“Do you mind if I ride along?” she asked when I told the driver to take me back to the hotel. “I feel like going for a stroll and the walk back would be perfect.”
I told her I needed to stop by Pijlsteeg and that the driver had strict orders to take me to get some cannabis. Gloria was unconcerned and told me she didn’t care where we were headed. When we got to the museum I felt obliged to invite her in with me to where the doctor’s son sat smoking in his underwear. Only a couple hours had passed since my premature ejaculation had ended its journey in Gloria’s latex-filled cervix, but what happened next was beyond past events. Steven looked at Gloria and Gloria looked at Steven. She was twelve years his senior; he wanted a lover who would give him a motherly sense of security. Most normal people would perhaps have taken offence to this turn of events, but I had trouble containing my joy. After telling them a few jokes about Gaddafi, president of Libya, I bid a warm farewell to the couple with numerous handshakes and expressions of hope to meet again soon.
Once out in the street I was gripped by a pure desire to fulfill my ideas from that morning: find a sleazy dive and start a marathon session of special drinks. Ramji seemed to sense the self-destructive impulse in me and refused to leave me alone. We sat for a good half hour at Blue Blue Jay Jay, a soft-core topless joint where I downed margaritas and Ramji sipped on his mineral water until he insisted on leaving, appalled by his client’s taste in watering holes. I tried to explain to him that we were equals and that I was very fond of him, and if something offended him he should say so.
“Yes, sir,” he said and drove me to Nieuwenmarkt, the very heart of prostitution and drug dealing in the city. “I don’t think you should go there, Mr. Trooper.”
I had hardly gotten out of the car when I was back in trouble, entranced by Steven’s super-joint. A stout man on a motorbike with the words “Rent your own Taxi from Rotandari Taxi” plastered on the side rolled menacingly toward me. I automatically grabbed a piece of patio furniture leaning against a nearby wall and hit him with it. The big man hardly flinched, got off his bike, took off his helmet, and sunk his powerful fist into my left jaw.
“Racist!” he yelled, pulling back his arm, ready to strike again. “I saw you at that racist gathering! Colonial cunt!”
He put me in a headlock, twisted my arms behind my back and ground my face into the sidewalk. I saw broken glass and gobs of gum, and the lowest parts of passersby: tights and shoes that whisked past without stopping, without any interference, because people were used to violence and fighting, endless hate and abuse. I screamed that it hurt.
“And for the Indians who live in little rooms far away from the city to wake up and drive Dutch Daisies to restaurants, and then just get spit on, you think it doesn’t hurt?”
“I’m not Dutch!” I almost cried. The pain was starting to cut through the numbness of the weed and I was beaten up and humiliated by Bubi Rotandari the taxi driver. “I’m from Iceland!”
Of all the things I could have said, but didn’t get to say to Bubi Rotandari at that moment, about my political correctness, my love for the multicultural and orgies with whites, Indians, and Masai—with all due respect for the cultural uniqueness of peoples such as the Sikhs—this declaration of my nationality seemed to be my get-out-of-jail card this time.
“Iceland? So you know Binu Singh Fagandi, my uncle. Hmm. Come with me.”
According to information related by Binu Singh Fagandi, Icelanders were a remarkable exception in the world of the White West, which had royally fucked up with Mr. Bush at the helm. President Bush had made money for his war by selling luxury apartments in Hollywood, but now there were no buyers so Mr. President Bush was poor. Icelanders, however, were not poor because they owned a bank in the Netherlands. Bubi had seen the bankers himself at a party next to a racist gathering. Icelanders were world champions in money making.
How all this tied in with his plans for me, I had no idea, but I was by no means a free man yet. My half-hearted attempt to get up reawakened his fist.
“Mr. Bubi, sir,” Ramji called out, having parked the car to try and talk sense into his old boss. “I saw what happened, sir. I think that even though Mr. Willyson was careless, sir, I don’t think he hit you on purpose. It was an accident, Mr. Bubi, that’s all.”
