes were brought out, and naturally every man had his own idea of the right way to tie a knot. When we asked our waitress for the check, the men were shaking hands, congratulating themselves for, I suppose, not crushing the ass-end of the car like an aluminum can.

Before Buddha belly drove off, each man rechecked his knot one last time. This interrupted the “shake hands, depart” sequence, so the men resorted back to standing in a semi-circle, talking -- like anywhere else in the world -- about god only knows what.

Newly Published by Matador Network

2010-07-02T00:35:00.000+02:00

Experience the ancient Chinese art of being set on fire...

http://matadorabroad.com/a-visit-to-the-chinese-spa-massaged-with-flames/

Stop, Drop, and Roll

2010-06-14T13:08:00.002+02:00

It was my first summer job, and I was helping my boss, Dave, fix a bumper boat motor at the Golfin‘ Dolphin putt-putt course. . .

This piece is currently pending publication. Check back soon for the link.

Can You Hear Me Now?

2010-06-09T14:59:00.003+02:00

If the winds are not blowing too hard off the North Atlantic side of Puerto Rico, I can talk to my father on his cell phone, his one and only line of communication. My parents pooled their resources before the housing bubble burst and purchased a cliff-side home overlooking a village by the ocean. Before leaving for the winter, they traded their LAN line for cell phones that claimed to provide service in both Puerto Rico and North Carolina.

    “Why pay for something we’ll only use half the year,” my mother asked. It was sound logic, but as it was, roofs proved too daunting for the mobile provider in both locations. They complained to the company, but ended up surrendering to the corporate giant. Instead, they took my calls on the porch, which inclined the conversation toward simpler matters.

    “You won’t believe it. There’s geese swimming in the pond now.”

    The “pond,” as my mother called it, was the murky accumulation of back water in the field next to the driveway. After a particularly large storm, the water sat there for months. The area was once a landfill, but developers came in with bags of grass seed and houses eventually sprung up around it. My parents spent their first winter in Puerto Rico as these houses were being built.

    This was our first holiday alone as a family. Although I called them a week before Christmas, celebrations were already in full swing.

    “Are you guys alright over there,” I asked, after what sounded like a shotgun blast. The phone was going in and out. It was Puerto Rico’s chaotic celebration of the birth of our Lord and Savior, but it might just as well have been Chinese New Year. With festivities starting as early as November, Christmas is something of a marathon for Puerto Ricans. When I spoke with my parents a few days later, another celebration called Three Kings was already in full swing. Jojo, the family Boston terrier, ran off in a blind panic from the fireworks, only to be imprisoned in a box by one of the neighborhood boys.

    From what I could gather, the boy wasn’t trying to be mean. He knew the dog belonged to somebody in the neighborhood, but with all the distractions around, he had just forgotten about the dog. My dad found Jojo still trembling in the box. The term shell shock came to mind. My mother crammed half a Xanax down the dog’s throat, but according to her “The poor thing hasn’t been the same ever sense.”

From Amsterdam to Dusk

2010-06-02T16:34:00.003+02:00

If it comes down to a matter of four hours or less, I’ll take a train over an airplane any day. It has nothing to do with a fear of flying or anything like that. Call me old fashioned, but there’s just something endearing in the clank of a departure bell, the no-hassle boarding, and knowing that no matter how many nail clippers I have clanging around in my pocket, some haughty security guard isn’t going to take them away from me.

    We had been anticipating this trip to Amsterdam for some time. Neither of us had visited the Netherlands before, and were not quite sure what to expect.

That sense of “arrival” doesn’t hit you until you step outside. We hadn‘t walked out past the awning when Takayo immediately stopped in her tracks like a Pointer on a scent: The reefer. No doubt, we expected to see people doing it, but it’s hard not to be astonished when you smell it in the crowded streets of a first world country. We laughed it off, marveling at the fact that pot -- despite the debates, arrests, and stigmas attached to it in the States -- is regarded as nothing more than an accessory to tourism here.

    Like good tourists, we crossed the street tracks to tourist information and waited for our number to be called to buy museum tickets and train passes. This allowed us some time to consort with our first loose screw.

    “They’ll talk about trust,” the man said to Takayo, as if picking up in the middle of a conversation. “They come on television, and they ask you to trust them, but they’re not in a position to be trusted.” He looked normal enough, but then I looked to the sleeves of his white micro fleece, which were sullied with dirt. He talked relentlessly, offering point to his own counterpoint.

When he finally paused to breath, I asked “Who do you trust, then?” Looking as if the question was some sort of riddle, he quietly stared off as Takayo and I inched away from him. When our number was called, we laid a stack on the counter girl for the museum and train passes.

    We would walk a few blocks and eventually make a left to find our hotel. While crossing a street, I was nearly run over by a bicyclist, the swish of his coat tail slapped my shoulder as he sped by. It was the sort of bust-out riding one might expect from someone named "Tiny" during Bike Week. It quickly became evident that bikes are King of the Road in Amsterdam. They bullied through traffic, ignored red lights and sped toward pedestrians, swerving around them at the last possible moment. They might have been scarier had they been brandishing steel toes and neck tattoos, but as it were, their necks were hid under thick scarves and slim-fitted overcoats.

