You Forgot These
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by William Huhn
There was everywhere the danger that a dance would arise. I could shrug off my other concerns, but the danger was there whenever I set my fiddle case down, whether in a walkstreet, a square, or alongside the most civil of the terrace cafés. While I also played in restaurants for tips, and plenty of “sandwich bars,” bistros, and nightspots heard my violin and sometimes my singing, I made my real money outdoors well after sundown, and could be seen still going at it late at night when the meaner elements were out, none of whom gave me trouble.
I’d wrung as much music as possible from Brussels since arriving some three months ago, and not once yet had my fiddle brought out of hiding the discontent in these street and squares, a discontent no music of mine could have reached if it tried.There was a hatred out here, beyond the capacity of even love to confound, but I played a way unaware that I had reason to fear, and my music mainly seemed to awaken just the good in people.
Soon I’d be leaving for the southern French provinces, in my vision of keeping forever ahead of winter and living for music alone, but even here up north, in September, with chills coming on in the evening, my fiddle could pull a crowd. Toes began tapping from the instant my opening notes sprang. Often that’s all I got out of them, but other times even when I was playing badly, they broke into dance.
My roadside recitals could also inspire acts of rudeness ⏤ the passerby who cursed my playing, a rock band that set up well within earshot of my mere violin, then flooded me out. But the dance moves ranged from bits of swing to traditional stepping, and once two shirtless breakdancers performed to a jig that a wandering guitarist accompanied me on…. With such gaiety all was forgiven of the unhappy few. Soon all the night’s revelers merged again into the passing stream, but not before I’d given some of them an interlude of joy.
I was anxiously alone in Brussels otherwise, living under a subletting arrangement soon to expire, and not sure where exactly my gadjo soul would take me after France, when I crossed over into Italy. The fable of the carefree beggarman, whom God remembers and watches over no less closely than over all of us, struck me as true to life; and I had in music a spiritual protector, against which the mortal and mundane were no match, and which gave me courage. But most of the friends I’d made since coming here, including a German woman I’d dated for a month, had withdrawn to their native lands or vanished altogether by now. If on many nights I felt like a dreamy soldier, astray on foreign soil, glad not to know what the next day held, at times I grew solemn and restless with no steady friends around. I was about done with Belgium anyway, and having long since “conquered” the capital, I began branching out to the lesser cities more. I wanted to play them all before leaving.
They, too, couldn’t get enough of my fiddle, and their enthusiasm occasionally equaled what I’d ignited back among the Brusselois, but fewer dancers gathered at these farther corners, and even at their height the eruptions rarely climbed above a score of hands clapping in rhythm to my licks. Nobody threw in for a riot. Their zeal never devolved into the brave rituals of the mosh pit.
Liège, Ghent, and Lille felt just lifeless to me. I made barely enough gelt to justify the travel, and I never went back to these places. Bruges charmed, but again ⏤ no money. Antwerp paid its buskers well, and the finest musician I’d jammed with in Belgium, a Scot no less, was based there, but I disliked the city. Although nothing leapt out at me that I could point to, I’d gone twice now, and somehow both times gave me the willies. I was picking up on the discontent without knowing it and didn’t understand why I felt uneasy, just as now I couldn’t quite explain my reluctance to return to Antwerp.
After all, that Scotsman could play a mean ukulele! He kept mostly to his native Scots folk style, which I’d relished, then he’d go off on some jazz fusion riff of his own unworldly stamp. Even when introducing himself as “Ian V,” he’d been riffing, I’m pretty sure, as this couldn’t have been his exact name. “Fifth,” he added, while crushing my hand, “as is spelled with a ‘ph.’” Whether he meant “Ian the Phifth,” “Fiphth,” or even “Phiphth,” I hadn’t pondered. I was too busy getting me and my fiddle ready to join in the fun he provoked. With his passion for music un feu grégois (”a wildfire”) ⏤ a phrase I loved, having only just learned it ⏤ Ian quickly became as much a kindred soul as a minor hero of mine…. And in the end I couldn’t leave this little country without attempting to connect up with him for one last duo.
