Story of a city on the evening of a war.

At first the Dempsey jersey draws some double-takes. Some palpable disbelief. A few smirks and tongue-in-cheek nods, like I'm playing with fire. Hope you know what you're in for.

In Bosnia, football is deeper than religion. It's identity. Sarajevo has only a little of what could be called street art, but it's filled with graffiti. Ugly scrawls like prison tattoos mainly marking territory, name'dropping for what in England would be called firms, or in America simply gangs, dedicated to football teams, with larger clubs having several competing ones. In many cases identifying with the team is secondary to your supporter affiliation, your barra brava. In Mostar I thought the "Red Army" tags I saw everywhere were holdovers from the Croatian War, or the Serbian forces from the onslaught of the early Nineties. War'cries still audible from decades ago. The truth is the same basic idea, but wrong timeframe. The Red Army is the supporters group for FK Velež, one of Mostar's two football teams. I know this because I met one of its footsoldiers. My hostel owner's nephew who drove a small group of us around Herzegovina explained that FK Velež is the club for Mostar's Bosnian supporters, traditionally unapologetically left-wing (he openly expressed his deep love for General Tito, the Communist leader of Yugoslavia who died a good decade before he was born). Velež is the bloody rival of HŠK Zrinjski, Mostar's other football team- this one supported by Croats and the extreme right-wing. A city's people divided by loyalties only ostensibly about the football on the field, but more'so a way to suggest the War is more dormant than truly completed, aggression merely sleeping. The frequent riots and clashes between the two groups, the fact that he changed out of his Velež shirt when crossing into a Croat and Zrinjski neighborhood to avoid instigating a fight, pretty much supports this.

Everywhere I go in Sarajevo, I see Vedran Puljić. His image is stenciled all throughout the city like an obscure Che Guevara. In the Baščaršija, on buildings across from the cathedrals, south of the Miljacka River, and sprayed huge on a heartfelt if artistically-lacking mural upon the city's Olympic stadium. He's dead, of course; no living person stirs such genuine loyalty or iconography in a free society. He was a supporter of FK Sarajevo, 24 when he was killed, apparently by police, during massive hooligan rioting between two firms in 2009. Couple that allegiance with the implied open rebellion against police authority, a romanticized subversiveness, and you not only spawn a dangerous legend, but announce to the observant visitor what it is the people around you hold dear.

So yeah. I knew what I was in for. Maybe not the same as traveling to an away game at Azteca (no bags of urine raining down from above) but every second I had on a US soccer jersey on the day they were playing the Bosnian national team, I was, by definition, the enemy. Because empty name aside, there's no such thing as a friendly. 

Game day was my fifth and planned final day in Bosnia, a country I've been strangely protective towards since it came into existence in the early Nineties, and that I'd only come to love more when actually visiting it. The elderly hostel owner had taken to me immediately, playfully chiding me for Americanizing how I pronounce my last name, away from the traditional Polish inflection. I was welcomed back from an overnight trip to Mostar like a prodigal son, with kisses on my cheek and a proud announcement she'd not only kept my same bed reserved but made sure my other four dormmates were now women. "Like a harem. Just for you." The city's bars were simple but absurdly fun. Tall tables set out along the sidewalk, even on the opposite one across from the actual bar, people huddling around with an open sky above and the city around, a palpable enjoyment of summer and the optimism such heat brings. On my second night out I met 3 members of the US team I'd be watching in a few days who had just arrived in Sarajevo from their various European clubs. I wished them luck in the game before giving them advice on bars around the city. An hour later, we then met Bosnia's star player, Edin Džeko, and watched as cars double-parked abruptly in the narrow street so kids could run out from the passenger seats for a picture with him. The food, the scenery, the breathtaking women, everything a perfect payoff for the twenty years of anticipation toward finally coming to Sarajevo. So it was difficult for this city, filled with everything I'd come to love so quickly, to be against me, even if it was just for the evening.

The cab never shows so the four of us walk the mile and a quarter uphill to the stadium. The American, British, and German girls with me all adopted Bosnian gear, my lone US shirt lost in surrounding royal blue and yellow, rivers of Džeko jerseys weaving through the bullet'ridden streets stronger and faster than the Miljacka. We arrive at the overflowing stadium shortly before kickoff, but still with time to pregame at one of the two adjacent bars, since we recognize our hostel owner's son at one of the tables. As we got closer to the stadium, to gametime, the novelty factor of the Dempsey jersey wore off and rather than smirks from the occasional passerby, it was stares from packs of scalp'shaven men, whispers and neck'cranes and more whispers. We finish our bottles of Sarajevsko and start off toward the stands, saying goodbye to the dorm owner's son and to an older man in full yellow and blue gear who'd been speaking to me exclusively in Bosnian and laughing at jokes I could guess at but not comprehend. I offer my hand with an "I think you'll win 3-1... We'll at least get one... Good luck," and he returns the shake with a smiling "See you after the game" and when I try to pull my hand away he won't allow it and then repeats, this time minus the smile "See you after the game." I nod a deadpan goodbye and enter the stadium with the girls, and we take some of the only remaining seats which are the rows to the front, less'valued because of the ambulances and sideline boards obscuring the view. Not to mention you're that much closer to the giant metal fences of chainlink diamonds, the old pens banned decades ago in England after 96 supporters were crushed to death at Hillsborough. Walking down to the front, my back is to the Bosnian crowd behind me, my DEMPSEY nameplate drawing even further attention as the only American supporter in our entire fenced'in quarter, one of only about 20 or 30 in the entire stadium of twenty'four thousand. 

