The gentle burning of the cheap DeWars they serve on transatlantic KLM flights reminded me of the sun I’d felt on my skin not six hours ago in the Old South of Amsterdam. I’d been sitting on a comfortable cushion in the open courtyard, sipping a typical Dutch latté while I waited for an old friend at the College Hotel near the museumplein of the old Dutch Capital.
But for whiskey to feel that way you have to drink it right. And it’s complicated. Draw half a breath, and then take a sip. And remember, it works best with the middle to low tiers of whiskies, or any scotch younger than ten years. Twelve is too old, too smooth for the right effect. You need the harsh stuff for the right kind of burning. When the liquor is in your mouth, swirl it a bit, but not too much. It’s not wine, dammit, and isn’t activated by oxygen, but rather by settling into itself. So swirl it in your mouth just enough to coat the interior of your oral cavity with the liquid gold and then open your lips and take another slight breath, stopping just before it burns to the point where your cough instinct takes over. Don’t let that happen — that’s bad form and you’ll look like a freshman jackass, so avoid it at all costs.
As soon as you feel yourself reach that burning point, stop inhaling and begin slowly letting the air out. If you can, simultaneously begin swallowing the whiskey, or rather, letting it fall down your throat. You’ll think of the sun on your skin right away, and you’ll know what I mean.
You’ll feel hairs tingling as your skin cells expand from the sudden warmth. Comfort will set in on your exposed arms first, and then your face. As the warmth penetrates your clothes, your core will begin to equalize, and if it’s summer in Amsterdam, you can go from chilly to too hot as quickly as a cloud can roll past the sun in high wind. It’s a frightening show of how fickle and dependant our bodies can be on the planet. But for those first five or ten seconds, it also feels damn good.
Which is how I felt in that morning warmth, just before it got too hot and my back started sweating against the courtyard cushions. I’d been sitting there for a while, drinking ice water while I waited for 10:30 to come. That’s when Vera, my agent and lead in Amsterdam, had agreed to meet me. She preferred that kind of setting, an open courtyard in a classy hotel in the chic part of town by her office, where you can have a fresh morning drink to interrupt your work and “feel as if you’re abroad,” as she put it. Or maybe she’d meant ‘a broad’, which is accurate too, I guess, for her.
Me, I prefer dark old pubs and bars with aged oak railings that carry the names of their proprietors’ grandfathers. Places where the floor sticks if you don’t step in the right places and where coffee is served only to water down the bourbon.
But I guess at 10:30 in the morning, this place was more appropriate — yeah, I can see that.
Unmistakable, whether from a distance or from across a few empty tables on a Friday morning, Vera loves to wear yellow. From brights to dulls, she has yellow blouses, skirts, shoes, gold bracelets, pendants, earings, purse, car and on colder days, leggings. She loves it. Even her credit card is yellow. She wears a grey scarf and red sunglasses, which disturbs me in terms of continuity, but suffice it to say, I didn’t miss seeing her in that empty gravel courtyard and waving her down towards my table.
I’m not a fan of that kind of attention, of course, and I prefer for my leads to be slightly more conspicuous. Those of you who know me know that my profile is kept low for reasons that involve contact identity protection issues, statute of limitations in certain countries and a general sense of paranoia which, despite its social inconveniences, has kept me in business all these years. So keep your comments to yourselves.
We started off with the usual chit chat about the Dutch and our mutual dislikes for some of their habits, such as waiting tables and actually bringing you what you ordered. See, Vera is no more Dutch than I am, and atheist Israelis of Polish heritage have a warmth about them that I just can’t ignore, and actually identify with. As if she were the Jewish Grandmother I never had, only younger. Our common distaste for the often obtuse mannerisms and cold tact of the Dutch had brought us closer together than either of our companies had meant for us to be. It was supposed to be all business. But there we were, a year after our last official dealing had gone down, two friends just meeting for old times sake and a fix for caffeine.
But instinctively, we gravitated towards our most common aim — Politics.
“What’s this deal I’m hearing about MSNBC and FOX news?” she asked me, after our chatter had subsided. “I’m hearing all kinds of gibberish from ThinkProgress about some kind of truce between those two networks. As if that can be good for anybody.”
“ThinkProgress?” I chuckled. “Why the hell do you still read that stinking hippie tripe?”
“Oscar, are you drunk? It’s 10:30 in the morning. Are you not sleeping enough?” She asked me, with a very straight face.
“I never sleep enough,” I told her. “You know that.”
“You also drink too much, and I’d put an end to that too, if I didn’t think it’d affect your writing negatively,” she said. “I swear you get off on it.”
I didn’t respond, except with a tight-lipped shrug of the shoulders.
“Hippie tripe…” she trailed off, and then snapped at me from across the glass of water I’d been drinking. “ThinkProgress is just about the most reliable way to get a lead into a story the main press will likely ignore these days. Where do you think I get half my ideas for followups?” I stared into the ice in my water.
“Christ, I’m glad I got out when I did, then,” I said.
“Got out?” She asked. “What, ‘got out’? You didn’t get out. You’re neck deep in this nightmare, probably worse than me.”
I sighed after she’d finished. “Tell me about it,” I said, leaning back on the cusion in my woven bamboo chair. “No — I mean, got out of this local scandal shit and into the global scene,” I said, pausing, “you know, business dealings in Africa, socialist policies in the EU, Labor conditions in the MercoSul, humanitarian issues in China, real ground conditions in Afghanistan and Iraq and who’s profitting from it…that kind of thing. The real news.”
