AN ORGY IN AMSTERDAM
I was happily watching Better Call Saul when the iPad stopped working. The screen went black and a legend appeared, asking; ‘Are you still there?”. Now, that is an interesting question.
I attempted to grab a damp straw between my teeth an answer in the affirmative. The straw was no good. I then tried pressing my somewhat bulbous Indian nose against the screen but succeeded in only pushing the iPad further away.
The legend remained. Was I still there? Was I anywhere?
My roommate has been sleeping a lot, often noiselessly, which is a mercy. But when he does snore, in our shared darkened room, his grunts sound like a sea lion.
I have eaten in fine restaurants. I have dined with scientists, artists and Brian Eno. But spending every night six feet from this injured man, his wails and incessant night-time phone calls, is new to me. I have no beef with him, nor he with me. Our lives have been become intertwined.
When my dear friend Roger Michell and I wrote together we devised a system called the Queenie Leavis Merit of marking when evaluating scenes. It involved three designations of merit; the first was Naughty, the second was Double Naughty, and the third Triple Naughty.
Each scene would receive its mark. In our film Venus there was scene between Vanessa Redgrave and Peter O’Toole which we considered Triple Naughty. O’Toole’s character apologises to his wife, played by Vanessa Redgrave, before saying goodbye. We deemed this scene Triple Naughty because something beautiful happened between the actors; they elevated the dialogue and created something exquisite out of it.
I considered O’Toole a bit of a cunt despite his fine acting. He said to me, “The only Paki I ever liked was Omar Sharif”. I said, “It’s a bit of a stretch to consider Omar Shariff a Paki but at least one of you was probably a gentleman”. On set O’Toole was known as Florence of Arabia.
A few days ago I promised you some filth but so far you’ve received only enemas and injections. So, in 2004 I gave a reading in Amsterdam. In a bar at the end of the night, a Dutch woman in her mid-twenties asked me to sleep with her.
She rode me to her hotel on the back of her huge Dutch bicycle. A year later I returned to Amsterdam and rang her up. I invited her to pass by later. We could do some shopping, if she had the time. I asked her to bring a couple of joints, magic mushrooms, lingerie and some chocolate for when we got the munchies. “Anything else?” She asked. I told her to bring a friend. “Sure. See you later.”
If this was a film, the camera would be close on Isabella’s face as she writes this down for me.
A few hours later there was a knock on my hotel door. In my boxers and open shirt, I opened the door and there she was, let’s call her Iris, with all the contraband, and the friend.
Tomorrow: less Proust, more Freud, more Iris and…
Your loving Scheherazade,
Hanif the scrittore
xx
Some days I can use my hands. Most days i can use them, knowing it will hurt and it will hurt more tomorrow the more i use them today. Some days I can’t click the buttons on the tv remote without tears. Some days I can’t push them at all and i pretend to have a headache so I don’t have to ask someone to turn it on for me. I can usually read on a kindle because i can prop it on a table and flail at the screen to turn a page when paper would be too delicate for my swollen fingers and the shape of an open book just wants to close itself beyond my ability to fight it back open again. Boredom becomes so entangled with despair it’s hard to tell which is the chicken and which is the egg.
When you talk about waking in the night and not being able to jot down the thought that awakened you — that’s the thing that resonates with me as the first problem you must solve. Is there a voice activated “hey siri” way to wake your iPad and dictate thoughts to it? I hesitate to offer thoughts as it’s depressing when people suggest things that I’ve already found to be unsuitable.
I’m not a writer and nothing sudden overcame me. It’s been a long degenerative road of denying the inevitable but when the moment comes that you can’t hold a fork for the first time, it’s shocking just the same. Incidentally I’ve also been stuck in an Italian hospital and i can hear the too-loud voices infantilizing you. I’m sorry they forgot to feed you. Italian pastries smell divine and that must have been maddening.
I don’t have great thoughts that i cannot write down, but I’m someone who used my hands constantly. I guess like pretty much everyone who has hands that they can use. I used to work in theater production and my life and career and identity were all built on my ability to do things with my hands. And my hobbies, too. I loved to bake and knit and build things with wood and turn paper pages of books and I’ve always wanted, someday when i had the time, to buy a falling down farmhouse and refinish every wooden plank lovingly by hand. Now i have the time, but not the hands.
I’m sorry for you to hear what has happened to you. Selfishly, however, i love hearing the things you cannot do with your hands because i am tired of reminding people around me of the things i cannot do with mine. When you talk about sausages sewn to your stumps, i nod and for a minute don’t have to complain about my sausages sewn to my stumps.
I like that Brian Eno has been granted his own category, separate from artists and scientists.