The Last Days of My Mother (10 page)

“I hate food.”

He stood up, retrieved an envelope with some grass, poured us tea, and began recounting his life story with the same enthusiasm as during our first meeting. In a relatively short time he'd lived in six foster homes, spent four months as an errand boy on a chicken farm, and a couple of months as a part of Dick Cheney's security team. His love for older women was laced with memories of a summer job in an underground bunker, where the only piece of furniture was a massage bench. He admitted that even though his native country was one of the greatest places on earth, it also contained some of the strangest people on the planet. It was good for business that Europeans were gradually catching up in weirdness, but there really was little comparison. For instance, he doubted that there were many Dutch men who would have their penises surgically removed and grafted onto their arms as a number of his compatriots had done.

“What? Why?” I asked, gaping more and more as our talk went on.

“Daddy Harold was an expert in penis enlargements. Had his own practice. The penis is grafted onto the arm so it won't die during the procedure.”

“What if Harold died during the procedure? Would the patient have to leave with his penis on his arm?”

“Precisely, Mr. Willyson,” Steven said and nodded his head knowingly.

Chapter 8

T
he next couple of weeks passed quite peacefully. Mother would kick-start the day with a dose of Ukrain, we'd have doughnuts and coffee at the hotel, take a walk, visit a museum, or catch a canal bus. I'd drop in on Helena at the Pleasure Fountain for a chat, and acquaint myself with Steven's stock of various supplements. Smoking sessions on the small balcony ensured smooth sailing into the realm of dreams after an evening out at one of the local bars. Then a new morning would break and the worldview was as round as the planet turning on its axis.

I decided to swallow my pride and reward Mother for her gallant and stoic resignation to the Ukrain treatment and take her to the Nazi ball. My drinking session started early in the afternoon with a private one-man Vodka Tournament in the hotel bar. Dmitri, my friend behind the counter, mixed up an orgy of fruit in his shaker and poured me shots like both our lives depended on it, and agreed that if there ever was a need to get shitfaced to survive an evening, this would be the occasion. A young Asian girl sat at the other end of the bar, petite and lithe, with suntanned legs that seemed to go on forever from underneath her red dress. I had been staring at them for a while when she came and sat next to me.

“You like Shaloo? Shaloo not free. Shaloo
expensive
. Shaloo make
change
.”

I stared at her. I had supposed that such a feminine transsexual would choose to go stealth, but Shaloo had no qualms about having once been a man. She took a different stance.

“Shaloo always be woman. Dick no difference, she reverse it.”

“I apologize for being so old fashioned,” I said, “but to me my dick is all I have to prove that I'm a man.”

“Darling, it in the heart! You decide what you are. I Shaloo, Night Queen. You tell me who you are.”

“Trooper,” I said. “My cardiologist tells me that I have the fat percentage of a sixty-year-old woman.”

“You joker, Trooper. I hear it. You buy Shaloo drink?”

“Sure, but just the normal price. I recommend My Bloody Fucking Valentine. Or Brain Damage.”

She settled on Brain Damage and we made a toast. After a short and rather interesting discussion about Thai sex change operations I ventured to ask how such a bright and beautiful person ended up in prostitution.

“Girl like me? Darling, I no get much money in other place. I fancy lady, I need
expensive
dress. I have high standard. Only men fifty years or older. Only five star hotel. No bondage!”

“No bondage?”

“Too risky. But for you, darling . . . anything!”

She laughed and said “fuckyfucky,” which made me laugh, too, ready to drown in the infinite, shimmering beauty of this face. I felt that I might have to reevaluate my place on the gay-scale Mother used to distinguish the different levels of gayness of male individuals. She graded me as a four. Her evaluation was based on a comment I'd made many years ago while watching ER with her that
George Clooney was handsome. Was I maybe scoring a five now? I was sure that my earlier ogling of Shaloo's legs, this transformed person who was the very essence of all my fantasies of the beauty of the female form, must push me up one level at least.

“Trooper!”

Mother emerged from the elevator and waved to us, by the look of it high on schnapps and pills from the herbalist. I said good-bye to Shaloo and moved over to a couch in the corner of the bar.

“I'm on fire! God, this is going to be so much fun. I'm going to dance tonight, Trooper. That's for sure.”

“Maybe you can take a turn with Mengele, back from the dead on the dance floor.”

“Oh, come on! I've examined the ticket and there is no sign of Nazism. You're safe.”

For a while she'd been quite nonchalant in the face of my cynicism towards the racists' ball, as her hash-jazz friend Tim Wallace had agreed to escort her. She'd even gone so far as to claim that she welcomed the chance to be rid of my nagging for one night, the constant preaching that would make even the most stoic person grind his teeth. She went on to say that in fact
I
was the only fascist, and so on and so forth. But then Tim was ordered to rest after kidney surgery and she was back to square one. So now she felt she had to be nice to me again. She pointed to the tray with the shot glasses and told me that it was very kind of me to make such an effort.

“Want some? Sex on the Beach, My Bloody Fucking Valentine, or just a good, old Brain Damage? Dmitri's been busy.”

“No, not really. I think I'd rather just have a cold beer,” she said as if it were the equivalent of joining a nunnery. “On such a nice day as this I sometimes enjoy a nice glass of beer. The only fault
I find with the hotel is that the fridge in the room should be a bit bigger, you know, for the beer.”

“I just keep it in my belly.”

She pointed out that not everyone wished to look like a pit bull and then quoted Great Aunt Edda, who'd said that it was better to stick to spirits if one wanted to lose weight. In that sense Brain Damage was ideal. We made a toast and Mother slapped the tickets to the Nazi ball on the table, along with a flyer for the Icelandic bank party. She felt it was incredible that two such grand events should be planned on the same day and in the same building.

