Artist In Residence

you were right alex

My passport raised eyebrows in Edinburgh but I had finally learned a lesson about dealing with Customs Officials and I was permitted entrance to the UK as soon as I could convince them that the box of Combat Paper in my possession was not a bomb.

I was on the bus from the airport to downtown when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I was in solo traveling mode, ready to pounce. I turned aggressively to find the pale, peaceful face of my friend John from Chicago. Johns an anarchist of the new school, D.I.Y. til he dies. He is lanky and only awkward to people not familiar with Chicago gender politics. His Scottish blood endowed him with reddish blond hair which hung around his face, as silly as my own haircut.

The serendipity was too much to handle. We jabbered non-stop until, well after we had gotten off the bus, we had to part ways with the hope that we would see each other again in Europe.

Then I found my way to the church where Donald “worked” to have a cup of tea. He is a proper Scottish fellow though he happened to be gay. He fretted over my weight (I had lost some) and my face (which looked tired and sickly) like a mom. His concern was palpable. While out on  walk he stopped at an ATM and got out a wad of money and put it in my hand. I almost cried. Maybe I even did a little. The kindness of the people I had chanced to meet had been overwhelming and I felt entirely undeserving.

Soon I was on a train bound for Newcastle.

Vane was working the night that I got in. I sat in the living room kicking it with the ladies. Again I felt too full of story to tell them what I had been through. I told them all about Hans and the offer to go to Vienna. They all looked very disapproving. Laura told me that he was a vulture just trying to prey on the good work that I had done. She warned me that my integrity was at stake so I had better not take this decision as flippantly as I did the others. I agreed with their analysis but a part of me had already made its mind up. I’ve been with my mind for years and I know its habits. When I am this far in it is impossible to turn around.

That night I stood at the monument where I usually met Vanessa. I smoked dozens of cigarettes as the hour grew later. I paced around the circle to try to count out the time. I figured that she was at least an hour late. I walked to her bar which she had, strangely, expressly forbidden me to do. She was in a booth talking to some guy that she worked with. What the fuck? I didn’t expect a homecoming parade, but I also expected a little bit more than being blown off for an hour in the cold while she chatted up some other dude. I knocked on the window and she looked up at me like a criminal. I tried to hide my jealousy and anger. I didn’t do such a good job.

The walk back was painful. The conversation seemed stilted and awkward like we didn’t know each other. I wondered if we had ever really talked like Alexandra and I had. Was it just a pretty pair of eyes that had lured me in?

Over the next few days our situation deteriorated rapidly.

I had moved into Hannah’s house down the road, closer to Fay, CJ, and Katerina. Occasionally I had a roomate named Joe who was a born and raised here. His accent was as thick as air and the feeling of this dirty old town. He was a sweet older guy who looked a little homeless. He had been in Fenhem for many iterations of young punks and activists. In a way he was one of the only stable elements except the houses which remained here through all of the transitions.

I spent all of my time writing a manuscript which would eventually be deposited in the trash because it was a piece of shit. I typed thousands of words each day in the apartment by myself with infrequent visits from the locals. When I wanted company I would go to Fay’s place. Vane and I were like strangers. I had become more and more jealous of her relationship with her ex-boyfriend who had the advantage of history and shared language over me. Maybe I was less jealous and more aware of how flimsy our relationship really was. She was aware that I had been writing emails, love letters really, to girls (intentionally plural) in the states. Danielle, Emily, Sara… I had forgotten how many times I had thought that she was the one.

Sex had become more and more complicated between us on two counts. A.) She was a hard-core feminist and she was highly distrusting of men which made me feel shady and very uncomfortable with my own advances. Once, after we had slept together and it had not been such a beautiful experience, I walked up to her as she was staring out the window to put my hand on her hip. When I did so she turned to me and lashed out. “I don’t like to be touched now, especially by mens.” B.) She wanted a baby. This came as a surprise to me and likely anybody who knew her. It was a secret agenda. At first she didn’t tell me. She tricked me once or twice. Then when confronted about these tricks she admitted that she wanted to have my child on the condition that I not help raise it. She was going to take it to some Mediterranean island where she would raise it with a gaggle of females.

Now coming from as many fathers as I do I find myself unusually anxious about the potential of becoming one myself. To even think about having a child that I could not raise made me sick to my stomach, bringing back all of the emotions that used to pass through my head when my mom would tell me that I was just like Sputnik Mixon, my biological father.

I had transitioned to being much closer to the rest of the community.

We went out one night to wheat paste big signs bringing attention to the CCTV cameras on every corner. We worked in the dead of night but the street was still very busy and once a cop passed right by us as we acted like we were just waiting for a bus. The signs didn’t stick quite like they should have which was my fault as I had suggested a faulty method of coating them as well as having done a half ass job of putting them up, also my fault because that was my job as the tallest.

We began work on an exposure unit for the theater, too. Exposure units are light tables that burn the photosensitive emulsion that are coated on high mesh screens for screen printing. The theater was well equipped for the rest of the job other than the inks and other supplies, it only lacked this one thing, so we all got together and built it. It had been my idea to do so because I had seen and used the table at Flight 64 in Portland but the task was quickly taken out of my hands by the girls who were much more proficient at getting things done than my lazy ass. I “helped” but really only to lift things.

It helped my head to have projects during this time. I was relatively stress free and, more importantly, self-reliant as I had a place to myself that wasn’t bothering anybody and money to spend, albeit very little money. My budget was working out famously. Every time that I received a small donation or sold a piece of Combat Paper or a zine I found myself with a few more days of Europe.

Despite all of the advice to turn down the offer I opted to accept Hans’ invitation. There was nothing for me to do here and I didn’t want to whittle away a huge chunk of my tour experiencing the same things over and over. I love that city and I could stay there for years but I hadn’t come over to England just to sit in a house and write and do things that I could do anywhere.

I still had Grandma’s hundred dollar bill. I was using it as a rolling machine to roll both cigarettes and joints. As the weeks went on I became more and more proud of that bill to the extent that it lost its function as a measurement of money and became just one more utilitarian item to be packed away into my traveling kit.

Come the end of April I’d already made my deal with Very Morning and I was on a bus out of Newcastle with Katerina who was going to Spain. As I left the city I found a Brontosaurus spray painted on the sidewalk. Vanessa told me that Fay had painted it for me. I had gotten too close to this group. It hurt to much to leave, and rule number one when you are traveling is that there are too many goodbyes to get that close to people. Keep a distance.

