Chasing The Dragon - Chapter I - "where in the world to go from here"
Enter Vienna, open a door to an old coffee house and follow the footprints. Some of them go hundred years back and even though I’m a foreigner, I’ve been here for so long that I feel like I always been here. Like finding a lost home, at last finding my place in this crazy world.
Some of those coffee-houses are full of chess players. I love the game and playing mostly online , Corona happened, well, something is missing, like having a breathing being in front of you and everything that goes with that.Facial expressions. Sounds, smells and movement and since I dislike humankind, not people, at least not all of them, for me it's hard to be social.
Finding friends that accept the way I am.
A depressive manic you could call me and it makes some things harder, especially when I am in a dark place, deep down trying to keep my head up. The modern diagnose, which I’m not that thrilled about, is Bi-Polar. Medicines change me into something else and I like who I am. My feelings, tears, my anger, sorrow and joy. My dark side. Light has it's origin from loving life because death doesn't seem that great. You just have to recognice patterns and learn to react upon them. Cognitive learning. Use your brain even though it ticks uneven. In a caledioscope full of selfreflection I map my path forward.
Under these periods of chaos I try to keep to myself. When I'm on a high, going manic, everything smiles. In waves of confusion. People think I'm on some kind of a drug but I'm not. Never in the middle. There are some complications. When a 'down' speeds up and gets a bit hysterical, accelerates, just like my downs, I retreat. The whole planet is a psychoneurotic place to exist in. No need to add.
*
I became aware of an amazing boardgame when I was five, maybe six years old. I wanted my father to teach me how to move those figures he had setup on that strange board but as often, life steps in and decides, out of the blue, to play the deathcard.
As in life - “where in the world to go from here” - you just go.
*
I thought I just surf through those optic cables we call internet. To connect and I found a strange site called Twitch. After some time of clicking around like a nutcase searching for something, anything that could be of an interest, I found a guy that called himself MyTeacherSam playing chess. He was nuts in a good way. Crazy. Happy. Full of excitement. People with weird ‘names’ was chatting and the connection between them both was something I’ve never seen before. Everyone was crazy about chess. A younger viewer kept asking for a game repetitively, he was hyper exicited. You could tell he was a fan. And all was good. After some hardcore hours of just watching him and chat interacting, I realized this is something from a generation I’ve turned my back on. I even felt a bit ashamed distancing my self from that part of evolution but … my father, the figures and that strange board in black and white. Everything came back.
My mind reset! I was hooked. Such a strange feeling but I loved it.
*
This day I felt like being social, so driving my beloved Skoda to Vienna actually made me happy. Even though some asshole crashed my car just three minutes away from my destination, I kept my cool. Nothing was going to wreck this day. Nothing! After filling out insurance I finally found a parking spot. God damn it, the car looked like a stepped on tin-box but it wasn’t my fault.
Insurance had my back. At least I thought so. I was heading for chess.
Noticing Jayden from earlier visits while playing some games against Frank, I somehow was curious of this young man, always sitting at the same table. Alone and abandoned it seemed. My opponent Frank, whom I usually play against was in the hospital, suffering the aftermath of a stroke. He was doing fine though and should be home again in a week or two. So I thought I ask this young man for a game. I took a deep breath and walked up to table.
- Do you want to play a game?
He was deeply sunk in over the chess board. No answer. He had some notes on paper sheets spread all over the table. All of them said "Got to catch the dragon" and some amazing sketches of dragons accompanying those five words. It was somewhat strange but at the same time intriguing. I thought he was studying some lines but realized that he was sleeping. Or maybe somewhere in between.
The waiter approached the table and told him to wake up and “Order or leave”. Like many waiters roaming the old coffee houses, he was unfriendly. Actually, a born idiot. I sat down, gave him the evil eye, ordered two Melange, a classic in Vienna. It took some time but Jayden woke up. As he rose his head, his eyes made contact with mine for the first time. Hollow and lonely like a one-way street four o’clock in the morning; looking into a black hole without a way back. Something soulless in a way and it was kind of sad. From a poem.
