Slouching Toward Pichka Materina

Slouching Toward Pichka Materina

Two Bosnian-born Brits wait at a pedestrian crossing.

A man across the street from them bounds right into traffic, causing havoc. Brakes squeal, horns scream, motorists raise bloody hell. The man somehow makes it across alive, not without a certain clownish, apologetic charm.

“How much you bet he’s one of ours?” the first Brit says to the other in Bosnian. She giggles, shaking her head.

“Excuse me, sir,” the first Brit asks the clown in English, “but where are you from?”

“Iz pichke materine,”* the man says in Bosnian.

Both Brits burst into laughter.

The man’s eyes widen.

“Just like the two of you,” he adds in English. “Just like everyone.”

*Pichka Materina = Mother’s Cunt

—WITNESSED IN LONDON, UK, CIRCA 2005

“We’re not here to answer cuntish questions.”

—GUY DEBORD

“In America you vatch television; in Soviet Russia the television vatches you.”

—YAKOV SMIRNOFF

0.1

We made it through what passed as childhood in Yugoslavia in the ’80s and into the gaucheness and ungainliness of adolescence just as our country was sent back into its mother’s cunt. It happened in the early ’90s. You probably saw some of it, spun this way or that, on your TV.

You and your fucking TV!

We loved you, though, still do, your cheery, mollifying sitcoms in which the TV set laughs at its own jokes, and your prescribed, moralistic dramas, the abridged binary worldview of good guys and bad guys, your representations of human conflict that can be summed up with the sentence: You lied to me! as if lying hasn’t been the only reasonable evolutionary response to what we vaguely like to call “reality,” your cultural exports that made the complex, fucked-up lives we in Yugoslavia both witnessed and lived feel easier to take, so much so that when we, the TZ PUNX (Tuzla punks), got pinched for, say, breaking into a newspaper kiosk to steal porn and cigarettes, we were so young and primed by your worldview that we actually believed we had rights, like you have in the States, and demanded said rights from the obtuse meat slabs that were Tuzla’s cops—kerovi—who leered and kneed us in the ribs and, using our Mohawks and long hair, guided our skulls into various durable surfaces, bloodsplit our ears by pulling off our earrings, and full-on stole our stolen Doc Martens and leather jackets.

We really wanted to be like you. If you asked us TZ PUNX in the early ’90s, we would have happily hung the Stars-and-stripes off of every Soviet-style balcony in our town. Shit, we would have tattooed them on our foreheads. Not because your stars and stripes are beautiful, not by a long shot, but because it would piss off our parents and grandparents and the other miserable commie and old and nuevo-nationalist fucks in charge of everything in our lives.

And yes, we sometimes made fun of some of your punks because they were “raging” against guitar solos that were too long in the ’70s. Kudos for that noble effort and all but, with all due respect, suck it a little. Your Natives and your Blacks were way more punk than any of your so-called All-Americans. Death, baby! Bad Brains, baby! Right?

But let’s stay on topic, shall we?

Mother’s cunt, or pichka materina, as we say, is where the so-called Yugoslavs used to send a lot of things and people, rhetorically, on a daily basis. It was the national pastime. A footballer kicks a ball into a post instead of the goal; send him to his mother’s cunt. A plate of chevapi slips out of hand onto the pine-needle-covered ground at some May Day celebration in butt-fuck Pozarnica; send it to its mother’s cunt. A D string breaks in the middle of a sevdalinka in the early-morning hours of a party when only the true raja—only the cool, essential members of the party—are still up (read: true alcoholics with a built-up tolerance); e nek se goni u pichku materinu.

We could easily have said that “war sent our country to hell” and made more sense here, but we’re not in the business of sugarcoating shit for you. It was back into its mother’s cunt that it was sent, back into the uterus, back into the place where its pieces were first put together and made into a whole, and back there it was backward unmade. The so-called Yugoslavs shoved it way up there and unmade it so well that we, their children, awakened without a homeland.

We belonged nowhere, so we formed our own tribe, chose our own markings and names, our own rituals and sounds. We wrote our own story. Good riddance, beloved homeland; you can go fuck yourself now.