Kind of like how we treated the detainees. Keep a distance.

F U B A R

I’d avoided one question the entire time I had been traveling. Not once had I had to deal with what might happen if everything didn’t just turn out fine. What happened if everything got all fucked up? This question defined the next chapter of my life.

It all started at in London. I had stayed the night at Jo’s place. I left with what I thought would be ample time, though severely short on funds. I was wrong.

My plane to Vienna boarded at 11:45. I didn’t get to the ticket counter until five minutes after the last call happened one hour before the flight. A short, mean little shit of a man looked away casually while telling me I had missed the gate time. Please step to the other counter. “But!” “Please step to the other counter, sir.”

So I got in line over there, time ticking on that one flight out for the day. When I got to the counter I immediately began to lose it. The plane was going to leave in twenty minutes and I could still make it on if they would just stop dicking me around. The little nerd at the counter kept staring only into his screen while shaking his head. “I’m sorry sir, the computer just won’t let me.”

“Fuck your Goddamn computer!” Now the guards came. I heard the engines of my plane warm up and disappear into the sky as I argued with the same little shit who had fucked my day to begin with. As it turns out he was the manager as well. He kept telling me that I had told him a different plane and that I could have gotten on if I had come at the time that I told him I had arrived.

He told me that another plane would leave tomorrow if I just paid a thirty pound fee for my indiscretion. I could have killed him if I hadn’t just earned the trust of the guards enough to be released. I don’t have thirty pounds and I couldn’t wait until tomorrow because I have nowhere to say.

In an act of desperation I pulled the vet card which almost never fails but it didn’t phase him in the least.

I was so angry I couldn’t think. I went outside for a smoke. Before I knew it I was walking down the highway with my thumb up, dead set and determined to hitch to Vienna. I even found two loaves of bread in the gas station outside of the airport.

A bus veered off the highway and stopped about a half mile down the road. I ran the rest of the way to it so excited to have actually pulled a ride. The driver was furious. He called me a stupid fuck! “Do you know how dangerous that is?”

I begged him to take me to the truck stop down the road but he was only going to take me to the next exit which was still two miles from there. He dropped me off in a completely inaccessible  country road and then drove off. Nobody would be getting on the highway here.

It was hard to figure out how to get down to the highway. There was a bridge over it which led to a suburb. I decided to walk through the suburb to the other side and then cross over to the truck stop. There was a cool little path that skirted the large fence that separated the houses from the highway. Little did I know that this fence would prove to be the doom of my plan.

When I got to the other side I figured out that this fence went all the way around. I scanned the backyards of these homes for some weakness in the defenses. Finally I found a small hole under one of them, likely carved out by some dog or kids.

I ran over, threw my rucksack under and then crawled through only to find that on the other side was a thicket of thorns, beyond them the high speed rail lines that were probably electric. No way. No fucking way. The bottom of the hole i was in was all mud. I was filthy.

I crawled back out and sat down on a curb in desperation. Then it started getting cold. A mailman drove by. He stopped to tell me that it was going to rain. I thanked him sarcastically.

I retraced my steps, ran over the highway (it was way more dangerous that I had imagined) and then set myself to walking the two miles that I had already done twice over down the road.

Right when I set my foot down on the onramp there was this enormous noise behind me. It was a scary sound. It was a cop siren. They actually picked me up and ran my file in the parking log. Eventually they let me off the hook.

I made a sign and positioned myself across the truck drivers, staring at them balefully for hours to no avail. It was getting really cold. The rain clouds were coming. A woman stopped and offered to drive me to the town. I accepted her offer.

I was shocked and pissed off to learn that I didn’t need to deal with the highway at all. The airport was connected to this town. Damnit.

She dropped me off in the center of town. I had a five mile walk to the airport with my tail between my legs to figure out what the fuck I was going to do.

When I walked in, covered in mud and sweat, coughing and starving, I went directly to the computers and emailed Drew from Combat Paper. The Rescue Chopper. I begged him to help me. He bought me a ticket.

I spent the night sleeping outside in a little park.

The next morning I was sitting next to a portly Canadian who had been staying in Scotland. He was noticeably disgruntled about my personal hygiene. I was so tired and angry that day that I did not make for very good company.

WHORE

The plane snuck under the clouds over miles of pristine green land. There was a moment of peace.

That peace was ruined inside of the airport when I shuffled out of the door with my bags to see those wide, skeevy eyes. Hans.

He didn’t waste much time getting down to the nitty gritty of his strategy.

“Guantanamo is HOT right now. We need to strike while the iron is hot and make as much money off of this thing as we can!” he blubbered arrogantly as the bus took us downtown.

I didn’t respond to his disturbing comments, I just looked out the window. Hans took to telling me about the raves that had occurred inside of all of the industrial buildings we passed which I had not seen from the plane.

Hans took me to his apartment where I would be staying with his family. The word family came as some surprise. He lived here with his wife Liz and their two girls. The apartment was large by any city standards, but not large enough to convince me that this wasn’t a very strange arrangement. Why so much interest in me? Why put themselves out like this?

The answer was clear but I was ignoring it. “Shut up!” My brain protested. “Just take the fucking money!”

I sat my bags down in the room that I was going to stay in indefinitely. The room had been wholly consumed by one bed which went from wall to wall to wall. It was enormous and eerie. Nobody should have such a large bed.

They took me out to sushi that night. The whole family was there. While the girls threw temper tantrums Hans and Liz took turns talking circles around the basic premises of the SuperEnhanced project. I still had no idea what they were looking for.

They told me that I needed to come up with an amount of money that I thought was fair for payment. I didn’t think that this was part of the job. Shouldn’t they tell me how much they would pay me? How much were my services worth? I had never been paid for them directly and I had no created a scale.

I counted up my predicted expenses and then meekly told them that I thought 700 Euros seemed like enough to cover all of my costs. They just looked at me like the number that I told them was either way too high or way too low, but they did not indicate which. Liz told me to be serious.

A few days passed us by. I spent my time walking around the city thinking about how I could provide something to this project. All of my experience was in traditional based techniques and processes: printing, paper-making and writing, not digital art.

In another meeting a few days later the duo presented me with a schedule of things that they expected of me. I was glad for the meeting because the ambiguity was driving me insane.

