Subteren Voivode România: Ryan Bartek Returns to Fortress Europe

Underground writer, musician, and traveler Ryan Bartek returns with his acclaimed book series exploring the global DIY underground. What began with The Big Shiny Prison and continued with Fortress Europe now reaches new heights with Return to Fortress Europe.

In his first book, Bartek’s enthusiasm led him deep into the underground punk and metal scenes across the United States, featuring interviews and appearances from The Dwarves, Brutal Truth, Job for a Cowboy, MDC, Pig Destroyer, Himsa, Kylesa, Phobia, Whorehouse of Representatives, Genghis Tron, Sasquatch Agnostic, and many more.

With Fortress Europe, he took an even bolder step, embarking on a journey through the heart of European DIY culture—visiting legendary squats, venues, and festivals such as KØPI 137 (Berlin), Metelkova Mesto (Ljubljana), Ruigoord (Amsterdam), Christiania (Copenhagen), and the Obscene Extreme Festival in the Czech Republic.

Now, with Return to Fortress Europe, Bartek is back on the road, hitchhiking, backpacking, Couchsurfing, and staying in squats and intentional communities while documenting his experiences in underground music and alternative culture during 2012 and 2013. This four-part nonfiction series dives deep into the fringes of punk and beyond.

The first chapter, Subteren Voivode România, takes Bartek into the heart of Transylvania with nothing but a tape recorder and a travel pack. His mission: to document Romania’s extreme metal scene while exploring the country’s social and political unrest in the post-Communist era.

In this Romanian chapter, he conducts in-depth interviews with members of experimental metal band Krepuskul, thrash/death overlords Decease, metalcore upstarts Divided By Perception, Sibiu’s groove-laced rockers Heavy Duty, and Brașov’s deathcore act Deliver the God.

The remaining three chapters of Return to Fortress Europe, set to be released throughout 2014, will focus on Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. You can read the chapter below.

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Return To Fortress Europe: Subteren Voivode România (Part One)

It was in the Hungarian torture basement, where the Nazis & Reds had imprisoned 70,000+ enemies of the state, that I decided to flee to Transylvania. This hideous, evil place—this haunted subterranean pit echoing the necrotic energy of 10,000 murder/tortures—it ruined Budapest for me. From thereon, all I could see was communism every where I looked. The great mass of sprawling architecture spoke this grim history in rambling prose, and the building which so drained me was a kingpin among world class bureaucratic horrors.

I’d slipped into the “House of Terror” around 11 am, a museum exposing the heinous crimes of the Fascists and Soviets. As the administrative center of both parties’ secret police, somehow the building stood untouched. Perhaps it was only because the entire length of Andrássy Avenue would have burned down had the Hungarian’s torched it. Maybe they wanted to keep their version of a Boardwalk/Central Ave. Or maybe, just like the Romanians, the denizens of Budapest held a similar fear that the Commies could never be stamped out of existence, that somehow they would return like an invading zombie army, and if they found their monstrous nest in scorched shambles there’d be hell to pay.

After being led through red and black hallways and endless corridors of propaganda, the looming round skull of Rákosi forever greeted me with that warm, calming smile. The third floor was dedicated to the repression of the clergy, and a carpenter artist had ripped up the wood varnished floor and placed at its center a glowing white cross that illuminated the room as if it were a cavernous monastery.

I accidentally stepped on it and shorted out all power on the upper floor of the museum. Angry Hungarian security guards scowled at me and spoke over battery powered walkie talkies. Alongside German tourists, we were all herded into a tiny box of an elevator with glass walls so you could see the industrial-like guts of the hidden section. The elevator descended slowly and all lights died as we plunged subterranean in slow motion. On came a black and white television screen—a survivor recounting 14 years of confinement and torture in Hungarian. Eleven minutes later, we had reached the most evil basement on earth. The elevator halted with the conclusion of his tale, and in I was pushed by angry security guards still incensed I’d nearly broken a world renown postmodern art display.

This basement of savage inhumanity reeked of black mold and desperation. It had the most atrocious rubber room imaginable, the scariest crawl space in Europe, and the most tense feeling interrogation room imaginable. The only part of it that felt inviting at all was the execution room, and the hangman’s post still stood as testament and as a warning to future generations should they loose control to bloodthirsty madmen.

When I made the street, I knew I had to get out. The vastly intense architecture provided an otherworldly, dream-like environment that seemed as if it would come alive, changing shape and form as to restructure itself like a robot of concrete and iron. Budapest was a non-tropical Athens with plastic surgery…

But Budapest at that moment was just not happening for me. The bare essentials of every European’s summary appeared to be true: Budapest was the only “cool cool” city in Hungary, no one is really speaking English in the wider sense, there’s a nationalist xenophobic undercurrent, street crazies are abundant, it’s crawling with the most shadowy element of Roma and it’s so tiny you can essentially see it all in two days (in the normal “tourist sense,” at least).

But these were not problems for me. I prefer not to hear English and to be absolutely alien. I don’t even look at a map before heading into a city. Just dump me in some weird planet, totally cut off from anything I know, and live as one of their homeless poor. I dig for the absolute truth.

I am a fan of street crazies, and Eastern European street crazy with it’s own form of mentality. I am curious of the Romani people, and I gladly take the time to listen to their Baltic street music. I don’t call them “gypsy,” because that equates to the Ni**er n-bomb of tasteless Americana. They are not gypsies. They are Roma, or Romani. The Europeans know they are essentially calling them ni**ers—it’s ageless. Refer to the children’s faerie tales of the Dark Ages for the popular mentality involving these roaming tribes who reject the notion of a homeland or even planting roots.

They don’t even know their own history. They were mountain men between India and Pakistan (who famously hate each other) and a shunned half-breed of both warring cultures. When Genghis Kahn ripped through Europe, he’d captured tons of Roma as slaves. Once the savage warlordship of Kahn climaxed (by his 14 year old wife punching him in the face during BDSM kink, breaking his nose, and thus bleeding to death from a smashed artery), he had left giant swathes of them spread across Europe.

The physical size of Budapest is negligible, because each man is his own universe. All you have to do is find that right fellow that will key you into everything, and you can fall into a labyrinthine adventure lasting for decades within the same 50 kilometer stretch. Budapest certainly was that place. It could devour you whole for several lifetimes, if you stumbled upon the right nerve. The tourist hordes were consistently frantic, kind of a mirror effect of what Amsterdam does to them yet lacking it’s claustrophobic, mega-stoned pressure cooker…

Budapest was symbolic because it was the last of the great European capitols I was dead-set on visiting. Combined, I had now traveled eight months total throughout Europe between 2011-2013. Every summer I went for 3 month stretches, and this third and final run I still had 36 days left. I’d reached the end of the road—almost. It was now August 2013, and it had been a brutally hot Summer. In fact it had rained nonstop from May to July, and the pan-European gloom ended the exact day I’d arrived.

While it was true that there were areas of Spain and Greece that I was deeply interested in, there was only one final territory left that I considered urgent as a matter of life or death—I wanted Romania. I wanted to devour it whole, to crawl through every inch of mystery. I wanted to understand the truth of the Romani, to walk among the Carpathians, to stare out from the stone windows of Castle Dracula. I wanted to see the Detroit-like rot of post Communism.

The problem which plagued me before is the same which plagues the Romanian people—there is no easy or inexpensive way there from the greater whole of Europe. Trains, no way. Eurolines buses, no how. Rideshare through carpooling? No one is ever going further east then Hungary. Hitchhiking? You have to make it through Hungary too, and they sure look funny at strangers and don’t jive much English. Hitchhiking through Ukraine is a suicide mission for Americans. There are some EasyJet, WhizzAir and RyanAir flight options, but you have to make it to the Milano Italia airport that’s in the styx and costs €15 from Central to reach, or you go from Charleroi, the industrial cornhole of Belgium.

Furthermore, I’d yet to meet a single person who had traveled Romania in any real capacity. A guy here or there might have crossed through it hitchhiking, or perhaps visited Bucharest. I could get little information other then to avoid drinking the water, as well as the packs of stray dogs that have multiplied uncontrollably. And the usual “keep your eye on the stereotype gypsies” thing, which is casually said like a fact of matter in passing conversation with nearly all Eastern Europeans.

Romania was also a milestone in my existence as a traveling journalist—at least in the form I had taken years ago. Throughout the entire year of 2007, I journeyed throughout America while being the road reporter for two of the largest heavy metal magazines in America. City to city I went, dropping myself in the thick of alien environments as if I were a character dropped into an RPG video game. I ran wild with it, and the overall American mission ended for me at the end of 2009. My book on this experience, The Big Shiny Prison, was released to coincide this personal milestone. The second book of this saga, naturally, detailed my exploits throughout Europe in Summer 2011. I headed again to Europe for 3 months in 2012. That year, it was a deep South run—Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain + all my favorite northern haunts.

2013 though, I never really thought I’d make it back. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my life—but I made the money by the skin of my teeth. I had my health and the opportunity, so I took it. I would tackle Europe one last time, but I would only venture where I’d never previously gone. The final frontier was East—it was all about the Post- Tito/Post-Soviet world for me…

I exited the basement of Nazi doom and crouched outside the House of Terror. The stench of Budapest crept up—the way too shallow sewers that were roasting under the thumping sun and that particular stench accompanying the aftermath of a parking lot carnival in Missouri. Bees were everywhere, as if soda pop glazed picnic tables were lumped into pyramids on the streets.

The Roma were heavy in presence, carting wheelbarrows full of old TV’s, bed sets, dressers, electronic doodads, clothing and convenience accessories into huge disorderly mounds on the sidewalks and peddled them as if it were a garage sale. They don’t need city permits to occupy the flea market. You could arrest them a million times over, and they will still go back.

The gypsies as a race are the unflinching, unbreakable angry antisocial kid in the back of the high school classroom that will never, ever do what authority tries to force. Whatever that authority is, they will always and forever mock and defy it. But that doesn’t mean they want to sling their arm around your shoulder and be buddy buddy with you just cause you think they are wacky and subversive and you detest the system too. In more graceful words then mine: “You ain’t one of them.”

Although, to be fair, it was Greece that I’d originally intended to go. I’d flown into Belgium on July 16^th, 2013 and spent the first two weeks of this journey hitching between Koninkrijk België and Nederland before taking a bus to Czech. The 3 stage, 5 day, 100 band Brutal Assault extreme metal festival then followed, and afterwards I dragged my drunken, ear-ringing carcass onto a convoy of Serbian metalheads, drifting ten hours south to Belgrade, Serbia where I spent two days ingesting their culture and

dirt cheap economics—so dirt cheap you felt dirty, ashamed by it, even though you tried unconvincingly to reassure the Serbian people that their quality of life was vastly superior to America. But they won’t listen. How is that possible, when they are selling bananas on the street?

It would be a long bus to Greece (Thessaloníki via Belgrade), because I would have to go through Skopje (Macedonia) and stay there a night before continuing onward. There was no way to find out the connecting bus times for the next seven hour liner to Thessaloniki. KI could be stuck there for three days.

One last Internet check before I headed to sort everything out at the station, and a distress cable from a Portlander popped into my news feed. West Nile virus was ransacking Greece, and her boyfriend had just been quarantined by the government. The Americans wouldn’t let him leave quarantine for three months, and he would only be readmitted into the USA after a battery of tests.

The African super flu spread by mosquitoes had erupted throughout the country, killing 142 confirmed people. The boyfriend was nearly to coma. The authorities had no drugs to treat it, and there was a massive shortage of blood donations. Legitimate scientists were claiming that at least half the mosquitoes in Greece were infected, and to stay away. The Greek government, of course, was too busy stealing money to arrange for planes to spray the mosquitoes. Greece was now a tropical paradise of standing water, and people were growing ill at an extraordinary rate that couldn’t be measured because most doctors don’t realize this virus for what it is.

40% of those infected don’t realize it, the other 40% is hardcore super flu, and the other 20%—their brains swell up and they die. It’s brutal. It was discovered in Uganda in 1937, but somehow it broke out in Algeria in 1994, then to an epidemic in Romania in 1996. The first USA case was New York, 1999. Now, it’s global. But as I learned while pecking away at my iPod in the Belgrade square, all of Central & Balkan Europe were having ballooning statistics. West Nile virus was everywhere, and if I went to Greece, I would be forced to execute my plan of sleeping outside every night. I was a man with a tent, not a credit card for hotels. The heat wave was incredible as well, up to 40+ Celsius (aka 104+ Fahrenheit)…

The most intelligent decision was to wait out the sickness. Crete had begun spraying for mosquitoes in a panic, and it was presumed the Athenian parliament would follow suit. Greece was a waiting game. In the meantime, I would head West. If the Greek coasts were not to be enjoyed, I would commence upon the beach bum alternative of Croatia, the Jurassic Park of the Mediterranean.