When the Bosnian team takes the field there are flares, and chants like penned'thunder from throughout the ground after each of their two opening goals. The Bosnian fans, and yes my accompanying German, English, and American contingent, stand to drum on the plastic seats in celebration. I just grin the appreciative smirk of the outsider, my loyalties too rooted to join in or to be pleased with the scoreline, but seeing the people of a city I love so happy is an acceptable consolation. At halftime a number of fans go to the section's concession table which is two men pouring paper cups of Pepsi from a 2'liter. When the US scores a harmless goal ten minutes later ("We'll at least get one") there's little distraction from the continued buzz of Bosnian domination. But the second US goal that comes just 4 minutes later is met with anger and immediate looks towards me from the fans around. I don't celebrate externally, I'm reckless but not an idiot. It stays at two'all for almost half an hour, which seems like the perfect scoreline, everyone leaving with at least an exciting game, but then Jozy Altidore scores two more American goals within three minutes, the first an absolutely filthy free kick, and the final consolation goal by Džeko doesn't lighten any moods or make my walk home any safer. It ends 4-3 to the US and despite taking my jersey off after the fourth goal to salvage a little anonymity on the walk back down the hill to the city center, I still get a few "Have a good night Dempsey"s from disappointed Bosnian fans. But thankfully far less stares and pointing mumbles.

I manage to find some of those other elusive American supporters afterward and my celebration goes too long. I miss both my alarm and early morning flight, making it to the check-in counter 15 minutes too late, but just in time to see a contingent of the US team checking-in beside me to redisperse back across Europe. The conversation with my cab driver back to my hostel starts with the game, but quickly shifts topics to the city, the women, the film festival that's about to start and the round'the'clock parties it brings with it. He recommends I stay to experience it and the only thing holding me back from doing that is reality, not emotion. Because I no longer feel an outsider, not the enemy of last night's expired conflict. Still an American and still my Sarajevo and in my last few hours in the city before my overdue departure, these two designations find a proud harmony.

For rebecca.

"To my friends in New York, I say 'Hello,'
My friends in L.A., they don't know
Where I been for the past few years or so,
Paris to China to Colorado..." - One Republic


I was turning around to leave again just eighteen hours after arriving, so that's why I was in the small car. My backpack accompanying me to make for a quicker goodbye. That was the logical decision made in the morning by Miran, the forty-something owner of the eponymous hostel in Mostar that I'd stayed at for a brief night made briefer by the unreliability of Eastern European trains. The ones delayed by the extensive border checks between fledgling countries that loathe one another. 

I took a train rather than a bus from Sarajevo to Mostar because of Rebecca West. Her six-week journey through then-Yugoslavia on the eve of the Second Great War is retold in the extensive and impossibly-dense Black Lamb and Grey Falcon; it's the essential book for any serious traveler to the Balkans, despite now being eighty years old. Reading it in modern day means you're doing so for its philosophy, its musings on how life once was before the contamination of the contemporary reached the villages comprising her trip. It means reading with the cruel hindsight of history she, for all her wisdom, lacks. As a travelogue, it has little use; in its twelve-hundred pages of minute descriptions, what quaint civilization wasn't razed by modernity was devoured by warfare. That of the '40s, the '90s, or our newest century- take your pick. But I rightly assumed one experience of hers would hold pretty true from her era to mine. I chose the train rather than the far more frequent bus because of Rebecca, and because there are only so many paths a train can take out of a valley. Only so many ways out of the holes we dig ourselves in. Eighty years can pass, but the train tracks in impoverished countries pretty much stay in place. 129 kilometers of travel at the speed of honey, letting her and I both centipede past the same massive earthen sharkfins rising out of jade rivers. Through nature stunning but unstrategic, in the World War she knew would surely come and the civil war she didn't.

