Chameleon On a Kaleidoscope (The Oxygen Thief Diaries) (8 page)

The producer was already
on the plane. My bags were being recalled. My phone was dead. I
remember feeling the beginnings of a tsumani surge of panic that
almost immediately subsided and settled into what could only be
described as relief.

Something significant was
happening.

My HIB work visa was out
of date and there was simply no way in the present politically
fraught environment they were going to let me back to New York
where, let loose amongst the unsuspecting public I might put the
finishing touches to yet another crap commercial. They were right.
I had to be stopped.

“
So, I can’t
go back to New York?”

“
No Sir.
You’re staying in Toronto“

Harsh punishment indeed. I
was shown into a windowless room where a huge, testicle-faced man
in a blinding white shirt did his best to behave like he was asking
trick-questions.

“
But you just
said you flew in from Calgary.”

“
Yes.”

“
So where
were you going?

“
New
York.”

“
What
for?”

“
I live
there.”

“
But you have
an Irish passport.”

“
Yes, but I
live in New York.”

“
And you say
you were shooting a commercial.”

“
In Calgary,
yes.”

“
What do you
do?”

“
I’m an art
director.”

“
What does
that entail?”

“
Making the
copywriter look good.”

His eyes remained on my
passport.

“
And you
don’t drink?

“
What?
No.”

“
Nothing at
all.”

“
No.”

“
Not even at
Christmas?”

“
No.”

“
And you’re
Irish?”

“
Yes, I’m
Irish.”

“
Conas ata
tu?”

Were they fucking serious?
I was being asked questions in Gaelic now? And how did he know I
didn’t drink? Had they looked up my profile on datemedotcom? It was
true that anyone growing up in Ireland would have at least a
rudimentary understanding of Gaelic but how the fuck did he know
that? I had always been terrible at Gaelic. I never managed to get
even a pass on all the test papers I’d taken and now because I
couldn’t think of the response to this basic question I was going
to be incarcerated in Canada.

Slowly from somewhere
uninvited, maybe because my internal editors were not yet at their
desks, a deep sense of dread began to overtake me like some huge
abstract ink-stain widening within me. Would I be strip-searched by
this gargantuan? Each of his fingers was bigger than my dick. He
reached into a drawer where I suspected he kept his rubber gloves.
I was about to lose my virginity to a Mountie.

He took out a
stapler.

When I was finally allowed
to make a call I was so happy to hear our receptionist mispronounce
the initials of the agency, (so many egos jostling for attention) I
almost cried. She put me through to our legal guy and suddenly it
was as if the Lord God Himself spake unto me.

“
We’ve had
this happen before. You can help Silvestro and Lucien in our
European office while we figure this out”

It certainly seemed like a
reasonable solution but I was surprised he was able to suggest it
with such confidence. My Irish passport allowed me to work anywhere
in Europe but did the agency lawyer have the power to just send me
there? Surely such an idea would need to be run past Andy. Not if
he already knew about it. Either way I had just agreed to be sent
to the most precarious place on the planet for a recovering
alcoholic and budding sex-addict. Or the most convenient depending
on your point of view.

2

“
Hi,
I’m a newly arrived
writer from New
York, and I’m sitting out here on the balcony of my Prinsengracht
office looking out on the canal. As I type this, I'm having to
half-close my laptop because there's a squirrel (or at least I hope
it’s a squirrel) above memunching on something left out by my
upstairs neighbour and as a result there is some serious
crumb-spillage onto my keyboard… so if I stat to moss up my werds
as I tip I'm hape you’ll firgove me??? But what has all this got to
do with you?? Well I don’t want you to feel bad but I’m supposed to
be working on my second book, the Notoriously Difficult Second Book
(hey, that might be a good title) but after seeing your beautiful
picture my concentration went out the window. You could say I'm out
here trying to find it. Write soon or I won't be able
to.”

The profiles in the
Amsterdam section of datemedotcom were mostly made up of East
European immigrants and British expats working for
internationalcompanies lured there by tax concessions. And judging
from the repeated references to books, films and music by the likes
of William Burroughs, Lars Von Trier and Leonard Cohen it was
obvious to even the untrained eye that a morbid intelligence
prevailed. Unlike their American counterparts who took great pains
to appear content and companionable at all times, the attitude here
was openly suicidal.

Maybe it was all that
rain.

I had hoped that my
happy-go-lucky impersonation of a newly arrived writer might go
some way towards alleviating the mood but my empty inbox seemed to
indicate that I would have to do better than squirrels if I was
going to get laid in Amsterdam. And yes the red-light district was
minutes away but paying for sex was unacceptable. It took all the
charm out of it. If anything, it was too honest.

Earlier that Sunday
afternoon, before letting myself into our elegant Prinsengracht
offices, I attended an English-speaking AA meeting on the Oude
ZijdsVorrburwal (good luck pronouncing it) and after a brief
conversation with a local man called Erik I was able to glean that
online dating wasn’t nearly as accepted in Amsterdam as I had
hoped. In fact when Erik finally managed to absorb the idea into
his comprehension his nose twitched involuntarily like he had just
smelled something awful in the air around us.

This from an
alcoholic-ex-junkie-wife-beater.

Online dating didn’t just
reek of desperation. It was worse than that. It smacked of America.
Meanwhile these immigrant girls were unfucked and far from home in
a country where it rained hourly and fits of coughing stood in for
conversation. Of course they were miserable.

