Maaarijaa come onnn!! Deki was yelling out to my window from the street, leaning on his white Yugo and reaching in through the window to honk, in his shiny-fluorescent-red tracksuit and rave shades, with trance blasting as loudly as it was possible with the car’s humble sound system. The tracksuit was sent from his uncle in Germany, making it very cool, regardless of the black two-headed eagle emblem, just like the one on the Albanian flag.
It was 8 AM and he had partied all night in a city in the north of Serbia but he was conscientious enough to leave for Belgrade and drive fast enough to make it in time to compete at the hair show at Hotel Yugoslavia. I was his “model”. I ran down and, before leaving, we did our usual synchronized Yugo shake – Deki stands on one side of the Yugo, I stand on the other, and we sway the car back and forth to hear how much gas is juggling inside. Yugo gas meters never worked and were impossible to repair.
We rushed over the bridge, crossing the Sava River onto New Belgrade and were in front of good old proud Hotel Yugoslavia in no time. With not as many cops and traffic on the streets of Belgrade as there are today, the Yugo was great for bringing us everywhere in time. We entered shabby Yugoslavia and walked through the dark hallways of what had been considered to be the most prestigious hotel in the Balkans, with a few shattering lights greeting us, to the room reserved for us and the hairdo. It was one of those rooms where Queen Elisabeth II, Nixon and Tina Turner would have stayed when visiting Tito’s great country in the 70’s and 80’s. It too was dark and shabby.
Deki did a few of his tricks and shortened my “model” hair even more, I painted my face with drastic make-up and we went to the show hall. As I walked the stage, everyone seemed to like my boy look, and Deki enjoyed himself mocking and making faces at me. The more I “modeled”, the more I resembled a boy, and all that seemed to matter at the time was to have fun while satisfying Deki’s strict boss, a coked out 40-something-year-old and the owner of the salon where he worked. Neither Deki or I ever earned any cash competing and presenting at these hair shows.
***
It’s 2 PM, following a successful hair show. A guy in a shiny-fluorescent-red tracksuit and rave shades and a girl with short white hair, black eye makeup and punk clothes are leaning on a white Yugo in front of Hotel Yugoslavia. The sun, fortified in the midst of New Belgrade’s communist blocks where shade is scarce, is melting the girl’s cakey and over exaggerated makeup. The guy is also sweating severely under his cool polyester outfit.
What are they scheming?
***
We decided it was useless to go home, rest until the evening and meet up again. We hopped into the Yugo, put on a psychedelic trance tape and let the fun begin. After a stop to the gas station for beers, we headed to our usual parking lot, where I would practice driving. Deki considered the Yugo to be sort of like a drivers’ boot camp. He would always say that the best drivers learnt how to drive on a Yugo and that, if I learned all of the tricks on a Yugo, it will make any other vehicle a piece of cake. We parked the car to drink a beer and relax a bit. He was giving me some pointers on parking as I noticed two cops approach us. We turned down the music. What a pain. They rarely ever approached us for something substantial and it seemed like too nice of a day to chitchat with them, especially since we were looking to save up the little cash we had for beers in the evening, not waste it on bribes.
“Good day”, they looked at us as if they were on to something. “Can we see your license and registration?”
It was a good thing Deki and I hadn’t swapped seats yet. He had me hold on to his beer as he searched for the documents and handed them to the fatter cop.
“So, what are the two of you doing here?” –the other one asked.
“Uh, you know, we just thought we’d enjoy the sun, hang out… the usual…” Deki responded nervously hoping the cop would stop gazing into the beers I was holding.
“Open your trunk.”
As the fat and the fatter cop shuffled the messy trunk, we rolled our eyes. This annoying procedure was a standard way for to get us to pay up when in hurry or simply looking to avoid embarrassment in front of a girl. This would have been the 30th time that the Yugo was undergoing such an exhaustive search and Deki and I were too good of friends to be embarrassed by this situation so we silently agreed on not giving them the cash. 45 minutes later, the fatter cop was sweatier than polyestered Deki and pissed that we had all the time in the world for their “procedure”. His red dripping face crawled in through the window.
“Next time, take her home to fuck her. It must be rather uncomfortable here,” he said as he returned Deki's papers.
Like a pair of angry chubby boys disappointed about not getting the candy they had been anticipating, they trotted off to their Yugo 101 Skala and drove off. The finishing touch of their performance, the degrading childish line, left us in numb shock. It was the type of shock you would get from the behavior of a person, who you know pretty well but disliked, who you thought would not be able to shock you anymore than they already had, but they still manage to. Time after time.
We watched the sun set behind Belgrade, poured down a couple of more beers, and decided it was not the day for me to practice driving. “Besides”, Deki was now arguing a contradictory yet equally valid Yugo theory to the one he had been selling an hour before, “if you learn how to drive on this Yugo, you will have trouble shifting gears on other cars”. Every Yugo has its own way of handling the stick shift and, more often than not, the first and reverse gears are particularly challenging and require extra strength and special angles in entering. Every owner is the master of his/her own stick shift and it is difficult to get accustomed to others after.
***
It was finally getting dark. Our time to shine. We drove over to Ivana’s and picked her up. Now when I look back at Deki’s white Yugo days, all I remember is excitement. The night after the parking lot incident with the cops was no different, no special. We drank, laughed, talked, smoked, mocked each other, danced, stuck our heads out the windows singing from the top of our lungs (to tracks blasting as loudly as it was possible from a Yugo). It was one of those moods that would make Ivana and I blow kisses at random drivers in cars around us. Bored cab drivers, lonely men and women, other careless youth like us. Blowing the kisses seemed to have a wonderful impact on everyone, confusion and surprise on their side, fun and spontaneity on our side.
The bastardly cops, the absurd hairshows and ridiculous hairdo’s, the coked-out boss, the messed up country and the shitty car couldn’t have mixed better. It was an accidental film for us to cast in as teenagers, a film full of mistakes and adaptations. And, for us, this life worked perfectly. Just like Deki’s white Yugo.