    “Look at that,” I said, remarking on the street-level apartments on the way to our hotel. The residents kept their curtains open, the rooms arranged like still-life pieces on display. Most of the homes, lit by carefully chosen lamps, were void of people. Many did not have televisions. I took every open window as an invitation. One woman sat at her dining room table facing the window, drinking out of an orange mug. I felt obliged, expected even, to look inside. She made eye contact with me as, I expect, she had every other passerby that cared to take a peek into her life.

    The city spreads out from the port and all of the canals flush you toward the busy shops lining the streets to the Dam. You don’t need a thing if you’re out for a stroll. We had checked in to our hotel and eaten at a small sandwich shop run by a Spaniard. We let the streets take us where they would, playing right into their hands. Since we deliberately had no agenda for the day, we decided to get a freewheeling impression of the city.

    Your heart starts to pump when you see the street urchins smoking sensitizers on the bridge. They were all bearded and heavily pierced. Perhaps after graduating high school they went backpacking through Europe to “find themselves,” but ended up losing everything. Even if their faces had been on some Mid-West milk carton, the toll of experience and grime might have rendered them unrecognizable. We ignored their mumbles as we passed, smiling and looking forward diplomatically. Moreover, we looked good doing it. It was finally cool enough to wear the custom-made clothes -- double cashmere pea coats, dress shirts, etc. -- we had tailored before leaving China. We strolled through the glowing red markers in the street, arm in arm, living in a white bread world .

    You think it’ll be seedy at first, but it don’t show you everything at once. Roses bloom the way Amsterdam unfolds. I get the impression that this isn’t a place to be ‘conquered,’ as one might say of an American city such as DC. Just sliding through the crowd, taking in the cobblestone streets, the slender buildings, chalky perfumes, and gang plank floors is an unexpected luxury.

    The city has enough class to keep walking aimlessly for hours. The guidebooks tell you not to walk through the Red Light first thing (you don’t want to get the wrong impression of the city), so that’s exactly what we did. An interesting aspect of the sex shops is the feeling of being on the outside looking in. At one moment you can secretly judge some pervert coming out of a store, and the next minute you’re bathed under the neon glow of a storefront window, intrigued by the items on display: Condoms with reservoir tips shaped like elephants, rhinoceros, hand mixers…latex arms, strap-on dildos, pseudo-erotic headgear, grainy Persian sex tapes, etc.

    And then there are the half naked girls in windows with dark-glowing skin and radiant underthings. The first window ladies we saw were black, and were tightly cinched with corsets into human wasps. One was standing at the window on the phone, while the other sat on a stool, lazily puffing on a butt.

    “Oh my god!” Takayo gasped. “There really are women in the windows.”
    “Of course” I said, feigning a macho attitude. “Who did you expect to see?”

Again, your heart starts to race because you’ve heard that it was real and you thought you were prepared to see it. You think you’re prepared, but you’re never really ready to see the girls until they‘re right there in front of you. I made eye contact with the one on the phone and quickly looked away. She shook her tits. We walked past. Our footing became awkward, a combination of coming to terms with our surroundings and the uneven cobblestone street. The whole scene is euphoric and vile, but it’s strangely fascinating like a crash you can’t look away from. Special horrors comes to mind. Get inside them, allow them inside you, all the kinky tubes and smelly bulges of human anatomy summed up to a trick.

We walked around, looking at the prostitutes and commentating their activities.
    “I love how half of them are on the phone,” said Takayo. “Shouldn’t they be fighting for business?”
    “Maybe they’re responding to customers by phone, instead of pawing at the window like a cat. These are modern times we‘re living in.”
    The location of the window, as related to foot traffic, was directly proportionate to how attractive the prostitute was. For the most part, the spiciest girls didn’t have time to be bored. They were too busy reeling in johns with their Red Bull inspired squirmy dances.

    The initial shock of it all was starting to wear off. We had talked about going into a bar earlier. We marched into the most decadent joint on the street. As soon as we walked in, people eyed us up and quickly looked away.

    “The waitresses doesn’t serve here,” said the waitress. I thought about asking her what she did do, but at the risk of sounding like a buzz-kill, I held my tongue.

We sat down at a large table across from two couples. A few minutes after we sat down, the couples at our table staggered out. A group of copper faced boys took their place. The boys look as if they were twelve. What was it like here, I wondered, when there was no televisions or kaleidoscope phones or latex fists flooding the town. Visions flashed to mind of a roaring queen, playing a piano in a corner, the brittle sound of peanut shells underfoot, and the glow of a hundred candles with wax boiling over like fondue.

    Meanwhile, the speakers pumped out a relentless beat, reminding me of the sound a vet might hear in his stethoscope. Ideas flashed and flitted away before they could expand. I walked to bathroom and laughed to myself in the stall. A sign over the sink read:

    DON’T DRINK THE WATER fish fuck in it!

