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28.1.07
I’d been underachieving for years.
There’d been a period of unemployment, a spotty record of warehouse jobs at minimum wage and night after night alternating between intoxication and hangovers.
Pervaded by a listlessness and lack of direction, punctuated by lonely nights listening to jazz or blues in dark rooms lit only by candles, chain-smoking, thinking about as little as possible until the veil of drunk slowly eased over the eyes, through the pores, numbing and transcendent yet all the while as though killing time with the acupuncture of oblivion, bottle by bottle.
And perhaps just as inexplicably, what had seemed acceptable for the better part of winter suddenly tasted like the bile of a bad meal eaten too quickly.
I had to find something else, some other method of living, some escape from the futureless present into a more tangible reality. I needed a career.
Keeping the nostalgic frames to a minimum, as required by one whose past is recollected infrequently, as though dropped into a 3rd floor walkup without history, I could count through the basics of growing up as consisted of two polar opposites, both of which eventually affected my lack of upward mobility, motivation and general, all-around championship apathy.
My father, Zbigniew, being a second generation Pole growing up in the Lower East Side and my mother, Miranda, a first generation Puerto Rican living in Harlem, were not precisely moving in intersecting circles, either socially or culturally.
Compounding the improbability of their meeting, my father had two great passions which dominated his life and shut out most else: he had been an electrician’s apprentice by the age of 14, dropping out of school to help his mother make ends meet (my grandfather had died in a construction accident many years before forcing my grandmother and father into early destitution.) and gradually building on his experience to start his own small company, beginning with the wiring and rewiring of his own building to that of several buildings owned by the same landlord all over the city once he had proven himself. One of the buildings happened to be the one on the Upper East Side in Spanish Harlem, where my mother lived.
My father’s other passion was Dixieland Jazz. Whenever he wasn’t working he was at home listening to recordings by trumpet player Henryk Majewski, pianists Mieczyslaw Mazur, Wojciech Kaminski and of course, Jan Boba. He bought his first trumpet when he was 12 and had played both trumpet and piano ever since, sometimes for church functions, sometimes for social gatherings, sometimes for street fairs but with virtually every spare moment he had away from working his lips were puckered, or his fingers were exercising the keyboard.
The day my father met my mother was one summer afternoon when he happened to working on a flat in my mother’s apartment building and overheard a bomba recording emanating from one of the adjacent flats. So intrigued by the drum ensembles, the rum barrels, maraca and the singer and chorus calls responding alternatively to one another that he took the brazen step of actually knocking on the door to ask what it was.
As it turned out, it was my mother who answered, just 16 at the time, who knew little about the specifics or the history that my father wanted to know about, but loved to dance to it and because she was able to bridge the language barrier between her mother’s historical narrative and my father’s inability to speak Spanish, she acted both as an interpreter and demonstrator of some of the dance moves.
Not to mention that Zbigniew was astounded from the moment my mother opened the door. Some days, many years later, my father would catch me off guard in the middle of a Saturday afternoon whilst he’d been seemingly drown in his own thoughts propelled by whatever symphony or jazz combo he was absorbed in whilst drinking one bottle of beer after another, a few months after my mother disappeared for the last time, he would suddenly stand up, pull a photo album out of the closet and sit next to me in beery recollection, one photograph after another like precious and out of print baseball cards, collectors editions, of black and white photos of Miranda, my mother, the 16 year old girl who’d invaded my father’s up-to-then unblemished heart.
Look at how beautiful she was Witold, he would mutter. Imagine what it was like to walk along 1st Avenue with her on my arm, by Christ, the stares we’d get from passersby made me imagine I was walking with a movie star. You just didn’t see beauty like that in this neighbourhood. Not back then. It was all blonde and blue, child-bearing hips and pinched immigrant faces. Miranda was like a matinee of fireworks shooting off stars in everyone’s eyes.
I often wonder about that afternoon, somewhere in some anonymously massive apartment complex overlooking the East River on a warm June afternoon, my father transfixed by a new sound he’d never come across before and my mother, dancer and translator of music from her native island. What an odd sight it might have made; the electrician and the beauty school student, weaving a new history in the course of an afternoon delicately balanced on a common interest in music.
Of course, it didn’t end there. There wasn’t anywhere in his own neighbourhood where he could listen to such music live and he certainly wasn’t socially capable of making the leap to weekend visits to Spanish Harlem on his own to watch live bomba dancing and singing and so eventually, it was sorted out that he would join Miranda, her family and friends one afternoon for a delicately monitored social visit which would include an evening of local food, music and dance.
And perhaps it’s not such an amazing surprise that from those twice-monthly visits, my father attempted boleros, started listening to music like the Rafael Munoz and might have forgotten all about his precious Dixieland Jazz musicians were it not for my abuela’s interest when he casually mentioned one day that he too played musical instruments quite passionately.
This led to an excursion of the Melendez family down to an afternoon of stifling Dixieland Jazz at the Ukrainian Street Fair one late August Sunday afternoon where the Melendez family formally met the Kazmirsky family over kielbasas, pierogies, blintzes, bacalaitos, carne guisada and empanadillas washed down with cold Polish beer and rounds of Puerto Rican rum in a cultural summit of unprecedented proportion for ours of their neighbourhood.
Zbiegniew was swollen with some sort of love sick hangover for months and this festival was the culmination of it all. Meeting by meeting Miranda and he had been exchanging secret glances, passing notes in mutually yet characteristically different broken English, using music and family gatherings as excuses to sneak away when nobody was looking.
And before anyone was the wiser, they were already hammering out the fine print of their relationship across the front seat of Zbiegniew’s pick up, pushing away the tools, lying down on estimate sheets and newspapers well after the light had escaped from the afternoon and windows had steamed up enough, the rum was gone, nothing but crumbs left and both families were approving of what was impossible to disprove: Miranda and Zbiegniew were an item.
Sure, it was an unusual cultural stew, taking up with a white boy, taking up with the Chicano teenager, a West Side Story without the gangs and knives, the choreographed dancing and well-rehearsed singing. Both families were compelled to agree: there was something appealing and endearing about them – memories of their own past passions sprang up in front of them and as though they were looking at the children of others and remembering their own, the cross-cultural romance of Zbiegniew and Miranda was compelling enough for both families.
As things progress in natural causes, eventually, I became the next bit of miraculous news to hit the two families. It was a bit stressful of course, given that Miranda and Zbiegniew were not married, but once that sticky situation was resolved with a ceremony that covered two different Catholic churches, one on East 7th Street near Tompkins Square park and the other near East 91st Street, the only unresolved problem was whether I would grow up in Spanish Harlem or in the East Village – as it turned out, a bit of both, until the timely death of old lady Sadowicz in a building just around the corner from my grandmother’s flat provided an opening which Miranda and Zbiegniew seized without much hesitation once it was agreed there would be plenty of subway and bus rides back and forth between the two neighbourhoods.
*****
How does this explain my own shiftlessness and dead end career choices? Well, as in many romances which begin with focused passion, inexperience and closed quarters, reality gradually set in, almost imperceptibly; nearly translucent cobwebs formulating in the corners of each’s heart, petty arguments over money and of course, the constant nip and tug and pull of two distinct cultures grinding against each other like sand in the gears.
My mother’s career as a beautician was in essence, ended upon impregnation. My father was earning a decent living as an electrician, we were in a rent-controlled flat and there was little need for my mother to work.
And so their intentionally interwoven lives might have strangled them.
Most weeks went on the same; my father off for work near dawn, my mother trying desperately to find a means of idling away the hours – housework in a small flat was no day-long episode and by noon, the cleaning and shopping had been done, the boredom set in.
Some afternoons if the weather was bright, she’d drag me out to Tompkins Square Park, mingling with the homeless and the junkies just for a sniff of a few trees, a glance at the skies by staring straight upwards. In my country, she liked to say, the sky is everywhere. You don’t have to break your neck to find it. Here we live like rats in holes, staring everywhere around you Witold, look, apartments, windows, brick and concrete. How can we live so trapped like this?
Other afternoons, she’d pack us up on the subway or the uptown bus to the barrio and I would spend the afternoon lost in a word of foreign sounds and smells. It was incredible that we could travel such a short distance to find ourselves in another world. What was this world? It must have been similar to what it was like looking out at East Berlin from West Berlin in the 70s. My mother made that commute as often as possible, from the black and white and drab to a vibrating binge of colours, animation where stoicism had only hours before, prevailed. My sky is here, she said, looking out over the East River. It isn’t pretty, but at least it’s alive.
My mother was a fruit fallen from it’s tree, gathered by migrant worker, placed into a box with other fruit and transported to the supermarket where it was then selected, paid for and later, consumed. Her seeds yearned to return to that same tree and begin the process all over again.
This was how we wiled away the hours of my childhood. Long walks seeking clear views of the skies, subways and buses, leaving one world for the next and then returning.
Later, we’d retire home to prepare dinner and begin the vigil of waiting for my father. Depending on how business went that day he might be home by 6 or 7, weary, but emotionally bouncy at the thought of what he’d accomplished that day. Other times, the harder days, the days with disagreements with customers or, more inevitably, other contractors and labourers, he’d stop somewhere on the way back to wind down with a beer or two in one of several neighbourhood Polish or Ukrainian watering holes. Some nights, after particularly gruelling days, the socialising took a more serious form and the drinking was more concerted and meaningful with oblivion being the goal, shots of vodka with mugs of cold beer chasers being the mode of transportation.
Those nights my mother and I would wait around for hours and then gradually, she would acquiesce to allowing me to eat but would hold off herself on the vague hope that any minute he would come bounding up the stairs and through the front door.
Over the early years however, a pattern emerged, as it often does, and as time went on, we ate every night at the same time, regardless of whether or not my father was planning on being around, once a silent, mental deadline had passed in my mother’s mind, her eating a distraction from the seething disappointment that wallowed in her like a taxidermist’s fluid.
And when my father did eventually make it home, it was no longer fatigued but angry. Angry with the world, with the contractors, with the crooked businessmen, with the fact that dinner was no longer waiting, that neither I nor his wife were there at the doorstep to great him. Those nights all hell would break loose – screaming, yelling, threats, dishes shattering, bottles breaking – a world within the walls of our flat of a slow breakdown of détente, a renewed vigour for finger pointing and accusations.
And although most nights it didn’t reach histrionic proportions; a few minutes of hushed voices, the slam of a door and that was the end of it, the pace was gradually set in stone. Some afternoons we would take the uptown bus and rather than a few hours of cozy chat, “we” would decided to spend the night with the abuelos. Rather, I would, and my mother would disappear for hours at a time.
But my father, despite his habits of late nights in bars after particularly frequent rough afternoons, was still a hard-working man and regardless of the state he woke up in the following morning he was always out the door by five or six at the very latest, freshly showered, ready to take on the world. In some ways he was machine-like in his ability to shake a hangover off, a characteristic I would later inherit and come to appreciate but at such a young age, at the time, I had no sense whatsoever of what was ever going on behind the scenes.
Sometimes, if my mother and I spent the night in Harlem, my father would return home early the following afternoon with flowers and the world’s troubles long ago off his back, smiling and singing, playing the trumpet whilst she prepared the evening meal. Those were harmonious and happy nights which all of us recognised as being part of a larger pattern of redemption – the ebb and flow of happiness at home.
My father worked Saturdays as well but usually much shorter days and when he came home it was never with the same menace or venom he returned with on the weekdays. Saturdays and evenings following overnights my mother and I spent in Harlem, were always the happiest times in our home.
My parents would play records with teenage abandon all afternoon and evening, starting with Chopin and Debussy, moving on to the avant-guard jazz of the Polish 60s, Kurylewicz and Trzaskowski’s hybrid of modern jazz and contemporary philharmonic hall music, followed later by the Andrzej Trzaskowski Quartet and my father’s new favourite, “Ptaszyn” Wroblewski, the brilliant tenor sax and flutist. And while this went on they’d sit in the parlour drinking rum or vodka or cold beers, smoking and talking like the two youngsters they were as though they’d peeled off the thick skin of adulthood for an afternoon and enjoyed themselves in precisely the manner they’d have done if they’d had a longer youth together before I’d come along to add the weight of parenthood around their necks like a millstone.
When I was older, my father would try and teach me a few things with the trumpet and although I was receptive, it was the tenor sax that really tweaked my ear. The first inklings were of Lester Young and his gentle manner I listened to within the Count Basie Band recordings before unconsciously following the chronology, the gawking aggressive sound of Coleman Hawkins, especially in those days leading a combo with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Max Roach, among others, as sidemen.
And then Coltrane swung into my hearing and whilst at one time I had merely dabbled, it was Coltrane’s mad spiralling, his out of consciousness playing that hooked me once and for all on the instrument.
When the polkas and waltzes and jazz records had all been played, by that time the room was thick with smoke and the careless, incessant laughter and howling of late afternoon/early evening Saturday night drunks and then my mother would insist they listen to jibaro records, the cuatrom guitar and guiro ensembles, bongos and bass, the old periódico cantaos of the plena, made up from old stories of old neighbourhoods of my mother’s former island, the seguidors, segundos and requintos reverberating off the walls, shaking past midnight with the boleros and danzas until the flat was magically transformed by booze and music into a personal dance hall for my parents – furniture shoved aside, yipping and clapping themselves into a frenzy which would inevitably end with me being left sitting in a room alone whilst they disappeared into their own for mysterious yet equally noisy undertakings.
And of course, on Sundays, there was atonement. I, of course, had nothing to be sorry for, nothing for which to ask forgiveness – sins are few and far between until you first are aware that they are possible and second, are willing to try them out.
It usually began and alternated between St Stanislaus Church , followed by dinner at Babcia’s of stuffed cabbage, kasha, peirogies, blintzes and pickles, a quiet afternoon of dulled senses from the church service to the heavy meal to the silent hours sat in the front parlour listening to the condensed orchestras of Liszt’s piano and Chopin polonaises before Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were all brought out in due course – music for remembering in that household, dark, craven thoughts, not conversing as it was clear in my household of my father’s youth, little talking, unless absolutely necessary, went on at all. My babcia would only stare morosely at photographs of my father’s father, showing my the black and white albums, their youth in Poland, the countryside, the funny dress, the world outside a world outside a world of memories and lost hopes. It was depressing, even for someone as young as myself who hadn’t even started school yet, just to be sitting in such a heavy, stilted air of musical harmony yet emotional distress. We could all feel it and not a single one acknowledged it.
On alternate Sundays, we would dress up and all climb into father’s pickup truck with the words Strzlecki’s Electricians painted on each side door and we would drive up town to meet my mother’s family for the day, and afternoon invariably filled with contrasts, afternoons which whetted my appetite for exotic day dreams and although we were still on the same island of Manhattan, it was easily as though we had transported ourselves to another world altogether.
Of course, my parents’ translation skills were required in all these endeavors – afternoons with babcia would require my father to translate the Polish to English for my mother’s sake. I was already familiar with the language and the sounds yet owed to age, my vocabulary in any language was strictly limited.
On the days in Spanish Harlem, my father would endeavour to muddle through some of the phrases he picked up via my mother, via labourers he came across, via the little islets of Hispanic culture appearing on nearly every street corner, and of course, via the lyrics of the music he’d become so fond of, but even then, for the more serious conversations he required my mother’s interventions for dialectical phrases, specific questions requiring specific answers rather than broad, philosophical strokes of whimsical speculation.
And in the early days especially, for its flavour, colour, beat and sassiness, pure interest alone, I was growing up more Hispanic than Polish and imperceptibly, as they’d likely intended, large weeds of Americanism sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement of my Puerto Rican/Polish heritage.
But more often, I grew up in a house of boredom that epitomised the hopelessness, the gutted future of my mother since I spent so much time around her and so little around my father. Although only a 40 minute bus excursion through traffic back to her home, my mother was in some ways, cut off from her own life, the life of security and familiarity, to be thrust in to a new role of motherhood in a neighbourhood of prying, fat babushkas who spoke in dialects she could not understand as they sniffed and pointed and mumbled whenever we entered a deli or stopped in somewhere for a egg cream. She was ostracized from social circles outside of my father and grandmother by those who jealous of her steamy beauty, her flamboyant personality and the loud salsa that emanated from our windows.
She took me out of the neighbourhood frequently, enough so that I grew up hearing more Spanish than Polish, but it wasn’t enough to take field trips thrice weekly to Spanish Harlem simply to have a brief dip in the pools of her culture. Gradually, the unease graduated to unhappiness, mild at first, growing as I did and my needs for her waned.
Thinking of the future, my father began taking on more and more work which in turn led to being home less and less frequently and even when he was home, he was tired, overworked, grumpy, no longer the hard-working yet simultaneously carefree Pole with a passion for Dixieland Jazz but simply greying in flesh, tiring in spirit, dying in soul.
Then there were fights – many of them in fact, some weeks, nearly every night so that I grew up with the impression that the two people who were meant to mean the most to me simply hated each other outright, tolerating one another’s existence simply out of a sense of duty to me, as if I’d had any say in the matter at all, as if I were the collective anchor weighing around their necks, as if it weren’t for me, Miranda would be working as a beautician somewhere in Spanish Harlem, surrounded by her culture, surrounded by her family and friends, surrounded by boys who chased her and praised her beauty knowing it was not being disassembled daily by the existence of a half-breed son neither Puerto Rican nor Polish, simply existing somewhere on a plain of foreign American neither here nor there.
No one came right out and said this of course, but it was there, palpable, for all someone who spent the entirety of their day with another, to begin to allow to sink in. My father resented me for I’d meant more work, driven a barrier between himself and the sexual passion of his wife, not to mention, taking away any semblance of free time to practice his beloved music. And my mother, although at first enthusiastically carrying me from place to place with her like an adult pacifier, gradually began to lose interest. She was too young to be so old and it was too early to have packed in a promising future so early.
So rather than a prize in a game of tug of war, I became the object of mutual resentment and blame, the cause of unhappiness, the ending of potentials and futures. Or so it seemed. Sometimes it doesn’t take a complicated thought process or a licenses in psychotherapy to draw simple conclusions.
Don’t think it wasn’t a relief to get out of the flat and finally start school. It meant freedom for us all.
Well, not exactly freedom. True, I was free from being toted from place to place and let out of the environment that was suffocating me with it’s resentment and blame, but I wasn’t exactly free, just on furlough.
For my mother, there was first the relief of not having to take a kid around with her everywhere she went, but also the freedom in there not being me around to report on our comings and goings to my father when he came home. This in turn led to some rather strange behaviour on the part of my mother who discovered a vicarious excitement in affairs of all sorts which might pop up from anywhere, any street corner outside of our or her neighbourhood, any chance propositions, any furtive glances of lust in her direction for regardless of being burdened with motherhood, my mother was still quite young and still quite attractive.
Eventually disappearances became more frequent and lasted longer. Some times my father would come home from work, find me buried in books and command me to come along with him, driving up to Harlem, up and down the streets in search of Miranda, a habit I would later undertake myself, albeit without the pick up truck and a lower quotient of anger boiling inside of me.
Like watching water swirling down the drain after uncorking the bathtub so was it to watch the disappearances eating away at my father, so it was like watching the marriage flounder, Miranda’s sudden appearances at home, drunken or remorseful, bursts of passion flowing between them as though they both knew the legacy was ending for both of them and I was forced to stand witness to it.
Years went by like this – it’s remarkable to think how normal it all seemed somehow. Day after day turned year after year, schooling continued, dinners were burned, arguments erupted but were quickly placated by my father who, although resigned to my mother’s scattered disappearances, knew there always existed the possibility of avoiding them just like the arguments – by keeping silent, seething within as if she wouldn’t notice the resentment, as if she were impervious to being ignored, she would remain faithful, not at his side but not utterly abandoning the two of us either.
You wonder what goes on in two peoples’ minds and hearts, linked by a sentence of marriage with occasional furloughs of genial grace, walls dripping with polite interaction, please, sorry, excuse me, might I…etc.
Perhaps it was at the point when the arguments ceased entirely that whatever lingering passion was extinguished forever. To me and perhaps to my father it was clear my mother was merely biding her time. She argued for the chance to go to night school and finish her diploma. She started taking up interests completely outside the realm of our household; palm reading, bowling, jogging, drinking and smoking less, calm, collected, cleaning on schedule, putting dinner on the table like clockwork, agreeing to everything my father said much in the way he agreed with any suggestion she made. A truce of magnificent emotional retraction, two icebergs passing in the night.
And then, as if to confuse fate, my father was the one who disappeared first and forever.
It was after a particularly long period of quiet restoration of quasi normalcy at home when my mother was home every night with dinner and my father was through the front door at six o’clock with the precision of a Swiss train and they’d sit with me eating and discussing the day as though we had decided to forget everything that had ever happened in all the years leading up to this remarkable yet transparent transformation.
Then one night, my father didn’t come home on time. He didn’t come home stinking of beer and vodka as he usually did when he didn’t make his scheduled appearance. He didn’t come home at all that night, didn’t show up the next morning, didn’t show up for several mornings and evenings in a row. Contractors began calling and complaining, customers were at a loss, no one had seen Zbiegniew although his pick up truck was spotted near the corner of 5th and Avenue C and another few days later when the police began to come around with questions and more and more questions and finally one or two people seemed to recall someone having taken a dive into the East River and begin swimming cross-current, towards the banks of Brooklyn, the ending had become apparent.
My mother didn’t make it to the memorial service.
Once the idea that my father had drown himself, either intentionally or accidentally, began to sink in, she appeared to see the light.
I was 16 by then, old enough to know the time was drawing near and sure enough, within days, I came home from school one afternoon to find the house empty.
Well, the furniture was all there, there were foodstuffs in the cupboards, the laundry and dishes had been done. One less chore for the guilty conscience. But she was gone, I could smell it the moment I opened the door. This wasn’t a disappearance to aggravate my father, my father was dead. This was a disappearance to liberate herself entirely from the memory of her life.
I checked the closets for her clothing and found a great deal of them gone. All the shoes, all the dresses, all the hats and scarves. A few winter coats remained, a few drabber styles and retired undergarments stayed behind but all else, toothbrush, mascara, deodorants, perfumes and soaps, shampoo and the essentials for running away for good were gone.
Odd, I thought. My father was dead yet all of his personal effects, all his clothes, all his documents and papers, auld tax returns, business statements, photographs, music – all of it were still here lingering like a foul odour. On the other hand, my mother had left little behind but the shell of the skin she had shed, free for the first time in her life.
On the kitchen table, which I had somehow missed in my investigative rummaging, was what I thought was a letter but as it turned out, merely bank statements, account numbers and passwords. Their legacy to me.
*****
I didn’t have many marketable skills to speak of. I’d learned a few whispers of the trade my father worked in and picked up skills like lint in the bellybutton merely by the experience of being on the job sites in my own free time when I wanted to earn a little extra cash after school.
My father probably dreamt some day of passing his electricians business still intact down to his son one day but of course, without my father, that business didn’t last forever.
With that there was little more. How they were ever married was always somewhat of a mystery to me. Your father, my mother used to tell me in the following weeks leading up to her own disappearing act, was not only quite charming, but industrious, always on the go, always working, always saving money, thinking of the future. So in the end it probably wasn’t love so much as a means of extricating herself from her own barrio of listless machismo that centred around bodegas and cat calls and whistles collecting unemployment or other forms of government benefits. At least that’s how she presented it. I wanted to get out, anywhere and your father was the only available ticket. That ticket was gone but she was still young, there was still some residual value left in her to trade upon.
*****
Without solitude
You bang your head
Against the W alls
That other people built
--From The Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, notebook three, somewhere between pages 113-117.
Of course, this put me in a bit of a bind yet also afforded me my own inherited flat, a luxury not many schoolmates could brag about.
I told no one of my mother’s disappearance, insisting instead that she was in bed suffering from the depression of my father’s death and some sort of intestinal flu when she missed the wake.
Given the heavy pall that had nearly suffocated me in that flat, I can’t deny it was a little more than liberating to realise that I had the place to myself, that there was no reason to keep any of their memories sitting around me like uncollected rubbish.
I had to make diurnal visits to babcia simply because she was still in the neighbourhood but by god, it was stifling. The unrelenting tears and babbling away in Polish that I kept insisting to her I didn’t understand, the foods she cooked for me whilst making little croaking noises about the no good mother of mine rotting away with some sickness in bed whilst I was left to fend on my own. I didn’t have the heart to tell her my mother had already disappeared and frankly, I was worried what babcia would have insisted upon had she known, so I kept mum about it and as she never really left her own flat very often to begin with, it was a secret that lasted until she finally gave in to the end of life herself several months later, still wondering what had ever happened to her son.
And although I still had the number and address, the Puerto Rican side of my family who had once caressed me with unadulterated fascination, vanished as though I had only imagined them all along, perhaps conspiring guiltily with my mother or perhaps simply not caring or even forgetting I’d ever existed in the first place. They had their own troubles and didn’t need me adding to them.
So I was alone and I didn’t waste much time to relish in it after all these years cramped into that one bedroom flat with my parents, stifled into reclusion.
Oh, I kept the hi-fi, the records, the photographs. I kept the things that mattered to me about their existence. Month by month, in secret rubbish sacks, I assembled bits and pieces of the past and left them out by the kerbside for the homeless and the scavengers and eventually, the garbage men. The bed and the sofa and the kitchen table were all disassembled hacked to manageable pieces with a hatchet I purchased from the hardware store on the corner and carried out in the middle of the night to the kerb.
