Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

A little later you’re walking around again in a daze, you’re still there, they rolled that oxcart off your chest and you sucked up oxygen like it was medicine. The relief at finding that everything still continues for the moment, the chalk on your knuckles and the wind from the sea that blows the last brown leaves across the grass.

A little later I was smacked in the eyebrow. Blood ran down beside my eye, a rip.

‘Wipe it off,’ Leland said.

If I didn’t the game would be stopped for a blood bin. We’d already run through all our substitutes. It was a hard match, but we won easily. Everyone did what he had to do, we played strongly, plainly. In the showers the elation, the flushed bodies covered in abrasions and bumps, flattered by the steam rising up from the cold floor.

‘I think it’s going to need two stitches,’ Ashley Loyd said.

He’d been watching the match from the sidelines. In the fading light outside the canteen, he looked at my eyebrow. Then he went in and rummaged about in the silver-colored first aid kit behind the bar, until he found a packet with needle and thread that was still intact. He grumbled about how we needed to replenish the kit. In the beer closet, beneath the light of a bare bulb, he peered at my brow.

‘Jungle medicine,’ he mumbled.

And, a moment later, ‘This will sting a bit.’

The long, calm glide of the needle through my skin, the doctor is a god making me whole again. Outside the door people were shouting orders to the barman, rashers hissed in the pan. From the little kitchen, Mrs. Packton shouted I’m not a bloody magician, you know! And just as I was retrieving my wallet and cellular from the crate of valuables, the phone went. A long, foreign number. My heart leapt. I answered it.

‘Hello?’

‘Ludwig? This is Mama. Where are you? What a horrible noise.’

I walked outside, her confusion in my ear.

‘Ludwig? Are you there?’

‘Where are you?’ I asked once I was outside the canteen.

She laughed.

‘It’s so nice to hear your voice, sweetheart.’

‘Where are you?’

‘In America, California, I’m in Los Angeles! What time is it there? Here it’s. .’

‘What are you doing there?’

‘Do you know Rollo Liban? Haven’t I ever told you about him? Rollo’s an old friend, a good friend, he invited me to come here.’

‘You haven’t been in touch for more than a month.’

‘You can’t imagine how busy I’ve been!’

‘You’re in America. .’

Her giggle.

‘At a hotel on the beach! Everything’s changed so much here, but somehow it’s still the same. You’d hardly believe your eyes.’

‘When are you coming back?’

‘Oh, I have no idea, angel. For the time being I’m just taking things as they come. I’m sitting on my balcony now, in the sun. The first few days were very gray and somber, but the weather’s been beautiful lately. Maybe someday we can live here, I think you’d find it very special too. Of course, it’s still America, but. .’

A little later, after we’d hung up, I realized she had not answered the essential questions: where she was exactly, and what she was doing there. I thumbed back to calls received and punched the last number. A woman’s voice, with the enthusiasm of good news.

‘Loews Hotel, can I help you?’

I hung up and looked around the canteen. The windows were steamy, the walls seemed to bulge a bit from all the light and life inside there.

I tore my eyes off it, turned and walked towards the lighted edge of the village in the distance.

‘THE GREATEST COMEBACK

IN THE HISTORY OF PORN’

The triumph of that first journey! As though you were piloting the aircraft yourself and setting it down, light as a feather, on the black sheet of tarmac! A little later, carrying my old suitcase, I walked out the sliding glass doors and into the world. I had drawn dollars from the ATM in the arrivals hall, the banknotes called me a man of the world. Fully confident, one strolls through the screen version of one’s own life, no one can see your heart pounding like a puppy’s. Look at him climb into that taxi, the casual air of authority, a man who has pulled so many cab doors closed behind him and says, ‘Loews Hotel, please.’

The cab driver turns around.

‘Hotel what?’

‘Loews.’

The irony tugging at your lips shows him his proper place.

‘Where’s that, man? The Lois Hotel? Never heard of it.’

Well then, if this poor immigrant lives in such dark ignorance you’ll have to help out a little, serve as his missionary, a lamp unto his feet. You spell out the name of the hotel for him and lean back; now everything will go according to plan. But the man doesn’t know when to quit. Now he wants to know where it is, this Loews thing of yours. Suddenly you lose your composure, it shatters into a thousand pieces; he’s the driver, I tell him, but if he doesn’t know anything I’m perfectly willing to take the wheel. His indifference is like bedrock, he doesn’t even seem to have picked up on my slur. Los Angeles, he explains to me, is a multiplicity of towns: Beverly Hills, Compton, Venice, Santa Monica, Palisades. . And I have to listen to all this. I fall back in my seat and mumble Santa Monica. The taxi moves away from the airport, into dissolving sunlight. The afternoon is drawing to a close, the glory is a lie, the bitter taste in your mouth at the end of the binge.

The streets had something distinctly shabby about them. Sometimes in the distance you could see a bundle of skyscrapers, all in a clump, as though smelted together by thermonuclear heat. I looked at the screen on my cell phone, which didn’t work in these parts. The road beneath the cab rolled by in slow waves. Palm trees stood in blunt silhouette against the turquoise billboard of sky. Big black cars slid by, introverted chunks of steel with darkened windows. I lacked all curiosity about the life inside them. Between the houses I sometimes caught a glimpse of the ocean.

‘This must be it,’ the driver said at last.

I said nothing, simply handed him the fare from the backseat. There were long, drawn-out limos at the entrance and men in weird tailcoats. Once inside, the enormous space of the atrium came crashing down on me. I made my way between rows of life-sized artificial palms, a cathedral of light and openness, past the reception desk. Through the huge glass panels at the end of the colonnade you could see the quiet ocean. My tattered cardboard suitcase marked me as an intruder; ducking into the lounge, I tucked it away between the little table and the easy chair. A waitress served me a Budweiser and slipped the bill under the bowl of pretzels. When she left, I glanced at it. Eight dollars for a beer. Ten beers and I’d be broke. I was impressed. Never had I drunk anything so expensive. At the Loews, the balance between price and performance had vanished completely, the hotel was a discreet piece of machinery designed to shake as much money as quickly as possible from its guests’ pockets. The guests didn’t care much. The bronzed floozies in their gold slippers, the noisy middle-aged men with barrel chests and spindly legs, the elderly couples with failing bodily functions but a portfolio full of reduced-risk investments; the price of things was an abstraction on the statement from the credit-card company.

I had hoped to catch my mother at something, perhaps merely to catch a glimpse of her life without me, but after an hour I went to the reception to ask for her room number. A young man tore himself away from the crowd loitering behind the desk, his smile broad, his cordiality obscene. Mrs. Unger was not in her room. I went back to the bar. My chair had been taken, so I settled down beneath a giant TV screen showing a silent basketball game. Suddenly I felt nothing but disgust for Loews, this temple of whores and hucksters. The window dressing of the lie.