I had to go to school.
Not to my own school, as everyone happens in nightmares, a classic. Then you have to take final exams again and, as it always happens with me in dreamland, it is discovered that I haven’t been going to all kinds of subjects for years, forgotten a bit, let it slip, no time for that. But every day playing billiards in the youth center Jacx, as our old base, I see, is called these days. It used to be called something else, I can’t remember it, a short, weird word, Fneuk, Prot.
‘Jacx?’
‘But of course.’
My own school was called the Blariacum College, and it still is, simply called the Blariacum, which sounds just as chic as the Vossius or the Barlaeus, those two poor schools from Amsterdam that are even chic if you drop out early, see Reve and Grunberg .
If not from the Blariacum in Blerick, which was not chic at all, it was not a gymnasium either, but a havo-atheneum, although a Martian wouldn’t notice that, haha, just as a Martian will not like my new tennis molières – I elaborate, friends, it is war after all.
‘There we have Ambrush on its Artengo’s,’ said Jet, when I came down with it enthusiastically, ‘so you went to the Decathlon?’ Did she think it was funny, did I know that the Decathlon was a sort of shadow Perry, and Artengo a sort of sports euro shopper?
“Sure I know,” I lied. “Ambrush is a real Artengo man.” There’s something about names, here, about brands, since we’ve known each other, alternative first names are being fired at me, Buwalda is fine, but ‘Peter’ not really, a boring boomer name, she thinks, with which I could not disagree at first until I learned that she thought ‘Pieter’, as her father was called, was a ‘very nice name’.
“So Peter thinks you’re very drowsy, and Pieter very cool?”
‘Yes!’
If Stan Laurel scratched my head, that’s all I could do. Since then, all kinds of things have been tested on me, I’ve already been called Kai, and Paco, and Pebu, often for months, and also against friends, who then also address me like this, ‘Can Pebu actually serve already?’ So now it is Ambrush, a Bohemian name, Ambrush Buwalda, I would also descend from Bohemia.
Oh well, in the times of the Button I just let it happen, what’s in a name, after all. (Well, a lot, I’m afraid. Putin is who he is because of his name. It rhymes just too much with Lenin and Stalin, and rapalje obliges. Please include that in the analyses. Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, they fall out, other matryoshkas! Be careful with that.)
Anyway, I had to go to a school, the Gymnasium Felisenum, to entertain children. ‘We are under the same administration,’ said the teacher who picked me up from the station, ‘as the Vossius and the Barlaeus.’
“And the Blariacum,” I muttered unintelligibly.
Two sixth-graders interviewed me, just smart questions. That again, yes. One asked me what it was like to watch the play from my book. Must – must, she said. Class. “Well,” I replied, “how would you like to watch a play of yours?” By return post: ‘The original would be better, I think.’
No, we didn’t have sixth graders like that in Blerick, I don’t think so. Or am I underestimating ourselves at the time?