A Problem with Zorky

You'll have to forgive me. This story is in no way related to anything else on this blog, save my insanity. It was the summer of '99, I was a fancy free soon-to-be-high-school senior living a life of loafing at my parents palatial suburban pleasure dome in Westwood, Massachusetts (also known as The Westwood Center for Performance Art (Yoko wanted to be on our board but we turned her down.))

The summer was young, I had just returned from a grueling year at boarding school and was ready for a vacation of total decompensation. The first few days I lay in our pool reading Molloy and listening to Loveless. About a week into this splendor, I was invited, along with rest of my family, to a small celebration for my second-cousin, who had just graduated from high-school. It was no major interruption, as we had to journey but across the street to reach our destination.

When we arrived at their equally palatial, if more obscene because visible to the road, house (which has since been sold and hideously subdivided), a smattering of other guests had already gathered out back around the pool. One was a mutual friend of my father's cousin and my mom. One of her young children was swimming in the pool. The second guest was pro-football hall of famer and then-future-failed-gubernatorial candidate Lynn Swann, who is I guess an old friend of my dad's cousin from college or something. But that isn't even close to the best part. Not by a long shot.

The next guest was my mother's friend's brother, Zoran, who was in town visiting from New York. He may have been with a girlfriend, and there may have been other guests at the party besides Zoran, or "Zorky" as he is known to friends, and the famous football star, but to be honest, I barely even remember that Swanny was there... From the moment of his introduction it was Zorky, and Zorky alone, who captured my imagination.

It is difficult for me to articulate exactly what it was, no, what it is about Zorky that I find so fascinating. He was of slightly below average height, around 40 years old. He wore his auburn (no doubt color-treated) hair at shoulder length, and as far as I can recall was wearing a pair of Levi jeans, with a silver-star belt buckle, a black t-shirt with an Eastern orthodox crucifix on a silver chain hanging around his neck. He may have also had a blue, Nautica jacket, but that could just be a false memory suggested to me during hypnosis.

In any event, my brother and I sat around the table beside the pool and talked with Zorky. We learned that he was a musician, a guitarist in fact who had made a living playing gigs in New York since 1980. Being a real music hound myself, I was of course desperate to hear any stories from the trenches Zorky might have to share. At first, he told us a story about coming across Jaco Pastorius, out of his mind, playing his bass in an empty fountain in Central Park as people passed by, not realizing who he was.

"Jaco was saying, over and over again, 'I'm the best bass player in the world,' and people were laughing at him, but I thought 'My God, it's true!'" Needless to say, we were eating this shit up, loving every minute of it. After the Jaco story, he paused, before suddenly interjecting:

"Are you familiar with the Paul Simon album Graceland?"

"Ummm, yeah. Sure. Why?"

"Oh, no reason, just wanted to mention that I've been playing some really great gigs with the African percussionists from that album lately. Those guys are unbelievable, the best, and their stories are so inspiring..." Zorky would then go on and sing the praises of these guys, say how great they were to play with, etc. This was all well and good, and actually kind of cool, if not for that fact that not five minutes later I overheard Zorky interrupting a conversation between our hostess and Swanny by saying:

"Excuse me, but I heard you mention Africa, and I was just wondering if you are familiar with the Paul Simon album, Graceland?"

"Sort of..."

Point by point he replayed the same conversation we had just had with him. It was incredible, such an outrageous act of repetition, egotism and self-absorption we couldn't help but admire him. The rest of the afternoon we followed Zorky around, hoping to overhear him utter what would become, for us, an immortal tag-line:

"Are you familiar with the Paul Simon album Graceland?"

And overhear we did! I kid you not, he said it at least four other times to different people, and near the end of the gathering we actually got him to ask us again by feigning interest in his current music project...

Zorky came back over to our house after the party was over and had drinks with our parents. He even came up to see our music room, where my brother and I were practicing. Much to our disappointment, he merely raised his glass to us, said nothing, and left. By the time we went down to hang out with the guests, he was gone.

We haven't seen him since, yet, in complete honesty, not a day goes by that I don't think of Zorky. Perhaps it's just the name. Maybe the tag-line. Maybe the hair? The detached, self-promoting egotism? As I said before, it's a very difficult thing to articulate.

Oh, and in case you're wondering if I've tried to contact Zorky, I have. Unfortunately, I don't know his last name, as my parents refuse to tell me what their friend's maiden name is and I have no other means of finding out... They have grown exceedingly sick of what they deem "that Zorky talk" over the past eight years. Internet searches for "Zorky Graceland" have so far yielded no results, and it seems the only guitarists named "Zoran" I can find are Serbian Classical musicians... But the quest continues, and I will locate him one day, if only in the hopes of telling him how familiar I've by now become with the Paul Simon album Graceland.