She grinned at me with tightly pursed lips and then burst out into a hearty laughter, a heartfelt glee I hadn’t witnessed in quite some time. She belly laughed for a quarter minute or so before she became coherent enough to stammer a reply.
“You’re daft!” She chuckled, raising her hand and waving down the waiter. “‘the real news…’ — listen to yourself. You know who you sound like? You sound like those tikes from Rolling Stone, idealistic as if they still wrote for their school newspapers.” She put her hand on her chest and recovered, “Oh…my,” she sighed.
“What?” I protested. “You’d rather I be wasting my time covering what Rupert Murdoch wants me to spread about MSNBC and FOX news being civilized to each other?” I drew a breath.
“First of all, like you said, it’s gibberish. More importantly, it’s self-serving. Who benefits from that? People who like drama’s who. There’s no drama as good as quarreling lovers, and a peace accord is just a sign of a larger battle to come. Who knows…maybe Murdoch is planning on buying MSNBC as well. It doesn’t server the people at all.”
She was still laughing. I accepted it, and toned down my rhetoric.
“But who cares, right?” I said, sort of giving in. “Nothing does anyway… but that’s not news, it’s theatrics. That’s show business.” I thought about it for another moment. “And what’s wrong with being serious about journalism for a change?” I asked her, still feeling somewhat challenged.
“No,” she said, “It’s politics.” She took a deep breath. “Look, there’s nothing wrong with writing it, I guess,” she finished chuckling. “Just keep your expectations of your readers low. Nobody reads that stuff, Oscar. Nobody cares.”
“Fuck caring,” I snapped, “they just need to know. Then they’ll care.”
“Sure,” she said, “why not? But in the meantime they’re too comfortable in their routines to be outraged by ‘the real news’, as you so astutely put it. Enough of them haven’t been near enough to real oppression for some time now, I’d say since — oh, I don’t know…Carter?” She looked at me as she flagged down the waiter again. “I thought you’d have learned that by now.”
“Carter?” I coughed. “Why Carter?”
“Well, I’d say Clinton, because he didn’t do anything, but then I’d be tempted to go back to Bush Sr., since he got away with that ridiculous war in the Gulf on the same repeated premise of Vietnam, not to mention Panama and his involvement with Reagan in the Contra affair. But then I have to go back to Reagan since he got away with much more than the Contras, like Nicaragua and Guatemala and the effective elimination of taxes for the upper classes, pretty much dooming everyone into the world we have today by creating the conditions for the drug war the US has with Central America and the Religious war the US has with the Middle East.”
I was eying her hard now.
“From there I have to bounce back to Carter, who needed to flex his muscles for the business world as the new Democrat. Did you know that in spite of running on the Demoractic platform, he actually raised military spending from what Nixon and Ford had set during their regime, as has every administration since, regardless of the need or mandate?”
Now I was just impressed at her reservoir of deplorable historical knowledge and smiled coyly at her. “No Vera, I did not know that.” I loved how pointed she could be with her facts, which is, of course, why she was my main lead for stories on this kind of issue.
“So I’m tempted to go back to Ford and Nixon, but that seems not only obvious since they were republicans in the middle of the Vietnam War but they also got their share of protesting in that day and age, when people still had it in them. So I bounce back on Carter, who had the chance to change it all, to bring real democracy to that land of yours and instead kept the same old system that serves the rich by means of many avenues, most pointedly, the military industrial complex, while keeping the population from rebelling, revolting, protesting or even just paying attention simply by giving them enough crumbs to keep them more interested in solving their petty problems while ignoring the larger ones that cause everything else in the first place.”
“Fascinating,” I said to her, smiling.
“My point, Oscar, in all seriousness, is this: no reporter, newspaper, network or any other agency has been able to break through the public’s disillusionment with the establishment for well over thirty years. And even disillusionment is not enough to cause revolution…”
“Just a coup, probably,” I interrupted.
“Right. For a revolution you also need outrage, which comes from desperation, from passion, from the inhibition of the human condition. The desire to break free. If enough people have enough desires satisfied, or at least, enough of what they think are desires satisfied, then you’ve crumbled that people’s ability to rise together, where their numbers matter, where their opinion counts for something. The civilized world of the US has lost its ability to outrage,” she eyed me, glaringly now.
It made me a little uneasy.
“So tell me, world traveler; what the hell do you mean by ‘real news’?” She asked me. “Get a grip, man.”
The waiter finally came over and took our orders. Vera ordered a triple espresso, to which I raised an eyebrow before deciding to make it two. Fuck it, I thought. It’s business as usual, I guess.
“So what else did ThinkProgress say?”
—
Several hours later, in business class seat 1A of the 747 bound for JFK, I smiled as I thought of what we’d said. With Amsterdam safely behind me and all caught up with the latest headlines from my several sources, I sipped my scotch and coffee, without mixing the two. That’s another trick I’ve learned about staying focused when you need it. Irish coffee, which is fun and comes at you easily and curvacious the way the continental shelf around Ireland does from 40,000 ft, is not a drink for focus. You have to keep the coffee and whiskey separate, much like your style and objective.
And if we can have both style AND objective, there would seem to be no limit to what we can reach when we drink enough whiskey and then put pen to paper.