We emancipated ourselves with glue sniffing and laughter in the face of our parents’ grave, fear-soaked talking-tos. Igor the Punk from Titova Street, who wore a giant encircled A on his T-shirt and who broke the communal light switches in buildings’ vestibules with his forehead as soon as they were installed, and who one time, when his own father caught him red-handed with shards of cheap plastic at his feet, gave his father (he didn’t know it was his father) a shiner in the darkness. He got his ass beat to a pulp, of course, but he kept on breaking the damn switches anyway, until somebody from the apartment-dwellers council thought to reinforce them in steel. Igor then started using a screwdriver on them, until his fed-up father sat him down and told him he had to stop or leave the house for good. Igor squatted on the living room rug and started to strain and grimace, as if in terrible pain. His father asked him what was going on.

“I’m trying real hard here to give a shit, Pops, but as you can see, no cigar!”

0.2

Before the war, we were kids who still somewhat respected grown-ups and gave a shit about getting together and playing games like football—sorry, soccer. We would gather after school on the grass behind the boxy building called Furnace One, called that not on account of its incendiary little apartments in the summertime, like everybody thinks, but because the area on which our ward stood was in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire known for distillation of local plum brandy using big furnaces. In our time, it was considered a tough neighborhood.

Skojevska je oshtar greben,

dodjesh poshten, odesh jeben.

Or, “Skojevska Street is a sharp, gnarly ridge / you may come here all honest but you’ll leave here all fucked.” This is an artless, unrhyming translation. You’re welcome. (Also, the word jeben, or “fucked,” used in this way can be translated as both “to fuck,” as in doing the fucking, and “being fucked with,” as in receiving whatever the fucker can unleash. Both are powers.)

Once there on that patch of grass, we would divide ourselves into cliques or teams, scream and kick soccer balls and each other’s shins, get kicked out of games for missing goals and pestered by resident drunkards. There was this birtija called Snack Bar right around the corner, and the lowlife inebriates who lived there would come out to take leaks right there in full view of us children. The most insufferable of them, one Anto the Hand—nicknamed that because he only had one—would always try to play with us for a while, make a jackass of himself, and wouldn’t leave us alone until the soccer ball ended up in the river.

The river always claimed our balls.

River, however, is too generous a term for this stinky, pond-scummy trickle of mostly sewage, forced by sun-bleached concrete embankments into orderly flow through the town. Most of the time, after retrieving the ball, all we had to worry about was wiping it on the grass to get rid of scum and sludge and solids. But every once in a while, usually in spring, after a snowmelt, this so-called river would become a monster.

One of us overzealous soccer-star wannabes would punt a mangy ball too hard through a netless goal. The ball would bounce off the edge of the embankment straight into the clayey, engorged river. We would all start running downstream and the punter would sprint ahead of us, ahead of the ball, climb down the sloping concrete to the water’s edge, and try to recover it with his extended leg or a stick. Often, if the ball caught a current down the middle of the river, the kids on the other side of it—attracted by all the hoopla—would throw helpful rocks, trying to nudge the ball within the punter’s reach, often splashing him in the process with filth.

But sometimes it was the river that would reach up instead, nab the punter, suck him in, swallow him, and then tumble him downstream. The punter’s best friend or older brother would run way ahead, climb down the embankment, and try to save his friend or brother in the same way their friend or brother tried to save the ball. Sometimes they would also get nabbed. Sometimes even grown-ups would get involved and some Good Samaritan—a firefighter on a day off or a soldier on leave—would jump in and save the boys or just one of them. And sometimes they too would succumb to the water’s rush, leaving nobody whom we could later thank for saving our lives and/or blame for not saving our brothers’.

Skojevska je oshtar greben…

0.3

We were natives of our ward and newcomers and every mix and mutt in between: blue bloods and peasants, bruisers and cowards, lower- and middle-class latchkey kids. Our parents were teachers and miners, engineers and nurses, artists and lovable fuckups. Our parents were also drunkards and psychopaths, religious communists and secret nationalists, borderline personalities and depressives, but good enough eggs, we guessed.

The walls of our apartments were adorned with kitschy needlework and woolen tapestries, Arabic calligraphy and Orthodox and Catholic religious icons, portraits of Comrade Tito, or peeling yellowed wallpaper bubbling damply.

