Volume 1, Issue 3 & 4 - Diverse Voices Quarterly

throat, adjusts his silk cravat (something he started wearing since living in Europe,
only three years since his wife drank herself to death).
The father says, “I can’t help but notice your accessory.” The girl puzzled, angles
her head. “Your necklace,” he continues, “it’s charming.” She gives the same half smile
the boy gave the father earlier, the kind where nothing goes on above the lips.
My heliumed-conscious self bounces around the top of the café, trying to find an
escape when I hear one of the men in the corner ask the others in Dutch, “Wie is de
ode flicker klog-sak.” Flicker means faggot and klog sak means pig fucker, I tell my
father in my mind. They think you’re fucking me.
The son puts the glass of beer to his lips to sip, except his glass does not leave
its dock until emptied. The father has introduced the son to the barmaid, “He came for
the summer, and when he brought the stereo, I knew he had no plans to leave…”
The son wonders what he is doing in this dark bar at five to eleven on a
Saturday morning. Why was his father so intent on a morning walk? The son has
difficulty meeting girls, is embarrassed about his shyness, a Dantesque circle, and
thinks the father is trying to show him how to meet women. The father told him about
a “deflowering party” at the Scots Bar last weekend. He had heard about French
fathers bringing their boys to bordellos on their eighteenth birthday. He shudders.
The boy thinks his father thinks his son is a sissy. His son would like to point
out many things the father has overlooked or not paid attention to since his mother
drank herself to death, but knows better. The father sits, sips his beer, and puffs his
menthol Stuyvesant cigarette, unaware the son feels he has no home anymore, that
the son also knows he is not welcome here in Amsterdam, that he has no place else to
go. The last place he knew of as home is 3,000 miles away, and his father sold that off
last June to help him forget about his wife, (the boy’s mother), who drank herself to
death.
The father does not acknowledge that only a year after her death, he vanished to
live in Amsterdam on his own. He does not want to hear about what he left behind,
the visits from the police, the bone-crunching fists to the face, the hunger, the
comments of the merchants the boy has known since birth, “Is your father ever
coming back because he has bills to pay, you know.” He doesn’t care he left his son to
cope with the chaos the drug-addled older brother unleashed. But the boy also knows
that after a few more glasses of beer, these thoughts bouncing and crashing around
him like steel spheres in a pinball machine will go away—a sense of calm will be
restored. He can rejoin the other side of himself watching from the ceiling.
Without a word, without even a nod, the blonde girl pours the boy another beer.
He sees something in her eyes when she places a new glass of beer back down. Her
hand lingers a second longer than when she served his father. Plus, she gave him a
new glass, whereas, she only refilled the father’s glass—a sign.
While Peter sings, asking someone to “show me the way,” and his father’s inane
baritone melts into the background, I try to find my way back to the ship in the sky. I
see an opening about to happen. One of the men at the end of the bar is getting up to
leave.
Diverse Voices Quarterly, Vol. 1, Issue 3 & 4 29