Their desires were three tiered: they wanted A.) for me to work a festival that they already had a booth in called the Subversive Messe which was an international subversive art fair in Lindz. B.) One lecture, the date of which would be set later. C.) Photographs. I suggested that we could take pictures of me hustling for money in different parts of this city. The pair seemed disinterested in my idea but they didn’t say anything in particular about it.

I agreed. Nothing was said about money and I was too scared to piss them off to ask.

The Subversive Messa was scheduled for a few days down the line. Until that time came I appeared to be free to do what I wanted.

Hans introduced me to his friend Suzanna. She’s a Vienna based installation artist. She had a very wise and calm face with short cropped hair, a strong build and a beautifully dark voice. She felt like a haunted attic.

She took me out one day on a mini tour. At least that was her excuse. Really she wanted to take the time to warn me about what I had gotten myself into. She seemed scared for what Hans and Liz were going to do to me. She told me that they didn’t have the best record in town and that I should stay close to her and her group of friends. They would take care of me. I brushed her advice off.

We walked around the museum amidst all kinds of awesomely disturbing paintings harnessing the sick guilt and anxiety of sexuality at war. This was my introduction to the Viennese flare for morbid and guilt ridden art.

When we were leaving I hinted to her that I was a dope fiend and she took the bait hook line and sinker. Soon we were standing in the street as she yelled up to an open third floor window. “TIMMY! TIMMY! LET US IN!” A man’s head poked out of the window, then his hand waved us in.

When the door to his apartment was open we were face to face with a slender, 40 something man with graying hair. He was very quiet and stern. He walked us into the other room.

This room hit me like a semi-truck. The walls were filled from corner to corner and to the heights of the vaulted ceilings with comic books. As I walked around like a new transplant to heaven he told me that this was the entire history of European comic publishing. He had meticulously collected every comic that had been produced on this side of the ocean. This was his life’s work.

I had forgotten what we came here for, but when I turned around from my reverie Timmy was holding out a bag of grass. He told me it was on the house. He looked at me very seriously and told me that he was my guy. I took to him with absolute loyalty.

When we were splitting ways Suzanna told me that she would set up another place for me to stay when I got back from the Messe. I didn’t know at the time how invaluable this assistance would be.

messe indeed…

I took the train to Lindz separate from Very Morning. I had become accustomed to forgetting about them entirely when I was not actually dealing with them which had been pleasantly infrequent. They seemed disinterested with how I spent my time and they had so little of their own to give me any guidance on what they would like me to be doing. Hans had been mostly occupied with walking around in his underwear and sitting at his computer in the room that I came to call his Masturbatorium. Liz was absent almost always inexplicably.

The train pulled into station and I reported to the docks where the show was taking place. On a concrete slab the city had constructed what appeared to be a giant plywood fishing shanty around which many freaks had gathered. There were freak bikes and punk clowns juggling and as I got drew nearer to the cloud of smoke wafting off of these people I could smell that we shared hobbies.

I reported to the first person in uniform I could find. Her name was Michaela. She was drinking directly out of a bottle of vodka. She looked at me with half lidded sanguine eyes, her blond hair hanging short around her face. She spoke a melancholic English. She showed me to the booth and then promptly sat down in one of the couches we had been allotted. Soon there was a gaggle of females who were all looking for the bottle of vodka. A fight ensued in German, then there was giggling. The vodka was going fast.

They ignored me for the most part as I unpacked the suitcases I had been put in charge of. The table quickly filled with an odd assortment of things: Handcuffs and chain, eye-bolts, padlocks and a toy pistol which looked quite real. The girls were staring at me. I looked up embarrassed. We were all wondering what the point in these implements were.

I made friends with them and soon I had floated far away from the booth and all of those uncomfortable things. I met with the other booth occupants. There was a freak bike building crew from Vienna, a screen-printing collective from Hamburg, two Americans that built tiny little sheds for the homeless in Atlanta, a woman who supervised a booth where people would throw perfectly good tomatoes at her (it turned out that the message was waste. She would goad the onlookers into throwing these tomatoes at her, but the real point was to get them to stop and think about how stupid it was to waste a tomato. Nobody really got the point.) there was a faux neighborhood watch group from Vienna complete with a guy dressed as a cop, freak clowns who were tremendously awkward when not in costume, two guys who had brought a bird that said political things but unfortunately the bird had died in transit so they were just two guys with a dead bird (even better than the original idea I reckon) and a hodge-podge of people who dressed very sharply and talked officially as if they were representing real government programs though these programs were, of course, fake.

Everyone was very nice and open and welcoming to discussion, mostly over a long European spliff or two or five. Michaela and I were proximally bound.

I fit in best with the screen printers who liked everything I did except what I was doing with Hans and Liz. They seemed completely repulsed by the idea of our booth. We shared the feeling but they understood what a person had to do to make ends meet in situations like the one I was in.

The big hit of our booth turned out to be Combat Paper which people loved. My heart melted to remember that project that had shown me what real, good work was and I rued the circumstances that had led me into this phony, bullshit art group that I was working with now. Oh Rescue Chopper, how I missed you.

Hans and Liz finally showed up and they brought with them the bad news of what the handcuffs were intended for. They wanted to short shackle someone to the ground while interrogating them with the automated interrogation software which was the real meat and potatoes of the SuperEnhanced project. They wanted to interrogate me. My stomach turned.

Soon I found myself shackled by my hands and my feet to the floor. It was a very uncomfortable position. There were many people behind me but I could not turn to see them, nor did I want them to see my face which was broken with anger and embarrassment. Hans sat at the computer doing his best to sound authoritarian but failing to be anything other than a snobby, petulant dick, like usual.

The program was mind-numbingly simple and broken. There were only a handful of questions which would loop over and over again until the “subject” gave the right answer which was to admit to involvement in terrorist activity. I beat the game in very few minutes. When it was over I begged to be released but they would not let me go. They kept playing the part of the cruel interrogator. Liz was taking particular interest in the role. Suddenly I  understood that this was meant to be some kind of BDSM parlor trick. They wanted this to be sexual.

They left me in the handcuffs. As soon as they were gone the screen printers freed me and took me out back to smoke. I was completely broken. I was disgusted. There was no way that I could continue to work with this project though I didn’t know what else to do. The printers were very good to me.

