The Old Gray Mare (She Ain't What She Used To Be)

It ain't easy being the World's Oldest Woman. You die at least once a decade and just keep getting older.

In 1986, she shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 115. By 1993, she had passed on again, 117 years young, and in Pennsylvania of all places. As it stands, according to the people at Guinness, the World's Oldest Woman is forever 122, buried well deep in a graveyard somewhere in the French town where Van Gogh painted Cafe Terrace at Night, not long after her thirteenth birthday. She claimed to have met the guy. 

But there remain a handful of hardscrabble Georgian villagers who would tell you that 122 is some weak shit, indeed. They come from a hard country. People die young there, and live even longer. They would have you know that the World's Oldest Woman was 132 years old when the almighty tamada finally summoned her to the great supra in the sky last September.

Her name was Antisa Khvichava, and I met her a couple of months before she died.

I was sitting on the couch with my host family on a Tuesday night, watching the Georgian news, feeling like the World's Oldest Man. It had already been a long summer. All my old friends were off on vacation, my new friends yet to arrive, so there was mostly nothing to do, and nothing whatsoever to insulate me from my host mother. Neither of my bank accounts were functioning, so I also happened to be flat broke. Escape was not an option. I couldn't even afford to leave the house - or at least, if I did, there was nowhere but noplace to go. 

It wasn't a total loss. I'd learned a lot of Georgian. I'd read a lot of books. And I'd taught myself how to use my busted left hand again, mostly through having my ass handed to me by my host brother, playing a bootleg version of Pro Evolution Soccer. We played every night, on ye olde PC. And before long, I could type again. Other than that, all we had was potatoes, cucumbers, plenty of salt, and the Georgian news to keep us sustained and relatively sane. 

I can't say from experience, but I suspect that the Georgian news is not fundamentally different from what North Koreans watch in North Korea. Plenty of portly bureaucrats inspecting things. Plenty of portly bureaucrats inspecting other things. We had spent several hours that Tuesday evening watching portly Georgian bureaucrats inspect things and other things when my host family suddenly sprang into animation. My host mom cranked up the volume to bowel-releasing decibel levels. The kids and I were told to shut up. And there on the television screen appeared not another portly bureaucrat, but a weatherbeaten scrap of splotchy brown skin shrouded in bedsheets.

"What is that?" I asked.
"That," said my host mom, "is the World's Oldest Woman."
"Cool," I said. "How old is she?"
"132."

I never got the hang of the Georgian numeral system, nor did I ever put much faith in village folklore – the same folklore that would have you wear a wet scarf to cure strep throat; the very same that would have you drink 120 proof cha-cha to cancel out a headache – so I was doubly unconvinced.

"World's Oldest Woman," I murmured.
"She lives here, you know," said my host mom.
"In Georgia?"
"Yes. In Sachino."
"Sachino? We've been there before. That's five minutes away."
"It is," she said. "I was born there."
"Do you know her?"
"Of course I do. She was a hundred years old when I was born."
"Is she really the World's Oldest Woman?"
"Yes. There can be no doubt."
"I'd very much like to meet her."
"What are you doing Friday?"
"Meeting the World's Oldest Woman," I said.

My arrival in Sachino was as good an excuse as any for the villagers there to throw a supra, so a supra was thrown. The first familiar person I bumped into was Lado, a tall, wiry dude with all the delicate mannerisms of a meth-head. I shook his shaky hand and he tugged me back into a garden shed. I figured he was going to get me drunk, or murder me, or perhaps first one and then the other.

"Check this out," he said.
He kicked back a door and there, in a bucket full of blood, was a severed cow head.
"Interesting, no?"
I nodded.
"Very interesting, Lado."

My host grandma found us in there, saw the cow head, saw the delicate foreigner, and shook a splotchy index finger at Lado.

"Sadisti!" she cried. "Sadisti!"

Lado and I wandered back out to the front lawn and joined the oldsters who were gathered there, huddled around a table.

"Do you know this game?" asked Lado.
"Sitting around drinking and smoking?" 
"No. Backgammon."
"I don't know anything about it."
"But everybody in the world knows this game."
"Not me."
"Then I will teach you."

The first thing I had to learn was an alternate numeral system that Mingrelians only use when they're playing backgammon. I memorized the numbers and immediately forgot them. It didn't really matter anyway. The oldsters, watching me play, swiftly established that I had the cognitive capacity of a Svani goatherd and took over operations. I sat and watched them play against Lado.

"Congratulations," said one of the oldsters, when I was already well past half-asleep, "you won."
"Good game," said Lado, and shook my hand.
I was undefeated, and remain so.

We got up and shook every palsied oldster hand held out to us. Then Lado tugged me over to the chicken coop. He had something else to show me. He plucked up one of the birds at random, threw it down on a tree stump, and sliced its head off with a bowie knife. Sadisti, indeed.

The adults were hard at work fixing dinner, so my host mom told me and my host brother to go down to the river and do kid stuff. The path took us through the village graveyard. 

The modern Georgian tombstone is a sight to behold. You wouldn't want to order one for yourself. It is not clear to me how exactly the things are made, but they have the appearance of having been screen printed in a t-shirt shop. A photograph of the deceased, at his or her prime in life, no wart or nosehair omitted, everything chiseled into the stone much too precisely. I respect Georgians and I respect their dead, but "tacky" is the word that springs to mind when it comes to their tombstones. Nobody wants to be remembered the way they actually were. Or at least I don't. One such tombstone, belonging to my friend's host cousin, featured the poor guy jabbering into a mid-90's first-edition Nokia cellphone that was roughly twice the size of his head. Sad. Embarrassing. Permanent. In any case, no reception wherever he's at.

There were pigs rooting around in the graveyard and a few of the more devout ones were trying to get into the church. My host brother punted them away and we went inside. We stood in the back and watched a poor old babushka wail at the altar until the guilty itch of heathenism crept up my spine. I shuddered a bit and made instinctively for the door. My host brother looked at me and shrugged. We went down to the river.

We skipped stones, something my host brother is very good at, a skill I never mastered because the mucky Missouri of my youth was the sort of river where you were liable to peg a rotted corpse six times out of ten. My host brother got tired of trying to teach an old hobo new tricks, so we started gathering up great big boulders and chucking them willy-nilly into the river, reversing tens of thousands of years of geology in about five minutes, laughing and laughing and scaring the bejeezus out of the muddy mudskippers. 

That got old, too. And exhausting. I sat down on a rock and smoked a Pirveli and watched my host brother build a small boat out of a stray chunk of cardboard, some twigs and some threads of grass. This, I thought, was a pretty neat idea.

"We should write a message and stick it on the boat," I suggested. "Maybe someone will find it. Maybe we'll find it when we get back to Jgali."

I was the Hobbes to his Calvin. He, the Calvin to my Hobbes. He thought this was a dumb idea. My host brother had nothing of the sort in mind. He nudged the boat adrift and pummeled it with stones until it sunk to the bottom.

We walked upstream a bit until my host brother found a full bottle of water bobbing against the banks. He handed it to me and gestured for me to throw it at something. I tried to bounce it off a nearby pile of stones, to see what would happen. What happened was: the cap blew off and everything exploded in my face. And it wasn't water. It was pure cha-cha. I nearly puked on the spot. I hadn't brought a change of clothes to Sachino, so I'd have to spend the next couple days smelling like I'd been on a weeklong bender. Luckily, for most Georgian men, such is seldom far from the truth. So I'd blend right in. More or less.     

Later that night, there was wine and there was toasting. Then there was a power outage, which made drinking more difficult than usual. In the darkness, I ran into a dude named Sachino who was born in Sachino. I told him that my name was Grand Forks, North Dakota. Not a bad evening. But I went to bed early. I had a date with the World's Oldest Woman the following afternoon and I couldn't afford to show up looking more haggard than she did.

The next day, I sat around in the living room (where my temporary bed happened to be) and read a book about Georgia's most recent war with Russia. I couldn't make much sense out of it. The war or the book. I put the book down and watched and waited. People kept popping in and out. They'd probably been watching me sleep. There were host cousins running rampant, host cousins I'd never met before, host cousins whose duty it was to give me semi-permanent cluster headaches. They were from Tbilisi, the big city, which meant that they possessed all sorts of things that my host siblings did not: smartphones, new clothes, good haircuts, snotty accents, decent English teachers, decent English. I got to witness the way my host sister's eyes glazed over the first time she held a smartphone in her hands, and it reminded me of the way the religious neighbor kids used to zone out when they came over to my house and saw that we had Predator on VHS. Within an hour of touching the thing, she was begging me to sign her up for Facebook.

"The Face Book?" I said. "Never heard of it."

I'd sooner set a kid up with a coke connect.

I decided to take a nap. Feeling mighty old, indeed. And I slept and I dreamt that I was trapped in a fundamentalist Christian concentration camp, but that I'd broken out of it by making a really good joke. My host sister woke me up before I could remember how it went.

"We are go to see old woman soon," my host sister said, "but we wait for our guide."
"Guide?"
"Yes," said my host sister, giggling. "She is wery beautiful woman."
"Is that a fact?"
"Wery beautiful. Wery, wery beautiful."

