Oh Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
Where you gonna run to?
All along dem day

Nina Simone – Sinnerman

This past April I received an email from a longtime friend of mine letting me know that Papa had died. It was a shock for both of us, since we knew Papa for years. I guess he was almost sixty, or so, and had some kind of cancer. A majestic portal in our lives was closed shut.
The last time I saw him, Eileen and I were walking through downtown Belgrade, where we all lived. Already divorced from Mira, leaning on his girlfriend as if his life depended on it , Papa looked absent, displaced in another dimension. The girlfriend was a typical bottom feeder, glancing at three of us sideways, not even trying to act friendly. Wherever Papa was, he tried to return by cracking a few empty jokes. It was a sad sight: he always had an exquisite sense of humor, and we used to repeat his ‘pearls’ for days to come. In front of me emerged another man, his instincts were taking a toll larger than him. Standing still in the middle of a busy district, we communicated like strangers with familiar faces. I didn’t act much better either, being freshly married and sensitive to Eileen’s reactions. If someone had to paint the scene, I would had gone with Toulouse-Lautrec much rather than Rembrandt – it was that painful in detail.
I met Papa some time in 1976, as he lived five stories above my friend’s apartment. He was a natural-born painter, a bohemian par excellence. Never met a woman he didn’t like, despite being married to Mira and having two boys, Philip and Mark. Other than that, he was a caring husband and affectionate father. Working as a janitor didn’t bother him a bit: he was people’s person in the truest sense of the word, liberated from socially condescending formulas. On the other end of the spectrum, he showed too much respect to those with high education: couldn’t resist paying the price for his own insufficiency there; which further led to a certain self-denial – his talent just couldn’t offset this poison.
Papa’s paintings were surrealistic, closer to Ernst in ‘Celebes’ than any Dali. My favorite was a head close up of man bursting at the seams of sheer power, a dog collar with metal spikes around his neck. None of us who surrounded him on daily basis figured it out, but it’s clear to me now, after Papa is gone: that was his autoportrait, where the utmost vulnerability met the extreme aptitude and raw instinct. Papa presented us with the painted quintessence of him, yet we acted as a consortium of mentally blind men.
Not once, we’d take a bus and ride out of the city to pick up his paycheck, then roll back to our favorite pub and get hammered, orderly (one scotch, one bourbon, one beer). We’d sit there, mano a mano, and dig deep into life, art, metaphysics, and even deeper, down the bottle. It’s amazing how many epiphanies you can extract from thick glass freshly washed by hard liquor. For the most of our circle, Papa was an entertainer: five-eight, lean and full of muscle, he was bursting with life; his thick blond beard and discolored teeth added to visual part of the package. He either had a wide smile on his face, or his eyes would be piercing through you with friendly attention. As for me, he was both an inspiration and support: natural motivator and mood lifter, Papa would build for you an aura around otherwise average day, person, or event. His electrifying vigor would transform reality in front of your very eyes, making you feel a special participant of a unique happening.
Papa supported me on different levels, the most memorable being the girls he hooked me up with. And he was so subtle along the way, that later I could barely remember whose courtesy it was. In essence, he treated me as a champ long after I quit racing, led me believe I still was, and kept my dream intact. How many people are willing, or able to do that? You tell me.
Eventually, we all morph into the later phase, following dialectics down the road obscure to us at the time. Eileen and I got married, Mira and Papa got divorced, I jumped into my taxicab and took on driving ten hours a day; and before you wiped the glasses, the picture exhausted its appeal. I have no intention of becoming a structuralist here – a person who looks at Vermeer and says: ‘Nice frame’ – but the composition lost its balance. The thrill was gone, and so was our camaraderie. There is an uneasy aftertaste in my mouth every time I part a friend and have to reshape my inner texture, a taste of emotional hangover, a self-query if the new path earned its marks, or just erased a perfectly sound direction. Some doubts always remain doubts, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
In 1990 we moved to the U.S., and memory hell broke loose: time, now multiplied by distance, turned into a voracious white shark, feasting on anterior relationships and images like there was no tomorrow, nor yesterday. The first new world impressions cut deep into the fresh soil of our expectations: life was future weighted, taking no prisoners from the obsolete wars. From the opposing end, I had to face the fact that Serbs, by definition of time, live in the past. Even though they gave up on rain dance years ago, communion via internet is random at best, having the shock value of Colonel Buendia’s, when his father took him to see ice.
Mira died in early April of this year. Taller than Papa, with thick framed glasses contrasting her pale face, she radiated forbearance of a Madonna combined with gleaming of a nun. Emma Bovary comes out short in the comparison of two hearts. Papa attended her funeral on April 15th, not feeling well himself. He died the next day.*

* How can anyone explain to Mark and Philip Cosovic what happened in front of their eyes during that short week. I certainly can’t. Maybe The Poet, in the boiler room named Romeo and Juliet?

When men on the chessboard
Get up and tell you where to go
And you’ve just had some kind of mushroom
And your mind is moving slow
Go ask Alice
I think she’ll know
Jefferson Airplane – White Rabbit

