On the blustery winds of October came the great misfortune. A one-two punch of deeply awful luck:
I should have seen it coming. Despite Mattijs and Jeroen’s assurances that the Dutch government handed out funding for the arts like subprime mortgages in an Orlando suburb, the idea that it would be prepared to hand over in excess of eighty thousand euros on six weeks’ notice to a fledgling company with no production history had been a tad optimistic. Nor had it been terribly savvy of me to leave my bag, which contained my credit cards, my checkbook, and what remained of my ready cash, unattended at an outdoor party in the red-light district. Jeroen had warned me for weeks about stealthy pickpockets who crawled underneath tables in dimly lit restaurants and other public places, stealing everything they could lay their hands on and occasionally molesting the private parts of ladies who couldn’t keep their legs closed while they ate, but I had dismissed this as an urban legend, like the people who claim they woke up in a bathtub full of ice cubes with “Congratulations! Your kidney is now on its way to Ecuador!” scrawled in eyeliner on their shower curtain. (I bet they took out their kidneys themelves. Some people will do anything for attention.)
Jeroen at least made a show of sympathy, but Mattijs was intractable. He had been raised a Catholic and had a rather more inflexible sense of retribution than his irreligious companion. “This is what happens when you buy a stolen bicycle,” he said, with no small hint of satisfaction. “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a bag for a bike.”
Jeroen tried to smile. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t go home. I can’t even book a plane ticket without a credit card.”
“Maybe your parents can make you one,” Mattijs said hopefully.
“No!” I said, startled at the vehemence of my response. “I’m not going home. And I don’t want my parents to know anything about this. I’m sick and tired of asking them for help.”
Deep down, I had always known this day must come. You can run from reality, but you can’t escape it. It just hangs back, biding its time, mocking you, until the horrible moment when it bursts forward in a kinetic jolt of speed, leaving you with no way to catch up. Eventually, you have to accept that you’re outclassed. There was a throb in my voice as I said the words I had hoped never to utter as long as I lived. “I guess I’ll have to get a job.”
Some people wax rhapsodic about the nature of work, the sense of purpose derived from honest labor, the satisfaction of receiving one’s hard-earned pay. There is a name for these people: retirees. I, on the other hand, have always felt it was more than a coincidence that “job” as in “occupation” was spelled the same way as “Job” as in “Book of.” To my mind, both were synonyms for crushing despair.
My terrible work experiences started early. In high school, I worked on the weekends as a barista at a strip mall coffee shop in Omaha called Casey Joe’s. I had noticed the “Help Wanted” sign in the window one afternoon while I was picking up the dry cleaning and, sick of asking my parents for money every weekend (although as yet ignorant of how this would become the major theme in my life), went in to fill out an application. The shop was owned by a man named Spider, who appeared to be in his late thirties, with thick red hair that he wore piled on top of his head in a Wilma Flintstone chignon and forearms covered in intricate spiderweb tattoos. When I wondered aloud if he got the tattoos because of his name, or if he had gotten his name because of the tattoos, he gazed down at his arms in wonderment as though he had never seen them before. “Nobody’s ever asked me that before,” he marveled. “That’s a far-out question, man. Can you start right now?”
Spider gave me his personal phone number in case anything went wrong, but I was only permitted to use it between the hours of three and five p.m., which I think were the only hours of the day during which he was awake. Otherwise, I was on my own, although I came to realize this was really better for business, as Spider tended to put some patrons off. Apart from his tattooed arms and fiery bouffant, his wardrobe appeared to consist solely of a University of Kansas T-shirt with the sleeves torn off at the shoulders and two alternating sets of pants: one made out of a rough, multicolored Guatemalan fabric that looked like the woven mat my mother had put by the door in the mudroom; the other a pair of black chef’s pants with a colorful habanero-pepper motif, which he wore on more formal occasions, like when he visited the bank to dispute the terms of his small business loan. Still, it wasn’t the style of Spider’s clothing that was the problem so much as its condition. He had stopped using deodorants, shampoos, laundry detergents, and other commercially produced personal care products years ago, he told me, because the chemicals utilized in their manufacture interfered with the body’s natural ability to cleanse itself.
“I had some pants that could stand up on their own,” he said wistfully. “That was the shit. Those pants could stand up and tell you what they’d seen, man. Then my bitch ex-girlfriend threw them out. That fucking cunt just did not understand the rich pageant that is life, you know?”
Despite his aversion to soap and water, Spider did avail himself of the odor-masking properties of essential oils, particularly patchouli oil, which he splashed liberally over his person as part of his regular toilette. This aroma, combined with the ripe scent of stale marijuana (not to mention the other, more intimate smells) that clung to him, formed a pungent cloud that lingered in the shop long after he had gone, making it somewhat difficult for me to push on my increasingly scarce customers the assortment of vegan quiches and muffins in the glass case beside the counter. Nobody wanted to eat after they met Spider, especially after I mentioned, as instructed, that all baked goods had been lovingly prepared on the premises by the proprietor himself.
