Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries)

by AnonYMous

  He took out a stapler.

  When I was finally allowed to make a call I was so happy to hear our receptionist mispronounce the initials of the agency, (so many egos jostling for attention) I almost cried. She put me through to our legal guy and suddenly it was as if the Lord God Himself spake unto me.

  “We’ve had this happen before. You can help Silvestro and Lucien in our European office while we figure this out”

  It certainly seemed like a reasonable solution but I was surprised he was able to suggest it with such confidence. My Irish passport allowed me to work anywhere in Europe but did the agency lawyer have the power to just send me there? Surely such an idea would need to be run past Andy. Not if he already knew about it. Either way I had just agreed to be sent to the most precarious place on the planet for a recovering alcoholic and budding sex-addict. Or the most convenient depending on your point of view.

  2

  “Hi, I’m a newly arrived writer from New York, and I’m sitting out here on the balcony of my Prinsengracht office looking out on the canal. As I type this, I'm having to half-close my laptop because there's a squirrel (or at least I hope it’s a squirrel) above memunching on something left out by my upstairs neighbour and as a result there is some serious crumb-spillage onto my keyboard… so if I stat to moss up my werds as I tip I'm hape you’ll firgove me??? But what has all this got to do with you?? Well I don’t want you to feel bad but I’m supposed to be working on my second book, the Notoriously Difficult Second Book (hey, that might be a good title) but after seeing your beautiful picture my concentration went out the window. You could say I'm out here trying to find it. Write soon or I won't be able to.”

  The profiles in the Amsterdam section of datemedotcom were mostly made up of East European immigrants and British expats working for internationalcompanies lured there by tax concessions. And judging from the repeated references to books, films and music by the likes of William Burroughs, Lars Von Trier and Leonard Cohen it was obvious to even the untrained eye that a morbid intelligence prevailed. Unlike their American counterparts who took great pains to appear content and companionable at all times, the attitude here was openly suicidal.

  Maybe it was all that rain.

  I had hoped that my happy-go-lucky impersonation of a newly arrived writer might go some way towards alleviating the mood but my empty inbox seemed to indicate that I would have to do better than squirrels if I was going to get laid in Amsterdam. And yes the red-light district was minutes away but paying for sex was unacceptable. It took all the charm out of it. If anything, it was too honest.

  Earlier that Sunday afternoon, before letting myself into our elegant Prinsengracht offices, I attended an English-speaking AA meeting on the Oude ZijdsVorrburwal (good luck pronouncing it) and after a brief conversation with a local man called Erik I was able to glean that online dating wasn’t nearly as accepted in Amsterdam as I had hoped. In fact when Erik finally managed to absorb the idea into his comprehension his nose twitched involuntarily like he had just smelled something awful in the air around us.

  This from an alcoholic-ex-junkie-wife-beater.

  Online dating didn’t just reek of desperation. It was worse than that. It smacked of America. Meanwhile these immigrant girls were unfucked and far from home in a country where it rained hourly and fits of coughing stood in for conversation. Of course they were miserable.

  From downstairs, the sounds of pedestrians on the Prinsengracht mingled for a moment with the muttering of two men’s voices before the front door closed again. Next came an insistent pounding which I quickly learned was the result of two people ascending the stairs. Lucien, with his black lifeless eyes scanning the floor ahead of him, was first to enter the room and he continued apparently unaware of my presence, to his desk. Equally intense and similarly preoccupied, he was followed by Silvestro Da Gemi, the black-bearded creative director of the Amsterdam office.

  I hoped that what I was witnessing was the silence that follows a heated argument since any difficulty in their relationship might be an opportunity for me, but watching them settle in at adjacent desks without so much as a nod of recognition to me I realised I couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, the velocity of their agreement would soon become apparent in the form of an award-winning ad campaign called The Life Less Driven. I coughed and shuffled in my seat and when neither of them looked up I had to assume I was being ignored and that my presence was indeed an inconvenience. It was true I had been sent there by their so-called superiors but they were obviously above all that. This was Amsterdam. Lucien was a Parisian, Silvestro was a Roman and I was just some guy who had fucked up his travel arrangements. I was a homeless person.