Michaela took me out to one of the docks. We sat by the water kicking our feet. She told me that her child had died at a very young age. Her eyes were much more haunted than they ever were. She was trying to convey a message of camaraderie. She wanted me to know that she was part of the “Bad Memory” club and that she understood what it was like to have the kind of thoughts that I was having.

We slept together in her trailer that night with about five other people. I had a hotel to myself but we both wanted to be with someone else. We didn’t have sex, nor would we ever, but we were bonded in a way that was almost more than the bond of sex. Misery had made lovers out of us.

After three days the convention came to a close. I had fifty new friends living in a dozen different cities which is a good haul for the kind of work that I do.

Michaela told me that I was privately contracted from the event and that, though they did not have the money to give me now, I would receive 300 Euros for working the booth. I was elated.

I had to go back to Vienna earlier than the rest of the group. Hans gave me 20 Euros and told me that he would collect my money, deducting the 20 from the sum. I was annoyed that he was going to nickel and dime me but it would take more words than I wanted to have with him to work the issue out. There was no way that I could say all those words without physically attacking him.

I told him that I was going to stay with Suzanna’s friend for a while to watch her house while she worked in Berlin. I didn’t care if he could read the subtext that I was trying to move away from them and our un-contracted deal.

I was enduring a PTSD episode unlike any other that I had ever had. My mind was furiously gnashing and the obsessive desire to kill myself had come back unlike it had ever been before. When these intrusive thoughts plagued me before they would go as quickly as they had come leaving me ashamed that I had them, but now there was a constant imaginary gun in my mouth and I couldn’t make it go away.

What did you do to me?

habits die hard

Nina, Suzanna’s friend who had offered her apartment, invited me to come over when I touched down in Vienna. I cleared the needed items of of the enormous bed, stuffed them in a day pack and headed to her end of town.

I had expected Nina to be an older woman but as it turned out she was the same age as I was. She had the same somber wisdom as Suzanna, which appeared to be a Viennese hallmark. She invited me in.

Her apartment was a beautiful studio, minimally furnished, completely filled with books on arts and boxes full of journals, collections of photographs and other assorted works of art like a rocking chair that wobbled from side to side.

Nina was soft spoken and gentle. She suggested that we go out for a walk. We found ourselves talking about what we were looking for in relationships, a common subject between two people that were likely to sleep together. My mind was a war zone and I knew that now was not the time to be making these kinds of arrangements but my habit of fleeing life’s many problems in the sheets of a woman’s bed was present and accounted for.

We sat in a tree house in a park while I rolled a spliff for us before we went to an art opening. The night was dreamy, the moment perfect in its turbulence.

The art exhibit was filled with the normal art student nonsense. Stylishly vague photographs and paintings filled the walls. There were a few artifacts of Vienna’s proud lineage of unsellable installation pieces that had been created by people that knew that in Vienna, a land where the government pays artists to work no matter how ludicrous their project may be, one could do whatever they wanted. This often represented itself in the form of frustratingly layered pieces at the heart of which there was no true message other than a subtle warning to the government that they had better be wiser in the spending of their precious money.

It rained that night. We ran back to her place in our bare feet. We stood awkwardly in her living-room while she explained that I could sleep on the floor “or…”

The bed it was.

The next morning she was gone and she would stay that way for more than a week.

Sam, from Portland, had emailed me to inform me that his friends Dan Wang and Amos Kennedy would be in Vienna participating in a two week art exhibition/performance piece. He thought I should work with them since the timing seemed so perfect. I agreed whole heartedly.

The festival was called SoHo and the theme of it for the year was “To Work Or Not To Work.” What better a place to apply myself to than this.

On the first day I walked down to meet the people that I would be working with.

Dan is a high-strung Asian man who had worked with Sam extensively in the past. He was a specialist in D.I.Y. production. He was another floating artist who worked for the extension of our utilization of space and productivity. The copy machine was his tool of choice. There was one old, dusty copier in the room.

On the other side of the room was a Letterpress machine and stacks of wooden type. A grumpy looking black man was arranging the letters on the printer. This was Amos Kennedy. I learned through Dan that Amos represented a kind of call back to the olden days of printing and cheap production. He made prints that sold for bottom dollar which was a critique of the high dollar market of the art world. In the states he worked in Alabama.

Stephan was an ashy Austrian who had worked with Very Tomorrow before. He was tall and skinny, his mind seemed perpetually lost in programming and other technical affairs. He often seemed to be struggling to convey what he meant because first he must translate his thoughts from programmers code to German and then to English. Over the course of our time together he would detail his own horror story of working with Hans which involved payments which never manifested and complicated litigation.

Dan and Stephan and I formed a gang of three. We toiled in the room every day trying to create some synthesis of our narratives which could be produced on the copier. I nearly broke our machine running Combat Paper through it. It worked, but the fibers rubbed off everywhere demanding thorough cleaning after every print. We were all very active stoners and I shared the wealth of my relationship with Timmy. This really helped the productivity go along.

Amos worked by himself at the other side of the room and rarely communicated with us. It seemed that we were two separate projects running alongside one another.

Hans and Liz had made it back to the city. The only contact I had from them was a phone call to tell me that I would not be getting the rest of the money from the Messe yet because there were some complications. Whatever.

I was happy to be working with real artists who focused on positive art again. It was slowly mending the anger of working for these two capitalists.

One night Stephan told me the real deal while we were walking around town. Hans had pulled a 6,000 Euro grant for this project. He told me that if they likely would not give me any of this money which is what happened to him. I became sick to my stomach. I was only here to add a glimmer of validity to a large welfare check that these two had cashed in on and they were destroying my mind in the process of enacting this stupid project with all of their sickly agendas.

I am an art puritan. Art is my Quran, or my Bible, or my own personal God. I saw art as a means for building a world that I wanted to see and I didn’t see that world being built by Hans and Liz. What I saw from them was a desire to capitalize on the dark reality of ruined lives. I knew that there was no way that we could recreate the horror of an actual interrogation. You can’t do that in a few minutes. To recreate that horror we would have to take people away from their families for years, torture them with interrogations day after day, occasionally physically abuse them, and in between the abuse and interrogations leave them to pray in a tiny space exposed to the elements for days without end.

In short, fuck Hans and Liz.

September 24, 2010

a storm this way comes

I had come to Vienna with a few bags and the goal to leave this city an artist. I had seen the lines outside of the Salvation Army in Portland and I had known instantly that that was not the kind of freedom that I sought. I was looking for the freedom of voice, the freedom to create something that I wanted to see through art. But what was my art? This question hid in every crevice and shadow and it nagged me endlessly.