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The left mouse button on my notebook was missing, and the other one was stuck. The rest of the right side of the keyboard was overheating right where the processor sits, whiring and coughing pathetically like a sick child at three in the morning. Typing anything that involved letters on the right half of the keyboard meant first degree burns. The drive holding two weeks of already useless work was now missing, corrupt from god-knows-what-error, making the last two weeks even more useless. To boot, the food here sucks, the economy is costing a lot of people that sit around me their very secure jobs, I’m frustrated about travel schedules I can’t make because of other people’s blunders, I’ll probably miss meeting some very important people in New York next week and all because I’m here, doing nothing for nobody.
No wonder I’m pissed.
—
In a split-second I couldn’t control, my feet exploded against the floor, throwing my torso into the air. My throat grunted a war whoop, my hands grabbed my PC and heaved it clear across the room, smashing it against the wall with a violent garble of plastic and metal being shoved against each other and uncomfortable angles. The hard plastic around the case cracked in one sharp snap that sounded like a femur splitting in two. I stood at my desk, breathing heavily, my sleeves rolled up and my top two buttons on my shirt already undone. I bared my teeth, totally out of control. A coworker was looking at me for obvious reasons and in a rage of animalistic rage I pointed at him aggressively.
“What the fuck are YOU looking at?” He and I work for the same company and I know his shitty equipment has had days of poor performance like this. “Don’t pretend like you’ve never wanted to do that with this stinking equipment they fucking give us. It’s a travesty,” I filled in the silence. The bewildered Dutch man kept looking at me silently. Dutch people don’t like scenes and it makes them uncomfortable to be thrust in the middle of one. And I’d never acted like so like the mos American person in the room.
“Besides, it’s YOUR fault,” I shouted, and pointed to the one across the table from him. “And YOUR fault, and YOUR fault,” I shouted indiscriminately, pointing to everyone in the room and making angry faces at the frightened bunch. “YOU - miserable twats put up with discomfort and wretched computer equipment and bad processes and retarded policies all because YOU don’t want to stick your neck out! YOU don’t want to be the one to make a wake, to change the color in this grey world. YOU frightened lizards that duck and stare empty-faced at every obvious conflict thrown at us from anyone higher than us. You SUCK!”
I waited a second for it to sink in, looking around the room and eyeing the door.
“YOU fucking useless inanimate objects,” I finished, throwing my hands up in a wild craze. “React, Goddamnit! Say something away from the fucking coffee machines!”
Nothing. I looked at the fattest one of the bunch and threw my mouse at the fat rolling over his waist but he recoiled like a mole. “Fuck you!” I yelled, and ran into the woods outside the building. The mouse bounced onto the floor.
—
I was furious that night when I went out for a run. Which I do when I can’t handle some of the things I hear. I’d heard of a little political story that was being kept quiet by Murdoch’s empire of media and then some, and I couldn’t find Dylan to get it off my chest. So it festered.
I’d already been losing it on the tube, in my car, even at the pub. Things were getting weird in a way you only expect during election season. The always important but continuous loser of politics, health care, was being ousted from the media waves by a combination of republican affairs scandals, the typical scurry of the appointment of a new Justice to the Supreme Court of Klowns and some inane tripe of fabricated batshit about Obama’s birth certificate that for some reason even Rachel Maddow was talking incessantly about. The intellectual property trial against a mother and student had, individually awarded record companies upwards of half a million dollars for downloading thirty-something songs. This was with a judge and jury. And everytime I re-read the article about Alberto Gonzalez and the continuing decadence of the Justice Department it struck that cord of dissonance that wishes death to those in the establishment as the only solution to getting out of this maddness that’s settling in over us.
In retrospect, I guess I should’ve known that just blowing the largest spores clean off the fungus that is our DOJ wouldn’t have done shit to stop the decay of the thing. But I just couldn’t get over it. The thick mucus of resentment that builds up in my mind when I hear enough bullshit sometimes constricts my breathing, or at least my ability to think straight. When I can’t wrap my mind around the absurdity I see and hear I tend to collapse into myself and that’s when other things, more extroverted in me, come out and the shit hits the fan.
That’s probably not what led to the the aforementioned work-related disaster but it wasn’t helping things either. Running violently into whatever jungles I happen to be inhabiting is just about the only thing I can do in times like that and I think that if it wasn’t for all the whisky, I’d be in amazing shape.
Earlier in the day I’d gotten beligerent, and yes, done horrible things to company property in front of my clients and coworkers. But so what? Let them sit in stale offices drink horse tranquilizers in the middle of the woods and slobbering figureless numbers onto their keyboards if they like, but they know I was right.
Besides, that shit felt good.
—
Later, back in my tiny hotel room I calmed down by closing the curtains, running the shower at full blast as hot as it goes and closing the bathroom door. I stripped naked and lay on the cold tile, feeling the steam of fifty degrees celcius build up in the enclosed space and fall on my face. My iPod sang Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and wailed a bunch of Muddy Waters and my blood pressure dropped to its normal levels of 140/90.
But that was all work stuff, the very same bullshit I usually avoid mentioning here because, well, shit, you don’t care. What made it relevant enough today was not so much the fact that I’d flipped my Compaq clear across the room and just high enough to miss giving two very tall Germans very clear USB marks across their temples, though I knew at the time that scene would make for some good theatrics. What made it significant was the why of the matter — the raison d’être; I’d finally seen the invisible hand of Adam Smith at work and it was jerking off my corporate employer while the other one slapped around some very good friends of mine.
And we’ll leave it at that. There’s no way to go further into it without getting into some very thick and ugly mud and right now I just can’t find the hours in the day to get into.
