(Louisville, KY) August 20, 2010…
Two days after
Klaus returned from his exchange program—a whole month in Croatia—he and I
crossed paths at Jabootie’s. He looked vibrant as always, but he was half
drunk… In truth, he’d been drunk for about thirty-two days.
Tossing a handful
of kunas and other currencies on the table while opening his laptop, he
insisted on showing me his travel pics. “You’re going to see a fine pair of
tits,” he promised.
He was right. First
was the image of his language teacher who he’d slept with most of the nights—a
pert 27-year-old brunette. Then there was a shot of the two ounces of ganja he’d scored for a mind-boggling $60 USD. …The
steppes of the Croatian landscape offered some dazzling scenic shots, including
a succession of short waterfalls into lakes that were situated on varied levels
of expansive bedrock—something like Nature’s inspiration for the architecture
of Frank Lloyd Wright. Klaus described these waterways as so unsullied that as
his classmates rowed around in canoes, they dipped their Nalgene bottles in to
scoop up and guzzle long pulls of fresh water in the summer sun…
Next was a photo
of the Norwegian chick—Klaus’s second conquest—on the pebbly southern beach
with her breasts exquisitely exposed to the sun, the sea, and a rabble of Euro
dudes wearing Speedos. Even Klaus adopted the traveler’s approach on that
beach, his bright smile gleaming above a red banana hammock. “When in
Croatia...” we’d agreed… There were some photos of Klaus cooking with girls
drunk on wine in a cramped kitchen—he was a cook at Jabootie’s after all. More
than often, his culinary creations were laden with the grass he’d obtained for
that absurdly low sum. He’d made palacinka, cevapcici, and even tried his hand
at cooking up some lignje, which I understand is squid—all laced with marijuana.
In just about every photograph, he was surrounded by women.
While there that
month, along with smoking nearly all two ounces of weed with the girls, he’d
managed to attend three rock concerts, snubbing his nose at the countless classical
symphonies advertised on street marquees. He saw The Pixies, Modest Mouse, and
Morrissey. This trip did not constitute the time of his life, because being
young he had much life ahead of him… but obviously it was a rollicking, good
fucking time.
Upon returning to
the states, however, the sweet melody of his life struck a different chord. While
on a stopover to visit friends in Chicago, he received a call from his mother
who intimated that Grandpa had a
somehow life-threatening urinary tract infection, that this man was venerably
old and withered, and Klaus needed to come home pronto. “I’ll board a plane tomorrow, Ma,” he told her.
“Why not tonight,
Klaus? You didn’t bother to call once in the past week! Did you even care about
what was going on here? …You know, I don’t know you anymore.”
I confessed to
him that I’d heard my own mother utter the same thing somewhere in my late-twenties…
and she got over it. It didn’t make it any easier for him, though, when an hour
later his future ex-wife called. He and Jessica were in the divorce process. According
to Klaus, she called just so she could tell him he’s a dick and he could go
fuck himself. This meant he’d be going home to no actual residence—no home, no
apartment, not even a garage with an oil-stained floor and a cot. And he hadn’t
slept soundly in three days.
Whilst trudging through
the Union Station Blue Line to catch a redeye from O’Hare, he discovered he’d
been pick-pocketed.
“Son of a bitch!”
The missing cash
was aggravating but the bigger pain-in-the-ass was the chore of recovering all
the shit you have to keep in your wallet to prove you are who you are. At least
his backpack still housed his boarding pass and some kind of ID.
It would only be
fitting at this point for the airline to have lost his luggage… which they did.
This airline had a kind of Fuck You policy about lost luggage. “Get on the damn
plane, sit down, and shut up. We’ll find your fuck-ass luggage,” in Klaus’s
words.
I have discovered
firsthand that no matter how careful you are whilst globetrotting alone,
sleepless, and strung out, such exorbitant Bacchanalia often yields nearly
instant—and unfortunate—karma.
Back in town that
morning, Klaus called his mother to enquire about Grandpa; he wanted to visit
him as soon as he could, especially after hearing there was more than just
urinary tract issues at hand: spinal problems, congestive heart failure, etcetera…
He begged his mother for a ride
to the nursing facility.
