Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries)

by AnonYMous

  And it wasn’t just men who got off on it. Women sauntered past smiling knowingly as if they recognised something familiar about it all. Maybe they were reassured by the fact that if you were alluring enough or just there enough (some of the prostitutes were unmentionably ugly) you too would eventually attract your man. Here, sexual attraction was reduced to its barest necessities. There was no literature here, no Elizabethan poems just naked sexual honesty. The yearning of bodily organs for each other. It was so practical. So very Dutch. You want sex. We have it.

  Josh finally emerged without even a trace of a smile. He preferred them not to make any oooh and ahhh sounds.

  “I appreciate it if they just stay quiet. I always tell them this in advance. If they charge one-fifty I’ll put three hundred down so I have some room for maneuver.”

  I was impressed by this no-nonsense approach but it was a paradoxical to me. I would need to believe they wanted me. Wasn’t this what was on sale? The illusion that a young beautiful woman was aroused by me? But maybe he was right. By letting them know he wasn’t interested in their performance he retained control of the situation. And control was the real commodity here. The need to decide if they meant it was removed. He already knew they didn’t mean it so why should he have to suffer their bad acting? He said he couldn’t come with the buxom hooker because she spoke to him and in doing so she broke the sexual equivalent of the fourth wall.

  “Have you been smokink maruijana?” he mimicked her “you only get ze one position.” and when he couldn’t come; “Maybe you should cut it off, ja?”’

  He picked up his bag with the airport tags still attached and we were about to head back to my place when he noticed the girl with the Liebfraumilch beckoning and even though she gyrated amateurish and giggled unconvincingly I felt a stirring. Josh didn’t know that she was beckoning at me. He didn’t know and he didn’t care. I tried to find some way to claim her as my own. I’d seen her first. Surely he wasn’t about to just go and fuck her so soon after the last one? She was a prostitute and as such she was doing what a prostitutes do. She was standing there nearly naked in a window offering sex for money with full governmental approval.

  And yes of course I wanted her but I couldn’t bring myself to visit a prostitute because it meant I’d have to confront the idea that all sexual attraction was based on a transaction. That men wanted sex and women wanted security. My ego just couldn’t handle the notion that any male would do. She had winked at me while I waited for Josh and now she was going to fuck him? Josh dropped his bag again and looked at me. He could see something was going on.

  “I won’t be long.” he said

  The uninvited heat of jealousy invaded my thoughts and my initial almost naïve sexual fervour for the girl in the window dissolved into disgust first for her and then hatred for the entire female gender who it seemed waved their pussies in front of us, to get a washing machine, a raise, a new dress or a free dinner. When he came out I searched his face for some sign of pleasure or relief or shame or mischievousness.

  “I fucked her in the ass” he said

  It disgusted me to think that by being there I had inadvertently added to his pleasure. I was as jealous and enraged as if he had fucked my girlfriend. I felt wronged but what could I say? There was no conceivable way to justify what I was feeling. I was jealous that Josh had fucked a prostitute. I called my sponsor and he suggested I tell Josh to get a hotel room and this exactly what I did. Josh wasn’t even surprised when I told him I disagreed with what he was doing and that I felt it was not sober behaviour. It was as if he wanted me to throw him out so that he could think even less of himself than he already did.

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

  Open on a shot of me in Albert Hein Supermarket. I take out my credit card and swipe it in the self-service consul. A green light flickers and we hear an automated voice; “Alstublieft.“ (In subtitles we see that this means “Thank you”) Lowering the groceries into a cart I wheel them away. Cut to another scenario.This time I’m buying some new clothes and swiping my credit card as the same greeting appears in friendly flashing typeface. “Alstublieft” I exit the store with my shopping bags. Cut to an interior of my apartment. I’m wearing the clothes I bought earlier and with the groceries I’ve prepared a beautiful dinner for two. The doorbell sounds and after one last look at the table to make sure everything is in place I open the door to reveal a stunningly beautiful girl standing in the doorway. But before she enters the apartment she holds out her hand for my credit card. Taking it from me she reaches up under her skirt and she appears to insert the card between her legs. She smiles politely as if waiting for the results to come through before her eyes widen and a huge seductive smile spreads across her face. She hands the card back to me. “Alstublieft.“ she says seductively and steps into the apartment. A title appears on the screen; “God is Good But Business Is Better” Issued by the The Dutch Institute of Commerce.

