What Possessed Me?

October, 2019

Yesterday I told this story at a local event.  I thought you might like to read it.

"What Possessed Me?"

1999. What possessed me to go to Bosnia, a country recently ravaged by a devastating war?  What possessed me to sleep on iron cots in mouldy church basements, get bounced around in an ancient rattle-trap truck with no shocks and faulty brakes on roads pock-marked by bomb craters which the locals affectionately called Bosnian swimming pools, into regions and villages sometimes so remote they had not yet been cleared of land mines?  You had to walk only where others had walked.  Others had successfully walked.  Worst of all, what possessed me to spend a month where the only coffee was an acrid mud so awful and thick you can only tolerate it by sipping from a cup the size of a thimble?  Why did I separate myself from my supports and leave behind the love that showered me at home?  Was it for the same reason a dog licks his genitals… because he can?  

Before I left, I asked my wife, “If you could go to Bosnia, wouldn’t you?” and she says, “Not on your life!” 

I say, “But that’s all I have is my life.  How rich do you want yours to be?” 

“Very rich,” she says.  “Garage sales do it for me.” 

I know what I didn’t do it for… not for karma; not to earn a place in heaven; not to be politically correct.  Certainly not for the money.   And not… this is the most important ‘not’.… I did not go to try to make a difference in people’s lives. 

I met humanitarians in Bosnia trying to make a difference and it drained them like a pond of leeches will drain your blood.  A humanitarian’s reward lies in how palpable the change they can effect.  And like Christ and the lepers, in Bosnia they saw that no matter how much fixing they did, it would never be enough.  You can fix a hole in a road, but how do you fix a hole in someone’s soul?

In 1999 Sarajevo was an absurd contrast of ugly and beautiful, of destruction and construction.  I stood where a tank had stood on the boulevard, 100 yards away from a 15-story office tower, and with casual precision lobbed a shell into each floor.  Now three years after the war, splintered furniture, shattered pipes and shredded cables still hung from the gaping holes left by each explosion.

But the first two floors were rebuilt, with a department store and a little shop that sold that Sirnica, the snake-like coils of pastry filled with cheese, which we lived on for the time we were there.

Outside the shop, dug into the sidewalk about four inches deep was a symmetrical rosette, surrounded by a smattering of petal- shaped indentations.  Looked like a sunflower.  They were scattered throughout Sarajevo.  It's what happens when a mortar round lands on concrete.  And a lot landed. 

The Serbs occupied the mountains above the valley in which this once picturesque city was nestled, mountains that just a few years before had hosted the winter Olympics.  They dropped 3 million shells onto the city in a 4-year siege… or maybe it was 4 million in 3 years. What difference did it make?  As my friend, Jelinek told me, “You chose not to pay attention.”

The artillery men would take up their stations at dusk, drinking Slivovitz and singing songs of rape and destruction.  That was the ‘air raid warning’.  But you sat in your room and read your book.  You heard the whistle of the grenades above.  If one landed on your building maybe it took out the plumbing.  Maybe it took out your life.  What difference did it make?” 

After digging holes for water and collecting rain from the gutters before it escaped into the sewers, after making soup from the leaves of trees to stave off starvation, after burying your mother, what difference did it make?

Absurd.  It’s all so absurd. 

The evening we arrived in Sarajevo we were immediately driven to a collection centre, a little building in the woods which I think had housed municipal offices.  But now the desks were replaced by beds because now, three years after the war in Bosnia, Albanians were suffering genocide in neighbouring Kosovo.  They crossed the border as they could, gathered in whatever shelter they could find, and sat with whatever they could salvage, looking fearfully at a blank future.

When you look directly into the eyes of someone who’s lost everything, their home, their family, even their country, it hits you differently than watching it on TV.  It’s not any more gripping.  TV brings us the horror in its own magnified way.  It is just more real, this woman handing me a scrap of paper with her husband’s name on it.  “I know he got out,” she tells me.  “Please look for him.  Call out his name as you travel through Bosnia.  Tell him we’re here and we’re safe.”  The fear in her eyes belies the hope of her words.

She is perhaps the only one who can speak English among the thirty or so folks who crowded into the tiny room for our concert.  Just a few feet from us, sitting, kneeling behind, and standing against the wall. 

I’m about to sing, “Ain’t Nobody Here But Us Chickens” and I gesture for them to join in the chorus.  A look of concern crosses their faces.  They don’t speak English.  Now, we have an interpreter, Edo.  But he can only translate into Bosnian.  But we’ve found someone who can translate Bosnian into Albanian and so they line up, side by side next to me as I say, “Ain’t nobody here but us chickens, in chicken…”

Edo translates into Bosnian and turns to the next fellow, who repeats it in Albanian.  Then they turn back to me.

“Is, bocka bocka bok bok bok gock.”

Edo copies my lilt.  “Eeai bocka bocka bok bok bok gock.”

And the next guy, “Eshta bocka bocka bok bok bok gock.”

By now the room has collapsed in hysterics.  Me, a thousand miles from my home and they without a home, disparate cultures find a common language in Chicken.

So let’s sing it and let me teach you the words in chicken in case you similarly find yourself in a foreign culture 1000 miles from home.

