"You must to understand..." part 2

The train arrived in Valjevo in the early morning and we made our way to an isolated piece of forest. We made camp close to a dammed up stream with a high platform. We spent the day in the water, jumping from the platform into the dam reservoir or jumping into another pool from atop a drizzly waterfall. Marko decided that we should shrink our group down. He broke up with Jasna. Zlata and Milosh stayed in Valjevo with family and the rest of us bribed a bus ride to Sarajevo. I threw up on that bus, into Moe's water bottle. "What the fuck man!" "What, you want me to just throw up on the floor so we can all ride around smelling like vomit?" I thought I had a good argument there, but Moe never let me live that one down. He threw the thing away. Hellride. Crossing the borders within Bosnia was the worst. The sweat hung on the sides of the bus walls and there was clear tension when the border guards ascended the steps. They didn't request, they demanded our passports. Three borders between two countries seemed a little excessive to me, but, I guess I hadn't seen yet what had happened in the region. We arrived late in Sarajevo and found some bushes to sleep under across the street from the American embassy. It was cold and miserable and a dog peed on my legs as I slept. We woke up too early and wandered around the city. Moe had made a connection with a local school so we went there and made a show. The building next door to the school was rubble. In fact, there was not a square meter in Sarajevo that didn't have at least one bullet pockmark in it. Across the street was a burned out bus that had been hit with an RPG two weeks earlier. Though the war was long over and the UN presence was thick in Sarajevo, different neighborhoods still quarreled with each other. The kids in the school were Bosnians. They loved us. Their classroom was covered in crayon drawings of destroyed buildings, of dead family. One drawing showed a happy little girl missing a limb, standing in a lime green field with a smiling sun. Marko walked on stilts. Moe and I passed clubs around three little girls. We taught a little juggling class. In the evening, we performed in the city center. The Sarajevo International Film Festival was at hand, so we were able to generate some relatively decent income with two or three quick rounds of fire and fast-talking. After our short and haphazard shows we began exploring for a place to crash. Some children wanted us to stay at their house, but that quickly turned really really weird. As we were walking, we heard a beautiful button accordion playing. In the shadows there was a woman with her squeezebox standing atop a juggler's shoulders. He was juggling clubs and passing with another guy. It was beautifully executed, but no one on the street stopped to look except us. There was no hat for money. We asked why they weren't busking. They were French and they replied that it would destroy the sanctity of their art. Unlike us, they seemed to have enough money for food and lodging without having to work the street. We drank beer with them and played a juggling game where you step into a passing pattern, take the beer from atop someone's head, sip it and put it on your own head for the next person. That night, we slept on a strange plateau overlooking the city. The wind was rampant and junkies were shooting up within twenty meters of us. We tied all our things to ourselves, but none of us slept very well. Moe had researched a local organization comprised mainly of Italians, Sprofundo. They were funded by the Catholic church but populated by the fun-loving and dance-able Italians we had all grown to love in our travels. The organization facilitated living situations where college students could stay with a family, help them with rent money and work in their neighborhoods, hospitals, etc. Marko decided he was in love with one of the Italians, Osman with another. A thick, dreidel shaped woman decided she was in love with me and began some bizarre courtship ritual within the first few hours of shared company. I dumpstered a little bag from the refuse of an abandoned building. It read "Licni Completa." Marko said it was a gas mask bag. Moe spraypainted "Circus" on one side of it and I tacked studs and spikes into it. Years later I gave it to a girl I thought I was in love with. I just hope she knows where it came from. Some of Moe's friends had arrived in town to meet up with us and do some shows. They had been touring juggling festivals all over Europe and had a great variety of equipment, including giant clown shoes, ribbon poles, animal balloons, etc. Stacy lived in Hawaii and Stan was living on a healthy nestegg. They had made a connection with Club Bok, the owner of which, Dragan, offered us the floor of his bar to sleep on. The indoor concrete was a welcome shift from the gravelly plateau of the night before. The next day we went to an orphanage for children who had suffered head injuries or shell-shock. Whatever medication they were given made them sway when they walked and caused their eyes to cross. They were like siamese cats with socks tied around their stomachs. Jugglers and clowns did little to excite them. The building they lived in looked like some kind of futuristic prison compound out of a Japanese splatter-horror film, with thirty foot walls and short clipped grass. The windows were all plexi with steel bars. We left from there to do a show at a hospital. We performed for a few children with chronic illnesses. Their joy in those moments erased for a time the horror of the orphanage. That evening, Dragan from Club Bok asked us to perform a fire show at a rave party. On the SUV ride up the mountainside, we discovered that it was being held at Tito's (former head of state of Yugoslavija prior to Milosevic) old summer home. The truck turned up a meandering dirt road and we could see the landing lights of the estate down the road. We unloaded and set up our fuel. Osman had decided he was going to be a fire-breather. "I want to be like DRAGON," and he emoted the flames coming out of his mouth with his hands. Moe and I explained the basics of fire-breathing to him and warned him not to make any mistakes. Breathing incorrectly can give you chemical pneumonia that can kill you or last for 6 months to a year. It's like a perpetual asthma attack. As the throng of teenagers and twenty somethings danced to minimal drum and bass on Tito's old deck in their knock-off turkish Tommy Hilfiger gear, we juggled fire, spat fire, twirled fire, fire fire fire. I'm not a big fan of fire, but people seem to really get into it. We took a little break and Osman and Moe walked across the field behind us to pee in the bushes. Dragan began screaming and pulling his hair. "Get back here right now, are you stupid?!" Apparently the whole area was covered in mines. That night, Dragan put us up in an apartment he owned. The place was beautiful with terra cotta everything, crawling vines, delicate flowers and good smells. The floors were blonde wood and the house had a cold fresh feel. "The Rolling Stones stayed here before," he said. He asked Stacy if she wanted to stay with him that night, but she politely declined. She told us later that evening how she was thinking of having a competition at one of the international juggling festivals where the best club juggler would have the opportunity to impregnate her. She was beautiful, getting older and had decided she wasn't going to marry, though she did want children. She was dead set on a juggler sperm donor. We street performed over the next few days and spent all our daytimes with the people from Sprofundo, Osman and Marko wooing their italian crushes, me half-avoiding my pursuer. We practiced our juggling and rope walking in their backyard, ate their food, drank their alcohol. We joked that we would change the sign on their building from Sprofundo to Hleb i Sir. They didn't seem to be averse to the idea. One night, after a little too much rakija, I made out with the dreidel girl. She started crying then walked home alone at 2am. I offered to walk with her but she blew me off, suddenly with a coy smile on her face. I didn't understand, but all the Italians said "She's crazy, but