Still, because of its earlier delay at the Croatian/Bosnian border, the train is two hours late in getting to Sarajevo and it carries me into Mostar past eleven at night instead of just after nine. Past the point when the hostel's social circles are pretty much solidified, or at least when there are no longer empty chairs left around the table to sit with the large group on the patio. Which was fine aside from the twinge of jealousy that the cute blonde backpacker also staying there was already flanked by other eager guy travelers. Another road fling never to be. So instead of conversation with the blonde, or any of the others, I chose to wander the city by night. Walking on Mostar's shined'by'wear cobblestones convexing streetlight back at my eyes, as I followed a many'folded map from Hostel Miran to the Old Bridge that spans the Neretva River. Stone leaping above the water as it has for almost six-hundred years, save the decade following its arbitrary destruction in 1993 during the Bosnian war, and prior to its replacement in 2004.

I wake in the early of the morning and it's back to the Bridge again, while it's still mine with minimal sharing. Mainly an old Italian couple and a local man walking his dog to have in my photographic foreground. I'm on the banks of the trickling Neretva before the arrival of tourists and the preening teenage boys goading money out of them, promising to dive the 30 meters off the Old Bridge to the water once the collection reaches 25 Euro. I get back to the hostel for their semi-famous day tour, the reason I chose to stay there in the first place. Before we head to a Dervish monastery perched above a river, or to a hilltop Ottoman fortress, or to Herzegovinian waterfalls, Miran splits our group of 15, me and the fourteen occupied seats from the night before, into two groups. And that's when I'm assigned into the small car with the other 2 backpackers who will also be taking the evening train back to Sarajevo. Two early 20s Brits, a redhead named Aidan and his friend that looks like the offspring of Eric Bana and Frank Turner. Along with Miran's also early 20s nephew, and an Argentinian backpacker, our tiny red car keeps pace with the larger van. Sitting in the smaller car means I'm missing out on more commentary from the absurdly colorful Miran, so rather than anti-establishment anecdotes and the more-than-occasional tactless sexism, the five of us talk football. Of Villa and Fulham, of the Bosnian star Edin Džeko, underutilized striker for Manchester City and current god of Sarajevo, who I'd met while out drinking a few nights before. Of how Džeko donates constantly to Sarajevo children's programs and hospitals, as he too vividly remembers being a small child during the city's Siege. Our young Bosnian driver is also an ultra- think English hooligan without the beer drinking. Just the fighting and flare'lighting, and the confession about how he has to change his shirt between stops because we're entering a mostly-Croatian part of the region where his team's colors and badge could easily provoke violence. Football loyalty being the proxy form of freshly'remembered war. In addition to football, Miran's nephew is also a huge basketball fan, and when he finds out I'm from New York he eagerly asks me about what seeing a game in Brooklyn is like, in the house that Jay built. Of how Barclay's compares to the Garden or to Staples Center in LA. 

For us five the words and jokes all come pretty easy and in between the sights that were advertised is an experience less tangible that wasn't, and a realization I miss one more thing I never realized I lost between LA and New York. It's the simple act of riding in a car with friends. Windows down, sunshine in a heatwave summer, and a soundtrack subtle in the moment that turns Pavlovian the next time you hear it. It was Dre 2001 back in senior year, usually in Vince's 80s Bronco, grabbing breakfast burritos from Corner Cottage or weaving around the Burbank hills. On almost monthly college trips out to Vegas, the year that followed Irwin and I turning 21, it was The Killers' Hot Fuss, cranking "Midnight Show" when we hit the top of the ridge on the 15 when the glowing promise of the city reveals itself and we would hurtle down to the dwarfing Strip with unrestrained smiles. In this Herzegovina summer it's OneRepublic that I don't realize is on until the five of us are caught in a moment of quietude, each looking out the windows with our eyes rather than our camera lenses. A silence not from boredom, or awkwardness, but a communal if subconscious recognition of contentment. Something so basic and ubiquitous that the top 40 song with its rudimentary lyrics is actually the perfect accompaniment. It's a moment we can all understand and we can all appreciate. Its very accessibility is what makes it beautiful. Our five cultures, biographies, and languages all overlapping for just these few car rides and hours but each easily understanding and agreeing. Our Venn being the football and the car ride, the attraction to Bosnia, and the words we take in while also meditating them out, our communal present and our individual futures....

Oh this has gotta be the good life,
This has gotta be the good life, 
This could really be a good life,
A good, good life...

After the song and hours at the Kravice waterfalls, more silent reflection of simple happiness as a particular cerulean dragonfly kept returning to perch unafraid on my knee, it was back to Mostar. The two Brits were also on my evening train back to Sarajevo, the one with far more daylight to see the Bosnian countryside Rebecca had urged me towards. We didn't talk past the casual goodbyes on the Sarajevo platform that mirrored the farewells to our Argentinian and Bosnian brief friends back in Mostar. More afternoon friendships where further communication or contact info traded would only muddy harmonious memories. The discs in the Venn were already slipping apart, towards future cities and soundtracks, but now with another song to bring a vivid moment back. At least for me, hopefully for the other four, and maybe for another traveler in the future. One who is in a car because of a train because of words that don't stop speaking even when the author and her world have long disappeared.

