"but Soft..." or Posies

It's always the usual days I want to write about, but when I sit down to write something about them I find that all the flavor was in the individual moments, leaving me with nothing to write about, nothing that will flow anyway. For example if I wrote a sentence like "the sky had that faded rose color that precedes a storm, back over the mountains, and two of the neighbor's kids were chasing each other around a broken pipe sticking straight out of the ground, running around and around like they were never going to stop." it's fine as a sentence but if I tried to expand upon that further, by bringing in a series of events to lead up to and away from the kids and the sky, well, it just wouldn't work; it would be obvious I was just leading up to that sentence. Furthermore, some days are just paced out in sentences rather than paragraphs or pages.

-I went down to get bread from the new Georgian place (Vratsakan haats), yesterday's rain still all over the place, and it took me twice as long to get home as I decided to pick up everything else I wanted for breakfast on the way back.
-Paige and I walked to another part of town that I now realize I've hardly been through; I was still drowsy from sleeping in so late but it didn't hinder our conversation as I'm so comfortable talking to her.
-We waited for the marshutka to take her back to Vyke sitting on a rock by the road.
-I stopped at the post office as I've been waiting for a letter from my friend Sam for awhile; the letter was there along with the last package my mom said she'd mail me, what she called my "welcome home" package, full of stuff that could be eaten on the road, some of which I've already eaten.
-I read Sam's letter on a ridge just north of town that overlooks the village Getap below, while the flies buzzed around me in the hazy May afternoon.
-I couldn't ask for a nicer letter from an old and dear friend, although it arrived nearly a month late,
-I stopped by the trauntella nest I found about a week ago and have been looking at nearly every day since.
-One of my students called me down to the university to practice for a recital coming up that my skateboard and myself are to play a part in, while I was talking with her I noticed her eyes, in some way, remind me of a butterfly, and as a result I talked in a quieter tone than usual.
-I came back to find the area around my apartment building in a flurry of late afternoon activity, my neighbors talking while their kids jumped and ran around shouting; they joked with me and I joked back, including me in the community activity.
-Bought a local brand of spring water to take to my favorite bench to read some more of the Central Asian Lonley Planet guide that I haven't been able to put down lately, jotting notes here and there, only to scribble them out after finding out about another visa restriction.
-Two old men sat down next to me and talked for some time; it was clear from the way they spoke that they'd been friends for their whole lives.
-I was offered popcorn later brought to the bench by a young girl and and young woman who was there with her 2 or 3 year-old child, who'd just been gifted with a new tricycle.
-Every time a car would come down the sleepy street everyone would stop talking and look up to see where the little girl and her tricycle were.
-I spoke with the old man after his friend left; he invited me in for vodka, I declined but meant it when I said I'd take him up on it some day, he does, after all, frequent my favorite bench and I'm sure I'll have another chance.
-I listened to Bjork's Vespertine while making a dinner that I expected to be lousy, but turned out to be tolerable.
-The sun went down about half an hour ago but I still haven't turned on the lights in my apartment.

Dreaming with the TV on or Your Tone of Voice is far too Serious for this Occasion

I.
There's a mania taking over. It's not really a bad thing; I haven't lost any ability or sense as a result and I wouldn't even say that anything has been dulled, still, I'm living with thoughts that vacillate so quickly I usually have a difficult time gauging my own opinion on anything, especially issues of importance. The problem here is that my service here is almost over. This brings a cascade of thoughts that have been building up for these last two years down on top of me. The stretch of time that separated the day I arrived from, say, today, often seemed interminable. I realize now that in my listless, day-to-day musings I was thinking about eventually leaving in such an abstract way that I had nearly blocked the possibility from my mind. Now, just two months from some kind of departure, I find I am not at all prepared for this drastic change. In part because I anticipated it far too much, and in part because I took my anticipation to be indulgence and not really connected to reality or worth my time.
The question I seem to be continually asking myself is whether or not I want to leave. Of course I don't want to stay here for ever, in fact even the idea of staying here another year is really not appealing at all. There are things I miss, things that I feel entitled to miss. Yet, the idea of returning to America does not fill me with enthusiasm either. I know I've built up a ridiculous picture of what America is in my mind. Two years of exaggeration have taken their toll. And when I really look through the memories the only relevant and worthwhile thing I can find are my friends and family. Yes, I desperately want to eat avocados, fake cream cheese, bagels and all sorts of crap again, but, really what is appreciation of such things? Am I going to savor the flavor of these things for months on end? Am I going to thrill every time I get on my bike (Which I've been without) for years? Yes, there's going to be an immediate, probably overwhelming shock of readjustment, but later, when these things again become normal, I know that my mind is going to wonder back to this place, the people I met and the things I did, and I already know that I'm going to regret not having done more of a great many things.
So I find myself in a kind of limbo. Stuck between the incredible contemplation of a realistic return home to all the things I have ever known and my last two months in Armenia, a place that I will not return to for many years, if ever, but none-the-less, a place where I have left an indelible mark of persistence, of will.
I know that I will continue to relive this place for years, much in the same way that I still remember what was happening in California right before I came here. Sometimes, what was two years ago seems like it was only a few months ago. For example, my last night in America, in Philadelphia, before catching a plane from NY the following evening,I walked around all night, past Ben Franklin's grave, down by the river, up to the north side, which seemed more hood than the west side. I remember walking through this city thinking over and over to myself that this was the country that I was going to be leaving the following day, that all the things I found familiar here were soon going to cease to exist except in memory.
I had my headphones on most of the night, I remember listening to "Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss" a lot and finishing a letter to a girl, shortly before trying to call her from eight different payphones and losing something like 6 dollars in quarters on old drugdeal AT&T coinslots. I went to a bar later on where other volunteers were meeting each other. I felt pretty numb to the whole thing, trying to remind myself that it would be a long time before I heard live rock music again.
And then, like that, it's the next summer and I'm standing in a bar in Novi Sad, Serbia listening to a decent rock band, with vague memories of a year in Armenia. After I left the country for my first vacation after a year, it was almost like I'd hardly spent more time than a month there. If I really pondered it I could pull up all kinds of memories from training and subsequent site placement, my first host family and moving out on my own after 7 months of living with families, but, usually, I didn't really ponder it, I just experienced it in waves of vertiginous dreams.
It'll be like that again, too. I'm going to lose a lot of this experience just by leaving. It's collapsible somehow. When I really want to think of it I will, but not without regret, but mostly I'll just remember the tunes to Armenian and Russki pop songs, the swallows outside my window and the sound of the recording on the Yerevan Metro, warning passengers that the doors are closing.
"skushasek dnera pakvum en--hajort gayarana yeritasardakan"
but that one I'll keep until I'm old, shuffling around a retirement center, mumbling it to myself through a trick of Alzheimer’s.