If I’d known that Antwerp, like any city, harbored the hate that had no earthly opposite, even Ian V’s ukulele couldn’t have enticed me back. My doubts about this Bohemian life I led were enough disquiet for a traveler. But you can’t plan to avoid malevolence, and the just stand I took against it was improvised. And of all the darkness I faced down that night, only my own made me afraid, only what all true fiddlers take to the floor.
***
The hour-long train ride to Antwerp’s Centraal Station put me, just after dusk, within strolling distance of the Meir, a spacious rue happily unavailable to cars and renowned for its shops. My mission here, as anywhere else, was to bring cheer to a few people, and for that I needed no companion whatever except for my fiddle. But Ian V performed on the Meir every Saturday night from what I could tell, so that’s where I’d go.
It was warm out. I felt less lonesome already, having left Bruxelles behind, where the police had begun to view me as a well-dressed parasite. I was sick of watching them leaf through my passport as if they wanted to altogether stamp out fiddle playing.
I’d hardly started walking before the perplexities of the Flemish straat names had once again thrown me off. A wrong turn, and I found myself wandering an addicts’ alley just off Van Maerlantstraat. Glassy eyes looked out from shadows and stairways. Through the grimy windows of an abandoned office building tiny spurts of flame revealed faces. I jaywalked toward the houses across from it and felt no safer. Here, too, the sidewalk listed like old grave slabs, littered with small ziplock bags here and there. Beneath a working streetlamp lay a syringe among scattered cubes of car glass.
My encased violin drew attention, but the users hung back, wary of an outsider. Though no police were near to hinder trade, only one dealer approached me. I shook him off by pretending not to understand the French he made his pitch in.
But around another corner, my pathway led to better en-virons. A recently paved road banked by Art Nouveau façades welcomed me. Just as I was getting that “all’s right with the world” feeling, though, a coven of prostitutes rose into view. The slit in the mini-mini of the closest ran so high it poked the cage of my animal spirits. Two others loitered near her, all in front of a rococo house whose window frames, with lurid purple-red glows within, resembled baby Doric columns.
I tried to not look as I passed, but I couldn’t not look. The close one nudged aside her leather lapels, exhibiting a lacy black bra; then with a pirouette she shape-shifted away from me, her spike heels clicking. When I caught up with the woman, now posted by the wrought-iron gate of the house, she calmly greeted me with a bright “bonsoir.”
Beauty makes me think impossible thoughts. I can’t and couldn’t help myself; and after returning her hello, I trembled to ask for directions to the Meir. She proffered them in the most elegant français anyone ever heard; and with a touching “faites attention” ⏤ touching, that is, my wrist with two fingertips ⏤ she, too, sensed that I was out-of-place here. So she asked, “Is it you would like to make love to me?”
“Where?” I stumbled, falling back into my native tongue.
“Chez moi,” she said.
I loved that “chez moi” ⏤ so direct, so clear. And I might have gone inside with the filledejoie, because I believed she cared about me. But rather than go, I began to wonder what her name was, and whether anyone loved her, besides God and maybe a mother somewhere. Then a feeling of almost a prayer came over me, and with simple words of parting I left her to the mercy of these endless streets.
No sign of Ian V reached my ears as I walked along the Meir, but I found the small plaza we’d played in twice before, and I set up in front of its central feature: a pallid statue of Anthony Van Dyck, the famous student of Peter Paul Rubens. Van Dyck’s painting had stood on its own so entirely that he became known in Flanders, then across Europe, as “Rubens II.” A graying redhead filled me in on all this while I struggled with my tuning pegs and she smoked. But she strolled off, denying me a chance to repay her in song for the two cigarettes she’d shaken from her pack into my open violin case.
I wasn’t necessarily hoping to become a second Ian V on the Meir that night, but this spot felt well-suited for any kind of lesson from a master; and the entranceway to the popular store Galeria Inno, forty feet away, drew people to the area and would do so till around eleven, closing time, even if Ian didn’t show.
Rain threatened, but since lamplight brightened the walkways, no one cared. But maybe Ian wouldn’t want to risk it. His was an exceptional uke. He called it an “akulele” and said that the secret of its rare sound lay in its maker’s choice of hand-carved spruce for the top. Reluctantly, he even let me give her a try. I doubted I’d ever strummed an instrument more alive, but with Ian so nervous I returned the “akulele” before my fingers could form a proper chord.
