Belgian Disregard and the Iron Heel

Posted by Matthew Crouch at 13:27

Outside the six panes of old glass and painted wood doorway to the balcony over the street I can see snow falling hard and fast. Snowflakes the size of potato chips. An unwelcome cold penetrates the lower portion of the room keeping my mind sharp and the air fresh. Its late autumn – it should feel like Halloween is near but it does not because this is Belgium.

I passed the day yesterday - and this is in some ways as simple and meaningful as my life gets - cooking and illustrating. I made burritos because you can’t get good simple food like that here. But somehow i did that without too much fuss - usually it’s a huge mess and time consuming. I spent most of the time happily working on this year’s annual Halloween illustration that I like to dream up.

I went swimming last night with the team but all the guys in my lane used to be made up of mostly Flemish guys but now they’re francophone and they aren’t so friendly. These guys are mostly younger than me except for one or two and now there are seven of us in that lane. I left early after a half hour because, I don’t know... I kept having death-obsessed thoughts in the deep end (a recurring swimming problem I have which might be related to when asthma kicks in slightly, or I am truly just another crackpot in need of therapy). So the language dysfunction was bothering me but not upsetting me like it can; I was more bothered by my lane mates disregarding me - its not like i don’t try, (make eye contact, smile, use a few French phrases and English words simply), with these guys but there is this phenomenon called Belgian Disregard which you get here when you don’t understand the language and then ad that to cliques and its kind of tiresome, then do all that with a tedious “gay” twist. Not that i really go to swim team practice to socialize but there is a point when people won’t look you in the eye and your always looking at their backs.

Like I said that disregard and my thinking about (my own – future tense and my moms – past tense) death when i was swimming head underwater in the deep in - the social isolation of it and the mental isolation of it and how morphine is a relief to it - and why the fuck does my brain go there when I’m busy swimming...?

So I got out of the pool took a solitary hot shower. Then took a long walk to the Metro and rode home.
All of that makes it sound like I am depressed but i don’t think so - not anymore than I would expect with my families anniversaries at this time of year and then on top of the autumn season being a season of vegetative death. Plus to day is nearly wintry cold. Kind of freakish extreme you might find more normal in Ohio or the Midwest!

Yesterday began really noisy, a bunch of school kids having a field trip on our street - ok that kind of noise isn’t so annoying as the LARGE FRIGERATED truck parked outside with its compressors running even though the outside temperature is at freezing IS... then some depannage (tow) truck sitting on the sidewalk outside the door where we have this fragile gas connection. With this kind of weather at the moment I don’t want the trouble of a severed gas line with the time it takes that to get fixed! The city will rush out at a moments to turn off the gas if a leak occurs but will take weeks to get around to actually finding the time to repair it and under the sidewalk is their responsibility... since the tow truck driver is this young hot Belgian stallion who I see driving around and find totally hot and decent looking - like he should be in college not driving a truck. Eventually I go to his truck window and explain in English, (not knowing what language might be his mother tongue so English is often times a safe bet here to not offend anyone), the situation with the gas line and could he just move his truck forward a meter etc... At which point he looks me in the eye (gets points for that! and added points for having drop dead gorgeous eyes at that!) and says in English...

"In Belgium we speak French"...
And without missing a beat...
With my right hand in a fist I hit my heart then made
A rather infamous salute as I once saw in the movie American History X.
A gesture he did not much appreciate!

Nor do i suspect he got the subtly of that bit of sign language being my comment on his spoken comment. There was a police agent just there standing around not doing much and I explained the situation with the truck parked on the sidewalk to him and he looked at the gas line which is sunken down with obviously reset paving tiles replaced etc. and so he goes and talks to the cute truck driver boy. Then policeman walks away with a sort of aimless gesture (I remember a sign i once saw near Park St. at the North Market that said "cops are crooks"). Then the truck driver boy backs his truck up and goes forward and backs up etc... and then makes some gesture i didn’t’ understand but perhaps a gay insult gesture - so i just repeated it back to him thru the window. We smiled at each other and I swear there wasn’t a malicious look in this boy trucker’s eye - which is the deception of beauty. Trust me I wouldn’t trust him - even if he was pretty enough to make me want to engage in anally penetrative sex with his boy truck drivers ass - and I swear there was something in his eye that said that’s precisely what he had in mind. It was all like a cheap porn story sequence.