I walked around town, my eyes agape as they took in the beauty of this town, trying to figure this question out. If I were to leave town successful I will have had to have answered it.

When I was not at SoHo I was in Timmy’s archive either looking through his library or drawing while he watched over my shoulder criticizing my sloppy lines. He had another student named Johan who came for the pleasure and the pain of his critique.

Timmy was an expert. His work featured a space man in science fiction settings. It was all cover art of the highest caliber, each piece alluding to dozens of hours of labor and love, each line a testament to his mastery of personal discipline. Not a flaw could be found in the extensive catalogue of his work to any eye except his own which saw shortcomings that no other human eye could discover.

When I was at SoHo I was madly running clippings of sketches and military paperwork through the xerox machine. The paperwork had come from the psychologist who had diagnosed me with a myriad of disorders along with suggesting that I not be deployed. My eager Captain saw fit to belay her orders. These papers have calmed my more nightmarish episodes when I remember how hard I fought to not have to do what I did, even though I lost that fight in the end.

I wonder what would have happened if my plan had worked and I didn’t deploy. Would I be living a dream in Vienna with a list of friends that went on for ages? Or would I just have another state school degree and, if I was lucky, working a job that had no loyalty to me like all of my friends in the states?

There is no finding out with questions like these.

Nina came back to Vienna to an empty apartment and a letter on the stove that thanked her for her kindness. It was curt but I didn’t want to hash out the politics of love with another person. I had already made a mess out of things by establishing something like a relationship with Michaela who also lived in Vienna and insisted that we continue to see each other. This kind of behavior was totally typical for me and I was growing sick of it. I felt like a junky with a serious habit. I didn’t even know what I was doing. I just ended up in bed with woman after woman saying all kinds of pretty things to keep myself there, expressing emotions that existed, but I knew they only existed for so long. I was beginning to worry that this was my only real art. Would I have to start saying “fucking around with wounded hearts” when people asked me what my art was?

I moved my stuff over to Michaela’s. We sullenly smoked cigarettes off the balcony. Then we laid in bed, again not touching each other, just laying there being sad together which actually felt way better than any sex at the time.

We continued like this for days until one night while we were out at a bar after I had been pickpocketed. We were sitting on some benches on the sidewalk watching a nasty storm roll in while we chatted to four black dudes with island accents who were telling us about Ja and the way of Rasta while cheefing down blunts. They said some vulgar thing about women and Michaela got irate in a hurry. Soon they were arguing. I tried to stop them nervously but my only success was in having Michaela turn her rage on me because I was being such a wimp in not confronting them as well. All of a sudden she said “you’re probably just some other hustler with a woman in every town” and my eyes made the mistake of dropping which ratted me out. She lit up like a bomb. It was true. Then she asked the one question I had so artfully dodged for the last few weeks. Did I have a girlfriend? I thought about lying, but that time spent thinking blew my cover anyway. She stood up, now totally angry. How serious was it, she wanted to know. I meekly began to explain my situation with Vane who still sent me letters in the mail because I hadn’t told her yet that our love was over. Probably because I’m a terrible person. Weak and undisciplined.

Right when Michaela’s fury hit its peak the storm that we had ten minutes ago been watching come to accompany the rainy cloud that was hanging over us finally made its appearance. The wind went from calm to tropical storm in seconds. Lightning split the air. Rain drops fell like buckshot from the sky. I watched Michaela walk away like a man who just watched a tornado tear apart his mobile home only to tear off across a field, leaving me there with the wreckage of something that was already a wreck.

Dazed, soaking wet and very confused I found myself under Timmy’s window hollering like Suzanna had on the first day that I had found this amazing place. He opened the window to see that it was me and then that same hand wave let me know that I was to come upstairs.

I stayed inside of the library for a few days. They were the best days of my entire trip. I felt like Borges in some secret archive of magic scripts. I lost myself in the comics for a few days while my mind reeled at the mess my penis had made for my whole body.

ghost town

I walked until the bones of my feet felt broken and I could walk no more. There were so many things inside of my head. Walking provided the only space I had to deal with them.

There is no better city than Vienna for walking therapy. The cold laced itself around my lungs, sharpening the reflexes of my mind. All around me were the remnants of wars past.

Vienna has been a hotly contested inland trading port for centuries. It stood as a gateway between the Middle East and the West and all goods between the two passed through it. The taxation of this process made the place wealthy enough to keep its poor quiet.

They walked through their own streets like guilt ridden ghosts. Never had I seen so many wizened and tired eyes.

Above our heads loomed concrete obelisks as tall as sky scrapers. These were bomb shelters that had been built by the Nazis during WWII. There was one in every neighborhood. They were built to be so strong that there was no way to dismantle them without blowing up the whole district that it rested in. I imagined that all of these ghostly citizens lived inside of these tombs, filtering out during the day to go about their ethereal business, forever in repentance for the collective sins that they were paying back like family loans that had been accrued during the war.

Not only had Hitler been born in Lindz and raised himself into the insane madman that he was here, but when the war came Vienna greeted the German Army with welcome arms. Their grandpas and dads and husbands and sons had been Nazis.

During all of the conversations I had about the gruesomeness of war with old men inside of cafe’s here did I hear one word about that generation. It was as if they had disappeared off of the map. It annoyed me greatly. Forcing oneself to forget things like this will only serve to mythologize that which actually happened. How are we to learn from that? In refusing the labor of acceptance the Viennese accepted an eternity of guilt.

It seemed like the perfect place to deal with my own guilt. I blended in gracefully with the citizens in their shuffling and baring of their historical chains. We all haunted the streets together.

One night while I was out haunting the streets I heard a girl’s voice call out my name. I turned to see someone I didn’t recognize. Her hair was brushy and she wore thick glasses. She was pretty. She fixed strange eyes on me, as if I had died and it were impossible that she could be seeing me. She told me, in a Scottish accent, that she had seen me speak in Edinburgh. It is a small world.

I told her that I was just out walking. She suggested that she join me. I begrudged the intrusion but it would be too impolite to insist that I must continue on to nowhere in particular by myself. As we walked she began an exhausting dialogue in how crazy she has felt lately.