really crazy, not just crazy." Osman's force of presence rolled over the woman he liked, and the morning after their night in the field, he seemed aloof, she seemed a little regretful. Marko asked me at one point what he should do about the girl he liked. I asked him if he wanted love or sex. He only kissed her...she had braces and vicious humor, though the linguistic barrier between them was complete. I wanted to see a movie of their romance but we were leaving the morning after next. That night we performed on the street and two old women in shawls began yelling at us, "They've done enough damage already!" They screamed, crying to the sky. The police said "I'm sorry, we have to ask you to stop performing before someone makes a problem." The film festival was ending anyway, and we had our trip planned for Kosovo. Osman said he would go to Belgrade first and then to Kosovo, but we all assumed by the fears he had expressed, that he was bailing on us. Finally, it was Marko, Moe, Stacy, Stan and I who boarded that morning bus and rode it south, across all the borders again. Nearing Pristina, the bus pulled over because of a paper bag in the road. The driver stepped out and investigated, checking the possibility of a roadside bomb. It was innocent but he still drove around it. No one in the bus smiled. We had two contacts in Kosovo. One was a Sprofundo office in the Serbian enclave of Mitrovica, the other a small community center a train ride south of that city. Our bus arrived at 7 in the morning. The first thing we saw stepping out into the still streets of Mitrovica was a UN urban tank rolling down the street. We had been let out next to a Serbian nationalist store that sold posters of nationalist heroes and offensive postcards. One showed a cartoon Chetnik anally raping a crying Mickey Mouse with his enormous cock. We all felt a little uncomfortable. We found a place for coffee and breakfast, ate a bean dish, then called the Sprofundo office. When we arrived there, it turned out that the administrator for this chapter of the service organization had used the Catholic funds to open a bar. He had a large overgrown and unkempt beard and wore soiled and stained clothing. He didn't like that we were there but he felt compelled to accommodate us. We would be sleeping on the green astroturf of his open air bar in the night chill of Kosovo. The next day the local Serbian radio announced that we would be performing at Sprofundo at noon. We prepared the area, though we didn't expect as many as 150 children to show up. Our show was ridiculous and thrown together, as always, but the kids ate it up. As usual, we taught the kids various circus things after the show. I had a line of children learning back handsprings, Stan was juggling. Moe was rope walking. Marko was talking. The children gradually thinned out and finally there was only a handful. We began talking with them. One of them spoke English very well. It was the same blonde boy who would be a gun runner when I returned 2 years later. The general sentiment among the kids was of animosity against the Albanians. They wanted to grow up to be killers. Stan's camcorder recorded their glassy eyed fantasies of murder and retribution. I never got that footage. Later that day, some middle-aged men came by to meet the clowns. I was practicing melodies on a melodica and one man asked me to blow the air while he played the fingerings. Another man jumped onto his hands and down to his head, in the drying mud of the Mitrovica street. He picked his hands off the ground and and kicked his legs in the air to the beat of the lightning fast melody being played. They smiled and shook our hands with iron grips and walked off laughing. The day we had arrived, I remember no one had smiled. Some people were smiling now...some, not many. For the next two days we partied with locals, performed at a school, ate cevapcici (a type of spicy sausage) and drank homemade liquor. The kids would visit us during the day and learn little bits of things we had to show. Moe called our other contact. They resided in a small village, so we jumped on the free Nato-controlled train and headed south two hours. The train held every type of passenger, Albanian, Serbian, Gypsy (Romani), Clown and Czech drug runner. I don't know how many Czech's asked us if we were looking for weed. After a bit, some Romani passengers began talking with us. They were going to the same village we were going to and they said they knew the place we were looking for, that they would take us there. Their dress was sharp, the vests and white shirts that the bands in Guca had worn as they walked around the city playing for tourists. When the train stopped, we all carried out our gear and began following the Gypsies. We walked perhaps a mile through this odd little grass-overgrown town. Abandoned farm equipment sat lonely in front of gray-wood buildings. There were no trees in visible sight, so wood seemed out of place. "Where are they taking us?" "I think to the community center." They were, in fact, leading us to their encampment on the edge of this sparse village to perform for their kids. The children caught a distant glimpse of us and started grinning and running up to us. We apologized to the parents, saying that we were expected at the community center and that we would try to come back and make a show for these children a little bit later. When we found the place, we were told that they would not be able to accommodate us or allow us to have a show in their space. They hadn't had electricity or water for almost a week. We walked back to the encampment and made the most beautiful show I was ever involved in. We took too long to set up. We had set our blankets, coats and bags down on the ground for the children, most of whom were naked, to sit down on. They immediately sat down, all teeth bare in bright smiles. Twenty-five children holding hands and singing as Marko put on his stilts and we adjusted our dirty costumes... The children loved our little show, sang, laughed and danced when we were done. Marko said that he wished the Serbian children in Mitrovica were this joyous. We spent one more night back at Sprofundo. There was a girl I had flirted with who politely dismissed me after hours of conversation in the cold, and I went to sleep impressed by the grace she employed in rejecting my verbal advances. I'm no real Casanova. I went to sleep in my thin sleeping bag and woke the next morning knowing I was sicker than I'd been in a long time. The first day back in Marko's Belgrade apartment found us surrounded by friends, including Greg and Slatko who had not left for Romania yet, and Ivan who held no hard feelings about not coming with us. I was coughing and sweating and somewhere during that first night's party, as I was shredding my soul with violent throat spasms, Ivan said to me "Old Serbian remedy," and poured rakija on my chest and rubbed it in. I woke up the next morning with no trace of the illness. Shortly after our return, we went to Svetomir's house for a night of debauchery and swimming. He had some flimsy but deep pool sitting in his back yard. After drinks and nudity, songs and techno music, Svetomir jumped off of his back porch into the pool. We all watched in horror as his body punctured the plastic back and 500 gallons of water spilled down the hill directly into the neighbors house. They were on vacation, so we all simply retired into the house and continued our party there. We performed in the street, at birthdays, and around town until one day I opened an email from my cousin saying that my Grandpa had passed. There was no way that I could make it home for the funeral. Marko, Moe and I left for Rijeka within a day and we parted company at the infoshop there. I don't remember where Moe was headed, perhaps back to the states. I gave Marko my bike that I had left in that town and he said to me "I want to give you something, but you have to promise you won't refuse." I agreed, and he handed me his Henry clubs. I immediately started saying no, but he just held up his hands. It was too late for that. I travelled by bus and train back to Paris, where I stayed one night before flying home to Detroit Metro where my love would be picking me up.

