01-VIII-1971.
Borik is becoming haunted, everyone's leaving. The last evening of several folks' sojourn we had the usual rite with the crazyman, when he came to the dock to try to make us disperse and go to sleep - their usual time 22:00. He came and started his usual "cen ura šlafen" (in pijin german) and flashed his tiny torchlight at us. I said "and now we also have a lightshow", to which everyone laughed. Then he started slowly jerking Thaeus's guitar, for which he got a twinkling stare, as in "what's up, man?". Someone suggested we just throw the crazyman aboard, but that was dismissed, fun is fun, trouble with police is not. I suggested we just get out of the camp, in front of the gate. We accomplished that in ten minutes, though distance is half a kilometer. We sat on the low wall opposite the gate, and sang as loud as possible. The crazyman reappeared, shouted some more, but Thaeus pretended he didn't hear him, and went for yet another loud one, probably the german shit song (it has about a dozen stanzas, each about shit). The crazyman came again, shouted some and left. We moved some five meters away, down the street, so still same distance from the camp fence. But then some of the guys and all of the girls have left, so there was just six of us. Thaeus gave the guitar to some guy called Drunk Cobra (no idea who that was...), and while we were waiting for the older Dane/Pole to pee, he asked me where the nearest tavern was. I had no clue, so I went to the gate and asked the crazyman, thinking that he'd be happy to see us leave. But he saw the guitar and started shouting at Cobra, telling him to appear at the reception tomorrow to get kicked out of the camp, so I had to translate some to convince the guy that he was not the guitar player. He took a better look, and sure enough, that's not the guy - curly hair of different color, no beard, while Thaeus looked like the front page of Acqualung - so I said he must be thinking of that other merry band of youngsters with girls, we just saw them pass by down the street. Behind my back, Thaeus understands the maneuver and can't stop sniggering. The crazyman goes "ah wish I could just catch them, I'd get them straight into the police..." (yeah, right, all the guards are retired cops, and they all have good connections there, and the police are just sitting all day waiting for one of those ex cops to call and then they all volunteer when summoned like that, yeah). I repeat the polite question about the tavern, and he points us in the right direction - Milan's, near the ferial.
From left: the Dane/Pole brothers, Wolfi, Pepsi (behind, invisible), Veca, Sneca. The restaurant is in the camp, facing the beach. No ashtrays, the whole restaurant is one. We even called it that, „see you at Ashtray“.
The drink of choice was the local still white wine, by Vinarija Zadar, good and cheap. Milan was from Belgrade, and he didn't have much of a restaurant, just eight tables under some kind of reed awning, and a kiosk-like shed where he kept the booze. No food, just drinks. Made good turnover, being practically on the crossroad, where the camp-coast-city road diverts to the Punta (cape) Bajlo, which always had lots of pedestrians, plus a bus stop. I wasn't drinking, as dad once squeezed an oath from me not to drink or smoke until age of eighteen... but then eventually realized that an oath under pressure is not as valid as one freely given, so I did have some, just testing the limits to see how much can I get away with, unnoticed.
After a few days of more or less the same stuff, the change in the composition of the company happened mostly unnoticed, but there it was: Rudolf appeared. His hair was black, straight, well over his shoulders. On (I'd guess) 8th we had lots of fun on his uncle's motorboat during the day, and then had fun with the crazymen in the evening. Around 21:30, enjoying the magnificently calm and warm water, I swam all the way to the hotel beach, which also served as a marina of sorts, and somehow managed to find that motorboat, get on it, start the engine, and ride it all the way to the dock (about half a kilometer altogether). Then we moved everybody, including Sneca's transistor radio, to the monkey island (which is a concrete square frame, mostly wide as the dock, propped on foundation of four columns of oil drums filled with concrete. It could have been intended as a landing for smaller boats, as it's just about four meters away from the end of the dock, but there was a change of plan and it was never connected to the dock. Looking at maps now, I see it's gone.). The two Dane/Poles were leaving the next day, so whoever fired a couple of signal rockets somewhere inland has just made us some fireworks.
Left: Rudolf, Wolfi leaning towards Sneca (lying), Rada (from behind on right), Veca (behind her). The guy between Wolfi and Veca I kind of remember, the girls behind him not at all.
Around 22:20 the crazyman still wasn't coming, and we were losing patience. At some point it was the older Dane on the island with Rudolf, me with three other german guys in the boat, and the rest on the dock. Then there comes Darmarka with a frajer, and they want to come to the island. Which we didn't quite understand, there was lots of crosstalk, and the crazyman picked the moment to appear. Rudolf lit up some newspaper, Dane upped the volume on the transistor.
CM: what are you doing here
me: just riding around
CM: at this time of night!?
me: it's perfect - water is calm, no swimmers, excellent.
CM: why so loud?
me: ok, we'll turn off the engine.
CM: okay, just make no noise.
And he left. Nothing spectacular. And we were so prepared.