There wasn’t much money left but I calculated roughly mortgage and utilities, the cost of pedestrian meals on a monthly basis and how long I could last on the remaining savings in between. Approximately two years. My father had been quite industrious after all.
I stopped going to school of course. What was the point? I had entire days, week after week into months with nothing to do, no obligations, no one stifling their hatred and arguments for my benefit, for the benefit of peace. It was everywhere this peace. I started hanging out in the Public Library on 42nd Street, liberated from strict curriculum to read what I saw fit as I saw fit, whenever and wherever to educate myself as the desire arose testing myself only against myself and how much I wanted to learn.
It had been a lonely existence when they’d been there yet somehow, in their absences, I felt a comfort I had never known – relying on myself was no novelty – not having to feign normalcy, was. But this loneliness was no longer as palatable because there was nothing to contrast it. Order needs chaos to be order by comparison. Now I was without the chaos. Order no longer seemed like order. Chaos seemed naturally internal now instead of external. It liberated an entirely side of me I had barely known existed.
Alone there are no toes to step on. You are free to walk as you please.
Unfortunately, not every memory of them had been removed from the house. There were two bottles of vodka and a crate of beer which I finished off in the first week. In seven days I experienced every degree of euphoria, desperate despair, boredom, excitement, lucidity and fog imaginable. I played their records day and night, drinking without few breaks but for to pass out, vomit, wake up and start again. This was my mourning and my toast to their lives, discovering the path to alcoholism. It’s not like they hadn’t left plenty of markers along the path to guide me to their legacy.
So the money didn’t last as long as the Two Year Plan would have indicated. And eventually the reality of needing to find some sort of gainful employment began creeping in. I’d lost the only job I’d ever had working for my father as an after-school and weekend electrician’s apprentice still several years short of competency, and was rather stuck then for something to do.
What followed was a transient tide of part time jobs requiring no skills and paying even less, jobs in restaurants as a dishwasher, as a busboy as a waiter eventually all the way up to a bartender although even this was done with great mediocrity and depressing incompetence, miserable Ukrainian dumps and delis, third world and Old World juxtapositions in a workaday world of one uneventful week after another.
And so on it went, year after year, futureless vista after futureless vista, drowning my sorrows in my dead father’s flat, reading books bought from street vendors, mincing around in Ukrainian and Polish pubs between worlds, listening nostalgically to fading salsa records that mother had never bothered to take with her, biding my time until one day perhaps I too would follow my father’s legacy into the East River.
But something happened along the way to give me a little kick, a slight start.
I somehow happened across Albert through these myriad fluctuations and pointless meandering from point to point in no discernable pattern. One night I came across him slouched at the bar in his porkpie hat, a Winston hanging from his lip as he stared at some point in the wall in deep meditation. He had a scraggly greying beard and the appearance of a man who had just been pulled out of a spider hole after 6 months on the lam.
It was barely eleven and I was already swaying, this pub being only a pit stop on the way to bigger things.
I stood next to him, sipping the beer and taking particular notice of the labels of every bottle on the shelf in front of me, becoming intimate with the names, memorising them and the order in which they ran, right to left. There was music playing from the jukebox, familiar music. Have you ever seen a dog watching you whilst pretending not to watch you? That’s how I stood beside Albert.
There was another guy to my left who had been drinking quietly and smoking with fever who suddenly began muttering to himself, sparked apparently by the song on the jukebox which he found, he stammered, beneath us all, an insult to humanity. It was some catchy Motown song which elicited a barely familiar melody in my ear but filled this guy next to me with revulsion. Albert looked up from his dead stare into his ashtray when the guy croaked a few bars of Ein Deutsches Requiem by Brahms.
That was my father’s favourite, Albert admitted unprompted. But I always hated it. Nietzsche accused Brahms of making a fool of himself by trying to pass himself off as the heir of Beethoven. Delusional, false. He falls back lazily on the past, fooling himself with the familiar rather than fooling the crowd into believing he is uniquely the great modern style, like Wagner, false and fooling the crowd rather than himself with this myth of modernity.
Albert’s eyes are closed as he speaks. The smoke from his Winston curls around his head, wafting upwards. When he opens them again, he points to the bartender, signalling another beer for himself.
The guy to my left appears uncertain of how to proceed. You could see his eyes, one second filled with the lust of a great monologue building, the next second, puzzled. He shrugs inwardly, almost imperceptively and looks down at his beer, deflated. There was no bark left in him as he busily tried to address the idea of the delusional and the delusionist. Brahms and Wagner. He was like a man enmeshed in a crossword puzzle, cranking out the words, one line after another until finally, stumped, he puts the crossword down and goes back to his beer.
The song was over and another began. There was no further commentary, both back to their neutral corners.
Albert rocked back and forth on his heels, lighting another Winston once the previous one had been ground out and took a victorious, smirking sip of beer.
“Ridendo dicere severum”, the man to my left finally and suddenly erupted. Through what is laughable say what is sombre. German composers are too serious anyway. I used to teach Nietzsche at Manhattan City College. I remembered reading that rubbish aloud, forcing those poor bastards to memorise chunks of texts like Talmud students.
Albert stopped rocking, took a long puff off the Winston.
It is the ethereal we are looking for, he cackled uncertain for a moment perhaps if he was even serious himself but pushing onward anyway, carelessly tossing provocative statements in the air like a bored baton twirler.
Like Chopin’s Polonaise in A flat Major, Op. 53? I had cleared my throat to make sure I wouldn’t be misunderstood, looking first to the man on my left and then Albert.
Precisely! Albert proclaims, finger in the air.
My father played that song every Sunday, during breakfast, for years.
Interesting. My father was a violinist in the New York Philharmonic, Albert exhaled, looking at me through smoke-squinted eyes in reevaluation.
My father was an electrician, I replied with the straight line.
My father was a Trotskyist! The man to my left exclaimed as if releasing the secret of his life out of his hands to fly away.
I signalled the barman – another three beers, the first round of solidarity purchased in a night wavy with empty proclamations and beery toasts.
*****
By the time last orders were called, the man to my left, Gifford, as it turned out, was swaying unequivocally like a man on a ferry crossing across a choppy and disturbed sea. The jukebox was playing Billie Holiday’s Strange Fruit.
I’ve got to go, he muttered, feeling around his pockets for unidentifiable objects, hanging his coat over his shoulders. Wunnerful. Unexpected.
Albert and I were left contemplating last orders and what to do next.
Of course, what to do next was a simple manner, in many ways. More beer. More beer as though there was nothing else going on in the world but the distance between this bar, the corner bodega and my flat. Why? Why, you can ask yourself night after night wondering when enough is enough, if it is ever enough. It never is. Just around the corner, after the next brain cell has desisted, lies peace. Numb and fluid.
*****
After that first night , which after hours of desultory poking into one another’s business, sharing histories; in my case, abrupt and brief, in his, spiralling into core values, important books and philosophical bends, political diatribes and hateful harangues on fellow humanity which, even in the fog of drinking, seemed to convey a bitterness so refined, so enmeshed that I wondered why in the world he’d ever begun speaking to me to begin with, why he’d left his own flat to venture into the herd, ended with what seemed notification by him that I’d passed some unspoken examination and looking back on it, perhaps the examination was more the artesian of his potential protégé than mutual strangers venturing into a rare air of grudging friendship, that is, not equals but symbiotic – for him, the ego of finding an appropriate and willing student, for me, the opportunity to latch on to someone not only sparing me an indefinite sentence of continued solitude but providing me with the materials with which to paint my masterpiece.
It was through Albert and only commencing from a period of time shortly after meeting Albert that I began to sit up and take notice of myself because of his excoriations on my listlessness and pointless existence. He summoned me to take pride in myself, dazzle myself with underdeveloped possibilities, tending to me daily like a botanist discovering an unknown form of weed. He provoked me to wonder if there wasn’t something more to my life than this endless series of dead end jobs and sweet memories of meringue music mixed with Polish waltzes.
It was Albert, through his cunning and encouragement that compelled me finally to try and figure out a method of moving forward, forget all about the past and reconstruct a future out of the present beginning with now.
Dropping out is just another form of mourning, he told me one night when we had spent the afternoon smouldering in dark, dank bars whose only populations were morose, intoxicated and hopeless. The intellect is the remedy, one of the few. The intellect stimulated by music. We are two musicians with one bass and one saxophone. Certainly, irregardless of the parameters of talent we possess, between us we should be able to find some modicum of releasing the mourning and embracing the feel of it.
You’ve got to have self respect to have confidence and to have self respect you’ve got to have a reason, he went on, his beard speckled with beer. Pride. So have some pride in yourself, stimulate yourself, and get out of this rut, this cycle of dead end jobs and emotionless drifting. And in the meantime, we’ll begin our band. That will be the release of the mourning. Work for self respect, like your father did and just as he did, find your haven in your music.
Are you crazy? Why would I want to emulate someone who drowned himself in the East River? And what about you, I countered? You have no job.
And this was in fact one of the many pieces of the puzzle of Albert, not only the air of self sufficiency, but the fact of it. Indeed, he was unemployed and when I questioned as to whether he had ever worked at all, in moments of brazenness when I asked how he managed to live this life of seeming self-reliance with his own flat, apparently endless financial resources and few constraints save for his fear of allowing his self-described original thoughts being suffocated by the collective of society, he would only frown as though I had violated an unspoken etiquette and indeed, had he been a stranger I would never have imagined asking such a question, but since we were spending so much time together and since so much of that time spent together bordered on manic intoxication, such inner protocols seemed ambivalent at best, unnecessary at worse.
Ah, but I’ve had a career, he dismissed one evening, the arm attached to the hand which held the ever-burning cigarette falling to the table like an uncontrollable twitch. It’s necessary to give perspective to a life of listlessness. Of course in my own eyes, this sort of existence is quite the inverse of listlessness, it is the damning reassurance of a regular, numbing profession which is in fact the listlessness, the demands of working to the benefit of the employer whilst simultaneously subjugating your own needs to that employer, all for the purpose of having a sense of belonging, for the purpose of some misery pay which you will scrape together a living with, all conspiring equally to suffocate the soul, erode desire that isn’t desire for material goods assimilated through thousands of hours of not-so-subtle advertising convincing somnambulists to want to purchase goods they don’t even know they wanted in the first place. Listlessness is doing things simply because you’re told to do them. Report at 9 am in a shirt and tie and sober, ready to do whatever tasks assigned to you. Leave when you are told. Eat the foods you are told to eat because they are good for you or because one company’s food product has more advertising revenue than another’s. The list goes on and on but the gist is you are not your own. You cannot think for yourself unless you wish to think about ways to improve yourself which are professionally and socially appropriate.
And yes, I’m quite fortunate in that respect. But I did at one time subjugate myself similarly and I can say the experience, Witold, is worth it. Because it is important to couch such knowledge in empirical evidence – you should not take my word for it or anyone else’s and certainly it will have little basis solely by thinking to yourself that you don’t like the idea of putting on a noose and hanging your life from the scaffolds of corporate brainwashing. For it to matter, for it to compel you to revulsion strong enough to reject the notion entirely, you have to learn to hate it yourself, first hand and thus, understand why you hate it.
As for your employment history, these have all been jobs that were simply menial labour. There is in fact, not enough demoralising environment to drown in, the existence itself is more demoralising than any environment can overcome. But place yourself in a corporate environment, Witold, and you will see the true nature and soul of the enemy be that it external or internal, and you will know for sure whether or not you hate it enough to reject it.
And as you have asked countless times, how do I, with no apparent method of supporting myself, continue to exist a life more comfortable than a person leashed to the corporate mentality, the answer is that I do not. With the exception of music, books, tobacco and alcohol, I spend very little money at all. The flat is rent controlled, which is a key element dyspeptic aversion to constant employment, minimising unnecessary expenditures, and yes, I believe housing, given the obscene amount of revenue landlords generate simply by owning real estate to be unnecessary, and as for my sources of revenue, it was clever investment of stolen goods, a rather nefarious past I will admit to only vaguely but the truth is, I took what needed to be taken, not necessarily what I needed but what needed to be taken from others, excesses which bordered on the obscene.
Yes, I targeted expensive automobiles but some were targeted solely because they were popular and easy to sell on the stolen car market or were targeted because they HAD been popular once and thus their parts were worth more. Sometimes these were not even the most expensive cars. But there are many levels of criminal ostentaciousness and yes, you might find it ironic that I would use the word “criminal” to describe a person’s ostentaciousness but not an act considered by society to be criminal and you would be correct but inaccurate, but briefly and at its very basic there are two within the car market – those expensive enough those purchasing them are doing so to announce their wealth thus, the owners’ importance and the other being the popular car which is never popular because it is cheap but because society has trained them to believe it is popular. I won’t bore you with my analysis of advertising for automobiles, perhaps another time, but for the purposes of revealing a portion of my past to you and in explanation as to how I came to have the resources to sustain myself without working, I took other peoples’ cars on a fairly mass scale in a city with unlimited resources of expensive automobiles and used such actions for my own profit.
It is viewed by society as a criminal act or in my case, a series of criminal acts and yet, I feel no remorse for one because I don’t believe there is need for cars in a city with such expansive and reliable public transportation and thus, those driving cars when they could just as easily use such public transportation are inevitably contributing to the darkening of the air I breath, again an irony coming from a man who chain smokes but for those who don’t, the air is already choked with pollutants so why add to it more simply out of laziness or a sense of entitlement when all those millions of working class people themselves are subjected to the trials and tribulations of a seemingly expansive and reliable public transportation system.
Owning a car in this city is in fact, mocking those who either chose not to own one or who cannot afford to own one and that sense of superiority in my code of regulations is as criminal if not more criminal than my stealing such cars and turning them into my own profit. Perhaps had I given the profits away to charity I would have been able to make a better argument, based upon the nobility of the action, that I was not in fact a criminal, but the fact that I did not and used such profits to enable myself to avoid the same drudgery as my fellow citizens, if anything, THAT makes me criminal but I am willing to live with that. I am hurting those I wish to hurt and my motives were purely selfish and yet I feel no remorse. What does that say of my character? It says that I will do that which is necessary to avoid that which I find unnecessary or distasteful. All very convoluted, I assure you and as you will have already noted by the irony first of describing those from whom I was stealing as being more criminal than myself and the issue of added pollutants in the air I breath when I myself am a chain smoker but not all of life is logic, Witold, no matter how much the rationalists would like you to believe it.
Despite immodesty and his drinking, Albert was in fact, quite diligent in his pursuits. He would spend hours alternating between reading and practicing his double bass which loomed in his spare bedroom study like lover waking up from under the covers.
Whereas Albert had once been my drinking buddy, chess companion, mentor in matters of literature and music, the older brother I never had, as if he had rehearsed the same song my father and mother had played, the departure theme, he too would one day be gone and when he was gone I’d been busy making amends.
From him I’d learned to drink Guinness instead of gassy Polish lagers, roll and smoke my own cigarettes, read and listen not to the classics, but those writers and composers falling between the cracks of the classics who often escape notice save by those who find it compelling to stretch themselves beyond the classics or whose interest brings them, perhaps like a scuba diver donning a wet suit as opposed to a person sticking their toe in a body of water and finding it too cold, retracting the toe with an embarrassed giggle and never knowing the creatures existing beneath the surface. And each day I would feel as though these unknown heroes of the sublime were walking throughout his apartment, room to room. The walls would shake with their compositions, books were spread open to key passages, highlighted and underlined for my edification. Another world opened up that I scarcely knew existed.
There was a lot I learned about him in the interim and I would have imagined by comparison there was very little he was learning about me simply for the fact that I was undeveloped and thus, beyond a brief history, there was little to know, much to learn. It was true for example, that some of his teeth were rotting and I knew this not because I had looked inside of his mouth but solely because on those rare occasions when his breath was not masked in a camouflage f alcohol and stale tobacco, the breath of rotting teeth was palpable. It was true that he wasn’t the most conscientious groomer. Not that he didn’t bathe or that he smelled foul – but he was consistently dishevelled and I got the idea at whatever I might have appeared at his flat, regardless of whether the visit was planned or unannounced, that I had just woken him from a long sleep. His eyes were alternately dreamy and intense, depending on the subject matter. As you progressed through his flat the smell gradually metabolised into stale beer and cigarette smoke clinging to every fabric, deep in the years of abuse. There were tropical fish, televisions set at different angles throughout the sitting room, loud music at all hours which his neighbours came to express their dissatisfaction for in torrents of abusive language and slamming doors, beer everywhere, stained on the counters, in the cushions, across album and CD covers, soaked in the rugs – a virtual laboratory of misjudged beer.
The funny thing was no matter how much he drank he never seemed visibly intoxicated. Certainly this was an illusion woven by years of public drinking and functional alcoholism, but it was an impressive trick he performed for me as my own head grew more and more muddled by the hour.
Albert was a man of the Classics hidden in a drunkard’s life.
And I, until he decided he wanted to experience some regurgitated fantasy of trans-American highway adventure, his prodigy.
*****
The experiment in finding a career was naturally, given my disinclination for bowing to societal pressures and social mores, an absolute failure.
I entered on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder, the copy machine. I choked a tie on every morning, ate a disgusting diner lunch every afternoon and came home at night, salivating with the thought of drinking beer to quench the tireless boredom.
We rehearsed sporadically. Usually we were at Albert’s flat simply so he wouldn’t have to drag the bass to mine. We both worked on compositions in our free time, compositions which bordered on being rip offs of other with extended improvisations. The extended improvisations weren’t the progressions of ego but more lack of discipline and they also allowed us time to practice without practicing together.
We didn’t have a particular philosophy of the music although we usually followed a pattern wherein I would produce a melodic sort of lead line, Albert would allow for some elaboration and then introduce his own bass line. It made for a very mellow and lonely linear sound. It was in short, as Albert coined, “thinking music”.
After a few months of this regime, Albert free to carry on as he had before meeting me and I going to the copyist’s job in the corporate’s world to add depth to a thus-far shallow series of experiences, none of which once my mother disappeared, had been anything but avoidance of such miserable experiences, and the two of us meeting with the excuse of rehearsing to drink.
On weekends, after particularly raucous Friday Nights, Saturday was spent lying in bed with the hi-fi droning out melancholic blues and jazz, sometimes sombre chamber music. Usually the relief of washing the grime of that hideous suit and tie world where I was nothing but a person treated with the simultaneous disdain and civility one treats a retarded person in public, was a half day’s work in and of itself.
I didn’t hate the work, mind you. It was simple. Document duplication. Nothing duplicitous, like shredding documents. Just reproducing them. And not in a Kinko’s-style entity in the global juggernaut matrix with a name tag and a fake sugar collegiate how-can-I-help-you pasted-on smile but on the 37th floor of a massive office building housed on Park Avenue just a short walk to Grand Central Station.
Multiple page documents fed into a feeder, sometimes just a stack left and pulled through on their own through the miracle of technology. Then it was just the watching of the LCD digital display panel counting off the copies made in a room lit adequately enough to allow the reading of brief snatches of the newspaper pages folded to wallet size and hand held, listening to patterns in the operation of the copier, the click as one page fed into another, the electricity formulating positive charges in the air above the photoreceptor, then the purr of the machine as the beam of light hits the photoreceptor and where that light doesn’t hit the photoreceptor, voila, the positive charges remain to produce the desired pattern , feeling the low vibrations of the machine, sniffing in the vague vapour and dust emitted from the paper and ink cartridges as the negatively-charged toner is shaken over the photoreceptor and the blank sheet is pressed against the photoreceptor.
Sometimes I would revel in these patterns wishing I was allowed to practice my saxophone at work to harmonise with the machine and although I’d asked and the request had been denied presumably because work is work, work is not fun, fun is fun and fun is not working, and it’s best for the work-minded not to confuse the issues lest productivity suffer as a result, the first several weeks of the job would send me home with haunting lead lines in my head based on a mixture of the copy machine noises and the vast idleness of the mind attempting to compensate for the Japanese-Zen-like enlightenment in this life of menial service.
Of course, there would always be something to fuck up these smooth harmonics. Papers would jam, the cartridge would run low or run out of ink, the entire process would be stopped until the issue was resolved and then begun anew.
At lunch I would go outside, removing my tie on the elevator ride down to the ground floor to feel free and spend an hour wandering the streets of mid town watching the go-go chaos of thousands and thousands of people converging simultaneously upon already congested and over-squeezed streets and restaurants. It reminded me of a video I once watched about the wildebeest’s clockwise migration from the Serengeti plains to Kenya’s Masai Mara, amassing on the crocodile-invested Mara River and making a maddening crossing, some surviving, some eaten, some drowning. The metaphors were singularly and consistently crushed in the Spring once winter coats were discarded and leggy secretaries and assorted office personnel in all shapes, colours and sizes began to populate the streets when it became impossible to steer myself to the Public Library and instead ventured for strolls along Bryant Park watching the momentarily listless stretched out for impromptu picnics in the sun before trudging back gloomily to their florescent honeycombs of producitivity.
This pattern went on for months although rather than developing my disgust for all things corporate, rather than encountering the nature and soul of my mortal enemy Albert had insisted I would discover once that shirt and tie were worn, I found myself growing comfortable within the role. Sure, I disliked being treated like the office idiot simply because I hadn’t wasted eighty grand on an undergraduate degree, or, as the interview for the job had failed to uncover, I hadn’t even finished high school or bothered to obtain an equivalency.
Instead I was amused that these poor little robots with human-like qualities who had been spoon-fed their educations for years almost longer than they could remember only to find themselves admitted into a prestigious race against time to find quality before death or before the effects of the anaesthetic drip of consumerist tripe wore off and left them writhing in existentialist agony.
And when that five o’clock hour kicked off and I was out the door, bursting like a handful of Chinese fireworks for the chance to find the alternative; either out for a neighbourhood pub crawl on my lonesome, fishing with a variety of lines, apnoeic and unoriginal, for what passed itself off to the casual ear as hieroglyphic banter, or recovering from the night before in the confines of the flat listening to variations of Miles Davis’ Blue in Green, double time solos and Mozart's Divertimento in E Flat whilst reading with one hand, Hesiodus or Kant or Kundera or Coelho and feeding chilli burritos or fried noodles and fried pancakes into my hung-over mouth with the other, I knew, in the barren outposts of reflection that either alternative was better than herding on to another train with all those superior-feeling colleagues who loved looking down their noses at me who were ground down to chuck meat in a suburban hamburger palace in New Jersey or Long Island.
My apathy at my plight vexed Albert to no end some nights. During those evenings of rehearsal he would be monitoring me, secretly he thought at first, for signs that my embrace of this dehumanising corporate culture was weakening and the doldrums of discontent were wearing thin my complacency. This was one element of his presumed experiment that wasn’t going to plan. He wouldn’t reveal what conditions he himself had been exposed to that had led to his own satori of hatred of the corporate world or what specifically had turned him from working from a living to stealing cars for a living, to a premature retirement pickling himself in alcohol whilst simultaneously attempting to stimulate his brain with music and literature in a cocoon of complacency in his own semi-contained flat.
And so it might have remained for uncountable years. Perhaps we would have developed from rehearsing in his flat to playing on stage, perhaps we would have taken the neighbourhood by storm with our conveniently unscripted lack of talent. Perhaps I would have continued on indefinitely in this vein, going to this same job, pretending, like Albert, to flush the numbness from my skin with a potent cocktail of alcoholism and music and literature. We weren’t going anywhere and like most else around me, I couldn’t quite bring myself awake enough to care.
Not until one weekend when Albert announced we were going to Washington, DC.
Why the fuck would we go there, I wanted to know, with the world’s greatest city beckoning like Gustave Caillebotte’s Nude Woman Stretched Out On A Sofa from every street corner?
Two reasons. First of all, change of venue. Changing your venue can be as refreshing as a hot shower after a week without bathing. But change for change’s sake is a futile and meaningless effort.
Thus there is another, more pertinent reason. The other reason is because I met Gato Barbieri last night in the lounge of the Buckingham Hotel and after a rather awkward beginning, he confided to me he was headed to there for a gig at Blues Alley in DC this weekend. We chatted for nearly thirty minutes. Fascinating guy. Soft speaking stream of consciousness sort of conversation. You know me, my favourite kind of conversation. And some good stories. About Argentina, Buenos Aires, how there were no instruments to buy when he was growing up and had to wait for someone to die to get one. Anyway, I think he was jealous of my irrevocable consumption. Reminded him of the good ole days, perhaps. He told me how he used to take a lot of coke and drink too much. Wore him away, he claims. You wear away anyway, I corrected him. But he’s like a child with a new toy, him and this sobriety. He says he’s stopped drinking, started exercising and eating healthy. It would have been repulsive but for the stories and the histories.
Anyway, Albert carries on, exhaling and sipping an espresso, staring out at the leggy pedestrians on a warm spring afternoon near Tompkins Square Park. He seemed to like me for some reason. I lied and said I was going to be in DC this weekend anyway. He says he’ll put me and a guest on the list. So there you go. You and I to DC, to Blues Alley, Gato Barbieri. Should be fantastic.
*****
So Saturday morning we get up and catch the bus down to DC. It’s an odd city. A museum of French government architecture in the middle of a ghetto. We were due to catch the 8pm show but Albert had brought a flask with him on the bus and we passed it between us with such religious fervour we stunk of it by the time we got off, already swaying.
