nablopomo
Back in ’94, you could still get a half-litre of unpasteurized beer and a salami & cheese (unpasteurized) sandwich for 50¢, which was fortuitous since the only safe way of getting money was to have your friends slip $50 bills into the center of a Polaroid photo, using a razor blade to slice open the back and glue it shut with the money tucked neatly inside. I’m absolutely certain some Romanian postal worker somewhere occasionally shows off his stolen photo of a bare American ass, not knowing that an entire month’s salary lay hidden just on the other side of that ill-thought moon.
“From now on, just take photos of flowers.” I added, “Nothing too colorful, mind you.” Hence, a possible theory as to why I have such a visceral response to dandelions.
One time, Travis got a $100 bill jammed behind a picture of a half-eaten Thanksgiving Day turkey. “We should go to istanbul,” he said, as we searched desperately for a black-market money changer who would believe that the note was real.
We grabbed Isaac, because we had always heard that as a man, you were as likely to get raped in istanbul as anywhere in the world, and Isaac was pretty, and probably wouldn’t even mind, and even if we weren’t attacked, we could probably exchange him for 10 kilos of hashish, and, once again, he probably wouldn’t mind.
In those days before I went on trans-european odysseys, my host mother would fill my backpack with meat and cheese, obviously blessed by forest elves because the food never seemed to spoil. I once stayed an entire week in Frankfurt and never spent a single pfennig, not even on alcohol because by the third day the cheese had assumed intoxicating properties. The meat just made me mean.
But not this time. Not this war. “No, I’ll just get some food on the train. We are going to exchange Isaac for goods and services.”
“That’s nice,” she said, in that charming way of foreigners who didn’t understand what you just said.
Halfway through Bulgaria, we suddenly realized we were the only people on the entire train, except for whatever creature was shoveling coal into the firebox, and the man who occasionally walked up and down the aisle asking for our tickets who appeared to have no feet. He never took our tickets, he just walked on by, repeating , “Tickets. Tickets.” I think he was trying to make us laugh, but it didn’t work.
This, mind you, was 20 hours into what our Fodor’s guide from 1947 said should have only been an 18 hour trip. And it was about the time we realized that the temperature inside the train was 8 degrees.
“I don’t want to die,” Isaac chattered between frozen molars.
“I fucking do.”
We also hadn’t eaten in a full day.
Travis asked me if I had brought any food, and I said, “Of course I did. I always take too much food on these trips.” And then I started crying.
Isaac eventually got up, helped by the wild gyrations of the locomotive, as we had apparently crossed into that part of the country where children lay abandoned automobiles on the tracks in order to make them flat. He was smart, you see, because intuitively he knew that if he kept moving, he might not die. We were smart, too, because realistically, we knew if we stayed very still, we would soon be out of our misery.
Travis asked me if he could tuck his feet underneath my armpits and that’s when I remembered the words to Hail Mary.
The train stopped, and we wondered if we had finally reached Reykjavik. Sadly, it was just a small station without a McDonalds or a Holiday Inn. One man stood on the platform and Isaac approached him. Travis and I returned to our cabin, jealous that he was probably going to have sex with the man, jealous of all the warmth he would receive, jealous that he still obviously had both the will to live and the will to love. We huddled around our shared cigarette for our own platonic warmth, smiling whenever the ember got too close and burned some sense of feeling back into our noses.
Isaac returned to our row, and when the man asking for our useless tickets walked by, we noticed Isaac was carrying a box.
“What’s in there?” I asked.
“I hope it’s a space heater!” said Travis.
“I hope it’s a hooker!” I said.
“I hope it’s a hooker with a space heater!” we said, in unison, satisfied at our ability to keep our wits about us in time of crisis.
“It’s Moon Pies!” Isaac said, and Travis and I looked at each other, understanding that the man on the platform must have raped him too hard, probably pinning his head against the tracks with the heel of his boot.
Of course, when Isaac opened the box, it was full of Moon Pies. And after each of us had taken a bite of our big yellow cookies with the soft, creamy filling, we offered ourselves to Isaac, in full recognition of his status as alpha male (THE MAN). Sadly, he was gone before our frostbitten fingers could maneuver our zippers into the Curious position, very likely searching for a case of RC Cola.
