The Ohio Interstate On-Ramp
bart plantenga
DJ Kees flees Amsterdam under mysterious circumstances with teen daughter, Alouette. Something to do with local enforcement, a biker gang, purported debts, damaged Harleys. The 2 hitchhike around America’s Midwest in pursuit of the LA mystery woman, a mythical benefactor – if she even exists. They eventually end up back in Brooklyn where they must survive, Kees as DJ and Alouette in a new high school. Kees must turn to slave-wage construction-renovation work offered by his deceitful landlord. Things go from hilarious to hallucinatory to absurd to harrowing in Brooklyn’s post-hipster-DJ-slumlord underworld, Here they wander through a dubious landscape in pursuit of a legendary club DJ … The entire story is told from Alouette’s Point of view who is beginning to pry into her father’s mysteries.
The TV is already on when papa wakes up. Truth is I left it on all night on mute. Truth is, at 16 I’m still scared of the dark – OK? To jar papa awake I turn up the sound. It is time. I am ready to go where we’re going.
Papa turns in a groan, eyes in a squint, reaches for his harmonica, knocks the styrofoam plate off the wobbly fake wood nightstand with its cigarette burns and glass rings. I switch the TV off. Papa sighs as if deep breathing can wipe his mind clean. He’s washing his underwear in the sink. No way am I doing that!
He clears his throat, runs a hand over his scruffy face. “Do you want to hear a weird story, schat?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really.”
“OK, but don’t disappoint.”
Slowly his story unravels: We used to unwrap the pastries from Broodnodig in the Van Helstplein, where he was going to before I was even born and there we sat on a green park bench, under the shady sycamores with the wax paper unfolded on our laps laughing, eating our tompoeses [big, creamy, messy bricks of delightful puff pastry filled with vanilla custard cream]. The kind of pastry that has you licking your fingers for half an hour – all you hear is your own sighs as they blend with the sunlight streaming through the trees. I remember squinting and how the sun made papa disappear and suddenly, in a weird panic, I embrace him for no real reason.
I never minded hearing different versions of how the Tom Poes was invented whenever we sat in that plein. Inspired by Tom Thumb, a dwarf is used by petty criminals to help rob homes. The other spelling, same pronunciation – tompouce – with pouce being French for thumb as inspired by … Tom Poes is also a small, Dutch, cat comic-book character that papa and every kid grew up reading. Did papa say he read all 177 issues? And did he at age 8 act out entire stories with neighbor kids and get into hundreds of arguments on the street about the two characters blundering through life in a charmed way like Winnie the Pooh? Was papa indeed almost named Tom in honor of this character?
We stumble down to the cramped breakfast lounge, a dank room with stained, dark-red, industrial carpet and rat-gnawed furniture.
His hair wet and shiny, combed back rockabilly style. The dense air stinks of grease, flatulence, strong deodorants, cheap perfume, dodgy socks, baby puke, melted donut glaze, strong cleaning fluids … The mounted TV is up so loud nobody has to listen to anyone else’s irritating eating, slurping, phoning noises: truckers, salespeople – you wonder what the man wearing the K-Mart logo tie carries in his imitation leather valise: body parts, security camera samples, kitchen cutlery?
Papa slurps the coffee. He whispers: “Het smaakt suspicious like water scooped from a pothole in a truckstop parking lot. Sticky pastries remind me of a dragon fantasy book: the dragon’s skull smashed open by a demon-warrior; just lying there, gruesome, gooey, soulless.
But survival puts tastebuds on hold as you stuff this junk into your face – and shoulder bag.
Papa always sings stuff whenever he wants to say things without taking full responsibility for it’s message: “I’m gonna hold time hostage down in Florida, child. Ain’t nobody, gonna tell me what to do, child!”
“I am just dumb enough to not be able to have my brains pay off,” strange whispered confessional moment with him leaning over the breakfast table. “If I’m so smart, what am I doing in a place like this?” Long sigh-stare.