I say we splurge, he says as we hop into a cab and ask to be taken to Georgetown. I’ve been here once before. Let’s get a nice hotel, fuck it. Dressing pigs up in tuxedos. We’ll stay at the Georgetown Four Seasons. Imagine their disgust and imagine our pleasure in stinking of this cognac, dressed like slobs, flippant at their gaudy pretensions.
And so that’s precisely what we do. We don’t have any luggage. One duffel bag between us. Change of clothes? Forget it. Clothes cannot change what we are. We’ll flaunt our arrogance with our apathy in our appearance. Who cares? These people love clothes. It’s a big fuck you to their pretensions that they won’t mistake.
And why make such a production of pissing people off? Why dress like slobs when we are presented with an opportunity to dress out of character, like cultured adults rather than subculture experiments? Because we are desperate to prove our apathy about outward appearances. We are determined to enunciate our disgust for false pretences and to illuminate the value of the character within those outward appearances.
We spend only a few minutes in the room before leaving, stopping in the first place we could find that was open, a Brazilian café. We drank Caipirinhas, entertaining the barman with our incessant, meaningless banter, word associations – the kind of stunted dialogue produced by tired minds, drunken minds. We mixed Brahma beers with the Caipirinhas, as though trying to prove some obscure point. When we mentioned going to see Gato Barbieri at Blues Alley, he asks, offhandedly, if we were going to the matinee show.
And this is what became our downfall, what began our plunge in the absurd. The matinee show.
*****
We arrived by cab, dropped at the alley and stumbled up to the front door demanding to see Gato. There was no mistaking our potential hooliganism; we certainly weren’t the typical matinee crowd. The door man listened to Albert’s wind up patiently, indulgently waiting for a long sputtering spiel of off colour ramblings to come to a merciful end before politely informing that we were not on the guest list of the afternoon show and we would not be getting in. It helped not one iota that Albert became slightly abusive at that point, demanding credentials, demanding justice, demanding again to see Gato personally for discussion on this slender point. Another doorman approached cautiously and soon we were surrounded by linemen sized men who took us in at first as a curiosity but once the curiosity had been exhausted, quickly began losing all patience with us.
One of them took me aside whilst Albert continued his harangue to another. Listen, he hissed, the two of you are disgusting. You’re drunk, you’re loud and obnoxious and frankly, unless you’re both members of Gato’s family, you wouldn’t get in here even if you were on the list for the matinee show. My advice is that the two of you go sleep it off. You won’t be welcomed here, not this afternoon, not this evening, not ever, frankly.
And when the doorway was shut tight leaving us standing there swaying in the alley with a gentle breeze, Albert suddenly slumped as though the life had been kicked out of him. He leaned against the side of the building and lit a Winston. Fuck ‘em. We don’t need these bastards anyway. I’ve got a better idea.
And those next few minutes would prove to be well fateful for as he spoke to me, pork pie had twisted in his hand, he spotted a cab driver on the lower end of Wisconsin Avenue getting out of his cab to talk to another cabbie who was leaning against the hood of his car reading a newspaper. I watched with interest as Albert pushed himself up from the side of the building and sauntered over towards the idling cab.
Then, without warning, he suddenly jumped into the driver’s side of the cab just as the other two took notice and as they leapt, shouting after him, Albert threw the car into gear and sped off, wheels squealing, up to M Street, hung a right and mingled into traffic at speed. The two cabbies shouted after him before stopping, noticing me standing there and vaguely recalling my presence next to Albert only moments before, approached me cursing.
I don’t know anything about it, I protested. I’m just as surprised as you.
They weren’t in the mood to debate and I could see the thought pattern in their brains tumbling between grabbing me and chasing after the stolen cab. They waved me off with foreign curses and hand gestures, hopping into the others’ cab and taking off down M Street in pursuit leaving me there wondering what the hell had just happened and what my next move was going to be.
Albert would later tell me that endlessly that he hadn’t actually “stolen” the cab perse. He was just bored and wanted a little excitement. The kind of dysfunctional excitement bred out of intoxication; senseless, without preamble, without premeditation. I just wanted to pick up one fare, just to see the look on their faces when they got in and I tore off from the kerb like a mad man. Just one fare.
But he didn’t make it that far. Naturally his driving skills weren’t very lucid given his consumption and before long, instead of a fare, he’d run straight into a parked car, jumped out of the cab bloodied, only to be overtaken by the two cabbies who between the two of them and the help of another passer-by, managed to hold him down in the street long enough, dazed and wounded, a burning Winston still perched on his lips, until the cops duly arrived about three minutes later, the moment of madness punctuated like the fluttering dropkick of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Opus 35.
*****
Two years later, Albert says the judge was lenient. We had a little joke in the court room. Either that or she was trying to find the motivation for my seemingly random anarchistic and criminal act. What are your dreams, she asks me at the sentencing. I gave her several different scenarios. To tread water until my limbs grow too tired to tread anymore and I drown. I thought I was being clever. She shook her head. Are you still finding this a joke, she asks me, incredulous. No, it isn’t funny at all your honour, I sincerely don’t have any dreams. Not dreams that would be rendered coherent in an incoherent society anyway, your honour.
You said that? I took another swig of the pint, these repetitive motions were all part of communication in the world Albert and I were sitting in. He nodded his head enthusiastically. So what did she say?
Nothing for a minute. Silence. Summing me up in her head. Clearly she was impressed by me in some indefinitive way she was quickly trying to calculate. Would it be more helpful if I told you it was my dream to be the guy who assembles display furniture all day long at an Ikea factory outlet mall? Then her eyes were like little slits, comprehending I wasn’t taking my sentencing seriously at all. What did I care anyway. I know the maximum sentencing guidelines. I wasn’t a murderer, I hadn’t committed a violent felony. Four years maximum, free food, regardless of how shitty it might be, the experience of prison, time to work on my book, I could have gone on all afternoon about the exciting possibilities a small prison sentence would have afforded me.
By then, the judge wasn’t interested in any of my answers. She’d tried a tact, tried to be humane. Inexplicably, while my public defender representative turned white with incredulity, she became almost jocular, leaned over the front of the bench. Too ambiguous, she stated, nearly inaudible and very slowly as though I had some sort of learning disability rather than genius.
How about an interpretive dance, done with feeling and emotion, I offered. But the game was over. She slammed the gavel down, suddenly impatient and poof, sentencing was on. Do you know how many times I told that fucking story to my cell mate? How many variations, how many different tenses, different languages, different angles I’ve created that story into, sheerly out of boredom?
He pinched out his cigarette with an annoyed look on his face. I’ll tell you something Witold. It wasn’t as bad as you might imagine jail to be. No rapings, no beatings from prison guards. A lot of long hours with nothing to do. It drives some people crazy but for me, it was two years to think.
*****
With Albert being housed in a prison just outside of DC I was left again to the daily disconnection of events which seemed, on the surface to have meaning and connection yet substantively accumulated as nothing more than motions. That familiar void in the soul which had its origins in the heart returned. It would be an exaggeration to say that I was lonely or that I was sad. As had been the case when Miranda left on the tail of my father disappearing, I rather welcomed the solitude that Albert’s stint in prison afforded. Not that I had anything particularly profound to accomplish in this solitude. The simple countermanding of the predominant culture was a definition I comforted myself with whilst reading that no definition of reality can substitute reality itself.
I realised in hindsight that Albert’s appearance had lent a background to reality, gave depth to my own consciousness which I hadn’t experienced in years and in his absence, rather than struggle to find a replacement I simply reverted back to the solitude that begat me.
For a few more months I continued working the same job as a corporate copyist simply out of habit, I suppose. Although it had given me a vague sense of belonging to something, a sense I’d craved and became aware of only once I’d begun it, I began to feel more and more out of place, swimming back and forth in this sea of humanity I found no connections with.
But with Albert gone so was the experiment and instead of being content with the simple experience, I began to crave finding something more stimulating, something with even a vague promise of upwardly movement. Albert wasn’t going to be back any time soon and time was wasting.
My existence as corporate copy boy might have gone on indefinitely were it not for these changes. At first there were small nuances in my appearance. The shirts were no longer pressed and hung on my body in the precise state I’d plucked them from the dryer at the corner of 6th Street and 1st Avenue. The tie I wore I wore grudgingly and as loosened as far from the collar as possible without actually taking it off. In this dishevelled state I took to wearing the same pair of pants every day – the same pair I spent nights out drinking in, slept in, and took off only to shower. Unbeknownst to me, I began to smell somewhat like a vagrant and although most of my working hours were spent in a room alone, those brief moments when people came in to drop off documents to be copied were sufficient to render a series of unusual complaints.
I’d spoken to my “boss”, Mr Claymore, less than a dozen times since I’d started. There was the first day of work wherein he described to me to me in excruciating detail, the duties of the job itself, the functioning and maintenance of the machine, how to order more supplies, the lunch hour and a few other human resource details such as holidays and pay days. Other than that, he had little to say to me and more often than not, I’d simply forgotten he’d existed at all until one morning when he summoned me to his office for a discussion.
I didn’t have to know much about Mr Claymore that couldn’t be sussed by spending a few moments with him in his office. He was every bit the corporate sycophant, from his hairstyle to his tie to his facial expressions and manner of speaking. On his walls were the prototypes of slogans I’d often glance at hung from the walls of the hallways of the office; slogans about productivity, team work, common goals, etc. He spoke in the language of the robot, the brainwashed, the self-important cog in an unimportant machine. I neither loathed nor disrespected him in any fashion. He existed, perhaps in the mind of some, to some utility, but as far as I could tell without knowing the details of his personal life or his facility with spreadsheets, he was in short, a man without a soul, a parasitic vulture with sagging facial features, the jowls and paunch of middle age self-satisfaction entombed in an existence consumed by numbers which meant nothing outside of these walls, a marriage that had produced the requisite number of offspring to no specific conclusion, a man who took his holidays with his family to the same places every year at precisely the same time. A man who lived by the book whose pages he read without ever comprehending.
In short, after a rather embarrassed and hesitant beginning prefaced with the obligatory niceties and sterile questions about how I was finding it here, he revealed to me that there had been several complaints about my hygiene of late and that whilst he would have been willing to ignore these complaints as minor indiscretions had they been sporadic, capable of turning a blind eye to the stray complaint since there had never been a complaint about the quality of my work, the fact was it had become such a problem that colleagues sent subordinates to deliver the documents to me because they couldn’t stand the smell that had accumulated in my little copy room over the last weeks.
And then as if on cue the officiousness disappeared, melted away in a sudden reflux of employee manual compassion and he compelled himself to enquire of me, this unhygienic little cog occupying a stale and smelly room within the office he presided over, if there were any personal problems that needed addressing, if I’d had a recently traumatic experience, if I were suffering from trouble at home, etc. As if wanting to found this line of questioning on a new reality, he couched it with the observation that it wasn’t merely hygiene but complaints that I stunk of booze most days more often than not. I could tell he was reaching out this olive branch with great discomfort knowing that he had no casual interest in my personal life and this unsavoury matter of discussing hygiene and personal problems with a lowly copy machinist as though we were discussing philosophy or politics over dinner and the appropriate wine in the comfortable confines of his family home in suburbia. I could tell that this was even for him and his vast experience an unusual set of circumstances he’d been confronted with and whilst his concern about my personal plight was not genuine he was in fact, vaguely perplexed with how to go about resolving it short of handing me a bar of soap, a dry cleaners business card and the date and time of the nearest AA meeting.
On the other hand, I was equally confused by these sudden turn of events. Those people who had entered the room I occupied solely to copy their documents, those people who had smiled passively at me, who had acted civil if not occasionally friendly, dropping casual lines about the weather or sports, had in fact been whispering behind my back not only speculating about my character but openly complaining about my sense of hygiene and that I reeked of the drink from the night before.
In a sense, it was a hilarious contradiction to be dressed in corporate clothing, the very symbols of enslavement and conformity yet stink as though I were homeless, like those who came in off the street to bath in the bathrooms of the public library or sleep in peace in reading rooms and cubby holes. Where was my sheen of invulnerability? Was it not sufficient to come in on time, do the job and do it well and leave when expected I wondered with a self-satisfied smirk.
This was not like the openings discussed in the 150-page book on chess called Libro del Ajedrez written in 1561 by a Spanish priest called Ruy López de Segura. This was more akin to his unsporting suggestion that the pieces be arranged on the board so that the sun shines in the opponent’s face. And before I would answer Mr Claymore I’d have to determine who was more uncomfortable with this sudden dissection, myself or him.
I considered a variety of defences; the time-consuming Norwegian defence wherein my goal would be to eliminate the white bishop or in this case engage in a long and protracted discourse on the nature of the fallibility of human kind generally, the Steinitz Defence which would have surrendered, although not fatally, the all-important middle of the board such as admitting it was all true and without proper reason pleading for the moment another chance at hygiene and sober living or, as I finally decided in the end, the Bird Defence, the uncommon variation with which I could hope to surprise Mr Claymore into making uncharacteristic moves, or making a mistake that would leave him in a vulnerable position.
Should I have opted for complete admission, to invoke a teary tale of my past; the disappearance of my father and mother within weeks of each other, the idiotic prank by Albert that had seen my only friend off to prison, I’d have likely only made things worse. As I was now, a simple employee with an unusual problem that didn’t involve motivation or productivity, perhaps we were both interested, I could sense, in a simple redaction of previous behaviour with a promise to correct it immediately.
But I wasn’t even certain that I cared about the outcome either tactic would have on my future employment. I was more interested in the kind of reaction I could extract from this man before me feigning paternal concern.
Do you mind if I’m absolutely candid with you Mr Claymore, I began, inhaling profoundly and wishing I’d had a cigarette prop with which to aid my performance.
He fell all over himself with platitudes of course, eager to assist if he could, prepared to refer me to human resources for counselling if necessary. He was a father after all and I perhaps young enough to be his wayward son. Whatever ailed me it could certainly be ironed out, this difficulty will have passed and I, with my unsavoury smells would be out of his office leaving him to dance again alone with his spreadsheets, statistics and motivational slogans.
The truth is Mr Claymore, that my offending smells are a form of protest.
His eyebrows rose, as the eyebrows are wont to do when the ears are confronted with a perplexing problem. I’m not entirely certain what you mean, Witold, he began with uncertainty revealed in both the sudden nervous gestures of moving papers from one side of his desk blotter to another and making sure to avoid eye contact whilst sensing like an animal instinct that what he’d hoped to be a simple conversation with a simple resolution was suddenly going to go off the rails into unexplored territory. Protest against what exactly?
Here I hesitated, uncertain myself of the direction I planned to take with this. But rather than giving away the fact I would be making this up as I went along, my hesitation seemed to reveal my own apprehension at discussing the matter in detail.
For months I have been an anonymous person employed here. I’m separated from all the other employees in a little window-less room, I’m never invited to office functions or happy hour festivities with the other employees, and don’t think not only that I don’t notice this slight but that I’m unaffected by it – on the contrary, it has had a devastating effect on my moral and on my daily living. I feel utterly worthless and unnoticed in this office, Mr Claymore and I assure you, there is nothing worse than being left out when all the others, from the lowliest secretary to the post room staff, are included. This social exclusion has ruined my confidence in myself and the work I do and although I have endeavoured to carry on with my work as this is what I am paid to do, I do so with increasing difficulty. It is almost too much some days to bring myself to come to this kind of environment where daily humiliation is such a large part of the terms of my employment here. If no one cares about me, I’ve come to reason, why should I care about them? Why should my personal hygiene matter when I am so insignificant? I haven’t done this maliciously mind you, simply to make myself noticed because it has been nothing short of demoralising to spend 8 hours a day in an environment that openly chooses to exclude me.
Oh, these words carried a weight of some kind, I could tell by the whitening of Mr Claymore’s face as he digested them. Now we are getting somewhere, I thought to myself, something humane, some degree of revelation that hasn’t been prescribed in simple textbook management formulas.
Or perhaps they were. He played absently with a pen as he nodded his head in paternal recognition of this ongoing yet unconscious slight.
I’m surprised by what you’ve told me, Witold. Of course there is no policy in place to exclude you. Just the opposite, we try to foster an environment here where everyone feels included and where everyone feels as though they are part of the team which is working together to achieve the goals we have set out. I feel terrible that you might have somehow slipped through the cracks, so to speak, of this concept of teamwork and inclusion but first of all let me say this with the caveat that the more appropriate method of addressing your concerns would have been addressing them to me as they arose rather than choosing your own, how shall we say it, unorthodox methods. That is why we have a system in place for addressing grievances so that such grievances are not allowed to escalate unfettered. On the one hand I empathise with your feelings of exclusion yet certainly do not condone the method you’ve chosen to address those feelings with. However, that said, I’m glad that we’ve been able to discover the root of the problem, so to speak and on behalf of the company and its staff, allow me first to apologise for any inadvertent sense of exclusion that was placed upon you.
He exhaled with the exhaustion of a man who thought he’d encountered every potential problem in the course of his career and knew the appropriate means of dissecting and resolving it only to discover on this day a different nuance – one which he would carry home with him on the commute home, one which he would still mull over even after he had swallowed his dinner, left his kids to their homework and his wife to her sitcoms.
Fortunately for all of us, Witold, tomorrow is another day. For my part, I will have a word with the staff generally, not revealing of course that the purpose of a refresher speech on employee inclusion is based solely upon the case of yourself, and will meet with you in two week’s time to discuss the progress of this matter. On your part, I would ask that you end your protest, by whatever method, resume acceptable hygienic practices and that if any problems, similar or otherwise, arise in the interim between tomorrow and our next meeting, you bring them to my attention before they grow to unmanageable proportions not only so we can work to resolve the matter before it worsens but also because frankly, that is the philosophy by which I’d like to think I manage. Again, I feel terrible that you’ve suffered like this without informing me but now that it’s been brought to my attention, it will be dealt with and I would ask again that should any other problems arise you inform me, as noted in the employee manual, before such problems escalate and create a mushrooming of problems so to speak.
He stood from behind his desk. For today, I would suggest you take the rest of the afternoon off as personal time and tomorrow morning, let’s say that you will arrive refreshed, so to speak, in all possible ways. Is that fair, Witold?
I nodded, smiling with the appreciative employee smile as depicted in the employee manual, and held out my hand for shaking as to test the limits of his endurance considering, as he must have when regarding that outstretched hand of mine, where a person who smelled as badly as I did, might have allowed that hand to roam. In the end, he pushed his hand forward allowing it to brush briefly against mine in some effete gesture of completing the deal and I left, free for the afternoon, which I took as an unscheduled opportunity to drink, hour after hour, giggling to myself over the absurdity of the entire experience, imagining the regurgitation of another faux-enthusiastic speech from Mr Claymore the employees would have to suffer, on the need for employee inclusion in all social events.
*****
Thereafter, I tried a different tact. Considering that it was no great mystery why those assistants arriving with their bundles of documents for me to copy suddenly effused cheerleader-like enthusiasm for the day, taking care to greet me and ask how my day was going, the changing weather patterns and minor complaints about their work loads which was meant to be inclusionary, I made the added effort myself at not smelling albeit moving only one extreme to the other.
The day after our discussion I brought with me a 4.2 ounce bottle of cologne, the cheapest I could find in the drugstore and liberally doused myself and my clothes with it to the point where even I had trouble breathing comfortably in the copy room. I wanted Mr Claymore to hear from others the overcompensation with which I had treated the complaints, much in the same way the other employees overcompensated for their earlier disregard by plying me with boring tales of their daily lives.
I patently refused all invitations to go out with others that were offered, making a face when they offered as though the mere idea of socialising with them revolted me. I already have plans, I would say to each and every offer without apology or explanation.
This path of course, was leading only to another meeting in Mr Claymore’s office, which is precisely the next step in this social experiment that I wanted to take. By now I so loathed the officious compliance of textbook and manual to human behaviour that it was all I could do to quit on my own, prematurely. What I wanted was nothing less than to be sacked. I didn’t want to resign meekly as anonymously as I had been taken on to begin with. I wanted stories to be told about me long after I was gone. I wanted my memory to linger in theirs as an appropriate epitaph to my career on Park Avenue because there would be other jobs somewhere down the road, I knew it, jobs which would bear equal hallmarks of mindlessness and futility and to endure them, I too wanted a memory to leave with.
*****
So when the appointed meeting with Mr Claymore was scheduled to take place I was rather disappointed that he was accompanied by the human resources representative to bear witness to my sacking thereby eliminating all prospects of yet another shocking yet engaging conversation with the man himself, to delve into the inner recesses of his thought process, shock it from regularity into confusion.
Instead, it was a brief and cordial meeting wherein I was informed, not even by Mr Claymore himself, that we had come to an unfortunate breach in my career with the company and with two weeks severance pay in my pocket, I was advised to seek employment elsewhere.
*****
*****
Having been blessed twice with a facility for language other than my own, namely Spanish and Polish owed to my parental heritage, I decided to forego my apprehensions about the future and burn time finding a new work experience; something which would allow me the apparition of being something more interactive something less machine-like, something requiring just a pinch more of thought and awareness outside of myself and my immediate environment.
So when I saw an ad for a bilingual paralegal for the Law Offices of Richard Pennymaker I decided to give it a swing even if my qualifications were minimal save for the linguistic skills. I knew nothing about law but as it turned out, I didn’t need to. It, like most else, was spoon-fed from the beginning and personal injury law in particular seemed, from the point of view of handling cases with a simplistic ritual already in place, a matter of applying new information to simple skills which even a chimp could perform.
So in relying on my present skills rather than my past in particular I decided to see what might happen if I applied.
The interview was a circus to say the least and should have been sufficient indication, even in my fragile state of desperation, like a low-grade fever and sore throat, of the terrible influenza that would this job would become.
There were many layers to the Richard Pennymaker phenomenon which would have been impossible to grasp without the benefit of hindsight but it was apparent straight away that Pennymaker was deranged in a not-so-subtle yet still socially acceptable fashion. It was apparent in his vanity – a pathetic state of denial; the comb-over of greasy, dandruff-ridden greying hair, the belt around the pants so tight that the fat would seem to explode in all directions if he dared inhale deeply, the generally vagrant look to his appearance – pleated corduroy pants, oversized NYU sweatshirt, psychotically shifting eyes, all warning signals that I chose to ignore.
The interview itself was fairly straight forward in that we discussed my background, or lack of background as it were in matters of personal injury before quickly moving on to a wide range of topics which had nothing to do with the job or law at all but more with his manic desire to impress upon me the goodliness of his nature, the selfless, fading 60s hippy ideologies and the somewhat incredible admission that he fancied himself some sort of modern day Robin Hood, taking from the big, bad corporate insurance companies who were, in themselves, some of the worst kind of thieves imaginable, and giving back to the indigenous, the poor, the needy, a tiny pocket of wealth to help them back on their feet.
The interview, as it were, went on for hours as he told me the history of his crusade, the indignities he’d suffered at the hands of corporate buffoons and political tyrants, the dreams which had been snuffed out by the callous indifference of a controlling society of greedy, lecherous types, all of whom flew the same sort of corporate flags again and again of indifference for the plight of the less fortunate.
We were interrupted frequently – the receptionist for important calls from insurance adjusters, witnesses, new potential clients, existing clients, doctor’s offices, reconstruction experts and plastic surgeons. A pattern of clients, all of whom had been scheduled more or less around the same time, brought in, cases dissected, medical treatments diagnosed, advises dispensed like a neighbourhood guru to the parasitic.
That the clients were brought in for these meetings in the middle of my interview didn’t seem to bother either him or the clients as I was introduced as a prospective employee, invited to ask questions on cases, all without the benefit of knowing anything about the field whatsoever, save for what I was trying to digest in between clients.
When one particularly important client arrived unannounced, he excused himself and brought the receptionist in to replace him. Alicia was my competency exam, a political refugee from El Salvador who had been in his employ for a few months. Pennymaker merely introduced us in his own broken and brackish version of Spanish and invited the two of us to sit alone in the conference room for a chat to flesh out my abilities in Spanish.
It wasn’t difficult. Frankly, Alicia was one of those barely literate immigrants of Central Indian descent who had somehow managed to escape the village she was from and land on her feet in America. She was terrified of Pennymaker, that much was clear and had no tangible idea of how or what was expected of her in the conversation so I took it over myself, pigeon holing her about her past, the village she was from, her musical tastes, her favourite foods, what she thought of New York City and America in general, whether she had a boyfriend (no) or any children (two already), where she lived, how long she had been working for Pennymaker.
I told her about my mother, romanticised the days excluding the drinking and the screaming fights and hot tempers, the beatings and the bruises.
In the end, I befriended her because I thought it would be the easiest way to win her approval. I flattered her unnecessarily and ruthlessly, pouring it on thick, relying heavily on a combination of lyrics from Julio Iglesias to Mercedes Sosa, which were the backbones of my vocabulary in post-Miranda Spanish, the lovesick months over women I had never met. In fact, I was quite adept at spouting beautiful, philosophical phrases about love gone wrong and heartsickness in general and although it had nothing to do with law or personal injury, by the time Pennymaker had finally returned some thirty minutes later, Alicia was like putty in my hands and as it turned out, gave a glowing review of my incredible Spanish to Pennymaker as I sat there admiring my handiwork, not the slightest bit embarrassed or disgusted by what I had just done. Desperate times after all.