He might show up yet. The rain was holding off, the night still pleasant. The drafts allowed short sleeves so long as I played with passion. With my bow the sword I lived by, I struck the first notes of a rag, the nimble “Pig Ankle,” and soon after I was having at a high-speed tune whereupon my fervor grew uncontained, like that wildfire I’d learned the French for. Again I proved that wherever I stood in the open air, whether I pushed southward or hung on in Belgium till someone turned off the fountains for the winter, I’d have the light of my fire, and I could lean on it to the last.
But I’d have moved on to other plazas or burgs this minute if I could have, since this one wasn’t valuing my music. All I’d earned so far, besides the smokes ⏤ which I hadn’t asked for ⏤ was a comment from a crank, “Cigarettes kill people!” as he made a big display of stepping around my case.
“I’ll be fiddling this next one on your grave!” I thought, and I wanted to toss off a few bars of Schumann’s lone violin concerto (said to be a work of madness) for these outriders streaming by, but I couldn’t since I’d never learned it. Instead I hit them with “Orange Blossom Special,” which soon won me my train fare. If Ian was still ensconced at home, at least I was in the black.
Another musician came along, his guitar in a canvas slipcase strapped across his back, his girl in tow, wrapped around his pinkie finger. You’d have thought he was Irish or German till he opened his mouth ⏤ “We heard you, like, last weekend… with that ukulele dude” ⏤ then you knew he was American. I remembered his girl more than him. Though she wore discount jeans and a pleather jacket, like last week, again I was asking myself, how did a loser like that get such a drop-dead girlfriend? If not him, I remembered his faded green vest ⏤ a US Army jacket with its sleeves amputated.
“You must mean Ian V,” I said. “You seen him around?” I also remembered that they’d tried to muscle in on our gig.
“Haven’t,” he said. “He could play that motherfucker.”
“I like what is these ⏤ a veeolin?” said his girl, in an accent I couldn’t place. She stepped forward ⏤ “You can make lot of money with these… veeolin” ⏤ and turned to face her guy. His eyes answered her suggestion. Her hair floated like candyfloss, not pink but a warm beige, a downy ridge cresting above the nape of her neck.
The guy walked around her. “I’m Gil, by the way.” Gilbert smelled like booze. He put out a hand that I shook. Then he ran his fingers through his long dirty blondness, in 80s throwback style, a revealing gesture: his mane was rapidly thinning.
“And this is Tarsie.”
“Why you always do this shit? You don’t tell them small name when first meeting the people,” Tarsie said. With one hand she pointed at herself ⏤ “I’m called Tarsila” ⏤ with the other she took mine in hers. She held on for an extra pulse or two. And nor were her eyes afraid to hold mine. She was spicy-icy hot this woman, and evidently a handful.
Last week Ian was done with this guitarist in an instant. Planting his blank gaze on Gil’s army vest, as if it said all anyone needed to know, he’d asked him if he knew the chords to “Greensleeves,” which Gil did not.
“A’m sorry,” said Ian, “bit ah don play reels wi’ a mon wha doesn’t ken ‘Greensleeves,’” or something like that.
But Ian wasn’t here to save me this time, and I had no witty defense at the ready when Gil asked, “Wanna maybe join forces for a jam, like impromptu?”
“Sim sim!” Tarsie clapped. “You play with us!”
While failing to identify this strange language the woman spoke, I also wondered how she fit in musically ⏤ did she sing?
No. She was the beggar woman. Rather than dig in an Hermès handbag for French perfume, she picked around in a wire-mesh bin till she found a tall paper cup clean enough not to offend the passersby. Then she freshened her lipstick.
After gathering up my earnings from my case, I applied my bow to “BakåtVista” ⏤ a melody that a Finnish flute player had taught me in July. I hoped the tune’s simple guitar accompaniment wouldn’t overexpose ole Gilbert’s thin talent. Not long into the number, though the guy was butchering it nicely, Tarsila’s smiles persuaded a tall black guy, wicked handsome, into pushing a bill into her cup. Something he said in a heavily inflected French made her laugh. He took little notice of Gil or me, but nor did he let Tarsie’s looks keep him from his night.
