JUJU THE JARABEK

 “What experience qualifies you for the law offices of Sphincter, Schpass & Succotash?”

“In 2008, I was instrumental as number-two prosecutor in diffusing tribal warfare in the Bamiyan state of Afghanistan.”

“Prosecutor?”

“That’s what I said.”

On his way out of the building, Juju Jarabek glances upward at the changing spring weather.  He’s walking through Savignyplatz.  He walks past his hotel apartment, the Aida, without the stomach to go up and spend any time alone in his wooden room.   The neighbor below always complains about his walking across the floor. 

Despite only having a few hundred Euros left to his name, Juju directs himself straight for the Irish pub near LudwigKirchplatz. 

It so happens that the World Cup Finals are going on and the match is being televised on beautiful, wide-screen, plasma displays - live from South Africa.  The pub is stuffed with various sausage-faces cheering on their respective teams.  Slovakia is playing the Netherlands, and it’s somewhat of an east v. west rivalry for the gassed Europeans in the room.  Juju enters without a scarce hint of interest for soccer.  After all, he is of Ohioan descent. 

Shortly after ordering his glass of lager, a Dutch sausage approaches him in full team regalia. 

“Drinking ‘at piss?  Slovak wanker!” he says. 

Juju looks up in mid-sip to see a bendy beanpole-link of a man, staring redly at him with the expectation of a response. 

“I disarmed Babushkas on Lebršnik of Herzgovina while you were sucking horse-milk from your mother in the Oude Kerk,” Juju says.

“What?” the bendy beanpole says.  “American, what?”

His nose was monstrous.  It was like a taco chip on the face of a photograph.  Juju watched the nose as it turned and glided over to its gang of plaster foreheads. 

What Juju really wants to do is tell his story, but it seems that at every opportunity he is met with the suavely disinterested, the utterly confused or just mockery.  He waits gallantly to unveil the lengthy tale of his enlistment into the army at Barberton, Ohio’s Wooster road recruitment center, then his deployments to Bosnia, Kuwait, Fort Stewart in Georgia and then  Afghanistan.  

 

The Netherlands scores a point against Slovakia.  The room goes wild, except for the east-European portion, who mock the celebration by pouring pitchers of Budweiser over a pretzel effigy of French President Sarkozy and singing Only You. 

Juju Jarabek finds himself flat-footing outward into the Berlin evening.  There’s a certain place he’s obligated to visit.  It’s a tall cathedral in Kreuzberg, not far from a remnant stretch of the infamous wall.  Juju chooses it for its calm silhouette against the east-German sky, and the fact that there is a secret boulevard walked by central Asian prostitutes around the corner.

Before going underground to the trains, he decides on his favorite evening meal, a bag dinner from the Turkish kebab stand on Uhlandstrasse.  As the Berliners know, your best dinner comes from such a place, and for a reasonable price, too.  As Juju would say, they make a damn good taco.

“I shall break bread with thee,” Juju tells the man serving his kebab platter.  “And a bottle of Erdunkel as well.”  

“No bier, my friend,” says the server.  He then nods toward a yellow-lit shop just a few strides away.

“The Moslem world,” Juju tells the man.  “I know your depravation.  I know your desperation.”

“Frittes with that?”  the man asks.

“I drank camel’s milk from a battery cell when sandstorms swept the bulk of Kuwait for seven months.”  

“No problem, my friend,” says the sweet-breathed Arab.  “Seven Euro, please.”

Feeling rather lit, our man finds his entrance to the subway.  He boards the train without a ticket because the payment for transportation relies one’s honor.   Juju’s honor was exasperated during his heart-wrenching tours of troubled regions.   He has no honor left for providing a fare to travel a mere 2.8 kilometers over to Kreuzburg.  He’d rather suck the poisoned blood out of a black Talibani’s snake bite.

