Date: Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:38:53 +0100
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: Hash and Coffee

[This is a considerably altered and expanded version of Unlike Raskolnikov.]


Hash and Coffee

I was becoming like one of those perverse, introspected, isolated
characters in Dostoevsky novels, wandering around, not St. Petersburg,
in a gray and gloomy winter-time, but  Amsterdam, spending my
afternoons and late nights not in filthy taverns but in hip hash and
coffee houses.

I had a cheap attic room, overlooking a canal, in an old house owned
by a middle-aged numismatist with an international reputation,
Heinrich Mengelbaum, whose grandfather had managed to outwit the Nazis
and survive.

Unlike Raskolnikov, I harbored neither desire nor plans to kill my
landlord, and often sat listening, attentively, to his stories of loss
and survival, and told him of my own life and, sometimes, late at
night, over some aqua vita and hashish, of the times my soul soaring
came to the surface of my body, of those moments I prize more than
anything, the ones I lived for and too often lived without.

Mengelbaum was a widower. All he had left of his wife, whose framed
picture showed her to be a beautiful Hungarian girl, hardly a woman,
was Johannes, the son she had borne and died doing so.

Of such sweet mettle was Mengelbaum made that the boy was his beloved
and there was no admixture of resentment in the man's love. Moreover,
Johannes inherited his father's loving disposition and his mother's
beauty.

You wouldn't believe what it was like to be young, then, Mengelbaum
said, glancing back and forth between me and Johannes, who sat at the
table with us, his ubiquitous sketch pad in front of him, making quick
studies of his father and me.

Megelbaum was referring to the period right after the war. Our hearts
was open with joy and contracted with grief. Here was life, again. And
there was death, forever, always lingering at the doorway of the
future, the past infiltrating the far reaches of the present.

Life teased like a neurotic girl friend who couldn't make up her mind
if she wanted to go to bed with you or never see you again.


I smoked my hash straight in an old Chinese pipe, without tobacco. And
I drank a strong, sweet, cinnamon-laced Greek coffee, several cups a
day. The first was at five-thirty in the morning. I rose each morning
at that time, did a half hour of exercises with free weights,
showered, squeezed a glass of orange juice, took a bunch of vitamins,
and had a second cup of coffee very hot and very sweet. The aroma of
cinnamon stayed with me throughout the morning as I wrote.

I wrote every day without interruption until one-thirty. Then I hit
the streets and had lunch in a hash and coffee house. Even then I
wrote, sitting over a bowl of vegetable soup with fresh bread and
gouda cheese, a little stoned. Sometimes Joachim was around and I'd go
home with him.

Usually, I slept in the early evening, and went back out later into
the night, roamed the streets and cruised the hash and coffee houses.
I generally got to bed by three.

It had been six years since I'd left the United States, and I hadn't
gone back yet and did not wish to.

Actually, I had become frightened of the country, the way you might be
frightened of someone who is not really who he seems. There is
something, too about lying itself that is very frightening, the
immense denial it proclaims of your right to exist. The United States
had become a country whose government had been usurped by liars, who
would not even stop at committing murder in their battle to make
falsehood appear to be truth.

I was happy to see Joachim standing at the counter at the Way Back. He
saw me and smiled as he handed me a pipe by way of greeting.

I accepted the pipe and took a big hit, feeling my head go loose
immediately, my flat gut tighten, and my cock get hard in
anticipation.

Before I could exhale, his lips were on mine and he was sucking the
smoke out of my lungs and taking it into his, pinching my nipples hard
to get every last breath out of me.

It's nice to see you, I said.

He breathed out.

I was afraid you'd be upset.

You set the rules. I follow.

Joachim looked at me, half in admiration, half skeptically.

It's true, I said. I've been totally reconfigured since I met you.

How so?

Nothing bothers me. Everything turns me on. I'm high all the time. I
mean I'm running on the energy you arouse in me.

He was groping me as I spoke, and staring into my eyes with a cool
detachment which completely enthralled me.

