Dirk would always finish first and when he did, he’d shiver slightly. Then he’d push me onto my back to finish me. I’d close my eyes and concentrate. The music would mix with the sound of his breathing. One of his hands would sometimes press on my chest, his knee might brush the inside of my leg. When I was done, Dirk would let out a short laugh, wipe his hand on the sheets, and pull the covers over himself. We’d lie like that, side by side, just the sounds of the wind outside and whatever music was still murmuring from the speakers. Somewhere between five and ten minutes, always side by side. Until our breathing went back to normal.
When Dirk moved, raising his head or shifting onto his side, that would mean it was time to wash up. We’d slip out of bed, sneak down the hall to the bathroom, and huddle at the sink to share the running water. I’d tilt to one side, Dirk to the other. We’d use hand towels to dry off. I’d fold mine and hang it off the rack when I was done. Dirk would usually drop his on the floor.
In the dark we’d find our way back to bed and under the duvet. Sometimes we’d sleep facing each other, like on that first night. Other times he’d hold me from behind. It always took a few minutes to get comfortable. To adjust the pillow, stretch a leg out for a cool patch of mattress, use a free hand to pull at the covers, and to let the other know he was still awake. Then we were quiet. The last track on the record would play out, in reality or imagination. The eyelids would droop, and the body drowse.
In the morning we’d wake up across the mattress from each other and it was as though the previous night hadn’t happened. We’d get out of bed, throw on pyjamas and housecoats, head down to the kitchen, and talk about girls, parties, music, movies, and the future, especially as we approached graduation, escape from Sint Ansfried, and entrance to the wide world.
“We’re going to be fat,” Dirk would say.
“Fat,” I repeated.
“I’ll be fat from always being on the move, bouncing from place to place, putting on productions wherever I can scrounge out a stage. One day I’ll have my name in lights, an Oscar in my hand. The next I’ll be in obscurity, in a clearing in a forest, in front of people who speak strange languages. I’ll go from riding first class to hanging off the back of a bus. From suites at the George Cinq to a dirt floor under a leaking tarp. I will suffer from tapeworm and have to drink a poisonous juice made from local berries.”
I’d smile. “And me?”
Dirk would press a finger to his lips and give me a serious look. “I’ve thought about this, de Vries.” He’d frown, wrinkle his forehead. “You’ll be chubby, Old Man.”
“Only chubby?”
“Okay, you’re right. You’ll be lardaceous.”
Dirk would grab my hand and look at the lines of my palm, or slurp the last of his coffee and stare at the grounds.
“You and I, de Vries, will be like two cans of lard sitting on the same shelf. One shopper will throw me into her cart, another will throw you into hers. I’ll be donated to a local food drive, the world never knowing my true identity, and you’ll be whisked to the pantry of an English manor and baked into the crust of a love-and-marriage quiche, filled with the cream of haut bourgeois existence. You’ll give concerts in the finest salons, playing Tchaikovsky ballet string quartets on the piano, and have your face on the cover of a Deutsche Grammophon record. I’ll be fat from eating fast food and the piles of trash that gather at the crossing of two highways. You’ll be fat from a steady diet of venison and cognac.”
“Fat people die young,” I’d say.
“We will live till the age of wisdom,” Dirk would answer. “One hundred years old. Each.”
“So we’ll have a weigh-in at fifty?” I’d ask.
“Yes,” Dirk would nod. “And all this terrificness will start for you, Old Man, in Maastricht. I can already see you under stage lights. New York City, Los Angeles, Paris. Flying first class where they have wider seats, because you’ll be fat.”
In December of my last year at Sint Ansfried, I applied to the de Groot Conservatory in Maastricht, the finest music academy in the Netherlands. Dirk had been the technician for my audition tape and even proofread, without too much mocking, my application essay on the influence of Eastern instruments on Debussy’s sonatas.
Dirk’s applications, which were all to schools in America, involved a live audition in Amsterdam in February. In the lead-up to the date, he rehearsed maniacally, subjecting me to multiple variations on a series of monologues, but when the day came he took the train up north like it was no big deal and returned the next day with a bunch of typically Dirk stories. How his leg fell asleep during the Pinter and he had to Igor his way around the room. How he was helplessly attracted to the angora-sweatered breasts of one of the examiners, even if she was ninety-four years old.