The next two evenings were failures. First we wanted to go to the disco, but the main girl (whom I don't remember at all, Z who?) couldn't get out, her mom must have seen how we looked. OTOH, the one shorthaired guy that hooked up to us, somehow the only one her mom would allow her to talk to, was the role model of how I imagined a bosnian moron - perhaps he had the street smarts for his little kasaba or wherever he came from, but he just didn't click with anyone in the gang. There was indeed a serious cultural gap (and a cultural shock when the girl talked to someone else and he immediately got drunk and told everyone what a whore she was, learning the word in german too, for the occasion).
Two memorable jokes this week. First, six matches are arranged to resemble a cunt. The task is to remove the virginity (or, in other versions, to make a baby). Looks like one of dozen such tricks where moving one match turns it into some other picture. So whoever tries to solve it will, sooner or later, try to move a match. Then the guy selling the joke slaps him on the hand, saying "it's not done with fingers!".
The other one is a bit more involved. The problem goes like this: if two men dig a hole in two days, how long does it take four men to dig half a hole? Theoretically, it would be half a day, but then the victim doesn't notice that no size is mentioned, it's just "a hole". So every numeric answer is wrong, because "have you ever seen half a hole?".
Then we all (Veca and hers, tetka and hers and we) packed and moved north to Medveja, for a couple of days. This was shot right in front of Milan's tavern, where we made a stop to soak a few sheets of toilet paper with what rakija was still left, to take down the pine resin from the windshields. This is uncle Staja in his trabant. The trailer's springs were too strong, so it was jumping a lot, we called it Jarac (male goat).
Veca and Sneca were generally getting on my nerves, I was going nuts. They adapted all the hippy surface stuff - peace sign etc, greeting with "ahoj" (which they picked from Rudolf, which he picked from the Czechs, who picked it from sailors, being landlocked and nostalgic of all things maritime). To make things worse, Anica joined them in that. They greeted each other like that, or any passerby.
On, I'd guess, 5th (though I wasn't very precise with the dates in my diary, and was writing it with a couple of weeks delay, so "on sunday" could have meant 1st and 8th just the same) we went to Trieste for the first time. Though technically this was the first time I went over the iron curtain, there wasn't much that surprised me. The gridlock traffic - yeah, pretty much like rush hour here, just with even higher density, these guys are driving bumper to bumper in those narrow back streets, and the same density spread almost everywhere. Then, the actually lower standard of shops - many were in abandoned garages, with not even any shop windows, not even whitewashed over the oil smudges and other traces of previous tenants. But the wares were abundant, and generally better quality and more to choose from. One of such backstreet shops was where they bought me my first jeans, vrenglerice*, two t-shirts with some string thread tie-up v-cut neck, and antelope shoes. Finally looking somewhat me, or how I imagined myself. One t-shirt was some shitty lemon-yellow, the other was dark brown. That brown one was still in use more than thirty years later. Yeah, and a bit of a gold necklace, at mom's insistence, though I refused any pendant - they were all rubbish, various dice, moons, stars, lanterns, anchors etc. I would have accepted a tiny cross, but so many wear it, just didn't want to get mixed up with them. Perhaps a peace sign, if it can be made by order, there's a goldsmith back home who may just do it.
Once as we were waiting for a pedestrians' green, I noted that a meter from me there's Nada Knežević, then famous jazz and pop singer. Who'd think that even they get their rags in Trieste. I was surprised to see how she was no taller than up to my ears. Happens when you memorize someone when you're a kid, and then you grow and she stays the same, and you remember she was taller.
The next day we rested before hitting the road (I think we moved to Ankaran for the last two nights, much closer to the border). Veca had trouble with her swimsuit's upper part, the clasp broke, so I had to assist her by tieing a knot. Wrong way, I'd rather untie it (seeing on the picture that she had much more, in terms of curves, than her sister)... aah.
The trip home, on 7th, was in no hurry. We took a ride through Postojnska Jama (the caves where that special lizzard, called human fish for its skin, lives), then the engine in our fića boiled, took us almost an hour to find water somewhere, then the Jarac had a flat tire. Milivoje is not on any shots after Jama, guess he just stepped on the pedal and left us.
We somehow made it to Zagreb, there was a big camp south of Sava, had its own lake and facilities - foosball, pinball etc - so we planned to stay for a day or two. But there was a huge storm approaching, and if the tents got wet, it would take us more than two days to dry them, or we could pack them wet and then pinch them up at home to dry... All too complicated, so we quickly packed and drove all the way home. Arrived at New Belgrade at 3:00. We slept at tetka's and arrived home twelve hours later.
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* that'd be Wrangler brand, which should be renglerice, and I knew it should be read so but not many did, so vrenglerice it was - just as the Levi's wasn't livajs, it was levisice, and the Super Rifle wasn't rajfl, that'd be singular and trousers are pluralia tantum, ergo super rifle.
Mentions: 06-V-1974., 06-X-2009., 31-I-2022., Anica Tešić, Borik, fića, frajer, Milivoje Stojanović, Radmila Tešić (Rada), rakija, Rudolf Ochsner, Snežana Stojanović (Sneca), tetka Mima, trabant, uncle Staja, Vera Stojanović (Veca), Zadar, in serbian
10-VIII-2022 - 21-V-2026