Joao's Party & Crazy CSers

Or: In Which A Brasilian Stripper Crashes Our Party

I'm not making this up.

There's a Brasilian stripper making her way on all fours across the tatty, waxy linoleum floor of the loft in the old district that we've rented for Joao's party. We're upstairs, all us CSers, foreign and Portugueuse alike, hands in pockets or folded across chests, sipping cautiously on Super Bock, water, mixed drinks. Some of us are still wearing the wigs we were instructed to bring: Ana's is a Cher-like straight, shiny black; Dea is Cruella De Ville, black with a white stripe. Cassandra and Andre sport long, curly, gaudy yellow and pink.

And we've all just gotten done giving poor, blindfolded Joao lap dances, the odd textures of wigs and hands making it impossible to tell how many of the bodies gyrating up against his chair are actually female.

Cameras are everywhere. Someone takes a picture of myself and Jaako, the seven-foot-tall Fin, his beer resting on my head. I don't even come up to his chest. This is what we do, pleasantly lost in a country where we don't speak the language. Find other expats. Speak English, because it's common between us. Drink beer. Laugh at what's funny anywhere you go, a giant of a Finnish guy using the short Indian girl as an end table.

One of the 'Portuguese' guys turns out to be a transplanted Dubliner. He meanders up. Amiably, I say, "Boa noite, meu amigo. Como estas?". He unleashes a stream of Portuguese against which I'm helpless, forced to admit that I don't speak the language all that well.

"I'm sorry," he says, "I just thought you were Brasilian."

Is this, too, the story of my lif? To always be mistaken for something I'm not? The stripper has a great body, but a mean, hars face; Joao is sitting with his hands thrust forcefully over his head. He will not touch her. Nao meu quero. He is not, he is saying, this kind of guy anymore. Everyone else hoots and whistles, rented strobe light and green tinsel streamers mixing the light crazily across their faces. The stripper kicks a leg out, hovering over Joao's face with her breasts. She cracks a long whip, pulled from nowhere, it seems.

I sit on the corner of a table, sharing another Super Bock with Jaako and talking to Sarah, a German girl who comes to me out of sheer relief at hearing me speak English. We are one in our need to rest just for a moment, to lapse back into the blessed partial-trance of the familiar. The conversation dies out and soon we are all just sitting, watching the dancers out on the floor. Joao leaps up and changes the song-he puts on 'Jeremy' by Pearl Jam and suddenly everyone is on their feet again, bellowing in the unselfconscious, unintelligible way that indicates no one knows the words.

Joao pulls us all out onto the floor with him and we form a rock concert huddle, jumping in place, all of us singing as loudly as we can, and although the music's loud and some sing in Portuguese, some in English, some nothing but the one or two words of the chorus they remember, in this instant, I am aware that we have understood each other perfectly. Pearl Jam ends and next is Nirvana, and we're all familiar with Kurt Cobain, too, so we keep right on jumping and huddling and singing, and in the middle of the floor, under a blue and green disco ball, Pavel and Agnes, wrapped up in each other, are dancing alone to a song no one else knows.

10.18 CS Party and Joaos birthday, first days in Portugal

Ive arrived. Airport in Lisboa is packed with people, mainly Portgueuse, but I am relieved to hear, all around me, words and phrases in English. Nine and a half hours from Paris. A million miles from Alaska and yet there are no butterflies. In the back of my mind, at all times, I hear myself as I must have sounded to Dominica, my seatmate on Air France flight 1624, I cant believe Im doing this.

But, priorities. I need to get to my first Couch Surfing hostess. The damn payphone! I had no idea, or had forgotten that, foreigh phones dont ring. They beep. I waste almost 5 Euro on this fucking Portuguese contraption before getting it right. Finally, friendly voices. I call Luis. Tell him, Ana is busy but could he pick me up here? He waits nearly 2 hours while Air France mucks up our baggage.

The first of a million thanks. He is standing outside with a sign handwritten, my name on it in black marker.

Ana radiates. Meeting me at the door of her cool, cozy apartment, she bestows kisses upon me (this greeting I will have to learn, for its standard in Portugal) and is immediately so gracious that right away I feel at home. I can see myself standing on her balcony, leaning out. Shes on her lap top chatting away, and lifts it so the face on the screen is pointed towards me. Say hello! she tells both of us. This is not jut a gesture, but an invitation. Gestures, the offering of coffee, of tea, handshakes, tours of bathrooms and backyards, say to the guest You are a guest, and welcome, but this is not home.