I had worked at Casey Joe’s for about two months, until Spider asked me to come in after school one day, saying we needed to talk. It had come to his attention that I was frequently absent from the front of the store during my shift. I refrained from telling him that for the past three weeks, the only customer I had seen was my mother, who graciously stopped in during her morning walk and would gamely stay to keep me company, ordering coffees until her hands started to shake. Nor did I mention that my frequent absences from the counter were because I had to run next door to the 7-Eleven to buy milk, sugar, and other supplies Spider had neglected to replenish, which I would pay for out of my tip jar (and since there were no tips, out of my wallet).
“But that’s not the real problem,” Spider continued. “The real beef we have is this.” He drew a CD from behind his back and dangled it in front of my face. It was the original Broadway soundtrack to Sweeney Todd, which I had accidentally left in the CD player after my shift on Sunday. Sweeney Todd, it seemed, was offensive to vegans.
“Look, man,” said Spider. “Casey Joe’s isn’t just, like, another fuckin’ coffee place. Casey Joe’s is an experience. And that experience extends to the music, man.”
I looked down at the floor, fixing my gaze on one of Spider’s fungal toenails. As usual, and in flagrant defiance of the health code, he was barefoot. “I hrrmm the Grfful Durr,” I murmured.
He leaned in close. The stench was overwhelming. I willed myself not to faint. “What? What did you say?”
“I said, I hate the Grateful Dead.”
Spider shook his head. “I don’t think this is going to work out.”
In college, I was briefly employed in a vintage clothing and memorabilia shop run by an irascible cabal of paranoid senior citizens, until I was fired for making a customer cry when she asked me how old I was and I told her. After graduation, I tried my hand at office work and was dismissed from two temp agencies in quick succession: from the first for using the phone at my desk and from the second for downloading a video of the man with the world’s largest testicles on an office computer. Now, with an employability level somewhere between a sex offender and a functional illiterate, I was seeking gainful employment in a foreign country where I didn’t speak the language and didn’t have a work visa. And as vice was regulated in Holland, without a visa, I couldn’t even be a drug dealer or a sex worker.
There was only one place I could go.
Boom Chicago was an Amsterdam institution. Once a guerilla mission of three American college grads who wanted to bring Chicago-style improvisational comedy to the European masses, it now occupied a grand nineteenth-century edifice on the corner of the Leidseplein, the bright, bold lettering of its signage clashing queasily with its cornices of pale stone. Fully equipped with two bars, a restaurant, and a black-box theater seating three hundred, Boom Chicago was also an American embassy of sorts, a clubhouse for travelers grown weary of all that was Dutch. The Dutch have a concept called gezelligheid, or coziness, which they consider a mandatory precept for life. Gezelligheid is a single ginger biscuit served with coffee, a napping cat on a well-worn velvet cushion—the small, the tasteful, the perfectly made. Boom Chicago, blessedly, was none of these things. At Boom, you could order a giant hamburger with French fries, a huge plate of pasta smothered in meaty sauce. You could have foamy beer served ice-cold in a frosty pitcher, instead of flat and warm in a tiny glass. You could have ice cubes in your Coke and watch American comedians with reassuringly Semitic features perform skits about horny grandmas and farting space people and Dick Cheney. It is a mathematical rule in Holland that, no matter where you go, every fourth song you hear will always be by Phil Collins, but at Boom Chicago one was spared the spectacle of grown men interrupting themselves in mid-sentence to close their eyes and sing along phonetically to “In the Air Tonight.” If you didn’t look outside you could be in any comedy club in any mid-sized American city, and when I entered the building for the first time, it was with an odd mixture of relief and defeat, like stumbling into your filthy apartment half-drunk at dawn.
You didn’t have to pretend to be Canadian at Boom Chicago.
Another Century in Paradise
PHIL COLLINS AND THE DUTCH: A SURVEY
The Law of Phil Collins
Given: In every bar, café, shop, or other public place in the Netherlands where background music is played, every fourth song will always be a song by Phil Collins.
“Phil Collins is a magnificent soul, he has touched the world through his music and continues to fight against world poverty . . . He is one of life’s true heroes.”
—Sir Bob Geldof, singer and humanitarian
“I’ve only ever bought one album for myself and it was But Seriously by Phil Collins, and if there’s a better reason never to buy another album, then I’d like to hear it.”
—David Mitchell, U.K. comedian and Shukert crush object
(Ed. note: Mr. Mitchell has since admitted to buying an additional album:
I Dreamed a Dream by Susan Boyle)
“I’ll have the music, and then I just turn the microphone on, press play, record, and sing. And whatever comes out is the melody.”
