January 2002
It it pitch black outside at 9:45 a.m. when I descend for breakfast in Hotel Holt’s dining room. Van Stein stumbles in mumbling about ghosts, swearing he has one in his room.
“They don’t have ghosts here,” I say. “They have elves and trolls. And maybe the devil is hiding beneath the ice. But they don’t do ghosts.”
Van Stein shakes his head. “There’s a ghost in my room. It even took the bedspread off.”
“That was the maid,” I say.
“Huh?”
“I know you usually stay at Motel 6, but in nice places like this maids visit in the evening while you’re out drinking Armagnac. They call it turning the bed down.”
I sip tepid coffee while Van Stein quaffs eggs and bacon, stockpiling protein for his imminent expedition with Erik the Red and Kristjan to Gofloss and Geysir.
“You don’t get it,” says Van Stein, yolk dripping from his chin. “My curtains were rustling.”
“So were mine. It was windy outside and the windows are draughty.”
“Mine aren’t,” says Van Stein. “And also, when I woke up my shoes weren’t where I put them.”
“That was the Armagnac. You’re not used to such refined drinking. They were shined by elves during the night.”
“Nope. I have a ghost in my room.”
Erik the Red appears and, not to be out-done, he has a ghost in his room too. I sip more coffee while they swap ghost stories.
“And did you catch channel 18 on TV?” says Van Stein. “Hard porn.”
“All I saw,” I say, “was an animated commercial starring a puking toilet.”
It’s nearing 10:15. “Where’s Floater?” asks Van Stein.
“We had plans to meet for breakfast,” I say. “Maybe he’s dead.” With a sense of obligation, I stroll to the lobby, pick up a house phone.
Floater answers, confused, disoriented. “What time is it?” he demands.
“Almost 10:30.”
“Are you kidding me?” Floater grunts something about it still being dark outside. By the time he descends, Van Stein and Erik the Red are donning final layers for their departure to the boonies.
Scouting a Runtur Route
A wicked wind kicks me in the butt as Floater and I reach Laugavegur by foot. I’m wearing long johns, a thermal vest, duck-down coat, neck gait and a Polar Fleece hat, but the cold finds ways to infiltrate places I never even knew existed.
Our mission: Runtur reconnaissance. Scout hotspots, prepare a plan.
“Let’s see,” I say, after slogging 90 minutes. “On the upper end we’ve got Kaffibarinn, Prikid, Sirkus. Lower end: Rex, Kaffi Brennislan, Club Ooal. In between, Hus Malarans.”
“Bless you.”
We enter a curio shop, partly in search of warmth, partly out of curiosity. Its proprietor Magnus Magnusson tells us in flawless English that he recently vacationed in Hawaii “where you should be this time of year.” Magnusson introduces Don Bryant, “An American who has lived here for 20 years.” Bryant, who says he’s from California, looks like an Icelandic native in fisherman’s beard and woolly white sweater. “Don has traveled to every part of our country,” Magnusson marvels. “On foot.”
Bryant is obviously nuts.
“So, Don,” I say, “what’s the American expat community like here?”
Bryant looks down, shuffles his feet. “I’m it.”
City’s Best Hot Dogs
At noon we dip down to City’s Best Hot Dogs. A biting wind from the harbor greets us halfway.
“Two dogs,” I say to the jovial lady who runs this shack.
“What would you like on them?” she asks.
“First time here,” I say. “You tell me.”
“Raw onion?” She lines a couple of buns with diced onion. “Mustard and also ketchup sauce?”
“Do it.”
“And will you try remoladi?”
“Whatever it is, load it up. I’m in for the full experience.”
She hands us loaded dogs and refuses to accept payment. “Because it’s your first time,” she says.
We relish every last morsel.
“Time for a culture check,” says Floater, leading us to a CD shop. He asks a pretty shop assistant for a recommendation and we don headphones to hear her choice: A local band called Sigur Ros.
Fifteen seconds is all it takes. “I’m in.” I slap down a wad of sponduliks.
Walking to the Holt, we pass shop windows resplendent in cutting-edge design and high-tech gear that makes Radio Shack look like it belongs in The Flintstones.
Geyser-Whacked
At seven o’clock Van Stein and Erik the Red truck in from the cold. Floater and I are lurking in the lobby as they arrive and Erik is shaking his head. “You have no idea what we’ve been through today.” He says this with a Scottish accent thicker than usual because his tongue is 80 percent frozen. He motions at Van Stein. “Him especially.”
The artist looks as if he’s been plugged into an electrical sub-station. His face is freeze-burned, hair frizzled, eyes ablaze with madness. He cannot speak.
One hour later, we launch on foot to a seafood restaurant called Vid Tjornina.
“I got kissed by the devil today,” whoops Van Stein, warming to candlelight on our table, drunk on accomplishment.