Do you play chess? I know, who does. They don’t even play chess where it was second only to soccer for decades, in former Yugoslavia. My father used to beat me like a stepchild, with his queen watching from a side of the board. He enjoyed his victories a little bit too much, so I returned the favor ten years after. Everybody played, and bragged about it: parks were full of chessboards and chess fanatics, bistros, chess tournaments all over the country – national pastime. Father used to joke how he beat the best Yugoslav grandmaster of his era, Svetozar Gligoric – a true story with a twist, since Gligoric never showed up for the official match of the Student Cup. For my generation, I can say that there is a grandmaster with my last name, not me though, and no relation. We shared the same chess club, Slavia, and Stefan was already a Master Candidate when I started. He ended up being an average grandmaster, while I quit even before reaching the Master title; kind of lousy average out of two Djurics.
Here, we are a poker nation, and that’s fine. What puzzles me is that the real history of chess begins and ends with an American chess genius: Paul Morphy and Bobby Fischer. Morphy beat everyone he played against, and retired in New Orleans at age of 22! On the opposite end, the best chess book I’ve ever read was written by the above mentioned Gligoric – an exquisite journalist, who also was an occasional tutor to young Fischer – about the mythical match in Reykjavik: Fischer vs. Boris Spaski. Spaski was a scholar and a gentleman, thus had no chance against the mad genius from Pasadena.
The history of chess resembles a pub in Soho, London, say The George, at 213 Strand: Morphy comes at noon to open, by three there are already a few drunk Russians and a suspiciously sober looking gentleman reading newspapers. By seven, the number of Russians is out of hand, with five or six of them lying on the floor, including the informant. Then the Serbs come, already spirited, and the real show breaks ground. By three in the morning, when Fischer comes to close, all the glassware is transformed into glass splinters and dust, while Serbs suddenly realize that crystal ashtrays somehow managed to remain intact, and go to work.
After the infiltration of the IBM’s Big Blue (and the spiders from Mars), chess unofficially ceased to exist; that is, if you ask me. Nobody plays chess anymore, even in Yugoslavia (ceased to exist), which proves how dead it became. The world has changed. But, I come to bury chess, not to praise it. The noble media had told you chess was an ambitious game, so they replaced it with series about housewives and Kardashians, while Brother Maynard (see: ‘Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch’) was substituted with Brother Madoff. My heart is in the coffin there with a wooden board and thirty two pieces of wood, and I must pause till it come back to me.
Somewhere close to the end of my brief chess career, I started to pay more attention to white rabbit in chess than chess itself. studying chess theory eight to ten hours each day, then playing another eight at Slavia, eventually got to me: there was no end in sight. Which, in return, helped me realize I was not made of the grandmaster material, i. e. the sterner stuff. So, instead of going wide and trying to conquer the chess world, and spread my thin talent to translucency, I decided to dig deep into mental Fata Morganas of analyzing a complex position on the chess board. When pushed to extreme, these positions transform into a newborn reality, self-contained and detached from chess reality. Like Castaneda’s 1968 master’s thesis, The Teachings of Don Juan, it leaves the common actuality in the dust, searching for the Geist beyond perception.
The first three moves – and keep in mind, one move means your move and your opponent’s move – in any type of position are mentally transparent, meaning you might be wrong in your analysis but you can ‘see’ them quite clearly. The fourth move will give you a headache and the inferiority complex, tempting you to quit self-torturing and move to greener pastures. By the time you reach the fifth, you are dizzy, nauseous, disoriented, pitiful, and on the verge of fainting. That’s where the most of us quit: it just not worth the effort (the voice of our ego whispering to our weak minds). Essentially, we do all the work required – and give up three feet from gold.
The sixth move is where the real fun begins. It’s where the White Knight is talking backwards, like in Four Horsemen of Aphrodite’s Child, where you enter the Court of the Crimson King, where the Red Queen allows Leslie West’s guitar to take her thoughts to Mississippi, where the Rook walks all along the watchtower, and where the Bishop (every saint has his past) tries to sneak through the stairway to heaven unnoticed. Pions, as usual, get served panem et circenses, fresh off the grill. Most importantly, and I underline this, you don’t need to ask Alice anymore: you are Alice yourself.
As for the seventh move, it is an albedo feature. I know it exists, I heard the rumors, but I’ve never been capable of getting there: my tiny brain simply overheated at the entrance, and the bouncers laughed me out of the chess Area 51.

I tried to free myself from him by moving on from the mythologies of the slums to games with time and infinity, but those games are now Borges’ and I will have to conceive of other things.
Jorge Luis Borges – ‘Borges and I’

Speaking for myself, I barely can. It took place half a century ago – a scary fact to say when talking about a human, especially about yourself – and I witnessed it with my own eyes, not yours. Truth to be spoken, while I was quite cross eyed as a kid, my mind wasn’t. The entry was grand. Depending who you ask, it felt like entering the Pink Floyd studio during the recording of Dark Side of the Moon, it was like the first lap of 24 Hours of Le Mans, or just as reading of A Universal History of Infamy. It sure loaded sixteen tons on my shoulders, which I don’t think I was ready for. Neither I saw it coming. As far as I could see, there was no writing on the wall either: the walls were all shelved up from bottom to top, bearing the enormous weight of the antimatter. Being barely five years old, I just guessed tons and tons of it. I don’t think I’ve seen that much weight ever after: my shoulders itch at a miniscule reminiscence. And for a some reason unknown to me, people assume that matter weighs more than antimatter. I am by no means an expert when it comes to astrophysics, but I’ll take the credit for this one.
Years later, driving my race car sideways through the first curve of my first rally, that feeling came back too me, touched my shoulder, and drifted away: time was already way faster and almost material. It became absolutely material just few hundred feet away, when my Abarth overheated and the smell of burning antimatter filled the cockpit. But that’s another story, ‘My First Rally’.
I recently wrote about the editorial analysis (I still deny my temptation to embrace analysis with quotation marks) I received from some literary magazine, and at this juncture I have to quote a tiny bit of it: ‘Why would a library full of books be considered THE wonder of the world…?’ It’s probably me, but I’m missing something here. Name any other wonder of the world, and I’ll laugh at the comparison. Nothing can stand shoulder to shoulder with human thought, unless we have an alien in mind. Even then, good luck to him.
Still, I have hard time remembering antimatter, and I don’t think it matters anymore. Forgetting it is like a spiral which drills deeper and deeper into the solid core of the Blue Planet, bemoaning the blues for the surface light in August. It’s almost November as I write this, spell-checking Gutenberg’s name for double ‘t’, and adding an extra t-shirt when I go out for a cigarette. Sometimes I wish I could smoke inside, and blow more smokes into the screen, just like the blind librarian. Or take a joyride on a psychotic horse through the burning stables. There are so many items I have to kiss goodbye these days: mouth-watering bar brawls, lucid moments of self-awareness, burning rubber while driving sideways around the neighborhood; and Eileen when I go to work.
Going to work is yet another story from a tedious library of Karl Marx. At age five, I wasn’t philosophically inclined: I hoped for a life spent in labyrinth of my own fantasies, fantasies constructed of other minds’ labyrinths – anything that would isolate me from mental ubiquity of the slums surrounding the farm my grandfather had, from those names my peers slammed over my large head and the exclusive Marty Feldman stare. Two eye surgeries and relocating to the big city took care of my exterior troubles, leaving the fancy emptiness inside. I got stuck in between the mythology of slums and the games with infinity, while the time was leaking out unnoticed.
Our memory is arguably the biggest thief of them all, robbing us blind in broad daylight. It serves as a surge protector for its mothership, the body itself. It strikes with efficiency of the Cheka commissars zooming in on a Gulag escapee, with no intention of taking prisoners. It creates darkness at noon within a single second, erasing any traces of the event ever taking place. Those erased segments eventually add up, arousing that itchy sensation of dizziness and confusion, shifting firm memories out of focus and into self-doubt.
For instance, I can’t remember why that day I just walked away from my racing car never to start it again. I even refused to get engaged when it came to selling the damn thing; my father had to deal with it. I was at my peak, only 21 years old, just a tad shy of the full-fledged mastery in terms of driving technique. But the speed was there: I broke almost every single record in my class. And I walked. Obviously, I know, or I think I know why I did what I did, yet I can’t remember the crucial turning catalyst which finally overpowered all the reason shouting at me to reconsider. It might had been some unknown personal trait that kicked in, or that Slavic self-destructive impulse, or I simply had enough of racing my talent into a cul-de-sac: Jovica Palikovic was the best, well-connected, well-funded, and all he ended up with was a part time stunt with Renault’s Balkans division, driving Renault 8 Gordini on few international rallies. They gave him a Renault 12 afterwards, but that car was a fluke. I was the fastest, not connected, not funded, and in all likelihood I couldn’t breathe under such an existential stress. Still, I don’t remember why.
One clue remains certain: George and I haven’t been in the best of terms ever since. There was a mortal leak of antimatter, cutting my future peaks half-mast, an absence of the secret ingredient that made alchemists amaranthine and philosophers tangible. For a brief, flickering moment George had it lined up, and now – as I walk away from him – he is where he always wanted to be: racing his bolide through the labyrinth of what-could’ve-beens.