II.
I haven't been writing much because I can’t help but to feel like these posting are becoming fairly formulaic. I try to elucidate on my internal struggle, my new dual identity as someone who lives in Armenia, someone who hasn't seen his friends and family in years, someone who has changed with none the usual people around to witness the change and, well, the kid who graduated from Jackson high in 2001, moved to Chicago, moved back to Michigan, worked in a bookstore, took road trips to Minneapolis and Pittsburg a lot because he knew people there eventually moved to San Francisco after discovering it to be the most beautiful city in the US, one February evening after driving all day up from LA, to the Richmond and getting out of a van that smelled like Red Bull and socks on 19th Ave and something, watching the light from the setting sun run up the street car rails that cut the streets out there. The kid who grew restless even in SF and moved up north and, eventually left for the Peace Corps, by again driving back across America for the forth time.
I write and try to reconcile these identities by talking about what I miss about America, indulging that character for a while, but this always seems kinda' fake, not that I don't miss these things, but I often find that I hardly have the attention to give full description to what I miss and why, mostly because my life here is continually hammering at my door. The kids who live in my building are coming in and bring their English homework, or their just coming in and asking me what I'm doing while sorta' drifting around my apartment, as kids are wont to do. If it's not that, someone's calling me asking me when the hell I'm ever going to come back over, people I met once, months ago are still calling me with this question and it's not unusual to me at all anymore. Even if nothing is deliberately intruding on my American musings Spring here is just too lively to ignore. In the evening the crickets chirp in alternating waves of somnolence, a sound at once so beautiful and bucolic that I listen to it and wonder why I ever enjoyed living in cities so much. During the day my neighbors are outside working on cars, revving the engines, yelling out their windows to each other, walking their babies, who have been imprisoned inside all winter, around the building. There are at least 5 different kinds of bird song that I can differentiate outside my window, all of them enchanting. When the kids get home from school they seem to just run frantically back and forth under my window, switching their aim every three minutes but always running, running and yelling. With all that going on I try to reflect on my time here, I try to think about what I left and what I'm going to return to and I'm not really there at all. I get fleeting glimpses of things, American things, that I try to write down, but can never seem to mold into anything substantial. I think about food and I mention that I miss certain food but no one, besides perhaps my mother, would care at all that I miss certain foods, to tell the truth I don't either. I write those kinds of things and I think to myself, "you're writing about avocados again, aren't you tired of writing about that?"
This all, of course, begs the question what the hell am I trying to express? If I'm totally acclimated to being here why do I keep trying to reminisce about things that I've obviously drifted too far away from to say anything interesting about. If my Armenian life and my American life can't be reconciled why do I continue to write about them in the same post? The only solution I have is that the two, for me, are totally intertwined. My Armenia doesn't exist without American fantasy. I can't really think to any time period that I was here when a certain facet of American living wasn't in the back of my mind. The first six months I was here it was the people. I just missed the raw material behind the people I knew in the states and wished I could somehow conjure up analogues to this in Armenia (I also didn't really have any friends here at that time.) Then, as I began to meet more and more people I began to miss the specific entertainment options. I would meet the people I had come to know and wish that we had something better to do than smoke cigarettes and talk, I wanted a background to the conversation like I'd always had at home, a bar, a bike ride, a to-go coffee and a beach-side bench. In time, I found this as well, cafes replaced cafes, mountains replaced the ocean, kitchens replaced bars, marshutkas replaced subways and bikes. As I became more and more acclimated I began to miss the little things, like sounds and flavors, things that are hard to replace, things that do not often play a very auspicious role in one's life but are constant. This began the long lament over foods and ephemera of life in America. But now I feel even this is fading, the little specific things have lost their import, they just aren't important enough and I can't hold on to them forever; I like the foods and the smells and the sounds of life here now. These things have become my life, and as they too are ephemeral I'm taking more time to appreciate them. So what does that leave me with? Just when it seems like I've gotten over every American fantasy my mind could conjure up, a new theme presents itself, probably the most troubling theme of all, that of pure fantasy. What now prompts me to write about America at all is nothing that comes from my own experience, but things I imagine I may be able to obtain when I go back, things that I have no familiarity with heretofore not because I've never done them, but I've never experienced them the way I think I will after having been away from them for years. It seems odd to say but this category of pure fantasy is probably the most mundane longing or nostalgia of all because it takes the most commonplace things and converts them into nearly limitless experiences. Let me give to an example to illustrate my point.
I was listening to This American Life today and there was a segment where two people talked about watching TV together and singing the theme song to a new TV show that they liked. A married couple singing along to a sitcom theme. When I heard this I was immediately transported to a reality where I was sitting next to someone after a long day of work and awaiting the start of our favorite new TV show. The between-shows commercials ended and the theme began, we began to sing lustily in anticipation of the continuation of a story we had come to appreciate and identify with. There was really nothing else to this fantasy, but while I was considering it I felt inexplicably happy, especially for someone who, back in the states, hadn't had any kind of network TV connection since 2002.
That's it, that's what I think about now when I think about going back to America. That's what makes me happy. The really boring parts of life that are probably the hardest to appreciate anywhere. I don't like TV, but the idea that it could really mean something to me and play a background role to the relationships I would have with other people is novel as hell. That's what entertains me now, the prospect that the things I used to reject as dull and unimportant will now be reinvigorated with a sense import, a sort of background potential I was never able to see before.
The only other thing I really think about, fairly frequently, are the cups of coffee I'd like to drink with different people in different places, some of them don't even make sense, that is, the cafes I'm putting these people in are thousands of miles, in some cases, from where they live. Sometimes my vision of America can almost be totally reduced to a handful of people and cafes, indeed there's really little else I'd want from it at this point, permitting a job.
There are about 14 weeks left. I'm going to travel around the country, work at a summer camp or two, finish all my paperwork and try to get a final project finished, then I'm going to Iran and onward to central Asia through Turkmenistan. My somewhat sedentary period is coming to an end, so the focus of this record is probably going to change. There's a lot to anticipate in returning to America, but I'm not going to write about it anymore, I think I exhausted it tonight. It would seem, just 20 days short of a full two years, I've finally used up all my desire, which should make this summer incredibly interesting.

