SouthSouth

"Someone wrote about Doimai and Vamă that it's a false myth, because only marginalized people came there. Yes, of course, most young people at that time were outcasts, thank God. We were young people who hadn't found our place in society, and maybe that's why we were more pure in spirit, more free. The established artists of the time went to Neptun, to the House of Writers or to the hotels of the creative unions, or hunting with the baștan. Neither Adrian Păunescu nor Vadim Tudor came to Doimai and Vamă... And what about the "important people", the people who ruled us, the privileged, the socially integrated? They didn't belong in the wilderness."

Cristian Pepino, e-mail, 03-03-2024

I had my real encounter with the SouthSouth in 2000, "when we were no longer children", although I had been there a few times, accidentally, taken aback by a crush or some summer boredom. I, too, was finding the customs more and more dilapidated, myself more and more pure, the houses and streets more and more insipid. I vaguely remember a kiosk on the beach, right in the sand, right in the soul, a heap of painted wood that brought with it a window and a door, it wouldn't surprise me if it was, in fact, a proto-house, covered with reeds to look good, it was summer and everything was allowed, we were young and everything was to come. My relationship with the sand was a circumstantial one, I never killed myself sitting in the sun, these myriads of shell fragments glittering as they rolled in the warm water at the edge of the waves, the stars the sun instantly set on the "shimmering saltwater ridges, in the post-sea world in which I mirrored myself", ...crazy - I was looking for girls. And they after me too, but less - that's tennis, but I was at the customs from whence the whispering stories left, in the corner of a smile, slyly - why? What was the mystery that these stories always hid, what was that something that was not talked about, but whose presence you felt in every south-south story?
I married various things - some to find rock, some to get away from oriental music because some of my friends said I had to, some to be a man and drink more than two beers without getting pilaf, to swim well, to get a good tan, to stand up straight, to let the euxin horizon encompass me to the wisp of living space in my little heart, I sat down next to whoever was making room for me on the bench, on the sheet, in the serene and temporary life, in the lack of worries of those five or six days spent there every year at Easter, I watched and let myself be seen more windowly, the cobilanschi boy kept his slips on in the sun and the fears of the camp road with him.
It was a bit late anyway and it's always a bit too late, the whole experience comes back to you post-factum and the Vama was proving to me wild and quite ferocious, the nights were cold and intense stares all the way over the fence, those unstable tents over which various characters crashed, the mornings in the bush, coffee at ovidiu's, miruna's, mother-fucker's, look - Vama is becoming more and more diffuse, not distant, but anthropo-analyzable, an operation on the open heart of a nostalgia. The 2000s were trotting ever more capitalistically, second-hand cars had arrived directly on the beach, stowaways in the land where lions mewed after lionesses and lionesses and lionesses - it was done that this invasive species left its paw prints on the pseudo-bohemian mini-beach full of us and Mitocan, arrived directly in the ad-hoc land registers, under the indulgent gaze of a bland and laissez-faire Fisc, o tempora! The slum pre-apocalypse was approaching, Vama was getting solemn for the new men we were becoming, micro-nostalgia was hiding in the little wrinkles buried under glitter, the forty belly was heating up in a youthful horde, in the dead of night and summer. SouthSouth was starting to put everything on sale!
Last summer, a temporary inhabitant of 2 Mai, on school vouchers received from Coana Leana, I set off on an expedition to Vama Veche, down the main boulevard, it was lunchtime and the street was biting with people and commerce, from cotton candy to churning out everything from doughnuts and stickers to hoodies and sticky sticks, you know that Asian-slum vibe, a kind of interstellar fairground, like in a sci-fi movie where all the species of the universe come to the butcher's, you can bargain for a cox's toenail or an alien spaceship, sell your soul for a little peace and quiet or get life without death in exchange for ten years of youth. It was as if the roadside eaves had come close together and formed a colorful, living canopy, a kind of syncretic roof into which your life and your money would flow as through an aorta, toward the (greater) sea. It was lunchtime, but the windows of the houses never close anymore, they have become small trade counters, the locals race to acquire their comforts for the rest of the year, everything is played here and now, the thatched roof hides a small transactional treasure, as little for as much! The village of yesterday has become a neighborhood, still marginal, of the great financial-Levantine metropolis, we want more rooms, we want more hostels, higher, faster.
I ruined Vama, not it ruined me! When I cried in shame and shame and shame for a whole summer in the two-person tent where I lived alone, I had taken a big kick in the coeur (expelled for non-payment of fees) from Alexa Visarion's theater directing class, from the secretary who had set himself up as the life coercer that my absent and impoverished past in the theater epos had entitled him to become; I also ruined it when I left it altogether when I couldn't fall asleep because of the simultaneous and competing music in the middle of the night, when soul-mate-five had gone off with that guy, oh my God!, when I went to Costinești to look for clients for the henna tattoos I had planned to secure for my summer stay, when I was happily dancing to Loredana and not Jethro Tull, when and when again?
Maybe even then, or especially when I tried to save her? Tired of the economic emancipation that our seaside summer playground had embarked on, together with you, Mircea and Velele, we started a crusade against the nature of greed - Cristian Pepino, in "The Book of Vama Veche", is fiercely angry - the apostles of tolerance, the friendly wimps, found themselves making a human chain against ... bad taste! Let's make Vama rock, let's keep the anchovy in the throats of those who don't want like us, we have relations! Let the South remain for the second and third youth, don't take away our chance to think we were the righteous ones, don't grow up, you guys, prices!!! It worked for a while, out of inertia, then came the fall and the rent increase, the boy left, the clock moved....
In 2030 the SouthSouth will be a small metropolis, large opening to the ocean of Chinese goods, the small village will become a perpetual restaurant, winter will be like summer, and the former cherhana will be intergalactic. The drinking water will be clean and absent, the traditional donkeys will have returned to traditional marriages, the new residents of "Dobrogene architecture" will have implants directly into their consciousness, we will drink vintage brifcor and listen to Gil Dobrică on vinyl, somewhere a beautiful girl will sigh for me, and I will write about the 2000s again like Pepino yesterday. I'll recount how I miss the little houses with the blue windows and doors, how we used to shower in the sunny barrel, I'll explain in great detail what that is and what the shuberek was like. And no one will believe me, cobilanschi fantasizing about a vanished world, unaware that you live on a sentimental hecatomb, an ossuary of youth, friendships and loves, in a bright and eternal tomorrow.