I’d never been there, and I was stoked. Back when Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia and others were united under Tito, this former Yugoslavian tropical play land was their paradise beneath intense forest canopies and gorgeous mountain sides. It was where the whole of Yugoslavia would head on a summer weekend to soak up the sun and float in pristine waters. Following the Balkans war of the 90’s, it was severed. Croatia became it’s own nation, and just recently, had joined the EU against the wishes of its majority. The clock was ticking down to the appliance of Schengen law, and no one but the grimy politicians getting IMF & Rothschild handouts were thrilled about it.

I took a bus from Belgrade to bypass the dodginess of Bosnia, and was dumped onto the streets of Zagreb, the capitol, on a drizzling night. I spent the evening trying to find the heavy metal bar which had moved locations on me, then attended an outdoor film festival devoid of English before sleeping in a mysterious park with giant trees and sloped hills. Wrapped in my plastic tarp like a burrito, I’d slid halfway down the hill by the time I awoke at chilly 5 am. I strolled through the cobble stoned Old World district alone for hours, but by early afternoon the greater city was closed down due to a national holiday.

I followed the map on foot two kilometers to what appeared a vehicle roundabout just before the freeway on-ramp. Once I reached it—sweating like mad and parched from the sun—it was a bicycle thoroughfare. The only hitch spot possible was a McDonald’s parking lot, and I flew a sign that read “NEXT PETROL STATION” for an hour. No one understood what I was getting at, although I thought they were just lying to me to make it harder, that they just didn’t like strangers. It was at least a five kilometer walk on the side of the freeway to reach the next big gas station which is always the key to a clean escape.

A Bosnian guy pulled up with his Croatian girlfriend: “Hey man, I’ll take you—but don’t be mad that no one stopped. No one says Petrol down here—it’s Benzine. No one knew what you were talking about.” I slid in the backseat, and we quickly established we were heading the same direction—Rijeka, the beach town that was the former border between Croatia and Fascist Italy. The couple zoomed us away and we soon were ranting about LAIBACH, hitch-hiking in Southeast Asia, every genre of extreme metal out there. I’d found my people, and not only did they escort me to the most pristine beach of Rijeka, they gave me swimming trunks, a towel, and plenty of free beer.

I hung with them for hours before they had to move on, and I lost myself in the Amsterdam-like corridors of downtown. I got an offer to work as volunteer staff at a mega Psytrance rave in the forest about 100 km east called “Momento Demento (aka Modem Fest).” The promoter would provide a free €100 ticket—but I had to get there soon and work five solid six hour shifts.

To those heavy metal fanatics reading this now grumbling that this tale is not yet metal enough for you, understand that this was not any kind of cheesy loop-based club music we know so well in the States. This was not tacky disco stuff with mall shoppers in tight skirts. This wasn’t the Matrix soundtrack or a cheesy Daft Punk single. This was like Skinny Puppy at the bottom of the rabbit hole—a collection of freakishly dark and evil sounding electronic music layered with horror movie instrumental dissonance. This was the pounding rebirth of industrial music for a new generation, spliced with gabba, breakcore, and hardcore techno of the Ultraviolence variety.

This was as extreme metal-minded as electronic music gets, and the bass system was to be a tower of power echoing for miles in every direction. This was the height of Forest Darkpsy, a specific subculture that has not quite invaded America and probably never will. This is something unique, something specifically European with origins back to the Goa beaches of India where it does not rain precipitation but rather LSD.

It was a solid ten days on a mountain, and I was debating it. I’d come here to try and hitch to Pula, another sunny beach town filled with alternative lifestyles and an anarchist squat fashioned out of an old army barracks. I figured if I was to stay out of the Euro Zone and keep my tourist visa legal, that place was the key. But so were the 3,000 friendly acidhead stoners I’d be camping with for over a week.

That night I slept hidden behind a public bus stop that I had to clear of broken glass shards and sprinkle dirt over to kill off it’s pissy smell, since endless scores of drunk Croatians had no doubt habitually used it as a beer-drunk pee corner before hopping on that bus to wherever. I woke up the next morning, got some grub, then ducked into an alley to make a hitch sign for PULA. As I was blackening the big U a younger blond kid with a bloodshot red eye from a bar fight snick up and began talking my ear off, trying to get me to throw down on some weed.

He wanted to practice his English, and invited me out to an all expenses paid lunch. One thing led to another, and by nightfall we were headed to KRK, the paradise island just off the Rijeka coast. Within a few more hours, we were hanging with his deceased fathers’ Balkans’ war buddies. One guy had a giant scar on his chest from a liver transplant, and the other guy a peg-leg. The guy with the chest scar used to run a bar but drank himself nearly to death. He explained through the gulps of whiskey he was using to wash down his heart and liver pills that he’d sold his business for the new liver. When we asked how he could take his meds like that considering his health problems he said: “Fuck it, I’ll buy another liver—after all, you only live once.”

I made it back to Rijeka the following day, and while waiting on the bus to get within proximity of the Psytrance rave, I met the personal chef for all the superstar DJ’s. I told him that I too am a professional chef, and he made a quick phone call. I too was locked into my gig of cooking backstage, if I so wanted. But getting there would be a long hassle—the bus took us to Karlovic, an hour drive north of our destination.

The bus arrived five minutes late, and we had to sit in the beating sun for another 6 hours to catch the linking vehicle. The chef and I went right back to hitchhiking, but after an hour of no one stopping, we accepted the age old principle of “money talks and bullshit walks.” We wrote a huge Euro sign on the cardboard and waved around a 100 Kroner note. Within 20 minutes we got picked up by three guys who were driving aimlessly, and decided they might as well take us way deep south for the free beer.

One of the volunteer coordinators picked us up in a small town called Slujn (spoken: “Sloon”). We were shuttled to a house where most promoters were cooking a gigantic feast for the starving crew, and arrived at the exact moment 12 humongous joints were being passed around. Within 20 minutes, everyone was so stoned that despite the mad grumbling in their bellies, no one could eat more then a plate of spaghetti.

The chef and I jumped into the shuttle, and off we went deep into mountainous back roads where we almost nailed two roaming cows at 50 km that were shuffling across the gravel. The driver swerved, and continued heading forward. We were all quiet for a moment, and then he turned to us. “Was it just me, or did it look like those cows were coming home drunk from the bar?” We all burst into crazed laughter, because we all thought the same thing. The look in that big white quadruped’s eyes was the same as every trashed drunkard you have to push out the door when a tavern closes at 2 am.

We pulled into the location, and by dawn the light revealed the paradise we’d been escorted to. It could only be described as a sort of Ewok Village deep within the heart of a sprawling Croatian forest, A rag-tag group of acidheads had banded together to throw the ultimate Psytrance party in a gorgeous, exotic locale that was somewhere between the Cascadian Mountain Range and Amazon terrain. They’d occupied the forest in April, and had lived within it for three months. They cut down entire tree clearings, made a Tibetan staircase up a mountain hammered with large logs spiked like railroad tracks.

Stages and structures were everywhere, and a two man German and Russian team spent three days rendering the main stage into a flood of black lights that was unparalleled in terms of Middle School black lit poster world. When the LSD experience is at it’s most insane, that first time, when little Johnny drops that first hit after school and climbs his way back home and loses himself to the images of his walls. We were living on the other side of the poster, in the peak imagination of the universal 14 year old, the bottom of the bottom of the rabbit hole these drooling children look off into when hypnotized by that flashy mess of wonderland splashed upon the void of black felt. This was germination. This was art.

This was the final festival of the summer for the subculture based around taking psychedelics as far as possible, and after a solid three months of such festivals all over Europe, the group flooding into our camp were those who had gone so deep into the rabbit hole that they were morphing into Pharaohs and elf creatures and warped caricatures of themselves rooted in primal subconscious. As in physically mutating in shape by the suggestive power of DMT, the drug your brain releases when you die, in a manner that the film Altered States suggests, even if not fully caveman.

All of these people have gone from raver kids to Gods of chemical DMT or the natural Chonga (chon-guh), which is the sort of thing pharaohs had around heir neck in vials. To communicate with the gods. To go somewhere else for 30 million years dafter hitting one hit of this mysterious thing (something I refuse to do, by the way, because I want to leave that blast from death. I don’t want to one day get to the end of it, realize I’m on a drug, and be forever trapped in a bad trip that lasts for eternity because it’s the last thought I have before my brain flickers out. I just want to go out thinking the space aliens I’m seeing are real. All of it, whatever it is, let it be unraveled then. Fuck looking the gift horse of the universe in the mouth. Its just rude.

Thus, the carnival of savage pagan psychedelic excess began. I gave up on it all, and we did the dirty hippie dance. 3,000 max capacity and the ultimate jaw-dropping underground lineup for 6 slamming days of full-on Forest-Darkpsy-Experimental-Goa. Everyone mutated into an elf creature goblin fairy human with medieval Jetsons/Tron apparel get-ups. The stage was a mighty beating heart, and electronic octagon of interlocking blocks. Projected onto it was constant movement in surrealist whirl. It was the beating heart of UNICRON—this was our boss, and if there was an issue, someone best had to take it up with him. No one would fuck with us here, not with a Cybertron decimating demigod at our behest. This was not a rave party—this was the palm of Chernabog, and we were the devils dancing in his grip.

The lineup was insane—Kindzadza, Malice In Wonderland, Module Virus, Fidel, Grouch, Nomad 25, Isochronic, Nargun, Disintegrated Circuits, Ellis Thomas, Arjuna, Asimilon, Ataro, Chris Rich, Loose Connection, Paralocks, Dataura, Dirty Saffi, EVP, Hypogeo, Holon, Dust, Flipknot, Modern Errors, Iketa, Eurithmy, Angular Momentum, Parasense, Quanta, R2, Whiptongue, Zoolog, Harmonic Rebel, Ianuaria, Kabayun, In Lak Ech, Sprocket, Soutwild, Xpiral, Wolfeye and WagaWaga + too many more to keep mentioning…

After 6 days it was every man for himself. Thousands had run out of food and money, and the rain had poured so hard most the cars were stuck in the downhill parking lot turned mud canyon. The port-a-potty toilets were overflowing, and someone had been tripping so hard they actually shit on one’s ceiling. It looked like the aftermath of a war—bodies were strewn about everywhere zonked out and laying in the mud. Those on foot were altered forever, and their third eyes’ silently burned like hot coals.

As bulldozers clanked through the mud like tanks dropping hay all over the mudslide, I tried desperately to find my way out. I had to return to KRK island—I wanted to swim with the dolphins. Within an hour I caught a lucky ride exactly there, with an American guy and two Austrian girls. We made KRK by nightfall, and spent two days recuperating at a hotel room. The American had grown deadly sick—whatever bacteria that had been dragged through disastrously dirty hippie freakouts over these past few months had solidified in one nasty flu. I feared we all would get it, and had to make my was to Greece before it was too late.

I ended up getting dropped back in Rijeka, having never made Pula. At this point, the clock was ticking down. Would I attempt Greece again? Would I follow the Modem Festival hordes to an even deeper rabbit hole in Ancona, Italy? Could I really handle another 6 days of balls-to-the-wall trance music at “The Black Sun Festival?” Or was the deep east route of Hungary/Romania my hearts desire?

It was the last week of August, and it would soon be growing cold in the Carpathians. Greece would remain warm enough until early October at least, but it would consume all my money. And it was in a civil war of sorts, not only with the politicians but also the fascist Golden Dawn staging black-shirt rallies and black bloc Anarchists waging ongoing street battles with them. It had reached a violent tipping point, and Molotov cocktails were being thrown back and forth.

Since Greece had bet the house on a “permanent tourism” economy—which illuminates a main cause of their irreparable ruin—the airlines are lifeblood. They are desperate and won’t back down from their scalpers’ pan-monopoly. A round trip flight almost anywhere in Europe is €400, if you are lucky and buy in advance. Most the time, it’s €1000 or more. Depends where you are. But you can still find that magic €200 one way ticket to Athens on a Tuesday in Copenhagen or Frankfurt Am Main, because those are the major financial business centers. Accordingly, all those cities are ultra-pricey in the meantime so it saps your reserves. It’s like tacking an extra €30 to €40 on your plane ticket if you are lucky.

All international trains had been suspended years ago. No Eurolines bus stops exist because West Europe is their racket. You can get about as far as Budapest with their network, but only then a handful of times a week. The closer you get to a country in person, the more you get the cheap buses under the radar because the management doesn’t quite understand the internet yet.

Thus the way into Greece is busing it from Budapest South, country by country. You either have to go through Albania, Bulgaria, or Macedonia to get there. Albania is a black hole, filled with gangsters and old world lifestyles, and you probably need to pay for some kind of tourist visa to get in. The cops also stop you and demand money like Mexico or Ukraine. Bulgaria is run by ex-Soviet mobsters and people have warned me that kidneys get stolen at petrol station rest rooms in the country.