It was impossible to unscramble the giggling. There was a slight chance - a wery slight chance - that our guide would turn out to be the one young, single, beautiful woman in the entire Mingrelian countryside, and that I'd need to take a quick shower and wash my clothes in a foamy bucket full of quantum anti-cha-cha and put on some deodorant before she arrived. But this did not strike me as especially likely, or even possible, so I decided that I would tempt fate and remain rurally grody.

There was a knock at the living room door. It opened. And in walked a gender-neutral photocopy of Lado.

"Do you think she is very beautiful?" giggled my host sister.
I wasn't at all sure what to say.
"You are confuse," said my host sister. "That because he is not girl and she is not boy."
"Oh," I said. "I see."
"You have this in America?"
"Yes," I said. "We do have this in America."
"This Lado's sister," she said, "or brother. Nobody know."
She giggled. 
"Grow up," I said to my host sister.
"My name is Eliso," said Eliso.

We shook hands.
"Nice to meet you," I said.
"You too. The old woman is not ready yet. Let's go to the river."

We rounded up Nini - my five year old host cousin, she of the Hello Kitty smartphone - and we went walking along the river. Lado's intersex sibling had a destination in mind, but as often happened, I did not know the Georgian word for where we were going and nobody knew the English word for where we were going, and our game of charades only confused me further. So we kept walking. We plucked foul-smelling berries from the trees and ate them. My host sister taunted me with snails. Nini recited all the foul words she'd learned from my host brother, who had learned them from me. We'd been walking about an hour when we came upon a waterfall storming down from the mouth of a cave, like something out of The Goonies.

The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for generating fear responses in humans, and I am convinced that most Georgians do not have one. My host sister and Eliso kicked off their shoes. Eliso picked up Nini and sat the fragile, pretty, delicate little five year old girl on his or her shoulders. They began scaling the slick, twenty foot vertical wall up to the mouth of the cave. My host sister tried to get me to come with them, but I'd just gotten my cast removed. I'd sworn off acts of physical idiocy for the time being. In any case, I was far too chickenshit to do anything of the sort. I'd always been. Too chickenshit. I was too chickenshit to even watch them climb. That girl. If she fell. While they climbed, I lingered near the base of the waterfall. Just in case. But when they arrived at the top, I could hear their voices reverberating high up above, telling me how beautiful it was up there, telling me to climb up there myself. I wouldn't. I couldn't. I never would or could. I sat down on a rock and smoked a Pirveli.  

Then we walked back into town. My host brother was waiting for us. And together we walked to the house of the World's Oldest Woman. Eliso opened the front gate and we followed. An old woman was working in the front lawn, drawing water from the well. She unstooped slightly when she saw us coming.

"Hello!" called Eliso. 
The old woman said nothing.
"This is my foreign tourist friend," Eliso said, indicating yours truly. "He thinks your grandma is fascinating and wants to take some pictures with her."

I pieced together what was being said and cringed. The word turisti rubbed me the wrong way. I hadn't come to gawk. A picture with the World's Oldest Woman was not what I had in mind. But what did I have in mind, exactly? What did I hope to accomplish by meeting someone over one hundred years my senior? Would I have even come in the first place if, say, she were merely 112? I began to feel suspicious of myself, and suspicious of my motives, and all and all, tremendously guilty in the residually Catholic way.  

"Can we come inside and see her?" asked Eliso.
"She is not feeling very well these days," said the old woman, "but I will see if it's okay."
"Look," I said to Eliso, after the old woman had shuffled inside, "it's not important. We can go. We should go."
"But we're already here. You've traveled so far."

An old man had come out onto the porch, hunching along on a cane. He looked us over and hobbled back inside.

"Her son," said Eliso.

After a while, the old woman came back outside.
"You can come in," she said.

It was a dark, clammy room, faded photos hanging here and there, no furniture at all but a cot in the corner, pressed up against the wall. And lying in the cot was the World's Oldest Woman.

Eliso nudged me.
"Say something."

I stepped forward.

"Hello," I said.

A pair of eyes emerged from the face, seemed to trace all over the room before they finally settled on me.

"How are you?" I asked in Mingrelian.
She said nothing, so I switched over to Georgian.
"Hello," I said. "How are you?"
She watched me. We made eye contact. She said nothing. I felt like a sperm cell.

"Well," I said, "I am from America. I am an English teacher. I teach English near Sachino, in a village called Jgali. It is very nice to meet you." 

The room expanded with silence. My host brother was shifting around and staring at his shoes. Nobody said a word. 

"We must go now," I said. "Long live you and your family."

I bowed slightly - a nervous holdover from my time in Asia - and turned around to leave. On the porch, the granddaughter of the World's Oldest Woman - no spring chicken herself - was waiting for us.

"She cannot understand. She has hearing problems," she explained to us, "and brain problems."

And that was it.

We went back to the house. Most of the hungover men playing backgammon were in even worse shape than the World's Oldest Woman. They still wanted to drink with me. My host mom didn't think this would be a good idea and I, for once, agreed with her. We got into a car with a guy named Soso - every bit as mediocre as his name would suggest - who drove us the five minutes to Jgali and then tried to touch me for ten lari. Gas money, he said. Fortunately, I was still broke.

In the end, all I could think of was how positively dumb it was for me to wish a long life upon the World's Oldest Woman.

Not pictured: The Author, because he sometimes has respect for human dignity.
(Photograph: David Mdzinarishvili/Reuters)

It wasn't until I straightened out matters at the bank - which takes about as long as you might imagine in Georgia - that I was able to get near the internet again, and when I finally did, I sat down and did some cursory research. Yes, it was true that Antisa Khvichava claimed to be 132 years old, and it was true that nobody could prove that she wasn't. But it was also true that nobody could prove that she was. She had grown up during an especially dicey epoch of Georgian history, and Georgia happens to be a country that has known very many dicey epochs, indeed.

She claimed to have been born on July 8th, 1880, and had a Soviet passport testifying in her favor. If said Soviet passport is testifying truthfully, she would've been 23 when the Wright Brothers took to the skies, 52 when Hitler came to power, and would've just turned 89 when human beings first walked on the moon. 

There are plenty of reasons for doubt. For one thing, no human being - save for Methuselah - has ever lived past the age of 122. 132 would seem to be quite a leap forward. For another, she would've had to have given birth to her son - the codgerly cane-supported fellow I met on her stoop - when she was sixty years old. More likely than not, nobody will ever know how old Antisa Khvichava was when she died. But I'm reasonably certain that the World's Oldest Woman I met was not, in fact, the World's Oldest Woman.

But she lived a very, very, very long time. That much is beyond doubt. She lived through all manner of horrible, and perhaps occasionally wonderful, things that I will never even be able to begin to imagine. She will almost certainly remain the oldest person I will ever meet, however long I live, and I don't plan on sticking around for 132 years.

She attributed her longevity to Georgian brandy - a substance that has killed many other Georgians well before their time, so perhaps it balances out somehow - and she was fairly independent, up until the very end. At her supposed age of 130, she could still do pretty much everything for herself. She only needed help getting to the family outhouse. Which was more than I could manage some nights in Georgia.

All of this information was obtained by Western journalists, who visited her village, and interviewed her through Georgian interpreters, and photographed her, generally with birthday cakes involved. I wonder where the journalists went for lunch. Where they shacked up. What they did for amusement. I wonder what they thought of the place. I wonder whether they ever ventured north to Jgali, where I lived. I never did the work any of them did. That's not my job. I have no job. But for what it's worth, I was probably the last foreigner Antisa Khvichava ever saw. Meeting her certainly changed me. I doubt I left any impression upon her at all.

Pseudosupra

I realized much too late how weird my living situation was. Well before I first donned the teal racecar t-shirt of Orthodox Georgian shame, I'd invited a bunch of foreigners to my host household for an end-of-semester supra. Weird Beard, the Irishman, and a nice girl named Leslie - in a few short hours, they'd be caught up in the thick of it, surrounded by adoring villagers from a village not their own, drinking, drunk, drunken. Nobody in my host family had seen more than two non-Georgians in their lives. That night, they were to see four of them in action simultaneously.

In Georgia, a supra is a nominally formal occasion in which the men drink homemade wine and homemade vodka to elephantine excess while the women set the table, cook a twelve-course meal, collect dirty dishes, wash them, drink a toast or two while remaining sober and clear-headed and servile, for they must constantly empty ashtrays and bring new ones, fix coffee, make dessert, mop up vomit ... The men are expected to drink. Is it ever exhausting to be a man.

The men drink shots, shots of cha-cha, shots of wine. There is no savoring, no nursing, and there is no drinking alone. There is no drinking at all unless a toast is proposed, and all toasting runs through the tamada: essentially, the Stalin of the supra. He appoints the toaster and he nominates the toastees. You may politely ask the tamada for permission to stand up and propose a toast of your own, but you may never, ever, under any circumstances usurp the tamada's toast. I had quite a notorious reputation for doing so without meaning to - particularly after that fateful tenth toast of the evening - and for that reason, I became known far and wide as The Rogue Tamada of Samegrelo Province, one of many nicknames I was to acquire during my ten months in Georgia.

