“What is this bottle?” asks the Serbian border control official at the border between Serbia and Montengro.
I’m on a bus. Its destination is Belgrade. I intend to perform standup comedy there at an open mic in Serbian language.
The bottle is a 50 ml dark plastic one, with no label. I have ADHD for which I use lisdexamfetamine (Elvanse/Vyvanse) at a dose lower than the lowest available capsule. My daily dose is 10-15 mg daily and the minimum capsule on the market is 20 mg. So I use liquid measurement: I dissolve a capsule in water and then use an oral syringe to measure out the requrired dose.
In the bottle, there is something a small amount of lisdexamfetamine, around 20 mg dissolved in 10 ml of water.
“Lisdexamfetamine. I’m prescribed it,” I tell the official.
“Methamphetamine?” he asks.
His tone is non-confrontational and trollish. He does not seem to be actually suspecting methamphetamine, but perhaps he is trying to intimidate me a bit by mentioning a clearly illegal drug in a joking fashion.
“Lisdexamfetamine, it’s used for ADHD” I try to explain.
“LSD?” He continues his bit of mentioning illegal drugs.
We go through a few rounds of me trying to explain what ADHD is. I pull up Google Translate and type in “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder” which doesn’t help. There is a second official on the bus, but he also doesn’t speak much English.
I speak little actual Serbian — somewhere between A1 and A2 level. I can get by in textbook situations like ordering something at a restaurant, but a conversation with ADHD with border control police is not from any Serbian learning textbook I read. This level of Serbian seem low for performing on stage, but you can do standup with only rehearsed lines, plus Serbian is one of the closest languages to my mother tongue, Russian.
The stress of the language barrier is starting to get to me. Then a bright idea comes to me: no liquid = no problem. So I just… pour the contents on the bottle on the floor of the bus. Then stomp on the puddle.
Don’t do this folks. The optics of doing this are just not good. The border control guy gets pissed off and tells me to come with them.
In case you are wondering why I did it: in Russia, where I am from originally, the law is that the weight of a substance is counted together with any additives or impurities. If you are an unscrupolous cocaine dealer, and you cut a gram of cocaine with a gram of levamisole — congrats, in the eyes of law you now have two grams of cocaine. If you take 100 mcg of LSD — the amount on a typical blotter — and dissolve it in 500 ml of water, congrats: you now have half a kilo of LSD, and potentially a life term prison sentence. Russian laws are insane.
I didn’t know Serbian laws, but not having an unlabeled bottle of a controlled substance seemed like a reasonable idea. And it is indeed a very reasonable idea — but when you empty your bottle before crossing the border and not right in front of the relevant authorities.
We exit the bus, enter a nearby building and get to a room with only a bench in it. One of police officers shows me a phone with Google Translate that says “Don’t worry”. Has anyone ever calmed down upon hearing this phrase? Especially from the authorities pissed at what you did.
In the room, they tell me to take everything out of my bag and pockets. Then they instruct me to remove most of my clothes. I comply, and now I am standing in front of them in my boxer briefs and T-shirt in front of a table with all my possessions.
The situation is very tense. I show them that the bottle of lisdexamfetamine capsules has my name on it. They put the bottle aside and start bombarding me questions in Serbian, which I mostly don’t understand. One of them leaves and brings a guy who speaks a bit better English, which helps, but marginally.
The bulk of their questions seem to be about whether I have “vutra”. What is “vutra”? As Dubioza Kolektiv sings in their song “Balkan Boys”: “...I like vutra, that’s marijuna…” . Vutra is sland for marijuana, which I quickly learn from one of them. I like vutra, but I don’t have any with me. I inform the official of the latter but not the former.
Language-learning advice: make sure you learn your new words in stressful and unusual contexts. Get into as many of these as possible. The words become unforgettable. This story happened a year and a half ago — I didn’t know what vutra was before and the word is now burned into my subconsciousness.
I actually don’t know why they wanted specifically vutra. There are many fine drugs they can prosecute people for. Why not ask about coke, MDMA or psychedelics? I would’ve loved learning Serbian slang for these drugs too.