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

  PAMELA

  “Tell me he’s going with you, you can’t not bring him.”

  In taking up my cause like this, Pamela, my newly employed assistant, made it seem like Johnathan wasn’t about to invite me to the awards ceremony when for all any of us knew he might have come upstairs to do exactly that. Such a strategy would make her popular with me, because she was fighting my corner, and get rid of me at the same time. She was hired when Lucien left because I had none of his computer skills. She was fluent in Photoshop, Indesign, After Effects and many other programmes I hadn’t even heard of. Also recommending her for the job was the fact there was no danger of anything even vaguely sexual ever transpiring between us since she had difficulty squeezing herself in, and extricating herself from, between the armrests of a normal-sized chair. (Mind you, it hadn’t stopped me before). This seemed to suggest that my superiors knew more about my proclivities than I realised. In any case, her substantial presence made mine even less relevant. She could easily make all the adaptations necessary for the print ads and posters, which was all that was left to do now that The Life Less Driven was running across Europe. In fact there was now no need at all for me to be in Amsterdam apart from the fact that I had been deported. This was the term being used in agency emails to describe my situation. But Pamela was no mere technician she was also the self-appointed curator of the Agency Celebrity Phone List.

  Hilarious, if like Silvestro, you resembled the classic Italian film star Mario Mercelli, or like Christoph, you were often mistaken for the Dutch footballer Erik Van Beek. But what if you looked like Uncle Fester? The Agency Celebrity Phone list sat laminated on every desk by every phone so that every photographer, illustrator, visiting client or pizza-delivery-guy saw your name and extension under an image of Uncle Fester. And what was worse, no one was confused by it.

  Was this Pamela’s revenge for making her work so late and so often while I rummaged around online looking for women? Seeing the trauma in my face the first day it appeared and perhaps fearing retribution in the form of even more late night sessions duplicating even more layouts, she confessed.

  “Silvestro said to find a picture of Uncle Fester. I didn’t know what it was for.”

  I thought she got off light as the Shrek’s wife.

  But Johnathan (Colin Firth), just smiled graciously and handed me a large manila envelope full of mail diverted from the New York office. I knew without opening it that it contained director’s showreels and photographer’s brochures beseeching me for work. It was probably the only reason he had stopped by but now that Pamela had shamed him into it, he did indeed invite me and I of course accepted because what kind of a crazy bastard would refuse an all expenses paid trip to the Cannes Advertising Awards?

  They only gave Titanium Awards when something was so fabulously wonderful they felt it needed a special category all to itself. The Life Less Driven fell under just such a category. I wanted to call someone and share the news but there was no one. I thought of Rebe
cca but what was the point? She’d be moving to Berlin in a few weeks and she’d have a new man within the month. My mother wouldn’t even understand and even if she did all she’d want to hear was whether there was some money in it for her. My sponsor? He’d feel obliged to congratulate me but so what? Congratulations and don’t forget to share your gratitude at a meeting…oh and don’t drink.

  The ceremony wasn’t until 8pm so we could have easily flown in later in the day but because Johnathan wanted to get away from his horrific wife I had to get up at 6am on a Saturday morning to meet the flight he’d booked for us. He could see I wasn’t very happy about it.