As the night escalates, shot glasses and wine glasses are put away and the horns come out. They are literal horns, the sort that cuckolds wear: hollowed-out cow horns, hollowed-out bull horns. These, usually, can be found dangling from the walls of any Georgian living room, regardless of whether there is drinking going on or not (and there usually is). The tamada starts with the small horns first, then moves up through his collection until, by the end of the night, you find yourself drinking out of a horn the size of your head, something that might well have belonged to a mythical or prehistoric beast. And you are expected to guzzle everything down at a single go. This is why I described the supra as a nominally formal occasion. Things always start out formally enough, but how would Emily Post have you projectile vomit all over someone else's living room floor?

I could sense the electricity in the house when I woke up on Supra Bowl Sunday - it was the only electricity we'd had all week - and by noon I was nearly blinded by the mischievous gleam in my host dad's eyes. My liver ached preemptively. I paced the house while my host dad lugged around ominous-looking plastic jugs and my host mom dusted under our feet. I felt the need to coach my host parents, the way you might coach your actual parents before bringing over your girlfriend for the first time. But of course, there was no point in worrying about anything: the Georgians would be Georgian, the Westerners would be Western, and my host mom would be my host mom, and I would be horrifically embarrassed at some point, and the night would get out of hand in the weirdest of ways. This was all beyond my control. There was nothing to do but pace around and hope that everyone else got drunk enough at the supra for me to steer the morning-after narrative in my favor.

Weird Beard was the first to show up, just shy of 4 PM. My host dad was already out on the piss somewhere else. The rest of the family gathered around on the porch to analyze (and psychoanalyze) Weird Beard in a language that neither he nor I quite understood.

"He's so handsome," said my host sister. "His beard is much better than your beard."
"Uh," said Weird Beard, "what did she say?"
"She said that you're handsome, and that your beard is better than my beard."
"Thanks," said Weird Beard.
"We want you to live here, not Kiti."
"They say that you should live here, not me."
"I like my host family a lot," said Weird Beard, "but thanks."
"Here," I said, tugging Weird Beard by the sleeve, "lemme show you my digs."
"Dang," he said, "how'd your Georgian get so good?"
"It's not," I said, "but if it is, it's because these people run my life."

My room was much the same as any other Georgian room, but that's not what Weird Beard had come to see. He wanted to see the shirt.

"Good God almighty. She makes you wear that?"
"I know, right?"
"So."
"So?"
"Put it on for me."
"No."

Host dad came swaggering back home and summoned us menfolk to the living room. A Big Beautiful Babushka named Nino had showed up. A bottle of high octane cha-cha had appeared. The night had begun.

My host dad was tamada by default. He filled our shot glasses. He proposed a toast to mothers. I clinked glasses with him, with Weird Beard, with Nino. My host mom, meanwhile, was off scrubbing the toilet.

"Sheni deda, sheni deda, sheni deda," I said. "Your mother, your mother, your mother."

Weird Beard nudged me in the ribs.

"Dude," he said. "What the hell?"
"Eh?"
"Do you have any idea what you just said?"
Nino's face had gone red. It looked like her eyes were about to pop out of her head and go flying across the living room. Finally, she could keep it in no longer. She busted up laughing.
"Kiti," she crowed. "Oh, Kiti! Sheni deda!"
She smacked the flat of her palm against the top of her balled-up fist, Georgian Sign Language for "fuck you."
"Seriously? Is that what I said?"
Weird Beard nodded.
"Huh. I had no idea," I said, "but I guess that makes sense. Yo mama. Same in English, no?"
We drank. Off to a good start.

There was a toast to international friendship. Obama, Saakashvili, megobrebi - gaumarjos! A toast to family. Ojakhis gaumarjos! A toast to the deceased.

"Gaumarjos!" I chimed.

Weird Beard nudged me in the ribs. They were starting to hurt, the ribs were.

"Dude," he said. "Think about what you just said."
"What?"
"Dead people. Cheers!"
"Shit," I said.
"Nicely done."
"At this rate, I'm never going to get to be tamada."
"Give it a couple more toasts. You'll go rogue. I just know you will."

My host mom decided it was time for us to switch over to wine. So much the better, I figured. She snatched up the bottle of cha-cha, put it in a box and locked it away in a cupboard like it was the Lost Ark. My host dad left the room and returned with a couple Pepsi bottles full of wine. He filled our glasses. Then he proposed a toast to me. I raised my glass.

"To me, I guess."
"To Oaf Loaf," said Weird Beard.
"Kitis gaumarjos!" cried host dad.
We drank.
I glanced over at Weird Beard.
Weird Beard glanced over at me.
We sat there in silence for a minute or two while host dad topped us off.
"Hey," said Weird Beard. "Notice anything unusual about the wine?"
"Yes. You?"
"There isn't anything in it."
"You're right."
"It's grape juice."
"It is grape juice."
Panic.
"You'd better call the Irishman," said Weird Beard.

"Yes, boyyyyy," said the Irishman. "What's the crack?"
"You still coming over?"
"Aye, reckon I'll be there in an heur, so I will."
"You might want to bring some party supplies."
"To a supra? Are ye mental?"
"The wine," I said. "It's grape juice."
"Aye, fer fook's sakes ... "

Pounding shot after shot of bootleg Welch's. Livers growing bored. Kidneys failing. One by one, the neighbors came tromping in. A digital camera was produced. Videos were taken of Weird Beard and I sitting around, self-conscious as all get-out. The Irishman arrived with a mysterious black bag that he stashed in my room. He sat down and chugged grape juice with us. It was immediately clear that nobody liked the Irishman.

My host sister pulled me aside.
"The Irishman is very bad," she said. "Very bad. He have a very bad character."
"He's been here ten minutes," I said.
"He is stupid and very bad."
"Fair enough."

My host mom mocked the Irishman's English, made a chipmunk face and went bwah-bwah-bwah-bwahhh. Weird Beard shook his head.
"Is your host mom making fun of the Irishman?"
"I believe she is."
"That's bullshit," he said. "Only we're allowed to make fun of the Irishman."

The Irishman had broken out in a sweat. He is a man who knows when he is unwelcome. He tried to ingratiate himself with the family the only way he knew how: by speaking lousy Georgian to my two year old host cousin.

"Batara bichi! Modi, modi!" he cooed. "Little boy! Come here!"
My host cousin shook his head, no. He wasn't going anywhere.
"Batara bichi!" scoffed my host mom later in the evening. "Your Irish friend is an idiot."

Leslie arrived and could immediately sense that things had gotten weirder than planned. Everyone marveled at her red hair. She had stolen the show and I could tell she wanted badly to leave. To her credit, she stayed until the bitter end. We knocked back grape juice, took frequent bathroom breaks, snuck off to the mysterious black bag for a nip or two, reconvened in the interrogation chamber for up-close videos and personal questions and mild humiliations of all sorts. It was nine PM at a Georgian supra and the four of us were stone sober. Under much host familial pressure, I finally caved and did a miserable breakdance routine on the living room floor. Thank God they got that on video. When I returned to the couch, Weird Beard was shaking his head with disgust.

"Enough is enough," he said. "Dinner's over. We've been polite. We've done our bit. Let's head into town and speak some English."
"You think we can pull it off?"
"I'll do the talking," he said. "Your host family actually likes me."
We looked over at the Irishman, who lowered his head.

Weird Beard got to work on my host dad, who was several sheets to the wind thanks to a secret stash that his best friend - a sixty year old geezer with the improbable name of Hooha - had smuggled in without sharing. My host dad agreed to summon a taxi. I went to my room, put on some cologne, took a little nip, ran into Weird Beard in the hallway.
"We're good," he said. "I made your dad promise not to tell your mom."
"Excellent."
"Ten minutes. I'll give the signal."

It was very nearly the perfect crime. A cab pulled up in front of my house. My host mom was next door. The four of us bid the village adieu and piled into the cab.

"Tsalenjikha," said Weird Beard, "and step on it."
The cabby wouldn't budge. He was looking at something in his rear view mirror. Objects are closer than they appear, et cetera.
The back door shot open.
"Kiti! Where are you going?"
"Um," I said. "We. We are going. Going into town. Be back soon."
"Why? What's in town?"
"It was good," I said. "A good evening. Thank you for everything. But now. Together we will go. To town. Be back soon."
"They can go," she said. "You cannot go."
"But - "
"You cannot go."
"But - "
"But what?"
"But ... me katsi var," I squeaked. I am a man.
"You are going nowhere."
She grabbed my leg and started tugging.
"What the hell," I said.
"Drive," Weird Beard said to the cabby.
"Don't drive!" I shouted.
I was halfway out the door.
"Just go," said Weird Beard. "Now."
I could feel my shoe sliding off.
"Man up," Weird Beard said to me. "Say something!"
I could feel my leg sliding off.
"Mom," I said. "Mom."
She looked up.
"I'm 29 years old," I said. "I'm going into town with my friends."
"Okay," she said. "But you're in big trouble when you get back."
She slammed the door, very nearly on my leg.
"Are we ready?" asked the cabby. He was half-asleep by then.
I looked around and nodded.
"Yes. I do believe we're ready."

Unfortunately, no official minutes were kept for the night that followed. Our minds lapsed into time lapse mode. Weird Beard caught a cab home at some point. Leslie lived just down the road. The Irishman and I hiked eight kilometers in pitch darkness back to my house, ogled the constellations and waxed metaphysical along the way, slipped on cow patties times beyond number, got lost twice before realizing we weren't lost at all, finally slipped past the guard dog, tiptoed past my host mom's lair, and bolted ourselves in my room. We had a good laugh about it all and went to sleep. I woke up at eight the next morning.