The guitarist abruptly nonsequitured into U2’s “Where The Streets Have No Name.” It took me a minute to hit on a violin sound not wholly unreminiscent of “The Edge,” and by the end I was also assisting Gil with my voice. We drew a sizable crowd and won more paper, which like that precious first bill, went straight from the cup into Tarsie’s pocket. She didn’t look like a thief. Keeping the container free of bills was a trick of the trade: you wanted them thinking you needed the money.
“So much people like these veeolin!” ⏤ Tarsie smiled, emptying the coins onto the velvet lining of my case ⏤ “especially on night like this of the weekend, when the people come out drunk from the bar.” A fistful of change stayed in the cup, enough to draw attention to our cause when shaken.
“A little early for that, Tarse,” said Gil. Having leaned his cheap axe against Rubens II’s pedestal, he extracted a half-size bottle of chardonnay from the daypack Tarsie had been carrying ⏤ “Ain’t nobody drunk yet!” ⏤ and unscrewed the cap.
“No, isn’t early. They drink starting soon as dark!”
“This isn’t Lisbon, Tarse,” he said. (Ah, she spoke Por-tuguese.) He offered her firsts on the wine, but she waved it away. I, too, declined. Gil said, “Antwerp you gotta wait till like eleven before the drunks are down.” He swept his hair loss back before taking a drink. “Not bad…still cold. You shoulda seen us came out here like a month ago. Place was raging till like two AM even on week nights.”
I assumed Gil was just your everyday drunk, but when he learned I’d lived in LA for a year, he slackened his jaw and admitted to having been “big into dust” back in his home city, San Diego, a factoid that didn’t exactly clarify why Tarsie stayed with him.
We played more, but I kept scanning for Ian among our fleeting fans and the night walkers drifting past. His reappearance felt imminent, even after I began holding out little hope for it. I couldn’t play Gil’s songs well, except maybe the folky R.E.M. anthem “Swan Swan Hummingbird,” but then, neither could he; and when I stopped trying and let my fiddle droop, Gil stopped, too. He unhooked his guitar strap and sank back against the plinth of the Van Dyck.
“Fuck,” he said, “that kid must be freaking.” He reached the chardonnay by his hip. Tarsie snapped up one of the cigarettes in my case and asked, “Is okay?”
“Help yourself.”
“I mean, that poor fucking kid,” Gil said, and swilled what was left of the undersize bottle.
“What kid are we talking about?” I asked.
“Ours. Our boy,” Tarsie said, touching a flame to the rette. “You don’t know? about our boy?” She shot Gil a cautious glance ⏤ “We have a boy,” puffs of smoke veiling her face.
“No way,” I said, as it dawned why she stuck with him.
Worse, the baby was “in hospital,” not breathing on his own. The two-month-old had had heart surgery. As Gil put it, the kid was “just lying there all by himself with all these, like, tubes and wires and shit sticking out of him. Fuck if I know what any of ‘em do.” He felt inside the pack for another bottle. Tarsie added that her baby had been “the same like this” for two days now.
Ready to give up on Ian, I was about to claim my share of the coins and bills and decamp.
“The doctors say he’s past worse danger,” Tarsie said.
Or I could just give them my whole night, I thought. They couldn’t get anything else off me, just my night.
“We owe the hospital like two million francs,” Gil said.
“It’s private hospital,” Tarsie said, proudly.
In my head I converted the absurd sum into US dollars: fifty thousand. Gil was thirty or so, Tarsie maybe twenty-three. Together they had hardly more than his iffy musical gifts and her appetite for panhandling in their favor, less fifty-thousand dollars and an ailing child.
“How long you guys known each other ⏤ or been dating?”
“Like a year maybe.”
Gil watched me calculate the magnitude of their plight.
“A year in next month,” Tarsie beamed. After a deep last drag, she flicked her cigarette into the smokefall.
On my nod Gil put the wine down and stood up with his guitar. The temperature had fallen, and we needed a show-stopper, so I went for a fast one, just to hear if he could keep up; and damn if he couldn’t! Sort of. He played confidently anyway, the new broken father. We drew another crowd ⏤ tourists, slackers, a nurse in lime scrubs, a clutch of officemates….
