In the movie that I call my past, it came in the second reel, an insignificant sequence that would wind up on anyone’s cutting room floor, a funny bit but no continuity really, other than the fact that it included alcohol, rock ‘n’ roll, lunacy, and destruction—key elements in the life of our lead character as they say in the movie business. And I guess you could maybe say that, inconsequential as it might have been, it did provide a title for the movie of the life and times of the previous tenant, Ram I. What the marquee on the dirty white wagon that came for me that long ago day at Six East could have read was, “Coming Soon to a Theater Near You! The Toilet That Exploded.”
Book Two
Woe the Luck
"The intellect of man is forced to choose
perfection of the life, or of the work.
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
When all that story’s finished, what’s the news?
In luck or out the toil has left its mark:
That old perplexity an empty purse,
Or the day’s vanity, the night’s remorse."
– William Butler Yeats, The Choice
Chapter Four
Outside The Oporto, snow was drifting down the narrowness of The Zoutsteeg, lightly falling in small flakes which the smoked brown glass and the dim afternoon light rendered mote-like as dust, as ashes. Ram had been sitting there since well before noon, slowly sipping the creamy pils and looking out the window at the passersby bundled up against the chill with arms full of Christmas packages. And later, he would well remember that day, as well as its attenuated nature. It was his last day in Amsterdam.
But he remembered, too, the day prior to it where the change could be said to have been catalyzed, and how that day was some weeks back, during the time of the red leaves burning.
Then it was the Café Heeren, early evening, late October, 1973, and during that best of seasons in Amsterdam, that time of year when the light was honey-ochre and brilliant to blinding as it hammered off the canals, when the elms lining them were all aflame and the wind hadn’t started to howl yet.
The Heeren was a brown bar, an establishment particular to Amsterdam, and so called not for some mysterious reason but because it was predominantly brown in its’ furnishings, with dark-brown, walnut-paneled walls and rough-hewn tables and bentwood chairs, all dark brown as well. The light inside these bars had a character all its own, owing to the fact that it came from brass table lamps and wall sconces whose candle-sized bulbs were multiplied by the liberal use of mirrors. And because the brown bars were usually smoky, the reflective surfaces were dulled to the point that the light they refracted seemed as ancient as the buildings themselves, as though it had been trapped there for the past three hundred years. And the brass, despite polishing, was itself as dull as long-buried gold doubloons. Usually, the only window in these bars was a large, brown smoked-glass pane fronting onto the street, and on them, the names of the bars were painted in script of gold leaf in a florid style of penmanship from Amsterdam’s Golden Age of the seventeenth century, when it was the most powerful city on earth. By Ram’s day, Amsterdam was no longer a world power, only a magnet, to which thousands of human beings clung lichen-like for existence.
They were mainly social discards from the west and east and south and far north, young in age or spirit, attracted there by the city’s tolerance and at times even support of them. And though there was much there that could have been said to be shocking, no Amsterdammer, native or adopted, was shocked by any of it, not the drugs, the whores, the drunks, the crime, or the sexual androgyny, all of it public and without shame. It was a wide-open and rollicking time in a town that had welcomed such doings since the day of the East India Company. Many said that Amsterdam was in its second Golden Age, but at the same time, this claim was mostly tongue-in-cheek: the gold was the kind you smoked.