"You must to understand..." Part 1

"You must to understand..." Part 1

"You must to understand, we are serbian." Osman was a 6"5' 240 pound juggler I met at a trumpet festival in Guca, a small town in the middle of Serbia. "We were under the Turks for 450 years." He would take a loaf of bread, tear it apart like it was a small animal in his monstrous paws, and pour a liter of milk on it. "Osman must to eat." We told him that's how he should declare his seemingly insatiable hunger.

It isn't exactly clear to me how I ended up in Serbia. School and Capoeira had been stressing me out, so when I was invited to join a traveling bike circus, the Cyclown Cirkus, I took them up on it. I died my hair blue with a red triangle in the front and red curls down the sides.

I flew into Paris and stayed with an older Jewish woman who showed me some churches and the Salvador Dali museum. She practiced her sparse English. After a day of wandering, I took the train to Venice to meet up with the Cyclowns. I arrived in the evening and decided to sleep on the station steps with other traveler kids. One particularly talkative young man was playing horrible pop music on an acoustic guitar. Some trippy people began playing percussion nearby and spinning fire so I grabbed my juggling torches and asked them if I could use their fuel. They were from Budapest and were headed to Morocco to street perform and buy instruments. They were impressed by my performance and asked me to join them. I told them I would go if my circus didn't find me.

The next morning, the whole troupe of us walked across the bridges over the canals to a little park to waste away a couple hours eating breakfast and practicing circus crap. At about noon, I heard a sour trumpet play and the spindly sound of a melodica. It was the Cyclowns searching me out. I bid my Hungarian friends adieu and hopped on the train to the first station out of Venice. The Cyclowns were camped in a small junkie park waiting for some of the clowns to return from dumpstering and clowning around.

As I was sitting, eating a sandwich in this little park, a very odd thing happened. Three tough guys were sitting on one of the benches, smoking cigarettes and looking like stereotypes. A skinny man on a bicycle rode up, dismounted, picked the bike up and swung it at the largest man sitting in the center of the bench. He rose to the occasion and grappled the bike. It was like watching a velocipede version of American Gladiator as they wrestled with this bike between them. The larger thug-looking man finally shook the smaller man off. The loser backed out of the park, flustered and yelling obscenities as the thug sat on the bench and leaned back with his hand resting on his trophy.

I bought a 100 euro bike at a local shop, using my poor Portuguese in vain with the shop owner who refused to sell to me but finally acquiesced at the urging of one of the shop techs.

The circus, 12 people or so, took to the road close to dusk, heading north toward Trieste. We performed a few times every night in some city or village center and sometimes during the day in an elementary school or social program for kids. We had a bike dedicated to dumpstering and every grocery store we passed, it would stop and look in the trash for edibles. We camped anywhere, ate food cooked over a fire, slept in sleeping bags on the bare ground. We woke up, drank coffee and ate small "chalky biscuits" or cookies and took to the road again.

Our show was a lumbering performance, sometimes an hour and a half long. I juggled and passed fire and knives in the show, sometimes as the finale if the normal finale was absent. All the music was live: accordion, clarinet and percussion.

One night, we camped at an old farmhouse. I woke up in the morning before everyone else and trained Capoeira for a spell on some broken concrete overgrown with queen anne's lace. Something about the farmhouse drew me and I made my way up some rickety outdoor stairs and opened the door into a room in disarray. Rats had built a penthouse out of foam in the middle of the room. The wall was riddled with holes and dappled with red spraypaint, or...ok, it wasn't spraypaint. Two people had been executed in that room, shot multiple times. On the floor where their bodies fell, red paste had clumped into a rust-colored mosaic of dustbunnies, chipped plaster and bug husks.

We crossed the border from Trieste into Slovenija and rode quickly to Rijeka, Croatia. From there we rode south through some fossil-filled, loose rock hills with long descending meadows to perform at a little crust punk festival in a smaller town. One of our crew welded racks onto my bicycle. We spent the night on cold-sweating concrete. The 2000 year-old part of the city was holding a folk festival so they hired us to perform up and down the ancient rock streets. From our dressing room in a little old theatre, we could see thirty 12 year old girls dressed in folk outfits dancing the Macarena in front of their families. We did 6 or 7 short shows that night and retired to have some free pizza, compliments of the city.