—Phil Collins, Emperor of the Netherlands
Sobering Statistics
9: Number of Phil Collins solo albums in existence, including the soundtracks to Tarzan and Brother Bear.
9: Number of Phil Collins number-one singles (U.S. and U.K. total).
10: The number of times one can hear “Against All Odds” in a single day without entertaining seriously suicidal thoughts.
11: The number of times one can hear same in one day without actually killing oneself.
12: The number of times I have personally heard “Land of Confusion” during a single evening in Amsterdam.
1: Number of psychotic episodes I have personally suffered caused by listening to same as terrifying flashback of the life-size Ronald Reagan puppet in the video reacted horribly with the psilocybin in the hallucinogenic mushrooms I had consumed earlier on same evening.
Prior to my arrival in Amsterdam, I had never harbored any particular animus toward Phil Collins. Sure, I jammed out to the rock saxophone in “Sussudio,” or mouthed “Against All Odds” into a stick of deodorant if it came on the radio while I performed my morning toilette, just like anyone with two ears and a heart, but I had never given him much thought until the ubiquity of his music and his obvious importance in Dutch social life became impossible to ignore. I had, of course, seen people in America halt themselves mid-sentence in order to call attention to the brief but penultimate drum solo from “In the Air Tonight” (and I would just like to mention that I wrote this sentence before the film The Hangover came out, in which Mike Tyson does this very thing—it was funny because it’s true), but in Amsterdam, the entire bar will go silent, faces shining with joyful anticipation, bicycle-toned buttocks poised at the edge of their seats, as listeners wait for that fevered cascade of cymbals to push them over the precipice to aural orgasm. Once, I watched in awe as a crowd of thuggish football fans from the provinces, dressed in regulation orange, tearfully and tenderly embraced each other as they sang along phonetically to “Take Me Home.” The strength of their combined voices flooded the night streets with song. Phil Collins to the Dutch is like Jerry Lewis to the French, David Hasselhoff to the Germans, Alan Alda to the Jews. He is not of them, but they have claimed him for their own.
I was determined to get to the bottom of this. Perhaps Phil Collins used to be a speed skater? Perhaps the raw emotion displayed in “One More Night” or the way he harrowingly channels the feelings of the homeless in “Another Day in Paradise” is subconsciously reminiscent of the traditional smartlappen, the rousing, tear-jerking ballads of Life’s Great Pageant (often accompanied by accordion) cherished by Amsterdammers young and old? These hypotheses seemed unsatisfactory. As did the responses I received when I started asking questions. “What are you talking about?” one man said to me, in shock. “The whole world loves Phil Collins.” I was not permitted a follow-up question. The drum solo from “In the Air Tonight” was coming up.
Why do the Dutch love Phil Collins so much? After months of investigation, my answer is this: I have no fucking idea.
So instead, I have done what a lot of cultural critics do and just made up something crazy.
Philipus Davidus Carolus van Collins was born in 1541 in the Gelderland town of Arnhem, the only child of Boudewijn, a tallow harvester, and his wife, Saskia, an illiterate Belgian. He showed a talent for music early on, often singing songs of his own invention to the vats of tallow in his father’s workshop, until one day, fate intervened. Philipus was slogging home through the peat bogs on the outskirts of the village after a long day of berry-picking, when he noticed a leak had sprung up in the mighty dike that held back the water from the town. Bravely, Philipus wedged his entire body inside the dike’s cavity, feeling his life ebb away as the water filled his lungs. In a final act of desperation, he prayed to St. Willibrord, patron saint of the Low Countries. The village was saved, and St. Willibrord rewarded young Philipus with immortality, like Tuck Everlasting. Fearless and now unable to die, he set off to seek his fortune. He led the Dutch troops to victory in their battle for independence from Spain in 1568, ushering in the Dutch Golden Age. After amassing a mercantile fortune, he next popped up in 1640, when he apprenticed himself to the up-and-coming Rembrandt van Rijn, serving as a model for many of the artist’s most famous works, such as The Night Watch and many of his portraits of Saskia. (Some art historians claim that Saskia van Uylenburgh was actually a disguised Philipus van Collins, and that the two men were in fact lovers.) Over time, Philipus van Collins became a party to almost every great event in Dutch history, a Zelig of the Low Countries.Sometime shortly after World War II (which was a hell of a time for everybody) Philipus decided that after four hundred years he could use a change of scenery and relocated to the U.K., where he lived quietly, until one day the Angel Gabriel in disguise as a man named Peter Gabriel approached him about starting a band.
And so the Dutch alone of all peoples know the true identity of the international pop star known as Phil Collins. And only the Dutch can understand the sublime mysteries of his plaintive song.