Just staring at the photo of the Neuschwanstein Castle gives me that uncomfortable sensation of diving from a cliff, sensation occasionally present in my dreams: it is not fear in a physical sense, more of angst from an outer world I’ve never entered. It talks to me in a language I don’t understand, but I get the meaning: you are just a tiny creature within its own limitations, and we don’t need a fence, or a bubble to isolate you from the real infinity: you are doing that job just fine by yourself. It comes across as if I peeked into a space beyond my comprehension, and received an anxiety jolt in return. Not necessarily as a punishment, more like a natural reaction, allergic maybe, to a realm I will never conceive. The only consolidation I can think of in a moment like this is to reach for the power of my imagination and fight back. But human imagination – by definition of its own inadequacy – lacks the emotional libido to back it up through life changing decisions, thus falling dry and short of any outer reality. Just another brick in the wall of human gutless actuality.
On a different level, so many intelligent people wrote over the centuries about powers of our imagination to engage the hidden capability of Universe in transforming our clear visions into our material world, as long as we persistently back it up on daily basis. Napoleon Hill, in his masterpiece ‘Think And Grow Rich’, even explains the very nature of this ‘mechanism’, as astonishing revelation as it may sound. It is similar to repeating a prayer, and essentially it is the same medium. What surprised me recently was a sudden realization that – when you think about it without the prejudice of our habitual doubt distilled from weakness – it is more likely for any of our tall orders to come to fruition than it is for us to imagine something beyond trivial. Just do me a favor and look for synonyms for imagination: that book comes in two letters – fancy, fantasy. And I challenge these as synonyms anyway. Yep.
Back in late 80s, Eileen and I were frequent Munich visitors. Following a dull ride through what once was a proud and coherent country, succeeded by the vivacious Austrian Alps, and passing by Mozart’s Salzburg, I’d hit the autobahn with my diesel Peugeot 505 capable of reaching a stellar 70 mph. Munich, the capital of Bavaria – if it means anything these days – is a spirited city in both senses of the word. After spending the entire day shopping for the kids, home, and ourselves, there was always one destination left: the illustrious Mathaser Bierstadt. The largest Bierhalle in the world until it met its demise in 1997 and became just another movie theatre, it was capable of hosting 5000 visitors; an establishment ‘where beer flows like wine’, in the immortal lyrics of Canned Heat, where karaoke singing was invented as a byproduct of Lowenbrau (play tipsy for me). Located at 5 Bayerstrasse, in the heart of shopping and cultural district, flirting with Karlsplatz and Haupt-Bahnhof on opposite sides, it was – in the words of another frequent visitor, an anonymous blogger – ‘cavernous, filled with nooks and byways and various banquet rooms and snugs, and decidedly grittier than the Hofbrauhaus – no less attractive for tourist, but rowdy and with an earthier composition of native barfly.’
My usual order would include half a roasted chicken, one-swirl raw beet salad, and all-you-can-drink drought Lowenbrau. Once Eileen wished to try the famed Sachertorte, and there it was, served as requested, in white chocolate.
Now, there are some 130 kilometers from Munich to the Neuschwanstein Castle, in direction of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, direction Eileen and I have never taken (‘Well, I’ve never been to heaven, but I been to Oklahoma…’ Three Dog Night). Even if we were aware of the Castle’s existence, which wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t have gone there: not enough time for leisurely detours, not enough freedom.
The lack of freedom of any kind places the blinders around our imagination, unless you are one Nelson Mandela or Viktor Frankl: at the time I couldn’t even imagine what the passion of Ludvig II, inspired by life-long devotion to Wagner, could create out of thin gray substance in human skull. The Castle was there, I wasn’t.
Listen to these words from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Commencement address at Stanford University: ‘It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.’
And yet my petty imagination couldn’t reach the peaking towers of the Neuschwanstein Castle, the best anticipation of heaven facilities ever erected by man.
Sometime in 2006, at the beginning of our commercial real estate adventure, Eileen and I visited Elk City, Oklahoma. We were greeted by a sharp and polite young man, Edward Harill, and we toured the 78-unit multifamily dwelling. It was listed at 1.15 million, and had the rustic charm that foliage and aged trees add to deferred maintenance: almost a Mark Twain morning where nature strikes back.
Thank Heaven for Oklahoma!

Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad.
George Bernard Shaw

It’s actually a quite appropriate idea for some female singers these days to name themselves ladies. Obviously, if they didn’t do it, nobody in their right mind would call them so. It serves their intended purpose, whatever that is, and as a side effect, it confirms the irreversible separation of words and their content; the intestinals of the latter being long forgotten. If some rapper calls himself Lil’ Moron, that would flow smoothly, since there is no meaning behind it, just a facade, a Potemkin village. It’s safe to declare the death of meaning. Updated, Shaw’s quote would state: reading made Don Quixote mad. He couldn’t possibly get mad by believing what he read since there’s nothing behind the words. Not anymore. Which, sooner or later, ships the entire belief system into oblivion, with 3D replacing depth, and pixels filling in for brain cells.
And then, as if it weren’t enough already, here we come: the Baby Boomers. One and only John Phillips, in his latest CARandDRIVER column, laments over the way we drive: ‘Their pace begins slow, devolves to sluggish, deteriorates to lethargic, then concludes with a full Kevorkian.’ It’s a lethal combination of aging, governmental oppression, evaporating 401Ks, and above all, broken spirit. Says Phillips: ‘I have seen quitters, and they are us.’
On the brighter side, the other day New Mexico police arrested none else but Al Unser Jr. I drove more than few times through Albuquerque, and there it was, the Unser Boulevard. Kudos to integrity of the local force, but much more to Junior himself, for racing his Suburban against the other driver at speed above 100 mph, while being intoxicated! At least one Mohican is alive and kicking. He fully reversed Sartre’s proclamation that no wisdom at old age can compensate us for the follies we failed to do when we were young.
I’m no exception either: my last traffic ticket dates all the way back to 1996, and I’m blushing while exposing this shameful fact. It was a good one, though: I ran through stop sign intersection at some forty miles per hour, drove sideways a bit, and parked in front of the trucking company I worked for. And he parked right behind me. For the lack of speeding tickets, I have no regrets: I live in California, where speeding on freeways gives me no thrills. Arriving here in 1990, I came ten years after the last Mulholland Drive illegal race, a regular nightly event for three decades, where the likes of Steve McQueen, Lee Marvin, and Jim Garner used to hang out. It was running the ridgeline of Santa Monica Mountains for some mile and half, starting just a few turns down from Madonna’s Beverly Hills château.
Few days ago, on October 5th 2011, Steve Jobs took the premature exit from the world known to us. He was, is, and always will be the final bridge in between the Boomers and the oncoming generations. In the same sense as the only authentic meaning of ‘life as we know it’ is Monty Python’s Meaning of Life. You may consider this oblique, but it takes a genius to connect two generations; otherwise they’ll just wave at each other as their trains rush in the opposite direction.
I feel more and more isolated among my peers. Yesterday, I received the response to a story sent to some magazine a while ago, when I didn’t know better. It was ‘Taming of the Shrewd’. Two editors offered their analysis, misread the Post Scriptum, couldn’t see the plot since it didn’t have a sticker on it shouting ‘plot!’, and wondered why I mentioned some persons nobody heard of, like Marcel Marceau. But that’s besides the point. The point is that I wanted to save their response so I could share it with people I know to enjoy literature. Well, I thought, I could show this to… and got stuck, realizing I have nobody to share that with. Sad and sobering insight.
As I’m sitting in front of the mental image of my generation, listening to a theme from an imaginary Western and whining about my intellectual solitude, something is brewing out there. At this point I don’t think anybody knows what really lies behind what our biased media labeled as Wall Street protests, and where desperate the current president calls for the slaughter of the golden goose for a gain of one golden egg; demagogically prophesying taking money from those who make it and giving it to those with no intentions of doing so; thus putting to shame even the likes of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, who at least dreamed of enlightening the (mentally) poor, not spoon-feeding it. If this isn’t ridiculous, we need to redefine the word.
The Boomers had their Woodstock and their Vietnam, leaving the current generation to deal with their inheritance: the incompetent presidents favoring big capital and its interest while ignoring the extinction of the middle class, members of Congress sitting there for decades serving their personal and partisan agendas, the media being ‘blind’ and disgusting; and the beat goes on. Contrary to Don Quixote, this generation became mad by not believing what it listened to – unless, maybe, Rammstein’s Reise Reise. As for the first part of Shaw’s equation, I’m not so sure: it doesn’t seem to me that Facebook communications are capable of producing a well-read, curious, and philosophically inclined personality – a sine qua non for humanity to prosper.
Am I just a singer in a rock’n'roll band called the Boomtown Rats – no relation to Bob Geldof and the guys – the band that has no equal when it comes to its selfishness, the sow that eats her farrow?
In the meantime, Rome is burning, partially, and no one can name Nero.

