A Take Back America Tour

July 4th weekend limps to a close, hung over and sweating in the humidity. American flags were hung from the houses with care. Ice cold thirty-packs disappeared from the nation’s shelves wrapped in red, white, and blue logos. The symphony of fireworks, roman candles, and M-80s wafted from the valleys below the Purple Mountain Majesty and across the Amber Waves of Grain.

The United States, as e pluribus unum suggests, makes one State from many disparate towns, cities, counties, and villages. In a time of sputtering economy, out of control energy costs, $4 a gallon gasoline, a shrinking job market, weak currency, and war, more clearly than ever I realize that America’s greatness lies in its’ commitment to diversity voiced in that simple three word Latin phrase. E Pluribus Unum. No longer can we claim with a straight face that we are the wealthiest nation on Earth (if we ever could is an argument for another day), and the greenback is no longer the universal symbol for value and stability. But even for our late struggles, we are big, multi-cultural, multi-textured, messy polyglot and not no other nation on earth can come close to our schizophrenic vibrant dynamism in this regard.

Here in Brooklyn, we live safely ensconced in the most liberal borough of the biggest liberal enclave in America - New York City. Someone who imagined America as a bunch of white people living in houses with white picket fences and with big SUV’s in the driveway would be sorely disappointed in the BK. If however, someone looked at Brooklyn trying to understand the loud, smelly, sweaty hyper diversity of the United States, they would easily understand the unabashed glory of this country.

The idea of America is alive and well in the 5 Boroughs. Recent immigrants of all different skin colors celebrate the birth of their new country, their heads wrapped in Turbans, their food spiced with foreign smells, their English warped by accents that bring with them the lilt of some far away but not forgotten mother land.

The white working class of Brooklyn, fill the neighborhood bars, conservative by City standards, Commie-Pinkos by the general standards of American white working class political beliefs. This is the heritage of a huge number of the deceased heroes of 9/11, and when they swear to never forget its not just a bumper sticker slogan. In Park Slope they fill bars with names like, Jackie’s 5th Amendment, or Smith’s Tavern with a chalkboard outside offering $1.50 mugs of bud, they grill sausages on the sidewalk, show off tattoos of Bald Eagles and hats reminding us that “These Colors Don’t Run.”

In Chelsea, the gay dudes are celebrating an America that slowly (sort of, maybe, in some places) is zig-zagging toward affording them equal rights.

In Brownsville and Red Hook, the mostly black population celebrates the birth of their nation even though it would prefer to send them to jail than to college. On the 4th the sounds of firecrackers and gunfire mix into an intoxicating cocktail of gun rights and patriotism in the hot air of East New York.

Penthouses in the Upper Eastside are dark and their lights off - the occupants have fled the city heat for their vacation homes in the Hamptons and Upstate.

In classic American form, New York is America - but only one America of many. For all of the City’s wonderful qualities that demonstrate the deepest meanings of American ideals, it is also isolated by its size; so large with so much happening that the world beyond the boroughs sometimes feels like a dream.

It’s hot in New York, and it smells like garbage – American garbage, its true, but garbage nonetheless. It’s time for me to reacquaint myself with the America outside the City.

Tomorrow, a friend and I will embark on a new tour. A Take Back America Tour. There is no form of travel more American, no way of seeing, and smelling, and feeling our country more true to the American Spirit than the road trip.

Driving from Madison, Wisconsin to Council Bluffs, Iowa across the plains of the Midwest, then into South Dakota to camp at Badlands National Park, from there through Montana to sleep under the dark, starry, Big Sky of the Big Sky State, the Tour will end in Portland, OR.

We will camp under the stars, cook over the fire, and drink whiskey into the night in the great tradition of the American West. I will try to see as much, inhale as much, and listen to as much American as possible – and then I will take it back to New York with me as nothing more than memories and photographs. A Take Back America Tour.

Happy 4th of July.

Jersey

The swamps and creeks of Newark must have been beautiful before they were so polluted. Now, the black water passes lethargically below rusted steel railroad bridges. Chain linked fences topped with concertina wire jut up from the banks. Wooden piers, now rotted through, flash filthy looking high-water marks to the passerby.