From downstairs, the
sounds of pedestrians on the Prinsengracht mingled for a moment
with the muttering of two men’s voices before the front door closed
again. Next came an insistent pounding which I quickly learned was
the result of two people ascending the stairs. Lucien, with his
black lifeless eyes scanning the floor ahead of him, was first to
enter the room and he continued apparently unaware of my presence,
to his desk. Equally intense and similarly preoccupied, he was
followed by Silvestro Da Gemi, the black-bearded creative director
of the Amsterdam office.

I hoped that what I was
witnessing was the silence that follows a heated argument since any
difficulty in their relationship might be an opportunity for me,
but watching them settle in at adjacent desks without so much as a
nod of recognition to me I realised I couldn’t have been more
wrong. In fact, the velocity of their agreement would soon become
apparent in the form of an award-winning ad campaign called The
Life Less Driven. I coughed and shuffled in my seat and when
neither of them looked up I had to assume I was being ignored and
that my presence was indeed an inconvenience. It was true I had
been sent there by their so-called superiors but they were
obviously above all that. This was Amsterdam. Lucien was a
Parisian, Silvestro was a Roman and I was just some guy who had
fucked up his travel arrangements. I was a homeless
person.

Mortified by
datemedotcom’s pink glow, I began to understand why Frida, our HR
lady, had been so reluctant to give me the alarm code for the
building that previous Friday. I thought it was because nobody
worked on the weekends in laid-back Amsterdam but it was obvious
now she knew Silvestro and Lucien were coming in and would not
welcome distractions. I couldn’t tell her I only wanted to check
out the local pussy and she couldn’t tell me they didn’t want me
working on the new campaign.

But I
was
there and
even though I wished I could disappear I couldn’t. I knew what they
were working on because I had been cc’d on the brief. It was the
same brief as always
Make Safety Interesting
. I was expected
to work on it with them but I knew they’d kill any idea of mine
before I even uttered it. And yet if I was to justify being taken
into their fold I’d need to at least pretend to come up with
something. I stared at my screen. Now I was miserable
too.

Norwegian
summers are short and the resident reindeer needs to make the most
of the newly sprouted pastures. The more he fattens in preparation
for the cold months ahead the more attractive he becomes to the
other local resident, the mosquito. Before long, the huge antklered
animal is barely visible through a whining hovering haze; not so
much a reindeer being harassed by mosquitoes but a cloud of
mosquitoes in the shape of a reindeer. The humidity combined with
the moisture from the fiords provides the ideal breeding ground for
the mosquito. And for the reindeer-herders, a swarm of mosquitoes
is better than a sheep-dog. They wait chatting and smoking on
higher cooler ground for the exhausted beasts to shuffle meekly
into harness. But this one, not content with being bullied uphill
kicks and bucks as he tries to unseat the multitude. He escapes
into sharp focus only to succumb once more to the blur. This is
repeated until the energy expended requires a return to grazing
which is apparently unacceptable because suddenly the
reindeer-shaped mosquito-cloud ejects a real-life reindeer into one
fresh, clean, breezy moment of freedom and the Fiord
below.

YORTA

“
I love the
reindeer story I can definitely identify.”

In all of Deadkween’s very
black and very white profile pictures she appeared luminously
beautiful in sultry poses wearing an assortment of black leather
and lingerie. In one particularly successful picture she paid
homage to Charlotte Rampling’s famous pose from Night Porter
complete with long sleeved evening-gloves and Nazi hat. She was
lost-looking in a soon-to-be dead-sort-of-way. As if her last
earthy exhalation would be in orgasm. She owned a small gallery in
Berlin called Poisoned Resevoir and visited Amsterdam regularly
“for inspiration” She wrote poems and attached them to her
hand-made dead-baby-dolls. I was allowed to know this much over the
phone but she waited until we met to tell me she was an Albino who
dyed her hair black and wore contact lenses. I never met an actual
albino before. She certainly was extremely pale but no more than
I’d seen on a Dublin bus. It immediately explained why all her
pictures were black and white and why she looked so good in them.
We were on her black leather couch at this point in her
black-walled apartment overlooking the Vondelpark and though it was
still early it was almost totally dark in there. And the veils
draped over the lights and blinds didn’t help. She could only be
exposed to daylight for a limited length of time each ay. All signs
indicated that I was about to fuck my first Vampire until I
declined a beer in favor of a water.

“
You’re not
in AA are you?”

“
Well,
actually yes. I am”

I left a gap for the
inevitable gush of admiration.

“
I. Fucking.
Hate. AA”

While her
alcoholic-heroin-addict-ex-husband had been in AA his sponsor had
insisted that she attend meetings too and while she sat in Alanon
meetings her husband sold the furniture. When she confronted him
about it he threw her down the same stairs we’d just ascended. She
pointed almost proudly to the areas of her face where she’d had
surgery. The rhinoplasty had cost extra.
If she
ever tracked him down she would round up some of the boys and have
the word Rapist tattooed on his forehead.
It was at this
point that she mentioned that
her best friend was
President of Hell’s Angels in Amsterdam. I could have used that
water now but I was too afraid to speak. Still recovering from the
shock of uncovering an AA member in her own home, she now sought
reassurance.

“
But
you
do
have the
job?” I nodded carefully. “And the apartment?”

The Job? The Apartment?
Like two out of three wasn’t bad. Like I had lied about everything
else.She continued as if none of what she had just said could
possibly have any effect on what she was about to say. What she
wanted, she said, was to settle down and have a child. She was
ready. Was I ready?

Somewhat calmed now that she was talking about her
future she sank back into the couch revealing a tattooed white star
only barely visible against the white skin of her midriff. It was a
Pentagram. Of course it was.
She would obviously be demonic
in bed but a good fuck was a small reward for what she really
wanted. Luminous babies and eternal darkness.