Because I’d calmed down from the work thing. I wasn’t belligerent anymore, yelling things at the radio or debating healthcare policy with my TV, though I was getting there. See, politics had come on the iDesk, one of the only good shows put out by CNN, and as if it wasn’t enough that the tentacles of Alberto Gonzalez hadn’t dried up after leaving the DOJ in shame and shambles, the goddamn things were still manipulating, twisting and otherwise creeping things out.
Anyway, the story was that after months of not finding work ahead of the trail of destruction he left behind in his former job, homeschool finally landed at Texas Tech in northern Lubbock.
Yeah, I know. Imagine that — Lubbock, TX. One more for the file of “Duh”, eh?
And I tried to get over the fact that he’s going to be getting a salary of 100K (when regular full-time proffessors with real PhDs and actual experience who teach more than 15 students a semester often get half that). I tried to get over the fact that students formed groups and petitions and even facebook efforts of getting rid of this taint on their education, all of which went ignored (help ‘em out, by the way — how’d you like it if you walked into class and Richard Milhous Nixon was your teacher? Same thing. Here’s the link: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=114577517744).
I tried to get over the silence of the faculty, and later their own ineffective actions when 45 of them signed petitions that will certainly fall on deaf ears of administrators who “don’t make decisions based on petitions”.
Of course not. Not when it’s not fun for the people who pay you to play nice with them.
I even tried to get over the fact that the school’s Chancellor, Kent Hance — who considers Gonzales a “good friend” — said that he received a “substantial number” of supportive e-mails about the hire, and just nine critical ones, and then added that “he wasn’t dwelling on the negative ones because they didn’t come from loyal university donors.”
I mean, shit. I tried. But the shithead that runs that ill-fated school didn’t even bother trying to mask the ugliness of his cronyism. And it’s fucking with education. That’s where I draw the line.
————————————————————————
There.
But it’s been a bad time for idealism. It’s been a bad time for hope and optimism, at least when it comes to government and life within this system based loosely on something that was once referred to as democracy. You know, back when we didn’t know any better. Or maybe we did. They did, anyway.
So yeah, I tried. But I was already on the verge of completely freaking out, so I did the only thing that has a documented track record of success in these situations — which is not, by the way, throwing laptops. That kind of lunatic behavior is revolutionary radicalism and you should be very aware of your surroundings if you even want to think of trying that on as ‘therapy’. Besides, I’ve only tried it once so I’m not sure of the scientific soundness of the theory.
But I was furious, my reason twisted like theirs and I needed to go for a violent run. It was raining hard too, and the lightning had gone wild, which is perfect.
Yes, I’m aware of the dangers of running in lightning. I went anyway.
Trees flew past my face like spiderwebs and I couldn’t distinguish one from the other. The green faded to black, the explosion of the summer woods veiled by the night. With my hands outstretched I felt like I was floating through the leaves, and who knows where I imagined I was?
The wet rubber of my soles against the smooth pavement squeaked and gripped until it warmed up, until the steps themselves molded with their environment. My feet were marching drums in synch with themselves. I could almost hear the trumpets of war over the heavy shield of the thick trees, over the hills that approached but never arrived until they were right underfoot. A steady rumble in the dark clouds above was in consonance with the heavy drops that already splashed over my cheeks, blurring my vision as I ran. I shook my head and the water drained from my face only to build up again in a few seconds.
But I ran.
My pace quickened, the steps growing louder. The path ahead of me was hard to see in the dark but it seemed to stretch to a point at infinity. It excited the hell out of me and I ran wildly into that green blackness. I thought I was alone but between what I thought were drums in the distance there seemed to be cars. The dim semblance of approaching headlights would appear between the bushes ahead and I turned away, onto another path. I tried to run deeper into the thick dark, avoiding as much knowledge as I could of the world outside myself, outside those woods, that rain.
But the deeper I ran, the more often came the headlights in the distance, the more of them there were; the closer they seemed. I turned to run in the opposite direction, but no thinning of that evil-tempered traffic could I find. They were coming from all sides, at all speeds, violently stripping the forrest of its solitude, of its haven. I stopped running.
I just stood there, and marveled at the traffic I could not escape.
—
I feel you don’t really know a city until you’ve run it in the rain, and this I’ve done in many places. Brooklyn, Geneva, Brasilia, Amsterdam, Oslo, London, Vienna — in the rain, through empty streets, void of the bullshit and other distractions there is more intimacy with a place. In the wet dark of a violent storm, there are thoughts you dare to think that normally would stay shut away in twisted crevaces of the mind, untampered with. You notice things you’d otherwise miss, like the echo under a stone bridge while your trainers seem muffled underfoot. You run into things that would otherwise not be there, like the lit up eyes of stray dogs, giving you looks full of evil and insanity, quite aware.
Fields of fireflys aglow in the downpour, flexing god-knows-which-muscles. It seems a lie.
No, I haven’t hit the rum yet. But maybe I should. Rum’s good.
Speaking of which, I’m glad I enjoyed that last bottle of Jack Daniels, because it’ll be my last. No, no, I haven’t quit drinking or found Jesus or anything crazy like that…it’s just that I recently heard they donated over twenty million dollars to the Bush campaign. Sure, I heard that from an English comedian in New York, and yes, the entire liquor industry probably leans toward “Republican Leanings”. And though the Dems aren’t any better when it comes to being friendly to business before being responsible and accountable to the people, it’s silly to base a political opinion on this little — oh, what the hell, let’s call it a fact — everyone else does it.
But this whole rant has been about cognitive dissonance, hasn’t it? And just to illustrate the point of how well esconsced in the matter we are, I’ll be giving up that particular Tennesee Whiskey. And I’ll be getting my inspirations elsewhere, thanks.