At ten at night we settled and started drinking on the steps of a little folk museum. One of us was playing accordion, another trumpet. I had my pandeiro (brazilian tambourine). The little congregation included clowns and crusty punks and a couple locals. I looked up to see a shorter, round man in a large cowboy hat with a waxed moustache, wearing plastic silver guns at his sides and a Sheriff's badge. He walked up to the accordion player and wagged his finger in the rhythm, as if directing the tempo. His eyes moved side to side faster than his head as if he was ultimately in control of this musical situation. Another taller and older man walked up to our trumpet player and asked if he could play the horn. Our accordion player began "when the saints come marching in" and the trumpet picked the tune up. Within two minutes, a 6 piece Dixie-land brass band had showed up and replaced us. The Sheriff was in fact the conductor. Everyone danced and flipped around, wiggled, and drank until the cops showed up. The Sheriff gave a look like "Let me handle this," and talked to the police as the music played on. They left with our promise that we would finish in 10 minutes. Two hours later, they returned and left again with the same promise given. An hour later they returned, and the lead trumpet segued into a minor reprise of "When the saints come marching in." Everyone milled about on the deck of the old museum and I talked at length with the trumpet player. They had been playing dixieland jazz for 40 years, had toured in the US and were delighted to have had this odd opportunity to meet a punk rock bike circus.

From that town we began island hopping off the coast. Water on the mainland was free but on the islands the prices were steep. Our audiences were Austrians and Italians on vacation. Our group decided to take a few days in a particularly charming seaside village and we pitched our tents in a little park with clearly visible "no camping" signs. The clowns lounged and chilled. We ate our chalky biscuits and drank beer, walked on ropes tied between trees and practiced new juggling patterns. The first night we performed on the street to packed in and inebriated crowds.

The next day we sent a clown to find some water. He returned with full jugs and a request from a local restaurant that we attend a free calamari dinner in our honor. The fifteen of us made our way to the restaurant. Our host inquired why some of us weren't eating the spread of fish and calamari in front of us. When the vegetarians gave their explanation, he prepared a second dinner for them. The payment he requested was "A kiss from a beautiful woman," and he pointed at his cheek. Two of the clown girls kissed either of his cheeks simultaneously. His deep brown eyes welled up and he said "I wish I could do what you are doing right now."

Most of us were enamored by this little town, but a couple of us (including me) started feeling stir crazy. The whole group decided to move out one morning. On the way, we gorged ourselves on fresh figs that we thought were wild. When we reached the ferry, most of our group decided to turn around and go back to the little town to vacation for a couple more days. Four of us pushed on. The group that returned to the little town was fined 2000 euros for camping, I think at the prompt of whoever owned those fig trees we plundered.

My friend Moe and I split from everyone to travel to Serbia. We promised we would return after our little stint, although I think Moe had had enough of the unorganized punk rock lifestyle. I was along for the ride. We left our bikes at an infoshop/art space in Rijeka and took the old communist trains, slow and smooth around the jagged rocks and old abandoned 2 man bunkers to Zagreb. We transfered there onto an even older and more beat up train headed to Serbia. It was an all-nighter with big, square-headed border guards barking at us for our passports, wafts of cigarette fog and the eerie sound of station engineers tapping every train wheel with a hammer, listening for any variation from the clean "piyang" of a healthy metal disk.

We arrived in Belgrade at six in the morning, stumbled out of the station. Everything in Serbia seemed to work differently from the EU. Moe had been studying a phrase book and using bits of Croatian. He kept saying "Bok" as hello, a Croatian custom. "Dobar dan" would have been a little more appropriate. We got on a bus for Guca, a village that once a year is descended upon by a hundred thousand Serbians, thirty thousand Romani people and a few thousand foreigners. The bus was a hellride. Every Eastern European bus is. Nobody smiled except the drunk kids who were on their way to the festival. Moe and I were afraid of speaking in English since it hadn't been so long since Nato (under American discretion) had bombed these people. I spoke in bad portuguese and Moe spoke in bad Spanitalian. We found some unhappy medium of functionality in our paranoia and tried to suppress the pukey feeling from fumes leaking into the back of the bus.

It was heavenly exiting the bus in the town outside of Guca. There was a shuttle into the festival, but it was only midday so we decided to eat at a little bar. A man in handmade clothing and an ancient hat, his long beard waving around his belt line, was pulling a bow across a one stringed gourd instrument and singing a microtonal melody in a verse rhythm. His eyes looked far away and he would flash a complete smile bearing large white teeth in his crescendos.

Two children walked toward the gray wood bench where we were sitting and drinking coffee. The girl was no older than 6 and she was grinning cheek to cheek. She said something when she neared us then deftly snatched my little bag from next to me. I bolted after her and she accidentally dropped it, turned around to grab it but I was too close by then. The two children laughed and ran away.

"Fuckin Gypsies," a guy at another table said. The two were Slovenian and had come here for the festival as well. We drank beer with them and rode with them in a taxi into Guca. As we pulled around the bend, we could see plumes of smoke from burning trash and campfires and from whole cows and goats roasting on spits. The fields were filled with winnebagos and tents and 100 different songs were mashed together as the sound rushed up the hill toward our haphazardly driving yugo. The road was barely wider than two of our little car and the driver didn't slow down as he turned around the cliff edges.

"This fucking festival it is fucking great. Everyone is drinking and there will be a lot of bitches. It is great." The Slovenians were getting on our nerves a little bit. They payed the majority of the fare when the taxi unloaded us at a bustling little intersection where meat was frying everywhere around us. We told the Slovenians we would meet up with them in a little bit, that we were going to find someplace to camp. We ditched them.

That night we slept outside of the town on a slope under deciduous saplings. We hadn't figured it was going to be so cold. It was the end of July and we thought that since where we were going was more south than Trieste, where we had slept on the seaside, that this would be warmer. I had a sheet and no sweater. I half-buried myself in leaves trying to stay warm. In the morning a farmer yelled something at us and laughed, shaking his head. Apparently, we hadn't gotten the memo stating that there was a designated camping area.

I dusted myself off. We ate some bread and peanut butter and started walking into town. As we neared the festivities, we switched to our Portutalianish dialogue. We maintained it for a spell.

