18% Gray. Zachary Karabashliev
more. I don’t know anybody here who could help me get rid of it all at once. If I start selling it ounce by ounce, I’ll stumble across some asshole and end up in jail. I have no idea how to reach a serious player. And, I suspect some local douche is in trouble because of this bag. There’s no way they wouldn’t be looking for it, right? What I’m saying is, if I try to sell it locally, I’ll either bump into a cop or someone who knows someone who has heard of someone else who is missing a bag of weed. You get the picture. So, I want to get rid of the whole thing and I want to do it safely! I expect you to help me resolve this situation. I think thirty percent will convince you to cooperate.” Long pause. “So what do you think? Can we do something about this?”
“Look here . . .”
“Danny?”
“Yeah?”
“Can you do me a favor and don’t start with look here? Just don’t look here me, OK?”
“OK.”
“OK. If it were easy, I wouldn’t have called you in the first place!”
“Give me some time to think. I’ll ask around. I need to talk to some people. I’ll call you as soon as I know more. You said about fifty pounds?”
“Something like that.”
“Fresh?”
“Aromatic, pungent, strong . . .”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it! How can I reach you?”
“I’ll call you, Danny,” I say matter-of-factly. I hang up the receiver and slowly walk across the sun-scorched parking lot.
*
We were poor. Although I never stopped inventing ways to earn the next buck, we were poor, always on the edge, and sometimes beyond it. In between midterms and finals I bought and resold jeans with the Gypsies at flea markets; I smuggled duty-free coffee from Romania; boom-boxes from Macedonia; beach towels from Greece; and leather jackets from Turkey. One summer we were in such dire straits that I had to steal corn from some fields, boil it in a barrel over a fire made from stolen pallets, and sell it to the tourists on the beaches of Varna. Humiliation.
How was I so arrogant as to ask her to marry me? How was she so foolish as to accept? Stella, I know now, often prefers saying “yes” instead of inconveniencing herself with explaining why no means no. She has a natural talent for minimizing situations in which she has to say either one. Perhaps back then I was one of those few cases in which she needed to give an answer. Maybe she had said yes. I think I remember where it happened. It was winter. A smoke-filled tavern at a train station in Pleven (what train were we waiting for there?). It was a white, cold night outside, warm and dim inside. I held her soft hand in mine, touched it to my cheek and I knew, I so ruthlessly and clearly knew that I did not want any other hand touching my cheek. I tenderly kissed her fingers where I was supposed to place an engagement ring and asked her to marry me. I did it instinctively. Tears streamed down my face (did I have any idea how this would end?). I promised her, I remember, “I’ll always take care of you.” What was I thinking then?
*
I decide to stay in the Los Angeles area one last night before I go. I find the closest Walmart and supply myself with a pair of shorts, blue jeans, socks, T-shirts, sandals, towels, toilet paper, bottled water, and air-fresheners for the car, as well as Toblerones. I get in line at the cash register along with the usual clientele—fat white women and their ice-cream-stained, pink-tank-top-wearing, snot-nosed kids hanging off the shopping carts, and fat black women with their oversized-shorts-and-shiny-basketball-jersey-sporting, buzz-cut, boogery kids hanging off the shopping carts. The cashier is unfriendly and slow. Next to her a kid with Down’s Syndrome wearing an “Our People Make the Difference” pin bags the purchases. I wait in line for a long time to get to the register. Then the cashier screws up and the system crashes. My credit card is not working, and we all wait for the store manager to come and fix the mess.
Walmart: a leech sucking on the flabby back of democracy. I leave in the usual misanthropic mood the place inspires. I unload my purchases in the car, unwrap the coconut air freshener, and inhale its trashy scent. Stella loathes it. So do I.
I find an ATM and withdraw two hundred dollars from our joint account. No more credit cards. No more complications. No more comfort. I want to go back to the beginning of things. I want to touch, feel, taste . . . I want to live again, God damn it.
*
Things were somehow going well with the rock band. The tapes of our first album sold before we were totally sick of the songs. Musically, we were supposedly reaching a new level. I needed a better guitar. Good instruments were not easy to find in those days. Needless to say, they were expensive. My grandpa stepped up and gave me his old Zhiguli as a gift. I fixed it, painted it red, and sold it. With the money, I bought a stolen Fender Stratocaster. For the first time, I realized what it meant to have the right instrument. I kept on writing songs, which we played in front of ever more people. At one of the gigs in a neighborhood bar along with the band Lucifer, our speakers blew and we sat on the edge of the little stage, dejected, waiting for a new amplifier. A gray-haired, serious-looking man approached us. He dropped some compliments and offered to organize a concert for us the next Sunday in the center of a nearby industrial town called Devnya. The money was good, too. He said they had professional sound and lighting equipment—we just needed to show up. We accepted the offer, of course. This was our first paid gig.
This time, I took my camera, along with the Fender, to capture the memorable event. A beat-up Chavdar bus drove us into a gray town, covered in what seemed to be ashes. The gray houses had gray roofs. On the gray streets we passed gray people bent over gray bicycles. It was as if I had ridden into a black-and-white dream.
We got off the bus, instruments in hand, and we found ourselves in the middle of a large crowd of old people waving red flags. Up on stage, under a giant red banner with the slogan of the newly reformed Communist party, a much decorated veteran from WWII was finishing his speech, thrusting a bony fist in the air. After him, schoolteachers got up, then nurses, then machinists, bakers, crane operators, factory workers, retirees, school girls, and even one local artist. Our promoter had conveniently forgotten to inform us about the nature of our audience. We, on the other hand, had never asked. He was nowhere to be seen, and we were forced to deal with his assistant—a round-faced, plain woman, with the well-intentioned and energetic radiance of a Girl Scout leader. She assured us that we could do anything we wanted and say whatever we wanted on stage—they were modern people. We put our heads together and decided that we would better serve democracy if we made ourselves heard instead of refusing the red party paycheck and going back to the bus stop and waiting for a bus (which would not come for another hour anyway).
After the communist rally was over, the crowd started thinning out, for it was almost time to drink some rakia. The murky sun was setting behind the bellowing smokestacks of the largest cement factory in Eastern European, which had discolored this town. We plugged in our instruments and blasted away with our most ferocious songs. From time to time, we shouted anti-communist slogans. The communists left the town square one by one, angrily turning gray overcoated backs on us and shaking gray heads.
And, of course, we didn’t get paid. Those were the times.
I didn’t give up. I kept at it, living in my own world, where things would always happen one way or the other. I somehow managed to conceal my technical impotency on the guitar. To the band, I elaborated theories on how I was looking for new musical structure and new ways of expression. I spoke of punk rock and heavy metal, but secretly listened to Bach, Beethoven, Paco De Lucia, Al Di Meola, Pat Metheny, Wes Montgomery, Miles Davis, The Beatles, Stravinsky, Pink Floyd, Tchaikovsky, Schoenberg . . . Eventually, I started digging deeper into jazz. I was reading more and more. I began having less and less time for rock and roll with the boys. We weren’t rehearsing as often anymore. I wasn’t satisfied with the conversations we had anymore. Often, I felt like I was sitting at a dinner table with some distant relatives. We didn’t have much to say to each other. When all of us were hanging out together, Stella and I could not wait to ditch them, so we could switch back to our own frequency.
I