Another bloody loveletter.

"You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets, but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war." - Don DeLillo

"I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood."  - Rebecca West


"Was that a bomb?" choruses around the room in English accented from Britain, Sweden, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands. My brain whispers the same in my American inflection, but I already know it's untrue. The explosion is too small to be a bomb of any significance, and the human commotion that followed was shouting rather than screams. But the sound also lacked the treble to be a gunshot and so the dozen of us backpackers race to the windows overlooking the bar in the alley below. We hear glasses shattering and see packs of people fleeing the standing tables they inhabited seconds before, and I start heading for the stairwell to make it to the street, to whatever phrase is Bosnian for "crime scene." All of this happens before the tear gas hits Matt's eyes and questions are replaced by a percussion of coughing. And then "tear gas" choruses around the room in English crippled by choking. And as the chemicals find my throat, my tear ducts as I'm shuttering the windows on that floor and up in my dorm room on the one above, I already know with bloodshooting eyes that this is exactly what I've always wanted.

xxxxxxx

I learned about war from Professors Talley and Slayton. From two-hour lectures at 7am three times a week from Killer Miller. From the would'be fathers drowning in mud in The First Day on the Somme and the baskets of severed heads filmed in "Night and Fog." I studied it as a concept in college, in poetic treatises like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning or immediately before this trip, in My War Gone By, I Miss It So, a memoir dedicated to its intoxicating proximity. But before all this, back when I was nine years old, it was Sarajevo that was my first introduction to war as reality.

Two years earlier I'd seen the night'glow green pulsing across a Baghdad sky. The initial images of the nascent First Gulf War. But that was warfare as abstract. A removed modernity sanitized for primetime audiences. We saw not the cities blooming with bone and meal of the bombs' aftermath on the ground, but the video game visuals of their launch from a desert nothingness. In Eighty'Eight the Wall was breached, then floodgated in Berlin and tanks crawled through Tiananmen the following year, and I watched them both from a brown carpet in the Rust Belt, years before coming to California. They were groundbreaking, flashbulb memories of history, even for a kindergartner, but not war. War came in Ninety'Two, with the fleeing residents of Sarajevo running through Sniper Alley. My first time seeing its true face without relent. Removed by layers of journalism and censorship, but still the images of people sprinting haplessly, chased by trails of their own blood and blossoming bulletholes. Mortars exploding, chunking off concrete and flesh. The idea that cities, and all the implied advancement they stood for, could plunge into total chaos. Could fail so completely its residents need revert back to the terrifyingly basic task of trying to remain alive. This was the first time I had seen this. My first time trying to digest conflict beyond its existence as a theoretical or the was of history. Blood and pavement, a contrast meaning war still existed, and not as tanks in the desert, but assault rifles laying waste to the urban, to the urbane. Shredding all that noble subtlety of the soft j. 

At eight, or even at twelve when the Siege of Sarajevo ended, I didn't understand the complexities involved in what was happening. I grasped it only as a fairy tale for the apocalyptic. Milošević as evil, Bosnia as victim, the grandiose scale of murder as the way to remind the world the barbaric will never leave us. It will just get faster and easier to obtain. Additionally, I was grasping then at the idea that there was no longer any such thing as Yugoslavia. That countries could simply cease to exist. This comprehension would also come later, that nations are constructs of the mind that we buy into without probing. That borders, while often mapped via massacre, are ultimately ethereal, arbitrary if not for the faith we put into them. And that they can fail when enough people cease to play along. When the thousand years of religious and cultural differences anchor heavier than a sixty year old banner. Fractures bandaged in flags are still fractures.

This is how deeply Sarajevo and the exotic poetry of its very syllables has been embedded within me for twenty-one years. A city I was drawn to for all the wrong reasons, even at so young an age. A moving-picture show of the grotesque that indirectly wove me through other points first. To Treblinka and Tuol Sleng. A map's journey traced and sewn through with vein and sinew, finally leading me here. When I felt I was finally ready. 