“No,” she said,
“You can just walk your ass there.”
“Well… fuck!”
On the two-mile hike
to the old-folks’ home, Klaus found a third of a pint of Jack Daniels in his
backpack and started in on it. He noted that it was beginning to take on the
gustatory character of water. So it was almost empty by the time he arrived; and
of course by then he felt much better. After the visit with the old man—who
inarguably looked like shit but who was not so bad off as his mother had portrayed, he got a call from Megan. Megan,
a close friend. She wanted to meet him for coffee nearby, and java was
something that might help edify the blood in his alcoholstream. He met her at
Hymen Brothers and within ten minutes over his double espresso catching up with
Megan, the future Ex (Jessica) called him again. This time her tone was more
civil; she wanted to… meet him for coffee.
“Okay,” he told
her. “I’ll be waiting for you at Hymen Bros.”
The interesting
part to me about this tale was the fact that Jessica didn’t know Megan from
Eve… Klaus and Jessica were only a couple of months out of separation… but all
the better, because this way Megan could sit idly by, one table over, and serve
as a kind of sentry to assess Jessica’s body language during what would
certainly be a trying encounter for my exhausted friend, Klaus.
She arrived. “I
want to talk to you about some things…”
“Yeah?” Out of
habit he proposed they go to the Irish bar next door. “How about we talk about
things over there. The coffee smell is making me feel ill.” (Megan told him
later that Jessica appeared to be… peeved
at this request.)
Within 22 minutes
of being at O’Leary’s, Klaus had sucked down three Jack and Cokes. While Jessica
was talking to him, he entered some new state of consciousness: He was
literally sitting upright with his head tilted back and his eyes shut, and
while she was pontificating on fidelity and betrayal, he was thinking of the
Norwegian chick, sweat glistening on her cleavage in the East European sun… His mind made leaps in the direction of
horticultural farming… And he was also
wondering when he’d recover his luggage and where he’d do his goddamn laundry. Jessica
sounded to him like “some bitch talking over the PA at the Department of Motor
Vehicles”—all jumbled, irrelevant dissonance, like Charlie Brown’s teacher. In
the midst of her spiel, Klaus planted himself on his feet and made for the
restroom. Two steps out of the booth he emitted an explosion of vomit that
coated the floor and a wall panel with dripping, curdled chunks of cevapcici
and hydrochloric acid.
“Nice,” I told
him. “Too bad you didn’t hit any bystanders.”
A few of the
nearby O’Leary’s wenches (“hot bitches, all of them”) were aghast, and a chorus
of phatic repulsion filled the area… along with the stench of fresh ralph. Klaus
scurried on toward the bathroom to upchuck some more… While barfing in the
sink, he turned to a guy pissing in the urinal next to him. “Dude,” he
muttered, “There’s a Latino chick out there. Tell her we’re leaving.”
“OK. Whatever,
man. I’ll do that.”
You’d think this
would be the culmination of Klaus’s day—projectile vomiting in a pub—but it was
actually only half-past noon. And somewhere between the old-folk’s home and the
Irish pub, he’d accepted from his mother the charge of picking up a
prescription for Grandpa. He viewed it as an opportunity for redemption, to evince
the responsible nature his mom alleged he’d left in Europe. In spite of
stepping politely around the bartender who was mopping up his puke, he felt
like all was not lost.
The now mortified
Jessica hustled him out of the bar. She remained civil and even sympathetic. She
took him to Walgreen’s… but in the car, Jessica needed to dilate further on Klaus’s
behavior, filial disintegration, the impending divorce… and “whatever the hell else
it is women need to jabber about when they need ‘to talk’.” For a half hour,
Klaus endured Jessica’s delicate inquisition while sitting shotgun in a parking
lot on one of the hottest days in the summer, sweating, jetlagged, and nauseous.
He suddenly interrupted her mid-sentence: “Hang on one second,” he said,
turning to blow chunks again out the window.
Then the glorious
and beautiful nurturing instincts residing in (most) women surfaced full-bore,
compelling Jessica to coddle him and take measures to make him feel human again.