And so this was how I embarked on my odyssey of personal injury law paralegal slash translator.
*****
It was all going quite well, all things considered. I had steady, disposable income. I had some vague sense of self-esteem that bordered on self-importance when asked what I did for a living, no longer mumbling none of your business or what the fuck do you think I do. I had yet another skin to cover that of the alcoholic, that of the struggling and hopelessly untalented musician, enough money to set up the flat in the Lower East Side, go out and try and impress unimpressionable women, find a group of people to start a band with and wow the unwowable city with whatever it was I imagined I possessed.
That is, until Albert showed up again.
*****
Although I’d often sent him odd packages with collections of non-sequential, unrelated miscellanea discovered in nocturnal walks through city streets, we hadn’t seen one another in nearly two years since he’d left to pay his debt to society in a prison in the outskirts of DC before early release for what he called not only good, but exemplary behaviour, teaching the inmates to read, teaching the guards to appreciate jazz and classical, making his mark with the best and most efficient laundry press work of anybody on the block, so he said anyway, in his sporadic yet voluminous letters to me.
So I was rather surprised as I strode home in my monkey suit swinging my briefcase which contained nothing but old newspapers, a flask of vodka, and several emergency packs of Drum, at passers-by in menacing fashion drawing occasionally hostile stares, when I spotted Albert sat on the stoop in front of my apartment building, a Winston dangling from his lip, a pork pie hat perched on his head, a yellowing neck brace and a cast on his right arm.
What the fuck, I managed to blurt out loudly, stopping in my tracks, the briefcase hitting me in the back of the knee.
Long story, he muttered, standing up from the stoop and snubbing the Winston into the side of the sculpted three foot high lion beside the steps. The lion’s head had long since taken on a Dadaesque melting quality by virtue of years and acid rain and god knows whatever other kind of abuse it withstood over the years.
I got into a car wreck, ironically enough, hit by a drunk driver, he laughed, half-snorted, looking up at an old woman who was shaking a rug from a window several stories above the sidewalk.
As it happened, the story spun out over a night of the kind of debaucheries perfected only by long-lost, beer-swilling mates in a time of utter black-out.
He had, sure enough, been involved in a car accident not long before and had suffered a series of minor albeit financially lucrative injuries as a result.
It’s the cash cow – I could almost hear Pennymaker’s horrific Jersey accent grinding into my ears like granules of sand – the cash cow is the knee, he liked to tell me, sitting back in one of his grandiose moments of self-delusion in his office, hands behind his head and unbearably philosophical - once you get the knee injury, the torn cartilage, or better, the meniscus, oh, then we’ve got them.
Never mind that because his law firm of two lawyers and a half dozen paralegals was built upon the worst nickel and dime sorts of claims, the overblown cervical and lumbar strain, the whiplash, the headaches, the inability to work, etc., could only rely on a cash cow like the knee. He could only dream about the accidental deaths on job sites or horrific car accidents resulting in permanent disabilities because that kind of lottery ticket was never going to drop in his lap no matter how many ambulances we chased, no matter how many ads were done on Spanish language television stations, how many pink business cards that were handed out, the big break was not going to happen to a man whose law firm was a constant threat to collapse entirely from the burden of stupidity and mismanagement that evolved out of it.
So you’ve got to take the knee if you can, I explained to Albert later that night. You’ve got crap knees already, don’t you? Aren’t you always complaining about them aching? Well, here’s your chance – perhaps they’ll find some previously undiagnosed tear, some arthritic change brought on by the vicious impact of the collision. In any event, you’re looking at thousands.
Albert squinted up at the ceiling, exhaling a draft of smoke from the back of his mouth and watching it be shot in frenzied directions by the overhead fan. How long is all of this going to take, he wondered sceptically, schooled in the no something for nothing academies. Still, you could see his brain working out the variety of implications a sudden thrust of income would have on his liver.
Regardless of how long it takes, so long as you play the role properly and to the hilt, you will get rewarded. If you need income before then, well, they’re certain to be able to work out some kind of loan based on your potential settlement as collateral.
So we are migrating nomads, Albert surmises through squinted eyes. What are nomads in search of? Water, arable land? We are nomads in search of cheap beer, loose women and a hedonistic apathy about global economics. We have no cattle, no sheep, no pigs to bring with us and thus must sustain ourselves on our insubstantial wits – that and a healthy personal injury settlement – which I share with you for helping me gain it to begin with…
So just like that, it was sealed.
The following morning, I brought Albert with me into the office. Pennymaker’s eyes lit up to see Albert coming in behind me with a limp, a cast and a neck brace. You couldn’t actually see the dollar signs ringing up in his eyes, but perhaps a fleck of saliva watering his lips.
This is my friend Albert, I began. Car accident, utterly the fault of the other driver. The only real issue I can see for us to speculate on Richard, are policy limits. The magic words, policy limits. Otherwise, the sky’s the limit.
We went to work immediately, ringing the insurance company with the policy number, gradually filtered to the claim number. And yes indeed, broken wrist, cervical and lumbar strain, possible knee injury. Music to Pennymaker’s ears who listened greedily as I spoke to the adjuster.
The three of us talked numbers in Pennymaker’s office.
Let’s say, conservatively, $2,000 for the whiplash, another few grand for the wrist and the knee…he shouted out to the paralegals gathered on the edges of the office: Somebody get Dr. Shoenshoin on the phone, get Albert an appointment, right away.
Dr Shoenshoin was the orthopaedic surgeon we often used for potential knee injuries.
My god, we could be looking at anywhere between 5-10 grand for the knee, at least. Policy limits Witold! We’ve got to get the policy limits somehow. See how much we can soak these bastids for. He rubbed his hands over the top of the desk as though caressing a woman’s breasts whilst leaning over her supine, writing body beneath. Oh, it’s the cash cow, he muttered to himself before snapping out of his reverie and looking up, his eyes glistening with giddiness, shimmering.
Well boys, Witold’s got it from here now. The rest of you, standing there? What the hell is this? C’mon, c’mon. He clapped his hands together. Every one out and working! What the hell is this? He turned to me, shrugging his shoulders. Albert looked at me, grinning evilly, shrugging his shoulders. I shrugged my shoulders as well. Now I was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Albert, man – this is the ticket, I murmur as we went outside to the parking lot for a cigarette before he was off to his appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon. Not only are you going to make some good money but you’ve elevated me in the eyes of that pederast, I exclaimed.
And sure enough, within a few days, once the initial prognosis of Albert’s knee by Dr Shoenshoin was spectacularly successful – possible torn meniscus. Possible surgery, months of paid therapy, ching, ching, ching.
Pennymaker was effusive in his mothering of me thereafter. I was moved into my own office. A few weeks later, complaining of the conditions bitterly, having it out in a tirade of ranting bile for every one to hear. Spoiled and pampered and demanding attention like an open wound. Admittedly, I was hung over, skittish and anxious to jump over the edge.
But Pennymaker, grateful for this unexpected windfall that held his focus day in and out ever since Albert’s arrival, silenced me quickly and conspiratorially with his rodent voice – We’re just going to have to get you a secretary…
Pennymaker had a knack for creating turnover. Employees came and went. Half of his days were spent interviewing. He fired people at the drop of a hat, humiliated anyone showing the vaguest sign of weakness, hired people after hours and hours of interviews that interloped with client meetings, telephone calls, newspaper reading, speechmaking, autobiographying. It was like the accounts of losing friends on the Front. You were afraid to befriend anyone lest they be gone the next day.
Rumours went on around about how he liked younger men – interviews were embarrassingly at times, little more than extended dates. The air was thick with a fetid sort of sexual harassment as Pennymaker hired certain younglings, barely out of college and those of us still around the next day were left to watch a stumblingly untalented neophyte delicately fend off the advances of Pennymaker who would spend days with the new boy, “training” him closely, until inevitably, by the end of the day, he’d raise his arms in frustration and say ah hell, you’re too goddamned stupid to work here. Get out! Get the fuck out!
And then Pennymaker would sulk for a few days in his office, refuse to see clients, showing up for only half days, sometimes looking as though he’d just rolled out of bed into the office, slipping on the same mangy corduroys tightly belted so the rolls of fat pinched out underneath some grease stained sweatshirt or a dress shirt that was two sizes too small and clung to him like a baby – all the fat oozing out from every direction.
You had to wonder about a guy like him. Something sinister and dark.
*****
From the Diaries of Witold Kazmersky, cahier one, p 100
“Pomifer autumnus fruges effuderit, et mox Bruma recurrit iners.” – Horace Odes, Book IV: Autumn, bringer of fruit, has poured out her riches, and soon sluggish winter returns…
The excitement of Albert’s arrival, the elevation of my status in the Law Offices of Richard Pennymaker and even night after night going out to see jazz bands and hone our visions, hear poets give open readings and rehearsals with my saxophone and Albert’s newly acquired bass were all conspiring to dull my nerves.
The first issue of course, was Albert himself, who did nothing for months but attend physiotherapy sessions, limp back to the apartment and drink the cases of beer I lugged back on his suggestion most nights after sweaty subway rides with the armpits of humanity stuffed in my nose and a full day of work under my belt.
It didn’t bother me that he didn’t work because this was an investment – splitting the proceeds of what was bound to be in the neighbourhood of 25 grand, even after Pennymaker took his cut, once the case was settled. It didn’t bother me that his knee was still too prone to go out and lug a case or two of beer back on his own or drop a bag of garbage out the window on to the street curb with steady aim at three in the morning when there were few passers-by along the sidewalk. It didn’t bother me that he didn’t cook or clean – I wasn’t much in the habit of myself quite frankly. Nor did it bother me that every evening upon my return there was a heavy pall of smoke in the living room, CDs lying around in a disc jockey chaos, newspapers and magazines strewn over every available empty space between seat cushions, overflowing in the bathroom, on top the television and the stereo – because that’s how Albert spent his free time, reading, plucking at the bass as he leaned, using it like a crutch for his gimpy knee, chain smoking, inventing new expressions and drinking beer.
The elevated status at Pennymakers grew dull once the excitement of Albert’s case wore off and it was back to the every day soap operas unfolding with Pennymaker’s ever-fluctuating and evolving obsession with young male graduates flowed in and out of the office and his knowledge that secretaries and receptionists were equally replaceable, all birdbrains in his repertoire, flushing them out of existence almost as soon as we’d become accustomed or even sometimes enamoured with.
And while it had been less than a year squired away under the constant scrutiny and back-stabbing, I no longer felt that itch of working to scratch, especially knowing that once Albert’s pay day spilled forth, so did mine and that it was unlikely in any event that I could withstand the daily uncertainties and chaos for much longer without seeing it spill like untreated sewage through the streets of my subconscious, invading my nightly rituals and sullying everything else being constructed around it.
I knew instinctively that once that payday had been cashed in there was little else left to keep me there under such primitive circumstances although what I planned on doing in lieu of it – returning to hit and miss jobs with contractors, dead end temporary assignments or bartending in pockets of hovel humanity – was left unassigned for later duty where I was busy imagining any number of possible scenarios that inevitably involved kicking up a great storm and leaving.
What bothered me in the end was simply the lack of space.
Although the flat had once been sufficient for the likes of my parents and myself despite my having to sleep on the pull-out sofa in the living room growing up and study at the kitchen table with the distraction of my mother preparing dinner around me, both Albert and his double bass were too big a presence in the room once he had taken it over.
In The Odd Couple, one guy is a slob and the other has a cleaning fetish. In The Even Couple, the sitcom Albert and I were playing out every night, I would arrive home flush with the spoils of the liquor store, pick up the empty tins of takeaway and deliveries stuffing them all into a bin heaving with empty beer bottles and crushed empty packets of former cigarettes, knock off the ridiculous shirt and tie act and the two of us would head out for the evening with the laugh track roaring in our ears.
It doesn’t matter who you’re with whether it’s a long time mate, partner, girlfriend, lover, relative, sushi and chopsticks Wall Street financial advisor, whatever, if you spend every waking hour in their presence and half of those waking hours are further spent nailed away in some dodgy dive bar peeling away beer after beer to find intoxication waiting underneath, eventually you tire of the presence. Eventually you begin to notice the habits and the quirks of the other and while you were once intrigued by the novelty of discovery, once they’d been discovered, they seemed to play over and over relentlessly repetitive, repeated annoyances growing to grievances to too much truth talking in too many loud bars in between laying bad lines on princesses sipping cocktails who couldn’t hear you over the music if they wanted to anyway.
Once the annoyances begin piling on they become like an inner city grime you can never fully wash from the windows that cloud your vision of the view as though you were suddenly suffering a mild form of cataracts and knowing you were gradually growing blind.
Gradually, the hints were dropped like carpet-bombing silences afterwards. Instead of coming home I’d stop off directly after work still caked in my suit and tie loosened then pissed then stumbling home with a takeaway, the lights and smoke blinding once in the flat, stumbling further into bed with the takeaway perched on my chest, snoring fitfully into the morning. Other times I’d come home and he’d already be out, sometimes a note of where he might be headed, sometimes a nothing which was meant as a message of something.
Either way, we tried avoiding one another as many days as possible, endeavouring to create space between us before eventually filling it back up again with consecutive nights rehearsing in the flat, the banging on the walls from neighbours until gradually relenting, back to sitting in the living room, drinking more beer, eating more takeaway, reading passages from magazines and library books which were never returned.
We were waiting out the end of a prison sentence. We both knew that the settlement which was to come would liberate us and it was all we could do to mark off the days on the calendar in black circles filled in with sinister dollar signs, waiting, purgatory.
Gradually we got around to talking about the spoils as though it were some dirty, unspoken truth between us that had to be gotten off our chests.
The rehearsing going on hadn’t been entirely in vain or delirious. I felt like I owed to my father and this particular flat and all those nights he and my mother had listened to records or my mother sat quietly sipping rum whilst my father played private concertos for the two of us.
I dreamt often of being in clubs – perhaps because Albert and I were in so many of them night after night showing up in cheap jazz clubs, not the flashy 25 dollar a head dinner table sort of jazz that flowed through Manhattan like a third river running through the middle of the island but the jazz of students and unknowns, up and comers, fading downers and never would be’s. I dreamt of playing alongside my father on stages all over the city, polkas and jazz blending in with calypsos and salsas, spinning into bottles and spinning back out again into the faces of my mother over the years, hair up, hair down, with and without mascara, in happiness and in health, sadness and poverty, emptiness and sullen and later like the fat peasant woman in Diego Rivera's La Molendera, before finally disappearing altogether and my father no longer beside me on stage, playing to the fishes in the East River or swept out into the Atlantic and then Albert with his stand up base, pork pie hat, head down in concentration, unlit Winston perched on his lip, loud Hawaiian shirt with camouflage pants and jack boots and there I was beside him back in the flat going line over line again, stopping and starting, snorting and laughing through rehearsals as though living out a piece of what this flat and my father never lived long enough.
One thing we could tell ourselves is that we weren’t very good in particular although in the abstract we were almost plausible.
And because the last month had been one long cold spell and we were cooped up in my little flat breathing in each other's chain smoking, it was Albert's idea, once he sensed he was wearing out his welcome, that the two of us should take out musical act on the road, somewhere in the distant spectacle of Europe.
Why indeed, he liked to stammer. Why not some cross country porno film cabinet masturbation of the great American dream bustling through the urban sprawl and dull poetic landscapes of Midwestern nothingness? Because that was where I last left off Witold, that’s why, Albert explained night after night until it sounded like an imaginary drum assembled on a beat machine in a distant African night. That is precisely what I chased when I last left New York, looking for my lost America. But it isn’t here. It’s over there, across the Atlantic, the lands of our fathers, the continent where history spills out of bins and is casually swept away into a larger pile of rubbish and carried out to the countryside to be buried in a landfill or carted off by ship to someone else’s landfill until some piece of it pokes out inescapably again to remind us. We must go to Europe.
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PARIS
In an after-hours boozer, long ago lost in the Pigalle's old, hilly curvy cobblestones streets, ash cement buildings, cracked paint and steep lamp lighted stairways, I wandered into the basement of a candlelit club, seated myself and spotted the girl I’d been following, my Edith Piaf, a tempestuous little street singer dressed in a black, hand knitted dress, a borrowed scarf hiding a missing sleeve and waited patiently for her set. She'd just come in from outside the cafe, lighting a cigarette in the light rain.
I'd followed her in. I'd followed her from walking through the red light district in full swing and with everything, the sex shows, sex shops and prostitutes clamouring for my attention, all the way from Place Blanche I'd followed her down Boulevard Rochechouart until she took a right on Rue des Martyrs and appeared to lose me near St Georges until I spotted her again on Rue St Lazare. I wasn't quite sure why I was following other than a simple break in the evening, a reason for moving to a destination out a nocturnal lagoon of listlessness than neither the drugs nor the drinking were able to overshadow.
I stood back up from the seat after private, subliminal pep talk I’d given myself about seizing the moment and taking the bull by the horns and a half dozen similar clichés recited like a rosary litany. She had been talking briefly with the bartender but then stood alone, comfortably alone, and looked off into the general direction of the stage.
As I walked towards her I imagined what it might be like to be moving with the intention of ordering a drink and then suddenly discovering her as though I hadn’t just followed her all that way into this place. I considered my potential opening, a variation known as the Staunton Gambit which had been named after Howard Staunton who played it against Horwitz in 1847. Basically, it is a bold attempt to demonstrate that by giving away the central pawn White can show that Black’s first move is misguided because it exposes the king. In practical experience it scores well at club level where an accurate defence is awkward to play when White has a rampaging attack. Still, as I approached, I debated the merits of establishing early pawn control of the centre, before quickly blurting out a breathless and disconnected dictum about "Le Bel Indifferent", Cocteau's play written for and starring Edith, perhaps still dreaming in a foggy, alcoholic trance that this woman in front of me was somehow Edith Piaf, or her ghost.
My sudden unravelling caught her off guard.. She regarded me with a look of amusement, a carnival in her eyes, engaged, then disengaged, considering the rapid development of her own pieces.
"I will be going on shortly" she explained, nodding towards the tiny stage where currently sat an experimentational jazz trio who were still, it appeared to me anyway, tuning up their instruments. In all likelihood, what I mistook for tuning was the actual performance. I feigned interest for a moment but immediately extinguished any look of interest in the trio when it appeared she was inhaling again, preparing to finish a thought, it was difficult to discern. "Perhaps you would like to speak with me at a more opportune time, for example, when my set is finished? Perhaps in one hour's time, or so?"
Aha, this had been too easy. Certainly, even though I couldn’t even remember my words, I hadn’t said anything particularly profound – I was confused and instead of catching her off guard she had made a move I hadn’t seen coming in staring at the pieces assembled on the board. I’d expected a polite brush off perhaps or a slight flicker of interest at best. Certainly not an appointment.
Sure, I said hesitantly, watching her out of the corner of my eye. I didn’t realise you’d be singing, I found myself apologising. I’ll just have a seat and…well, watch the performance, I shrugged.
But she shook her head lightly as though I’d lost myself in the translation. I could not discern the colour of her eyes which somehow lost anyway in the shadows.
I must explain…I cannot bear singing for the first time in front of people that I know. I can only sing for strangers. Otherwise I get too nervous. But I will meet you instead. Why don’t you wait for me at the Lily La Tigresse? It’s just a short distance from here. I can meet you inside or just outside the entryway between one and one and a half hours from now...
Well, sure…I answered in the voice of a man pretending he didn’t realise he was being brushed off. Her voice had the effect of intoxicating me, the room felt unbalanced and out of focus. I’ll meet you at the Lily La Tigresse. In an hour or two.
Sure, I thought to myself. I’ll sit there. I’ll wait and wait and wait. I shall place myself in the trust of her honesty. I will beat back the voices of derision in my head and wait patiently as though doing so would be enough to guarantee her appearance.
Ok, I’ll see you there? Her eyes did not hide from me even though it was apparent her thoughts were already moving from me to thinking of the set she would perform. It was the possibility of meeting her where she suggested, when she suggested that compelled me into compliance even though I doubted the outcome. I was curious to hear her sing yet the facility with which she had first allowed me in, then made arrangements for later, then turned back to the business at hand of the stage with barely a second thought, was unnerving and I convinced myself that I’d be better off leaving before my nerves got the better of me.
Yeah. See you in a bit, I greeted, backing off and leaned in the direction of the entrance. I wanted to look back to catch her looking at me but instead I imagined her gaze stayed fixed to the stage, focused without giving me a second thought.
"I'll wait until you get there." I noted, suddenly enthusiastic. The experimental jazz trio had morphed into one tune together, at the same time, something vaguely familiar before it hit me: The "West End Blues" 1928 recording performed by Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Fred Robinson, Jimmy Strong, Mancy Cara and Zutty Singleton. Or perhaps it was the jukebox. The room was far too smoky to discern the stage any longer. She was smiling at me blankly as though she knew I was already supposed to have turned around and left but in seeing me still standing there she had no idea what sort of smile to leave me with and had decided, at the last minute, to remain neutral. Had I remained standing there, I imagined there was quite a good chance her smile would melt, her eyes would hiss and a few strong-arms would grab me and dump me outside the door without further notice, back out into the spattering rain and the cold and the strangers.
"See you then..." I waved, turned on my heel in an effort at careless optimism and headed for the exit. Fate indeed. Whether our conversation went any further or not was entirely her decision.
**********
The Lily La Tigresse was a respectably seedy bar in the heart of the red light district although I was rather taken aback to see there were dancers there. Is suppose it was to be expected considering the neighbourhood but perhaps not that someone like her would have directed me there. I'd quickly learned my way around the seedier aspects of rue Blanche so finding it wasn't difficult. Toulouse-Lautrec had once painted the surrounding area into a district of cabarets, circus freaks, and prostitutes and at this hour, with the remaining stragglers lurking and leering and drooling a dazed sort of enthusiasm as they passed and bumped into me and threw up in the alleyways, I imagined I could see what he’d have seen, the nocturnal circus of haphazard humanity.
I’d read somewhere that Toulouse-Lautrec, because he’d broken both of his legs in his early teens, and neither had ever properly healed, they stopped growing. So this Tom Thumb genius had abnormally short legs as an adult and was only 1.5 meters tall. I’d read that he’d been a heavy drinker in Montmartre and that because of his heavy drinking he was eventually confined to a sanatorium, battling the drink, battling his insecurities and his pain.
(AMEND TO NOTE IT’S TRUE I spent my waiting time in La Lily Tigresse in a variety of fashions. First, the effort of waiting for the waiter. At first I tried looking at other customer who were sat around me trying to decipher their conversations. , I thought about the things I'd lost forever due to my own carelessness or apathy, or by virtue of someone else's fuck up. I began to sketch a list of them, a dispassionate list because you had to become dispassionate about such losses in order not to let them gradually destroy you like the slow leak of air from the pinprick of a rubber inner tube. In the end, it is about denial and the acts and losses which deny you are like angry, self-loathing little people who derive great pleasure from denying you over and over again. The list grew impossibly longer as I thought about it further and stared past people seated around me as though they were ethereal, temporary visions. As I choked down an Anise aperitif served with water that I'd ordered solely to appear as though I knew what I was doing, I began to feel sickened at the losses and resolved to make up for the losses with gains. Monumental gains that dwarfed the world. Explosions of personal insights and epiphanies.
The list I'd begun to sketch had become a doodle, an incomprehensible, unhinged triptych growing darker and darker with each subsequent swoop of my recollection: childhood toys destroyed in fits of rage, writings and drawings ripped to shreds in frustration, musical instruments bent and dented beyond repair at the most subtle, corrective hints from strangers when I played on street corners, friends discarded because of distance or because they'd grown intolerant of appeasing me, lovers, dead in the heart, wilted, ashed and forgotten. An entire gawking collective of memories and strangers mocking me. My blood pressure was rising, I was sure of it. The Anise tasted terrible and the water was as warm as piss. However intrigued by this girl, I didn't know if I could bear it even another minute of sitting alone in bitter recollections that stormed in from out of nowhere.
"So there, you've found your spot and look, you've even begun to sketch the customers!" She seemed delighted to see me, far more delighted than a stranger would be meeting another stranger after a few seconds of introduction and a completely blank history of conversation. But the cloud which had stuffed my head and my ears and was adumbrating everything around me passed suddenly and quickly as she removed an imitation velvet cloth coat with a fake fur collar and shook the rain from it before setting it down along the back of her chair. "May I have a look?" She attempted to remove the sketch from beneath my hands as she seated herself across from me but I kept my palms flat on the table, the paper snug inside.
I cannot allow strangers to see my drawings, I teased, reminding her of having to leave the club for her, relegated to this table alone for nearly two hours yet secretly joyous that she’d arrived after all.
"Do you know that Toulouse-Lautrec used to sit like you, in crowded nightclubs, drinking and laughing with patrons and drawing sketches. Then he would take those sketches with him to his studio and work on them as bright-coloured paintings. Is that what you’re going to do, take these sketches of yours back to your studio and turn them into paintings?”
I scoffed. Hardly worth the bother. Besides, I don’t have a studio. I don’t even have a room for the night.
Oh, she said quietly. I didn’t mean to pry. I didn’t realise…you are homeless?