“ this day | fall falls | leaves leaving | with the wind | all the traces ”
- Some caffeine to enjoy this wonderful spring day?
- I don’t like coffee without a game of chess, he answered, and his forehead glued itself back to the table. Same position.
- It's all good young man. I’m Jackie.
- Jayden, my name is Jayden and I play black.
He surely knew what he wanted and crushed me in about 25 moves. I've never encountered a play like that. During the game he was mumbling things about dragons. Fire and smoke. We played five games and I lost all of them in a manner that makes you lose all self confidence. After every game he unfolded his fist and kissed a black bishop. It looked old and wasn’t from the set we was playing with. It seemed the chess piece ment a lot to him. Something special.
- The dark side bishop. My saviour, he said.
*
Trying so hard to improve. I really needed a couple of days to process the games. That was no coffee house chess and Jayden was certainly not a hustler or a Patzer. He was really a strong player. So what to do. I decided to get right back to the battlefield and maybe, just maybe, we could get to know each other better, in a vain wish to find someone who could help me levitate my chess.
Later that same week I returned to the coffee house and there he was, Jayden, with his forehead glued to the table. As I approached the table Jayden says, without raising his head.
- So, what's up old man. I've been waiting for you.
- I'm fine I guess, except for the games we played. They have been messing with my brain.
Jayden just laughed and asked me to sit down. On the board there was a familiar position which I recognized after a short glance and in that moment he took the a-rook and moved it to c8. Like walking right into a filmset, prepared and ready to engage, I sat down. Even though embattled I felt lost.
- Remember? he asked.
- Yes, that is the position we had in our third game.
- Good! Then you played f5 Jackie. F5! Do you have anger issues?
He didn't let me answer, he played the knight from b3 to d2. He stopped, silent and signed me to look and not to speak. He even gestured a ‘please’ which I didn't expect.
- Then I did this, he said. Rook takes knight on c3. See! See! Do you have a hard time handling pressure Jackie? Do you?
- On the chess board, sometimes I do. I don't even know what in the world is going on. Jayden, I haven't played chess that long and I'm trying to learn. And then I play against you and your dragon. Do I look like Magnus Carlsen?
- No, he said. You look lost. He does not!
We both bursted out in a laugh. He seemed more alert this day. His eyes had some spark in them and it felt good seeing that. I ordered two coffee, Melange as usual and we talked for hours. About everything between heaven and hell. He even invited me to his home even. He had something to show me.
- You'll see. You'll see. See you on Monday. Don't be late. Nor early either!
He took out a sheet of paper, drew a dragon and wrote down his address, told me to pay the bill and literally ran out of the coffee house. I smiled.
This guy is an original.
*
So here I was, in front of the door of Jayden’s place, excited and curious what Jayden had to show me. There was no doorbell, there was a dragon door knob. The building it self was from an era typical for Vienna. Maybe a hundred years.
Maybe more.
- I'm coming, I'm coming …
The door opened and there he stood with a hazy look in his eyes. He seemed a bit stressed and a smell from oriental spice hit me. Distinct but pleasurable.
- Jackie!!! Great to see you, glad you made it.
- Well, it wasn't that hard to find, the address on the phone, started the car, drove and here I am.
- You're driving in Vienna, why not take the U-Bahn or the tram.
- I don't live in Vienna, I live near Rax, I answered as we went in.
- Take a look around by your self, I'll be in the kitchen.
Jayden had a wild apartment, I was stunned. Surprised. The rooms was spacious, like five to six meter to the ceiling, thick thick walls and an amazing wooden floor. Lamps from different times was hanging everywhere and the furniture were all old genuine pieces. Furniture you rarely see these days, in the age of IKEA. I suspected that there would be dragons in his place but I was wrong. Then I noticed a strange chess board parted in two pieces. The first half was the chessboard and the second was an ouijaboard. It seemed to be made of oak and iron and it was mesmerizing. Around the ouijaboard some candles were lit, three white ones and one black. A black cross necklace and some feathers. The board was placed on a "low" table which stood on a surely Persian carpet.
This was it!
This is what he wanted to show me. It had to be.
