 I left home at a rather late age,
having to endure the usual parental pestering and recriminations till I was almost
25. The standard of living in this country means that housing is both scarcer than
in the U.S. and much more expensive. It's next to impossible for a young person to
accumulate enough money to strike out on his/her own. I was lucky to have a friend
offer me to move in with his younger brother. Their parents had died recently, he
was contemplating a move to his girlfriend's place and hated to leave his kid
brother alone in their amazingly large, cavernous apartment in a very old building
downtown. Needless to say, I accepted the offer with the speed of greased
lightning.It was a godsend, not only providing
the long-awaited opportunity to try fashioning my life in my own way, but also
promising a revival of my sex life which -- due to an almost total lack of someplace
private -- had become rather dormant. Fashion my new life I did; it took quite a
different tack then, more different in some ways but much more satisfying in others.
As for the promise of a sex revival, well, it didn't work out quite as easily as I
had hoped it would.This young man I moved in with was a
bit of a slob. I hate to admit it, but I soon turned into one myself, probably in
reaction to the years of unrelenting home discipline. Neither of us would lift a
finger in the interest of tidiness, and the place soon turned to seed. It acquired
a uniform grey coating of fine dust, deep and velvet-like in appearance. The smooth
surface was broken only by the narrow footpaths leading from the apartment door to
the beds and connecting the beds with the kitchen, bathrooms and toilet.Quite a few girls, oh, all right,
all girls were a bit put off by the ambience. Luckily in those days we were
both attractive enough in body and character to make some girls overcome the
aversion and/or dust allergy. Having successfully passed that first hurdle, such
hardy types would then be confronted with real challenges.
Branko, my apartment mate, and I were
both bearded but kept our beards short. The trimming was done over the washbasin in
the bathroom and, as we never washed the basin itself, a sediment of short, curly
snippets accumulated there, adhering to the sticky surface, until the washbasin
resembled a hairy ape hanging out from the wall fixtures. It would scare the bejasus
out of girl visitors trying the bathroom for the first time. One of them reported
it growled at her when she'd tried the hot water tap. Not that we believed her, of
course, but still, it was kind of reassuring that the thing was firmly bolted to the
wall. Good old-fashioned pre-war engineering, not the modern
cardboard-stucco-and-parcel-string housing project crap.As Sigourney Weaver has shown us so
ably, an adaptable girl can learn to live with a hairy ape, and some of our girls
did. You beat your chest with clenched fists once in a while and you're OK,
apparently. (Wonder what Dolly Parton would make of that?)Branko's aunt Ettie, however, was a
much more serious threat. Her actual name was Erszebet (Hungarian for Elizabeth)
and she was as bad as her name sounded. Over the spring, summer, and fall she lived
in a seaside house on the Adriatic coast, but over the winter she'd simply move in
with us and take over the kitchen. She didn't cook for us -- Branko, who knew her
well, wouldn't touch her cooking and I prudently took his hint -- no, she
lived in the kitchen. There were some other rooms in the apartment, but they
were filled with clutter to such an extent that they were uninhabitable. The fans
familiar with Harry Warner's story of "The House on Summit Avenue" will know what I
mean. So, the kitchen it was.The problem with such an arrangement
was that we often needed the stuff from the kitchen. Our fridge was there, for one
thing, taking good care of the staples: beer, cheese, frankfurters, and Dr. Oettker's
Chocolate-and-Vanilla Pudding. That's what we lived off in those days. With
Erzsebet in the kitchen, a trip to the fridge was not a thing we looked forward
to.Old Ettie was a... er, a lady who had
spent all her allotted lifespan of three score and ten years learning the art of the
disapproving stare. Her normal life over and her skill honed to perfection, she
then lived for another half-dozen years on borrowed time, putting what she'd learned
into practice.Ah, the sheer expressive range
that that woman's stare had! If you can imagine the late Sir Ralph Richardson in
drag, boiling inside with resentment, yes, that would be the close approximation of
Branko's remarkable aunt.By day, we took turns for the forays
into the kitchen, and by night, we tried to do without. The wisdom of such policy
was amply proved one chilly evening when a girl I was rather piqued at (she had come
as my guest but immediately took a liking for Branko, and started emitting
various coded and not-so-very-much-coded signals at him) expressed a desire for some
of our Beaujolais, to get warmed up inside. (At this stage in our narrative, I
trust it will not surprise you that the wine was not actually Beaujolais. The
bottles and labels were genuine enough but the wine was God knows what; the point
was that it worked.)Anyway, the girl wanted wine and I
wanted to get even. Without stopping to think, I told her to go help herself from
the fridge. "Yeah, why don't you bring a bottle for us all?" chipped in Branko's
girlfriend with a malevolent gleam in her eyes. Obviously, I wasn't the only one
who saw the signs flashing. Branko looked somewhat alarmed but said nothing. The
words were still hanging in the air when I felt the first twinge of conscience, but
by then it was too late. The poor girl went into the hall and opened the kitchen
door. We had neglected to tell her to knock.
