Big Pete and Little Pete

Soi Buakhao – Pattaya

Brussels International Airport, Zaventem. I had retreated to a Panos corner. The yellow of their house style taunted my retina. All desks closed, dark, screens deaf.
Spring just didn't get going and everyone was grumpy. Hordes of ski tourists had stormed all flights to sun and snow in the previous days. I was sleepy. Midnight long past. Only camouflaged soldiers walked in circles, their black flashing FNC barrel down.
At that hour it was the only refuge for a hot coffee. I still had a long time to go before I could check in at Thai Airways. The coffee was muck, it's the law of mediocrity. They promise you aromas of the highlands, you get ditch water from the lowlands. My Macbook was open. All sorts of thoughts darted back and forth like shiny metal balls in a pinball machine.
There in that Panos corner a man in a shabby leather jacket and sandals from a nearby table spoke to me. He went to Thailand too, had a ponytail that swept back and forth, a gold tooth, bought up truckloads of rusty scrap metal. He had built an empire with it, one of the few trades that the tax authorities still paid a blind eye to. Reddish blades curled above the collar of a T-shirt. He was a working-class man at heart, in his fifties with rough hands and his heart was on his tongue. 'My name is Piet!'
A younger ruddy man joined him, a giant of a boy with a blushing, curly ash-colored hair, robust metal spectacles, a full round face, thick earlobes. I saw no resemblance except for the strong fold of thought on his forehead and his volume of body.
In the evening it had stormed heavily. Shortly after the commotion, a friend had taken me to the airport way too early just to be on the safe side. Trees with torn branches stood in an orange light along the highway. The world was deaf.
On the fourth floor pier, departing passengers normally disembark from the taxis. Now it was full of cops and not one kiss-and-ride car. In the air was the smell of wet wood, burning chemicals, an evil air, and a taste like grass that horses tear off with their lips.
We link smells to memories.
The agents guided us to a long lock of improvised crush barriers and white emergency tents, searched the travelers in line one by one, mixed up luggage. Brussels was still licking its wounds. As in the fairy tale of the wolf, there was a taste of suspicion everywhere.
Who still had the great answers to life, answers that philosophers like Kant and Hegel used to diligently pour into iron words at a small table in a damp room? Absolute words. Words, they are just thoughts in one person's head that can make them haunt other heads. That's today. Was there still sufficient grounds for absolute statements?
That blushing young man agreed with everything Piet said and added an approving smile every time. It turned out to be his son, but any resemblance was a mystery to me. Immediately I knew quite a few things about Piet and at every outpouring he looked meaningfully to the side, looked into my eyes to see if I understood the magnitude. His neck twisted skimpy in his Harley jacket like a rooster on a poop-filled pasture.
His eyes were a little too close together. My feeling, the first sight. I once read that you like people based on how far or how close their eyes are. A primal reflex, it was even an impulse to choose a partner. Actually, it wasn't about you, it was about what those apart eyes did to you and the chemistry they created.
After last year's attack, large parts of the entrance hall and many shops in the airport were boarded up with building boards from the Nordic forests. The explosions had caused quite a bit. The plywood was of a yellow kind, here and there red flames that flared up from the wood, as if the fire from the brimstone was still smoldering.
Piet's ponytail swayed in its liveliness. Ended on a frayed point, held together with a rubber band. Wiry hair, shot through with a gray that made him knowable and split ends. The gray of the wild years. Once upon a time he had flattened the shiny green hills of the Pajottenland – the Land of Bruegel – on a Harley.
Deep down in front of the large windows, airplanes in all kinds of emblems of all kinds of companies lingered like dozed mammoths.
Piet was on his way to Pattaya for two weeks. 'So short,' I said, 'a paltry two weeks?' 'I come every two weeks,' he said, 'four or five times a year. A long time already. That's how it is.'
The terrorist attacks by IS in Maalbeek and Zaventem were only half a year behind us. Brussels put itself on the map after Paris.
It was about sin and grace and when someone is a villain or a saint, a terrorist or a freedom fighter.