She gave him bottled water, procured a damp cloth for his head, stroked his
hair. “God you’re a mess,” she declared.
His response of
“No shit, Megan” wasn’t well-received—probably because “Thank you for taking
care of me” was the reply Jessica
would have preferred to hear. “Woops,” he added.
At this point Jessica
shook off her kid gloves and booted him from her sedan, speeding off into the
apocalyptic future. …Feeling tuberculotic, Klaus dragged himself, drenched in
sweat, to Cherokee Park and fell down face-first, succumbing to a miniature
coma on Dog Hill.
Five hours later
he awoke, blistered by sunburn and covered in mosquito bites. It is surprising
the Jack Daniels in his system didn’t serve as some sort of antigen to deflect
the hungry bugs. Maybe it attracted them. This meant that his already-abject
condition had graduated to a new level of misery. After scratching his sweaty
skin long enough to draw blood, he called up Linnea—his closest friend in the
area—who came to pick him up. While Klaus conveyed the events of his last… 768
hours… she cooked him up an omelet that was good enough to squelch the mild
undercurrent of suicide ideation streaming through Klaus’s brain. And she also
equipped him with some clothes…
Klaus needed
shorts; the jeans he was wearing all day were soaked. So was his shirt. Linnea
had to be at work by seven o’clock so she tossed him some garments and jumped in the shower. Klaus would wear anything as long as it
kept him conscious in the stifling heat. The only shorts Linnea could find that
would fit him were cutoff khakis with a gaping hole in the crotch.
“Why a hole in
the crotch?” I asked, with one eyebrow raised, clenching my jaw.
“I dunno, she
probably blasted a big queef and tore them open.”
Queef or no, before
she left for work, Linnea took the time to sew up the hole so Klaus’s dick
wouldn’t hang out… Naturally, he had to wear the same hiking boots he’d been
wearing in Europe, except the socks Linnea provided were bright white,
stenciled with a bold Jolly Rogers pattern. To top it off, she gave him a
women’s shirt with super-short sleeves that strained to contain his biceps. It
was black, truncated below the ribs so that Klaus’s midriff was showing, and
the white print on the front spelled out FEAR
AND BITCH STICKS, displaying a plate of deep-fried cod next to a frothy
pint…
Being late for
work, Linnea couldn’t take him in the opposite direction of her job so Klaus
found himself walking once more to the nursing home. Now with the Midwestern sun still high, Klaus
noticed his legs were bluish in tint. At first he was startled. Had he contracted
some strange VD in Croatia? Did Jessica poison him with her bottled water? Was he
having a massive coronary? But on close
inspection he realized this affliction was merely a gross discoloration caused
by the jeans he’d passed out in at the park. The cloying July humidity (coupled
with his deranged biochemistry) imparted his pants with zero color-safe
integrity. The jeans’ denim dye had bled into his skin like tattoo ink.
“Oh… fffuck,” he
sighed, trudging south.
The faces of
drivers passing him on Limestone Avenue reflected the appropriately twisted
image of this sun-scorched man in his twenties wearing a cutoff women’s shirt,
khaki shorts, and pirate-themed socks rising out of hiking boots—with blue
legs.
By nearly sundown,
Klaus arrived at the nursing home. The doors were locked—visiting hours over. They
couldn’t have the coffin-dodgers spilling out into the night air, after all.
Klaus slept on a park
bench outside the home, flat on his back. He’d managed not to drown himself in
puke, which was one milestone worth mentioning. Moreover, he stated, “When I
woke up, I was shocked I hadn’t been arrested.”
“You mean by the
Fashion Police?” I joked.
“No,” he said.
“Because I’d fallen asleep with the weed pipe I bought in Vodice hanging out of
my mouth, and it was packed full.”
At 9am, the
unsympathetic nursing staff opened the door. Maybe Grandpa would have some wise
words for him, or maybe he had croaked overnight since Klaus hadn’t delivered
the Rx on time. Ideally, the old man would be fine, and he would inform Klaus
that he looked like a schizoid drifter. He entered the home, breathed in the mixture
of urine and Lysol, and made his way down the hall…
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