Community

While in Copenhagen, I stayed in a commune called Jomsborg. It was, to use a Danish term, fantastisk.

My Portuguese friend Di lives there. We met in Boston six years ago when she was getting a BA in philosophy and physics.

Founded in 1900, Jomsborg is said to be the oldest collective in town. It's a big yellow house in a neighborhood whose rich neighbors would like to shut it down for party noise. But there is some respect for history in Danmark, and that won't happen any time soon. It's supposed to be for students and artists, but after 7.5-year-resident painter Jens-Peter (JP) Soendberg moved out recently, the only remaining artist is Danish National Theater ballerina Mie. Like every guy in Jomsborg and Copenhagen, JP had a little crush on Mie, but it was not to be. She cuddles with him and even strokes his face, then swoons into the arms of Jens-Louis, with his railroad cap coolly askew, who is taking her to Brazil for Carnaval next month.

JP moved out, but he can't leave. Something keeps pulling him back to Paradise House, as he calls it. The unlimited food, the beautiful girls, the supply closet, the music, the laughter; this place has it all. In fact, every former resident I talked to expressed regret about moving out. They think they want more space or privacy, and once they have it, they miss Jomsborg.

JP is a wild, Neal Cassady character who once spent the night in jail for kicking cars in a general lust-rage outside the commune. He supports his painting by drawing on Danmark's generous social programs when he can. But recently he's had to get a job as a social worker, making home visits to elderly people.

What I loved about living in the commune was that you never knew what you'd find when you came down from your room into the living room. One day there was JP, who was crashing there most nights, lounging on the sofa. Somebody always had a pot of coffee ready, and there was dark rye bread and curried herring for breakfast, though it was noon.

"Yesterday I was fixing the hair of a 100-year-old woman," JP announced. "100 years old! She has this long hair. And I had been out hunting for girls the night before and was still a little drunk. I was standing behind her and I couldn't stop thinking about all the girls I had met. It was still dark outside. She said, 'Ah, that feels good' as I was doing her hair. I said excuse me and went to the bathroom to masturbate. When I came back, I kept doing her hair, and when the sun came up I noticed there was a little sperm on my jeans."

It didn't matter who was around or who might be listening from the kitchen. He didn't care. Another time there were six of us sitting at the dining room table. We had each given one significant thing that had happened to us in 2007, when JP walked in. Someone urged him to tell "the blowjob story." He demurred, then finally gave in. He stood up, shaking his head and talking quickly, as if he were doing a task like mopping the floor. As he got into the story, his hair started shaking. It was short on the sides and poofy in the middle, like an 80s singer. He wore a jean jacket. He gave himself fully to his cackling laugh, which always followed by a few seconds a moment of absurdity.

"I was walking to work one morning when I passed this tall Asian woman who looked at me. I turned around about 100 meters later and she was waving at me. I turned around, "Me?" Yes, she nodded. I went after her and she led me down a smaller street and put me on the hood of a car and sucked me off. I started to wonder how many tall Asian women are there, and I started touching her face to see if there was any stubble."

I couldn't believe this guy talking so freely in front of a group of six men and women in their 20s sitting at a dining room table. He even stood up to tell the story. Did he talk like this when he still lived in the house? Yes, it was clear, from all the people rolling their eyes while they soaked up every detail. "Oh Yelpee," they'd say. (Yelpee being how you pronounce the letters JP in Danish). The Danes have a reputation for being sexually free and open, but it's not true. You can't find anyone else who tells stories like Yelpee.

"It was a man!" someone shouted. He looked a little concerned, then shrugged it off. "Oh well," he said. "It still counts as a significant moment in 2007, my first blow job by a man."

The house is a three-floor yellow house, separated by a small courtyard from a second, two-storey building of dorm rooms. All work is shared, divvied up at a weekly meeting. Every night two people are responsible for cooking for the 20 residents. Someone else makes bread every night. Others clean and shop for food. Any complaints or requests are recorded in a journal in the dining room, such as, "People can you empty your fucking beer bottles and put them in the crate so it's easier to recycle? Thank you--Lars."