I don’t know why people feel so free to treat me like their psychologist. It just happens. I meet someone, then five minutes later they’re telling me all about their childhood traumas and neurosis, every once in a while taking breaks to both breath and thank me for letting them be so open and honest. Its not like I start these conversations by saying “hey, look, I really prefer to talk about things that you don’t want to talk to anybody else about, so why don’t you just start telling me about your relationship with your mom.” It doesn’t bother me, though sometimes I feel like I really ought to suggest that they pay me. It just makes me wonder what it is about myself that makes these people feel so free to discuss these things.

This went on all night, all the way through the dinner that we shared at a restaurant that worked like a soup kitchen. We ended up on her roof. She was finishing off detailing why her anxiety made it difficult for her to relate to anyone while I ate a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. At the time I was “between living arrangements” so she let me stay the night at her place. We slept in different rooms which was fine because I had no interest in manifesting sexual tension along with the emotional tension that had already make me feel spiritually broken. She kept coming in to offer me things, or sometimes to make awkward comments about how she has to sleep alone because she doesn’t really trust people. I just slept through.

In the morning she gave me a sweater and I was on my way, back into the haunting streets.

there are two sides of me. there is the one you do, and the one you do not see.

Always, in every extension of the the universe manifested here, there is more than one story. To those lucky few with truly clever vision there is an infinite unraveling of stories in everything. But for me there were only two. I attribute this mostly to a manic dualism which manifests itself in me as the disorder known commonly as Bipolar disorder. I fluctuate haphazardly between two emotional poles at all times, each pole with its own story.

The two stories of my life now were absolutely at odds.

One story was the story of a boy who was lost, very tired, poor, mentally unwell, malnourished and over-stimulated, stranded in a world which never felt comfortable, in which I was always an outsider. This was why it was so easy to leave every situation I was in. It was like I was never there in the first place. Maybe that is why I thought nobody would notice my bathroom breaks on all those stages.

The other story was a ballad of freedom, luck, faith and, most importantly, beauty. It was the story of why it was still worth it to believe in something in a day and age when nothing seems worth believing because the airwaves are so constantly crowded with lies.

Between the two I was torn. They were both true.

While we were in Cuba Rooster had had a version of this debate that lasted from the drizzly day on the rifle range when we first met each other and banded together to form MotorCycle Awesome, the worlds premier imaginary bike gang, all the way through the gnat infested bitchings of Cuba up until the day he walked out of the armory with his bags. A free man. I didn’t get to do that for two more years. I hated him so much during those two years.

He always insisted that there was a silver lining to everything, enforcing the conclusion that I was just being a “bitch” for my belief that things were wretchedly fucked and that nothing meant anything any more.We were both right. Places like Gitmo happen. It sucks, but its a fact of life. Sentimentality was a waste of emotion, but to me nothing means anything without the emotion. If it is to be an emotionless world I want out of it.

Every one of those detainees knew the way out. I did too. That’s why they keep the safety scissors in the booth.

The truth of the matter is that it is a beautiful and fucked up world. Between those two things there is nothing. No gray area. At least not to me.

Standing there in Vienna, in the cold, about to do another speech about how people think about torture, in my tattered army coat over a white t-shirt that I had written “MAGNETO WAS RIGHT” on with a Sharpie marker, freshly shaven mohawk, eyes pink around the edges, black crescents under my eyes, sallow cheek bones, tight black pants in my Army boots with two stories in my head, standing on ground that had seen centuries of the white man’s horror show, waiting for a repulsive man to come guide me to where I was to complete the second tenement of our contract which never manifested all because of money and a hunger for recognition I realized that when it all came down to it, I really didn’t give a fuck.

That’s when I realized what it was the Army had done to me. The special power it had given me. It gave me the power to say Fuck It. Whatever happens happens. I didn’t need to stress out any more. I had Fuck It on my side.

I called Hans on the payphone in the center of town. I felt like I was in a movie, leaning against this thing with a cigarette in my hand, counting out the last of my change for this one last call that needed to go through. He picked up the phone frantic. Where the fuck had I been? Who was I with? Would I be on time for the event? I tried to quiet his blubberings. I only had so much time on the payphone. I said “Hans, I’m at the town center at the front door of the church. I don’t know where to go. Come pick me up.” Then a polite German woman was saying something I didn’t understand.

Only one thing to do. I rolled a cigarette and waited in the gloomy mist for my fat man to come.

He did make it after a while, red in the face with his big fat fury. We hustled along to a place I had already been to and really should have remembered the location of but, to be honest, smoking all that weed was taking a real toll on me. Yeah. Its like that.

We walked in the door of a little bar with a patio on the second floor of a nondescript building. I didn’t say much of anything to my hosts. They were trying to tell me that I should focus on the really dark shit because people like stuff like that here. I had already made up my mind on the matter however. This was to be my last talk of any kind about this subject. I was done with Guantanamo. As of this afternoon I was really ready to put it behind me.

People filtered in, got drinks, shmoozed. People ignored me for the most part. Hans and Liz bustled about like they were the coolest kids in town. Everyone was dressed in black and they stared down the barrel of their noses at everything with shrewdish suspicion. They were caricatures of the European artist type. I found it pretty hilarious.

Suddenly there was silence and I found that a space had been cleared around me, leaving me in the middle of dozens of skeptical eyes beaming from emotionless faces. Awkward barely begins to explain things. Hans’ said a few words in German then said my name and pointed to me. Go!

So I talked. The one thing I can do at any moment of the day on command. I took this opportunity to say it how I’d always wanted to say it.

I told them about my fears that this really was fascism and that I had been a part of something worst that the Nazi’s had ever been. Where before the was the Third Reich now there is the World Bank. The transition was flawless. It had only come to be this way because the good people of the military industrial complex had learned a lot of lessons from Hitler’s failures. Now here we were in a world that was twice as terrifying as the ones that generations of science fiction writers had toiled in their basements to create. Our leaders were even good enough to afford us a taste of irony in declaring a war on terror, which is a natural reaction to waking up into a world in which millions of people are being killed in occupations on account of a disagreement over beliefs. I made sure to tell them that we were fucked as a species and that we didn’t deserve to be saved. We do horrible things and we have it coming.

Then it was just over. Dismissed. I took my beer and my cigarettes outside to sulk alone but some guy thought that it was chit chat time. He wanted to let me know that he thought that I couldn’t just come here to make some banal form of apology and think that I could get away with war crimes. I didn’t even have the energy to discuss this with him. Luckily I was spared by a beautiful accident.

