Hawking the Scene

My Chocolate Covered Oblivion

It's when I see the rain roll to the edge of the wildflowers with the help of the sun-drenched, springtime breeze that I realize I'm in my secret place--the journey where I catch a piece of mellow oblivion to escape the rush of thoughts,the rush of feelings, the rush of realities that so frequently haunts and vandalizes the tranquility of mind.  It's my peace, my opium, my inner-sanctity.  I can sit atop my towering precipice and see beyond all that is distorted and misunderstood, to the laughter of the jubilant children playing in the kaleidoscopic, flower-strewn field, oblivious to the decisions and trials that lay before them.  It's the place I can avoid the tribulations and inconsistencies that hover above me like the halo to its angel.  It's a place I can find myself.  A place can be myself.  And a place I can elude myself.

-Jeremy Hawking, 1996

I'm Too Pretty For This Country

The following is a story I wrote while in training for Peace Corps in Ukraine.  When I first got there, everything was so different and funny to me.  Eventually, everything became normal.  I'd like to preface that although this story is 100% true, it is in no way meant to reflect negatively on Ukraine...just to show the humor of an American guys' first exposure to a land much different from his.  Afterall...Ukraine is my second home.

This morning was a typical morning for me. My alarm, babushka and not that fucking rooster for once, woke me around 7am. I made my ‘bed,’ which is actually a pullout, couch-like apparatus, and blearily stumbled into the bathroom to take my morning dump. Mind you, I haven’t taken a solid shit in two months. My excrement has been more of the ‘soft-serve’ variety. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of preservatives in the food, but I’m beginning miss solid stool.

 

Upon completion, I wipe my ass with this ‘toilet paper’ that has the consistency of sand paper. I tried to clean up a spill with it once and it didn’t soak up the water so much as push it around.  Then I head to the shower.  Again, it’s not so much a shower as it is the bathroom mockingly spitting at me.  A nice spring drizzle would provide more water pressure for my desiccated body than this dribbling. I can’t complain too much about my shower situation since I frequently have hot water, which is a precious commodity in this country. My fellow volunteer-in-training, Kasper, has ‘hot water days’ on Wednesdays and Thursdays, though for the past five weeks, ‘hot water day’ has turned into ‘no water day.’ In any case, after struggling with the shower wand, which has no holder, so I must fling it over my shoulder while I wash, I try to keep the floor dry.  Apparently this country has something against shower curtains. I then dry off my body with a towel the size of a postage stamp with the softness of Nabisco Shredded Wheat.

 

I then shave and put on a dust mite drop of facial moisturizer and not the recommended dime-size, as I’m in the Peace Corps and must preserve such precious commodities as facial moisturizer and the like. After partial facial lubrication, I style my dry, non-conditioned hair, as conditioner is yet another commodity one cannot afford when one lives on $20 a month, in a wall mirror that’s smaller than a 9-year-old girl’s compact.

 

I slip into my slippers and move into my bedroom where I place my crispy, stretched-out clothes onto my un-moisturized, un-conditioned, half-washed body. Why are my clothes crispy and stretched out, you ask? Good question. I also lack that really neat invention that dries your clothes, making them soft, fluffy and revives their shape. Instead, I hang my clothes to dry on a drying rack hovering above the shower, which is another thing I must avoid by ducking and maneuvering my body with crafty gymnastics as I’m showering. However, my complaining will remain at a minimum on this topic, as I’m lucky enough to have a washer and do not have to hand-wash my clothes in the bathtub like most other trainees.

 

After assaulting my dry body with grain-like clothing (you don’t know suffering until you’ve placed burlap-like underwear against your undercarriage), I move into the kitchen to sample some of babushka’s moist-free chicken, beets, cabbage, mashed potatoes, mystery meat encased in flavorless Jell-O, or any number of variety of Ukrainian dinner foods she wishes to serve my delicate stomach for breakfast. Again, my whining will remain at a minimum as Kasper has recently been served chicken head soup. That’s right - broth with an actual head of a chicken floating in it.