  “You’ll thank me later when we have a nice dinner”

  He smelled to me like he was still drunk from the night before. I couldn’t summon even token excitement at the prospect of receiving the equivalent of an Oscar for a campaign I’d had nothing to do with. We hadn’t even taken off yet and I couldn’t wait to get back. By the time we were ushered onto the stage that night after an eternity of delayed flights and a torturously slow cab ride from the airport I felt like I’d been out-maneuvered yet again. I’d only just managed to get into my shitty little hotel room when I Johnathan called to say we were already late. I only just had time to change before jumping in a cab. Onstage Silvestro, Christoph and Johnathan wore simple white shirts and comfortable jeans. Had they agreed on what to wear? They effortlessly exuded the demeanour of talented people accustomed to the logistics or receiving awards. Their light-colored clothes deflected the heat of the spotlights while I stood there in my black cowboy shirt, black jeans and crepe-soled brothel creepers, staring at the other three in consternation. I looked like the guy who had no connection with the other three. I had become the American who didn’t get it. Between camera-flashes I remember looking out at the rows of faces each of them seemingly searching for something up on the stage. What did they see? The area around my feet was scratched and scuffed and over-lit and just seemed dirty. There was dandruff on the photographer and feedback from the microphones. The curtain was frayed and the music was canned, the applause reluctant, the podium perspex. This was the view from the top?

  MARIEKE

  Later, Silvestro, Christoph and Johnathan held court in the Noisette D’or, and sitting next to Silvestro was a girl so beautiful she all but rendered him invisible. She was so insultingly beautiful I felt an inexplicable urge to retaliate at someone or something.

  I was invited to sit down and watch them all get drunk.

  “Hi, I‘m Marieke, I don’t think we’ve met?

  Marieke, I decided, had developed an expression of perpetual severity so that mortal man might be spared the full brunt of her allure. So flattering was her beauty in its relaxed state that even the weakest smile ignited fantasies. When she told the table she and her boyfriend had bought a place in Amsterdam and then split up, every face brightened involuntarily and then checked themselves. She was after all, Silvestro’s property now. Johnathan seemed to have developed a maddening itch on his upper arm that required him to push back the sleeve of a t-shirt that ordinarily concealed his Maori-style tattoo from clients. Christoph, already quite drunk, continuously took pictures of himself and whoever else was near so that presumably the following morning he could consult the digital oracle for clues as to what had happened the night before. His camera turned blackouts into brownouts. There was an ad for cameras in there somewhere. Meanwhile Silvestro was trying very hard not to get caught ogling the up-turned braless breasts of his unbearably beautiful neighbour while he somehow managed, in spite of her protestations and gentle arm-slaps to finish a story about Leonardo DiCaprio hitting on her in a club in New York. The punch-line being that she didn’t even know who he was. Marieke rolled her eyes as if to say Silvestro is such a charming liar but behind this mock-mortification her eyes twinkled.

  My role for the evening I decided was to be impressed. Oh how wonderful it all was. How fortunate to be at the winning table with the Titanium, Gold and Silver Lions sat like ornaments on the linen. Oh thank you all for allowing me a seat at your table. And a desk in your agency. I kept one hand on the water glass making sure it didn’t get filled with wine. People were very generous with booze when they weren’t paying for it.

  Marieke became even more serious.

  “Do you mind people drinking around you?”

  “No, it doesn’t bother me”

  “Silvestro says you don’t you drink at all?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing?“

  “No.”

  “Ever?”

  “No.”

  “Not even at Christmas?”

  “No.”

  “No joints either?

  “No.

  “You don’t do anything?”

  I’d already said it too many times but there was no other word for it.

  “No.”

  This was not the answer she wanted and now having wrinkled her pretty brow I felt like I‘d ruined the mood and I was ready to change the subject. Johnathan was looking interested in my direction. Christoph had put away his phone and Silvestro was sitting back in his chair the better to regard my discomfort. I was after all the only one at the table who wasn’t on the brink of getting absolutely fucking sloshed. It seemed only fair that I should explain myself. I tried to think of a way to change the subject. The awards. The weather. The French. Her bracelet. Did she get it locally? Your bracelet, I like your bracelet.

