Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (11 page)

A Mick was fucking
her

OLGA

“
You live a
charmed life”

Seeing myself through the
jealous eyes of my house-guest felt unexpectedly good. Josh was
only half way through his first day and he’d already visited the
red light district and two of its prostitutes before we even got
back to my place.

Josh was a sexual tourist
and I was his base.

I’d gotten to know him
just enough in St LaCroix to invite him to visit me in New York but
he never took me up on it because I suppose New York didn’t offer
the same sexual possibilities as Amsterdam. And more recently he
had fallen in love with a Russian girl and so a few days layover in
Amsterdam seemed to him to be a good idea before continuing on to
Moscow. It transpired after only a little questioning that the girl
in Moscow whom he talked about marrying was in fact a
self-confessed… I didn’t dare say the word in front of him because
he was convinced she was in love with him too.

.Josh was what I imagined
every hooker dreamt of. A constant source of employment. He talked
a lot about asking her to come and live with him in St LaCroix. In
the meantime had selected a rather buxom girl who wouldn’t have
been my first choice but it was his money not mine. While I waited
outside for him I noticed a girl in a window to the right who, when
she thought no-one was looking took swigs from a tall glistening
black bottle and surreptitiously stroked the white tail of a cat
hidden behind her little bed. The tail straightened between her
slender fingers like some headless python or yes I suppose, a
penis. I had already spent more time than was healthy waiting on
the little brown bricked bridge as Josh fucked the girl-next-door.
Defiling such a wholesome phrase would have appealed to him. I
began to see how this worked. These scarlet windows were no
different from the covers of fashion magazines in the more
respectable bookstores across town from which similar girls
simpered. One informed the other.

And it wasn’t just men who
got off on it. Women sauntered past smiling knowingly as if they
recognised something familiar about it all. Maybe they were
reassured by the fact that if you were alluring enough or just
there enough (some of the prostitutes were unmentionably ugly) you
too would eventually attract your man. Here, sexual attraction was
reduced to its barest necessities. There was no literature here, no
Elizabethan poems just naked sexual honesty. The yearning of bodily
organs for each other. It was so practical. So very Dutch. You want
sex. We have it.

Josh finally emerged
without even a trace of a smile. He preferred them not to make any
oooh
and
ahhh
sounds.

“
I appreciate
it if they just stay quiet. I always tell them this in advance. If
they charge one-fifty I’ll put three hundred down so I have some
room for maneuver.”

I was impressed by this
no-nonsense approach but it was a paradoxical to me. I would need
to believe they wanted me. Wasn’t this what was on sale? The
illusion that a young beautiful woman was aroused by me? But maybe
he was right. By letting them know he wasn’t interested in their
performance he retained control of the situation. And control was
the real commodity here. The need to decide if they meant it was
removed. He already knew they didn’t mean it so why should he have
to suffer their bad acting? He said he couldn’t come with the buxom
hooker because she spoke to him and in doing so she broke the
sexual equivalent of the fourth wall.

“
Have you
been smokink maruijana?” he mimicked her “you only get ze one
position.” and when he couldn’t come; “Maybe you should cut it off,
ja?”’

He picked up his bag with
the airport tags still attached and we were about to head back to
my place when he noticed the girl with the Liebfraumilch beckoning
and even though she gyrated amateurish and giggled unconvincingly I
felt a stirring. Josh didn’t know that she was beckoning at me. He
didn’t know and he didn’t care. I tried to find some way to claim
her as my own. I’d seen her first. Surely he wasn’t about to just
go and fuck her so soon after the last one? She was a prostitute
and as such she was doing what a prostitutes do. She was standing
there nearly naked in a window offering sex for money with full
governmental approval.

And yes of course I wanted
her but I couldn’t bring myself to visit a prostitute because it
meant I’d have to confront the idea that all sexual attraction was
based on a transaction. That men wanted sex and women wanted
security. My ego just couldn’t handle the notion that any male
would do. She had winked at me while I waited for Josh and now she
was going to fuck him? Josh dropped his bag again and looked at me.
He could see something was going on.

“
I won’t be
long.” he said

The uninvited heat of
jealousy invaded my thoughts and my initial almost naïve sexual
fervour for the girl in the window dissolved into disgust first for
her and then hatred for the entire female gender who it seemed
waved their pussies in front of us, to get a washing machine, a
raise, a new dress or a free dinner. When he came out I searched
his face for some sign of pleasure or relief or shame or
mischievousness.

“
I fucked her
in the ass” he said

It disgusted me to think
that by being there I had inadvertently added to his pleasure. I
was as jealous and enraged as if he had fucked my girlfriend. I
felt wronged but what could I say? There was no conceivable way to
justify what I was feeling. I was jealous that Josh had fucked a
prostitute. I called my sponsor and he suggested I tell Josh to get
a hotel room and this exactly what I did. Josh wasn’t even
surprised when I told him I disagreed with what he was doing and
that I felt it was not sober behaviour. It was as if he wanted me
to throw him out so that he could think even less of himself than
he already did.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Open on
a shot of me in Albert Hein Supermarket. I take out my credit card
and swipe it in the self-service consul. A green light flickers and
we hear an automated voice; “Alstublieft.“ (In subtitles we see
that this means “Thank you”) Lowering the groceries into a cart I
wheel them away.
Cut to another scenario.This time I’m
buying some new clothes and swiping my credit card as the same
greeting appears in friendly flashing typeface.
“Alstublieft” I exit the store with my shopping bags. Cut to
an interior of my apartment. I’m wearing the clothes I bought
earlier and with the groceries I’ve prepared a beautiful dinner for
two. The doorbell sounds and after one last look at the table to
make sure everything is in place I open the door to reveal a
stunningly beautiful girl standing in the doorway. But before she
enters the apartment she holds out her hand for my credit card.
Taking it from me she reaches up under her skirt and she appears to
insert the card between her legs. She smiles politely as if waiting
for the results to come through before her eyes widen and a huge
seductive smile spreads across her face. She hands the card back to
me. “Alstublieft.“ she says seductively and steps into the
apartment. A title appears on the screen; “God is Good But Business
Is Better”
Issued by the The Dutch
Institute of Commerce.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PAMELA

“
Tell me he’s
going with you, you can’t not bring him.”