Once a year we piled into our families’ sad Fiat sedans and endured pukey, serpentine excursions to the Adriatic seaside, stayed in our fathers’ companies’ trailers in Neum and Podgora, in Makarska and Bashko Polje and Orebich. We made friends with the locals, touched their boobies in the backs of theaters showing movies starring Steven Seagal and Eric Roberts, Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. We swam and fished shparove off the docks, pretended our pasty, peasantly parents were not our parents, and hoped that the Vespa guy with a cooler on the back would drive by the beach when our parents were still in the water and yell his customary Pepsi-Cola, Mirinda, pivo! so we could rush to him, beg him to sell us a beer.

In the winters—nothing. We didn’t have money to go anywhere in the winters. We just stomached the cold and the snow and the Tuzla salt mines’ briny industrial slush on the roads. We sniffled and sighed, dug our hands into our pockets of Spitfire and Levi’s jackets, pined over girls who thought nothing of us. We went to crowded student clubs, sweated and swore, peacocked and thought that things could only get better or worse. We moshed to new American punk rockers and old American and British ones, watched as some of us who slipped on beer-soaked tile got kicked and punched in the mosh pits by peasants who came to underground clubs not because of music and strobe lights or to show off in front of punky girls but to anonymously kick fallen bodies when they were down on the ground.

In your movies, your male teenagers lose their virginity under the bleachers, or in the backs of gas hogs parked on dusty vistas in the middle of the night, or in dorms and Motel 6 rooms. In our neck of the woods your no-good cousin sits you down just as the first peach fuzz of mustache darkens your upper lip and plops hard-core German pornography in your lap and starts teaching you how to finger pussy. You ask him, What does it feel like to be with a girl? and he sends you to get him a jar of honey from the pantry, leaves the jar out in the blazing sun for a while, then calls you over, takes you by the wrist, and dips your forefinger into the honey to the second knuckle, and pulls it out. You scrutinize how the hollow in the honey closes as your finger tingles with warmth and newness. See how it closes? the no-good cousin asks, and you nod because you do. That’s how it feels.

He also says, Don’t be a fool. All of your friends are gonna go around falling in love like greenhorns, getting their hearts broken by, like, four pretty-faced girls in the school. Fuck that. You have to go for the ugly ones. That’s where the pussy is. You gotta blanket the market.

Your twenty-five-year-old no-good cousin, who never finished high school and got a trucking route at sixteen, who lived in his parents’ attic with his new bride—an unwed mother of two (one of whom was his)—whom he mercilessly squeezed and groped in front of children and elders alike (to the sallow woman’s shame and chagrin), he, the no-good cousin, he promises the sixteen-year-old you he’s gonna get you some this month, then plucks you off the street one day in his hearse (a side gig of his) with a cadaver in the back and takes you to the shores of the slightly toxic waters of Lake Modrac, where he introduces you to a woman who looks like the mother of the sallow woman he cohabitates with, pushes you into the woman’s bedroom, and leaves the door ajar, turns on the TV in the living room. He watches a local derby between Sloboda and Chelik, narrating the action, as the woman who could be your mother opens up her robe and tells you to get in.

Malo vas je, malo vas je, pi!-chki!-tze!, your cousin, a soccer hooligan, chants from the living room as the dead man sweats in his penultimate hovel outside.

The prostitute puts your ear to her heart and rubs your head until the proximity of boobs gets you hard and then tells you how to go about it. You’re in the incendiary honey jar for three seconds tops and then she’s wiping herself with a kitchen towel, gracelessly.

Coming from a repressed culture and still confused about the birds and the bees, about love and sex, marriage and sex, you ask the woman for her hand in marriage—it’s the least you can do, you think. She laughs and laughs and can’t stop laughing. She beats the sheets on her side of the bed with her fists, and breadcrumbs, pen caps, and a pair of glasses bounce up into the air.

She informs you that it’s not necessary to marry her to fuck her, that any time you procure a bottle of Vecchia and a ride, you’re more than welcome.

You’re confused and exhausted, disappointed and heady.

U pichku materinu! yells your no-good cousin at the TV. Chelik just fuckin’ equalized!

0.4

We had city cousins who deigned to talk to us only—preko kurca—when they came over as part of the package to family parties, hosted by our parents, to drink our best shljiva and eat our mezeta, and who later acted like they didn’t know us on the street, scraped the clouds with their haughty noses as soon as our eyes collided in the crowd. They wore Levi’s with tucked-in polo shirts, aviator sunglasses and goatees, and other such horseshit.

