Rojo
There is a colossal roundabout in the Argentinian city where I stayed. It consists of a wide circle of grass and in the center of it is a big square. It is here, on a hot and humid Friday night, that we meet.
He is easy to spot in a crowd full of Argentinians. He’s wrapped up in the star spangled banner. His cap and T-shirt blue, his shorts red, his white hair a tribute to the stars. The only thing more foreign than his appearance is this Aryan face of mine.
Within the first minutes of meeting I know we’ll get along. We bond over harsh jokes, our interest in all that leads to progress and the fact that we’re both fifty percent fantastic and fifty percent retarded - depending on the chromosomes’ mood.
He’s a man that worked all his life and now, retired at sixty, decided to see more of the world.
His story is one of struggle.
He started off with a remarkably bad hand of cards and added some damage along the way, some self inflicted, some gifted. The odds were against him, yet he turned it all around. He traded his youth for liberty and changed dark thoughts into mental serenity.
A bad mouthed, good man - which is a better combination than its opposite. A kind man that endured so many rounds in the boxing ring of life, that, to him, all critiques have become redundant noise.
To make sure I don’t start taking him too seriously, he lives about as healthy as an overweight diabetic snorting lines of sugar out of a frying pan. It’s Diet Coke and cigarettes around the clock.
The following week we meet up on a daily basis. I show him around, he provides me with gems of knowledge. Time is killed, a friendship is born.
After that week he goes out into the wild and I become a literary recluse once more, only to shake hands again a month later in Panamá. Traveling together for a number of days.
Sights are seen, food is eaten, yet it’s all irrelevant. We could stand in front of the Mona Lisa, we could be on top of the Empire State Building. We are at our best sitting down at a quiet spot, conversating. Letting words flow whilst forgetting time.
So there we sat on a roundabout in Argentina. There we shook hands at a Panamanian airport, there we stood on a mountain, there we were standing, laughing in a metro in yet another city and finally there we sat, overlooking a lake in some random village. There we sat saying farewell for now.
He puts his cap on backwards, takes a sip of Diet Coke, welcomes the smoke into his lungs and shakes his head while I refill my bottle of water.
He winks. “That stuff will kill you, you know.”
“As will life,” I reply.
I suppress the urge to call him sir, because he prefers me to call him by his chosen pronoun, which is ‘cunt’.
We shake hands and a pick up truck drives him into my memory lane, parking at an undetermined spot in the future.
I smile. Having said hello to a stranger, waving goodbye a friend.
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I wrote a novel! It’s available on: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Koopmans-ebook/dp/B0B6TC4WX9/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=GWSYPFYSYYSU&keywords=vic+koopmans+head+first&qid=1658281167&sprefix=vic+koopmans+headfirst%2Caps%2C127&sr=8