“North Jutland Blues” by Wes Trexler

I SEE MYSELF next to a freeway onramp, leaning against a guardrail in Denmark. I don't just see myself-it's one of those cinematic crane shots that starts way off in the distance among the miles of marshland, then pulls in close to reveal green, treeless hillsides tumbling up to a superhighway. There I am, twenty years old, undernourished, poorly dressed, being whipped by a nasty North Sea wind. Or it's more like an After School Special, a cautionary tale of excess and spiritual decline. Maybe a public service announcement that shows me, passed out, leaning against a signpost, clutching a faux-leather patchwork backpack, not a sporty one, not a school bag, but the kind of thing a fifty-year­ old woman would take to the beach. An x-ray freeze-frame shot shows the contents: Hershey Bar-sized blocks of hash, and a sack of sinister looking red-and-white horse-pill capsules. A voiceover says,  If  your son or daughter is hitchhiking across North Jutland with a sock full of pills like these... it may be a sign of serious problems with drugs or alcohol.

It's a movie, not a flick, nothing cheap. It's gritty and shaky, a student project. I would call it noirish but I don't think that word means anything. I'm in Aalborg at the university, living in the basement of the international student dorm, the Collegium, in a windowless corner crowded with boxes and bric-a-brac, a TV room with worn­ out couches. I wait until everyone goes to bed, then eat leftovers in the communal kitchen, bathe in the sink, crash on a couch. Mostly, I try to stay warm, wrecking myself with sentimental thoughts of that girl back in Florida.

Lonesome scene, I know, but I have this racket that keeps me going. Once a week I collect money from the heads in the dorm, the Italian guy, two phony American chicks, a biology major from France, then I hitchhike to Copenhagen and score whatever I can, buying my own provisions with the extra cash.

Klaus comes up with the plan. He's the other protagonist, the foil-a frizzy-haired Dane, named after an ugly German horse. His parents probably thought, Well, he's not a pretty baby; maybe he'll grow up to be strong.

He tells me about Christiania, the free town.

"It's free because you can do anything you want there, except take photographs."

A visual collage of Christiania shows me dazed and disoriented, walking through an urban park, a faded utopia in Technicolor, surrounded by squat apartments and warehouses, a few cafes, and, in the center, an open-air drug bazaar-rows of shoddily built plywood booths, all filled to choking with a variety of grass and hash and mushrooms, little brown ones from Iceland, cubensis raised in Holland, and of course, those lecherous red-and-white capsules.

I'm a mouse in a pop bottle.

The soundtrack is a live Kraftwerk bootleg, Berlin, 1986, boom... boom-chick.

I buy sixty-five capsules from a longhaired Eskimo fox. She winks and says, "Have a nice trip." But I'm out of money, and it's too late to start thumbing, so I hangout in the only all night bar in Christiania, the Woodstock Cafe, being abused and harassed by a loaded Greenlander; he's toothless and blind from cheap Danish beer: Tuborg in a can, "For Export Only."

The Woodstock is warm and crowded and I lean back on a rough­ hewn bench that's at least two hundred yearsold. By 2 a.m., large women are swaying belligerently by themselves, nodding off, being dragged by their collars across the barroom floor and out into the cold. I write a line in a spiral notebook: Don't fall asleep.

Later I meet a hippie, a white-dreaded Dane with a backpack full of dumpster bananas. My kind of guy. I ask him,"You know anywhere free to sleep?" He looks off into the ether considering, like it's a philosophical issue. Finally he responds in the affirmative and we're off to his place.

We walk to a shipyard warehouse down by the canals. Naval schematics and ship blueprints line the walls. He camps out in a side room. It's not even his squat but a practice room for a jazz band. I lie between a stand-up bass and the drum kit, the walls covered with this guy's canvases, scary psychedelic overdose images scrawled in menstrual hues. He tells me he was on welfare for seven years trying to make it as an artist; now he's off the dole, following this nobler path. We eat bananas and hairy carrots, smoke some joints, Danish style, fat tobacco cones laced with brown commercial-grade hash.

By the next scene I'm in the bathroom of a moving train, sitting on the sink trying to write in the notebook. Another bad pop song, it starts, Whats the difference between lonely and Lonesome... The ticket taker knocks and peeks in. No, I don't speak Danish. No, I don't have a ticket. Yes, I will gladly get off at the next stop. I cross the station, hop on the next train going north. After a few hours, my dignity is bruised and I'm forced back onto the road. I make it to the outskirts of Hobro, get let off on a dead exit. I walk to the onramp, stick out  my thumb, and go right to sleep. Boom boom-chick.

Actually, maybe it's not like that, not an art-house movie, but a foreign film, sort of surrealistic and pointless, with lots of subtitles and gratuitous nudity, only there is no nudity because I'm too strung out to get any action. So I stay up at night smoking hash out of homemade bamboo pipes, writing bad lyrics and pseudo-philosophy in  the dorm basement. In the background, Miles Davis plays, later Miles, experimental synth-jazz with weird overdubbed monologues.

Before sunrise I walk out onto wet Aalborg streets, listening to a Walkman, trawling for bikes. Sometimes I find them unlocked in a bike rack, or they've been stolen before and dumped in the hedges, or more often they're broken down and abandoned, so I collect them. I keep an eye out in front of super markets, looking for the ones that are always there. I pry apart their silly wheel locks and ride off on two busted tires, bring them all back to the International Collegium.

We'll call this one, The Bicycle Thief.