Ana doesnt sign off. Insted, I do go out to the balcony, taking in Lisbon, the Vasco da Gama bridge, and she finishes her chat. She has made me at home in the way an ignorance does, invited me into her life. Yes, I am her guest, but my presence doesnt interrupt her activities, wont derail her day. Already weve laughed together, shared a piece of her life that others may not know about.

She takes me for my first really Portuguese meal, what she calls a gourmet hamburger, a burger more like a steak really, with no bun, garnished in cream sauce and piled with thick potato chips. Its delicious. Around us, the breeze picks up, blowing in the smells of the gourmet burger shop, charcoal, a womans perfume, a mans cigarette. All the way home, we talk about our men. Giggling, I emote to Ana about John, finding this common thread between us, gushing about how smart he is, how good looking, how I dont know what to do when I return to him.

Ginginha. Fat ginger berries floating in these tiny plastic cups of it. Jaako, the tall Finnish Couch Surfer and I trade drinks. Were all standing in Al Fama, in the square, backs turned on hustlers and beggers alike. I float a little. Around us are more expats, Pavel and Agnes, the quiet Polish couple, he dreadlocked and cheerful, she blonde and demure. Pedro, scarf at the ready around his neck, jumping about from group to group. Susanna and Emmi, the stylish Finnish students. Its warm. Were all picking the berries from the bottoms of our cups, waiting to head to the old part of town, to a birthday party for Joao, another CSer. The ginginha stand is close by. The night is only begun.

August & Everything After

...which is, in fact, the title of a Counting Crows album, and so I've marked myself as unoriginal.

I am officially unemployed as of Friday. For my entire adult life, I've been employed/employable/an employee; the revelation of unemployment hangs over my head like a skewed tiara on a doll: It shines, appears important, and is expensive. Liberating is not the word for it, although I suppose it to be the most accurate descriptor. At the moment, it's difficult not to feel like a bum, a burden, not a contributor but a walking rucksack, an empty stomach wandering about from meal to meal.

My budget for each month of this two-month excursion is around $400 US. What that might amount to in Euros, I've no idea. I lack direction upon arrival in Lisboa. Brandon can't make a ferry off the island (Madeira) until Saturday, so I am muito sozinha em Lisboa for two to three days. This will give me a chance, I hope, to experience the other side of CouchSurfing: This time I will be a surfer rather than the host. The only problems remaining may be navigation, the language barrier, and finding a string of pay phones by which to contact Brandon.

I worry. Rather, the residual parts of me accustomed to structure, to planning and itinerary, are worried. I grew up traveling as the head of a ragtag convoy, my family racing hand-in-hand across airports and bus terminals around the world, a chain of paper dolls, oldest to youngest, our suitcases numbered off digits 1-8: 1. My father, 2. My mother, everything following attached to a kid. Now, I have a giant, ugly blue packframe, crammed to its tattering gills with clothing, notebooks and Handi-Wipes. Two flashlights, a Ziploc full of dryer sheets (helpful as fire starters should I need them), several soft sweaters, a package of Orbitz Bubblemint gum. A picture of my family. Several memories of John. Extra socks. I count the hours until the plane lifts off. I count the hours until I return home.

A myriad of other adventurers, predecessors and colleagues alike, tell and have told me that this can be done. That one can wander the world alone surviving on nothing but the occasional hearty meal at the invitation of strangers, on air and water and the hard ground under a sleeping bag. In August, two months from departure, I still didn't believe I'd purchased a plane ticket, decided to quit my job, or that I would relish the idea of traipsing a foreign city, attempting to make my way on a rudimentary knowledge of its layout and language. The years I've spent clawing through things: bad relationships, too much snow atop my aging car, my own fear, books and books and books on the way to a degree, are all falling away now, and the openness of it all reminds me of when we were kids playing outside after a blizzard, one of those dumps of snow that piles up in feet, not inches, grazes the rooftops, buries the yard:

One tree, hidden in the woods past our front yard, bent over with the weight of snow and its own age, makes a perfect arch, eight, maybe ten feet over a pristine patch. We struggle into snowsuits, pull on mittens (the kind with strings through our sleeves, the ones Mom can't believe we lose anyway), force feet into boots. We are going to scale that tree. We are climbing to the top if it's the last thing we do.