If you follow one creek out toward the edge of the city to the east, you will leave the land of the living. The hot sun beats down on a post-industrial wasteland stretching as far as the eye can see. Rusted out, abandoned earth movers languish next to a warehouse with a collapsed roof. Empty pavement rolls out in all directions. In some places, the careful observer can even make out the faded white lines that once denoted parking spaces. Now the only other being on the hot shimmering blacktop is a seagull standing on one leg, looking intently off to the south.

The creek goes by the blacktop. In some places, there is a slick of muck collected against the concrete bank. Black water laps against black muck, styrofoam cups and tires float half submerged in the muck.

Following the current, the flat black waters open into a marsh. The blacktop and rusted equipment of America's better days are nowhere to be found. Cattails and swamp grass sprout up as the creek widens and spreads its black waters into the brown waters of the marsh. There are no birds or signs of fish. Clouds of river bugs and mosquitos hang thick over the stagnant water. A strand of brown wooden telephone poles haphazardly makes its way across he marsh. On pole is down, the wires hanging just inches above the water.

Off in the distance, above the green of the marsh, loom two dark mounds - a massive junkyard. Excavators, invisible from the water, roar and every so often the ground shakes as an especially heavy load falls the ground. Someone who was close enough to the junkyard would see a three story pile of washing machines, dryers, and refrigerators. The other pile is mangled scrap metal, mostly rusted to an orange brown. The newest additions glint in the sun, giving the pile the appearance of a crown.

It is in the shadow of the junkyard that the once thick strand of water has become many intertwining veins sliding through the high grass, each invisible to the next until they intersect. Every so often a small boat with an outboard motor and a flat bottom announces its presence by the putter of a two stroke engine and the smell of diesel fuel.

Around four in the afternoon, the August sun high in the sky, thick humid air cut by warm garbage breezes from the junkyard, a small silver dingy comes up the creek from the direction of the black water. Two men sit in the boat facing each other. One rows, facing forward with no shirt, a beer belly and fat man breasts glinting under a sheen of sweat. The other, facing the back of the boat wears a gray shirt and a white hat, the floppy brim pulled down over his ears.

The dingy rides low. To the casual observer, the boat could almost appear to be sinking. As the current dies out in the main tributary of the marsh, the man rowing slows and lights a cigar. The smoke wafts from his face at every pull. A train goes by, fast and loud on the tracks above the marsh.

He sticks the fat, brown cigar in his mouth and slowly moves the left oar, the dingy slides to the left. The man in the front of the boat turns and looks behind him. They scan the marsh and although their words aren't intelligible from across the water, they seem to be talking. The one in the gray shirt stands and shields his eyes in the bright afternoon heat. He points to something on the left and sits down.

The shirtless fat one angles the boat into the wall of marsh grass and the dingy disappears into one of the veins of water cutting across the marsh. The ripples come from the grass and the cigar smoke rises above the grass, heading east.

The ripples die down and all that is left is the distant roar of heavy equipment and the intermittent screech of metal folding and falling against itself. Then the report of a gun, loud and heavy in the heat. Now two, three more shots like thunderclaps. Then a splash and ripples.

A lone stork, rises from the grass startled, flies back in the direction of Newark.

a/c in the city

There was a heatwave a couple of weeks ago. Must have been 99 degrees four days straight. The city turned into a big smelly dirty concrete oven.

My room doesn't have any windows. Even with two fans going on high and pointed right at my face, the air was thick like soup. Fans whirring - just moving around hot air. I could not sleep for shit.

I was out partying on Saturday. We were old friends egging each other on for hours. We got after it all afternoon and into the night. I finally stumbled up the stairs, dropped the keys twice and on the third try managed to throw the door open. A blast of hot air mixed with the smell of garbage enveloped me.

Seriously - I could not sleep for shit that night. I got up at 3am and 6am to take cold showers. The night was hellish. I woke up, my face slicked with grease, in a pool of sweat at 8am.

Thank god for the cold water in the fridge. Fourth floor of a walk up on 8th Street must be almost as hot as the ninth circle of hell.

Sunday me and my brother went to the mall to spend some time in the a/c. Brooklyn soaked up the sun. My mom said it was global warming.

Sunday night same deal. Monday morning, I'm out early at the gym just cause its air-conditioned. Feel like I slept maybe 40 minutes when I woke up - my eyes all red as soon as I roll out of bed. Out the bed and straight to the fridge to wet that sandpaper mouth.

