I’m from New Jersey

Everyone other than Ida and I end up going out to some club I’ve never heard of, pretty far outside the city center, including Jeff.

They all walk into the club, and it is from Jeff’s perspective no different from any other club he’s been to before, save for the company he’s with, and the people at the club, most of whom are Danish –

The music is loud, generally background house music, of the type they play at Le Bain, that seems an unending medley of indifferentiable baselines, all with a steady beat, the music changing so gradually, you never notice the changes at all, absent conscious effort.

Jeff is not a fan, but he understands the utility of this type of music, in an environment where you need to fill the void, creating demand for a type of primal communication, of which he is a master.

He gets to know everyone well enough beforehand, so there’s only incremental schmoozing left to obtain the arguably unwanted status of the center of attention, which is something he can’t do without, due to his physical stature, and imposing personality.

So he it makes it happen –

He identifies the most likely point of friction, Ron, the petite gay man, who appreciates Jeff’s intellectualism, after hours with him at our home beforehand, but is nonetheless naturally a bit distant from the large, lumbering, heterosexual male.

Jeff charms Ron to the point that Ron is later seated atop Jeff’s shoulders, as Jeff bounces Ron up and down to the music, as Ron sings along to a song he happens to recognize –

This catches the attention of a group of Danish girls, in their late twenties, seeing a petite man, in tight, high-legged shorts, perched atop the shoulders of a beast, with both men laughing hysterically, in earnest, at the presumed absurdity of the scene.

One of the girls makes eye contact with Ron, who waves them over, and seeing a sizable table filled with free drinks, before a couch fit for dancing, they’re now completely sold on the matter –

Ron taps Jeff on the chest, like some kind of giant horse-man, who gently places him back on the dance floor, both giving each other a giant hug afterwards, while still laughing.

The girls approach, and Ron offers them drinks, as does Jeff, one of the girls immediately firing off at Jeff in Danish, which is not surprising, given his appearance, which borders on the cliche Nordic man:

Tall, fit, with blond hair, fair skin, albeit a multiple up in scale.

Jeff replies to her in English,

“I’m from New Jersey.”, causing her to laugh, already softened up a bit from the scene before involving Ron.

She says, somewhat loud, leaning in so he can hear, with the music blasting, as he’s now standing behind the table, with her before it,

“What’s your name?”

“Jeff, how about you?”, he says, to which she replies,

“Pernilla”,

He repeats,

“Pernilla?”

And she says,

“Yes, you’ve got it right.”, to which he says,

“Just making sure –

So what do you want?

We’ve got vodka, Hendrix, and some champagne too, which you’re welcome to, but we don’t have a lot.”

“I’ll have champagne, if that’s OK.”

So he pours a glass, and she laughs a bit, as he lifts an already thin champagne flute, which now looks comically tiny in the full context of his massive frame –

As he carefully pours the champagne, she can see that he is oddly delicate, succeeding without any spillage, then recalling the way he placed Ron back onto the dance floor, immediately puzzled by an apparently complex person from New Jersey.

Physical graffiti

There’s only one late-night food option outside the club, which is basically a grocery store, that now stays open late only because of the club, giving them a brand new source of income.

Jeff walks in with Pernilla, both of them completely obliterated, after several hours of heavy drinking –

Jeff now confronted with an ocean of foreign labels, written in what appears to be heavily vandalized English, he spots a wooden cubby filled with bananas, a familiar food, and so he moves upon his prey, grabbing a bunch, still attached at the stem, roughly a dozen in number, and marches to the counter, simply pointing at the bananas with his credit card, while looking at the clerk, who nods, prompting Jeff to simply hand the clerk his credit card.

Don’t get too excited

Jeff and Pernilla get out of a cab, both hysterically laughing at nothing.

Jeff then opens the door to the house, prompting Pernilla to exclaim,

“Fann, who is your friend?”,

Upon seeing the landing of the staircase, unclear if she recognizes the painting, but in any case, with the sense, this is not a normal set up.

“Don’t get too excited”, he replies, pulling up the chain that then lifts a trap door in the floor, exposing the staircase to the studio below, in the basement.

She looks at him, grinning,

“This is mental.”

Eurovision

Jeff is sleeping on the couch in the basement studio lounge, unfolded into a bed, together with Pernilla –

He wakes up first, to total darkness, since the studio has no windows, and no incoming light, but for the two staircases, which Jeff has left concealed.

He desperately needs to vomit, and knowing there’s a bathroom, he grabs his phone to use it as a light, but it’s not enough to navigate –

Spotting a light switch, he accidentally turns on a bright neon light that says, “This is not a door”, which is above what is plainly a door, now glowing bright red in his face, somehow adding to his nausea, annoying him, though he leaves it lit.

He then spots what looks like another light switch, which apparently does nothing, which he angrily flips up and down, but it is instead the volume fader for a set of headphones mounted on the wall of the studio lounge.

Finally, he spots the remote for the TV, which he wagers should provide enough lighting, when on.

Confused, and desperately hungover, still otherwise in the dark, he turns on the television, sincerely hoping for some kind of brightly-lit programming that will end his drunken woes:

It’s a best-of Eurovision show, glaring at an unreasonably loud volume, which Jeff fears he has no time to adjust, featuring a male singer, wearing what is in essence a figure skater’s outfit, throwing his body about a preposterous stage, with cheesy pyrotechnics, audibly exploding, basically shouting into a microphone, in what strikes Jeff as most likely to be German, as he briefly stares in disbelief at the TV, thinking for a moment this could be a telethon for mentally ill people, having seen some phone numbers flash, that are instead intended for voting –

Hearing positively awful, saxophone-heavy music, as the singer parades about the stage in spandex, with innumerable flairs, flying about, positioned inopportunely along the singer’s lanky, and highly visible frame, with a deep-cut tank, exposing copious chest hair, all of this ultimately expressed in a totally alien language.

Jeff, now able to see somewhat, quickly spots and grabs an ice bucket from the table below the TV, and vomits –

Pernilla bursts into laughter, then hiding herself under the blanket.