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.