i am quitting my life for something new in europe.
the one-way ticket is to copenhagen, but i think i will not stay there.
the hope is to get work under the table if not over (visa?), and looking at the little mermaid statue does not present the kind of learning curve i seek in a professional undertaking.
also it’s starting to be baloney that i’m not proficient in a second language, and danish is probably not the one to invest in.
also i have been cold for fifteen years, more or less, since shortly after the arrival of that great letter from princeton, so probably i will make my way south to somewhere sweatier.
somewhere less prevailingly white.
somewhere that it’s okay for me to have a mustache.
Is there any way I am so lucky as to have the whole row to myself on this overnight flight from Kennedy to Copenhagen?
The cartoon passengers in the Norwegian Air safety video are so white as to arouse my suspicion. Also the oxygen masks in premium seats reportedly require some additional action, some pulling of a cord, that those for economy seats do not. Suffocate the rich? Interesting.
The fat and pale analog humans drinking Coca Cola at eleven thirty at night across the aisle are staring as I swallow the Unisom recommended by my gynecologist in lieu of the Ambien prescription I wanted and the half a Klonopin I found among the dregs of some party past and later on learned how to spell.
Ah, here are my rowmates.
Too bad for me.
Perhaps they will be more tolerable for whatever disposition makes them almost unable to make a flight.
My absentee host Deepak is quite responsive via text but I am otherwise, on reflection, unsatisfied. The most unforgivable thing — the thing least forgivable! — is the point, moments ago, at which the toilet paper ran out, with no replacement stock in evidence anywhere. I mean, that’s not great as a conflict between flatmates, even, but to put a paying guest in that situation isn’t okay. Now I guess there is an onus to be a white lady on the internet, or find something else at which to point my entrenched entitlement and discontent.
The apartment where I will be cat-sitting for the next few days is fabulous, too fabulous, such that now that the owner has left me and it for Paris, instead of exiting into greater Denmark I am hanging out, eating whatever meal-like arrangements I can make from the contents of her larder and being soothed by the Scandinavian design and unimpeachable blondness in every one of the portraits and watching “Friends” with Danish subtitles, trying to pick up a pronoun or two.
I’m liking it well enough here, I guess, but where are all the Black people? There are very, very few, and most of the ones I’ve met are African immigrants to Germany, Senegalese and Nigerian men in Michael Jordan jerseys who sell me crummy weed at exorbitant prices because they are savvy and I am wide-eyed and high on novelty and fairly begging for the authentic! cultural!! experience!!! of being taken for a ride in a strange land, plus the bassist from the band from Madagascar that played at Carnival of Cultures, and one Jamaican rapper I encountered at same, the latter of whose black-and-green-and-yellow things I gravitated to for homesickness for Flatbush, one presumes.
I guess I’ve been looking for the Black people speaking and dressed more or less like this nation’s natives. African-Prussian Vernacular German, anyone? But how does a place come to have such a population if previous residents didn’t specifically travel overseas to the African continent and kidnap and bring back and enslave and force foreign names and language on enough African people that, over generations, a new dimension of civilization eventually comes into being? I don’t know enough about this. Someone told me I’ll see more Black people in the clubs, but who are those people, and where are they the rest of the time?
