"yerevan by fire light" ZJC (2010)

Photos of the nightscape of Yerevan, the capital city of Armenia, taken today are strikingly different than the city I knew back in 1995. For one thing, the city was pitch black at night. The brilliant wash of neon and white light that marks urban nighttime was absent. Here and there were isolated pockets illuminating a shop or a home, someone with illegal “left line” electricity, someone with access to a generator, but by and large it was the unspoiled night I found myself in, the type that makes stargazing so fun, regardless if you were sitting in a major city surrounded by thousands and thousands of others quietly passing the night away.

My time that summer was marked with linguistic frustrations. When I finally went to Gyumri to start my work I felt I was a complete failure at my ability to speak and retain “Hyerin,” as the locals call their tongue. Sitting in the dark of my bedroom, studying grammar by candlelight, did not help. Bella had given up with my attempts to communicate with her, finishing my faltering sentences and barking out questions at a rate of speed I could not follow. At the time it felt overwhelming but, over a decade later, I find certain words and phrases have not left me. Indeed, even though it is rare for me to get a chance to talk to another Armenian (West Michigan has few) I can communicate better now than I could when I lived in Hyestan. I keep finding certain words and phrases wanting to live in my poetry.

Draft 1

G'na. Go. Leave with your steam-headed needs;
I am weak, needy, lovely in my greed.
G'na. I received your love. Go. It bleeds
me dry. I believed in you. I hurried
to you. More the fool I. Call me simple.
Call me naïve, thief. You stole my frenzied
tongue, all that makes music. Every loyal
note. I grieve for what you took, hid, buried
beyond my sight. Get up. G'na. Go. Dog.
Fruit from hell. Stone of woe. I have emptied
more spite than you will ever know. I flog
your name with soot and ruins and wormseed.
Receive. Perceive. Conceive. Believe. Naive.
Deceive. Grieve. Thieve. And now you bastard, leave.

* * *

Draft 2

Get up. G'na. Go. Leave your steam-burnt needs.
I have been weak and lovely in my greed;
no more. Get up. G'na. Go. The lark bleeds
me dry. When it cries, I cry. I'm wearied
from tears; rosewater, rosewater, never
salt. Call me naive; you stole my frenzied
tongue, all that makes music, every vulgar
note. But I won't grieve for lark songs buried
beyond my grasp. Get up. G'na. Go. Dog.
Fruit from hell. Stone of woe. I have emptied
more spite than you will ever know. I flog
your name with soot and ruins and wormseed.
Deceive? Thieve? Grieve? No more. The lark's sorrow
is not my sorrow. Get up. G'na. Go.

The Armenian word for “Go” is G'na. I had been working on a story about the 1915 Armenian Genocide at the time I wrote those sonnets, a story told by a young girl. The voice of Armenian women is one that, more often than not, remains missing from that time period. Or, to put it slightly differently, they are present only in the background. They are the long lines of wretched figures being marched away by Ottoman soldiers out into the Der Zor desert in much the same way World War II movies show Jews as only long lines of wretched figures being loaded into box cars. They are simultaneously present but silent, a visual cue to remind the audience that barbarous things are taking place, but it is not their story we are listening to. That happens off-stage. Sadly, because this is not my personal story, I soon found I was drawing far too heavily on the source material I was using. The Knock at the Door by Margaret Ahnert and Skylark Farm by Antonia Arslan are both far more superior to my efforts and do not need to be retold. That is not to say I do not have other stories. There are whole hosts of witnesses I do not want to forget that lived with me in Armenia in 1995. The beer garden monkeys, for example.

One night, after we'd been in training for nearly two months, a small group of us went by Metro to a beer garden one of the host-fathers raved about, urging us to, “See the monkey! See the monkey!”

I often speak of Yerevan being under a black-out, where the average home saw a couple hours of electricity a day. That shouldn't imply there wasn't any in the city, it was just being used for other things. The Yerevan subway was spotlessly clean and ran with an effectiveness that must have marked the city's progress at some earlier time. Later during my tour I'd spend hours riding it, partly because I was homeless when I visited Yerevan, and partly because just because it was one of the few things that ran on-time back then.

We sat at the beer garden that night and enjoyed something frothy and homemade that came to us in large, chipped mugs from the tap. The bar was south of the Republic Square, hidden away on a little street corner. The space appeared to have been where a building of some sort once stood, having then collapsed and the debris carted away. Now we sat in a rubble-strewn alleyway between two towering apartment blocks. Compared to the brilliance of the lighted Metro, sitting under the stars at the tall pub tables, drinking beer and avoiding the copious sunflower husks spat out by every local man at the bar, made one feel like they were out in the country, not a block or so from the heart of the city.

As the evening wore on it became evident that some form of entertainment was taking place off in a dark corner. Men stood around and pointed and laughed continuously. Looking over a shoulder I saw a large cage and inside sat two emaciated monkeys making gurgling-shaking noises throughout the night. They were about three feet long with dingy fur coming out in patches. They'd run from one end of the cage, drinking from offered beer mugs that many of the men pressed between the bars. After a few sips from a mug, the monkey would turn to screech and run towards the opposite side of the cage to another mug.

That is the whole story. We didn't demand the release of the monkeys or give a stern lecture on animal rights or even raise our voices. We simply drank our beer and went home. Later that week John said he went back and the monkeys were gone. Cruelty toward small things. Death of small things. These were the metaphors I witnessed that ran through my time spent in Gyumri. To talk of these things is to talk of failure, of an inability to save anything, even oneself. Perhaps it was why I wanted to write about “Mets Yeghern,” the Great Calamity as the Armenians call the 1915 Genocide. Not from the point of view of the male defenders historians now focus on who fought back at cities and villages of Van and Musa Dagh, but the stories of the women and children who were captured in blurry photographs, miles and miles of them being marched away, names I will never know. I have no photos of those monkeys. I doubt they live in anyone else's memory. And yet, despite all that, they still live. I still remember how, at one point, one of the creatures fell to the floor and lay quite still for a period of several minutes. The men laughed even more at this. Many threw lit cigarettes at the prone monkey, some of which landed on its flank.

"my host mother, Bella, with her daughter
and granddaughter" (1995)

On July 5, 1995, all the stores in the city of Yerevan were closed. We Volunteers were told we shouldn't come to school that day as none of our teachers would be there. It was the day of the Armenian National Elections. The main issues during the campaign were the economy and foreign relations, especially the conflicting situation with neighboring Azerbaijan. Officially there was a peace called between the two warring countries, which was why Peace Corps deemed it safe enough to send in Volunteers, though no one could say it was a peace that would last. Considering Armenia had only gained independence in September 1991 it was interesting that after the elections it was estimated that 56% of the populace had turned out to vote.

There were about a hundred political parties running, though the major opponent to the President of the Republic, Levon Ter-Petrossian, was the Armenian Revolutionary Party (in Armenian called the Dashnaktsutyun) which had been banned from participating in the elections earlier that summer.

The night before my host mother, Bella, had the TV on to watch the electoral debates. This week only, it seemed, the people had been given a little extra perk and we had a couple extra hours of electricity than normal. Surprise. An opposition leader and Ter-Petrossian were going head to head on TV. Though from what little I could understand it was more of an one-sided monologue for the President. I couldn't understand what Bella was saying, but she watched the proceedings with growing irritation. I spent half an hour with the dictionary trying to find out who she was in favor for though in the end she just made a face.

That night around a dozen of us went to the American Embassy to watch Anthony Hopkins in Shadowlands. The Embassy was on the Navy's movie rotation list, so every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday a new movie would be shown. For one dollar you could sit in the little auditorium and watch people talking in English. At the time this did not seem like a big idea, having been in the country less than a month and a half, however later it would feel like a life-line tethering us back to a world that felt a million miles away (or 5,837.06 miles if you are counting). The Embassy was also, according to Sylva, off limits to Volunteers.

