Dear Mom (A New Year)
Excerpt from HOLLAND (YOUTH)
I told my mom six months before she died that this trip would make me a better friend, a better brother, a better son.
The plane leaves the grounds of Texas. We tip and launch off towards Paris in a discount jet, me tucked into its bowels. The turbulence is frightening.
"Oui, monsieur?" asks the flight attendant.
"Oui," I say. "Est-ce que le vent compris?"
I decide to ask in French if the wine is free.
He looks like I spit at him. "Le vent?" He crumples up his face. "Quoi?"
"Vin!"
He pours me the glass and pushes his cart away, thinking the smarmy American in seat 46B just asked if the wind was included with the flight.
I take a sip and a deep breath. I wonder what sort of rough life Wes, my old friend who I'll meet in Holland, has set up for himself and how long it's going to take him to leave it for the thing down south.
He barely spent any time in the States anymore and when he did, it was in quick bursts, usually until he went mad with malaise. It would creep in slowly. In mega grocery stores, he'd whisper, "I'm gonna lose it," and sneak through racks of tic-tacs and celebrity worship magazines and wait outside alone. It was always about up ahead and somewhere else.
When the time was right and only to those closest to him, he would talk for hours about that time he spent outside La Paz learning Spanish over two-dollar wine jugs, or the vacuous glitter over the beach in Bali, the dead Albanian gun turrets, the Sarajevo ghost monuments, the dirty mattress in Corfu, the commune at Beneficio, all tugging him, with their own force and style, away. And then Africa, always and again, Africa. Those photos he'd show me of him sitting in deep dark forests, his eyes projecting the mad lonely glow of a self-portrait that maybe five people would see.
I had felt the migratory instinct before, but never this strong. I would shoot out and dock back, but never for more than a month at a time. I never thought I could afford it, to which Wes would reply, "It's not that you have too little, it's that you have too much." I no longer have any excuses.
I roved the streets of Paris on an hour of sleep. Found a hitch at the Antony station and climbed into the battered car of a stoic German doctorate student. The hitched bug bopped and rocked and the German kept my ear going about astrophysics. I was so groggy tired I could barely keep my head straight. His handling of the car was steady and fast and precise as he pulled us out of the Parisian tollbooths onto the highway stretch. Great spongy forests traveled by.
"And you," he asked me curtly. "Where are you going?"
"Africa," I said. "My friend Wes lives in Holland and has bought a Volkswagen. I'm meeting him there and in a week or so we should be setting out."
"Do you have a plan?"
I thought about it.
"The plan will present itself," I said.
"Where will you sleep?" he asked.
"That will also present itself."
The German studied me critically for a long moment as he sailed down the highway.
"What do you feel you have lost that you must find?"
A new life, away from explanations and easy answers. To feel my body move, to wake up each day not knowing how it will end, to be healthy again, to clear out that forlorn driftwood that accumulates when you stay in one place for too long.
"I have no idea."
"It may take you a long time to realize all you could need is right under your nose."
"I don't like microscopes."
"That's not what I mean, of course."
We hit a tollbooth and the German paid. Belgium.
"You will be so vulnerable out there," he said softly, looking at the flashing lines. "We are not all equal. And that is something you might also realize. I just hope not the hard way."
I gasped at one point later when I woke up to realize the car was stopped on the side of the highway. I looked in the mirror to see the German fervently searching through the back trunk. Slamming tools, creating harsh, loud sounds. For all I knew, he was going to bludgeon and toss me out into the forest.
How long had I been asleep? I pawed at the door handle and pushed it open and lurched out into wintry Belgian grass.
I hobbled up to him.
He said, "It is okay. Everything's okay," and brought out a plastic jerry can of gas to fill up. I trudged back to the van and got in and fell back asleep.
"Sorry," I said later, when again I nodded off in the middle of one of his stories. "I am so tired."
"You are allowed to sleep," he said, at once tight-lipped and kind. I don't know why, but he made me nervous.
In the middle of the night. That muted coo coo European dial tone. The German waited patiently by his car as I tried with chattering teeth to reach Wes at a phone booth at the Wageningen bus stop, 90km southeast of Amsterdam. After three tries, his voice clicked on and I shouted ceremoniously, "Take one guess where I am!"
He said, "At a phone booth in Wageningen."
"Yeah," I said, mildly deflated. "By the bus stop."
"I'm a minute away. Be right there."
I walked over to the German and said, "Success." I gave him the twenty euros for the ride. We stood awkwardly. I rocked back and forth and looked around at the sleeping Dutch town. Proper, prim, unthreatening. Bone cold. I turned back around and the German was looking directly at me. It felt like something had to be said, like we were skirting under the rug some strange agreement we had made while I slept. I was uncomfortable and scanned the town's horizons in search of activity, so I could talk about that.
