SURREAL BOUNCE: 13) INSTITUTE OF PHALLOLOGY
In Search of Creativity & Madness
January 2002
At dawn—about 10:45—I wander the disturbingly quiet city streets, which now accurately reflect Van Stein’s nickname for Reykjavik: Wreck-it-up.
Because during the wee hours the Laugavegur was transformed into a cesspool.
Six hours earlier, I’d concerned myself with finding a urinal. But the natives simply unzipped their flies and hosed the streets. And now it takes serious focus to avoid patches of frozen urine and vomit along the sidewalks.
I count 22 patches on one short block.
Furthermore, shopfront windows that are not actually shattered are cracked like elaborate spider webs.
Expulsion Therapy: The release of bodily fluids to stave off anxiety, madness and commitment to the Kleppur.
Two cappuccinos served by Heidi at Café de Paris bring me back to life.
I am disgruntled with myself for allowing the runtur to put me to bed, not the other way around. But I still have tonight, Saturday.
And my sanity. I think.
Back at the Holt, Van Stein knocks my door late morning. “I need coffee,” he begs, bags forming beneath bloodshot eyes, wisps of hair the shape of a butterfly looking for liftoff
Floater appears; he, too, in need of a caffeine infusion.
We stroll to a bookstore café.
“After you left…” Floater is shaking his head, “we ended up at that Sirkus place. Even PT Barnum and all the frigging Ringling Brothers would be amazed.”
“Yeah, they have a beach garden in their backyard,” says Van Stein. “Sand and beach chairs and umbrellas. Unless I was hallucinating.”
“I saw it too.” Floater nods vigorously. “And the owner’s son… he offered Erik a free drink in exchange for a blowjob.”
NASA’s toilet loiterers? A free drink for a blowjob? Had the Vikings become a nation of gay blades? But the owner’s son did not discriminate. A nubile blonde female obliged him for a drink.
Says Van Stein, “I told her, hey, I’d have bought you two drinks for one of those!”
“Walking home at 4:30 was a war zone,” says Floater. “Guys pissing everywhere, throwing glasses.”
“Caught that,” I say.
The National Gallery is closed, so we’re left with the Icelandic Institute of Phallology—a fancy name for giggle-stick gallery.
This is the only penis museum in the world.
It displays a collection of a hundred-plus wieners from whales, dolphins, seals, goats, sheep—and even a polar bear.
Sigurdor Hjartarson, the institute’s phallologist, is feared by whales, dolphins, seals, goats, sheep—and even polar bears.
We hoof back beneath a setting sun, mid-afternoon.
“I will never think of the male anatomy the same, now I know what’s out there,” says Van Stein. “I have been somewhere most people haven’t.”
“What do you make of the curator?” asks Floater.
Van Stein: “What can you say about a guy who collects dicks? Kind of cocky? Broke the penal code? Something very traumatic must have happened to this guy at an early age.”
It’s already dark by the time we reach our hotel. Van Stein dons three layers for the sacred mission before him: To paint Klepp Psychiatric Institute beneath a the Full Wolf Moon—having managed, beyond all odds, to persuade Kristjan to drive him back to the House by the Blue Bay.
That night’s restaurant: Three Jackets. Their menu, written in elf-speak, seems to say: We’d like to welcome you pigs to our restaurant and We also serve screwballs.
Fresh from the Klepp, or struck with it, Van Stein is mumbling to himself again: “The Reykjavik effect, yes, we’re going to wreck the effect, the Reykjavik erector set...”
Smoked puffin breast—an appetizer—is set before us.
“Some of those whales,” Van Stein wails, numb from cold, still awed by the museum we visited earlier. “Oh my goodness.”
Erik the Red had been reluctant to order puffin, having told us he adored puffins as a child so he could never eat one.
Then he orders it.
Moved by Erik’s tale, Van Stein jumps up and grabs a stuffed puffin from the bar, stands it on the table facing Erik. “Look at it—and eat!”
Puffin is rich, somewhere between duck breast and smoked salmon. Erik goes whole hog and orders whale steak, too.
We all try it, a texture and taste akin to calves liver.
“May I spout off after this?” Van Stein asks the waitress.
“Don’t mind him,” I tell her, between mouthfuls of halibut in lobster sauce. “He just returned from the Klepp.”
She expresses bewilderment.
“The House by the Blue Bay,” I explain.
“Kleppur?” She recoils. “No, no. Never.”
“Not you.” I point at Van Stein. “Him. We checked him out today. Two years. We’re celebrating.”
She backs away, unsure, taking no chances. “Have you seen the film?” she asks a-shiver.
“What film?”
“Angels of the Universe. An Icelandic movie. About schizophrenia. About Klepp. Have you seen?”
The waitress adds that 4,562 establishments in Reykjavik are licensed to sell booze, one liquor license for every 25 persons. When young people go out, she tells us, they average about 15 drinks each.
I’ve gone quiet. It makes Van Stein nervous, not yet knowing my compulsion to introvert without warning. He feels a need to snap me out of it, asks, “How’s the character development coming?”
“Devolving.”
The plan, this runtur, is to avoid disco-dance raves, explore the beast’s underbelly.
So we begin at a café named Kalli List.
Van Stein, Floater and I converse with two British university girls who say they won a weekend in Reykjavik through a shampoo contest. We, the runtur experts after one night, direct them to Club NASA.
“Where did berserk come from?” asks one of the girls.
“Viking warriors,” I say. “They’d bite their shields and yell as loud as they could to disorient their victims before chopping them into pieces.”
“No only.” Van Stein dashes around, nuzzles up to one of the girls, purrs into her ear. “If their wives were unfaithful, they’d drown them in a special river.” Cappuccino foam has settled on the artist’s lips. “I saw it yesterday.”
The gals recoil, bid us goodbye—and hastily depart.
Van Stein throws his arms up. “What did I say?”
Next stop, Café Reykjavik, down the hill. More poetically, over it. Designed like a Wild West saloon, this café caters to an older crowd, the divorcees. It’s past midnight when a a trio takes the stage and performs a grotesquely off-tune Tequila Sunrise.
Rejoined by Erik the Red, we drain Remy Martin cognac (to hell with coffee) and wander past Café Amsterdam, Astro and Hus Malarans, whose very name cracks the code for elf-speak: The native tongue requires lubrication. The more you drink, the easier it is to say Hus Malarans—and sound like you really mean it.
By the time we reach Hus Malarans, I’m struck by another epiphany: This going berserk business is just a tongue-in-cheek façade for the real thing. The city elders and shopkeepers put up with the runtur for the same reason they’re scared silly of the Klepp: This genetically pure people, who brand their offspring sons and dottirs, are like the toilet door at Hus Malarans: Unhinged.
The Runtur is an outlet—a human version of geysers.
With this realization, runturing suddenly becomes insignificant—and not even enjoyable for someone who enjoys cuisine, fine wine, vintage Armagnac and a feather bed way before midnight.
Floater and I leave the other two cocktailing at Hus Malarans.
“Hey, look up there.” I point to an emerald-green aurora borealis in the northern sky, framing the bright and bloated moon—a moon that never sets on glacial chic.
About five a.m., I awaken to drunken singing in the street. I’m minded to get dressed, go outside and make this a visual as well as an audio experience.
But I can just as easily envision the scene in my mind’s eye while enveloped in goose down: Drunken 20-something males slinging bottles, tossing cookies and expelling body fluid from their short knives.
Well that was one of the strangest if not worst pieces I have ever read on this site