Piercing further and further through what we call the Universe, one conclusion becomes imminent: at the same time we discover our future and our past. This unique point confirms the old metaphysists’ declaration that time doesn’t exist. Unfortunately, our tiny brain cannot grasp a possibility of all things happening at the same time in the vast everywhere we are unable to define. Then a bit larger tiny brain comes across, claiming axioms left and right (left and right, by the way, don’t exist in ‘Universe’ either), one of them being that the speed of light is the top speed possible out there: who are they to place a governor on the top speed of a barely known matter. That theory was denied the other day, when even larger tiny brains in Switzerland discovered that so-called nutrinos can travel faster than speed of light. Now what? This proves the previous ‘laws’ faulty and the claims arrogant, and what is really arrogant is to believe this latest edition to be the final one; as if final in itself exist as a fact. If the Bing Bang was the beginning of all the matter, how did the picture look like prior to it? Something is missing in that picture.
Myself, I prefer the timeless silence of myth. It’s a vacation from all the frenzy that mixes time, matter, anti-matter, speed, and gravity into loosely controlled chaos. It means drinking ambrosia margaritas and chatting with friends throughout the centuries, without being lectured by the latest agenda of the newest ignorants. Surrounded by archetypes, I can easily counter any axiom attack. If you ask D. H. Lawrence, myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
Sometime in eighth grade, or seventh, I stumbled upon Serbian heroic decasyllabic poems, narrated for centuries along with the sound of one-string fiddle-alike instrument, kept in between the legs of the sitting narrator. Those fiddles were already on the verge of extinction, when I heard my distant uncle perform on one. It came across as a cry for the times gone and forgotten, as well as the times yet to come and pass. What struck me the most was the lack of enthusiasm in the audience, assembled mostly of our relatives: they couldn’t wait for the ceremony to be over with. Not much past they had in them. On the other hand, Jacob Grimm was impressed with what we called the Serbian decasyllabic, to be surpassed by none other than Goethe, who went into lengths of learning the Serbian language so he could read the original.
I already knew the language, having advantage over Goethe for the first and only occasion in my life, so I throughly enjoyed this unique blend of mythology and narrative rhythm, aware even at early age that these pearls will forever stay in the vaults of one tiny language, defying any translation by the sheer force of its unique ingenuity.
Most of decasyllabics circled their wagons around the monumental event that indelibly shaped the Serbian history in making: the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. Serbs remain the only nation that I’m aware of that managed to lose the same battle twice: once, when heavily outnumbered by Turks back in the fourteenth century, and recently, in 2008, when U.N. politicians let Albanian Muslims declare independence of Kosovo, a contradictio in adjecto: how can you separate one nation from its ancient land, and call that an act of independence for the other party? The only Tito’s legacy with disastrous outcome, since he opened the border to Albania for anti-Soviet sympathizers after the war. Once Serb population plunged from 95% to 5%, you didn’t need a prophet to foresee the future. I usually try to stay away from politics, but they got me on this one.
One decasyllabic poem, The Ailing Doychin, became my favorite the moment I finished the read. It preceded the Battle of Kosovo cycle, and most likely originated during the reign of the first Serbian czar, Stefan Dusan, in early fourteenth century. I conceived the city-state of Thessalonica behind the thick stone walls, the harbor with its merchant vessels, dromons, and biremes, the Italian-style galleys, the salty smelling dock water. In the midst of this throng, far from the madding crowd, laid Duke Doychin inside his castle. It had been nine years since the debilitating rheumatism struck the man, leaving him motionless at his prime.
The vast field in front of the city portal, the enormous tent spreading among olive trees, and the Arab Uso challenging anybody for a duel; to decide supremacy over Thessalonica, to scratch the history page, to exhibit his manhood, while assuming Doychin being dead and buried. I could taste time stuck in the hourglass by default of myth, smell the tension of fear mixed with the odour of laurus nobilis.
When the continuum of inevitable events chose Doychin’s sister for Uso’s next concubine, she at last broke the news to him. Keeping his facial expression above human mortality, Doychin sent his wife to the stables to look for his faithful horse and take him to his bosom buddy, blacksmith Peter, for a fresh set of horseshoes. All through nine years sea waves flushed out camaraderie and awe, encouraging Peter to reach for his friend’s wife, in avail, as she ran back shedding tears.
Bundled up matador style, to prevent his bones from drifting apart, Doychin managed to climb the horse, one fat but eager animal, and went reverberating down the cobblestone streets of Thessalonica. If Uso saw a zombie in the close up, he would had handled it quite better. His face suddenly melted like a Salvador Dali clock, his voice went missing in Arabic translation, his ears battered by the bells of Panagia Chalkeon.
Doychin had no time to waste, his hourglass ran on memory of sand, more distant and unreliable by the Byzantine minute. He nailed Uso to the city portal, rushed back and parted Peter’s head from Peter’s neck, then rode his heavy breathing horse back to the castle. Where he dropped dead, high from his silver encrusted saddle.

