Scott MacLeod

 

I’ve been in the air for 19 hours: San Francisco to Toronto to London to Belgrade, almost three days of flying and layovers, without decent sleep, but now I’m finally here in Yugoslavia. I make my way into Belgrade to my hosts’s apartment, where I think I’ll be staying. but I have somehow miscommunicated my arrival date and he has no place for me until the next night, so he and his sixteen year old son take me by cab to the Hotel Slavija, a large touristic modernist hotel that I’m stunned to find out will cost me $53 for the night. I’m planning to be traveling through Eastern Europe doing performance art for four months, and now I have to spend 10% of my entire budget on the first night’s hotel. I’m freaking out inside but I have no choice. I’m exhausted and almost delirious and really need to sleep as soon as possible. We go up to my room and I give them the fifth of Johnny Walker Red I’ve brought as a gift. They decide to open it right away so we drink shots, probably half the bottle, then they decide to take me around the city to look at possible performance sites. They drag me three miles across downtown, through art galleries, bookstores, clubs, alleys, crowds, it’s a very warm night, I’m sweating, we’re all pretty drunk, they make me eat Turkish pastry and drink a shot of Slivovitz, then as we are beginning to head back to my hotel, they yell “There’s our tram! You know the way don’t you?” as they start to run for the streetcar. I suppose I do, so I nod and walk alone the three miles back to the Hotel Slavia and pass out on the bed just after midnight. At four a.m. I wake up with not one not two but five separate muscles cramping in my legs and thighs, my muscles are twisting into pretzel shapes, I’m bent double, screaming as quietly as I can. I can’t believe how painful this is. I’m also feverish, covered with sweat, bent over pounding the knots in my calves and thighs with my fists as hard as I can. The bed is soaked with my sweat. After an hour of punching and squeezing, the pain is manageable and I lay back down for a minute. I am six feet tall. My bed in the upscale western-style Hotel Slavia is 5’ 10 long. The bottom sheet is 5’ 8” long, the top sheet is 5’ 6” long and the blanket is 5’ 4” long by 4’ 2” wide. It’s like sleeping with a large dinner napkin on my genitals. At 7 a.m. the maids start trying to come into the room. They open the door, I yell, they close it. Three minutes later they open the door, I yell, they close it. This goes one for a while. By 7:30 a.m. I realize that I am not going to be able to sleep anymore. I stand naked at the window looking out over Belgrade, wondering what the next four months will be like, wondering if I’ve made some terrible, possibly fatal, mistake. Then I sit down on the bed and take this, my first photo of my 1990 European tour.