Being with you is a trip to heaven, I said. Even as I said it I was
succumbing to the complex aroma of his mansmell.


I'll be back in two weeks, I said. It won't be long.

The night was warm and we were strolling together by a canal, holding
hands and pressing our shoulders together.

For me it will be long, Joachim grinned and drew me to him in a kiss.

Are you scared? he asked afterwards, looking hard into my eyes, making
sure of the truth of my answer.

Scared?

You said, he answered, America scared you and you did not wish to go there.

I'll be back, I said.

How could he know how my heart raced, excited, despite my fear! I had
hit the big time.


America had become an ache in my heart -- an empire built on war and mendacity.

New York was unlike the city I had once known. The angles had changed.
Streets which had been there were gone, and ones which never were
suddenly had glassy skyscrapers standing on them.

Farrell drew on an unlighted pipe as we walked along the new promenade
along the Hudson.

You must be in heaven, he said, referring to the book award.

I don't even know how to think about it.

Well, I read the book, and you're amazing.

I blushed, and tried to hide it by blurting out anything that would come to me.

You used to be able to stand right on the edge, I said, leaning
against the tubular fence extending from the cement. No barrier to the
river.

Come here a lot?

All the time.

Farrell looked at me, understanding.

The trucks were over there, he said.

Hemingway, I said.

Served him right, Farrell said.

And now we knew that we knew each other.

When do you fly back to Amsterdam? he asked.

Saturday morning. It's to Paris.

Will you have dinner with me tomorrow night? After the reading? Just
us? Not business, just friendship.

Sure, I said.

But you don't have to wait till then to come up to my place.

I won't, I said, extending my hand, which he took and brought to his lips.


You make my cunt open up, I said, teasingly, as he blew kisses on my
neck, but I'm not sure I want you to fuck me.

May I kiss you?

Yes, I said, and his lips were pressing me into him before I could
take in a breath.

You're starting to make me want you, I said.

Finally, he did not, but I left him in friendly spirits. I took him to
a happy orgasm and caressed him with admiration. He was the sort of
man I admired, but not the kind I surrender to.

I winked when I kissed him in the morning and said ciao. He grinned.


My book was in all the bookstore windows. It was prominently displayed
in the Astor Place store.

There I was, an infinitely reproducible cultural commodity, me, a
book, with a dust jacket, stacked up pyramidally, offering to
reconfigure reality with strings of words, in sentences that came from
beyond where we are and go both nowhere and where we want to be. It
took my breath away to think of all the human channels I would flow
through.

I had to keep hold of myself or I would explode with vanity.

The reading went well. First I spoke, and watched the crowd and saw
how many young people, male and female, were there admiring me. I let
myself enjoy it the way you let yourself fall sleep in the arms of a
caressing sun under an infinite azure sky on the shore of the
Mediterranean.

Once I begin to read something I've written, I usually feel good about
it. It astonishes me.  I'm ready for the embarrassment, but instead I
feel the thrill of discovery.

I've been writing, I said with a faux-sheepishness that is really the
opposite of self-effacing, when the clapping stopped, what maybe can
be called poetry. I wrote this on my flight over here, when I got to
thinking about the painfulness that America has become for me:

The president speaks
Rodents jump out of his mouth

Rats jump off his tongue
Poisonous snakes slide off his lips

The reptiles slither to the ground
They curl around his feet

The rats land on their paws
Softly striking the carpet

In the frenzy of freedom
They rush through the doorways

They swell on the street and spread
The plague they carry is loose

The lice of the president's lies
The lice on the rats from his mouth

Cling to us all

Carried  beyond the seas to breed
A great plague in the hot desert freed

Afterwards, I stood around with a plastic flute of champagne in my
hands answering friendly questions, gently flirting, and being
charming until Farrell hustled me out and took me to his room and
slowly licked my nipples.


I landed in Paris. Joachim met me at CDG . We stayed for a week, in a
little hotel on a crooked winding street not far from the river.

The moon hung like an amber halo beside the slender neck of the Eiffel Tower.