Or you have Macedonia, which is very Serbian in nature but is also home to Shutka, the “capitol of the gypsies,” which is an area outside Skopje. If anything, I wanted to spend the night in Shutka before heading to Thessaloníki. The people of Greece had figured out how to exploit carpooling(.com)—there were endless posts of underground cabs flooding the board (we call them“gypsy cabs” in Americanese). They seemed to use it it more then even the Germans with mitfahrlegelhet(.com).

But that was a hassle, and probably €100 altogether if I rode them all down. The only way to bypass the transportation trap in Greece was a one-way Easyjet flight from Milan to either Crete or Athens—€80. Easyjet was like the Greyhound of air carriers. But like Whizzair, or Ryanair, they would charge you way extra for bags and dump you of at weird airports in the sticks.

Crete though was what I lusted for. It was an explorers paradise that never rained and you could sleep outside anywhere. It was Clash of the Titans incarnate, and one easily could hitch out the airport parking lot. I’d already found the €30 ferry to Athens online. After a week in dirt cheap Athens, I could explore every nook and cranny of Greece on €200 worth of transportation if the hitching scene is really dead as they say.

Worst case scenario? Buses—and those I profoundly prefer. After all, once you arrived in Greece, there was no cheap one-way flight out of it, by order of the Tourism Rape Department’s central committee. I would go up to Skopje afterwards, unless some miracle took me to Sofia, Bulgaria. Greece could be mine, oh yes, it could… but what of the dreaded mosquito?

I took a cheap bus to Trieste (Italy) and hung tight for a night. The bus to Romania was €120, and left once every three days. I visited the train station, and the best I had was a €40 night train to Milan just to gain access to their magic, dirt cheap airport. There was an EasyJet flight straight to Crete Island for €80. I had to think it over, and decided a night in seaside Italy couldn’t hurt.

I wandered down the waterfront, past large boats roped into docks. Glistening and bright, this was a postcard photo defined. Italians were scattered about in teal and turquoise colors with white pants, eating ice cream, looking relaxed. I dipped my feet in the water, and began to notice the slight burning in my throat. That odd, unmistakable feel of the full body flu creeping up. I was going to get sick. Between the American guy sleeping 14 hours a day from sweat-hysteric illness on KRK island, and the lingering threat of West Nile, I feared this might be a wallop.

I walked past the town square into a corridor filled with shops. Not a word of English, and I was feeling alien. Not because lack of communication, but because the horde of deranged acid freaks behind me had vanished. Days ago, I was the multi- talented handyman and court jester of an otherworldly civilization. Now I just felt dirty and confused. There was no magic aura pulling me into Italy.

Crazy British guy with circular John Lennon shades spots me out the crowd, winking a nutty eye. He’s on me quick, this benevolent hustler—a street crazy of the UK breed, which is it’s own stripe. Cocktail Charlie, with his rocker ponytail and denim coat. One of these wine-drunk Ferris Bueller magic men that roll out their knowledge of the territory and keep you a little company while they keep knocking ’em back on your dime. I know his breed. He knows I know his breed. There’s no pretense about roles. He knows I’m gonna get him drunk anyway, because street urchin is as street urchin does.

Charlie and I go off on a bar hopping cruise rambling conspiracies. As the night grows, so does the fever and it’s weirdly dizzying effect—it’s fluctuating beneath me, like seasick rumbling. Charlie had been on the streets in Trieste for ten years, just avoiding Britain. Tells me the locked him up in a psyche ward because he cried in public at his son’s own funeral. He says the English are so dead they really arrest you for showing unscripted emotion.

Said he had all sorts of State Intelligence secrets, like all street crazies do. And being a street crazy myself, I like to sincerely ponder any nutty shit that these weird people tell me. Well, homeboy Charlie says that Barack Obama is an MI-6 Manchurian Candidate created by the British. He says all you have to do is look into the guys college records, something about his professor and his stint in England. Or something. I’d like to think it’s way more likely that Obama is just an alien shape-shifter, and that they just killed the real Obama directly after he swore into office. Like when he walked out of public view into the White House, freakish alien guardians of The Secret Agenda just pounced on him, froze him in carbonite or something. But that’s probably just bullshit too. At least it would have the guys’ career make some kind of sense. At least there would be a blatant source to the vileness which has somehow come from this fallen idol of HOPE and CHANGE. It’s hard to make Nixon look good, but once you scrape off Barack Obama’s smiling corporate motivational speaker veneer, somehow he has actually don’t this. He is one of the most hated man in my country. But at least I can say that he doesn’t make George W. Bush look good. No, that is just impossible.

Anyway, Charlie and I go out on the town, meet a cigar chomping Sicilian bar owner, then get trailed by a gypsy midget in a brown trench coat and a Moe Howard bowl cut. Just a few teeth, nasty gums. She looked like a Jawa. She was definitely a midget though. Many gypsies—their parents hack of their legs from beneath the knee, so they can get more money hustling the street, make them look young forever. It’s a freakish world ever beneath you.

Charlie and I stayed near the seaside, in a small public park by a liquor stand. Charlie knew the lady and we got some freebies. We laid out to sleep and I went under fast. I awoke to blue sea, blue skies, perfect temp. Charlie soon began cursing, because the gypsy had stolen his prized oval sunglasses. “Damn it, damn it! I can’t wear n’e’thing more then 10 grams on me nose! They were special, they were! N’e’thing else just hurts—I had me nose broken 15 times, dont’cha know?”

Then I noticed it—the big red mosquito bite on my forearm—right where a junkie would plunge a needle. I remembered reading that Trieste had 30 confirmed cases of West Nile. Whatever the sickness I felt yesterday, it was begin to rise like a time

controlled vice. Within a few hours, I could be spiked by this click-down iron maiden. I broke off with Charlie after morning coffee and decided I had two options: A) chance the flu and camp out at the Black Sun Psytrance Festival for five days (the promoters already said I could volunteer via email) or B) Fly to the bottom of Greece and make my way through brutal desert terrain in a post-apocalyptic economy in a cold civil war stalemate or C) Go to Slovenia first and chill with some pals in Ljubljana, lay low, get healthy, and go for Hungary and Romania. Kill off the worst summer heat in the notoriously cold Carpathian mountains then if money and time permit head to Greece for the final three weeks.

Slovenia it was. Within the first 15 minutes on the bus, I’d developed the shakes. I was ice cold, sweating heavy. We made Ljubljana and I head to the Durum Doner stand. I was too sick to eat more then three bites, even though I was starving. I found a pharmacy, but they did not sell aspirin in two pill mini packs like we have everywhere in the USA. You have to buy a 20 pack, and it’s $25 USD. I made it to the park, and I collapsed. I went under for three hours. By the time Ivan from the grind/death band Dickless Tracy found me, I was in ragged shape. He let me crash that night, and I slept a full 12 hours. My shirt was soaked with sweat when I awoke. I masked the flu as Ivan led me around the city like a tourist guide before throwing me on the national radio for an interview on Radio Free Slovenia. That night we attended a secret gig near the mountains, and the next day I was left to myself on a Saturday.

I was dropped at Metelkova—the ex-Yugoslav army barracks turned squat art colony. It was a dead scene; a holiday and everyone was out of town. The connecting hostel was a quiet scene, but pricey. I went outside to nap in the sun, but I awoke with fever blaring again. I’d only bought one hostel spot so far, a month ago in Rotterdam when it was 100 degree humidity soup. I could take the hit, even at €30. I paid, got the key, and found my room was a former prison cell with bars intact. I was not in the mood for this novelty when in came my roommate—a Jewish guy from Israel that was fiercely advocating a Western led attack on Syria while around the globe at the very moment was an internationally coordinated march against any USA involvement that rivaled   the   resistance to Bush’s   Iraq invasion. We were not getting along.

The second day, I wanted out, but after being awake more then three hours I had the most pounding, viscous headache I’d ever experienced. I drifted off sluggishly seeking nourishment and found a tasty, reasonably priced Chinese hole in the wall. I laid on the grass, and pecked away at what I could. My head was pounding like a million war drums. If this wasn’t West Nile, I would be impressed.

I imagined some bereft virus drag itself through all the Psytrance fests of the summer—a cellular amalgam organically created by one million LSD addicts surrendering themselves to months of the most savage drug frenzy I’d ever laid my eyes upon. John Carpenter’s The Thing was eating me from inside. I reluctantly dished out another €20 and made my brittle-boned way to the top floor with nine beds. I opened the door and felt out of place amongst the teenage backpackers and college students, and they looked unnerved by the bearded, dark tempered man hacking, coughing and shambling his way to the bed.

I awoke 13 hours later. The glass roof panes were coated in thin layers of water as a heavy storm rained down. The sickness had broke away enough to hitch out, but the cold outside remained. It would be an extremely unpleasant hitch and rolling the dice on my health. I had the address of a squat in Maribor, an hour away, but I had no direct contact. What I really wanted was to make it all the way to Budapest in one shot. It was only four hours away, but it was uncharted territory to me. I hung tight and got my intel in order. The storm broke. As I was leaving to stock up on supplies, I ran into a Belgian survivor of Modem Fest in Croatia. He’d been riding a motorcycle this whole time, and came to Metelkova because someone else from a Psytrance fest recommended it.

I finally had someone to talk to. Within a few hours a French kid wandered into Metelkova—he too had survived Modem Festival, and had spent the entire summer consumed by the fest circuit. We were all still recuperating, just floating out there. I explained my plans to the fellas. The French kid had been in Romania earlier this summer—the first person I could ever find in person that properly explored it! He had spent eleven days in Cluj Napoca it was so amazing. He spent another two weeks just floating it, shocked by it’s inexpensive quality. He made Brasov, Bran, Sibiu, Bucharest—all the hallowed sights. He was thrilled to describe these uncharted delights.

Well then, it was done—I would head to Romania. But it had grown too dark to hitch, and if I stayed any longer I would never get on with it. I walked a few kilometers and camped out near the hitch spot, in an overgrown field and draped in a tarp. The next morning, it was frigid at 5 am, and due to the elevation of Ljubljana we were coated in a thick gray fog which made everything extremely wet, almost as the vapor from a squeezed dish sponge. Thank you Gore-Tex.

It took four hours to hitch out, and the man who gave me a lift was a music professor at the Maribor college. He dropped me at the spot which lead to Murska Sabota, near the train station. At the train station I was told a train to Budapest was €120 and took 12 hours. I went back to the new hitch spot and soon a preppy looking guy pulled over in his nice, new shiny car. Showed me the spot I really wanted to go on his smart-phone and directions I vaguely remembered. As he left, another guy down the street was flashing an M. Sabota sign as well—a French kid, just as lost as me, trying to get to Hungary. We spent two hours on foot to make the hitch spot which was a really shit location and nowhere good to legally stop. He took off to try a bus, and I stayed nearby. Another night in Slovenia—six days. I couldn’t believe it, but there was no denying the skies were the most dynamic reflection of light I’d ever seen. The clouds were Asgardian above the mountain range. I popped my tent in a field of construction equipment, and the sweat came on again—super-flu day seven…

I caught a ride early at the awful spot and was soon dropped at a large fuel station with dozens of semi trucks parked in long rows. This is what I’d been scraping by to reach—the launch pad for endless cars going hundreds of kilometers in one straight shot. The heat slowly came to a boil, and a honk caught my attention. A tiny car was about to jump on the freeway, and the driver was waving me to run up. Behind him a giant semi- truck was impatient, looking like it just wanted to crush him out the path. I ran up and hopped in, and we were again swooshing by scenery. The man was Hungarian, and spoke zero English. He took me 25 minutes east and dropped me at the spot the French kid and I were trying to reach yesterday—a tiny on ramp to the freeway between two tiny Slovenian towns with a gas station perfectly situated.

I was all but 15 minutes from the Hungarian border, and per usual, this is where everything went wrong. The super-flu had again crept up in the devastating sun. I waved a cardboard sign for three hours dripping sweat. I was offering money for the ride, but not a soul would stop. The next town south was Murska Sobota, and I felt that a cheap train or bus had to be possible. I was too close to believe otherwise. I lifted my thumb and a Slovenian man picked me up. Again, zero English. He took me halfway to M. Sobota and parked at his home, pointing in the direction of the road I needed to walk.

I began my difficult, sickly walk. Nothing but farmland and cornfields, decorated by religious displays with burning candles and images of the virgin Mary. The first English speaking person that walked by told me it was 15 kilometers to the town center, and then next public bus didn’t come for three hours. I kept walking, hoping I’d nab a ride. With every step it grew more painful, and the hollow eyes of scarecrows seemed to mock me. It was one of those moments where I knew I had gotten in way over my head. Was hallucinating and felt trapped in some deleted scene from Johnny Depp’s Dead Man. Seven days now, trapped in Slovenia. Stuck in the middle of nowhere, and for friends nothing but crows circling me like a piece of meat soon to drop dead for rabid flesh pecking.