I suppose, in a way, yes. But not in the way you’re imagining. I’ve just arrived here this morning and in the excitement of being here, I guess I just sort of forgot to look for a place to stay. I don’t really mind actually. There’s something romantic about going to a place without a plan, not knowing where you will end up when it’s all said and done, wandering around a new place without a specific purpose…
Ah, but you seem to have had a specific purpose, haven’t you? After all, you followed me for quite a distance, yes, I knew it, but I wasn’t sure why and then when you appeared again in the club, well, I was rather curious to know why you’d been following me. I thought perhaps you knew me and in the club, as dark as it is, well, it was difficult to tell whether or not your face was familiar and yet now that I see you here it seems quite apparent that I don’t know you at all, so still, I am curious. Why were you following me earlier?
I didn’t realise you’d been aware I was following you, I began with embarrassment. I guess I wouldn’t make much of an undercover cop, would I?
She laughed nervously and I imagined I could sense her reassessment of having agreed to meet me at all in the first place. Any minute I expected her to realise the business of solving the mystery of my having followed her was no mystery at all, merely one lonesome man prowling the streets who happened upon her and decided to see where she was headed for lack of anything better to do. I expected her to allow the mistake to sink in for only a few moments before politely excusing herself mentioning the lateness of the hour and disappearing back into the night she’d emerged from, gone forever. But she didn’t appear eager to go anywhere.
So tell me, stranger, she asked, touching my hand lightly, why have you come to Paris then and why did you chose to follow me?
For the same reason you agreed to meet me here, I replied easily, relief in the knowledge that she wouldn’t be taking her leave of me just yet, that the interview wasn’t quite concluded, I was curious.
Her eyebrows were raised remarkably, the habitual, beaten path lines of comers-on etched in the cynicism of her expectations.
And so tell me then, stranger, what precisely were you curious about?
Unfortunately, I had no good answer. I suppose in the world of flirtation, male bravado and self-confidence there are answers that lend momentum to a snappy, comfortable rapport which would have fallen from my lips as the tongue of a panting dog, But in this world I inhabited, there were no well-honed comebacks. I was like a heckled comedian who lost his nerve on stage.
She must have sensed my unease because her hand returned to mine again with reassurance and she smiled, turning her head slightly as though seeing me from a different angle might provide some clue.
You could begin by telling me your name….mine is Anastasia.
And so it began, the stuttering lack of timing and grace gradually succumbing to an unexpected outpouring of detail beginning with Albert’s arrival on my door step, flowing into the personal injury claim, the departure for Utrecht to discover ourselves, the success of one gig that made us believe we might actually be able to subsidise ourselves through a combination of guile and music, waking up the other morning suddenly with that dream still lingering and deciding to take the train, just on the whim of the dream, finding myself here almost as suddenly as I’d decided to come, wandering aimlessly all afternoon in expectation that something unexpected would happen to justify my having come at all.
It’s funny. I was readying myself to pack it in for the night, find a room and start again tomorrow in a different arrondisement, wander more until that inexplicable something would reveal itself to me. I mean, it’s odd because I had faith in it, faith that it was bound to happen, bound to be discovered, if only I were patient and diligent…and then, I spotted you.
So, she said cautiously, am I to infer then that I was the dream? She laughed to herself softly, amused by me in a way that a mother is amused by some unexpected expression uttered by her child.
Well, not entirely…certainly if I wandered long enough, something was bound to grab my attention, fulfil the expectation of finding something, whatever it was. For all I know it could have been a painting or the view as I turned down a particular side street. As it turns out it was you. Not the dream of course and not even necessarily the purpose of being here. But when I saw you, I wanted to know where you were going because perhaps where you were going held some answer…
And as it turned about, a jazz club, she inserted. How ironic, for a jazz musician.
Well, not that I got to hear any of it, I answered shyly.
Perhaps there is some sort of internal yet cosmological magnet between musician, singer, you know, all that jazz, she giggled, feeling clever.
I can’t deny we would certainly be aided by a chanteuse, Albert and I, but somehow I have the feeling there’s more to it.
Her cheeks pinkened and her pupils dilated slightly, perhaps a reaction to the fatigue of the evening or perhaps out of the game of the curiosity, I wasn’t in a position to tell.
Strands of sweat still lightly tinged her eyebrows and even the nape of her neck was damp. I wondered what her singing voice had sounded like. I wondered what those other dark and anonymous faces had registered as she sang.
Well, there’s always a chance of almost anything happened, if you’re in the right position, she teased, smirking, took a cigarette from the pack she'd tossed down next to the ashtray and lit it quickly before the act registered in my brain and my hands could reach for my own lighter. She exhaled quickly, tracing an absent circle with her index finger in a small pile of salt that had spilled several diners before.
I knew she wanted to witness me squirm from the discomfort of having been misinterpreted. I knew it was a little game she was playing with herself, but I wasn't feeling generous any more. Verbalizing the train ride had disembowelled a section of the dream yet again, reality had crept back. She was little more than a desperate urchin. She'd take me back to her apartment, finish me off with a bottle of Absinthe back in her rent-by-the-week apartment in some still seedier section of town, take off enough clothes for the later dream sequence to appear as though we'd actually fucked, then allow me to pass out before stealing my wallet, grabbing what few personal belongings she had in the room that she wanted to keep and then disappearing forever into the buxom night of Paris. I felt sick and lonely all at once, a wave of self-pitying nausea. I stood quickly, clearing my throat.
Well, I suppose we’ve had our fun…your curiosity is satisfied, I know where I can find a jazz club and perhaps I should be pushing on…
"I'll go with you." She volunteered, dropping the cigarette to the floor and grinding it out with the toe of her shoe before standing. The top of her head barely reached my stomach. Suddenly she seemed harmless. "Besides, what do you know of the city? You don’t know what neighbourhood to steer clear of, you don’t speak the language and you have no place to stay. I couldn’t very well just leave you to wander through the mysterious night of your Paris dream without a guide, could I? Besides, I’m always wound up when I finish over there. I can’t sleep for hours. Usually I just go home alone and sit quietly in the dark, drinking wine and listening to music. It would be interesting to try something different.
Her questions ran along with her trying to keep up with me as I pushed out into the night air which I gulped with great relief and satisfaction, the dyspeptic dread finally departing as though I'd already showered and changed and was seated on a living room sofa with my feet up on the coffee table, a pipe in my mouth and the evening paper beside me.
"You were magnificent" I said suddenly, taking her by her tiny shoulders and looking down at her.
"How? What do you mean? Did you spy on me this evening?"
Nothing of the kind. I meant to say, you are magnificent. I feel better already. Maybe I won't even bother with the train back to Amsterdam after all. What would you say if I told you that? What would you say if I said I wanted to stay a few days, or a week even? Would you let me hear you sing?
I began walking again without waiting for her reply. The night air had suddenly filled me with unassailable buoyancy. I kicked myself inwardly nevertheless for having made the decision to leave the horn behind. Now would have been the most appropriate time! I could have latched onto the banks of the Seine just as the dawn began and lent my own dissonant blaring to bounce off the hours and airs of Paris. All the while Anastasia followed behind, or as closely to my side as possible, double timing her half steps to my determined yet absent-minded strides as we went in no particular direction, street corner after street corner until she finally begged, in exhaustion, that we stop, that the incessant marching cease..
“Le seul honnête homme est celui qui ne se pique de rien” – La Rouchefoucauld
It was late, the sky was littered with traces of dawn.
So if you are a horn player, why have you no horn, she asked as though just making the observation as she pushed open the vaulted front door of an apartment building. I had no idea where we were. She had led me through a labyrinth of winding, ascending streets, alleyways and across sudden boulevards to get here.
I left it behind in Utrecht. I didn’t see the point of bringing it. I hadn’t been intending on performing any serenades although in hindsight, that lack of foresight seemed crippling. Not that I’d have impressed you with my playing anyway, I admitted as we ascended the stairs leading to her flat.
She opened the door, flicked on the light and tossed her keys on the table beside the door which was already overflowing with things having been tossed on that same table without having been picked up. There was smallish front parlour and to the left a kitchen nook that further led down a slight hallway. In the very front of the parlour, facing the door was a television set which had been gutted and then stuffed with as many teddy bears as could possible fit inside, all crammed in with the same blank expression of teddy bear enlightenment, despite the cramped quarters.
What do you think about strangers when entering their flats? A quick glance at the wall coverings before making a beeline for the bookshelf. That’s what Albert taught. Nothing reveals more about a person than their books.
In Anastasia’s case, there was no book shelf. But the studio reflected her passion for collecting, certainly. The teddy bears stuffed into the empty television screen, a few posters on the wall announcing gigs in cafes I’d never heard of by musicians I was utterly unaware of and then, the photographs, everywhere, spread out on tables, on the floor, clipped and cropped, pasted on boards, everywhere little scraps of lives and even glancing at them casually it was apparent that none of those pictured where Anastasia.
Shall we have wine or coffee she asked, already moving into the kitchen and taking a bottle from the cupboard.
As it transpired, we spent a great deal of time looking at photo albums, scrapbooks of strangers even she didn’t know, more photographs from piles of postcards with 50 year old postmarks. I collect photos, she admitted sheepishly but without further elaboration.
I read somewhere, she said finally, that there are two types of refugees. Those with photographs and those without. Which one are you?
I am without photographs, I admitted, although not a refugee, merely the world’s immigrant. Not one, not even in your wallet? Nada, save for my passport photo, I suppose.
Well, my parents were never really ones for taking photographs…we didn’t even really take holidays. Trips out to the ocean some weekends, once, a trip to the mountains upstate, but more or less, we spent our time in our neighbourhood and didn’t really leave very often. There were occasions for photographs, I suppose – birthdays, anniversaries, parties…but my parents weren’t interested in photographing their memories. Frankly, I think they believed there wasn’t much all that memorable to begin with.
She stared at me a long time without a word, her green eyes through which I imagined I could see the neighbouring candlelight flicker, focused on my face as though looking for a hint of a break in the stoic poker player’s face. My defences were taut, disciplined for even then there was something about Anastasia that told you to keep up your guard. Perhaps it was simply the mystery of why. Or that lack of trustworthiness in why. It wasn’t as though I didn’t believe I belonged with her – it could just as easily be me as anyone. More a question of why she had chosen me when just as easily, I could have failed to advance past the initial introduction.
You see, there was something I believed back then relating to selection – the mating ritual of the ******* for example, requires ********** and *********.
I, on the other hand, had merely shown up. I felt certain it wasn’t as simple as a matter of timing – well, perhaps timing in that she was between relationships rather in the middle of one, but certainly not that if I had arrived through the doors of the café a day earlier or five weeks later all chance would have evaporated.
*****
Do you believe in fate, she asked me one afternoon when we were sprawled out, limb in limb, tracing the outline of each other’s skin, watching the shadows lengthen through the windows. Why do you ask – do you have us in mind? I stood up then to have a cigarette and pace but she pulled me back down again, nonono, she whispered, I just mean in the sense of where any of us are heading, the direction you chose, the direction I chose, why certain strangers walk past you on certain days but never again, why some are born in one country where there is poverty and starvation yet others in a market economy perfectly adept at handling the possibility of that individual’s economic potential, you know – in a vague yet not too general way…
I could quote *********, I said, growing more uncomfortable and making another, more successful effort at releasing myself from the floor and the mattress and getting up to the table to roll a cigarette. ******** said ********.
That doesn’t answer the question of whether you do or don’t believe in fate, Witold. What made you choose to leave NYC? And once you left, why Utrecht and once in Utrecht why did you leave your friend behind to come here and once here, why did you decide on entering my club and even then, that we were placed in the same place at the same time, something gave you the nerve, the verve, the desire to approach me and even though I wasn’t the most receptive possible, merely calculatedly mysterious, you were eager to see the possibilities through without worrying what disappointment might lie ahead. Was it fate, partially fate, partially choice, or just dumb luck?
There’s no such thing as dumb luck, only good and bad luck. In the instance of meeting you, I’d say it was more a matter of chance than of fate or choice. Is chance considered fate when chance is created in part at least, by your own choices? I think fate implies it is absolutely, utterly out of our hands – like the weather. You can dress up for the cold or for rain but you cannot control if it rains or becomes cold. I cannot control that I met you however, the circumstances were in part, created by my own actions – unknowingly at first, let’s say up to the point when I’d first spoken with you in the club – but thereafter, it is less a matter of chance or of fate than of two people with somewhat similar goals, even as broad and simple as getting to know each other.
Well then, let’s say it is a matter of fate or for destiny, her hand ran along her left shin bone and stopped at her knee. Fate would have been determined by something beyond our control as in, some higher power brought us together for a reason. Could be the fate of souls perhaps, souls which are destined, in the course of living to meet again and again through various stages of existence perhaps. You know, like perhaps in another life, if you believe such things of course, we knew each other very dearly and even though the lives that were the vessels of our souls had long expired, once new vessels were found, like this life we are living now, our souls were bound to be reunited.
Smoke tapered upwards from her cigarette left burning in the ashtray as she sipped at her wine. Fate, on the other hand, might be much similar in that those souls are still meant to be reunited but we too are participating. Perhaps we are doing so knowingly or unknowingly. You coming to Paris, my being on the street I was on when you first started following me.
If we did not follow this destiny, it would have been fate.
I exhaled and stared out the window of her flat overlooking Rue Mont Saint Genevieve. She had already stood as well, changing the disc from a sombre yet unknown jazz pianist to a wild and incomprehensible Ornette Coleman as though the cacophony might release us both out of the cocoon of the fledgling comfort of roads still on the horizon, yet untaken.
Well, most of these photographs are of people I don’t even know, she commented, turning page after page, stood in her panties in a brazen display of either self confidence or apathy. Her words, as I focused unflinchingly on the bulb of her buttocks the fabric of the panties couldn’t quite cover and then downward to the arc of her calves into her ankles, as much as those words were to have been cherished, were somehow lost, as though they weren’t being spoken at all, merely forming a background symphony to an visual presentation. And then I faded back in time to catch her continuing: Sometimes, she elaborated as though I’d been paying attention all along yet somehow sensed the impossibility of my concentration and hence her stance there in the twilight of the flat in her panties, lighting a cigarette of her own, it’s more interesting trying to interpret the lives of others through the memories represented by their photographs than it is reliving your own…
And without an introductory preamble she suddenly changed discs again and the Chet Baker River was flowing between the walls, carrying us on a fool’s errand.
*****
Nothing happened.
I stayed for two weeks in that flat with her.
The second morning I stole the keys, crept out in secret although secretly she was likely not such a heavy sleeper she would have no idea I was heading out, and got out into the streets of morning Paris.
Regardless of the last day and twelve hours, I’d had a yet unperformed desire to walk the streets alone. Especially at this particular moment when you need the space to reflect on all that was taking place inside the walls of Anastasia’s flat in that time frame from which we hadn’t left since entering.
Without wanting to break the yolk, the rhythm, the syncopation of bonding, I still felt compelled to get out - the air, the smells, the foreign language until now had consisted primarily of everything inside her flat and nothing of the world outside. Not that I minded, but it was getting unnerving as though without a backdrop of some sort of reality to add dimension, the entire encounter might well have been some sort of dream, a prolonged stare out the window in a moving train letting my idle thoughts wander into the woods, over the plain, of mystery.
I wasn’t gone long, mind you. I wanted to stretch my mind, like my legs, to ascertain what I was thinking – my thoughts had not been my own for the last day and a half. It was as though I had been sitting for a painting and now wanted to see what it looked like.
At first, it was just a roll up and a coffee in the first café I came across. But there was no real concentrating. Every fabric in my skin breathed her – I could smell her perfume, her hair conditioner, her sheets, her voice lingered in my ears – everything that had been in that flat had come with me in scented form and it was after all, impossible to escape.
And there was no real walking. Yes, the movements were similar but inside, I was floating – as though watching myself walk without having to actually perform the act, or incapable of it. This is what it is like in the last milliseconds of life, I thought – the experience often recounted of rising above the body, above the room, the earth beneath you eventually growing so distant it is but a speck as you are drawn to a greater light. This was infatuation in action.
The barman was saying something to me – no idea what – I had been speaking aloud to myself, muttering as though completely alone and now, caught in mid speech, I stamped out my cigarette, shrugged to the barman and headed back out of the café into the street again.
I was able to accumulate a few provisions before returning to the flat. Some eggs, several different cheeses, none of which were familiar and so like gambling, just as with the wine, placing bets based on the colour of a label or the way the words were assembled. Bread was easy enough and ham I was well familiar with, as were the smoked sausages and fruit.
When I returned to the flat it was as though we’d been living together for years. There was an air of familiarity which only a short period of time had woven yet a familiarity untinged by boredom or fatigue. These two lives were affixed, however provisionally, to one another, slapped together like a sandwich constructed from the remnants of the fridge until one of us would allow a larger hunger to gnaw at us and it would all be consumed. Was it prophetic or merely inevitable that one or the other would eventually wear this relationship like a stringy sinew snapped and twisted, a meniscus tear or rotator cuff gone off its wheels.
Already she had assembled herself prior to my return, fatigued with dreaming, too excited to lie still in contemplation, figidity with the temporality of my disappearance. This is how it was at first – those first few drinks were just settling into the bloodstream and you could feel the effect of the alcohol in the head yet the vision was still clear, the speech, unslurred.
There was a hot bath running whilst she went about picking up the clutter of accumulation the last few days had assembled.
What did you bring, she asked impatiently, reflexively leaving the sink and the dishes to greet me at the door as though we’d been doing this already for years. Proudly, I emptied the contents of the sacks – feasts for lovers, enough wine to set us into days of oblivion – on to the table for approval. The contents said all I cared to say: let us not leave this flat, not now, not ever, let us maintain this clean oblivion and nest herein forever.
Her reaction was mixed.
It wasn’t as though she didn’t necessarily share the enthusiasm but perhaps the enthusiasm, in hindsight, was tempered by reality – the reality of knowing her own life rather than flinging herself recklessly into this ritual as I was willing to do.
That’s a lot of cheese and wine, she noted, picking through the selection with expertise, rubbing labels with her thumb and forefinger as though hoping to peel away a more sublime quality. Starving artists, she shrugged to herself without further comment. But it did not escape her that this appeared to be a survival kit assembled to last for days, rather than hours. She wasn’t yet sure how that felt.
We shared meals although eventually, as though realising a hidden crime in spending the entirety of my time in Paris in her flat, Anastasia was able to lure me outside when the sun was brightest and the flat was growing stale.
Out we went for walks on clichéd tours of the bookstalls of the Quay, sifting through paperbacks and manuscripts, art histories, bartering prices when one struck either of us. We spent hours in museum cafés yet visited no museums, walked along the Seine, one bank to another, crisscrossing bridges with reckless abandon and spent token gestures sitting for hours in cafés, before eventually touring bars and allowing a different form of intoxication to overcome us.
And so it went most days and nights. Mornings, incapable of sleep once the repetition of traffic began outside the windows like the breaking of waves on the beach and before long I’d be standing, already accustomed to the reality that Anastasia would sleep well beyond the stirrings of civilisation outside the flat and there would be long hours alone for myself, these sort of moments I once longed for, bathing in the oil baths of solitude until I began waking up in her flat. Then it was simply a matter of killing time.
I killed time by walking as though boredom is a bomb waiting to go off once motion stops.
I began with short forays, circles around neighbourhoods with the spirals outward growing gradually. You could be utterly ignorant of history and still wonder through timeless unfamiliarity, overcome by the senses – Albert would’ve had to page through a myriad of history books and start each jaunt knowing precisely where he planned on ending up simply because that’s how he went about travelling. But I was content to move in a dreamlike sequence, imagining history without the facts, piecing it together in from the stories I imagined overhearing conversations I couldn’t understand in family-run cafés, butchers, cheese mongers and tobacconist shops.
Infatuation has a way of weaving its way into every moment, every sight and sound, every impression and no matter how many far I walked, I was dreaming in this web about a future with Anastasia spent here – that I barely knew her or her habits made little difference as I tiled together a mosaic of future moments walking those same streets, the moments and sights and experiences conjured up from an imaginary future with no basis in reality, no matter the wishing or dreaming it were already so.
I tried to rationalise that this was simply a temporary experience, following temptation, morsels of Anastasia left like crumbs throughout the day to nibble on. I knew at the bottom of the barrel there would nothing left eventually – I knew this simply for the historical precedents of other women that had already arrived and departed in the year long terminals of train station after train station.
But there was no stemming this benevolent rush of water overwhelming the emotional levy built in time to prevent precisely this sort of infatuation from overrunning me. There was only walking and dreaming and when once noon had come and gone I knew it would be time to head back to her flat, that she’d already be awake, drawn gradually back to consciousness by coffee with a tiny shot of anisette.
And when I returned, there was no cause for further dreaming because there I was, living the very dream I’d been walking through – a punctual kiss and back to the business of waking for already I was learning that nothing could be forced upon her and it was better still to leave the hints and suggestions to her lest those dreams start leaking from my head out of my mouth and into her ears and the entire hideous charade was exposed.
By early afternoon it was back out in the streets for a small lunch followed by another walk through one of many parks she seemed attached to. It was by no means solitude but there was still a unique intimacy that must surely have been apparent to strangers who might happen to have watched us from a distance.
I wanted to convince myself that we were like other couples we came across but there was little evidence – you sensed that those people around us had already had lengthy histories, had gone up and down a hundred different times, had loved and spat bile at one another. We were neophytes, tentative, hardly ourselves but the best impressions of ourselves.
And always it was me poking and prodding into her past getting desultory answers which made the piecing together all the more impossible. She showed occasional interest in my own background but for her part she appeared to prefer finding out my background via tactical philosophical questions, the kind of questions on computer programmes designed to evaluate your answers into a psychological profile.
She didn’t like talking much about the past. She’d dummy up immediately and between us it would seem as though a storm had suddenly blown in on what had moments before been perfect weather – sometimes she’d just change the subject abruptly, other times refuse outright to delve any deeper – in either case, I didn’t get much out of her save for observations of things going on around us or little historical miscellanea prompted by a turn around a corner, a building’s face, a street sign where a resistance member had fallen in the liberation of Paris.
In so many ways it was an odd experience that I should have either just broken away and returned to Utrecht before I’d become any more pathetic with a lack of emotional control like a premature ejaculator or should have somehow managed not to allow the emotion to pervade me, to deflect it one moment after another like swatting gnats around the head, late summer afternoon.
And thus I was in the unique position of constantly fluctuating state between joy and melancholy, my nerves jumbled by too many quirky stops and starts, too much caffeine, emotion on the fingertips like a match held too long and in some ways, when she would leave at night, I’d be relieved.
On the nights she had gigs, she always demurred my self-invitations to come along in audience. You would be too distracting, she’d deflect. I would forget the lyrics of songs and lose a note or two. This is my profession, Witold. You wouldn’t have wanted me hanging around with you in that law firm of yours, would you? Of course not, and so it is with me in my work place, even if it is just a dingy nightclub, even if you are on holiday with too many hours to kill. It would be too difficult for either of us to understand.
The enigmas of Anastasia were partly woven by odd phrases which I could never quite decipher whether they were meant to portray a deeper meaning than a twisted phrase in English, or were merely grammatical errors with no hidden agenda. How can you tell with a woman around whose every corner another unsettling inability to pinpoint lurked?
One afternoon we were walking and as we walked she started telling me about this Parisian girl named Amélie Hélie, a singer at the beginning of the 1900s. She was nicknamed the Casque d’Or for her lengthy, golden hair. The leaders of two rival bands in the neighbourhood, the Corsican Leca and his rival, Manda, both fell in love with her, madly, brutally. Their competition for her eventually grew into a big battle one day on this very street, rue de Haies. A big battle with knives and guns. They were arrested and then appeared before the magistrate. The magistrate keeps badgering Manda about why the battle grew in the first place, refusing to believe that it wasn’t over neighbourhood territory, but a girl. Manda said something to the magistrate like, we fought each other, the Corsican and me, because we love the same girl. We’re crazy about her. Don’t you know what it is to love a girl?
So what happened I asked, thinking the magistrate saw the logic of the explanation and let them free to fight some knightly battle for the girl’s hand. We both had stopped walking and were simply standing off to the side of the street as passersby dodged us.
I think Manda got life and Leca got many years and they were both deported off to hard labour.
Hmmm. The magistrate wasn’t swayed toward violent demonstrations of love? Free will out the window?
Something like that, but worse still, after all of this…she paused, waiting for me to light her cigarette. A friend of Leca, seeking revenge for his comrade, stabbed Amélie one night in the club where she sang. She didn’t die, but she could no longer perform as a singer. She’s buried at Bagnolet. Sometimes it isn’t sufficient in life not to let yourself fall in love because letting someone else fall in love with you can have equally damning consequences.
*****
Instead of ripping my fingers into her soil and digging further, the foreboding facial expressions, the slight change in pitch of vocal chords, which she must in any case, as a singer been a master of, all conspired to convince me to be satisfied with not knowing further, to accept with further innuendo, whatever was presented.
Left me to my own devises by the time rush hour traffic was hitting its peak as though the timing of it were meant not to leave me alone but united with the thousands of souls racing around the boulevards and traffic circles to keep me company in her absence.
It was then the thirst would overtake me. I needed conversations in a city whose language I didn’t speak.