I look from the realization that anything is possible in a human life. That is the new consciousness, the ultimate humiliation of Kant. Your son, from the desert of Brussels, can carry out international attacks just like that, get all the cameras in the world on him.
The government spoke of thirty-two dead and hundreds injured. Now people walk around with arms or legs torn off, with a missing piece of skull, with a stoma, with a single lung, the others pierced by thick rusty nails and surgically removed.
It was complete chaos and the man in the hat became a meme in our collective memory. A crazy hat. The man who was there in both Paris and Brussels, the man who just missed blowing himself up, the man who kept walking through images from cameras. Abrini – the man who took a very ordinary taxi to the Bataclan from a notorious suburb of Brussels and grumpily put on the driver, his packed sports bags with bomb belts did not fit in the trunk because of a built-in gas tank. How simple can life be?
As long as the free Western world supported the wrong dictators, the Middle East continued to export its social problems.
'It's that simple,' said Piet. 'My taxi will soon be waiting at Suvarnabhumi, I'll get in, no hassle with buses, for a few cents I'll be delivered to the hotel like a gentleman. My heart is eager, then beats so much that I don't manage to take a nap. I immediately throw my leg over my moped and tuff to the comrades. They put their arms around me, pat me on the back, push a Chang into my hands. There is so much to tell. Man, you don't know what friendship is over there in Pattaya!'
He had now turned his whole head towards me. His tail swung from side to side. His eyes gleamed, his eyelids floated in the wet. They were really full of tears. Behind hard glasses, the son's eyes shone with understanding. He had a blush on the cheeks. It seemed to me that the love for his father was unconditional. It was beautiful.
I can understand that – not the love of ideas. Thoughts, the power of thoughts that we allow. You fill other people's heads and make them follow you.
A flag of the Islamic State is raised on a mountain in a rising sun. It's a drawing, it's by the hand of the man in the hat. He sent them to his cousin a year before his attacks.
'It's just not Alice in Wonderland,' he wrote under the drawing. The man in the hat, the man who didn't blow himself up. Scared weasel or sensible human?
Piet's blushing son didn't like Thailand, because the diving happening was subpar. Now he set out for a godforsaken island below Australia and so did the whole world. "Virgin," he said. But he understood his father's passion.
'Look,' said Jean, 'Am I sitting here with my wife next to me? No! I'm sitting here alone. But every time I ask my wife along, sometimes she comes along, but she doesn't have fun like me. She goes to bed at eleven o'clock, there in Pattaya and then I start. We don't share our passion.' He had a wide, unadulteratedly cheerful grin on his face, his gold tooth sparking. I looked curious.
It must be a happy place every night in that bar on Bhuakhao Road. They drink, joke with the barlady's, tease each other, sing Irish songs, talk flat jokes, laugh very loudly. That lasts until six o'clock in the morning, then Jean picks up another female for bed. Hopsakee, there goes the moped, the Thai lady nimble on the back and no alcohol checks.
the night is the night,
Handsome man, very chic,
I like you, very big, sexy man, Pattaya,
Pattaya, Pattaya, Pattaya, Pattaya,
Phuuying love you mak mak.
Pattaya, Pattaya, Lou Deprijck, stage animal in heart and soul, born on the language border in the Flemish Ardennes, incoherent deluge of words from a stoned man. Lou, from Lou & the Hollywood Bananas, from Two Man Sound is an icon in Belgian pop music and deserves a statue.
'That's how it goes for two weeks straight,' says Piet. If I see one hour of sunshine a day, it's a lot,' he says. 'Drink, drink, fuck, sleep,' he says. That order. For two weeks straight I live by night.' His son nodded approvingly.
'But Jean,' I say, a little disappointed, 'Jean, you were married…'
With astonishment, almost astonishment and his eyes full of incomprehension, he looks at me, with those eyes that were too close together. His voice full of good-natured mockery and with mock anger and a clear nod with a meaningful look at his crotch: 'Married? No one! Do you hear – no one or no one ever commands Big Pete what Little Pete does. And even less what he has to put himself into.' And then vehemently: "That would be the end of the world."
His ponytail flicked uncontrollably from here to there, the gold tooth flashing angrily. The blushing son nodded vigorously, a hunk of a man. He agreed with everything, not at all perplexed. Clearly a boy overflowing with fatherly love.

(Bangkok, February-March 2017)