Yuck.

Monday at work I was like - fuck the bullshit. Got to get an a/c. After work, hopped on the D train express over the Manhattan Bridge. Got off at Atlantic Avenue, air-conditioned subway cars give way to the stale hotness of subway platforms, to the stale hotness of the street.

There's a P.C. Richards and Sons electronic store right at the subway stop. Crowds of people milling around outside. People selling little bottles of cold water for $1 out in the street when the light goes red, on the hunt for thirsty drivers.

P.C. Richards, the rare big box store in the boroughs, is cloaked in a disheveled red, dirty white, and faded blue logo. Inside, pandemonium reigns.

Throughout the store, different models of air-conditioning units are piled in boxes. There are no prices. There are no sales people. I start by looking at the a/c's on display out of the box in nice rows at the front of the store. A man in a white shirt says they are all out of stock. You got to find a sales person. Its every man for himself.

Finally I see one - a black guy with a name tag that says Kelly. He's telling a fat woman that there's nothing really left. She needs to follow him and he'll find her something. I cut in - where can I get an 8,000 btu a/c?

He looks at me with a gaze that I can only interpret as pity. His shirt is mussed. He says, pretty much whatever you find is what you get. Follow me - maybe I can help you.

Off he goes toward the back of the store. The fat lady, her man, me, and now an asian guy trailing our pied piper of a/c. Its a mad house.

Two older women fight over a cardboard box that has a blue Carrier logo on it. Kelly seems convinced that what all we really need is an LG 50-something. He keeps muttering that they're all in the warehouse.

I'm trying to figure out if suggesting a model that isn't in stock is some kind of black belt sales ninja tactic. When we get to the far corner of the store, Kelly just sighs and takes the chewed up toothpick out of his mouth and says - all gone.

I double back to the site of a box I had seen on the way across. There it is! A Gibson 8,000 btu - it's not energy star but I mean fuck - desperate times call for desperate measures. I accelerate towards the box. A woman stops and puts her a/c box on top of my target while I am only steps away. I look to her with beseaching eyes - are you taking that one?

To my relief, she smiles with surprise - no, just this one.

I grab the box and hustle back to Kelly, still in the back corner now scratching his head and looking at the floor. Hey - Kelly, I want to get this one. He's like ok.

We wait at the check out area in the back. An old woman, she's missing some teeth, keeps cutting in on the sales person checking out the person in front of me. She has a broken a/c. She's trying to get some help. Kelly and the other salesman look at her with tired eyes. All a/c sales final, says Kelly - he's getting annoyed.

He runs my card and scans the box. Can't print receipts at this computer. I carry the heavy ass air-conditioner and we hustle along the back of the store to another check out area. Can't print there either. Kelly is like the captain of an intrepid ship. We weave through the masses of people bunching tighter by the door. I stay close behind him, afraid of getting lost in the masses of the unconditioned.

The line for the front cashier wraps almost halfway around the store. Kelly asks a woman behind the register to give him his receipt. Peaches, just hand me my ticket please? She makes a face but she does it.

I'm on my own to muscle my way out into the blasting heat with my prize in my hands.

Out the Parlor Window

Out the parlor window sprawls the multi-textured cityscape of Brooklyn. The parlor looks out from the fourth floor across a neighborhood of three-story row houses. Rectangular windows stare plaintively out like somber, drooping eyes. The gray sky and bright green leaves of the maple tree across the way give the impression of August.

Dingy and beautiful at the same time, it has been said that Brooklyn lives for nostalgia. But in 2008 the future is now for the biggest borough and new condominiums with bigger windows and rooftop terraces pockmark the otherwise wistful streets.

The parlor window is technically three windows in an alcove swooping out from my living room towards the street. As the wind picks up, children play off to the right, the occasional shriek wafts through the screen. On the left, a mass of leaves blocks everything but the giant cross on the roof of a church on the corner.

The window straight gives me a wide open view that unburdens my mind and accelerates me thoughts as I sit before it in this straight-back wooden chair. The back of a beige building with flowers planted on the fire escape of the third floor looks back at me. The white washed roof slants up and away towards a red building of the same pre-war type facing the other direction from Seventh Street.

Looking across at the row houses and into the humid darkness of the open windows in the gray dusk of May, I am reminded of another May, many years ago.