My Peugeot 505 was gliding across the Greek countryside some time in late eighties, covering the route in between the tiny village of Asprovalta and Thessaloniki, the second largest city in Greece, when a white rooster showed up in the middle of the road, just feet away. I wasn’t doing more than 70 mph, and can’t really explain how it got there. Just a week before, in Yugoslavia, there was a headline about two women getting killed in a car accident while trying to avoid a dog on the road. In a situation like this my options always run short. I pointed the center of the hood across the chicken, didn’t touch the brakes in order to keep the vehicle’s height equal. The entire session was over in about two-three seconds and – other than my sister Gordana shouting from the back seat into my ear – went smoothly. I didn’t feel a slightest thump, neither I saw anything in the rearview mirror, which made the entire event a bit mysterious.
Nothing happened further, as we cruised through the endless olive trees wrapped in an unceasing cricket symphony. Thessaloniki , which I prefer to Athens, is quite a charming Aegean Sea port, mixing reminiscence of Robert Graves, Conrad, and ‘wooden ships on the water’ (very free and easy…). The eons were ubiquitary, yet we had a shopping spree to perform. Instead of my usual soliloquy, I briefly argued with Plato walking down the Tsimiski, while my wife and my sister went all out.
Hours, or ages later, depending on who you ask, I was offered to buy myself an inexpensive gift: an exchange for ladies’ itching conscience. A tip for not asking the only sensible question: When is enough?! Waken up into the late twentieth century noise, I couldn’t think of anything amaranthine. A Plato’s torso as an immortal piece of kitsch, maybe? A little fish perhaps?
Receiving gifts was never a specialty of mine: I either knew exactly what I wanted, and drilled my parents’ brains until I got it, or I was absolutely indifferent. Now, I stood in the middle of the prime Greek shopping district like an idiot just inducted in some Hall of Fame, while Zeus was laughing his lungs out, and the only coherent thought that came to mind were the ageless words od David Hume: ‘A man, who has had no opportunity of comparing the different kinds of beauty, is indeed totally unqualified to pronounce an opinion with regard to any object presented to him.’
Alas, I was denied my opinion before even knowing the object I was to opine about, plus I was naturally incapable of choosing that object, a gift. With one brilliant stroke of chisel worth Phidias, both my material and cerebral horizon became marble dust. The smell of lavender emerged from a side street as we walked back to the car.
I did buy myself a present that summer day in Thessaloniki, ignoring the sound advice to ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. Colette once mentioned to young Truman Capote that the only point of giving a gift is when it’s very dear to your heart. Obviously, it wasn’t something you buy for yourself, let alone for some hundred drachma.
I bought myself a tape, The Animals’ Greatest Hits, blasting in the car on the way back to Asprovalta. Their House Of the Rising Sun introduced the age of rock to me, cracked open an unexplored dimension, a new mental realm. The years that followed had the prism of rock firmly nested behind my eyes, encouraging me to ‘keep on rocking in the free world’. Which I did. I freed the reality around me, and comfortably walked the talk.
There was a song on the tape, When I Was Young, that brought me back to the time I was five, spending days within the farm-like property my grandfather had in the suburbs of Zemun, a town across the river from Belgrade. The Austro-Hungarian Empire run out of breath there, staring for centuries at the fortress of Kalemegdan, and the Turks parading its walls. When I was eight we moved to Belgrade, crossing the point were the two super powers agreed to a draw, the delta of rivers Danube and Sava. Tucked in my immense ignorance, I noticed nothing.
My grandfather’s estate consisted of a living yard, with an enormous oak tree and a deep well hand pump, followed by an economy yard, and a never-ending open garden rich with fruit trees and all sorts of vegetables. A bunch of street dogs would occasionally storm through in pursuit of their bad to the bone dream, sending me up my favorite cherry tree in a Budapest second.
Those were my Huckleberry Finn days: my parents would leave for work, grandpa would take his horse carriage to the field where he grew corn and watermelons, my three aunts were off for school, leaving my grandmother cooking, and myself wandering the realm. Until one day I exhausted all of my roaming ideas, and just stood there, leaning on the wire fence that divided the two yards. There was a fat white rooster gazing at me, shifting his head sideways so he could stare more efficiently. Kind of a challenge, don’t you agree? I lifted my rubber sole, placing it on the fence and in his face. Just what the sucker was waiting for, as he went bananas trying to poke my sole. Ten minutes later I got bored, strolling to find out what grandma was baking.
As the story would have it, I forgot all about the episode, casually entering the yard the following day. The rooster shot at me like a cannonball, no more fence in between us, bringing my thoughts back to earth in milliseconds. I dropped a white plate I carried to feed the chicken, and ran back. My trips to the garden were immediately placed on the layaway program. In the next few days I made a handful of lame forays, which ended with cowardly retreats after barely covering half the distance needed. The inconceivable tragedy came right afterwards, when no one would take my fear at its face value, help me reach the garden. Two of my aunts’ boyfriends, my future uncles, all but ridiculed me for being such a sissy, my father smiled and did nothing. At last, grandma came to my rescue, cooking a delicious chicken soup for my battered soul out of my arch nemesis.
A desert of sand through my hourglass later, while building a ‘made in U.S.A.’ nest, on September 29th 1992, the Rooster emerged from the Dirt, its fertile sound heavy with Seattle moisture. Courtesy of Alice In Chains.

Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future – Oscar Wilde

I was sitting on a park bench, Marina and Miroslav were playing in the sand, the hourglass was trickling. One 1987 clear spring day in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, life as we know it. A man wearing robust black-framed glasses walked by me and took the next available bench, letting his Dalmatian run free. This was a tiny park, known as The Students’ Square, surrounded by a university building, a not-so-busy street, and the last stop, as well as the first, for the bus line 26. You could taste time in its rich texture.
The man sitting few yards away was Dragoslav Mihailovic, who wrote the best novel ever written in Serbo-Croatian language, When Pumpkins Blossomed. I say this in the face of the fact that Yugoslavia already had a Nobel Prize laureate for Literature in Ivo Andric. I admire Andric and his immense wisdom, as well as I respect him for being one of my milk delivery customers – it was a small world out there! – yet, in my humble expert opinion, the greatest Yugoslav writer wasn’t neither him, nor Mihailovic, but Borisav Pekic, who drained shots of plum brandy while drooling dark Slavic sensibility all over his countless pages. This man was the Faulkner of the Balkans, or should I reverse acclaim according to the talent penetration: Faulkner was the Pekic of the South.
If I shared milk with Andric, plum brandy with Pekic, with Mihailovic I shared the publisher: Slobodan Dane Masic, and his The Independent Editions. Obviously, if it weren’t for two commodities and one cyclopean heart, any similarity in between myself and the masters of the art would’ve been a nonsensical coincidence. Dane Masic decided to publish my flash fiction works, a collection named The Metaphysical Stories, which came out in 1989 and shot me to the fifteen minute stardom: I had a prime time TV appearance, few one hour-long radio interviews, numerous reviews, and a belletristic night sponsored by David Albahari, the Gaius Maecenas of up-and-coming Yugoslav writers; an exquisite author in his own right. Only months later I was ‘George who?!’. But at that point I didn’t care: we were packing, destination U.S.
So I sat there, next to a Yugoslav great, curious if I could arrive at the point relevant enough to address the man as an equal, exchange a few neighborly words. There was twenty-four years in between us, a generation almost, which erased any esoteric common ground: I didn’t have my future fame, and Mihailovic already had his heavy past – years spent at the infamous Bare Island, where those who opposed the regime were sent to rethink their philosophical grounds, while sledgehammering rocks into gravel, intruder in the dust. After such a mind fortifying empiricism, Mihailovic went on to become a circus impresario; he exchanged a political circus for a straightforward one, showed them a finger, and moved on.
My past, up to that date, was a quite different circus, more of the Circus Maximus type, panem et circenses: I did what I chose to do, and except for a brief head to head combat with the government dealing with my mandatory military service, which I won hands down, my existence lacked any sterner stuff. Watching Miroslav and Marina play, I realized that I entered the world of heavyweights for the first time.
After executing a quick ‘Ben Franklin close’, where cons outweighed the pros, I decided to keep minding my own business, whatever that was, and leave Mihailovic to his thoughts. It’s fair to say that my book of business ran light in those days. If you’ve ever seen what day traders call a ‘flag’, you’ll know what I mean: a stock would shoot up one day, say 20-30%, drop down big the next day, then go up less, drop down less, while volume would decrease significantly. By the time it forms a triangle, the volume is almost non-existent, and the pattern is about to explode upwards and hit the moon. That’s exactly where I was sitting the spring day in question, unaware of a ticking bomb underneath the bench: I performed all my wild swings punctually throughout my youth, I fell down on so many occasions and I jumped up like a yoyo, and now there I was, on a May morning, sitting motionless on a park bench. And the only objects moving were Dragoslav Mihailovic’s Dalmatian and my own kids.