(We sing)

Sometimes what works best when you’ve been thrown into the limbo of losing your foundation, of not knowing what to do or what will come, sometimes what works best to bring you back to the sense that you are a human being among humans is to be presented with something even more absurd than the absurd condition you find yourself in.

I remember when I stood on that spot where the tank had been, suburbans and SUVs were hustling by like ants repairing their nest, each sporting a medallion advertising their country and particular NGO, and nearby a high speed trolley with a banner on the side reading “A Gift From the People of Japan”.  I thought about what my mentor, Stan Dale used to say to me.  “Eric, there is either love, or violence.  And even violence is a cry for love.”

 

There have been times in my life when the evidence of violence was so pronounced it was hard to imagine where love was.  I guess what possessed me to go to Bosnia was a faith that love was hiding beneath the rubble.

STREET SKILLS

Hanging out in a folder I rarely visit, I happened to click on this.  I'll call it:

STREET SKILLS

I’m standing on the balcony horking up a good dollop of phlegm, snorting up my nose what I can gather, then hacking whatever’s in my throat, combining the mixture in my mouth and stirring it with some saliva into a gelatinous glob.  I gaze into the air beyond the railing, aim at a 45⁰ angle to counter the affects of gravity ... and I spit.

It’s a good shot … out about twenty feet, then continues its parabolic trajectory for another ten before landing on a dandelion… dripping… proud … a good spit.  An excellent spit.

Then I hear a high pitched snort next to me and there’s my four year old imitating me, her mouth open to an exaggerated gaping maw, making cackling sounds in her throat, her nose scrunched up, a twinkle in her eye.

“Go for it,” I say.  “Give it a spit over the side.”  She looks and spits, a miniscule whitish sliver  quickly dissipates into a gentle spray that disappears before it reaches the ground.  I need to teach her how to spit.

I remember my youth, some sixty years ago and Billy Smith who could spit a good three feet further than anyone on the block, teaching us the finer points of street spitting.  He would form his tongue into a tunnel, thus creating extra thrust the way a rifle barrel directs the expanding gas of an exploding bullet.

We’d draw a line with chalk on the macadam and edge our toe up to it like a basketball player at the foul line.  We’d grunt and hork and snort and bring all the phlegm we could muster into play, gather it, coddle it up and cup it in our tongue, take a breath and blow.  The pressure formed by the conjunction of tongue and lips would hold it for an instant and then let the missile go with a 'fathoosh'.  The mass of gelatine would sail into the still autumn air, soar beyond the manhole cover, and land in a skipping splash on the street.

We’d mark it.  We’d comment on it.  Then call the next contestant to the line.

Spitting on East 29th Street, Brooklyn was an art.  I’m grateful I can live in the country, in a house with a balcony overlooking a garden that accepts my bodily fluids without disdain, and a granddaughter to carry on the tradition.

You Lucky

This was back in the eighties.  I was living in the basement of a house rented by my friend Rica... throw rugs scattered on the cement floor, books in boxes, the TV perched on a milk crate.  One morning, half awake snuggled in my futon on the floor, I heard an upstairs toilet flush.  Presently an offensive smell assaulted my nose and water began to rise from the drain in the floor... not just water... sewage.  I called to Rica as I pulled rugs away from the edges of the effluent which crept rapidly like a tide on a flood plain.  Frantically we dragged boxes away from the flow, threw the futon over a chair, lifted clothes onto the stairs.  By the time the level reached a stasis there was a fetid pond some ten feet across and three inches deep.  I sat at the top of the stairs holding my nose, and wept.

The plumbers arrived in thick pants and rubber boots.  They carried long poles with flat disks on the end.  One plumber attacked the sewer on the street while the other waded into my basement swamp, pulled the drain cover, yelled to his partner, and  commenced to pound his disk-pole into the drain with the passion of a boy in a mud puddle, making waves and spraying the room with brownish droplets and little sludge balls.  I ran down and pulled what stuff I could as far from the advancing swell as possible. 

Eventually there was a yell from the plumber on the street, and the evil fluid sank back into the hole from which it came. 

As I looked gloomily around my ravaged room the way a despondent general might survey the stinking aftermath of a battle won at great cost, the plumber ... and here’s the point of the story ... the plumber said, “You lucky.” 

I’m lucky? 

“You lucky.  If it hadn’t come unplugged we’d have had to dig a big hole in your front yard.  Very expensive.  You lucky.”

That was some twenty years ago.  Every once in a while I run into Rica, we look at each other and say, “You lucky.”  We remember that disaster, and the day that followed, in rubber gloves and boots, mopping, sponging, filling garbage bags, looking at each other and saying, “You lucky.”  You know  what.  We didn’t feel lucky.  We felt... well... we felt like the stuff we were cleaning up.

On that day I vowed never to rob someone of their well-earned misery, never to tell someone with a cast on their arm they were lucky they didn’t break their neck. ... never to tell someone groaning and sweating with the flu it could be pneumonia... never to tell someone who opens the fridge and all there is is a week-old Hawaiian Pizza that people are starving in China.  Never to tell someone whose house burned down to look on the bright side.