nablopomo

nablopomo

Back in ’94, you could still get two litres of unpasteurized milk and a week’s supply of salami and cheese in exchange for a health check-up, at least that’s what I noticed living with my host family, both husband and wife physicians, which was fortuitous because the Americans typically didn’t drink the local milk, being as how you had to chew through a considerable amount of gelatinous film before reaching the actual liquid. I, of course, loved the film, to the consternation of my host family, who also loved the film, and sadly for them, they knew exactly how to treat a guest. I ate the film at every opportunity.

I was thinking about milk, naturally enough, as I chewed through my fifth Moon Pie, and suffering a bit of guilt for not learning how to share better when I was a child. Of course, as I am now fond of saying, ‘Let pound dogs eat unpetted,’ which is my cryptic and intellectual way of saying, ‘I was poor and mistreated. Don’t expect me to be civilized.’ Friendship trumps past experiences, however, and I wanted nothing more than to give up my last bit of graham crackery goodness to these two boys.

“If I’m going to die,” the vapor of my very words crystallizing in the arctic air, “I can think of no finer place to expire, no finer company with which to share my final breath.”

“Seriously,” said Travis. “I’ll pay you $1,000 if you let me stick my feet underneath your armpits.”

We were both incoherent by this point.

Isaac, as usual, was nowhere to be found, neither in our pockets nor in our frozen thoughts. And the Moon Pies, as I’m sure MOON PIE, INC. would be pleased to discover, returned to us a bit of that will to live that we had previously abandoned in Dimitrovgrad. And when men recover the will to live, the first thing they do is walk.

By the time we reached the 6th empty car, we were convinced that the will to live is of all wills (the will to love, the will to overcome, the will to rock) by far the most tedious and confusing. Nevertheless, we continued on, both of us remarking that whenever we crossed between cars, (which in a normal train is not much different from passing through the typical front-door foyer of a ranch-style home, but in the 1994 BOSFOR, a third-hand train that likely saw action in the Second Battle of the Marne, is more like that scene in that one movie where the protagonists nearly died from exposure and fear trying to cross a 40-foot rope bridge whose individual strands kept breaking in slow motion, your feet dangling below the busted planks to the pleasure of the crocodiles below) it was actually WARMER outside than in. Much like the heart of a whore.

Until the 7th car, when we realized something must be happening to our bodies, strange physical emotions we had forgotten, both of us pushing full-strength against the iron door, we tumbled into what can only be described as a Miller Lite commercial. The 70 degree ambient temperature burned our skin no less than the stomach acid forced upwards by a half-rack of Moon Pies. Isaac was in the middle of toasting our names to his new, incredibly attractive friends.

“You should meet Travis and Brandon! They’re hilarious!”

Point of fact, we ARE both very funny. And the mark of a good comedian is that you can take it as well as you can dish it out, so we both crawled over to Isaac and his HAREM and introduced ourselves as Isaac’s aforementioned friends, ‘GAW’ and ‘NAOH.’

And no sooner had we sat down that the train came to a screeching halt and we were forced off the train at Kapikule.

“Follow me, please,” said a rather eager official, with a glint in his eyes straight out of Lawrence of Arabia. And as I followed him into the bowels of the station/prison, I thought, “This might be the one time where it’s okay for a man to cry during sex.”