Lars is my twin. I could be his father, but we look the same. Tall, thin, same face, same dry humor, same slow demeanor, same thoughtful look even when we're thinking about nothing at all. We have the same favorite Bob Dylan song. Idiot Wind. Both our mothers are 65. Both our fathers are dead. He has a mustache, I don't. He cut his own hair. Then he cut mine. In a shower in the basement. Both haircuts look like works of sheep-shearing.

One Sunday night, Lucia the Spaniard and I were on duty for cooking. We decided to make the Spanish national dish, paella. Volunteering to help us were Alan and my twin, Lars. I chopped onions while Alan did nothing but talk to me. "I'm sorry for talking to you so much," he said in a faux formality, "but you intrigue me, I'm fascinated by you, tell me more." He was gay, but he knew I wasn't; we had the same sense of humor and were laughing quite a lot. Meanwhile, Lars went to his room to get Blood on the Tracks. When "Idiot Wind" came on, I started hopping for joy. Lars and I, both normally sedate, were searching the middle ground, searching each other's eyes.

"Listen to that," I said. "The anger, the bitterness."

"It could only come from a specific person, someone he really hates."

"Yes!"

"It's his wife, Sara, the mother of his children."

"Aha. You can't get sharper than that. 'You're an idiot.'"

Lars laughs. "Yeah. But at the end he says, 'We're idiots, babe,' he's taking some of the blame."

"Yes! And listen here, he goes from 'you're an idiot' to (and I sing with Bob) sweeeeet laa-dyyy." I want to talk about the texture there, the ambivalence, the complicated nature of human relations, but it's too much. I'm lost in the music. He says it himself, why should I repeat it.

"Cook! Chop! You're not doing anything," says Lucia. "We have to have this finished by seven o'clock, or people will be very upset." It was 5:30, and we had a lot to do.

"Alan's distracting me!" I yell.

"Oh sorry, sorry," says Alan, who had been standing there quietly.

Alan and I played a game throughout the two-hour prep in which Lucia was the boss, and we were trying to get promoted at each other's expense. Every faux pas of the other, imagined or real, went reported to the boss, and each of our triumphs too.

"Did you see the way I lit the broken burner, Lucia?" I said. She ignored me.

"But he dropped some of the onions on the stove!" Alan said.

"That's not good," said Lucia.

"Haha, you see! Demotion!" said Alan.

I made a sangria, and soon we were getting drunk. It was 6:30, getting down to crunch time. The paella was simmering. Alan tasted it. "It's boring. It's flat. It's nothing," he said.

"It needs some spices," said Lars.

"No! No spices go in the paella," Lucia said. "Don't touch the paella!"

But I had another glass of sangria, and when Lucia's back was turned, I reached on the shelf over the stove for the coriander. The spices are in these huge glass flasks. I poked my nose in and nothing ever smelled as sweet and delicious as that fresh coriander.

"Smell this," I said, poking it under Lars's nose.

"Mm, wow," he said.

"Shall we?" I said. Lucia was cleaning something on the counter behind us. There were four pots of paella. In one of them I tossed a dash of coriander, partially to make trouble and partly as an experiment to see if the flavor would improve compared with the others.

She didn't know until dinner was served and someone asked the difference among the four pots. "Well," I said, giving myself away, "there's a secret spice in one of them, see if you can identify it."

Lucia was distraught. She glared at me across the table and said in Spanish, "I will never forget this. You ruined the dish. You ruined the paella. You ruined the night." Later she was found crying in the arms of a gay Pakistani millionaire who claims to have been targeted like Bhutto and her children.

The next day I apologized five times, she gave me a half hug of forgiveness. But every time Lars or Alan walked in, she pointed at them and said, "What spices did you put in? Chili powder?" She is allergic to chili, and feels the Danes put chili powder in everything just to drive her crazy.

"What did I do?" Lars said. "But I didn't do anything."

"It's true, Lucia, it was all me," I said. Clearly I had some issues to work out before I could be a healthy member of the community.

So did JP, though he survived in the house for 7.5 years. One evening, my dear friend Di hit JP in the back of the head. According to some reports, she even grabbed him by the hair and shook his head and said, "You need this, JP." But I suspect that this, too, would not have happened without me in the country.