Hro or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Answer the Phone

A friend of mine went back to Russia about a week ago and another friend of mine is coming back from Russia in a few weeks, or at least he said he was the last time I talked to him. The season changes and people from the CIS countries go back up to Moscow to resume summer work, mostly physical labor, and send the money back home, buy cell phones and other western products that are either really over priced or not available here. My friend Arshack is an exception in that he owns a skatepark in the capital Yerevan, where he hopes that summer will be a higher grossing period than the winter, wherein he had very few customers, other than myself, dropping by on occasion to practice the same tricks that I've been doing for the last eight years or so now.
My friend Hro, who went back, left without much pomp. A few friends and I dropped by his place in the evening, had a barbecue, talked, danced a little and then left, leaving him with an unopened bottle of vodka and two new DVDs, that I don't think he really cared much about. He walked my friend Paige and I back home and we joked a little, dodging open manholes and unmarked trenches in the dark. When we arrived at my apartment, I suddenly realized that I was going to miss what I used to consider his relentless badgering but had come to understand as his means of relating to people.
When I first met Hro about a year and a half ago we would occasionally talk and walk around town together on my days off. It didn't seem to be a big deal to him whether we hung out or not and I found myself appreciating this after having met so many younger kids that would call me 7 or 8 times a day just to ask me where I was and what I was doing. With Hro it seemed simple; we hung out for a little while, had a coffee and then parted ways, really just what I was hoping to do usually. But when I moved out to my own place he began to drop by, it was, after all winter, and he had nothing to do. The problem was that I was really busy, still getting used to my work at the university, and even after seven or eight months, still getting used to being in Armenia. I can remember far too many occasions when I would return home after a long day to start a meal and put on some music (the kind of private activities I had been longing for after seven months of living with two families) when my doorbell would ring, not a normal doorbell either but a screeching racket of an imitation bird call, something I initially thought amusing, but later came to loathe the sound of. Above the sizzle of potatoes and onions and the insufficient tones of my computer's speakers I would hear it, "SKREEEEEEEEEEEE!" and I would shudder, wait a moment to make sure I hadn't mistaken, perhaps it was the neighbor's, but again, like the sound I imagine an Emu or some other huge predatory bird makes before ripping you open with those grizzly talons "SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-EEEEEEEEEEE !" held down longer this time as if he sought to ensure me that no, it wasn't the neighbors doorbell, and, yes, he knew I was in there. At this point I would reluctantly head to the door, peep through the peephole, sure enough, standing there brushing snow off his boots.
"Hello, Hro, What doing?" My Armenian still being pretty laughable at this point. And without answering he would come right into my apartment. When he had gotten settled on the couch he would repeat my question back to me as though he hadn't heard.
"What's up, Jon?" Already rubbing his finger all over the touchpad of my computer and looking for songs to play 10 seconds of and then skip to another and another and another while I went back to the kitchen to finish cooking my dinner, knowing that I wasn't going to enjoy it.
At this point you might be thinking that I'm some kind of rude and secluded bastard who has problems relating to people because he likes to hang out alone and mutter to himself like some kind of latter day Golem, but well I'm quite sure that at one point or another, everyone has taken the sociology class that introduces them to the notion of social distance and how this tends to vary between cultures, how for instance, middle eastern men will lean right into your face when they talk to you, and an American will keep backing up, trying to preserve that little bubble of his or her own space. Although I don't recall anyone rubbing noses when they talked with me in Syria, in Armenia there is definitely a notion that your friend and even your neighbor is supposed be social toward you at all times. If there is some loophole that allows you to say you are busy I never found it; such a thing simply isn't done here, or maybe I just never encountered it because I never just showed up at someone's place. Either way I spent about 3 months in minor irritation. It seemed like every time I was in the mood, after a long day, to just hang around and read and relax, that hideous doorbell would blast through my thoughts again, and I'd spend the next two hours, hoping that Hro would get the drift and that I was not really in the mood to talk, but every time he stayed; I would be reading and he'd just go on playing around on my computer as I read the same sentence over and over again. I wasn't trying to be rude, we just didn't have anything else to say to each other. In twenty minutes, at the time, my Armenian was pretty much exhausted, and yeah, I guess I coulda' pantomimed around, but Hro really wasn't the talkative type either. The result was that when he left in March I was kinda' happy he wasn't going to be around to bother me anymore. I had begun to avoid going home just to avoid him. It was becoming ridiculous. Yet, when he called me from Russia about two months later, well, I was happy to talk with him for a minute, perhaps because he was so far away and I knew he wouldn't come barging in my door, but I was also surprised he hadn't forgotten me. Since he spent so much time at my place with my computer, I had begun to wonder if all I had ever been to him was a warm apartment where no one would bother him and an interesting contraption that played foreign music. He call proved otherwise.
When Hro cam back in October I was happy to see him. He had called me maybe once or twice more during the time that he stayed in Russia, and although our conversations were short I was always happy to receive them. When he returned I met up with him in a place that sells lumps of fried dough sprinkled with powdered sugar and filled with what looks and tastes like a mixture of flour and sugar. They're pretty simple these ponchiks, but they're good with coffee in the morning if you're feeling like going back to bed in an hour or two, as after such a large dose of sugar you will inevitably crash later. I was already done working for the day when I met up with Hro for a coffee and ponchik. We talked a little about what he had done in Russia and about the phone that he had bought that he was absolutely blasting music from, some ridiculously large, boxy-looking thing that had what appeared to be a TV antennae sticking out of it. After our meeting we parted and I went back home both happy and already somewhat disconcerted that he was back in town, perhaps indefinitely, as he had said he wasn't sure if he'd be going back to Russia.
It wasn't long before things returned to their previous state, Hro, again deprived of anything better to do, began dropping by and hanging out in my apartment. The only difference was that this time he no longer bothered to ring my doorbell and dispensed altogether with the formality of even knocking at my door. I remember more than a few times he would come in when I was in the bathroom. I would yell "I'm in the bathroom!" and I'd hear him proceed to my couch and soon the music would begin from my computer, sometimes I thought of staying in there to see if he'd go away. Despite finding myself annoyed again with his presence I always tried to be cordial; I'm sure that at times my weariness wore through, but, in truth, he never seemed to notice, or deliberately ignored it. Once, however, I remember, having just returned home. my friend Henni, had called me and we had decided to make something to eat together. She had been in my apartment not more than 2 minutes when suddenly Hro's head popped in the door.
"Ok if I come in?"
"You're already here" I heard myself reply in some unbearably wry tone that certainly was not my own, but rather the accumulation of months of irritation. But I never really had to feel bad about this rude remark because Hro just came in and plopped down next to the computer as if I had responded by saying,
