Joe Speedboat

by Tommy Wieringa

  ‘Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds, then you broke.’

  Two minutes and thirty-nine seconds: I was amazed, it had felt like an eternity to me.

  ‘You didn’t give an inch, the others all went down within the first minute. Well, that’s the importance of calcium. Just imagine if that bone hadn’t broken? You had a chance, you really did. But OK, a couple of months, Frankie, then we’re back on the road.’

  P.J. groaned in disapproval.

  ‘You guys are nuts.’

  The nurse had given us a box of painkillers, the first of which was administered to me at five o’clock and washed down with beer.

  ‘Sleep in our room tonight,’ Joe said, ‘for if you need to pee and things.’

  I hadn’t even arrived at that complication yet; Joe would be assuming Engel’s old role . . . I decided to get sloshed.

  All things considered, my arm left me less depressed that I would have thought. I took comfort in the fact that it had happened while doing battle with the Arm Saint: it was my Fracture of Honour.

  P.J. showed her solidarity, drinking at the same pace I did. Our waitress’s face bore an expression of boundless long-suffering. Out in front of the hotel entrance, Joe was bent over the engine of the Olds, repairing the leaky radiator with duct tape. The waitress brought more beer, P.J. stuck a straw in my bottle and set it in front of me where I could get to it easily. I drank with a vengeance, to calm the spasms; the arm was immobilized, but the contractions caused me hellish pain. She pulled the X-rays out of the envelope and held them up to the light one by one. When you looked at them like that, the bones were flimsy little things. A wonder that they had held up for even two minutes and thirty-nine seconds.

  ‘A clean break,’ she said, ‘not jagged or anything. Does it hurt?’

  Yes, dear Florence, it hurts. Will you ease my pain?

  ‘We’ll have to take care of you for a little while now, you can’t do anything. My finals are in August, but I can study at my parents’ place.’

  P.J. slid the photos back into the envelope and said, ‘Come on, let’s see what’s happening in town. I’ve pretty much had it with this place.’

  She rolled me out of the dining room and across the lobby to the desk, a dimly lit niche at the end of the hallway. The clerk was reading a book.

  ‘Bitte,’ P.J. asked, ‘do you have a map of the city? We’re looking for a gutes Restaurant, or maybe a bar.’

  The man looked up angrily.

  ‘Hier keine Bar!’ he snapped. ‘Keine Bar in Poznan!’

  His Slavic accent sharply emphasized each syllable, his eyes glowed with a kind of anger.

  ‘Here we have only Arbeitslosen und Banditen! Going into town is suicide.’

  He demonstrated to us how deadbeats and bandits would knock us over the head and steal all our money. P.J. looked on in amusement. Then she tried a different tack.

  ‘Would you mind my asking what book you’re reading?’ she asked sweetly.

  ‘Ah, reading. Yes, of course.’

  He handed it to P.J. and we saw that it was a comic book, with Vampirella in an SM suit on the cover. In the background, SS officers were torturing a blonde virgin.

  ‘Sehr gut!’ the desk clerk said.

  P.J. flipped through it and showed me a page on which SS men with massive dicks sticking out of the trousers of their uniforms were raping a group of women, who looked rather like gypsies with their thick, dark locks and the hoops in their ears.

  ‘They don’t make them like this where we come from,’ P.J. said.

  The desk clerk’s smile revealed a ruined set of teeth. He opened a drawer, pulled out another book and handed it to P.J.: a Polish edition of Mein Kampf. The idiot was reading Mein Kampf . . . P.J.’s eyes sparkled.

  ‘What else do you think he has in that little cabinet of horrors?’

  She gave him back Vampirella and Mein Kampf and leaned across the counter, trying to see what else he had. The man, rising to the occasion, pulled out a grimy little book of photos in which he appeared in heavily wooded surroundings, posing with one foot on the back of a dead bear. In his hand he held a huge hunting rifle.

  ‘Schiessen,’ he gasped, ‘gut!’

  But the prize piece in his collection was yet to come: a pistol. Or a revolver, I can never tell the difference. He rested the bulky thing on the palm of one hand, and only gave it to P.J. after a good deal of cooing and wooing on her part. He was proud that we were so interested in his collection.

