The Hopes and Tragedies of Oddadammed

Odadammed is a busy place. Perhaps, the busiest in the city. The nice kind of busy, you know, with people streaming in and out of it. There is chatter of which ice cream flavors to buy, of what restaurant to choose, and if she will not look plump in that daring red dress she bought in haste. Odadammed gives you a remarkable license to scream out doubts about anything: muffin-tops or your promiscuous roommate or your sleazy boss because it wraps everything you say in a crisp layer of anonymity. Even the most gifted eavesdroppers have had to return empty-handed for all Odadammed has to offer is waves of white noise sparkled with an arbitrary frosting of unrelated words. Oddadamed is hardly a gossip's heaven. What self-respecting voyeur would be proud of intricate details concerning a sleazy, promiscuous muffin anyway.

I've snuggled under the protective comfort of Odadammed's blanket of sound too. Everybody in the city has. The square has shared many of my intimate secrets. Mostly the ones I would coo to Jane through our many walks, jostling with other passersby, and sometimes each other. I would point to her rude observations about a tourist at the streetlight, one-liner fantasies about us, jokes about somebody's hair and she would chuckle and nod. I remember winters when I've made uncomfortable admissions or felt the cold despite the jacket. I've mouthed guilty secrets on these paths. Sometimes she would be all ears. Other times, I'd have to content with the attention and kindness of Odadammed alone. Never a solitary secret here.

Today, I only wait as the white noise bounces of me. No Jane to point at the tourists and guffaw. I could describe their clothes later and share a laugh perhaps. Would she find it funny? With Jane, there's no saying. She can't usually help laughing at my 'Idiotic tourist' stand-up gig. I could greet her with one, perhaps. Will she come? With Jane, there's no saying.

I sit at Rio, the small cornerside cafe at the square.Instantly recognisable from from the thousands of tourist pictures one finds on the internet and in television travel shows. The square at Odadammed is the flame to touristic moths. And come they do, in droves. Just like the River and the Bridge. It is where everything is priced a just beyond reason. It is where artists will draw caricatures of yours for a few precious bucks. The portraits cost a little more. Ones with colour, more than that. The tourist couple posing for the colour portrait are paying good money for what their Canon and photoshop can do these days for free. They are perhaps in their early thirties? The woman looks eager. Ostensibly, this one is for the albums back home. The bloke does well to hide his impatience. Too well in fact. He looks a complete prick, Jane would have said. That is quite the same thing I would have told her. You can see he gives jack to the picture. A little less to the woman, maybe. You can see him eying young girls walking past. He may have been addicted to porn in college. And is probably flirting with a chick called Natasha in office. All, as his lady decides where in their pretty little pad this portrait will hang. For posterity, she will say with a smile to the bored artist after he is done. Jane says she hates stupid women a lot more than the philandering men they tag after.

But that is Jane. She has a thought for all the men she has met, and some of the men she hasn't. She has hated every man she has loved, she'd say.They were either too strong, too weak or too messed up. In retrospect only, I would silently hope.God knows her love isn't easy. So does the benevolent Odadammed, he after all has been in on our petty fights, our 'sweet nothings'(like the tabloids call it. We hate that term anyway) and our separate lonelinesses-- being thanked for which would have made the real Odadammed choke, roll over and die.

Odadammed, you see, was the name of a medieval warrior known and feared for the brutal ends his enemies met. Alas, he wasn't cruel, or valiant or barbaric enough to breach celluloid and have Gerard Butler play him. How was he to know the dynamics of Hollywood, poor man. He, however, caught the imagination of a pub owner, in the '70s who named a seedy little bar Odadammed's Head. A further development he wouldn't have thought much of was that the pub became a place for petty goons, hardened laborers-- hardly the sort of men he'd have befriended. Oddadamed's was a classic case of death liberating one from truths one needn't have known. For, another thing the place was infamous for was illegal trafficking of the contraband-- crack, weapons, women. The latter making the name of the pub an entirely unintentional, unenviable sexual innuendo. This, I take, would have been pretty hard hitting stuff, even for a steely, ruthless soldier who chopped off men's arms with their own swords.

The streetside artist is now finished with his portrait. The woman gushes and the man pays, not without bargaining on the price. Cheap bastard! I wonder if Jane would have liked a portrait of the two of us. Only if we were painted in neon, I suppose. I can tell she'd prefer caricatures to portraits. In art as in real life, my woman.