"Why, Hro old fellow, come in and take a load off, there's my computer, all set for the tampering! Knock yourself out!"
He didn't even seem to hear me, just came in and made himself at home as usual. I never understood how he was capable of that. I know there were other time when he must've seen my impatience, but he never seemed to regard it in the slightest, just acted like everything was fine.
After my outburst, I began locking my door. I didn't like to, but I realized, the next time I might say something worse, and for all the irritation Hro caused me, there was something about it that made it difficult to stay angry with him. Although locking my door helped with the spontaneous visits, and even helped me block him at the door, it couldn't stop the phone calls, coming at least 3 times a day. Asking when I was going to come over to his house. I tried to diffuse this be going over there on a number of occasions, thinking that if I came by he would stop asking about it, but it never seemed to matter. I guess, and I hate to say this, it would've been a different story if there had been something to do over there, like eat dinner or work on something, but every time I went over there, we just sat on the couch, hardly conversing while the TV roared on behind us. And several times when he had invited me over I would arrive to find he wasn't even there. I'd call and he'd say "oh, ok you're there, don't go anywhere I'm coming right now." But 'right now' sometimes took as long as 20 minutes and by the time he came I would be ready to go, to get back to my own nest of solitude to think over my lesson plans for the next day and what I was going to do about that class that never listened to me.
There were also the girls. One of the things that made forging any kind of relationship with Hro hard was that he was interested in all the foreign girls I hung out with. He had told me over and over again that he liked foreign girls, almost mentioning it as some sort of consolation, like, because he understood that I had to hang out with them, that he, contrary to other males his age, actually found them intriguing, when actually ever other male in his age group found that equally, if not more intriguing than he did. Whatever his intentions were it always made me feel like a go-between. It seemed like more and more often the only time I would see Hro would be when I was hanging out with one of the three female volunteers in the Yeghegnadzor area. I couldn't help but to feel awkward in these situations because he was forever doing stuff like helping them out of their coats, taking their arms when they had to cross puddles and paying for their drinks, things that always seemed brazen to me, but then I began to wonder if they were so brazen. I couldn't help but to feel like something of a bastard not keeping up with the protocol myself, lagging behind the group like some kind of third wheel while the guy in front of me was constantly reaching over to help my friend down stairs and around construction area heaps of dirt. I began to wonder, "should I be doing those things?" After all these were my friends he was helping along, I had known them longer, was it more my responsibility than his to offer them my coat if they complained of the cold? Sometimes, I even felt like something of a spurned boyfriend, wanting to just say the hell with it and leave these two to their coddling if that what they wanted to do. My female friends were always telling me that it annoyed them, but it was hard to be sure, and it just felt awkward. Even if they truly were annoyed, what then? Should I intervene? Then I'd like look stupid, but if I knew that they didn't want to be taken by the arm when the ground got a little uneven was it my duty as a friend of both parties to say "hey, she knows how to walk, you know." Not to mention it seemed to me that this wasn't really my place, perhaps if I had been dating one of these girls I would've had a place to say something, but the situation was just so nebulous and ill-defined, really, who the hell were we all to each other.
The months went by and the telephone calls continued on a daily basis, but, strangely, after a while, I discovered that I didn't really mind them. They were usually no more than 3 minutes long, and, though they all ended with an invitation to Hro's house the same day, we seemed to have had come to a tacit understanding that most of the time I wasn't going to be able to make it, ( I usually have something to do) that he understood this and wasn't bothered by it, but had to offer every time nonetheless. Even his visits became much more tolerable, he seemed to expect that I was usually busy with something, and got to be more tolerant of having a quick conversation in my doorway. Within a few months I found that I was actually expecting him to call, and when a day would go by when he wouldn't, I'd notice.
At the beginning of March Hro mentioned to me that he was probably going back to Russia for the summer again but didn't know when. I received the news initially with a kind of relief, although I wasn't really bothered by him anymore, and in fact, in many ways considered him my friend, I was glad that he was going to have something to do for the summer and that I would be able to spend my last few months here without having to continually turn down invitations to his house.
On April 3rd we had a small going away party for Hro. Like I wrote above, we brought some gifts and ate a little bit of food while we were there. At some point Paige called on me to make a toast, something that I'm really horrible at, something about the structure of laudatory speech like that evades me even in my own tongue, not to mention my lousy Armenian. I started the speech by saying how Hro and I had first met nearly two years ago and how he was the first person that I had really met in Yeghegnadzor. I wished him well in his work in Russia and said that I hoped we'd meet again either in Armenia or in the states. I also added, for effect, that he was a great friend. I didn't really felt like I meant it when I said it, I mean I thought of him as a friend, but I certainly didn't number him among my really good friends, but the nature of friendship is an elusive thing. I guess it was hard for me to really think of Hro as a good friend because he did all the work for me. I never had to call him, I never had to stop by his place, he always did these things for me. And, perhaps more importantly, I realize now that Hro actually taught me a lot of the place I have lived for the past two years. As I have few other friends his age and gender here, (the little kids seem to think I'm pretty amusing, my students are all female and everyone else is at least middle-aged) I have learned most of what I knew about the behavior of young Armenian men from him.If it wasn't for Hro I probably wouldn't know when to say 'da vai' [Russian], 'prosta' [again, Russian] or how to light cigarettes for your friend and try to make him smoke yours instead of the ones he has. Sure, these things are ubiquitous in this society and you see and hear them all the time, but there's something akin to an initiation that yo have to go through to really understand them, for me, Hro took me through this initiation.
It wasn't even a week later when I was hanging out with two other young men when he called me from Russia. I was happy to hear from him and we talked for a few minutes about what it was like in Russia. When I came back in the room one of the young men asked me who I'd been talking to, when I told him he kinda; smirked. "I think he just wanted to get to know the foreign girls you're friends with" he responded, and soon I found myself vehemently defending Hro, the same guy who had annoyed me in more ways and on more occasions than I care to count. it was at this point that I realized, like so many other seemingly trivial things, Hro had become a major part of my time in Armenia, although he had nothing to do with my work or how I spend most of my free time, there he was, and probably will be forever when I recount stories from this place.
I should add here too that while I was writing this he called me, the second time from Russia and he's only been gone about four days. Our conversation went something like this.
"Huh? Barev Hro jan , vonc es, inch ka?"
"Inch klini, Jonis, du asa"
"Lav em, inch pes meesht. Inch ka aynter?"
"Ba, voch mi, heto?"
"Heto..yes im, ban, vagha yes kgnam Sisiani im ankroch senund."
"Lav, kzanges, kshnorhvorem"
"Lav, kzangem, heto."
"Heto ban chika."
"Lav, uremen, kzangem yete pogh umen vagha."
"Eghlav,da vai"
"Da vai"
In more ways than one we speak the same language.