I have mixed feelings about discussing my time spent with our Country Director, Sylva. For one, she is still alive and I am hesitant to be disrespectful to a fellow member Peace Corps. We were, after all, only the third group ever to be sent to Armenia and it must be difficult to establish good working relations in a country in such dire need. Perhaps all Country Directors are like Sylva and it is my ignorance that they do nothing more than pad their wallets and spend their nights in their private box at the Opera House that is in error but the more time I spent in Yerevan the more I came to believe that there was a huge gulf between the tenants of Peace Corps and the self-imposed poverty we were about to undertake the insanely lavish lifestyle our Country Director chose to flaunt before of us.

I do understand around much of the allure for many foreign aide workers is that they can live lavish lifestyles beyond anything they could normally afford back home. There is little to no personal oversight on their lifestyles, there are few child labor laws, sex can be bought for mere pennies and the organizations pay such outlandish paychecks and stipends to stay in-country that a person could very easily retire early on a four year salary. Things might have changed in the decade I've been away, Peace Corps might have come to realize the hypocrisy of their own administration and reigned in the excess, but somehow I doubt it. Perhaps it sounds petty to bring this up, often those who fail in things cast around for someone or something to pin their blame on. I no more blame my Country Director for sending me back to Washington D.C. than I do for Gyumri for being destroyed in an earthquake. And yet to ignore or soften Sylva's treatment of us over the two years I was there would be like talking of Gyumri and failing to mention the dead, which are on everyone's mind. Sure, you can keep telling your story but you are leaving out key plot points that are needed to understand what happened later.

We've been warned in numerous memos that many of the Volunteers found Movie Night and the Embassy's bar ”addicting,” as Sylva put it. As far as we could tell this was not only her pet peeve but all she talked about. Soon it became apparent that she put more energy into keeping tabs as to who went in and out of the Embassy than what the various projects her Volunteers in the field were working on are. She would type up these threatening notes, about anonymous sitings of certain Volunteers and leave them in their mail box. She actually would question the Volunteer's “moral responsibility” and “ethical judgment” (direct quotes) for being in Peace Corps if they had time enough to travel to Yerevan and be seen entering the Embassy.

Many within our group did not know what to make of these statements. We'd been in-country only a little bit, none of us had our sites and it seemed a bit bizarre that our Country Director couldn't recall the various projects going we were going to be working on but felt our “ethical judgment” was at stake for going into the one place in the country Americans were free to go in and out of. This coming from a person who was chauffeured around in her private BMW and lived in a $1000 a month villa with eight generators, central air-conditioning, a maid, chef and a small army of servants. When some of us talked to Sylva about what she expected she'd reminisce about her time spent in West Africa during the 1970s. They didn't even have an embassy or bar back then and it was unheard of for Volunteers to leave their sites simply to come into the capital city for a decent meal. I found it difficult to respond to such feedback, even the little I knew about the tribal communities of Nigeria twenty years ago it was obviously apparent that this former industrial country was going to require a radically different approach than what Sylva was telling us we would expect. Dropping us off in random villages and expecting the people there to whole heartily adopt us like lost children was simply not going to work. This, we were to soon learn though, was exactly our Country Director's plan. Never mind that the old Soviet fear of the United States was still running high in some part of the country. Never mind this was a society in which you were either born into a family clan and belonged or didn't were seen as an outsider. I found it amazing back then, as I do today, the Sylva's entire plan hinged upon a complete ignorance about the people she was sending her Volunteers out to live with. At the time it seemed her actions were nothing more than bullying, the sort of passive-aggressive behavior corporate middle management uses to harass their workers into being productive. What I couldn't know at the time was how these very misguided and naive ideas of her would directly effect me once winter set in up north in Gyumri.

After the movie was over we herded up the main street of the city to drop off our fellow Volunteers to their host families. As a rule, the city shuts down after dark. Yerevan's population did not seem to care much for the night, which made sense when there was only 2 or 3 hours of electricity a day the city was pitch black once the sun went down. Elaine was the first to get dropped off. To get to her apartment we had to walk up past the President's office and Parliament, past the heavily gated fences of various ex-Soviet buildings and finally take a little back road up past the American University.

As we sauntered our way uphill, we came upon a crowd of some few hundred protesters blocking the street and wide sidewalk. Someone was shouting through a bullhorn. People carried torches and Laurel later said she felt like she was on the set of Frankenstein when the villagers arrived to burn down the mad doctor's lair. We made a hasty conference and decided since everyone seemed peaceful enough, so we tried to worm our way through the crowd and get to the other side. This was main because none of us knew any other route to follow save the streets. Trying to stay as close as possible we went holding hands in case we lost someone in the throng. About halfway through we saw a gap where people were hurriedly moving away and made towards it. It was then we saw the riot police.

There was a long line of them, all heavily armed with their plexiglass shields, breast plates, helmets, black billy-clubs and rifles. They formed a line in front of the Parliament building. Since nothing was technically happening as we passed by save the crowd thinning out in places, we picked up our pace and were relieved when nothing continued to happen. We got Elaine home, then re-traced our steps. The crowd was as thick as ever and the police just as impassive, so we took a back street we hadn't seen coming the other way.

All week long the Russian TV station that broadcasts in the city had been reporting bizarre stories coming out of the United States about race wars, with gangs of young Black men rampaging and looting. One of our host families explained it was Moscow's attempt to prevent locals from immigrating to America. Right before the elections the Minister of Health went on national TV and stated for the record that AIDS and HIV were not an Armenian problem since, “our blood is too pure.” He went on to say that it was impure Turkish blood that caused AIDS and if anyone in Armenia was infected that just meant they weren't pure Armenians. Though I was being trained to teach English as a foreign language sexual education and reproductive health were subjects I was encouraged to touch on. To single out the Minister of Health for this belief in the purity of one's blood would be unfair since it was an idea that was expressed to me often over the next twenty odd months. It was an indication of just how much work lay ahead for us.

After being in-country for a whole month some of us were chaffing under the stress and strain of not getting to do virtually everything we once had the freedom to do back home. Simply being unable at that point to communicate in Armenian with host families that knew not a word in English was difficult. Thus an excuse to come together and be ourselves, even for one night, was welcomed. That get together came about in the form of the 4th of July, a celebration that took on new dimensions when we realized it meant we could be unsupervised and free to talk English as much as we'd like. This greatly encouraged many of us and so a group was formed and headed to the Chicken Coop.

From what I understand the Chicken Coop no longer exists, which is a shame, since it represented a transitional period in Armenia when new ideas about the West were seeping in, some better translated than others. It was a restaurant, located, as many businesses in Yerevan were, in the basement of an apartment complex. It was run by an Armenian-American named J’rair Avanian who had migrated back to his motherland and brought the West with him.

When we arrived J'rair came out to greet us, wearing a flaming yellow and pink shirt with cacti all over the front. Because it was a holiday back home tonight the menu would consist of pizza, hamburgers and hotdogs.

“What is more American than cowboys?” he asked us and we noticed he had decked out the restaurant with hand-painted silhouettes of cacti and teepees. His waitstaff wore blue jeans and a variety of hats as well as colorful bandanas around their necks. It was the Wild, Wild West as interpreted by the 1960s British Mod scene, perhaps. But it was festive and everyone had a hamburger and beer and were talking and laughing. A little while later J'rair came back out, this time wheeling in a giant wide screen TV. “I know what is more American than cowboys,” he said, ”Tom and Jerry!” And sure enough, soon we had the old animated TV running along side of all the chatter.

At some point in the evening he brought out a new VHS tape and began to show what appeared to be a bootleg of a bootleg of a Garth Brooks concert. It was hard to tell, there was certainly someone on stage in a cowboy hat and guitar but the sound was so poorly dubbed it might have been a whole range of artists. This new twist to the evening divided our group into half. Some expressed distaste for Brooks and said they hadn't come halfway around the world to listen to that. Others said that at least it was music they were familiar with and any taste of home at that point was better than the Russian pop music heard on almost every street corner kiosk.

The discussion never really got resolved since it became apparent that no one could understand anything that was being said or sung on the tape, the scratches and white noise hisses weren't in a form of English, Russian or Armenian we could follow. Admitting defeat J'rair put the cartoons back on and we continued celebrating being our own brand of American late into the evening.