  Mortified by datemedotcom’s pink glow, I began to understand why Frida, our HR lady, had been so reluctant to give me the alarm code for the building that previous Friday. I thought it was because nobody worked on the weekends in laid-back Amsterdam but it was obvious now she knew Silvestro and Lucien were coming in and would not welcome distractions. I couldn’t tell her I only wanted to check out the local pussy and she couldn’t tell me they didn’t want me working on the new campaign.

  But I was there and even though I wished I could disappear I couldn’t. I knew what they were working on because I had been cc’d on the brief. It was the same brief as always Make Safety Interesting. I was expected to work on it with them but I knew they’d kill any idea of mine before I even uttered it. And yet if I was to justify being taken into their fold I’d need to at least pretend to come up with something. I stared at my screen. Now I was miserable too.

  Norwegian summers are short and the resident reindeer needs to make the most of the newly sprouted pastures. The more he fattens in preparation for the cold months ahead the more attractive he becomes to the other local resident, the mosquito. Before long, the huge antklered animal is barely visible through a whining hovering haze; not so much a reindeer being harassed by mosquitoes but a cloud of mosquitoes in the shape of a reindeer. The humidity combined with the moisture from the fiords provides the ideal breeding ground for the mosquito. And for the reindeer-herders, a swarm of mosquitoes is better than a sheep-dog. They wait chatting and smoking on higher cooler ground for the exhausted beasts to shuffle meekly into harness. But this one, not content with being bullied uphill kicks and bucks as he tries to unseat the multitude. He escapes into sharp focus only to succumb once more to the blur. This is repeated until the energy expended requires a return to grazing which is apparently unacceptable because suddenly the reindeer-shaped mosquito-cloud ejects a real-life reindeer into one fresh, clean, breezy moment of freedom and the Fiord below.

  YORTA

  “I love the reindeer story I can definitely identify.”

  In all of Deadkween’s very black and very white profile pictures she appeared luminously beautiful in sultry poses wearing an assortment of black leather and lingerie. In one particularly successful picture she paid homage to Charlotte Rampling’s famous pose from Night Porter complete with long sleeved evening-gloves and Nazi hat. She was lost-looking in a soon-to-be dead-sort-of-way. As if her last earthy exhalation would be in orgasm. She owned a small gallery in Berlin called Poisoned Resevoir and visited Amsterdam regularly “for inspiration” She wrote poems and attached them to her hand-made dead-baby-dolls. I was allowed to know this much over the phone but she waited until we met to tell me she was an Albino who dyed her hair black and wore contact lenses. I never met an actual albino before. She certainly was extremely pale but no more than I’d seen on a Dublin bus. It immediately explained why all her pictures were black and white and why she looked so good in them. We were on her black leather couch at this point in her black-walled apartment overlooking the Vondelpark and though it was still early it was almost totally dark in there. And the veils draped over the lights and blinds didn’t help. She could only be exposed to daylight for a limited length of time each ay. All signs indicated that I was about to fuck my first Vampire until I declined a beer in favor of a wa
ter.

  “You’re not in AA are you?”

  “Well, actually yes. I am”

  I left a gap for the inevitable gush of admiration.

  “I. Fucking. Hate. AA”

  While her alcoholic-heroin-addict-ex-husband had been in AA his sponsor had insisted that she attend meetings too and while she sat in Alanon meetings her husband sold the furniture. When she confronted him about it he threw her down the same stairs we’d just ascended. She pointed almost proudly to the areas of her face where she’d had surgery. The rhinoplasty had cost extra. If she ever tracked him down she would round up some of the boys and have the word Rapist tattooed on his forehead. It was at this point that she mentioned that her best friend was President of Hell’s Angels in Amsterdam. I could have used that water now but I was too afraid to speak. Still recovering from the shock of uncovering an AA member in her own home, she now sought reassurance.