Instead I walked from wherever we had been, the scent of her perfume still in my nostrils and headed for the Panthéon, the beginning of a long, winding journey through a bastion of student life forward to the Place de la Contrescarpe and then behind there, a few streets of misdirection and I’d find myself at Le Teddy’s for it’s boudoiresque salon of chess players and beer drinking, the ground through which I’d slammed my pole and flag of discovery as my local, my oasis and new-found reality all at once.
Walking worked well in the mornings but once the dark of day’s business end drew a curtain across the sky and the paths were more uncertain, the markings less clear, it was time to head indoors and as most places before and since I would discover, with time, persistence, a predictable presence, eventually humanity would return to me. Perhaps it was equally myself once a few beers had registered, oiling my jaw and mouth enough to dare speak to strangers without knowing the language of strangers and intimated through facial movements and hand gestures until inevitably, someone would show up or make their presence known and the roadblock to communication would disappear through translation.
There were delineated stages of the evening defined by the coming and going of customers and regulars whilst I remained planted at a key position in the middle of the bar, wandering through one conversation after another until the hours had filled up as simply as empty beer mugs and before I knew it, time to return to Anastasia’s flat for a midnight snack and a shower.
Yet even within the course of several nights haunting this same place I was able to discover revocable bonds with some of the locals, Didier, in particular.
Inside Teddy’s we are roaring to life beyond happy hour. Didier, as his comrades have fallen away, one after another yet somehow our space at the bar ebbs and flows until now, flooded as it is with humans, he must nearly shout his questions to me.
Do you feel as though you’ve been especially summoned, that there is a special calling for you as an artist? Are you particularly aliented with a pronounced sense of being misunderstood by conventional wisdoms, bourgeois moralities? He was asking me these questions, he the unemployed poet, the aspiring artist, the man who couldn’t simply allowing himself to drown in his drink and keep quiet about it.
What’s the point anyway, I ask pointedly. Isn’t this all some crutch you use to get through your daily misgivings your dissatisfaction with yourself in comparison to the accomplishments of the others? What purpose does your art serve other than a selfish mechanism of petty, egotistical indulgences?
What purpose does my art serve? He asked with incredulity. What purpose do you serve if we are speaking about purposes. What is your utility? Is there some very special yet hidden trait woven into your genomes that will come to fruition and blossom in the righteousness of your purpose?
Calm down, Didier, I caution, licking my lips nervously as other patrons are looking at us out of the corners of their eyes. What I mean to ask is what purpose do you propose your creativity to be used for other than yourself?
Why should my creativity serve any purpose other than for myself, he asked, clearing his throat of Gitanes phlegm like a plumber snakes a clogged toilet. I suffer enough from my choices, they make sure I do suffer indeed for not being one of their productive members of society…I could never calculate the psychological damage brought upon me by seeing the contempt in their eyes. And why then do you think I drink? Who wouldn’t under these circumstances? What are you saying, simply because I cannot subordinate my art into acceptable consumerist values like writing commercial jingles about disposable diapers or creating new superlatives for the unique comfort and absorption of a particular brand name tampon, I should crawl into my preternatural cave to wallow in my own isolation, fed on disgust, shat into neat little pellets that can be easily swept up and disposed of as if I never existed?
He was easily excitable this evening, either in a particularly foul mood or simply unreceptive to my line of questioning. In any case, the monologue was spat forth with great intensity, with barely a breath drawn. And just why are we suffocated with this doomed sense of having to justify ourselves and our utility to others? Do you think the pimply teenage bagging groceries in the Carrefour hypermarché is pissing himself over his lack of purpose? A paper-shuffler, lost in a bureaucratic labyrinth of spread sheets and interoffice memos is scratching his head wondering why he hasn’t yet soared to the heights of his corporate manager, fluent in corporate techno speak gibberish?
This silly question of yours, questioning the purpose of my forsaking the chain gang of subordinates, pacified by television soma, beaten into submission by the overwhelming nature of keeping up, this is nothing to me. I laugh at it. I am proud of being poet, a craftsman. Proud of not being nothing, beautiful for it, in fact. Look, Gautier once wrote that only things that are altogether useless can truly be beautiful; anything that is useful is ugly because it is the expression of some need and the needs of man are base and disgusting as his nature is weak and poor. -
And furthermore, he added, warming to his subject like a university professor unwittingly lured from the patina of his daily monologue in front of an unfocused group of students, Pessoa agreed, “Freedom is the possibility of isolation. You are free if you can withdraw from people, not needing them for the sake of money, company, love, glory or curiosity, none of which can thrive in silence and solitude. If you can’t live alone, you were born a slave. You may have all the splendours of the mind and the soul, in which case you’re a noble slave, or an intelligent servant, but you’re not free. And you can’t claim tragedy, for the tragedy of being born what you are belongs to Fate alone. Hapless you are, however, if life’s very oppression forces you to be a slave, Hapless you are , if having been born free, capable of being separate and self-sufficient, poverty then forces you to live with others, This tragedy, yes, belongs to you and follows you…”
And that is what the purpose of my art is. Not to cultivate myself out of egoism, not simply to avoid the plague of working for some other fat pig who will make profit from my sweat and leave me scratchings in return. The purpose of my art is to elevate me out of this slavery of civilisation…to free me to be myself, not just the self in front of you in physical disarray, but the self I am beneath all the surfaces, the subconscious, the bones, the gristle and blood, the ineptitude of years, deep down below all of this, like an object buried in a landfill which will never be dug out, lies myself, the self I am trying to discover, my only reason for living here, now drinking this beer with you, walking home – all of it seems entirely without purpose unless it is in the name of this search.
I heard Didier’s voice ringing in my ears all the way home, having finally extracted myself politely, excused myself, my existence, wondering whether I was beautiful or ugly, useless, or useful…the world was upside down and I was rapidly becoming a slave to the schedule of Anastasia. This was my sense of purpose.
*****
And sometime before dawn I would hear the key in the door as I lie attempting to sleep despite the racing of an adrenaline heart and the anticipation like a dog of his master coming home and I would hear her footsteps creeping quietly across the front room floor and after giving her time to pour a glass of wine and have a seat, I would rise as well, feigning as though I’d been sleeping all along and we would go through a predictable round of apologies for waking me as though I hadn’t been waiting like a predator all evening for this particular moment to arrive and my subsequent dismals of the apologies for wanting her company and pouring a glass of wine myself she would unwind her evening to me in great detail, each song that she sung, the reaction of the crowd at particular moments, whom she spoke with, whom she met, what she had to drink in between sets until every detail had been scratched into my imagination deeply enough that I could almost convince myself I’d been there as well.
She was often exhausted by the effort, the reliving and recounting but would relax more deeply asking me about the conversations I managed to remember from the evening, which characters I could myself recall through the hazy evening. Half the stories I made up from conversations I’d had before with Albert because the truth was, a great deal of the conversations I’d had, mired as they were in a lack of common language and the tilting back of glasses invariably meant that I’d spend most of those conversations determining the dialogue myself as though I were writing it now free from the slowing tactics of alcohol and translations.
Don’t you get bored of that place, those people, the same beers, the same faces?
No, they are like a human glue holding me together some nights. I suppose I could have found better uses of my time but the truth is, coming home to your empty flat with so much time to kill is like sitting on death row awaiting a stay of execution. I need these people, like I’ve needed all the people before them – if I am a juggler, their faces are the balls I am juggling and concentrating on those faces I am able to juggle.
Through the candlelight of the flat, I could see her staring at me – why you’re just a drunk, Witold; you don’t have to make excuses just for me. I can’t judge you any more than myself – it isn’t the faces as often it is the drink you are juggling and instead of helping the concentration it is merely distracting it. I know, I’ve done in for many years here and alone.
But we don’t have to be alone, I would protest as though arguing with a republican about the merits of the royal family. We’ve worn paths through ourselves in that pattern, being alone and just as easily, with time, we can wind paths through each other…
And the moat would be drawn back in and her feet would curl and her knees hugged closer to her chest. Not now, she would murmur. Not yet and maybe never but still always possible. There are a lot of years on that same path with too many false steps in wrong directions. That’s why I need this time alone even if the one thing I seem to want most is to be with you.
The value of life can be calculated only by the itemisation of the sum and intensity of experiences, she said.
One of the reasons I keep all these photographs of strangers, she was explaining early that morning after undressing and pouring a glass of cognac from a bottle purloined from the club, is because I try to abstract the particulars from the universal, the parts from this composite. I wonder all the time what it is that makes one or two men, say, out of a collection of them in one photograph, here, she gestured, handing over a photograph of black-faced miners standing below the photographer looking up as if from the bowels of hell, regarding God. Look at this photograph. Notice how one or two of the faces particularly grab you – why? Is it the angle of the light, the photographer’s vision, or some internal aura that the captured soul demonstrates for that one split second?
She calmed after this sales pitch of the individual over the collective and visibly decided that I could be trusted with her next line of reasoning. When I regard men I wonder what qualities about them I might admire, what characteristics might I absorb through being in their presence – of course, the obvious – the only qualities which are not intentionally hidden or cannot be hidden in our venal society, are the easiest, yet least accurate measure of judging. I cannot tell from looking at this photograph, any history of the strangers below. I cannot decided who would be the more caring lover, who would make the better father, who would be the drunkard or the wild spirit yet in their eyes, those little white circles peering out from the soot of their faces, I can tell who among them is a decent man…
The candour was overwhelming when it came spilling out of her like that so unexpectedly that I’d almost want to ask her to repeat it again to make sure it hadn’t been just another imagined bit of dialogue in my head on a morning walk of dreaming.
I wanted to believe her but I wondered instead, with a vague jealous passion, what she was doing. I wondered about friends which she must have had whom she didn’t introduce me to. I wondered if there was someone else allowed to attend her gigs, wondered how many lovers amongst the musicians she had taken or still took. I wondered who stared at her dreamily as she sang, who invited her for drinks between sets, who she shared jokes with and if of any of them, she explained my sudden appearance.
Her minute descriptions of her evening always pointedly ignored what was probably the reality of most of her evenings, whether it was merely in my imagination or not.
I have to admit, my heart was fairly limping along with me those nights. It was a rather unfamiliar feeling; queasiness, excitement, uncertainty. The hours we spent together seemed like part of the same stitched together during sleep and the moment we parted, reality loomed ahead again. I didn’t think about Utrecht or Albert or any other moment in my life. I was living solely for the moment when we would meet up again.
*****
I have something to tell you Witold, she mentioned casually as we sat in Jardin du Luxembourg tearing off hunks of bread from a loaf and stuffing it with cheese whilst washing the meal down with wine. I sat up, alarmed. Finally the penny would drop.
I’ve had a month-long gig scheduled for some time, a gig that I can’t really break or postpone and it’s not here in Paris.
No problem, I shrugged, I’ll come along.
No….she drew her words out carefully, shaking her head. We can’t really do that you see…first of all, the place that booked me allows me free room and board which isn’t to share…
I could find a place wherever it is and stay back, in the shadows like, I smiled playfully, unable to mask the fear in my voice.
Well, you know how I feel about having you see my gigs…there just isn’t much point. Besides, I want to have some time alone. To digest all of this, she explained calmly, waving her hand somewhere in the vicinity between her and I.
Aha, I knew there was a catch to all this sudden happiness, I lamely attempted to joke. Boyfriend stashed away somewhere else?
She smiled patiently. No, no boyfriend stashed elsewhere in a secret cupboard in another town. It’s just like I said, time alone to reflect. Besides, aren’t your friends going to start worrying about you?
Ah, so it is your concern for my friends…I felt instantly and regrettably bitter. She caressed my head and looked deeply into my eyes as though willing my comprehension.
When I return, I will come up to Utrecht to visit you…
*****
There were, of course, untold questions I wanted to ask but I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know the answers. There were nights of unflinching truths I’d often heard my father express about things I could only imagine, truths which were usually better left unspoken, as he often impressed upon me about my mother.
Deep down the desire to pout and pull in as though doing so would alter the reality of the situation was overwhelming at times. Any inducement out of pain, any remedy for the imagination of incessant infidelities or worse still, apathy. I wanted to insist on coming along, verifying myself things were as innocent as they were being portrayed but I wasn’t certain I wanted to be around to find out they weren’t.
I wanted to say fuck the whole thing, sorry I’d come along for the ride, wanted to roll in a slough of my own bile, my own greed for more, my own in fatigable paranoias and distrust. But I didn’t want to feel this new limb severed, didn’t care for the idea of feeling the numbness set in, the futile blankness of knowing something that was once full with promise had been emptied, deflated, punctured. I knew better somehow, innately, not to want either extreme for neither extreme instinctively, was not the answer, merely a impatient conclusion.
Play it cool, coldly and calmly and play it warm, supple and with feeling.
*****
So the next morning, bitterest of mornings, reeking fear and regret, I was seen off. Anastasia seemed genuinely disturbed by the looming departure but I, as the entire time I’d been trying to piece her together, hour by hour, sleeping or awake, through gestures, facial expressions, hidden meanings in seemingly innocuous utterances, remained as confused as ever about whether there was any difference between what she appeared and sounded and felt and what she really was – what did I knew even after all these days and hours accumulated like rain water in a bucket left outside in a draught, was that I didn’t know her at all. I didn’t trust her, I didn’t understand her yet somehow I was able to convince myself there was something growing in me which she was unquestionably a part of – as though the root of an indigestion can be pinpointed through a specific meal, oh, it was the chilli dogs and sauerkraut, no doubt.
So departure was drawn out with a breadcrumb trail of promises and yet still somehow, even though I was apprehensive about it, relieved and heavily medicated from our farewell night that drew out into the early first train of the morning in the direction of Amsterdam, I wanted to leave the thread of this emotion at the station and let it unravel all the way to the end of the journey so that at any time, if either of us had been so inclined, we could merely follow the strand of thread all the way back to the origin, crawling through a tiny hole in the universe that had begun with a stilted conversation in a night club.
*****
Odd, what a difference a woman can make.
As Paris faded away and gradually made its way to Brussels, it was impossible to ignore the simultaneously twitching in my brain, staring out the window lost in reliving every memory I could manage to piece together as though relieving every note played in a show, the heavy eyelids of two sleepless nights holding sway in between the sticky familiarity of a train ride which was heading back to what was almost familiar yet still lacked the feeling of home.
*****
Was it so long ago pulling into the Utrecht Central Station with Albert, eyes brimming raw with excitement and now, one woman later, every kilometre left behind on the tracks was a deeper surge of the incommunicable pain racing through the veins, numbing yet simultaneously heightening the pain.
There was little to do in Utrecht but pine away, stuff two week’s worth of memories into every day to be replayed over and over, hour by hour like a television sitcom you’ve seen so many times there isn’t an unfamiliar episode remaining.
It’s not like we ever had that much to do to distract ourselves with in the beginning.
Considering our cramped quarters, it was a relief to pick up black work through a friend of a pub friend, if only to get out, focus on something other than memories and clear some space in the head.
My apprenticeship as an electrician interrupted, I had retained enough familiarity with a job site through the summers with my father to be able to work my way around Arjen’s when it came to carpentry and basic electricity and so passed most days working off the steam of infatuation with my hands.
At first it was more than sufficient as a distraction. Day over, I would gather myself back to the flat, filthy from head to toe and exhausted. If he wasn’t already in a pub or café, Albert would be drinking steadily in the flat, chain smoking and listening to music through the flea market stereo he bought the first week we’d moved in.
The flat itself was above a Somali takeaway on Amsterdamsestraatweg, one flight above the kitchen where food was prepared we shared the bathroom and shower facilities with the cook and her staff and then another flight above it, the top floor of the building which opened from a kitchenette into a 10 x 15 metre bare wood floor flat.
We’d partitioned the space as best as possible but it was a small space for two people. A large kitchen table never used for eating on, just dumping stuff on – books, papers, empty beer bottles, clothes, rags and whatever else found it’s way into the flat but no further – the kitchen table like a border guard, was off to the right clearing a vague path into what we determined to be a combination of a front parlour and makeshift bedroom made up of a futon which I slept on although usually only it’s sofa form, rarely bothering to even pull it out lest the trouble of having to push it all back in the following morning. Just before entering the parlour there was a small ladder leading to a small crawl space within which Albert had tossed a mattress and a few small drawers. It wasn’t of such a height that he could stand up straight in it but in most cases he didn’t seem to care as it was enough work to crawl up into the space and onto the mattress to snooze away the hours.
We had no television – like freaks without societal connections, our only method of newsgathering was via innuendo and gossip in Marktzicht and even then, limited. The familiar faces that took the favoured places in the café gathered there every day as if following through on a daily reservation, other workers coming in from a long day with plenty to complain about, observe and contemplate, all within the half pint amsterdametjes that were poured down their thirsty gullets.
Everything had a method in the day of a worker. Following work there was the obligatory shower although some either too lazy or too impatient for drink would go directly to the café and start in. In either situation, by 6, the café was flush with workers sat around tables, depending on the weather in or out of doors, drinking beers and gossiping, filling the air with themselves, their voices, their laughter.
And then as though deflating, they would one by one, get up and head home for dinner content that they were sufficiently buzzed to make it through dinner, an hour or two of blank stare television and then bed.
The first night out with Albert I attempted explaining the meeting with Anastasia. I’d sent a few cryptic postcards to him that I wasn’t coming back straight away but beyond that, I hadn’t mentioned anything. Now I was a faucet that couldn’t be turned off.
In time it was up to Albert to shut me up. Nothing’s more annoying than listening to someone going on and on about some girl, some infatuation, some inability to shut one’s mouth for a moment long enough to allow the other to get a word in edgewise. So you see, there is nothing more boring. We have an entire world here to talk about, gigs to rehearse for, side streets to explore, people to meet. I can’t stomach the idea of spending the next few weeks listen to you waddle on about some girl you just met as though you’d already had five kids with her and you were reliving your memories on a deathbed fifty years later. Enough already. I get the picture. I’ve got every detail stored away in my head. Now seeing as how the situation won’t be changing any time soon, might I suggest we go back about our business and end this incessant warbling about love and women?
He was right, of course. At this rate I would drive away every friend we’d met since we got here so I directed this passion and enthusiasm to writing letters to her instead. Fucking encyclopaedias they were, devotionals, hymns, scraps of poetry, lyrics, new Dutch words I’d learned, things I saw in a given day that reminded of her in every blade of grass, every shift in the wind, changing of the sky, dawn to dusk as though there was not a droplet of a single second I wished to pass without her having knowledge of it.
Anyone can tell you such obsession is not only unhealthy, but bound by its very nature to disappoint, he went on, perhaps feeling a tinge of guilt for his recriminations. Unless of course, you can imagine a reciprocal relationship where the emotions of one are equal to the emotions of another, in depth and intensity – puppy love, if you will, which is not bound to last. For every pair of high school sweethearts there, rolled out like a line of custom-made Rolls Royces, there are five times as many crap cars manufactured whose shells you will see littering streetscapes – just like these false senses of love and harmony. We aren’t meant to spend our time wallowing in love with one another; we aren’t wired for it because it’s too self-destructive. What would man ever accomplish if he spent all his time trying to fall in love rather than merely trying to get laid?
Albert was one to often preach the utility of whores – lamenting the simplicity with which man’s second most difficult labour after the effort to acquire power, the effort to get laid, could have been made if the world had merely embraced prostitution rather than try to sweep it under the carpets of morality. Can you imagine, he would struggle breathlessly with the potential of this fantasy of his, can you imagine if everywhere in the world were like Holland, if getting laid was merely a matter of walking around the corner with 100 guilders and a hard on in your pocket? Can you imagine all the broken hearts that would have been saved, all the fucking time and trouble we men could have been spared all these years? Fuck. You think man has progressed and advanced so far in this space of time and yet you wonder what he might have been able to do, far greater heights in far less a period of time had he not been consumed with constructing methods and schemes for getting laid….
But Albert, I said, deciding to play the devil’s advocate solely because I had a flutter of infatuation in my heart and because it was still early afternoon yet I was already feeling light headed from beer, uncertain I would last the night. Certainly you can’t imagine all of those girls being enterprising young capitalists who don’t mind exchanging a series of sucks and fucks over a period of several years in exchange for financial security? Surely you recognise that the majority are there against their will, or against their nature, forced by circumstances into a life of prostitution. Surely you can understand how unsavoury it must be for them, day in and day out to take men into their bodies, no matter how clinical the method is with which they deal with these bodies who have little or no personalities, just hard little dicks to compel them. I mean, do you imagine them all merely nymphomaniacs who found a sound financial mechanism through which to express their nymphomania?
Albert scoffed. It is volunteer work, he muttered into his beer. Sure, maybe the idea of servicing a dozen disgusting men a day isn’t so appealing but I’ll tell you what IS appealing…the money they make afterwards. I’ve spoken to them in great detail about this because I’m fascinated by their lifestyles. Do you realise that here, out into the light of freedom rather than the dark shadows of some moralistic insanity that forces prostitutes into true servitude; pimps, beatings, rapes, the whole nine yards, here, it is a simple matter of paying your rent for a room for the night. You pay the rent and the rest is yours, the decision on how much you make, how many you are willing to fuck, is entirely your own. It’s free enterprise, he stated, poking his finger in my chest. Let’s say, and I know from having asked, that a room costs a girl the equivalent of 200 bucks a night. In an eight hour shift, and, ironically, EU human rights labour laws play a role in this, a woman can take, on average eight to sixteen men at let’s say a going rate of 50 dollars a pop. Do you realise the money involved? Hell, if I were a woman, I’d do it. I wouldn’t care. Keep your eyes closed, let your mind wander, what’s the difference? At the end of the night you’ve got a fat bankroll of cash to keep you company.
You’re going to absurd lengths to justify visiting whores instead of trying to meet the local girls, I pointed out.
Bah, he spat. Meet the local girls. What for? So I can waste hours of my time trying to impress them? So I can spend my own money on them, to treat them like royalty, let them think their own shit doesn’t smell, say anything just to impress, just to convince that I should be allowed between her legs? Why the stultifying conversations alone make that a withering proposition. I don’t want to talk to women. It’s been my experience that women, once they believe they have you in their clutches and no longer have to be interesting, will immediately fall back on the old clichés of shopping and nagging, nagging and shopping, planning the nest, blablabla. The whole thing makes me sick to contemplate. And for what? Just to get laid? I don’t want to have any children. Do I look like husband or father material, he asked with a laugh, standing back, holding out his arms so that I could regard his full character. No, of course not. And so what am I left with? Lies. Acting. Convincing myself that wasting a several hours of my time in a bar with a complete stranger is somehow worth it all just because on the periphery of it all lingers the faintest hope that perhaps this stranger will be convinced or perhaps this stranger will become drunk enough that she no longer requires any further lubrication and there we go. Just the possibility mind you. Now what kind of investment is that?
He took another long gulp of beer, wiped his lips with his shirt sleeved and let a low, subtle belch escape him. On the other hand, he whispered conspiratorially, I can pay my wages and cut right to the chase. God, I love it here, he emphasised again. Suck and fuck they say, right down to business. Can you imagine if we could all be that honest? I want a suck and fuck, how much?
But it’s crass, Albert. These aren’t cattle or pigs we’re discussing, they’re humans. There’s a certain finesse required when dealing with our equals. You couldn’t by that same token, walk into a bar and point out a few burly men and say, hey, let’s go – there’s a farm house up the road I’ve had my eye on and I need a few men to help storm it. And think about this, Albert – if all that was ever required for sex was a few guilders in your wallet, wouldn’t the lustre erode over time? Sure, the novelty here of the concept here, for you at this moment is enthralling, more so than I can really comprehend frankly, but that’s beside the point. Once the novelty of a world of whores wears off, what are you left with? Wouldn’t you then go out in pursuit of pure women, virgins even, who are yet untainted by the experience of other men? Wouldn’t you then, sated with sex on demand, begin to ask yourself what love is?
Bah, he waved his hand at me dismissively. You’re love sick, that’s all. That’s all you think about, the girl. It’s unhealthy to put all of your emotions into one sack like that which she could just as easily drop off the side of the Pont Neuf and never see again. Who needs it, he mumbled.
*****
Fortunately, between the black work day labour, cleaning off and passing the rest of the night drinking somewhere or rehearsing in the flat, there managed to be some time spent other than devout letter writing in an abundance of unanswered correspondence which would be piling up through the mail slot whilst she was away in an incessant effort of connecting myself with her even when she was nowhere to be found.
There were times in the first few weeks when I toyed with the idea of returning to Paris, even for a weekend, as though to be within its borders would be near enough to her but invariably, Friday nights after working would become night-long debaucheries which culminated in the early hours of Saturday morning and an entire afternoon sleeping with the shades drawn, the window slammed shut to try and block out the sound of traffic, white noise CDs playing all afternoon at low volumes from the stereo left over from the evening-ending post-pub-closing beers Albert and I would stutter through, already leaking through the pores with beer regardless.
By mid or sometimes late afternoon once of us would begin to clatter around and by then it had snuck into the subconscious that the early trains to Paris had been missed long ago and there was no sense in just getting up there with enough time to turn around and come back in time for work on Monday. I was too broke for that. I earned a decent wage working black but most of it, ninety nine percent of it anyway, was poured back into the pubs and cafés of town, consumed in late-night halal meat takeaways and crates of Grolsch brought up the stairs at some point nearly every day.