    We hit the street arm-in-arm in the direction of the regressing sun. The clouds drifted across the sky like gun smoke over a burning body. A leather clad man stood in a doorway, poking his head around the doorframe like a terrapin. Anyone with a Euro to his name has a chance here. There’s something timeless about the blind alleyways here. They echo in the huffing, grunting displays of involuntary muscle spasms. Sticky, able men. The suckers in the shops pull money out of their pants like burning peckers. We didn’t make eye contact, won’t give them the satisfaction. We have an image to uphold.

    Stiffened by the cold, I stubbed my toe on the ground, thinking, ‘It’s getting hard to walk.’ Like an omen, all of a sudden this man in a wheelchair rolled out from an alleyway like a bat-out-of-hell. I cast aside my complaints, grateful for my legs.

    Cathedral bells gossiped through the passages, springing to mind a past-life vision as a medieval bell-ringer. Below the sagging flesh, my muscles react like jumper cables. The rooftop is a bell-ringer’s domain. I awake at dawn. A bell-ringer’s peak is at sunset. That‘s when I sharpen my trade.

    “I feel like I just fled the scene of a crime,” I said, as the street opened up to the Dam. We were walking toward the great white pillar. Tourists milled about the protrusion as children gamboled up and down the levels encircling it.

    “What if there were people circling around this thing for no particular reason? You know, like they might have done in the stone ages.”
    “Monks circling around it.” Takayo said.
    “Yes,” I said. “Monks.” Boy was that ever good. I envisioned the top level thick with monks.

    The bricks underfoot seem to slosh about like brine water, causing us to walk askew. We crossed the street toward the Royal Palace. Large men in overalls manipulated brightly painted machines, screeching in the center of the square. The thrill rides were collapsed like boxed accordions. A greasy, longhaired drifter dropped his rucksack and wrung his hands. We pushed through the square, minding the framework of electrical hoses and pigeon shit strewn across the stones.

    OMAN. The word was emblazoned upon some signage, hanging by the doors of a large, gothic cathedral. It seemed like a curious juxtaposition to me. I needed to go back to the hotel for my coat, but at that moment, I was compelled toward that structure tucked into the corner of the square.

    “We need to be humbled,” I said, making a beeline for the church.

The sharp, ancient spires seemed to rake the sky’s hyper-colored underbelly. As always, I resorted to thoughts of planetary warfare. It’s the same song and dance: Swollen red bombs arching into space, reentering the stratosphere over some bleak regime. More countries annihilating each other. The Message is broadcast, in English, just moments before all of the marbles fall to the ground.

We arrive to the foot of the entrance and I immediately start pulling on the doors. The knobs are the size of polished honeydews and they don‘t budge. We walk around to another entrance, where a group of kids hung from the locked wrought iron gate drinking sodas. The gift shop windows were full of, what appeared to be, Omani gutting knives. I can appreciate weapons in a place of worship, but it’s hard to feel humbled by a cathedral that has a café sticking out of its side.

In the hotel room, we opened the window and kicked off our shoes, looking out over the skyline. The slates glowed orange and sharpened in the last of the fading light. We laid on the bed like punched geese as bells echoed over the canal. A pigeon roosted on the blade of an adjacent rooftop, puffed up his feathers, and become a silhouette.

Moving Beyond Walls

2010-05-31T17:36:00.000+02:00

I used to have this job. When I was there, it felt like I should be doing something else. What this ‘something’ was exactly, I did not know. So, I just kept working, doing things better than the last time. It’s not surprising that a lot of people feel this way. However, it’s hard to change what you can‘t pinpoint.

    Part of it was, I didn’t feel like my skills were being fully utilized at my job. I could leave, but what would I do next? I once read that nobody has ever been so far into the wrong business, that they couldn’t get into the right business. Imagine that: NOBODY.

    Consider this: Do all that you can where you are, but keep an eye out for opportunities, and jump when they present themselves.

    Flash forward a couple of years. I don’t have that job anymore, and I’m doing something else. According to my wife it’s called ‘nothing’ and based on her calculations, business is booming. In my defense, I have an immense capacity for sustained focus, but I’m having trouble getting paid to stare at walls.

    The frustrating thing is, I fit the middle-America corporate profile: White, polite, and makes a good impression over the phone. The glitch is that I cannot speak German, which excludes me from most of the job market. In my time overseas, strangely enough, I’ve found that I miss going to job interviews. I just find something strangely romantic about them. It’s like the prelude to an arranged marriage.

    “Tell me a little bit about yourself,” the interviewer would say.

    This was my favorite question. I’ve never wanted to be someone else, but I did enjoy pretending to be someone else. Interviewers don’t want the truth. I’ve been not hired by enough companies to know that.

    What are you going to say, “well, I’m unemployed, this thirty-minute interview is the longest I’ve been sober in a week, and I dressed in the parking lot before walking in.”

    “Gee, how quickly can you start?”

    My last interview was a seven hour drive away, but the company put me up in a room at the Courtyard Marriot. It was a claims position at an insurance company and I was so nervous. Shortly before the interview, I bent over wrong and strained something in my back. Hot pain shot up my spine and into my neck. I couldn’t bend down or turn my head. All I could do was rotate my torso like Bigfoot. When I arrived, it was nice to see that everyone else was as stiff and outwardly anal as me.

