whitelennykravitz-blog

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

Fearlessness can come in a few different flavors. Or I assume it does. I know of 2 kinds, and it seems like these are a more general set of categories that people with more refined palettes can split into an entire array of delicious fearlessness.

The two I know of:

There’s a type of fearlessness that comes from mastery of Self:  where a person through intense introspection becomes aware of their base intentions, desires, and needs. Then there is a fearlessness that comes from compartmentalization. A person that chops off parts of themselves to an emotionless pit in order to try and ignore and minimize the impact of those parts of Self on their current state of being.

I guess the typical response to this is that one is more healthy than the other. Which I suppose is true from some view, where the world can spread out before one in all of its permutations. But as far as practicality goes, I think a fearlessness that is some parts of A mixed with some parts of B is as good as any.

The first time I almost got in a threesome with a woman I actually loved, versus just some random people, happened a few years ago. She was fearless. A woman of small stature, that I can easily image stomping towards castle gates, fist raised. I don’t know why I place her in this kingdom like setting, as I’m not so much into the imagery of fantasy, but there you have it. She seemed singular in her expression, which is different than saying she lacked depth and dimensionality. It was more that this expression of Self was driven with eyes glued to the horizon; a car merging into traffic with zero acknowledgment of other drivers. Sure, there were accidents, but she never dropped below the speed limit.

We had been seeing each other in some sense, but we were keeping our relationship below the radar. The setting we were in at the time was caddy and full of people snickering and whispering in corners. Neither of us cared so much about being the subject of these side room conversations, but it wasn’t our aim to hand ourselves over eagerly to them. No public sex or other, less intense, forms of PDA.

No hand holding.

The thing was there was a second woman in this mix of people that I had a crush on. Let’s call her Susan. And let’s call the woman I was seeing Eve.

One night there was a party and Eve didn't really want to dance with me (keeping with our Not So Much Interaction Around Others ) and I ended up dancing with Susan. We’re having a good time, spinning around the floor, having drinks and doing a bunch of MDMA. There’s a point when I look over to Eve and she’s looking at me with a very emotionless face. This is in retrospect that I pull this detail into clarity, so there’s a chance that this didn’t ever really happen.

Fast forward and Eve and I are going up to my studio and I invite Susana and a friend of hers as well. Things are a bit confusing upstairs. There’s an electrician for the building there too, and I’m grinding up lines of MDMA on the hallway floor while I’m laying on my stomach and he’s giving me what can only be called a Creepy Massage. I'm sniffing lines and I can hear him in a thick accent talking, I think, about Rakhi. I can see through the door to my studio and Eve and Susan are laying on a mattress on my floor looking at things on a computer.

My Creepy Massage ends and I’m suddenly in bed with Eve and Susan. The mattress is actually inside a whole tent of plastic sheeting, with fans around the outside so that we seem to be inside of a tumbling shopping bag: we’re drifting in a shopping bag sea with the computer screen lighting things up like Christmas day snowfall. I look for a moment to something in my mind and when I come back, Eve is close to Susana and kissing her gently. Or so I think (the next day she says she doesn’t remember this… or says she doesn’t.) They separate and Eve looks around at me and then lays back and just starts looking for music online. There was this brief moment where maybe I could have been part of something, or so I thought at the time. But now I think it was more of a Fuck You from Eve. Although she doesn’t know it was a fuck you. Here’s my theory:

There were conversations in the past about people Eve and I found attractive and if we were going to see other people. The whole point was that we should just speak up and be honest if someone came along that also interested one of us. But for me, I really wanted to just have Eve, or maybe, if I’m more honest and less dopey romantic, I wanted her to just want me. And I tried to show that through an insistence, through some words, but mostly actions, that she was all there was. But my mind did wander as it has always tended to do and I think that night she was saying to me,���you should say how you feel and make it open”.

And so this failed threesome, really made me think more about my own honesty. And it made me think about Eve and her fearlessness because she wanted to break herself open. She wanted to push herself to a point of destruction. And that’s something I’ve always admired. Because a lot of people don’t even know the direction for their destruction: the way to their most sensitive and vulnerable parts. Which is a crazy thing about people, because we’re usually standing about 2 steps from an edge of an emotional cliff, but we spend years never knowing, a couple missteps from plummeting to some depths below. But for those fearless ones, driving down into their vulnerable parts with the emergency brake line cut and the gas pedal pressed to the floor; they forget to notice all their other directions of destruction and compartmentalize themselves down this one set of roads they’ve taken. They forget that their dimensionality is endless, in a certain sense, and their vulnerabilities are still there, even if those vulnerabilities are maybe less than what they once were.

I should also note that after that kiss (that did or did not happen) there was that thing that people do together when they get on YouTube and start going around showing videos/songs to each other. This is my nightmare scenario. I know no hidden gems on YouTube. And there is alway that person who pulls out the perfect hidden B-side for the Indie, SciFi, Romantic Comedy (pick the genre that is your life) for your life. I end up playing some fucking song that people audibly moan when hearing.

Oh. And another thing about Those Days With Eve. I stopped our relationship for awhile because I knew that I’d be emotionally damaged when she inevitably broke up with me. So I told her that I needed to end the romantic piece of things because I cared more about her than she did for me. But as things happen, sex drew me back into things.

We were at a market where we liked to have lunch, drinking some Aperol spritzes, and she was curled into my side like some animal that somehow emitted an energy that made one aware that it had an immense amount of knowledge on how to give good blowjobs. You know… that animal.

A few minutes later we were jumping into a van and driving down some service road near the restaurant. I climbed into the middle bench seat and she pulled my pants down just past mid-thigh and dropped her pants to the same distance on her thighs. She sat down on me, with both of us facing the same direction. It was like our genitals were prisoners whispering through their doors’ food slots.

I came inside her. When she lifted her hips up, on my t-shirt, where it had been wedged between her ass and the top of my cock, she had left a perfectly circular poop stamp of her asshole. I laughed and she looked at it and shrugged as if to say, “it seemed inevitable.”

As a moment, I think this defined that time of our relationship quite well.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

Sally

(between fluorescents there is light worth waiting for)

When I walked into University of Washington’s NICU, the first thing I noticed is how hard it is to navigate the hallways. The impression given by the orientation of intersecting passageways is that a design process was undertaken where a lost game of Jenga was translated into a floorplan. Directly. No need for anything to really line up, just let hallways gallop into each other willy-nilly with little regard for the experience of using the hallway for their designated purpose: easily moving from point A to point B. Like most places containing a large number of children, you can’t just walk in unannounced. There is a sign-in process, involving a clipboard full of a questions and a person behind thick plexiglass watching as you write down your responses. One of these questions is “Are you sick or experiencing flu/cold symptoms?”. I assume that with an entire floor full of tiny humans with virtually no immune systems, that this is an important question to get right. I also stand thinking about how I am someone that does not think twice about biting his nails after touching something on public transportation. I check “no”, but feel a bit doubtful. I pass the clipboard to the attendee (through something that you find in an old bank, or a Baltimore Taco Bell, which also uses the same plexiglass/slot system for interacting with the outside world) and she glances over my answers, looks satisfied, and buzzes me in.

As we approach my friend’s son’s room, the first thing I notice is my friend and a nurse looking casually over various panels that are emitting waves of light and sound that are assaulting me with the knowledge that something horrible is happening.

Buzzing. Red flashing. Technology designed to easily and with completeness express panic.

You quickly learn that in NICUs there are always sirens and lights, because the human body is a complex thing and isn’t meant to be shot out into the world months before the world was expecting it. The World, however, as we all know, is a bus driver with a casual time table who isn’t concerned with our events lining up with what we perceive to be The Schedule.

There are taps on screens and the slot machine of medical ills silences itself. Sally, the nurse, turns to me and over her left shoulder, in a space-aged plastic home, sprouting wires from all over his body, lays a baby the size of two fists; my friend’s son. Sally is beautiful. The overhead florescent lights, usually devices that make skin slump against ones bones, is illuminating a stage between us. This little moment, where I suddenly feel guilty because I know my attention in this place has forever become split between The Son and Sally. Her face is made of crisp lines shared by import cars and lingerie, and she boils with dissatisfaction, hopefulness, world-weariness, and innocence. Her affect is of someone who has, with extreme diligence, molded themselves to be something very particular with little regard for what lays outside of this mold. Oil and water lay in the makings of her foundation. But her physical self is sensual and smooth; water bending over warm summer stones.

She excuses herself after a brief introduction to grab something from another room. I won’t see her for four months.

Lindsay

(cats, cocaine, and bourbon)

I arrive at Lindsay’s house a little after 3pm on a Saturday. It’s sunny out: clear sky caught up in a snow globe of perfect blue. She’s standing on her deck when the cab pulls up, here eyelashes flung wide and hands fidgeting with each other. She told me that she can make really good old fashions (“I’m a mixologist… it always bothers me when people call me a bartender”), so here we are at her house to sit in the sun and drink some afternoon cocktails. When I walk up to her there is a bubbling to the way she strides towards me and wraps me up in arms and somehow legs too (or maybe I’m just imaging that?). A bottle of Bulleit is on the counter, as is an orange, some maple syrup, two glasses, a knife, and what appears to be about 10 grams of cocaine. I look between all these items and have a strong sensation that one is not like the others. She is laughing and skipping/hopping around the kitchen, “I can’t BELIEVE how beautiful it is out. Can you believe?! Look at that sky!”. She is pointing to a somewhat shuttered window which reveals a partial view of a fern or some generic shrub. “It’s just one of those Saturdays where all you can think about is how great some bourbon and cocaine sounds. Am I right?! I mean really! Where is the ice?! Did you get ice? I didn’t tell you to bring ice, did I?”. She is spinning between freezer, orange and cups, and I can see in her eyes what looks like a looping dialogue of the words “yes. yes. no. yes. yes. no.”. She decides we need to go grab ice from a mini-mart over on Hastings, which is just two blocks from her place. Hastings is a street in Vancouver that affords you ample access to needle exchanges, black-eyed prostitutes, and junkies wrapped in a miraculous amount of winter wear even during the height of summer. We exit her building and walk up to the street. As we come to street level we are greeted by a woman waving what appears to be a collapsable telescope, shouting at a coyote halfway down the block who is contently eating a pigeon. The telescope is gold and slightly cartoonish, belonging to a Saturday morning program that maybe deals with pirates and some sort of flying horses that shoot rainbows from their heads. I look at Lindsay with eyebrows raised and she replies “I don’t know who she is. I think she lives at the place down at the end of the block. Fucking Hastings”. It is, of course, the coyote that I am somewhat perplexed by, and it is only later in the weekend, from a waitress, that I learn coyotes are a somewhat common appearance in Vancouver. The scene of the coyote in retrospect seems like a metaphor for the day that was to come, or at least some sort of sign, but I still don’t really know how to put this feeling into words. I’m pretty sure the pigeon somehow represents true love.