"Hey, are you guys Americans?!" We were mortified. The voice was an American's and we could only imagine that the whole of Serbia was suddenly aware that they had been infiltrated.

Well, as it turns out, Serbians could really care less if you're American. In fact, they didn't care that our new friend Greg's traveling partner, Zlatko, was Croatian. Wasn't there some war that just happened? Greg had been traveling through Albania, Macedonia and elsewhere, mostly by himself. He had with him a clarinet, though his main instrument was sax in a New York marching band. He was in Guca learning traditional melodies from many of the Romani musicians. He was excited to see us with our juggling equipment.

"Hey, I want to introduce you guys to the only jugglers in Serbia." What an honor!

We came to the real camp and met Marko, Ivan and Osman. They were outside their tent juggling and after a bit of excited conversation, we began juggling together. Marko had a set of Henry clubs, top of the line from a girlfriend of his from Italy. They were beautiful, jade and light green on a silver mylar frame. It seemed like every throw with them was perfect.

We went that night to the field. It was the size of a soccer stadium with a stage and amphitheatre at one end. No one had clued me into one of the simple truths of homemade liquor: sip, don't gulp. Every time the rakija was passed my way, I treated it like whiskey and in the smallest time, I was physically drunk and mentally sober. Still, the bottle found its way into my hand. I faked shots in the midst of the wild-eyed and danced gangly armed amongst the mass kola half circle of holding hands, feet syncopated whirlwinds under rigid bodies.

I knew I was going to be sick. I prepared by eating a banana and drinking almost a liter of water. I sat against the chain link fence and watched smoke roll through the crowd. Every time one of my new friends asked if I was ok, I reassured them that I knew what I was doing. "Don't let a gypsy steal your shoes." I had this all planned out. The first puke was five feet to the left, next five to the right, three to the left, three to the right. More water, left, right, left right. I slept black that night but never threw up from rakija again.

They shoot an artillery cannon off at 7 in the morning on the final day of the festival. The trumpet competition starts around noon and lasts until midnight. Each band plays three songs and at the end of the competition, some musician is awarded the "Golden Trumpet" award. Boban Markovic (best described by Miles Davis: "I didn't know you could play a trumpet like that") wasn't allowed to compete anymore so the city had constructed a fifteen foot bronze statue of him in the middle of town.

We hitched with some French kids back to Belgrade and moved into the apartment of Marko the pancake clown. Greg and Zlatko accompanied us, as did Osman. Marko lived with his sister in a tiny space in a huge old communist tenement building. He had two dogs who would chase cars during the day. I would watch them from the 9th story window, some of the cars swerving in hopes of hitting them, but the dogs were too good. In the evening, they would come in and eat the pot of rice and tuna that Marko had prepared for them on his stove. I eyed that dog food longingly.

We spent the next few days walking around the city, planning a little circus tour to Sarajevo under our new name "Cirkus Hleb i Sir," (the Bread and Cheese Circus). There are bread stands everywhere in Belgrade and cheese is inexpensive, so we thought the name apropos as that was our diet. Marko and his sister made pants and juggling balls. We walked around the city and Marko told me about how during the bombing, everyone wore shirts with bulls-eyes on them. He had left during part of the war, had skipped a couple borders, had found his way back into Belgrade in time to help firebomb the central police station and watch the slow painful resurrection of Serbia begin. He and most of his generation had a hard time referring to their country as anything but Yugoslavia. Their hearts were broken by the dissolution of that ideal and, at the time, they were in strict denial of a Serbian perpetrated genocide.

They were the most cosmopolitan of the communist countries, the gateway between the West and East. The land of suave spies and new wave music, good white rasta bands and groundbreaking artists...they couldn't fathom what levels of treachery that the horrible acts in Bosnia and Kosovo implied. It seemed like everyone I met was an artist, musician, writer.

Marko's analysis spoke of the conflict between the city and the country in former Yugoslavia. Pockets of militants would clash and with little or no government or outside influences, they waged wars on neighboring villages, or, oftentimes, their own villages. This was complicated by the Mujahadeen entering the Bosnian fray, the military bombardment of Sarajevo, the mismanagement by Nato of the "peacekeeping" missions. It was all a big mess and every sentiment I heard seemed paradoxical and conflicting.

On our walks, more than once a Palacinke (crepe or pancake) stand manager would run out from his shack and shake Marko's hand, beg him to come work at this stand. Marko would decline or say that he was really busy. With his colorful look and pancake-flipping skills, he was a hot commodity on the streets of the capital city.

After a few days we departed. Our initial band of travelers included Moe and I, Zlata and her boyfriend Milosh, Jasna (Zlata's sister and girlfriend to Marko), Marko and Osman . Ivan stayed in Belgrade because Marko considered him to be too much of an alcoholic. Greg and Slatko left for Romania to attempt to satisfy Slatko's desire to find a Romanian gypsy bride.

We bribed the train station doorman and he gave us entrance tokens at a discount. We snuck onto our train, carrying stilts, unicycles, instruments, dressed in our clown outfits. We found an empty car and piled everything in, closed the curtains and waited for the train to start. It rolled for a good 2 hours before a porter came along.

"Tickets?" She knew when she opened the door we had none. In Serbia, one rarely paid legitimately for travelling. Bribes were the order of the day and most workers were inclined to accept them.

Marko chimed in: "We are but poor circus performers travelling to perform in an orphanage. We have little money, will you accept this 500 dinars as payment?" The total cost of our tickets would have been something like 2500 dinars or more.

Zlatas boyfriend was holding an acoustic guitar. Marko juggled 3 balls. The porter took a moment to consider the proposition.

"Ok, but he has to play 'Winds of Change' by the Scorpions."

Without hesitation, Milosh broke into the song:

"I follow the Moskva
Down to Gorky Park
Listening to the wind of change..."