“You swear it, Ramji? Can you swear it on our Punjabi ancestors?”
“I swear it, Mr. Bubi, this is the truth. Mr. Hermann Willyson made an accident.”
“Ok. I do this for my father, Ramji, I do this because you are family and because my father is a good man who takes care of his people. As do I. You can go. But when I want to collect my debt from Mr. Willyson—it is dishonorable to hit someone with garden furniture—I will call you, Ramji. This will do for now. Mr. Willyson is free to go.” He was about to stand up when he suddenly turned around, stared at me intently and said: “One more thing, Mr. Hermann Willyson. Does your name mean ‘brother,’ like in Spanish?”
“No, it doesn’t mean brother. I suppose it means soldier. I think so: soldier.”
“Mr. Soldier? Mr. Soldier, very good. Mr. Soldier is dismissed.”
We walked back to the Ambassador and got in. I stared vacantly out of the window at the endless, red-eyed traffic slithering by. I felt a steady beat at my temples and a growing sense of nausea punctuated by bursts of needing to drown it in liquor and junk food. When I finally made it back to the hotel I was in no mood to face what had happened sober, so I ambushed the minibar with inspired grandeur, took two painkillers and barreled down to the restaurant to order a Bloody Mary and a large helping of French fries with mayo. My friend Dmitri watched bemused as I wolfed down my food and drink, and topped up my glass on the house. The relief over not feeling horrible swept away what little remained of any common sense in my being. I walked out of the lobby, light as a feather, knowing the only way I’d go to sleep was if I passed out. It’s hard to accurately assess the time, but I vaguely recall the growing gray light when I crawled out at dawn from some doomed hash dive in the Red Light District, a good twenty hours after I’d walked with great expectations down Spuistraat in search of the perfect he-male.
“Trooper, my lovely boy!” Mother sat at the hotel bar with the latest issue of Bild. “Now, you go lie down and get a good, long rest, like a babe in a cradle. Mutti will take care of her little super trooper, and everything will be just the way it used to be.”
I dozed off with childhood lullabies ringing in my ears, drifting off into fits of dreamless sleep.
Chapter 10
After my run-in with Bubi I mostly kept to myself. I slept until noon, had a latté on the balcony, read, called Helena, and checked in on Mother every now and again. In the evenings we took the elevator down to the restaurant or found a small pub nearby where we could have a bite and something to drink. I spiked her gin with calamus—a wonder drug from the Smart-Shop in Warmoesstrat that obviously did what it said on the label. Two glasses of Gordon’s with calamus set Mother on fire. She laughed and sang sappy songs about the student life and drinking wine, like a slushed recording of her thirty-years-younger self. Her face lit up with exaggerated delight and she threw her head back in laughter, whipped her high-heeled feet up on the table and shouted for more jenever—let’s drink! I kept them coming like a factory worker, either helplessly inebriated, or shattered by a hangover. If I suggested that we’d leave early she accused me of being Hrafn Gunnlaugsson, an Icelandic filmmaker she abhorred. “It’s only one o’clock, Trooper! More jenever!” Then she’d launch into a repertoire of socialist songs from days of yore. The music poured into my soul like a melancholy porridge of stress and happiness. The rhythm reminded me of the heavy rains in the Reykjavik of my youth, a deep drumming of incoming low pressure from the Atlantic. I didn’t sing along, but let my mind drift into the din and song, until Mother realized I was dozing off and sent me to the bar for more.