Money doesn’t last long in drinking binges which is to say nothing of the effort involved following a cold shower, of clearing your head of enough of the molasses to be able to pedal a bike around the streets in and out of traffic, around pedestrians and other bicyclists, every potential obstacle in your furry state of mind a disaster waiting to happen.
Yet I kept on feeding it to myself in a rapid cycle to burn the hours I would have otherwise haemorrhaged through, bleeding internally thinking about her, wondering what she was doing, whether or not she was giving me any thought.
*****
But the more I thought about Paris the more I realised there was no possible good outcome. If she was there, she obviously wouldn’t have wanted my communication. If she wasn’t there, what was there for me? A city of memories? A city to mope around in reminded at every turn of Anastasia?
It was almost too much merely being in Utrecht because even in its own stunted way, Utrecht was reminding me of Anastasia, reminding me of the euphoria upon my triumphant return – the train station arrival over a month ago imagining how one afternoon she would be here and we would be walking along Amsterdamsestraatweg out for a stroll from the flat, stopping in for a small beer or a glass of wine.
So if there was no clean slate, at least I could avoid what reminded me of her. Great lengths I’d go. For example, every time I passed the Smakkelaarsveld just outside the station I’d think of the first time seeing it in my return back to Utrecht from Paris.
As the bitterness and disappointment festered day after day without reply I couldn’t bear the sight of it any longer so I’d take an elaborate route to escape the view, taking the back way out by the bus station, down Moreelsepark, across the Catharine Baan along Mariaplaats then wander back to Weerdzijde, Oudegracht overlooking the cafes bursting with tourists and locals relaxing over lunches and drinks, all the way down to Kaatstraat before turning onto Oudenoord, Stroomstraat to Kerkweg then left on Blokstraat until I hit Amsterdamsestraatweg near our flat, a feat which took a good thirty minutes longer than simply walking straight across to the Amsterdamsestraatweg and having to see the field – stupid, I know, especially since we hadn’t actually spent any time there, but indicative nonetheless, of the fruitlessness of trying to venture to Paris without her.
*****
I developed elaborate rituals in her stead. After work, after showering, after grabbing a quick meal, I’d head off by myself to a place Willemstraat to a pub decorated with local regulars, presuming as such as they greeted one another like family, played cards around large tables or sat quietly reading newspapers. It was here I could normally find a good sized table to myself because other than regulars, not many others came in and although the regulars numbered quite a few at times, there was always sufficient space, if you could drown out the slot machine and the Dutch folk music playing in the background, to sit down and compose my letters to Anastasia.
And there I would order my beer, set it down on a fading Leffe coaster which existed even though the Leffe didn’t, and from my pack take out the French/English dictionary, the pad of paper, set the pen down, all an elaborate ritual as if preparing the table she would soon be joining me at although instead it was merely my obsessive thoughts of her and the paper and pen.
Sometimes it would be snatches of lyrics or poems, but more often than not, it was a breakdown of the minutia of the day, what the weather was like, what the work that day had been, conversations with the builders, the lunch, perhaps a few glasses of wheat beer at the Ledig Erf after we knocked off work, snatches of local politics I’d gleaned from listening to conversations…it was all quite boring I’d imagined, sprinkled with memories of Paris, excerpts of historical passages I’d read.
And when I wanted to wander further, I’d wander back behind the train station again, moving westward along the Moroccan and Turkish shops of Kanaalstraat through the residential yet occasionally seedy public housing Lombok neighbourhood, down Coenstraat past the Molenpark and the big windmill, left on the Leidsekade along the Leidsche Rijn past the boathouses until I reached Kanaalzicht, a café pub set across from an ugly factory complex which was equally spacious though somewhat louder but with a bigger outdoor café area to write.
From the Diaries of Witold Kasmersky, cahier 2, p 331.
It’s now that I begin to devour the history of Paris trying to pry little figs of information through obtuse channels I flick through trying to find images of Anastasia. I’m not sure what the siege of Paris from September 1870 to January 1871 in the Franco-Prussian war had to do with it other than September was fast approaching and I could see myself laying siege to Paris myself. But the intrepid men using hot-air balloons to take messages in and out of the surrounded city certainly intrigued me in the absence of a word from her.
Or perhaps this was the Paris of August and September of 1914, when the second German attempt to take the city was stopped by Gen. Joseph Gallieni –a prostate cancer-ridden, retired officer who saved the city by staying and fighting when he responded “Nowhere” to the question of where the line of retreat would be in case they were overwhelmed. Instead, 600 red Renault taxi ferried troops to the spot in the front of the German line where a gap had been left and each taxi making two round-trips a day until the enemy was stopped.
It takes ingenuity to overcome a sort of crisis.
*****
After three weeks we had finally managed to convince ourselves to make another go at an open podium performance. The last one had been so underwhelming that the crowd’s distaste for our style was politely palatable. Not one came up to us afterwards to offer any encouragement as though by their collective silence, they might will us out of their recollection of the evening.
This time we weren’t giddy and flush from the success of a surprisingly well-received gig. We were humbled and even though the majority of our free time was spent drinking there were moments of coherency well groomed enough to have managed three new songs to perform.
I tried to conjure up Anastasia to give me confidence but it merely unsettled me more as instead I had been busy calculating how much longer before she would return and would knowingly begin to doubt with each day nearer, that she would arrive in Utrecht at all – it was certainly a distraction from pre-gig butterflies and the gloomy uncertainty of how these three songs would be received, but it was merely a replacement gloom, a heavy gloom, a heart-wrenching worse than any potential embarrassment on stage.
Thinking of Coltrane’s solo in Walkin with Miles Davis on the same stage was no better encouragement. I was a little ant in comparison and a little ant that wondered what the hell he had planned going on a stage in public and playing. It boggled the mind, overwhelmed, suffocated. Who was I kidding?
This time we’d invited a few friends for morale support figuring that if we’d already been able to uncover a few souls who were unafraid, willing even, to accept us, certainly, if we hit the right songs, we could enlist a few more.
I spotted a few of them through the smoke of the club as the MC clattered on unintelligibly in Dutch before we finally heard ….De Deadbeat Conspiracy….a smattering of applause before Albert began plucking out the first few chords and I began a memorised preamble of the obituary of a Dutch politician, in Dutch for several sentences before emphasising notes that peaked at the wrong moments of the sentiment of the phrase as though driving us all backwards before pulling us forwards again. Albert punctuated these swings and the room was silenced as we went on, confused as to our direction yet drawn in by a vague familiarity.
It was a dark cavern we were leading them through. Alberts thumbing bass notes were the stalactical tears to the wails I hit with the saxophone, raising my torso against it in effort as the sounds bounced off these imaginary, slippery walls in a damp cavern the crowd followed us through.
As usual, we didn’t know precisely where we leading them. Rehearsals were merely familiarisations with where would begin and end but for the playing in between, we were on our own, one off the other and back again as though our hands were holding a rope instead of an instrument and the rope was what was holding us both in the same line, the same line that the others were clinging to as we wandered further into some low and slow flow melodies, tiny hints of melodies really, suggestions as to directions which invariably led down dead ends to turn around and head back from.
And when it was over there was the familiar silence as though they were all expecting it to begin back up again until several seconds hung between us and the realisation that it had ended, unexpectedly – and just then, in that split second as they began to realise it, as though we were too afraid to wait to find out if the silence would last or melt into applause, we were already pulling them back forward again.
*****
I woke up two Saturdays later wondering what it was I should be expecting. For over a week the realisation that Anastasia was to have returned, at least to Paris, was a constant cloud hanging over me but for the hours I pined away drinking with Albert and friends and I could quell it for a time only to have it punch me again in the stomach without the slightest bit of forewarning.
There was no word from her.
Not that it had been all that well planned out. She taken down my address but did I really imagine in hindsight that the minute she got back to her flat in Paris after a month on the road she would repack her bags and set on the first train headed out to Utrecht?
In fact, when I went over it in my mind, it was hard to ignore the realisation that she hadn’t pinned herself down to coming immediately. She had merely said she’d come, not when she’d come. I found myself analysing key words. After I come back, she’d said. Not how long after, not soon after or years after. I’d been so over the moon when she’d said she’d come I hadn’t bother to read the fine print – WHEN?
I seemed to take quite a lot of pleasure out of kicking myself over that one. I was pinned down with just my King clinging to a corner, three moves from mate. I resolved to pretend the month hadn’t passed at all or alternatively, that I had imagined or dreamt the entire experience, that there was no Anastasia to begin with, I’d spent too many hours in a coffee shop, had smoked myself into a stupor.
But every morning I woke up again there was a thick knot of nausea in my stomach as though it weren’t the overindulgences and late meals that was doing it but some shattered dream that had collected itself in pieces all around me waiting to be picked up.
Every morning I made the coffee, sat in silence at the kitchen table after clearing a mound of clutter and rolled a cigarette so I could sit back and smoke whilst staring out the window down into the courtyard wondering how long I would manage to hold out before writing again or worse still, taking a train to Paris and paying an unexpected and unrequested visit.
Every morning, after the cigarette was stubbed out on the bottom of my boot I drained the remainders of the coffee in one long gulp and headed outside, unlocked the bike, got on and rode to the job, another afternoon of filing dirt and assorted particles underneath my fingernails, carrying wood from a pile, hammer nails into wood, measuring, cutting, hammering, stopping for a coffee break with the others at 10:30 and then lunch at noon seated on overturned plaster buckets eating sandwiches with filthy hands, washing them down with cold milk that offset the soot of destruction and construction combined with the stale taste of every cigarette break until finally we’d pack it all up again, get back on our bikes and ride off in different directions to different homes, different pubs, different understandings of the day.
I arrived home to the familiar strains of something bleak and evil leaking out of Albert’s headphones at full volume, sipping a bottle of Grolsch with hand, alternating with the Winston in the other, the smoke trailing from it like a plane that had been hit and was on its way to smouldering ruins on the ground.
When he managed to notice me, somehow the feel of the room must be different when all other senses are completely absorbed in the holy trinity of music in the ears, beer in the hand, cigarette to the mouth – there must be some perceivable alteration in space when I entered because no amount of noise I made could have penetrated that veil – but he noticed something changed in the balance of the room and so turned to see me.
He removed the headphones which for a split second before he also turned down the volume were as loud as the speakers might have been without the headphones plugged in, took a swig of beer and nodded in my direction. Good day?
I brushed off more dust and held up my hands. The day of a labourer, I lamented before leaning over the crate and plucking out a beer to pop open.
Oh yeah, Albert mentioned as casually as possible. Letter for you today.
*****
You know what the simultaneous experience of elation and dread feels like? As if two boxers, when clenching up between each other in the middle of the ring covered in sweat and pain, suddenly begin to kiss and I mean a deep, probing and soulful mashing of the tongues against each others’, held long enough for the passion to mount before one of the boxers reaches behind and delivers a razor sharp punch to the kidneys of the other.
I drained the beer whilst simultaneously hovering over the contents of the kitchen table, bottle opener, overflowing ashtray, Dutch advertisements for high tech electronics at low tech prices, empty packages of Drum, empty packages of Winstons, empty wine bottles with candles stuck in the tops like corks and melted wax hardened on their sides, yellowing copies of Metro and De Volkskrant, pliers, electrical wire, odds and ends of emptied pockets, lighters awaiting refills, and finally, there it was emanating like magic atop a musician’s magazine and a flyer for free pizza delivery – undoubtedly the letter, undeniably, the fate.
Of course, I couldn’t open the letter yet. After all these days and weeks accumulated waiting there would be at least one night’s festivities with a least part of the harness of doubt loosened – there I was, my name in her antiquarian script on an envelope, proof enough that I hadn’t merely hallucinated a few weeks of time. Evidence that I must have crossed her mind at least once in crossing the gulf between us. Enough for heel-kicking and a shower and a night out to celebrate the fate, whatever it was for at least for the moment, I was going to live…
*****
What should I have expected such a letter to say? After all, she’d promised to visit, not write. I could imagine nothing but a dark foreboding, her left handed scrawl conducting apologies and excuses simultaneously and between the lines, the truth that it had all been sort of memorable but unremarkable mirage of events which had transpired indeed, but had perhaps been blown out of proportion. Surely by now my daily letters had reached her, my unhealthy obsessiveness and oblique paranois apparent like some filthy secret I’d unburdened to her.
But even looking at the postmark I could tell it wasn’t from France at all, but Italy and as I tore open the envelope and read hungerly, I was overwhelmed with the realisation that the letter was only a partial answer – if she wasn’t in Paris it explained in part why she wasn’t here (logically, because she’d not yet returned) – but it didn’t explain more than some place where she was, the gig extended, a brief confessional of an exhaustive battle with mental demons.
In the end, her words were almost as nostalgic as the thousands I’d composed in all those letters but no regret other than her personal trials. So in the one sense, I could afford to feel elated – I wasn’t being rejected, I was being put off for a time, postponed. The gig was actually a big hit, she’d been singing in places throughout Italy it turned out, Milan, Rome, Napoli, Firenze – all over and as her status had grown, so had the demand for her, hardly surprising, I supposed, but disappointing nonetheless because what it all boiled down to was that she wasn’t coming back straight away and couldn’t even say really, when she’d be back at all, although promising definitely to be back and as soon as she was back, she hadn’t forgotten she was coming to visit in Utrecht.
Of course it was equally disturbing her casual questions like, have you thought of me at all, I don’t even know if you remember me any more, perhaps I was just a fling for you, killing time in Paris – (when all the while I’d thought it might have been the other way around,) and the uncertainty of when this string of gigs would finally end – she thought there might even be a small recording deal in the offering. All things I felt proud of, that she was that talented but also that amid all this excitement she thought of me, wondered how things were working out in Utrecht, wondered if I thought of her at all and imagined how much she missed our moment.
What it all spelled out in the end was that we wouldn’t see each other any time soon on the one hand, but that my hopes hadn’t been in vain, not necessarily, on the other hand. Just enough hope to be maddening.
*****
After all those months of unreturned letters, there was bound to be an answer eventually. I hadn’t expected to just run into her outside the flat though, I have to admit.
Yet there she was, seated regally atop one of her bags of luggage, casually smoking a cigarette and watching me with amusement as I neared and my eyes roared to life from a dull and listless stare.
And so here she was. Weeks, months of writing had conjured her as mystically as I had met her. She shrugged her shoulders at my incredulous gaze. I suppose I never really believed that all the writing would work. I suppose deep down I had prepared myself for the worst case scenario and despite the optimism bred in the act of writing all those letters, sharing all those thoughts had somehow grown with little nurturing like a cactus that needed little water.
I was away on holiday, she explained. I was gone three months, staying with some friends near St Etienne and when I finally returned to Paris, your letters were sitting there waiting for me, like an unfinished novel. For two straight days I read them all, word for word, stopping only to cat nap a few hours here and there. Your presence coursed through me like a hot shower. I decided to take the train here immediately.
I would love to have a chance to freshen up she mentioned when several moments had passed without my saying anything and had simply looked at her instead, dumbfounded. It was a long train ride…
Of course, I immediately stammered, picking up her suitcase and hurrying through the front door of the café. The men playing cards around a table stared up expectantly when we entered, amused by this sudden stranger who had declined their hospitality for hours and had preferred only to sit outside at the lone table and chair nursing a glass of tea and watching the flotsam of Amsterdamsestraatweg passing by.
I made brief discussions, as brief as possible: friend from Paris, stopping by a few days…but their curiosity would not release it’s clutches from us and they continued on with questions, bemused or perhaps encouraged by my impatience.
How long are you staying for?
Why are you here?
What part of Paris?
What do you do?
Did you come by train or plane?
Why are you with this one?
When we were finally released I clattered up the stairwell without waiting for her dreading whatever humiliating disarray awaiting us in the flat. When we reached the stairwell I stopped a moment in the kitchen which was devoid of the afternoon help peeling potatoes and the smells of cooking still hanging in the air like someone else’s memories.
You’ll have to excuse the state of this place I forewarned, pushing open the door to the second landing. She shrugged me off. You’ve prepared me quite well in fact she mentioned, reminding me of the degree to which I had described the flat and the lingering smells of the kitchen. So far it is precisely as you wrote. So far, I laughed to myself.
My, she stammered to herself taking it all in, stepping back and wiping a stray hair from her forehead which had fallen in the exertion of walking up the steep incline of the second stairway. My, she repeated, having a glance at the piles of accumulated bachelorhood; the vague indifference of the unwashed plates, piles of empty containers, newspapers, empty beer and wine bottles, the stale smoke hanging in the air like a dense fog even though all the windows had been left open.
Well, perhaps you underestimated the degree of your slovenliness, she laughed.
I had to set about explaining the contraption of the shower and toilet combination in the floor below, struggling to find clean linens and towels, bemoaning the lack of good mirrors and even the simple addition of a small table inside the shower for grooming. We weren’t particular after all. But she wore a face of pleasant indifference which in the effort to conceal produced a mixture of shock masked by a determination not to allow her disgust to register. She didn’t have to say anything. I was well aware of what any normal human being might begin to imagine seeing such squalor first hand. Albert and I rarely noticed – there were no guests invited in this hovel and thus how we chose to keep it had been precisely how we chose to keep it without the intrusions of keeping up appearances.
While she disappeared into the shower I quickly leapt back up the stairs into the main room to make some demented effort at straightening up; ashtrays dumped into empty pizza boxes and halal meal containers, bottles quickly collected, drained into the sink and placed neatly back into their respective empty slots in the crates they were once carried in, magazines and newspapers piled into one corner, clothing picked up and thrown into a pile within the makeshift closet.
However we had no vacuum and little more than a hand broom to sweep up the lingering odours and ashes, dust and stains, mildew and assorted filth. By the time she had finished freshening up the flat had taken on an almost unrecognisable order which despite the state of it’s interior, was vastly improved by any effort to render it back to it’s original state which quite frankly, had never been too charming or too clean to begin with.
Albert was no doubt already at the café and as I huffed and puffed around the room I remembered myself – that I too was covered in the dust and woodshavings and drying concrete, that my clothing hadn’t been washed all week and that I likely smelled far worse than the pong of the interior of the flat. I lit a few candles and several sticks of incense hoping carelessly to mask it all in perfume, the room and myself.
She wasn’t fooled. She made the best of it, put on a smile, pretended it was another world altogether and yet still one we were both in.
So we were fine. I just needed a shower and to let Albert know the one room flat being used by two people had now become three people.
******
Of course, it was Albert’s idea, one which had crossed my mind several times but never reached my lips, to include Anastasia in our rehearsal. We hadn’t done much for weeks until then but one night we’d stayed in, ordered Somalian food from downstairs and ate it on the table in the Styrofoam containers they were served in, plastic forks, napkins, washed down with a few bottles of beer.
So how about you singing a few with us? He asked grandly, pushing himself away from the table and tossing the remains of his meal in the large bag of rubbish that was opened just a few feet from the table. We haven’t had much inspiration these days, Albert explained and I’ve heard from Witold that you’ve got a beautiful voice.
Anastasia, not one for self-promotion, at least not from what I’d witnessed, rolled her eyes. But I came to see Witold, to get away from singing, she tried to explain.
Still, we’ve got to rehearse and well, don’t you have to keep your voice in shape?
I could tell he wasn’t going to let this one go although I wasn’t certain if he was making a big deal out of it simply to annoy the two of us, because he was sceptical, curious or just wanted to hear her. I started to beg off, not much in the mood to play myself but then an evil little grin crossed her face and she nodded sure, why don’t you play a little for me now and then, well, if the mood strikes me, I’ll join in. After all, I haven’t heard either of you play before…
We don’t know any songs, I fumbled, again explaining how we ad-libbed everything, never learned a jazz song and probably weren’t worthy of having her singing anyway. But Albert was having none of it. Oh hell, Witold, we haven’t needed to know songs before, let’s show your guest a little sample of what we can do…
He got up from the table and moved with sudden dexterity into the living room where the bass was leaning up against the side of the sofa. Reluctantly and knowing there was expectation in her bemusement, I too rose from the table and made my way into the living room, our little improvised studio with horrific acoustics. Outside the hustle and bustle of Amsterdamsestraatweg was audible. Anastasia made to clean up the table and light a few candles while the two of us tried to tune up and get into each other’s keys.
And it was true I thought to myself, putting the reed in my mouth, I was curious and excited about the idea of her singing with us. We’d discussed it but never with any seriousness and she was here after all, why not?
But maybe it was the nerves or the outside noises or fear that the landlord would hear us down two floors and complain at the racket because normally we waited until late at night when they’d already shut down and the café was closed before starting to rehearse, normally well into a session of beer, reaching blindly for inspiration but here we were anyway and Albert looking at me expectantly, fingers poised. Goofing off to relax, I blew a long sequence to begin a sort of soulful snake charmer song, holding and blowing while Albert slowly filled in behind me, plucking furtively. In time we started to build on it a little more, lost a little deeper until I was no longer aware she was even in the room. We went on like this for quite some time before realising there was nowhere for her to step in, even if she’d wanted to. I stopped playing and stood there with the sax around my neck and looked up at her staring at us both with arched eyebrows, bemused.
I don’t think I’ve heard anything quite like, she stammered for a moment. I’ve never sung to anything like it, that’s for sure, and she tittered and we all guffawed, relieved for the moment. You guys are, well, a bit weird, I’ll say. I didn’t realise…
We tried a few more on for her, laying it out thick and experimentational until ever so slowly, sipping a drink of scotch Albert had poured her from his alcove stash, she stood up and made her way towards us, hips swaying slightly until I closed my eyes entirely and then I heard it: she wasn’t singing words, just trying to find a melody somewhere amid the confusion, her voice huskier than I’d remembered hearing before. Soon I was trilling and Albert was slapping and we began to hear this mournful humming that gradually birthed into some sort of lullaby in French.
I don’t know how long it went on, maybe it was only seconds, or a few minutes, it was impossible to tell, but just as suddenly as it began, it ended and we all stood there in the room not saying a word, staggered not by a sudden genius but by the strangeness of the collaboration until Albert finally set the bass to the side, wiped his brow and lumbered back into the kitchen to pull a fresh beer from the crate and settled back down into his chair. That’s enough for me for the moment, he mumbled into his sleeve as he wiped it across his lips. I think I need some time alone, why don’t you two have a night out?
*****
None of us said anything about those few moments as a trio and several days went by before we were encouraged, by virtue of several bottles of wine, to do it again. In the interim, Albert stayed long hours away from the flat, giving us our space. Anastasia was much more animated out of her surroundings than she had been in them. She regaled our friends at Martkzicht with steamy tales of the clubs she’d been singing at in Paris and in Milan, embellishing, I hoped, for my benefit rather than that of the others. She revealed tiny shards of her past to me over days drawing out on canal walks, bike rides and afternoons sat on various café terraces soaking up the rare sun and sipping Belgian ales. She seemed to demur less and less as though whatever fears had held her back when we were in Paris had mystically evaporated. Don’t get me wrong, she wasn’t a sputtering fountain of information. What little bit I learned was drawn out over a long process but at least it appeared I was making headway, at least I was no longer feeling like an intruder on her secret life.
And then a few nights later, when we were sipping wine around the kitchen table, listening to a few CDs she’d brought over with her, she suddenly asked if we knew how to play any jazz standards. You know, she said, My Funny Valentine or Mack the Knife, or anything really, something I could sing to that wouldn’t require, hmmm, too much skill for you two to play. Not that I don’t think you could play standards well, I dunno, what do you think? Do you ever play something known?
Albert and I looked at each other with a mutual grimace. We’d never tried it before to be honest. What was the point for a double bassist and a saxophonist when we had no one else to back us? We’d been left with improv and weirdness out of necessity and even with lovely female vocals we doubted the two of us trying to slam out some jazz standard was going to sound very good.
But hell, Albert said. We can try it a time or two, just for the novelty. How bad can it possibly sound just because Witold can’t read music and I can’t play anything I didn’t make up on my own? He snorted into his glass. What do you think, Witold, are you up for a little Mack the Knife? I’ll do a smooth walking bass line to start – and you just start going from there…
But before we even started, Anastasia wanted to get us in the mood by telling us how the version we knew was nothing like the original murder ballad, the tales of Mackie Messer, Und Macheath, der hat ein Messer, doch das Messer sieht man nicht and she sings it with real sinister intent, the man with the knife no one sees waiting to spring it out and stab away, the cold hearted murderer…
And sure enough while she’s telling us this, setting a background, Albert began thumping the notes, slow and morose. And she sang a little more and then, struggling to find the right note, I blew a little – it was rudimentary, no doubt. Pitiful maybe, but Anastasia seemed to gain a little more life because our efforts. She let us walk through a few versions of it while she hummed the beat she wanted. Man, it was a lot of run throughs as I kept missing the note and trying to figure it out from a little memory and a little help from Anastasia’s humming but after awhile, it started to take form. Not any form that any of us had ever heard it in before because it was slow and melancholic and not snappy in the slightest. And we went through it several more times until it began to feel a little less stunted and then we were ready, from the top and wow, we were just blown away by Anastasia singing this horrible song about a murderer, changing the lyrics, switching from German to Italian to French, nothing like we’d ever heard with that low husky voice until she broke with a higher pitched warble, a plea, almost.
And again we were all a little overwhelmed, and it felt a little kinky almost, the three of us standing together there in that room past midnight, sweating and letting it all ooze into us and then breathing it back out slowly.