- Jackie, come, lets eat, something amazing will rock your world. Food!
He made some effort. An old wooden table set with silver cutlery, porcelain plates with a blue pattern of flowers and leaves, linen napkins and an old oil lamp was the source of light. A copper casserole with some kind of stew in steaming. It smelled more than good actually. Jayden was tasting, adding salt and what not into it. The Jasmine rice was already on the table and there was some lavender in it. I recognized the smell from my childhood as my grandmother used to put it in her her cabinet along with towels and bed sheets.
This was unexpected. Who could have guessed.
- Sit, sit.
Jayden placed the casserole on the table, sat down, poured me some red wine, took my hand and said grace.
- Dig in, I've been cooking all morning. I'm hungry, I could eat a horse.
So I did and Mama Mia, the food was like nothing else I've ever tasted. It bloomed, perfectly balanced and the wine was rich without taking over the whole meal. We sat and ate in silence which I love to do.
"Let the food silence you", as my Grandmother would put it.
I was full but Jayden insisted that we have some strawberries with whipped cream, coffee and cognac. Which we did. In silence. This was the best meal I had in ages. Perhaps ever!
- Jayden, where did you learn to cook like this. I'm speechless.
- In India. You see, there is something about you, I can't put my finger on it. Feels like trust. Don't ask me why. I'll explain it when we’re at the chessboard. Did you see it when you took a look around. Did you?
- Yes, it's a strange board and I've never seen one like it. But I know now where your beloved saviour, the dark side bishop comes from. Where did you get it?
- I’ve got it from my father. Come on, lets play and I'll show you something I've never shown anyone.
We sat down on the carpet, he reached out over the board, took my hands and asked if I was ready for something from another dimension. I wasn't sure but I nodded. The dark side bishop linking us together between our hands.
- What ever you do, don't let go.
This was strange, sitting with Jayden at a chess-ouija board. I knew that the name Ouija means luck so I decided to feel fortunate. He closed his eyes and I followed . An embracing breeze swept through the room. Like a cooling wind breaking a sweltering day in the desert. I just followed. Behind closed eyes, beyond light and dark. Truth is like a wave. Powerful.
Like the liberation felt as young.
I broke, floated in tears. I washed away, by rivers into empty lakes. I found my self back home as a young child. At a time revealing forgotten memories. Reliving the wooden cabin on the heights. Pinus trees and below, the marsh and it's breath, always rising with an awakening. Smiling. Where time gives its hand for right values. Things l left behind climbed whispering. A lost language.
Words never to be written. Spoken. Sentences without a voice. A love poem for my father. The first and last. At the foot of the mountain, by the waters, where a ring of trees surrounded an eternal echo A heartbeat. Almighty. All giving.
Beautiful.
There I was, maybe five, six years old. I wanted my dad to teach me how to move those figures on that strange board. It was exciting. I didn't know what a chess puzzle was at the time but he always solved puzzles from the daily newspaper. He would set up the position on a board along with coffee, an 'easy' boiled egg, a tomato and a salt cellar. Crashing the egg against his forehead.
I'd laugh until my tummy got cramped.
Sickness came knocking though. He got ill and that was that. Game over. Everything was chaos. Heartbroken and aching. Alone. Mourning is hard work and life just keeps on hitting you. High definition of reality is something you sense.
Children doesn't care about HD, they're at totally different planes. At those levels high resolution photos are an unknown topic. A time will come when the unformed soul is pulled out of the body to outline some kind of nebulous. The vital force left behind we call naive. In a fuzzy existence between the both vehemence resides. Childhood becomes a gaze at the stars. A yearn. Small feet stamping in the dirt for infinite wishes until gravitation just stops.
And Bang!
Back to day to day life. I didn't want to. I wanted to go back to the light. To the dark. To my father but the fight goes on. Life. Chess. Jayden opened his eyes.
Mine was already wide open.
- The feeling that spreads through bone and marrow is electric. Only I can turn it on. Only I can turn it off. Jackie, It could be anything, if even that.
I was frozen still and it took a minute or two before I got it together.
