Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

Twelve days later I was ready at last for a light training session. It came as a relief: using my muscles intensively had become a remedy for the darkness inside. The dumbbells, the arrival of that neutral soul Hennie Oosterloo, the tournament in Liège; it had kissed awake the man of action in me. Wearing out my locomotor apparatus freed my mind, because of the endorphins it released. That was the first conclusion to be drawn from arm wrestling. The second was that I was a temple of burning ambition. That had nothing to do with Kensei’s philosophy; it was all rage and bloodthirstiness, and I understood now why some sports were symbolic massacres.

I racked my brains over how I could ever defeat colossi like Mehmet Koç. How one sweeps away a mountain of sand with a feather, that question.

I could see only one solution: hypodermic redemption. I suggested this to Joe, but he never added such rough remedies to the training program. ‘If we can get as far as we did in Liège with just a few months’ training,’ Joe said, ‘then you’re nowhere near the limits of your natural ability.’ We did increase the volume of protein supplements, though, and the number of repetitions, and he gave me a jar of creatine, a controversial performance enhancer made from animal tissue. ‘An advance on your birthday present,’ he said.

They say lots of activity boosts your testosterone. Maybe that’s why I dreamed so immoderately of P.J. during that period. Lewd dreams, with no fucking whatsoever. Can you dream of copulating when you’ve never actually done it? What I remember of those dreams are violent, exhausting scenes between me and other men before she and I even touched. That touch brought on feelings so ecstatic that I knew they had to exist in real life as well. She twisted her body in such a way that, in the course of things, I could never see her cunt. That was the trick my dream mind played, to camouflage my lack of anatomical insight.

But the truly special thing about those dreams was this: that I walked upright, ran and leapt. And when I made love to her, it was with a body that was whole.

It was Joe who arrived with the news that P.J. was at her parents’ and that she was ‘not doing well’. Not doing well meant: beaten up by Lover Boy Writer. In a fit of psychotic rage he had damaged home and garden, as well as the temple of his beloved. She had been at her parents’ place for days without showing her face. I saw a disturbing correlation between the violence in my dreams and that of her slaphappy Lover Boy Writer.

Joe and I went to Acacia Florist’s on Breedstraat and had a red-and-white bouquet put together for delivery to the White House.

‘It’s actually more the season for autumnal tints,’ the noodle of a shopkeeper said.

We ignored him.

‘Would you like to add a text for the recipient?’

Joe looked at me.

‘You’re the writer around here.’

The shopkeeper handed me a folded card with a hole punched in it. I wrote:

We’re around.

Your friends

Joe and Frankie

‘What kind of a text is that?’ Joe said. ‘Don’t you have to write something like “best wishes” or something?’

I shook my head. I had full confidence in P.J.’s ability to decode the message; she would read that we were here if she needed us, and that we were thinking of her without imposing our presence. That’s the way it was.

The very next tournament, in a backstreet district of Vienna, was a fiasco. I won’t go into it in depth because it was a glitch, an isolated dip in another otherwise steadily rising curve. There’s no sense boring people with things like that, I think. It was a paradoxical defeat, because it came in a period when I was experiencing exponential muscle development. That produces greater strength in the long term, but deep depressions in muscle capacity in the short term. That, in short, is how we lost Vienna. One thing, though: my picture appeared in the paper for the first time. What you saw was mostly that arm with the veins bulging out along it, and the beautifully defined muscle groups. Above all that, a head that looks like it’s about to explode. Until that picture started making the rounds of friends and family in Lomark — Joe had bought a whole pile of the Wiener Zeitung — almost no one knew what we were really up to. Once they found out, though, they erupted in a sort of boundless curiosity about our doings. With his story Joe became the man himself in the canteen at Bethlehem. A match was organized on the spot between the operator and Graad Huisman. Huisman won and, before long, began weeping again over the tumour in his knee.

At coffee the next morning Ma said people were driving her mad with questions. Whether it was really true that I had beaten men twice my weight, and whether I had actually won a tournament in Antwerp. In the Sun Café, where the incident with the roofer remained unforgotten, the rumour went around that I could never have become so strong without the use of ‘pills’. I noticed that people were looking at me differently — that people were looking at me. It was very invigorating.

Around that time I started smelling different. I don’t know whether it was just perspiration or something else as well. I don’t know, for example, whether you can smell testosterone. In any case, both Joe and Ma started throwing open the window whenever they came in. Joe even bought me a stick of deodorant, Beiersdorf 8x4, which to this day stands unopened on the kitchen shelf as one of the countless memories of him.

I still rode past the Eilander residence each day, on the way back from my training route to Westerveld. I flew by so quickly, in fact, that I barely had to time to peek in. Sometimes, when Joe had told me that P.J. was at home, I didn’t peek at all. I hoped she would see me and come outside and call my name, and invite me into that mysterious house which I had never seen from the inside. I wanted her to feed me beer the way she had fed me rosé that summer day, I wanted her to say intelligent things and pass along to me exciting details about the world of writers she now knew from up close. When she would ask me how my own writing was going, I would inform her that I had stopped, which was true: I no longer wrote.

I had spent years constantly painting the view from my own head, and then it was over. I would announce this with the romantic decisiveness of the artist who doesn’t believe that his talent obliges him to anything, but who sees it as something he can leave behind like an old pair of gym shoes. As casually as possible I would then draw her attention to my wrestling arm, and she would realize that I had become a man of action. Times had changed, other things were required of me. And after all, wasn’t writing an extremely unmanly activity? One to which arm wrestling was vastly superior? She would understand that. She would admire my stance, and think about Lover Boy Writer, who I imagined as a deeply neurotic pen pusher with puny limbs. The comparison would work in my favour. And then we would — we would, we would. .

I can’t claim that the Strategy of Becoming Stone was always successful.

We heard nothing from P.J. about having been beaten up, it remained a wild supposition. Joe said he had seen contusions next to her ear and above her eye, bruises that were already getting better by then and had faded to a yellowing glimmer. She hadn’t said a word about it.

Before long, though, it became clear that it was no isolated incident: once again, she came home damaged. We heard that she had refused to go to the police. The manhandling of girls with pin-curls and lovely broad cheekbones is, of course, forbidden by law, but without a police report that’s not much help. The White House became her rehabilitation centre. This time Joe and I sent a funny get-well card showing a dog with its tail all bandaged up.