Pulling Down the Bill of a Baseball Hat or Sometime Every Spring

I have had many unsuccessful attempts to write an update. I'm caught somewhere between liking what I wrote last too much and not really having anything new to add. I articulated my feelings of conflict between past and present, here and there well enough last time that I don't feel much more need to go back into it, but, for some reason, every night I sit down and grapple again with the slippery topic of finishing Peace Corps service, or at least the impending feeling of finishing Peace Corps service, despite the fact that it's still something like 4 months away, by no means an indifferent, unimportant amount of time, but considering the length of time we've already been here and the fact that the summers are usually pretty carefree, it's hard not to just pull off the last two months of that and say there's only two months left, only about a month and a half when you count the end of the semester at May 17th. Like I think I mentioned before the weather also plays into this. As it gets warmer outside it becomes summer in my mind and I begin to think about how, before the summer is over, I will be leaving this country, with no real clear destination apart from a trip, by bus and rail, to Kyrgyzstan, which puts me pretty much in the exact middle of nowhere, finishing two years in Armenia and finding myself in a yurt outside Bishkek.
This burgeoning idea has begun to drift into my dreams. Although during the day I feel perfectly content, my nights have begun to be mottled with restlessness. I dream and wake, talking or gasping, and when I fall asleep again I resume the same dream. For months, perhaps even nearly an entire year, my dreams have been nebulous and elusive, fading from description the moment I wake up, but lately, they've stuck fast to my , waking mind, gumming up my reality late at night when the town is totally quiet and my single room apartment almost seems stifling with the air of the dream that just expired there.
I woke up about 3:50 last night trying to talk to someone across the room from me, standing in a back-lit door frame so that all I could see in the darkness was an outline. I was calling to this figure and woke with the inarticulate sounds I had apparently been producing to get this figures attention, somewhere between a moan and a grunt. I've always found it disconcerting to wake up to the sound of your own voice, still numbed with sleep, almost as if a dream persona had actually been able to break a few words (or grunts at least) into your waking world, with you as a mouth piece. When I fell asleep again I was arguing for my sanity. A number of things had happened in my dream that led those around me to declare me insane. Naturally, no one believed my defense, except a cousin of mine that, though now probably about 16, appeared the last way I remember seeing her, years ago when she was about eight or nine; a quiet, shy girl with very light blonde hair. In the dream I had such an incredible sense of love for her because she alone believed me.
Perhaps the symbolism here is not so clear but when I woke up this morning it was clear to me that I had been dreaming about coming back to America after living in a different reality for so long. My insanity was the means of living that I have adopted here and all the socio-cultural aspects that influence it, for example language, and standard of living. It seems curious that I should feel worried about this in my dreams, as I have never really concerned myself with it in waking life. Of course I assume that it will be difficult to communicate so much to the people back home, and that, for propriety's sake, I'll probably have to cease trying to explain after 20 or 30 minutes to most people, as it's probable that most of them won't really care. The language too will have to go. I know that people don't like to hear a language that they don't understand for anything more than a minute or two just to hear how it sounds. If, say after a few beers, I were to switch into Armenian for my sole amusement, I would surely only be harassing those around me. But I have prepared myself, or thought myself prepared for all these pitfalls, so why the daunting dreams? Why am I outside of things so often looking in when I am asleep? It only makes me think that perhaps I have been even more affected by the last 22 months than I had previously thought.
Perhaps the dreams are resulting from the, somewhat coincidental, string of American situations I seem to continually be finding myself in as of late.
A few months ago a guy by the name of Oscar opened up a Mexican restaurant in Yerevan, the capital. When I noticed the sign above the place before it opened, I didn't think to get my hopes up. Usually restaurants in the capital are expensive and too hung up on posh decor and service to really be fun for me. Every time I would chance it and tried out another Thai or Indian place, I would also find myself feeling very uncomfortable at the prospect of having to act like a rich person while I dined there. Apart from hotdog stands there are very few casual-type restaurants in Yerevan, people don't go out to eat much so when they do it's extravagance all the way. Even the summer outdoor cafes are outfitted with plush chairs, almost Laz-e-boy like and 4-dollar coffees, instant but served in a tall glass, not to mention they'll surely come by and replace the ashtray after every extinguished cigarette, bearing the old one away with all the dignity someone engaged in a very important task.
I stopped even suggesting that we go out to eat in Yerevan probably almost an entire year ago, there just didn't seem to be any point in it. It was a little too pricey for the volunteer budget, even when we only did it once every three months or so, and just wasn't really any fun. So, when a new Mexican place was set to open I didn't find myself very excited. I imagined just another knock-off of the good places outside of Phoenix and Baker, California, only the circumstance would be reversed, where before the food was great and the atmosphere dingy, in Yerevan the atmosphere would be immaculate but the food would make you wonder if any of the staff had ever even seen real Mexican food, let alone eaten it.
Luckily, I was completely wrong, the owner, turned out to be from San Diego, and the ambiance of the place is much like the taqerias I remember from Ukaiah to Oxnard. In short, (and to finally get on with my point) sitting in the place, with a company of other English speakers, laughing, vaguely aware that the night is waining on outside the window while peeling the aluminum back from a second burrito can give the immediate illusion of being back in the states.
The last time I was there we sat in the patio dining room, eating and talking and smoking for at least two hours, all the while I was somewhat aware, that for perhaps the first time since I had come to Armenia, I felt like I was in America. I kept having flashes of the realization, the food, the music and the jokes, the city outside, all combined to crystallizations of San Francisco. I would've attributed this solely to the new restaurant and it's ingenious proprietor, if, again later in the night, celebration the Iranian holiday of Chahar Shanbe Soori I hadn't suddenly found myself feeling the same way, holding a beer, listening to the pop of fireworks and staring up at a light-polluted night sky, latticed with the shadows of overhanging amusement park rides, great twisted tracks set darker against the mauve sky and the occasional bright gaudy relief of some kind of roller coaster maidenhead, the snot-green face of a caterpillar that heads the car that's supposed to look like a sectioned caterpillar's body zooming by, the lights from the concession stands, the clanging noise of cash registers, all of it combined to make an Iranian holiday feel like a teenage night at the fair in Springfield, Illinois.
It wasn't only that night. It seems that ever since that time this feeling keeps periodically washing over me. As time goes by I seem to be continually finding scraps of what I remember of America here and there. Yesterday, I played basketball with Paige and Elliot, and before going back home, sat under the late afternoon sun in on Paige's roof, sipping beer out of a jam jar and feeling the kind of contentment that I remember feeling after a Saturday afternoon, spent with my friends after skateboarding across town when I was 16, or taking a bus out to Ocean Beach when I was 23. The kind of late afternoon feeling that required no advance plans for the evening. There's nothing planned and somehow it's better that way. I ended up going home, but thinking about that afternoon for the rest of the night between pages of a book about Afghanistan I was finishing. It seemed that while we played basketball on that outdoor court, with a group of school kids watching us that the three of us had become a moving, living piece of America. We were no longer just a rag-tag group of foreigners, playing some weird foreign game, but actually people from an identifiable place and time, there in the middle of Vyke Armenia. For a very long time I felt uncomfortable doing things that singled us out as American; I did all I could to try to fit in and I think Paige and Elliot did the same. When we walked through town together we talked in quiet voices. When we went into stores the volume of our voices went up when we began to speak in Armenian with the shopkeepers, and we hid our American qualities behind the doors of our houses and felt slightly guilty for watching movies and missing things like city bus schedules and bike rides with friends. But all this time here has changed that. I no longer worry about seeming culturally inappropriate because I know that part of the reason I came here was to share my culture while learning of another one, not to totally try to blend in.
I'm finding America more easily now here perhaps because I've finally begun to feel totally comfortable here. The jeers of young men on the corner don't really bother me the way they used to, and the stares of people who I haven't met don't really cut through me anymore. It's just part of being here. For nearly my entire first year here I secretly longed for the comforts of home, the lack of certain amenities and kinds of food did not make Armenia less interesting, but made it hard to love as I had loved San Francisco and Chicago in the past. But after all this time I've finally discovered that my sense of what is comfortable is totally relative. Good Mexican restaurants and cheap, second-run movie theaters are great, but they don't necessarily define whether a place is livable or not. I know this all might sound really obvious, but for me it wasn't. I came to the Peace Corps to see something different and be challenged by it, so that's what I got, but this perception made it hard for me to let go of the things I loved about being in the states. Armenia was interesting for being Armenia, but it would never have Friday evening kickball games for 20-somethings followed by dinners in pho restaurants where The Pixes would be played on the overhead. I put a lot of stock in these things before because I had assumed that they were my ideal way to have fun, my culturally specific way, and therefore that best suited to me, of enjoying my free time, but now, coming up on the third June of being here I realize these things are relative. I enjoyed kickball games because I felt they were my element. Now that Armenia had become my element, even if I don't fit into it the same way that Armenians do, it feels comfortable to me. So, I've finally been able to put a basketball game in Vyke at the foot of the mountains, with kids and old men alike watching us with curiosity, on the same level as a game of Frisbee on a Saturday afternoon, in Dolores park with bikes and cans of PBR all over the place. It may not sound like much of a revelation, but it's something that I personally took a long time to acclimate myself to, the idea that I could be myself here, just as much as I could there.
The morning sun is warm, but there's a chilly wind blowing down from the mountains as I leave my house with a thermos of tea and a Batman comic book. I walk up the dirt road the borders the cemetery on one side and come to the top where people dump all their garbage down into the ravine below. The wind has kept the heat, and thus the smell of this garbage, down. I walk along a shepherd trail that skirts the rocky hillside. There's little pellets of sheep crap and cloven hoof prints in the soft earth along the trail. The sun warms my face but the wind cuts through my thin sweater. Where the trail ends in a flat clearing, so flat as to look like a putting green amidst all these craggy hills, I find a place to lean up against a rock and pour myself some tea. I take a drink and open my comic book, but before I begin to read I look around and enjoy the view: hills and the rocks that break out of their tops and climb further up into mountains, some with snow still on their peaks. There's a two lane road winding through the Selim pass below and the village of Getap looks like something that grew naturally, in earthen colors, along the river bank. I try to begin reading, but my concentration is stuck on the scenery, and I look back up, although I've seen it all a million times by now, when suddenly it occurs to me that where this was so long my reality and my memory was the view from Alamo Sq. in San Fransisco (that shot in the opening credits of Full House where it showed the four bright Victorian houses with the city sky line behind them) that soon I would back back in Alamo Sq. seeing this backdrop in my mind's eye and before too long it would be somewhere else, until the panoramas pile up over the years and my rheumatic eyes can no longer tell the difference and I prattle on and on about all the places I have sat and watched until they drew themselves into the convolutions of my mind.

The Last Day of February Was a Sunday or Last Sunday Was in February.

You have to remember that I have no spellcheck anymore.

I.