Babushka and I attempt conversation and usually succeed on the topics of food, weather, time, and other incredibly simple topics I’ve learned in Ukrainian thus far. However, she soon forgets that I don’t understand her when she speaks too quickly nor do I understand her when she speaks Russian. I ask her to switch back to Ukrainian and I then pretend to understand her and nod a lot, agreeing to do who knows what sort of Communist activities. Babushka flashes a smile at me revealing a full set of gold teeth. Babushka’s got bling. I wash down my dinner, I mean breakfast, with a glass of bark juice. Yes, bark juice—juice that came from a spout in a tree.  I then proceed back to my bedroom where I unsuccessfully try to digest a few new words with which to impress my language teacher.

 

I leave for the bus, accidentally telling babushka “good night,” instead of “goodbye.” I walk down the sludge way, I mean road, for a block and wait for the bus while kids stare at me like I’m an alternate life form. The bus is a comical piece of machinery, completely broken-down. The shocks on the bus are entirely blown and the back of the bus sticks up in the air like a cat in heat. On top of the bus reside immense tanks, which I’m assuming are tanks of extra gas, although they could very likely contain oxygen to revive frightened passengers. The outer layer of paint on the bus is red, though the previous 30 layers are starting to expose. You can figure out the age of the bus by counting the paint rings. Inside, the floor is made of fake wooden tile, most likely Formica, which is peeling at the corners and exposes the road below. Sea-foam green curtains don the inside of the ‘red’ bus and are held back by a variety of different ties, from kite string to purple pipe cleaners. The torn plastic seats, which due to the lack of shocks provide a more exciting ride the further back you sit, are a lovely shade of post-burrito-eating fecal matter with various shades of packing tape to hold the foam inside.

 

I stand aside while everyone shoves each other, snarling and exposing their gold teeth in this land unaffected by current dental hygiene practices, while trying to board the bus.  I enter last, handing the woman sitting in the unfastened card chair to the right, my 50-kopeck fare. I walk to the rear of the bus, trying not to bump into the babushki, as I do not want to incur their wrath and sit across from the most beautiful Ukrainian children who are intent on staring at me for the duration of the ride. There is one child, however, who screams the entire bus ride. His siblings are perfect angels, which leads me to believe that he is the Spawn of Satan.

 

The bus leaves and manages to hit every plentiful pothole on the road and stalls at each and every stop. After turning onto the main road, the bus approaches a hill, which it cannot handle so well. Old women walking with canes pass the bus as we attempt to ascend. I fear, as the only young, able-bodied man on the bus, I’ll be asked to get out and push. God love a bus made 40 years ago under Communist rule. The bus rounds the top of the four-block hill the next day, spewing black smoke the entire ride.

 

After straining all the way to the city center, I get off a stop early and head into the supermarket to buy my morning caffeine, aka Coke Light. At the checkout, I hand the cashier a 20-hryven bill, which is approximately five US dollars, but of course she cannot change such a large denomination, so I have to fish around my pockets for random loose change. I leave the supermarket and head over to the post office to buy a couple of envelopes, which would normally be an easy transaction.  Not only did it take me five minutes just to communicate this ‘simple’ transaction to the post office clerk, but it then took ten more for her to actually complete it. Everything in Ukraine is in slow motion, except for the driving, which is an entirely different story in and of itself.

 

I walk over to language class and when I arrive at my teacher’s apartment building, which appears remnant of Chicago’s infamous Cabrini Green, I realize that I forgot the security code to get in. This poses no problem, however, because I remember my host brother, Anton, teaching me to look for the worn-out buttons on the pad. Simultaneously press these and you’re in. I’m happy to live with such high security standards in Ukraine. After pressing the worn-out buttons, I proceed to walk up the eight flights of stairs because the elevator hasn’t worked since the fall of Communism. As I ascend, I make sure to enjoy the fetid aroma of cat piss the entire way. I arrive to my teacher’s apartment, take off my shoes, and place the lunch that babushka made me (that I’ll probably feed to a stray dog later) into the fridge and head into the living room to start my four-hour, intensive language lesson. It’s only 9am. I’ve been up for only two hours and already I’ve had a full day.