I lucky ride picked me up to take me back to the gas station, but after another three hours of a rejuvenated attempt, I still had no one pick me up. A bicycle cop rode up, and demanded to see my ID. Some guy trying to be a Slovenian Andy of Mayberry. He was a moderate hard-ass, and took down all my passport information. Told me I couldn’t stand there anymore, that there was a hotel nearby and I should pay the €50 to rent it, and that in the morning there was a cheap bus south to M. Sobota and from there I could get a €30 train to Budapest. If I were to take his advice, Slovenia would nearly have cleared me out of travel funds. I was pushing $600 for a month and a half, if I was to return to the USA with anything at all. I already knew I’d be on the street again when I returned, but without a dime to my name, the prospect was grim.

I walked to the nearest town for food and water, again chased by that bicycle cop. There was no field or area I cold pop a tent and get away with it. Like Holland, every meter of Slovenia was zoned and populated. It wasn’t in the culture to have a strange man camping outdoors. They had solved the problem of homelessness, and a backpacking/hitchhiking American was an anomaly. I took care of the basics, then went back to the hitch spot one last time. I again was stopped by another cop, this time in a squad car. He took my info, then radio dispatched his people. They let me proceed. By the time I reached the spot, the sun was setting. No one would give me a ride,. People looked scared or distrusting of me. Three more cop cars passed giving me grim faces. I would not be getting out that night.

Once the sun set, I went deeper into that nearby town. I found a football field for the high school students, and surrounding it was a canal like a moat. Something about the canal had caused thick mold to grow from it’s trenches, so that a normal grass field had become a swamp with mossy mold four inches thick. It was like horrendous astro-turf. I popped my tent on it, and was quite surprised it acted like a full body cushion.

The phone alarm rang at 5 am, and I made the bus by the skin of my teeth. Again we drove through the cornfields of sickened doom and their monstrous scarecrows to the larger city of Murska Sobota. Close to the bus was the train, and I had found that magic ride to Budapest—€22 for a return ticket, and only six hours. I could return if need be, but I wanted to leave Slovenia in the past.

So it was after another long 6 hours that I finally was able to ride that fateful choo-choo. Two hours in, the sickness returned again, and I was out cold in a sleeper car, shivering under my coat in the summer sun, sleeping most the way there. When we arrived at the old communist railway station of Budapest, I was starving. Unlike any other city I’d been to, there were no bank machines. Everything was closed. I had to walk another hour just to find money, and by the time I ate a stale sandwich from a mini- shop I was desperate for sleep. I wandered into the “too dark Roma park” and found a darkened area with a large bush that I was able to sleep beneath. It was another drunken urine forest, and broken slabs of concrete and smashed pottery were poking me in the back. I was so tried the concrete slab was a wonderful pillow, and I went deep under cloaked in my tarp like the camouflaged tamale.

I awoke freezing cold at 5 am, and went right off into the city center. Historic capitols, thousands of tourists, sunny bright. Everything was remarkably cheap. Budapest looked like Athens in many respects. But it was a tourist haven, and I felt out of place. I was dirty, ragged, at the end of my rope. I decided upon a cheap hostel room to sweat off the last of the probably West Nile super-flu. I fell asleep by 8 pm, and slept a good 12 hours.

I was free; I had survived. Best way to celebrate? Nazi torture basement… Not that I in any way thought fascism was cool, but because the energy of the place might enliven me. There were things to fight against in this world, and I needed a jump start. I needed the energy of a thousands lost souls reaching out for a chance at the life and freedom I currently possessed, and I thought it would be the ultimate booster to recognize my powers. Instead, I left haunted. I needed out, immediately…

Nepliget is the cheap bus station on the Budapest outskirts that does not exist on tourist maps. No one will tell you it exists at the railway stations, because they are trying to milk any fool that stumbles in their clutch. And what a weird setup it is—the “modern” train station is a strange wedge in a calm part of town, and the tracks dump you off at something resembling an open-air airport terminal linked to a subterranean mall that fells equally Greek as it does Serbian, like an uneven mudslide of architecture.

The train station to the East was built totally severed from the Western European railway system. It was the Commie Superhighway, the back door straight to Moscow. The building is massive, almost like a Milan church with rusted tentacles of steel spiraling like corrosive roots. Inside, it’s like an American DMV meets greyhound station. Take a number and wait in painful plastic chairs, then walk up to the bulletproof windows and speak though an intercom with an old lady that mangles a barely discernible choppy English. It’s a mad house. But train prices are a fraction of what they are Pan-Europe. You can actually get a huge distance by train in any direction for dirt cheap. Still, I could do better.

I grilled an old man, and he pointed out Nepliget the bus station way off the margins of my tourist map. I walked three kilometers through increasingly destitute sections of the city. It was looking like Detroit, down on Jefferson, with busted old communist warehouses and crumbling brick walls, Red apartment projects that looked like grid tombs. Public parks with trash on the lawn, abandoned clothing, rusting monkey-bars, pee forests & grizzled gypsies eyeballing me under the burning sun.

I was running out of food and water. I said to myself that if a bus were magically heading to Cluj Napoca in the next 15 minutes, and that if it was like €20, I would just hop right on. It seemed a fantasy, but it happened—I was right on time, give or take 15 minutes. They rushed me up to the driver who was taking cash from the boarders, and I talked him down to €20. It added up flawlessly! And this was the last bus to the heart of Transylvania for a week, and they wereonly stopping in Cluj Napoca because of two other riders that had booked in advance for a special exception. Thus, I climbed aboard the rickety bus—just me, 60 Romanians, 12 hours, and not a lick of English aboard.

It was about three hours into the trip when I began blubbering like an infant. People stared curiously at the odd American dripping tears silently, the total fool called out by absurdity. Like a hardened crest shattering to tectonic plates, an ancient wall of confusion had been undone. In my long quest of journalist drifter existence, I’d reached the end of the road. This was the last chapter I would live out for my Big Shiny Prison book series. What began in Detroit would end in Transylvania.

Here I was, an amorphous man that had figured out the secret key of escape. Someone who simply walked off one day. A guy that just uprooted from all he’d ever known and floated away like a ghost with a crazy mission. And the phantasm realized all you needed to crack into any major city was a tape recorder and a little imagination, or just a Sharpie and piece of cardboard.

The man that realized all past was negligible, and that any day of the present was utterly malleable, and no one would ever know who you were if you told them otherwise. That you could get whatever you want if you just smile and tell them whatever they want to hear. I was a traveling journalist, simply because I declared it. I was on tour, just because I said so.

And city by city I thrust myself in as a stranger, and within a week my experiment birthed a new life that I could have stayed in if I’d wanted but chose over and over to simply walk away from. From homeless man to well-connected organizer bopping across town within one week or less. A job, a place to stay, a possible romance, a possible band. All the sorrowful circumstances of my life in Detroit that drove me to desperate loneliness—once I left over and over I was given a happy ending on a golden plate that I would have killed for if I were to imagine the years of frozen winter and endless depression and grimness from the depths of Michigan that only a man who has been freed of them can remotely understand.

The more you do this, the more you deconstruct yourself. And once you’ve done it hundreds of times, the ones you used to hang around become alienated to you. I went from Detroit to San Diego to LA, Albuquerque, Denver, San Fran, Huntsville, New York, Portland, Seattle. It wasn’t enough—the relentless tours I did began incorporating cities by the day until I had consumed most of America. It went on through Raleigh, Clearwater, back into the Northwest, and then Finally to London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, Milan, Venice, Ljubljana, Bologna, the whole of Belgium. But it still wasn’t enough—Frankfurt Am Main, Athens, Rome, Barcelona, Lisbon, on and on and on and on… Romania was the final destination; I pulled out my iPod, and typed the following: “In the name of punk rock, heavy metal, and the gonzo-Kerouac-Miller revolution—I have traveled alone to the heart of Transylvania to plant the trilateral flag of Occupied Cascadia, the East Side Crew, and The Cleveland Street Posse upon the very peak of the Carpathian mountains!!”

---

The border cue is what I expected from Russia—militant guards in uniform with with triangular servicemen hats. The sort of dudes in a bad horror film that would inspect a cargo truck filled with experimental chemicals soon to undoubtedly spill and entice the dead to rise form their graves.

We poured from the bus and began racing towards the toilet shack. The little old bathroom lady wanted money and would not take Hungarian. I sidestepped the mob and headed for the other group which were lined across a fence with their dicks in hand. It was nasty—a mudslide piss waterfall that had certainly been there since the borders’ creation. It was probably a small ditch 40 years ago and it had turned into a miniature cliff from the sheer weight of perpetual urine blasts. The muddy, pissy, shit caked mudslide cliff rolled out into a bioseptic ravine overgrown with funky reeds.

I caught some English behind me—a tall Brazilian kid and his Polish girlfriend were traveling the “awkward countries.” They were the reason we were stopping in Cluj Napoca. Like me, they’d only heard rumors of the place. We decided to team up once we got to city centre, whatever that might entail…

Passports stamped, we cruised into mythical Romania. It was dark night, and the sparse fields beside the highway seemed infinite and vague. The pot holed street was lit only by bus headlights as we cruised past gas stations and motels, trucker stops with gaudy neon lights. It was a scene out of southern Missouri in 1988. Soon we passed churches, crucifixes—little white homes all cemented together in one story blocks with tight metal cages around their property.

We reached the outskirts of the Carpathian Mountains soon after, and began our upward ascent as if it were a roller coaster ride. It was like roaring through Eastern Oregon or Northern California, and I was geeked. We soon parked at a diner that was our last chance of a meal or bathroom for hours. Fancy, upscale—and they were selling all of their meals by the gram!

By 1 am, we were let off the bus in Cluj. The mountain air was crisp, and everything had frosted. When I left Budapest it was 37 Celsius, and here it was six, at best. We were far from city centre and surrounded by gray projects and black mountains. It was like Denver in February. All we had was a gas station beside an empty road large enough for a highway. The woman at the counter spoke no English—she didn’t even understand “city centre.” We also had to adapt to a new monetary system—the Romanian leu (4 leu = €1).

We proceeded onward, seeking a tent-friendly hidden area or a park to sleep in. The streets became more narrow, and the architecture more bizarre. It began to look like a vampire movie set, where all the buildings were a slop of Old World Hapsburg and Soviet design. Steel shutters and twisted iron bars protected already cracked windows. Roofs looked like they were molding and collapsing inwards, paint just falling off in clumps to the ground. The iron bars of most windows resembled Bane’s mask in Dark Knight Rises, this tarantula tomb of iron enclosure.

I felt like I had bit off way more then I could chew. I was in a weird, frozen world where I anxiously awaited the xenophobia of bankrupt locals, shadowy gypsies, and the packs of stray dogs living like coyotes in the streets. Had these two lovebirds not crossed my path, I’d really be gobbled up.

We emerged into the main square with an unexpected turn and proceeded towards well lit college buildings, a well-lit gothic church with a sprawling cobblestone square, and a thriving strip of restaurants and bars. We grabbed a Romanian-styled gyro then found Hostel Transylvania which was only €10 a night. But if we were to we’d be paying €10 only until noon, then we would have to repay for the next night.

When I told the Hostel keeper that I would just go sleep in the park and come back tomorrow, he thought I’d gone mad. He scribbled down directions on my tourist map anyway, and off I went at 3 am to a tiny public triangle surrounded by black iron bars. Wrapped myself up like a burrito in my tarp and I slept fantastically. 5:30am came much longer then it felt, and the air was brisk and unpolluted. I’d never felt such a stringent chill. It brought an arctic focus, like the initial sip of a coffee cup filled with lightning. I wanted to set an easel upon a mountain cliff and paint. I was intoxicated by life again.

I made my way to an open bar that looked like a haphazard jazz club in a subterranean cave. In Romania any establishment can serve booze 24-7, apparently, and these were the remainders of the bar crowd avoiding the painful sunrise. This was a town that likes to drink, and the TV’s were filled with ’80s rock videos. After some Dire Straits and Billy Joel, a Hare Krishna chant with an animated rainbow landscape went on for a half hour of “Har-reeeeeeee-Har-reeeee-krish-naaaaaaaaaah.” I drowned it out as I spoke to a Romanian semi-trick driver that had spent years in America hauling cargo. He shook his head at America. Like everyone from Transylvania, he though the streets were paved with gold. Now he just works there for 6 months at a time, then retreats back home where its sane.

We kept getting interrupted by a hammered Tunisian guy. He was obnoxious and sexually propositioning women bar-wide, almost getting into fights with their Romanian guy friends who had too much dignity then to pound on this skinny drunk guy. He kept coming up to me, “I’m from Tunisia, I don’t care, fuck these bitches. I have a wife back home, she is beautiful. But I no care—when I go out, I fuck bitches, all these bitches, I fuck them. Hey hey, buddy—come on, come on.” Tries to drag me off to his Ukrainian coke dealer and then gets offended I don’t want to snort any blow. It was getting weird for a second, almost like I’d be coaxed into a fist fight—or potentially be stuck with this guy for hours.