“I'm determined to drop in on the bank party first,” she said. “I suppose it was nice getting that bottle of champagne the other day, but really, what is that compared to all those billions?”

“We're not going to go there to hoard wine, Mother.” I had a bad feeling about this. If Mother had decided to drink her share of the Icelandic banking profits in one afternoon, I was in for a nightmare of an evening.

“So now you're going to forbid me to go to the bankers' party?”

“No, but you're going on your own. I'm not setting foot in there.”

“Is there no end to your tediousness, Hermann? It's pathological.” She stared into her beer and kept silent as if she was pondering how best to tackle this problem. “I was so sure I'd meet a gentleman.”

“I just can't do it, Eva. The last thing I want is to spend an evening with the Klambra boys on top of everything.” When she pretended not to understand I reminded her that, before my life started revolving around drinking sessions and museum trips with her, I'd worked at the Klambra Real Estate Agency in Reykjavik. I'd read that the owners, father and son, had some dubious business
dealings out here, and I was sure that Amsterdam was their city of choice so they could snoop around the holes of the IceSave bankers. There was no chance in hell I was going to show up at this gathering of necrophiliacs and risk running into them.

“Aren't you being overly negative like usual?” Mother asked and gave me a withering look. I felt the need to explain myself. My job at the real estate agency had taken up three years of my life, a period that spanned the most excessive period of hyperconsumerism in the history of Iceland. We made such a killing one month that the office closed for over a week while Benni, the father, had a Jacuzzi room installed. He insisted that this would “greatly increase our opportunities in the upper levels of the market,” somehow believing that people who invested in luxury apartments would rather buy them from Klambra because Klambra had a hot tub—because people who had millions to spend on real estate in apartment buildings would relish the chance for a free bath. The true purpose of course, was to provide the Klambra boys with an R&R room where they could do their coke and whoring.

When I resigned because Zola and I were moving to Ireland they owed me over two million kronur for overtime, as it had been my lot to clean up the boys' fiascos. The money was supposed to pay for our room and board in Ireland, but Benni always had an excuse when I tried to collect my salary. He told me that his son Daniel was responsible for this stuff, there were a few things that needed clearing up first, he couldn't find my letter of resignation—was I sure I handed it in? He said that this needed to be 100% certain because of tax matters. Finally, the boys told me that I'd have to take them to court if I wanted to try and get paid for hours no one recalled me putting in, and everything around my resignation was very muddled and bore witness to my sloppy work ethics. I
slammed the door when I left and shut those two million down in the deepest, blackest hole in my brain, where I kept all the darkest and nastiest stuff that my psyche had repressed during my life, and I promised myself to forget this along with everything else Klambra boys related.

“You know why I'm not jumping at the chance to join the bankers' party. I'll take you to frolic with the neo-Nazis, but that's it.”

“I suppose I'll skip it too, since you feel so strongly about this. If I'd known they had behaved so abhorrently . . . I'm not even sure I would have accepted that champagne. That's one thing that can be said about the two of us, Trooper—we are not for sale.”

“I'll drink to that,” I said and asked for the bill. “Do you want me to ask him to call a cab?”

“No, Ramjiminn will drive us to the ball.”

“Why would you involve him in this? I thought he had the night off.”

“Sure, but this is not just any night, Trooper. It's not as if the two of us do this every night—dress up in our Sunday best and head out for adventure. He was very pleased to help.”

Daylight was surrendering to dusk when Ramji arrived to pick us up in the Ambassador. The hubbub outside the conference hall indicated that there was even more going on than a Nazi ball and an Icelandic bankers' party. Ramji, with his uncanny ability to find parking where there was none, managed to squeeze the car between a hotdog stand and a garbage can. Suddenly he went chalk white.

“Mam BriemMam, I must hurry. I must say good-bye now.”

“Is everything okay, Ramjiminn?”

“Everything is okay, EvaMam, but now I must go.”

It was evident that something had upset the driver even though he seemed intent on hiding it. The mystery was solved in the next instant when a big man with a turban came rambling over and banged on the car window.

“Ramji,” he bellowed, pushing down the window with strength fit for the circus. “If you want a proper job you come and talk to us Rotandaris. We can use more drivers. It is me, Bubi, you know me.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramji said. “But no thank you. I have a job.”

“How about you?” the big man said, pointing to Mother and me. “Can you drive cars? Choppers?”

“Mister Bubi, sir,” Ramji said and seemed to edge ever closer to the precipice of life as the man refused to leave. “Mam Briem needs to go to a ball, sir, and Mr. Willyson must join her. You have to let them go now.”

“Who was that clown?” Mother asked when the man ambled off. “What on earth was that all about?”

“Mr. Bubi, Mam. My old boss. He is very determined.”

“So am I, Ramjminn. I'm determined to go to the ball.”

“You just go, Ramji. We'll catch a cab later.”

He drove off and I ran to catch up with Eva, who had managed to mow down the people waiting in line to get into the Nazi ball. I only just managed to grab her sleeve before she disappeared inside with both our tickets. Heading over to the bar, I came across a brutishly ugly, mustachioed male exchanging bad breath with a female of the same species, an ambiguous cross between human and hippopotamus. The male had inked something vague but slightly familiar on his forehead . . . Could it really be? The hope of confirming the truth raced through my soul. I greeted the couple
and could not take my eyes off the tattoo on the man's forehead. The opportunity was too good to resist.

“This is Hans, our brother in Christ,” I said, introducing the creature to Mother. “I'm not going to detain you from your friends for too long, Hans, but it is always a pleasure to meet a brother in Christ and I wanted you to meet my mother.”