"Jeesus," groaned the Irishman. "Where the fook am I?"
"My house," I said. I threw on my suit coat.
"What time is it?"
"Eight."
"What the fook are you doing?"
"Going to work," I said.
"How is that even fooking possible?"
"It just is," I said. "Get some sleep. I'll be back in a couple of hours. Want me to lock the door?"
The Irishman was already asleep.

An hour or so later, my host mom broke into my room to do God knows what. She found a half-naked Irishman in my bed. A certain scene from The Godfather springs to mind. My only regret is not having been there to witness it.

So there was that.

At any rate. Looks like I'm the only tamada left. So I'd like to use this final paragraph to propose a toast, if you don't mind. Here's to Georgia. Here's to America. Here's to David Bowie. Here's to The Wire. Here's to friendship. And here's to host mothers. Sheni dedas, gaumarjos!

Racecar is No Longer My Favorite Palindrome (or Is My Favorite Palindrome No Longer Racecar?)

"Happy host families are all alike; every unhappy host family is unhappy in its own way."
- Leo "Tolstoy" Garbleson (TLG Volunteer, Samegrelo Province, Class of 1972)

My host mom came home one afternoon with a great big plastic bag full of crap. I was reading on the porch. She reached into the bag and pulled out a teal green t-shirt. She unfurled it in front of me. I saw that it had racecars on the front. The hounds of dread bayed from the very depths of my bowels.

"So. What do you think?"
"It's interesting."
"Try it on."
"But - "
"But what?"

I looked around, searching all of spacetime for a zippered pocket to climb out through.

"Nothing," I said. "I'll go try it on."

I went to my room and paced around its perimeter. The wood creaked and groaned under my Pumas. I launched into a soliloquy of sorts, the kind of monologue between internal and external where you gesticulate and mouth foul words to yourself without making so much as a sound. The t-shirt lay spread out across my bed. It was at least a double-XL, the size of a national flag. Criminy, I mouthed, I'm not that fat!

I'm colorblind, so I've never fully experienced teal, but this shirt was the sort of color that violated even my stunted sense of sartorial taste. And like I said, there were fucking racecars on the front.

Finally, after a moment of meditation, in which I sat at the edge of my bed with my fingers massaging my forehead and my palm shielding my eyes from the absurdity of the life I'd so freely chosen for myself, I unbuttoned the dress shirt I'd worn to work, navigating the sleeve somewhat skillfully over the bazooka of a cast entombing my left arm, and I put on the racecar shirt. Then I took my paisley patterned sling and slung it over my neck, stuck my busted arm through the sling. I walked over to the mirror. I wanted to beat the shit out of my own reflection. I looked like some sort of white trash time-traveling trainwreck. I saw that there was a price tag stuck to the front of the shirt. Fifteen lari. I wasn't sure whether that meant the shirt was a bargain or an egregious waste of money that would've been better spent on any salable object in the known universe. Pretty sure the latter, seeing how we'd all been eating cucumbers for a month. Either way, I thought I'd play it safe and leave the price tag on.

I trudged out to the porch, shamefaced as a shaven dog. My host mom clapped her hands. My host sister nodded approvingly. My host brother sat motionless with his arms crossed; he knew the score. I did a little pirouette, then I went back to my room, removed the shirt, and locked myself in with Tolstoy for the remainder of the evening.

You'd think that would've been the end of it, but the next morning, my host mom refused to let me go to school until I'd changed out of what I was wearing and put on the shirt. I contended that it was cold - and indeed it was - but in the end, I was badgered into wearing it as an undershirt. Later, in the teacher's lounge, my host mom got me to lift up my sweater so that seven fluorescent yellow racecars could come zooming out from my torso, and the old ladies applauded. What a good host mother you have, she buys you t-shirts with racecars on the front, et cetera.

As the weeks walked by and the northern hemisphere warmed, it became harder and harder for me to find a convincing excuse to not be wearing the shirt at all times, short of coming out and telling my host mom directly that I hated it because it made me look like a child. In retrospect, that is precisely the tact I ought to have taken. Instead, I remained polite, lowered my head, hemmed and hawed and mumbled whenever the shirt came up. Why aren't you wearing your shirt? I wore it yesterday. You wear the same thing every day all the time! But it's not clean? None of your clothes are clean! I don't like racecars? You watch auto racing every day with your brother! (This latter was true, but only because, as far as Georgian satellite TV went, auto racing was marginally preferable to the Turkmenistani Comedy Hour.)

Things finally came to a head towards the ass-end of my first semester. A friend of mine in the next town over was having her students put on a choral concert. It was something of a farewell concert, too, because she was leaving Georgia a couple weeks after. In short, it was a formal occasion. I put on a dress shirt, a tie, and my best suit coat (which also happens to be my worst suit coat). I'd ironed some slacks the night before by stacking a row of books across them and leaving them atop the Soviet-era upright piano. The next afternoon, on my way out the door, I bumped into my host mom coming home from school.

"You are going to the concert?"
"Yes, I'm going to the concert. See you later!"
"Wait," she said. "Where's your shirt?"
"Shirt?"
I tugged at my collar.
"No," she said, "your shirt."
"I'm wearing two of them."
A standoff, so it was.
"You know the shirt," she said. "You know, the shirt."
I nodded.
"I know the shirt."
"So why aren't you wearing it?"
I said nothing.
"Go put it on," she said.
"It's a concert," I said. "Suit. Tie. Pants."
"Shirt."
"I'm already late. I've got to go."

I dribbled forward and she boxed out the lane. Basketball fundamentals. I juked left. She mirror juked right. The shirt, the shirt, the shirt. This went on for an unbelievably long time.

Imagine for a moment a 29 year old man showing up to a choir concert in a XXXL teal green t-shirt with racecars zipping across the front. I wasn't having it. And my host mom, all of 35, wasn't having it from her end, either. Like I said: it was a standoff, so it was. I would be inclined to say that I prevailed in the end, except that as I was making my way down the stairs, I realized that I had no idea what time the marshrutka into town came by. So I was thrust back into the role of the dependent, racecar-t-shirt-wearing host child.

"Uh, hey, mom," I said over my shoulder. "When's the next marshrutka?"
"3:30," she murmured.

A glance at my watch: it was 2:30. The concert was at five. Determined not to show up a sweaty, bedraggled mess, I opted not to walk the eight kilometers into town and sat down instead with my host brother in the living room and watched auto racing for about a half hour.

When I went out to the front lawn to catch the marshrutka, my host mom tagged along. 3:30 came and went. No marshrutka.

"Say, Levani," she called to a neighbor. "When is the last marshrutka into town?"
"Same as it ever was," said the neighbor. "2:30."
"Oops," said my host mom. "You'd better start walking."

Suffice it to say, I missed the concert.

I don't mean to slag off on my Georgian host family more than I ought to. Really, I thought they were wonderful people. If nothing else, they kept me alive for ten months, despite my best efforts. But to quote Garbleson (1972), "every unhappy host family is unhappy in its own way." And there were times in which I was very unhappy, indeed.

Tragically, I do not have any pictures of the t-shirt, or of myself wearing the t-shirt. If I recall correctly, I included the t-shirt in my outgoing trash the very night of the concert I missed. I was in a foul mood. Waste not, want not, I know; but also true: waste if you want not. More to the point: I don't have many pictures of anything from Georgia, because someone in my host family ransacked my room, found my camera, used it, destroyed it, and returned it to my desk drawer as though nothing had happened - and that was well before any of this had happened.

So there was that.

St. Michelin

For a long time I used to go to bed early ... If nothing else, ten months in a Georgian village is a good way to catch up on one's reading, and one's sleep.

I was lying in bed around nine PM, trying to read Proust. My host family was outside, being loud for the sake of being loud, on a warm-ish evening in early spring. It would be easy to say here, from the vantage point of The Reader, that I, as a cultural ambassador, should've been out there in the lawn being loud with the fam instead of locking myself away in my room with a book, but my days by then were a hyper-social grind, surrounded by humanoids at all times, contorting my face into a smile as my every little quirk (of which there are many) was dissected by people who otherwise knew nothing about me, all in a grammatically taxing backwoods Transcaucasian dialect, to boot. For sanity's sake, it was necessary to hide out in my room once in a while. It is true that for a long time I used to go to bed early.

During the day, I did my job with patience and grace, I think. I taught my classes. I helped my host sister with her English and her German, even her Mandarin Chinese. I engineered bizarre third world assault weapons with my host brother and we tested them out on our host cousin, with satisfactory results. I complimented the hell out of my host mother's potato-and-cucumber cooking and watched the boob tube with host dad until my brainstuff came bleeding out both ears. But I always made sure that the nights were my own. Every moment I spent alone was sacred to me. And no matter how much sleep I got, sleep was sacred, too. I could dream there. I could've stayed in bed forever. I tried to.

For a long time ... for a long time ... I read until my eyes crossed and the words on the page congealed into an ink-black clot. I didn't read very far. I put the book down, walked across the room to switch off the lights, and flopped down in bed. ... I used to go to bed early ... 

