A few years after I left London, Alex would achieve passing fame in a Jean-Luc Godard film. But before that, while I was still in Europe, he’d visited California and stayed with my family, frightening them with his narcissistic intensity and unsettling stories of their son amok in Europe. He hung around California for a while, then New Mexico, then worked his way back to Paris and roles in films. News would arrive by way of the travelers’ circuit that Alex was in Cap Ferrat with an heiress and had a painting studio, or shooting a new film in Ibiza, or back in London acting in underground films. Somewhere around the end of that decade, news faded and I lost track of him.
Then some years ago, en route to a writers’ conference in Warsaw, I arrived at my hotel in Amsterdam to find a note that “Alex” had called. Could it be him, after all these decades? And how on earth could he know I was here?
The next night, I called California to inquire after my father, who by then was quite frail. The woman looking after him told me that a few nights earlier Alex, describing himself as an old friend, had called from Amsterdam. Apparently feeling curious, or sentimental, he’d found the number he still had for my parents and discovered to his surprise that my father was still alive and living in the same house. To his greater amazement, the woman had told him that by sheer coincidence I was just arriving in Amsterdam, and she’d given him my hotel number.
I was ambivalent about getting back in touch with Alex; it stirred so many ghosts. I assumed Alex - attractive, educated, multilingual, variously talented - had gone on to do interesting things in the intervening years: act, direct in film or theater, perhaps establish a career as a painter.
He called and left a second message. Finally he called a third time, when I was in. It was odd but not unpleasant to hear his voice. I suggested we meet and go have dinner somewhere. “I hope you’ve got money to pay for it,” he said. “I don’t.”
That night, I waited for Alex outside my hotel. He drove up on a rickety bicycle in a torn pea coat, a cardboard tube under his arm. His hair was long, graying, and tangled; some of his teeth were missing. We embraced warmly and walked to a ristoffel restaurant nearby. Talking fitfully, popping an array of pills - “for high blood pressure,’ he said - Alex painted a picture of a life buying and selling antiques, running sports cars in from Germany until his partner ripped him off, opening a bicycle shop for a while only to have all his bikes stolen when he forgot to lock the door. His physicist father, cancerous from his own nuclear radiation lab experiments in England, had shot himself years ago. Recently his mother in Hilversum had died, leaving him a small inheritance he’d already gone through. Broke and in ill health, with an array of children, ex-wives, and lovers scattered about Europe and the U.S., he was counting upon Holland’s prodigal welfare benefits to keep him afloat.
We moved on to a bar and drank and talked about such people as we’d known and what had happened to them. We talked about my misadventures after I’d left England. We never said a word about that afternoon at the London hotel when we tried to be gigolos. At the end we exchanged addresses, though it felt like a formality.
Before we parted, Alex removed from the cardboard tube he’d brought a drawing in pastels of the lighthouse at Cap Ferrat and gave it to me. It was signed and dated in the lower right hand corner - a year when we both would have been 28.
“My best year,” he said.
Excerpted from the memoir Native State (Random House)
Native State....still my favorite.
If you liked this, you need to read Native State.