The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (2 page)

PART I

I.

The Humorless Ladies of Border Control
(Ukraine)

O
ur roommate on the sleeper train from L'viv to Kyiv was a stocky, ham-fisted forty-five-year-old veterinarian. A friend of his, he told us, had a visa to America in the 1980s, but he got caught stealing from the grain quota and now can't go to America ever. He had conspiracy theories and opinions he was eager to share: they didn't kill bin Laden, it could have been “any tall guy with a beard”—for that matter, I, Franz, look a little like bin Laden, don't I? And we haven't seen that much of Michelle Obama recently, have we? If there's not a trumpet, it's not jazz. Vitamin C doesn't work, all you need is raspberry tea with lemon and the love of a good woman. Everyone's been there—first beer, first guitar, first girl.

He stripped down to what would once have been called his BVDs, nearly obscured by his hairless belly, and snored all night.
When we awoke, he was gone, replaced by an older man with a lined face and Clint Eastwood stolidity. “He has the saddest face I've ever seen,” Maria said. He slept first, facedown and fully clothed; then, when I returned from the bathroom, he was sitting upright, bag beside him, staring out the window. He never said a word.

I was a musician then, often traveling alone, sometimes with my new wife, Maria. I hadn't always traveled alone: for years I had been a member of the kind of bands who traveled in marauding, roving packs, like “Kerouac and Genghis Khan,” as the songwriter Loudon Wainwright once put it. First there was the nine-piece circus-punk orchestra World/Inferno Friendship Society, a monument to pyrrhic, self-defeating romanticism and preemptive nostalgia that still haunts me like a family lost in a war. But I had ambitions, and World/Inferno had “underground phenomenon” baked into the concept. So I jumped to a rising neo–classic rock band called the Hold Steady, which became, for a few years, one of the biggest bands in what is, for lack of a term of representation rather than marketing, called “indie rock.” We opened for the Rolling Stones and played the big festivals and bigger television shows. Our victory-lap touring constituted an almost audible sigh of relief that we'd finally arrived—we'd never have to work a day job again.

But I couldn't, it turned out, take “yes” for an answer, and it seemed to me that I was still too young to settle into that comfortable chair. Amid the usual dull stew of misaligned personalities and creative sensibilities, I shrugged off (or threw aside) this rare sinecure for a keyboardist in a rock band. Compare it to the gamble of the ambitious young lawyer or financier who knows he'll never make partner at the firm. When you're on the train,
one friend said, and you realize it's not going where you wanted to go, you have no choice but to jump off. You'll get bumped and bruised, and you don't know where you'll stop rolling, but you do know the train's not swerving from its track.

I enjoyed a brief palate cleanser in Against Me!, who shared the dual title of most influential punk band of their generation and most controversial soap opera of their scene. It was a brief interregnum. I wanted to test myself as an entertainer, without the crutch of volume. I wanted to see if I could walk into a room full of strangers, who might not even speak my language, and keep them, at bare minimum, from walking out of the room. I aspired to the tradesman's charisma and practical craft of the old vaudevillian, the one who may not be the best dancer or singer but knows a few jokes, can do some soft-shoe, whatever it takes to get over that night.

There is a great deal of similarity between touring life and military life: small groups of men (and it is still, almost always, men) of disparate backgrounds, bonded by close quarters, foreign places, and meager rations, engaged in activities of dubious purpose but governed by vague and powerful ideals—patriotism, punk rock, machismo. The rules are the same: Do your job. Pack light. Defend your gang, don't get off the boat, beware of strangers. Sleep stacked three-deep in bus bunks like submariners or curled in hard foxhole corners. Release your tensions in promiscuity, alcoholism, and violence. Keep your mouth shut. Keep your feet dry. Above all, don't complain.

And, like army men, when we finish our tours of duty, even if we remain in the touring world, we lose our taste for adventure: we return, like World War II veterans creating the Eisenhower suburbs, and quickly domesticate. We pair off, leave the cities for
places like the Hudson Valley, Northern California, or Oxford, Mississippi, places within driving distance of an airport and a music scene but far from chance encounters with tour acquaintances. We drink quietly and alone, avoid loud bars and rock shows as places of entertainment and possibility. We tell and retell, buff and hone, our debauched and criminal war stories with those who were there when we see them, in a mutual, fictionalizing reassurance that what we did had some meaning, that we fought for the right side and maybe even won a small skirmish here and there. To outsiders, we no longer brag: we're no longer sure we were noble.

Now I lived like a pack mule, a dumb and anonymous brute whose only purpose was to carry weight from one place to another. Accordion in a backpack on my shoulders; a day bag slung from my neck over my chest; a banjo in my left hand, my right dragging a suitcase full of CDs, vinyl records, and T-shirts with my name on them. From Brooklyn by subway to Manhattan, by train to Newark, by air to Frankfurt or Kraków or London, by cab to some club or another, dragging bumping bags across cobblestones to a kebab-and-pizza storefront to wait out a winter downpour. Often it was cold—I should have brought my overcoat, I would think, but that would have meant too much excess weight and bulk. You don't travel for comfort; you travel to justify the daily discomfort, what in the last century would have been called existential neurosis. It's a kind of therapy: the nagging doubt, sadness, weariness, the sense of being a stranger in a world viewed at an oblique angle suddenly, miraculously, all has a reason—you've been traveling. It's not your past, your guilt, your family. It's just the road: you
are
tired and sore, you
are
a stranger.

I lived like a pack mule, but I had to exude the appearance of ease and confidence. I packed carefully. I traveled alone out of thrift. The shows were rarely large, but I never lost money. It was a point of pride but also a necessity and a justification. I lived like a wealthy man, though I spent as little as possible; I had little to spend. I sometimes traveled with musicians whom hundreds of people paid to see and who were provided with bread, cheese, beer, fruit, hot food, orange juice. I scavenged like a beggar or a half-forgotten houseguest. I nibbled trail mix by the handful, like a rodent. I crushed single-serving bottles of water in my fist, as if my thirst might expose me if it, itself, was exposed.