Ten minutes later, I was awakened by the pick-pock of pebbles pitched up against my window. Then, the familiar cry:

Kiti! Ki-ti! Ki-tiiiii!

I had learned to shake off host parental summonses by feigning some sort of coma, but I knew game-theory-wise that on the night in question, the annoyance of confronting my host mom head-on would amount to marginally less net annoyance than lying awake while she threw pebbles at my window for the better part of an hour. In my boxers, then, I unbolted my window and, like a minor league pope, raised my arm in salutation and gave my host family my blessing.

"Huh?" I said.
"Kiti," host mom barked, "let's go!"
"Where?"
"Get down here! Let's go!"
"Where are we going?"
"Will you just get down here so we can go?"
"But," I objected, "I don't know where we're going!"
"We're going to see the [Georgian word I was not familiar with at the time]!"
"What's a [Georgian word]?"
"You'll see when we get there! Let's go!"
"But I want to sleep and I don't have any clothes on and I don't know where we're going and I don't know what a [GW] is!"
A host maternal snort.
"Just come down here! You'll see!"

There was a time, during my second of four puberties, when I full-throatedly embraced the Nietzschean philosophy of yea-saying, which I took rather too literally to mean that I should say yea to each and every odd little invitation thrown my way. It wasn't until my third of four puberties that I realized how unsustainable a principle this was when put into practice, both because it resulted in a lot of undeserved hangovers, and because, when living abroad, one receives a lot of invitations to do a lot of things, and saying yes to all of them leads to madness or, much worse, to abject boredom. By now, in the thick of my fourth puberty, I have abandoned Nietzschean yea-saying altogether, which doesn't at all make me a nay-sayer: I simply say "maybe" a lot, up until the point that someone with as many balls as my host mom finally badgers me into to mumbling a forlorn yeah, I guess.

I put on my pants, hosed myself down with Axe® Body Spray. (Dark Temptation™, in case you're curious.) I returned to the window. It was impossible to tell, engaged in a tense trans-fenestral shouting match with my host mom, what exactly a [GW] could mean for my evening. In all likelihood, it would amount to another rusty link in a very long chain of underwhelming rural Georgian experiences. But there was a chance it could turn out to be one of the best nights of my life. That's how Georgia works, if it can be said to work at all. All or nothing, but more than likely, nothing at all.

Not yet abandoning sleep, not yet abandoning Proust, I tried to paint my host mom into a linguistic corner.

"What's a [GW] like? Is it big, small, good, bad, hot, cold?"
"You'll see when we get there! But we have to go now!"

I threw up my hands.

"Okay. Why are we going to see the [GW]? Is there a why, at least?"
"Because," she said, "it is a Georgian holiday!"

I still had no idea what a [GW] was, but it was at least a something imbued with some kind of cultural significance, so it was the kind of something I was obligated to go see, something ceremonial and traditional and uniquely Georgian, and therefore inescapable.

"Alright, ma. One second," I said. "Pisi minda."

I gotta pee.

I went to the bathroom to take a whiz and as I shook everything out the nicotine patch on my right bicep slipped off and fell into the toilet.

"Shit," I said to myself. "No sense in saving that one."

I flushed it down.

Then my phone blew up. I didn't even have to look at the damned thing to know that it was The Irishman.

"Yes boyyyyy," he said. "What's the crack?"

"I'm about to go do something underwhelming with my host family," I said.

"Aye, what is it then?"

"I have no idea. Just know that it's going to be underwhelming, probably."

"Underwhelming, so it is? Aye, keep me posted, then."

"I know how you love that underwhelming shit."

"Aye, it's Georgia, so it is. What else is there?" 

I went downstairs and out to the lawn and my host mom and I – along with my two host cousins and my host aunt – went sauntering off down the dark-ass gravel road together. 

"Do you know who St. Mary is?" asked my host mom.
"Mary? Host Mother of God?"
"Do you have her in America?"

"Yes," I said.    

"Tell me who she is, then."

"She had a baby."

"Who was her baby?"

"Jesusi," I guessed.

"Who's that?"

"I don't know how to say 'Jesus' in Georgian."

"Jew-sos?"

"Forget it."

The wonderfully-named Iago came ambling up the road towards us. He and I shook hands.

"Iago," I said. "How are you?"

"I have a terrible hangover."

"Shouldn't have drank so much without me," I said.

We exchanged a fistpound of sorts, then proceeded together towards the traditional Georgian whatever-it-was in the distance.

The stench grew stronger and stronger. As we approached, I could make out a flickering, dancing light splashing up against a graystone wall. My host mom grabbed me by the wrist – the one I'd broken – and poked me in the ribs.

"See!" she cried. "See!"

"What is it?"

I saw her eyes roll in the darkness.

"You don't know? It's a [GW]! Idiot."

Ah, yes. A fire. I nodded, mouthed the word to myself, repeated it, was surprised I hadn't learned it before, decided I'd remember it. Could be useful. A fire.

As we drew nearer to the shallow blaze, I could make out the slanted silhouettes of the village winos embossed by the flames and then yes, what I'd perhaps known it would be all along. It was a tire fire in a back alley. A bunch of crap thrown into the center of a tire. And that crap was set on fire. So it was. 

"How beautiful!" cried my host mom. "Do you like it?"

"Yes," I said numbly, but did not elaborate.

"This is Georgian tradition," she said. "Do you have this tradition in America?"

"Some people do."

We watched the tire melt. I detached myself from my host mom, aligned myself with the winos, asked them how they were doing. Not surprisingly, they all had hangovers. A wino asked me for a cigarette and I told him I didn't have any. This surprised him. It surprised me. We stood there in a circle, mostly silently, watching the tire fire die. Occasionally, a wino would rustle up the flames with a stick, or throw in a stray branch. But the fire was done for. We'd just arrived; we'd be going home soon. And then the little kids started throwing in plastic bags, candy wrappers, anything inorganic they could find to keep the fire alive. And the melting plastic and the smoldering rubber and the crunchy crap of the modern world twisted together into a nasty black snake and the wind kicked up and blew it everywhere. And I turned away and shielded my face and, for the first time in recent memory, I coughed a long, clean, healthy cough.

The Summer Wind (or How I Broke My Wrist in Georgia)

I reckon I would've pulled it off gracefully enough at a younger, shorter, nimbler age. My instincts told me that it was easy from here on out, pretty much inevitable: simply a matter of pivoting on my left foot by way of setting up a blistering volley into the upper 90 with my right. Instead, the world shot out from under me and I flew upwards and then backwards at such an angle and with such velocity that the control tower in my brain abandoned all hope of coaxing the rest of my body into a smooth landing. Mayday. I sat down on my left wrist.

There may or may not have been an audible snap. There was not, at first, any pain whatsoever. I remember holding my hand up in front of my face and observing, rather calmly, that it looked more like a foot. 

Some of my students had gathered around to gawk. A few of them fought back vomit; the others shielded their eyes and turned away. My host brother, crying, ran off to fetch mom. One of the teenagers extended his hand, offering some sort of assistance, and I was disoriented enough to take it; he made as if to snap the joint back in place and I lashed out at him like a wolf mother. He backed up a couple paces.

I am not a radiology tech, though my dad once was. Some trivia, there. I knew that I had broken my wrist very badly. No bones were sticking out in any literal sense, but not for lack of trying. An older high school student – incidentally, the only kid in the village with frosted tips – approached with a rectangular chunk of cardboard that he'd scraped up off the ground. With one of his own shoelaces, he rigged up something to keep my arm level and blood-imbued until the ambulance came. I asked him what his name was. Giorgi, he said. No surprise there. Thank you, Giorgi, I said. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Then I asked when the ambulance was coming.

Word travels much faster than ambulances in the Georgian countryside. The whole village had turned out to take in the spectacle of the vulnerable American. I was slumped over on the asphalt in a pool of anxious sweat with my arm propped up in a rudimentary cardboard splint, cursing in the Queen's whenever the pain flared up, making gallows amputation jokes in Georgian whenever the pain ebbed away. These quips were my first attempt at skirting the fringes of something I really preferred not to think about, not then or hopefully ever again: Georgian healthcare. In America, the situation would've been clear-cut: I'd get my wrist fixed by a professional and tumble into debt for the rest of my life. In Georgia, it was possible that I'd lose an arm for free.

My host brother returned with the rest of my host family. He darted down an alley behind the school, where he dissolved into a puddle of tears. Earlier in the day - the first real day of spring - he'd called me fat. So I'd tromped off to my room. I returned sporting a bootleg Chinese Nike t-shirt-and-shorts ensemble. "What the fuck," my host brother said - who teaches them this stuff? "I'm fat," I said, "so I'm going running." He wanted to come with, so we went on a two mile jaunt up into the mountains. Then we trotted down to the playground to do some pull-ups. Then we played soccer for four hours. Then I smashed my wrist to bits.

My half-tight host dad peeked over the heads in front of him, caught a glimpse of my arm, and let fly a traditional Georgian aüf! My host mom slashed through the crowd like a battleship and set about scolding me for inhabiting the body of the idiot that I am.