  “But don’t you ever feel the need..” she paused here selecting and discarding phrases,”…to escape yourself?”

  It was a revealing question. It told me that she considered it normal to want to escape. It was as if I’d caught a glimpse of her naked without her knowing. The thing now was not to be critical of her. A silence had descended. An answer was expected.

  “Well,” I said, now addressing the entire table, “I suppose I try to make myself more inhabitable.”

  Was inhabitable even a word?

  Fuck it, she was Dutch.

  I hadn’t noticed until that moment that she was smoking a joint so well-rolled it looked like a cigarette and the glass of white wine on the linen in front of her was so full it might have been water. Inhaling from the joint she raised her glass, sipped, swallowed, and regarded me anew. I didn’t see her exhale.

  “I like your bracelet“ I said quickly.

  This somehow signalled the all-clear and the conversation resumed around the table. I tried not to look too relieved. Silvestro was still looking at me.

  “I hear you’ve written a book.”

  It was true that during a quiet moment before we sat down to dinner I had mentioned to Christoph that I’d written something but only because he’d asked me and I hadn’t said it was a book. I said I’d written something and that I wasn’t even sure what it was. Christoph appeared unsurprised but then as a producer that was his job. The file containing my book was accessible on the agency’s shared network so it was possible Christoph had already seen it there before I told him about it. For all I knew he might have even read it. Either way he’d obviously mentioned it to Silvestro who, despite Lucien’s best efforts to deplete it, still had money left in the Projects slush-fund. As he continued talking I didn’t hear, so much as see, Silvestro’s mouth open and close in apparent slo-mo around words that seemed to suggest that he might like to publish this so-called book of mine. He would need to read it first of course and I would need to keep an eye on the agency in the meantime but maybe I could send him the file so he could get an idea of what it was about? He couldn’t risk the possibility that I might put less energy into the agency than I had done recently and publishing my book would keep me motivated and give me a reason not leave them all in the shit. I was after all, at that point the only one beside Pamela who knew where all the adapts for the print work could be found. I nearly cried when I heard him say the word publish because even though it was like a dream coming true it was cheapened by the fact that in doing so I might be strengthening my connections
to the advertising business when my intention had been to write a book that did the opposite.

  “Can I think about it?”

  “Yes of course, take your time. No rush”

  He, of all people, understood the need to pretend to think about it.

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

  Open on a wide-shot of me checking into a tiny little cheap hotel in a back street in Cannes. A shrunken old man in the tiny reception area hands me a key. Cut to inside the room as I enter and look around. It’ll do. Shrugging my bags to the floor I make my way straight to the bathroom and after a few moments we hear two distinct unmistakable plops. There is a gurgling sound but the cistern seems to be faulty. I try flushing again. Nothing. I pick up the phone and when the old man at the front desk answers the I say in my very best French; “Monsiuer, la toilette ne march pas” Silence. The old man doesn’t understand. “Toilette. Not. Work” I say again. Cut to the wizened old man in reception as he repeats the phrase. “Toleet. Non. Quoi? Cut back to me holding a burning match to dispel the odour. I try once more to flush the toilet but with no success. There is a quiet knock on the door and I open it to find a beautiful young girl standing there in an apron. She might be the old man’s daughter or grand-daughter or niece. She is smiling professionally.

  “Il y a un probleme, monsieur?”

  “Ah yes, over here.” she follows me to the bathroom and when I nod at the toilet she looks away horrified. I wave frantically to regain her attention. I behave now like we’re starting all over again and I raise my index finger in front of her face. I hold it there hypnotically before theatrically moving my hand towards the flush-handle and slowly, as if demonstrating to a child, I push it downwards. The toilet flushes perfectly. I stare at the toilet bowl in disbelief. The girl starts to cry. My mouth opens and closes as I try to find some way to explain. Learnanewlanguagedotcom