  “But you do have the job?” I nodded carefully. “And the apartment?”

  The Job? The Apartment? Like two out of three wasn’t bad. Like I had lied about everything else.She continued as if none of what she had just said could possibly have any effect on what she was about to say. What she wanted, she said, was to settle down and have a child. She was ready. Was I ready?

  Somewhat calmed now that she was talking about her future she sank back into the couch revealing a tattooed white star only barely visible against the white skin of her midriff. It was a Pentagram. Of course it was. She would obviously be demonic in bed but a good fuck was a small reward for what she really wanted. Luminous babies and eternal darkness.

  Suddenly my natural paranoia, which until then had been gathering facts in a half-awake, half-interested manner awoke with a jolt. She was obviously pregnant and the plan was to first fuck me and then dupe me into bringing up the her pasty progeny as my own.What was happening here? Was it the suicidal reindeer? I looked down at my feet to find that I was descending the stairs with only slightly more dignity than she had when she’d been thrown down them.

  *****

  “I never got to thank you for all the work. It’s going well isn’t it?”

  Johnathan, our very British account manager, appeared genuine enough but an account man’s work was never done. He might need me to work late, or let him kill an idea he couldn’t sell or come in to work on a weekend. This was his way of sounding me out. So when I redirected his gratitude to Silvestro, his eyes narrowed. A creative who didn’t gloam at easy praise was something to be wary of. Did I know something he didn’t? Was this campaign about to be received less favourably than he’d been led to believe? Why would I deflect the credit for a potentially award-winning campaign?

  The preliminary research results indicated that The Life Less Driven was a winner. It had already tested through the roof in London, Berlin, Los Angeles and New York. The idea was simple. Demonstrate safety by showing the driver and passenger conversing freely. Real conversations. The more relaxed the conversation, the safer the car. The client loved it because the car was in every single shot and creatives aspired to it because the conversations were real. It went beyond advertising. It was reality with a logo.

  Christoph, our German producer had referred to it, in an all-staff email as the Irishman’s campaign. This was something he would only do if Silvestro had already sanctioned it. My first impulse was to send out a reply-to-all saying I’d had nothing to do with it. But if the creative director wanted it said that I was involved in this campaign then who was I to object? Maybe it was his generous gesture of welcome? His way of including me. I also had to tread carefully since my visa-situation had become extremely delicate. The lawyer was now saying my “ little hiccup” at the Canadian border could effectively halt my green card application and because of this here was a very real danger I might never work in the US again. This was not the time to distance myself from an award winning campaign. And anyway hadn’t I perpetrated enough good work of my own over the years to piggy-back just this once?

  Across the room Lucien sat straight-backed and expressionless watching me carefully as if he might draw me later from memory. Without taking those button-black eyes from mine his fingers began typing so fast I thought at first he was joking. The screen in front of him was as indecipherable as he was. Macro enlargements of half-tone photography woven into layers of transparent type, ground up against jagged slabs of flat black and white. All strangely haphazard and definitely non-commercial. It was like an aerial view of some unforgiving alien landscape, impenetrably obscure, airless and unwelcoming. It was obvious from even a distance that it wasn’t agency work. It soon became clear from the galleys and layouts strewn over every available surface of the three-story canal house that Lucien’s book of black and white photography (mostly black) would soon be published thanks to agency funds set aside by Silvestro. It would be his reward for past services and, as far as I could see it was the only reason he tolerated any of us at all.

  What I didn’t know was that he had already resigned. As soon as his books were delivered he would be gone. Was it just co-incidence that I should end up in Amsterdam just as he was leaving? It might have been paranoia but a scenario began to emerge that seemed to explain everything. Maybe Andy had intentionally orchestrated the shoot in Canada knowing that my visa was up for renewal. He wasn’t exactly pleased when he caught me printing out my book and even less so when I made that comment in the toilet. And with Lucien leaving they needed someone to help Silvestro. Andy could get rid of me and find a use for me at the same time. It made sense. As creative director it would have been easy for Andy to find out the status of my work visa. If this was true then I might have to accept that Amsterdam was now my permanent home.