  ‘This is getting better all the time, Frankie, look!’

  She pointed the pistol down the hallway behind us and sighted along it with one eye closed. The cackling laughter from behind the counter gave me goose flesh.

  ‘Arbeitslosen und Banditen! Bang bang!’

  The last thing he handed us was the little bundle containing the passports we’d left at the desk the night before. P.J. traded the pistols for the passports. She opened the one on top, saw that it was mine and stuck it in the pouch on the side of my cart. Her own passport she put in her back pocket. The only one left now was Joe’s. She glanced over at the door of the hotel, then back at the passport. Then she opened it; I sniffed in protest, I knew exactly what she was up to: she wanted to see Joe’s real name. So even she didn’t know! But that was forbidden, no one was allowed to do that! She looked surprised at the way I shook my head so adamantly.

  ‘You mean you’re not curious?’

  Of course I was curious, but that wasn’t the point. Fucking bitch, put it away! But her eyes were already scanning the front page. She raised her eyebrows and smiled. Then she turned the open passport to face me, I saw Joe’s photo in a flash before I closed my eyes. I wasn’t allowed to see this. Everything crowed alarm in the darkness, she had no right, it was blasphemy, no one was allowed to finagle him out of his real name, it was his only secret. As soon as I thought she’d understood, I opened my eyes, but there, twenty centimetres in front of my nose the front page of Joe’s passport was still dangling. She was looking for an accomplice, she was luring me into her corrupt universe, the one Metz had warned me about, oh Christ, how could I refuse her? I focused on the passport in front of me. Joe’s passport photo, a little tough, a little casual. Oh, Joe, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.

  Naam/Surname/Nom

  RATZINGER

  Voornamen/Given names/Prénoms

  ACHIEL STEPHAAN

  The passport disappeared from view, P.J. handed it back to the clerk.

  ‘Would you please give it to him yourself?’ she said. ‘He’ll come by in a minute.’

  He nodded in amazement, he had no idea what had just happened. P.J. rolled me back into the dining room and set me down in front of my beer. A few minutes later Joe came in, wiping his hands on a soiled rag.

  Achiel Stephaan Ratzinger.

  The man at the desk called him over and gave him his passport. In the doorway to the dining room he smiled at P.J. and said, ‘Do you guys have your passports? He says . . .’

  ‘Yes, love, we’ve got them.’

  ‘All right. And we’ve got wheels again.’

  P.J. lit a cigarette for him. His fingers left oil spots on the paper. Achiel Stephaan. Why the hell had his parents given him such a retarded, Flemish name? Had they named him after a Flemish grandfather? A guru from Westmalle? Whatever it was, we were looking at a man without a secret. And that secret was a Belgian joke. Achiel Stephaan; handed over to the Philistines by his sweetheart, betrayed by his friend.

  *

  That night in their room I puked all over everything. Joe helped me into the bathroom, I screamed, I think I even begged his forgiveness.

  ‘You were terrible,’ Joe said on the way home the next day. ‘You threw up all over me, you nut.’

  That I had pissed all over his fingers remained our secret. In the back, P.J. remained as silent as the Sphinx.

  It’s an X-raylike experience, knowing Joe’s real name. Achiel Ratzinger is the fate he tried to escape; it caught up with him at last. I
seem to recall biblical characters being given a different name, after some drastic change in their lives. I scribble a note to Ma, asking to borrow her Bible.

  ‘It’s never too late to start,’ she sighs.

  It doesn’t take long before I hit pay dirt. In Genesis, God himself gives new names to Abram and Sarai. ‘Neither shall thy name any more be called Abram, but thy name shall be Abraham; for a father of many nations have I made thee.’ Abraham’s wife Sarai also receives a new name: Sarah.

  In the New Testament, Peter receives a new name as well, as seen first in the Gospel of Mark: ‘And He appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom He gave the name Peter), and James, the son of Zebedee, and John the brother of James (to them He gave the name Boanerges, which means, ”Sons of Thunder”).’ The same thing can be found in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says: ‘You are Simon the son of John; you shall be called Cephas (which is translated Peter).’