Just a moment ago, though many years past, an infamous Canadian from Vancouver, outlandishly dressed and hirsute, a drunk little man in his fifties on a Canadian Arts Council stipend, musician and poet by the name of Phil Ryan, shouted, “Ha!” and scraped back his bar stool. It was a conscious act which served to announce that Phil Ryan was about to begin one of the sermons he was famous for, if only at the Café Heeren and only among its regulars like Ram Le Doir. Here is how it went…
“Ha!” It always began this way, and Ram thought that the “He’s” were a kind of mental workup for Ryan, specific points that he wanted to remember in the course of his text. He was wobbling in place, stroking his beard and taking one last long drink before launching himself. “Punks! Bunch of goddamn punks, fuckin’ punks and fairies. Babies, greeeen!… Yes,” said Ryan, nodding in agreement with himself then picking up steam again. “Um-hmm… What the fuck do you know? Goddamn bunch of shit-pantsed hippies is all you are. Ha!” A broad gesture signified that his assessment included everyone in the bar. “I mean, what the fuck do you know about music? What can you know, listening to this fairy, what’s this? Goat’s Head bullshit. Music? That’s not music… Now, goddam, Bud Powell, Bud Pow-ell!” he said, solemnly taking another pull of beer and tumbling some more into his glass. “Now, that… That was muuu-sic! And I knew Bud Fucking Powell… Yes, yes, I did,” said Ryan thoughtfully. “Gave him a job when nobody else would. And goddam Ornette Coleman, too… Gave him his first job outside L.A…. Yes, I did, um-hmm.”
Ryan was seated at his usual place toward the end of the bar, and the first “Ha!” that he shouted out to the wild brown yonder before the actual sermon began had that peculiar sinusy sound: the claxon he reserved for announcing that the Gospel according to St. Phil was about to commence.
From the moment he walked in the Heeren, it was inevitable it would. The fact that he was wearing the brocaded tea cozy on his head—what Mac called his cardinal’s mitre—and not wearing his teeth, had to be taken as a sign he would. He seemed to disdain wearing his teeth whenever launching into his spiels. Ram figured that he did so in order to better suck on his gums and draw out the venom which seemed to secrete there.
Before him was a half-filled glass and a bottle of Grolsch, alongside which were two empties—not for lack of attention on the barman’s part, but because Phil always suspected he was being cheated when his tab was presented and so insisted on keeping his empties lined up before him to ensure that he wasn’t.
Midway down the bar, Mac and Ram sat on stools eating salami-and-cheese broodjes and spooning bowls of fish soup. They were watching Ryan with interest, as was Peter who stood behind the bar and in front of them. And when Ryan had said, “Ha!” and scraped his stool backward to begin, Peter and Ram reached for their pockets, pulled out ten-guilder notes and handed them to Mac.
“Double or nothin’ on when he finishes or gets snatched?” Ram said.
“You’re on,” said Mac. “Peter, you in?”
“No, I’ll pass. Ian, he looks too, I don’t know, patient tonight.”
“He kinda does at that,” said Mac, looking down the bar and studying the redheaded presence for a moment.
Ian Benjamin sat on the end stool, around the far corner of the bar and directly facing Phil Ryan. Though he was looking straight at him, as were most of the regulars, it wasn’t with his usual air of protectiveness. In fact, he looked annoyed. This was not a good sign, Ram was thinking. Nor was the fact he was drinking whisky. Where a beer or two usually mellowed Benjamin, whisky tended to aggravate his paranoid schizophrenia, sometimes violently. Aggravation was not a good thing to observe in a man who was six-feet-nine-inches tall, weighed 320 pounds and had once been a professional wrestler in Toronto.
Mac liked to tell the story of how he had once came upon the aftermath of a Benjamin fight and that it looked as though a bomb had gone off in a Haarlemmerdijk broodje shop. Bolted-down stools were ripped from their moorings, glass and splinters were everywhere, and three defenestrated Dutch dealers were moaning on the sidewalk. They had committed the cardinal sin of lau
ghing when the mitre-crowned and well-lubed Ryan had entered the shop. Lagging a moment behind His Reverence was Ian Benjamin. A moment later, the Dutchies were bleeding and quivering on the sidewalk. Ryan then leaned over one of them and slurred, “I will have you know that I am not a figure of derision. Ha!” Six weeks of negotiations later, his semi-official bodyguard, Ian Benjamin, was released from the solitary tank of the Marnixstraat lockup.
Benjamin was glowering and Ram concluded that he would have to gauge his bet not on when Ryan had merely become a pain in the ass to his protector, but on when he’d become one to the point that he provoked somebody else to the point where he needed protection. It hinged on how far he took the sermon.
“Okay, what’ll it be then?” Mac asked.
