by Cathal Kelly
We got blind drunk one evening in Toronto and I talked far too enthusiastically about Thomas Pynchon. (There is only one age at which it is permissible to talk about Thomas Pynchon at all—twenty-five—but you still sound like a pompous nitwit while doing so.) It all felt very artistic.
Erik asked me what I was doing with my life and I didn’t have the good sense to be embarrassed or the presence of mind to lie. I was doing absolutely nothing. He invited me to spend a few months at his house. We’d do a movie together. No, really. He said that.
It didn’t make much sense, but it felt very European—asking a complete stranger with no skills of any kind to come into the bosom of your family and potentially destroy your livelihood on the basis of one choppy filibuster about Gravity’s Rainbow. I assumed this was how most things got done on the Continent.
I pointed out that I had absolutely no money and no chance of making any. I’d only just graduated from school with a useless degree, been fired from my first real job, split up with my live-in girlfriend and landed penniless in my mother’s half-finished basement. I’d fallen so far, so quickly that I was in the space beyond dignity. I was post-dignity.
So I laid the money problem on the table and waited for him to pick it up. Without hesitating—and in retrospect, this is the part I have trouble believing—he did. He was in the process of connecting one house to the adjacent one. He’d need some help with the construction work. Was I handy?
“Yes,” I lied.
Well then, he’d pay me for that. Plus, he’d feed and house me for free.
Feeling more adrift than adventurous, and still quite drunk, I agreed.
Erik went back to Belgium. I went back to the basement and forgot all about it. A few weeks later, he emailed and repeated the offer. I’d spent most of the interim lying in bed staring at the faux log trim and feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t sure Belgium was a good idea, but it couldn’t be any worse than this.
Since I had no money, I had to ask my mother for the airfare.
The Irish have many clichéd attributes, all of which are true. The one that doesn’t get enough press is suspicion. This pathology is so pervasive that it’s been rendered culturally inert—every Irishman and -woman believes that every other person is on the make, and comes to decisions accordingly. That way, everybody thinks they’re the ones getting over on everyone else.
I remember my mother coming home from work one day in foul humour because the guy driving her bus had been singing.
“And that was a problem because…?”
“Singing,” she said, nodding seriously. “And what do you think he’s got to be singing about?”
Shoulder shrug.
“Right.”
When I explained the Erik situation to her, she gave me that same nod and said, “Sure, this isn’t a gay thing, is it?”
“No, mom. I don’t think he needs to import boyfriends from overseas. You should see him smoke.”
Erik was married and had three young children. Telling my mother this didn’t help things any. Now we’d entered a new paranoid realm of imaginary perversion.
Nonetheless, she gave me the money and I went.
I had many hopes for that summer, few of which came to pass. I thought I’d learn a new language. I didn’t. I thought I’d spend a lot of time in cafés and write a book. I didn’t. I thought I’d have affairs. I didn’t. I thought I’d become cool. I absolutely did not.
The closest I’d come to that was one night out with another movie producer, Geert. We went to some filmmakers’ haunt where Geert began telling people that I was a famous American scriptwriter and “de schrijver van Speed 2”—Speed having recently been a box-office hit.
By the early hours, we had a group of fascinated hipsters surrounding our table asking me what Steven Spielberg was really like.
“By tomorrow, I am the most famous producer in all of Belgium,” Geert announced. We staggered back to his apartment. He put on the soundtrack to Once Upon a Time in America, stood swaying in the middle of his living room and cried. Then I drove home in the dark in a borrowed Opel in which I could not locate the headlight switch. I thought the whole thing very cultural. The best bits of it were like that.
I spent my days gutting a house, and did it immensely poorly. After I’d left, the whole edifice began to sag dangerously and I know in my heart that that was somehow my fault. I was so useless at the renovations gig that I’m not at all sure how I screwed it up. I just know I did. There was a lot of random swinging of a sledgehammer.
Erik and his wife, Karin, adapted their routines around me. The kids—aged eight, six and two—were fascinated at first. Every single day, the oldest, Jacoba, asked me, “Has you girlfriend?” She was newly disappointed every time I said, “No. Not since yesterday.”
Pitied by children. This was low.
Eventually, I became invisible to them. Erik and Karin lived in a bucolic village about forty-five minutes outside Brussels. It was a pretty, sterile place, unused to bohemians who invited strangers to pop by for months at a time. The neighbours would cross the street to avoid saying hello to me. Which was disappointing because “Good day” was the only thing I could say in Flemish.
I’d set up house in the attic of the half-ruined home, dragging up a mattress and laying out a few books. The windows had been blown out and not yet replaced. At dusk, I’d lie across the sill and stare out across the back of the property, which led to infinite unplanted fields. The sky was impossibly high. The sun never seemed to fully set.
I’d spent most of my life feeling out of place, but this was the first time that seemed like the appropriate response. There was some comfort in that.
Days bled into one another without very much happening. Halfway though the summer, a new refugee arrived—Frans.
Frans was a local with artistic pretensions who came from money. He’d blown all of it trying to bring the Jim Rose Circus—a collection of freaks who enjoyed a very small window of renown in the early 1990s—to the country.
