one shot. they had to stay still. they needed to put braces on people’s necks so they wouldn’t move
—what a nightmare
—now, what I want from you is to stay very still and not move at all . . . just for fifteen seconds
—like this?
—yep. i’m taking this picture at a very low speed
—why?
—because i believe that the longer i keep the shutter open the more life gets captured on the negative
*
I cannot stay in the motel, of course. FOX News and Channel 10 trucks are parked next to my car. Reporters, photographers and camera crews are walking around. A helicopter is hovering above, it’s a total circus. I take my stuff from the room, stop at the reception desk, but, guess what, I don’t need to pay anything.
I find another motel, throw myself across the bed, and fall asleep immediately. I have a dream that I’m in my grandparents’ old house in their village. It’s winter. I press my forehead to the frozen window and look at the snow-covered backyard. Suddenly, in the distance, I see an animal running toward me at great speed—as only happens in dreams or films. The next thing I see on the other side of the glass is the enormous, toothy head of a gruesome wolf. I pull away from the window, but I just can’t stop looking at him. I wake up. I don’t know where I am. Evening is nearing and I’ve slept through yet another sunset. I close my eyes and let my head fall back on the pillow.
*
As time passed, I became more and more depressed by my own inability to master the guitar. I found a teacher and started taking classical guitar lessons and spent countless hours practicing—technique, arpeggios, arpeggios, arpeggios. I wanted to play like Steve Vai, but everything I tried sounded like the Sex Pistols. Sometimes, at night, I dreamed that I could play like a virtuoso. My fingers obeyed me. They moved wonderfully, joyfully fast. In my dreams, I extracted each note with no effort whatsoever, as if I didn’t play the instrument but rather thought with it. There were no secrets for me. I wanted to share all this with Stella and the world. I would be awakened in the middle of the night by difficult, gorgeous symphonies echoing down through the nothingness. I would desperately chase them, trying to grasp at least a few chords with which to put together a song. The results were murky reflections of the real music which flowed through me and which I was incapable of capturing.
We were still poor, but managed to keep our heads above water. We were together all the time—not just hugging, but clenched to one another. We were both excellent students, even though we never studied too hard. We received scholarships and lived in a cheap, small loft from which we could see the red roofs and beautiful sunsets. I started taking pictures and writing short articles for the local paper to make money. I had a Russian camera and a Bulgarian typewriter. The most expensive thing I owned, though, was the Stratocaster. My calling, my gift—I had fooled myself into believing then—was music. Stella never seemed to question her true calling—she just kept on painting. In the uninhabited space adjacent to our loft, she made an improvised studio under the eaves where she started experimenting. Since we didn’t have any money for art supplies, she painted with anything she had at hand on anything she could find—oils on bed sheets, industrial paint on cardboard, house paint on sheet metal.
I wonder where all those paintings are now?
*
It’s cool outside. I find a coffee shop. I order espresso. I sip it as I write some random thoughts in one of the notebooks. Why do I write them down? For whom? Another diary by someone who didn’t need a diary until recently? Aren’t there enough losers in the world already?
I ask the girl behind the register where the cool places are for Friday nights around here. I don’t learn much besides that it’s cool everywhere Friday night. Life begins Friday night. America lives for Friday night! TGIF, America!
It’s still before eight. I leave the coffee shop. I find the closest movie theater. The movies playing this summer are mostly stupid sequels of stupid movies that were playing the summer before. I debate for a while before stopping on a flick starring Jack Nicholson. Stella finds him repulsive as both a man and an actor.
I get out of the movie theater around ten. The film wasn’t bad, not at all. Only Jack Nicholson . . . Isn’t there anybody to tell him that those days are long gone and acting with your eyebrows isn’t funny anymore?
I decide to walk until I reach the ocean and, after that, I haven’t really decided what to do.
The bars start filling up. The night gets cooler with every block. Music sounds from the open restaurants and bars. The ocean is near. I can feel its chill. I can hear it. Here it is.
There are moments when you expect the answer to come precisely from there, from that endless dark mass they say we all crawled out of. I walk through the sand until I reach the water. That’s it. This is where the west ends. And here I am at its very edge. Here I am—at the brink of Western civilization, whose sunset I slept through today.
So what’s beyond this? The East?
I take off my shoes and let the ocean, calm as a cat, lick my bare feet. The foam wraps around them. I close my eyes and inhale—the ocean’s scent now reminds me of blossoming linden and smashed watermelon.
Pacific Ocean, what am I doing here in your calm caress while the Black Sea thumps inside my head?
There is a lifeguard tower further down the beach, and I see a few figures dragging wood and trying to start a fire. From time to time one of them cups her hand around her mouth and yells toward the closest pub: “Bobby-y-y-y-y-y-y-y, you asshole! We’re out here-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e!”
*
Things with the band started stalling. We weren’t going anywhere. I dreamed of arenas, but we were playing small bars instead. I wanted best-selling albums, but the boys were happy if the local radio played a song or two of ours. I wrote scripts for our music videos with helicopters and car chases, but I didn’t have the money to buy decent guitar picks. I was so naïve. Stella accepted all this with an unfathomable understanding. She did not judge me. And I looked at life as if somebody somewhere had promised me something. I am asking myself now whether my craziness was contagious, or perhaps the daydreaming of those first years of freedom from the communists had pervaded everyone’s minds, even the most skeptical of us.
Or perhaps youth made things seem so inexplicably possible?
*
I shake the sand off my feet, put on my shoes, and head back to the nightclubs and Friday mood. There’s a long line in front of every place. It makes no difference to me which one I choose. I pause in front of one that is almost right on the sidewalk. Only a tall plexiglass wall divides the table-filled yard and the street.
I can see everything happening inside. Gestures, waitresses, customers, Bacardi, Jack Daniels, bartenders, TV screens, American beer ads . . . I get in line. Behind the glass are the pink tank tops, the bare midriffs, the lower-back tattoos, the ubiquitous California flip-flops, the silicone breasts, the chewing gum, the laughs, the bleached teeth, the artificial tans, the searching eyes.
Soon the line behind me gets longer. Across the street, one idiot gives another a piggyback ride. Both of them fall and start rolling on the ground. The line laughs. A Jeep Wrangler drives by and the three blonde girls in the back laugh and flash the crowd. Large breasts gleam and disappear