Ram pursed his lips. “I’ll say twenty minutes.”
“Forty-five. Take it?”
“You’re on. I’ll snatch him myself if he runs longer than thirty.”
The text was an old standard in the Ryan missal—“The Glory Days of How I Once Was The King of Jazz Impresarios,” was what Ram called it—and it was all about the jazz club he’d owned and run and played at in Vancouver in the late 1950’s. The nostalgic spin down a heroin-lined, post-bebop, jazz-lovers lane was a litany of the great and wasted, which usually provoked little more from Ryan than his own tears or sometimes a female shoulder to shed them on. Most of the women in the Heeren pitied him. “He’s just a sad old man who’s lonely,” they’d say. All except Netty, who worked behind the bar, was disgusted by him, and called him “that nasty little troll,” once to his face, adding that he was a manipulating old fool, but that he didn’t fool her. At that, Ryan, claiming illness, left the Heeren in a huff and didn’t return for a week.
“Peter, get him another Grolsch,” said Ram, motioning toward Ryan.
“That’s against the rules,” said Mac.
“What rules? We never said anything about any rules, Mac.”
“Well, it’s not done. That’s interference.”
“No, you’re just pissed ’cause I’ve figured out his game. Ryan’s broke. Give him the Grolsch, Peter.”
Peter popped the vacuum seal and Phil Ryan nodded and straightened, opened his mouth once more, as if to continue the tirade, then paused to consider. He hummed a few bars of “Well You Needn’t,” smacked his gums a few times and fell into a long silence and seemed to be deep in thought. Then, carefully removing his mitre, Phil Ryan sat down, gestured a salaam of thanks to his unknown benefactor and refilled his glass of beer.
“Give me back that ten, Mac.”
“You cheated.”
“No, it was straight-up and you know it.”
“Okay, okay,” Mac said, laughing. “Got me that time.”
“Damn right I did, partner. Cheers!”
They drained the last of their beers and Mac called out for another round to Peter, down at the end of the bar and talking with Big John and Tony. Big John was only slightly smaller than Ian Benjamin and had been a Golden Gloves boxer in upstate New York. He now worked as Tony’s “driver.”
“Ever wonder what might happen if Big John and Benjamin ever got it on?” asked Mac.
“Be like Hiroshima, I guess. Ugly.”
“You know, maybe if they did it for charity or something.”
Ram could hear Mac’s wheels clicking. His dad was the biggest bookie in Vancouver and Mac was likely calculating the potential for all the money to be made in side bets.
“It’d be good for our p’n’r,” he said.
“I think you mean P.R.”
“Whatever it is, you know what I mean. Polish up our image.”
Ram looked down the bar at Benjamin and Big John. They sat three stools apart. Their separate auras of menace took up the other stools.
“Never happen.”
“Why not? We could suggest it to them.”
“Not those guys. For them, violence is a stock in trade, not a sport or public spectacle.”
“Well, you’re in a sunny mood.”
“Just tired is all. René woke me up last night—looking for heroin.”
“No? René?”
“The same; our neighbor.”
René lived one flight up from Ram and three flights down from Mac. He was half-Mexican, half-German, dressed like a vaquero, and was married to a stunning high-yellow mulata named Santana.
“Santana doesn’t know about this, does she? René? I can’t believe it.”
“It wasn’t for him, for somebody else.”
“Who?”
Ram cocked an eyebrow.
“You ready for this?”
“Shoot.”
“Keith Richard.”
“Get out of here.”
“I swear, man. I thought he was jivin’ too, but I looked out the window after I told him to piss off or go to 65 and there’s this big fuckin’ limo idling outside and puffing smoke. René gets in and the light goes on and there he is, big as life and twice as ugly.”
“You’re shittin’ me now, Ram.”
“No, straight up, Keith fucking Richard—in the flesh and lookin’ to cop.”
Mac looked at Ram, waiting for something that might indicate Ram was joking. When he was satisfied he wasn’t, he suggested they get another beer.
“Alright. But just a draft, not a bottle.”
