Evil Men: Short Stories by Erik Wennermark

Author:Erik Wennermark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ibew
Published: 2018-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Valery smiles, nods, pulls out his checkbook.

D. bows gently, swaying and showing mossy teeth. He says graçias in expectorant Castilian and goes to find it.

Croatian Drug Camp makes activation.

***

Upwards Venezia falls Trieste where Ulysses landed, and we too journey there, following the path of D. out of Venezia, its choked alleys and dead art, into the great Italian brush-fire and the country of its own, Trieste. Nigerian and Eastern European émigrés sell knock-off Gucci in the heat, speak Italian with a Slavic accent and thread the sun. Imagine D. with his digital gear, in full preparation, the limestone reflection burning his eyes. We watch Slovenian Budvar girls make nice with yacht enthusiasts and think, what would D. think? What would he do? Where would he be? We put ourselves within him, feel glorious. The Slovenians trade sexual favors to the octogenarians for an imaginary Firenze holiday―the smell of dead cow on an Arno quay, faded mornings of cappuccini and brioche watching dead rats bloat. We take an afternoon tonic in the James Joyce café while D., knowing D., sat with bug-eyed miscreants outside the bus depot munching a cheese and tomato sandwich and sharing his flask. We rent a Fiat and drive across the border. The path of D.―as corroborated by his sketchbook―leads us to meet the sculpture of Ivan Mestrovic, patron art saint of Croatia and one-time resident of South Bend, Indiana, and to compose in his garden, where D. likewise sat.We uproot the grass and ask ourselves questions: Why Zadar? How did D. know to find Croatian Drug Camp there? In Croatia at all? It is not clear to us if he had ever visited the Balkans previously. We tend to think not; for his now-almost-mythic wanderlust, he was really a parochial sort of fellow in our opinion and preferred New York. “Falafel, Chana Saag, and crack cocaine within a block of my studio,” he used to say. We guess it was divinely inspired, even if in saying such a thing we are in full contradiction of D. Mostly he was drunk and met a Bosnian prostitute―husband castrated and hung by Serbs―working off that damage with more grievous penetrations―while trolling Venetian dive-bars. She spoke of the Kornati Islands, and it stuck. He read a short story by Ivo Andric and it reminded him of his childhood in Michigan. He looked at a map and seeing the jagged coastline said, “Here is my legacy. My contribution to the canon rests here.” Maybe he just happened upon Zadar, it was fully random. We know überteen was, that eventuality would have been impossible to foresee, the Hun’s cooperation too. Croatian Drug Camp was born from beautiful random energy, and apparated in the mind of genius.

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