Then I encouraged Gil to go solo, just to see if he could hold our audience on his own. He fooled with the tuning till it was close enough. After a gaze of reflection, he took a breath and sliced off the keyed-up chords of a John Lennon ballad. Although Gil was drunk and banished ⏤ and his mistake could die at any moment ⏤ his pained voice and missing guitar technique made him a folk legend when he sang, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small/ by giving you no time instead of it all.”
Ian V would have pricked up his ears. Gil was channeling the late Beatle. A silver ponytail appeared amid the bobbing heads and sang quietly along and alone…. “A working class hero is something to be.” But everyone who listened knew Gil wasn’t a hero of any class. He was neither Tarsie’s nor even his own hero. It’s hard for a man not to be his own hero, and the folk adored Gil for showing them how hard. The entertainment took on a life I didn’t think the dusthead had in him.
Someone else I recognized arrived now, at the edge of the growing crowd. A wiry-framed figure, mid-fifties, clad in navy-blue pants, a light blue shirt, and a blue-black beret worn aslant, had paused to take us in, if not to listen to us. It was no Ian V standing back there but, rather, someone who’d had some trouble with the ukulelist, as I recalled. He was wearing the same hammy outfit as before. It’s remarkable how local we rootless souls keep until we disappear for good.
He hugged the same sketch pad to his ribs, a pencil stuck between his knuckles. With his free arm he shook a tea tin of change at the flow of pedestrians. The man drew comic portraits for a living and was fishing for takers. Last week when I saw him talking to Ian, I didn’t know it at the time but he was trying to sell the musician on having his portrait done.
“So Ah bit,” Ian said afterwards. “And Ah din especially mind him wanting to make a cartoon a me.” Ian would have said no more about the fracas that I’d observed arise between them. I had to press him for the backstory: it seemed the man in blue had violated a code. He’d laid a hand, uninvited, on the shiny carving work of Ian’s uke.
Gil left off strumming. As the clapping dwindled, all you could hear behind his John Lennon fans was the tin shaking and some brusque Flemish words. Tilting a smile at Gil, Tarsie poured another haul of coins into my case, five feet in front of us. The artist seemed to pause at the rush of metalic sound. And Gil smiled back at Tarsie. He had delivered. His music had opened the hearts of our audience. Now we just needed to follow up. Almost any old song would do.
Caricaturists, like stick man back there, were usually a harmless stratum in Flanders. Hunting for tourists, they idled about the squares or fountains, or along the borders of sidewalk eateries. When he’d come around last week, at first I’d barely noticed him. I was caught up in rosining my bow. Then I heard an acrid curse ⏤ something Gaelic, probably the meanest word ever to exist in any language ⏤ and I looked over at Ian, who had him by the wrist. Though wearing an amused look on his blank face, the Scot was angry and held on, poised between letting him go free and a desire to punish.
But I quickly forgot about “the geeze” ⏤ and whatever other names Ian had had for him. And I hadn’t thought of him once since that episode and never as a threat, but here he was getting his tin in the faces of our people, scaring them off. His aggression startled me. Before, he’d gone away with no outcry. After all, the Scotsman hadn’t actually hurt him, just given him a bloodless hand.
Hoping I could both calm down the poor bag-o’-bones and make amends for Ian’s transgression, I waved him over. The staff of Galeria Inno was herding the last-minuters out the glass doors. I’d get my caricature done, a keepsake I could tuck into a letter to my parents or someone, but the artist stayed away. He looked like a washed-up sailorman in his blue getup, and with the bearing of an alley cat he eyed me like I wasn’t there.
Meantime, Gil was speculating that he, Tarsie, and baby would make a killing in Italy. Tarsie believed Gil, but what about the boy? No burden he. If the kid pulled through, said Gil, he’d make “an extreme prop,” and with that, he chewed off the über-intro of “Pinball Wizard,” a superb sequel to the Lennon, just what we needed to kick the show up yet another notch.
Where could I lay on a little fiddle? I wondered, the wood beneath my chin. But now the cartoonist bounded toward me and, standing between me and my case, was strangely staring.
“Bonsoir, Monsieur,” I said, speaking my most amiable French. “I have much respect for artists.”
“Oui,” he stared.