I was accepted by Maastricht in mid-March. Dirk had to wait. But when he got the big envelope, during the last week of April, he brought it to school and opened it with me, at our lockers, at the end of the school day. There was a calendar with pictures of campus. A several-hundred-page course catalogue. Dormitory forms. Student visa forms. A bumper sticker for his parents’ car. Dirk tried to act nonchalant, but I could see his excitement, his pride.
“This is only step one, a minor corpulence,” he said. “All part of the larger plan to tear right through the asses of the pants we’re currently wearing.”
With our courses charted, school stopped mattering, and Dirk turned his attention to making one last splash. In grade nine he’d assistant-produced Thespus. In grade ten he was Hamlet, in Dogg’s Hamlet. In eleven he was Gilgagorm in a one-act play he wrote called Beowulf for Breakfast. But for his send-off he wanted to do everything at once.
“I know what it is,” he said. “Gargantua Redux.”
Dirk had long talked about turning Gargantua and Pantagruel, required reading in grade ten, into a play. I’m not sure he’d actually read the novel, or even half of it, but he often recalled the bits he’d picked up about dirty monks, corrupt bishops, cloisters, drinking, war, rogering, swearing, codpieces, exotic animals, decapitation, floods of urine, and grand speeches to “the people,” and was determined to transform it into a show.
“It’ll be a demonstration of pure Dirkian nonsense,” he said.
Somehow he persuaded the head of the drama department to give him the run of the studio. He wrote up a script and cast everyone from his class, Pym, Pirm, Beate, even Lise, putting himself in the lead, as Gargantua. He moved the story to a Japanese setting, included a silent chorus, and left stretches of dialogue in the original French. And in a grand gesture, he had an upright hauled onto the stage so I could play in the background through most of the action. “An original sequence,” he promised. “It will be Sprachgenie!”
After some experimentation, Dirk and I settled on a Chopin mazurka, opus 7, no. 1. It would be introduced in the opening scene, with improvised variations during the rest of the play. At certain points, Dirk had the cast hum to the melody. He also decided I’d be in costume with everyone else, turning out the sunny mazurka while knives and threats and stuffed animals flew. We rehearsed for a week, Dirk frequently sitting on the risers, taking notes and offering encouragement.
“Oh … this is totally … fuck me … yes.”
After the final run-through on the day before opening night, the cast and crew assembled and Dirk made his prediction.
“People will hate it,” he said. “They will get up from their chairs and leave. And I will be so proud of you.”
The opposite happened. Sellouts extended the initial run of three days to a week. It was standing room only, and on the final night we were well over legal capacity. Dirk took his bows before an ovation given by students, parents, teachers, and people from Vught and Den Bosch.
The morning after the last show, Dirk and I went back to an empty Sint Ansfried to clear out our lockers, throwing away things we had kept for years. Unreturned textbooks and library books. Pieces of clothing, either moth-eaten or too filthy to bother clea
ning. Cutlery once considered lost. A detailed sketch of testicles, which Dirk had drawn years before. He held the sketch to the light. “God, I’m good,” he said, scratching the stubble on his chin before he crumpled the piece of paper.
We stumbled across a pornographic magazine that Dirk and I once thought we’d misplaced somewhere in his house. We’d spent a weekend tearing through every room, then decided to appease the gods by dumping the grey gym bag that carried our entire porn collection into a postbox on the corner.
Dirk flipped through the magazine, then tossed it over his shoulder, into the growing pile of garbage. “I wanted to say something to you, de Vries,” he said, “and not about that magazine, which I do remember and which almost gave me a fucking heart attack.”
He put his hand out, and we shook. I tried to look solemn but was unable. For the moment, though, Dirk seemed serious.
“I wanted to thank you,” Dirk said, still holding my hand. “I don’t know where I would’ve ended up if it weren’t for you. I mean, I could have gone on the wrong path. Ended up like Pym, Pirm, all those guys. Nice people, but, you know. You kept me on track, de Vries.”