I snuck out the back door and started towards the hostel. I began hearing thick chanting, and I immediately assumed it was a loudspeaker recording. Once I got a solid view, hundreds of older men with fedoras, old ladies with rag bonnets and traditional skirts were chanting outside the medieval church. Like monks, they were united in one deep moan.

Back at the Hostel, I sign in. “Ah yes, the writer—The American. Someone will be here to pick you up at 2pm for the protest—they will take you to someone quite knowledgeable whom you can interview. We also have a staff member with a metal band, and he knows of your project and wants to meet for an interview if you are up for it.” I was shocked to find them managing me, but I was thrilled at the same time. I’d made some quick remarks to the night staff about my project, and word traveled fast. I was a broke ass vagrant, but at last I felt like a superstar!

Then the word “protest” dawned on me. The city would soon be thrown into an uproar—a national Occupy-style revolt was underway with a vast coalition of marches and pledged civil disobedience. A Canadian company was trying to come in and dump cyanide over the top of multiple mountains to make gigantic open pits so they could strip mine all the gold and minerals. The cyanide would just be going directly into the water supply; it was an lunatic plan enacted by purchased politicians.

I took a nap and went to the main square. The activity was beginning to swell. Crowds of impassioned people were gathering,and soon it was as if the entire University was there. This was a massive showing—the spirit I remembered so grandly during the peak of Occupy. We could not speak the same language, but we all understood the hand signals. We all had a grasp of the organization issues with the nod of a head.

As I sat on the park bench looking at the gathering throng, from the sky buzzed down a police drone. It looked like the Empire’s spy droid from the Planet Hoth. It just hovered there watching me, videotaping me, taking pictures. What a head-trip! The Orwellian future buzzing about like a multi-eyed insect on the backdrop of Old World cathedrals and Hapsburg buildings!

As the speakers worked the crowd into a frenzy, the two travelers from last night caught up with me. We began a long walk seeking traditional food, getting ourselves lost in intricately painted Gothic churches. There were more worship spots then there were businesses, and the religious were out in droves. Soon we were met with a throng of angry protesters. They were everywhere, huge columns of people chanting, waving flags as the cops luckily marched alongside them nonthreatening. This was a peaceful march, and the people were winning. Later that night, the government called off the deal…

The next day, a smoky restaurant—this time with Andu Anches, the bassist and vocalist of Krepuskul. They are an experimental metal band weaving their sound from a host of different styles. Any time Romanian metal gets brought up, I hear this name. What better a way to kick off the next portion of this mad telling? Andu strokes his goatee like a super-villain conjuring a maniacal plan, lights up a cigarette and then unfurls the legacy of Krepuskul…

“OK so we formed out band in 2005. Our first show was in January of 2007. we changed like 15 members in the first two years. We started playing live a lot we tried to maintain an average of 30-40 gigs a year. We released two albums one in 2007, then in 2010 we release the ‘Game Over Album‘ and to promote it we did a big tour. I think it is the biggest tour in Romania made by a Romanian band. It went for almost 30 concerts. We also started touring outside Romania seriously. Right now we came back from a tour in Russia, Belarus, and Moldavia also. Really nice places. We went on the bloodstock festival in UK last year. We opened for many big bands, international bands like Sepultura. Rotting Christ, Crematory, Pain. In 2011, 2012 we took every festival we could. Right now we are working on a third album we hope to release in 2014.”

“Your site had it listed as experimental…”

“It’s more a death metal thrash with black influences with some metalcore, old- school hardcore and all this mixed with non metal like raggae, swing, funk, haha. That is our style. We didn’t want to do it like that at he beginning but in the end we enjoyed it.”

“So touring Ukraine and Belarus, I hear its kind of a closed society.”

“Don’t talk about politics and don’t talk with the police, or something like that, from what we saw its a really nice country, really good looking, the people there are nice. We had only one night in Belarus, but from what we saw they are really great people.”

“Is it like Ukraine where cops just stop you and want money?”

“In Ukraine it was like that in fact. We passed the border but only once they wanted money. We didn’t want to pay and they kept us there the whole fucking day. We had a little not good thin in our papers and they made us turn back in the Ukraine in the biggest city which took us the whole day. Then at night it was a huge que at the border. We got to Russia 10 am. We still got to the concert, but.. we had four gigs in Russia.

“What was the Russia experience like?”

“Really nice. The border, the police—they were really professional. We didn’t have to wait more then a half hour. And then also the concert, the crowd is really great. Everywhere the crowd was really cool, in Moldova, Ukraine they like to move a lot , they like to mosh pit allot. You don’t see it everyday in western Europe. The people are a bit more static. But if you go to this part—Slovakian, Hungary, going east—the crowd is more crazy and responsive.”

“Tell me about the Romanian metal scene…”

“Well its kind of growing up—more and more foreign bands are coming now. This has its advantages and disadvantages. We get to see many bands, but the crowd becomes divided. Some go this, to that, so on. The scene is growing. We played in Brasov—its quite a big city. But it was really cool. It was the fact for three or four years they didn’t have places to play, now they are having one or two pubs which do metal concerts. We played there one and it was amazing,. In Sibiu we played five or six times, felt good every time. In Sinai I don’t think they have real metal scene. Its kind of small town and more of a town for people that want to go in the mountain. Another city we like is Petrosani. I think we had more then 150 concerts in Romania. We played pretty much everywhere we could.”

“You have a nightmare tour story for me?”

“We were touring in Bulgaria. And we were playing the seaside and the day we were coming back directly home and in the middle of nowhere our tour bus stopped. The engine stopped and didn’t want to go anymore. We found ourselves with no water no food no cigarettes no nothing. It was also on a Sunday. It was also really cold and heavy raining and saw a sign that the next village was five kilometers. So we walked over a giant hill that was 5 km long trying to find an open shop but there was nobody it was all deserted. In the end we finally managed for food and water. But then a platform came and we got our bus on and this is how we got back into our country—on a tow truck. We crossed the border like this, even though it was totally illegal. We took the train back from Bucharest to Cluj but on the way the train engine broke too. So we got stuck another 6 hours. It was a mess. But now as we look at it it seems like a funny experience but then it was pretty hardcore.”

“About the church…”

“Unfortunately the church here is interfering with the politics, the community businesses in places they shouldn’t be. Also I think they are just getting money from the people and instead of doing—building shelters for the poor, helping the communit8ies, they just build huge churches and this is pretty much everything. For now, they are kind of a big pain in the ass…”

“We are roughly the same age. I’m curious what it was like living through the fall of communism and what that was like.”

“Well we kind of got rid of the communist regime in December 1989. but the people who were leading the country in that era kind of stayed after. I think it happened everywhere in all the ex communist countries so this transition was very hard for the first ten years. As an economy—the life changed but it changed a bit slow. After 2000 things managed to be a little bit more light, but we still have mass corruption. We still have people who first think about the money then the population. Since we entered the European union things got a bit better because we had some anti corruption laws imposed by the EU. Also I think the generations are changing so more young people are getting into politics and high positions. I hope that in five or ten years things will be totally different, it’s kind of a hard transition. The communists were here for 60 years. So you cannot repair the damages in 20 years. Usually it takes longer then it took to fuck it up. We still have to change the old generations way of thinking, but I think we are going in the right direction,. I hope. You know, in ro0mania, metal started in the ’90s. Before that there were only three or four heavy thrash bands, because in the communist days in order to be a band or musician you had to do a test at the ministry of culture so they only let play those that were convenient to them.”

“Was joining the EU a public vote?”

“I think everyone wanted to join the EU. We were supposed to from 1996, but it took us almost 10 years. Also because the corruption the fucked up politics, they just postponed. They didn’t want us since the beginning,. It was kind of understandable. They are still holding us away from the Schengen open border area.”

“You got a ghost story for me?”

“Its no ghost, but it happened to me. I was going with a friend to a city and in 45 kilometers we changed a tire four times. The thing was it was the same tire, the same wheel, every time. But the same wheel, the same fucking wheel, it happened only after we passed a church or a cross. It was also a rented car. So we said that car was really satanic and dint want us to pass churches. It was also on a winter night, and we both got so sick we stayed in bed the entire week after. We did like 100 kilometers in eight or nine hours. We kept calling friends saying will you please bring us a tire, we need to get to Cluj. It was a kind of a crazy story.”

A few hours later, and I’m finishing up a cafe table interview with Divided By Perception, one of the better metalcore/deathcore acts in town. We cover all the familiar basics and they reassure me and all who will listen of the same basic challenges all of us face as musicians. Wherever you go it seems, the clique is in the place. Wherever you go, shady promoters want pay to play gigs. With the lack of activism and punk rock styled occupations, you are left with no house venues, no proper squats, and random bars more often playing ’80s covers and traditional music.

Metalcore is still the rumbling of the day for the younger pack about Romania. Apart from Diamonds Are Forever, Divided By Perception are easily one of the most noteworthy exports of the genre from Transylvania. But more then anything, they want to know what’s on the outside. They want to know about America, about touring in the EU. Tommi, the lead vocalist, explains how difficult it is to tour abroad because just like the Serbians, all Romanians need to get a tourist visa just to enter the EU—despite being an EU country. The European Union treats all of Romania like a dog on a leash.

I wave goodbye to the young metalheads and make my way towards more old-school pasture. I am to meet with the guitarist from Decease—a more death/thrash styled band—at the subterranean jazz club. But first, I need to have a long discussion with “Alex,” one of the protesters I met yesterday who was totally fluent. The guy had a good vibe to him, and he seemed the right candidate to put into the words the emotive uproar which I remotely witnessed last night…

“What is your PhD about?”

“Oh my god don’t ask, its something very fucked up in the brain—yeah its philosophy so some thing about paradox and hiding your thinking, some crappy thing…”

“You want a tailor made cigarette?”

“No, I like to be the tailor [starts rolling his own cigarette]… and they’re fucking expensive. If I would smoke real cigarettes I couldn’t afford smoking.”

“Have you lived in Cluj your whole life?”

“No, no. Just eight years, since coming to the university. I came from a small town in the south of Moldavia, the Romanian Moldavia, not the republic of Moldavia.”

“People told me basically there were no squats in Romania…”

“Nope. We’ve been wanting to do one here for 6 months, but it is very hard to find a state owned building—that’s worth taking. Haha. Because 80% of the town centre is owned by the church and not the state, and that is a big problem. Because if you take it from the church no one is going to be sympathetic to you reclaiming the space. If it could be the state, OK, its the state, its for everybody, nobody is using it for social usage. So the church—the state has very few buildings worth going in. and that sucks. Also there is a good community here but I don’t know if its enough to squat a place and keep it. You could squat it but after one week, two weeks, the police will kick you out.; unless you have a big mobilization of people. I don’t really see that happening right now, maybe two months ago. but its changing gradually. I see a lot of people…”

“Why two months ago? “

“The law was the moment, the law for Roșia Montană. I didn’t really expect nothing like this”.

“So it’s basically a Canadian company wants to come in, dump cyanide over one of the Carpathian mountains to melt it down so they can plunder the gold and minerals, and then all this goes in the water supply, and…”

“Four mountains—four mountain tops. Its a junior corporation they had no projects until now. And they are trying to create the biggest open pit, open mine in Europe. It would be the biggest. Near Mannheim is the biggest pit in Europe, and its horrible. And the mine projected for Roșia Montană would be 200 hectares more. It would be a 180 meters down with a huge lake of cyanide. They are trying to tell us “no, it wont go into the ground, we’re going to put some something on it and it will stay there for only hundreds of years. What they are doing in Canada though, in neutralizing the affects of cyanide, because there was mining like this—is to freeze the ground, they are actually making huge holes in the ground and freezing the lower strata to neutralize the cyanide and arsenic. Canada is spending 1.5 billion dollars a year fixing this shit. And our profit would be five billion. So in five years all the profit would be gone.”

“It doesn’t make any sense”

“Yeah it makes no sense”

“Is it a paid off parliament trying to push it through?”

“The parliament, they have no balls to do it from the government, so they said ‘let the people vote on it‘—the people being those in parliament, the representatives. I don’t know if you saw this but today parliament made declarations that they are going to vote in the parliament to ban it. Yeah, because they are afraid. Which is good. And the company, they are going to try and sue the Romanian government for banning them. Which I don’t give a shit. Good, sue the motherfuckers. They signed it, so they should pay.”

“And they’ve been trying to do this shit for awhile now?”

“15 years. And we’ve managed to stop them for 15 years.”

“Is Monsanto banned here?”

“No, fuck no. we had two ministers of agriculture were employees of Monsanto and they were pushing for GMO’s. Now, the quantity of GMO fields here is diminished. But The government gave us one of the most retarded laws in the history of law making—to allow GMO crops in protected natural sites. No, fuck no—That’s why they are called protected!”