This was one of the things I’d completely forgotten to take into account when we set sail for the Netherlands:
the daily, almost incessant partying was conjuring up a potent alcoholism in me. Like many others, I enjoyed babbling nonsense and drowning the world’s sorrows in drink, but despite having earned my stripes in sherry marathons on Spítala Street I had never possessed Mother’s stamina for the merciless binges she dragged me on during our stay at Hotel Europa. I was sucked into a world where the laws were alien and stronger than I was, and all I could do was go with the flow and try to contain the rising anxiety looming behind the conviction that I wasn’t in control of anything at all. Mid-day took me out on the balcony with a glass of red and a bong while the hubbub of the day evaporated into the stillness. I spent several days doing nothing but wandering around the hotel room in my underwear, reading books, doing crosswords, and having the only sex available for free: masturbation. The only time I ventured into daylight was when I needed provisions—Campari, cannabis, or new records for the gramophone.
On Saturdays I went to the market on Waterlooplein to rummage through endless stacks of vinyl, amazed at finding albums I thought were unobtainable, but were actually hidden like buried gold among all the junk. There was the New Wave and Indie Pop that Zola had collected on her numerous trips to Ireland and which she insisted I take after we broke up. The Stone Roses, New Order, Sonic Youth. I’d adopted her musical tastes in the first months of our relationship. We’d lie on her sofa and listen to the records that I felt spoke to me in the same way that Zola did, like an exotic, irresistible voice from a world that seemed to only grow and expand. When Zola left and told me to keep the records because she had no room for them, I took it as one more nail in this cruel and incomprehensible coffin of rejection: that even the memories of the past, the most beautiful thing we had, was a dimension she no longer wanted to know. Had Zola disappeared into the void? I was warped by bitterness that instantly melted into sorrow, like a rag in an over-sized tumble-dryer. Or was this maybe her way of communicating what she couldn’t say: that she was sorry how things turned out, despite her incomprehensible behavior? And that maybe, one of these nights when I was looking through my records and time had sanded down all the things that went wrong, she would pick up the phone and say: Sorry, Trooper, I understand what happened, I understand now that I was wrong. She would fly to me from wherever she was and bittersweet music would fill the cosmos, the soft down on Zola’s body . . .
“You buying those?” The record dealer whisked me back to the present and I realized how low I had sunk. I suppose there was no denying that I’d missed Zola terribly after the breakup and wanted to gut that French dentist of hers, but the fact of the matter was that she’d irritated me in so many ways while we were together. Peculiar interests like Gaelic funeral songs and ballet could drive the happiest of fools to suicidal thoughts. I had to remind myself that I was responsible in part for our dwindling sex life, choosing to spend my weekends with Dave, an annoying friend of ours on Grafton Street, drinking crème de menthe over soccer games. After I handed the record dealer 5 euros I imagined the Frenchman puking at the ballet, with a migraine due to Zola’s incessant nagging about folk music. I longed for some sort of Iberian ham I’d tasted at a tapas bar in Galicia a long time ago. As I absentmindedly took up my crossword puzzle in a nearby pub I heard someone address me by name. Right next to me sat a woman who was looked exactly like Gloria the matchmaker, and it took me a second to realize it was in fact her.
“Trooper?” she asked and planted a motherly kiss on my lips. She was wearing a green tunic over tight, black pants, with a judo belt tied around her waist, and I simultaneously wanted to run away and to have passionate sex with her. “We’re engaged,” she said, glancing over at Steven, who I now noticed sitting at the table. “It’s insane, of course, we know. But Trooper, neither one of us has done anything this fun, ever.”
They kissed and we ordered a bottle of champagne, talked about the Euro Cup in Soccer, Rastafarism, and the upcoming wedding. Steven wanted to have a Jamaican reggae band called Satiricon. I was sure that the union of this unlikely couple had to be the best thing that had come out of my ramblings around Amsterdam. Aside from Helena, these two were the only people I could, without dramatic polarization, call my friends here in the city. Steven was so saturated by agoramanic innocence that Gloria hugged him in her delight. Until now I had always equated positivity of this scale with stupidity, but now I put that idea to rest. Meeting them by chance was a sign that there was something more than ethanol and oxygen encompassing my and Mother’s existence here. After two hours of slurred happiness I said good-bye at the corner of Herengrach and walked back to the hotel with an ounce of tar-black hashish in my pocket.