Well, I thought. As long as I’m in excruciating pain, I might fit in.

    For the interview, my character was based on someone that watched their apartment burn to the ground. Instead of cursing the world and everything in it, I would find strength in the claims adjuster that dealt with my claim. “And now I want to do the same for others.” That was going to be my closer. I imagined shaking hands, and accepting an offer. But before that, I had some issues to clear up. I wasn’t exactly a swoop-in-and-save-the-day kind of guy. I was the type of guy that drove the getaway car while friends siphoned gas out of untended lawn mowers. Or, to put it another way, an asshole.

    But this insurance interview was something different. A ticket out, if you will. Not that I didn't love North Carolina, but I saw something different in my head. I visualized this 'victim turned victor' story until it became true. I didn’t have to recall prepared answers when the questions came; In my mind, I was already a claims adjuster. My answers sounded believable.

    Of course, my apartment really did burn down, but when the smoke cleared the reality wasn’t all that compelling: The claims adjuster asks you to make a list of everything you own--Including, but not limited to jock straps, candelabrums, Halloween masks, boxes of Honey Smacks--with a dollar value. I sat in a quiet room and filled page after page with these vaporized possessions. As it turned out, there were things I didn’t even know I had. And damned if they weren’t more expensive than I remembered.

    It was my final semester of college, and I was sharing an apartment with two friends. The fire started in the bathroom of all places, from a faulty air handler. It was 4a.m. I smelled smoke on my way to the upstairs bathroom and walked down to investigate. The flames illuminated the outline of the closet door. It wasn’t so much “oh no” that was going through my head as “isn’t that funny.” Of course, a fire ball shot out when I opened the door. I ran into the kitchen, grabbed a pot of water and threw it at the flames. Camp fires are one thing, but electrical fires are another. Water pisses them off. I had never seen a fire spit lightening bolts before, but it was awesome. Frantically, I threw the pot at the fire and ran upstairs to evacuate the house.

    We all made it out safely and were warmed by the flames that consumed the building. It’s a strange feeling, watching your home go up in flames, but it’s stranger still to see yourself on TV the next day with the subheading describing you as “Local Hero.” My ego wouldn’t let me divulge how uncomfortable I was with the exposure. It’s almost like you’re waiting, hoping in fact, for someone to come along and call you out. “Come on. Hero? Really.“ When they never appeared, I stepped into the position. Perhaps a little too well. But I was young and a lot was happening in my life.

    I take that hero title with a grain of salt now, but I haven’t written off the good that came about because of it. Without that fire, I probably never would have sought out a career in insurance. The greatest twist of all was meeting my wife, whom I never would have met otherwise if I hadn‘t taken that job seven hours away. It never ceases to amaze me how these serendipitous things happen, while failing to connect one event to the other.

    So, what can I do now, sitting here staring at my wall and basil plant? All the world is out there, waiting. I’ve cornered the market on ‘nothing,‘ and I'm ready for more. If I can look back and see the chess moves, what’s to stop me from looking a few moves ahead?

Milan Rules

2010-05-26T17:13:00.010+02:00

It is our last night in Milan, and my wife and I are seated in a restaurant with our friends Jesse and Caroline. A candle sits atop the checkered tablecloth, adding a warm glow to our section of the dining room. Close your eyes and say “L’Osso Buco” three times and this place will spring to mind. Despite its Old World décor, Caroline, who has been living here for four years, assures us that this is THE place for pizza. Had we caught up earlier in the week I might have taken her advice. The thing is, I have been eating pizza for five days straight. I knew Milan was a fashion capital, but for some odd reason, it surprised me to see a pizza joint on every corner. And it’s not just the Italians. Other ethnicities have jumped on the bandwagon: Turkish pizza, Indian pizza, even Chinese pizza. No one is unrepresented. It’s like the UN opened a pizzeria on the catwalk.

    I’m asking Caroline about a previous conversation we had on the social “do’s and don’ts” of Milan when our server, a 70-year-old woman with orange hair, presents us with a bottle of wine. Of course, every country has certain behavior parameters. Bicycles are king of the street in Amsterdam, for instance, while pedestrians equate to a target with shoes. Germans, on the other hand, take a crosswalk signal at its word, skipping the whole “look left, look right” deal, they’ll gambol into the street no matter what is barreling down the road toward them.

    I’m mulling over Caroline’s list as Jesse fills the glasses. As you can imagine, the rules of Milan deal primarily with food and style. Their taste for food is somewhat traditional; their style, classy. That said, it never ceases to amaze me how quickly people resort back to middle school.

    “You don’t leave the house with wet hair,” she said.
    “What happens if you do,” I asked.
    “People give you dirty looks. Waiters will look down on you.”

    This may sound harmless, but no matter how hard you wave, a waiter will only see you when he is ready to see you. The customer is always right is not a common axiom here. You are in their world, so you’d better style accordingly.