Ah, there he is. I could spot Wes' walk out of a crowded stadium: swift, forthright, hunched over, eyes on the ground five feet in front. He stole little glances at me as he approached, then we hugged like brothers. We both shook hands with the German, who still awaited some golden consummation. "Thanks, friend," I said, and we walked away.
"My pleasure," he said from behind, with a perfect blend of admiration and pity.
Wes slapped me on the back again and again and skipped with his hands in his pockets.
"Yeah!" I shouted.
"I didn't think you'd make it tonight," he said.
He opened the door to the squat house and the kitchen was filled with a hovering cloud of smoke and I shook the hands of faceless, smiling squatters and comrades. Some forlorn beast barked at me from the shadow shafts.
"Luka! Sientate!" one of the voices barked back. Spanish? The dog just got louder as I approached it. I dropped my bags against the wall and Wes led me to sit on a dirty couch in another room. He gave me a bowl of cereal and I took off my beanie cap to show him my new look: completely bald. In some fit of inspiration, my friends in Texas had put on masks, tied me to a chair in the garage, gagged me, and shaved my head while whispering an eerie made-up language in my ear.
"They took photos and video and promised me they'd be up on the internet while I went missing."
They fed me shots of liquor while they filled their cups with water and pretended. Perhaps they wanted to see how far I'd go, get everything out of me before I left for good. They smiled as they waved goodbye but I think they were nervous for me.
"You look like a Bosnian fundamentalist."
"Yeah, they figured no one would mess with me looking like this."
We opened the doors of the squat and walked out into the silent town and spoke of women and family and plans.
I woke up the next morning on a mattress in the empty room of the squat house. Wes was crashed hard on the floor next to me. I think it was the smell that roused me; a penetrating mildew stench like a fist in the throat. The ceilings and walls were cracked, peeling, and bare. A hole had formed in the ceiling, just in time for the Dutch rains.
The first thing Wes did when he woke was show me some photos of his recent solo excursion to Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia. The images of Sarajevo seemed to be filled with phantoms. And a shattered, gutted war helicopter. A cement wall smashed inward with bullet holes. Wes street-sleeping next to railroad tracks, a world of rust.
"Smells like shit, eh?"
"Ah, it's not so bad," he said. "I've been sleeping in here with Carly while my mom's in my room. If it's good enough for my beautiful and lovely girlfriend, it's good enough for you."
Oh, right. His girlfriend, whom he just met. Our departure south could be delayed. I knew that coming here. The way he spoke of Carly proved it. She works for Oxfam, lived in Ethiopia for half a year, has traveled to India, is as tough as nails, he says. I've never seen Wes in love before.
Oh, right. His mom is visiting, too. I'd known his family back in San Antonio, though hadn't seen mum for years. And there she was, standing in the doorway, with coffees and pastries in hand. She hadn't been with her son in some time. He wanted to get her a decent place to stay in Amsterdam, like a nice hostel, or travel around with her in this van he bought that I keep hearing so much about. Apparently it broke down a few days after he got it, the transmission totally shot, another fact that puts Africa as a future prospect. So Wes figured, instead of taking his mother around to places they've both never been, why not take the leap and let her stay in his home, show her how he really has been living? I trudged down the steep staircase and noted that few moms could make it here. No toilet. No shower. Grimy, half-washed, blown-out kitchen. People of every stripe filing in day after day.
I like this place. I had to sleep through it for a night, eat off a crusty fork, wake up smelling like smoke, hang up my wet socks to dry, slap some water on my face and get some coffee in me before I could feel the scene and see my place in it. Throw myself into a game of foosball, joke, keep it light, look people in the eyes. Stand out in the doorway and look at lovely dread-locked Dutch girls coast by on bikes in the cold morning wind, all bundled up on their way to a hot meal.
I'd always itched to see what sort of place could keep Wes harnessed for more than a few months. This was base camp for his satellite adventures. He'd jaunt out from here to broaden life's picture frame.
All of the people here are at least bilingual, some speaking as many as five languages with near fluency. There is Martijn, who Wes hails as a master mechanic and electrician, who is in the middle of a project that involves tapping into the city's water line. There is Herman, the world ecology student and PhD candidate. There is Mano, the Argentinean, and Wout, the youthful TEKNO-head. There are floaters, too, like this guy called Geoffrey, who has claimed legal sociopath status and received a government stipend of 300 euros a month for… "not fitting in," he says. And his forty-year old groovy girlfriend Donna, from Ireland, who tells me she sleeps when and where she can.