Ice is bought with little fanfair, and we are soon back at her place, where two glasses have had an orange slice placed in their bottom and covered in ice. She cuts up 4 thick lines of cocaine and quickly takes care of two. (I am mentally writing down the steps to Lindsay’s Perfect Old Fashion: 1. Buy Bourbon, oranges, maple syrup, and ice. 2. Place drink ingredients to the side in order to make room for an appetizer of cocaine.) Using a spoon, Lindsay is trying to muddle the orange peal, but in her vigor, ice cubes are flying out across the kitchen; she is a human blender with no top. A cat that I previously had not noticed is darting madly about batting the ice cubes. It is unclear if she or the cat is twitching more. It’s name is Smokers and later that night it will bite Lindsay on the ass as we sit on the kitchen floor in our underwear talking about different scenarios where Lindsay overcame adversity.

The drinks do finally come together, guided by an unceasing line of dialogue from Lindsay. She has covered topics as broad as favorite sexual positions to Canadian’s outlooks on US politics. The drinks are delicious. She smiles at me, does a line, “Saturday’s are the best”.

I look into the living room and Smokers is asleep wrapped up inside the pot of a houseplant, covered in potting soil.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

I guess Warsaw now has very high contrast memories for me. I’ve been there twice: once on a fickle weekend for sex, and now on a weekend that was dense with my life. This second time was a Friday through Tuesday that included everything: laughter, crying, broken teeth, and mental spaces that both seemed insignificant and insurmountably oppressive.

I’ve been seeing Katarzyna for about a year. Or I guess we met about a year ago, when I walked into the building that housed my new studio, and saw her alit on a balcony wearing a kimono. I say “alit”, because she seemed to be drifting around the concrete railings after having just landed from above, with ivy around her that clung with an air of casualness to walls that showed no signs of hand holds.

She introduced herself a few minutes later and I was smitten. Her face beautiful and turned towards mine, and eyes that held vast confidence that clearly masked severe self-doubt. Eyes like mine. I think that’s why we got along so well. And the sex. Which was amazing. Although, we had the worst first sex I’ve ever had in my life. About halfway through there was a moment where we both looked at each other and the unspoken was almost deafening as it reverberated around awkwardly entangled limbs, “Do we really want to keep doing this?” I would have never thought that sex so clumsy and awful could ever become what it did. Insatiable. Our sex life was the Brussels sprout of my sex life: intolerable at first, and now craved and lusted for.

She was not so keen on me at the start of things. In fact I think she didn’t like me. But something of me found hooks in her, and vice-versa, and a year of fucking in clubs, lead to long distant telephone calls across the world, to us finally landing in the same area of the world once again, where I decided I wanted to break up. It’s hard to tell if it was a flare up of the crushing depression I suffer from that is what caused me to pull the trigger, or the fact that two artists hanging out is basically a pingpong match of people starting sentences with “I”. All those “I”s and distance and it became a practice of spending time with someone while somehow still being completely alone. Either way, distance and the sensation that I was screaming behind my face made me call it quits.

I initially did this over Skype. Never break up with people on Skype, especially if they are prone to large swings of emotion. I now know this after a 4 hour session of being yelled at, being called a coward, and then being told how much I was loved.  This all ended with us planning on meeting in Warsaw to talk about things face-to-face. I know that doesn’t logically follow, but suspend disbelief in the details of this story.

We decided to put off Our Talk until Sunday, giving us 2 days of pretending like we were a real couple. We saw friends, went to exhibitions, fucked like we were trying to redecorate rooms through kinetic energy. I don’t think I’ve ever navigated the texture of so many surfaces with my balls before. This was due to a stage of the fucking that meandered through a foyer and kitchen, where different ledges and surfaces (each adorned with it’s own selection of free range objects, knobs, and finishes) meant a new terrain for my balls to high five like a drunk frat boy at homecoming. Oven knobs, keys, and a steak knife, I believe, were all involved at one point.

We spent some time with her friends: artists she knew and an ex-boyfriend. The ex, had always treated me sort of like shit telling me that weekend, in condescending tones, how to pronounce Katarzyna’s name correctly while we bought beer in a convenience store. Or maybe it wasn’t condescension, but just the protection of someone who knew I was a day or two away from really hurting her. It’s hard to tell. The first time I met him he walked into the room briskly and declared “tell me something about you.” Which is a dismissive and affronting command that I tried to laugh off, as I thought about the ways gorillas establish dominance. I also thought about how I really didn’t have anything to say about myself, but the first thing that came to mind was to tell him the last thing I had had to eat. After this first meeting, Katarzyna agreed something strange had happened. Feelings that still dwelled? Anger over their breakup?

Katarzyna loved to talk about how beautiful she was and I could see how certain men looked at her. When I look back at the group of characters that I was flung through, I’m trying to guess which one she’ll fuck now. I guess that’s pretty stupid and shallow, but it’s the truth. My money is on Dawid, a photographer/PhD in art, who clearly likes Katarzyna, and who she clearly likes the attention from. Maybe he’s the one.

We also had a dinner with her brother who I had never met before. His boyfriend and he met us at an Italian restaurant where I watched the dynamics of sibling order take over, as Katarzyna turned into a younger sister, with simplified vocabulary and school girl antics. I think the love between siblings has the potential to bring out their deepest insecurities. Maybe it’s because they can’t let their ego swell up in the face of someone that knows them so well.

The breakup talks started the next morning, Sunday, around 1pm after a night in a shitty club, doing some shitty drugs, and having some rough sex that ended up with Katarzyna chipping two teeth. She was into getting slapped and thrown around during sex, but with the teeth grinding invoked by this particular drug, one slap ended with a chipped bottom and top tooth. This now gives us one more thing in common, besides our narcissism and being lovers, as both of my front teeth are chipped due to a night that involved acid, cocaine, a flaccid penis, and a woman intent on fixing this with an extremely eager blowjob (which I could only look down at both with fright and awe while I bit down so hard, that I broke my teeth. This woman, Cleo, was actually someone that I dated after a particularly long relationship, and on this teeth breaking night I had randomly ran into her at a bar and somehow ended up walking back to her place as I explained, “I’m pretty fucked up and definitely can’t get hard.” And she nodded with a sly smile like she knew something I didn’t. But she didn’t know such things. It was like a mall cop standing outside an English football stadium in the throws of a riot and saying, “Don’t worry, I got this.” before bolting into an entrance with too much enthusiasm.)

It’s an interesting connection to notice, because Cleo was the first person to get me into rough sex. Ropes, gags, and pushing the limits of physicality. We met when I didn’t have a room of my own — I was floating around Seattle — and I asked to use my friend Jon’s room for a date night with her. After being tied spread eagle onto his bed, fucked, and hit with a belt, we took a break for drinks, only to have Jon and his girlfriend return to his room. I guess a pro tip here is: don’t leave a bunch of ropes tied to the bed of your friend, with a random belt and a heap of condoms presented almost like gifts at the foot of his bed, when this friend has a very jealous girlfriend. This girlfriend will never talk to you again.

But Katarzyna and I took all that to a whole new level. It’s not a place to unpack here, but she made me reframe what a physical relationship is: the celebration of the independence of two bodies that choose to spend a moment of time together.

Anyway.

The thing about breakups is that both people want to be understood. To be heard, and acknowledged. The problem always is that if you both understood each other perfectly there probably wouldn’t be an issue in the first place; the issue would have been fixed. So the Long Tail of relationships can happen where you mix arguments with breakup sex over and over in the hope of baking the perfect We Both Understand cookie. This cookie doesn’t exist.

An extra piece to the whole thing was that on Sunday around 2 or 3 hours into talking/yelling, Katarzyna’s mom called to say her grandpa had died. This wasn’t out of left-field, he had stopped eating and drinking fluids a week before, but the timing was somewhat absurd. Over drinks the following day Katarzyna jokingly retold the story of our breakup, as if talking to friends, saying “and then my mom called to say my grandpa had died, and he thought, ‘nah, I’ll still break up with her.’” There’s a lot I want to say about her grandfather. But there are only a few snippets that popped into my head when I heard he had passed: he was in the war, his wife was mean to him, he had seen too much. My sister remembered that he had an apartment that looked exactly the same since he moved into it after the war. It was like going back in time. I didn’t remember this, which made me feel very bad.

There was a lot of crying that weekend. From both of us. At a certain point I broke down and wailed like an animal. Katarzyna drew me a bath and lead me to it as I seemed to be overplaying the part of a lobotomized patient. There was a point right before where I thought, “this looks good if I seem to feel this bad.”, but then I realized I actually felt that bad; playing crazy and then realizing no game is actually happening. 

She soaked a scarf in the hot water and draped it on my head. Splashed water on my shoulders and back. She couldn’t help but flick my cock once. That’s one thing: she creeped on my body hard, all the time, and it was the sweetest thing. The next day I was able to return the ritual to her, making her a bath and caressing her as she wept and took deep breaths.

I think she performed the ritual better: my approach felt a bit like applying sunscreen to someones face using only the backs of my hands.