It was late afternoon when I arrived at Boom to look for work. The downstairs bar was not yet crowded. A couple of boys in knit caps sat hunched over a multicolored map, struggling to make sense of its baffling anatomy lesson, the curling arteries with unpronounceable names. A girl with glasses sat behind the glass window of the box office, methodically counting out a stack of white envelopes, while another, a pudgy moppet of no more than seventeen dressed in a regulation polo shirt and long apron, rushed up and down the stairs bearing trays of glassware fresh from the dishwasher. Neither of them seemed to notice me. Timidly, I approached the bar, where a dark-haired man in a black T-shirt stood idly flicking a wet rag against the wood.
“Excuse me . . .” I began.
“What can I get you?” The metallic Australian twang startled me, throwing me off script.
I cleared my throat. “I’m . . . um, looking for a job.”
To my surprise, he gave me a sharp, knowing nod and brought his rag back down to the bar with a slap. “American?”
“Yes,” I said hesitantly. “But I didn’t vote for Bush.”
“I don’t give a shit,” he said. “No visa?”
“No,” I said.
“It wasn’t a question.” He turned away from me to straighten a bottle so that its label showed to its best advantage. “You have to speak to Kat. She handles the promoters.”
Promoters? Not those wretched souls who accosted you desperately on the street in New York, swathed in layers of fleece and nylon, insisting that you liked comedy and they had just the show for you. “Um . . . well . . . I thought I could help with the box office, or maybe work at the bar . . .”
“No papers means promoter. She’ll be here in about twenty minutes or so,” the bartender said. “You can wait at the bar if you want. You can have something to drink, but it’ll have to be a soft one. Otherwise you’ll have to pay.”
I thanked him and asked for a Diet Coke. It came in a big plastic glass with a lot of real ice cubes. Just this was nearly enough to bring me to my knees in gratitude.
Kat, the promotions head, arrived on schedule. The bartender shrugged loosely in my direction. Kat looked at me quizzically.
“New blood,” he grunted. “American, finally.”
“Oh! Oh, great! Just one second,” Kat said to me with a smile. She disappeared up the stairs and returned in a moment, divested of her coat and carrying a large black binder emblazoned with the logo of the club. Kat was stunningly beautiful, tall and delicate with an Audrey Hepburn, gazelle-like loveliness, and radiated the kind of placid serenity common to people who have spent their entire lives being admired. Despite these obvious flaws, I liked her at once, and I soon confessed the whole sad story—the canceled play, the stolen wallet—that had brought me to this sorry state of affairs. Kat was sympathetic. “Well,” she said, “if you want to promote for us, that’s fine. We’d be happy to have you.”
I fumbled with the zipper of my bag. “I have a résumé, if—”
She waved me away. “We have meetings every Thursday at five o’clock. Come this week, and you can get started right away.”
To be a promoter at Boom Chicago one needed to be only three things: physically ambulatory, reasonably fluent in English, and willing to approach total strangers on the street. There were literally no other qualifications. Nothing else mattered—not work experience, nationality, criminal record, nor respect for other people’s personal space. In fact, a lack of the latter was encouraged. It helped get the point across.
Our hours were assigned on a first-come, first-served basis; at the beginning of the week, each promoter signed up for shifts on the big paper calendar in the upstairs office. Each shift was three hours long and situated at a major tourist landmark—the Heineken Brewery, the Van Gogh Museum—where the promoter, bundled tightly against the chilling autumn gusts of the North Sea, would stand outside, keeping an ear open for English speakers. Americans, Brits, Australians, Canadians, South Africans, it didn’t matter; once the target was identified, the promoter approached, engaging them in friendly conversation and offering a free guide to the city. The guides, thin booklets printed in color on flimsy newsprint, were published by Boom Chicago, with covers decorated with the club’s logo and a “comedy” photograph: a burly bearded man in the starched white cap of a little Dutch girl gesturing gleefully toward a joint the size of a large cone of fries, an elderly woman holding an enormous black dildo to her lips. Disarmed by the common language and the seemingly magnanimous gesture, the tourists usually accepted these guides gratefully, confiding how desperate they were for a map, how tired they were, their plans for the evening. Some might tell you slightly more about their visit than you cared to know.
“She used some kind of antiseptic gel that gave me a terrible rash down there,” a bluff fellow in a Miami Dolphins jersey told me, “you know, on my asshole. So I figured I better take it easy tonight. Just a little oral, maybe from one of them window girls. You don’t happen to know how much that’ll run me, do you?”
That was when the smart promoter moved in for the kill. Rather than waste your money on yet another dead-eyed blow job, she would say, why not enjoy a real American-style meal while watching the best—and only—English-language comedy show that Amsterdam had to offer? If you like Saturday Night Live, if you like Whose Line Is It Anyway? (for our British friends), then you’ll love Boom Chicago. This was when the subject would move quickly away from you, as if they had suddenly noticed a stream of fresh urine trickling from your pant leg. The bolder ones might declare that they could never get enough dead-eyed blow jobs, thank you very much, but there were always a few, about one in seven, who expressed noncommittal interest, at which point the promoter would call their attention to the stamped coupon printed on the back of the booklet that would give them a hefty discount at the box office if they decided to come to the show.