    The wet hair rule, I feel, is geared more toward women, the implication being that if you are too lazy to dry your hair after a shower, you’ll probably die alone anyhow, so stay home and do us all a favor. This also explains the twenty-seven umbrella salesmen that bombarded Takayo in the subway after a sudden downpour. A lot of men use hair product, which can give the impression of being wet, but I’m sure that patting a stranger’s head violates a different set of rules.

    “You don’t wear flip-flops before ‘flip-flop season,’ which has no exact date, but is determined by some unknown fashion circle.”

    I like this one because it sounds like the premise of a Dan Brown novel: A city gripped by a mysterious society obsessed with creating a legion of fashion forward citizens. Aside from the vague timing, the flip-flop rule is a throwback to America’s “no white shoes after Labor day” rule, which has become largely ignored. The fact that there is a Wal-Mart in Milan, Tennessee, and not Milan, Italy, is no coincidence.

    “You don’t eat on the go.”

    Besides apples, which have artistic merit, this is a rule that I agree with. Good food should be appreciated, not crammed down your throat while passing the United Colors of Benetton. I’ll take this rule a step farther: A McDonald’s hamburger was designed to be eaten under fluorescent lighting, not sunshine.

    When the waitress returns, she places a fine looking pizza before everyone but me. I ordered a pasta dish with mozzarella and eggplant, but what she sets before me looks like a Terracotta roof tile drizzled with tomato sauce. It’s familiar enough, but so is the view from our budget hotel, and neither one is really all that compelling.

    “How’s your…what have you,” Caroline asks.
    “Fine. Are there any more rules, aside from don’t order this?”
    “You don’t drink wine with pizza.”
    “What are you supposed to drink?”
    “Beer. The three of us are breaking the rules.”

We all looked around to the other diners in the room and it was true. All the pizza eaters had a glass of beer. We were the only ones with a bottle of wine on the table, if that says anything.

    I used to see myself as something of a rebel. Rules were a tool used by “The Man” to keep us down. Depending on your age and social circle, I suppose they still are to some people. But not me. Cecil B. deMille said, “It is impossible to break the law. We can only break ourselves against it.” This broadened my perspective as far as Milan is concerned. These rules are more like guidelines. They don’t so much oppress people as they protect them from social faux pas, holding them to a higher standard.

    Except for the beer rule. That’s just stupid.

Don't Be a Victim

2010-05-24T23:14:00.000+02:00

Thanks to shows such as "To Catch a Predator" a lot of criminals have been taken off the streets. However, criminals are catching on to online 'baiting' tactics. They are becoming more brazen in a strange new place called 'offline' or 'the real world.'

Exhibit 1

Imagine, if you will, spotting a five dollar bill on the sidewalk as you're walking home from work. You sprint toward it before the wind catches it. When you catch up to it, there is fishing line attached to the money. You pull...

Exhibit 2

Just one little tug, and you've pleasured a pervert and become a victim.

Missed it? Review image 2. Here's how it went down...

A pervert lies in wait. The anticipation builds with each passing moment. The money is attached to 50 lb. test line. Money, of course, is the bait. The other end of the line is attached to anal beads in the pervert's rectum. (NOTE: everyone picks up money) Nature and curiosity cause you to pull the line. The pervert is wearing Nike Air Max shoes behind those bushes and runs like the wind before you suspect a thing.

What are you wearing, penny loafers? You never had a chance. Sucker.

In these hard times, how can you fight back? REALIZE THIS: There's no such thing as a free lunch; keep an open eye. Scrutinize.

Justice Files, Part 2

2010-05-18T16:39:00.002+02:00

    Over time, the rush I got from hearing, “Sir, please step out of the vehicle” began to dwindle. By the age of twenty I had read a few books on persuasion and decided next time I would reason with the officer. A well blended mix of cockiness and inexperience allowed me to believe I could do it. After all, it has been done before.

According to my sister, within her first year of driving she has been pulled over nearly twenty times without being ticketed. It became something of a long running joke within our family.

    “Why are you late for dinner“ my mother would ask.
    “Oh, I got pulled over again. But he didn’t give me a ticket, just a warning. I was doing 70 through a school zone with one headlight. All he said was ‘SLOW DOWN‘ and let me go.”

Maybe she had uncovered some kind of Police Whisperer technique. She could get pulled over drunk, hand the officer a bloody knife and confide in him “lets keep this between the two of us” before leaving him smiling in a cloud of dust.

    My dad purchased a year membership of legal insurance before my first year of college. The basic concept is that you pay a monthly fee to a company, and if a legal situation arises they provide representation. From then on, it seemed as if my sister and I were in an all out competition to see who could drive our parents to the brink of sanity. When I ran a stop sign, she ran a red light. When I was T-boned by an out of control pick-up truck at a gas station, my sister collided head-on in an intersection with a Jewish woman in a Lexus.

I would call checkmate for a moving violation I received shortly after college. The charge was ‘Disobeying the orders of a police officer while driving on the wrong side of the road.’ If you read into the charge, it was like the chicken and the egg.

    “Were you already on the wrong side of the road when you disobeyed his orders, or did you drive on the wrong side of the road against his orders?”