In taking up my cause like
this, Pamela, my newly employed assistant, made it seem like
Johnathan
wasn’t
about to invite me to the awards ceremony
when for all any of us knew he might have come upstairs to do
exactly that. Such a strategy would make her popular with me,
because she was fighting my corner, and get rid of me at the same
time. She was hired when Lucien left because I had none of his
computer skills. She was fluent in Photoshop, Indesign, After
Effects and many other programmes I hadn’t even heard of. Also
recommending her for the job was the fact there was no danger of
anything even vaguely sexual ever transpiring between us since she
had difficulty squeezing herself in, and extricating herself from,
between the armrests of a normal-sized chair. (Mind you, it hadn’t
stopped me before). This seemed to suggest that my superiors knew
more about my proclivities than I realised. In any case, her
substantial presence made mine even less relevant. She could easily
make all the adaptations necessary for the print ads and posters,
which was all that was left to do now that The Life Less Driven was
running across Europe. In fact there was now no need at all for me
to be in Amsterdam apart from the fact that I had been
deported
. This was the term being used in agency emails to
describe my situation. But Pamela was no mere technician she was
also the self-appointed curator of the Agency Celebrity Phone
List.

Hilarious, if
like Silvestro, you resembled the classic Italian film star Mario
Mercelli, or like Christoph, you were often mistaken for the Dutch
footballer Erik Van Beek. But what if you looked like Uncle Fester?
The Agency Celebrity Phone list sat laminated on every desk by
every phone so that every photographer, illustrator, visiting
client or pizza-delivery-guy saw your name and extension under an
image of Uncle Fester. And what was worse, no one was confused by
it.

Was this Pamela’s revenge
for making her work so late and so often while I rummaged around
online looking for women? Seeing the trauma in my face the first
day it appeared and perhaps fearing retribution in the form of even
more late night sessions duplicating even more layouts, she
confessed.

“
Silvestro
said to find a picture of Uncle Fester. I didn’t know what it was
for.”

I thought she got off
light as the Shrek’s wife.

But Johnathan (Colin
Firth), just smiled graciously and handed me a large manila
envelope full of mail diverted from the New York office. I knew
without opening it that it contained director’s showreels and
photographer’s brochures beseeching me for work. It was probably
the only reason he had stopped by but now that Pamela had shamed
him into it, he did indeed invite me and I of course accepted
because what kind of a crazy bastard would refuse an all expenses
paid trip to the Cannes Advertising Awards?

They only gave Titanium
Awards when something was so fabulously wonderful they felt it
needed a special category all to itself. The Life Less Driven fell
under just such a category. I wanted to call someone and share the
news but there was no one. I thought of Rebecca but what was the
point? She’d be moving to Berlin in a few weeks and she’d have a
new man within the month. My mother wouldn’t even understand and
even if she did all she’d want to hear was whether there was some
money in it for her. My sponsor? He’d feel obliged to congratulate
me but so what? Congratulations and don’t forget to share your
gratitude at a meeting…oh and don’t drink.

The ceremony wasn’t until
8pm so we could have easily flown in later in the day but because
Johnathan wanted to get away from his horrific wife I had to get up
at 6am on a Saturday morning to meet the flight he’d booked for us.
He could see I wasn’t very happy about it.

“
You’ll thank
me later when we have a nice dinner”

He smelled to me like he
was still drunk from the night before. I couldn’t summon even token
excitement at the prospect of receiving the equivalent of an Oscar
for a campaign I’d had nothing to do with. We hadn’t even taken off
yet and I couldn’t wait to get back. By the time we were ushered
onto the stage that night after an eternity of delayed flights and
a torturously slow cab ride from the airport I felt like I’d been
out-maneuvered yet again. I’d only just managed to get into my
shitty little hotel room when I Johnathan called to say we were
already late. I only just had time to change before jumping in a
cab. Onstage Silvestro, Christoph and Johnathan wore simple white
shirts and comfortable jeans. Had they agreed on what to wear? They
effortlessly exuded the demeanour of talented people accustomed to
the logistics or receiving awards. Their light-colored clothes
deflected the heat of the spotlights while I stood there in my
black cowboy shirt, black jeans and crepe-soled brothel creepers,
staring at the other three in consternation. I looked like the guy
who had no connection with the other three. I had become the
American who didn’t get it. Between camera-flashes I remember
looking out at the rows of faces each of them seemingly searching
for something up on the stage. What did they see? The area around
my feet was scratched and scuffed and over-lit and just seemed
dirty. There was dandruff on the photographer and feedback from the
microphones. The curtain was frayed and the music was canned, the
applause reluctant, the podium perspex. This was the view from the
top?

MARIEKE

Later, Silvestro,
Christoph and Johnathan held court in the Noisette D’or, and
sitting next to Silvestro was a girl so beautiful she all but
rendered him invisible. She was so insultingly beautiful I felt an
inexplicable urge to retaliate at someone or something.

I was invited to sit down
and watch them all get drunk.

“
Hi, I‘m
Marieke, I don’t think we’ve met?