International
Intrigue (11/15/92)
Rome collapses
for me in a day. I am in the wrong place at the wrong time with the
wrong disposition. I see what I see and the writing on the wall
appears to me. It's telling me to get out of Rome, make an about face
to the train a return to from where I had come. The man dragging a
cig was obviously suspected of drugs. This was zero tolerance as I
had never seen. The two male police held the man while the woman
thrust her knee to his jewels. He doubles over in pain, his face is
twisted and they are barking orders to him sharply in verbose
Italian. The man is cuffed and they pummel him more. He is a public
spectacle and I am the horrified spectator. They are commissioned
gladiators, beating a man because he's broken the stiff Italian drug
laws. In the US possession of drugs is an offense, but distributing
them is much, much worse. In this case the mere whiff of a cigarette
draws attention to something a little foreign looking in its
substantiate nature. The man, besides, looks ill, pre-occupied, more
than a common Romanesque pedestrian should.
“The oblivious
doobie, or smack—lit up
like the dogs
wander a bit, pre-piss.
The blinding him
brought a knee to
the groin.”
__Journal
“Tripping '92”
We pull out of
the station. My defeat at the Colosseum is shuffled through the great
rectangular windows as speed mounts. Now I have a moment, a calm in
which to consider the assault I just witnessed, the brutality that
made me flee the scene like I was the next unsuspecting drug taker. I
am dark and might pass as an Italian. Again the walk trips me in my
tourist endeavors. The last thing I want is a night in an Italian
jail. The man's face sticks in my mind. It is tearful, it is
confessional, it is angered, it is assaulted, it is fearful. The
female cop's knee extending up to his jewel box plays over in my
mind. I want to get far from there and promise I will thank myself
later for leaving Rome.
Zurich was nice.
The Swiss seem to not make what everyone is up to a top priority. It
is happy, industrial, proactive. In Italy small clusters, covens of
cops amble the streets. They are light and cocky, cool in their
secure government jobs with he smart uniform. They play games.
They're sly boots and walk the market squares pretending to be
lassie-fare, pinning on white-washed mimes a lack for a reason to
care. I'm glad that they are there, overall. I did not trust that
they would not eye me with the same suspicion of the man with the
crushed jewels that a slow day gives. I don't get this read in Zurich
at all. I can glean a lot from spending some time in a city's train
station, the hauptbahnhoff. I can read a lot from a schedule.
“As the rope
drew tight his armband strapped its growth.
The needle
pushed in. As casual spoon-fed coke stayed on
rotted tables to
snort, the heroine of Zurich clawed at her
face pleading to
trace a fix about to explode.”
__from journal
“Tripping '92”
I find myself in
Needle park as I walk along the Zürichsee.
Lake Zurich offers recreation other than shooting up, but I am
mesmerized, curious, with a suburban innocence. I have never
witnessed heroin being shot up, never observed the human rawness of
the urgent end of a fix. I needed once to see the practiced
connection, the euphoric reflection when veins surge and then are
quickly tied to constrict. I wonder about the fate of these teens in
Platzspitz Park, their success in willing it to be known as a drug
taking haven.
At 22 year of
age I have a few bong hits in college on my natural soft drug
prove-that-I'm-not-a-tight-ass resume. Anything harder is dangerous,
expensive, and I certainly don't need that monkey on my back.
Ironically, I am living in a small efficiency apartment in a
so-called, tempting, paradoxical “drug free zone” in downtown
Minneapolis. Weed is sold on the streets, although it is stuff I
would not smoke with a ten foot bong. Crack houses (“A Gentler
Place” from my collection Finding me—and Them: Stories of
Assimilation) stand, stately, deceptively dilapidated in their
manner. They are the next stop as the junkie flys by my kitchen
window, following red blinking taillights like they're profitable
fire-flies. So I do have drugs accessible to me. I never see heroin
but don't doubt that it's being shot in some vein. I decide not to
fall into that culture and, aside from a pesky chewing tobacco habit
I picked up on a backpacking trip, I have few monkeys. As reads in “A
Gentler Place” I question the decisions that a junkie I meet makes
in spite of what he can do that I cannot.
Tripping
continues. I follow my bread crumbs back to the train station. Safe
in the car, the bar section for weary and thirsty travelers, I slowly
nurse a 12 ounce bottle of Hürlimann
Gold. I begin to watch it foam in the bottle from the train. Its side
to side motion rocks me to a high. I appreciate my more or less
affection for beer and think how that may blur my interest, my ever
having any conceivable desire to try harder stuff, to wind up with
that zombie-like deadness of dependence I had just seen. A small man
in a conductor's hat with a light blue shirt slides the door open.
“Passport
please,” he says in a vaguely French sounding accent.
We
are crossing the border into France. The accent will grow. I can
measure our depth into a country by the strength and acuity of the
accent. Dijon sounds nice, strong enough, but weak enough to pass
without knowing the language, maybe not experience the full wrath of
France-rude rumored to exist. Not my experience at all. I find people
to be nice, much nicer than the Munichers or what I saw in Rome.
Rain falls lightly on the rivers' convergence, the Suzon and the
Ouche. Dijon lies on a plain along the eastern border of France. I
watch people fan their umbrellas, offering me a seat as I am allowed
to unburden myself again. I smile and they forgive my English.
Sinking back in my chair I re-assess my trip. Right there, at a
French cafe in the presence of blue collar Frenchmen on lunch-breaks,
I pigeonhole my tripping.
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