I loved JP's sense of humor, and I was always egging him on. It's true he annoyed people while he lived in the house, and surely his continued presence there after he moved out grated at people. But things seemed to get worse after I declared that we needed to make a film called, "The Man Who Left Paradise" about an annoying guy who keeps coming back to the community he left and eating all the food and annoying everyone. It was based on a true story, but it also became the true story because he started willfully annoying people in my presence. And also when I wasn't there. One night when I was visiting my Aunt Gitte, he kept interrupting a serious conversation Di was attempting to have with three other women. Di has also been doing a lot of feminist reading, and she felt that his psychological intrusiveness and bullying was tantamount to a physical assault. So she got up and struck him in front of everyone, and the next day he told me he had a concussion and was feeling nauseated.

I asked her if this would have happened were he still in the community, and she said probably not. And if he had been, she may have been kicked out of the house, since among Danes, you must not hit people. It's what everyone said. "I understand her feelings. JP can be so annoying. But of course you must not hit anyone." As it was, JP being gone, people ignored the incident, and JP never came back.

Ah, Paradise House. I had planned to stay only a week. But that week became three weeks. It was just too intense and beautiful to leave.

Family

Two days before Christmas, I yelled "balls!" to isolation and headed to Danmark, my Moderland, the land my mother left at 17 for New York. Is it so scary to be all alone in a freezing English house on the sea for Christmas? Well, when you grow up looking forward all year to a traditional hyggelig (cozy) Danish Christmas with all its traditions and friendships, the answer is yes.

I still have an old aunt living north of Copenhagen, in a burb called Hillerod. Gitte is 74, an alcoholic, no kids, somewhat of the black sheep of the family. Paying the price now for being a funny but irascible snob throughout her life, she lives alone with her health problems in a senior residence. A stroke, a fall, and a schnapps- and wine-dissolved liver left her close to death at various points over the past few years, but Antabuse, a drug that makes you sick if you drink alcohol, may have saved her life. Attached to the notion of the old Danish royalty, she points to our family's coat of arms at nearby Fredensborg Palace.

After her divorce from the love of her life, Henning, she changed her last name, not to the name she grew up with but to Moth, her mother's maiden name. "Don't you know the name Moth goes back to the 13th century!" she says when I ask her why. For proof, she pulls out a 20-page geneology following the Moths through the centuries. I have visited her in Hillerod twice before, in 2004 and 2006, and each time I am amazed at how sharp and funny she is, given the stroke and the ravages of liquor.

I showed up at the Hillerod church around 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve. Through the window I could see the minister was in full swing, with his head on the platter of a frilly white collar. It was freezing outside, but I was afraid to interrupt the service. I looked through several windows for my Aunt Gitte, until I seemed to be causing more of a disturbance than if I'd just entered the church. I went in a took a seat next to a little girl near the back. The congregation was singing now. I wanted to be sitting next to my aunt, Gitte, to hear her sing these songs from her youth, to steal glances at her happiness. But this little girl singing and poking her brother in the pew in front of her would have to do.

I don't speak Danish, so there wasn't even a point in trying to mouth the words of the songs. What the hell was I doing wasting my Christmas in the back of the church? I blushed, I sweated, but I pulled my body up and dragged it down the aisle to the front pews and took a seat there, sure that Gitte would be nearby. But I saw her nowhere. The songs ended, the minister apparently said we could go, and finally I spotted my dear old aunt across the aisle a few pews back. She was standing with a cane in one hand and the other grasping the wooden edge of the pew. That was better than when I saw her in the summer of 2006, when she couldn't stand and I rolled her around in a wheelchair.

She was ecstatic to see me, her hand slapping at my shoulder as we hugged. Over the next hour I helped set up a neighboring room for Christmas dinner, while Gitte sat and watched. We slid tables together, draped purple tablecloths over them, poked pine sprigs into candleholders, and in the space of an hour transformed a sterile room into that miracle of coziness captured in the most important Danish word, hyggelig.

