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."