The porter sang quietly to herself until the chorus. The whole car broke in:

"Take me to the magic of the moment
On a glory night
Where the children of tomorrow dream away
In the wind of change..."

...with Zlata singing the second voice backup. The guitarist even played the solo perfectly.

The porter, satisfied, took the money and continued on. We stayed in the car and drank rakija.

Sex all over the City

When I was 19, I had sex all over the city of San Francisco. For a couple months, my girlfriend and I lived out of her car and under an overpass in the Castro. I disabled a sprinkler system for that spot and pitched my little camoflauge tent most evenings. In the morning I would wake up and walk down the street to bank of america to process checks. I smelled like dirt and sex but I was the best auditor they had.

The car was a rolling sex box and each night found us in a new neighborhood in or out of the city. When the sun would rise in the Sunset, the gray volvo windows would be dripping condensation and our bent bodies would unravel. She would start the day with coffee and cigarettes and I would stare silently at the urban playground we had infested rolling eerily by on the back streets.

We were insatiable, but perhaps not very bright. We had started a band with this mostly blind albino mexican junkie named David. I had met him working at a residential/retirement hotel up from the Tenderloin on Geary. He decided to live outside when I decided to and he claimed that he was going to use me to become famous. He would pull out a magnifying glass to examine drum equipment in the pawn shops and would concatenate odd words to form new insults. In fact, I don't recall anything leaving his mouth that wasn't insulting to someone, if not everyone in a room. He loved metal and jazz.

We decided to practice at my girlfriend Marjon's parent's house. We picked up some apple cardboard and carpet from some dumpsters and proceeded to tack it up to the walls in Marjon's room to dampen the sound. I know, it's not so hardcore living in a car and under an overpass when your girlfriend's parents live in the city and you work at bank of America. Young. Stupid.

She played cello, I played guitar. The songs were odd timed and silly, not quite reminiscent of anything. We finished and she and I went to take a shower (at least once a week was sufficient) in her parents virtual spa of a bathroom.

Everything was tiled and the shower was as large as a queen sized bed, which is exactly what we used it for. Somehow, over the spray of water, slapping of bodies, groans, etc, she heard her parents pulling up. She jumped up as they entered the house. My heart was in my intestine.

Her father was a six three persian man who barely spoke english and forbade her to do almost anything that she did. Her mother was a short japanese woman who also barely spoke english. Neither of them spoke each other's languages either. Messy situation.

She toweled up and told me to wait in the bathroom, that she would signal for me a time to sneak down. Her parents had walked into their house to find an albino man playing a bass guitar in their daughter's bedroom and their daughter in a bath towel attempting to explain things away. I heard the father walking up the stair toward the bathroom. Marjon distracted him and he walked back down. I looked out the window and David was walking down the street with a grin on his face, shaking his head from side to side.

She finally came for me and led me to her closet. I wriggled in, naked and buried myself under some of her dirty clothing. I could see her sitting on her bed through a little crack in the door. It was just enough to see her crying hysterically as her parents took turns yelling at her in their respective languages. She was slapped a couple times and I had this brief fantasy of stepping out of the closet, some birthday suit super hero but then I realized I had to pee.

I really really had to pee. At least a half hour of tag team discipline passed before they decided to take a brake. Marjon came to the closet door and I squeaked "I really really have to pee." She grabbed a 7-up super big gulp container, one of those "diabetes or your money back guarunteed" cups. I filled it, she dumped it and sat down in her bed just in time for round 2. Her parent's voices were becoming hoarse, but they persevered. I still had to pee really bad.

They finally let up and left the room, grounding her indefinately. I filled the cup 2 more times...perhaps 3 liters of pee total? She dumped them each time. She brought me my clothes and I ninja'd my way past the dining room where the two parents were smoldering over tea. I sprinted down the hill outside of her house, feeling the rotten butterflies in my stomach, but god damnit I was free.

Another notable moment in our foolish sexual history took place in a park in the lower Haight. We put up my tent around dusk and promptly began. Perhaps an hour into it, my hand slipped out of the tent, into some poo. I don't really know if it was human poo, dog poo. It could've been elephant poo and still not stopped us from having sex. We wrapped a plastic bread bag around my hand and rubber banded it at the wrist and kept going. The next morning, I wore the bag for a couple hours before we found a place where I could wash.

Everywhere, from elevators to libraries, public bathrooms to, more often than not, the passenger side seat of her parent's volvo, we did it. The last time was a goodbye after she told me about her heroinn habit and after her tryst with the crack dealer. She was wearing a pink tutu and the act was angry and desperate from both of us, unlike the earlier, more innocent and wild moments. We had spent nights together crying in self-pity but the profession of hard drug use snapped me out of whatever reverie we had lived the past year and a half in.

When I left the city six months later I dropped by the apartment we had rented together. We had lucked out after sleeping outside and in the crack hotels and had moved into a $700 a month studio. My hiking pack was there. She had taken out her dreds and her weave and now wore two perfectly round afro-puffs. She looked like some beautiful stranger that would never give me the time of day. I didn't smile, neither did she. She took a drag on her cigarette and said "I can't believe you're leaving." My response, and the last thing I said to her before going was "Why?"

Jehova’s Pimpness

Terry was an ex-crack dealer and a pimp, Capricorn, aged 42 when I met
him. He had ratty and short dread-locks, was deemed "socially unfit" by
the state of California and had become my best friend after I fixed his
computer. It turned out that he lived about 100 yards from me on
O'Farrell street in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco.

His apartment was strewn with cheap and found stereo equipment,
books, bibles and, most notably, a blown up photo of him with a joyous
smile holding some 3 foot long thrashing fish that he had just pulled out
of the water. Hung over it was the actual fishing net that he had used in
the photo.

His answer to every "How are you" was "I'm blessed." "What's up?" "Heaven." After being in prison, he had started using crack and other
things, but had later been saved by some Jehova's witnesses who
would still visit him weekly.