We each shimmy up, padded knees clinging, until we can sit with our legs hanging over the trunk, feet dangling. My brothers are the reckless first: They stand up slowly, balancing on the curved-most part of the arch, then flail out into the cold air, arms tucked by their sides, eyes slammed shut. I wait in the space between their disappearance and my own hesitation, then do the same. The air rushes by. It's strangely warm- perhaps the friction between my body and its chilly surfaces becomes a kind of warmth, and then the air itself is gone, replaced by the soft crump of my body hitting snow, and though I've held my breath the whole way down, I suddenly realize that I can breathe, and the air I've passed through becomes crystalline, saturated with the taste of bark, dry and fresh at the same time. I can hear my brothers, and my sister laughing, but most of all I hear everything living in the woods all at once: a woodpecker landed several trees away, ice melting into a bucket beside the house, and breathable air is indistinguishable from cold, solid snow, and I am not afraid to drown here.

Time moves forward. I remember now how, two weeks ago, I kissed a man with a mouth like the sea and left him to catch his own plane. In three days I'll catch mine. I may be sleepless, jobless, homeless, but it all rises up around me now and I am not afraid.

Bear Mountain: Exploration

Bear Mountain stands just outside tiny Peters Creek. As my hiking partner Rich has put it, because it is there, we've all ignored it, this ridge of a height lesser than those so fabled up here, and so even to locals, passable and mundane. It's hot-a lingering 80 degrees, one of the driest days of the summer, and we are all wondering why climbing this peak was the first activity to come to mind. Chad, in a welcome executive decision, opts to take his new Toyota FJ, a shiny yellow vehicle with 4-wheel drive and we pile in, feeling slightly conspicuous and overdone. There's only one pack, full of water and fruit, the dog dish, and some $7 beef jerky from REI, pricey and smacking of pretension.

Jumping out of the FJ, I feel ready. The trailhead is not steep, nor particularly different from any other I've seen. The dog, Chip, my sister's miniature schnauzer, is off like a shot. While there are many cars parked along the pullout, we encounter only two men with aluminum telescoping walking sticks. There's an elated sense of pioneering: we may be the only ones on the mountain today. In the puffed-up, overconfident way of the conquistador, we all believe it more noble to be the 'first', to set foot to a terrain unfettered by other eyes and feet-no one but we could then say what transpired, what was said or undone or given.

We had very little time to come into a stride. The steadiness of our entrance to the trail soon gave way. Chad veered to the left-"I'm pretty sure this is it",- he seemed preoccupied. We were not, then, to take the main trail, one I would later learn curved steadily around and up the back of the ridge. Instead, Chad was intent on finding that a less-traveled path, one that sloped up quickly, leading directly to the summit. Our calves ache immediately. Chip scampers ahead, sending up a dust cloud; the first hint of that heavy, ripe-cranberry smell, and often it is impossible to tell what must be done as it hits your nostrils. Is this decay? revulsion? Do you recoil from it? Or is it merely the scent of harvest, of a season not dying but being born? Perhaps, though, the cranberries told us what we were refusing to acknowledge otherwise, stranded by the energy of our own wakefulness in the heat of summer, not yet able to begin hibernation. Chip ate a few blades of grass and turned. Chad was convinced he was taunting us. The trees covered the sky, yet the patchy sun we were exposed to crept up our bodies, a gradual overheating, and Chad stampeded up the first rocky, muddy incline, while Rich and I hung back, our hearts knocking in our throats, lungs heaving. We yelled a few breathless obscenities at Chad's ascending back: "Chad, we fucking hate you right now!"

He was running on his toes, not lightly, but with the labor and strain of a mountain climber. Shortly thereafter, each of the three of us would juggle the adoption of this same strategy. One soon learns, after an embarkation of this type, that each small offering of energy-from a calf muscle tensed against rock, from a few deep breaths-must be accepted and immediately distributed to the denizens of the body, and more importantly, to the unfocused and hesitant mind. One at a time, with the other two lagging behind, we each charge up ever-shorter sections of trail, bursts of energy lasting first 200 feet, then 100, then 50, Chip's gray and white back bobbing in and out of the brush ahead. Using another strategy, we never looked up.

Those with a fear of heights, of falling, refuse to look down. When summitting, it is preferable to practice the opposite. One focuses on feet, on seeking a foothold first with the eyes, taking in every stray crushed plant, and rock, distillation of a usually-smooth, thoughtless action into its component parts. Having not looked up for minutes at a time, we were surprised to find that when we did, we had come up through the shade into full sun: treeline.