    There was a fire truck in the middle lane blocking the entrance to my apartment complex. I pulled in behind the fire truck and waited for it to move. When it didn’t, I waited for oncoming traffic to clear before I proceeded down the left side of the road. I drove past the fire truck, no problem. Ahead, a pool of sapphire crumbs sparkled in the road, and further still was a car trapped under an 18-wheeler. The deflated vehicle peered out from under the trailer, as sad and dominated as a poodle inside the clutches of a love drunk rottweiler.

    Over the radio, I heard a voice holler out, “HEY!” I didn’t notice anything until I looked into my rear view, where a reflection filled the rear view. A police officer was pursuing me on foot. By the looks of his wild gesturing, we was instructing a plane for landing or signaling me to pull over. I drove into my complex and parked in my usual spot near the front, rolled the window down, and waited to see what all the commotion was about. The officer approached in a lunging full-out run. The articles secured to his belt crashed upon his thighs as he galloped toward me. Something told me to put both hands on the steering wheel.

“DIDN’T YOU HEAR ME YELLING?!” he shouted, stopping short of crashing into my door.

He was panting heavily. Before I could answer his question he screamed “LICENSE AND REGISTRATION….NOW!”

A piece of spittle blasted from the officer’s mouth onto my pants.

“What’s the problem, officer?”
“WHAT THE HELL IS THE MATTER WITH YOU?!”
“I'm not sure what you mean? I live here.”
His voice took on a robot-like quality. “THAT IS A MOTOR VEHICLE ACCIDENT. YOU CAN NOT DRIVE INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC! LICENSE AND REGISTRATION. NOW!”

    Upon producing both items, he snatched them from my hand and ran back to the scene of the accident. I had groceries in my car, seat belted into the back seat like a couple of toddlers. After ten minutes alone I seriously considered taking the ‘kids’ inside for a bath before peeling off their skin and boiling them alive. I began to wonder if I should I just put a note on my car telling the officer where I went. “Dear Officer, I got hungry." No, I can be patient.

    He kept me waiting for about twenty more minutes. When the officer returned he questioned my sobriety, and I informed him that my own stupidity was to blame. He returned my license and registration with a ticket. Before parting ways, he offered some last minute advice for me to chew on.

"Next time, don't be so stupid."

Isn’t that what the ticket was for?

    I read the ticket aloud after dinner that night, overemphasizing each syllable. The words were scribbled lividly upon the back of the citation, “MR. PELL-E-TIER EN-DAN-GERED THE LIVES OF MY-SELF AND OT-HER DRI-VERS WHEN HE CARE-LESS-LY…”

Justice Files, Part 1

2010-05-17T15:54:00.002+02:00

    You know you’re a novice driver when a state trooper pulls you over, asks for your license and registration, and you reply “No. What do you want it for?” For a first timer, I would describe being inside of a police car a ‘neat‘ experience. I was sixteen at the time, driving my sister and her friend to school in my mini van when we were stopped. We were typical late, as in, we would be able to socialize in the hall for around seven minutes before the late bell. I was not speeding when the cruiser came up behind me -- I was preparing to speed -- that much was certain. Oncoming traffic had to clear before passing the god-fearing vehicle in front of me. Herein lies the problem -- it's not illegal to drive a vehicle 55 miles per hour on the highway; however, it is unlawful to do it while drafting two feet behind the vehicle in front of you.

    As soon as I saw the blue lights behind me I looked to my speedometer -- exactly 55mph. “What the hell does this guy think he’s doing?" I said that aloud, dumbfounded that anyone should dare bother me on my way to school. Maybe I should get his badge number after this misunderstanding, I thought. Prevent this from happening to someone else. The officer, however, was certain he had the right vehicle.

    As he finished the ticket, I was uninterested in the trivialities of appearing in court or paying the fine. I was inspecting the array of gadgets implanted into the cruiser’s dash, overcome with the urge to push colored buttons and flip switches. What would he do if I pushed the red one? I could hold off on the buttons, but something inside of me was brewing a rebuttal. Before exiting the cruiser I snatched the ticket from his hand, opened the door and blurted out “well, thanks for ruining my day,” and slammed the door. It seemed very dramatic at the time, and I felt as if I had gotten the best of him.

    Of course it wasn’t him who was out of line for pulling me over. The urge to mouth off to someone ‘keeping you down’ is on every teenager’s wish list. I just happened to be stupid enough to do it. What I didn’t count on was seeing the officer in court. Or the fact that he marked the ticket with a star, a sort of scarlet letter, to remind him that I had been a dick at the time of the incident. My attorney informed me that the officer wasn’t keen on lowering my charge of ‘following too closely.’   The two spoke in private for a few moments and settles on a deal - apologize to the office, or the charges stick to my driving record and I pay the ticket. After it was over I did the math: Each word of my apology cost me $50 a piece.

No Stress in Stresa

2010-05-10T17:27:00.007+02:00

We came across a dock with large, comfortable boats moored to piers. The parking lot was teeming with men in white captain hats embellished with gold anchors. The only people in Stresa that weren’t asleep must have been these captains and, of course, us. We didn’t have a chance.

“Boat, boat,” one captain offered. “Go to the islands,” said another.