As a U-Bahn official walks by him, Juju shrinks in his seat.  He is afraid to tears that he’ll be caught without a ticket.  But the man beside him is cramming a sandwich down his throat and the official walks by without a tick.   Juju has just felt the adrenaline of a Korean whore approached by a Pakistani dirt-bag on Macao’s Sun-Yat-Sen boulevard.  Or perhaps it was the emptiness of an Indian metrosexual dropping his mobile phone into the biggest rain puddle in central Leicester, England.

Coming above ground, our man is greeted with a boisterous crowd of young, god-speaking youth.  Actually, they are speaking about the absence of god.

 Juju’s church looms on the near horizon.  Without breaking step, he directs himself toward the shadow and within minutes finds himself on the dark avenue leading up to the cathedral’s vacant thigh-span.   

It’s the church-scape that Juju has frequently placed himself before since arriving by train from Hamburg.  It is his bi-weekly climax.   He does not enter, but kneels on the lawn and faces the southern tower.  He then proceeds to repeat his single confession of a lifetime:  the confused killing of a young man in Afghanistan.

“We went on normal patrol through the village.  It was early morning and I had skipped my coffee.  Private Hedgebend was buggin’ the hell outta me with his Jay Leno impressions.  We came around this corner and saw a family or something getting water out of a well.  Hedgebend started talking in his stupid accent about how fuck-worthy the daughter was.   It was pissing me right off.  This kid comes out of a door with a god-damned tree-trunk in his hands and I just pull my trigger.  I shot the kid down and he hits the ground all bleeding everywhere.  The tree-trunk is on top of him.  Hedgebend starts saying ‘what the f-, what the f-?!’ and so we took off running.”

“Before I ran, I looked at the mother and she made eye-contact with me.   She looked at me like I was a god or something.   Yes, like I was a god.  But she was crying.”

“Lord, have mercy on my soul,” Juju says.  “I am not you.  Lord, have mercy on my soul.”

Having taken care of his bi-weekly confession, our man sets out into the colorful Kreuzberg nightfall.  The smell of Lebanese folk is everywhere.  The aforementioned ‘whore alley’ is right around the corner, but Juju doesn’t like to go straight into it.  He prefers to lumber about the neighborhood an hour or so before pretending to stumble across it accidentally.

“Why are the Russian girls taking everything over?” He thinks to himself.  “Would it kill ‘em to put an Uzbek, or a Turk, or an Iraqi girl out here?”  (Juju really wants to have sex with a Muslim fairy) 

It’s true, the alley is full of Russians again.  When Juju was in Budapest he got a Russian girl.  The only thing she could say in English was: “I don’t give a fuck.”  If he asked her name, she replied “I don’t give a fuck.”  If he asked her what she liked to do, it was “I don’t give a fuck.”  If he asked her what the capital of Russia was, it was “I don’t give a fuck.”

Not having a choice, really, Juju takes another Russian girl to an hourly-room off Arndtstrasse.  The room is small and bare, but there is a crucifix and small print of a beachscape in Phuket or someplace hanging over the bed. 

As the girl sleeps in her underwear, Juju takes photos of her with his digital camera.  And he sets the timer and hangs the camera from a nail, as to take a photo of them lying together.  When she wakes up, she sees the camera hanging on the wall and takes it, erasing the photos.

“When I was stationed in Fort Stewart,” Juju says to her, “we used to go to the tattoo parlor and get tattoos of each other’s girlfriends.   It was-“

“I don’t give a fuck,” she says.

After paying the girl, Juju finds himself with very little cash at all.  But he was sure to save enough to buy a phone card, so that he can phone his mother back in Barberton, Ohio.

“We were up in the Jhorgal valley, Ma,” he tells her.  “We were up and down all day every day.  The further in we’d go, the heavier fire we’d come under.  It was like a finger trap.  We kept asking ourselves why we were there, and what we were doing there.  One of the guys in B Company told us that the reason we went hard on that valley was because the Taliban were protecting the real Garden of Eden up above.  The actual Garden of Eden, ma!  They would do anything to keep us from reaching it.  It was sacred to them too, you know?  All we kept telling ourselves was that we were doing this for the Garden of Eden.  We were going to save the Garden of Eden.”

“I know Juju,” his mother says.  “I know.”