We got into a cab and rode along the Seine watching the amber-gold,
illuminated buildings of Paris reflecting in the water.

In our hotel, the steps turned round an invisible center, a column of
unencumbered air. We reached our room. Joachim unlocked the door and
pushed me in and kicked the door shut with his heel and took me to
him. He stuffed himself with my kisses until I was gasping with desire
for him and felt the wonderful hardness preening inside his jeans. I
brought it out and kneeled before him and slowly took him in my mouth
and with my true heart's reverence I began an act of worshipful
surrender and felt the pulse of his responding. He pulled me up to him
and wet his fingers in my mouth and then lubricated me. Gazing at me
he entered me as only he can. I knew him and he was mine and I was his
and this is what I was whispering when the breaths half-formed in my
throat did become actual words.

 We took a train back to Amsterdam on a Tuesday evening.

We sat watching the French countryside dissolve into the night.

Look, Joachim said, but he was not pointing at the dusky landscape
running by us like frames of film over revovong sprockets. He was
showing me a small, red velvet box, the kind rings come in.

I opened it.

Yes, I said and kissed him.

Inside there were two small silver rings, for the nipples.

 Back in Amsterdam, we fell dead into my narrow bed asleep in each other's arms.


It was a very handsome stamp on the envelope, Mengelbaum said as he
held the door open for us and we walked into his airy living room with
plank board floors. Thank you.

It's good to see you again, I said.

Joachim stretched out his hand and shook his when I introduced them.

Mengelbaum poured out four shots of vodka (Johannes was sitting in his
pajama bottoms and a sleeveless undershirt, his nineteen-year-old's
radiant physique glowing), and we clinked our glasses and sipped the
vodka.

I need a bigger place, I said.

Joachim and I are going to live together. I'm going to have to find
something. I hate to leave you.

Mengelbaum smiled.

Why are you smiling? I said.

Because one floor below the roof where you are now, I just happen to
have three large rooms with a kitchen and a separate w c, airy and
facing the canal.


2

Joachim was gone when I opened my eyes. His place in the bed, beside
me, was empty; the sheets and his pillows were no longer warm with his
body's nighttime warmth.

Joachim, I called, like a frightened child calling for his mother.

The apartment was empty but for me, however.

Outside, the sky above the canal was clouded, dappled with gray and
intensely luminous patches of white, like silk rumpled in bunches,
with darts of pale green lining the peripheries.

On the old pine table in the kitchen, a glass of squeezed orange juice
waited for me, and the things for my coffee were laid out. The smell
of fresh coffee still in the bag was heavy.

I looked out the window, beyond the canal. In the distance, I saw
Joachim out on his morning run, all in black, in his scanty black
track shorts, high black sox with the yellow band around his muscled
calf, his coltish thighs with ropes of muscle gleaming, and his tight
sleeveless black shirt over his Roman torso. He even had on black
leather running shoes.


I sat at my desk in my black briefs and a burgundy robe because there
was a poem that was bothering me to be written. It had been a repeated
occurrence recently. I would hardly begin to think about Joachim and
it turned into a poem.

Together we will sleep one sleep
Joining both our heads in one dream

A light and densely-hued shadow
Will flicker a hypnotic rhythm
Joining us in one pulse

Twined together in each other's sleep
How will we know we are not really
Only one. How will we be able
To tell anymore

The difference between kissing and breathing

I finished my coffee, and finally got into the shower, adjusted the
water when a swift gust of air parted the shower curtain.

Mind if I join you? a naked Joachim, drenched with grimy sweat asked
as he stepped in under the shower with me and pulled me to him with a
playful brutality which thrilled me.

I kissed him as furiously as he was kissing me and got hold of his
tongue before he got mine, and I pulled him to me as if his tongue
were the rope of a lasso I had slung around him.

I held him in my power until he rallied and pulled me by the nipple
tips until I was dancing, knees dipping, in front of him with my head
tilted back and my mouth open breathlessly to receive his kisses.

