[This is a considerably altered and expanded version of Unlike Raskolnikov.]
Hash and Coffee
I was becoming like one of those perverse, introspected, isolated characters in Dostoevsky novels, wandering around, not St. Petersburg, in a gray and gloomy winter-time, but Amsterdam, spending my afternoons and late nights not in filthy taverns but in hip hash and coffee houses.
I had a cheap attic room, overlooking a canal, in an old house owned by a middle-aged numismatist with an international reputation, Heinrich Mengelbaum, whose grandfather had managed to outwit the Nazis and survive.
Unlike Raskolnikov, I harbored neither desire nor plans to kill my landlord, and often sat listening, attentively, to his stories of loss and survival, and told him of my own life and, sometimes, late at night, over some aqua vita and hashish, of the times my soul soaring came to the surface of my body, of those moments I prize more than anything, the ones I lived for and too often lived without.
Mengelbaum was a widower. All he had left of his wife, whose framed picture showed her to be a beautiful Hungarian girl, hardly a woman, was Johannes, the son she had borne and died doing so.
Of such sweet mettle was Mengelbaum made that the boy was his beloved and there was no admixture of resentment in the man's love. Moreover, Johannes inherited his father's loving disposition and his mother's beauty.
You wouldn't believe what it was like to be young, then, Mengelbaum said, glancing back and forth between me and Johannes, who sat at the table with us, his ubiquitous sketch pad in front of him, making quick studies of his father and me.
Megelbaum was referring to the period right after the war. Our hearts was open with joy and contracted with grief. Here was life, again. And there was death, forever, always lingering at the doorway of the future, the past infiltrating the far reaches of the present.
Life teased like a neurotic girl friend who couldn't make up her mind if she wanted to go to bed with you or never see you again.
I smoked my hash straight in an old Chinese pipe, without tobacco. And I drank a strong, sweet, cinnamon-laced Greek coffee, several cups a day. The first was at five-thirty in the morning. I rose each morning at that time, did a half hour of exercises with free weights, showered, squeezed a glass of orange juice, took a bunch of vitamins, and had a second cup of coffee very hot and very sweet. The aroma of cinnamon stayed with me throughout the morning as I wrote.
I wrote every day without interruption until one-thirty. Then I hit the streets and had lunch in a hash and coffee house. Even then I wrote, sitting over a bowl of vegetable soup with fresh bread and gouda cheese, a little stoned. Sometimes Joachim was around and I'd go home with him.
Usually, I slept in the early evening, and went back out later into the night, roamed the streets and cruised the hash and coffee houses. I generally got to bed by three.
It had been six years since I'd left the United States, and I hadn't gone back yet and did not wish to.
Actually, I had become frightened of the country, the way you might be frightened of someone who is not really who he seems. There is something, too about lying itself that is very frightening, the immense denial it proclaims of your right to exist. The United States had become a country whose government had been usurped by liars, who would not even stop at committing murder in their battle to make falsehood appear to be truth.
I was happy to see Joachim standing at the counter at the Way Back. He saw me and smiled as he handed me a pipe by way of greeting.
I accepted the pipe and took a big hit, feeling my head go loose immediately, my flat gut tighten, and my cock get hard in anticipation.
Before I could exhale, his lips were on mine and he was sucking the smoke out of my lungs and taking it into his, pinching my nipples hard to get every last breath out of me.
It's nice to see you, I said.
He breathed out.
I was afraid you'd be upset.
You set the rules. I follow.
Joachim looked at me, half in admiration, half skeptically.
It's true, I said. I've been totally reconfigured since I met you.
How so?
Nothing bothers me. Everything turns me on. I'm high all the time. I mean I'm running on the energy you arouse in me.
He was groping me as I spoke, and staring into my eyes with a cool detachment which completely enthralled me.
Being with you is a trip to heaven, I said. Even as I said it I was succumbing to the complex aroma of his mansmell.
I'll be back in two weeks, I said. It won't be long.
The night was warm and we were strolling together by a canal, holding hands and pressing our shoulders together.
For me it will be long, Joachim grinned and drew me to him in a kiss.
Are you scared? he asked afterwards, looking hard into my eyes, making sure of the truth of my answer.
Scared?
You said, he answered, America scared you and you did not wish to go there.
I'll be back, I said.
How could he know how my heart raced, excited, despite my fear! I had hit the big time.
America had become an ache in my heart -- an empire built on war and mendacity.
New York was unlike the city I had once known. The angles had changed. Streets which had been there were gone, and ones which never were suddenly had glassy skyscrapers standing on them.
Farrell drew on an unlighted pipe as we walked along the new promenade along the Hudson.
You must be in heaven, he said, referring to the book award.
I don't even know how to think about it.
Well, I read the book, and you're amazing.
I blushed, and tried to hide it by blurting out anything that would come to me.
You used to be able to stand right on the edge, I said, leaning against the tubular fence extending from the cement. No barrier to the river.
Come here a lot?
All the time.
Farrell looked at me, understanding.
The trucks were over there, he said.
Hemingway, I said.
Served him right, Farrell said.