A game my friends and I would play, back in a world where desert islands were, if not real, at least something we could speculate about, which three books would you take if you were marooned on a desert island? The more practical among us would suggest survival guides: how to build a fire, how to fix a three-foot hole in the side of a boat, how to made a laptop computer using coconuts and copper wire. Unfortunately for me, my brain never ran in those circles. I would immediately start thinking of my own bookshelf and which books hadn't I gotten around to reading but meant to? As the saying goes, “life is so short and literature is so long” but getting stranded on an island seemed like the perfect time to catch up on the billion + 1 novels I'd yet to read. Anthologies, I decided, were the only possible solution – find some 2000 page tome on all of American literature, something with rice paper pages and very, very small print. It was my college years at Michigan State University and often, I'd find, several of my friends didn't enjoy reading so to amuse whoever was sitting next to me we'd also play “Last Dinner of the Condemned,” “Famous Dead Person You'd Get In a Fight With” and “Which Total Stranger Walking By Would You Have Sex With?” It was all about context. What kept the games amusing was that none of them were based in anything remotely real. Being Fine Arts majors we weren't exactly fighters, lovers or the sort random strangers would come up to and slip us their phone number. Nor, in the heart of the state and surrounded on all sides by endless farmland and rolling forests, was there any danger of being washed overboard, clutching a copy of William Shakespeare's Complete Works as well as an edition of So You're Up Shit Creek: Island Survival for Dummies and The Gypsy Ballads of Federico Garcia Lorca, respectively.

It is, indeed, all about context, since literally a year after I graduated with my Bachelor's degree I found myself packing my 50 pound box which would be all I was allowed to send on ahead (which, ironically wouldn't arrive until October, a good five months after I was in-country). 50 pounds is not a lot and one should never get in the mind-set of debating whether thermal underwear or the complete works of Steinbeck should take priority. I decided that I'd carry as many novels as I could on my person to Yerevan and summer training, under the logic “who needs extra clothing when it's hot outside?” and ship the lesser necessary things, like shoes, in the box. As it turned out, out of 32 other Volunteers not one of them thought the weight limit was a fixed number, more like a suggestion. Suggestion or not, the books I finally decided on was, indeed, the complete works of Steinbeck and the depressing, drunk Russian authors. Here's a good rule to follow: if you are going to be spending time in a poverty-stricken city surrounded by mass alcoholism taking with you only stories about poverty-stricken peasants suffering from mass alcoholism might not be the smartest move. Let's just say I soon discovered Anton Chekhov's work can be described as journalism, not fiction.

There comes a time in all adventures when you move beyond the point of no return. Be that passing Crush Depth in a submarine or passing the last Última Casa Amiga (The Last Friendly House) or simply leaving the last oasis and heading off into the desert, at some point you have left the familiar and moved into the unknown. Paris was, for us, that point. The last Western city we'd be in as we passed on to Yerevan and who knows what, for possibly two years.

We landed at the Charles de Gaulle Airport around 6 in the morning. The building was designed with a 1970s space station feel in mind with a circular glass everywhere and elevator tubes crisscrossing at various heights. We gathered our carry-on luggage, made our way through the neon arched tunnels towards the baggage claim. It had been strongly impressed upon us prior to leaving that we had to recheck our bags ourselves at the Armenian flight desk.

It was upon reaching the baggage claim area our first difficulty strikes. We wait patiently as all the flight's luggage rumbles onto the conveyor belt, but not a single one of ours. Have our bags somehow already been forwarded to our connecting flight or are they still sitting in a room somewhere in the Kennedy airport? I hadn't slept the entire Trans Atlantic flight. Everyone is tense. Then a second problem arises, Christiana lost her ticket. She thinks she might have left it in the pocket of her seat and forgotten about it. No one at the Northwestern desk was of any use. Some of us suggest we go directly to the Armenian Airlines with the ticket receipt and ask for a new one. The man behind the desk refuses, saying if she doesn't have a ticket she won't be getting on the airline. Matt stays behind with Christiana to argue in his broken French to the desk clerk on her behalf. It is agreed that the rest of us should go one a little sightseeing since we have a 6 hour wait.

We broke into groups and took a 45-minute metro ride into the heart of Paris. Shannon, who had lived in Paris as an exchange student, played tour guide and the rest of us followed: Heatherly, Erica, Veronica, Stephanie, Andrew and Elaine. Shannon said the Eiffel Tower was a tourist trap and too away from everything else to make it worth while so we walked by Norte Dame, surrounded by scaffolding, but didn't go in. She took us instead to see Victor Hugo's flat, over looking a square surrounded by old apartments. Elderly people sat in the shade on stone benches and chatted. We then passed through a small red light district with scary, shapeless women in torn lingerie literally hanging out of doorways. We finally ended up in a retro 1970s disco cafe. There were two giant naked statues of David on either side of our table and Prince's greatest hits blared away on the P.A. system. The waiter was a slim Moroccan with elaborate dreads. There was a moment when he caught my eye I wondered what my life would be like if I simply remained in Paris with this cute stranger, grew out my hair and spent the rest of my life in this cafe. That didn't happen, of course, but besides being my last cappuccino for six thousand miles it was also my last taste of gay culture. When we returned to the airport we found that not only had Christiana found a new ticket but our bags were also confirmed.

The flight to Armenia from Paris was a twilight production. Nearly all of us made the half-heartily “hope the plane don't crash” joke as we waited in the Air Armenia section of the Paris airport. No one believed the ride would be smooth, some didn't think we'd make it at all. The plane was an ex-Soviet 1950s army left-over, with faded Russian lettering whited out, though you could read it under the Air Armenia logo. There were around two hundred other people besides us, including a small group of Marines going to guard the American embassy. It was around the time the stewardess said the gates were open it dawned on us this would be a “first come, first served” flight. We were at the back of the line. Within moments there was a mad bodily rush as husbands and fathers literally pushed entire families and their worldly belongings to the entrance door. By the time we boarded the plane almost every available seat was taken and we were forced to sit by ourselves, surrounded by one of the noisiest parties I'd been to in a long time.

On our flight there was a group of Armenian musicians. They were heading to a wedding. Two sat in front of me and kept offering my row bags of French potato chips. Frank and Jennifer got into an argument over abortion. The joke we came up with was that Frank mistakenly signed up for the Peace Corps when he thought he was talking to a Marine Corps recruiter, since we was, without a doubt, the most socially conservative of the group. The musicians had a small boom box and played John Coltrane the entire six hours we were in the air. At some point the stewardess brought along dinner and I was a bit taken aback at how good it was: chilled cold fish, a fruit plate, vodka and an actual sponge cake. For most of the evening we simply sailed over the dark landmass of Eastern Europe, occasionally passing over the golden lights of some city which quickly disappeared behind us. As dinner wrapped up the stewardess switched on the night's movie, a series of home-made Russian rap videos. It was a curious way to start our adventure: Coltrane, rap, vodka and two hundred voices talking as loud as possible.

“losing oneself” ZJC (2010)

I tend to avoid autobiographies that center around “finding oneself.” Not because I have anything against self-discovery but mainly because they are all the same and poorly written. It seems to be the fallback of divorced yuppy aspiring writers with nothing to say and the freedom and money to travel to Italy or India or Nepal or some exotic local the rest of us can't afford to go to. After all, popular opinion says, you really can't find yourself while working two jobs to support your family or going to school or happily married. Forget finding enlightenment in Peoria or Spokane or Gary, Indiana. Wisdom dwells somewhere else and only the geographic cure can save you.

Plus, at the end of the journey, even if you are the same vapid, dull human you started off as, you can always claim you found Mohammad or Buddha or Whatever through some act of charity and no one will ever be able to say you didn't and doesn't that make rewarding reading?

This might sound hypocritical coming from someone who went to an exotic local and found … well, whatever the opposite of enlightenment is, ignorance? (if enlightenment is being in the light, then another term meaning “in the dark” is inexperience, which sounds nicer than “criminal naivete”). And yet in order to tell this story I must talk about things that, had my 25 year old younger self read it, would have left me rolling my eyes.