“Could you tell me more about the general political landscape here?”

“Well Romania is obviously a post socialist country, hahaha… zero when it comes to civil activism or any kind of activism up until now. Now we have to go after banning cyanide, because they have another project near Deva. But civil activism—what communism did was destroy the social texture of people so that there was no solidarity, no nothing. We had in the ’90s the hugest occupy-like movement. Tens of thousands of people occupied the university and the square in Bucharest. And they were beaten horribly by the miners. So after that a lot of people emigrated, the progressive people because they couldn’t really live here. And we had like jack shit, so this is starting to change for two years now, more and more people being aware of the problems.”

“What I was basically explained that the overthrows of Ceausescu was a coup by his own people to save their neck, and they killed him fast as possible so he couldn’t talk.

“Yeah, it was a coup.”

“And it took about 10 years to wheedle those people out of power.”

“No they’re still in power now. That’s why people say that were still living in communism, but that’s such a big piece of shit. We didn’t have communism when it was communism. How can you call this wild capitalism that we have no communism? The next day after the revolution—’ah, flea market. This is what we always wanted.’ so yeah, they are still in [power. That’s why its very hard to structure an anti-capitalist discourse in Romania because they think what does that mean? Communism, like we had? No thank you. and its really hard to say no, that wasn’t communism, one, and second, no, not that—dictatorship, what the fuck? In ’89 there was this slogan in university square better off dead then a communist, better something then an activist. So an activist meant something really bad. In the ’90s if you were an activist you were a communist. But now this has changed. It means something good, you are doing something, you are involved. But it took like 20 something years. And gradually people are starting to wake up to this. There are a lot of youngsters coming along who have almost nothing—they fail their exam to get into university. Like 50% fail rate. So these people have shit jobs, they will continue to have shit jobs anyway but without the degree they will have even shittier jobs,. And they have nothing to look forward to. We want to privatize health, we privatized the railroad cargo system, electric, oil, everything. So we have nothing basic ally.”

“Is health care the only thing left that the state provides?”

“Yeah, and education.”

“Is the health care shitty?”

“Oh yeah it’s shit-shit. Its horrible.”

“Is it worse then the USA?”

“…I don’t know.”

“Hahahaha”

“It’s debatable.”

“If an ambulance picks you up and takes you to the hospital, hos much does he charge you? In the US they make you pay $900-$1500 dollars.”

“Nothing. But in the new system, it will only be free to stabilize you, and then after the money starts rolling… In activism, things start moving in Cluj in 2012.”

“What sparked it?”

“Privatization of health. And those in power were very very smart. While over Europe you have movements that build up very gradually, now they are 1,000, tomorrow 5,000, five weeks a million. But in Bucharest, by day 3, violence broke out. The people that started the violence, nobody knew them. They had hoodies on, they were infiltrators and afterwards people saw them going to police and shaking their hands and leaving. So it was a big plan on the part of the police to discredit the protesters. To say ‘ look here’s these football hooligans that come to the streets to smash everything.’ Which wasn’t true, but, I get, you know, people were genuinely angry. And I have no problem with being genuinely angry. I mean fuck banks. In Romania they wanted to put a bill out to like when you identify an abusive clause in a contract and you take it to court and win, the law should change for all clauses. It should be annulled for every contract. Well the banks opposed it, saying this would be a €600 million loss for the banks., so this sis why they did not. So what they are saying is abuse is good, because otherwise the banks would lose money. What the fuck is this? Really. It’s a fucking nightmare, you know, so this happened last year and people started meeting everywhere, organizing, going all over the country. Its a big part of that mobilization that is now making this happen here.”

“Do people talk about the Bilderbergers here?”

“Yeah but they talk about it in a very conspirative, the masons, the Jews, the various anti-Semitic…”

“So you can’t pull apart this stigma that it’s not a hoax and should be taken serious…”

“Yeah. I mean they are rich people, that’s the problem. They have all the power and it doesn’t matter what nationalist they are. They could be Romanians, that doesn’t mean anything. They control 80% of the world. That’s the real problem, not that their Jews or masons or whatever the fuck.”

“Because the Freemasons these days are mainly a charity group. I mean, it was just a secret handshake you’d learn from a master stone architect in the old days. Because they were no college degrees…”

“Well that’s changed over time…”

“Oh yeah, no doubt. They’ve been involved in many unsightly things I’m sure.”

“Yeah, like the union of the free Romanian little countries that went on to form the larger Romania after the first world war, during the Versailles Treaty. We got the union because all the heads of state were masons, as were the heads of state for all the civilized winner states. There are masons involved in politics yeah, but thats just some conspiracy piece of shit that takes your attention from the real problems.”

“When I saw the Occupy wave happen, I saw stuff for Occupy Bucharest…”

“I went there. It was a total fiasco—it didn’t even actually start I went there and the idea ‘let’s not put up tents because the police will destroy them, let’s just sleep in the street.’ I slept there one night,. We sang some things, maybe 40 people. And only 15 remained the whole night. At one point some people went to a bar and returned later kind of drunk which wasn’t very good. And then people walk by and think ‘those are the occupiers? fuck no we don’t want that.’ so I just left the second day. Actually, last night, eight tents remained in Timisoara. They occupied the central square and nobody is telling them anything…”

“Alex” bails to further the good work of civil disobedience, and in comes Radu Vulpe the guitarist/vocalist of Decease. Influenced by the late ’80s/early ’90s thrash scene, Decease combine a pummeling drum style with dynamic riffs, battering bass lines and grunt heavy, raspy scream. In 2012 their debut “Exhort to Obliterate” was spawned, and by August of 2012 Decease put out their first official video. By December, Decease had signed a deal with Hatework Records//Asociatia Culturala Manifest. By February 2013, their work was unleashed upon the underground…

“Did you hear the new Black Sabbath album? You like it?”

“I’ve listened to it about 26 times. I’m kind of bored. It got out at my working place,e I work at the biggest music instrument shop in Romania. Its just stuck in my head. Its good but, I don’t think ill ever listen to it again, haha.”

“Well, tell me your background in music.”

“Well I played live in bands since 2005, with NECROVILE. Pretty much brutal death metal with programmable drumming. Since then we are still playing, we did five or six European tours. We did obscene extreme festival. Between this band, I’ve played six or seven over the past years but not all metal. One was very pink Floyd, another was metalcore but in a time before it was fashionable now everybody plays metalcore, its the shit for Cluj.”

“I went to Obscene Extreme in 2011 and 2012.”

“I think since 2010 OE started getting more death metal then grindcore. I played there in 2009, back when everything was like dead infection or early Napalm Death. Now, I’ve read about Curby—he put out an edition in Asia and USA”

“Yeah, he did four. I actually sent a guy to Mexico to cover that one. I heard Australian went OK, but Indonesia didn’t have much turn out… did you go to Brutal Assault this year?”

“Yeah, for me it was the festival of my life. This year was brutal—everything, everything, it was the perfect combination of everything. Gutalax, Decrepit Birth, Dying Fetus—a little pause between Anthrax and Entombed. It was perfect.”

“So you did a tour with NILE recently?”

“Yeah we just returned from a tour with NILE. It was a short tour for us, for Decease, six concerts. We had very bad luck and when we arrived to Vienna—the stage was four meters square. We had huge equipment. It wasn’t even possible to put everyone there and play the show. We said let’s put everyone on the stage, and then we play where they are standing,. Haha. I think its best. The pre-sale was only 90 people. It was pretty much impossible to do that show, but the rest of the tour was amazing. It was our first European tour. It was a big achievement to play with Nile. In Poland, the first two shows it was at the anniversary tour of Vader. They just gained 30 years of metal so they are on tour and now playing in the states. We also played with Hate. And to see Vader in their homeland—it’s definitely a different case. Int heir home town, their home country—it’s a totally different approach.”

“What is the general message of the band?”

“We usually talk about politics and war—everything that’s anti right. Everything is denied since you are born, when your grow up, when you die, everything is being taken from you. first were started with religion. In Romania its the dumbest thing. You are actually being obligated to be a Christian. It is the ideology of the communist period—old fashion. Whether Orthodox or Catholic.”

“Is this a more particular religious spot then eastern Europe?”

“I can call this the epicenter of Christian fucks. I don’t think the Baltics, the Hungarian, the Bulgarians are more Christian then us. Here everyone is Christian, everyone believes and is afraid of god. Except the hipsters. Here you have to be a metalhead or hipster or modern guy not to believe in this shit. So, rewinding… since the day you are born you are obligated to be Christian. Fuck this shit. You don’t have a choice here. Its not like they pressure you after that. When you are 18 you do what you want like everywhere else. But when your a kid with fucked up parents with fucked up minds, brainwashed minds, you are obligated to go to church. I think i was luckiest—my parents were divorced since I was three years old. The part from my father was more question, he is a pastor. He’s a preacher, you know. Of the dark side of Christianity—like the worst kind.”

“You’ve toured a bit—what is a good nightmare tour story…”

“I had a really weird experience. After a festival, we were 70 or 80 kilometers from Romania. Me and my girlfriend, we got ditched by our friends and were left there alone. We said to ourselves lets go and hitchhike at four in the morning. We’d met some really crazy people on the road while we were hitchhiking. There were three guys, one was a bald guy that didn’t speak English. He repeatedly said “this is not a safe place to be —walk walk walk.” he kept repeating “walk walk walk, the police are coming, walk.” The other guy was 12 year old kid—just standing there doing nothing at 3 am. The third guy was an old guy—you know the Buddhists with the robes and those long hats? It was an old guy on a bicycle with one of those hats, and he was riding his bicycle in a circle towards us and kept ringing his small bell. It was like the twilight zone, you know. So I said to myself fuck this. So my girlfriend and I went to a public place. Your in a foreign country and something like this happens to you and you are alone,. So we went to a park, sat on a bench. And until 6 am we heard that annoying bicycle bell. The old guy was looking for us. Fucking creepy. No one believes me. The town was Kavarna in Bulgaria, with the metal mayor, with the Ronnie James Dio statue…”

---

Brisk was the air that next morning, rising from that notorious 04:00 Transylvanian chill to a steady 13 Celsius by 7 am. It was a 15 minute walk from the touristy comfort zone of central Cluj to the Autogara (aka “auto garage” or “bus depot” in Americanese). I made it on foot, quickly realizing the major contrast between the cleanly facade of the University area and the real Transylvania before me.

I felt that I instantly traveled into some grainy 1980’s BBC documentary on Iron Curtain life. Big dark blocks of buildings, freaky churches, cobbled stone & brick streets, oblong building structures and steel shutters. Like vampire mythology, it’s as if they entomb themselves at 4 am into these giant blocks. When you walk those empty streets at that moment, with the Bane mask windows and chipped paint dust in clumps like neglected basement cellar rooms, Transylvania feels the way your flesh zangs when you lay down on cold marble. The way the Earth just pulls you out of your body, when there is no cardboard or blanket between you and the ground. As you walk, the Carpathians just pull it out of you. Not like a leech or a parasite, but in a mighty solidarity with the Earth. It invigorates and propels. Yet it is a lonesome pulse at once; it bears sadness and grief, but with a faint vagueness way. Your body receives it like a hushed whisper you can’t clarify, though you know whatever it speaks is a typhoon. It trembles your core, like Odin descending to the Earth and screaming at your sternum like an enraged gorilla ready for the battle of primate primacy. But then, as always, no matter how freaked out or confused you are by it, you simply walk up to one of the people where this is all they have really known, and they are legitimately some of the nicest people on earth. Transylvania is filled with those that listen; they are a people who do not speak just to hear themselves think aloud…

The Autogara was a fraction of the price of Nepliget in Budapest. Since the trains were old world and the railways had to go around the mountains, the only way between cities were large mini vans, some with trailers hitched to their bumpers that were open air and covered by fastened tarps.

Packed like Haribo bears in a crinkly wrapper, we drove off towards the south. I selected GoaGil on my iPod and drifted back into the Momento Demento mindset. I was once again with my ghost army of maniac acidfreaks doing way too much goddamn DMT. It rained in the early portion, giving the black outlines of the mountains a freaky character. The sky turned gray, and we began traveling through some of the larger outlaying towns, until we started passing small villages connected to sprawling farmland and valleys. Everything was old world about these tiny ranch style homes, enclosed like sardines and oddly resembling minor Mexican towns.

As we went deeper into the mountainous region, the Carpathians were surprisingly spread out. When we did get close to more wooded areas, there were scores of gypsies selling potatoes by the side of the road. There were probably thousands of Roma encampments under the over of the trees. They were everywhere, just fishing in the lakes. Tons of wild dogs just hanging around, wandering in packs. But they looked depressed, used to a beaten life. They were not savage, but acting like all of Romania was a domesticated pooches living room. It was as if they detected an invisible dome stretching along the country borders. They knew instinctively that they were home.

