Moby Dick Meets Caravaggio Meets Nadia Comaneci

September 27, 2025

This is a short one. It’s what I intended to write yesterday before I got distracted by my first sentence. Actually, no, it was the second sentence that led me away from my initial thought. As I wrote, I was at an opening the other night — I will avoid saying the place because every time I think about it, I get sent off into wild digressions — and it was the journey in getting to that location that I thought slightly funny. It is not a major incident, nor could I spin it into some sort of ‘life lesson’ courtesy of this moment. Instead, it’s just a vivid set of seconds that has managed to stay lodge in my head.

It was raining, so instead of walking I ordered up a taxi. The Škoda Rapid arrived, and I climbed in the back seat. Now here I want to also take a small digression and pose a question to my Slovakian readers: do I get in the back seat, or the front seat? Because every time I get into a taxi, I take the back seat, yet the front seat is pushed so far back I can barely squeeze my legs in; I end up sitting like a delicate ballerina or something, tucked up in the slim crevasse available to me — making me wonder: should I hop in the front? What to do? Anyway — I was wedged in the backseat with the blood in my legs slowly getting pinched off, becoming numb. Rain was pelting the windshield and my driver, Oleksii, was hunched over the wheel, sprawled out in such luxurious repose he might as well have been in a Caravaggio painting. His ride looked comfortable, mine was not.

Oleksii, or maybe it’s Saint John the Baptist, Caravaggio, 1610.

He drove with one finger on the wheel, a delicate little pinkie, reminding me of a photograph I once made many years ago in Ukraine. His other finger from his right hand was constantly switching the radio presets, letting maybe two seconds play before he passed judgement and climbed up the list to the next station; his finger was a DJ, frantically re-mixing the radio frequencies into a cacophony of crap rock, Slovak talk, rage metal, Euro-trash, and other aural slop, a taxi-fied version of experimental, avant-garde music the likes of Edgar Varèse or Karlheinz Stockhausen could never have conceived.

Photo by me, from the series Interrogations, 2012.

Just as he was descending the radio presets for what seemed the eighteenth time — by now I was truly into some kind of transcendental, surrealist private concert by a musical genius — his pinky ever-so-gently placed on the steering wheel, the Škoda was swallowed by a megalodon of a pothole, a massive monster that feasts on cars and other machinery, spitting out its remnants like flecks of chicken caught between your teeth. He did not flinch. Not once. Not an ounce of counter-correction, no sudden grasping of the steering wheel, or even adjusting with a counter-balance in his repose; he remained steadfast, sprawled across the front and passenger seat. That pothole definitely cleaned my colon, but for him, Moby Dick did not knock our vehicle from below, there was zero change in register. He absolutely murdered that hole. We continued on, a missile on a flight path that no actor was going to shake from its trajectory.

Perhaps the only slight adjustment Oleksii made was to fish a cigarette out of some hidden pocket from his tracksuit, a lighter magically appearing in his hand to spark his smoke. His left-hand pinky and and his right-hand forefinger transformed into fully fledged hands, balancing cigarette and lighter while his knees took on new duties of driving. The window cracked open a tiny bit, sucking the carcinogens out the window, expelled to some other land. He took a champion inhale and sucked back what seemed to be half that cigarette, leaving nothing more than a leaden ash teetering on crumbling. I was happy I was on the opposite side of the car, albeit downwind from his hot dog-sized leftovers of tobacco, but luckily wedged into the small precipice between front seat and rear.

We arrived. I extricated myself out of the car, stumbling into the wet air, rain already seeping down my neck and trickling along my spine. I said to him: “Slava Ukrainii:” his name gave it away, but more than that, it was his liquid body and absolute cool as he sailed through that massive pothole without flinching that solidified my speculation: I know this guy. I spent years in Ukraine, perhaps too many, with dudes like you. In response to my salutation of Ukrainian solidarity, he slightly shifted his head, a minuscule pivot of perhaps a degree or two, an ever-so-vague nod in my direction. Walking around the car, his window buzzed down a bit further, and he expertly flicked his cigarette through the limited gap. It spun through the air like Olympic-era teenage gymnast Nadia Comaneci, gracefully arcing over and over and over again, this beautiful butt spinning through the rain about to score a perfect 10.

It hit the pavement, extinguished by a puddle. I heard a slight hissing sound, a final gasp of smoke filled the air. Out the window, Oleksii sported a thumbs up. He sped off, and I went to the exhibition.