Photo by Jesse Scott

Lost in Delirium

2010-05-05T17:23:00.007+02:00

Je ne parle pas François. I slowly repeated the words in my head. [I do not speak French. I do not speak French.] Despite having a French last name, when Takayo and I left for Brussels, Belgium, this was the only French I had mastered. And by mastered, I mean mangled. I’m no stranger to foreign lands, but for once, part of me wanted to know some of the local language. Before we left Düsseldorf, I jotted down some phrases in a notepad and practiced them on the train. My pronunciations were suspect. However, for a city boasting the world's best beers, I'd most likely be mistaken for a stroke victim.

    There are some places that seem to ooze character the moment you arrive. Landlocked in a sea of rolling green pastures, Brussels was like the Flying Dutchman with Marie Antoinette at the helm. It’s the epitome of a beautiful European city. We found ourselves in Grand Place, sandwiched between the Guild House and City Hall. We fought past the crowd into City Hall to conquer the spire, but the monsieur behind the counter told me it was impossible. Back out in the square, I overheard a man say, “this is one of the prettiest squares in Europe.” It’s funny, but throughout the trip, those words stuck in my head. Though it isn’t the biggest square in Europe, it was a place we’d return to many times.

    We followed the signs to Manneken Pis, the small bronze statue of a boy, well, pissing. As one of the stories go, (and there are a few) some troops put a two-year-old lord in a basket and hung it in a tree to encourage opposing troops. The boy urinated on the opposing troops, who, instead of kidnapping the baby and holding it for ransom, lost the battle. We strolled until we spotted a gathering at a seemingly uneventful street corner.

   They don’t tell you how trivial the statue seems out there in the real world, or that there are hundreds more on display in the Maison du Roi. The little guys are decked out in traditional, pint-sized outfits from all over the world: Japanese samurai, Elvis, Vatican choir boy, even a US Union soldier from the Civil War. Sometimes they dress up the one on the street, but he was naked while we were there. Everyone just took their picture with the small bronze boy, pissing away.

    Ma fleur de pantalon à la tirette, was one of the phrases I had written in my notepad. [My pants bloom at the zipper.] Considering the outfits, I found it surprisingly relevant.

    Part of a country’s job is to pick a handful of indigenous items, build them up to mythical proportions, and exploit them for economic gain. In China, for instance, Chinese food has become so popular, that it is just called ‘food.’ It’s the same with Belgians and the waffle, or gaufre. After biting into one of these bad boys, you’ll never look at an Eggo the same way again. We stumbled across a van sitting outside the Magritte museum: Banana yellow, with hand-painted ducks on the side panel, the thing looked like it had rolled out from 1970. I was instantly drawn to it.

    There was a man standing inside, jiggling a waffle maker. Vanilla scented smoke wafted out, and then the jaws swung open like the cover of an old book. The waffle was an inch thick, and caramelized by the searing metal. He wedged it between a piece of paper and handed it to me: Crunchy on the outside, and slightly undercooked inside. As they say in the waffle biz, it’s the best of both worlds: A little slab of heaven. I took mine straight up, not wanting to ruin it with a topping. A-Team fans may disagree, but this was the best thing that ever came out of a van.

    We had been in town a few days when New Years Eve rolled around. Folks gathered at the Museumplein for the countdown. When we arrived at eleven, an odd video was being projected onto the wall of a museum. It was grainy footage of Russian soldiers stringing barbed wire in, what looked like, the prelude to the Berlin wall. Defectors walked with their fingers locked overhead as armed men urged them along with rifle barrels. We had only brought one can of beer apiece to the square.

     I wasn’t prepared for this shit. And worse, the crowd was too thick to head back for more beer. Kids threw confetti and blew horns. Just before the fireworks display, a few guys climbed up onto the base of a stature and danced for everyone in the square. Throughout it all, thirty foot soldiers rolled barbed wire barriers, incorporating a bleak element to the festivities.

    Takayo and I wandered the streets, dodging people and exploding fire crackers until we found the Delirium Café. There was a barricade holding people back in the alleyway. We nudged past the crowd to see what the hold up was. When I reached the opening, I decided to just keep walking. A security guard threw his hands up.

    “I don’t speak French,” I said in English.
    “Do you have a girl with you,” he asked.
    “Of course I do.”

He saw Takayo and let us pass. That seemed to be the only prerequisite for defeating the road block.

    Inside Delirium, people were hanging from the rafters. Of course, the place was full of piss-ants and douche bags, but there were plenty of folks that might have looked to me and wondered, “who’s this piss-ant douche bag?” Fishbowl glasses of honey-colored beer sloshed atop every table. Your first instinct might be tourist bar, and it is, but once you get a load of the beers on tap, it becomes apparent: When it comes to beer, this place is dead serious. Far from being a beer geek, I asked the bartender what he recommended.     “This one,” he said, yanking back the lever. “Is a good one that I think is completely underrated.”

    He chose a blond Belgian ale, brewed by a small local brewery. Since most of the larger brands--Duvel, Leffe, Stella Artois--are exported, small breweries are stepping up to the plate in a big way and producing some damn fine beer. There are around 125 breweries in Belgium, pumping out nearly nine thousand different beers. Some of the finest beers are produced by the Trappist monks.