I bring this up because I can only make guesses as to what caused my break from reality, what caused me to get Psycho-vac'd. I have a lot of round-about explanations, of course, there were official terms Peace Corps used in my report – but none of that touches on the underlining causes. It's like saying a piece of ice sunk the Titanic. Literally? Yes. But there is so much more. And I think it was my dogmatic belief in the literal – what I refer to as the scientifically provable – that was in part a cause for my downfall. The living are alive and the dead are gone and never the two shall mix was one belief I had. That is until I spent two years in Gyumri, where the dead are very much alive but I simply refused to see them.

And yet, rereading what I just wrote, I cannot help but wonder how do you tell a story about something that, by its very nature, was one of the factors that led me to be seen as too unstable to continue my service?

One of the problems with the English language is that we use fewer words and terms to talk about matters of the Spirit than we do for love. We use the same two or three words – spirituality, could, for example, mean “faith,” “otherworldliness” and “ghost,” none of which are very helpful in a complex conversation – so let me be clear here: stories about other people finding faith or losing faith bores me to tears. New Agers and Baptists are cut from the same cloth when it comes to these sorts of narratives, be it a new found love of power crystals and white lights or a wrathful old man in the sky who hates same sex love, it all comes down to a similar set of personal beliefs that 90% of the population forget are, and should remain, quietly personal. When I speak of spirituality, then, I speak of the invisible world, the land of the dead, the halls of the gods, what have you, the waking dream some of us visit and some of us don't but remains one of the Mysteries every human must face at some point.

I was raised with a healthy respect for the scientific method – that is, for something to be proven “real” it not only needs to be a tangible observable object to base one's observations on but it needs to be a tangible observable object other people can see and base their own observations on as well. There is only one humongous flaw in this literal approach: if humans have not developed technology in order to observe a phenomena then, by science's own laws (or at least as I understand them, I've been wrong before obviously) that said phenomena does not exist. Up until last year water did not exist on Mars. It wasn't a “we don't know if there's water or not so we won't say anything until we find out” situation, it was a “Mars is a dead planet” claim that was in every book of astronomy I've ever read. There's an entire genre in Science Fiction that depicts Mars as bone-dry (which was the motivation for the Martian invasion in War of the Worlds). What bothers me isn't that we were wrong, it was the hubris of the scientific community that claimed they were right. That's not even the scientific method we're talking here, which is one of the problems we have when we leave science in the hands of fallible humans with unchecked egos. They tend to spout out all sorts of nonsense if they think they can get tenure.

I thought about all this as I sat on my roof the other night trying to see the Perseid meteor shower. I knew they were up there, even though the city lights more or less destroyed my night vision. When I lived in Vegas you could never see a single star for all the green electric glow the city casts in the sky year round. Sometimes, though, I would drive out into the desert to watch shooting stars. If I went far enough to escape the green then the dark was truly dark. Of course, I was still using a car with headlights to drive and so was everyone else so, after finding a side of the road that seemed safe enough to park and get out, ten or twelve other vehicles were sure to pass, looking for the same bit of darkness to sky watch, destroying the night in a white blare of headlights.

In a very big way Gyumri, the city I volunteered in, and Las Vegas are very much similar. Both had their defining moments in the 1980s, though with Gyumri that moment was the earthquake that destroyed it and with Las Vegas it was the sudden, unchecked urban expansion across the valley. Both are viewed by people who don't live there as tainted and corrupt and both are filled with some of the most loving, humane people I've ever met. Both are also, I was to discover, overflowing with ghosts.

The Southern Utes call Mt. Charleston the center of the universe and I believe it. I am always amused by writes trying to capture “what Vegas is really like” and it's always the same — gambling and prostitution — which is like going to the Redwoods and focusing on the bicycle paths. You are missing the larger picture. They also mistake aesthetic with profundity. As urban sprawl goes I don't like Vegas. It's ugly. It's full of Mormons. But it does act as a hub, endless streams flow in and a few days later flow out. As such, then, it possess a certain quality that is impossible to name. It is this quantity, this mystery, that tourists do not see and thus fail to understand why, exactly, Vegas came to be what it is. The Mob and casinos and brothels have very little to do with it, they exist elsewhere in similar combinations and yet Vegas remains an oddity compared to all other cities in America. Gyumri is exactly the same and the more I try to explain the mystery or imbue it with human-like characteristics the less either of us will understand, since explanation defeats the whole point: if you can understand the Mystery it isn't a mystery anymore.

I was thinking about this last night, waiting to see a shooting star. Of course they were passing over head even as I stared upward. Just because the city lights made them invisible to me didn't somehow negate their existence. Similarly, in my attempts to try to get you to understand what happened in Gyumri I will be talking about the fantastic in its most literal sense, “appearing as if conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; bizarre; grotesque.” Gyumri is all those things and it's easy to romanticize an earthquake devastated city. It's like stories told from a war-zone: the most incredible human suffer occurs but you weren't there so at most all you can do is see photos, speculate and blow things out of proportion. I will try to avoid that but I still have to talk about what I experienced. If you are the sort of person who sees post-traumatic stress as the root of a person's break from reality or if you completely believe in spirits and the world of Spirit, either metaphor will work, since, depending on how you look at it, they both happened. I no longer belong to either side. I fall directly in the middle – the things I once assumed to be facts about our world are now doubts and the things I once dismissed as superstition haunt me to this very day.

[as a former Peace Corps Volunteer I am slowly organizing my memories; these concern the summer of 1995 and getting to Yerevan, Armenia]

“I spent the last ten minutes before the airplane taxied away trying to pick your figures out in the observation window of the airport. I like to think I saw you watching me leave.”
– snippet of first letter sent to my parents (June 28, 1995)

When I first told a friend I was having trouble writing about my Peace Corps experiences she said that surprised her since, unlike fiction where you must make things up, autobiography simply required you to write things down as it happened. Perhaps not surprisingly my friend is a fiction writer herself and says she tries to avoid writing about her own personal experiences. This is not to say one craft is more complicated than the other since, in my opinion, they are equally time consuming. They simply focus on different ways of telling a story.

It's impossible to be able to capture “as it happened.” Journalism can't do it, why should memoirs? Or even memories? By going over my old diaries I realized that most of what I wrote down as it was happening isn't all that interesting, even to myself. For example, my flight from Lansing to Washington D.C. I note: “The president of MSU, McFerrigson, as well as his daughter and wife, sat in front of me on the plane … In mid-flight, one can look out and see the brown waters of Erie, everything is flat and gray … A man two seats behind me began to recite a long poorly rhymed poem he had heard about the counties of Michigan.” Of course by now I cannot recall what the poem was or how I knew I was sitting behind the former president of my Alma Mater, but apparently it made enough of an impression on me at the time to write it down.

But what do you do with information like that? Unlike the creative process I use in writing sonnets, where I sit and think about a vague idea and then start following whatever direction the poem wants to go, these little throw-away memories don't sing. For one I know how they end so I can't do, as Billy Collins suggests one of the jobs of a poet is, to “find a surprise ending for where the poem wants to go.” I've tried that approach in the past and the story that comes out is not my story I want to tell. The whole point of this project is to write about my Psycho-vac and everything that led up to it.

Another problem with memoir writing is the art of keeping one's friends while still trying to write about them. Anaïs Nin solved this by not publishing certain sections of her diaries until everyone in them was dead. Hunter S. Thompson took a slightly different approach and turned his friend, Oscar Zeta Acosta, into a 200 pound Samoan, Dr. Gonzo, in his novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The first draw back to this strategy was that Acosta still immediately recognized himself and was not very thrilled by the less than flattering portrait. While we are on the subject of Thompson, the other direction I hesitated to try was what Hunter called “gonzo journalism,” a method of writing based on William Faulkner's claim that “the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism” and vice-versa. The problem I have with telling it “as it happened” is that I have no clear idea what “it” is. Like the bad acid Thompson used to fuel himself through his literary landscape, my perception on my own time in and out of Armenia keeps metamorphosing drastically and I find that if these memories are the “it,” then I have a rather shaky foundation to start building a house.