- Jayden, I see it through my windows. All of us loves. All of us mourns. Nothing heals whole. He hummed and asked me what I saw behind the curtains. I told him about my journey through time, to my childhood. I even remembered the puzzle my father had set up.
- Look at the board!
I just caved. The exact same position that I'd seen from the trip I just had. Like magic. It was hard to take in. How could this be possible? It was spine-chilling and captivating at the same time. Absorbing the moment.
- Black to move and win, he said, still with a smile on his face.
- I can't solve this right now. Are you kidding me? My mind is trying to digest everything.
- I will explain all of it but not now. There is a time for everything but that day isn't today.
- Okay. Under protest though. Give me a minute to gather my sanity.
So there I sat beaming the puzzle while waterworks kept streaming down my face. It took about twenty minutes before I got it right. That afternoon turned into an extended Ted talk about almost anything anyone can imagine. How breathing tends to get harder for every step humanity takes. A few carries responsibility. All the lies; justifying them. Fights about trivial things and everything seems to be about us humans. We distinguish us from all other beings. It's getting colder for sure, we both turned our backs from the world we all live in. A world full of signs, weapons, flags and borders and flags are increasing, borders change coordinates like the weather. Some have guns.
Most of us don't. We don't stand a chance. Sad but true.
Jayden said that he sometimes dreams about a time-machine that can change everything. I replied that every time our star rises or sets, we see time. Travel through time was already fulfilled before anyone even had a thought about it. The warmth came and liquefied the ice. The first mother realized that this was something to follow. Fathers followed the glow, the blaze. Tactical and calculating in every way we can imagine. Poetry paint our misery in colours, metaphor's and tones, all while the elephants sad proboscis sound over the zebras coat. We don't fight the odds, we set them. We reside in the wheels hub. Everything is in motion. We wanted control but it spun out. The key that unlocks all locks exist in courage, exist in saying 'no', exist as in refusing following some rules. The lead is there but we're looking in the wrong places. Moral and ethics, we're borned with it. You can't read it in. It is what it is.
Good or bad.
It was getting late and I had to drive home. Me, my dog and best friend Breadcrumbs wanted to take a walkabout by the river.
- You have a dog? Breadcrumbs, what a name!
- Well, he's a bit active, never been in the city and I don't think he'll like it.
I pulled out my phone and showed him a picture.
We agreed on so many things Jayden and I, identifying him as a lost son. Having four daughters, being a single parent for a long time, watching them grow up, evolve and finally leaving the nest makes you feel alone. Tomorrow is a satellite orbiting our conscience. Locked up in a matrix.
Finding a new friend felt good.
*
Hospitals. Endless white. Corridors. Even more doors. A bit lonely. A quite question. No answer. I was Dr. Strange on the way to Frank’s room. There are no windows on the doors, at least not here, so opening the door without a visual made that odd feeling grow in strength. He called me last night and asked me to drive him home. I waited a few weeks for that call.
He just sat there with an emotionless face. Like carved out of stone and you could touch the atmosphere. Words was just not there. What to say. Something had happened. When you don’t know what, but you know it’s something sad.
- Frank!
I tried to sound positive. Weird things comes out of no where when you don’t what to do. How to approach something you feel is wrong. Within the core. Not out of pity but out of compassion and then coming out sounding major when minor is the only tune playing since Frank woke up. Like I said. Weird things.
He didn’t answer. Not a look. No movement. A statue of nothingness. Empty.
He’s old school. A second world war survivor whom watched his city getting divided by two times two. A puzzle that took some decades to put together. A puzzle of four. Frank is a man living by principals and only by them. There aren’t any turns. No trips to the moon. Nothing. Actually you have to admire it even though it leads to some, lets say drawbacks. Spending time with him, well, he complains a lot. About most things that doesn’t go his way. You could say he is a loud person. Above average. When worked up, it all starts off well but has a tendency to end in a disaster.
Age is catching up, he’s close to that lid on the coffin. Never laughs. Never seen him cry. I’ve seen him angry but most of the time you can’t really tell what mood he’s in. Very little small talk and if any it’s about the weather. And how stupid everyone else is. He seldom talks about his wife, Claudia, even though they’ve been married for half a century. No kids. Disliking kids is like a principle of it’s own. A parrot named Sebastian Bach is his closest friend. It is older as his marriage. The bird is very provocative. Very! He’s a person.