I knew this girl in the small town where I grew up. This is rural America, rolling farmland and wooded hills spread in all directions. We were friends. She lived out on the edge of town in a big old farmhouse.

When I was a kid, the bullies used to kick my ass sometimes. This girl, this friend of mine, she would always try to cheer me up. We were in the same homeroom class during middle school. She was so smart and I was a pretty big nerd so we got along. For some reason, as a boy, the roman emperor Constantine was an obsession of mine and I could talk about him to her and she wouldn’t think it was stupid.

In those days, there was group of boys in my class who were big assholes – they were obsessed with the WWF during my Constantine phase. It seemed like every day they would hang me by my underwear from the hook on the inside of the stall in the boys bathroom during fifth period. This high difficulty move is known as the “atomic wedgie.” You don’t know skid marks until you’ve had an atomic wedgie.

The hook was about eye-height and so I would sometimes spend hours suspended there with my feet swaying back and forth above the floor. This girl, my friend, would always draw me pictures and tell me jokes and pretend that she didn’t notice my adolescent humiliation when I snuck into class late and ashamed.

A few years later, she applied to go away to university. We were seventeen. By then I had stopped going to school about a year before. I just felt tired all the time so I dropped out. I would go out drinking late with my friends, riding the back roads and sleep late all through the morning.

When I was in this school we read an essay during black history month about how black men in America sometimes feel like they have to act mad all the time. Its not just black guys though, its poor white guys too. At 17 I already had it all figured out, I wasn’t worth shit to the world.
All I had to my name was a bad attitude and I felt damn proud of it.

To me, she was the very archetype of intellectual prowess. She was going to go Harvard in my mind. Once I got to high school, we never really had class together anymore. She was in the classes for kids who could learn things.

I was put in all the classes for victims and perpetrators of 5th period atomic wedgies. Funny how that worked out – I suppose that looking back, being obsessed with the Emperor Constantine and being obsessed with the WWF are different ways to skin the same cat.

I was driving by the high school one afternoon after I had dropped out and she came walking up the access road on her way to the bus. I gave her a ride home. I remember she gave me a cassette tape of Arias that she had sung for the university admissions committees. I played them in my cousin’s pickup truck at the carwash on the first warm day of spring that year.

Out the parlor window darkness is falling. Off in the distance, lights have flickered on illuminating Venetian blinds and curtains pulled open. A fan spins lazily in the apartment on the third floor of the beige building. The deep green leaves of that maple tree really bring me back to that spring those years ago.

When the universities started to admit students that spring, I expected to hear that she was going to go somewhere elite and prestigious and then we probably wouldn’t ever see each other again. Maybe in twenty years when she had kids and rich husband that wore a suit to work.

In small towns like the one I grew up in, the “grapevine” is a pillar of the community. It’s funny - in 2008 cities seem to define the American experience, but I swear those small towns are the most gloriously American part of the whole country.

In those days, despite my budding delinquency, my mom was still reasonably successful at enticing me into the house by making dinner. In our family love was expressed through pasta salad, potato salad, ribs, and meatloaf. The grapevine is a community institution upheld by mothers and fathers at the dinner table.

“Oh honey, I ran into Freddy’s mom today at the supermarket and she said that Freddy got into Syracuse! He’s so excited but Cornell has the best hotel management so he’s not sure if he’s going to go there or to Skidmore. Isn’t that great, sweetie?” The whole time, I’d be shoveling lasagna into my mouth and thinking that Freddy was always a fucking douchebag and I could give a fuck-less where that little prick went as long as it was far away from here.

I pretty much expected that I’d find out where the girl was going to disappear to from my mom one night as I dumped ranch dressing on my iceberg salad, the kitchen lights dully absorbed by the weathered wood of our round oak dinner table. Maybe I was coming home to dinner for more than the food in those days. Maybe I wanted to know where she was leaving for. In this case though, and it was the only time in my whole life to this day, the grapevine let me down.

You could say that I wanted to make myself feel like shit. Maybe that’s what drove me, but the more time that went by without my finding out where she was going to go, the more I needed to know. I wasn’t afraid of losing her. We hadn’t been close since we were about 14 or 15. I just needed to know the wonder and excitement of a wide-open life with endless possibilities maybe so I could torture myself with the knowledge that I would never have that.