A third problem in my story telling is my attempt to be chronological, starting my story on Day One with the whole group of Volunteers arriving in Washington D.C. It seems logical to tell you we stayed at a hotel across from the Watergate building because that is what happened. Thirty two of us in fifteen rooms. After we had checked in we met in the hotel's conference room to perform the ritual introductions — orientations, icebreakers, getting-to-know-you. There was much talk about all the things we had been able to bring: tennis rackets, lap top computers, guitars and whole suitcases full of contraband food. My roommate was John, a 39 year-old Texan with a tattoo of Mickey Mouse on his ass. Former 1987 Mr. All Nude Texas, former banker, he kept his gray hair cropped military short and wandered around the hotel room naked, rubbing at what appears to be a bad case of poison ivy on his right side. When he loitered in the bathroom to piss, he would leave the door open so he could talk to me.

We leave the registration conference room late. The Peace Corps coordinator in charge of making sure we actually were able to leave the country, seems utterly bored and indifferent to our questions. He simply states to most our inquiries that we will have to wait until we arrive in-country to find out. Right before we leave for dinner we are excepted to say one thing we all hope to get out of our two years of service. When it's my turn I think about the eight lonely months I had just spent working as an auto-parts delivery boy. “I want,” I said, “to make some friends that will last the rest of my life.”

Being our last night in America, most of us went to a Mexican restaurant down the street from where we were staying. I am 25 at this point in the story and highly indignant with the stuffed toucan birds on the wall and Aztec murals of phony temples in back of waterfalls with half-naked Mayan priestesses standing in hip-deep water. I find as my diaries go on I am highly indignant about a lot of things, it isn't by best trait.

The food was terrible, the margaritas weak and we still remained festive. Around 10:30 a bunch of us walked around the Vietnam Wall. I had never seen it lit up and it was hard not feeling that I was part of all of this in some small way, not a soldier but standing here regardless at the heart of my nation's political center, about to embark toward something I had no idea what to except.

Soon everyone begin drifting back to the hotel. I walked with Rose and Jennifer over to the White House. I was reminded of a comedy sketch when Ford arrives late to a poker game at the White House because he went to 1700 Pennsylvania by mistake. I located the building, though, and was a bit disappointed to find it was simply a drab office front.

As we ambled Rose began to talk abut her time spent watching Rocky Horror Picture Show in her hometown in Nebraska and used the word ”scandalous” on more than one occasion. I nodded my head, admitting I had my share of Rocky experiences too, but since the movie had been around for well over 25 years it seemed more of a cultural curio harkening back to a more innocent age, like Madonna's cone-bra. Jennifer, on the other hand, had never heard of the movie at which point Rose began a long series of “art fag” jokes, explaining that was more than OK for her to tell them since she had friends who were both artists and gay. For Jennifer's part, not to be outdone, told us about her last gynecological examination in graphic details and how she was still as virgin. When we walked by the White House gates, heavily guarded after two earlier assassination attempts by disgruntled libertarians, Rose acted as if she would toss her left-over box of Mexican food over the wall. A hostile looking security man rushed up, walking one step behind us the entire length of the gate until we left.

One weakness of using my diaries as source material is that it is only in the beginning of my adventure did I ever take the time to write down full details of what was happening. Maybe they were easier to identify since everything was The Last back then: the last dinner, the last chocolate ice cream, the last glimpse at MTV. So, on the last morning in America I took my final hot shower and breakfast. We met at noon to leave to the airport. Our luggage took up the length of an entire city block. Once we arrived we received our official government passports and tickets and shuffled to boarding. The Kennedy airport is so large one must take a shuttle, a prototype of the moon rovers, a “Mobile Lounge,” all knobby wheels and boxcar frame that goes roughly .003 miles an hour, to get from the Domestic terminal to the International. Frank sat next to Al Haag, ex-Secretary to Reagan on the ride over.

As the airplane taxis down the tarmac, I slipped my headphones on and listen to the beginning cords of Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones. I was prepared to give up food, hot water, sleep and humor to get to Armenia, but the whole world seemed suddenly overwhelming when I could not find my toothbrush. We were told to expect an eight or ten hour delay in Paris. I sat next to Stephanie on the flight across the Atlantic, who told me the plot, cover to cover, of Stephan King's Tommyknockers and then promptly fell asleep on my shoulder.

[as a former Peace Corps Volunteer I am slowly organizing my memories; these concern the summer of 1995, in Yerevan, Armenia]

First two weeks of training are up. We attend TEFL and language classes, 8 in the morning to 4:30 in afternoon, six out of the seven days of the week. I find I have not brought the right sort of clothing for a Yerevan summer. Almost everything is wool and business causal, at best, since Peace Corps made it very clear Armenian tradition does not allow for men to go out into public without a tie and dress slacks and I had no reason not to believe this until the first day I wandered onto the street and saw that almost half the male population of the city was in shorts and t-shirts because, as one of the language teachers informed me, “perhaps twenty years ago that was the case, but we are a progressive people, you know.”

Every morning I wake and make my way to the bathroom so I can fill a little basin I use to shave with water stored in the bathtub. Like electricity, running water is at times hard to acquire and so most families fill their bathtubs up and simply use that. On the first morning he was at his host family's David assumed they had drawn him a bath and promptly climbed in, causing no end of amused outrage on the part of his host mother. Since there is no light in the bathroom I stand out on the sundeck and shave bare chested in front of the world, or at least the apartment across the street. When I'm done I work on my Armenian flash cards, trying to make heads or tails out of sounds that seem like eight or nine complex guttural syllables haphazardly linked together.

I am not sure what Peace Corps told our host families about us. Apparently they were instructed to boil our drinking water, constantly. Perhaps something got lost in translation and our host families simply think we love drinking boiling water since this is what they give us when we ask for water, “jur.” Of greater interest in our group is the topic of our host-fathers and the roles they play in their families. Or, to more exact, the lack of roles. Unemployment, of course, remains extremely high in Armenia. Regardless of the progressive nature my teacher proclaimed the residents of Yerevan to possess there were many, many rigid and traditional gender roles still in effect. The more cynical in our group said that reading newspapers, playing narde (the Armenian version of backgammon) and drinking vodka seemed to be the exclusive rights of men. All the housework, cooking, cleaning, raising children and holding down jobs appeared to be “woman work.” The flip side to this was that both our host-mothers and fathers would become equally agitated when any of the male Volunteers offered to do any housework … not that every single male in our group has offered. David keeps insisting that his host-mother had nothing else to do so house work apparently kept her busy. A statement, like many of his, that was met with dead silence from the rest of the group.

Around 6:45 Bella gets up. Since I am not allowed to do anything in the kitchen this gives me around five minutes to choke down a meal before having to be out the door. Breakfast usually consists of whatever wasn't eaten the day before plus hot tea. It is a custom of Bella's to fry the morning leftovers into super-crispy, super-soggy blobs, which I must then somehow eat. Regardless of how I try it, biting into scalding grease and not burning my gums is a skill I've yet to master.

I am out the door by 7, having bid Bella the two or three phrases of good-bye and good-luck I've mastered. It's a fifteen minute walk to the Polytechnic building where classes are held and my route takes me by the Cascade Steps, which resembles a massive staircase taken from an Aztec pyramid, cut into the hillside and connecting the upper and lower sections of the city, as well as the Opera House. Prior to even getting offered an opportunity to serve in Peace Corps the Detroit News ran an article about a whole ballet company that was forced to live in the Opera House after the fall of Communism. At the end of the street, right before I get to school, I pass the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts, a depository and research facility that houses all the papyrus scrolls and crumbling tomes that helped create, eons and eons ago, the ancient Armenian language.

Being high in the mountains with only slivers of farmland to the south of us, it seems like all the rock dust of the millennium has slowly made its way during the summer months to reside in the Polytechnic building, especially up to the floor where our classes are held. Since there is no electricity for the lift we hike up the nine stories of stairs to the top. The steps are old and made out of marble. It is hard to imagine why anyone would design this but the central well of the stairs is simply a chasm that goes nine floors straight down, giving the impression that at one time an elevator was housed there. Having an insane fear of falling from great heights I would devoutly press myself as far away from the lip of the stairs as possible, my hand continually touching the wall under the belief that if I keep in contact with the stone then gravity would not reverse itself and I would not slip and fall, screaming, over the edge. This is why its called an “irrational” fear.

