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06/20/01
-----Original Message----- I told them of the American Art show I had seen at the Galerie Rudolfinium earlier that day. I love Jenny Holzer. She makes words so shiny. And then the Mike Kelly stuff was great, too. Have you ever seen him? He does, amongst other things, these fucked up videos of people wearing ugly plastic masks, dressed as old Germans or Swedes (at least thatıs what they look like to me), desecrating various detached plastic body parts. Todayıs feature included an old man and a severe-looking Heidi type shoving brown liquids and sausages through a plastic anus, even going so far as to stretch it with their fingertips and then trim the plastic anus when the larger sausage wouldnıt fit. The Danes found this tale amusing. I just kept thinking of them as Danishes, light and buttery and creamy. One of them (Iım too tired to remember names right now, sorry) was studying English and reading On The Road, on the road as it were, and the other was an aspiring poet who had just bought some land outside of Copenhagen. They both loved indie rock and Paul Auster, so we talked enthusiastically of Moon Palace. They made me write down names of other Paul Auster novels they wanted me to read. I think maybe I would like to meet Paul Auster someday. He seems to be doing something right. Their good humor really cheered me up, and I gave them a full-fledged red, white, and blue New York, USA performance as a reward. By the time I was tap-dancing for them in the Praha train station a half hour before our train arrived, we all knew we were in love. Alas, they had made reservations in the sleeper car for the trip, and I just in a seat, so I was separated from them during the trip. I ended up having my very own cabin for approximately a half hour, before the party was crashed by two young Mexican women. We all slept silently after the initial tumult of backpacks, and adjustments, and I even had an entire side of the cabin to myself. The two of them slept intertwined, one head on either end of the seat, their legs gracefully crossed like scissors. They clutched each other so tightly, I wondered, Are they lovers? Sisters? Best friends since childhood? Later an elderly Romanian woman joined us, and there was no more fun. She sat silently, occasionally trying to engage us in conversation, but there was no luck. We speak English, said one of the girls. English. And Spanish. No your language. No you. They returned to sleep, again, peaceful, with their limbs locked. I studied them sometimes, and snuck glances at the Romanian woman. She wore white slippers, and black pantyhose. Her leg hair was thick under the pantyhose. She had a black floral scarf wrapped around her head, a tan, tweedy skirt, and a purple sweater made of cheap, staticky material. Her hands were huge—man hands. She weighed maybe two-fifty, and looked eerily like Larry King. In fact, I had to wonder, is Larry King secretly an old Romanian woman? (Iım willing to open that topic up for discussion at a later date.) Anyway, we all traveled along in slumber and silence until we hit the Slovakia border. Passport control officers entered the train, and immediately started busting the chops of everyone in our cabin. The Romanian woman shouldnıt be on that train, The one Mexican girl with the Mexican passport (the other girl had a US passport, it turned out)—what was she doing there? She had no visa, they barked, in their deep, guttural voices. It was chaos for about fifteen minutes, and the end result was that the Romanian woman was allowed to stay, but the Mexican girl had to go, her friend following, of course. I looked out the window, and watched them walk away, trudging with their backpacks, accompanied by one of the surly officers. The Romanian looked at me, pointed at me, and said, American. Tu Numero Uno. And then she stuck her thumb up in the air. I shifted to the other side of the cabin, and a new seating configuration was born. The Romanian continued not to talk for the next five hours, except at the very end, when she tried to carry my bag off the train for me to show me how much she liked Americans.
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