I didn’t know how to take his words, or answer them, so I stayed quiet. Eventually, Dirk let go of my hand.
“Now let’s get the fuck out of here,” he said.
We collected all our junk in a black garbage bag, which Dirk slung over his shoulder. On the way out, he kicked every door’s push-bar, and I did the same.
That summer passed at presto tempo as Dirk and I compressed as many experiences as possible into four months. I must have spent every day at Dirk’s and stayed over most weekends. Fridays we had our routine, and Saturdays we went to the park or bars downtown to meet friends or pick up girls. In mid-July a group of us drove to a fair in the countryside where they had set up a roller coaster that Dirk made me ride seven times in a row. “Until you puke,” he said. “Until I can see your fucking lungs.” In early August he had a fling with a girl who went to another school and I spent a weekend at home while the girl stayed at his house, but the next weekend we were back to normal.
Then came the end of the August, and Dirk’s last party. We were supposed to set up together but I had a bad cold, which threw off the plans. On the way to Den Bosch I stopped at a pharmacy to fill a prescription and when I showed up at Dirk’s door my eyes were streaming and my nose was stuffed.
“Oh, what are we going to do?” he said, half mockingly. “Party through the pain, I guess.”
I walked into the kitchen and put my overnight bag on the floor. Every inch of the counter was covered with bowls and bottles and pitchers and serving plates, each filled or covered with food and drink. Cheesy Goldfish, Ritz, Baken Snaps, Grasshoppers, and Pop Rocks. Wimp and lemon-lime Fresca. Pigs in blankets, soft cheeses, two dozen oysters, and ten bottles of cava, which Dirk called “aspirational champagne.” Dirk looked at the assembled display as though he were seeing it for the first time himself, and seemed impressed. “New Dirk, mature Dirk,” he muttered to himself. He rolled his head back, then side to side, and bounced on his feet, like a boxer preparing for a fight.
Dirk had had get-togethers, smaller parties, and even dinner parties, but never an all-out bash, and he had great ambitions. He started by drawing up a guest list, which was actually a guest list of girls, specifically those he had yet to score. First was Anna, from the year above us, who had promised Dirk a “dry run” on his birthday. “That’s when the girl takes off all her clothes,” Dirk had explained, “and the guy takes off everything except his underwear. The whole thing is she can touch you but you can’t touch her.” Anna had made the promise at a cast party the year before, but then she graduated. “Does graduation annul such promises?” Dirk asked. “Difficult to surmise.” But she was still in town and friends with girls in his class, so she was invited. Same with Rika, an off-and-on standby for Dirk. He had never gotten that far with her, so she was the backup in case Anna went sideways. Then there was Pym, Pirm, and Beate, of course. We struggled with Lise. Dirk pointed out that she had gotten better looking since we dated her. She was now better looking than Stefa. She made the list.
By eight o’clock my medication was kicking in. Dirk and I went to his room where he had me try on clothes from his closet. We went through suit vests, open-collar shirts, striped pants, and brogues, and settled on flared jeans and an untucked, mustard-coloured dress shirt, sleeves rolled up. Vest on top of that? Sure. Bandana? We decided against. In the bathroom Dirk and I shaved in front of the mirror, then he fixed my hair with gel and doused us both with 4711 cologne. Before switching off the bathroom light, Dirk stared intently at his reflection, slapped his face twice, hard, and declared himself ready.
At around nine people started showing up, and by ten the volume on the downstairs stereo was at full blast. Despite the curated guest list, the party quickly became a free-for-all. People brought their own drinks and cigarettes and joints, which they ashed everywhere. The couch migrated. The carpet was flipped over. The oysters and strange cheeses were the only things that stayed intact.
Dirk, meanwhile, was in his element, revelling in how his party was getting out of hand, glad-handing people he’d never met before, letting out screams for no reason and at no one in particular. At a certain point he’d begun hugging old friends while mock crying, then stepping back and looking at them as though they were strangers. It was like a curtain call on the Sint Ansfried years.