Each promoter was assigned a rubber stamp, the kind an elementary school teacher might use at the top of a completed worksheet to indicate a job well done. Mine was a knife and fork intersecting each other in the form of an X, like a sign on the interstate indicating restaurants ahead. The stamp was how you got paid. Customers came to the show, presented their coupons at the box office, and the attendant made a note of the stamp: how many smiley faces, how many palm trees, how many top-hatted penguins. For each customer who presented her stamped booklet to the cashier, the promoter received three euro. Unless she had persuaded Kat into assigning her the final shift of the day, luring in customers directly outside the theater during the two hours before the show (for which she was granted an eighteen-euro flat fee), this was all she would receive. This was how the company got away with hiring foreigners with no work papers—technically, none of us were on the payroll. We were independent contractors or, on very bad weeks, volunteers. Likewise, the three-hour shift was only a suggestion, the maximum time you had before your replacement turned up. If in the first five minutes of work you felt confident that you had lured an Australian tour group or a herd of good-natured Canadians large enough to be worth your while, you were welcome to fuck off and spend the rest of the shift as you pleased.
After a shift, promoters were welcome at the bar, where they would be given a single glass of wine, beer, or well drink, free of charge. Boom Chicago also offered a family meal, a bountifully American plate of food with a vegetarian option, every day at five p.m., provided you had the foresight to inscribe your name on the sign-up sheet in the kitchen. Each meal cost two euros, to be deducted from one’s weekly take, although whether the sweet-natured Kat, who was in charge of dispensing the wages, actually had the heart to do this was unclear.
Our weekly gatherings, at which we were presented with our earnings, had a feeling similar to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: the same underlying buzz of tension, the same cloud of cigarette smoke, the same furtive gang of misfits gnawing at their cuticles, their eyes darting around the circle with a mixture of worry and hope. We were an international bunch. Luke, a powerfully built Australian, fancied himself a bit of a ladies’ man; every week he was full of fresh stories about his many and varied sexual conquests, the telling of which he seemed to regard as a sort of job interview, arguing his qualifications for an opening that would never exist. Carolina and Sebastiao were from Portugal, in love, and claimed to be vampires. Sebastiao spoke no English, which disqualified him from full promoterhood, but when Carolina had declared heatedly that only Sebastiao’s presence could prevent her from feeding on the hapless humans displaying an interest in improv comedy, Kat permitted him to accompany her on her shifts, provided he refrained from wearing the red contact lenses that made him look like a cross between an albino rabbit and Dark Heart, the evil red-haired boy from the second Care Bears movie. The girl with the Raggedy Andy bob I had seen carrying trays of glasses up and down the steps was Hattie, a teenager from New Zealand who seemed to have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting until, that is, she opened her mouth.
“I took four E’s last night,” she declared cheerily, her pupils still dilated. “And then I met these guys on the street, and they said they had a boat moored in North Amsterdam, so I went back with them and we smoked some crystal and then they all had sex with me.”
“Were they Italian?” I asked, concerned. “What did they make you do?”
Hattie looked thoughtful. “Actually, I think they were Turks. Whatever language they were speaking, it was weird. Lots of k’s. Like this.” She imitated their speech with a series of glottal clacks, like a farmhand subduing a troublesome chicken. “I didn’t use a condom, but that doesn’t matter since I’m already pregnant from Luke. You’ll come with me to the abortion clinic, won’t you? I’ll buy you a falafel afterward. It’ll be fun!”
I didn’t know quite what to say to Hattie. I wasn’t sure if she was looking to shock or to be comforted. If she was anything like me, it was probably a little bit of both. So I just did what I wished someone would do for me. I patted her shoulder and, in my best big sister voice, told her everything would be okay.
“I know that,” she said, looking at me curiously. “This will be my fourth one. I just want someone to hang out with in the waiting room. The magazines are all in Dutch.”
Sometimes I thought I could learn a lot from Hattie.
Of all the promoters, I first got to know Mattijs, who (out of deference to Mattijs the former) I always referred to as Beta Mattijs. Beta Mattijs was the only Dutch promoter at Boom Chicago. He spoke English with a flawless American accent, despite having never been to the States. He was just a savant of the ear, able to mimic any voice or accent down to the smallest pattern of speech. I had never heard anything like it. I knew he secretly dreamed of being an impressionist or a stand-up, but was held back by his fanatical devotion to the tenets of a highly restrictive form of punk rock, a rigorous code of ethics that seemed to shun any kind of virtuosity or material success. To Beta Mattijs’s mind, hustling tourists in the street for pennies was punk rock. Delighting a paying audience with your pitch-perfect Liza Minnelli impression, tragically, was not. This made me sad.