“I have an idea,” I said, the Who chops gathering, the eyes of the artist narrowing. Gil again proved he could sing: “EversinceIwasayoungboy, I’veplayedthesilverball. FromSohodowntoBrightonImusthaveplayedthemall….”
“Let’s make a trade.” I stepped closer and talked at his ear: “I’ll play a tune for you”⏤ I lifted the fiddle for emphasis ⏤ “while you sketch my caricature; and however much money comes in while you draw and I play, will be yours in exchange for the picture. Çasuffit?”
“He stands like a statue, becomes part of the machine.”
“Baises!” said the man.
This word meant “kiss,” and it could also mean “fuck” as in “fuck me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, lowering my fiddle, as his stink ⏤ of body fluids, drink, and soil ⏤ reached me.
He was homeless.
“Thatdeaf, dumb, andblindkid ⏤ ”
“Baises!” he reiterated, puckering his hole.
“Who?”I stammered.
“Toi!” he rejoined.
“He’s a pinball wizard! There has to be a twist!”
I sidestepped, seeking refuge in Gil’s cluster of Who fans, hoping to play among them. The sailor turned, keeping me in his line of stare. Then saw my case. Most of the money we’d earned lay at his toe-tips, which poked through the filthiest tennis shoes you ever saw. You could barely tell they were blue. I thrust my fiddle and bow into Tarsie’s good hands. By the time I got a hold of his funky shirt, his fly was unzipped over my case. His pad fell from where he’d stashed it under his arm. Gil quit playing. I yanked the shirt, popping a button, but mon vieux bent his knees to weight himself, still trying to pee.
Plunging my shoulder into his, I knocked his frame off balance. But he only almost lost his footing. He snapped back like a palm tree after a gale and once more stood over my case. Now when I went for him, he fought me one-handed, his other down at his junk, his cursing in pluperfect American ⏤ “I’ve got you fuck bastard” ⏤ that lapsed into a bout of Belgian-French curses. En Belgique even the street people wax trilingual.
In my clearest King’s English I said, “You’re not fucking doing this!” then just creamed the guy with a body check. He stumbled backward, his tin wheeling in the air. Coins rang on the cobblestones. Backwards toward the statue he tripped on the steps and broke against the marble pedestal, where he deflated like a bag, now, of bone fragments, his half open shirt exposing a mottled pink chest. With his beret missing, he was bald as a vulture save for a ring of slick gray straggles. His zipper gaped, but by some grace his privates weren’t public.
I peeked at Gil’s fans. They’d stuck around, and others had joined them. All were enjoying this drama of the grotesque. None knew if I’d injured the man. His feral eyes were unclosed, but he was lying across the stone ⏤ until again on the move, crawling to his feet up the base of the statue. I called for Tarsie to put the fiddle away. My relief that my blow hadn’t paralyzed him turned to dismay that it hadn’t when he went for my case again. I blocked his way, now, to protect Tarsie, who was nudging the case offstage with the point of her boot.
Gil materialized next to me.
“No worries, Gil, seriously. I can handle it.”
I turned not away from the vagabond.
“Sure?”
“Oh, sure.”
Gil backed off. Tarsie scolded him, “What is this you do? You want to beat up a old man? Bring me guitar blanket.”
She didn’t mind if I beat him up by myself, while she and Gil stashed the money in his canvas case. I’d worry about that later. My opponent turned and spat on Rubens II.
“That was beautiful,” I said to his back. “Now get the fuck out of here before next time you don’t get back up.”
With shrills of laughing, as if obeying orders, he galumphed forward and went behind the monument. “You ain’t nothin’! Baauh, you ain’t nothin’!”⏤I could still hear him. But he came around the other side, nearly stepping on his beret, which he scooped up and flipped back on. He paced the cobbles, also grabbing his pad, lurched my way indecisively, then abruptly turned down Otto Venius, the nearest sidestreet.
The gawkers wanted to get on with their night, but not far along Venius, the cartoonist took a beer bottle from a window niche, stashing his pad in same. He drank off the beer. The bottle shattered on the opposite building. Everyone who heard looked, but he shot his glances only at me, while spouting garbles of obscenities and insanity. “It’s my country! He tells me get out, and it’s my country!” he screeched. “My country!” Then more awful laughter.