One thing that's going to be hard to return to (because I have begun to contemplate that) is the notion that doing menial tasks will no longer be an important and valuable part of my day, not because I have gotten lazy and want to occupy myself with such things, indeed, doing housework is quite antithetical in the routine of a lazy person, rather, I have acclimated myself to living in a place where doing the dishes and sweeping the floors are tasks as necessary as writing papers and studying the cantankerous words of aging scholars late into the night.
When my landlady first came to visit me more than a year ago, she was extremely put off by the state that she found her apartment in, not because any irreprable damage had been done, but rather because dust was accumulating here and there and my blankets were all in a tussle and "why, those books are simply haphazardly thrown on that end table!" When I returned home after a long day of teaching classes I was appalled by this woman's list of complaints that seemd to me as more of an attack on my very way of life than anything that was egregious for her apartment. I laughed aloud at a few of her comments. "Books not straightened" this seemed like lunacy to me, after all who was this woman to infringe upon my right to have my books floating in the toilet, if I should chose to keep them there.
I barely escaped being booted out by promising total reform. I swept and dusted and polished for days on end, even inviting two female consultants to view the results (and alternately help me) so that I couldn't miss anything. Interestingly the woman never came back again, but I think her intended effect stuck as ever since that incomprehensible phone call (the only distinct words being "deh gana" [essentially 'get out']) I have been ruling over this small apartment with a broom for a septre and a smock for my rainment.
At least twice a week I sweep this place out. The dishes are done shortly after they are dirtied, the ashtray is emptied with OCD-like regularity and though my books are still disheveled, they are free of dust. I have come to view these menial tasks, or what I thought of as menial tasks before coming here, as absolutely essential. A number of things led to this seachange in housekeeping habits. The obvious was fear of being kicked out and having to live in the sterile student dorms (I have prided myself on never having lived in such a place, even in that endurance test of freshman year), but I also came to accept the necessity of keeping a clean apartment through other social pressures. As a clean apartment is expected here, even amongst single men (though a man living alone is an incredibly uncommon thing here) apartments and indeed everything else is expected to be clean. One's clothes, shoes, car and apartment all reflect one's self respect. Here, anything dirty or unkempt is a remark of one's inability to keep it clean, usually through lack of money to do so. As such, this is to be avoided at all costs. Initially, I naturally rebelled against this. I went through the immense social pressures of high school without ever caving and saw this as only being another test of my sense of individuality. But as time went by, and I became somewhat desperate to be accpeted I began to clean the dried mud off my shoes even when I was going out into muddy streets; I began to brush the chalk dust off my clothes because I got tired of my students constantly mentioning it as though I were covered in anthrax; I began to clean my apartment even when it did not look very dirty. I began to have more resect for my European and Armenian guests because I knew I could count on them to take their shoes off at the door rather than lounging on my couch with some tattered Reeboks smearing mud on the armrest.
In only a few short months what had once been normal became almost reprehensible to me and I found myself picking up the broom and doing a once-over when I was talking on the phone or waiting for the water to come to a boil in the kitchen. As time has gone by I realize that I have become fairly accustomed to spending nearly half my day keeping this one room apartment clean in one manner or another. With only about 5 months left here I can't help but to wonder what it will be like to return to a place where I will be expected to lay aside all other cares to persue my studies. How will I be able to keep a clean apartment, especially living in a cooperative setting, when I've got 6 hours of paper writing to do every day? The question I ask myself is will I be able to revert back to not caring if anyone takes their shoes off in my house? Will I be capible of keeping my shoes on in my own house? Will I spend hours of time that I won't have cleaning the kitchen?
I'm not really too worried about this, especially as I often find myself wishing I had something to do other than wipe off the table for the 4th time in one day, but I can't help but to wonder what reforms I will bring back with me. There is no question that being here has changed some things about me, most of them still dorment, perfectly acceptable now, but waiting for an opportunity to present themselves in the states and render me a weirdo of some kind. I am interested to see how much personality I have adopted from this place. What is immutable and what shifts with one's changing environment? Only time and the reemergence of vacuum cleaners into my life will tell.



II.
I look around my apartment at 8, 9 in the morning and think how far I've come. How different everything looks than it did twenty-two months ago, when I pulled my luggage off a quiet convyor belt and nestled into a 3 am marshrutka seat, filing out past the Yerevan suburbs, dark and fenced and worn. I wake up to my apartment and think of my schedule, who I have to see, what needs to be done for tomorrow. I try to remember dreams, but I seldom do, there's just a feeling of being emotionally spent, as if while dreaming I am nightly running emotional gamuts that I cannot recall in the morning.
At night, I sit in my kitchen, watching the lights flicker under the moonstone snows of the mountains just past the pastures on the edge of town, where I have walked so many times and never returned with clean shoes. I go out, when there is no moon, no stars and its hard to see the streets and the open manholes. I walk the backlanes of the town and remember that here, last spring, there was a bright and beautiful lilac bush. I remember the morning frost that fillagreed my path when the first autumn came and I was living higher up on the hill. I remember the streets and the roads as they looked through all the other seasons. The mud: dark orchre, mixed with sheep manure, cigarette butts, that tepid reddish standing water that accumulates outside areas where there seem to be too many chickens living. The snow: sometimes hard, frozen into the tiretracks produced by a thaw, reticulate windows of ice framed in the iron-hard dirt, some broken. The first snow, the second snow, the last snow: lilies, white danelion froth, eraser shavings on a test-time paper, the pleasant screen of slightly opaque breath before one. The bloom: 3 weeks of green on the perpetually brown, rocky hillsides, a bright and startling spring, the calendar days to which guidebooks show focus all their attention. Summer: dry rippling sun, the mirage waves of a fan heater, the roads empty in the afternoons, the university shuttered, unfamiliar and cool in its closed marble and tufa hallways, quietly seething in dust.
In every walk I confront parts of these things. In my apartment I go to sleep in the same position that I resume when I wake up. Somedays I drink coffee all day long and an hour of reading on the couch still carries me off to the restive slumber of fugitive dreams.
The buildings are flawed, but familair and wonderful. There's a broken house plant pot in the stairwell, dirt tumbling from the place where the plastic has broken. In Vyke, there's a house that's been covered with flat rocks, like the kind that could be flung delicately off waves, in a houndstooth pattern. Where so many perfect skipping rocks came from in a country with no oceans or seas, I'll never know. At a wedding, I saw an entire house converted into a banquet hall. "I love you" on a carpet, hung on a wall, written with pulled cotton. I never heard the bride say a word, although I was there most of the night, smoking cigarettes and nodding, clicking glasses and shouting "Oh-pa!" for no reason.
The glass is faintly flawed by ripples. Looking out onto the cemetary, occasionally the lights of decending cars drift too high up into the corners of the room and suddenly depart, rolling out over the dapples and waves in the imperfect window.
I sweep the floor again and light a cigarette. For a moment I think of Marquette, MI (red-brick downtown, simple bay); Blue Lake, CA (afternoon barroom television very loud and undiscernable through the dust and sun light, my last night in Arcata, drinking an evening, no, a twilight beer here with Mikey) Taco Bells in Missula, MT and Bismark, ND (sodium arc lights everywhere); Tbilisi, Sakartvelo (a palm tree covered in snow); Argentina (not Buenos Aires); Trieste, Italia (like a Venezia with fields that connect it to the land and Sarajevo out there somewhere, statues of Joyce) Samakand (an opium-induced dream of Victorian England); and Mexico with a worn flannel and better shoes than these, drinking Tamarind and smoking a cigarette, Spanish, writing Spanish, speaking it slowly as I walk from place to place, beard either totally neglected and tangled or shaved off a few days prior, red and stubbly. I return to my apartment, to the memories of the first Armenian house I entered, summer kitchen, without a word in my mouth hoping we'd eat soon. A whole summer, not really working, not really studying, not really vacationing. Learning how to say things and then forgetting them, packing a language amalgam into the cavities of my teeth. All the phone calls that have sputtered out over the Atlantic.
There are two and a half month left of the semester. Two months of summer. It took so long to introduce myself, it should take as long to say goodbye. Taking the dry and gnarled hands of shepards, the smell of sheep that I never knew before, but will never forget. Every incidental meeting where I promised to return. I should return to all those places and thank all these people and then go. Try to get a commital goodbye in before it's too late. Not leave quietly in the morning like the volunteers last year. A bright July morning, a few boxes picked up, placed on the plush seats when the trunk was full and, well, here's a hug, have fun back in the states. Two weeks later the empty apartment had computers in it. Even today, I remember it and I don't: the plastic cups, the linoleum floors, America taped all over the walls.
In the end I want to know what all these bucket-flush toilets and bucket baths came down to, all the times I answered the door and the few times I didn't, responding to every insistent bang with a muted sigh from the kitchen where I had just finished cooking my dinner. What did these things amount to? Have I come into something new? Did one of those long walks down by the river change something? Did that dog who bit me last Spring really infect me with something? Have I become mountainous? Are my phone calls more insistent now?
I go out into the grey morning to visit a potential pupil at his father's behest. I don't want to go. I've got enough to do and little time to do it. I cannot teach this kid very much through the medium of my own ebbing and falling apathy, especially not in two and a half months. Still, I make my way through the dispelled myth of Sunday morning to his house.
A white Lada 4x4, a dog in a small fenced-in enclosure barking madly, a cold stone foyer, where I take my shoes off, the walls inside are covered with carpet, as I now imagine they are everywhere. I felt unable to start this again. I asked about 'Y' and it was 'U' [Russian] I asked about 'I' and it was 'E' [addmitedly the sound it usually makes, especially in trasliteration]. I mentioned a few basics of sentence building, describing the arc of the basic English sentence and the sine qua non of the present simple tense. I said study your books. I said I'll come back and check and made a move to find my coat.
When I don't feel much like talking I seem to be better at speaking Armenian. Everything rolled out with practiced ease, which allowed me to point out the importance of actualy speaking the language one is trying to learn. We set up future dates, or tried to, over coffee, the ubiqutous demitasse cup, coffee silt at the bottom, chocolates and fruit: the social engagement laid out to perfection, an ingratiation that I know I will miss when I leave.
I told a painter last night that one of his landscapes will be the Armenia that I remember after I leave, and although I wasn't lying, I realize that the Armenia I will remember will be "confetov ker" [have your coffee with candy, in the imparative] and all the other things that I can't even respond to any more. The things I will mutter to myself in lonely America and smile.
The life of a 20-something American is full of big decisions. Graduate school, moves across the country, engagements, moves to different countries and careers are set and begun in weeks. Life moves quickly so that it may find a course to settle in and flow evenly onward. Here I have feigned at making such decisions. I spoke about going home over a year ago when I knew I wouldn't. I've planned and replanned the trip I will take when I am finished here. I've read books on Ireland and Italy and India and considered moving to all these places. But at the end of every day, I find myself watching the stars from my kitchen window, a modest dinner simmering behind me, knowing that I'm making personal history by just staying in the same place for so long, but having absolutely no idea about the end result of all these thoughts about frozen mud roads, carpeted walls, marshrutkas, how the number '3' looks like the letters 'Y,' 'Z' and 'V' in three different alphabets and the familiar feeling of drinking coffee in someone else's slippers.
How can I possibly share these things with you?
Start by curiously taking one thing out and you end up with a mess.