  In the Book of Acts, Saul – that fanatical persecutor of Christians – undergoes a change of name when a heavenly light appears to him on the road to Damascus. A voice revealing itself as that of Jesus shouts: ‘Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?’ Saul becomes a believer and, for the rest of his life, bears the name Paul.

  It seems to me that the patriarchs and disciples were given a name to match their new, elevated status. Men of God who bore their name as a sign of distinction.

  Finally, in the Book of Revelations, I read that if we lend an ear to the Spirit, we will all be given new names. ‘And I will give him a white stone, and a new name written on the stone which no one knows but he who receives it.’

  Our secret name that is known to no one – P.J. and I, however, have peeked under that stone and are disappointed at what we find: the humiliating tag stuck to Joe’s back, so that when you are around him you sometimes feel the urge to giggle. His Achilles’ heel had lain tucked away inside his name the whole time: nomen est omen. The men of God were given names that made them greater; with Achiel Stephaan, P.J. and I have made Joe smaller and divested him of his dignity. Beneath his self-appointed name he has no clothes.

  In the weeks that follow P.J. does a great deal for me, she takes me out for walks (‘Do you want to wear my sunglasses? You’re squinting so badly’) and when evening comes she feeds me frankfurters with obvious distaste. After work Joe comes by and the three of us sit around, making Joe and P.J. seem like a couple with a pathetic child. When I have to piss, Joe helps me. Ma is the only one I let wipe my butt, I still will not tolerate anyone else behind my anus horribilis. That Joe sometimes takes my dick between thumb and forefinger in order to worm it back into my underpants is bad enough. He doesn’t dry it off the way I always do, so Ma has to boil my underpants to get the piss flecks out of them. When Joe helps me I look the other way, as though I weren’t there. I’d kill myself if I ever got a hard-on.

  Joe’s real name has brought P.J. and me closer together. Guilt feelings rise to the surface when I’m alone again and lie looking at the dying light of day. Sometimes I see Engel, the expression on his face with which he assesses this, and somehow it seems unlikely that any of this would have happened were he still around. Joe stands alone in the face of a new three-cornered construction of a woman without scruples (‘She is not depraved or bad, she simply lacks a conscience: that is all’ – from About a Woman) and two friends who quietly hate him at times.

  When I’m not in the mood to feel guilty I tell myself that it’s actually nothing more than an exchange of intimacies: he’s seen my dick, I’ve seen his name. So what if we know that about him, he has P.J., doesn’t he? It’s only fair that I then take back something in return. Compared to him, I’m nothing but a petty thief. But when in my mind I again hear the hideous laughter of the desk clerk at the Hotel Olympia, I can’t defend that train of thought. Joe Speedboat is more than an adolescent whim, it’s his destiny. The men of God became different people because of their new names, and it’s unthinkable that they could have gone back to who they were as Abram, Simon or Saul. But that is exactly what has happened to Joe. We no longer see the beloved sorcerer’s apprentice, but Achiel Stephaan Ratzinger, like a kind of Christof who long ago tried to disguise how pathetic he was by adopting Johnny Monday as his nom de plume.

  I see that P.J. in her thoughts has begun calling Joe ‘Achiel’; a certain nonchalance has crept into the entirety of actions with which she expresses love: every kiss and every glance now poisoned by irony. Sounding brass, a tinkling cymbal. Agonizingly slow, she’s busy tearing him apart.

  I believe every person must have a holy core, one area where he is reliable through and through; the same holy core that has become corrupted in me and that I have never been able to discover in P.J. Only that predatory opportunism that possesses a beauty of its own, definitely; when she takes care of me, she lets me feel like I’m truly important to her. This has bound me to her more intensely, the knowledge that she does not possess love but does her best nonetheless, for reasons we may never know. Metz writes: ‘Perhaps she does have a heart, but keeps it in a thousand places.’ I think P.J. really wants that, to be like other people, that she’s envious of the abandon and loss of self with which Joe loves her, and that she despises him for it.