At half past two I lost stamina. My ears were plugged and my head was foggy. More people had arrived after midnight, maybe coming from another party, and I lost track of Dirk in the crowd. I climbed halfway up the stairs, to survey the living room, and saw him sliding between groups of girls.
“Dirk!” I called. “Dirrrrrrk!” He didn’t hear, but when I waved my arms, I caught his eye. I motioned that I was quitting for the night. He looked at me as if I couldn’t be serious.
“But this is the last party, de Vries!”
I mimed that I was dying on my feet.
“I wouldn’t be graduating if it weren’t for you!” he yelled.
I shook my head and smiled.
“You’re right! It’s not true, de Vries! But I wouldn’t be graduating this year! Stay up a little longer. It’s your party, too.”
I shot an imaginary pistol at my forehead. Who knew mixing cold medication with booze would be such a downer?
Dirk waved with two hands. “I’ll be up … soon!”
I trudged the rest of the way up the stairs and undressed as soon as I got into Dirk’s bedroom. Closing the door muffled some of the noise from downstairs, but not all of it. I felt restless, dizzy, and overheated as I collapsed onto the bottom bunk. The covers twisted themselves around my body. I closed my eyes and tried to keep them shut, but every so often, when I forgot I was trying to sleep, I opened them again and looked at the green numbers on Dirk’s stereo. 2:52 … 3:12 … 3:28. Downstairs the music was still playing, and in the pauses between tracks, I heard glasses clinking, cupboards shutting, the front door slamming. At 3:47 I heard a large group leave. “Goodnight! Ta!” A brief silence followed, but then came another series of whoops and something or someone crashing to the ground. More laughing, more music, and Dirk’s voice rising above the din.
It was well after four o’clock that the house fell quiet and the music stopped. I strained for the sound of footsteps padding up the stairs. I held my breath and listened closely. At first nothing. Then came something from downstairs. Dirk and Anna? The dry run?
The clock numbers blurred. My eyelids felt heavy. I shifted in bed trying to find a comfortable position to fall asleep. Not long after, I heard the door to the bedroom creak open. An outline of Dirk. Then the door closed.
He crawled onto the bottom bunk, beside me. Sitting on top of the duvet, facing me, he stripped off his pants and underwear. Even in the dark, and bleary-eyed as I was, I could make out his penis lying against one of his thighs. I propped myself against a pillow. Dirk got under the c
overs and put his hand flat on my chest. I lay back, closed my eyes. The world started to spin. I heard him mumble something and felt him change position so that he was leaning over me. I opened my eyes slightly, looked down, and saw his head at my waist. I felt his breath on my stomach. He eased the hand on my chest, telling me to relax. Then he turned around to face the wall. Do it, de Vries. I got on my knees and leaned over him. I felt his hand take me inside. He grunted at first, then held his breath. I held mine and pushed. I heard him exhale, letting me know to keep going.
Dirk left for America. I left for Maastricht. All of a sudden I was faced with new surroundings, new classmates, new tutors, and practice routines. I was excited, and nervous. In the early days I’d get the sensation that Dirk was sitting in class with me, and if I’d glance over my shoulder, I’d see him. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I’d imagine telling him what I’d seen and learned and done, as if we were sitting on his bottom bunk, listening to music. Ray Charles, Booker T and the MGs. I thought of calling or writing, but somehow never got around to it. At the same time, neither did he, so I didn’t feel like I was letting down the side. I figured we were both sorting through new surroundings and would save up our stories for Christmas.
There was plenty to tell. I had applied to the conservatory with full confidence, but when I got there I quickly saw myself as a dilettante surrounded by proper musicians. When I heard others play I realized I was not the standout I had been at Sint Ansfried. For many of the other students, performing was effortlessness, mastery a given. I was in a dinghy, rowing against the waves; they were on a motorboat, gliding over glassy waters. The laws of friction and inertia did not apply. Did they even need to practise?
But the thought of Dirk on the other side of the ocean, thriving in a more alien culture and different language, made quitting impossible. If he could do it, I could do it. And better.
School of Velocity Page 5