Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

‘Oh, I see, a sacrifice. Of course. You made a sacrifice, for me. . I was an inconvenient interruption to your life as a whore.’

‘That’s not what I am,’ she said quietly, ‘so please stop it. I have a contract for three films, and Rollo’s trying to arrange a show for me in Las Vegas, along with Annie Sprinkle and one of these new girls, Holly Cranes or something. I’ve heard that Linda Lovelace got thirty-five thousand a week in Las Vegas. We could make a new start, Ludwig, start something new.’

‘So this Liban is your pimp.’

‘My agent.’

We had arrived at a broad channel that ran down to the sea. We couldn’t go any further, we had to go up, to the paved path used during the day by cyclists, skaters and pedestrians. An asphalt road through the desert.

‘They dump straight into the ocean,’ my mother said. ‘Swimmers get sick from it.’

The water was covered in thick foam. It moved. I couldn’t help but think about puréed shit.

She walked on, back to the hotel; I went looking for something to eat. I was not pleased. There were certain words. Whore. Pimp. They bothered me. It was pathetic. I crossed them out of my vocabulary.

On Appian Way I saw a big man screaming into his cell phone. The man’s voice cut through the darkness.

‘No, now you’re gonna listen! We’re talking here, you and me. I buy a drink, you buy a drink, and that’s it. No, I’m talking now. No! First you’re going to let me finish. .’

He was giving someone hell. It was all completely revolting. Before I even reached the corner, a woman came running past me. She was holding a cell phone to her ear as well. She screamed.

‘I wanna fucking die! Do you hear me?!’

She slalomed through the cars waiting at the light on Ocean Avenue. A shopping bag fluttered wildly on her arm. She ran into a parking lot and was gone.

Russian cabbies on Colorado Avenue were chewing on seeds, spitting out the hulls. A couple of blocks further along I went into a restaurant. The realization that it was a vegan place arrived with the menu. The mint tea, pumpkin soup and spring rolls all landed on the table at the same time, because , the boy waiting on me said, we’re closing in a minute . He put the bill on the table as well.

‘Maybe you should have told me that before I ordered,’ I said.

The look on his face changed. The hatred with which restaurant personnel talk about us behind the swinging doors. Sometimes spitting on the plates.

‘It says so on the door,’ he said curtly.

Still lightheaded from the flight, I slipped into that buzz of estrangement that the world sometimes produces. I left the restaurant before finishing my meal. Out on the sidewalk I saw sheets of thin, parchment-like paper, torn from a book. I picked up some sheets that were still glued together. Someone had ripped a Bible to pieces. The pages rustled between my fingers. The final pages of Genesis, a large chunk of Exodus — the portent was not lost on me.

My mother was in bed when I came in, she looked at me over the top of her reading glasses. I suggested asking for extra sheets and blankets and sliding the two halves of the bed away from each other.

‘I don’t want you to do that,’ she said determinedly, ‘that would clutter the place up right away. The bed is big enough as it is.’

I was too tired to enter into another conflict, to work up the energy needed to get my own way. She went back to her book about force fields and how a secret world government had covered up the discovery of an internal combustion engine that ran on water. Esoteric literature was all she read anymore. I took my toothbrush and pajamas out of the suitcase. A fast shower to rinse off the trip, my gums bled when I brushed them. I tried not to think about the future, about a life full of temporary addresses.

Sleep was long in coming. On the other side of the bed there was someone else’s body. It breathed, it made a choking noise and then, two hours after the light went out, it began to snore. Sucking in air with a rattle, letting it escape again with a soft burble. Disquieting intimacy.

‘You’re snoring,’ I said in the dark.

A little later, again, louder this time.

‘Hey, you’re snoring!’

She awoke with a start.

‘Oh, sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll roll over.’

She fell back asleep, became body once more. The body that would again play a role in people’s fantasies. Men’s. Millions of men. It would be lusted after, it would summon up burning desires — her likeness would be reproduced countless times, she would be a star again, for that is what a star is, the result of uncontrolled, eruptive proliferation, a metastasis. But now, because it was a comeback and she was much older than back then, there would be the nudge-wink of camp, of bad taste taken ironically, perhaps she would become the patroness of homos, who had more or less invented camp. But how ironic could it be, I wondered, commercialized sex: you could fuck in front of the camera in a derby or a Minnie Mouse mask, but it remained pornography: the portrayal of penetration, intended to stimulate masturbation. The way it had appeared to me in Lilith . That body beside me. That had already caused me so much painful confusion, and that was now snoring. The thought: what if I raped her? Then it would all be over and done with, then the sin would be manifest and my life would have purpose, it could consist of penance. I would long for what didn’t exist: forgiveness. I can’t turn my thoughts to anything else, it’s all equally filthy. And she sleeps on, like a baby. A very noisy baby. In her dreams there are no demons. I am standing guard. This is how our lives will be, I suddenly see it all clearly: she will give herself away, and I will save her. With me she will re-find herself and remember who she was. The life of a porn star is her point of departure, I will be her return. All night long, that is the only clear moment, the moment when I realize what our life will look like. I will stay with her, wherever she goes to do whatever she does, I will be there with all the inert patience of a confession box. I also know that she will push me away, that she will say I should lead my own life and that I don’t have to be her keeper; words I will tolerate purely and passively, with the smile of one who knows better.

Halfway through the night, I’d had enough.

‘Why did you turn the light on?’ she moaned.

‘You’re snoring, goddamn it.’

I climbed out of bed and began pulling away the sheet on my side. I pushed the beds apart.

‘I have earplugs in the bathroom,’ she said, ‘in my sponge bag.’

‘Forget the earplugs.’

Now I had a single bed, but not enough sheets and blankets. In trousers and a T-shirt I went out into the hall, took the lift down and asked at the desk for extra sheets and a duvet.

‘Which room number, sir?’

‘I’ll take it up myself.’

‘We’ll have it brought to you, sir, that’s no problem. What is your room number?’

A little later a knock at the door, a black boy with sleepy eyes behind a pile of linen. My mother had turned onto her side, a sleep mask from the plane over her eyes. She had fallen asleep again.

The next morning she had gone out, without leaving a note. A big breakfast, the fruit aglow with freshness. I could get used to this life. Dozens of snowy white gym shoes wandered back and forth through the dining room, a procession in all directions. Outside the windows an oceanic heaven full of immaculate light. To be honest, I didn’t quite know what to do. The day spread out before me without direction. I tried to summon up the feeling of a traveler who, after journeying on foot for two years, finally arrives in California.