Observing our rapport, Kat assigned him to accompany me on my first few shifts, to show me how it was done and to help me feel comfortable. To watch Beta Mattijs in action was a thing of beauty. Fearlessly, he would approach a line of cranky, jet-lagged tourists, effortlessly veering back and forth between the five languages he spoke until he found the right one. He flirted, teased, cajoled. He gave directions, posed for pictures, accepted hugs. He always made the sale.
Now and then, I caught glimpses of the real actors in the office or smoking in the stairwell. They had all been imported from the great comedy factories of Chicago and L.A. and Ontario, and many made no bones about wanting to get back there as soon as possible, preferably with a writing gig on SNL or a recurring guest spot on The Drew Carey Show. I would stare at their product-rich hair, their big, straight American teeth and familiar American shoes and sometimes I wanted to scream: I’m an upper-middle-class Jewish kid from the Midwest! I studied acting at NYU! I took tap! My Bat Mitzvah colors were hot pink and black! Don’t lump me in with the Portuguese vampires and that guy from Romania with one hand! I’m one of you! But they looked right through me and went back to talking to their agents on their sleek transatlantic cell phones.
There was only one promoter the actors acknowledged: Antonio, our de facto leader. Antonio was from Argentina and had been at Boom Chicago for as long as anyone could remember. In accordance with his seniority, Antonio didn’t hustle the streets in the cold like the rest of us, but had the privilege of dropping great stacks of booklets, stamped with his personal emblem of the skull and crossbones, in the lobbies of all the major hotels. He would roll in at the very end of our weekly meetings—in his leather race-car driver’s jacket and tight T-shirts emblazoned with characters from ’70s television shows—to collect his Ziploc bag of cash, which inevitably dwarfed the rest. He hardly needed the money. It was said he had a wife, an older woman with a high-paying job in finance. Antonio was unmistakably a cool guy. I was terrified of him.
• • •
One afternoon, when I arrived to stamp brochures, Antonio was sitting alone at the bar. With some trepidation, I sat on the stool next to him, trying to look hip and international.
“Kat say you are from New York,” Antonio said, without so much as a glance in my direction. It was the first time he had ever spoken to me. His accent was strong, but he enunciated every word, as though he expected me to have trouble understanding him. I wasn’t sure if this was meant to be considerate, or mocking.
I stretched my lips into a hopeful grimace, like an infant with gas. “Yes,” I said, “that’s right.”
Turning toward me, he nodded solemnly. “You were there for the blackout?” He was referring to the catastrophic power outage that August that had shut down New York City and much of the Northeast. I had been in Zurich at the time, although I had certainly heard the horror stories of people wandering penniless through the streets, unable to retrieve cash from ATMs; of the elderly and handicapped forced to drag themselves up fourteen flights of steps to their suffocating apartments; of packs of neighborhood children running wild over rooftops in the darkness.
“No,” I said.
“I was there,” said Antonio.
He told me the following story:
My wife, she is from New York. When we are married, I live there with her for one year. In August, I find on the Internet one very cheap ticket, and I decide that since she is working all the time I will go back for one visit to see some friends of mine.
From the first time I am flying into New York City, I love so much to look out from the window at the twinkling lights. This time I lift the shade up to look from my window, and immediately I can see that something is strange. The lights, they are not there. The plane lands, but we are not told to stand up and gather our baggages from the overhead. We are told nothing. For maybe three hours, we are in our seats, wondering what has happened. Is it one bomb? Is it one terrorist attack? All around me, people are trying to call their families on cell phones. One woman she is crying. “I have come for the funeral of my father,” she is saying, “and I cannot get through.” She spit on her phone in anger. Finally, the captain appears. I am afraid the other voyagers will throw at him their phones, like they are making one stoning. You know stoning, as in the films of Monty Python.
The captain say to us there is blackout. No electricity anywhere in New York. We are the last flight to land, he say; all other flights must go elsewhere. You know the Americans go crazy always. Even when it is something tiny what goes wrong, the Americans, it is like they are eating their own skin from their bodies. But at this time also the Dutch people are going crazy. I begin to be for really afraid.
We are on the plane for maybe two hours more. In the terminal, it is madness. It is like the scene from one movie about one war. As if we are refugees fleeing our village in terror. Everywhere, piles of baggages. People lie down on the floor and they do not get up again. I have no American money. The cash machine, she does not work. The phone, she does not work. Five, six hours I am sitting on the floor, listening to the screams of the children. Then, through the darkness, I see one bright light. Is reporters, from the television station.
“Will you give us one interview for the television,” they say.