Our demented country cousins, in turn, with their boxy LEGO dos and woolen trench coats, would give us a choice of spiderweb-sealed black galoshes from musty Siporex sheds that looked like serial killers’ secret lairs. They would pick rusty hatchets and screwdrivers off the walls and stick them in the inside pockets, saying perfect for the discotheque. They would take us up a mountain to another village, through fields and forests to a secret brothel/club in the woods, painted pastel pink and yellow and called Rainbow, of all things. No windows. One entrance/exit. A stage with a fat fuck behind a synthesizer, and a broken woman in a too-short skirt behind the mic pole, and a sweaty accordion player religiously focused on his finger work. Intermittently the power would go out, and when it came back, sixty percent of the Rainbow’s population was mid-coitus.

City rats, country rats, both we called family; both we called blood.

Until the war, that is, that ultimate prophet that roars at full blast and wakes up even the most comatose of citizens by educating them, by goad and by blow, that the rules they played by all their lives are just agreements that can be changed at any time, that society and reality, safety and money, land and power, law and order, God and country, family, LOVE, for fuck’s sake—yes, LOVE—that these are stories alone.

As the agreement that was Yugoslavia became void, our parents, the “Yugoslavs,” showed their true colors. Some right off the bat packed us up and fucked off with us, with jewelry and photographs, to the various suddenly enemy countries, or neutral ones, or, in one case, Guam.

Of the ones who stayed, some hoarded what they had while others shared with their neighbors, believing that good deeds get repaid. Some carved their existence out of the nonexistence of others. Some joined the army and eroded with war years into skeletons or drunks, or grew oily and bonkers on nationalist slogans, screaming, Them or us.

English and German speakers weaseled into interpreter jobs for the UN, the UNHCR, and world-loving humanitarian organizations up the ass, feeding their kids, squirreling away funds. Award-winning sopranos lost their aria weight, put on miniskirts and fishnets to sing dubious turbo-folk lyrics atop tables and bars, stirring their hips in front of men who were prospects suddenly—rich bus drivers, insane enough to drive the semi-privileged out of the Serb siege for ten thousand deutsche marks a pop.

Those with houses in the country were chased into the crowded living rooms of their urban kin or, if connected, “given” the apartments of some Tuzla Serbs who snuck out of the city on the eve of the attack with their families, promised by the Chetniks (Serbian uber-nationalists) via snail mail that all they had to do was leave and wait out the quick and inevitable fall of Tuzla into Chetnik hands, risk-free. In some instances, there were parties the night before the attack, and some Tuzla Serbs, though their cars were already packed and in the parking lots, warned none of their “fellow Yugoslavs,” none of their friends and neighbors, none of their family members of different ethnicity, of the impending war.

Those with places in the city rented their own master bedrooms to foreigners and spies, so that they themselves could sleep on chaise longues and pullouts, piling the children at the bases of weight-bearing walls away from windows. They crowded together with refugee country relatives in suffering silences, three or four per room, bottling up diligent human grievances. They proclaimed their cheapo stand-up pianos off-limits to their rural kin but shit-grinned and cooed when blue-bereted Martins and Olafs two-finger-“Chopstick”ed the keyboards accustomed to Debussy and Dvorák, drunk on swanky bourbon they never shared with their landladies and landlords.

As always, life was easier for those who didn’t give a shit.

A kid we called Masni, idiot savant on the bucket drums and a bit of a talker, told us a story. Masni’s urban aunt, who lived in a two-story house near a park, housed a UN officer lodger and had no qualms about getting this tiny, mustachioed Swede blackout drunk and selling him, then stealing from him, one and the same ring, numerous times, this rare thirteen-carat diamond ring she first bought off of Masni’s desperate mother for a fifty-kilo bag of flour and five boxes of powdered milk—courtesy of UN cash—who had bought it for the ruble equivalent of three thousand deutsche marks in Volgograd in the late ’80s in hopes that her son might one day propose to his future wife with it.

Masni’s rural aunt, on the other hand, gave so much shit that if she eked out a two-onion harvest she would get on a rickety, banana-seated bicycle and ride the ten-kilometer road to Tuzla to deliver one of them to her sister’s family so they could have a taste as well, then pedal off back into the night.