There was a double scream, and in a
split second we were all there to witness a curious spectacle: Erzsebet the Terrible,
wearing an ancient lacy peignoir, was in the middle of the kitchen, standing
ankle-deep in a shallow tin tub full of hot water. Steam was curling around her
bony legs like the dry ice smoke at a rock concert, while she waved her hands around
in impotent fury, a big hair brush in one hand and an elaborate wig in the other.
Without her head covering she looked as bald as Kojak and twice as dangerous. The
rest of the night does not bear describing.The one and only useful thing in life
that that woman did was getting rid of the kitchen growth. Her arrival at the
beginning of winter sounded the death knell to the refrigerator fungus. Or was it
mold? Lichen? Can't be sure; botanics has never been my strong suit. Whatever it
was, she attacked it with a potent-smelling cleaning liquid and a Brillo pad, and
wiped it out in a single afternoon. Throughout the winter, the fridge gleamed
antiseptically.Even after Erzsebet was gone the
fungus was reluctant to return. The white fluffy down didn't spread over the
Mozzarella before May, and we were well into June when the first thin strands of
green appeared in the salad drawer. Branko and I watched it grow with mixed
feelings. The plant was a household fixture we had come to know well, and its
reappearance signaled a return of normalcy into our lives. On the other hand, before
aunt Ettie razed it to the ground, it had grown to unmanageable proportions. It was
good to get rid of it for a while.We debated the need to control it for
most of the summer while it grew and developed and asserted itself over larger and
larger portions of the refrigerator. In August we finally gave up. After all, it
seemed to be pretty harmless and much less scary than the apelike washbasin. It
didn't growl and it never actually bit anyone.Branko did comment once that we were
curiously free of insects, bar a few spiders and house flies. He had the idea that
the fridge flora might have been responsible, but I doubted it. From what I could
remember of my high school biology classes, the carnivorous plants liked it hot
while our box of green tricks was still close to zero, dutifully cooling the beer
and murmuring to itself occasionally.Branko's theory was soon put to test
and disproved in a dramatic fashion. A curious and very unpleasant smell was
beginning to be felt in the kitchen in those days. Over a couple of weeks, it
gradually increased in intensity, finally reaching epic proportions, a true acme of
household fetidity. At about that time the bugs started to appear, isolated at
first, then in twos and threes, and finally in droves. Very unpleasant. It had all
started to interfere with our sex lives again, just as we repaired the damage aunt
Ettie had wrought. The girls simply refused to enter the reeking, bug-infested
place.Branko had put his hope in our fungus,
but the plant failed him utterly. Instead of whooping ferociously at its prey and
wreaking havoc among the insect hordes, it just stood there and watched
noncommittally from the butter and cheese compartment. In the end, we had to do
something ourselves. A thorough search of the kitchen nooks and crannies turned up
an opened cup of (what used to be) Dr. Oettker's Chocolate-and-Vanilla Pudding with
whipped cream, well hidden in the cupboard. Branko sheepishly admitted hiding it a
few weeks previously and forgetting about it. He'd been loath to leave it in the
fridge, afraid that the fungus would get at it.
