I Drool for You

And other peculiarities one notices when abroad

When I am in Auslander mode, visiting or living in a country that is not my own, I find myself seeking out and sometimes fixating on subtle differences from my own land in the culture and everyday life—mundane peculiarities endemic to a particular place. 

Usually when I encounter these peculiarities I wonder why the heck they aren’t more widespread. When we first moved to Bulgaria, for example, the grocery store had a fresh-orange juice vending machine: Insert 1 lev (about 55 cents), push a button, and the machine chops and squeezes the oranges right in front of your eyes. Genius! 

Bulgaria has stores that sell only electrical cables, or light bulbs, or cleaning supplies—it is so much more civilized than Walmart. And I always make it a point to patronize the coffee vending machines which, for 40 cents, dispense a decent espresso with a dollop of cream on top. On your birthday you give chocolate to your colleagues and friends rather than receiving gifts. Food processors here are also juicers, blenders, and even hand mixers. And it’s custom to drink Rakia, a very potent brandy, with one’s shopska salad. These are lovely traditions.

Other peculiarities aren’t so charming. Renewing one’s car registration here, for example, can be an hours-long bureaucratic rigamarole that makes a visit to the DMV seem downright therapeutic. And the local tendency to drive straddling the center line—in what we’ve come to call the “Bulgarian Lane”—is terrifying. 

Still other quirks merely cause the eyebrows to raise in bafflement. The most peculiar of those is the proliferation here of slogans, always in English, plastered on bumper stickers and, more oddly, t-shirts. You might expect to see these slogans on novelties or gag items in the U.S., a t-shirt worn at a bachelor party once, or given to someone for Father’s Day—e.g. “World’s Greatest Dad”—then relegated to the back of the closet where no one will ever see it again. But here I see people wearing them on the subway, in restaurants, on their walk to work, and I never cease to be amazed, particularly since they are often, well, a bit vulgar. 

Last night, for example, a lithe young, blinged-up woman at an outdoor eating establishment wore a high-fashion, pink shirt that read, in a different shade of pink: 

“Pink as F—k.” 

The slogan was printed across her chest, which appeared to be the handiwork of a certain Dr. E!—a famous plastic surgeon in these parts—and in my urge to comprehend the enigma I stared at the words for a little too long, which didn’t seem to make her male companion—with biceps the size of my thighs—very happy. I decided not to ask her what the writing on her shirt meant. 

It’s possible that I’m just too old or square to get the meaning of that one. As far as I know, all the pop stars are wearing the same shirt. But I’m fairly certain that the same is not true for the “SUCK A F—K” that was embroidered on a sweater worn by a woman, probably in her late teens, in a gelato shop. 

The F word is remarkably common on these shirts (and yes, it’s spelled out in its entirety, not typographically bleeped as I’ve done here). It’s not uncommon to see young kids trotting around with the F word plastered on their shirts, which leads me to believe that the harsh bite of the word gets lost in translation. 

Sometimes the slogans are simply out of place, like the “Bride Squad” t-shirt donned by the elderly woman walking alone down the street. Others strain logic, like “Too Sexy to be Fifty.” I mean, just imagine for a moment wearing that shirt, yourself, and you’ll see what I mean. And one of my favorites: A woman going into a convenience store wearing a too-large white t-shirt that proclaimed, in bold print: 

“WINE ME DINE ME SIXTY NINE ME.”

Anyway, ever since I first noticed this phenomenon I’ve been trying to come up with my own slogans that I could put on t-shirts. Only my slogans would be written in Bulgarian, so that when I was in Bulgaria I’d draw the same sort of reaction that I’ve had, and in America I could tell people that it’s a common folk saying in Bulgaria. Then when they used their Google translate to see what it says they’d be really confused.

I’ve diddled and daddled, though, and failed to come up with anything aside from a convoluted saying about the devastating effect shopping at IKEA can have on a marriage (more on that in a future dispatch). But I never got the wording quite right, leaving me slogan-less. Now that we’re about to leave the country, the project has taken on more urgency. Which brings me to my dentist-chair epiphany. 

We go to a wonderful dentist here. The only peculiarity being the location of his office on the second floor of an upscale, yet gaudy, hotel. In order to get a couple of fillings replaced I had to run a gauntlet of giant Mercedes jeeps, each with its own giant mobster-looking dude (shaved head, aviator glasses, cantaloupe-sized biceps, tight black t-shirt), and then skitter through a grand marble- and chandelier-bedecked lobby, all while sweating profusely due to humidity and pre-dental-procedure anxiety.  

Dean, my dentist, knows that I have an irrational fear of having power tools whirring away in my mouth, so he did his best to make me comfortable, but stopped short of ordering me a martini from the bar downstairs, which probably would have saved us all a lot of grief. Then he went to work excavating the old fillings, first with the whiny, high-pitched grinder—I swear I smelled something like burning rubber and saw sparks flying out of my mouth. I winced so hard that my cheeks hurt for three days afterward. 

Then he moved onto the “tractor,” a lower-frequency excavation machine. It sounded and felt like he was jamming a jackhammer into my jaw, and maybe he was. When he began the work, Dean had a calm and soothing demeanor. But as he progressed his movements became more and more frantic, as if trying to stem off disaster. I opened my clenched eyelids once to see he and his assistant working with the alarming urgency of ER docs trying to save a trauma patient. Something had gone terribly wrong. “Suction!” Dean said. “More suction!” 

Suction!? What the hell was going on? I knew this would happen. I knew it! The tractor had slipped and nicked an artery and now I was bleeding out. I could feel my life slipping away. Tears mingled with the perspiration dripping down my face. “Ahh ahh eay!” I screamed, which is dentist-chair talk for “I’m not ready! I’m about to move to Greece!” 

Five or six hours—okay, 30 minutes—later they finished the main part of the procedure and stopped yelling about suction. I looked inquiringly up at Dean, asking with my eyes what had happened. “You have an astounding ability to produce large amounts of saliva,” he said. “That’s, er, a good thing. Really.” 

It feels good when someone finally acknowledges your talent. Really. 

My initial impulse was to run home and add “prolific salivator” to my resumé. But first, Wendy and I went out to celebrate my survival at a container-restaurant place down the street from the dentist. And that’s when I saw the “Pink as F—” shirt. The dots in my dental-drill-addled brain connected, and I knew that I had my t-shirt slogan, at last: “Drool as F—,” perhaps? Maybe “Have spit. Will travel.” Or perhaps something more romantic, such as “I Drool for You,” which would look something like: 

Лигавям за Tеб. 

It’s got a certain ring to it, don’t you think?