  She is obviously still fascinated by the notebooks, my History of Lomark and Its Citizens. The day will come when she will ask to read them. I will give in, for if anyone is to be allowed it is she. She is as welcome in my world as I am in hers. But the day I’m talking about is this one, now, the day she makes a drawing on the cast on my arm. The drawing shows Islam Mansur as King Kong, who is holding me (tiny, but clearly wearing a sling) in the palm of his hand and looking at me with one bulging eye. THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD, she writes beneath it. She draws well, Mansur’s incarnation as gorilla is striking. As she colours the gorilla blue she is very close, I hear her deep, quiet breathing, I feel the warmth of her body like a stove. Sometimes, when grains of plaster block the tip, the flow of ink stops. When the light falls in a certain way, her eyebrows are almost reddish.

  ‘Sit still,’ she says as a spasm rolls by.

  I lean forward a little to muffle the start of an erection in the folds of my trousers. Who wouldn’t be edgy, with her around? Even knowing who she is, you remain susceptible to that seductive ruthlessness that one could also dismiss as humorous naughtiness. That’s the whole point: you can recognize her manipulative nature if you choose, but to close your eyes to it is an act of the will. That makes P.J. a self-imposed fate. And I, I do not wish to be spared.

  King Kong is almost finished, P.J. looks up. I look the other way, fix my gaze on the tabletop and the things on it. The atmosphere is suddenly, how shall I put it, charged, making it difficult for me to swallow.

  ‘What is it, Frankie?’ she asks quietly.

  I feel caught; sometimes my thoughts are like muffins you can pull right out of the oven. The next thing I know is that her hand, her hand, is at my crotch. If only she doesn’t feel my hard-on, I think in a panic, before realizing that that is precisely what this is all about. It is the hand of God with which she gives me soft, dizzying little squeezes; never before has my dick in someone else’s hand been something to squeeze softly, only to shake firmly or scrub rigorously, but not this, not like this. She glances out the window and loosens my belt. I don’t budge, deathly afraid of anything that will stop this. She opens the zipper and slips her hand into my underpants. Good hand, warm hand that closes around my cock, making me almost choke with bliss. P.J. pulls it out and slowly begins jerking me off.

  ‘You’re so hard,’ she says, more to herself than to me.

  Her hand moves a little faster, the fingers tightening their grip, greater joy cannot be imagined. I hear the cloth of my trousers rustling against her wrist, her breathing grows faster. A little pensive fold appears between her eyes. She slows, slides her thumb across the head of my cock and my vision darkens to the speckled image of snowfall at evening, I come all over her hand and my trousers. I stifle the scream
, my upper body doubles over. Then the cramps ebb away and she lets go. She smiles serenely, gets up to fetch a dish towel from the kitchen and wipe the sperm off her hand. She cleans off my trousers as well.

  A little later she walks to the door, holding her bag. In the doorway she turns and asks, ‘Did I take good enough care of you today, Frankie?’ and bestows upon me a little smile. Shattered, I lean back in my chair and know that there is no limit to what I would do for her. Her faithlessness was heralded, she has proliferated as naturally as lice on a child’s scalp, and all the things I’ve thought about myself are true as well, it was only a matter of time before it came to the fore. That knowledge contains an element of freedom; facts are better than suspicions.

  Today I have chosen to end my misery; the pleasure of P.J. in exchange for my only friendship seems like a fair trade. And if you didn’t feel so shitty about it, nothing would be the matter.

  A few days later I look on in regret as the nurse cuts P.J.’s drawing right down the middle. Beneath the cast the arm has grown much thinner, for the next month or so I won’t be able to do anything strenuous with it. Late in June comes the longest day, rainy and a gusty gray. Ma says it’s going to be a wet summer, and that we’d be better off getting used to it; partial to heavy clouds with occasional rain or drizzle, daytime highs between nineteen and twenty-two degrees, and lots of earwigs.

  The first time I open a can of frankfurters on my own I’m afraid the arm is going to break again, but after a while everything is back to normal. It takes some effort to get back into my training rhythm, I can’t imagine that Joe and I will go on with everything like always, but for him there’s no doubt about it. The doubt exists only in my own head, where the things of the last few months converge in the moment when I come all over P.J.’s hand. This is the life that comes after. All my innocence was only guilt that hadn’t materialized yet.