I told my predominately francophone neighbor Jean the story in the afternoon at the kitchen table here and he really liked my ballsy (sign language) reply but then his grandmother was German back then - he laughed so hard and hit the table - but we both agreed that the boy truck driver would not get the subtle mirror in your face sign language comment i made.
I said to Jean:
"Petit pays petit esprit".
I read that once in King Leopold’s II Ghost.
Which impressed Jean that I could quote that and speak it and that I knew who said it.
That being what Belgium’s King Leopold II said about his Kingdom’s subjects - can you believe that - and people here are still rather monarchical in their ideologies despite the insults of the previous King. Go figure. Its not like England where those poor English can’t liberate themselves from such an old family of the land. But here the monarchy like the country only goes back to 1830. I find that strange and sham like, stage theatre prop.

Jean also asked in what century does this boy live in when he thinks to say “in Belgium we speak French”.... what about the Dutch speaking majority - what about the German speaking minority, what about the unofficial languages of various if not ALL Arabic dialects, ad to that a few eastern European languages, not to mention some English and other European languages thrown in because of the EU and all)...

Then en route to swim team practice Günter and I talked about European tendencies toward fascisms these days – namely, typically, Austria, but now also shockingly, Switzerland; increasingly, France also where everyone thought they were immune to such thinking; like always though invisibly so and therefore more dangerously so, Denmark - and then how Flanders/Vlaanderen always gets the blame for the Belgian version of fascism when there is a franco-version for Bruxelles and also another in Wallonia alive and kicking but then no one seems to mind...

Yesterday I saw this francophone (white) also young and adorably kind all too innocent looking Belgian boy actually young twenty-nothing viciously insult an older Moroccan woman - nearly spat on her – this while we rode the tram home last night... while all of us in the tram just stared and there seemed to be this sense of shock you could feel in the tram - and the boy was relentless and the woman was calm and detached and cool when normally you think oh she’s going to go really crazy in that way north Africans can or are known for at least according to Lonely Planet guide books. But she didn’t.

I think the only place you can go to, to be really safe from fascism in this day and age is Deutschland – ironically the old Vader land! Because they know better than any of us how that plays out after it all comes to a head. Certainly Israel gets away with a shameless amount of fascism however it seems to justify its actions.

So after Günter and i talked that over - I said you know and in the states we have economic and corporate fascism running right out of the white house and Günter was like yeah, wow, Matt that’s really great you can admit that.
Then we arrived at swimming.

The natatorium was cold but the water not as cold as i expected - the swimmers, however, weren't so warm and I was rather cold myself but not in any sensation of temperature just my attitude.
While in the deep end I worried and wondered when was the last time my old street saw such a gesture as I had made earlier in the day. In what time, what year, what context - if ever did men like that walk this street? I then supposed so as an answer to my question. Were they sexy, stupid or intelligent? Did they believe in things or just do as they were told?

I was reading about Jack London the night before, how he had what would be considered today rather racist back in his time, but how despite that he wrote the Iron Heel in a color blind way - bringing the races together to fight the “iron heel” of the corporations. Whatever you do read that book!

I guess i got too much on my mind.
Normally drawing calms me down but when the cold air kicks in my asthma kicks in - and when it does it constricts my throat and my thinking in a way.
I don’t know some days it's hard living with yourself as I presume you know from your own experiences.
All my adult life I have thought i don’t like who I am inside. I miss who I was as a kid. I wish I were a better person but it’s like in my DNA to be a malcontent - social critic.

In the deep end I thought about death, the water, the suffocation, the slow eventuality of the inevitability of death. It made me fearful in a way that was not panicking but rather existential. I thought about what my mother’s thoughts were when she was alone and with my dad at the end. Before the morphine haze took over. I wondered if my own death would be fast and unexpected or slow and in such a way I would have to make a peace with it while yielding to it. It was then that I became angry at my lane swim mates for being unwilling to try and communicate with someone in another tongue, someone from another land – from another age. If I were ten years younger they would have brought out their English skills to impress me but in gay middle age someone like me is in the way, taking up space, different, foreign, and perhaps a threat to the cosy myth of linguistic isolation in the capital of Europe. Eye contact and a smile, forcing conversation between guys without a common language – the awkwardness of it can bring on laughter and a bigger smile. And the smile of a stranger can dispel the threats of ones inner demons and familial ghosts who linger inside.

And i try not to remember as I last saw her in decay of cancer and morphined relief but in some other way of being before all that.

That’s what kind of day it was.