A constant reminder I put into my diary is that I am a slow learner when it comes to Armenian. Our teaching staff is made up of eight Armenian teachers, women in their mid-thirties who have taught English at the American University on the other side of the city. They are helped by several of Volunteers from the second group, the A2s, as well as a married couple brought in to give us more technical instructions, Jeff and Lizette. My language teacher is Danielle, who swears by route memorization. Her method is, more or less, saying a word or sentence, then having us repeat it two or three hundred times until we've become stupefied and the syllables all slur together into one long clunky blur.

The first six weeks have gone along like clockwork: from 8 until noon we hold language classes in Armenian. There is one break, where old women in white smocks sever us tea, “tey,” bitter, thick coffee, “surch,” or juice, “hu'oot,” as well as a variety of pastries. It should be noted that these same women carry everything we eat and drink up the stairs as well on their backs, an observation that did not occur to most of us until much later. After that our complaining about our daily exercise seemed a little childish.

At lunch we hike down the stairs to the Polytechnic's dinning room to eat with the other instructors. The first five weeks of lunch is made up of borscht and apricots. Despite being centered along the ancient Silk Road and thus, in theory, open to a constant source of exotic spices, I find Armenian cooking uses only one spice, salt, and with that rather heavily. Apparently the Armenians heard the old saying that those who control the spices of the kitchen control the world but decided to have nothing to do with it. Most of us agree that spicy borscht in the mid-day heat is better than bland borscht, but only just. What gets fought over, though, are the cherries, apricots, cucumbers and tomatoes left in bowls in the center of each table for us. Fruit and vegetables disappear within the first moments of us sitting down.

After lunch we begin the various technical training lessons we will receive prior to starting the projects we were sent here to accomplish. There are also injections every Wednesday. Or, as Doc George, an ex-nurse from the Marines, puts it, “another round of dang medical service.” The Doctor is, using the vernacular of the modern era, a “dirty, old man.” He brings with him two or three random female Armenian nursing students, whom he refers to with a slight leer as, “his girls.” I understand a large number of Americans agree to become foreign aide workers and ex-pats because they get paid outrageous amounts of money and their power and status allows them to have sex with any local they choose. I am not sure if there is a circle in Dante's rings of hell for such people, but I can always hope so. So far I've had polio, hepatitis A-Z and a large painful anonymous needle whose purpose I apparently repressed.

Americans, it seems, tend to be finicky eaters. In a world where I can go down to the mega-market and buy strawberries at any time, throughout the entire year, lack of variety in a diet is, at best, a vague concept that happens to others. And yet many of us impose upon ourselves our own set of bizarre dietary restrictions to such an extent that the possibility of staying in any Third World country longer than 24 hours becomes somewhat difficult. A family friend asked, upon my return, if he would enjoy Peace Corps. He said he was committed to helping change the world and I pointed out that he'd have to stop being a vegan for a while since, literally, there were long stretches of the year in Armenia when he would starve. I told him about how even the most hard-core of our vegetarians found they were cheating a bit, when, come January, the only vegetables to be found in the market, the Shukka, were month-old onions. That was the end of the conversation for my friend about going abroad.

Of course, I didn't think about food when I agreed to join. Food, I felt, was like bad weather. You could get upset about the quality of it, but it was what it was regardless. And yet, after settling in to live with a host-family for the first three months during training, I begun, slowly, to find all food totally repugnant. Perhaps it was the dry, dusty heat that coated every surface I sat down on. Perhaps it was a severe case of stomach flu that slowly circulated among the Volunteers. Whatever the case I found myself trying to redirect my attention to other things while sweating freely in the afternoon heat. From our classroom on the ninth floor of the Polytechnic building the entire city of Yerevan spread out before us in all its Soviet architectural splendor. I am not sure to call it metaphorical or not, but at least from that view I had there of the most symbolic image of all of Armenia, Mt. Ararat where Noah is said to have landed the Ark, I found the mountain completely obscured by a single high-rise tenement building whose logical function seemed to be to block out as much skyline as possible, all compressed concrete and clothing lines between the balconies.

On the second day of classes we met with the U.S. Ambassador, Peter Tomsen. He talked about the contested region in the south, Nagorno-Karabakh, that Azerbaijan and Armenia had been fighting over for years. A cease-fire was currently in place, being kept in check by joint Russian/Finnish forces. He warned of occasional shelling that often went over the borders and far in-land, but, as he put it, he was not in a position to comment any further. Armenia, he said, was the third largest recipient of U.S. Foreign Aide, receiving wheat, fuel, oil as well as a newly implemented “Winter Kerosene” program. It was June 5th and in exactly one month the country would hold national elections. The oldest political party, the Armenian Revolutionary Front – a long-time surviving organization dating back to the 19th century and weathering over 200 years of Turkish and Soviet hostility – had been recently suspended. Six months ago President Levon Ter-Petrossian had barred them from all political activity on the grounds they were “drug-running hooligans” and participated in several assassination the year before.

Ambassador Tomsen then talked about the European Communities' concern that the nuclear power station, Metsamor, a sister of the Chernobyl reactor, should not be put on-line as was scheduled in three months time since it did not have a back-up containment facility and sat on an active earthquake fault.

He then blamed the Armenian Mafia for the terrible oil shortage that was crippling the country but warned us to be careful because, as he put it, the Mafia had long arms.

I showed my host mother, Bella, a telephone list of other Volunteers I had been given that day during training. I attempted to say “Sa dzar,” which I hoped meant, “For you.” Bella took the little yellow Armenian-English dictionary I had been given and looked up the word “Comrade.” I'm her comrade, she told me. Greovg looked at the list and assumed I wanted to make an International phone call. “Sputnik!” he kept shouting, as a way of explanation, pointing to the sky. I kept nodding, having no idea how an ex-Soviet satellite played into a list of my fellow Volunteer's host-family telephone numbers but not wanting to miss anything in case he knew something I didn't.

G-G-G-GYUMRI … ONLY FOR THE FEW, THE LUCKY AND THE STRIKINGLY HANDSOME!
QUALIFICATIONS:
—> Single and willing (* to have a good time, single is optional too)
—> History of neurosis is favorable.
—> Attitude definite!
—> Blind devotion to the Gyumri Posse required.
—> Height (preferable but not mandatory – current average 6 feet)

DO YOU … CAN YOU??
—> How fast can you run? (from a pack of rabid dogs or obnoxious children?)
—> Can you handle a little chill in the winter? We're breezy.
—> Can you do the Gyumri dance, “The Quake”?
—> Can you endure the scenic bus tour on the Yerevan-Gyumri Express? (average running time, 6-8 hours)
—> Do you have leather skin? Not a problem if you don't, you will soon!

One day we were given a list of site reports, all anonymous, from the first two groups of Volunteers to allow us a little taste of what we might expect as foreign English teachers working in the Armenian Education system:

“My school teachers have not been paid their salary for two months and it is difficult enough for the director to keep them coming to teach. They aren't interested in anything new, unless it is money.”

“Twice a month, from December to January, and once in March, I hosted a Tea Day for the English Teachers from my Institute. It was a good break for the teachers, because they got to come and sit in a warm room and relax for a while, while practicing their English in a fun, engaging style.”

“Partially effective were several lessons devoted to prefixes/suffixes. Many teachers thought, what with their students' knowledge of Latin, this was a particularly effective way to introduce beginning students to English.”

“I have tried to use different methods, but it is difficult when discipline is so bad. I have resorted to using strictly the textbook 'as is' in my difficult attempts to control the class.”

“Our [project] goals are ambitious, especially given the unique situation of Armenia today. Often it is difficult to get teachers enthused about projects when they don't have enough food to feed their own children.”

“Teacher training is needed, but resistance to outside suggestions is often high. Working within their system still seems to be the most effective … motivation is still low due to economic conditions.”

“They are a truly lovely people, especially my host family. They have become just like my own family and that means a lot.”

“Teachers believe in a system of route memorization and have no patience for the kind of participation required by students in activities that involve critical thinking and problem solving.”