Isn’t that just the bitch about the truth? It comes out in the end, doesn’t it? It may be late, it may be stretched thin and pale from being hidden in deep places inside the human-sized safes in old men’s closets and offices. But it comes out.
And you’d think cognitive dissonance would be unpleasant enough to be a deterrent, or obvious enough to be a detergent, but no. The evolutionary abilities of men with power based in the establishment to rise above that most basic and inconvenient of human traits is quite incredible.
Posted in Anecdotes, Politics, Rants, Travels | No Comments…
Oscar and I sat in the back of a shisha lounge called Green Light Cafe. The bar was tripped out and smoked in, a hopeless scene of smokers from all walks of life, not a one of them local, which meant no Dutch people.
Don’t get me wrong, you know — Dutch people and I have a lot of things in common and I esteem their practicality and straightforwardness. It’s just that, hell — I needed a fucking break from the freaks of blunt.
And for that I was thankful. In that pillow-covered hole of wall to wall carpeting and blue and green and yellow and red neon floating on the ceiling there were no Dutch people. Not even the barkeep, who alternates on different nights from being a beautiful and petite Thai girl and a chunky English douchebbag.
Worlds, man.
The music there is usually a mellow kind of Jazz remix that seems to have engaged in acts of coitus with punk rock and steel drums. The chilled out clientele — overeager Erasmus young’ns, dreadlocked white guys, hippie chicks and Israeli stoners — always in character. They’re all straight off the train, backpacks and all. Haven’t even found their hostels yet.
I watched Oscar blow elegant smoke rings from the shisha pipe we shared. The man’s been everywhere and when he says he learned to blow smoke rings in the Middle East, motherfucker means Mecca, man. Or, at least as close to it as non-Muslims can get.
“Jeddah is the coastal port on the Red Sea, just outside of Mecca,” he informed me after seeing the blank stare on my face. He seemed surprised by my ignorance and I snapped out of it.
“I know where it fucking IS, Oscar. I’m just contemplating what a fucking cool job you have that by the sheer will of the mind, you can, on certain weekends, decide to just hop on a plane into the port of Jeddah and smoke enough shishas alone on the edge of the Red Sea until you learn to blow smooth smoke rings that smash calmly into the ceiling.”
He dragged the pipe a bit, and still took a second deep breath, exhaling slowly, as if his soul was leaving his body through his mouth. “You know, man, this job…it’s great. But it’s not as great as you think.”
“How do you know what I think, Oscar,” I said, with a spritzy tone in my voice that I hadn’t intended. He wasn’t annoyed.
“I’m telling you that this job has its curses and isn’t for everybody. Especially if you have specific needs.” I nodded, my head in my hands, showing him how bored I was with that topic I’d heard so often, so many times before.
Still, the man has been everywhere, it seems. But I knew that there are two roads to Mecca: one that actually goes to the city and one that goes around it, for foreigners or non-Muslims that think they can see Mecca just because they’ve traveled for god-knows-how-long? Nope, they’ll put you back in your blistering car and send you off. Everyone has their own problems.
He tightened his lips and thought for a moment, eventually saying, “Yeah. That was an interesting weekend. What a fucking shit country, that is, though.”
“What do you mean,” I asked, reaching for my pint of Heineken. “You told me you went from an air-conditioned Marriott — with a pool, which you swam in quite enjoyably, to hear you tell it — to a beach-side restaurant to smoke and watch the sunset and then the next day you took a drive to the sandy penninsula to search for a boat and ended up meeting a bunch of Dutch guys on the docks…”
“First of all, exactly. I went to Saudi-fucking-Arabia and who do I meet there, as if I didn’t have enough of that around this town of lunatics? The Dutch. I don’t see what you see in these people, honestly.”
“In my defense, I’m not all that happy with them either,” I said, looking around and smiling. I’m pretty sure I let that little gem slip every now and again. You should pay more attention.” He hesitated.
“Anyway,” he said, “it was shit. The town lists TGIFriday’s, Chilli’s and Pizza Hut among their top ten restaurants. People who go there return with pictures of their standard rooms at the Hilton, of unimpressive statues, some sunsets and occasionally, sidewalks.”
“I can picture,” I said, “the kind of people that take pictures of their hotel rooms at the Hilton. Clear as day, right?”
He furrowed his brow at me and took a deep drag of the pipe. “You mean people from the midwest?” he asked, holding it in. Then he blew another elegant masterpiece that grazed my left ear.
“Never mind,” I mumbled, grinning.
He went on. “And did I tell you that when I was about to sit at the restaurant where I smoked that shisha — by the way, it wasn’t beach-side, it was water-side; they don’t have beaches in Jeddah. There are some stretches by the highway that hug the water that are lined with large rocks to muffle the waves, but definitely no beaches.”
“ANYways…” I said, suggestively.
“Right. Did I tell you that at that restaurant I had to sit on the second floor, away from the water because the section — the empty section, I should say — of seats by the water is reserved for family seating? No single men allowed.” He seemed happy to have gotten that off his chest.
“Really?” I asked. I knew that Saudis segregated their men and women, but I figured there was space to move or something.
“Single men,” he repeated, “are the lowest fucking rungs on their social ladder.” He folded his arms and leaned back into his chair, his long, curly black hair bouncing on his head. I was surprised no one in Saudi had ever suspected he was Jewish. In any case, he was very satisfied with himself for that story.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “I remember when you told me of those boys on that lawn in Riyadh one time and how the police chased them down…”
“But they let me go,” he reminded me, “when the bell boy came out to explain I was a foreigner in the hotel.”