It was twenty minutes before the ambulance showed up: a first edition VW hippie van, scrap metal gray, rusted out, with red crosses spray painted on the sides. The paramedics pushed through the crowd, examined my wrist and the Giorgi MacGyver splint job, and decided it was good enough for the time being. Then they told me to get up. It was evident from the beginning that I was a liability. Nobody wanted to touch me. I nodded toward frosted-tips Giorgi, who helped me to my feet, and with the half-whimper/half-laugh that sometimes accompanies incomprehensible pain (a noise my host mother found unmanly and therefore amusing) I began to hobble towards the ambulance. Nobody helped me inside, so I climbed in and found a seat in the back by the window.

It was a sunny, dusty day in April. I've watched too many Vietnam movies. The way I remember it, I was in the back of a chopper, tall grass tussling in a propeller-propelled gale, smoke flares hotboxing the heavens, generations of rice farmers gathered round to watch their wounded white-skinned hero spirited away in the bowels of a strange metal bird, bleeding generously from head and torso, gritting his teeth (also basted with blood) in order to flash a dogged American smile and a thumbs up out the window as …

I leapt to my feet. A pain in my ass. I jumped up and clunked my arm against the wall. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck! I turned around and saw that my pants were down, and that there was a paramedic kneeled behind me with a syringe squirting clear liquid all over the ass of my chaps. 

"You could've asked first," I said. I stuck my ass out. They injected something into my left buttcheek.

Nothing happened. This was not morphine. My host mom climbed into the ambulance. She would not help matters much. The paramedics slid the side door shut behind them. The driver tossed his cigarette and pulled himself up behind the wheel. I steeled myself for my long-awaited Vietnam-era smile and thumbs up scene. The engine wouldn't start.

The engine wouldn't start for a good long while. Eventually, the driver gestured for Jgali's biggest and brawniest to gather behind the ambulance and give it a push towards town. I halfway expected us to get pushed all the way into town until the engine sputtered to life a click or two down the road. I winced a smile and flashed my dogged American thumbs up out the window. Nobody seemed to notice.

The nearest hospital was in Tsalenjikha: ten minutes by bus, twenty by ambulance. A pair of nurses ushered me into an office of sorts. I sat down. They asked me if I wanted anything and I didn't know the Georgian for "the strongest opiate Soviet Russia has to offer," so I said "water" instead. I drank glass after glass of water while the doctors copied the text of my passport by hand into a notebook. After a while, they pulled my pants down and injected me with more antibiotics. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed like my fingers were turning blue. The doctors finally turned their attention to my wrist, gave it a cursory glance, then left the room together. On their way out, I saw the one say something to the other and make a chopping gesture at her left elbow. The doors to the ER swung shut behind them. 

"I'd like to talk to my boss," I told my host mom.

"Yes, Kiti," she said, over the phone, "what ees problem?"

"I broke my wrist," I said. "I was playing soccer. Or football."

"You were drinking?"

"No."

"Then ees no problem. Health care cover this problem."

"Great. In the meantime," I said, "I want you to ask these people what exactly it is that they're about to do to me."

When the doctors returned ten minutes later, I was given to understand that they were probably not about to chop my arm off, but that their little hospital in Tsalenjikha was in no way equipped to treat an injury of such magnitude. They would give me a rentgen – an x-ray – and send me on down to Zugdidi. A load off their shoulders. A load off my mind. Zugdidi was a city of sorts. Zugdidi was developed, within reason. There was a kebab stand in Zugdidi, run by a real live Turkish dude. A whole street of shady 24-hour casinos managed by Armenian pimps. And where there are Armenian pimps, there are doctors.

A bald guy in a white lab coat – I could've sworn I'd seen him mopping the lobby earlier – came in some time later and told me to follow him. We were not headed for a lab or an office. He led me outside. We walked a couple blocks down a pothole-pocked gravel alleyway until we arrived at a slipshod old barn. He struggled with the padlock, knocked it open eventually. We went inside. He flipped on the lightbulb. A dirt floor covered in rat droppings. In the corner, an x-ray machine.

When the film had developed some 45 minutes later – it was dark out by then – I was finally told what I'd known all along: that my wrist was broken and that I'd need to go to the hospital. The director of my school had shown up (likely to cover her own ass) and the three of us - the director, my host mom, and I - piled into her Georgian Geo Metro. 

But we didn't go anywhere. For half an hour, I sat in the backseat while my director and my host mom argued with each other. My director, apparently, was not confident enough in her driving abilities to shuttle me the thirty minute straight shot to Zugdidi. My host mom offered to pay for gas. (In retrospect, the cost of benzin, I imagine, was the sticking point.) My director said no, driving wasn't an option, maybe they should just call for an ambulance. This went on for a while. I was sitting with my forehead pressed against the glass, miserable to the n-th degree of f-bomb. I was starting to drift into the third person.

After an hour of talking it out in the car, my director hit upon an idea. She remembered that another foreign teacher lived just across the street; maybe they could go get her and bring her out and she would know what to do. My host mom duly got out of the car and walked across the street. She talked to a shopkeeper for ten minutes, much gesticulating and laughter, then wandered down the road to a rusted metal gate, opened the gate, and stepped into the driveway. A guard mutt went crazy. A middle-aged woman emerged from the house. She and my host mom chatted for a bit. My host mom came back. 

"The foreigner is asleep."

My director called for an ambulance. We waited in the dark. I was no longer talking to anybody. I clamped my eyes shut and pretended to be asleep, or dead.

The ambulance took an hour to arrive. But it was a real ambulance. I was helped out of the car by real doctors. An old man, an old woman. I took one look at them and knew that they were professionals and guessed that they were married, and I was right about both. The old woman handed me a bottle of water. I guzzled. The old man checked out my wrist and raised both brows and asked me if I was in pain. I nodded vigorously. He asked me if I wanted medicine. Again with the vigorous nodding. A syringe was produced, was flicked, and a shimmering arc of clear fluid was ejaculated up into the air between the doctor and me. 

After the opiated ambulance ride, the hospital was a night terror. Like the music video for "Knives Out" by Radiohead, if you've seen that. Flickering fluorescent lights, everything metallic blue or concrete gray, or pitch black when the lights crapped out, all manner of medical procedures taking place side-by-side at a breakneck broken neck pace. I was shown to a bench between two other benches. From the sounds of things, the guy to the right of me was having his intestines removed, link by link. The woman to my left was schizophrenic or worse. A busted wrist wasn't so bad at all, certainly not in the state I was in. But then, it is easy to look on the bright side on morphine.

A tall, gray-scalped doctor with witty little creases under his eyes came in and shook my functioning hand. He explained what was about to go down. 

"We fix you arm," he said.

"You won't be cutting anything off?" I asked.

"No," he chuckled. "No cutting. You only go to sleep."

Sleep I could handle. I lay back in my cot with two entirely different kinds of screaming going on in my left and right ears. Nothing mattered terribly much. They plugged me into an IV. 

"This," the doctor said, flicking the baggy dangling over my head, "make you sleep."

I laid there a moment or two and watched the doctor as he massaged a roll of gauze into a tray of gray slime, setting up shop next to my wounded paw.

"Er," I said, "I'm not ready for that yet. I'm still awake."

"It okay," he said. "Soon you sleep, Kiti. Very soon you sleep."

He began to toy around with my arm.

"Oof. Ugh. Aüf! Er. I just don't think I can be awake for this, doc. I'm on some big drugs already, believe me, I understand that, but I'm pretty sure what you're about to do to me ... it's still gonna ... I mean ... I ... "

I sat bolt upright in bed. Something had catapulted me outside of time and space and misery. My wrist belonged to somebody else.

"There it is," I said. "There it is. I tell you, doc. Whatever this stuff is ... whatever it is ... I tell you what ... you gotta market this shiz ... the kids back home ... you'll make ... I promise you'll make a fuggin' mmmint."

My head hit the pillow.

An existential second or two later, I was awake again, a wet heap of gauze molded to my left arm.

"How'd you do that?" I asked.

"Is easy," said the doctor. He snipped off the last wrap of tape with a pair of office scissors. "I am doctor."

The day I broke my wrist was the first day of the year you could really go outside. Summer was coming, with its promise of heat and sun and lukewarm beer and lukewarmer women, subpar Georgian beaches, and three months of fuck-all to do. But it was this summer that I was to serve out my penance for having never once broken a bone in my youth, for having never once missed out on a childhood summer. For having never showered with a cast. For having never sat idly poolside reading The Boxcar Children #72 while everyone else cannonballed their asses off. This summer would be my Rear Window summer. I'd sit and watch the cows go by, watch my host aunt pin the clothes up on the line, watch my host cousin get spanked pale-assed; it was the summer I'd learn how to work a Kindle one-handed, among other things …

               

A month later, the month of May, I went back to get my first cast removed, presumably to get my second cast installed. I was reunited with the doctor who'd done the original cast job. I offered him a fistpound with my operational hand and he received it, though he didn't blow it up. He cut free the cast and I was overwhelmed at first by the stench and then by the withered t-rexian appearance of my left arm. He sent me to the radiologist's lair to get an x-ray.  

The radiologist returned a couple minutes later with the good news. In English, no less.

"You are not needing cast," he said, holding the x-ray up for my approval. "Is healthy. Is fine. Are young, so excellent progress. You leave here today. You are not needing cast."

This, I knew, was false. It had been a month since my wrist had been smashed. 