Baum was my best friend for years. We went to chess tournaments together, played poker against the locals in shady parts of the city, chased girls together, got drunk so many times together. We went for a vacation on the Adriatic Coast, beered out the money in the first three days, than ate bread and plumbs for the next ten, waiting for the live concert of then the best Yugoslav band, The Korni Group (where Korni was short for Cornelius). Later on I’d go racing, and Baum delivered milk to my customers at 4 am. It took a strong PR campaign afterwards to retain those outraged people on my customer list, but nevertheless, he threw his best effort out there, into the dusk of early mornings.
Sometime in 1978, our connection faded away. I returned from my six-month visit to Macedonia, and there I was, by myself. I got married the following year, and for the next decade we visited each other occasionally, then Eileen and I took our kids to terra incognita, with $8,000 in travellers’ checks and eight pieces of luggage, not knowing a single soul across the water.
What happened in 1978? Nothing really, other than a natural expiration of coming to age phase, both for Baum and me. We did take opposite ways of getting there though: him having a long term relationship with Edith, not much different from a marriage, which exploded in his face before a wedding date could had been set. Me, going flat-out for years, then suddenly waking up in a life without steroids of dreams: I exhausted every single impulse turned vision, caught and consumed the last remaining carrot.
Still, how can one deep and lasting relationship vanish into thin air some fifteen years later? Are our bonds made of light and perishable matter, subject to leaks in the manner of hoses and pipes – like a 287 unit apartment complex in Baytown, TX, with its plumbing collapsing due to deferred maintenance, after all those feces came through and floated away? Is that what it is? Just a different tube in the ground, another brick in the wall? We would sit around the kitchen table, Baum, his wife Marcy, Eileen and I, and he’d throw that baumesque smile de profundis, from the times mourned and buried, but there’d be no weight in that smile, no substance, just an unbearable lightness of being. One sad scene.
The day came for us to leave, as if it was written in some books unknown to man, in the library that denied a membership even to Borges himself – and we left. We left Yugoslavia, and now we are ‘originally’ from Serbia; so funny I can barely laugh. A new hourglass started to trickle for us, or one of those fluid clocks that made Dali famous, while the speed of events and first impressions pushed time backstage, behind the curtains of an amateurish theatre with no funds and no community support. Like in that adage : we eat what we can eat, we can what we cannot.
So we canned a lot, you name it, from the very first house we rented, south of Ventura Boulevard in San Fernando Valley, to that same house that we had to leave behind on my birthday in May of 1991, some nine months later, packing all of our belongings into a Dodge Caravan and heading for a brief slice of life in Chicago; with the van braking down in Oklahoma City in pouring rain, and Marina (6), Miroslav (9), and our huge German Shepherd Alfie getting uncomfortable under the circumstances. Nothing that a good dream of a promised land and the next morning can’t cure.
By the time we cut back on canning we were back in San Fernando Valley, I for once had a steady job, we had two kids, two cars, and still the same hairy monster, and life itself, as we knew it, was easing off its immense pressure. And time – the most valuable commodity if you ask Todd Harrison of Minyanville (not a small town, not a hamlet at all: a cyberspace community of people who think and make money in the stock market by using their heads instead of their mouths) – time became more visible, more omnipresent.
In the meanTIME, Yugoslavia was falling apart, until it fell apart. I don’t think any of these dramatic events had any impact on Baum, it’s just the way he is. I’d occasionally correspond with the third man, Velja Pavlovic, who concluded Drei Kameraden, and according to him Baum did nothing out of Baum’s style. His mom Vera died and left him a sizable apartment in the heart of the Belgrade’s Downtown, his son was born and growing up, and Baum would go daily and place a stand on Revolution Boulevard, and peddle the latest peddling attractions, with beer in lieu of time soothing down his throat.
Recently, I finally joined the Big Bang of social sites, for the purpose of writing this blog, but I didn’t push the barbarians much further than the seacoast, settling myself within the Twitter Magna Charta. I mickeymoused my Facebook site, and stopped right there. Little by little, or little by more and more, some weird messages came my way, that I’d at first ignore and delete in a hurry without paying any attention to the content (The pagans are coming, the pagans are coming!). Eventually I got pissed off, and began reading what was written. As it turned out, Baum was coming up with all kinds of new names for his multiple Facebook accounts, sending me invitations to join him in poker lounges across the web, offering some cyber chips as a reward, etc.
I remember driving my Freightliner through Wisconsin one dawn in May of 1997, listening to the best Classic Rock station I’ve ever listened to, when a song came across and threw me off guard and into an emotional early morning spin. For no obvious reason, or any reason for that matter, I began singing along, shouting down the tune, while weeping like a lost child: ‘And time waits for no one, and it won’t wait for me…’
Time didn’t wait for Baum, as it sure didn’t wait for me.

I owe gratitude to a lot of people. This story, however, I owed to myself and my fellow Slav