The closest thing we have to a portrait is a picture we took together in front of the Odadammed statue and fountains at the square. It is dark, neither of us sober, and lights of many colors illuminate our inebriated smiles as we make to take a dip in the fountains. This was years ago. It was more of a joke to us than symbolic or commemorative. We hated the statue of Odadammed. A ridiculous, ostentatious installation with too many lights and silly fountains. One would think the warrior's poor ghost had enough to resent but no! In the summer of 1987, a protesting crowd of homosexuals and transvestites had set fire to the Odadammed's head pub, prompting that iconic headline in The Daily Gazette: Gays Ravage Odadammed. It was a revolt against the oppression, harassment and bias by the local police. The incident caused much noise in the state, and before more chaos ensued, the then mayor quickly commissioned a monument in memorial to appease the gays. This gave way to the statue of a warrior atop a horse, in Roman sandals and a skirt (The sculptor erroneously thought he was Greek, when Oddadammed was actually Syrian) which now stands at the square christened Odadammed's Square (lending to the widely used, derisive schoolboy phrase 'as square as Odadammed'). Water from four different fountains coalesced at his feet. Each fountain representing, supposedly, different kinds of people. To people of different kinds, Odadammed is a relic to this day. You can see them devoutly walking around in T-shirts printed with the screaming headline from the '80s incident, in groups of twos, holding hands and taking pictures. The Odadammed Ravaged t-shirts, bearing the picture of some artist's representation of what he thought Odadammed looked like, holding another man's hands with a cheeky grin, some say, is more popular than t-shirts bearing the city's name, making Odadammed a veritable gay icon, and a universal pop-culture phenomenon.

We never bought those t-shirts. As a rule, every tourist city has a separate set of things to do and buy for the tourists, none of which is in any way connected to what the locals do. The locals, for instance, would never eat at the flashy food-joints near the bridge. it was simply something we never did. Just like Jane and I always hit the town on weekends(staying home is for the sober:Jane). Just how Jane and I never watched romantic comedies (I don't get them) or visited her parents(She can't stand their company) or wore red colored clothes (Red is too loud:J) or planned to holiday in the mountains(Bad memories of mine). As locals, we never went to the Museum of Love or visited cafe Rio. Which is what makes me uncomfortable today. Jane once spoke of how being a tourist- in spite of its obvious moronic trappings- was fulfilling. She thought tourists have no synthetic notions of what a city feels like, tastes like, where the best food is, or where the best bands play which gives them license to try new things without unimaginatively settling for what we always did. To try things without bias or prejudice. 'Being a tourist frees you from saying it's just something we don't do', she had argued, enthusiastically.

But we nevertheless considered Odadammed a place to only walk past. A means to an end. A colorful, sometimes eventful, flight to chosen destination. One never sat down at the Odaddamed square. That was what the tourists did. They ate and talked and took pictures. We always walked. It was one such walk that the fight broke. I said something about unfair judgment. She thought it was ironic. I asked why. For a man who judged indiscriminately, to ask for fair judgment was a little rich, she snapped. She was being unfair, I said. Why, she questioned brazenly. I never judge, I countered. She scoffed. I had walked off in rage. I heard a little bit about how I was the kind of man who never cared to listen to what a woman was saying because in my head, because I had already decided she wasn't smart enough. I had called her a vacuous bitch. Or something. That was the episode Jane and I had had. And the last one at that.

Now, as redemption, I do what every man hates to do. I wait. And I confront uncertainty. Possibly, rejection and heartbreak. In front of me, Oddadammed smiles a strange kind of smile. We share kinship over being misunderstood. At least you can change who they think you are, pal, he is saying to me, the skirt notwithstanding. Where I sit now, is at a table on a cobblestoned side-walk at the crossroads that lead to the monument at the square. I sit down where people always walked. Like one of the people Jane and I mockingly sympathised with. Poor geezers, we thought. He who sits at Oddadammed square having been our standard for extreme oddities. This brings me to another sorry snippet from Oddadammed's quiver. Say it fast, Jane had said excitedly, when we were walking from the bus station to the movies past Oddadammed once.

Oddadamed Square. Odd adammed square. Odd a dammed. Square. O da dammed square. I laugh as I repeat the name aloud to the bewilderment of a passing waitress. I sit at the square of the damned. Waiting with hope, where others always walked.


Epilogue:
I met Jane ten minutes later. I had hopelessly walked out of the cafe to be stopped by a bunch of tourists in Oddadammed ravaged t-shirts asking me to click a picture in front of the fountains. Just as I clicked, she tapped me on the shoulder and smiled sweetly. She was in a pretty red dress.