One afternoon I took the rusted-out yellow pickup truck that my dad lent me on weekends and drove it over to her house. I took the left onto the dirt driveway winding under those old maple trees. When I knocked on the glass storm door that had not yet been switched to a screen for the summer, there was silence. Then she appeared before me.

At first I felt awkward but after a while we found our old common ground. We walked down along the creek skipping stones and joking about our old middle school classes.

Finally I asked her where she was going to go to University. I had been trying to seem nonchalant because I didn’t want my voice to crack or tremble and show how much I needed to know. She looked up quickly and I thought I had betrayed my curiosity.

She told me that no university had offered her a spot in its’ freshman class. Still skipping stones, but throwing them harder now, she told me the story. The first day, she got letters from four different schools in the mail. All of them polite, all of them courteous, all written on fancy stationary with bright logos and seals, all informing her that she would not be offered a spot in their entering classes.

We had both always been outsiders in some way, and maybe that is what our friendship had been based around when we were young. Now we shared an afternoon soaking in the injustice of life. At the age of 18, that injustice can really change a person. When I dropped out of school I always just felt like I was an idiot and that I didn’t come from smart people, I came from working people, but hearing her tell me this story I felt like something was wrong with the world. I felt as though the hopes I never had for myself I had for her.

We went to one of these food shacks that open up in warm weather in the country. I had a teriyaki chicken sandwich with cheese and she had a chocolate-vanilla milkshake. She told me how slowly all of the schools had sent her those same letters – all infuriatingly polite but arriving at the same conclusion. Cars flew by on the main road every so often, scattering the flies by the trashcans.

There was one university left that had decided to put her on what they called a wait list. We walked back to the truck and she kicked some gravel. I smelled diesel fuel. She said she didn’t know if she would end up there or not.

I told her that I knew it wasn’t much consolation, but I would be glad to have her around that year. She smiled, looked at her hands and didn’t say thank you. I dropped her off at home and went out with my friends to drink Jack Daniels.

One night a few months later while we were at the dinner table, my mom was describing the events of the day. We were eating ham salad. “Your little friend over there, what’s her name? The girl? Her daddy’s that Jewish lawyer? I saw her daddy in True Value and he told me she’s going to New York City to university next year. Isn’t that just great honey?”

“New York City?”
“That’s what the man said, dear. Don’t drip salad dressing on the table please.”

He Tratado a No Pensar en Ti

“Slow ride on a slow train, gonna get back home and tell ‘em where I came from. Every night when I close my eyes, my head hurts so bad that it blows my mind. Only thing in my life that’s changed is the woman in my bed and this age in my brain.” – Shooter Jennings

Back on this train again. It’s a long ride into the silent black and starry skies of rural America. I feel like I’ve been on this train so many times I’ve lost count. Same old blue cloth seats, and the same dirty windows look back at me as I stare out the window.

I’ve got a pint of bourbon and I’m glad of it. It’s a long trip and my ipod is running out of batteries. Over the river, an orange sunset paints the river metallic. Rowboats carrying fishermen stand out black against the view.

Take a pull of the whiskey and pull my hat lower over my eyes. I feel like I’m always at the wrong place, honey, at the right time. My thoughts turn to the past - concrete cowboys and taste on her lips.

My flying carpet made of steel speeds up to pass through an old rail yard. The phone poles and wires make a mesh of black outlines against that dull pink sky. An old brick building with broken windows looms over the river at the edge of the rail yard, its smokestack covered with vines.

The reflection of the summer dusk against the river reminds me of my soul. Take another pull on the bottle, but look quick to make sure the conductor doesn’t see. This old train makes me feel like I’m going back where I always go, like I’m going back home.

I always remember that time, years ago, that you came with me. We were late for the train and your hair trailed behind you in the wind as we ran. It was a bright hot, blinding hot, white-hot day. They don’t have days like that around here this time of year, but I remember it.

I feel like I’m going back where I always go. Maybe it’s the whiskey. I think it’s my heart. It’s this damn train, too though. The tracks go around a bend in the river and it reminds me of everything. The car leans in toward the water, negotiating the bend, gravity, and fluid connection of old times and good times in my mind. Do you remember the time I had dusty boots and you cleaned them off for me with a wet paper towel? I never told you how much that aroused me. Now it’s too late.

