“DOORS OF HEAVENS, or WHEN JIMI HENDRIX WAS BULGARIAN”
Foreword
Simeon Gasparov
“Doors of Heavens” is the novel that I have decided to write for my thesis. This novel is a story comprised of many other stories. They have different moods, pulses and beats similar to the music that I have always adored – rock ‘n’ roll. But this is also a poetic analogy and devotion to the passion, spirit and the thrill, of being a small particle within the great idea of the human and liberal sciences. A devotion to the spirit and the thrill I was inspired by as a student at the University of Chicago.
Before I begin with the introduction to the “Doors of Heavens,” I would like to reveal the roots and the reason for my choosing this particular topic. This, I hope, could provide the readers with understanding of the feeling that was hidden inside of me, and was pushing and bothering me, teasing and tormenting me for a long time, until the moment I sat and expressed it in writing. The introductory essay about the essence of the “Doors of Heavens” I named “When Jimi Hendrix was Bulgarian.” (Oh, yeah, I can see the suspicious smiles!) How come? What does Jimi Hendrix, an American, black rock musician have in common with an Eastern European country that you can’t even find on the map?
It was somewhere in the beginning of the 1970s. I was a kid, living in the lonesome, odd, quaint, erratic and misunderstood Bulgaria. It was one of those last hot sleepy summer days of school vacation. My friends and I, living in a blue collar neighborhood of Sofia, did not have many chances in front of us. But we also did not have, many things to worry about it. While our parents were working in the nearby factories, we were spending our days playing soccer, breaking the windows of houses with the soccer ball, repairing our rusty bicycles, stealing plums, peaches, apricots and apples from the green orchards around and waiting for the time when we would grow up and, like our parents, be swallowed by the same surrounding factories.
Like all kids in the summer, we had our favorite moments. One of these moments was when the day was over and the red sun was stepping down behind the forests. Then, the dark haired evening, full of magic and miracles, would come to take us away to the world of the fairies and fantasies. We gathered under the balconies and roamed around the sleepy cobblestone streets– old, poor, crispy, fragile streets, sunk into the hug of the chartreuse linden trees. We stayed hidden, under the wild bushes and started dazzling each other with volumes of different stories. Some of my cohorts told how they had helped local hunters catch a wild grizzly bear, or a wolf or a hundred-foot-long, sheep-eating snake. Others told how, a few years before, when they were young (!), they helped the local sheriff catch a thief, or criminal, or spy who was about to burn the village where they had visited . Still other stories were about saving the life of the people who were drowning in the sea, or the river, or the lake, or in the swimming pool. Each night the wolf, or the grizzly bear, or the criminal, or the spy were different, but the plot remained always heroic and was retold again and again with the same poignancy and pathos. And we would retell these youthful sagas, hiding in the bushes, until the birds fell silently asleep and the lamps behind the drapes faded into blackness. The tales would cease when our parents, tired from the day at work, opened the windows and called us to go to bed.
Each summer night was like this, stories and storyteller constantly emerging anew. I don’t think we ever listened closely to each other’s stories, but we still liked to tell them, to everybody. In our budding pride, we believed we were telling them to the whole world. Later when I grew up, I realized that we had a listener, and not only one, but thousands of thousands of listeners. These listeners were the stars, shining quietly from the shoulder of the mountains around our Sofia. They were the only truthful listeners, who really understood us and kept inside of them the mark of the time when we, indeed, were kids. Even now, when I am marveling at the dome of the starry skies glistening above my house in the Fox River Valley, I search to find these naive, innocent years and stories of my childhood as the key to the inspiration. Some times I hear my friends’ voices, but never see their faces.
Yes, it was one of these last summer days of the early 70′s. My friends from childhood and I were returning from the only movie theatre in our neighborhood – Krasno Selo. Although it was falling apart and had the creakiest and the noisiest wooden chairs in the whole world, it was our favorite movie theater. This day was very special and we were very excited. We were speaking loudly and laughing, because we had once again pulled our favorite trick. We bought tickets for two, and then, when the movie started, we snuck behind the exit gate attendants and opened the theatre doors. The kids from the neighborhood were waiting outside, and as fast as they could rush into the building and sat in the empty chairs, where nobody could catch them. Then, with the money we saved from the tickets, we bought more ice cream, candy or soccer balls for ourselves. This day we saw the latest episode of our long awaited black and white Western serial, “The Sons of the Great Bear.” These were the only Westerns to which we, in Bulgaria, had access during that time (they were made in Eastern Germany). They featured the Yugoslavian superstar Gojko Mitich, always playing an Indian warrior who was mercilessly beating, kicking, killing, and scalping the Americans, who were daring to mess around with his people. Every Friday, in our movie theater they showed a new movie with Mitich and every Friday we went crazy over it. We even did not sleep, so riveted we were on how Gojko Mitich was going to punish the bad cowboys and restore justice and the order to the tribes. Hollywood has no idea what they were missing, not showing Gojko Mitich’s Westerns made in Eastern Germany in the United States. After seeing Gojko Mitich I cannot watch American Westerns. I have tried, but they looked to me too stale and shallow without Gojko Mitich – the Chief from the Balkans in the East German Westerns.
Once, after leaving the movie theater, unnoticeably, while we were laughing, devouring ice creams and imitating Gojko Mitich’s walk and talk, we, the kids from Krasno Selo have approached a house next to the neighboring fruit market, that reeked of rotten tomatoes and watermelons. Suddenly, from the open basement windows, a glorious exotic drumbeat shook the street, as an earthquake’s tremor.