Most all of its buildings are still besieged, like I witnessed them then. The bullet hole constellations are usually brightest on the south sides of the buildings, the ones facing the former strongholds of Serbian gunmen in the surrounding hills. In decline are the Sarajevo Roses, the sidewalk indentations made from mortar shells and their fragmented blast debris, later filled with red resin as dotted memorials throughout the city center. How little chance those on the ground stood is articulated in the expansive spread of their death petals. That spin'art pattern of violence draped all along the city's main street, Zmaja od Bosne, the Sniper Alley I'd watched people die in nineteen years before. A pair of Roses fade outside the new glass Parliament Building, which replaced the one ignited and gutted by tank'fire during the Siege. Above the dead red petals, a cluster of crisp blue and yellow Bosnian flags snap in the breeze. Maybe not enough to heal fractures, but seeming to work on amputees. On an adolescent country relieved to be separated from the older one it knew. Just down and across from Parliament is the Holiday Inn, the historic headquarters for the journalists covering the Siege on the city. Every news report I watched then, and most of the words I've read on it more recently, were relayed by people camped inside. Its conditions more hovel than hotel as the blockade and the fighting drew on. They stayed doubled, tripled up in rooms on the north side of the building, empty ones to the south shielding them from the brunt of the Serbian onslaught. As it stands today, the distinctive outside was repaired but never remodeled, still trapped in a timewarp to the more optimistic Seventies. A banana yellow topped by an uneven brown the color of carpets in the Rust Belt fading from memory.

That optimism of the late Seventies, of the early Eighties, was seemingly well'placed, as is most optimism without the benefit of hindsight. Eight years before the Siege started and Sarajevo was the capital of the fracturing world, it was center of something more hopeful. The Winter Olympic Games of 1984. The first Olympics of my life, even if at six months I was totally unaware of their existence. Which is what makes Sarajevo more than unfortunate, but impressively tragic. Its fall Shakespearean. In order to drown it, one first had to reach above to grasp it from a pedestal. Our abstractions and exaltations are just as mortal as were are too.

Twenty-nine years after Olympians sped down the bobsled track on Trebević Mountain on their way to various medals, I walked down it with six other backpackers, pushing thin branches of heavy overgrowth aside. Most of the track is bombed out, in both the graffiti and warfare senses of the phrase. On the turns, where the track clamshells over to keep the riders from flying off course, the largest works are displayed. The traditional term is masterpieces, but they're aesthetically not, just chunky letters in backgrounds of six or seven colors. They're usually sprayed in the hope for some sort of immortality, but if that's the intent this isn't a very promising venue for it. In the time between the bobsleds and the spray cans was of course the guns. Because those clamshell turns have a better use than canvas, at least to snipers. Facing north, back towards Sarajevo, back towards Sniper Alley and the too many other vulnerable areas of that Bosnian valley, the assassins here could focus and fire through holes in the track with total protection. That's what became of the first Olympics of my lifetime.

And back down in the east of the city, near the Baščaršija, the old bazaar echoing the Mediterranean markets of centuries more Ottoman, is a stone undamaged by fighting. It was masoned there after the Siege, replacing an older one inscribed solely in ruby Cyrillic. That initial plaque was cemented above another one indented with the assassin's footprints, mock-ups of where Gavrilo Princip stood facing the procession along the Miljacka River that marched the Archduke closer. The red'writ one then, and the bilingual greyscale one now, state the rudimentary basics of that June night in 1914. A simple pronouncement of the deaths of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, while omitting the editorial that they certainly had it coming. The diminutive assassin was nineteen, the Miljacka and the Latin Bridge spanning it both equally tiny. In front of the stone, on that bank, the reflective visitor is awed by history, not only its gravitas but its cruelty, in allowing such negligible components to catalyze a World War that would kill over sixteen million people. Because eighty years before Sarajevo would introduce me to warfare, it would do the same to the once-optimistic modern world.

xxxxxxx

The tear gas canister was the second to hit the same bar that summer, according to the girl from Colorado who'd been staying at our hostel for two months. Some personal dispute with the owner was the rumor going around. The effects on me were minimal past the first ten or twenty seconds, briefer even than the communal confusion of those first instants. Shorter still was the surprise, which here in the Sarajevo I remembered and the one I was finally coming to know, was never really there at all. 

Sarajevo, in photos

Rathaus.

"NO NAZIS" is sprayed in a black tag that anchors the already enveloping grey of the Dresden afternoon. The blue abstraction the words tramp upon has the four curving legs of what could be a swastika unmoored in zero gravity, but without the seven letters to force adjacency I can't imagine anyone making that connection, nor that that was the intent, given that the spore is simply part of a larger modern piece. The words themselves are not street art, just a quickly'scrawled reminder, or apology, or threat, depending on who's reading it.

r.

It's a reminder to the casual visitor. The ones that think any mention of Germany is a welcome segue to the cringe-inducing attempts at jokes. The raised straight arm, a brusque "Heil!" Maybe fingers just beneath the nose to feign that silly little mustache. The people unfamiliar with Germany, or history, or good taste enough to not understand that German is not a synonym for Nazi. It actually never was a synonym for Nazi, in the same way American isn't a synonym for Obama supporter or Tea Party conservative. There's a dangerous laziness to paint history in generalities, assume everything was homogenous in societies far more complex than can possibly be captured in surviving writings or photographs. Far too many Germans then, but certainly not all and in some cities less than half, were members of the Nazi political party for anyone's liking and there still exist some today. Not because the country or its citizens haven't learned anything or want to continue the horrendous actions of the past, but because a small fraction of people in life are just festering, abhorrent creatures. The same reason the Westboro Baptist Church exists, or Al Qaeda, or Rush Limbaugh, or that some people's focus immediately after Sandy Hook wasn't on the victims and their families but on how twenty murdered children could potentially affect their lifestyle. Some people exist simply to be pieces of shit. The more people begin to understand that, the more their grotesque aberrant opinions can be ostracized, and the less we'll need reminders of our own distance from them.

a.