Basement Horrors or a la recherche du temps perdu

In order to stem the effects of seasonal flu, or perhaps to justify rumors of its particular virulence this year, the schools in Armenia have closed down for the next two weeks until the official beginning of the winter break. I’m sure the kids have got to be happy about that, but their mothers seem to be keeping them all inside ‘cause I haven’t seen many to ask them what they plan to do with this miraculous 2-week extension of their vacation.
In the meantime the university continues it’s scheduled courses heedless to the menacing coughs and frail looks exchanged by students and faculty alike. Luckily, I’ve already gotten myself sick so I guess I won’t have to anticipate getting sick again, at least not until the current illness abates.
The last few days have gotten slightly warmer, but have produced a particularly nebulous, grey sky, something I’m totally unaccustomed to as this place is classified as semi-desert and is usually very sunny. As a result of the weather and this nearly consumptive-sounding cough I’ve got going for me, I’ve spent the last couple of days hiding in my apartment, emerging only to buy more juice and to run only the most essential of errands. I’ve finished two books in the last two days. This, as you can imagine, complicates the task of writing anything exciting about life in Armenia. I find myself even further perplexed by the sudden appearance of predictability and normalcy in my daily schedule. I haven’t written very much for the last couple of months because it often seems as if very little worth writing about has happened. Sure, a few things here and there, but nothing to make me run home, jotting notes on my hand the whole way so as not to forget the tiniest detail.
I’m content enough, working, or rather, beginning to work on the final projects that will surely wind up my remaining 7 and ½ months in Armenia (Wow!). At present I’m not really even over-concerned with the future, as I have been in the past when suddenly everything became commonplace. Last winter, I spent a lot of time thinking about different places and people I’d like to see again, but it looks as if this winter is going to be different. I don’t want to lose sight of the few changes I’m hoping I can make before I leave, and, besides, I’ve been gone so long now that there doesn’t seem to be much reality left to draw from day dreams of San Francisco or post-Peace Corps trips to Turkmenistan or India. I’m here, and I guess after all this time, in a way, I’ve finally excepted that, until it’ll change again.
However, la recherche du temps perdu does still filter through, things that I’d nearly forgotten only to have them dredged up by a line in a book or a brief conversation, where they settle into reminiscence.
The most recent example came to me today while reading a book where the characters have to drag a damp mattress out of an extinguished house fire. This reminded me of one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever had to do. I think now with enough temporal distance between myself and the offending event, I can safely describe it.
Years ago I lived in a typical collegiate house, a big place on the east side of town, a little run down and cold as hell in the winter, but nothing too offensive. Even if it had been some kind of full-blown slum I certainly would’ve minded, but, as it was, the place we used to live on Foster Ave. was ideal for my Jr., Sr. and post-undergrad., pre-grad. days. The house was spacious, although there were not always enough rooms for all the people living there. My old roommate Jon lived on and off again in the attic and I once spent an entire summer sleeping on the couch in a room off the kitchen, awakened nearly every night by someone coming home and deciding to cook at 2 am.
"Oh," barely whispering, "that’s my roommate Jon, I guess he’s sleeping in here now."
"Why," barely curious interlocutor asks, "doesn’t he have a room?"
"I don’t know, who cares, ughh this kitchen is always so dirty, help me clean this pan will ya’?"
"Yeah, ok. Where’s the beer?"
Whereupon the noise would commence until the prepared meal would, thankfully, be taken into a room to be consumed and all the dishes dirtied in preparing it would be left for the next night, so that the same conversation could be repeated for my benefit.
I shouldn’t be so cynical. Mostly it was a wonderful place. I have so many happy memories from Foster Ave. that I really have to stretch to write about it in a negative light. In some way it seems as though I was the freest I had ever been in my life when I lived there. Just out of college, working at a great bookstore, 1st class diner right down the street to sequester myself in whenever I felt like drinking coffee and reading all night, which was frequently. My roommates were also great people. Two guys I had known since Jr. high, one of whom was never around and a succession of various people living in one of the other rooms. I had all kinds of things in those days, and it’s the only time I can remember when I actually had to debate with myself whether or not I wanted to leave. Up until this point and ever since, a move comes naturally. I feel that it’s time to go and I do, and after I leave it usually doesn’t feel as if much has changed, but when I did finally leave that place I did so amidst much internal argument and skepticism. I know that I had no other choice. If I didn’t leave that place when I did for SF I would’ve left it another time for a different place. Essentially, it was just a matter of which bus I was going to catch, not whether I was going to get on one at all. I’m glad I left. Many people I knew there have since left themselves and no one wants to be the last to leave the party (although I usually am.) Still, many of my good friends, in fact both of the guys I lived with, are still there. It’s a great place to go back and visit, to go unearthing old memories of winter nights, summer afternoons and autumn evenings. In fact it seems like every time I sit down to write something really substantial it’s a story that has come from my time in that house. They are the memories near enough to be full and rich without the gauzy covering that comes from memories when life perspective was different, for example those of childhood, or even, I hate to say it, the ridiculous stuff I did when I was 17 is also hard to center on anymore. It was just too long ago to remember without embellishing. Likewise, the most recent events often have a sheen of newness that needs to be buffed off by a little more time and experience before I can claim to be representing them correctly. Four years ago seems like a great time period for the glimmer to wear off, but also to hold the memory against obscurity. For this now we’re going to go into a dimly lit living room that hasn’t been cleaned in months.
I came in from a nice spring night, the kind where the fresh grass and the melting snow blend together on a light, clean vernal breeze, just enough so that a three block walk takes the smell of cigarette smoke out of your jacket. The door was never locked, even at night I don’t think anyone ever really considered locking the door and the familiar, but somewhat stale air of home greeted me on the threshold, a murky light and the sound of a television just out of sight, the atmosphere a mix of evening-quiet library and day-after-a-party frathouse . It was calm.