I pulled away and reached for the soap.

You are one grimy man, I said, beginning to soap the back of his neck
and working my hands down the front of his chest, soaping the smooth,
pale skin and the well-wrought muscles which made him so wonderful to
look at.

He pressed his mouth to mine and worked me as if he'd devour me. He
brought me all the closer and contained me more entirely in his power
pushing two strong, soapy fingers deep up into me, wiping me out,
stripping my soul, turning my brain around with his eyes.

I clung to him and writhed under him and turned to him with an
intensity of tropism, like the open flower following the sun.

He was above me. We were stretched out on the terrycloth mat on the
bathroom floor. He rocked and writhed inside me and took me with the
power of lightning. He made pain sing with pleasure and pleasure
extend into the borderland of pain.

I gasped as his tongue touched the depths of my throat, and his
living, throbbing, hard and propulsive masculinity took me beyond
endurance. I cried repeatedly master in frantic surrender.


Have you heard from your publisher? Joachim said.

Yes, I said.

He was silent, waiting for me.

They will tape the interview here with me at VPRO.


Joachim held the envelope up to the light before opening it.

He looked at the address. It was a bold handwriting.

He opened it.

The letterhead announced an independent affiliate of a major American studio.

Above a signature in the same bold hand was a short note.

I saw your film, it said. I want to see you. Meet me Tuesday, at three
o'clock, at the American Bar.


The American Bar in Amsterdam is a clean, well-lighted place. I would
never go there. Neither would Joachim. But that's where the producer
said he wanted to meet him.

It did not turn out to be what Joachim had expected. He was naive. I
would have been, too. It was our time for recognition. This was just
one more instance.

Joachim must have been surprised, no, more than that, he must have
been thrown entirely off balance by the outright, undisguised
antagonism which met him.

I can only imagine it. And I do repeatedly, always somehow magically
intervening the moment before to prevent it.

What happened there does not really happen in daily reality.

There is death all around us, all around. There are single mad murders
that make the headlines and wars, and wars within wars with their
inexhaustible, unquenchable wildfires of killing. All those who are
provoking and promoting them try to keep them from being reported at
all. And the headlines about them are made in the numerous and
competing propaganda offices of all the combatants.

Nevertheless, that Joachim was the next moment shot point blank in the
chest made no sense. It was an impossibly incongruent event. His body
slumped down in the booth. He was dead. The bullet came from behind.

Joachim's interlocutor was unhurt. Of course! He was part of the whole
plot, the decoy to get Joachim where they wanted him, those enemies of
liberty and liberation, those triple agents who provoked and inflamed
the world's conflicts and supplied every side with venom.

The gunman, with a scarf covering his face just about up to his eyes,
fled out the door before anyone knew what had happened.


Geliebter, Johannes said tenderly, looking straight into my eyes, the
landlord's shining son whom Joachim and I had taken as our friend.

I held him tighter and sobbed more grievously.

Outside there was a thunderstorm, I began to laugh. I was laughing and
crying at the same time.

It had exploded, and all the tears of the world washed over my heart
and beat their way through me, finally emptying themselves out whether
or not I would. I was vomiting tears. And it had not yet ended.

Johannes held me and said nothing. He only held me. And I sobbed, as
grief and the relief of grief released twisted inside me. It was the
kind of twisting you have to do when you're undoing knots, and it's
much more a painful process than tying the knots originally was.

These were love-knots I would never have untied, but now they had been
torn, cut, and the more brutally they had been pulled at, the tighter
they had become until I could no longer breathe.

Now as Johannes held me and stroked me, my breath began to flow
smoothly, slowly, somewhere else; somewhere in the distance, the
thread of life was keeping alive some other body, not me.

my eyes are burning; my head
is bent with the weight of unspent tears

the future is a bullet
to the gut
shot
from the gun of the world

the men who have never been tired
the executioners of sleep
now they threaten us
those are guns that were their eyes

hope is a ghost
a lost memory
the song of youth
that only an old man
can sing


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