I don’t claim any insight into the Belgian mindset, but I think I can say with some authority that they are not especially fond of freaks.
If I was drifting, Frans was utterly lost—bankrupt and broken. Erik put him to work retiling the slate roof of a barn.
I would charitably call myself an unskilled labourer. Frans was more of a furiously ambitious saboteur. When he started on the roof, it seemed to my untrained eye in a state of middling repair. By the end of several weeks, it looked as if a brickworks had been dropped on it from a great height. Imagine Dresden after the firebombing.
Frans would spend the day shuffling about on top of the barn, clinging desperately to the apex because he insisted on working in rubber-soled, patent-leather creepers. It is a Lourdes-level miracle that he didn’t fall to his death.
Frans was another Belgian who refused to speak to me. The first time we met, I stuck out my hand, but he just stared at it.
“Frans is having a difficult time,” Erik said. Frans—a shambling middle-aged man wearing far-too-fashionable eyeglasses for a roofer—was standing there when he said it. He nodded mournfully in agreement. He spoke English, but refused to do so in my presence. Yes, absolutely. Very difficult.
Frans and I would spend our lunch break together in the backyard that linked the two houses, sitting under a sun umbrella, drinking beer and staring off silently in opposite directions. I consoled myself with the idea that it wasn’t just me—Frans hated everyone.
The three of us did enjoy one epic night out after Frans had finished his “work.” The evening started in an abandoned theatre. It ended with Frans passing out drunk in a twenty-four-hour diner. One moment, he was mumbling in Flemish. The next, he was face-down in his omelette. He had had the foresight to take off his glasses the second before he went down, and to lay them on the table. Erik was speaking to me as it happened. Without breaking eye contact, he reached over, grabbed Frans by the hair and gently laid his head back against the banquette
.
Once Frans had regained a very few of his wits, we set off to find his car. I looked at Erik, alarmed. He was doing his Nazi smoking thing.
“We’re not going to let Frans drive, are we?”
Erik waved his cigarette around thoughtfully and said, “It’s his car, non? I suppose we must.”
Well, if we must.
When we got to the automobile—one of those low-slung half-car, half-truck European deals—Frans began wrestling with the front seat so that I could slip in the back. Once I’d done that, he went to the other side and began yanking on the other seat. We left him to it until he realized there were only three of us. I suppose the hope was that the struggle might sober him up a bit.
Then he dropped his keys and toppled over trying to pick them up. I recall the sound of the top of his head hitting the pavement.
I have been really, truly afraid perhaps a half-dozen times in my life. That kamikaze ride through the centre of Brussels as the sun began to rise was one of them. Frans ran reds. He mounted curbs. He glanced a light post. Had there been anyone else on the road, you’d have seen the resultant carnage on CNN.
Despite the fact that it was just after 5 a.m. and perhaps one and a half of his five senses were still operational, Frans wanted very badly to go to an outdoor flea market. Again, I gave Erik the look. Again, Erik gave me the “I suppose we must” shrug. The whole thing had a very bad, last-twenty-minutes-of-Das Boot feel. And not just the smoking.
Frans found a parking spot near the market. There may have been fifty feet of open curb, yet he insisted on backing into it. He hit reverse like Goggles Paisano and slammed into the car behind him, knocking off its bumper. Then he rammed it into first gear and shot forward the other way, hitting the car in front of him as well.
Frans opened the driver’s side door and fell out in slow motion. Lying on the pavement, he remained momentarily curled in the posture of someone sitting behind a steering wheel. He even had his arms stretched out in front of him.
Erik picked Frans up and he stumbled toward the market. People had begun laying out their goods on blankets in a cobbled square. Frans tromped through them, heading in a straight line for a stuffed boar’s head.
The last I remember of Frans is seeing him standing ankle-deep in the midst of some unamused vendor’s wares, trying to purchase the boar. Frans was cunningly reducing his price at each pass. The salesman kept repeating the same number—“1,500 francs.”
Erik and I stood to one side, staring dully.
“This is foolish,” Erik said and we left in a hurry lest Frans notice us and insist on more driving. I never did find out if Frans got his pig, or if he survived for that matter.
At that point, the summer was winding down and I was anxious for some sort of catharsis. I hadn’t learned anything in particular or had any of the revelations I’d hoped for. I’d done one terrible draft of a film bible, which Erik—again, I have an easier time believing Area 51 is a thing than that this actually happened—paid me for.
We’d tooled about the country a bit. I’d visited Leuven and Bruges. One night, we ended up in a brothel in Antwerp. The next morning, Karin turned to me at breakfast and announced brightly, “So I hear you visited the hookers!” I spit coffee across the table and the children applauded.
The last hurrah before I set off for…well, I had no idea where I’d go from there…was a music festival up by the Dutch border. It was a two-day gig. Karin would go with me on the first day; Erik on the second.
I tried to pay for my ticket, but they wouldn’t have it.
A few days earlier, Karin and I had gone to see Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet. On the street afterward, Karin stopped suddenly, blurted out, “It was so beautiful,” and burst into tears. I stood there rubbing her shoulder while she cried. She snuffled into the arm of her coat for a long time, hiding her eyes like a child. It was raining. I had no idea what was really going on, but I’ll never forget it.