I presented the x-ray, along with my translation of the radiologist's verdict, to my doctor.

He donned his bifocals and glanced at the x-ray, turned it from side to side. 

"Is the bull shit," he said. "You need the new cast."

               

I shrugged.

"I thought so," I said, "but it was a little weird. The radiologist said – "

"Yes," the doctor nodded. "I know radiologist. He belong in hospital. He is doctor, but have qualities of mental patient. He have something schizophrenia."

[here, the blog post you are reading cuts abruptly to a "closing credits" sequence in which our protagonist and pseudo-hero is observed from slightly above and directly behind, reclined in a plastic beach chair, cocktail in one hand, 39 pounds of Georgian plaster wrapped around the other, silhouetted against the Black Sea at dusk, and "The Summer Wind" by Frank Sinatra swells into the foreground and crescendos until the sweetness of the moment becomes almost unbearable – the director of the scene pours himself a nightcap and sits and drinks and strokes his whiskered chin as he watches and waits and finally decides to allow the full two minutes and 53 seconds of the original Concord Records recording to blow themselves decrescendoing softly to sleep]

Send Away the Clowns

First day of school. March something-or-other. Walking through three feet of snow both ways is considerably less impressive to the old-ass hard-asses of the world when it only takes you five minutes both ways. Flanked on either side by a posse of host familial strangers much shorter than me: my host mom, my host sister, my host brother and my host cousin. My host mom is the music teacher. All the host youngins are my students. Yes, I thought to myself all along the short walk to school, and thought to myself once again all along the short walk back home: I can see how this might get a bit claustrophobic after a while.

On my way down the hall for the very first time - tromping through the stunned hordes of children like a freakishly double-browed and red-bearded Godzilla - I spotted a bright yellow flyer on the wall and, at a glance, with equal parts fascination and terror, comprehended its significance.

"Hey maw," I said, "circusi."

In the same way that one can bullshit one's way through Spanish by sticking the letter O at the end of every other word, rudimentary Georgian can sometimes be bullshitted by appending the letter I to the end of everything. Circusi. A circus was going down that afternoon. On the first day of school.

"Yes," said host mom. "Later circusi. But now, classi."

I was led upstairs to the teachers' lounge - a gray peeled-paint sort of room every bit as inviting as an interrogation chamber - where I was fawned over by the middle-aged women of the village. I swiftly became the center of their affection, and I would remain so for the ten months to follow. They asked me whether I liked Georgia and I said, sure. They asked me whether I liked Georgian food, and I lied yes. This garnered a small round of applause, and the pit of my elbow was squeezed until it hurt. My praises were sung, mostly by way of talking trash about the volunteer who came before me, a poor young Asian girl that I was given to understand had a weak stomach when it came to Georgian spices and Georgian culture to boot. Clearly, I was different. I was the chosen one. The golden boy. I wouldn't fuck off after three months like she did.

They asked me if I had a wife and I was dense enough to say no. All eyes in the room spotlighted upon a dark-haired woman a couple years my junior who was sitting, shielding her face, blushing, busily sketching a feminine flank into a notebook. The art teacher. Much laughter all around. She did not look up. I looked down. Sighing inwardly, I wondered if I was the sort of dumbass who could be peer pressured into living in a Georgian village forever.

I retreated to the window by way of exhuming myself from marriage. I enjoyed a smoke. Cigs are fifty cents a pack in Georgia. Too cheap to quit. Outside, beauty: green and white and cold, smoke drifting up from the chimneys, the thatched roofs of the village barns weighed low under last night's deluge of snow. The white-streaked crags of the Lower Caucasus bore down upon the village, impossible for me to tell how near or how distant; Midwesterners do not have a sense of perspective. The bell rang: an actual bell, rung every 45 minutes by way of a cord pulled by a student too short to reach it without help. The bell rang. All the teachers scuttled away to their classes. I had no schedule. It was my first day. Nobody had told me where to go or what to do, so I sat down in the teacher's lounge and did nothing. I think I read something. I forget what I was reading at the time. Probably something pretentious. Barthelme, maybe?

After a while, the door shuddered open and an old woman entered. I greeted her in Georgian and she replied in the Queen's English. I put my book down and braced myself for an eccentric. While it is not always the case, in my limited experience, fluent non-native English speakers who happen to reside in the middle of nowhere tend to come with a suitably bizarre backstory.

"How are you?" I asked.
"As always," she said, "I am not so good."
"I'm sorry to hear that. What's wrong?"
"There is nothing to be done," she said and shrugged. "What is your name?"
"Keith," I said. "Or Kiti."
One learns to transmogrify one's name in places like this.
"Kiti," she said. "Oh, that simply won't do. Don't you know what kiti means in Mingrelian?"
"Do I want to know?"
"It means, yes, finger."

I shook my head. My name has never traveled well. In Korea, it meant "kiss." In Mexico, it was synonymous with KITT, the talking car from Knight Rider. Not too bad. But then, in Poland, it meant AIDS.

"We must give you, yes, a Georgian name."
"As long as it's not AIDS," I said. "What are some good Georgian names?"
"Levani," she said, counting her arthritic kitis with an arthritic kiti, "Lasha, Luka ... Soso - "
"I don't like Soso," I interjected. "Too mediocre."
She jumped the pun.
"... Shotiko, Zaza ... "
I was about to express some fondness for Zaza when she raised a withered hand to stop me.
"What about Giorgi?"

A brief note on etymology at this point. Georgia's real, actual, in-country name for itself is Sakartvelo. And nobody in the world, so far as I am aware, calls the place Sakartvelo. Everywhere else on the planet calls this dinky little pancreas-shaped country "Georgia," or some variation thereupon. The origins of the name "Georgia" are unclear, but there are plenty of theories floating around, all of them more or less equally plausible. "Georgia" closely resembles the Greek γεωργός - meaning tiller of the land - which makes a great deal of sense, given Georgia's proximity to both Greece and the Fertile Crescent. St. George also happens to be Georgia's favorite saint, so it is possible that the country was nicknamed by association, the same way you'd call a dude Nickelback Douchebag if said douchebag showed up to work every day in a Nickelback t-shirt. There's a chance the name comes from ancient Persian, from whence the Russian exonym for Georgia - Gruziya - is derived, which makes sense given Georgia's proximity to Iran. My theory belongs to the St. George camp, but differs a bit: I am of the mind that early European explorers stumbled across this weird little bumfuck commune on the Black Sea, found it overrun with fat men profoundly drunk on their own homemade wine, all of them named Giorgi (after the saint, of course), and they accordingly labeled it Georgia: Land of Giorgis. This is a roundabout way of saying that Giorgi is the most generic of all possible Georgian names, and I certainly didn't want to adopt it as my own.

"Giorgi sounds good," I said.
"Excellent," she said. "Then I shall call you Giorgi."
"I don't think I caught your name."
"Zhuzhuna."
"Zublubla?"
"Yes," she said. "Zhuzhuna."

The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. I had my first class to teach. My second and third, too. I don't remember them, nor do I seem to have taken any notes on the experience. But rest assured that by lunchtime, I knew full well that none of my co-teachers could speak English any better than my students could.

My fourth class was preempted by a choral concert put on by the students. In my honor, apparently. I was ushered into a bench seat in the far back of a small, low-ceilinged auditorium, and watched for an hour with the sweetest, most paternal gaze I could muster as my host siblings and host cousins and host cousins twice or thrice removed filed out on stage and delivered their pieces to the tune of the detuned piano comp-work of my host mom. The teenagers in the auditorium were squirrely as fuck. Same is true of the teachers. Same is true of the janitors. Nobody seemed to be watching the performances. They were all staring back at me and giggling every time I blew my nose. The kids were shoving each other into me, trying to get a rise out of the 29 year old, red-bearded foreigner. I ignored them the best I could. I smiled sweetly and stared straight ahead or, when that failed, I busied myself sifting through all two pages of the concert program, squinting at the Georgian squiggles. It was a good show. My host brother was awkward and bashful. My host cousin performed admirably, I thought, but that's probably just because she's cute.

Afterwards, I tried to walk back up to the teacher's lounge for a smoke, but Zhuzhuna caught me by the pit of the elbow and invited me out for some coffee.

"Coffee," I said, perplexed and jonesing. "Where?"
"Why, in the canteen, of course."

She led me into another interrogation chamber downstairs where there was a wood stove in the corner and a wide, flat table arrayed with starchy Georgian goodies: greasy potato cakes, raspberry pastries, loaves of thoroughly leavened bread.

"Erti khava," I squeaked, testing out the only Georgian I knew. I held up one finger. Then I glanced over, remembered Zhuzhuna. I held up two fingers. "Make it ori."

The old lady behind the table smiled, flashed a gilded grill.

"Your Georgian is very good," she crowed.
"It's so-so," I said.
No modesty involved. For the first time in my living-abroad life, I'd opted to show up totally nude. I hadn't bothered to learn anything of the language at all.

There is no such thing as Georgian coffee, not unless you count Nescafé. Georgians drink Turkish coffee. It comes in little shot glasses, more sugar and foam and coffee grounds than caffeine. I drank mine in a gulp or two, was embarrassed to discover that Zhuzhuna was still savoring hers. So I ordered another round. Zhuzhuna paid for both of us and shuffled off to her next class. The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. I sat there like a dork at a table by myself, reading my Barthelme, until the babushka barista gestured for me to sit down next to the stove. I did so gladly. Even with three sweaters on, I was freezing my ass off.