Such strong emotional engagements in bed made for some interesting conflicts between body and mind. Katarzyna would scream or cry, but this look would creep in her eye, and she would excuse herself in an emotional explosion, getting out of bed by pushing off of me, her hand placed fully on my chest, or resting precariously close to my cock. It was like subway creepers “accidently” brushing against strangers. Similarly, I would be talking and holding her, and suddenly be completely hard. We were in middle school, slow dancing; a lot going on with maybe only a 30% conscious understanding of what was happening.

I think as I get older and look at what I have failed to accomplish, it can be hard to hang out with younger people making something of their lives. The whole breakup conversation was made worse by it being lead by a young woman driven and dedicated to a certain path. If I had been coming to awareness of my poor basketball skills while talking to Lebron James, the sensation would be similar.

I cried, and laughed, and fucked, while thinking, “that could be me!” Which is actually a funny sentiment to have with her as the previous year she had thrown me a surprise party where everyone was wearing masks of my face, which I then asked if she could wear during sex. We cut a hole in the mouth and I watched my unblinking face as I blew myself. It felt a little like getting a blowjob from a character in Goldeneye. After I gave myself a facial, she put on one of my sweaters and jumped eagerly onto all fours on my bed, looking over her shoulder. My face peeking over the shoulder of a beautiful young woman’s body, which made me see my normal face as one begging for sex as I tried to put everything together in my head. I couldn’t finish fucking doggy style. It felt like a bit much.

Anyway, I had technically been her at one point in my life. And fucked myself. Which seems very similar to the current situation.

On Monday we woke up late and I think I ate the best pussy of my life. Katarzyna’s entire body became paralyzed and she retreated to a ball and started crying. She was terrified at not being able to move and described something that, to me, sounded like her pussy throwing up all over her body. I’m sure the intense emotional context had a lot to do with it, but I’m going to go ahead and give myself a gold star anyways.

We went out for one last date together. We drank Prossecco and got a seafood platter that reminded me of how I hated seafood platters. It’s a lot of work spread across suspicious flavors; all Mike and Ikes mixed with black licorice that is too salty. But the point is they’re fancy and it seemed like a thing people get on a first date, which maybe are also the perfect things to get on the last date.

I left early the next morning. We lay in bed those final moments and I told her I loved her.  It felt a little like saying hello to say goodbye; Hawaiian customs adapted to a failed relationship. She stood in the apartment’s entry in a kumano. Her body a stripe down the open front. Light switches and door bells seemed to hover around the walls. But the door wasn't a good place to say goodbye, because half of my mind was on the elevator arriving. It did. I entered, and it closed around her body, the building swallowing her up.

I’m still trying really hard to remember exactly the look in her eye. Probably over the years it will be many things.

I turned to look at the mirror in the elevator and my hair looked like shit — I looked like shit — and I thought about how this is exactly as she would remember me.

I thought about two nights before as we both entered the elevator and immediately did the preening checks that most are wont to do in elevator mirrors: the subtle turns of the face and drawing of facial muscles, as we quickly scan the imperfections that we are trying to hide.

I can see her pretty clearly in the mirror at that moment, as stacked layers of a woman seen on a balcony, in a doorway, and through some things in-between that seem hard to put my finger on.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

I think a good metric for the quality of a city is if there is an equally good chance, while drinking a morning coffee, of seeing a tank drive by or seeing a dead cat. Chongqing, China is this city. It was also a city that brought a lot of firsts: On the sports front, the first time playing basketball next to dancing formations of military men and women. On the culinary front, the first time eating a pig’s brain. On the drug front, the first time smoking meth.

I should point out that I flew into Chongqing in a haze of a drug hangover and a bit of wonder at the events that led me to be on that plane in the first place. It all hinged on Rona. I had met Rona in Prague the year before and over the course of 3 days (spread out over two periods when we overlapped in the city… and these aren’t “full” days, as in I didn’t spend 72 hours with her, maybe 35 hours, tops. And a lot of that was on a rickety boat in the Vltava river dancing in what I assume was vomit) we decided that I should come to Chongqing in order to pursue a group show with her. After some emailing to institutions over there, everything was set to go.

I departed Berlin for Chongqing and my timeline with her wasn’t really on my mind, yet, as I was exiting the security checkpoint in Tegel desperately looking for a Club Mate to drink before boarding my flight to China. I was parched and the long lines and xray machine (they just seem dry, don’t they? Cooking everything just a little bit) had left me needing both bubbles and caffeine. I entered an airport market and on opening my coin purse to pay for my drink, noticed that I had mindlessly wandered through the airport with a half gram of cocaine and 3 tabs of acid.

I’d like to say this is the first time I’ve done this, but it is, in fact, the third. The other two times were both on flights taken from Seattle to LA. The first of those LA trips occurred when I casually threw a bag of drugs (mushrooms and MDMA), that a group of friends and I were planning to take over the weekend, into my carry on bag the night before my flight, and then promptly forgot about them. This meant I walked through the airport with a carryon whose first item on opening was a ziplock bag full of drugs, conveniently on top of both my toiletry bag and laptop, both of which I forgot to remove from my bag. How this didn’t end poorly, I’m still unclear on. I think maybe it’s like dazzle camouflage in World War 1: it was let through because it was all just a bit too much.

The second LA trip was to chase a woman who had firmly shown me that there is no upper bound for the intensity I can love someone while still knowing that someday they will probably forget me. This is actually still on ongoing story, but it’s not very funny, or entertaining. This particular woman did create an image in my head, however, that I will probably never forget: we were sharing an apartment in Prague, and we had just woken up in my bed; high ceilings, everything painted white. There is a balcony overlooking a park, and huge snow flakes are drifting down pulling both the room and our lives into total silence. The light is dense and compact. It fills but does not overwhelm; it is a light that is reminding us of the totality of our lives. Some swedish knock-off white linen comforter is covering us, with a motif of blue trees with little blue birds in their branches. Her head is pushed into that spot where my arm meets my shoulder and it makes me feel like I am at once protecting her and also in awe of something very far away. We are looking out the large french doors to the balcony, and in between us and those countable snow flakes, huge like doilies under a grandmother’s teacup that all the neighborhood loves, is this woman’s ass peaking out from the blanket. We seem to both see her ass at the same time. She leans up to look at me with these eyes that have no mercy but can understand too much kindness — these are eyes that lovers are made of — and she says “look, a rabbit.”

Anyway. That is a side bit about a perfect moment in time. The point is when I went to see her, I threw on a hoodie that had a joint in one pocket, and 15 tabs of acid and a gram of cocaine in the other (there’s a pattern isn’t there?)

Once I had made it through Berlin security, though, I was scared about flying into China with drugs. I’ve never been to China, but the propaganda machine in the US is strong, and had given me a mental image of a country that seemed chronically terrifying in their treatment of human life. My solution to this problem was to quickly consume the half gram of cocaine, and to take one tab of acid. I didn’t think anyone would really pick out a tab of acid from a coin purse — they’d probably just assume the little ball of tinfoil was making company with other shinny things — but I thought one tab might help balance out the uncomfortable high that comes along with doing a half gram of cocaine in a very small amount of time.

I’m still not sure, in retrospect, if this was the right decision. I’m certain that the woman sitting next to me felt it was an awful idea. Her experience was sitting down next to someone who was overly concerned with the alignment of air vents, while gleefully rattling on about the different ways it is possible to organize genres of movies on the in-flight entertainment. “THEY’RE ALL FOREIGN FILMS TO SOMEONE, RIGHT??!” as I quickly do a tactile check of the air vents for the 100th time, while banging my knees together to what I believe was a Young Thug track playing on some level of my brain. I can be very cliche.

The flight is long, though, and with too many hours still left everything started to settle into “normal”, and that’s when I thought to myself, “How do I actually know Rona?”. The answer was really, “I don’t.” So as we descended into Chongqing, population 30 million, I was getting ready to share a flat with, and work with, a woman that I didn’t really know, for a month, before spending a second month there on my own, all in a city I didn’t know.

And to be honest, our relationship and time went really well. She’s one of those people that if you get into her space on day 1, day 2000 will be equally accessible. She shows up with no assembly required. No batteries needed. It’s all there. There was a cold war period of about a week, due to some assholeness on my part, but as part of our treaty agreement, I think it’s best that that side story gets left to another time.

But this writing all started with me stating firsts that included military formations, pig brains, and meth. And while I’ll get to each one of these items, I think it’s interesting to point out that in most stories the LARGE piece of it, the summit of the story, is actually quiet uninteresting, but it is the details leading up that cause for pause. Maybe this is one of those things that everyone already notices and I’m late to the game on.

I have a friend Emanuel who claims that while watching Fight Club for the first time that he knew immediately that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were the same character. I still don’t know if I believe him, but I do know that I am amazingly good at suspending disbelief — to the point where I watch things and don’t worry about any structure between one frame and the next, or if things even make sense in general, I’m just happy that a machine is spinning away shoving images into my eyes at 30 frames per second.

The point of mentioning this is that I think I can sometimes suspend disbelief of my entire life, which I guess is me just saying that I’m good at ignoring running themes and important details of the world around me. Or maybe I don’t see the ones everyone else does.

Anyway. There are bits and pieces about the basketball: Military formations right next to the courts, white gloves that sway and sometimes were even part of elaborate pop music dance numbers involving 200 different soldiers. There was the street baller named Chocolate, who’s favorite NBA player was Jason Williams (a.k.a, White Chocolate). Chocolate wasn’t white, but did have a picture on his phone of him and Williams during an NBA promotional tour of China. People didn’t smile much playing ball there, or set screens. Both things I do a lot of. In fact, I believe in a good hard foul to stop give away baskets, which wasn’t a custom on this court. If you go and foul someone in pickup basketball when there is a precedence set for not touching anyone at all, a precedence you are oblivious to, yet people would assume you would be following, the look on peoples face as you deliver an obvious foul is a bit like you walked up and slapped a strangers baby while it lay in a carriage. Importantly this analogy requires a stranger’s baby, because the look is not anger, but more like, “what the fuck is that about?” Disbelief.