I collect about ten bikes, a half dozen wheels, and three partial chassis. Klaus and I split a gram of shitty danish speed, and he watches me plant each piece in the wind berm in front of the dorm. I partially bury them, some with the wheels down, some with the wheels up so you can turn the pedals, watch them spin, a couple doing wheelies, all in a line across the top of the little manmade hill. At three in the morning, Klaus pulls some speakers through the front door and blasts a Wagner suite at very unsubtle volumes. "Perfect," he says, then sits on a picnic table to take in my performance art.

When I'm done I ask him, "What do you think?"

He says, "Looks just like a sea monster."

"Supposed to be a pod of dolphins."

"That too," he says.

I sit beside him and check out my creation. There's a tight close-up on my face, then it gets all hazy and dissolves into a flashback scene.

It's black and white, a herky-jerky silent film motif, Chaplinesque.

Midwinter snow, like glass bullets, lashes me as I get off a train and walk into the deserted predawn streets of Aalborg for the first time. January, 1999. I haven't slept in two days. I'm jet-lagged and train-weary, and my baggage is en route to a country no one's ever heard of. I'm wearing matching corduroy head to toe, and the frozen slivers blow straight through me. All I have is a faux-leather knapsack, a spiral notebook, a half jar of peanut butter, one fifty-dollar bill, American.

I pace for a while looking for signs of life in the gritty little port town, ancient pubs, shuttered bistros, no one but me on the street, sad violins faint in the background. I shiver and walk until I see the first morning bus crunching through snow. I run to it and enter, looking shocked, numb. I try to explain I don't have any kroners, only dollars, and no change either; the bus driver tells me he can't understand a word I'm saying. I shrug and make my way to the back of the bus; it's too early to fight and he's already running late, so he lets me ride. I go on one whole circuit around the city before he boots me at the edge of town. The sun is rising but the cold slices in again. I see some well lit buildings, make my way to them. I try every door on every building until I find one open; I thaw out in the lobby of what turns out to be the International Collegium.

I pull a flyer off the announcement board and start writing a letter to Gina. I fill up half the page with scrawny, numb-fingered script before I realize I don't have an envelope, probably can't afford postage yet, but it doesn't matter--I write until the page is filled around the margins, then place it folded into the breast pocket of my corduroy jacket.

The flashback bleeds into the next scene, only it's back to the art­ house flick. I'm hungry-looking and ragged, my head shaved except for a small ponytail protruding from the dead center of my skull, Krishna­ style. Klaus comes to me in the basement, pulls a box from his pocket and hands it to me. Blister-pack pills.

"What's this," I ask.

"Painkillers," he says.

"Awesome," I say. "Where'd you get 'em?"

"Stina had a procedure," he says.

"Oh?"

"A chemical termination," he says.

"Oh." I pause. "How's she doing?"

"Physically, not so bad." A minute passes.

"How are you doing?"

"This is not my best day." Another minute. "You know, I'm going to get pissed tonight. Absolutely pissed."

"Right," I say. "The best way to deal with your problems."

Then we're downtown in someone's third-floor apartment. Klaus is chain-drinking bottles of Carlsberg, and I'm matching him with painkillers. Every bottle he puts back I chew a pill like candy. He's talking nonstop, Danish and English, on the verge of tears.

"She said I'm not fit to be a father." He shakes his head.

"Dude, you're not," I say.

Klaus looks at me with venom and pity. "Well, I know that. But it is still rejection." He pounds another bottle, I crunch another tablet between my molars. This goes on until Klaus makes a run for the bathroom. I go in to check on him. He's face down in front of the toilet. He almost made it. I leave him be and go back to the living room, where someone hands me a bong. I take a hit, mostly charred tobacco. The nicotine hits me hard, goes straight to my head. I start sweating, get the swerves. I pull the blister-pack from my pocket, ask the guy what it says on the package. "Morphine," he says. I look surprised then double over, and just before I curl to the floor I see the city lights through a rain-streaked window. For a moment it's like looking at the sun through a Coke bottle, then it fades to black.

In the final scene, I wear an ill-fitting leather jacket, sit on the seat of a sunken bicycle. I'm bald as a stone, staring off at the cityscape, due north. I watch, dead still, as a certain circumpolar constellation skirts low across the horizon. The sky above the overglow is purple, like a crushed velvet canopy quilted by stars, each one radiating erratic beams. At my feet is a knapsack holding nothing but a notebook, and folded inside, a cheap, one-way airline ticket. An envelope full of green powder bulges in my breast pocket, the pulverized dust of dried Cambodian Psilocybes, the remnants of what was once sixty-five red-and-white capsules. I take pinches of the dust and gum them like snuff.

In a cheap movie this is where I would laugh a couple times, then break the fourth wall and enter into a soliloquy, to narrate my life as it happens.

I might say, "I dissolved into self-induced schizophrenia as I sat pinching the green stuff every few minutes until the word minutes lost meaning, becoming some hysterical epistemological abstraction: minutes."

It could go into ultra-hazy, deep-background flashbacks, all trippy and blurry, like the visions I'm having: It's me, or some towhead who might be me, five years old in a barn. I'm pulling an old pop bottle from the comcrib. Inside there's a live mouse that ate all the cob, got too swollen to escape.

Or it will end with enigmatic finesse: a close-up zoom of my notebook as I hold it to my nose, scribbling in low light the final line of a bad song... She knows the difference between lonely and lonesome....

I reach into my pocket and take a pinch of the green dust. There's another big crane shot, but this time it starts with my face--my eyes dilated into black holes--then pulls away to reveal the skyline as it begins glowing weakly in the east. The shot pulls farther back until the whole city is in frame, and a single contrail traces a jet as it takes off in the distance without me.