“An expensive hotel?” I asked him.
“The most ridiculous thing I’ve ever stayed in,” he said, which is saying a lot. “In the Egyptian Marble shower I could lie flat on my back and roll away from the showerhead, rolling five times before I hit the other wall. I know this for a fact. I had enough space to do cartwheels in that suite.”
“That explains why the guard didn’t give you a hard time then, right?” I offered.
“Right,” he said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that single men, especially young ones, are scum, the lowest class.”
“Why do you think that is,” I asked, suddenly kind of seriously pondering the reason.
“Honestly? I think it’s society’s way of projecting their own self-hatred onto something. I mean, I just can’t reason with the notion that separating men and woment results in anything other than repressed sexual urges. Just look at the Catholic Church.”
“Mmmm,” I nodded, and it felt like he was on a roll, so I didn’t say anything.
“I think that somewhere deep within them where human needs can’t be touched by silly rules, religious or otherwise, there is at least the faintest whisp of a wish that those men didn’t need for marriage to be their highest priority in order to escape the social hell it puts them all in. A kind of a obtuse logic: single men cannot be in the presence of or seen with a woman to whom they are not related. Deep within people must find this repressing and wish it weren’t so. And if all single men were married, they would not have this problem. Therefore, single men are frowned on.”
I looked at him in awe. “Oscar, that was, by far, the craziest thing you’ve said tonight. And that’s following your story of rolling on the floor in the shower in your hotel room in in Riyadh.”
“I know,” he said, half-ignoring me, sort of beside himself for nailing a thought like that down. And then his face lit up. “And what about the Catch-22 of how a boys meets a girl?” he asked excitedly. “Have I told you about that?”
I shook my head no and reached for my beer.
“I had been wondering –” he explained, “after being in that country for 2 months with no alcohol, cheap gas and nothing but sand and flat land around me, how it was that people could, in the 21st century, still go along with the notion of arranged marriages.”
I nodded again, and sipped my beer. He dragged the pipe again and let the smoke pour out of his mouth slowly, like a waterfall. That fucking guy.
“So I did what I normally do when I want a straight answer,” he said.
“What’s that?” I asked.
He smiled, and blew the dense smoke off the table in front of him. “I ask a cab driver,” he said, pursing his lips and raising his eyebrows. Fucking Oscar.
“And?” I demanded.
“And…” he dragged it out, “he told me that when parents won’t look away or pretend that they don’t know what’s going on, what the kids do is go down to the shopping mall with their mobile phones…”
“Mobile phones?” I interrupted.
“Yeah. He said what they do is set the Bluetooth receiver on the phone to be discoverable and when they find a phone they like they start texting and chatting with them. If the kids hit it off, they agree on a meeting place and a way to feign either marriage or relations for long enough to be seen in public before they become engaged.”
I was stunned. “Was he lying?” I asked, only half-kidding.
“No,” Oscar said. “I did this in a mall in Riyadh once and used my Bluetooth thingy to search for other discoverable devices. What came up was sort of sad.” I tried to sip my beer, realizing that I was sipping an almost totally empty glass. “A list of at least 30 or more phones came up. Their names were mostly illegible, but there were some with names like ‘Sexy, Sixteen and Single’ and ‘Ready for love, boy’.”
“Yikes.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Look, the pool was nice and all, but talk about a vast emptiness… I mean — who pays for all that gold trim?” he asked. I shrugged in agreement. He continued.
“In Jeddah, after wandering around the immediate neighborhood and finding nothing to do I finally found someone who understood enough English to be cajoled into telling me something, even if it was to give up hope. Those are the stakes.”
“Yeah?” I asked. I was partly distracted by the young Israeli kid rolling a joint of hash next to us.
“Yeah,” Oscar said. “This young Jordanian manager at the Marriott, when I badgered him enough about WHAT TO DO there he sort of lowered his voice and lowered his shoulders, leaning in to talk to me. He said, ‘listen, I’m a foreigner trapped here too. None of them will tell you but I’ve been here for two years and all there is to do is go to the mall.”
“I wonder why,” I said out loud, with a grin.
“‘Nonesense,’ I said to him, sort of startled by his honesty. ‘There must be a café where you can go read a book by the sea, right? These people are pious to a fault but they can’t be averse to a good life.’ I decided. He cast a look that told me he was not getting through to me.
‘It’s worse than you think,’ he said.
‘It can’t be,’ I countered. He smiled.
‘You’ve been to Riyadh?’ he asked me.
‘I’ve just come from there,’ I told him. ‘I’m here for the weekend’.
‘What do you think of Riyadh?’ he asked.
‘It sucks,’ I told him. ‘That’s why I came here. At least there is ocean here, right?’ I have him a smile. He smiled back but it was more wishful than it was agreement.
‘Look, the only thing the ocean adds to in Saudi Arabia is humidity.’
My heart sank for a moment. ‘That’s ridiculous. You’re telling me that there is nothing to do in Jeddah except either pay $250 for an hour for a wave runner or else drink tea in the hotel lobby all afternoon by yourself? Why are there even hotels in this place? Why are you people here?’
He adjusted in his seat and a grave feeling dripped all over his face. ‘I wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you. I think I understand what you want. You won’t find it here.’”
—
“And that,” Oscar said, “was the greatest reaction I’d gotten there, by far. By FAR.