The pigs brain is uninteresting, really. It just tasted like weird tofu, so let’s move on.

When I first got to Chongqing I was introduced to my sidekick and future friend, Joey. He picked his english name from Friends (very strange choice I think based on personality, although Chandler and Ross are hard names to say for Chinese people) and met me the first time wearing a generic Cleveland Cavaliers jersey. I asked if he liked Lebron James, and he replied, “Who?”

China is strange like that because everything looks like it does everywhere else but for some reason you can’t quite participate in the same way. I’m convinced it’s something to do with how the Chinese language is structured, which is so different from a western language. And since language makes our reality, I think their reality is very different. It always felt like I was watching everyone jump into a stream, but when I tried to, I bounced off the surface of the water.

Eventually Joey and I got to partying together, which made me want to find some good vice. The problem was that most of the people talked of hardcore drug users as the people that sucked NO2 balloons and smoked weed at this one bar/club called Echo Bay; people hanging around someone frying pork on open coals, while another person sits with a huge NO2 tank, filling up balloons for that 20 second rush of brain cells dying. Drug culture is so stratified in China that the lower, more sober, layers don’t have any idea about the layer above them. But it is there. You just have to look. This weed/NO2 layer thought they were king, but they were just jesters. There was a layer above and it was a layer dense with meth and ketamine.

When I first met Mustafa he claimed to have quit doing drugs years ago, and encouraged me to “live the party with my own pure excitement.” I told him that seemed like it was working for him (although, and I didn’t say this then, it sounded like the kind of thing someone says when they are trying to convince themselves this is the case) but that I really enjoyed drugs. Just as they are. No need for excuses, just bring on the drugs.

And so it was a few weeks later that he asked me, “want to smoke some ice?” I’d never smoked meth before, but I’d heard that it was a drug that was used by people that were quite well off in the country, and also was a huge export from China. My cultural curiosity got the better of me and we were soon on the back of his knockoff Vespa, weaving through traffic with the bright lights of the Chongqing downtown across the river on one side, and the dark outlines of rundown apartments on the other. I’m a large guy, and Mustafa is sort of average build, but the two of us on that scooter, my knees poking out to the sides like trolling rigs on a fishing boat, wheels going all squirrelly from all the weight, seemed like the only way to drive to a drug dealers apartment in China. A cartoon version would be the emoji for “buying meth in China”.

We weave out of traffic, towards the sidewalk, with Mustafa yelling “hop off before I hit the curb!”, I sorta popped my bum up, and pulled my legs off the scooter, so that I ghosted off the back of the scooter landing in a quick jog as he expertly popped the curb and parked in front of one of the run down apartments. I think to this moment as a cirque du soleil moment; it had equal grace and skill from both parties.

There was a large cage over the entrance to the apartment block, and Mustafa didn’t have the guys phone number, but I noticed a buzzer switch for the gate about 3 meters inside, and using a piece of bamboo I was able to push the button and let us in.  Upstairs we werer let into an apartment that I can only describe as part brothel, part gambling ring, and part meth den. But in a classy way. Everyone was in suits and there were bowls of exotic fruit everywhere; I was immediately offered a coconut water on entry. Nothing makes smoking meth classier than some fresh fruit and coconut water. Actually I think it makes about any vice seem alright and somewhat dignified.

Preparing meth is pretty fabulous. Movies always make it look all dingy and gross in some trailer that is permanently caked in dust and oil, while someone heats up some glass apparatus, inhales, and falls listlessly back into a couch that is sun-bleached and covered in cigarette burn holes. This place is all leather and spotless glass tables. It’s like Bauhaus but with everyone looking very excited, talking at very rapid clips about topics of no consequence.

Mustafa flattened out a piece of tinfoil, perfectly flat with no wrinkles, sprinkled on some meth, heat the tin foil, which melted the meth into a nice glass sheen. He then offered me a sort of water pipe. The idea is that you heat the tinfoil, see-sawing the little liquid meth ball that forms, sucking in the smoke that comes off the top. It’s a bit like playing that maze game with a marble where you tilt the board and keep the ball from falling into holes. But you get high. And it’s a high that is neither pleasurable nor displeasing. You’re just high. It’s a bit like getting an average, non-painful handjob. But the process! Really one of the more fun processes out there.

The night floated on from there. We met back up with friends and went to a high-end karaoke bar where I grabbed some tinfoil and straws from the attached restaurant and convinced Mustafa to make a rig in the bathroom of the karaoke bar. Surrounded by all that marble and stainless steel bathroom fixtures, it actually worked well with my first impressions of meth; all that was missing was some fruit bowls and coconut water.

A woman ended up back at my place that night (I’m unclear on what her rational for that was, given that I can’t imagine I looked like a real winning catch), to be left completely unsatisfied as I laid in my bed, sweating profusely while my penis refused to produce an erection. She fell asleep and I slinked out to the bedroom feeling 100% strung-out. I always think this phrase refers to the sensation that one is existing in between actual minutes; time becomes infinitely long, and you can’t move between seconds anymore.

Out in the living room, a woman I knew back from home through mutual friends, happened to text me asking how I was doing. We hadn’t talked in a long time, so I responded honestly, “I’m high on meth and can’t get an erection. Feel bad for this girl that came home with me.” She responded by sending me pictures of herself naked and one of some guys cock about to penetrate her ass. It was unexpected as I’d never seen her naked, but the nice thing about meth is it really lets you roll with the punches.

I told her thank you for the photos, and then curled up on the couch, smacked my lips still tasting all those fruit bowls, and desperately wished to fall asleep.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

Plymouth, England is not a town I would have ever set out to visit. It got bombed to shit in the war, and seems to have been rebuilt with the same enthusiasm a teenager has as they push a stray cellphone around the table with a single, bored finger, while their parents tell them about the importance of school. The whole town is broken up into various sections based on the unavoidable, like geographic features, to the poorly placed, like enormous roundabouts, or the mall. The layout reminds me a little of Mario 3; one world away I was in a frog suit enjoying a swim, then suddenly it’s all about the raccoon tail. You know? 

The mall in particular is something that conjures to mind what would happen if an architecture student wanted to test the limits of a certain piece of architectural software by having it combine the most ill-matched facades possible. I think in architecture there is generally agreement in trying to maintain rhythm and weight within structures, but the rejection of these principles in the design of this mall is maybe only topped by the McMansions that were built in the dotcom boom.

I had a friend, Joey, in high school who’s parents owned a house like that. He ended up in LA as a high end coke dealer, and apparently also came out as gay after high school. This isn’t that surprising to me, in retrospect, in that I have a distinct memory of his obsession with making shitty techno beats in Fruity Loops and having dance parties that consisted of maybe 4 friends, all of them guys.

The upside of the mall is that if you stand on Exeter Street looking up towards it, with the historically preserved shell of a bombed out church between you and it, the unusual fan like structure on that particular face of the mall gives it the appearance of playing Go Fish with the church.

My friend Oliver visited me the first weekend I was there and had done some research about gay clubs that he would be interested in. This lead us to what, I incorrectly, kept calling Sparrow the first night he was in town. The bar was actually called Swallow, which makes sense for the quick rim shot and wink n’ nudge towards the fact that it is a gay bar, where men may in fact swallow versus spit, but I still maintain that a sparrow is gayer bird in principle than a swallow, and it therefore is a better name for a gay bar.

Inside I was quickly approached by a woman that wrapped me in arms that were overly dry to the touch and hair that smelled of chemicals. I could tell that she had been very beautiful, yet years had stripped her of a certain glow. In low light, and I imagine in profile pics, she looked quite fetching. She gushed over how handsome I was and asked if I was gay. I told her I wasn’t, which brought forward a series of giggles and hard eye contact that was both flirtatious and terrifying.

She seemed to be the queen (not that type of queen) of the bar and when I mentioned that Oliver and I were going to leave soon to see what the town had to offer, she caught on to the tone quickly and asked if she could help us get anything. This started us down a path of getting to know Leah.

Leah seemed to know everyone as we floated through town on cocaine and booze. It would have been a typical “girl who parties and knows the locals” sort of scene, if it wasn’t for the numerous times I would look around in search of her platinum head, only to find her chiding or consoling someone with a finger-in-face-sailor-mouthed style. It’s like she was the drugged-out mother that no-one had, but all apparently wanted. Her advice, as best as I could tell, was somewhat like her appearance: an inner beauty that was quickly masked by excessive accessories. “Do you like shitting glass? No? Well then you better start remembering her birthday!” I’m still not sure the context the could illicit this sort of advice. At each interaction the recipient was either starring at the floor and nodding solemnly, or looking at her with a mixture of respect and wonder that comes with seeing exotic deep-sea fish.

At one point she took me aside, for what I assume was my turn of advice. It started along the lines of “you only get what you take”, but took a sharp turn in a new direction when she looked at me and asked, “You know how I get money from the state because I’m a danger to myself? For cutting myself?” I said I didn’t know know that. She continued, “You know what that means?”. Having seen her arms at multiple times during the night, I could attest that her left arm was mutilated not just with small scars, but scars that looked like someone had tried to twirl spaghetti from her flesh. I offered up a joke about her being right handed. This she cruised on by, and went down some rabbit hole about tricking the system.

The thing with talking to Leah was that it didn’t really matter what I said, because she would just smile gamely like we were both super on point and continue along as if I wasn’t there. If she cleaned up her language, hid her arms, and cut down on the public drug use, I think she would have been a pretty decent politician. And that isn’t me trying to poke at some stereotypically ugly side of politicians. Or even her. She just genuinely had a roadmap to where things were going, and couldn’t be bothered with details that seemed to slow down her perceived progress. 

Eventually we ended up at a club in Plymouth called Jesters that had a dance floor that elicited strong comparison to segments of the music video for Billy Jean. I think it was mostly the dance floor made up of large backlit squares as well as the chic 80’s decour. But there were also the patrons, who seemed to, on the whole, be wearing an absurd amount of red leather. And only one man ever pulled off full red leather: Eddie Murphy. And he did it while making fun of gay people with AIDS and still somehow walking away cool and sexy. I guess that’s the power of comedy.