  PIPPA

  Pippa was an upper-class British girl whose idea of slumming it was to fuck someone like me. She was fat little fucker but her accent seemed to suggest otherwise. As if body fat was something only the lower classes suffered from. Daddy, a politician in the Hague would no doubt be suitably livid when she inferred between Dover Sole and Gooseberry Fool that she’d bedded a Mick. I probably made as much money if not more than he did but I wanted her to see me as a bohemian writer mostly because I wanted to believe it myself. She drove a little MG sports car that she constantly felt the need to apologise for. She said in a faraway voice that I looked like a Labrador and I somehow knew by this that we were going to have sex. When she took her clothes off she expanded like dough and at one point I inserted myself into what I hoped was her pussy but there was a very real fear that it might be a sweaty fold in her lower bellies. I tried to give the impression I was enjoying the sensation so much I had to close my eyes but she wasn’t having it.

  “Open your eyes, would you?”

  The nubile girls I had conjured in my mind exploded and I suddenly became a sexual plate-spinner trying to keep her nipples erect so that at least I could tell what was tit and what was not. When she got on top of me I had to suppress an urge to fight. I was beginning to doubt if I could actually orgasm under all that heaving girl-flesh, until she had the decency to reach down and insert one of her fat fingers in my butt hole.

  I ejaculated immediately.

  Flushed with relief, I turned to her, grateful that I’d never have to see her again.

  “I felt something in there,” she whispered,”you might want to have it looked at.”

  My hard-won swirl of endorphins soured inside me.

  *****

  “Apple-sick duck the fuck?”

  The receptionist thought I was Dutch.

  “I have an appointment with Doctor Van Amersvoort.” I explained.

  “I‘ll tell him you’re here”

  It would seem silly later, childish even, but the thought that I would die from stress-induced cancer of the colon had for the two preceding weeks occupied the width and breath of my being. Advertising had killed me. Pippa’s post-coital concern merely confirmed what I had already feared. I’d die elegantly in nearby France while my medical insurance
was still eligible. At least I wouldn’t have to be insulted by spoken Dutch ever again. But my almost comforting death-wish was short-lived when, after administering a gentle lunchtime probing to my virgin sphincter, the doctor declared me benign. I felt relief and then joy. And then relief again. It occurred to me that I had been at least as frightened of getting an erection as a bad diagnosis. You could say I got the all-clear in more than one sense. Mind you, he was an ugly fucker.

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  This commercial opens with an over-the-shoulder-shot of me writing on my laptop. The camera zooms in on the screen until we are looking at what appears to be an extreme close-up of two equal sized dots positioned one on top of the other. It’s a Colon.

  :

  Voiceover:“Getting checked early can seriously increase your chances of survival.” The camera finds and settles into the next extreme close-up, this time, one dot positioned over a comma. A Semi-Colon.

  ;

  Voiceover; “Getting checked when the disease has already set in can prove more difficult to treat.” The next frame shows only one solitary dot. A Period.

  .

  Voiceover:“Get checked early for colon cancer before it’s too late. Isuued by Center For Cancer Research

  ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  VALERIYA

  With Silvestro, Christoph and Johnathan away in Rekyiavik shooting the first instalment of The Life Less Driven I was left to look after the agency. Four more shoots would follow in Hong Kong, Berlin, Lisbon, and Rome. Silvestro had invited me to tae his place but it was wrapped in an unspoken expectation that I should stay. It was pure diplomacy. Falfaux had just signed off on a pan-European campaign that had no script and they weren’t about to have it supervised by a guy who couldn’t even remember to bring proper travel documents on his last shoot. I knew this and Silvestro knew this. But it needed to look like my decision because this was supposedly my campaign.