Take another drink. Everything’s changed. It’s not the same. I wish you were here now. It’s gotten so much better now, this life. I reach up and unlatch the little window above the window I look out of. Cool air floods my hot face. Now the sun is down and I can only barely make out the mountains across the way.

There was a time that my boys and I went off-road in that old red pickup truck I had back then. We drove up over the Tennessee Gas Pipeline and stopped at the top to smoke and look at the view. Those guys always smelled like coffee and wintergreen chewing tobacco. Early in the morning, before I’m all the way awake, wintergreen chewing tobacco makes me want to retch.

I think maybe you wouldn’t have taken that trip with me all those years ago if you’d have known how much better things would get for me. My face doesn’t show everywhere I’ve been since then. My face doesn’t show it, but if you looked at my shoes you could tell. Those old shoes, the sole is worn damn near clear through to the pavement.

I’ve been gone for so damn long I can’t even count the days. We roll through these little towns with little yellow lights falling on the railway platforms like wedding veils. Its dark out now and I stare out the window trying to remember the way things were. The harder I look out that damn dirty window, the more I just see my unshaven mug looking back at me with a surly glint in its’ eye.

It’s too bad you’re gone now because there’s plenty I would say to you if you were here beside me. If you were here at my side on the institutional blue pattern of Amtrak seat-cloth. . . I would tell you all the things that I never realized were true.

I could have sworn I’ve been on this train before.

Drink that whiskey dude, drink it right down. I guess the people around me can smell a whiff of that bourbon every so often. I don’t mind. It probably gives them nostalgic glimpses of a past they never lived. Now the orange lights along the bridges reflect orange smudges onto the flat surface of the river.

Are we ever going to get where were going? Those bridge lights, they’re beautiful.

The Rising Costs

What if the price of envelopes hit a new record high of $1.14 a box?

I mean, we live and die by our stationary around here.

What if we were forced to invade the bra company's office down on the 14th floor because they had huge envelope reserves?

Across the Pond

Our first day full of rain, sleet, and snow, was not very cold. Or at least even though the wind could bite at times, people filled the streets and rode bicycles. Europe affects me differently than Latin America. In Europe, I find a land that is different, but doesn’t feel foreign. The people look mostly how they look at home, here in Holland they all speak perfect English, and their senses of time and space are similar to ours in America. The European experience is a different one, to be sure, and in its private thoughts it has different dreams and those of the American experience. Nevertheless, Europe feels familiar to me like the smell of my grandparents’ house when I was little.

The city of Amsterdam seems water beaten. Wind whips up the canals as the sky changes. Big, severe, square windows plaintively look out from steep-roofed buildings onto cobblestone streets. One black building, doubtless many years old, twists perilously to the left; four floors of huge windows are flanked by huge white wooden shutters.

When I was a young child, I went to a Rudolph Steiner school from kindergarten through third grade. The schools followed a philosophy of education and childrearing that is connected with Anthroposophy. This philosophy comes from Germany or Holland. When I was in kindergarten my teacher was a severe old lady from the Black Forest. If I misbehaved, she would pull my ear.

Lots of the women riding bicycles around Amsterdam have an air that is similar to hers. This society runs as a much more precise symphony than the controlled confusion of the United States. This morning when we got off of the plane it was 530 in the morning. We went to a kiosk to try to buy a ticket on the metro to Amsterdam. My brother put his card in the machine and then punched in his pin three times. The card had come out before he even put his code in, but we had been up flying all night, I wasn’t paying attention, and he was tired. After his pin code was rejected, he thought his card was still inside the machine. He frantically pressed the clear button several times, turned around and said, “It ate my card.” Then he waited on line to talk to one of the train ticket people. They said a mechanic would be around on a couple of hours. They would – get this, here’s where the symphony comes in – write down his name, hold the card a couple of days and if he didn’t come, cut it in half.

They meant it – they were going to do it. You could never rely on that kind of service in that situation in New York City. Your card would just be disappeared and you’d need to call it in missing.

The train we finally bought tickets for arrived exactly on time. It was a double-decker train like the Los Angeles Metro-Link. The train in Amsterdam is yellow outside, and the seats were green. We sat on the green benches in the deserted train as a gray, rainy day dawned.