—
His circles of smoke glided over the pages I was reading in the dim light, casting strange shadows and faint shapes over HST’s words. I struggled with my crude attempts at such cool manufacturings and eventually just gave up, sucking it all down and expelling it forcefully towards the dark blue ceiling.
It tasted like apples.
—
A long-haired blonde down the bar continued to throw suggestive glances at Oscar while shaking her shoulders in time with the mad noise the DJ was making. He glanced up from his writing every now and again to return them. I got the unshakable feeling he was playing some kind of game but I wasn’t a part of it.
He was deep in thought and I had just taken a deep inhale of the pipe when I saw her, out of the corner of my eye, get off her barstool looking over in our direction. I panicked and looked across the street at the signed bolted to the next building. It read, fortuitously, “Obstakel“. I knew exactly what it meant.
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The nighttime is still full of dark things, as always. Stirrings in the unseen blackness between walls and windows, silence among the trees — these are natives to the soil of the night. Through the leaves and a light mist I can see dim lights that don’t fully penetrate the canopy. I hear strange, elusive songs that howl in a distant direction. Time has passed, too much time. Yet these things never change. I like it. Still.
–
The reports of my death are greatly exagerated, I should tell you. Not to mention that I’ve always wanted to say that.
But seriously. If that’s what you’ve heard, you’ve been misinformed. I myself heard it from an IT specialist on the outskirts of Amsterdam. Which was weird.
It was unnerving to hear — to say nothing of having an argument with — a perfect stranger about your current status as a living being. He insisted I was dead, the story being that I’d perished needlessly along with the other passengers on that Air France flight from Rio.
“Why would I be in Rio?” I asked him. “I have absolutely NOthing I want to do in Rio.”
He dodged and I lunged and eventually we came to an understanding. But I had to insist, and that’s usually when things get ugly. Thankfully, he just fixed my hard drive problem and I got out of there and went back to New York.
There’s been a lot of that lately, this business of crossing the Atlantic once a week for months on end. It’s becoming routine, almost. Sure, the miles pile up and the whiskey is free, but who cares? I have plenty of whiskey at home. And anyone who’s ever flown across the Atlantic, especially anyone who has flow over the damn thing four times in a week knows that it does terrible things to the human body. There is no way around that.
Laura and I had had a good week in Iceland just before all of this got underway so it started off on the right foot with some camping, hiking, subzero temperatures and landscapes that defy any existing means of description that I’m aware of. Once I had switched into professional mode I made the best of it, taking weekends as they came, when I had them, to meet up with the right people in the right places. Paul was working in Paris at the time and did the right thing by taking a train to Rotterdam where I picked him up and we drove to Berlin. The next weekend Laura did a similarly right thing by flying to Zurich, where I met up with her and we had ourselves a proper Swiss weekend, followed the next weekend by a proper Belgian weekend. That’s how I make the best of this situation. And that’s alright.
But as you can imagine, it was somewhere between Bruges, Zurich and Berlin that I started to lose my bearings once again. Fleeing to the US had done me little good. After over four months of attempted residence in the heart of hearts I had started to feel safe, far from their grip and the beckoning of my whining clients.
Foolish.
When you’re this good at something, there will always be someone willing to pay you to not give it up. I learned that with a few carrots and the yank of thier chain, after which they got me right back to where I’d been when I fled.
Which is how I found myself again in the center of the old city in Amsterdam at the Haven van Texel, an old favorite thinking spot of mine. It was a typical summer night in the Dutch capital, tourists floundering about and locals ignoring them the way they do so well. Neither tourist nor local, at the edge of a large umbrella I sipped a thin beer under a heavy air. The split pea soup is pretty good too, but that’s not part of the scene.
In the late evening the whole sky had come down over Amsterdam and afterwards, the rain having passed, the atmosphere had become dense and thick. The waiters walked around with a dripping wet rag, wiping whole puddles off of tables. People need to drink, after all.
In this scene I sat, as I said, sipping my thin beer, watching the boats round the curve at the Oudezijds Achterburgwal gracht while I got back to some basics with Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. I’d always suspected that American history was rooted in some shady stories but I didn’t know the half of it, it seems. Will Hunting was right; that book will knock you on your fucking ass.
But the boats — they kept passing, the curves never seeming to run out of them. A small one meandered ’round the bend and stopped at an inconspicuous doorway at the water level with no lights on. I wondered what they were doing there, in that dark corner out of sight that only only ducks and villains even notice. A place where people vanish into the night. Strange things happen in these places, right before our eyes. Sights and symbols are everywhere and it’s up to us to turn away and let them happen.
Which is exactly what I did. I don’t need the extra stress, man.
—
The uncertainties and pressures of the path I’ve been walking for the better part of this last year are out of sight. Politics doesn’t begin to describe it. I’m still waiting on a gaggle of statute of limitations so you’ll pardon the lack of specifics, but it’s a doozy. Suffice to say that it involves a lot of very roundabout language, 24-7 monitoring of all communications on every channel and of course, a LOT of air travel. The amazing thing is that it’s working well when I’m amazed it’s working at all.
The gist of it is this: I’ve been working in what equates to a pressurized bee-hive. Deadlines loom and crumbling deliverables are demanded as if Jesus had just walked out of the desert. Meanwhile, touchy topics like layoffs and salary reductions fly unchecked through people’s inboxes and nobody know’s what’s going to happen. Like some half-mad badger in a paper cage they keep me under the guise of effectiveness, skill and track record, but I know better. Some cheap executive type upstairs in a building far from any I occupy is covering his ass like red on a baboon. Sooner or later, when the walls of irreconsilable confusion come down and the barbarians come rushing in shouting for actual credentials I exepect to see the nail end of a finger protruding out of a very expensive suit.