And now we knew that we knew each other.
When do you fly back to Amsterdam? he asked.
Saturday morning. It's to Paris.
Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night? After the reading? Just us? Not business, just friendship.
Sure, I said.
But you don't have to wait till then to come up to my place.
I won't, I said, extending my hand, which he took and brought to his lips.
You make my cunt open up, I said, teasingly, as he blew kisses on my neck, but I'm not sure I want you to fuck me.
May I kiss you?
Yes, I said, and his lips were pressing me into him before I could take in a breath.
You're starting to make me want you, I said.
Finally, he did not, but I left him in friendly spirits. I took him to a happy orgasm and caressed him with admiration. He was the sort of man I admired, but not the kind I surrender to.
I winked when I kissed him in the morning and said ciao. He grinned.
My book was in all the bookstore windows. It was prominently displayed in the Astor Place store.
There I was, an infinitely reproducible cultural commodity, me, a book, with a dust jacket, stacked up pyramidally, offering to reconfigure reality with strings of words, in sentences that came from beyond where we are and go both nowhere and where we want to be. It took my breath away to think of all the human channels I would flow through.
I had to keep hold of myself or I would explode with vanity.
The reading went well. First I spoke, and watched the crowd and saw how many young people, male and female, were there admiring me. I let myself enjoy it the way you let yourself fall sleep in the arms of a caressing sun under an infinite azure sky on the shore of the Mediterranean.
Once I begin to read something I've written, I usually feel good about it. It astonishes me. I'm ready for the embarrassment, but instead I feel the thrill of discovery.
I've been writing, I said with a faux-sheepishness that is really the opposite of self-effacing, when the clapping stopped, what maybe can be called poetry. I wrote this on my flight over here, when I got to thinking about the painfulness that America has become for me:
The president speaks Rodents jump out of his mouth
Rats jump off his tongue Poisonous snakes slide off his lips
The reptiles slither to the ground They curl around his feet
The rats land on their paws Softly striking the carpet
In the frenzy of freedom They rush through the doorways
They swell on the street and spread The plague they carry is loose
The lice of the president's lies The lice on the rats from his mouth
Cling to us all
Carried beyond the seas to breed A great plague in the hot desert freed
Afterwards, I stood around with a plastic flute of champagne in my hands answering friendly questions, gently flirting, and being charming until Farrell hustled me out and took me to his room and slowly licked my nipples.
I landed in Paris. Joachim met me at CDG . We stayed for a week, in a little hotel on a crooked winding street not far from the river.
The moon hung like an amber halo beside the slender neck of the Eiffel Tower.
We got into a cab and rode along the Seine watching the amber-gold, illuminated buildings of Paris reflecting in the water.
In our hotel, the steps turned round an invisible center, a column of unencumbered air. We reached our room. Joachim unlocked the door and pushed me in and kicked the door shut with his heel and took me to him. He stuffed himself with my kisses until I was gasping with desire for him and felt the wonderful hardness preening inside his jeans. I brought it out and kneeled before him and slowly took him in my mouth and with my true heart's reverence I began an act of worshipful surrender and felt the pulse of his responding. He pulled me up to him and wet his fingers in my mouth and then lubricated me. Gazing at me he entered me as only he can. I knew him and he was mine and I was his and this is what I was whispering when the breaths half-formed in my throat did become actual words.
We took a train back to Amsterdam on a Tuesday evening.
We sat watching the French countryside dissolve into the night.
Look, Joachim said, but he was not pointing at the dusky landscape running by us like frames of film over revovong sprockets. He was showing me a small, red velvet box, the kind rings come in.
I opened it.
Yes, I said and kissed him.
Inside there were two small silver rings, for the nipples.
Back in Amsterdam, we fell dead into my narrow bed asleep in each other's arms.
It was a very handsome stamp on the envelope, Mengelbaum said as he held the door open for us and we walked into his airy living room with plank board floors. Thank you.
It's good to see you again, I said.
Joachim stretched out his hand and shook his when I introduced them.
Mengelbaum poured out four shots of vodka (Johannes was sitting in his pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt, his nineteen-year-old's radiant physique glowing), and we clinked our glasses and sipped the vodka.
I need a bigger place, I said.
Joachim and I are going to live together. I'm going to have to find something. I hate to leave you.
Mengelbaum smiled.
Why are you smiling? I said.
Because one floor below the roof where you are now, I just happen to have three large rooms with a kitchen and a separate w c, airy and facing the canal.
2
Joachim was gone when I opened my eyes. His place in the bed, beside me, was empty; the sheets and his pillows were no longer warm with his body's nighttime warmth.
Joachim, I called, like a frightened child calling for his mother.
The apartment was empty but for me, however.
Outside, the sky above the canal was clouded, dappled with gray and intensely luminous patches of white, like silk rumpled in bunches, with darts of pale green lining the peripheries.
On the old pine table in the kitchen, a glass of squeezed orange juice waited for me, and the things for my coffee were laid out. The smell of fresh coffee still in the bag was heavy.