There were about 20 people around the table for dinner, mostly old folks with nowhere else to go. I sat between Gitte and the man who had organized the event as an act of goodwill. His wife did the cooking and serving. He described how they'd fallen for each other at age 14 but had to keep their feelings suppressed for three years. They signaled their love for each other by draping the sleeves of their jackets over each other in the coat room. At 17, they finally told their parents. Then he went away for military service and thought she might not be the one for him. Then, on leave in their home town, he saw her in the street and knew instantly she was in fact the one. I could feel Gitte beside me filling with jealousy, like her blood with red wine.

She had asked her doctor if she could drink for the three weeks of the holiday season, and he had said yes. She wasn't a sloppy drunk, though, nor a cranky one. We could still talk and laugh after she'd drunk most of a bottle. For dessert, there was the rice-almond pudding. There were two intact almonds hidden in the pudding, and whoever finds them in their mouths wins a box of chocolates each. Two old men at the far end of the table won. But they hid them until the dessert was finished, which really vexed Gitte. "I hate when people do that," she told me. "If they showed the almond right away, we could stop eating and there would be some pudding left over for tomorrow."

I told her one of the men looked like a professor. "Are you attracted to him?" I asked her.

"Well, I don't know him," she said. But I could see her checking him out after that. I knew she desperately wanted a man. "Not for hanky panky, just someone to talk to about the history book I'm reading, for example," she said.

Gitte sat while the rest of us performed the Danish ritual of walking in circles around a Christmas tree appointed with lit candles. We were supposed to hold hands but since we were in church we were holding hymnals and singing as the organizer played tunes on the piano. I saw the professor sitting quietly across from Gitte, so I went over to introduce them. They spoke two words and it was over. "He has no teeth," she explained later.

We sat on sofas and drank coffee and ate little marzipan cakes. On my left was a 40-year-old Persian man who had lived in Hillerod for 20 years. He told me he was a prophet who had predicted Hurricane Katrina. In fact he had gone to the U.S. embassy in Copenhagen to offer a warning six months before the event. He said next time I visited Gitte I was welcome to stay at his place. (I did a few days later, and he showed me his website, on which he in fact does relate a vision prior to Katrina, except that the prediction was that a tsunami would strike New York.)

My right arm was around Gitte's shoulders. Sometimes she would laugh and curl into me, and I would clutch her like a girlfriend. She slapped her hand down on my thigh and said, "I am so happy you have come to visit your old aunt."

"I am so happy I've come, Gitte," I said. I thought of England and marveled at how such feelings of coldness and warmth were possible in the span of a week.

Isolation

I've heard it said that when you go somewhere you should be sure you're running to something and not from something. After all these years and all these trips, I still can't tell the difference.

Did I just go from New York to Europe because I was running from the city's bad feelings? Or did I run to a big empty house on the North Yorkshire cliffs because a friend had offered it to me and I needed a place to write?

For those who would argue that I'm an escape artist and am afraid to settle down, this could be one of their best cases. The house was only free for a few weeks before it was due for a renovation. Then I'd be back to homelessness in New York or wherever the next city was. Half of me thought I should move to Europe, hence the one-way ticket.

I got to the seaside Irish town outside of Dublin to pick up the key and visit my friend for the weekend. I spent most of the weekend sleeping. When I took the compost out back, it was my first time outside in two days. The wind was blowing a bit. It was bleak and grey. I could tell I was somewhere else, the sea smell vaguely, the greyness, the dampness, the quiet, the suggestion of green everywhere if there weren’t these walled-off yards and little stuck-together houses, a gull’s cry. There was something haunting about these islands, the bleakness, the moors that suck you in, the sea that could dispose of you easily.

I blinked and was in northern England. Bus from Durham Tees Airport to Darlington, train from Darlington to Saltburn. It was hard to believe these nattering gerbils were the colonizers of the world. There were young men carbuncular with skateboards going from Darlington to Redcar because they’d heard there was a skatepark there. They asked me where it was. There was a blond micro-Sting with logorrhea unloading on the poor woman beside him. There were the dough-faced, the snaggle-toothed, the misshapen faces of Britain, bulbous-nosed, and here along the cliffs was their history, from the Roman watchtower that prior to crumblingto the sea looked out for invasions from Scotland or the low country , to the 10-meter fan mill made to blow smoke out of the iron stone mines, to the skeleton of the wheel that's left there today, emblazoned with a graffito by “Nigga Thomas.”