“Keith Richard, goddam, and René’s hanging out with him?”
“He was last night anyway.”
Finally, Ram could hold it no more and started to laugh.
“You’re a motherfucker, you lyin’ piece of shit.”
“Twice in one day. You’re slippin’, Mac.”
“I must be. C’mon, Ram, have a bottle. It’s Saturday, the night’s young.”
“No. I’m going home in a minute. I want to go to Ochtshof later. Anyway, like you say, I’m a lightweight.”
“Peter, two drafts,” Mac called, holding up his fingers in a v and signing a pull of the tap. “Keith Richard. Fuck you! So anyway, hear anything from Jaime?”
“You mean, while we’re on the subject?” Ram shook his head and sipped the fresh beer. “Not a word.”
“Which means same-o?”
“I assume.”
“Maybe we’ll be seeing him again soon.”
“Kinda doubt that. He’d be writing me letters if that was the case.”
“You never know. Maybe he’s got it together again.”
“You believe that, Mac?”
They fell silent a moment looking directly ahead into the mirror, catching and then turning away from each other’s eyes.
People who didn’t know them thought Mac and Ram were brothers, and there was a marked similarity in their physical appearance. They had the same colored hair and eyes, although Mac’s was longer and Ram’s were clearer and wider. They dressed similarly as well—Levi’s and Levi jackets over bulky sweaters, with long woolen scarves and Frye boots. But who didn’t then?—it was a sort of ex officio uniform of A’dam exiles of that period. They were nearly the same age—Mac, at twenty-two, had two years on Ram—and they lived in the same building, right around the corner from the Heeren in a seventeenth-century canal mansion at 69 Keizersgracht. They sometimes worked together, buying and selling cars, exotics mostly, like Porsches and Ferraris, which they supplied to rich young North American businessmen whose businesses were off the books. Neither of them wanted for money. Business was as good in the second Golden Age as it was in the first.
“To Jaime,” said Mac, raising his glass.
“Jaime,” Ram said.
…A blink, and the mirror fogged, and outside, it was late afternoon and distantly sunny with sea smell wafting up the cobbled street and through the swinging doors of The Kentucky Bar in a little fishing village called Sitges, south of Barcelona. Mac was still sitting next to Ram, but on his left now, while on his right, Jaime was head down over his beer, greenish gold swimmer’s hair falling around it, nodding and unshaven. “It’s not cool, this,” said Ram. “First Atcliffe an
d now here; it’s too conspicuous, too much for the plastic hats to ignore. Know what the shopkeepers call you behind your back?” (The hair waggled a negative) “Senor Dormadina. Day after tomorrow, when I take Hilary back to London, you’re going back up with Mac and John to Amsterdam. They’ll see you get off, OK?” (Now it wagged up and down.)
Except for the Christmas party at the Tennessee Club, which Jamie was passed out for most of, that was the last that Ram had seen of him, green eyes aswim in a barbiturate pool, fingers scabbed and burned from cigarettes which had gone out between them, and a wan smile. “Bebar vino, homey?” slurred Jamie, making a sign with his thumb as though tipping one back.
“Sure. Sure, why not,” said Ram, and they ordered a round of small reds and clicked toasts—“Por Nada,” they said. And by the time Ram was done seeing to it that Hillary had got off alright and had then taken the ferry from Harwich to Hoek and then the train on up to Amsterdam, Jaime had already gone and the only ones left from what the Dover News referred to as the Atcliffe Commune were he and Juan. And the two of them and Mac, whom they’d met in the Kentucky right after arriving in Sitges, spent Juan’s last week in Amsterdam shooting pool with the pimps and hookers in the Post House bar and wandering the town with a camera, taking pictures of each other in hotel rooms or at bars along the Amstel, or in wintry scenes in Vondel Park and the Jordaan, Amsterdam in frozen white, a city so bleak as to seem abandoned to them alone. And then, only Ram was left. Only he stayed on. Another blink and he was back in the Heeren with Peter standing in front of him and the sound smearing in again…
Windwhistle Bone Page 10