That’s kind of a typical day for me, I guess. I hear I’m not alone but I sure as hell don’t see it. You people do a hell of a job hiding shit like that.
—
Later that night, darkness continued to fill the space as the early signs of midnight called for the sun to set sometime after 10. Amsterdam is farther north than most people realize and in late June the place sometimes feels a bit like Oslo with the canals of Venice and the heavy air of Florida. Without, you know, the Cubans.
Just kidding. There are plenty of Cubans here.
Glowing windows in the dark raise questions and stir desires. What’s in there? And who? What are they doing? And could I do it better? I’m no longer able to distinguish fear from anxiety, politics from causality. Things start to fall apart.
The banjo blues still play in my head and my eyes wander the scenes looking for a grip, a handle — something to help it all along the way. There used to be a fine line that dictated equilibrium for me, between alcohol and sleep. That balance was maintained, day in and day out. Who knows where it’s gone to now?
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Jo skipped down her steep Dutch stairs in her flat in the Old South, a far-off land nearly 20 minutes away from Amsterdam’s Center. The cafés in that neighborhood of Amsterdam crawl with the affluent and those horny for the appearance of the same. Bordering Vondel Park, a Central Park-esque sort of green area, many vagrants wander outside of the perimeter after dark looking for a port-o-potty or somewhere else to defecate. Also, many artists live in the area due to its proximity to the Museumplein and the Concertgebouw. Though most of them are hard-to-swallow hipsters with ‘artist’ simply written on their H&M vests, there are some who are worth knowing, and even visiting on a warm summer afternoon.
I heard the keys jostle in the lock as the bolt was withdrawn.
“Hellooo!” She said, perky and excited as she usually is when the weather is this nice. And it was. She was in jeans and a floral-patterend blouses that isn’t really trying but always looks great when there’s sun to shine on the skin.
The sky was clear and the greens were greener than I could ever get used to. Spring in Amsterdam is usually no different from the rest of the year, overcast and grey. The cold never seems to stop blowing in from the North Sea, except when it does. Then you get days like this, with flowers and people and football out in the open and lots of beer and laughter on the narrow streets; pretty girls everywhere and no matter where you look it’s as if you were seeing it through a polarized lens.
No shit.
—
It was good to see her and I gave her a big hug full of relief. I’m not sure why the relief, but that’s how it felt. She kissed my cheek and we went to a place in the park where you can lie in a pile of pillows and order beer and some fried Dutch food. We waxed philosophic, launching deep thoughts into the grassy fields beneath the canopy, shaded and serene with laughter and sunlight.
“You know,” she said in a Polish accent mixed with German and what I think is some kind of old Croatian, “we have very similar, uh, professional situations, I think.”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling, sipping my beer, “we’re both, in a way, consultants.” She didn’t smile at my wit, but I often suspect she doesn’t get half of my jokes. I’m learning to be alright with that.
“No, but I mean…we both work from home, and it can be very difficult to do that when you don’t have people close by that are in a similar situation.”
“Oh, yeah. I know, right?” I said right back to her. “I remember when you used to live there in the center — in that flat that belonged to a friend of yours who was out of town or something? Yeah, and we would grab a coffee in the morning before we each dove into our work, and then later we’d catch up for lunch, maybe, or perhaps another afternoon coffee…”
“Yeah, that was fantastic, eh?” She said, with her eager smile. We both dwelled on the memory for a second.
“Sure. Until you moved to the Old South with all these yuppies,” I chuckled. She did too, knowing full well what I was talking about in the old south of Amsterdam, even if she didn’t know how to translate the word ‘yuppy’ in either Polish or German.
“Yeah,” I continued, “working from home is great but if you have to enjoy the freedoms it brings alone, it gets pathetic pretty fast.”
“Hmmmfff,” she agreed, “I remember when I used to go to the café in the corner, or else take the time to cook something for lunch…now I just make myself a ham sandwich or something and eat it in the kitchen, with Lord of the Rings playing in the background or something.”
“Such a nerd,” I prodded, and she stuck her tongue out at me most indifferently. “And is there anything, ” I continued, “more depressing than a ham sandwich eaten hunched over the sink? With your elbows out? And Gandalf murmuring riddles to ancient kings?” She kept smiling. “No. No, there isn’t.” Which is true. “I think the difference between you and me, though, is a factor of motivation: you’re after an objective, and it’s the means that’s bothering you. I have no objective. I just love the means that the lifestyle provides me because of where I’m going. Wherever THAT is. But I yearn for an objective.”
“Exactly!” Jo seemed to get it, but I’m never too sure. In general the phrase I most often hear after describing the superficialities of my job is, “wow, you wanna trade jobs?” But I don’t put all that much effort into describing it better and more concisely, and most people just aren’t equipped to handle the mediorcity that comes with doing purposeless tasks that cover your face with a veil of bullshit that you can only hide if you’re really in love with what you do. So I don’t bother.
Only once did I feel that I got through to someone when discussing the meat of my beef with my lifestyle. Usually, when I describe to people how despite the apparent glamour of constant travel there IS a downside that can only really be understood by those who’ve lived it, the reply comes in the form of a “well, ups and downs, right?” or “take the good with the bad,” and other, equally meaningless statements. But once when I told my brother, his response was very refreshing.
“Yeah, mate. You’re fucked,” he said.
Brilliant. Someone gets it.
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