21-III-2010.
The breakfast in the hotel offers something that looks really close to ćevapčići, but it's the so-called sausage*. I could sense Bob Evans laughing at me from it.
In front of the hotel, where we get out for a smoke after breakfast, there's a bus, waiting for the group of tourists to check out and embark. The engine is permanently on, seems it's some age old contraption that's hard to start and takes long to heat up, feels like at home. The group is standing close to the bus, but nobody seems to mind the diesel fumes. The cigarette smoke is a different matter - we are confined to a certain place, almost behind the corner, and it seems they all pay strict attention to us, not to light up before we're far enough (and surely out of range of the bus's exhaust). Serves them well.
We drive to Burt's place, north of DC. We find it easily, with just one missed exit and a couple of miles driving back. He lives with his father in a shotgun house**, on a farm, which they rent from someone called Peter Fonda. We even shook hands with the guy - something to tell at home, eh? The house needs a lot of repair - the banisters are shaky, the gutters are bent. Nothing major, but a lot of it. There's a wider octangular room in the middle, with a piano.
There are two or three more houses arround, one of them the owner's. There are some silos, but the owner doesn't farm, he rents the land, the two houses and just mills around. It used to be a dairy farm, then they switched to husbandry for meat, then stopped that too. One guy grows pumpkins at large, more than he can pick, let alone sell.
We take a long walk over the rolling hills, the pond, bits of forest.
The house on the picture belongs to someone filthy rich, with a taste for McMansions. Unbelievable is the size of it - and yet it's all wood and sheet rock and plastic siding, to the tune of about 2 million dolars. These Amers are nuts.
They have a huge rusty yellow cat. Not the kind we have at home, it's about 10kg and almost 75cm head to ass, but is otherwise a regular cat.
His dad is also a programmer, retired, old school, wrote cobol or maybe even something older, for federal statistics - census etc. Strongly believes that the system is good, just needs to be applied neatly. Oh yes, in a country where „there is no system“ is an axiom.
The lunch is pure masturpiss. After all the times he ate with us, all the extra slices of pizza and muffins he got for the road, now that we finally sit around his table, he serves us cheese and crackers. There's a stick of sausage, not exactly promising, but uncut and on his side of the table. And he's got it to himself, along with the knife. The only bright spot is the bread his father made, almost close to those she used to make seven years ago (when she was still learning the tricks).
We drive off to DC to meet with Zyanna, but we hit the parkway on the right bank of the Potomac, and end up on Arlington boulevard. We call Nina to guide us to the nearest good hotel. We find one on our own, but it's cramped and expensive and in a bad spot, looks like a rental for military retirees. She finds us another one, no breakfast but much nicer in any other respect. Same street, five blocks down, not 140$ like the previous hole closer to the center of Arlington, rather 90$ and a smoking room.
Then we spot a Peruvian restaurant and have a real lunch. I wanted lamb but got chicken anyway, the cashier pretending that she understood everything (which she may have, but they had no lamb, didn't check what she charged us, wasn't much anyway).
The restaurant is... well, had the waitresses not been Peruvian, it would have been a mess hall. In a rented space, all glass and sheet rock, hidden steel and quasy rural façade, shingles nailed over cheap particle board or, in better cases, plywood, the steel tube pillars hidden by façade brick frame (there's no other kind), painted over in the same navy gray... And the parked cars would have been all gray too, had we not parked there (the Matrix looks black, but is in fact blue). But the food was great. When we were really full, it was almost dusk.
By the time we found Zyanna's place, it was dark. It's not so complicated to find, not my first time there, but with no geepyess, and when even memorizing the map wouldn't help as we're coming from an unexpected direction... still, the general sense usually gets me there more often than it leads me into getting lost. It was just the dusk that disoriented me some, but once I recognized a place, the rest was easy.
The house is a hodge-podge mix of Scottish stonework, brick and later additions, with narrow staircases, secret passages, forgotten rooms and attics. Her studio is a huge vaulted ceiling room, with its own gallery.
She eats nothing with gluten, which is seriously limiting her choices. It's unbelievable how many staples have cereals in them. We first sat outside, on that terrace, and I didn't make too many shots - it was almost dark, so either an extra long exposure or flash. The terrace furniture is, of course, gray. You can't find any in (any other) color. What we bought ten years ago is also krmkast (v. house dictionary), same thing. I enlarged the picture to see what was it on the table, did we have that coffee out there or later, and no, it's the fragrant candles, probably against mosquitos. Potomac flows about 100m away, may come handy. There's a dozen step staircase behind, leading down to that door, which opens into the mid-level hallway, which is the first floor on the other end - there's old Burt's room beneath it. Because this is a house on a slope. We had the coffee in the studio. Um, no, beneath it, afterwards, in what was once Burt's room.
Zyanna had a traffic accident, and her vocal chords were in danger. After the surgery it took a while, but she's found her voice now. Actually, a new voice, a bit deeper but smoother, and the sample song she played (from the CD, not live) was surprisingly fresh. Deeper, even a bit darker, smoother, less dramatic but somehow more mystic than before. Too bad that the market moguls won't allow that to spread anywhere beyond a scope of a samizdat. She recounted how once she sat in a club with Donovan, yes the one, and he wanted to hear her sing, but she was too fresh from surgery and just couldn't risk sounding coarse or causing damage to the chords.
On the photo, the instruments are in low light; bottom right there are guitar necks and a piece of drum set reflecting light; the picture frame under the right side of the further wall sits on the house amps; the dark space between those is a grand piano.
We talk about Burt for a while, and it turns out that he's borderline autistic. Except when it comes to his only vice, food, for which he'd go to lengths to avail himself of. The case when someone said "there's one of these left over, anyone?", and he hears it from the other end of the hall and runs in with "I'll take it!". Geoff added few bits to the story here and there, but mostly stayed the silentologist he always was.
I think we heard what her name once was.
We easily found the boulevard and the hotel, and had a good sleep.
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* (v. 04-X-1999.) sausage doesn't necessarily mean ground meat in a gut, but the mix of meat etc itself. It says sausage on the wrapper, and then inside it's a mix that you cut into patties and fry, for example. Bob Evans is a brand of that. Not even close to what we have, there's more white pepper and other spice different from ours, but then isn't that bad either
** house where the rooms are one behind the other, and doors lined up on one side, so that a double barrel shot at the front door may hit someone at the last door. Allegedly Elvis was born in such a house.
Mentions: 04-X-1999., 17-IV-2014., Second day, ćevapčići, Geoff, house dictionary, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Reginald Burton Cape (Burt), Zyanna, in serbian