“I believe that my impact thus far in introducing a new way of thinking – as opposed to the older, lecture-oriented classes – has yet to see any success.”

“Classes went well through September, took a swift and terrible downturn in October, seemed to hit a permanent horribleness through November … due to winter classes being shortened to a miraculous 30 minutes, then 20. By then it was no longer school, it was just biding time.”

“I feel that my social and cultural adjustment to my community has been one of the least troublesome aspects of my service.”

“One of the biggest factors that hinders me is the TIME … students can't do homework or join my after school programs because they need to herd cows, or they don't want to waste their time studying a language they'll never use since none of them are going to an institute or university once they graduate.”

“My intended activities are to finish teaching this spring without losing my mind or killing my students, seriously.”

“Just the other day I visited a family in a neighboring village for the first time. They were surprised I knew about such activities as how to bake their flat bread, lavash, and the most recent events on the soap operas 'Suplemente Maria,' 'Tropicana' and 'Santa Barbara.' I'm finally beginning to feel like I'm part of this community.”

Bella, just like every other Volunteer's host mother, feeds me to the point of no return. It has become a nightly ritual of “Eat or Offend.” Tonight's meal was two fish heads, which was actually all that was left over from the previous night's dinner. I know this dish has been sitting on the counter all day, since I'd gone by earlier and brushed flies off it, wondering what, exactly, it was doing there. Then I sat down for dinner and found out. The four eyes stared back up at me from a congealed soup base. Greovg sat down opposite me, stared very intently at my attempt to find a portion of the fish to cut into and shook his head vigorously when I offered him half of my dish. “Guest!” he said loudly. “Guest!” Yes, the joys of foreign cookery.

“It is hot here,” I note helpfully in my diary. Nothing more. I fail to write down that there is still no electricity and all these high-rises seem to have been built with central air in mind. There is no natural breeze or airflow to be had anywhere. Around 9:30 I excuse myself from the living room and close myself up in my little bedroom. Americans and their privacy. I am, apparently, a creature of habit, though I find that most nights as the sun goes down, curiously, the temperature in my room goes up, making the whole issue of keeping my door closed silly. I wake up at one or two in the morning and the air has become nose-cloggingly stuffy. There's no light, of course, the entire city appears dark, but if I move to the open window the inky blacks fade to that dark blue black of the open night sky and peering over the window ledge I can make out the silver-blur shadows of traffic five stories below moving slowly up and down the street. Sometimes in the apartment complex across from me a random family will have “left-line” electricity, usually paying to tap off someone with a working generator. Then, for 20 or 30 minutes, all the lights in the apartment go on and I can see the entire clan in partial stages of undress moving about at midnight.

Politeness would seem to dictate I spend as much time as possible with Bella and Greovg and yet the more I sit in the living room, the more visibly uncomfortable the two become, as if me doing homework nearby or watching TV with them was causing some sort of unspoken friction. Around the third night I had been there, about every 15 minutes Bella would get up and call me into the kitchen where I'd be served tea or told to eat a plate of candied fruit floating in a saucer of syrup, all of which was accompanied with her sitting near by, staring blankly out into space. It was clear she was profoundly exhausted and yet offers to share my food were met with a grunt and a shake of the head. This is not to criticize my host-family. They invited a complete stranger who could not even say “where is the bathroom?” “vortegh e zukaran?” into their home. I will always be grateful for that. There were times, though, when the stress level was very tense and after a while the only real solution I found, especially in the beginning, was to smile, say “good evening,” “bari yereko” and lock myself into my heat-box of a room. Vodka, peaches and opera gets a boy through a lot.

On occasion our apartment does get a burst of electricity. To make sure we are awake to take full advantage of the situation Greovg leaves the TV on so the white-noise hiss of the off-line station will wake him. More often than not there is nothing to watch, but it seems important to him to go through the motions, regardless. Perhaps it gives order to a world that must feel as if it is rapidly spinning out of control. Often I am awaken in the dead of night by this other-worldly hissing, only to stagger out of my bedroom to see the old man bathed in the electric blue static, the TV blaring away for all the world to hear.

"a grackle to watch
over me" ZJC (2010)

Officially it was a starling that saved my life but I love the way the word “grackle” sounds, plus I told everyone at the time it was a grackle and so it might as well be one. The key to telling stories is not to get hung up in the details and there are lots of different ways to start this: “On the day they came for me, three days before my 27th birthday, I woke up in my concrete hut and found the vodka had frozen.” A friend immediately pointed out that vodka, technically, can't freeze – at which I said, “But who gives a damn? My pillow had frozen. The bed I lay in was frozen. The fire in the pot-bellied, kerosene-drip stove in the middle of my hut had gone out and was frozen. I slept in my parka. Everything in my hut was frozen so the vodka might as well be frozen, too.” Because, really, narrative continuity is for the anal retentive. I've tried writing poetry about this and it just doesn't work. I would like to say I could sum everything up in a sonnet, squeeze that world I inhabited into 14 lines of iambic pentameter, but that cannot be done. Perhaps there are languages that can measure despair, but English is not one of them. What few words we use have been exhausted a long time ago and to simply say “catastrophe consumed me” is not enough. Which is a shame, since if I could pull it off it would be a killer sonnet, the sort that medical journals enjoy publishing, told from the survivor's point of view, but truth be told, there are some things that should not be rhymed.

I don't know how many Peace Corps Volunteers get Psycho-vac'd every year – a short, derogatory term, much like “drunk” or “faggot,” used by others that gets applied to complex sets of highly personal circumstance – but since Peace Corps not only has an unofficial term they use but an entire set of procedures as well to deal with Volunteers who have break downs, I must suspect I am not the only one.

Technically, I was medically evacuated just like everyone else, what is sometimes called in the military a MEDEVAC or Medi-vac. Medi-vacs were unfortunate but completely understandable. Accidents were always happening out in the field and often a Volunteer would not want to depend on the services of the local doctors to, say, perform an appendectomy, when, in under 48 hours, you could be flown to Berlin or Washington D.C. to have it done. It was reassuring, and after the Honeymoon-stage of being in a foreign country had worn off and our hard work had begun, we would joke late at night about the best way to get Medi-vac'd, since one of us had read somewhere that you could bring a fellow Volunteer along as a traveling companion, and, much like having a BFF, we would drunkenly promise we'd pick each other if it ever came down to it. Who wouldn't want the chance to score points with not only taking care of a friend in need but getting a mini-vacation in a city with flush toilets as well? The problem was none of us could ever figure out an injury that would be bad enough to warrant a medical evacuation and yet not so horrific as to be disfiguring or life-threatening. Of course, there was the Psycho-vac … if it actually existed and wasn't a myth. No one knew of anyone who actually had been Psycho-vac'd. Plus, we'd all laugh, you had to be nuts to take these jobs in the first place. What with the rampant alcoholism in our group of Volunteers, how could anyone really tell if they needed to be Psycho-vac'd?

“We could all walk to the Capital city … backwards!” Lynette once joked. “They'd have to send us to D.C. for being crazy then.”

That's the sad thing about prophetic words, substitute the “backwards” for “in a blinding snowstorm” and at the time she said them I never knew how close to home she was hitting.

But I am getting ahead of myself. This story is about a grackle. It had to be a grackle. It's about sitting on a park bench in Washington D.C. on my 27th birthday, not knowing a single soul in the entire city, and seeing a grackle. The reason it had to be a grackle is that no other bird – nothing graceful or elegant or exquisite – would have stayed around. Anything else would have fled when faced with a human slumped on a park bench in a winter parka. Especially this human. Especially on that day: March 10th, 1997. Three days earlier I had woken up and the blizzards of the Armenian mountains were still raging, endless shades of gray blowing around my hut. Nothing had changed for months and months. I woke up and the fire in the pot-bellied, kerosene-drip stove in the middle of my hut had gone out, which is how they found me. Except March 10th in Washington D.C. is much different a creature than March 10th in Gyumri, Armenia. I had never thought a lot about cherry blossoms, except vaguely knowing Japanese poets had been known to get carried away praising them. But as I walked down M Street in my winter parka in 80 degree weather, there were trees blossoming all around me. This amazed me. I had not seen a tree for a long time, except in the far distance as when whatever bus I was riding rounded a mountain pass and I could look down into the valleys, smudges of green, always far away. They had cut down nearly every tree in Gyumri, the city that was once called “The City of Tree-Tops in the North,” they had cut down their namesake for survival. For firewood. Because after the earthquake there was no electricity. It was December when it struck. First they burned all their libraries, every book that could keep them alive among the rubble and dead bodies, they burned. Then they burned all their furniture – 200 year old carpets, chairs that had been carried on their grandmother's back out from the Ottoman Empire and their Genocide, beds that had been passed down from generation to generation, back when Gyumri was the metallurgy capital of the world, back in 301 A.D., back when the poets reigned and the tall white buildings matched the tall white trees and everything worked – all that was gone and for weeks and weeks I'd come home from work and find my pillow etched with frost.