0.5

We kept our Mohawks and long hair and were livid at the high-tech beasts on the hills around our town for having it in them to rain shells on zitty, malnourished civilians in bad shoes and with worse attitude, who inhaled paint-thinner fumes and shady spirits and exhaled blackouts and hangovers, rage, and nonconformity, all of it just to feel a tiny bit sane for a moment.

When the war started, some of us knew it was coming and some of us didn’t. Some of us shaved our ’hawks and were sent abroad, to America, Australia, Europe, by our parents. Those of us who didn’t have family elsewhere just hunkered down, trying to learn the new rules, opposite from the old ones. Now thou shall kill, and if you don’t, it’s jail for thou or digging trenches on the front lines, a human shield. The older ones among us were picked up by military police, given old rifles, and marched up mountains in our punky sneakers.

The younger ones among us once heard cats fighting behind the “Trans Servis” on Skojevska Street days after all the blood had been washed off, and we were curious and a little drunk and went to investigate just to find an ass—not an ass as in donkey but a human ass in Levi’s 501s, red tab and all, and no torso or legs, just an ass—and somebody said it’s perfect to park a bike in and everybody laughed and one of us poked at it with a stick wanting to see if it belonged to a guy or a girl but then we stopped and walked away in silence, and the cats, they were nowhere to be found.

Skojevska je oshtar greben…

0.6

Some of us were hard-core punks and some of us were wannabes, and either way we wore TZ PUNX handwritten on our T-shirts and spray-painted it on Tuzla’s walls. Tuzla was named after a Turkish word that has to do with salt, which is mined but also used to be extracted from an underground saltwater lake directly beneath the town. Displacing the liquid holding up the crust on which everything had been built created growing pockets of vacuum or air under the town and made its streets volatile, and every once in a while, throughout the years, we witnessed asphalt imploding on itself, big sinkholes opening up like hellmouths, devouring citizenry, cars, trees, whole houses.

Those of us who were eighteen and over claimed we were seventeen and under because we didn’t want to get drafted, freaked out by the increasing number of funeral announcements stapled to tree trunks and glued to poster boards, black if you were from a Christian family, green if you were from a Muslim family, and baby blue if you were “other” or just too young to give a shit.

At the beginning of the war, it was easier. People had stockpiles of food and the waterworks were largely undamaged. We had what we called Bucket Parties in our apartments when our parents weren’t around, and the price of admission was alcohol. Those of us who were relatively well off would raid our parents’ liquor cabinets and bring in a bottle of Brazilian coconut liqueur from the back of it, arranging the other bottles to hide our thievery. Those of us who weren’t would scrounge or steal a bottle of beer or risk our lives and siphon slivovitz from our drunkard fathers’ secret stashes into empty mayo jars and add water to the five-gallon canisters until it looked like they were untouched. At the party we would pour all of it into a plastic bucket, mix it around, pour it into mugs and creamers, and drink until we vomited into sinks and potted geraniums.

The New Year’s Eve of 1994, at Frida’s party in Super Blok, all we had was one canister of moonshine we’d made out of sugar and rice and aromatic herbs to cover the almost fatty taste of its high-alcohol content. We poured some of it into a communal soup bowl and slurped it with dessert spoons because Igor the Punk had told us it was easier to get drunk that way. Most of us blacked out before ten p.m. and woke up in the new year parched, lips dehydrated and puckered like sphincters, shivering on foreign tile or parquetry.

At midnight Masni woke up from a nightmare and, finding himself in the complete darkness, hightailed out of there, bounced around the building’s stairways to end up on the deserted Titova Street.

It was snowing. There’d been no cars in years, no traffic to speak of except UN vehicles in the mornings, because the UN could ship in their own gas. He lay in the middle of the street looking up at gunmetal skies, pockmarked facades, shrapnel-chipped balconies, snuffed-out streetlights, the geometry of straight lines of human existence cutting nature into portions.

When he felt the water permeating his clothes, he got up. There was a mysterious coil of human shit steaming at the entrance to Frida’s vestibule, a heartfelt, punk-rock-style sarcastic little nugget of joy.

Happy New Year, it meant.