I chipped my front tooth on the rubber cork of a bottle of wine. I had pushed it in too deeply, and taken it in my teeth and twisted the bottle to squeak it loose. A true cork might have torn or bruised, but the stubborn rubber ripped the tip of the tooth before popping free. Just a flake, a grain of sand on a pristine bedsheet, but, like the princess, my tongue grew restless in its sleep, probing, rubbing, aware.

Be inconspicuous all day, I learned, except for the thirty minutes onstage, when you must be the most conspicuous thing in the room. Your livelihood depends on being unable to ignore. Artistry has nothing to do with it: anyone can ignore a good song, but few can ignore someone singing even a terrible one in their face. They want to be entertained, but they don't want it actively; you must both convince them of their need and fulfill it. You are the bottle and the wine, the vessel and the salve; they are the stubborn cork to which you put your jaw, in a grin that is both welcome and a challenge, like strange dogs meeting in an alley. Whose will is stronger? Is your wheedle wilier than their indifference? Can you bully or seduce them or turn their
curiosity into interest, and then to attention? And for what? The restless tongue probes the tooth.

I marked my aging by renunciations: first I traveled with a band of nine, then with five, then with none. I sloughed off concentric circles of friends: my college friends and then my band friends stopped noticing I was away and filled my empty chair with others. Then instead of friends I had passing acquaintances with fake names whom I saw once a year when I came back through their town, if I ever saw them again. Time passed, and my body began to set its own contracting boundaries: first I couldn't sleep on floors anymore, then I couldn't sleep on couches, finally I couldn't sleep in shared rooms.

But that changed again, and I could too: I married Maria, and she joined me in this world of transience and assumed names. Two years later, we were three months into a six-month tour, playing together on our way from Poland to Ukraine. The previous months had included six weeks around the United States, followed by a counterclockwise spiral through Central and Eastern Europe. It was time, then, to abandon the car for the train and slim down for Russia and Asia, mailing or abandoning anything we couldn't carry. We repacked our remaining things in the parking lot of a rest stop: one acoustic guitar in a hard case, one banjo in a soft case, one accordion in a backpack case. Six audio cables, one tuning pedal. One hiking backpack filled with day clothes—for me, one pair of pants, one shirt, three undershirts, six pairs of socks, six pairs of boxer briefs. I had learned the army style of folding one's clothes, first in halves and then rolled into themselves, tight and elastic like hot dogs or police batons. One rolling suitcase, mostly merchandise: one dozen large white T-shirts, one dozen each black and white mediums,
one dozen large black, one dozen small white; two ladies' tank tops; two dozen LPs, fifteen vinyl EPs; some stray one-inch pins. Two boxes of CDs met us in Kraków; we had sold enough to fit more in the suitcase and hoped we could restock before we crossed into Russia. Only one stage suit—two would be better, but space and airline baggage charges didn't permit the luxury. No room for regular shoes, so I wore my dress shoes onstage and off: the uniform comes first.

We returned our rental car without incident. We changed forints, crowns, and euros into złoty and back into euros, then tried to spend the change on gewgaws and water bottles. “Every traveler experiences,” says Gogol in
Dead Souls
, “when scraps of paper, pieces of string, and such rubbish is all that remains strewn on the floor, when he no longer belongs to a place and yet hasn't regained the road either.” We had to downshift from libertarian car touring, in which we could control our route, stop for lunch, and air-dry our dirty laundry across the backseat, but also were responsible for our pace and parking and gas and the logistics of the journey, to the contained social-democratic leisure of train travel, for which you have to pack tight and efficient and mobile, but once you're on board and give yourself over to a power greater than yourself, your time is your own. On travel days you're in an Internet-free bubble with a window and a bed and nothing to do but read, nap, snack, and think.

From Poland into Ukraine we rode a new generation of sleeper trains, an upgrade from the clunky metal midcentury model: molded plastic and triple-decker bunks with private sinks and en-suite bathrooms that don't stink of the filth of decades. Our roommate was an elderly and cranky Pole. Who could blame
him for his mood as we clattered and tripped and, sweating, hoisted a camping backpack, a suitcase full of merch, a guitar, a banjo, and assorted day bags above our heads and onto the shelf? We finished a half-bottle of Italian frizzante and tried to get a few hours' sleep before we had to reckon with Ukrainian customs agents. Time to get our story straight: we're not playing any official gigs. We have some friends with whom maybe we'll play a few songs. We're giving away the CDs. We don't have any concrete plans. Just a couple of slacker Americans.

Three youngsters, two guys and a girl named Larisa, picked us up at the Kyiv station. They had moved from Kharkov and other more provincial centers to the big city and were sharing an apartment in one of the beige Soviet housing projects on the far side of the river. A couple of people had driven their cars down into the shallows and were bathing them with soap and soft sponges. Along the public beaches people sunned themselves. Russians and Ukrainians like to sunbathe vertically: stripped to their Speedos, they stand, hands on hips and arms akimbo, sans headphones or other distractions, dignified, bellies oiled, like little Easter Island statues lined up facing the water.

We showered and changed while our hosts watched rollerblading stunt videos scored to “Gonna Fly Now” and Lil Wayne. The blades had the middle two wheels removed and a reinforced bridge for sliding on railings. Larisa asked if we skated.

“No,” I said. “I used to ski, though—downhill racing.”

“Really? Respect.” She gave me a high five.

We offered them a hard-boiled egg. “We're vegan,” she said. “But can I have it for the dog?”