We arrived in Sibiu after a wave of trepidation. I felt extremely out of place, unsure where to go or what to do. I was to meet with a guy named Flaviu from a metal band called Heavy Duty, but he wouldn’t be off work until 17:00. I had six hours to kill in this potentially backwoods city.

After the sub-Amarillo like emptiness I saw passing throiugh most of these cities, I thought Sibiu might be akin to Belgrade—broke hustlers on money-loaded American like horse-flies on a mound of feces. After what looked like a field of broken oil wells and a run down private airport, we approached the city. On the horizon, it was much larger then I’d expected. After a quick turn it was an extreme mix of Old World and Iron Curtain again, and both of their social fabric emerging into this digital era.

I exited the bus and went for a stroll, getting lost in a section that looked like a mini industrial rail-yard without tracks and somehow haphazardly built all over a normal city section. I made my way to city centre, and was immediately in the most Old World looking city I have ever been to in my life. The town centre was vampire world incarnate, all buildings medieval and crooked with slanted roofs covered in moss. Huge churches, iron statues, cobblestone streets. It was a UNESCO World Heritage site, and it earned the title. After all, the first official record of Sibiu dates from 1191.

I decided to celebrate, and went back to pretending I was on vacation. I sprung for a pizza—a fully round oven baked beast at a fancy pants restaurant with coffee and a payment bill that came out to what one would pay in Brussels for a large French fry smothered in mayonnaise. The best pizza I had in Europe thus far, Italia be damned! And I had to tip big, because otherwise I’d feel like a thief!

After a few hours in the more posh town square, it was starting to drag just watching the children feed pigeons. Flaviu Volosciuc from the band Heavy Duty came right up to me with an outstretched hand. This man was a pro—straight to the point, no bullshit attitude. He seemed unsure if I was some weird con man, but was down to give this weird journalism experiment a shot.

He thought I was absolutely crazy. Not because of my passion for writing, or the passion for metal, or even backpacking. It’s the whole thing of just showing up to a city without even looking at a map. He couldn’t fathom why I wouldn’t research a destination, or even bother to Google it’s most basic attractions and atmosphere. I explained quite simply as I always do—that’s all part of the adventure. I let the universe take me where it may, even if it isn’t doing anything at all, and just go along with the magic notion and try to navigate it as such. Let the fortune cookies do the management… After a cautious introductory rambling. Flaviu warmed up to me. He had family randomly living in my hometown territory of East Dearborn. We dug into a beefy stew he made from last night while I dispelled the fixed idea people seem to have of me as a potentially way-too-politically-correct-for-my-own-good-blowhard-anarchist. We took a stroll to the store and picked up the mixtures needed so we could complete his homemade wine mixture. Flaviu had been fermenting his own supply and gotten quite adept to the process.

Flaviu explained how the Gypsy King of Romania had died the week before I arrived, and that his “castle” was in Sibiu, which was a large mansion that looked like a messy squat house from afar. When the Gypsy Kind croaked, the Romani pushed ox carts into the streets and shut down the city Occupy style, with a sudden and glorious parade for their dead king.

There are, of course, people who call themselves “Gypsy Kings” all over the world but this was The Big Man of Romania apparently, and his son had just taken over whatever duties such a subterranean monarch would perform. Personally, I wanted to show up to his castle mansion with it’s iron gates and request an interview. That would be epic! Flaviu just laughed at me, and told me not to waste my time. There was no chance in hell they would talk to me. And even if they brought me into that ramshackle palace, I’d probably be leaving one wallet lighter and my travelpack picked clean…

“So the band is called Heavy Duty, we started it as a simple hobby. I mean I had always this dream from high school that I should try to play in a band. I had some experience in playing guitar, but I never had the financial power to start the band, and after I had my second job I believed it was time. So we started in a garage down the street. This was 2008 and we did this for three or four months and the other guy quit. So I moved on. I s thought the perfect combination would be with two guitarist—the classic thrash band so to speak and I found him in a bus. He actually played a show one year ago—it was a Metallica tribute. So these were the beginnings. I remember I didn’t have a head for the guitar, a power amp, anything. I was just playing through a power amp with old overdrive. The sound was like white stripes or something like this, ah ha. And he came with a hi watt combo. And wow—it was only 30 watts. But wow, it was amazing. We found this place by the train station and we rented the place with a lot of money and we had to sign a contract for one year. We said OK let’s risk it. So we started playing covers—Hammerfall, Sentenced, Rammstein, Black Sabbath. All this combination that makes no sense OK I have nothing against it, we play all sorts of metal style. In the end we found our style. At the end of 2008 we had the first concert here in Sibiu. And of course it was almost a disaster. Imagine he was the only one that had a combo. The equipment was shitty, the drummer was shitty. He could only play the 2×4 tough punk style. ‘I will not play it, because I don’t hear you.’ we went on doing the same shit, and then we create out own songs. After awhile… the drummer was gone, because he went to the university. There is always this problem with drummers—you can find drummers, but not that play metal. Everyone plays rock or alternative. Then you say ‘play metal but you wont make any money’ no one wants to come. So we found this guy near Sibiu. We had to buy the cheapest drums we could get In 2009 we started playing in the north of Romanian, which is known for the Hungarian population, but I felt there was a problem with the vocalist. He didn’t have much time—I wanted to go much for a growling sound. I took the place. From there on we told ourself we would not stop rocking until we are getting old. So I am the vocalist and the rhythm  ”

“Why do you feel passionate about this music?

“This music represents us. From its harsh sound to its growling attitude, everything is a part of us. I don’t imagine ourselves playing something else, this type of music is what defines us.”

“Tell me about the Romanian music scene and how it is being a metal band here.”

“The Romanian music scene is the product of mediocrity—it is a cheap copy of the American mainstream music scene. The only difference is the language used in the lyrics and the Balkan attitude. Visually the scene is represented by fancy cars, tuned girls and bad boys but somehow kitschy. A metal band has no place in this scene. First of all because metal as a whole cultural thing is not accepted or understood by most of the Romanians. Second, why would somebody listen to screams along aggressive or depressive music when he is bombarded daily with fake sounds of a imaginary good life?”

“What Romanian metal bands should these readers check out?”

“Loudrage, Target, Dirty Shirt, Taine, Cap de Craniu, Negura Bunget, Altar, Krepuskul…”

“What are some stereotypes or ideas people have about Romania that are either true or untrue?”

“Romanians = gypsies is untrue. Is Romania is a garbage disposal pit for the European industry? Partly True. Are Romanians beggars? Untrue. Romania is a corrupted state? True. Romania is the scum of Europe? Partly true. Haha.”

“What is the message of the band?”

“We don’t have a general message and we tried not to sing about social problems. Each song has its own theme from fantasy or occult ideas to WWII depicted images or personal profound experiences.”

“What is something strange that happened to you and when you tell people they think you are making it up?”

“I have experienced a Succubus appearance. In other words I felt the touch of a ghostly female entity while I was half awaken. I am convinced that the whole experience was the result of my mind, a very strong dream in its own. So I decided to recreate it in a song called ‘Hunting Ghosts.’”

“What was it like living through the transition from communism?”

“We are still living in a transition. I believe it’s a continuous transition to nowhere. I feel that the nowadays trend in the whole World is the transition. It’s like a perception change so that the people would lose their confidence in order to be easy manipulated. There is no order, just a daily chaos in which you strive to survive.”

“What are the major differences between areas in your country. Like the mentality in Bucharest vs Transylvania vs Moldavia, etc?”

“Bucharest is the capital of Romania, a city full of egocentric people. Bucharest is their homeland, and not the entire country. The Moldavian mentality is rooted in an ancestral past where their leader is still Stefan cel Mare also known as Stephen III of Moldavia. Churches are their source of vitality and they still have a Russian accent due to the communistic Russian occupation after the WWII. On the good side they have great food and easy women. Transylvania is a mixture of German Saxons, Hungarians, Moldavians, and Oltenians all gathered here for a better living. This part of the country was very influenced by the Austrian/Hungarian Empire, from the economic to the cultural point of view. While the rest of the country was forced into internal warfares, this part flourished with the help of foreign support. Today Transylvania stands out as a reformatory territory, an example of Romanian good life…”

---

I arrived in Brasov the next afternoon at an extremely communist looking bus station. Black mountains ranged in the distance, and the buildings were those gray Soviet blocks that towered like tombstones around the shambling city. I was far from the tourist centre, if there even was one. I immediately headed to the public bus and was dropped two kilometers away at another bus station. Here, all the tours departed to Castle Dracula.

I climbed aboard a rickety bus with air fresheners stapled all over the ceiling. As we drove, they dangled like a Christmas Tree thats ornaments affected by vicious earthquake. I spent the day at Bran castle, which may or may not have had Vlad Tepes as a prisoner in the basement at one point in history. It was all marketing, assuredly, but it was still epic in it’s own right. Far smaller and less haunting then I’d imagined it to be, but it was clear that when Bram Stoker came here once upon a time he harnessed its vibe and imagery as the basis for his legendary Dracula novel. I was thrilled to have stomped its domain.

I returned to Brasov and made the real city centre, where in the middle lay The Black Church. Dating back to the 13^th century, this is the apex of that Old World cathedral that a guy like Van Helsing would fight satanic creatures on the roof of. This is where the villagers would huddle in the medieval Dark Ages, harnessing the energy of countless ceremonies. So much history, so much human reality—it just seeped through it. But the building was inherently cold & basement-like. It must have been a tomb in the dead of winter on those sermons of the Unenlightened Ages.

I realized it was now 9/11, and what a strange juxtaposition to find myself here 12 years later! I really don’t know how many Americans think in this manner, but for me there is only the world before and the WTC. No use going on a conspiracy rant, because I feel the proof is in the pudding. And no matter how deep you are willing to go down the rabbit hole or how fringe your possibilities of what really happened might reach, we all know that it’s not so much “fishy” as it is reeking like a decomposing beached whale. It took a cab ride to reach Rockstadt Club, the premiere metal/rock bar of Brasov. The cab driver kept saying “Yeah Barack Obama Number 1, America Number 1!!” and I kept saying “no, no—Romania number 1—Barack Obama criminal, he is criminal.” But I do not think the word “criminal” translated. He just smiled and replied: “oh, oh… George Bush number 1, George Bush number 1!!!” This guy knew what it meant to be a taxi driver—anything for a solid tip. I reached Rockstadt and soon Alinescu from the diverse, multigenre metal band Deliver the God met me. He was in a cheerful mood because at midnight it was his birthday: “Please excuse my English, haha.

The music has a long history—I’ve been playing since 1992, but in 2009 we started this band Deliver The God. It’s just hobby; its our passion. We cannot and do not make money out of it. Why? First of all, it’s Romania. Music is complicated for people everywhere, but I think especially for Romanians. Second, we are not very young. I will be 36 tomorrow, the other guys are 35, 34. I look at the kids today and they had all the good gear, and we couldn’t have that then. We started a little late. We get around and said can we do this for hobby. Can we accept that we do this for our pleasure, and expect nothing more? Because if our expectations are low then our karma will be OK, our harmony. We just want to crate the music we like, and thats it. Our success comes from the heart. Id someone thinks that we deserve some money or something, its rather OK, but its passion and thats why we continue. And the feedback from the people, from friends and strangers that come to our shows, it’s excellent. And thats great. Thats what gives us the power to continue. So we played from 2009, I think around 60 or 70 shows around Romania and never had negative feedback. Hell breaks loose at our concerts—stage diving, circle pits, wall of death. I mean I can play technical shit, complicated stuff, but thats not the point—the audience is the point. I think we found the recipe that moves the audience and thats everything we need.

“What is the message of Deliver The God?”

“Our vocalist should be here, haha. Its about life experiences, about religion, but not in the satanic way or something—but in a rather hidden message, its not a very direct message. Something like fuck church or something. Its rather philosophical, arising more questions then answers. So it’s about life, feelings, fears. Its not political, not social. More personal stuff because our vocalist makes the lyrics, its his parts. Its not something you figure out at first.”

“Tell me about music scene in Romania.”

“It’s rather complicated—what I can say is the metal scene has grown a lot. Its growing my maturity, all the bands invest a lot in gear. There are a lot of bands that are coming into he light. A lot of young bands and that’s great. They evolve wit their technical skills, their musical conceptions, of course you cannot reinvent the wheel but every band has a unique DNA. I’m against this band is better then that band because you cannot compare because each is unique.”

“When traveling Romania has been a mystery of people, stereotypes…”

“There are some issues here—Dracula, vampires, that stuff. I think its marketing. If someone says come to Romania see this Dracula stuff, its worth once in a lifetime to see. But its mostly marketing. Its OK, because everything is business. But after that its the stuff with the gypsies, that thing.”

