Danish Craftsmanship

I pay $70 for a car to JFK, which feels like a good deal, because I am not going to make my flight on time if I take the subway. It’s nice not to carry my bags. It feels luxurious. I call my mom.

Then my ticket doesn’t have the TSA PreCheck symbol on it, and the cell service isn’t working, so I can’t download the airline app to check why. I wait in the regular line. I get anxious but I do not speak up and say that I need to make my flight, and I watch the time tick, the line crawl, and my brain calculate when I absolutely have to say something.

I start researching. On international flights they close boarding thirty minutes before departure. I thought it was fifteen.

There is nothing I can do. I’ve already waited in the whole line.

I get through finally and start running. My phone is buzzing. Someone is calling me. And then over the intercom:

Adam Shlomi, please come to gate. Adam Shlomi, please come to gate.

I get there and the attendant looks me over and asks are you Adam Shlomi.

I can’t say yes. I am so out of breath I can only nod. I am panting and sweating and I feel like I haven’t moved that fast in years.

I pull up the boarding pass and he asks for my passport. The app has finished downloading in the last minute at security, and on the app boarding pass it shows the PreCheck symbol.

Everyone working that plane knows who I am. They say, are you 43A, as I walk on. Yes. They know, because I am the only person they are waiting on. The last person on a full flight.

I take a Xanax. They’re old so they take longer than they should to kick in. We sit on the tarmac for another hour because of some issue I am too busy trying to fall asleep to hear. My neighbor repeats it to me later. Who knows. They always find some excuse. But it’s the decline of empire, that the trains and the planes don’t run on time.

Hurry up and wait.

I wake up after a chemically induced sleep. This is my third time in Copenhagen. In the summer it’s beautiful. A blessing of a city with refined understated style and temperate sun.

At the airport I get the party started. I eat a whole weed gummy when I planned to eat only half, because it tastes so good and I have a goldfish brain. I take the Copenhagen metro, which runs straight from the airport to the city center on a self-validating, high-trust honor system, and I get off at Forum.

I store my bags in a convenience store. The guy says I have to do it through the app and I say, you don’t like money? He charges me €7 for both. Then I annoy him because I have to get back into the bag, because it’s gray and cold this morning and I need another layer.

I have the breakfast I want, which is a dark rich roll covered in seeds, seasoned butter, and a soft-boiled egg that the Danish traditionally eat with a spoon. I’m hungry and eating a little wild, like an animal, but I’m not making a mess for anyone else. The guy making coffee has razor blade tattoos on both hands and looks like an Abercrombie model. Another guy with curly hair is taking calls. A woman next to me is reading a newspaper.

Then I meet Peter. I wander into a picture frame gallery and he greets me with kind eyes and a soft smile. He has a very sweet face. He looks like a pudgy Viking, a Viking who was struggling to keep up. Long hair, a little short, stout.

He asks if I’m an artist. I show him my website. He likes the doors of Brooklyn. A photo catalogue of unique doors in the borough. In a way doors are their own frames. Similar shape, similar job.

He wants to tell me everything. Peter frames artwork with an intense eye for detail. He buys a stick, basically, like quarter round, and he makes the square frame himself. He has a machine to punch the staples but he uses wood glue too. The paper is pH balanced so it won’t stain the glass. He uses a steel piece instead of the bendable one, so once the picture is set in the frame, it’s there for life. He makes sure the glass will protect the picture from the sun and that the paper won’t stain it with acid from the back.

Buy it for life. That’s what he’s making.

And he says how he is very intentional in thinking about how the frame needs to match the piece.

But every frame in that shop is the same. A half inch square of brown or gray hardwood. Nothing unique about a single one of them. The most boring understated Scandinavian designs. Nothing wrong with them, but no detail. No flair.

Through the door to the back room there’s a little girl and a woman with a big plate of food, some grapes, some coffee. The girl is drawing. She has every color crayon that exists, because Peter wants to make her an artist. They show me her artwork. She’s a kid, and she doesn’t seem like a kid who’s especially talented.

See, Peter says. It’s about the process, not the end result.

And then we all tell her how beautiful it is.

He really wanted to be an artist, this guy. But he’s just a framer.

He tells me to go to Christiania, feeds me a hearty lunch from the table, and I go on my way.

Walking, I go down into a storefront basement belonging to a cobbler. Old school leather scraps and used tools lying around. I buy a pair of Fendi boots for $30 because the owner left them at the cobbler for the last two years. Resoled, reheeled. They look like they belong in a Bond villain’s wardrobe. Black, shiny, and sleek. They don’t match my farmer overalls and work boot vibes, but there will be a place for them.

Going into repair stores and alteration shops and cobblers is by far the best thrift shopping. It’s really nice stuff that somebody wanted to invest money in fixing, and then they got rich, or forgot, or moved, or died.

Then a bar where they have the biggest barfly in the world. His drink is Gammel Dansk, which I think of as Danish Malört.

I ask him if he knows any dirty jokes.

He says he doesn’t.

I say I don’t believe you.