“You smoking half-naked out there? It’s not even noon!” Mother had seen me go out on the balcony and stood calamus-content in the doorway.
“It’s actually past three,” I said, “and I’ve been out and about since this morning. I met Steven, who gave me this as a parting gift.”
“Well, then you might as well give it to me,” she said and took the pipe, inhaled, and sat down opposite me. Her little trip to the Hash-Jazz, along with a few dedicated practice sessions in the various coffee shops, had given her a tolerance for the drug that was even greater than her superior stamina for drink. She chattered on about cousin Matti’s hopeless experiments in growing tomatoes, and the degenerate indulgences of Caligula. She asked me if I’d read I, Claudius.
“Sorry?”
“I, Claudius. You know the book. Come on, are you completely dense, Trooper?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The book! An incredible story about the Roman Empire. I’m seriously amazed sometimes by your ignorance. And you’re supposed to be my son.”
“Supposed to be? Are you going to denounce me because I haven’t read a book?”
“Hardly. We just have to accept that there is a certain injustice of the given.”
Incidents like this were proof that Willy Nellyson and his big cock had not necessarily provided me with the intellect that ran in her side of the family. The fact that I had a magnetic memory that stubbornly held on to every little bit of information within its force field was of no significance. If I didn’t know something she knew, she took it as a sign of the decline of civilization, the dumbing down of the generations raised on Beverly-Hills-something and ER. Time and again she would fish for some a random quote from the labyrinth of her mind and ask me: “You must know Britten. Don’t you know who Cornelis Vreeswijk is? Goodness, you are ignorant.” It was like being on Jeopardy twenty-four-seven.
I stood up, went inside, and turned on the TV. There was a program on young models in the United States. The girls were goddesses and their proclamations perfect for convincing Mother that there actually were people dumber than me.
“I think I would do anything to get ahead in the model business,” Alice said and I translated for Mother: I don’t mind whoring and doing coke. Francis had this to say about Alice: “She’s charming, but she needs to work on her legs.” She’s not just boring, she also walks like a duck. “It’s fantastic working with Damien,” Dorothy said, “He’s really good at bringing out the best in me!” I’m so sexy! Everyone wants to fuck me!
Mother wasn’t interested so I changed the channel and found Ten Years Younger, a monstrous show about lost youth and beauty. Janine, a beige housewife from Essex, England, had aged more than ten years due to obsessive dieting and numerous pregnancies; now she’d had a thigh-tuck to prop up her ass, her teeth swapped out for a set of porcelains, and every strand of pubic hair burned off with a laser.
“It’s such a blessing to be naturally beautiful,” Mother said, “just think of all the trouble and pain people go through for looks. Just to look normal, really. Or would you say that woman is beautiful now? If you compare her to me, for instance?”
“Compared to you, Eva, Janine hasn’t got a chance . . . but there’s nothing normal about plastic dolls in their fifties. It’s all hemorrhoids and smoker’s cough.”
Mother told me I was
being vulgar and probably overdosing; she tended to outlast me anyway. She would sit there on the hotel balcony like the Sphinx of the desert and recite some irresistible wisdom from the depths of her soul while I whittled away into the matrix of cosmic fantasies or collapsed by the toilet bowl, dead pale and paranoid. I made the same mistake over and over again: thinking I could keep up with her. She claimed that the cannabis calmed her and made her lighter, like Oprah Winfred. It was plain to see that it had a very different effect on me.
“I think you should leave the stuff alone, Hermann, you don’t have the stomach for it.”
“You’re not the only one who needs to relax.”
“Have it your way, son. If your idea of relaxing is to hang out with your head in the toilet, then I’ll have to leave you to it.”
We went to bed early that evening. I turned on my side and fell asleep with my face squashed between the two mattresses of my king-size bed.
The Last Days of My Mother Page 9