There was a cocktail waitress nearby who had heard the whole discussion and she decided to step in on my behalf. She told the man something sharp in a singsong German and then looked down nervously and walked away. The man turned to me and apologized for being rude and then he too walked away. Then Nina came up wearing a raincoat and boots, her short cropped hair fuzzy, she was wearing that same obvious declaration of distance that I had seen more than once from girls who were done with me. She just wanted to say hi and then she had to go. Hi. And then she went. I couldn’t tell what her emotions were then, but that was the story of all of my Viennese interactions. Those people are hard to read.

Inside a girl who looked like a boy was looking over my Combat Paper. She was punked out so I knew she didn’t have any money but I always sell for cheap to my punk people because sharing is caring. She picked one that had my whole record xeroxed on it and before I could tell her the price she handed me fifty Euros and punched me on the arm. Then she told me that this stuff had great fetish value. Then she took off. I was touched.

Outside the cocktail waitress was smoking a cigarette. She was picture perfect. Long legs elegantly crossed, beautiful eyes calmly fixed a thousand miles off, dyed blond hair and thick mascara, that perfect punk beauty queen taste with a take back to historical elegance. I was staring at her. I realized it before she did luckily or it might have been creepy. I walked up to her to thank her. Her name was Nina, too.

She apologized for the man. I told her not to worry about it. We smoked for a while. I saw that Nina, the first Nina, was still inside. I decided to go. I could feel trouble brewing.

I stayed out all night that night, spending most of my money on whiskey. I stumbled into Hans’ shitfaced in the early morning.

September 25, 2010

belle nina

The night after the speech I was walking by the museums. I took a turn around an ally and soon I heard the sound of a gathering of people and a distant thumping. I followed the sound until I was standing before the enormous wooden doors of an old building that looked like a castle. The person at the counter looked at me with familiarity and asked me what my name was. When I told her she told me that I was on the list. Some hidden kindness of my captors I assumed.

I walked in and there in the first room was Nina shrouded in her charms. Beyond her a rave of sorts was raging, complete with a spectacle of lighting like I had never seen. My blood began to boil with the likelihood of heavy duty hallucinogens.

I had been thinking about her all day, kicking myself for not at least getting her number or making an attempt, and then kicking myself again for even thinking about dragging another girl into a scene that had just recently been evacuated by all other participants on account of how fucked up I was capable of being.

We talked briefly but it was too loud so we just stood next to each other sneaking glances. We never did go inside the dance.

We left the party with her friend Daniel who I took to be her boyfriend even though she showed no interest in returning the longing glances that he gave her. We went to a cafe where we talked for a long time, though I can’t remember what we talked about. Then we were in some lavish club that was covered from wall to wall with golden things, everything shining. I couldn’t afford a drink here. We talked all night. When we left that place the sun was just starting to come up. Daniel was getting on his motorcycle, I was smoking a cigarette, Nina was saying goodbye. When he was gone she told me that I could stay at her place. I realized that I really didn’t have any other options other than going back to Hans’. It was too late/early to show up at Timmy’s. He’d be pissed. I considered sleeping in a park for the morning but then I realized that that was a stupid idea when a beautiful girl was offering you a place in her home.

When we got to her place she told me I could either sleep on the stiff, uncomfortable couch or in bed with her. The question seemed decided already. From that moment on the only time that I left that apartment was with her.

We started the clock with eleven days. We spent those days as if we had been in love forever.

We spent hours in her huge, beautiful bathroom floating in the tub every day. She rolled us spliffs with her nimble fingers while her voice sang out sweetly to me, calming every anxious nerve in my body. Her beauty was manifold. Her virtues beautiful. She was had the sweetest heart I had come across.

She loved me because I was free. She had never met anyone who lived like I did. I felt awkward receiving this love because I knew that in a way this wasn’t really me. I had always had a job before this journey. I’d always been in the same place doing the same thing with the same people which was the life that she was hoping to escape. She had her own American Dream, and like so many dreaming girls before her she rested those dreams on my story and my face which never grew older past my teenage years. I was Peter Pan. A myth of a life she wanted to live.

Thats not entirely fair because when she told me she loved me I believed it more than when it had come from others. She saw something in me that I couldn’t see and she loved that part of me, and in her love I could love it too. When I apologized to her she stopped me, forcing me to understand that there was nothing to apologize for. This made me begin to question why I apologized so much. Were the things that I said or did which I thought to be disasters really not that big a deal?

I began to write these apologies down. We called it our Apology Garden. This is the list:

– I’m sorry I’m so gross.

– I’m sorry I’ve only been here for two days and I’ve moved all of my shit all over your room.

– I’m sorry I can’t stop touching you.

– I’m sorry I talk about myself so much.

– Sorry I never see these things.

– I’m sorry I’m stoned and I can’t find my bearings in this place.

– Sorry I am from the future.

– Sorry I talk funny.

– Sorry I’m so simple sometimes.

– Wow, sorry. Super downer.

– I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.

– I’m sorry but you have to.

– Sorry I didn’t go with you guys to the hospital yesterday.

– Sorry. I should have saved it for you.

– Sorry that I said no drinks and then I got myself a drink.

– We stole your seats, sorry.

– Sorry I’m a business man about these things.

– I’m sorry my friends are all crazy.

– Ugh…. whatever, sorry.

– Sorry, its kind of wierd.

– Its almost over. Sorry.

– I was the only person here to dance with. I’m sorry.

– Sorry I am kind of a mess.

– Social butterfly, sorry.

– Don’t you like dangerous games? No, not really, sorry if I looked like I did.

For every apology she took a photograph with her Polaroid camera.

Her eyes were beautiful and you could see her taking the moments in, appreciating them for their aesthetic merits. When I was with her there were no politics or massive emotional conversations to have. There was just holding hands and keeping our eyes open so we didn’t miss one moment of this time. Everything was precious. The clock sped up despite our efforts to make it stop.

I finally had someone to share this town with, somebody to fill the hole that I felt alongside of me every day as I walked around in a beautiful place that became worthless without the values of a shared experience. Our bond became complete in very few days.

I forgot about the rest of the world because we had our own world. I didn’t want to leave it, nor did she want me to go. Goddamn the hands that move the hands of clocks and all the things they take away which will never be returned after they are gone!