“You paid for my ticket to the film,” Karin said. And while I had, it was about a twentieth of what the concert would cost them. What could you do with people like this? I mean, seriously?
In the total summation of your life, you may vividly recall forty or fifty days. Maybe. I’m forty-four as I sit here and I’ve got about twenty that stand out. Those two days at the concert—the name of which, like so many of the small details of things that have happened to me I’ve completely forgotten—were like that. I can think back and smell the smells.
It isn’t so much what happened, but how I felt about it happening. There was a heightened sense of switching on the mind’s internal “record” button, so that a moment could be captured and revisited for reference—“This is what it feels like to be young.”
There wasn’t anything special about the concert itself—thousands of people, a few dozen acts, too many booze tents and a farmer’s field of steadily deteriorating condition. The Prodigy headlined the first night (loudly). Bowie closed the second (magnificently).
Erik and Karin were the sort of people who knew everyone. They could not go anywhere in the country—a bar, a grocery store—without running into one person who was one other person removed from some good friend of theirs. So if there were 150,000 people at the concert, Karin might have known half of them somehow.
It had never before occurred to me that one person could have so many friends. And that all of these friends could be so roundly delighted to see them. It may sound silly to you, but for me it was a small epiphany. I remain baffled and delighted by people who can hold more than four or five people in their circle at any given time.
The venue was set up in an L shape. At either extreme end, there was a stage. At the bend in the elbow, the tent city of beer halls. We ignored the music on that first day.
(Karin did have a visceral reaction to the appearance of Pulp—a band I could not tolerate. She ran up to the front with me trailing behind. When the crowd thickened, she began to push. When it closed up in front of her, she began to shove. “I think we’ve gotten as far as we can get,” I said. She smirked at me, lowered her head and began to burrow into the wall of people. Someone well in front yelped as Karin hit him. Hard. Her head finally popped back up in the front row. She turned back in my direction and waved delightedly. I have always admired viciousness in women.)
But for the most part, Karin stood in one place and received visitors. I fetched the beer and nodded agreeably whenever introduced. I took some pride in the fact that, for the first time, a few people turned to me and began speaking in Flemish. Right at the end, I had begun to blend in.
On day two, I returned with Erik and the pattern was reestablished. He stood in one spot, smoking, while people lined up for “Hellos.” Then it happened.
We spend our lives sifting through culture. It’s hitting us every day, all day long—new things to see or hear or read. We absorb a great deal at the beginning, but our hide gradually thickens against new ideas and experiences.
In my middle twenties, I was very near the end of my beginnings. Fourteen—or six, or eight, or eleven—seemed an awfully long way off. I was already becoming what all of us become—a nostalgist for my own life. Nothing was ever again going to sound as powerful and revelatory as the first time I’d heard The Smiths or lived through the first playoff run or read Tolkien for the first time.
That day may have been the last time something moved me so deeply that it changed the internal calculus of my tastes.
Erik and I were standing in the midst of a crowd of people. I was on my fourth or fifth beer, in the pleasant stage of buzziness. I couldn’t understand what was being said, but was enjoying being adjacent to all of this amity. Everything in my world was pretty perfect in that moment.
Then Radiohead came on.
Radiohead was a band my younger brother, Brendan, liked. I knew a song or two, but I wasn’t a particular admirer. For me, they were just another noisy guitar-based British pop band. In the late nineties, the musical landscape was littered wit
h them.
Plus, it is impossible to really love anything your brother has discovered first. It’d be like walking up behind Amundsen and saying, “I’m going to plant my flag right here. Beside yours.”
It was mid-afternoon. Radiohead had just released OK Computer. They clearly weren’t yet a very big deal in this corner of Europe—hence the daytime slot.
They opened with “Paranoid Android”—a meandering, electronic dirge that hit me from the first few notes like a falling piano. I had never before (or since) heard anything quite like it. Every time you hear for the first time a song you will never forget, there is the vague impression that you’ve heard it before.
When I imagine how a scientist experiences his eureka moment, this must be it. That you knew something all along but have only now consciously accessed it. In that sense, the experience of the truly new is not so much a discovery as an unveiling. You’ve spent your life waiting for this little show to begin. And then the curtain pulls back.
I remember turning slowly on my heel toward the stage and standing there, fixed dumbly to the spot. The band was a long way off. I couldn’t see them very well. Was anybody else feeling the same thing I was feeling?
They were. Erik and his friends had stopped talking. They were also staring. Everyone was being struck the same way at the same time, which amplified the effect of wonder.
Erik looked over at me and said, “Maybe we should go closer, non?”
For the first hundred or so yards, there was no resistance. Then, once again, the crowd thickened. Erik was no Karin—no burrowing. We got to a comfortable spot about a football field from the stage and stopped. The crowd filled in behind us. This was now a proper crush.
We stood there for a bit, blissfully. Then someone in front of us opened the umbrella.
The day was comfortably warm and overcast. No beating sun. No imminent rain. It’s likely that the improbability of the umbrella was the reason no one reacted to it for a while.