Potty Training Mom in Ukraine

This is a true story that I wrote as a Peace Corps Volunteer, living in Ukraine.  It was published in our volunteer newsletter and my mom quickly became famous amongst volunteers and Peace Corps staff. 

It has been six months since my mother’s first trans-Atlantic excursion to visit her peace-loving son and I am still being approached by fellow volunteers asking me if I have “heard the one about the volunteer’s mom who…” when I quickly cut them off to reply, “Um…yeah…that would be my mom.” This particular story is quickly becoming a Peace Corps-Ukraine urban legend, of sorts. So, for those of you who actually have not heard the story, allow me to introduce you to the amazing, one-of-a-kind, non-Ukrainian-toilet-going legend that is my mom.

The first thing you need to understand is that my mother has a bladder, which she insists on referring to as her ‘kidney,’ the size of an acorn. So, naturally, the first thing I ask after she passes through passport control and engulfs me into her arms is, “Do you need to use the restroom?” “No,” she replies, “I just went on the plane when we landed.” While most people shove their way to the front of the plane to get off, my mom makes her way to the back of the plane to relieve herself. We leave the airport and take the 50- minute bus ride to Kyiv’s central train station as I point out the many interesting things that there are to see along the way: “Look at the skinny Ukrainian trees.” “That’s the big Kyiv sign.” “Those are called Soviet blocks,” I pointed out, referring to the rows of identical block apartment buildings, built during Soviet times.  As soon as we arrive at the train station, my mom declares that she has to use the facilities. I think to myself, “this is going to be a long two-weeks.”  Silently, I begin to carefully recall locations of bathrooms in various Ukrainian cities and plot them on my mental map as future tourist stops.

I walk her to the public toilets in the train station, pay the 75-kopecks to the woman working the kassa, remembering to ask for some toilet paper, and I physically move her body in the direction of the Ж sign and walk her as far as I could without being deemed a pervert.  I waited no less than a minute before I heard a woman shrieking, “Девушка, девушка! Что вы делаете, что вы делаете?” (Girl, what are you doing?) I knew something was amiss. I just knew this fanatical woman was yelling at my sweet, docile mother. I continued waiting patiently for about another five minutes before my mother exited the bathroom, walking in slow motion, completely agape. I have never, in all my days, seen eyes opened so wide, nor have I ever seen my mother look so panic-stricken.

“What’s wrong, mom?? What happened??” I asked frantically, thinking somebody took her purse, or worse, assaulted her. “There was no toilet,” my mom said, matter-of-factly. “What do you mean, there was no toilet? I put you in the bathroom!” Her anxious expression turned to that of near tear-ridden exhaustion. “Jeremy…there was no toilet,” she repeated, her voice now cracking. “I…I went in…and…and there was no toilet. I opened up all of the stall doors and this woman started yelling at me. I…I tried to explain to her that there were no toilets, but she didn’t understand English.” My sweet mother, never taking her eyes from mine, continued, “That woman…she finally put me in one of the stalls and I didn’t know what to do!!!” as she threw her arms in the air. “What do you mean, you didn’t know what to do,” I asked, completely bemused. “There was no toilet,” she repeated once more. “There was just…a hole.  “So what did you do?” I asked my despondent mother. My mom dropped her head into her hands, massaged her temples and forehead, looked back up to me to said, “I…I sat on it!!!!”

Stay tuned for the exciting sequels:

• “Oh, I can’t eat that,”
• “It’s so cute that these little kids know how to speak Russian,”
• “And how do you suppose I wipe my ass with this?”