We’d spent a month in Turkey, my girlfriend and I. On the last day we were awoken at about 3:14 in the morning by some dipshit who could barely speak any English. He was the stooge of our landlord, a quixotic nimrod with two quarts of empty nothingness surrounding his brainstem, dividing him from the rest of the world, in perpetuity. My girlfriend was scared. I went downstairs in my shorts.

“WHAT? MOTHER FUCKER.”

He looked aghast. A Siamese cat went scurrying in the aftermath. Bad words. I won’t repeat them here.

On the road at 5:30 in the morning, toward the airport. In Antalya. The south of Turkey. Hot as sausage meatballs melting in the lime-colored sunlight of a gorgeous place but well August was hot and I’m supposed to be writing about Serbia.

We had an early flight to Istanbul. A layover. Then we flew to Belgrade. However, I still had a few nails to splinter in the process.

“BABE, EVERYBODY HERE IS SO FUCKING RUDE. THEY KEEP CUTTING IN FRONT OF US IN LINE EVERYWHERE WE GO. AND WHY DO THEY KEEP STARING AT YOU?”

My girlfriend laughed at me. She knew I was ready to leave the country.

Turkey was cool. They had good coffee. I fucked my girlfriend overlooking the Mediterranean Sea.

We landed in Belgrade. It was a short flight.

My girlfriend and I were leaning on each other. A beautiful woman with lots of makeup covering her face came up to us and lodged us awake.

“WHAT?” I screamed. “WHAT KINDA SHIT IS THIS?”

It was hot in the entranceway to the country. There were cops with badges right when we got off the plane. My girlfriend had never experienced getting into a country without a visa. I threw my USA passport at one of the female officers and moved forward scratching my nutsack.

We passed through to the airport where people heaved and hovered and took out their hard-earned loot from ATM machines. My girlfriend and I nearly got into a fight about how to get to the Airbnb.

Ah, we got there.

A woman introduced us to Pedro. He was a black cat.

“He serves liquor, kumquats, despair, and alleys filled with grilled fish bones. Mostly carp, cod and chicken liver.”

“Uh,” said I.

My girlfriend was crying with laughter.

We got rid of her, the host. It was a Monday.

I wanted a beer.

Since we had had such a crapshoot kinda day, we lay in bed and braided each other’s hair. Then we left the place and walked around and I hunted for the pointlessness of everything and wondered if Pedro could pick a lock.

My girlfriend and I walked the expanse of the city out to the west. I said that she should head for the water which was north, leaving her to the directions. That of course led to a fight.

“I SAID GO TO THE WATER.”

“YEAH WELL WHAT DO YOU THINK WE’RE DOING?”

“THIS IS ALL THE WAY ACROSS THE CITY. WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST GO NORTH.”

We sat on a bench. I tossed a rock at a kid, nearly missing the moon.

“You want some juice?”

“Yes, baby.”

(We had both calmed down.)

The sun retreated into the green trees, the horizon was burning with laughter. Somebody nearby did the sign of the cross. I lifted one of my asscheeks and farted, quietly. My girlfriend picked her nose and flicked some of the specs from a millon years hence, we had both gathered enough rocks to hit all of the kids with gladiolas, spatulas, frostbite, and gangrene. I wanted to swim across the Danube River and live in one of the outposts.

“I’ll warn everybody,” I told my girlfriend.

“About what?”

We got up and walked. People stared at her.

“It’s coz your pretty,” said I.

She had her hand up my back, like I was her parakeet.

The days twindle-d into burnt firewood. I laughed at the moon. In the mornings, I drank coffee and the sun burned up the terrace adjacent the living room. It was like thriving in a bottle neck, at the top there was an ostrich chocking on some okra.

“What food has cal-sea-um?” My girlfriend asked in her Shanghai-like tongue.

“Bread.”

I poured a beer.

The week had flown by.

We had trouble with the WiFi. My girlfriend taught classes online. I wrote whenever I felt like it. Read a lot. Stretched in the morning. And hunted for Pedro.

“He stole our blanket!” I said one morning.

“What do you mean?” my girlfriend asked me, nervously.

“You know what I mean,” I replied.

I pulled open the blinds one morning in the kitchen. Pedro was staring at me, directly in the eyes. They turned into liquid soup, his eyes. Iridescent and keen on turning me into an olive. I couldn’t believe that I was looking into another dimension from a black cat. He stared. I laughed.

“BABE COME LOOK AT THIS.”

I tested the aqueducts that lined the borders of the former Republic of Yugoslavia. The beer was cheap. The people were friendly, mostly. Some of them stared. The food was good. One of the restaurants took forever just to take our order. I got impatient.

The clouds overhead, white, sputtered with gaseous mutterings.

Finally, as the week creased its sleeves. We went out to the Belgrade Fortress. We came across an American dipshit with a pink or red shirt that resembled a flag intertwined with its own destiny, loud, obnoxious, entitled, one-sided, hollow, a harpsichord with one key, broken, annoying, he had a beautiful woman by his side, both times. She had long blonde hair. The women in Belgrade were of the utmost beauty.

I grabbed my girlfriend’s hand.

“Let’s get the fuck away from that asshole.”

We rode back later when I really had to shit, I mean that Chinese food, spicy, had really got to me — and the ride-share app was a local shitshow, bowls of rice twirling in my guts and gonads — what a crook! — we got ripped off by a jackass taxi driver — what would F. Scott Fitzgerald say about that?

I went hunting again for a big bottle of beer and drank it like a sword into my esophagus. And got confused about why I wrote that, many hours later, in italics.

I’m sure there are some very good things to say about Belgrade, Serbia.

You try it sometime.

I’ll be drinking beer out of a glass, listening to Bob Dylan. Looking for the sheets Pedro stole from my bed!