We settle into the roof top bar where Leah immediately confronted a Jamaican man and started yelling at him. She turned to us and said, “I haven’t seen this guy FOR A YEAR. Last time we spoke he was being racist AS SHIT to me.” The guy looked sort of bashfully at the floor and she continued, “Can you believe his n*****?!”. At this point I’m pretty dumbfounded. I expected bottles to be thrown and for this guy to (rightly) punch her in the mouth, but nothing. Nothing. She continues joshing around with him, slapping plenty of n*****s into the conversation.

Then suddenly we were downstairs. Two girls in vinyl mini skirts were dancing with me and one of them was telling me about how her fiancé had the biggest cock she had ever seen; she described in vivid detail the first time she saw him erect in his pants, using her hands to show girth and length, and then pointing at him across the dance floor. I waved at him and gave him a thumbs up. 

I have to admit the story was actually a really touching part of my night. After the mad dog looks of Leah for 3 hours, the heartfelt and emotive story of the finance’s cock was pretty moving. In my head I pictured her and her fiancé as Tom Cruise and Renée Zellweger in the elevator scene at the beginning of Toby Maguire, but with Tom Cruise having a massive hard-on.

It ended up the girls were sisters. The youngest was 17, the oldest 27. The older one had a son who was severely mentally handicapped; “there’s the sweetest girl from the neighborhood looking after him, you know?” You may wonder how and when I got this information, and it was pretty much as her and her sister dry humped me in front of her apparently well hung fiancé.

And, of course, Leah knew these women. They were friends. Best.

Oliver had picked up some guy at this point, as we kept ducking into the stall and taking pretty questionable bumps of cocaine. Questionable because it was unclear about the quantity we were taking and whether it was ground up at all. It felt a little like engulfing large amounts of sand through my nose; maybe like crashing while surfing and having my face pummeled by a beach. But with a sort of caffeine jolt afterwards.

Oliver, the two sisters, the younger sisters paramour (is that what you call someone who pines after someone that acts like they are taken?), the older sister’s finance, Leah, and me all headed out to the older sister’s apartment. People sort of splashed into the apartment, settling into corners, having the giddiness that you can only really get when you’re in a strangers apartment, with other strangers, all wondering who the hell everyone else is. And all being extremely high. I was laying on a massage table (one of the sisters is a masseuse) and everyone was taking whippets from balloons, and the noise of the metal canisters quickly pilling up on a dinning room table sounded a bit like a junkie’s chandelier swinging to the beat of trap music for white suburbanites.

As I was sitting under too bright lights with the younger sister, inhaling from a balloon, I thought about my friend Kevin telling me once about visiting his high school friends during college, only to end up in a car with everyone, except him, all doing whippets. One of his closest friends ended up throwing up on the passenger side floor after a bout of hysterical laughter. Kev and him ended up sorta drifting apart after that visit. And I can see over the horizon of a balloon, slowly sucking away brain cells, how not all drugs are created equal.

There are little moments of light during this hideously depressing collection of moments. One was when the young paramour took Oliver and I aside to talk about love and sex and how he thought he maybe needed to sleep with a guy once in his life, but he wasn’t sure, because he didn’t think he was gay, and didn’t want people to think he was gay.

What was surprising about this, was that this young man was about 17 or so, and had more fearlessness than I believe I’ve ever had and possibly ever will have. I also could briefly remember when my sexuality felt like a cat clinging desperately to a living room curtain. Claws dug deep into the notion of sexuality as I was flung from side to side with the requirements of the rooms lighting; life passing by as I masturbated furiously and ran circles inside my head around whether Alana liked me (she didn’t).

I told the young man to stop counting conquests, bang people that he found attractive, and try anything that seemed interesting. I punctuated this wisdom with a whippet, quick line, and a declaration that I was going home.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

It's impossible, you'd think, that while eating a girl out in front of a large bay window that overlooks a shared garden entrance for a triplex apartment, that her upstairs neighbor, sharing this same garden entrance -- the only entrance to the building -- could be robbed of all their personal belongings (including couch) at the same time, but you'd be wrong. It could have been the 5 grams of cocaine, or my inability to stop glancing over, tongue still in motion, at a cat that I thought maybe was dead, lying in the pot of what I believe was a ficus tree. Whatever the reason, couches, tv, and a parrot in a cage apparently were whisked away in front of my very eyes.

The cat ended up being alive.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

Last summer, I was in Prague and overlapped with these Israeli artists during a summer that folded into itself, like some debaucherous pastry, with drunk circus performers, dance floors on old boats covered in vomit, and a thin coat of sweat on everyone that turned any limb into an instant salt lick mixed with mdma, cocaine, and acid. Nights turned into days, turned into nights, and the sun would rise through a champagne bottle swinging in my one hand and an eight ball clenched in the fist of the other. Many sunflowers were bought for strangers. Many shoes were thrown away because of those vomit covered floors. 

Dog shit is temporary, but vomit is forever; you could say that the wetness of vomit is uncountable, in a mathematical sense.

One of the artists, Rona, was back in Prague a few days ago as part of an open studio, so I decided to jump down from Berlin to say hello. It had been about 6 months since I’d seen her, and her eyes were still cracked glass in morning light, and her smile came onto her face like someone revealing that they had just pulled an elaborate, but brilliant prank on me; it crept and sputtered, and eventually conquered all.

The open studio was great: Rona’s work was good and I also stumbled into an Australian artist, Sarah, who was a carrot cake of a human being. If you don’t know me, it is best to share now, for clarity, that I find carrot cake to be the most superior of cakes. Sarah was smart and leapt around with her ideas, billy goat-ing from one topic to the next in a manner that seemed to imply she was wearing roller-skates and eating icecream. These high concept, great thoughts, seemed to giggle and flip their hair, which made the depth of what she was saying even more intriguing, and her, more stunning.

This next paragraph makes me seem a bit like an asshole, but I definitely thought she was older than me by 5 or 6 years; her skin looked older than mine. Like she’d been in the wind a lot. And when I was just standing next to her, I kept thinking, “Man, she has a killer body, I can’t believe she’s in her late 30s”. And I want to be clear that she is crazy attractive. But now that I think about it, adding that qualifier, just adds to my dickish-ness for even expressing this whole train of thought. Anyways: fast forward to the next day when I was looking at her (impressive and expansive) set of work online and I found out she was exactly same age as me. Her impressiveness as a human being on top of my unimpressive Reading A Book By Its Cover really knocked me down a couple notches in my own head. This moment of realization made me think about what a dude I can be sometimes. Like That Dude. But lets move on.

She had this video piece where she sands the surface of a table in a room and the dust from the sanding slowly fills the frame, until she disappears. There’s an audio component where she’s reading a prepared text which, for me, spoke a lot about the simplicity that can define the world and this simplicity doesn’t necessarily mean simple. Simple things can be complex. I got teary eyed. Almost full on crying. But I kept it in, because there was an attractive woman in her late 30s in the room (or so I thought at the time). A more well rounded man would have thought, “Because there is an attractive woman in the room.” An even more well rounded man would have just cried a bit.

The curator for the open studio showed up to visit Sarah's studio and introduce Sarah’s work. I should mention that this open studio took place in a venue that I’ve spent a lot of time wandering in and out over the course of the last year, sometimes also showing my own work. So after the curator introduced Sarah she turned to me, and in front of a crowd of about 30 people, says, “And this is, Mark. He was here as a resident and also had a show here. He now wanders around Central Europe, and every couple weeks I walk through the bar, and will inevitably find Mark chatting with some stranger. If you want a good drug dealer, or to go to the party that no one knows of, or talk about math, please find him.” I looked up at the crowd of strangers, announced this was all true, and that they were all beautiful. No one seemed amused. I even used my most ornate hand gestures in addressing the crowd. Nothing.

I wandered back into the hallway and found Rona with her boyfriend, Adi. He was getting a haircut from a popup barber. It was his first haircut in 15 year. He’d always cut his own hair. I asked him what made him jump on it this time around, and he said, “it seemed like the moment.” Something about the way he answered that still really makes me laugh a little. Like the symphony of his life had this little flourish around the moment of this exact haircut; a violin just did a little booty shake.

About this time I dropped some acid and started filming a lot of the haircutting that was going on.

Between filming haircuts and running around saying hello to old friends, I was really pushing everyone to go out dancing, and we had a pretty good crew together by the time things were winding down. We gathered outside, jumped the railroad tracks, and ran for a tram heading into town. We all just squeezed on, with Adi bringing up the rear. It’s unclear exactly what happened, but in running up the stairs along with the lurch of the tram starting, Adi lost his footing, and slammed his head into a hand rail. I reached out to grab his shoulder and pick him up, and as I looked at my hand on his shoulder, I saw a single drop of blood, perfectly perched on my knuckle. The acid had started kicking in, so the vividness of the drop would have only been outdone if some vibrant blue parakeet had landed on my finger instead. It was marvelous, but also I knew, the sign of bad things to come.

I looked from the blood drop to Adi’s face, and then back to the blood, and then up at the tram ceiling, thinking that the blood had somehow dropped from there. I tussled his hair looking for cuts. There was nothing. Then I touched his ear, to find a river sprouting from behind it. Blood splattered on my hands, and then continued on its course, rolling down his neck into his collar.

When you are on acid, and suddenly find human blood on your hands, you don’t go into full MacBeth mode immediately, but it’s a pretty fine line. In any case it’s a serious mental exercise not to start acting really fucking weird. Adi had sat down at this point with a scarf pressed against his wound and everyone was talking about taking him back to his apartment to sit down for a second. I nodded a bit like I was listening, but was pretty much fully distracted by the blood possibly soaking into the cuff of my jacket, and then through some (unknown) expansive quality of blood, turning my entire jacket red. I was sort of nervously jerking my jacket up my arm and shaking my hand at the same time, as if the blood could defy gravity and climb up my arm as well.