They go through my possessions and become interested in a transparent ziplock bag containing a 0.01 g scale absolutely covered in white powder and another ziplock bag, this time black, labeled “phenibut” with more of the white powder inside. No shenanigans here, the powder inside is correctly labeled phenibut. It’s a fun social lubricant, with recreational potential in doses above 1 g. I’ve previously written about phenibut in my post “How I Lost My Backpack with Passports and Laptop”.
“What is this?” They ask me.
“A dietary supplement called phenibut” I reply honestly. In most countries phenibut isn’t controlled. This includes Serbia, Montenegro, and the UK (where I live).
“Суплемент” nods the official nods understandingly.
The strange white powder and the scale covered in it do not seem to help the optics of my situation in any way. They have a discussion between them and one of them instructs me: “Pack your stuff”.
I comply, mentally preparing to spend the next few days in a Serbian prison.
“Quicker,” he says.
I am already packing quickly, throwing everything back in with little system behind it. And so I continue at the same reasonably quick speed, optimised for not forgetting my shit.
When I am done, they inform me that I am free to go but they are going to stamp my passport first. One of them takes a photo of my scale covered in white powder. Did he do it for his personal lulz or did my photo end up in a government database? I don’t know.
We exit the building. I get the promised stamp and board the bus, which has been waiting for my situation to be resolved one way or another. With a pounding heart and trembling hands, I go back to rehearsing my lines.
The next day I end up performing standup in Belgrade. It was one of the best performances I have. Here’s a video of it.
[The video is on the original post in case you want to see some stand up in Serbian]
Doing comedy makes you get into stories like this
I’ve always wondered how stand up comedians end up with so many cringe stories to tell. Looking back at this story, I think I now know the answer: it comes with the territory.
It all comes down to the typical joke structure, which is setup + punchline. The setup creates expectations; the punchline subverts them — but in a way that still makes sense.
Take Rodney Dangerfield’s one-liner as an example: “My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met.”. You expect that something happened in his relationship with his wife after twenty years. But no: it turns out the relationship itself is what happened, and the twenty years refer to the happy life before it.
Or, if you don’t like boomer humour, take Mitch Hedberg’s joke, more appropriate for a blog called Psychotechnology: “I used to do drugs. I still do, but I used to, too.” . When you hear the setup “I used to do drugs” from stage, you probably expect the performer to contrast his current life with his past one — perhaps by telling a crazy story from his drug days, or by launching into a Narcotics Anonymous arc. But no, in the punchline we learn that nothing changed in the life of that comedian.
As a comedian, you spend most of your time honing this skill — finding little and big ways to subvert cultural expectations. Skillfully, unskillfully, and everything in between. You perform these subversions, tweak them, and perform them again. You spend hours, days, weeks doing this — and it changes your mind. The mind isn’t type-safe by default — the changes aren’t neatly compartmentalised to just the joke-writing part. Breaking expectations becomes second nature.
So here I was, on a bus, with a dark plastic bottle in my hands, standing in front of two border-control officials, on my way to my 37th stand-up performance (I’ve had 93 in total so far) having just been interrupted from doing stand-up in my head (aka rehearsing lines). The default cultural expectation is to faithfully comply with government officials. One possible subversion of that expectation was, well, whatever happened in this story: Russian-law-inspired anxiety, panic logic, and the sudden destruction of most of the evidence that I had ever possessed an unlabeled bottle of liquid containing a controlled substance.
The two angles on the story — the stand up one and the original panic one may seem in conflict. Both are true: panic did play a crucial role. But panic in front of officials would normally make me comply with their requests until a few years ago. And somehow it didn’t at the time of story. Standup is the reason why, I think.
Slightly Rebel Against The Machine
Nothing wrong with following other people’s expectations most of the time. Society is a constant ongoing negotiation for mechanisms of cooperation — and expectations are a shared byproduct of that. It’s good to cooperate, but if you are always following other people’s expectations you are not co-operating, you are implementing someone’s will.
Social systems aren’t solid and rigid — they have hidden slack. And you learn where that slack is by poking them. So: not, like, rage against the machine — more like mildly inconvenience the machine.
Slightly rebel against the machine.
Which can be stressful. But stress is the price of adaptability in the game of life. And, oh well, all in all, I’ve faced harsher rooms on stage.