It's an apology to those affected and offended, which is to say essentially everyone. But it's a catharsis I've already had at many stops and studies along the way. To read this message, to hear this apology, isn't why I came to Dresden. The guilt of the Nazi party or of any of the mid-Twentieth Century German people isn't what I think of when I think of this rebuilt city. Rather my mind is on one of the rare but disgusting sins of the Allies. The guilt of our American grandfathers... their peers or their commanders. I came to Dresden to reconcile my American heritage with the fact that in February 1945 we firebombed a city into nothingness for no strategic advantage. That we did it out of spite. Killed twenty-three thousand non-combatants and leveled one of the most gorgeous cities in the world just as an elaborate Fuck You.

Leveled is a euphemism. The scrawled possible apology I'm looking at is in the Neustadt, which translates to "new town" despite it now being the older part of the city. The part that was relatively untouched as British and American bombs turned the more storied cultural center into shards. It wasn't on fire. It was fire. While it raged, the firebombing changed the temperature of the town to up to 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That's eight times hotter than the closest planet to the sun. From the photos I've seen, there wasn't a lot of blood, because there wasn't much moisture left of any kind. Just the hungry vacuum of incineration. 

The Allies would win the war, as they had to, but not because they destroyed Dresden. They'd left the few industrial complexes near the town untouched. It was the buildings like churches, the Semperoper opera house, the traditional royal mansions, that would need to be jigsawed together again from what remained. They went on to win the last Good War assuming it was the Perfect War, ignorant to lessons from Dresden that they should have learned. Which means they were repeated in Royan and My Lai. And so it was their grandchildren who would return on their behalf to the rebuilt Frauenkirche, to the lawns and fountains at Zwinger, to witness the pathetic danse macabre come to an end, and join their German counterparts in carrying the sobering weight of inherited apologies.

t.

The smallest group it speaks to is the most disturbing. The threat to the subject named within. Neo-Nazis do persist in modern Germany, as they do in Orange County, California, the American South, far too many other corners of the world. But Dresden is a notable center for their contemporary movement, and among the many other spray-paint stencils on walls throughout the Neustadt I saw one of theirs. An advertisement to a rally protesting police that would have occurred back in June. For decades they've chosen Dresden as their focal point because of the firebombing. Their flagship rallies, including the largest since the height of World War Two, are typically held on its anniversary, hoping the mourning may be galvanized into anger. Which is the exact problem with unwarranted destruction, lapses in morality on such a grandiose scale. When you kill, you create. And a phoenix is a hateful fucking creature.

They'd exist nonetheless, without Dresdens or Abu Ghraibs to fuel recruitment. But we still shouldn't help buttress their propaganda with obvious transgressions. We should never create more destinations for the more somber of our American grandchildren to have to visit in the future.

The wall in Dresden says NO NAZIS. But the ones in Richmond, Virginia could easily say NO SLAVEHOLDERS. NO KLANSMEN in Montgomery and Sumner. NO MANIFEST DESTINY throughout the nation entire. They should be read as reminders, speak self-aware apologies as long as the buildings stand to serve as canvas. And if they're read as threats let them be strong ones, until those seeing them are too afraid to come around these streets anymore.

Retox.

"It was good to take up one's courage again, which had been laid aside so long, and feel how comfortably it fitted into the hand." - Rebecca West


There's no way for me to change the channel and so I'm forced to watch my own addiction, though I don't realize that's what it is right away. 

The only thing the screen has shown since I boarded the plane is the four-inch image of a vehicle parked in a concrete cube. It's not until the aircraft backs into reverse and the little vehicle shrinks from four inches to three, and more of the surrounding loading dock comes into view that my hunch is confirmed, along with the location of the camera. I've watched tarmacs roll by from window seats, walked on them while exiting jets at smaller airports like John Wayne, Long Beach, Kiev, driven on them in shuttle buses, but never seen them from above. I've never had a little camera mounted to the bottom of my airplane to watch the runway digest away in realtime during takeoff. Which means I've never inspected what they truly look like up'close beyond the rosier, rounded-up view of the big picture. Past the broader concept of travel and international airports, the runways themselves are bruised rivers of pavement, pock'marked with the weight of the unrelenting.