That winter we used to sit in Galerija on bulky wicker chairs, eight of us around two cups of tarlike coffee, shivering, with crackling empty bellies and all the time in the world, making fun of the waiter with a gap in his teeth and the soldier by the bar who was looped up on grape brandy and livid at the command and his life and the mad dynamics of war and us youths too young to carry Kalashnikovs and hallucinate about pussy in the trenches full of mud and bullet shells. The soldier had no dough to pay for his bill, so to clear the way to the exit he hard-brandished a hand grenade, which slipped out of his hand and haphazardly distributed some shrapnel, the tiniest piece of which ended up in Masni’s back and made him wail like a widow as the café filled up with the savory musk of gunpowder.

0.7

Every night at Club Stelekt, trying to find girlfriends though nobody wanted to have anything to do with us, we finally said fuck this, figured we’d do our own thing. Masni’s father was a pretty famous Bosnian musician who, as luck would have it, had gotten stuck touring in Austria when the war started and so Masni lived with just his mother and brother in a big house on the hill, overlooking the old town center, and he had his own room where his mother wouldn’t venture, and an acoustic guitar, and there was a mini recording studio in the attic and a huge storage in the basement filled with exotic musical instruments, Balkan and Scottish bagpipes and Senegalese drums, tooth-missing pianos, and, to our delight, a wine cellar to end them all.

Masni started sneaking out bottles of wine every evening and we would go to a remote place in a park, or to the old zoo—where, nightly, a ravenous lioness roared and roared to be put out of her misery—or down the embankment of the smelly, exhausted Yala River to pour wine into our empty stomachs, puke, and give each other shit for puking, daydream about starting a punk band, dreaming MTV dreams.

It went like that until the cellar was empty.

By that time, we were older. Our Mohawks were overgrown because the winter was bitter. Igor the Punk showed us how to get high off of paint thinner, the only other bottled liquid in the basement, and we haunted the streets of our city under siege, huffed under bridges, atop garages, in graveyards and ancient ruins, got in fights with soccer hooligans and lost, got our noses broken and our mouths burst, and cackled in the faces of our assailants to be beat on some more. Wracked and out of our minds, we raided people’s war gardens and ate scallions raw in handfuls straight out of the ground. We blacked out and woke up in uncanny places with jaundice, TB, crabs. We stopped throwing ourselves down onto the pavement during shellings, felt shrapnel murmur in our hair. We stole our fathers’ handguns and fucked around with them in the park and once one of us got shot by chance in the head by another one of us, and we went high to the funeral, smelling chemically of glue, laughed during prayer and wept during the reception, and a bunch of times we got picked up in army raids and, if of age, got sent to the front lines, where we got our limbs torn off by anti-personnel mines, and shot in the bowels and in the eye and through the jaws.

The Stelekt shut down and our group eroded.

Electricity was available for four hours every four days and hard-core punks stayed at home, slept all day. There was nothing to drink any longer, nothing to huff, eat. There was no point in going out, saying the same words, soberly staring at the same faces, knowing you had nothing in common with the souls staring out of them, nothing but misery, psychosis, paranoia.

Sobriety led to depression, boredom, thoughts of suicide.

We were spent.

In America, teenage punks die from overdoses and cancer, or wrapping their momma’s Mazdas around suburban oak trees, drunk, or just going out with a busy daddy’s BANG, out of pain or out of spite.

We died from boredom and shrapnel, from sharply broken hearts, from slugs. When kerovi raided Stelekt, Igor the Punk, the hardest one of us, a berserker who would crush bricks with his forehead for giggles, made a stand with both middle fingers out. The rifle butts, though, proved harder than even him. He was shoved out to the front lines, where, scrambled up on paint-thinner fumes and who knows what, he stumbled out the mudfucked trench that very night, sans the gun, and zombied miraculously across the minefield to the enemy side, thinking, I’m a Serb too, where, summarily, Serbian Chetniks had him shot, Serb or not.

Masni’s father returned from Austria and brought with him the newest Ramones album, Mondo Bizarro, and the news of their new tour. When Frida, one of the two girl punks we knew, and some others went over to the house to listen to it, the father barged into Masni’s room, wild-eyed and wild-haired, said hello to them, shook their hands, and said rather genuinely but sternly as fuck: How’s it going, comrades? Would you like something, a glass of wine, perhaps? And they thought: Uh-oh!