He decided early on that he was going to watch out for me and my
girlfriend. We were young, naive, unexposed in his mind. He was right,
but he was a little bit crazy too. Good crazy.

One time, the three of us were walking to my apartment and a young
man on something was hassling us. Terry went rigid and told him to get
tha fuck on. The young man became angry and performed some flying
ninja leap in Terry's direction but...and I know this sounds physically
impossible, he turned around in midair and started running the other
way as Terry dropped into the fighting Irish stance, upturned knuckles
and everything. "I was just playin, just playin," and the kid sheepishly
wandered off.

Terry would rap over beats he would make on his computer and record
to VHS tapes on an old VCR. The sound quality was exceptional,
though the lyricism was sometimes a little off. It all came back to Jesus,
nothing wrong with that if you're into that sort of thing. The
meanderings to get there were often odd, though, like a stream of
consciousness personal revival. Maybe we all needed that at the time.

Living with Marjon, my girlfriend was somewhat trying. Between her
bringing back to the apartment guys she would meet at bars and talk
with until 2 in the morning while I was smoldering jealously in my bed or
her deciding wholeheartedly that I was a male prostitute on the down
low because I was stoned once and smiled at a guy on a bus who was
smiling at me and that I looked at people's shoes obsessively due to
skateboarding, the only conclusion was, obviously, male prostitute. Long drawn out fights about nothing, depression from apathy, bla bla bla.

Terry would say "She needs to move back in with her parents." I started
to agree with him, to some degree, but when you're young and in love
and stoned and stupid, it's hard to make clear decisions.

My father went into a diabetic coma a year and a half into that
relationship and I flew home to be with him. A week later Marjon called
me and told me she didn't want me to come back, at least not for a few
months. She had done meth and during the come down had slept with
some ratty skater kid who I had met around town.

I couldn't eat for almost a week, naturally, and my gaunt frame was
probably horrifying to Marjon when I saw her again in the city. It was in
the lobby of Terry's low-income apartment building. She was wearing a
ruddy vinyl coat and her extensions were matted. She looked skinny
too and was in the company of another girl who I had never met who
was wearing way too much make-up.

Terry made me eat. The second day I was back, we did mushrooms and
played raquetball in golden gate park. I remember when we were getting
on the bus to go there, this girl in some sort of demonic goth outfit kept
starting conversations with me. Terry looked at us and said "What, do
you want to fuck her?" She was shocked but not offended, but I
avoided her after that.

A week passed before Marjon and I started talking again. She had
started dating a crack dealer. A few days later, she was involved in a car
accident. A few days after that, the crack dealer got busted and she was
trying to raise bail for him. A few days after that, she and I were sleeping
together again. When the dealer posted bail, she informed me that he
had been doing crack and that she had been doing heroinn.

That was it for me. I quit her and the strange dream that we had shared.
I had moved to Hunter's Point, living with Tom, an older jewish man with
a hauling business called Schlepper Brothers. "Yogic, Holistic moving
services." Not only did he get the jews, he got the hippies too. We rode
around in an old pie truck that he would always say "used to have a
sweeter life." He gave me a free one bedroom apartment in the basement of his house in exchange for helping with his sustainability project.

I would travel to the Tenderloin to hang out with Terry. Somewhere
around this time, he took it upon himself to introduce me to the pimp
who worked in front of his building. This 75 year old man wore full fur,
gator shoes and a feathered hat. He was a Capricorn, like Terry
and I, so the three of us would refer to each other as "Cap."

"Capricorns are the best people in the world," he would say through his
odd arrangement of teeth. He was missing the top row from his middle
incisor going right and the bottom row from the middle incisor left. His
mouth fit perfectly closed. "I've known a lot of women in my life and they
all still talk about me. 90% good 10% bad. I slapped every one of them
bitches."

Terry just nodded and said "I know that's right."

Marjon ended up fixing her life, finishing school, etc. I never kept a
friendship with her, though she did call me a few years later asking me to
help her track down the baby's mama of a guy she was dating. I guess she figured I was internet savvy. I was living in Detroit by then and that was the solvent for whatever gelatinous pool of nostalgia that had coagulated in my lonely heart. We havn't bothered each other since.

I don't really know what happened to Terry. I think he started seeing a
woman that he had known and I think had had a child with prior to going
to prison. I heard he starting using crack again with her, the real
heartbreaker in the story. Imagine someone with so much faith that they
would ride no handed down the longest hill in San Francisco, through
red lights, yelling "God is on my side!" His smile was the purest in my
memory with all subtleties of emotion on its fringes. I think about the
fish picture, the reminder in his room of how life is supposed to be and I
think I understand why people pray. They pray for beautiful people like
you Terry.

How I lost my tooth

It started to hurt one night in Novi Sad. I happened to meet that night a
Serbian who was living in the Uk and had flown home to have some
dental work performed.

"We have the best dentists in the world," was his position. He pulled
back his lip to reveal some stitches in his mouth from a rectified absess.
I tongued the little bubble of flesh that had formed over an upper molar
and decided that I would inquire about a dentist in a few days when I
returned to Belgrade.

The spindly tall dentist had an apartment office and we carried on a
conversation completely unrelated to dentistry over cups of sugarfree
kool aid for over an hour before he had a look at my tooth. He said it
would have to come out and we made arrangements for after I returned
from Kosovo to have it extricated.

You can buy a revolver and bullets on the street in Kosovo and one of
the kids that we performed for was a gun runner at age 11. Apparently 2
weeks before, he had beaten a grown man down with a wooden club
because of some indiscretion. He roller bladed around on the gravel
roads and had the smile of a child. Another boy, Celovi, was completely
hairless due to radiation exposure. He looked and talked like a little old
man.

Our little band of 5 clowns slept in a hot pepper storage shed in an
ancient apartment building in Mitrovica. Our eyes burned. The ground
floor bathroom hadn't functioned in quite awhile and some of the elder
occupants simply opened the door and used the floor. Although the
building would often lose water and occasionally power, most of the
tenants seemed to have internet access.

