About squandered opportunities

In the ninth district of Wien, right off the University campus, you’ll find the Narrenturm – literally, fool’s tower. It’s one of the oldest insane asylumns in the world, decomissioned in the early 20th century but standing since the late 1700′s. Soren, who knows everything imaginable about Wien, clued us in to its existence a few days ago, and yesterday Kelly and I rounded up some Studentenheim kids for a tour.

We didn’t know quite what to expect, but got somewhat more than we bargained for.

In Olden Times, before color photography or refrigeration, they used to make wax models of various ailments for medical students to study. The Turm has literally thousands festooning the walls and inside glass cases, illustrating everything from Herpes to Syphilis – there were an unusual number of models dedicated to STDs – to Rubella to Tuberculosis. They’re all horribly realistic, and still retain their original sheen and color from their creation over a hundred years ago. Most are mounted on wood plaques, exactly like heads of game animals, and the artist who created them proudly signed and dated many of the pieces. They’re like disgusting works of art. Other rooms exhibited torture-esque furniture and medical tools from back in the day, including a birthing chair that resembled a very posh toilet crossed with an arm chair. All of the explanations were auf Deutsch, so we had a hard time deciphering their exact purposes in some cases. One device sported four wicked-looking pointed rods, one set at each compass point, designed to move in and out when one adjusted the calipers, perhaps to firmly hold one’s head or other fleshy part in its grim center. Our tour guide didn’t even know about that one.

Most interesting of all, though, were the bleached skeletons and carefully preserved bodies of freaks: siamese twins, children with various birth defects, a child with hydrocephalus whose bleached skull ballooned over the rest of his small frame, persons with bone disorders (untreatable back then) which made their bones bend and twist horrifically from the weight of their limbs, curling around on themselves like springs. I was feeling a little green around the gills, what with the horror and what all, when I entered one of the last rooms and saw what I thought was the best the museum had to offer: the skeleton of a siamese-twin cow, standing on all four of its hind legs and grinning from inside a glass case. While I was ogling that freak, I caught another out of the corner of my eye. My breath caught in my throat.

On the shelf to the right of the cow lay a two-headed boy, fully preserved, floating inside a gallon glass jar. There can’t be more than a dozen such specimens in the world, and with the PC movement in the States infringing on our God-given freak-ogling rights, their number is fast dwindling. As it happened, I had Pablo Esperanto slung over my back, Kelly having brought him to school that day and tired of carrying him around. Kelly was held rapt by the tiny double-infant floating in glass, and I surreptitiously swung Pablo around to bring the business end to bear; my plan was clear. How many chances would fickle fate afford me to play “Two-headed Boy” by Neutral Milk Hotel in the presence of an actual two-headed boy? Precious few, you can count on that much. I strummed the opening chords coyly enough, but Kelly knew immediately what I was up to. “Don’t even think about it,” she warned. I already had, clearly, but without her encouragement I decided to show the dead some modicum of respect – that time. I was telling the rest of the group about my failed attempt to play the song once we were all outside the Turm, and Kelly got my whole monologue on video. I watched it, and must admit that it’s a fairly characteristic representation of me. It will go on the site in a couple months, when it’s more convenient to upload things of that size.

We’d also caught wind the day before of a concert / festival that night, held in the open air in a huge park near Grinzig. If you like, you can think of Grinzig as the Wallingford of Vienna – lots of nice family homes, trees lining the streets, lots of quaint little stores and restaurants. We took a subway and a bus there last night with Jennifer and Jonathan, after the Turm visit, and were again surprised by what we found. We had expected perhaps five hundred people lounging in the park, idly passing around joints and watching a small stage with a barely-workable sound system. We were right about everything except the scale – try more like 4000 or 5000 Wieners and a rig rivalling that of a Bumbershoot show. A Czech emo-core band, whatever that entails, had just finished and given way to a German techno group as we arrived in the fading twilight and tried to make sense of the scene. Kelly and Jonathan bought us a beer apiece while Jennifer and I camped out by the entrance, and then, after wandering aimlessly for quite a while, trying to decide how to best place ourselves amidst the lazy chaos, we noticed a campfire growing under the careful hands of a ring of hippies, a ways removed from the main clump of concertgoers – clearly, where we needed to be. We sat down and immediately struck up converstion, Deutsch and English, with several of the people around and made a pleasant time of it. Kelly and I both traded poi-spinning techniques with an Austrian girl who was completely intelligible to me in spurts and otherwise incomprehensible, I played a few songs for interested parties and passed Pablo around a bit, and we basically just hung out.

As we were considering taking off for the night, the evening suddenly became much more intense. From out of nowhere, a large man hurtled through the ring surrounding the fire – by this time, several dozen people – cuffing my shoulder with his foot as he shoved past, lept directly into the small fire, and began kicking it everywhere. Glowing firebrands flew off his dililgent shoes onto people’s backpacks, into their eyes and hair, generally hither and yon, freaking everyone out with good reason. An argument erupted between the hippie organizers, if they merited the title, and the fun-killer still kicking coals onto innocent bystanders. “You can’t have a fire here!” the Champion of Responsibility shouted. We were on the grass in the middle of the park, not in a designated fire area, to be fair. “What’s it to you?!” an incensed hippie shot back. They argued back and forth for some time, but since no one was willing to step forward to take responsibility for the fire, it didn’t get anywhere. The interloper seemed to be retreating when he was joined by several other responsible adults who renewed the effort to extinguish the coals and eventually started yelling at everyone to disperse. “There’s a fire pit in the park, and this isn’t it!” If we hadn’t already been on the way out, we probably would have been upset rather then just shocked.

The indignant hippies were slowly congregating to the designated fire area to jumpstart the fun, but we weren’t sure when the buses stopped running and didn’t want to get stranded in Grinzig, so we left. Who knows what amazing things happened in our absence? We never will.