Maybe some paint thinner in a plastic bag? the man continued in the same manner, and their extremities felt like sandbags. Masni said: Don’t mess with them, Dad! and the man started to laugh, shook his crow’s-nest head, called them knuckleheads, and eventually left the room.

The moment Frida realized the Ramones, on their last tour ever, were gonna play in Dom Sportova Arena in Zagreb, a few hours across the front lines by car, she became obsessed. We have to go! she said to us, but it was the third year of the siege and there was no way of getting out if you were male, if you were close enough to fighting age. I can’t believe you! she said, gnashing her teeth. You’re a pussy hair away from getting rocked by a mortar on a daily basis and you sit here and quibble. This is your life! she screamed, your last chance to see them! This is why you survived these three years! Punks, my ass! she moaned, then mooned us. Aunties, is more like it.

There was no way that we would put our asses on the line and try to cross the inflamed border illegally just to go and see a band—even if we knew all their songs by heart—lest we get caught by our side and sent to dig trenches in the line of fire, or by their side and get our throats cut, end up nameless in group graves, entangled with other gutless, nameless cadavers, or maybe get lucky and survive just to get locked up in a concentration camp and suffer a piecemeal devolution from an individual into a thing. No way.

But when the time came, Frida squeezed out of the siege in the trunk of a fake cab and managed to get to Zagreb in time and saw the Ramones play live (she had pictures and a T-shirt to prove it) and snuck back into Tuzla a week later, unmolested, alive, really alive, more alive than the rest of us ever were.

0.8

We all shaved our Mohawks and got jobs, got married, had daughters, sons. We became nurses, teachers, mechanics, religious zealots, hated and lovable fuckups. Grown-ups.

Those of us who stayed talked shit about the diaspora. Those of us who ran away talked shit about the motherland. Those of us who stayed couldn’t wait for those of us who ran away to come back in summertime, in our fancy or trendily shitty foreign garb, to put the cowards in their place, Bosnia-style.

Hey, doctor, who’re you pretending to be; I knew you when you ate boogers!

Hey, writer, how much do you make an hour at Burger King?

Hey, award winner, who do you think you’re gonna satisfy with that dick?

On the trips back home, those of us who ran away avoided the old friends and mosh-pit churners, considering them triggers for our New World depression, PTSD, alcoholism. We pitied the fools who didn’t have it in them to leave the safety of their own culture and make something of themselves in a different one, duke it out in the real wild world. We thought them cowards and peasants, thought because we lived in rented apartments in Chicago or Portland and could go see famous punk bands live that we understood real life better.

Some of us abroad, we still sported Mohawks—if our jobs, wives, let us—and got knowing nods in supermarket lines from balding, yam-shaped ex-punks who, upon seeing our the Exploited T-shirts, always said something sad, like That’s old school. Desiccated, old white bastards in USS Nimitz caps, humping reduced-priced, guaranteed-tender good ole U.S. red meat in grocery baskets, asked us what tribe we belonged to and we said Bosnian, watched their faces smirk. Some of us walked away then, while others iterated that if there was a race war in the U.S. we just wanted to signal to the white American baby boomers that we’re not gonna be on their side, despite our shade of white skin.

We had pigheaded, romantic opposition to change, though we gave in in all the important ways. We abandoned our old culture, our language, our family, and used our whiteness to assimilate. We showered every day even though our mothers back in the old country—living on fixed, always-late pensions—waited until midnight once a week, usually on Sunday, for the cheap electricity rate to heat up the water in the boiler. We cringed as we scraped our leftovers into bins, but scrape we did, to fit in. The originally Muslim ones of us celebrated Christmas and Easter, said grace holding in-laws’ hands, complimented the succulence of dry turkeys. We were asked to teach the rest something in our language, told in tipsy human confidence that they were happy we had made it out of all that mess. The jokers among us made sure to get on video our spouses’ extended families, kids and grown-ups, in reindeer Christmas sweaters, repeating the phrase We love sucking dick in Bosnian and shared it secretly on Balkan social media outlets to likes and likes and likes and likes.