“For then are they monks in truth, if they live by the work of their hands.”

--From the 48th chapter of the Rule of St. Benedict.

Only seven Trappist monasteries in the world produce beer, six of which are in Belgium. The most popular is Chimay, a top-fermented bottled ale. Authentic Trappist beers are brewed within the walls of a Trappist abbey, and/or under monk control. The proceeds must be directed toward “assistance” and not financial profit. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch the name of the beer my beer master chose.

    The place was a madhouse. Takayo and I were standing near a U-shaped bench when a group stood up to leave. I saved us a couple of seats on the bench. Takayo went to the restroom. A group of six filled up the remaining seats. They were all twenty-something, but only one of them spoke English. Her name was Natalie, and she translated for her boyfriend, Stefan, who was sitting next to me. They seemed to be having a good time, so I broke out my notepad. “Je ne parle pas François,” I said. “Mais je suis un monstre de mer.” [I can not speak French, but I am a sea monster.] I’m not altogether sure why I wrote that down. However, by the time Takayo returned, everyone was pantomiming and laughing like full-grown lunatics.

    One by one, members of Natalie and Stefan's group disappeared like camp counselors in a horror film. We all decided to walk across the alley to a different section of the bar. At one point, I got up to find a restroom. It was the strangest thing, but along the way I became inexplicably lost. The walls began to breath like a sleeping animal, and all the table coasters went cross-eyed. The bar had become a maze. I walked for what seemed like thirty minutes, down rickety stairs, past strange woodland-folk conspiring around tree stump tables. It was the walk of a cold-sweat dream.

    A wrong turn dumped me into an alleyway. There was no telling how I got there. I walked up to a window, looked in, and saw the face of Whistler’s mother drenched in yellow candlelight. There was nothing there for me. I continued up the alley like the ghost of Jack the Ripper, balancing on the head of a pin. It was another dimension, and nothing made sense. Suddenly I heard a knock on a window. I looked right and saw Takayo waving. When I found my way inside, there was a glass of absinth sat on the table, burning like a chemistry set. They asked me where I had gone, and I didn’t quite know what to tell them.

    I fell ill later that night in our hotel room. It was nearly six o’clock, New Years morning. Unlike those dreams you don’t want to wake up from--finding money, shooting a gun--this was a waking nightmare. The bed sheets--as well as my face--were covered in last night’s spaghetti.

    “Call housekeeping,” said Takayo, tossing the linens in the farthest corner.

It seemed like a good idea. Hell, by that point, I would have walked off a cliff. When I pushed 6, a tired sounding woman answered the phone.

    “Oui?”
    “Je ne bu bu…poly vu…” [pause] “I made a mess.”
    “Sorry?”
    “Um, housekeeping, I need help.” [pause] “Hello…oui?”

Perhaps I could have explained it differently, but in my state, the words just wouldn’t come. The next thing I heard transcends language in every culture. Click. Housekeeping had hung up on me.

     Throughout the day, I opened the window to let fresh air into the room. Aside from those violent bouts of hurling, I heard the words of an Irishman, not a Frenchman, continuously looping in my head.

All is quiet on New Year’s Day / A world in white gets underway.

Although a chorus of truck mufflers were backfiring in my head, the morning light was pale and grey. Snow fell softly upon the rooftops of adjacent buildings, and the world seemed like a peaceful place.

City, Map, Defeat

2010-05-03T17:16:00.001+02:00

Six-story buildings curve ever so slightly down the cobblestone street,

like a movie with no outcome.

Have we passed this garbage pile, you wonder.

Her silence waits like a banana peel.

You feel the soot-covered men loading coal

in the pit of your stomach.

Repent, they sigh. Backtracking is sacrilege, and

The piss-ant handing out fliers already remembers your face.

Shanghaied By the Tea Party

2010-04-29T17:27:00.009+02:00

***

It was a sunny June morning, and I was walking the streets of Shanghai after picking up my new passport....

This story is pending publication. Please check back later.

Back massage, hold the steam.

2010-04-26T17:25:00.005+02:00

I was face down on the massage table when the masseuse tapped me on the shoulder. “Look,” she whispered into my ear. Five minutes into a massage, it seemed like a strange request but I did what she said. When I lifted my head, the girl was pointing to my wife, whose neck, as I recall, was on fire.

"What a great story! And wonderfully written. I’d love to try a fire massage sometime. Also, I had always wanted to try cupping, but that icky photo makes me rethink… " -- Reader comment

This post has been published at The Matador Network. Read it HERE.

The Irrigation

2010-04-21T15:13:00.005+02:00

It was spring break and my wife and I were in Bali when my hearing began to fail. It was only in the right ear, thankfully, but the condition was definitely getting worse. I might have blamed the tropical heat or the humidity, but we had flown a long way to enjoy these things, and I wasn’t quite ready to curse a foreign god...

This story has been published at BootsnAll

http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/10-09/the-irrigation-bali-indonesia.html