The Mansion of Dovetown

On Christmas Eve  afternoon, never mind of what year, I prepared myself a glass of eggnog with a dash of Wild Turkey 101,  drank it, prepared another one, emptied it as well, and by five in the afternoon, unused to drinking hard liquor, too dizzy to stand up,  I had to lie down and take a fast nap.

I dreamt about an old adventure in which I found myself drunk, lost and confused in a city 75 miles from home, wandering its dark streets,  unsure how I ever got there.  I don't have a car, did I take a bus, train here, and for what purpose?  I searched my pockets for a ticket or some other evidence of a journey undertaken. I looked through my little address book for names and telephone numbers of people who lived here.  Nothing.

It was a dark and stormy night and I kept walking. Lost. I have never been in this city before. Aha, I suddenly remembered, I arrived here with a pair of friends and another woman, who wasn't keen on me, as I wasn't keen on her, the four of us in the friends' Volkswagen, visiting their friends house, where we drank, listened to music and smoked, when I stepped out to go to a store with instructions on how to find it, and  to buy munchies, chips and crackers or pretzels, and somehow I became lost.  I passed a few people on the street, but I forgot to note the street of the hosts' house, so what directions and to where could I ask anyone?

I must have been walking in circles - the streets and houses all looked the same, uninterrupted rows of  two story tenements that must have been build at the end of the 19th century if not earlier,  narrow streets, no cars parked or driving.   Are cars forbidden here or are the residents too poor to own them, I asked myself.  Anyway, a parked car would have blocked three quarters of the street. A handful of low powered or very old motorbikes stood next to the houses on the sidewalks.  If a truck roared through this place, these wooden houses would all crash down.  A few small stores were all  closed, signs in their windows in foreign languages.  And bars. Open and on almost every corner.

There were bars on every corner of the intersection where I finally stopped, and where I thought I had been before a few minutes earlier and a few minutes before that.  I decided to go to one of them and get a drink. But which one?  I spotted an empty Coca Cola bottle standing up smack in the middle of the intersection.  I approached it, leaned down and spun it.  It stopped pointing to one of the streets, I spun it again and got the same result.  A motorbike passed me, the rider cursing me in Russian.  I spun the bottle for the third time, and when it stopped,   I set the bottle standing where I had found it and walked into the bar on the corner to which it pointed me.

It was crowded,  Friday night, the faces of people told me what I already knew that this was a working class neighbourhood, they were boisterous, friendly, singing in what I thought I recognized as Lithuanian language.  Someone handed me a beer can,  and I joined in the singing, not understanding a single word.  I was reminded of those people you sometimes read in the newspaper about who wake up from a coma speaking perfect French or some other language they never studied or had known.

Someone told me that the bar on the opposite corner outside was Ukrainian, the bar to the left Polish, and the bar to right some other ethnic group, I forget which now.  Another watery beer or two and  I forgot that I was lost and joined in the revelries like a native Lithuanian.Or Latvian, because to this day I'm not sure the nationality of these revelers. Definitely not Estonian.

The next morning I woke up in the room above the bar, in a wide bed next to some woman.  I don't think we had had sex.  She served me breakfast, coffee, I thanked her and went out heading straight and without any directions to the bus terminal where I boarded a Trailways bus home.   I checked my wallet, my watch on my wrist, no one had robbed me.

I didn't see my friends until Monday afternoon and they weren't angry or concerned about my disappearance, and only casually asked me what had happened.  I told them that I ran into a couple of high school friends and followed them to their mansion located in the wealthy section of the city, that somehow or another I knew was called Dovetown.  They believed me, or pretended to believe me, better than I pretended to believe my own story myself.

A month or two later, I ran into the woman who had not been keen on me, she was keen on me now, and told me that she had heard the story I told Tim and Kate, our mutual friends, and didn't believe a word of it.  I then told her the story I have just told you.