Calypso(57)

“Would you ever call someone a…I don’t know…a diabetes slet?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I were missing out on something so fundamental, it was a wonder I could dress myself in the morning. “Of course not,” she said. “The disease has to be terminal.”

“So, like, AIDS whore?”

Again she seemed exasperated. “AIDS? Never. Those poor people—that’s not funny! If you want to be creative you say something like ‘dirty typhus Mongoloid,’ which you hear a lot lately.” She paused. “Is that the right word, ‘Mongoloid’?”

“We would say, ‘person with Down syndrome,’” I told her. “But I guess that when joined with the words ‘dirty’ and ‘typhus,’ it would be too long. Especially when you’re passing someone on the highway.”

They’re strange, the Dutch. After talking to Els, I met a man who frequently calls his eighteen-month-old daughter a “little ball sack.” “Because, I mean, it’s what you do,” he explained.

“What do you mean ‘it’s what you do’?” I said. “It’s not what I do or anyone in my family does. I don’t even call my ball sack a ball sack.”

He shrugged, Dutchily.

In Vienna, I returned to my original question: “What do Austrians yell out their car windows when they get angry?”

“Well,” a young woman told me, “sometimes we will say, ‘Why don’t you find a spot on my ass that you would like to lick and lick it?’”

I’m guessing this is quicker to say and less awkward-sounding in German. Even so, it lacks a certain something. “You give them a choice of where to lick your ass?” I asked. “That doesn’t sound like much of a threat, given that they could pick a spot on the side or up top, where it’s basically just your lower back.”

She agreed. “And sometimes if the bad driver is a female, we will call her a blood sausage.”

“Is that because a woman has a period?” I asked.

“Maybe.”

Later that night I met a Bulgarian. “In my country, you say to someone you hate, ‘May you build a house from your kidney stones.’”

Well, finally, I thought. This is essentially wishing someone an eternity of gut-wrenching pain, all for taking the parking space you wanted or not turning his blinker on. I’ve had three kidney stones in my life, each the size of a small piece of gravel you might find at the bottom of an aquarium, and each excruciating. The thought of passing enough of them to build an entire house—even if it was just big enough for a termite to live in—is unfathomable. Those Bulgarians don’t fool around, though no one can come close to the Romanians.

At a book signing in Boston, I met a woman from Bucharest. “My publicist is Romanian,” I told her. “Not full-blooded like you, but still she can speak a little. Her favorite saying, taught to her by her grandmother, is ‘I shit in…’ God, what is that?…‘I shit in…’?”

“‘I shit in your mother’s mouth’?” she asked. “That’s probably what it was. It’s a very popular curse.”

The woman walked away, and I thought, Well, I can see why. “I shit in your mother’s mouth.” Does it get any nastier than that?

I discovered a year later on my first trip to Bucharest that, actually, yes, it does. “What’s the absolute worst thing you’ve ever heard?” I asked from the stage at the end of my reading. People lined up with answers, and I learned that, as in all Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries, the most popular target when on the attack is the other person’s mother. Thus: “I fuck your mother’s dead, I fuck your mother’s Christ, I fuck your mother’s icon, I fuck your mother’s Easter, I fuck your mother’s onion, I will make skis out of your mother’s cross,” and “I fuck your mother’s memorial cake.” This is something you bake when a loved one dies, and there’s a lot of cursing centered around it, the absolute worst being “I dragged my balls across your mother’s memorial cake, from cherry to cherry, and to each of the candles.”

A young woman told me this, and when I repeated it to the fellow who drove me to the airport the following morning and who had previously been chatty, he fell silent.

“That is total devastation,” he eventually said. “I mean, wow. What kind of a person told you this? Was it a girl? Was she pretty?”

The Romanians really do lead the world when it comes to cursing. “What have you got for me?” I asked a woman from Transylvania who was now living in Vienna.

“Shove your hand up my ass and jerk off my shit,” she offered.

I was stunned. “Anyone else would say, ‘Shove your hand up my ass,’ and then run out of imagination,” I told her. “You people, though, you just keep going. And that’s what makes you the champions you are.”

Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to drive, I thought, watching as she walked out the door and onto the unsuspecting streets of Vienna, this poet, this queen, this glittering jewel in a city of flint.





The Comey Memo



It was mid-August on Emerald Isle, and so far no one had drowned or been attacked by sharks. This was good news for the local Realtors, one of whom, a cheerful woman named Phyllis, had become a family friend. Hugh dropped by to see her the day after we arrived and returned an hour or so later with a flushed face.