We were having dinner with a couple of friends at a restaurant they call ‘De Vreetschuur’ when the conversation took a turn I hadn’t foreseen. “But you really have a poop head,” the girlfriend said to me. Bewildered, I put a piece of fries in my mouth. “Okay,” I stammered. She looked at me, kindly but firmly, the way a primary school teacher might look at a student when she’s trying to explain something. “You know that, don’t you?” she asked.
Well, maybe a little. In the past, sure. Fifteen years ago, when my cheeks were clean-shaven and full of baby fat, someone said something similar. I had just moved to Seville and had hair that fell halfway down my neck. “You really do look like a fraternity ball,” said a girl I’d just met. She was Swiss, but had studied in the Netherlands for a while, so she probably knew what she was talking about. The next day I grabbed a clipper and cut my hair, which I kept short for years afterwards. With that almost bald head I was sometimes taken by some people as someone who in his spare time demolishes bus shelters or kills people for the secret service of an Eastern Bloc country.
I’d rather be anything than to be mistaken for an asshole. That wouldn’t be so bad at all, if it were actually true. If indeed I was born with a golden spoon in my mouth; if everything had come to me and I could always live on the money and the network of my father and mother. If I really lived a cockroach’s life and had the resources of a cockroach. But I don’t have one, unfortunately. Apparently the head that goes with it – and the perfumed last name.
About a week after dinner, I took a bag of clothes to a thrift store. The owner, a woman my age, introduced herself and I did the same. She ran her eyes over me and then over the big garbage bag I was carrying. “Julien,” she repeated my name, “packed and bagged.” She paused and looked at me intently. “And also… poop?” she asked. Oh no, I thought, here we go again. But it was really a joke, she assured me when I hesitantly asked if she seriously thought I looked like a cockatiel. I handed in the stuff and soon after we said goodbye. “Hello,” I said. “Hello, Julien,” she said, “the non-poor.” In the future there was the buzzing sound of something that might have been clippers.