We performed in a junkie park toward the middle of the town, not far
from a bridge that separated the serbian and albanian parts of the city.
Most of the vehicles that drove across were NATO and armored. The
park was strewn with empty plastic liter bottles and hypodermics,
shredded black garbage bags and abandoned knick knacks. It had
been a tradition the past few years of our group's performance for the
children to chase the clowns around town immediately after the show,
hunting them to capture. In our make-up and costumes we ducked into
alleyways, hid behind bushes and sprinted in our large shoes. We did
finally escape and after the hullaballoo died down, a child yelled at us
from a 3rd story veranda:

"You got away this time clowns!"

Ivan the alcoholic clown responded "Naturally, and took a drag on his
cigarette."

The day we left Kosovo, I had been taking acetominophen all day. The
side of my face was throbbing. We boarded a bus and the bumps were
agony. Beban offered me some pain killers and I gladly took them. I
asked him what they were, these large glossy blue pills. He said they
were like strong aspirins. When the bus pulled over for a meal break, the
clowns, still dressed in our clown suits, stepped out to have a drink. We
all had a quick rakija and boarded the bus.

About half an hour later I was having the worst drug trip of my life. I
turned to Dean, an american clown from the bay area, and said "I'm
freaking out." He had a very even voice and knew somewhat how to
distract me, though I couldn't dispel the notion that I was going to die in
a clown suit on a fucking bus in the south of Serbia. How would they
get my body home? My parents couldn't afford that. I kept reminding
myself to breathe. The whole world swirled and the exhaust fumes that
haunt the backs of eastern european buses churned my stomach. Dull
tracers of gray and green swooshed in front of my eyes.

The next day I visited the dentist. We talked about his family, his wife's
portraiture. He chain smoked and promised to come see us perform in
Belgrade's main square sometime soon.

"Are you ready?" He stuck a needle in my gum, grabbed some stainless
steel claw and with the most delicate touch popped my tooth out. I
didn't feel anything. He stitched my gum and we made an appointment
for two weeks to remove the threads.

The first couple days were agony and my serbian clown friends simply
made fun of me for not wanting to go out. I woke up one day to
someone's penis dangling in my face and raucaus laughter. I wanted
them all to die.

My friend Zlata offered to let me come to her grandma's house in "the
village" and I took the opportunity. We took two intercity buses, talked
our way past the control...

Zlata:"I'm a student, do you think I have money for a ticket."
Me: "Duh, no speak Srpski."

We hitchiked the last little leg of the trip to the hill where her grandma
lived. This little woman was tough. She tended fourteen sheep and a
small farm, baked bread four or five times a day and still found time to
have disdain for me. Her eyes told me how unwelcome I was. Zlata's
father echoed this sentiment when he arrived later that day and he made
me sit next to a freshly slaughtered pig in the back of his car as we drove
down to the city for Zlata's sister's going away party.

We pulled up to a small office building housing the admistration for
Zlata's father's construction business. He dropped us off. It turned out
that my company was more than likely a way for Zlata to not have to be
alone at a family function. I decided I would be polite, inspite of wishing
eternal rest upon myself (I had also developed a sinus infection
somewhere in the healing process).

I would have no rest that evening.

"This is the only night we have, we will never see each other again!" said
a particularly square-headed and drunk serbian that I had just met that
night. I flatly said "I don't care, I just want to lay down." He pulled back
his gum and showed me a missing tooth. "I went to club every night
after!" I tried to explain that I had a sinus infection but to no avail. My
new solution was alcohol. With every drink I could feel a trickle of thin
blood seeping between my stitches. Soon I was learning a song about
some German saint in Serbia who would give his horse a drink every
time he took a drink. My new friend forced me to learn the limerick in
both German and Serbian and would not be satisfied until I recited it
perfectly and with good accent. I excused myself to the bathroom and
sidestepped into an office, found a couch and layed down. Two minutes
later my very large and newly agitated friend was shaking me back to
life.

"You cannot go to sleep! We will never have another night like this!" I
wanted both of us to die.

"You must to eat pig brain! It is a serbian wedding tradition." I pointed
out that it wasn't anyone's wedding but that didn't stop him from
grabbing a cleaver and slamming it into the middle of the pig that had
been prepared for Zlata's sister's departure. It split neatly down the
middle and my drunken memory has a clear outline of the skull and
rended face. The dead pig looked confused.

"No. I don't care. I don't want it." I wanted to cry. I may have been
crying, I don't remember.

"You must to eat it. You are offending me. We are friends and we will
never see each other again."

"If I eat this, will you let me go to sleep?"

He thought about that one but finally let go a long and slow
"ooookkkkk"

I took a pinch of the brain. It was like shredded tobacco in consistency.
I popped it in my mouth.

Now, I don't know that I would eat brain every day or anything, but I
forgot for the moment all the biology that was happening in my swollen
face. The salty sweet taste of the porkers cerebral process navigated
my tongue and for those moments, life was good. I ate a couple more
pinches as square-head gave me the smiling "I told you so" look.

We returned to Belgrade the next day to strange news. Marko the Clown
had been shot at and run over by a car at a wedding party that the
serbian clowns had excluded me from because I was "too much of a
pussy." He was in the hospital with a broken collar bone and multiple
broken ribs. He had told a married man to stop hitting on his sister. The
man had grabbed a shotgun loaded with buckshot out of his trunk and
fired the two charges at Marko, close range. Somehow the man had
missed. Serbia has mandatory military service, by the way. Ivan the
alcoholic clown pushed the guy into his car and started asking

"Why are you doing this? You have a family, you have important things,
why make trouble for yourself."

The man started his car, slammed on the gas, ran Marko down and sped
off into the night.

The sunday newspaper article describing the incident read roughly "It
was a big circus wedding with clowns shooting guns into the air.
Things became a little out of hand and a clown was accidently run over."