- My wife died this morning.
It came out like a whisper but had the power of a dynimite and there is no quick reaction. No defence. Just a fast punch that puts you down; into some kind of hibernation. A dizzy existence.
Fuck.
- I’m gay.
What is happening?
The first whisper; a Federico Fellini film. The second susurration transposed me into an Ingemar Bergman movie. Like most humans, at some point in life, you realize that acting is something you do even if you’re not in the industry. Sometimes you feel you ‘have’ to. Sometimes you do it naturally.
Sometimes.
- Since how long have you been carrying that secret around?
- For about sixty years. Give or take some. When I grew up, in contrast to young people today, being gay were not okay period and jumping out from hiding when I was a young was not on table. Especially during the second world war.
- So you’ve been swallowing this truth about yourself. That surely shows where some of that bitterness is coming from. A hard nut to crack but it’s open now. Maybe some more mines hidden. God damn! What happened to Claudia?
- She died! Enough now! Bring me home!
*
We walked through all the white in silence. We drove in silence. Every sound was turned off. Surreal. I don’t like driving in Vienna because of the extremely slow pace. Jams every where and as a bonus, every street is a one-way direction. Makes me aggressive. Not passive aggressive. Active aggressive.
“Don’t do it, I will stop my car, get out and punch you in the face. Idiot!”
Born into being explosive. I was always like this. It gets even worse when I’m drinking liqueur. Which I don’t. Learned that the hard way, hitting a brick wall doing seventy miles an hour. Similar to when you play a chess game.
The whole game you’re winning. You can feel it but just before you can force that win disaster appears. Your opponent takes your pawn with a sudden check and at the same time unleashing a devastating discovered attack on the queen with a surprising bishop. You can’t take the knight checking you because a rook is x-raying your soon to be dead king. Disaster and if you’re anything like me, you’ll get real angry. You swallow the scream without chewing to much.
Even with a seatbelt. Loads of luck. Still hurts like hell. A long time.
Navigating through my own thoughts wondering how Frank must be feeling went above all of the above. Imagining a scenario IRL and instant. It’s a rock heavy, hard and it weighs tons of tons. Compassion. Composition. Character.
The silence continued all the way to Franks front door but as he opened ‘the quiet’ was over. Obviously Sebastian got excited.
- He’s home, he’s home.
Frank was already on his way to Sebastian. He never had a cage and his wings wasn’t clipped, it’s really a ‘tell’, Frank cares for his bird like nothing else.
As I caught up I could see that he’s been picking his feathers, he does that when Frank is gone and he looked like a cartoon figure. It’s a revelation when you really understand and see the bond two beings can get involved in, evolve in, even though not from the same kind.
- How are you Son? Little boy, I’ve missed you so …
Seeing Frank like this, tender and careful, like a parent whom been worried as parted for so long. I wouldn’t be surprised if this few weeks was the longest they’ve been away from each other. I never meat Franks wife and I’ve only been inside his apartment for a couple of times and that’s just because Claudia wasn’t at home. When she was I always had to wait in front of the door.
-Frank, do you want me to stay or do you want to be alone?
He didn’t answer. He was talking to Sebastian.
- Frank!
-Yes, what?
- Do you want me to stay or ..
He didn’t let me finish. He just told me to go home and that he would call me when he felt ready. I didn’t ask what he had to be ready for but every human grief in their own way. There is some basic similarities how people cope, universal reactions. I just accepted his way and left. Seemed right.
On the way home thoughts collided like small particals of dust. Light thoughts with heavy content. I was surprised that I consumed the day like that, telling myself that the feeling I carried was a sign that Frank would manage just fine.
Last month been full of strange things happening and you realize that certainty is not that certain. Like an awakening, a cognitive state waking up after a ‘sleeping beauty’. Whenever a tone like that hits the surface it strangly still feels like it happenend just yesterday. So close you can smell it.