I remember looking at Adi’s face and thinking a lot of the end of the movie Everest and the guy who is freezing to death on the mountain, and then my mind sorta skipped off to the IMDB page of Jake Gyllenhaal and I couldn’t remember if he was one of the shitty or non-shitty ex-boyfriends of Taylor Swift.

My thoughts were brought back when Adi announced he was feeling sleeping and couldn’t keep his eyes open. Luckily we were pulling into Andel, where, by the grace of God (I figured it must be God with all those Israelis on the tram), there was an ambulance just waiting. I bounded off the tram like a Saint Bernard taking a spin class, running towards the paramedics pantomiming the process of how Adi had received his head wound. I realize in retrospect that my approach appeared to make me the one looking injured. It took a few beats to work out that confusion, before I brought them over to Adi, who had been dragged off the tram, unconscious, shaking, and with his body heaving like he was throwing up.

His eyes flashed back open as the paramedics walked up. He had been out only a few seconds, apparently, but in my mind telegrams had circled the globe in that time reporting and updating  loved ones on his condition. I was walking in circles, in place. As they looked into his pupils with a flashlight, I did what felt totally natural: I sprinted off to buy flowers. I remember from living in the area a year earlier, that there was a 24 hour flower just 50 meters from where we were standing. I’ve never understood the need for a 24 hour flower shop, as it seemed to suggest that people in Andel were incredibly horrible to their significant others and could never wait until the morning to say, “I’m sorry”.

I returned with flowers, which everyone seemed, actually, pretty excited about as well. Sarah was being a superhero and talking nurse-speak and sort of owning the situation. In my mind I was thinking, “when I grow up, I want to be just like her”, but remember, dear reader, that she is actually my exact age. So my inner thoughts could be translated more accurately to: look at all the skills you could have learned at this point, but haven’t.

A drunk man with a large gash above his eye wandered up to me for the second time to ask for rolling papers. I answered, “sorry, still don’t have em”. Oh shit. Did I not mention him? When we first showed up there was a very intoxicated man with a gash above his eye saying to the paramedics, “How’d I get it? I guess I just got it.” Which in a sober, sophisticated setting could actually be deeply profound. Add some champagne and nice crackers, and you’re basically at a high society book club meeting. Something about the history of Fluxus.

Adi get’s popped into the ambulance and is stable, with Rona jumping in with him. They want to take him to the ER just to be sure. I declare that I am also headed to the ER. The reason being: coffee. I’m certain they will have one of those machines that pops the cup down, and then in a whiring that sounds like a dust buster that accidentally sucked up some water (I picture a mixture of drain hair and mop water, rapidly being beaten with a fork) coffee and white liquid shoots into the cup. I also like that the cup is usually held by a mechanism that doesn’t easily reveal how you are supposed to retrieve your coffee. It’s like when you’re playing fetch with a dog and it brings you back the ball, and is really excited, but you can’t seem to get the ball out of its mouth as it looks up at you with pleading eyes saying, “THROW IT! THROW IT!” (Fast forward and this does end up being the case: there are two coffee machines, in fact. But we only have enough change to buy two cups of coffee, one from each machine. We carefully deliberate on our choices — 10 different coffees from each machine — but thankfully end up with a second cup that surpasses mop water, and lands squarely in Shitty Gas Station Coffee. My favorite coffee category.)

On the way to the hospital I eagerly point out to people that there is a dog racing track quiet a short distance from where we are. No one questions why I know this. Which is offensive. Because the reason I was there, is I pulled up randomly to it one night with a woman I was in love with, and she was trying to tell me not to fall in love with someone that is lost in the woods, which only made me love her more. People that care for me, but are also impossible to sometimes reach is sort of my thing. Maybe we’ll talk about this at another time. Not me and her, but you and me.

The ER is actually pretty un-exciting. No one is there. Big empty building with bad art. The object that still fascinates me the most, resides on the second floor in the waiting room. The walls were covered with some real shitty nature photography, but by the exit door there was this burnt piece of driftwood hanging by a piece of yarn from the wall. And I’m not talking about some beautiful petrified piece of wood, or carefully sanded natural artifact: this was some burnt piece of beach wood that looked like a dog had retrieved from the surf during a mediocre family vacation. Hanging from the wall. By a worn piece of yarn. It was hideous, but also completely intriguing. Like someone saw all the photos everyday, was at home, saw the piece of wood, and thought, “Oh… this comes from the same place those photos are taken”. And then came to work and nailed it to the wall. Rona even thought it was strange, as we talked about for some time, and she wasn’t even on acid. It was the children’s ash tray of art. So maybe the best art? I don’t know. That book club discussing Fluxus would know.

Oh. One other detail: the rooms leading out of the waiting room were enormous 8’ x 8’ square doors that opened on some sliding mechanical device. They for sure could have been used as a set piece for a Jurassic Park movie: somewhere the raptors were held. So every time one of them would slowly start sliding open, I would pivot my head sharply and assume a raptor role. When the doctor for Adi finally came from behind one of these to give us an update, I high stepped towards him, with raptor-like grace, but then was immediately struck that he seemed to have walked off a 90’s porno set. Deep V orange scrubs, silver chain, swept hair, tan, and hairless. I’d size him up, and then laugh hysterically. Size him up, laugh hysterically. Rona had to point me towards the wall, where I went back to my safe space of walking in circles.

Adi came out of getting stitches and rolled a cigarette, EEG pads still on his chest, IV needle in his hand. They finally took out the IV needle, but left the EEG pads, and we wandered out to the street to get some security guards to call a cab for us so that we could go eat some burritos.

It was about 4am.

Rona and Adi bought my burrito for me as a thank you for coming to the ER. When we sat down to eat them, Rona was looking at me in horror, which, too late, I realized was because I was licking hot sauce off my hands like they were ice cream cones. The lapping of hot sauce wasn’t what she found so appalling, but more the fact that 20 minutes earlier she had been watching as I climbed over various parts of a sketchy hospital, sometimes on all fours, touching every surface. I mean, all those gurneys and chairs, with no one on them, is basically asking for some attention. But nothing was probably that clean.

I washed my hands. Finished my burrito. And called it a night. 

No Hep-C, yet.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

“Shouldn’t we be fucking?”

Ten minutes before I met Ola — short for Alexandra, maybe long for “oh, dear” — I had dropped a half tab of acid and taken a bit of MDMA while I was out for a drink with a friend of mine. It was supposed to be a sort of relaxed night: shoot the shit, and laugh as loud as we liked at stories that maybe weren’t funny. Ola burst into the bar wearing a red dress that looked more like a set of surgically adhered bandages. I’m never sure how I feel about outfits that are deliberately sexy. They obviously get a rise out of me, but they also make me hate that someone is basically hacking my brain. Her lipstick was equally dramatic with the line where her lips ended seemingly cut with exacto knives and then additionally laser etched just to make sure that her audience was aware of the large curved structure that adorned her face.

She pulled me onto the dance floor and within a minute or so my mouth was hovering near hers and her eyes were all glittery and loud with that perfect moment before you kiss someone. But instead I asked her to sit down with me on couch that was nestled in this hallway off the dance floor. The floors are dirty, and the ceiling is slanted at an angle where it feels like we are in someone’s grandma’s attic. There was this painting of a woman with a rabbits head on the wall, with another rabbit with human arms watching her. I asked Ola if she was the woman or the rabbit. She thought about it, “The woman, obviously. No, the rabbit. Shouldn’t we be fucking?”.

I found my friend and asked for the keys to his flat and if he could give Ola and me 20 minutes. She looked at me sharply. I asked for 2 hours. I tried to explain that I gave the original 20 minute estimate, because SHE seemed in a hurry, not that I intended to fuck her like so many rabbit parts in front of us.

There was an L shaped couch in the apartment that we rolled around on in puddles of people and blankets. L shaped couches are not meant for having sex. It’s fun at first but then it turns into a super frantic game of Tetris, where I was begging for that one piece to finish off 3 or more rows at once. Bend elbow this way. Knee goes there. Hand goes here. Things were planned many moves in advance and I kept peering around looking for handholds and places I would get the least amount of rug burn. It was technical in a way that was somewhat exciting, but in the way that new phones are exciting.

Then there were these moments of balance, where everything turned from Tetris to Jenga, and we just didn’t want all the pieces to fall apart in some unruly mess. We would just stare at each other. Ola would laugh after a second and sort of lob her eyes into the corner of the room in this bashful way. Then she would volley back, and we’d just be starring at each other again. It was painfully personal.

We ended up spending 23 hours on that couch. My friend came and went. The apartment was very small so that at one point I woke up, with Ola draped naked on top of me, and my friend was sitting at the computer, 3 feet away, behind the couch, in boxers and a t-shirt, reading Facebook updates. Not to be crass, but I was definitely inside of her. She peeked her head up, aware I was awake, wiggled her hips a bit to make sure all was as it should be and gave a good morning (afternoon? evening?) to my friend. They did a more formal introduction and he immediately entered her into his Facebook search bar and we, all three of us, started looking at her profile; my head craned to look behind me, her chin perched on my shoulder.

She was a very sexy parrot and, of course, I was still inside her. 

It ended up she did a bit of modeling. My friend kept on trying to see her face in the half lit room with a disbelieving, “This is YOU?!”. Her head would bob out of view onto my chest and then slyly peak back up over my shoulder at my friend. My cock twitched.

I said goodbye to her underneath a ferris wheel. It was all very cliche and all very romantic. We just stood there holding hands and looking at each other. It was like being in those Jenga moments on the couch but without all the nakedness. Everything felt so momentous, but it was also just another last bonfire after highschool; people talking about how much they love each other over one too many beers; the glimmer of hope seeing an old flame for the first time in a few months or years. And it made me think about how we can end up forgetting even the best little moments by diluting them in too much sentiment.