I walked into the living room and dropped into one of our enormous and battered couches, not bothering to take my hat and jacket off.
"Hey guys, what’s up, how was work?"
"Jon, we’ve got to get it out." My roommate, also named Jon announced, as if I’d been privy to the conversation that was going on between he and my other roommate Eric before I came in.
"It? What it? I…oh that. Do we have to tonight?" After I realized what ‘it’ was my spring ebullience left me.
"Yeah, Nelson (the landlord) came over and said it absolutely had to go before tomorrow. I guess there’s an inspector or someone coming over," Jon said, looking apologetic and even slightly scared.
"Well," I said, remembering that every unpleasant task must be done sometime and thereby letting a little of my former light-heartedness back in, "let’s go down there and get this over with."
There being no just cause for further delay, we slowly got up and walked toward the basement door.
Let me stop here a moment to give a little background for ‘it.’ What I’ve been referring to was a mattress that had somehow found it’s way to our basement. Even if we knew whose it once was no one would dare claim ownership of such a loathsome object. Of course we frequently hypothesized about where it had come from, all of us being sure it was the property of whoever we had lived with over the past three years that we had liked the least. My bet was on a girl who had come to live with us for a thankfully very brief period and who often accused me of plotting against her for very absurd and somewhat schizophrenic-sounding reasons. Jon claimed it came from another roommate that he had thought not very tidy and Eric, if he had any opinions, kept them to himself. Regardless, at some point this mattress had found its way to the basement floor, back behind the stairs, where it had presumably remained quite unobtrusively for some time. In fact I don’t remember ever noticing it until one day it made itself particularly conspicuous by being festooned with condom wrappers a few weeks after a party had been thrown. After this the mattress began to develop a certain repulsiveness. It brooded down in the most mildewed corner of our already filthy basement, providing refuge for all sorts of mutating insects and other assorted vermin. In fact, Jon and I had tried to move it already, about two months prior, but had dropped it and given up when a dark swarm of some spider-centipede highbred had come pouring out at the slightest perturbation.
There the mattress had remained for the duration of something like three spring basement floods, sponging up the brackish basement water and vomiting it up in little putrescent rivulets and breaking out in dark moldy splotches that did not bode well for what it had going on inside. Layers and layers of wet spongy foam, pregnant with abysmal dark terrors and Lovecraftian horrors, living forms of moist and dark filth.
I had never particularly liked going down into the basement before but with the mattress, swollen with its mephitic smell and seeming to wring out nightmares from its once posturpedic convolutions, I only went down when I absolutely had to and each instance brought me closer to the certainty that one day it was going to raise itself up and belch out some sort of Jabba the Hut-esque threat.
‘At least,’ I reasoned as we cautiously descended the basement stairs, ‘at least I don’t have to try to do this alone, so after we all get Ebola they’ll at least quarantine us together.’ It is sad to note that in man’s most lonely and frightened times he often thinks of ways to bring those he cares about most down to his own dark level of suffering.
Although there was a source of light, in the basement it seemed as if the darkness was total, every corner, every crevice all but roared with it. The basement was actually constructed in a manner that seemed conducive to peripheral darkness: strange anterooms and root cellars crept up to the main room from all sides; the single 60 watt bulb was not nearly enough to dispel the ages of darkness that seemed to be festering there. Amidst this backdrop of Chaos and Night the slick and dirty tumescence of the mattress seethed its poisonous dreams.
It seemed that we had tacitly agreed on a surprise capture, because before I was really aware of what was happening, I found myself grabbing a corner of what felt like gelatinous mold and angling it toward the door.
Our attempt with three people was much more successful that our attempt with two had been previously and soon we were already to the stairs, slipping up the wooden slats as quickly as possible trying not to gag or vomit. Our task was not merely the moving of a revolting object but rather, as it soon became apparent to us, an exorcism. As we toted stench incarnate or in-pillow-ate up the stairs we were each subject to reoccurring nauseating waves of stench memory. As they say that the fermentation of the grape is capable of taking on any known flavor due to the molecular arraignment as it becomes wine, the mattress had actually developed nuances of stink that mirrored every putrid thing I’d ever had the displeasure to smell before: summer dog shit, stagnant subway tunnel urine, halitosis, forgotten Tupperware in the back of the refrigerator and endless mountains of dirty socks. The mattress seethed with these smells and bled a thin dark line up the stairs and through the living room, angry that its rest had been disturbed.
I could see from the looks on my roommates’ faces that they were also revisiting their own worst olfactory memories. We shuffled through the house as quickly as we could not daring to drop the dreadful load near any place we actually lived in the house. As the door opened and the smell of the ghastly thing mixed with the fresh air it almost seemed to come to life with stink. We coughed and gagged, no longer able to hold back our horror and total revulsion. The mattress, as if sensing that the end had come at last, almost seemed to squirm in my grasp and I nearly let go my hold in surprise.
Near enough to the dumpster we finally pitched the thing down and immediately ran back into the house in search of quicklime and bleach, anything strong enough to eradicate what was surely septic ooze from our hands.
With the deed finally accomplished we returned to the living room to brag over our accomplishment and bravery while the mattress, now bested and dying quietly in the dark, eked out the last of its mordant juices and killed more than half of our lawn.
Next time I write I’ll try to get back to Armenia instead of writing about old basement horrors, but, unless you’re really squeamish, hopefully you enjoyed reading this as much as I did writing it. It’s funny how such a disgusting memory can fill one with feelings of love and friendship. As I remembered this particular, otherwise uneventful evening, I couldn’t help but picture the three of us squirming up the stairs trying not to let the thing drip on us, laughing and gagging at the same time and, of course, the feeling of relief that followed when it was finally out of the house when we could return to our own peaceful musing brought about by a warm April night, when even the most distant joys seem totally attainable.