By then the cupboard resembled a bug
Worldcon. Dr. Oettker would have been proud of his product, as every insect known
to inhabit Central and Southern Europe seemed to have gathered there, milling about
purposefully. It was an illusion, naturally; the huge swarms feeding on vanilla
were composed of perhaps four or five orders of Tracheata altogether. The
invaders' strength lay in numbers, not diversity.Coleoptera were out in force,
of course, with the various Staphylinidae, Silphidae, and
Bruchidae frantically busy over the last dregs of cream and chocolate. A few
hundred Blattaria were the only representatives of Dictyoptera and all
were of the mundane Periplaneta orientalis variety, a.k.a. the brown
cockroach. Nothing remotely exotic, apart from sheer quantity.The only surprise was the presence of
several dozen Forficula auricularia, proudly crawling under Dermaptera
banner. What they wanted was anyone's guess; they usually feed on rotten fruit, not
pudding. Perhaps they were simply attracted by the commotion, the way crowds will
gather at the site of a traffic accident.Diptera made up the remainder
of the insect forces. Borboridae (their cheese-loving Piophila casei
in particular) found their natural habitat there, wallowing in the cream curdles
with merry abandon, while their cousins Muscidae, homely flies, so drab among
the shiny and scaly intruders, seemed much more reticent. They preferred to hover
around, occasionally poking their hairy heads into the busy cupboard and quickly
pulling back, as if resenting the whole business. Poor old Fannia canicularis,
our regular tenant, looked downright annoyed by the bustle. So were we, baby, so
were we.Since the killer fungus proved to be
a dud we contemplated chemical warfare for a while, Geneva convention or not, but it
turned out to be unnecessary. Once the food source had been removed (with the
proverbial ten-foot pole) the arthropodic ranks slowly dispersed and our normal fly
and spider population went back to life as usual.If our spiders looked relieved after
the bug tide had ebbed, you can imagine our sentiments about it. Not to mention the
girls'. Understandably shaken by the sexual ostracism the invasion of vanilla
snatchers had brought upon us, we introduced strict apartheid and the crawlies were
firmly kept in their place thereafter. Even so, several weeks of intense persuasion
were to pass before the girls returned, nervously casting their glances around and
sniffing the air with suspicion.Ah, the complications of bachelorhood!
Well, at least we were safe from burglars. Anyone unlucky enough to break into our
apartment would certainly rue the day. How would you feel if somebody sicced
Erzsebet or a hairy washbasin at you in the middle of the
night? - - - - - - - - - -
Bruno's article brought out a lot of apartment misadventure stories from our readers,
of rodents and insects and cooking and disgusting stuff growing on things. (We're
glad those days are long behind us!) There were also comments about the general
excellence of Bruno's writing, including one from Vincent Clarke, who paid this
compliment: "Bruno Ogorelec reminded me very much of the English John Berry's stuff
in Hyphen, Orion, and other zines -- some absurd facet of life parlayed
by a vivid imagination into fannish art. Well, I suppose that holds for all humour,
but it's peculiarly gratifying to read such stuff produced under such awful
conditions."At any rate, the first half of 1992
was a busy time for us. We were both involved in reevaluating our professional
careers, which eventually resulted in Nicki going back to college for her Masters
Degree while Rich had the first of his many job-related trips to Eastern Europe.
But there were many fan events as well which also took us out of town, the longest
of which was to the 1992 Corflu fanzine fans' convention in Los Angeles. It was
epic and fun convention, as reported in our "Corflu Odyssey" opening comments to the
issue, and left us in a good mood for the remainder of the year. It also perhaps
inspired us to put together what might have been our best issue to date, with a
remembrance of Isaac Asimov by Dave Kyle, a remembrance of the fannish year of 1954
by Walt Willis, a remembrance of the Vietnam War by David Thayer, plus articles by
Richard Brandt, Sharon Farber, Vincent Clarke & Chuck Harris, Roger Sims, Ted
White, and the following one by Terry Jeeves.The theme of the issue was 'Past
Influences', about how events from our past have influenced the way we are today.
One of the biggest of these, of course, is the 'sense of wonder', characteristic of
well-written science fiction, that made us readers of the stuff in the first place.
From there, it was just a short step to attend a convention in hopes of meeting a
favorite author, and before we could stop to catch our breath we were publishing a
fanzine. But in other places and in much earlier times, such as pre-war Great
Britain, fandom wasn't yet wide-spread enough to be easily discovered, but that
original 'sense of wonder' influence still existed:Mimosa 12 cover by Stu Shiffman All other illustrations by Alan Hutchinson |
|