When you Americans find yourselves abroad and stumble into one another at a pub or a stony foreign national monument with your cameras cocked, you recognize yourselves as expats, and even when one of you is a degenerate ex–meth head from Vegas and the other an evangelist from Michigan, there’s a moment when you come together in your basic americanness. You exchange some familiar damn rights and you better believe its, bitch about no ice in the soda out here, wherever here is, disclose hidden finds of the foreign lands you’re in, and have a good one each other in the end.

Us, we hide in plain view. Those of us who ran away, we’d kill to fit in, to not be noticed. We are poster-child immigrants. We make self-deprecating jokes, are first to shit on commies, terrorists, Eastern Europeans, you name it, putting you at ease. And even when at Safeway we come across a couple obviously at each other’s throats, a baggy-eyed woman and a gray man hissing at her in our homeland’s lilt, we don’t make ourselves known to them. We don’t know what side they were on.

Instead, we pick an avocado off a pile and pretend to squeeze it in a knowing way, part of us wondering if our mothers would die without ever trying this buttery alien egg. We pretend we are you in front of our expats because we want to survive.

We don’t crave salad or smoothie; we don’t cleanse or abstain; we eat what’s in front of us. We don’t say I need to get a run in, or a sweat in, or a nap in; we do what we can as long as there are no eyes watching us. We don’t listen to our bodies but commandeer them into the closest hiding places. Our aspirations and dreams are not particular or American. In our messed-with minds, in our traumatic lives, any life would do.

0.9

Those of us who dragged ourselves into our forties will feel older than our age. The ones who stayed will watch the unfathomable new generations in our constantly and exponentially changing cities and times. We’ll watch and wonder how they can run marathons and open restaurants and care about regional theater, take their kids to basketball camps, join amateur folklore groups, learn languages, and have open minds—when we feel like this.

We will feel disgusted by them and cheated by life, tuck ourselves into unchanged and familiar city nooks of yore, and sneer at the verve and the élan of the people who grew up after the war. We’ll blame our anger problems, poverty, loveless and sexless marriages, and inability to get work or an erection on the people who dare to believe in the future, these perky, tent-pitching, millennial fucks. We’ll watch them out of our hazy, bloodshot eyes at closing times and use puny pretexts to start some shit every time, head-butt a youngster in the mouth for smiling too hard, for wearing a cap, or for not wearing one.

Those of us who, abroad, were weaned from the bosom of the motherland, we’ll change our names, our Tomislavs into Toms, our Mehmeds into Mikes, our Miloshes into Milos. We’ll respell and repronounce our surnames for the sake of generic English speakers. We’ll chop up our fused consonants and squeeze foreign vowels into their gaping wounds. We’ll neuter our rolling Rs, to us vowel sounds, to accommodate our new friends and neighbors. Over time, we’ll even umlaut our simple vowels, make them ooze or singsong, so much so that when we go back for a visit, our relatives will call us fags.

But here’s the thing.

Those of us who stayed and got married to people who went through the same things as us, we’ll somehow stay married. Despite the shit of life, we and our spouses will reach some kind of equilibrium, see each other not just as partners but as fellow sufferers, survivors of life, and though our children will grow up hearing hissed midnight fights about money and screaming drag-outs full of Mom and Dad’s mother’s cunts, mornings will somehow take care of themselves, and tears and apologies will be expressed or hinted at, and chimbur on sudzuka or maslanjak, coffee and cigarettes, will respawn all the players into a new day, new game.

Those of us who left and who partnered with people who didn’t go through what we went through, we, God bless us, we got fucked. Try to explain to an eighteen-year-old Nordic Lutheran from the suburbs of California—who grew up with cats—that a car-squashed feline on the side of an American freeway is not just a stuffed animal, no matter how much she wants it to be, no matter how much it sucks that it isn’t, just like nine plastic-covered mounds by the bus station in front of your high school back in Tuzla weren’t just mounds of dirt.

1.0

But who am I kidding? It’s not all of us who feel like this, just me.

If all of us felt like this, there would be none of us Bosnians left in the world. But we’re still alive and kicking, becoming Miss Australia, a MacArthur Fellow, an Oscar winner, a restaurant owner, a miner, a truck driver, a fisherman, a policewoman, a psychiatry nurse, a PE teacher, a painter, a lovable fuckup, a grandma, a West Point graduate, a database administrator, a pole dancer, a Swedish politician, an inventor of some doodad that helps arteries get rid of fatty plaque.

It’s just me, it seems, just me.

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