tales from the happy noise

He insisted on taking us wild boar hunting. His mother lived in a small village in the hills outside of Brezova with no running water and at night after drinking beers I had to navigate around a pack of dogs on the way to the outhouse. Pista woke us early–the morning just barely gray—and served us a breakfast of home-smoked bacon, cheeses, and fresh picked vegetables from the garden. We finished off with a couple of shots of slivovica and piled into his old Moskva and went into the hills. We arrived at the crest just as the sun was coming over the horizon and he handed a rifle to Dave and me. I had never killed anything of any size and didn’t plan on it today. We split up–Dave with Pista and me and Silva. We sat in a hunter’s stand overlooking a wide meadow and waited for wild boars. Silva and I dozed in the sun and were surprised by Dave and Pista coming out of the woods pointing to the middle of the field where a small deer was grazing. He said my name, as to say shoot. I raised the rifle, put the deer in my sights and then moved far to the right and pulled the trigger. The deer bolted into the woods and I thought about Nick Adams. Silva laughed and knew what I had done and Pista stood cursing. We drove back, our rifles in our laps, hoping to catch a boar as it crossed the road, and it all felt like a safari.

waiting in line at the fortune teller

My grandfather died in October when autumn was in full effect and everything felt like a Bob Mould song. Dave and I had just spent an alcohol soaked weekend in Ostrava near the Polish border visiting his friend Kirby, who like us, taught English. From Kirby’s apartment you could count 32 smokestacks spilling smoke across the horizon. He took us to a party where there were lots of other ex-pat teachers–mostly Brits and Irish. We almost got our asses kicked when some drunk guy thought Dave and I were going to throw the keg off the nine story balcony. There was pushing and shoving in the middle of the living room until Kirby calmed everything down. We all got drunk together and I found an Irish girl that I fell in love with for the night. We laughed about the “Quiet Man” and danced in the living room when they rolled up the carpet and played songs from the 80’s that ran like a soundtrack to another life that I once happened to live in by mistake–New Model Army, the Smiths, Altered Images. And when the keg was tapped and the night was over, I walked Katie down the nine flights of stairs, stopping to kiss her halfway down on a landing and every landing after that, until we ran out of stairs and landings and we pushed the door out into the gray morning, where the smokestacks spewed soot into the air and it fell like snow all around us.

lena

Lena shared her desk with another girl named Lena and one day I will paint a picture called, “I Never Met a Lena that I Didn’t Like.” I will capture them in spring, sitting in the desk in front of the teacher’s, hiding behind a vase full of lilacs and the picture will be so lush you will want to walk up to it, let it run through your fingers like warm sand, press your nose close to it to smell the heavy dreamy scent of the purple flowers and try to catch the faint taste of spring in Zahorie coming through the window from behind the two Lenas and into your nose, passing across your tongue where it inexplicably tastes “green” and cool like well water and buzzes in your head sunshine thick and all of this will work over you until you want to stand close to the painting and lick it, afraid that may have missed something.

flashback-and it almost blows my mind

She mouths along to the song, singing, I know that you are almost in love with me/I can see it in your eyes. We bounce around the room, the narrow space between the kitchen table and the unused black and white TV push us closer together, bodies almost touching, the space between us as thin as cellophane. The tips of her hair hit me in the face like live wires sending the message of love down my spine and her breath is warm and sweet from half a bottle of eastern Slovak wine. Perspectives change, viewpoints shift, our references framed by guitars and alcohol and soon we are up above the room, floating intertwined and lost in the music. It is almost right, this one could pass for love and if this was horseshoes, it would definitely be a leaner. And sometimes a leaner is good enough—guitars filling the room, the dizzy anticipation of sex, heads swinging back and forth, the candle throwing our mad shadows across the wall until it is my turn to sing, The breeze blowing softly on my face/reminds me of something else…

Stuck in Blue

Stuck in Blue, originally uploaded by jfl1066.

passing by in b-ville

Bratislava

Bratislava, originally uploaded by jfl1066.

wandering around Bratislava early monday morning.

Ready for the Return

She once translated the words to this song in a notebook that I later lost-just like I lost her.