I looked out the window, beyond the canal. In the distance, I saw Joachim out on his morning run, all in black, in his scanty black track shorts, high black sox with the yellow band around his muscled calf, his coltish thighs with ropes of muscle gleaming, and his tight sleeveless black shirt over his Roman torso. He even had on black leather running shoes.
I sat at my desk in my black briefs and a burgundy robe because there was a poem that was bothering me to be written. It had been a repeated occurrence recently. I would hardly begin to think about Joachim and it turned into a poem.
Together we will sleep one sleep Joining both our heads in one dream
A light and densely-hued shadow Will flicker a hypnotic rhythm Joining us in one pulse
Twined together in each other's sleep How will we know we are not really Only one. How will we be able To tell anymore
The difference between kissing and breathing
I finished my coffee, and finally got into the shower, adjusted the water when a swift gust of air parted the shower curtain.
Mind if I join you? a naked Joachim, drenched with grimy sweat asked as he stepped in under the shower with me and pulled me to him with a playful brutality which thrilled me.
I kissed him as furiously as he was kissing me and got hold of his tongue before he got mine, and I pulled him to me as if his tongue were the rope of a lasso I had slung around him.
I held him in my power until he rallied and pulled me by the nipple tips until I was dancing, knees dipping, in front of him with my head tilted back and my mouth open breathlessly to receive his kisses.
I pulled away and reached for the soap.
You are one grimy man, I said, beginning to soap the back of his neck and working my hands down the front of his chest, soaping the smooth, pale skin and the well-wrought muscles which made him so wonderful to look at.
He pressed his mouth to mine and worked me as if he'd devour me. He brought me all the closer and contained me more entirely in his power pushing two strong, soapy fingers deep up into me, wiping me out, stripping my soul, turning my brain around with his eyes.
I clung to him and writhed under him and turned to him with an intensity of tropism, like the open flower following the sun.
He was above me. We were stretched out on the terrycloth mat on the bathroom floor. He rocked and writhed inside me and took me with the power of lightning. He made pain sing with pleasure and pleasure extend into the borderland of pain.
I gasped as his tongue touched the depths of my throat, and his living, throbbing, hard and propulsive masculinity took me beyond endurance. I cried repeatedly master in frantic surrender.
Have you heard from your publisher? Joachim said.
Yes, I said.
He was silent, waiting for me.
They will tape the interview here with me at VPRO.
Joachim held the envelope up to the light before opening it.
He looked at the address. It was a bold handwriting.
He opened it.
The letterhead announced an independent affiliate of a major American studio.
Above a signature in the same bold hand was a short note.
I saw your film, it said. I want to see you. Meet me Tuesday, at three o'clock, at the American Bar.
The American Bar in Amsterdam is a clean, well-lighted place. I would never go there. Neither would Joachim. But that's where the producer said he wanted to meet him.
It did not turn out to be what Joachim had expected. He was naive. I would have been, too. It was our time for recognition. This was just one more instance.
Joachim must have been surprised, no, more than that, he must have been thrown entirely off balance by the outright, undisguised antagonism which met him.
I can only imagine it. And I do repeatedly, always somehow magically intervening the moment before to prevent it.
What happened there does not really happen in daily reality.
There is death all around us, all around. There are single mad murders that make the headlines and wars, and wars within wars with their inexhaustible, unquenchable wildfires of killing. All those who are provoking and promoting them try to keep them from being reported at all. And the headlines about them are made in the numerous and competing propaganda offices of all the combatants.
Nevertheless, that Joachim was the next moment shot point blank in the chest made no sense. It was an impossibly incongruent event. His body slumped down in the booth. He was dead. The bullet came from behind.
Joachim's interlocutor was unhurt. Of course! He was part of the whole plot, the decoy to get Joachim where they wanted him, those enemies of liberty and liberation, those triple agents who provoked and inflamed the world's conflicts and supplied every side with venom.
The gunman, with a scarf covering his face just about up to his eyes, fled out the door before anyone knew what had happened.
Geliebter, Johannes said tenderly, looking straight into my eyes, the landlord's shining son whom Joachim and I had taken as our friend.
I held him tighter and sobbed more grievously.
Outside there was a thunderstorm, I began to laugh. I was laughing and crying at the same time.
It had exploded, and all the tears of the world washed over my heart and beat their way through me, finally emptying themselves out whether or not I would. I was vomiting tears. And it had not yet ended.
Johannes held me and said nothing. He only held me. And I sobbed, as grief and the relief of grief released twisted inside me. It was the kind of twisting you have to do when you're undoing knots, and it's much more a painful process than tying the knots originally was.
These were love-knots I would never have untied, but now they had been torn, cut, and the more brutally they had been pulled at, the tighter they had become until I could no longer breathe.
Now as Johannes held me and stroked me, my breath began to flow smoothly, slowly, somewhere else; somewhere in the distance, the thread of life was keeping alive some other body, not me.
my eyes are burning; my head is bent with the weight of unspent tears
the future is a bullet to the gut shot from the gun of the world
the men who have never been tired the executioners of sleep now they threaten us those are guns that were their eyes
hope is a ghost a lost memory the song of youth that only an old man can sing
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