Erik the Red explains: While Van Stein painted a geyser in sub-frozen conddtions, the damn thing changed direction and slapped him hard before freezing to ice. Talk about wind chill. “It was the biggest blow of the day,” says Erik.
“In other words,” I say, “Thomas made a pass at a hot hole and got geyser-whacked?”
“No.” Van Stein stiffens. “I tried to paint the devil, and he blew me a kiss. From the abyss.”
“Wait until you discover you’re pregnant,” I say.
“I have seen fortitude today,” says Erik.
“No,” I say. “Forty-two fetuses. When Alpha 26 hears about this he‘ll want to conduct a combination exorcism/abortion.”
“You want to know about hell?” Van Stein shudders. “Kristjan showed us the Drowning Pool.”
“The what?” says Floater.
“It’s a river out there, where the Vikings took their unfaithful wives. To drown them. And afterward, there’s a geothermal spa nearby where they’d celebrate with a hot bath.”
That’s the way it was with Berserkers a millennium ago. When foul weather postponed faraway forays of rape and pillage, one of them would get bored and slaughter his family for the sheer hell of it, and his friends would say, D’ya hear? Wolf the Unwashed went berserk yesterday, needs another woman.
We drink chablis and order something that in Icelandic reads like dead pike smelling dyke. And if that’s not enough, Floater’s small potatoes turn out to be rams testicles, part of a plot to Thorrablot him.
“So what did you guys do,” sneers Van Stein.
“You kidding? While you were out watching Mother Nature fart sulphur and steam, Floater and I did the real work, laying down the runtur. And that’s not all,” I add. “We ran into that cultural attaché.”
The Snake Department
“You mean the guy we wrote to before we left California?” says Van Stein.
“Yup.”
Van Stein closes one eye, dribbles chablis. “But wasn’t he supposed to be out of town?”
“Damn right he was. I caught the lying son of a whore at a place called Café de Paris.”
“But how’d you know it was him?”
“There aren’t many Americans around here,” I say. “Aside from a nutcase named Don who walks around this frozen country for kicks. Anyway, this guy is obviously American in his navy blazer and L.L. Bean flannel-lined chinos and anorak. And then I heard him say he works at the embassy.”
“To who?”
“Heidi.”
“Who the hell’s Heidi?”
“Maybe my next wife. For now, a waitress at Café de Paris. The embassy guy tries to chat her up while his girlfriend is using the john. So I ask him, where did the cultural attaché go this weekend? And he says, I’m the cultural attaché. So I tore him a new asshole.”
“This isn’t true,” says Van Stein. “Floater?”
Floater nods.
“I told him,” I continue, “you folks at the Snake Department are just a bunch of pant-load do-nothings.”
“No! What did he say?”
“He tried to ignore me. So I raised my voice and called him a lying-son-of-a-whoremaster, right in front of his girlfriend, and everyone else.”
“What happened?”
“Everyone in Café de Paris applauded. I don’t think they’re fond of Americans here, especially the ones who work for the government. That’s when he got pissed-off. Said he was going to fix me good, wanted to know my name.”
“And?” asks Van Stein.
“I told him.”
“Told him what?”
“Told him I’m an artist named Thomas Van Stein.”
Van Stein turns to Erik the Red. “You hear that? This is what I get from him all the time. He meets some mystery American in the hotel bar at the Lowndes and tells me I can’t come down to see who it is.”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t come down.”
“Yeah, you did.”
“No I didn’t. What I said was, Stay in your room.”
“You see!?” Van Stein howls. “So what happens next?”
“You mean the runtur?”
“No, the cultural attaché.”
“When I get home, I email the Snake Department and report what a do-nothing he is.”
“And?”
“They promote him. They prefer do-nothings, it‘s safer for them.”
Devil’s Delight
The server asks if we need dessert.
It’s not a need thing, baby, it’s a want.
“I’ll have the Devil’s Delight,” whoops Van Stein, reading from the menu.
“I thought you had it earlier,” says Floater.
“I want to reminisce.”
Our server invites us to take our chocolate cake—made in heaven, devilishly good—in the bar. On the way we pass a party of women. Erik the Red interrupts their revelry to snap a few pics then he dashes to where we’ve set up shop and shows us the results on his digital camera. Van Stein grabs the camera, races to the babes, bounces back. “They’re going to join us for a drink,” he whoops. “Some place called Nasty Bar.”
“Are you guys blind?” I ask.
“No,” says Van Stein.
“Drunk?”
“No,” says Van Stein. “Desperate. My dad once told me: At night all cats are grey.”
The options before us: Await these grey cats in Nasty Bar—or start the runtur. It is nearing eleven o’clock and we’ve heard most bars are packed by midnight, so we aim for Laugavegur.
“Speed up, would ya?” I call back to my lagging gang. “This is supposed to be a runtur, not a walktur.”