We were just blown away! We gazed with open mounts, not knowing who we were and where were we going. We stopped and stayed and listened to this mesmerizing music, as a flock of little sparrows lumped together over a piece of bread on the sidewalk.
How long we stayed and listened to these new sounds, I do not remember. The ice cream melted over our threadbare tennis shoes. We were holding the empty cones with our sticky fingers, captivated by what we were heard.
When we awoke from this hypnosis the music was over. The sun was going down behind the mountain of Vitosha. It was time for us to go home. That night we did not go outside after dinner. We did not go to the bushes. We did not tell any heroic stories. The grizzly bear, the wolf, and the immeasurable snake survived the hunt. The spy, the thief, and the criminal roamed unpunished. That night we stayed in our rooms staring at the ceilings, and listened to the voices of the night from our opened windows.
Somewhere a baby was crying. A woman was arguing with her husband who was coming back from work drunk. Elsewhere, girls were laughing at some boys’ amateur attempts at courtship. A TV’s soccer game was turned up as loud as it could be. A little farther away, somebody irritably was slamming a door. From the near by street, the old-fashioned street car was jangling tiredly to its last stop, as the crickets from the back yards gathered together for their nightly choir recital. For the first time, we were discovering the sounds that were living in the night.
The next morning we went again to the basement, where they played the music. There was nothing. The following day gave us the same – nothing. We itched through a whole week of nothing, until the next Friday when, from the basement blared the same sounds and the same bewildering excitement. We tried to see what was behind the opened window on this basement but we couldn’t see it. Then, our curiosity overcame our embarrassment and we went down the stairs. We knocked once. Nothing. Twice. The same – nothing. Only the music was getting louder and lauder. Then we started kicking and kicking on the door, until somebody came.
It was a skinny guy, about 20 years old, with tight jeans and bushy hair. I do not remember his name, nor do I remember what we said or what he said. We were surrounded by sets of drums, speakers and stereos. This guy was listening to the British rock band Deep Purple, and the song that he was playing again and again was called “Stormbringer.” And he put it on, one more time just for us. After the first few cannon fire guitar chords, we were really unleashed into space.
The next morning all the walls in our neighborhood were decorated with these two words “Deep Purple”. Well, somewhere it was written “Deer Puple” or “Deep Purle,” or “Dep Durple,” but that was insignificant. We were all freshly in love with the Rock’n’Roll. To all of us “Deep Purple” was such a magical phrase, like a howl pumped into our children’s souls. Finding LP’s of Deep Purple was not a simple task, especially for 10-year-old kids in Bulgaria. But we found them. On the cover of the first of Deep Purple’s album we saw, was a Pegasus flying to a rainbow. The moment I held for the first time in my hands this album called – “Stormbringer” is to this day a touchstone of memory I use when I need to reconnect with a fading sense of wonder in my life. It was amazing! In this day me and my friends were sitting under the shade of a giant oak tree near, the ruins of an old brick house covered with huge green ivy, and we, as Newton and the apple that helped him to discover the laws of the gravity, were discovering, with this album in our hands, the firmament of the antigravity.
Our spirit and imagination took their first flights into the unknown bizarre feeling of joy. Our young souls for the first time soared into the endless orbits of the excitement from a sound that seemed so in tune to ourselves.
In a moment, the summer vacation was over and school had begun. We never heard music from the basement again. The guy who was listening to “Stormbringer” disappeared. One day, one of the kids from a higher grade, who lived close to the house of the “Deep Purple” (as we called it), told us that a bona fide rock band had lived there, but after a concert in Norway they all immigrated to America. “That is not true!” interrupted another kid, who also lived close to the house. The basement was public property and was closed because of the noise, and the guy with the bushy hair, was sent to the army, he said. This dude never became our friend. We did not believe him. We believed what the first kid had told us, that the guy and his band were somewhere in America and were playing together with Deep Purple.
The Fall came soon, coloring our city Sofia and the mountain of Vitosha with its canary, lemony, scarlet, reddish, emerald colors of melancholy and sadness. After gathering after school, instead of falling to our home work, we would go somewhere and listen to “Deep Purple.” We loved to hang around the “big guys” who were selling illegally LP’s on the Sofia’s “black market”. Once we had bought an old LP of another band we were also in love with – Black Sabbath from some guys older than us with the money that we saved from our lunch. They, of course, gave us an LP streaked with scratches and when we put it on the record player, the player never finished the songs. The same riffs would just roll and repeat again and again. So, if we wanted to listen to the song from the beginning to the end, we learned to kick the record player or push the needle forward only to make more scratches.
The “Purple” mania soon infected the all kids from our grade. We proudly showed to everybody from our class our greasy, scrape, chafed LPs. The kids were “aahh”-ing and “ooohhh”-ing and looking enviously at us. Soon everybody started bringing black and white pictures of rock bands, tapes and more LP’s. The maniacal fascination with the rock music was turning into something new. Instead of listening, some of our friends started learning how to play the tunes from Deep Purple. The fact that you can play on the guitar the first few chords of “Smoke on the Water,” was the real proof that one was very gifted and could be a great musician. For decades “Smoke on the Water” remained the most popular song, the alphabet of the generation of not only rock musicians, but ordinary, amateur Bulgarian performers who were entering into the world of rock and roll in the mid 70′s.