*****
The next morning we decided we would learn at least three songs, this Mack the Knife version, like a sinister milonga, My Funny Valentine and How Long Has This Been Going On. Each one had its own strange stamp to it, the tentative, nearly talent less version of our playing that she worked so hard to overcome and indeed, her vocals were quite capable of carrying us beyond. We forgot all about drinking for hours, simply rehearsing in that room over and over again until we all began to feel comfortable with it.
Between these three standards we sandwiched two originals – well, two songs that Albert and I sort of made up as we went along and which Anastasia showed an adept ability to sing around. I had to go to work during the day, Albert stayed in sleeping and Anastasia took trips alone to Amsterdam, unbeknownst to us, scouting around places we might play. It was if we all had some purpose – well, Anastasia had had a purpose in her mind all along, it was Albert and I who really felt the difference, really felt as though for the first time since we’d come here we were finally doing what we’d come to do. And Anastasia was the alchemist who turned our slovenly, drunken and pointless hours into quasi-disciplined sessions of rehearsals. I didn’t have the energy to drink. We would rehearse for a few hours at night after dinner and then I’d drop off to sleep sitting there on the sofa afterwards. And after a few weeks it began to feel as though we were really on to something. Just what, we weren’t quite sure but at least it had this tactile quality of accomplishment about it.
*****
Riding my bicycle back from work, covered in cement dust and paint, I found myself veering predictably for Marktzicht. After all, it was Friday, the week over and I was exhausted from the week of work and practice something no one else in the trio was undertaking.
Anastasia had her own wealth, I was certain of that. You don’t have a flat in the location she had in Paris without some resource hidden away somewhere even if everything about her seemed to exude material poverty. She bought her clothes from second hand shops, rarely seemed to eat and certainly was no extra strain on my budget staying with us. Both Albert and I were subletting our flats in New York but unlike Albert, I wasn’t charging the market value and making a neat profit on the side. I suppose I should have done but there are so many people in those neighbourhoods who come there with their stupid little dreams of success and fame that I didn’t want to be the first to gouge them. Let them learn on their own.
And so yeah, I was the only one working. We still had plenty left over from Albert’s settlement although my cut had been dwindling and this forced the work in a way, I still preferred working. Firstly, for the social aspect of it – I couldn’t sit around the flat all day listening to music and reading like Albert could. I’d had years of that already and frankly, I could have done that back in New York. I preferred this life of labour, it was in my blood just like these efforts at music. All in the name of the father, so to speak. And of the mother? My mother? I couldn’t think of her because doing so only worried me. I considered her dead. As dead as my father whether it was fact or fiction.
Swinging down Loefstraat, I spied Albert already out on the terrace entertaining himself with a few locals and locked my bike up against an iron post.
*****
I awoke that morning as I had each of the four mornings before it; for the first few seconds of consciousness I felt nothing - that delicious absence of pain – didn’t even realise the pain I would feel again coming on as slowly the fog in my head lifted and memory returned. But then in one millisecond I would remember where I was as I stared up at the browning stains of the ceiling, the cobwebs gathering in the corner directly to the left of the sofa upon whose arm my feet were resting and in that millisecond every would return like a cramping abdominal pain in a mid-spasm episode of irritable bowel syndrome. Well, not everything. Just the realisation that Anastasia was not here followed quickly like a right hook follows a series of penetrating and exploratory jabs looking for the opening, that I didn’t know when she would be back nor when I would see here again, here or elsewhere.
And then a psychosomatic pain would rub it’s way through my joints individually until I could feel myself involuntarily curling into a foetal position, inch by inch until my knees reached my elbows and the blankets were pulled not over a recognisable human form, but a cruel and tiny, curled char of a human being’s soul.
I could already smell Albert’s Winstons burning away in the room as he sat in the kitchen having his first coffee and vainly attempting to focus on the words of his dog-eared copy of the English translation of Marcellus Emants’ Fanny. He had been reading the same book for three weeks, always at the same time of the morning, getting no further than the first dozen pages, reading, then rereading passages until eventually the caffeine would kick in and a few of the words began to focus. By then it was time to stand and face the day.
As I had every morning since she’d left with her unbearable little note, I contemplated a series of actions to ease the pain. I could sit up and reach for whatever dregs of the evening’s beer were left over in the bottle on the coffee table beside the sofa. I could continue lying on the sofa and practice squeezing my abdominal muscles until I could distract the pain out of me in yoga like fashion, or pretend to feel it leaving. I could try and imagine myself in a nightclub somewhere, imagine the inhale and exhale, the fingers along the saxophone, the people in front who were but blurs, passengers on a distant imagination train stuck forever in the same terminal. Any number of tricks employed to forget, none of which would work, leaving me with the uncomfortable conclusion that whilst lying forever on the sofa was perhaps the act of a man stricken with inertia, it was not the act of forgetting, nor easing and thus, inevitably, I would swing my feet off of the arm of the sofa and place them on the floor simultaneously pushing myself to an upright position.
You’re up! Albert chirped with annoying alacrity. For a man who himself greeting the onset of each new day like a new pain discovered, Albert had been disgustingly enthusiastic ever since we’d discovered Anastasia’s letter. Not because he was happy to see her go but that he believed, in his own misguided but well-intentioned way that somehow, by exposing this new, nearly criminal zeal for existence he could also influence me to embrace a like-minded approach to the impending disasters of the day, as though his sugar-coating misdirection of the pain I could not help but embrace and wallow in like a man infatuated with his own disgust would somehow similarly afflict me and remotely ease my burden.
I gave him high marks for the effort. It was not easy for Albert to feign enthusiasm when his entire being, as long as I had known it anyway, had been constructed for precisely the opposite, an appalling aversion to cheerleading, a sterile blanket of immunity and apathy that covered him and his flesh like a thin, ratty overcoat. I admired him for the effort – the first time I could recollect any such effort streaming out of him solely for the benefit of another. As I scratched my head and focused my eyes on first the coffee table, then the overflowing ashtray and the empty bottles in front of me, I felt vaguely appreciative for such efforts. But they were all for naught. The feigned enthusiasm merely underscored the severity of my situation as though he had come with a cheery countenance to my death bed to tell me what a beautiful day it was and how many more beautiful days there would be to follow.
I cleared my throat severely several times until I worked up a healthy wad of phlegm into my mouth, spitting it reluctantly into the ashtray. The day gives birth. I stood finally with aches and pains that one becomes aware of only in an ultra sensitised state of low esteem and made my way to the kitchen table where Albert sat, staring at me expectantly.
Gradually, I regretted to note, the scent of domesticity was ebbing from what had become a sort of breakfast nook during Anastasia’s stay and in its place reappeared the gruesome dishevelment of two miserable and sloppy men living in a miserable flat looking out over a busy street of passer-by strangers and impatient traffic. The few dishes we had were again piled unwashed from the residue of Indonesian and Somalian late-night take away meals, bottles were everywhere, ashes dumped in any convenient container, a general haze of smoke, a hue of greyish ambivalence pervaded and outside, another cloudy day to greet us.
It’s Saturday, Albert exclaimed as though revealing I’d forgotten having slept through Christmas Eve and a pile of presents waited for me under a childhood tree adorned with tinsel and blinking lights. No work, he added, as if I needed the reminder.
No work means nothing to do but wallow, I thought to myself as I stared at his ridiculously happy moon face finishing off the last of his coffee and lighting another cigarette. This Saturday means that last Saturday I was waking up with cowbells in my ears and Anastasia in my arms and it means that this Saturday I have woken to a grudging acceptance of a miserable fate awaiting me. What possible joy could be found in opening this unending bag of coal?
Wordlessly, I poured coffee while Albert watched me expectantly as though I were a pregnant cat about to give birth to a miraculous litter of kittens.
I sat down across from him and fumbled for a pack of Drum.
I was thinking we could go to the Saturday market, load up on herring and salmon and mature Gouda cheese and make ourselves some kind of feast for the afternoon, I’m starving, he recounted as I continued staring at him as though this new Albert were something of an alien who had taken over the previous Albert’s soul casing. And, he said gradually having elicited nary a sound of approval or disgust from me, I have a surprise. Two surprises, actually.
I rolled a cigarette and tapped it against the kitchen table before popping it between my lips and lighting. I inhaled deeply and almost immediately induced a brief coughing spasm before drowning it out with a quick swig of bitter black coffee.
Which surprise do you want to hear about first?
C’mon man, I chided, what the fuck are you talking about? Since when do you have surprises?
He stood up from the kitchen table, grabbed a bag from the floor just beneath the ladder leading up to his nook and produced two tickets. Voila, he stated smugly. Two tickets for tonight’s show at Tivoli to see Walter Trout and The Radicals. He waved them under my nose and then dropped them next to my cup of coffee while he leaned over and pulled a fresh Grolsch from the crate and popped it open for emphasis.
Damn. I wasn’t beside myself but grudgingly, I let some of my delusion leak out to be replaced by a vague enthusiasm. This kind of blues guitar could be just the tonic. I glanced over at Albert who was still watching me for a reaction. And oh yes, for the price of a ticket, I let a slow smile escape me.
***
So what’s the second surprise, I asked after enough coffee had entered me to send me on a morning colonic and refreshed, returned to the kitchen table to pop open my own Grolsch and pretend to feel human again.
I’m in love.
For some reason, this sent me into a spasm of hysterics. Albert, in love? With me kicked in the balls and groping for solid ground, Albert, the man with few discernable emotions has suddenly decided to find himself in love? What sort of sick irony was this at work?
With what, I asked reluctantly.
Not what, he corrected. Who.
Oh fuck off. What are you talking about?
Well, check your cynicism at the door my friend. This isn’t some ridiculous tale of meeting some fanatically self-referential Dutch woman last night in a pub last night and falling in love, oh no, this is much more beautiful than that. You see, I went to visit the whores last night (this is what he called it, frankly enough, visiting the whores…) and I came across an exceptional character whose honesty, forget about whose beauty, simply knocked me loose and sent all my change spilling out of my pockets.
I drank my beer faster shaking my head. Tell me you haven’t fallen in love with a whore, my god, what a cliché.
Not just any whore, Witold. An honest whore. An honest whore who told me everything I ever wanted to know about the psychology of whores without ever having taken my dick out my pants. A whore who told me things I never realised not about herself, but myself.
What the fuck are you talking about?
I have too much ego, Witold. This is what the whore told me. She wouldn’t fuck me. She wanted me to go until I insisted I’d still pay her even though she wouldn’t fuck me. I wanted to hear why she wouldn’t fuck me.
How hard could that be to figure out? You stink of beer, you have no respect, you can’t get hard? What was it?
She told me that as a rule, she only fucked cripples and ugly men and men with no egos. She said for a beautiful woman, her profession would be disgusting if it were merely the money and the act itself. She was looking for redemption and she found redemption only through helping lost causes, like a saint, or a nurse. Her logic was that any man who had too much ego sullied the goals she had in mind. She wants to give comfort to those less fortunate not to give comfort to horny, drunken men. Not to give a suck and fuck to a man too lazy to find love on his own but only to those who could never find it on their own and had to pay for it because no other woman but a whore, would fuck them.
And this was enlightening?
Well, hardly at first. It pissed me off, quite frankly. But in the middle of listening to this good faith whore who only fucks lost causes, this patron saint of pussy, it suddenly dawned on me that this was precisely the woman I’ve been looking for all these years, if I’ve been looking at all. A woman who isn’t out to take my money and feign pleasure for a fee. A woman who doesn’t even want to give me the time of day because I am not needy enough. Do you get that? Not needy enough? The audaciousness of such an attitude from a whore. It fascinated me. So I paid for her for hours, just to discuss things with her. Not just the aspect of being a whore, but everything. It turns out she’s a medieval history major at the university in Delft. Working on her doctorate. Can you imagine that?
You’ve lost me somewhere Albert. Somewhere between not getting laid and paying a whore to talk to her. And to pay her all night to talk to her no less.
No, you’re missing it entirely, Witold. It isn’t anything about that, it’s about finding someone who is real. Someone who is both a scholar and a saint.
You believed some line about you not being needy enough? That she only takes money from gimps and pathetic cases, a whore with a heart? Is that what you’re telling me? Am I hearing correctly?
It was amazing of course, getting lost in this absurd conversation. For awhile I completely forgot my own misery, let it slip away as though reading the news about someone else’s misfortune and shrugging it off.
And I’ll tell you something else, Witold. I’m going back again tonight to her after the show. I want you to come with me. I want you to meet her.
You’re out of your fucking mind, Albert? Do you hear what you’re saying?
Sceptical little man with a broken heart, yes, I hear what I’m saying. I’ve lived years waiting for this moment that I never knew was expected of me. There is hope for me yet. I have found the saintly, intellectual whore and I intend on finding out more.
*****
The weirdest thing to me is that this language, the lack of a common one – fascinates me. Here, take the Dutch word gift which means like, poison or venom, the opposite connotation of the word in English. It’s as though the word connotates some psychological feeling in one language different from another. They use the same word and mean something different, having a different feeling to the same word I use in English to mean practically the opposite.
You’ve been to the coffee shop, I see.
Look, coffee shop too. Think about what image coffee shop elicits in small town America and then think about the image of coffee shops in Holland splashed with fresh coats of the yellow and green painted colours of Jamaica, music buffeting the door way and the subtle clouds of Dutch reared sativa like a dry ice mist as you enter. Same words strung together altogether different meaning. It’s difficult to feel responsible when everything linguistic seems familiar and yet the deception lies in these different meanings for the same word. And that doesn’t even count the fact that otherwise, the same meanings have different words completely.
You only think it’s confusing because most of your time in public is spent drunk or getting drunk or starting to get drunk from simply drinking. Your entire perception of reality is gnarled, like the discs of a spine which need to be straightened into place.
A cute girl approached the table. She’s celebrating her birthday and just yesterday Albert had been celebrating his. They both find this absurdly fascinating. But that connection wouldn’t be put into gear until later. At the moment, she made her way to the table with determination, her left hand was curled into a ball and only moments before she had been staring dreamingly at the stained photo wall before she began to overhear us.
This conversation you’re pretending to have is not realistic enough, she accused, stopping just before our table. I don’t believe either of you are sincere. Why don’t you talk about your feelings instead of vacant eyed ideas? She held up Albert’s glass to the light. What the hell is this you’re drinking? What could possible compel you to prattle on like that about the fact that languages are different? Are you so completely inebriated by facile observations that you can no longer hear the difference? What are you doing here anyway?
We’re musicians; Albert smiled, taking his glass back. These facile observations are in fact a furthering of our communication on stage between my bass and his saxophone. Our musical is predicated on simple thought. We believe repetition in sound is the finest method of building faux spirituality. Or perhaps barbaric spirituality. None the less, we were merely rehearsing with words as our musical notes. Imagine coming into this café and finding two dolphins in lounge seats at this table chattering away in dolphin saying exactly the same thing I was just telling Witold here about language. The same story sounds more fascinating in a language you don’t understand. And that’s precisely what we intend on portraying on stage.
*****
Ova, she says much later in the evening where the three of us have been taking turns trying to out drink ourselves. The feminine suffix of generally every woman’s surname in Czech is ova – which means daughter of or belonging to, and is tacked on to the end of the surname of the father.
What about it, Albert shrugged, puffing luxuriantly, splayed across the back of the pullout sofa I slept on in the living room Doesn’t it allow you to be immediately identified as a female, branded, open to attack from all sorts of perverts with a telephone book?
It’s demeaning, she huffs, sipping a snifter of claret.
But you’re not even Czech! Albert sits up suddenly knocking over an empty beer bottle with his elbow and ashing on the floor unintentionally, limbs akimbo.
She watches him with curiosity, the suddenness of Albert’s detangling from the sofa and coffee table paralysing her a moment before regaining consciousness, not literally of course, but almost stunned in a way. She had never witnessed one of Albert’s face dives into the coffee table high on absinthe. At least this time nothing was broken.
No, I’m not Czech but I’ve been there before and when I found out about this –ova- business, I turned right around and left.
If you’re not Czech then what are you?
Slovakian, hahaha. She burst out laughing as though on the verge of manic hysteria. I don’t think Albert understood what the fuck she was laughing hysterically for but it was infectious. Albert, from the floor, laid his head back down and held his belly, his body trembling with the effort to burst out laughing. And then, like some sort of airborne virus, I too became infected, laughing, hey it’s ok, laughing what the fuck are we laughing about anyway?
*****
Albert and Marie became an item in a short few days. I shadowed them like a sole paparazzo lost from the flock, every intimacy recrucifying me with memories. I watched them with a masochistic yen feeling closer to Anastasia for the pain. But eventually it was too much. Consummation needs privacy, so I decided I was going to head out of town, find a train going somewhere and get away, romanticise the travel as a sedative.
They bid me good bye with their arms around each other’s waists, probably muttering don’t hurry back to themselves as they shut the door behind me.
Where was I going to go but of course Paris. Not the touristic Paris but the no alternative Paris wherein I’d prowl the streets thinking about every fifth corner that just around the block was a girl who looked just like Anastasia, enough so that I’d gasp audibly. I know this because I caught myself hearing it and thought what the hell kind of weird thing it was to actually gasp at the thought of the sight of her. If I had been any weaker I’d have needed a wheel chair and someone to push it otherwise at that very corner I would be stuck standing as the image walked past me and what I thought had been Anastasia had been some other waggish beauty with an entirely different history, a completely different perspective, unawareness of my existence entirely, immune to me as she continued on the sidewalk. And this was entirely how Anastasia had once been. Non entities. Visions in an incomplete future. Parasitic souls searching for other souls to suck dry.
And what does a drinker do in a city like Paris with all the statues and parks and monuments and history beckoning like a lurid filmy cartoon whore? Why he finds a place with a good view of people, has a seat and orders a litre of wine, of course.
When you drink alone in an empty café on a weekday afternoon there isn’t anyone but the staff to socialise with. I wrote that down on a piece of paper and congratulated myself for forgoing the second litre when the first was empty, standing up and straightening out and walking aimlessly around the streets breathing in as many as I could take in without stereotyping. I ended up after a few trips on the Metro at Père Lachaise, watching people walking around looking at tombstones, an outdoor museum of the dead, the famous lumped with the infamous, what a fascinating collection of ghouls who walked hand in hand from section to section of the cemetery with maps in their hands to help them identify locations of names they weren’t even sure they knew but figured that if they were on the map they must be famous somewhere.
I caught myself fantasizing a life wherein this walk through this cemetery was eventually going to take me back to Anastasia’s flat, ringing the bell and hearing a tinge of excitement in her voice as she sang out and pushed the security buzzer to let me in.
And then I caught myself hours later in a jazz café off of a main boulevard, a candlelit cave with smoke and music. And listening to the band playing I sat back and poured a few more litres of wine down my throat, gradually of course, and let music and interpretations fill my head instead of realities which were thus far unrealistic.
*****
Albert and Marie together were not believable. How many months had I heard Albert disdaining the complication of emotions whilst simultaneously composing Te Deums to legalised prostitution.
And this is the same Albert who loved nothing more than to spend an afternoon on the terrace of café near the Oude Gracht sipping Belgian beer out of snifters and giving me little monologues on the history of prostitution in a vain effort to shrug out of the overcoat of guilt he felt for allowing himself such pleasures.
Even in the Middle Ages everyone was pretty pragmatic about it, he would shine, warming to the subject for the 100th time. I could recite the speech from memory I thought to myself as he continued. Of course, back then it was more encouraged because it kept all the perverts busy who might otherwise have been preying on the chaste women ripe with rape and defilement in their eyes. And then of course our dear friends the Protestants came along and started forcing people into crazy ideas like tolerating sex only within marriage. The Protestants made it a sin and a crime in the 16th century. Get it? The Protestants regulating Prostitution, likely only because people were getting the two mixed up.
Albert wheezed into his beer, grinding out a cigarette with an athletic vigour only a heavy smoker can muster. Anyway, as you can see, Prostitutants; whores disclaiming sex. God, I hate religion. He spits phlegm into a handkerchief he pulled out of his front pocket brought along specifically with such a use in mind. You can’t spit on the street, can you now, he asked at my somewhat repulsed expression. So never mind about what religion does to your dick, think about all the spitting and pissing in the streets that went on back then. Unpaved roads, probably. Cows and sheep and chickens all over the place. Open fires on the road side, soot everywhere.
What the hell are you talking about I ask suddenly as if only then realising he was talking about nothing at all just putting sentences in senseless organisation. This was how we practiced our music without ever using our instruments. We couldn’t imagine music as a skill because it was too much about non verbal communication, an on stage charades with notes until one picked up the rhythm of the other and there was a reasonable understanding of something, simply scratching the surface with repetition until the pattern became familiar enough to recognise.
*****
However difficult it was imagining those two as a couple, always on the brink of menacing the other, they were in fact, spending a lot of time together which meant that eventually we were becoming a trio.
Oh, Marie can play, Albert assured me as we were riding bikes back at night after a concert at Ekko, some sort of tango opera. Marie can play the accordion and congas. She could be very useful.
He knew quite well what I would think about it considering Anastasia was the real missing piece to the trio and without saying what we both knew, that this was just a crass replacement, an ornament to stick on the hood of a jalopy, and eventually, I succumbed to it anyway because frankly, I was outnumbered.
*****
Eventually I was back to going out alone simply because of the intensity of intimacy going on in the flat making me feel like I was in some suburban family room instead of a shabby flat above a takeaway on the Amsterdamsestraatweg. Then they would demure and demand that we practice in the flat instead of going out. We brought beers in from the corner market by the crate, each of us carrying our own along with a few bottles of Jinever to tinge the evening further.
These rehearsals were like séances each of us attempting to conjure up something that simply wasn’t going to make an appearance. Other nights, for some magical reason it would begin to appear as if it were coming together a time or two. We have to get used to her playing and she has to get used to ours, Albert complained in between sets, sweat pouring down from his face just before he slugged down a half dozen throatfuls of beer from his bottle. We pretended we were in clubs because we had no gigs. And we couldn’t have performed in such a state. Albert and I alone were barely credible but the three of us together, off key, out of sync, disjointed and confusing, were simply incomprehensible. We might have been forcibly removed from stage.
So we stayed in the flat at night and practiced. After weeks, we were back out in the night again going in different directions because night after night had made us sick of each other. Albert went to Marktzicht, sometimes with Marie in tow but sometimes Marie would go back to her flat and reality and spend a night away simply to clean herself of the soot that hung over all of us from so many nights in that little flat with nothing but those instruments, beers and smoke.
I would head for Fabriekzicht and sit quietly at a corner stool at the bar watching the people all around me out of the corners of my eyes.
*****
And then one day, it was all over before the first gig was even staged. All that hard work for nothing. Albert was fed up. Too much fucking touching too many reassurances required, he complained. I was right all along. People are too fucked up to have relationships. They should all just accept solitude and get on with creating something meaningful out of their living, something more meaningful than fucking reproduction and mass consumption.
They had one outburst and that was the end of it. She came back to Marktzicht one night and threw a glass of beer in Albert’s face. The punters around us all clapped with amusement as she turned on a heel and walked back out. Albert accepted the barman’s beer-soaked towel and wiped his face off with it, smiling. I’m glad that was your beer, Jan.
*****
Now the sensation of being in Utrecht was wearing thin.
Both of us had nearly had the last member of the trio in their clutches only to see them escape in the case of Anastasia and get relegated in the case of Marie. Now we’d both had an experience that involved all three of us and now there weren’t any more experiments to be conducted in this city. It was bad luck. We weren’t getting anywhere.
The place we should go, Albert suggested one night as we were spending thirty minutes trying to unlock our bicycles in mutually drunken stupors, is Prague. Prague is where we will find our trio, our muse.
******
Making matters worse was that Albert was beginning to grow restless. I like it here, he confided one afternoon when we were sitting out in a terrace swallowing beer and enjoying a rare sun despite the chill. But we aren’t getting anywhere with the music and I’m getting bored having the same conversations with the same people, playing the same game of cards over and over again. I’m beginning to think it’s time to move on.
Move on? But why? I thought you liked it here. It’s your heritage after all, isn’t it?
Well for one, I’ve been thinking a lot about Prague. The more I read about it, the more I hear others talking about it, the more I’ve begun to believe that it’d be a better place for us – it’s a lot cheaper for one – the beers are almost free, the culture is bursting, the women are rumoured to be angelic not to mention horny and well, it seems more conducive to jazz and just odd enough a place to accept us.
But we’ve been accepted here…
Oh, in bits, yes. But not overwhelmingly so. Besides, let’s face it, there aren’t that many jazz locales, not enough gigs, and frankly not enough inspiration. We’re pissing away scads of money every day we remain here – we’ve got to find something cheaper, somewhat western yet with a hint of mystery – and old communist stronghold, an historical nugget, my god, do you know Kafka lived there for example?
Well what would we do there? We don’t speak the language, for example and whilst that’s not a problem here, it could be a big hurdle there.
Hardly. I’ve read there’s some 20,000 expats living there – we should be able to straddle the border between expats and locals, find jazz venues, drink cheap beer and meet racy women. What more could be expected? I’m tired of whores, I’m tired of getting stoned to oblivion in coffee shops, I’m tired of drinking these little glasses of lager, tired of living above this hideous Somalian takeaway, the weather sucks and most of all, here you are moping around most waking hours, thinking about that girl. It’s not just for me, but for you as well. The change of venue will do you good.
3:58 AM
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