From the living room we could often here Mimu, her roommate playing her bizarrely beautiful music on an accordion which added to the surreality of our dream.

These were the most beautiful eleven days of my life. I treasure the memory of them more than anything else that I have in my possession. I will keep them locked inside of a safe inside my brain and guard them for eternity from the rest of the world.

You can take everything else, but you will never take my photographs of Nina.

fuck you and your money.

There was only one thing left to do in this city. The photographs.

I had thought, as was the original plan, that this would be the most painless of my promises three to the Wicked Witch of the Welfare State, but I was painfully wrong.

I made a call to Hans from Nina’s phone. Again he was furious with me for absenteeism but I didn’t give a fuck. As I said earlier, fuck Hans and Liz. The month was almost over and I couldn’t care less about my commitments to them. So far they had only given me a sprinkling of money and put me up for less time than all of the much truer artists that I had met who asked me for nothing.

He had arranged a photographer and a location. I was to meet them at the apartment two days before my flight back to England where I would connect with the Drews from Combat Paper for a dangerous month long mission.

Nina and I were smoking cigarettes outside the front door that morning with our sunglasses on looking too cool to be true. Hans came down and ushered us off to an Army Navy Surplus store down the road. He was disappointed that they didn’t have any Nazi uniforms and my hairs bristled. What did he want with those. I asked him what kind of photos he had in mind. He said he wanted pictures of me in a uniform. We settled on a pair of fatigues that were of an unfamiliar camo pattern, probably from some Eastern European rag tag military.

We took the train out to the farthest reaches of town and walked for a ways until we came to what appeared to be the edge of the apocalypse. Broken down buildings, empty lots, broken glass, remnants of large machines as far as the eye could see. We set our things down inside one of the buildings which looked like it used to be some kind of shipping dock. It had no roof and there was spray paint everywhere. While we waited for the photographer Hans finally informed me that what he really wanted of me was to get pictures of me in a uniform which would be super imposed over pictures of me naked in shackles. He brought the three piece suit they had detained me in while we were in Lindz out. My mouth dropped. I pushed my glasses to the top of my head so he could see the full scale of fury in my eyes.

I was unleashed. How the fuck did he think that this was art? You can’t make bondage porn out of a humanitarian crisis that had swallowed the lives of so many people. How was I to let these pictures eventually wander into the hands of Moazzam and Omar and Jarallah who would be disgusted with me for participating in such a disturbing display of vulgarity. This was fucking sick.

Nina was standing at my side with her hand on me, the only restraint I had from physically venting the anger that was destroying my insides. I absolutely refused.

Hans jumped up and down and twisted about like a petulant child that hasn’t gotten what it wanted, switching between whining and this extremely scary face that was the last piece in the puzzle that I was putting together about Hans’ true psyche. I couldn’t tell if he was a serial killer or a pedophile or both, but he was something that was absolutely fucking twisted and my dealings with him were done.

The photographer showed up finally in a fancy SUV. The scene confused him thoroughly. He joined into the debate, letting us know that he drives a fly ride and that the rest of his clients were important people and he had no time to be sitting here for this.

I needed the money. I put the uniform on and snatched the shackles out of Hans’ hands, controlling the urge to beat him to death with them. That would make for some pretty fucking awesome pictures I think. For the next few hours the photographer and I worked together while Liz kept Hans under control.

We pretended that this broken down building was a block and I walked up and down it as if I were on duty, every five meters stopping to talk with one of the imaginary detainees. I was comfortable with this because in a way this scene represented something like the twisted fragment of a nightmare that those blocks had left in my brain. It was not good art and there was no value in it for them but I was accomplishing my mission.

If Nina had not been there I think that situation would have broken me, but with her I didn’t care. I didn’t need them any more.

The photo shoot came to an end. They told me I could come pick my money up the next day. My last day in Vienna. I wanted it now because I did not want to see them again.

Nina and I went back to our dream.

The next day we were standing in their apartment for the last time. Hans was, as always, in his underwear. It seems that we caught him in the act. He started to tell me that I was a big disappointment to them but I told him to shut his fucking mouth. I focused on Liz. I asked her where the money was. I wanted my pay from the Subversive Messe and whatever it was they saw fit to give me for the completion of our contract. Liz presented me with a payroll log which listed the 200 Euros they were going to give me with all of the deductions for the small increments they had given me, many of them false. The balance was 70 Euros.

Again I lost it. The money they had given to me had been a very small and infrequent per diem. On top of that they were completely ignoring the 300 Euros which was owed to me directly from the Messe. They told me that I wasn’t entitled to that money because it was their project which was on display there. She looked shocked to find that I knew the size of the grant that they had received and that I had a list of my own. The list was the expenses that they had invested into this project which amounted to less than 500 Euros which meant that they were sitting on a 5,500 Euro profit for a project for which I was the only claim to legitimacy they had and they were going to hand me 70 Euros? Absolutely not.

Liz changed her offer to 200 which was still not enough to calm my fury. I wanted at the very least the 300 that they had outright stolen from me. I didn’t give a fuck about their money. I didn’t want their money. I wanted my money.

Liz left the apartment to get the 200 Euros from an ATM (no, she didn’t even have that bullshit sum prepared) and so Nina and I were faced with Hans in all of his grotesqueness. He began to yell obscenities from his computer chair, too fat to get out of it and to face me like any kind of a man. He began a very bizarre tangent. He started listing off things that I have sucked. Dicks, people, art, Moazzam, etc. etc…

This was too much. I looked at Nina. Her eyes were like two pools of comfort. I decided I didn’t need this. I grabbed her hand and we began to leave. When we got out to the sidewalk Hans had continued his ranting out of the window. Liz was walking to the door with the money in her hand. She handed it to me. I slapped it out of her hand and told her to fuck herself.

We walked out of a cloud of bills holding hands, poor but proud and, most importantly, together.

The next day the plane came to take me away. Inside the airport at the electric gate which would separate us we kissed one last time in Vienna and she whispered in my ear that she would see me in Brighton. I smiled. The sunglasses were hiding a few tears. That was the hardest departure I’ve ever made.

The ticket had been acquired by a friend of Liz who worked for the airline. She was a stewardess. She asked me if I had the money for the ticket. I told her that Hans and Liz had sworn that they would cover it.

Goodbye, Wein. You showed me the best and the worst of yourself.