Reaching the treeline is not an achievement understandable to those outside the jargon engendered by the outdoors. True, such a term is, on paper, dry, poor substitute for the event that it describes. Passing from brush out onto a slope above the treeline is like surfacing abruptly from under water, a gasp associated with struggle, the shock of it simple to overcome, but never avoidable. In late summer, with each plant's colors beginning to change, the terrain rising up above us is subtly briliant with reds, browns, yellows. Here and there the fuschia hue of fireweed lingers. Suddenly, as with a rush of oxygen after long deprivation, everything is perfectly and calmly clear, devoid of stressors, as effortless as the movement of a few wispy, feeble clouds across the sky. There was nothing tall above us, nothing creating a canopy, and very little greenery . Once past the treeline, the tallest, most invincible bodies around were ours, unfettered as we were now with trunk or tendril or leaf.

It was of course, here that the climb became most difficult. The surface of the trail was powdered with dried, pounded dust, a fine dirt that, not matter how careful you might be, you cannot help but kick up. Rich's feet raised a thick swirl of the stuff straight into my face as he took the lead again, toes digging in for hold, hands cranking at his sides. "Sorry, sorry..., this stuff is so gross..."

We ate it, our faces like those of little kids at a campfire, blackening around the mouth and across the cheeks. Chip, even, eas looking strained. He stopped twice for us to catch up and laid down, tongue hanging out.

About half the way to our eventual summit, Chip disappeared, hearing voices. The three of us were perturbed. Other people on our mountain? This insurmountable peak and obstacle that we claimed for ours, sweated over, and were fiercely determined to not share. Around a corner, we came upon an entire family, mother and father and two kids, spread out under a sparse bush, having a picnic. The mundanity of it was incomprehensible. We'd toiled for some two hours now only to find that an elderly gentleman holding a diamond willow walking stick, his wife, and two little boys had beat us to it.

There was, of course, only one solution to our feelings of inadequacy: pure, unadulterated raucousness. Leaving the family behind to finish the picnic, we are heedlessly louw as we barrel up the trail again. We hoot. We holler. One of us (me? Chad?) yelles and obscenity upon realizing that we had hit the base of the steepest incline yet: the final, hard 25-foot ascent. Once we come up over it, reach its apex, we will be there. We aren't exactly sure where 'there' is. Chad and Rich had admitted earlier that they'd never actually hike Bear Mountain, although they grew up directly beneath it. I certainly never had. What lay on the other side seemed as enchanting and full of frightening mystique as the sea creature always etched in the corners of old world maps. Having climbed and strained for all these steep feet, we know that this particular world is not flat. It is all too possible, still, to step off the edge.

Much to the detriment of our spirits, we are soon joined by another hiker on the descent: a boy of about twelve years, grubby, long-sleeved t-shirt and jeans, pink in the cheeks but calm, not panting and desperate like we are. He is another part of the family below us, and has clearly reached the same goal we have yet to achieve.

With the arrival of this other person comes disappointment. Here was a messenger returning; what will his message be? That it's nothing special, the sea creature nothing but some low-bush cranberries, a blade of two of grass? Thankfully, though, we nod amiably, and he does nothing but smiled a little and continue down. Our resolve strengthens again: if this gangly boy can do it, so can we. We take the twenty-five feet in on hard plunge, arms pumping, legs burning. Chip hits the apex long before we do, looking down on us. We all feel, then, that we will burst, fly to pieces before we make it, the heat too much, sweat pouring into our eyes and down around our ears.

THat's the thing about tests of will, of mind over matter, endurance: when they are over, we always feel we could have done more. Pushed a little harder, one last show of strength that might have given us greatness. And yet the three of us, so utterly exhausted before that last climb, thought of nothing but the relief of it. We thought of the last half-bottle of water, of how dust felt rolled between lips. We thought of how good it would feel to take our eyes from our feet, to finally look up.