The house was big and cold. No central heating. Only one gas heater worked reliably, in the downstairs sitting room. The heater in the upstairs master bedroom wouldn't light for me the first week, so I slept under five blankets in all my clothes but shoes.

After a few days in which I didn't utter a word, I went into a pub to look at human beings. This was a seaside town, after all, and people lived there, and others came to look at the sprawling views of the sea and the cliffs to the south, said to be the highest cliffs in England. I had the following conversation with a young drunkard:


"Oh my god, I’ve never met someone from the States before," said the drunkard. "I’ve met Americans, people from Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin, but never anyone from the States. The Big Apple. Washington, D.C. Do you know Britney Spears?"

"No."

"Have you met any famous people?"

I was sure I had, but given that this was my first conversation in days, I was having a hard time thinking. The only one that came to mind was Sugar Ray Leonard, and that was when I was nine.

"Ray Leonard, sure," he said.

I told him I needed a phone booth, and he left the bar to take me to one, with his female friend pulling his arm and commanding him not to leave her alone. "We call them cabins," he said. "What do you call socks?"

“Socks?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean, those things?” I touched my sock.

“Yeah.”

"S-o-c-k-s."

"I’ve seen some places they do it s-o-x."

I spent another few days alone, devoid of human interaction. I read Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence and was stunned both by his brilliance and that I'd neglected him for so long. I wrote poems too mawkish to ever see the light of day. I watched English reality television and enjoyed it. One was "Make Me a Muslim," another "Arrange My Marriage," neither of which would fly Stateside. I watched the 100 funniest moments in television, as voted for by the English, and laughed inside for much of them. But the moment I'd been waiting for, the funniest moment in the history of television, was a stand-up comic with an accent so inscrutable that I missed every joke.

After another three days without speaking, I headed for another pub. I watched some boys play snooker and told a girl that she looked like Cameron Diaz. She and her less-attractive friend invited me to another pub. The road was glazed with ice, and it took 15 minutes to walk 100 meters down the steep hill in their pumps. We had just gotten our first round when the girl's boyfriend showed up and made her cry. "This happens all the time," said one of the other two women who had met us there. "It's just one of those relationships."

So it was me and four women and an arguing couple. I refused to take off my tweed cap, because I was ashamed of my greasy hair. I hadn't showered in a week, because the water heater wasn't working. The four women took Cameron Diaz to the bathroom for a pep talk, leaving me alone with the surly boyfriend. I had no idea what my role was. Was I supposed to be stealing Diaz away from him? Was I supposed to eject him from the bar? I took one of the women aside and asked her this. "Am I supposed to throw him out of here?"

"No," she said, "don't get involved. He's nasty. He'd just as soon punch you as look at you." I couldn't help laughing inside at the poor guy. He was about 5'4" and had this 80's hockey-rocker mullet do. I was sort of in the mood for a fight, but after all this was his town and his life and his girlfriend, and who the hell was I to interfere.

I went back and sat across from him. He looked past me. I looked over his head at a TV screen. Our faces were both tense, as if we were a second away from jumping on each other. Two bouncers stared from the door. Two of the women came back. Diaz could be seen crying at the bar, with her friend comforting her. One of them said, "No one wants you here. What are you doing here if no one wants you here?"

"Fuck off," he said. "Do I even know you?"

I was surprised two people here didn't know each other.

Suddenly Diaz was sitting next to the hockey player and they had made up. What the fuck. The two anti-hockey women left, and the one who stayed made peace with hockey. I did to, asking him about Middlesborough's shocking victory the other day over Liverpool.

People got drunk. The women started reaching for my cap, trying to yank it off my head as if we were on the junior-high bus. "It's rude!" they said. "It's rude to keep your hat on inside! Take it off!" There were two transexual twins. I was about to advise them to come up with more feminine gestures and stances when someone told me that they are in fact native women. "There's no way," I said. They had Leno jaws and huge mouths and moved like linebackers, though they were thin. One was blond, the other brunette. The blond swiped the cap off my head. "Let's see what you got under there," she said. I managed to quickly snag the cap back and cover the damage, then got the hell out of there and headed back up the hill to my seclusion.