I am tired, I am dirty, I smell bad. “No,” I say. “Get lost. I don’t do a fucking interview.”
They begin to walk away, taking with them the light. I cry out, “Wait! I will do interview, if when you are finished you will drive with me into Brooklyn.” They say okay.
He paused dramatically.
But my friend, she is not at home. I am so hungry, I think I am going to die. People pass by and they think I am one homeless person. My friend, she lives in a Spanish neighborhood. All around me, people speaking Spanish, having barbecue. They make fire in garbage cans. They cook everything from the refrigerators before it will go bad. The bodegas give out cases of beers, slices of cheese. I go up to one group I see. In Spanish I am explaining what has happened to me, that I am coming from Amsterdam and I do not know where is my friend. They invite me to eat with them. We cook chickens. We dance to Spanish music they are playing from one boom box. We are drunk, shouting in the streets. Is amazing.
Soon, is very dark. Nobody wants me to come home with them. They do not trust me in their dark homes with their children. They give me chicken, but still I am a stranger.
Finally, one man say, “Is okay, you will come home with me.”
His apartment is very small, one room with one couch and one bed. Is totally black inside. He begin to light some candles in long glasses with one painting of the Virgin Mary on the side. He ask me do I want something to drink.
I say to him, “Look, man, thank you so much for this. I really appreciate you will let me stay here for tonight. And if you want ever to come to Amsterdam, you will be my guest.”
The man smile, and he say, “I love to go to Amsterdam, but I am not permitted to leave the country.”
I say, “Why?”
“Because,” he say, “I am convicted felon. I am in prison for twelve years.”
My flesh, it has goose bumps. I ask, “For what?”
“Murder,” he says.
Then he come and sit very close beside me on the couch. He say, “Do you want to take a shower?”
I say I am tired and pretend immediately to fall to sleep. He get up from the couch. Very slowly he take off all his clothes, and finally, he go into the bathroom. I wonder if I should escape. But where I am to go? Outside there is no light. It is pitch black. Whatever I do, I am going to die.
A long time passes, and he come back. He wears only one small towel. Through my eyelid I can see him drop the towel to the floor. He stands naked over me. I don’t dare to move. For maybe twenty minutes he stands like this.
I don’t sleep one minute this night. All the time I am thinking terrible things. He will rape me. He will murder me. I wonder if it is better he rape me all night and leave me alive, or is better to be killed immediately but not raped. I stay like this until at last one crack of light comes through the window and I escape. I take my bags and sneak out like a thief into the dawn.
I think I cheat death that night. I think it was meant for me to be murdered. Now, everywhere I go in Amsterdam, I see one woman. She is dressed all in black clothes. Her hair is black. One day, she turn toward me. Her face is like a mask. My wife, she thinks I am crazy. She cannot see the woman. Nobody see her but me. The woman is death. She has come to find me. I will not escape forever.
Antonio was pale. He seized his half-full beer glass and poured the remaining contents down his throat. “This is the end of the story.”
I was tempted to throw my arms around his neck. You’re not cool! I wanted to cry in relief. You’re a crazy person! Instead, I said, “Do you really believe that?”
Antonio mused, “When I go back to New York, I will make one documentary film. I will collect the stories of people in the blackout. Some people are raped. Other people maybe their brother was murdered. Maybe there will also be good things too. Maybe some people find their soul mate in the darkness. Could be like the documentary of Spielberg, when he films the stories of the survivors of the Holocaust. You know this documentary?”
“Oh, boy, do I,” I said.
“My grandmother, she is one Jewess, born in Argentina,” said Antonio. “But now she is baptized, she sits at home all day and sends her money to the 700 Club.”
I told him that my Great-Aunt Rita, who in addition to being a Jewess was also a recluse and a midget, had upon her death left the overwhelming bulk of her assets directly to Jim Bakker. “She liked men who cry.”
Antonio smiled for the first time. “Mattijs likes you,” he said. “I think he hopes you will be his girlfriend. Do you like him also in this way?”
To be honest, it had crossed my mind. It probably wouldn’t be any grand passion, but it would be nice to spend the night at his apartment sometimes and give Jeroen and Alpha Mattijs a little privacy. Maybe we would go to the country sometime, to the village where he grew up. I could meet his mother and learn how to milk a cow.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”
“And his earlobes? You do not mind this?” Beta Mattijs wore plugs in his earlobe, the kind that stretch the flesh and leave a gaping hole when removed. Normally, I found these terrifying, as they reminded me of the tags punched through the ears of cattle marked for death, for whom my classmates and I would weep during our annual field trip to the stockyards, but Beta Mattijs’s plugs were small and tasteful.
“I don’t know,” I said again. “I think I can handle them.”
Antonio nodded gravely. “Okay. But if you decide to do the sex with him, there is one thing I must tell you. Inside his penis, he wears one ring.”