The bell rang and a man came swaggering in. I recognized him from somewhere. He was wearing a bootleg Phat Farm windbreaker. In his left hand was a twelve ounce Pepsi bottle filled to the brim with an ominously clear liquid. I stood up to shake his hand and he gave me a hug. I looked around for campus security. After a while, I was given to understand that this was the P.E. teacher.

"You like cha cha?" he asked. He flicked an index finger at his esophagus.

Liquor is very much a matter of personal preference, but I will go out on a limb here and say that nobody likes cha cha. Not even Georgians. I have written extensively about the vile intoxicants of the Far Eastern World, but few beverages (if any) could give Chinese baijiu a run for its money in terms of sheer vileness. Georgian cha cha is pretty much the worst drink in the world.

"I like cha cha," I said, out of well-learned politeness, "but now, no. I'm at work."
"Fuck work. I'm at work, too. Just one," he said, reciting the refrain of the lonesome alcoholic. "Just one."
I looked from the babushka barista to the P.E. teacher. She shook her head. I shook mine.
"No," I said. "I don't want."
"Of course you do," he said. "Gogo, two shot glasses!"

The babushka barista did her job. The shot glasses appeared. He poured us a couple. I saw the clear liquid sitting there, gleaming in the grayness. I could smell it. Enough to make you puke by smell alone. It sat there shimmering like the desperate glint in a car salesman's eye. We were at school, fer chrissakes. I shook my head, no.

"I don't want," I said in my crappy Georgian. Then, in English, more to myself than to anyone else, "Fucking A, I'd get my ass fired over this bullshit right here."

He squinted at me like he didn't quite believe who I was. Then he pounded both shots and muttered something to himself in Georgian, probably something to the effect that I was a little bitch and not quite a man. Then he invited me upstairs to the exercise room, where he kicked my ass in ping-pong several times over. Afterwards, I shuffled on back down to the canteen, where I found my unfinished shot of Turkish coffee waiting for me. The canteen was pleasantly empty. I hadn't had a moment to myself since I'd arrived in the village.

Aborting my reverie, an old man came in a moment later, studied the room, and ordered a coffee. He sat down across from me. He was a man much older than his years. His face was creased and blotched with the sort of age that doesn't come with aging alone. For all that, he appeared to be wearing makeup. I'd just learned that the village drunk was in fact the P.E. teacher, so I was ready to assume that this guy was the director of the school or something.

"Nice to meet you," I said. "You a teacher here?"
"No," he said. "Me var clowni."

Refer back to aforementioned append-the-I rule. I understood right away. Me var clowni - I am a clown. I'd missed the circus, somehow. This was the afterparty. Here, indeed, was my first Georgian clown.

I reached out to shake his hand and, upon shaking it, realized that he didn't have any fingers. It was just a palm. I let go of his hand, stared at it unintentionally. It fell dead in my lap. He stuffed it back in his tri-colored jacket pocket. Sadness seemed to be chiseled into the contours of the clown's face. The sad clown. An anti-archetype, of sorts. And I, the narcissistic volunteer. Both of us inversions of what we were supposed to be. Both of us failures, in some sense. I wanted to ask him what it was like to be a clown, but my Georgian wasn't anywhere near good enough. So I just asked him how he was doing, and he said he was doing okay. We sat across from each other in silence, staring at the floor. A few minutes later, Zhuzhuna came in with another babushka or two. They sat down on either side of me, across from the clown. Ignoring the clown. They called for some more coffee. After a while, the clown left, leaving behind a fingerless fistful of change in his wake. I drank another coffee with the babushkas.

They asked me if I liked Georgia. I said, sure. They asked me if I liked Georgian food and I lied yes. They asked me if I liked Georgian girls and giggled so much that their giggles obscured my answer. They ordered me a potato pastry and before I could refuse it, I found myself devouring it. After I'd finished it, I could feel my heart palpitating like a frog trapped in a brown paper bag. When we'd finished our coffee, the babushkas suggested that we move over and sit next to the stove. So we did. I sat there, the youngest person in the room by a couple decades, feeling very old, indeed. I ordered another coffee.

"Do you drink much coffee, Giorgi?" asked Zhuzhuna.
"Sure. Lots of coffee," I said.
"I drink four or five cups a day," she said.
"Turkish coffee?"
"Yes."
"We have much bigger coffee in America," I said. "I drink four or five cups of that."
"That much coffee is bad for you, Giorgi," she said.
"Probably."
She ordered another round.

We sat warming ourselves by the fire. When Georgians run out of kindling, they'll throw anything on the flames. Candy wrappers, white out, glue sticks. You wouldn't believe it. The fumes are enough to get you high, and not in the good way. The babushkas talked amongst themselves. I listened passively, trying to get a feel for the language, trying to decide whether it was more Slavic or more Middle Eastern or more Turkic or perhaps more of nothing of anything I was at all familiar with. And my mind wandered back to the clown, and I wondered how he'd lost all his fingers, whether that wasn't the reason he'd become a clown in the first place. I don't imagine one ever becomes a clown voluntarily. I wondered about the smokehound P.E. teacher, and I wondered about my students, and I wondered about my co-teachers and how they'd managed to teach English for so many years without learning a word of the damned language, and I wondered about myself, an English major, sitting there in a gulag coffee shop with a bunch of babushkas, wondered whether I could've ever imagined myself sitting here doing this sort of thing back when I was young and smart and full of vigor, wondered whether I'd gone off the rails at some point or whether I wasn't precisely where I was supposed to be: in a bumfuck Georgian village pretending to teach English, hanging out with fingerless Georgian clowns and drinking fake-ass coffee with a bunch of babushkas.

"Georgi," said Zhuzhuna, and she gripped my wrist, "I must ask you."
"Ask away."
"What do you think of Rima?"
"What's Rima?"
"The art teacher," she said.
"I don't know," I said. "I saw her earlier, but really - "
"She's beautiful," said Zhuzhuna, "and very talented."
"I like talented women," I said. "And I like beautiful women. That's true."
"Think about it," said Zhuzhuna. "Think about it."

I didn't think about it at all. I thought about going home and locking myself in my room and going to sleep. That's what I thought about. But in the early days anywhere, you tend to do what everyone else does. You tend to do what everyone else suggests. And short of marriage, I was cool with that. The babushkas finished their coffees and turned the shot glasses over on their dishes. I did the same. They laughed at me. Uproariously, as it were.

"Oh, Giorgi," said Zhuzhuna, slapping me across the shoulder. "Giorgi!"
"What the fuck did I do?"
"You see, Giorgi," she said, "the coffee, this is Georgian tradition. Not for you. Do you believe in, yes, superstition?"
"No," I said. "Not at all."
"In Georgia, we believe in, yes, what it is, fortune telling."
"Ah."
"How do you say - the coffee grains?"
"Yes."
"We can read informations in the coffee grains."
"What sorts of informations?"
"Everything," she said, "but usually it is for women only."
"Well," I said, "when in Rome."
"Yes," she said, snagging my shot glass. "When in Rome."

She tilted the little glass up to her eye, squinted at the streaky patterns therein. She giggled an old lady giggle.

"Yes, this is very interesting, Giorgi."
"What does it say?"
"Well," she said, "do you have friends?"
"Yes," I said, "some."
"You are to have a very good weekend with friends," she said.
"That's good."
"Yes," she said, "but then you are to meet a man."
Her face soured a bit. So did mine.
"Is he a bad man?"
"Yes," she said. She held the glass up to my face and pointed an untrimmed pinky-nail at a pair of boob-like white blobs therein. "He is a very bad man. He will lead you astray."
"In which direction," I asked.
But she was lost in the patterns of the coffee. She saw things in there that I had no interest in, things that meant nothing to me, things that meant everything to her and the babushkas sat around the table.
"You are to meet," she said, "a bald-headed man. A man with a very large head. He will be wearing glasses, yes?"
Checking her English. I nodded. Glasses.
"You are to meet this man and it will have bad results," she said. "Very bad results."
"But," I said, "this weekend with my friends. It's going to be good, no?"
"Yes," she said. "The weekend will be good. But when you meet this man it will have very bad results. Very bad results."

The bell rang. Someone rang the bell. We all got up to leave. I felt like hugging somebody. One does, after one's first full day in a strange, strange place. But me and the babushkas parted ways without fanfare. I walked home with my extended host family at the end of the day. Through three feet of snow. When I got home, I sat down by the stove and drank briefly with my host dad. Then I locked myself in my room and dicked around without the aid of the internet and fell asleep in three sweaters and dreamt dreams of amputated host clowns. I woke up in the middle of the night and snuck out to the patio for a smoke. Stared up at the sky for a good long while. You wouldn't believe how beautiful the stars are in this part of the world. Especially in winter. There's a scientific reason for that, but I'm too lazy to explain it. You stand there looking up at the stars and every second you just kind of know with some weird measure of comfort that your tiny little human eyes are drinking in the light of an immense beauty that knows nothing at all about you. Perhaps because it is part of you. Nobody knows. Hence the beauty of it. Or something like that.