I ended up flying to Warsaw 2 months later to see her. I’d been sleeping on this mattress in the corner of my studio in a converted factory in southern Budapest, and the extremely cheap last minute booking for a 5-star hotel with a bed that was basically a rectangular, exposed, sleep deprivation tank, sounded like something I desperately needed.

When I landed on an evening flight into Warsaw, I called Ola to tell her I’d have to push back dinner plans because of some things I had to get done for some people in Budapest; I really just wanted a couple hours alone on that bed. The bed was fucking amazing. I’ve never had a mule kick me in the head, but I assume that unconsciousness would descend at the same speed as when my head touched that pillow. The room had this great view: 26 floors up looking out at the NYC/Vegas mix that is downtown Warsaw. It was all bright lights mixed with the momentum of people who have too much drunk hope and suddenly wake up hungover on a Tuesday realizing they really need to re-evaluate their lives.

We met for dinner and her lipstick created the dramatic tag team of an upper and lower lip looking to do damage. It was sexy, but also alarming. The funny thing about flying to another city to see a woman that I had only seen for about 23 hours before, is that it is fun and giddy for the first 20 seconds and then you notice on the penumbras of the date that things could be really fucking awkward.

The way to fix this is to drink fast and hard. 

We did shots and drinks over some light appetizers (with a main course of more drinks). While we were eating she mentioned we were going to hit some club later with some of her friends and her ex-boyfriend. I should have been slightly alarmed by some of these facts, but I was already a bit drunk, and her lips were salsa dancing around on her face, and all I could do was smile.

Fast forward a few hours and we were in a shitty club called Sketch with her friends and ex-boyfriend. It reminded me of a shitty club in Seattle called Q not only in its decour, but also that her ex-boyfriend was a Thai guy named Tony. When I first found Q in Seattle it was on a whirlwind night centered around a Thai drug dealer named Tommy who I met (and gave a blowjob to) during his drug fueled birthday party. The whole thing I was dragged to by a friend, Jeff, who I’m pretty sure worked for a porn company, and who I had met in Bangkok a few months before. (As a side note, I should mention that Tommy didn’t really identify as gay, and was a very shy drug dealer, which made the apparently somewhat aggressive blowjob a bit of a mind fuck for him. But when you’ve been dipping powdered MDMA out of a sandwich bag for the better part of 10 hours, little makes any sense. Also: shy drug dealers. Adorable.)

Back in Warsaw my memories were slipping between Q and Sketch as I watched Ola flirt with her boyfriend; I was apparently an import tool for creating jealousy. I was holding her jacket at this point as we all sort of crashed between the VIP room and dance floor, but I kept loosing her and Tony. I got so fed up, that I left the club, with her jacket in hand, and quickly fell in step with two gay guys, and their girlfriend. They invite me along to a strip club, while they waited for a gay club next door to open.

I used to really like going to strip clubs. You could say it verged on a problem, as far as money is concerned. (I actually dated a stripper who was about 12 years my senior and could spin on her back with her feet behind her head. We met over a private lap dance that consisted of me sitting beside her naked self, just as if we were in a bar booth on a first date, excitedly talking about The Smiths. I owe, entirely, my ability to hold this conversation to my friend Tim who just recently had informed me of who The Smiths were and gave me brief background on Morrissey. My lack of music education isn’t just embarrassing, it’s appalling. My childhood memory of music is the intro music to NPR and Terry Grossman’s voice.)

But these days I only end up at strip clubs with friends (or family). This place ended up being one of those classy ones (the worst) where a bunch of businessmen sit around and pretend like they are loved, and the girls are too pretty and they smell like real perfumes not just LipSmackers strawberries. Everything seemed really clean. It was the awful. I was a bit moody after the whole Sketch scene, so I sat in the corner, facing the wall, drinking a beer. I would describe my mood as Childlike Drunkenness; it’s a drunkenness where I refuse to admit my ego is bruised, even as I sit in a strip club with strangers, drinking a beer in the corner.

It’s a sad scene.

As the gay guys and girl go to get lap dances, I decided I would take this time to compose wedding vows for an upcoming friends wedding. I pulled out my phone, opened the notepad, slammed a shot of vodka, and really started pouring my heart out. It took about 3 minutes of writing before I was crying at the bar. Not sobbing, mind you, but there were tears rolling down my cheeks. And, no, I was not making any mouth noises or body motions that go with crying. Just sort of a sad clown face with water works. I blame a mixture of really loving my friends I was writing the vows about, a sense of abandonment, and alcohol.

In my head at that moment I decide that drugs could possibly swing me back into a more suitable state. I turned from my timeout corner, and was immediately approached by a stupidly pretty woman, in some outfit that I’m pretty sure was worn by one of the fighters in the original Mortal Kombat; sort of an impractical swimsuit that also seemed easily washable. I think she was wearing a Hermes perfume that an ex girlfriend of mine wore. I ask her if she had any drugs. She got me to pay to go to a private room, but then kept insisting to fuck me, while I kept insisting on being given drugs. It was another poor investment of my money. As well as a possible sign of dependency.

I was pissed and jumped in a cab to go back to my hotel. The cabby gave me change that included a counterfeit bill, which I only found out the next day. (I really can not stress the amount of times I felt burned throughout this night.) In the elevator on the way up to my room there was an older couple making out against the wall. They stopped when the doors opened and I jokingly ask the woman if she wanted to come back to my room. She looked at the guy, he nodded, and before I know it I’m walking to my room with some unknown woman in her late 40s, early 50s. I’ve never seen a woman, or man, walk down a hallway with such an incredible ability to project, simply, “I don’t give a fuck”.

We grabbed a bottle of wine from my mini-fridge, both starting to drink from the bottle as we danced around to some shitty top-40 radio station. She put her body up against mine at some point, placed her finger against my lips, handed me the bottle, and then walked out of the room. Gone. Out of the entire weekend, this is the part that I’m most amused by and also love the most.

Also, through all of this, I’ve been holding Ola’s coat. I send a text, “I have your coat. I leave on Monday. Let me know if you want me to leave it at the hotel front desk.”

Ola and I did end up going out 2 nights later. I gave her her jacket back. We got a nice dinner and I tried to think about it all as just a funny weekend, with a strange girl that I can laugh with who will show me around the city. In other words I tried to check my ego and remember that I don’t really know this woman.

The whole night starts getting all romantic, though; walking around ice skating rings and holiday decorations. Spiced wine. Kids running around in snowflake sweaters. It felt like christmas when I was a kid and cold air caught the back of my throat as I smelled pine needles and saw candle light flickering off of windows. The old town of Warsaw (which is actually fake old, because the whole thing was bombed to shit in the war), is basically the scene printed on the faces of those advent calendars that have chocolates in them. I felt like I could pick up a cobblestone and find a cadbury egg. And then there’s this beautiful woman on my arm.

Going out suddenly seemed fun so we end up a club again, this time with different friends, this time all of them guys. I should take an aside at this point to mention that Ola was about 12 years younger than me. This made her guy friends also 12 years younger than me. And at my age I can’t really tell the difference between certain guys that are in college and certain guys that are in highschool. These where those guys. So what I walked into was a nice club (compared to Sketch) with a bunch of apparent teenagers scowling at me; it seemed Ola liked to surround herself with attention.

I didn’t really feel like a round two of following Ola around while guys fawned on her, so I told her I was going to call it an early night. She asked if I wanted to join her and one of her guy friends for a joint outside before going, and I said yes. As we are in the parking lot, smoking, a drunk British guy staggers up to the wall next to us, leans against it, and starts pissing. He’s leaning in the way people lean when they are trying to act really casual in some Lifetime movie. No name actors. No name directors. You know? The scene stars someone that has never acted before, while some guy that only coordinated set design for middle school plays is shouting, “You’re just waiting for a friend, so… lean against that wall and, and… whistle! Maybe twirl your keys!”

I shouted over to him whether he was waiting for the bus or taking a piss. He sort of lets out this Howard Dean roar, shoves his cock back in his pants, and spins around. With the way he is walking it is clear he is going to ask no questions and proceed directly to punching me in the face. But as I step a bit away from Ola and The Guy Friend, getting ready to do a little Tom and Jerry, I realized he thinks The Guy Friend (who is oblivious to the whole situation) is the one that yelled at him. It is a beautiful moment, where I watch in silence as Drunk British Guy ambles up to The Guy Friend, and sucker punches him in the face.

The end of the story is that I wake up with Ola (that bed!), fuck her on the window sill of the hotel as window washers run up and down past the window, and share a Starbucks.

The only lurid, but also alluring detail of this last part, is that when I would have sex with Ola, her eyes would lose focus and her head would rock on her neck in this sort of Sexy Possessed Witch way. Then, after a bit of time, I could watch her eyes coming back into focus, like when I’m walking down some dark hilly road and think I see the lights of an oncoming car, but I am not so sure, and suddenly they pop over a rise and I think, “fuck! those are headlights!”, and she would be starring into my eyes like someone who really knew me, and then, just as quickly, like an ambulance’s siren on its way to save a junky, she would disappear again.

It was strange, but also entirely memorable.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

I met Kathrine on a dance floor when I noticed someone’s head at approximately my hip. I don’t know what it is about short women but they drive me completely insane. Kathrine was particularly petite with beautiful eyes and pretty decent dance moves. 

(I don’t know what it is about dance moves, but they can really make or break the deal for me. People that can weave a sense of humor along with a little twist of salaciousness into their dancing, are basically like perfect sunsets: they will stay in my memory for a long time, and make me believe I had a small spiritual awakening.)

These days everyone asks me why I’m here in Hungary. It’s an obvious first question, just like my obvious, “Oh my god, you’re so tiny!!!!!”. I tell her I’m here for work and she asks what kind of work I do, and I say, “I’m an artist”. 

The Artist Card is a pretty powerful thing for a single person. Whether you’re a man or woman, if you’re single and someone finds out you’re an artist (and you don’t look like you just crawled out of a gutter), they are immediately intrigued. I obviously appreciate this response, but I have spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why it happens at all. An artist to me is usually associated with reckless behavior, poor money management, and narcissism. Oh, and depression.