He laughs at that. Then he says he’s heard a lot of dirty jokes but he doesn’t remember them.

I say, we call that a goldfish brain.

Got him to laugh.

You can smoke inside in Copenhagen and you can walk outside with your drink. So I finish my cigarette in the bar and carry the rest of my beer out the door. And I thought I lived in the land of the free.

Christiania is like Danish Wynwood. It’s covered in street art and there are all these old people living in art communes, and they’re white guys with dreads but they’re not gentrifiers. They’re from there. They made this place special fifty years ago and now they’ve aged into grumpy old hippies in a place where everything is commercial. People are paying rent for these storefronts. It’s all trinkets for Danish people on vacation. It’s literally a gift shop.

An old hot man with strong hands shows me a bunch of wooden massage devices. They look like handcrafted German toys with their spinning wheels and perfectly sanded wood grain. One of them pinches your skin but not hard enough for me. One is a wooden lacrosse ball, and I would just prefer a lacrosse ball. A lot of it is acupressure, which I’m not into. One of them has great form with four long legs emerging from a handle, like a futuristic baby animal. I think they’d be good gifts but I’m afraid they might break in my suitcase. He kneads my shoulders. It’s nice to be touched. I think about buying one before I lure in another customer for him and keep moving.

A Persian guy is selling Indian shirts. He wants $61. I offer $59, which is every dollar in my hand, and he’s willing to take US dollars, and jokes that of course I take dollars. I exchange. I’m Persian. I think of my grandfather Avraham, who would change money like a mobster. With a wad of bills on a corner. In his later years, after the store closed, when he was old but not yet sleepy. But this round Persian wants $61 exactly. And I look good in that jacket. It matches a light silk scarf, a shirt I got from a thrift shop in Sedona, black Blundstones with the blue tongues, a gold watch from the Chelsea Flea that doesn’t work, a silver bracelet from Jane, Noah’s fiancée, a green jade from the tea shop, and a gold chain.

I’m a little dripped out. Looking like an artist. Like an eccentric. Not like an NPC. I am alive today.

I flip a coin at the end of the day to decide whether to go back for the massage roller. It lands heads. So I do go back, but I can’t find him. And I don’t buy the shirt over two dollars. I could have bought both, honestly. I was just cheap. Don’t gotta separate a fool from his money.

I steal a bunch of fridge magnets. One of them is a coffee cup, which is a good shape. Cylinder with a handle, strong edges. The other says I hate cars, from a bike store, because everyone in Denmark rides these reverse tricycles where you put two children in the front and pedal from the back, and they’re electric. It’s so quiet here that I almost walk into the street twice because I don’t hear enough noise. I look and no one is there and there is a bus coming. The bus is just so much quieter than New York. Imagine Mr. Bean stepping out into the street.

Then I get smoked salmon and eat it outside for half an hour. Four pieces with mayonnaise and bread. I figure smoked salmon here is just going to be better than America, like lobster is better in Boston than New York. It’s good. The lox in Norway turned out to be better, and I had some delicious thick cuts later, but this isn’t it.

At the airport I steal gummy candies from duty free. Here is my reasoning. One, they don’t have a real checkout, the register is off to the side away from the door. Two, there’s a million things going on. Three, they’re far more concerned with security than with theft. And four, I’m not going back to America, I’m going deeper in, so if I got detained in Copenhagen for six hours I’d be fine with it. Honestly I kind of want to stay.

I’ve come to learn that stealing stuff is just fun. But the consequences mean it’s not worth it. Fridge magnets are fine.

They’re called wine gums. They’re harder, denser gumdrops that nobody needs. I’ve had about ten. They’re not that sweet, they’re not that chewy, they’re not that pleasant.

The flight is sold out. A hundred and eighty three people. The gate agents are using a walkie talkie app on brand new phones, so it sounds as crinkly as a walkie talkie but on Android, which is a weird anachronism from the past.

There’s also a girl sitting in a luggage cart while her brother pushes her in circles. He’s got big buck teeth. She’s holding on. He’s going kind of slow. Seems like the fun thing to do with your brother.

I’m heading to Bergen on a short flight from Copenhagen. It’s cold as fuck there. I was supposed to go with my girlfriend Tabby but we broke up and she didn’t come, because I told her I didn’t want to go on the trip with her. Honestly I’ve had a great time going over by myself so far. But I also got high, so that changed things a bit. Tipped the scales in my favor.

It’s more fun to have an audience. You know what, it really is. I want a live audience of someone just giggling at my stories. And then we should record that. That’s really what I would like to happen.

There’s a man in this terminal with what I think is multiple sclerosis, going as fast as he possibly can from one end of the airport to the other. He’s done it three times now. He’s wearing blue jeans and one leg is filled out and the other is skinny and clumped around something that looks like a peg. He just ran all the way to the 7-Eleven. He could go slower and be more comfortable but he’s really going.

I would love to help him but he seems very self sufficient. Mostly I would love to watch him take a seat. I’m tired, bro. We’re all tired. Don’t you want to relax for a second.