Early on in the taxiing process I notice the stray twin tire tracks. The outliers. Spaced out enough to think those were just rough landings. Ill-trained or overworked pilots bringing in their planes too fast, too abruptly. But as the craft picks up speed, so comes the realization. That just about every flight leaves its mark on the ground below. And as we hurtle forward, the unruined grey is swallowed into a lake of blackened damage so complete that the unscarred pavement is no longer visible. Every flight that has ever landed at JFK, etched in burned and cooled rubber atop the tarmac. A tangible personification of every trip taking its toll. And as I search the ground for any hint of the before picture, looking past the puncture wounds for a fresh vein, we pull up and aloft and I remember I'm in one. 

Somewhere in the cargo hold just above the camera is the also-fading grey and black of my REI backpack. In my pocket is my passport, which quickly remembered the contours of my leg that it's been forever molded to fit. They're back with me for my first backpacking trip in almost two full years. The sacrifice of adulthood and career responsibilities was treading lightly on requests for time-off. Several California weddings, discovering my love for New Orleans, but all brief vacations without earning visas. Only fainter echoes of my chosen intoxication. The time away allowed me to understand that this is an addiction. Even in absence, it was a constant topic of conversation, an unavoidable influence in my daily life. Eight months of 3am conversations at work with my favorite editor, a forty-something former Israeli Defense Force'r who traveled for a year following his service in the late Eighties. Listening like fairy tales about a time before guidebooks and Hostelworld.com, of crossing unmarked rivers in Bolivia by looking for the freshest set of ascending tire-tracks climbing the opposite bank. Twenty months of planning for this trip, of imagining myself scaling the abandoned steps of Buzludzha only to discover that now the backpacker graffiti was being erased, the monument interior being rebirthed and renovated- robbing it of all allure it held. Sealing off the potential for narcosis. Any bored hours at work, waiting for an assignment or killing time when I was finished but still on call, was spent clicking through slide shows, making a list for future trips scaling lava to San Juan Parangaricutiro or rowing in Tam Coc. Borrowed minutes from the future, like patches of slow nicotine getting me by. An addiction with lessened vices. I'm not looking for rehabilitation, just further revelation.

Plenty of drugs improve your life in the short-term, in the moment the chemicals hold total sway. It's when the timeline is drawn out that the cons grow ultimately heavier. Traveling is one of the few addictions that earns respect, that exudes worldliness that can't be gained from leaves crumbled into a bowl or powder railed onto a mirror. But let's not shit ourselves. When it's tallied up, I'm really not that different. I'm chasing a fix, same as those others. And maybe among those that travel I'm in the minority. People who buy postcards by the dozens, who stay at the Hiltons or Courtyards by Marriott, who are replicating America pocket by pocket in foreign capitals- for them the departure lounge isn't a gateway to dependency. But I can also tell you, we're consuming different levels of potency. The purer experience you tap, the more you need it again. 

My addiction, this sea change in my personality that came from travel, or was at least awakened forever by it, is what made New York City eternally more appealing than Los Angeles or San Francisco. Because a home here, in this sprinting city, would mean a constant low-level state of that intoxication, the same sensation of being abroad. A life forever lived on the balls of the feet. Leaning forward, shoulders tensed. "On to the Next One." The necessity of this constant fix is what would keep me from enjoying the mellow lifestyle of the West Coast. Because I remember too vividly what happens to sharks that don't stay in motion. 

These are my thoughts when I leave America. Seventeen days abroad at the expense of so many other experiences that this money and vacation time could have bought. The missed weddings of friends, the foregone concerts to save money, seeing my immediate family in Pennsylvania and my friends in California only two weekends a year. All those burned tire'tracks stacked atop one another. More instances of the compass needle and the damage done. The decisions I make that leave me vulnerable to being called a bad friend, a disappointing grandson. But I can live with the names, those damning designations, because they're conscious decisions. I've thought carefully about them, weighed the alternatives. And I really do believe that this is a drug that makes me better in the long run.

The hours pass on the plane and the tiny screen is commandeered again, the channel arrows rendered useless. The addict turned self-voyeur. The approaching tarmac comes into view below and more constellations of scars come nearer and nearer. The wheels impact the concrete, presumably adding another set of permanent bruises to the countless already compiled. My eyes hug closed and I take a conscious breath and slip back into the familiar warmth of the unknown.

The come-up.

"If this were a Movietone News item... and you were in a darkened movie palace of the thirties awaiting the feature, you'd see ropes being thrown off, gangplanks being lowered, steamer trunks being unloaded, and passengers starting gaily to stream off. They'd bring up the sound track- something stirring, to suggest the march of time." - Paul Hendrickson

The scene starts before the first note, before the eighty minutes the band keeps the bar'crowd waiting under low light and lower ceiling. It starts before a catfish dinner next door and the bottles of Abita served by a bartender named Kiss, resident of New Orleans by way of Brooklyn, to a traveler named Joshua, resident of Brooklyn, by way of Los Angeles and a sliver of the world. The true iris-in starts before anyone reading this was born, and before their grandparents' grandparents, but it's been shown in bars throughout this city and this country, and in this particular dive on Tuesdays for twenty years.