With his proud appendage on display again, he pranced from wall to wall, streaming with abandon, while all of Antwerp watched. After belching, he tucked his bishop back inside and was ready for another run at me. After madly grinding the glass underfoot, he exited the sidestreet with one fist raised, shrieking, “You ain’t nothin’, fuck fuck bastard, fuck…. Get out! connard, un connard! Un connard in my country!”
I couldn’t figure why he was calling me a duck (”uncanard”) and only later learned he wasn’t. I had to look up this word “connard.“ You don’t want to know what it means.
He assailed me with “This is mymymymy country!” while throwing a flurry of punches. I blocked them easily enough, but it wasn’t easy. He was aging, out of breath, and unyielding.
“Your country’s ashamed of you,” I said. He burped another loud one and tried to kick me. I stepped sideways, keeping him facing me, and said, “I do more for your goddam country than you’ll ever do.” Another absurd punch thrown missed. We were pacing through a circle I couldn’t break out of.
“Please just leave us alone!” I implored. He swung two more fists, gnashing his teeth, nostrils flaring. His smell.
“Let me tell you what you are,” I heard myself say. “You’re disgusting. You have no friends. Nobody on God’s earth gives a fucking damn about you, not your own goddam family…. How could they? You have no family. You’re a zero, a drunk ⏤ a fucking street bum! Why don’t you crawl off somewhere and die? No one would even notice.”
The circle broke. He gazed at me as intently as ever, but pain entered where before had been only dark vacancy. My words sank home, deeper than his scant store of hope. His fears took hold: the picture I’d drawn of him held true.
“You ain’t nothin’,” said the voice; “either,” it didn’t say, but I heard it in a kind of thought-echo caught in the aftertone of his failing croak. He tried for more laughter, but veered toward a cry. I thought, then thought better of asking him for my portrait again.
Now he was walking the plaza in confusion and talking out loud, as to convince himself that “this is my country.” But since an invisible tether connected us, he kept circling back as if about to unhinge anew, and I caught a shard of wisdom in his closing dispatch to the enemy.
After some French about the “star of my eyes,” which he aimed skyward and I couldn’t quite parse, his filmy stare fell on me a final time. He returned to English, his voice pitching up to a high songful register. “Go on, go on!” he said. “I’ll follow you! I’ll be all right, I’ll be all right…. I’ll follow you.”
But off he went, a man whose gait told of a ship that was listing, always listing, always about to be overwhelmed. Upon reaching into the niche for his pad, he receded along the barred windows of Otto Venius until gone. The wrought-iron secured the people inside by keeping him out, him along with the street ladies, criminals, drug addicts, the other drunks, and the rest.
Near the Van Dyke lay an upside-down tea tin, a stubby pencil, and the odd coin. These things must have been valuable to the man. I should have gathered them and called after him, “Wait, sir!” Like a small prayer rising on his behalf, for him and all the friendless souls out here, “You forgot these,” I’d have said when reaching him. Maybe then he’d have felt like an ordinary citizen of this country of his, not like one of the many who had lost the fight and left nothing of value behind.
Like any believer in the Golden Rule, Tarsie divided the pot, including the bills she had stowed, with perfect justice. She gave herself a third, the same as each musician. But I was no longer intent on this outcome. I got my money, but I’d squandered a chance to stand outside myself and see what only the few ever see ⏤ themselves in another.
Ian V’s every pick had made good on a promise ⏤ that music alone can arm you against the world ⏤ but he never did return with his akulele, and from this night on, the peculiar beauty of his playing began to defy my powers of recall. The sound of the tea tin, on the other hand, stayed fresh in my ear, for the seafarer came around often in the nights that followed my last in Antwerp, which turned out to be my last in Belgium.
This essay, which earned the writer a “Notable Essay” in Best American Essays, originally appeared in Thema.
William Huhn lives in Westchester County, New York, with his wife and their two-year-old son. His narrative essays have been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and cited six times as a “Notable Essay” in The Best American Essays series, most recently in 2018 (“Grave Ivy,” Flint Hills Review #22). Huhn’s poetry has been featured in the The Carolina Quarterly and can be found on the popular website Verse Daily. His essay “The Pagadder” appeared in the Spring 2019 issue of Pembroke Magazine.