“Ive heard a lot of stuff, problem people don’t want to sound racist, but I know stereotypes do exist and this is usually…”

“I think this is the biggest problem because they media is talking about the issues with the gypsy and that somehow puts a label on all of us, on our nation,. And tis not like that because every nation has it’s gypsy people. There are a lot of good people here as well as every country in the world and there are some bad segment of the population that wouldst make our nation proud. But its not like that. I had a friend that came from sewed where everybody is white and blond, and he was here at this table, and we start6ed talking, having a beer. And he said oh you know I was very afraid coming here cause the gypsy the media talking about how dangerous your country is, violence, whatever, and I came here and I found beautiful people, beautiful country. Its distorted. A distorted image, I think these are the two issues. Also people would be surprised because we a re a farm country—horses, cows, all this. Its like 50 years behind or something, and this way of living of ours is very surprising for many people. I know many tourists come here exactly for that they want to feel those 50 years back,. That clear water. Now if we take different regions—i think every region has something to show. Transylvania has a lot of history, castles,. Fortresses. Another interesting area is the Danube delta. Then the shore of the black sea, as well. The northern part, where all the traditions are like they were hundreds of years ago. Christmas or new years eve, you see the traditions taking place in the street in the villages, I think this is very interesting for people to see.”

“I’m curious about the Moldova country.”

“Well it looks like Romania but—BUT like architecture, communistic architecture big blocks of flats. Not much history, historical. It’s rather more modern. The thing is that they are poorer then us. There is no middle class. Its high class and the poor. And thats all. This is one of the most astonishing image when you get there, apart form the border where they check you for visa, everything. Politically speaking, they want to pace with Romania. Yes we are Moldavian but we speak Romanian , so its a big political fight to extend our territory with them. Its communist there, still. There is some kind of democracy, but still communism. Its like Russia or something, that kind of stuff.”

“You lived through the change of communism…”

“Well I was very young at the time, 13 during the revolution in 1989. its a long story a lot to speak here. After the revolution there was some opportunities. Politically speaking nothing changes because the people cont8inued to rule somehow and took he opportunities—financial stuff, all the smart guys took advantage of the chaos and build their business, stole things, you know? They increased the gap between the high class and the poor class. And that was some years… now I think it changes. Because it started to show a middle class somehow. I guess they settled somehow. We say we are poor but I wanted say exactly that,. Of course there are many poor, people who worked 20 or 30 years and got nothing for their pension. But besides that now its some kind of balance. There are problems with the politicians like every country. With this protest here, I think its a kind of manipulation, its too easy that those were in the streets 20,000 people with riot there had some kind victory, because our prime minister said that the project its stopped with the gold and cyanide. But I think he will for sure run for presidency and if he makes this move now, to say to the people you asked for your tights, well I stopped the project, so when I run for president you should elect me. I am sure that every politician will think for himself, his group of interests. So don’t tell me that this move is for the people because it isn’t so. After all this, it was a bad time after revolution. It was chaos. But now it’s rather stabilized and we are somewhat progressing.”

“Is it extremely hard for people to get into politics or is it a closed system?”

“No, not really. Judging by my young friend—everybody is getting in a party, into politics. People younger then me are getting into the senate. What the fuck? I know a singer from a band that is now running for senate. You pull some strings, you know some people, and in a few years, you get to the bone. Its not about the money its who you know”

“Bucharest?”

“Personally I don’t like Bucharest. Because its very crowded… Starting Brasov to west, we have some kind of thing against them. Wee see them as the capitol,. We see them—we are from Bucharest. And you are from the country. You know? Its still this kind of thinking and we don’t enjoy that. And there were some kind of wars between the country and Bucharest. I was living in Bucharest two years, and I couldn’t accommodate with the living. I took the bus from where I was staying to work and I was spending three hours of the day of my life just on the bus. What is that? It does have its beautiful things, some great historical buildings—its the capitol. But I wont live there. But you should go to see it, its like three million people or something.”

“If you had the time and money and you could go anywhere in Europe…”

“I guess the UK. I really love it there. I’ve been on the south coast, Southhampton—I had a scholarship there. I’ve visited London, Wales, Stonehenge, Cardiff. A little bit until Glasgow, but I didn’t see Scotland.”

“Is Stonehenge as powerful feeling?”

“If you want it to be. Its something you should see. But for me personally, it was—I’ve been there. It’s OK.”

“What’s a totally bizarre story you tell people that happened to you and everyone thinks you’re lying when you try and explain it…”

“There is one, a small one. I was studying in Cluj for two years—geography, whatever, tourist industry—and at that time I was a big fan of martial arts. I studied a lot—I also had a small school of martial arts. I was studying the art of ninja. And in this art of ninja there are some meditation things, there are stuff you do with your fingers and you meditate and you feel your body is going somewhere, you feel crazy stuff, they say.. Its called tantra yoga, stuff like that. In one I was in the bathroom, in the bathtub, and I open the tap with warm water. I went in lying in my back and I waited for the tap to fill,. And I started to do this tantra stuff and I was freeing my mind, I wasn’t thinking of anything—it’s a process, you get through, to get that state of mind, I remember that it seemed to me that is passed five or six seconds but when I open my eyes the water was to my neck. And I was scared of that. This, I think was the weirdest thing to me. But it happened. It was very strange, the strangest of my life. Missing time or something”

“Do you have a question for me about the USA?”

“Yeah, is it really happeningSubteren Voivode Româniathat stuff like going on vacation with some friends in a van, taking a left turn and reaching the remote small village with the small gas station with an old man that is picking his noise and after that what happens is Texas chainsaw massacre? Is that shit really happening there? Haha.”

“Thats what we think about Romania, hahaha…”

“Hahaha, yeah like ‘Hostel.’ That kind of stuff, I think is real. But like Moldova, Ukraine. Like the movie where they go to Brazil but are hunted for liver, for kidneys, whatever…

I parted ways with the smiling Alinesku and made my way to the hostel he’d arranged for my broke ass. In the night, the dim corridors of Brasov seemed menacing, but any shadowy figure that passed flashed a smile. There were no lurking strangers here, it seemed. I crawled atop the bunk bed and lay awake staring at the white ceiling still bright in the heavy darkness.

It would be many months, if not years, before I fully understood the impact of this Romanian trip. It was a strange land to confront, and one of beautiful terrain. Nearly everything I assumed or heard was at least partially true, but no traveler I met accurately entailed the character of the Romanian people. Even the “gypsies” that populate it’s fringe are obscured. Western and Northern Europe broadcasts this stereotype that Romania is somehow a land ripe with missing teeth, violent poverty, flesh starved wild dogs, pick pockets, Russian gangsters and such nonsense. It is a true shame that this majestic land of natural beauty and intensity is dismissed so frequently. It is a level of insipid fear broadcast from the west such as American media does to Cuba, Mexico, Latin America at large. Life is not “cheap” in Romania—it flourishes. It may be economically strangled and treated like the unwanted child of the EU, but it is a people versed to community, even if that sense of community is enveloped by rural Old World platitudes. Even if they are behind in technology, fashion, bureaucratic organization—there still beats a great heart that thunders if you are apt enough to catch it’s pulse. To some, this pulse is silent; for others, it roars like a tiger. All one must do is put a careful ear to the ground and reappraise what it means to be a simple human stripped of the flashing television set and instead imbued with the rich soil of the earth…

---

Days later, resting on a park bench in Budapest. I had toyed with the idea of heading to Bucharest, but the attitude towards it from those in Transylvania defeated the impulse. I ended up taking a series of mini vans to Targu Mures, where I caught a lucky return bus to Budapest for €20. The ride with thunder and rain all night, 12 straight hours of driving through lands that reminded me of the Pennsylvania countryside. Maybe it was just the best of George Thorogood comp on my headphones. I felt like we were all truckers zooming through Nevada on that slick black road.

I was back in Hungary though, and I’d have to make it towards Belgium in the next few days. It was one leviathan of a distance to hitchhike and very little English along the way. Perhaps it was OK to just pay for a bus back to Brussels, or as close as I could for as cheap as I could. Just be a tourist for once. Spend a little money. Get wine drunk and lay in the sun. Just read a book in the shade for once, and not kill myself attempting to write one.

Today the sky is clear, and the calm weather a pleasant 20 Celsius. Kids play soccer in the field, and two teenage girls smoke a joint behind a tree trying to look inconspicuous, even if any trained eye can spot their behavior from a kilometer away. They nervously look around for cops the way cannabis amateurs do, hoofing huge lung intakes of that crappy Eastern European marijuana which is on par with Mexican brick weed. They snuff out the jibber, hide it next to a tree stump and dart off.

I wait a minute, survey the scene, then head over and pick it from the ground like a freshly dropped orange. Even if it’s a bile vomit color of pea-green, the dirt weed is still stickier then the floor of a jack shack. I roll it’s remains into a spliff then wander through the park. Like a long lost slobbering dog, my stoned mind frame finds me again. Everything makes sense.

I walk the busy streets packed with tourists, most of them German. Everyone here is on a final vacation push before the weather turns sour again next week. I’m am at the epicenter of Summer’s finale, and I still have 3½ weeks before my plane leaves. I am rapidly running out of cash too, but I’ll make it—or simply pop a tent on the floor of the Belgian airport and live there like a caveman for a week.

As the tourists pass, I reach an odd fulfillment. I have lived out the final chapter of my European journalism mission. As it stands, I have spent nearly nine months over a three year span wandering Europe. I could go anywhere, but I had already traveled to every city and territory I ever set out to. I now know their sprawling continent then probably half the population living on it. True, I got screwed out of Greece and a little more Spain action would’ve been nice—maybe a weird week in Belarus or Latvia—but Budapest was the last big fish to catch. I was left again with the hyperactive tourists snapping photos, having their naughty sex capitol drunken night or their drunken getaway.

It was all said and done, and I felt like I’d reached the final level of a video game where you defeat the ultimate villain but once he drops dead nothing happens—you are just stuck piloting around a character with a joystick and no credits or animation comes on the screen. There’s no way out but to just turn off that PlayStation and do something more fulfilling.

I really had no idea what to do with myself. In conquering my journey across The Atlantic, I defeated my main reason to live, to work, to struggle for that mysterious payoff. Europe was played out, finally. I was tired and it was time to go back to playing music, start my own band again and have other people write about me for a change.

I headed back to the bench and there was a younger guy with bright blue eyes sitting in my previous spot. He had a weird energy about him, a sort of mega-fulfillment going on that I could sense. I asked to bum a smoke, but he said he quit years ago—in an American accent. I kicked up a conversation with him that he seemed to want out of, only because he was waiting for something. He was from the Midwest too, some nowhere town in Minnesota. He too had traveled far and wide like me. Spent a lot of time trying to get out, same as me. Said he would never, ever have to go back. That he was waiting on someone to meet him and they were going to leave Budapest that night and go live in Sweden.

I reached into my pocket to fish out one of my promo fliers for the book, but before I could even tell him who I was or what I did, he said “sorry, sorry—I have to take this.” He veers his eyes to the left, gets up with a once in a lifetime smile, and starts walking towards someone. I turn my head, and there she is. Beautiful Swedish girl, bright blue eyes—his eyes looking back from another body. He walks past me in a delighted haze, leaving both myself and his American past completely behind. As he gets closer and closer to this mysterious, gorgeous Swedish girl, I watch her eyes well up, almost with tears. He glides right into her, and they share a passionate kiss that somewhere, in some locked room in the fabric of space and time is photo developed by Cupid and placed amongst the 1,000 greatest kisses in human history.

Whoever he was, American guy gets his European dream girl. Captain Minnesota gets his green card. Lt. Midwest escapes, and never again has to go “home.” They embrace for an intense 30 seconds, pull apart, walk off hand in hand into the sunset.

I plop back down on the bench with my twisted, aching, disc ruptured spine and all my flimsy gray little Xerox copy fliers made to push a book that the majority of people in Europe can’t even read. Me and my crazy little mission, a phone that never rings with a lonely voice, barely a dime of life savings to speak of and no one coming to this quiet Hungarian park to take me hand in hand to the promised land.

And then I laughed—I laughed, I laughed, I laughed. I arose from my seat, and drifted back into the tourist herds leaving a little moat of discarded gray fliers around the bench. I no longer felt the need to promote anything. Budapest was waiting with it’s cheap beer and €3 dinner plates & thermal baths & raging nightclubs & gypsies selling piles of broken appliances & stained clothing in lumps on the streets.

And somewhere in that sprawling mix of ant people, I knew I could find the solution to my new priority. Somewhere out there were blue eyes for me too. It’s great to be infamous amongst the antisocial, socially awkward, misanthropic teenager demographic. But you know what? They won’t hand you a cup of coffee in the morning or wash your socks when your not home… And if that’s all a pipe dream my friends… well, then… there’s always South America…

xXx

Dr. (hahaha yeah, sure, why not?) Ryan Bartek // 2.23.14