If you ask me, and I don’t know why you shouldn’t, the best novel ever written in Serbo-Croatian language is Dragoslav Mihailovic’s When Pumkins Blossomed – plain and simple claim, no maybes or stuttering words of hesitation. Other than hitting me straight in the solar plexus with the osmosis of my sensibility and the metaphysics of its lucid life float, this masterpiece deals with one of rare endeavors I’ve never tried: boxing.
It doesn’t take a village, it’s too small and cramped, it takes a village idiot to try in his lifetime as many trials as I did; and if you ever want to blackmail me, just list them all and keep the tally well hidden, and I will pay, in installments if I have to: that’s how embarrassingly long that dossier is. And yet, as a contrarian fresh breeze in Desert Hot Springs after days and days of scorching heat, here comes something I always desired to try, and never did. Amazing! What happened there?
As I can only guess, these two things took place. First, I was doing boxing almost daily during my pre-teen and early teen years, fighting every bully who opened his bloody mouth. I was a magnet for them, as efficient magnet as a fresh horse shit is for cognoscenti flies. In one sense, I had enough action, but then again, when I watched those boxing matches on TV, comparing myself to fighters in middleweight division (since I could probably squeeze my weight down to 75 kilos), I never knew if they’d beat me badly, or the other way around. And that really bugged me. During that time of what could’ve been I was already in my mid teens and past any sensible entry point.
Secondly, my intellect would dismiss the idea of his house (or housing shell aka head) being banged on daily basis, thus lobbying against it like there was no sensible tomorrow.
I’ve never gone to a boxing tournament in my life, not once. Why should I? If I’m not boxing then I shouldn’t be there period. Those were times of action, I had places to be, all of us. Watching great boxing matches on TV was a bit different, since they took place once a year or so, like Olympics, the European Cup, USA vs. USSR, or the finals of the Yugoslav Championship: I wouldn’t miss that for the world.
In a certain way everything was more real back then, not much of the gap in between spectators and ‘celebrities’, whatever that word means. At one occasion of Yugoslav finals, as bouts would line up by weight, by the end of the night the heavyweights came out, and something was amiss. My buddy Baum turned to me in disbelief: ‘Where the hell is Radisa?’ Radisa Nedeljkovic was a legendary heavyweight champ, a huge guy, overly obese even for his size. If he hits you, you’d be sorry you missed that train (to hit you instead). On the international scene he didn’t achieve much, if anything, for one good reason: he barely ever trained. Guy had better things to do, why waste sweat with all of his natural talent. The commentator was aware of the viewers’ disappointment, so he clarified the reason for Radisa not to be in the finals (he’d be there just by showing up for the tournament): the man was building a new house for his family. Pure and simple choice: family comes first, house second, boxing…
Over the years I collected a lot of exquisite moments from the sport of boxing, memorable fights, favorite boxers, and I could’ve packed them neatly into a file if I wanted to: into memorex device in my brain or into gigs of my computer. Still, I was one piece short for that harmonious puzzle to finalize itself into a myth. On one occasion I saw an international boxing match where a Russian fighter pulled something I had never seen before or after. He kept double guard for the most of the round, the other guy was dancing all over the ring jabbing, until he danced one step too close, and was sent to lala land by a single uppercut. The astonishing part was that uppercut: it didn’t seem to be viciously fast, let alone powerful. Very weird. I made a note of his name and moved on.
Eventually his full name shrunk to his last name and kind of faded, as I grew away from boxing. I assumed the case closed, that I’d never be able to get through to his story. Once again, I underestimated both the mythological labyrinth of the web, and even more the human element behind it. Wikipedia went blank, but two boxing fans from the former Soviet Union wrote a great piece about this incomparable master, throwing a quintessential prologue which cuts deep, with a touch of Slavic nostalgia dripping thick as amber: ‘Unfortunately, human memory cannot compete with a good photograph or video on which we record the most wonderful moments of our lives. That is why when we read about some obscure Olympic boxer or athlete, we open our mouth and say: ‘Yeah, he was some guy…’ and move on with our business and our lives. Today, we ask everybody to take a moment and think and read about a 20-year-old boxer, with a funny looking moustache, seen in photographs in so many Russian and Soviet newspapers, who although gone from our lives, unquestionably deserves a moment of your time.’
Nothing measures to this ‘aha effect’: after almost four decades of tolerated laziness turned ignorance, after the full failure of mind to either delete permanently an occurrence, or to get to the bottom of it, the shipwreck emerged into my awareness. And what a story that is!
In 1966, while I was comfortably fantacising pros and cons of my boxing career-never-to-be, Vyacheslav Ivanovich Lemeshev showed up at the Moscow city championship, at age of fourteen, and not only won the tournament but was crowned the best technical fighter. Two years later the history repeated itself, this time at the larger scale, in Yerevan, Armenia. Another two years passed and Slava Lemeshev became the European champion, and the best boxer of the tournament. In 1972 he boxed in my backyard, Belgrade, before leaving for Munich Olympics, where, after taking out Marvin Johnson in the second round, he destroyed the flintstone gritty Finn Virtanen in the finals – after only 2 minutes and 17 seconds! – and, at age of twenty became the youngest Soviet Olympic champion. The following year, and shame on me, again in Belgrade, during the European Championship, he went through the entire tournament and won, with his notorious right hand broken. In 1974, barely turning 23, Slava won the Wold Championship in Katovtzi, Poland. Finally, in the USA – USSR Match Meat, he defeated none else but Michael Spinks.
Scientists claim, and I have no reason to doubt (since it checked out correct, otherwise I don’t trust anybody) that a bullet flying straight in the air eventually stalls for a brief moment of eternity, before accelerating back toward the mother Earth, gaining speed proportionally to height achieved. I refuse to cite the common slogans about this topic: they are coined by those who had never lifted their devotion above the next bottle of fear.
Slava couldn’t beat gravity. Six-two, 75 kilos, lean, tall, and lethal, one of the greatest talents any sport had ever seen – and yet he couldn’t beat gravity. The way down was as fast as the way up, pure physics. Not being himself anymore, he picked up few heavy beatings, lost fights early into tournaments, then rumor had him drinking at 24. In 1978 they sent him to German Democratic Republic as an honorary trainer just not to watch this painful collapse. His brother, master of sports in boxing, Yuri Lemeshev: ‘In 1983, Slava came back from Germany. He was already being overcome by sickness: epilepsy, cirrhosis. At first, he was given class two disability, and after a while class one. Some friends of his found him a job digging graves, because living on a single disability pension was impossible.’
In 1995 Slava underwent cranial trepanation. The doctor who examined him told Yuri that in all his years he had never seen such a damaged human brain. One month prior to his death, the champ asked for a pair of boxing gloves, put them on, then hit them against each other, saying: ‘Eh, I was so strong once…’ Lemeshev died on January 27, 1996, at age of 43.
In the words of his good friend and fellow ace, Vasili Solomin: ‘Lemeshev’s manner of fighting was impossible to compare to anybody else’s. None of his opponents could understand anything. Everyone knew he would finish with his right, and still nobody could avoid getting hit by it.’
At last, one question remains unanswered – a question that doesn’t depend on an answer, not at all, but rises beyond tragic or magnificent by pure existence of a life that was: ‘Was it worth it?’