The best reasoning that I’ve come up with is that a lot of people associate being an artist with a certain freedom that they don’t see themselves as having. Which I guess I understand, but I also find it to be pretty false: I spend a lot of time doing paperwork and reading stupid things on the internet, just like everyone else. But I also have no problem taking all my clothes off in public, so I can lay on the hood of some stranger’s car in my underwear, trying to pose like I’m in a swimsuit magazine.

Kathrine says she is an art history major, and whips out her phone to show me pictures of her art. As she’s doing the finger flip scroll, she warns that their may be some naked pictures. I immediately stop her, and tell her that in that case we have to scroll slllowwwwwllllyy. She laughs, and then just hands me the phone. Sure enough, about two scrolls in, I’m looking at her very naked body.

It’s a very nice naked body. And I tell her so. But then my focus is immediately brought up a row.

“what are those?!..” “OH! Yeah... I took those in the bathroom...”

The picture looks as follows: I framed shot of a toilet, looking down into the bowl. The water is at the typical level, mid-bowl. Running down the front of the toilet bowl, all the way down, disappearing down the pipe, is a deep red line. It starts off super crisp where it is on the porcelain alone, but as it runs under the water, it diffuses out and takes on a sort of Gaussian blur (if you’re a Photoshop user), before disappearing. It’s like a narrow Rothko painting dipped in someones toilet.

It’s a really nice looking picture. And there are dozens of them.

“So... I’m looking at your period blood, yeah?” “YUP!” “It’s actually really pretty.”

Her paintings are nice, but the toilet pictures are better.

Her drunk friend comes up and introduces herself to me at this point by yelling in my face about how she tried to jerk a guy off on the dance floor and he wouldn’t let her. She tells me this by showing, on me, what she tried to do on the dance floor. She’s too drunk to really navigate my underwear, so it all turns into one of those cat videos online, where the cat gets lost in a pillow case and is frantically looking to escape. 

I’m looking at Kathrine and we’re both laughing, as her friend struggles to try and give me a hand job. Her friend finally gives up and storms off. I don’t know if she was mad at us laughing, or embarrassed that she couldn’t make it past the high security of a button fly and briefs.

We left shortly after. Kathrine took her drunk friend home, and I took some mushrooms with a Hungarian drug dealer, his friend who had a clef palate, and watched the sun rise.

It was a nice sunrise, and I think I even had a small spiritual awakening. I awoke the next morning feeling refreshed and headed to the gym. On the way I received a text message from the drug dealer, showing him and 4 friends (one of who was the clef palate guy from the previous night) posing with a different selection of automatic weapons. 

They’re holding the weapons in a sort of crappy knock off of a 90′s gangster rap album cover. I’m pretty sure one of them is wearing a large striped sweater that is usually only found in a florida retirement home. But Hungarian fashion can be hard to pin down, so I close my phone deciding they are at the peak of their game.

[whitelennykravitz-blog]

There’s a shitty club in Budapest called Instant. “Shitty” is very subjective, and further nondescript by the fact that I go there a lot. I guess it’s like me watching the reboot of Hawaii Five-0: it’s total crap that I continually get a kick out of. Plus, Instant has no republican propaganda undertone to it; just wasted tourists mixed with wasted locals. 

The other amazing thing about Instant is that no matter the day of the week, I always end up meeting someone. And I mean “meeting someone” in the fact of literally just meeting someone. I’m not too much into the one-night stand thing (although it does happen... some months more than others), and I actually fear the first time having sex with someone, as I feel it usually is pretty marginal. All of this results in me finding much more pleasure in laughing with someone about one of my absurdly direct first question, or laughing with them as they tell me how gay I look; most of the time my new acquaintance immediately becomes the beard for my straight self, but I’m cool with that.

I have met women there, ranging from the uninteresting: they are there with someone else and quickly pull me aside to get my number. To the incredibly attractive: a Polish model on vacation. To the truly alluring: a Hungarian/Russian MMA fighter.

The MMA fighter was one of the best dancers I have ever seen. I was engulfed in what I dub my “High Knees, Low Mantis” dance move, when I found myself face to face with her pristine cheek bones and mid rift that looked like an anatomy example for health magazines.

As she got near to me, she smiled, I smiled back and said, “Don’t touch me. I’m really sweaty.” She laughed and we danced for a bit before a drink and she slowly meandered towards the question of “Are you gay?”. 

It’s such a common question here, that it is seen trotting in on a limp horse from miles away. It makes me think a lot of the first time I tried to buy drugs and would saddle up to people hanging outside a club, or at a party, and start with questions like, “So.. you’re waiting for someone?”, before finally getting to some awkward, sad, request along the lines of, “Can I buy some drugs from you?”.

We get past my sexuality and start planning our wedding and taking selfies. I think we set on July 23rd for the reception. We even checked each others phones for times that would work. As we’re laughing and kissing each other and rubbing around on each other like teenagers, two guys in front of us start trying to punch the shit out of each other.

Having just been in a fight the week before (in Warsaw... different story), I was primed for the situation, and so I leapt between them and grabbed one of the guys. In his drunkenness he couldn’t really differentiate between me and Guy Two, so I’m sorta ducking his looping drunken hooks and trying to yell at him that he has to calm the fuck down. We do a violent swing/square dance towards some tables, and I’m able to pin his arms and push his chest down onto a table. He’s apologizing profusely at this point, and I’m looking crazed with hair disheveled and my shirt scrunched up around my body in ways that don’t really make sense.

At this point I looked up and my future wife (let’s call her Trish) is calmly looking over at me with a wry smile on her face, having completely subdued the other guy apparently only using one of her arms: she was still holding her drink.

Trish, with her different length thumbs (broken), was a gem. And she was gorgeous: you would never know she had had 4 broken noses and a broken jaw. She looked like a beautifully fit sprite from some sexy disney movie.

We split ways at 5am. She went home, and I decided to go do some cocaine with a Hungarian hooker in the disgusting bathroom of Piaf. Or I should say, I decided to track down a prostitute in order to find some drugs. They always know people. And Piaf always has prostitutes.

Now the thing about buying drugs from a prostitute in a shady after-hours club in Budapest is that both quality, quantity and price are all going to be an issue. Most of the time buying drugs, there is an understanding about a few of those categories, but in Piaf there are none of those luxuries. The easiest part of the whole thing is finding the prostitutes.

I walk into the basement and in the back of the room there are two women sitting apart from everyone on their own. They are not drinking (this is the sign!). I grab a drink and sit a few tables down, across from them, and pretend to play with my phone. I glance up to see them both starring at me and I give them a wink along with a “Toddle Doo” hand wave, that makes them both giggle and one of them, Monica, motions for me to come sit with them. Our conversation starts exactly as follows:

“Hey. You guys look so NICE tonight.” “Oh yeah? What are you up to tonight?” “To be perfectly honest, I’m just looking to have a drink or two and then I’m going to buy some drugs.” “Maybe you want something else, too? Come back to my place..?” “That’s so sweet, but I’m really just looking for drugs.”

She takes me to the bathroom for the typical Try Before You Buy line. And I also start in on the “how much” questions. These conversations will inevitably lead to a moment, which is best highlighted by a time when I was in Prague, trying to buy an 8-ball with a woman I was seeing. The dealer had out a few gram baggies which I looked at and said, “none of these are the same size, and none of these are gram.” To which he replied, “some grams are different than other grams”. I looked over at the girl, who was nodding understandingly (she was super fucked up), and then I turned back to the drug dealer and said, “No... that’s why they call it A Gram. It’s a unit of measurement. Like kilometers an hour...”. His face honestly looked pained as he took in this news.

Monica and I haggle on price and quantity, which actually felt a lot like two friends trying to split a dinner check where no one really remembers who ordered what. It was a strangely pleasant affair and had the undertone that maybe we were going to a homecoming dance afterwards.

I always find the moment when the bathroom door closes and I’m standing with a drug dealer (or prostitute selling drugs) that I don’t know, around a (usually dirty) toilet, to be very awkward, and the conversation is always stilted. It reminds me of this time I was being driven to the airport by my grandpa and he was really concentrating on not missing the exit, but he was also trying to ask me questions about my life. But the questions were things like, “so... where you buying your groceries?” Real crackling conversation. And drug dealers are, I think, having the same problem my grandfather was: they are very focused on a single task, but realize the social engagement that is expected.

Monica is ruffling around in her purse grabbing things, and suddenly stops her large-font-picture-book conversation, and looks up at me.

“You’re cute.” “You have amazing..”, and I gesture on myself as if I’m cupping my own breasts. She laughs, grins, and pulls on the neck of her shirt more so that at this point the only thing it is hiding is maybe the brand name of her bra.

The toilet seat is disgusting and she wipes it off with her hand before dumping some coke straight onto the cover. Call me old fashion, but I would have preferred everything on top of another card. Or really any clean surface. 

As she is leaned over, her low slung pants reveal a tattoo that I at first take to be a tiger, but then I notice that it has flippers, and before I can put together this “animal”, I get further distracted by a pimple at the base of her spine. I think about how much it would hurt if she sat down too hard into a chair.

We do a line together and she laughs and for some reason we are suddenly talking about her plans for her birthday and how her mom is making a big deal out of it this year. She’s turning 22. Just like Taylor Swift.

As I leave Piaf that morning around 10, It pops into my head that I bought a blowup beach toy in Prague, that was a purple and yellow tiger with flippers. Maybe it’s an Eastern European thing where people here really like the idea of a land-based carnivore becoming slightly vulnerable by being augmented by sea-faring anatomy. I think I would have preferred a bear with dolphin snout.

Me and Trish don’t end up working out. We meet for coffee once after that night and she’s nervous because she just got out of a relationship and blah blah blah. I do learn, though, that one of her part-time jobs is being a body guard for celebrities. She goes to parties acting like she’s just another pretty friend, and then when some dude comes along being a little too aggressive, she breaks their arm (or whatever). Without spilling her drink. I imagine.

Goodbye, Trish. You were loved.