Part of my personal project for the trip was to use a Dictaphone to record important ideas. The idea was to try and preserve the spoken part of the moment in the same way that a camera preserves the visual. The recorded snippets are full of background noise that truly brings the listener into the scene. I’m not sure if it works, but without further ado. . .

Across the Pond
March 21, 2008 - 6:45 a.m. Amsterdam, Netherlands

The yellow train speeds through the rainy gray predawn. No sooner did we land at Shiphol International Airport, than Jeremy’s debit card is eaten by the automatic train ticket kiosk. The seats on the second floor of the train are made of green vinyl.



Jeremy feels violated that his credit card has been eaten by the machine. He suggests eggs and biscuits for breakfast.

At Barney’s breakfast bar groups of people stand in line when the doors open at 7 a.m. Many of them were on the same plane from New York. It is too early to check into hotels and hostels. The travelers look out into the street as they sip their coffee.

March 21, 2008 - 8:57 a.m. Amsterdam, Netherlands

As an American, the word “canal” brings to mind the Panama Canal – military exploitation.

March 21, 2008 - 5:44 p.m. Amsterdam, Netherlands

Korsowstraat, bathed in the light of the setting sun. Nippy cold air and reflective puddles of fresh rain.

March 22, 2008 - 8:53 p.m. The motorway outside of Halmstad, Sweden

Full moon. 1,000 kilometers from dawn till dusk across Scandinavia.

March 23, 2008 - 1:39 p.m. The motorway near Fredriksborg, Norway

Jeremy is getting frustrated because there is too much traffic. He doesn’t mind driving, but it is just a pain in the ass. The Norse drive some American cars. We pass a hummer on the highway.

March 23, 2008 - 8:09 p.m. Oslo, Norway

Es que. . . es que. . . no, its like this - I record myself with this thing.

March 23, 2008 - 10:03 p.m. Oslo, Norway

Waiting for the Metro in the snow, a black cat just crossed our path.

March 23, 2008 - 10:51 p.m. Oslo, Norway

Music and voices in the background. “Benjamin ski raced grand slalom and at Bousqet Ski Resort. I don’t know if you’ve heard of it – its kind of a big deal.”

Jeremy announces to the line of people waiting in the freezing cold to go into the club that he is patient and feels that he can find a small amount of solidarity within himself and a small amount of dignity standing in the cold as his “forefathers” did when they crossed the Atlantic coming to the new motherland to be.

March 24, 2008 - 12:11 a.m. Oslo, Norway

Transcript of a recorded conversation:
Girl: Hey there!
Ben: Jeremy is flirting with every girl in here.
Jeremy: Valentina. . . Lorena. . . Aguila . . .Solatita.

March 24, 2008 - 2:19 a.m. Oslo, Norway

Kebel punched some guy in the face and got punched in the face. His eye is swollen shut. Jeremy dislocated his shoulder while throwing a glass of beer at someone. Ben’s hat fell on the floor and was stepped on but then he get it back.

An Arab guy has beer spilled on him and is cursing in arabic.

Jeremy’s shoulder still hurts and he doesn’t want to spoon.

March 24, 2008 - 9:21 a.m. Oslo, Norway

We took a cab to the club last night, it was ten or fifteen minutes. It costed about $130.

March 25, 2008 - 6:16 p.m. Copenhagen, Denmark

“This Benjamin thing – its no so nice. And this Jeremiah? Ha! He gotta change this behavior. Benjamin is getting up now – I know he is going to be better, but I gotta work hard on this Jeremiah. This is Kebel here, from in front of the boats. CNN.”



March 26, 2008 - 8:48 a.m. Copenhagen, Denmark

“So we just getting up, and we getting stressed already. He gotta drive – I don’t know how long. The guy last night was an asshole. He’s trying to be American. He’s not. But yeah, its weird. Yeah, you know. Its me from – you know – CNN. . . in here - Copenhagen.” -- Kebel

March 26, 2008 - 9:15 p.m. Amsterdam, Netherlands

“Jeremy has a headache. He needs some Advil. We don’t have any Advil. He should have thought of it in the hotel. But he didn’t.”

March 27, 2008 - 3:45 a.m. Amsterdam, Netherlands

“Son las cuatro menos cuarto – I’ve been drinking. Benjamin just walked me to the hotel. That’s something I will never forget. Because you know – I felt like a girl. The second part of the movie – the punishment. It’s a free country, by the way.” -- Kebel