“What?”
“He wears one metal ring. Is pierced, through the foreskin. He has shown it to me one time, and I have taken a photograph. Look.” Antonio produced a small digital camera. The viewfinder was small and the image slightly blurred, but I could make out a long tube of flesh with what looked like a miniature barbell thrust through the tip. Antonio gazed at the screen fondly. “I wish to make with this picture one art project. I will blow it up huge, the size of a wall. The title of the photograph will be Il Mostro. In Italian, this means the monster.”
“Ah,” I said. “Well. I think I would find that a bit of a challenge.”
“Don’t worry,” said Antonio. “He knows is not for everyone. We will both still be the friends of you.”
After a week or so of training, Beta Mattijs proudly told Kat I was ready to strike out on my own. My first solo shift was to be outside the Anne Frank House. As a small child, I received a picture book about Anne Frank and her family for Hanukkah one year, which, given my preoccupation with the Jews and Those Who Would Destroy Them, quickly became a favorite. Unlike other children’s books about the Holocaust, which were illustrated with photographs of firing squads and mountains of naked, emaciated corpses, the Anne Frank book had dreamy watercolors depicting the Franks in an assortment of touching familial tableaux: celebrating birthdays, walking among the tulips, being held at gunpoint by the Gestapo on the sidewalk outside their hiding place. I had never been able to walk by the Anne Frank House without thinking of that picture: Anne in the foreground, a stricken expression on her watery face; Mrs. Van Daan, draped in fur; the creases and pools of the policemen’s leather coats skillfully rendered in the milky paint. Now I stood outside on the same shadowy cobblestones clutching to my chest a stack of brochures featuring the picture of the old lady and the black dildo. I wondered why I’d never noticed before that she didn’t have any teeth.
I spoke shyly to a group of college-age girls with dreadlocks. They grabbed the booklets from my hands and stuffed them into their backpacks before I had a chance to launch into the rest of my pitch. A group of French tourists asked me for directions to the train station, and an exuberantly stoned pair of boys from Cleveland exulted over how fucking awesome it was that I lived here.
“You must be fucking wasted all the time,” said the youth, cackling with glee. “If it was me, I’d just fucking wake and bake every day, and then I’d go down to the fucking red-light, pay some bitch to fucking suck my dick, and then go into one of those coffee shops and just get stoned off my motherfucking ass all day long. You don’t know how fucking lucky you are, dude. You are so fucking lucky.”
I turned an anxious eye to the cluster of ominous clouds beginning to form in the sky. It was about to pour, and mama needed a sale. “That sounds so fun!” I said. “But you know what’s even more fun? Comedy improv!”
The youth spat on the sidewalk and turned away.
Many people snubbed me completely. Others quickly plucked a booklet from my hands but turned away in distaste when I tried to start a conversation, like I was a beggar on the subway. They’d given me a quarter, so why the hell was I still talking? I shook off the rejection. Maybe if I stood by the exit, I’d have better luck.
There was a woman striding from the exit doors across the square beside the Westerkerk, her two teenage daughters in tow. From the leaden-footed entitlement of her gait, I could tell she was an American, maybe even a New Yorker. My grandmother liked to say that you could always tell an Arab by his shoes. I can always tell an American by the way they walk.
Desperate, I threw myself in my countrywoman’s path. “Hi, there!” I exclaimed in my folksiest voice. “Whatcha doin’? Feel like seeing a comedy show tonight?”
The woman looked up at me with swollen eyes. Fresh mascara streaked her face like the silhouette of a mournful tree. “How dare you,” she spat. “How dare you come up to us like this, after what we’ve just seen?”
“I’m sorry—” I began, but she was on a roll.
“My daughters and I”—here she flung her arms fiercely across the shoulders of the two mortified teenagers on either flank—“are Jews. Proud Jews. Now that probably doesn’t mean much to you, but to us, it means something. You are standing on sacred ground. And for you to try to . . . to sell us something, here, of all places—well, it’s disgusting. I am disgusted. You ought to be ashamed.”
“I am,” I said truthfully. I was mortified, although not quite for the reason she meant.
The daughters had fled, but their mother stood her ground. “Good,” she said. “Then maybe you’ll think about what you’re doing the next time you decide to exploit a place of tragedy for your personal gain. Maybe you’ll stop and think about what happened here.” There was a fierce gleam in her eye as she taught me this Very Important Lesson. I considered setting her straight, but I thought that would just make things worse. An insensitive Gentile is one thing, but another Jew? We could be here all night, and there was a watered-down vodka cranberry at Boom with my name on it.
“Well,” said the woman. “Aren’t you going to apologize? Don’t you think it’s terrible, what you’re doing?”
“I think,” I said, “in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.”
“Fuck you,” said the Jewess, and left to join her daughters at the hot dog cart.