But here, in D.C., the cherry blossoms were just budding and everywhere I turned drunken revelries of white met my eye. Yes, drunk as drunk and I am a creature that consumes everything. I had never known what the term “color-starved” actually meant until then. Until I realized how little color had been my world. Nothing vibrant, just ice and snow and endless curls of black smoke from a thousand pot-bellied, kerosene-drip stoves like my own, keeping my city set on eastern Anatolia's desolate plateau called Kars, which literally means snow, a vast empty sea-bed of dry grass swept by the wind, alive. And here I was, sick like turpentine, having spent the last three days telling myself over and over what a fuck-up I had been – worse than a failure, worse than a dumbass, worse than a loser – worse than any word I could come up with because there were 32 of us and some real prime candidates to be sent home, Volunteers who had not been sober for the last 547 days they'd been in Peace Corps, Volunteers who had given up on their assignments and one we suspected a possible child molester, and out of all of us they had picked me. To return home in disgrace. To be Psycho-vac'd. Apparently I was that damaged. And it's easy, when you have a Transatlantic flight that will stretch over 35 hours, to think as dark thoughts as you can. Often in literature we use the term “self-pity” dismissively, as an insult to the author, because we are a people afraid of pain and to admit one is in pain is a sign of weakness. What was the loudest complaint about Confessional poetry? It lowered the masks we use to hide from pain a bit too much and reveled in its own self-pity. But isn't pathos a state of grace since the other word for pity is compassion? There is no answer to this, I had no compassion for myself. When I arrived that day, the morning of my birthday, and watched the coastline spread out before my window on the jet airliner, when I took the taxi to the hotel all Medi-vac Volunteers stay at and met my roommate, a young man who had been serving in Togo, when I lay down in my bed because I had not slept for three days and found I could neither relax nor think nor desire anything in this entire empty world, when I got up and put on my parka and began walking simply because sitting still and being with myself was hideous, I cannot say at any point during all of that did I sense any self-pity, for I could not feel a center, a self, a sense of wholeness, to attach any compassion to. The closest we have in English to describe this state is “the Void,” as in “I stared into the Void and saw Nothing.” But we use the term so often that it has become a cliche, and yet even that does does not sum-up the experience. We need a new word, a new language, one that captures grief in a way the words I am using right now do not. I suspect if we had such a vocabulary, a deeper way of describing emotional pain when we experience it, fewer of us would attempt to flee from its memory. But who can say? I simply put on my parka and wandered out into the sunlight.

All this happened 13 years ago. One would think that after the first decade a person could look back and make sense of it all. To say: “Of course the details are important, this __________, this __________ and this __________ happened which is now why I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier.” But the truth is the events that lead me to wander over the Francis Scott Key Bridge, wander down through George Town, down M Street, getting lost in a city laid out like wagon-wheel spokes, none of that matters. Because right now, as you read this, there are other Volunteers just arriving, stumbling out of that same hotel, or one like it, who have been sent back to Washington D.C. for their own complex set of highly personal circumstances, that have nothing to do with mine, who might feel like I did, that I had fallen all that I could and there was no more disgrace left in this world for me to sink down into. Of course, that's bunk. That's what self-pity is and why literary critics tend to dismiss it in our writing – that claim that our agony is somehow unique – which is also why critics make some of the worse friends you can turn to when in pain, for at some level they are right, what emotion can truly be beyond the pale when faced with our creative imagination's amazing talent to dream up ever worse soul-crushing ignominy than what we are currently going through? I won't say I thought about any of that. I simply sat on a park bench on a spring day in March, in a winter jacket far too warm for my needs, and stared at an ugly black bird mucking about in the grass near by.

Except, it wasn't ugly. It sparkled. I had never seen a bird sparkle before. Under the black plumage lay a multitude of color – greens and blues and golds and reds – and suddenly this bird was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I've told this story so often, to everyone who'd listen, that even if it didn't end exactly in this fashion, it does now. It ends with the realization that there was an animal in front of me that didn't run away in fright. We would comment that the stray dogs of Gyumri and Yerevan and Vanadzor and all the cities and towns and villages of Armenia were metaphors for the country: starving, beaten, often missing limbs, ghost-like creatures that would snarl when humans came by. There was one, a mama dog with a shredded, broken stump of a front leg, all pepper-black with infection, that lived near my hut. There was nothing like dog food to be found in Gyumri, but I would go down to the market, the Shukka, and buy raw meat I'd leave out for her. She never let me touch her, I never tried, but she'd hobble from whatever shelter she'd found for herself and ritually ate whatever I left out and when the first blizzard came I found her frozen and stiff under my window. That is the fate of all animals in Gyumri, anything not human that gets labeled a “thing.” And here I was – unwashed, unshaven, a vagrant, something to avoid – just as broken inside as that mama dog was on the outside. And here was a bird, a common, ugly, quarrelsome bird – except it wasn't ugly, it just went about its business without a care in the world. English might not be a good language to describe pain but it is wonderful at describing grace. Our poets write their best, I feel, when they write about the glories of what breathes through us, called it Spirit or Creativity or what have you, English is marvelous at capturing what really moves us, as when the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins sang his praises “for dappled things” and glories for “skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow.” Or when Walt Whitman said, “I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd … They do not sweat and whine about their condition … They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God … Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things … Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.” Amen. And here I am, staring at this bird, this splendid, beautiful bird that isn't afraid of me – of me! the most wretched thing on the park bench – watching in awe as it sparkled in the sunlight and I stood up and began walking back to the hotel and I had gone about half a block when a thought struck me and I stopped and I began to laugh. I couldn't believe it. I hadn't laughed in months. Maybe years. Maybe I had never laughed before. What a rube! What an ignoramus! This bird, I would say, pointing to the ground as if you could see it to, as if somehow you could be let in on the joke, this bird that had amazed me, what was it? Of all the birds in the freakin' world to fall in love with I was laughing over a grackle. A bird so unremarkable there are no poems written its honor, yet, and yet it was the one thing, out of all of creation, that showed me that if I could laugh then, perhaps, everything really was going to be fine.

Of course this poem isn't about the fox, it is about those ghostly little lights seen at twilight over bogs and marshes, like the fire flies in my front yard but blue and bigger. I wanted to write about the fox, but the moment I thought that my mind drew a blank. Of course the fox, as a mythological symbol, has been seen as a trickster around the world, much like the pixy-lights themselves. But I can only think that way when there are no foxes present, when I let my mind wander and see what happens. Once the fox arrives I stop talking about spirit-foxes completely. I begin talking about something else. A humid, hot night. My butterfly lisp. The spectral balls of light floating out in the darkness.

Ghost-Light or Puck-Orb or Will-o'-the-Wisp
(Ignis Fatuus, Latin: “Foolish Flame”)
or Corpse-Candle. Fox-Fire coming about
her own business in my backyard. I love
you all. Come to me. The fat moon above
the house does not mind. I am a devout
friend and you will find that we are the same:
being both silent, lonely. This boy's lisp

would make anyone burn blue. Feux Follets,
Merry-Flames, Fuego Fatuo, Wicked-Light.
The night is so long. Show me how to blaze
blue like you. Help me fill the sluggish night
with song. I wish to sing. I wish to sing.
Friends, I wish to sing above everything.