Tommy Wieringa - Joe Speedboat

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.

Sometimes Joe says things like ‘I don’t know, man, sometimes I’m so scared. Since Engel died I keep having the feeling that something terrible is going to happen.’ He sniffs his armpit: ‘I can actually smell it. Fear.’

He works himself silly on that bulldozer, he goes in search of physical labour to counteract afflictions he can’t really put into words. He too will become human, naked, afraid and lonely like all the rest.