Beyond us the blessedly-flat ridgeline were were now spread out along was russet-red, lacking tall things, no trees. Barely even a shrub. The sun blinded, then showed us what it was hiding: a river-valley vista, the small town of Peters Creek bordered by highway directly in the shadow of the mountain, yet laid out beyond and beyond that, the vast silver twist of the river and its tributaries, the flat and browning floodplains, a flock of geese arrowing their way south, flapping silently below us. Below us. We keep up our exploration, so in awe that every few feet, one of us breaks off, gingerly peering over the edge again to take in what we've discovered. Tundra blueberries smash under our boots. Eventually we kneel to pick and eat, tart oblong-shaped and truly delicious. Thick everywhere are black crowberries, somewhat flavorless-in fact, they taste like water. A handful of two quenches our thirst: epetrum nigrum, carpet under our feet. For a while Rich hangs over a precipice, looking out on the valley. Chad goes further ahead to find a similar vantage point. I wander behind, Chip busily sniffing, and despite the fatigue settling in our limbs, the warm ground and the smell of moss and berries comes up around us, and the only word for what we feel might be 'cleansed', might be subliminal.

Might be free.

CHAMMOMILE

for Zoey Zeller


All that summer, your mother and I
walked as far as we could, the city smelling of something
ready to fall from its vine, she
with her hair pulled back, our faces and
shoes glistening with thin sap squeezed from clover,
gritted with dust and molten asphalt and gravel.

And some days I wanted to cease,
in the way that a season does, or perhaps like a fire
confronted by a break, by a river, by men
with shovels, to turn back on myself until there was nothing
left to consume,

but the scent of chamomile tea drew me back,
your mother’s face wet behind the steam.
Months later, I could picture her uncontrollable smile

when she told me she was pregnant
with you, and what did I recall but the hour of my greatest
grief, when years ago, knees buckled,
I knelt in the street, in the rain, in another summer,
body sagging toward soil,

in front of me, as far as my arms could stretch,
sturdy, fragrant blossoms of wild chamomile,
surrounded by pavement,
thriving in the gray, inhospitable twilight,

accepting the tepid water of my tears,
and all around me--as they are today,
now that I know you are born--

things green and new and scented,
the water collecting itself in the ditch beside me
amber, like your mother’s eyes,
and all the world—though laden as it was—was full of new life,

and yesterday I dreamt I heard you cry.

FOUND OBJECTS: Hiking Powerline Trail

1.
8 o'clock in the morning.
Vapor.
Series of strange and broken child's things:
(These are a tricycle with one flat tire. A plastic Go-Kart, muddy. Swing set.)

2.
If possible, wild snapdragons, pale yellow and whose stems are either spike-leaved and equally-pale green, or, if not against the rusty dividing fence, autumn-red.

3.
How do these tiny versions of hothouse flowers get across the trail?
Growing outside their flowerbeds, now.

Civility can become wilderness.

4.
Tiny: I think they are orchids?
Maybe ladyslippers.
Exotic, shaped perfectly, deeply pink miniatures, so small and fragile,
perhaps by their very hiddenness avoiding being picked.

5.
As if someone has tired of Monet's gardens, flung them aside with the onset of cold, a pile of trampled nasturtium, uprooted: red and purple and punk.

Flung out onto the path with their potting soil rounds still attached.

6.
Rotting burlap sack.

Hollow ahead an ideal place for moose to bed down. It is still so very, quietly early.

Sure enough-moose turd in the trail. Long gone.

7.
Dog is in someone's yard.

We've left the "nice" part of this neighborhood. These are all trailer homes, and old.

One, painted bright green with pine-green trim, has its own shed.

A picnic table.

A statue of a kneeling angel on the railing of its tiny deck.

The next has a collection of prisms hanging across the rear window.

8.
A rainbow.

9.
Cluster of Shasta daisies whose petals have all fallen, leaving nothing but their round, golden centers.

I am thinking of the way yellowness will creep, then rush, up over the mountains.

It will be met by snow.

10.
Walk back.

Boots wet and spackled with grass.

The dog chews a single sprig of cat-grass. All the fireweed in this area are blown out, fuzzy white seeds help down by the damp.

11.
Blue Toyota full of elderly couples pulls out. They point at the dog, then wave.

He does look like a stuffed toy. Chinese delivery man from last night called him a "baby caribou."

12.
On the pavement, in candy-colored chalk, a drawing of a dinosaur, and next to it, lettering:

G A B e.

good morning!!!

I LOVE LUKE

Another rainbow.

Christ, I love Tony Hoagland.

Lawrence

by Tony Hoagland


On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,



a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder



to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name



the way pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
“O Elephant,” they say,
“you are not so big and brave today!”



It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people



don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,



I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, “I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,”
or, “You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life



as to deserve to lift
just one of D. H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.”



Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far



in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more



than fight, and fuck, and crow,
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.




Copyright © Tony Hoagland