That eighty minutes of anticipation dissipates the instant the first notes leap out of the armada of brass packing the stage, the firing squad unmuzzled. The dead time comes alive with the sound of the New Orleans big brass band, all horns and jazz'told'fast. An American artform played at our national volume and speed. Tempos of weathervanes outpacing clocks.

They're telling our story like we always do, through tall tales turned gospel. Our American flamenco.

In bars in Sevilla and the East Village I'd heard plucked guitars and metal kissing wood convey the éxodo migration of Moors out of the Middle East through North Africa and into the South of Spain, coming to rest in the Andalusian peninsula but recalling the struggle, those caravan centuries, in every shuffle'heel'stamp'clap with tornadoing wrists and flourishing skirts of silken fire, wailing tones of Arabic like weeping muezzins.

The same story grown more profound for its congruency, wandering lines remaining parallel, sociology transcending mathematics, geography. The tale of history from below reaching the surface. That People's One of the United States. Yeah yeah the same story told instrumental but unequivocally American in this overpack'd room where sound and energy can't escape. The stage pregnant with ten wailing musicians. A near dozen historians blowing out biography with brass. Their notes competing like generations for legacy, harmonizing like neighborhoods to weave communities, districts forming cities. 50 equaling 1.

Ten'minute jams of the same notes, the same two'steps coming back and back again with little subtleties added to their nature to make the progress each generation's own echoed victory. Orville Wright becoming Neil Armstrong. J. Fenimore Cooper to F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Crane to Cormac. Homer Plessy to Rosa Parks, and Jackie Robinson to Barack Obama. Every tragedy our own scars worn with somber defiance. Or just defiance. Remember the Maine to Never Forget. The Twin Towers to One World Trade. Enduring the Great Depression, and the lesser ones of jilted hearts and corporate layoffs. Down the years history comes fast like machine-gun ratatats and tambourine jangles. Hurricane Betsy. Andrew. Katrina. Sandy. 
And then we reply.

The scene always starts in utero, before we realize we're actors, authors, autobiographers, but it's the story of America in every note. In every two-syllable chant as the audience proclaims the band's name in incantation. Shouted constantly, hoarsely, fiercely. As mantra, as battlecry, as promise, as the myth each generation galvanizes into reality.

"RE-BIRTH."

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Down at the end of old Bourbon Street is a place you're not supposed to go, where everybody's been. The locals will swear you away from the area before making you promise to visit.

Isolated just a bit from the noise and the neon is the lingering point to an exclamation,

is the spent ash at the end of a burning cigarette.

Past the hand grenades and hurricanes and Kentucky sorority girls lies a little speck of darkness.

Sits a little den of contradiction. 

Where they're shouting in frenzy to wire and ivory and bachelor parties have moments of sincerity. Where sleeping songs by Mr. Waits get resurrected once the patrons and piano 

have been drinking.

Leave "Sweet Caroline" and the grenadine to Pat O'Brien's; we're drinking whiskey and

calling out for Young rather than Diamond. 

Trying to avoid seeing our faces in those of the worn elders while we're glancing at tattooed ivy snaking around arms, 

past breast implants, and into toffee hair.

For longer than we've been a nation, these walls have been seeping alcohol into conversation.
The oldest bar in America. Hideout to the pirate Lafitte, 

and lesser criminals along the way.

You can visit in daylight. 
All sunshine and discordance. 
The tourist horsecarts will stop out front and a waiter will run out to drop off a voodoo daiquiri while you snap a photo with your iPhone and post it to Facebook. The bartender, 
with her ivy arms, 
will make your daughter fruit juice and call it a virgin hurricane.
But the piano will be silent,
and the 
corners will be bare. 
Or you can come by night. When the girls are lighting 
cigarettes off candles, 
when the boys are warning 
that's bad luck for sailors. 
Shoes settling into brick canoed down by the centuries of impatience, and boredom, and 
insecurities, 
and determination renewed 
by spirits.

When the years feel palpable. In the bar and the drinkers and the sing-a-long psalms.  When the line "Old man, look my life. I'm a lot like you were" finds its proper mark. They'll tell you it's haunted and it has to be true. 

In this city 

we keep coughing up ghosts.

They fill the wood

and the brick

and the off-key shouts, the claps in missed tempo.

And here at the end of old Bourbon Street,

we'll keep coming.

Past the hurricanes,

and the hand grenades,

and the sorority girls borrowed from wherever,

We'll know we always have a place to visit.

A hideout.

 Somewhere to
die by the minute.
Drawn forward to the darkness, we
martyrs to filthier causes.