“It’s all adventure. … One night I’m in the Bar Sass on the Marnixstraat, always a pittig, spicy mix of beauties, thugs, artists, and fuck-ups. This girl, this Jongedame is buying drinks. Or maybe I am paying. Obviously she thinks I am somebody else. No, she was paying. She is English. And at een uur [1 AM] I stumble outside; across the street I’m waving to her saying ‘CIAO BABY!’” He stands, tips his imaginary hat. “I’m very loud and I stumble, bumping into a motorcycle, one of a line of a dozen polished machines parked side by side and the first one hits the next one – like dominos – boom Harley boom Triumph boom boom boom …
“Like PeeWee Herman.”
“If it was dominos it would have been amazink. But it is not and I am in panic. You can almost see the bikers’ heads detonating, fumes rising as they burst out the door and I make escape on my bike through the Marnixplantsoen. On through the Staadsliedenbuurt, behind Café Brel, I wind my way into Westerpark where they cannot follow me. But they don’t let go. They wait at the entrances. They never give up. I save myself riding through a broken fence. Years later they still have a wanted poster of my face up in their private clubs. Revenge is the air they breathe. They find out where you shop, where you walk, they harass you, threaten you. Death threats followed – a bullet in an envelope slipped into our mailbox one sunny day.”
“Papa, dat wist ik he-le-maal niet, I had no idea!”
“A kid of 10 is not supposed to hear this kind of story. These bikers make deals with the cops to rough up radicals, harass squatters, set suspicious fires, kidnap movement leaders, threaten punks at art-noise shows in Vrieshuis Amerika in exchange for dropped charges and sometimes looking the other way. Cops are failed criminals – dat is duidelijk! – and criminal bikers are failed cops. They are in a complicated love-hate relation – they drool over each other’s weapons and uniforms.”
“I get it papa. Genoeg!”
“Sorry schat!” One day they have enough of toying met you and they just lay into you until you are butcher gehakt meat and de flik, the politie don’t hear your cries for help. The bikers take pictures, lick the blood off each other’s arms and foreheads. I am just saying …”
“I don’t want to go back – ever.”
“I read in a psychologie magazine once about how psychiaters interviewing career criminals: when they were kids, they dreamed of becoming cops. Attracted by the uniform-badge-gun-cop-car thing – the power trip. The article said some criminals are attracted to ‘high voltage’ occupations and that’s bikers for you. … We moeten gaan.”
“Papa, will we know where we’re supposed to be when we get there? Do bikers communicate internationally? Can they find us?”
“Don’t know. We just won’t take any rides from bikers. HA!”
Or had papa, as Eddie DuBois once insinuated, exposed a horrible Amsterdam slumlord, this American-Israeli-Dutchman named Jerzy who claimed he had once been a hitman for the Mossad and now owned property all over Amsterdam, where he ruled with impunity and without any fear of city council intervention because he “liked” them all? Did Jerzy hand out death threats like Sinterklaas candy? Du Bois says papa once told him that “every time someone close dies the news sits in your skin like a lead weight in your pants pocket.”
DuBois described the Knettergek Festival where people went wacko, danced crazy as an exercise to liberate themselves at Ruigoord [an autonomous village] called Herrie Krishna and DuBois Du Bois described how papa’s DIY mixes showed off his absurd sense of humor, anxieties, and angst – and the effects of lingering insomnia: “From time to time, the face of a dead lover or stalker with a grudge will appear in the glimmering reflections of store windows, dashing across his vision on a stolen bike or in a dark flowing coat in the background and reappear in another window reflection as he walks by and no sooner has he turned around to draw a bead on the fleeting chimera, than it has evaporated. And eventually his insomnia paints everything as mere fleeting reflections on passing windows of friends no longer with us – and foes out to settle an outstanding grudge.”
“Het is beter om spijt te hebben van iets wat je gedaan hebt dan om iets te betreuren dat je nog niet hebt gedaan.” [It’s better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven’t.]
“Something for your gravestone.”
“Goed idee!”
“I will write it down.”
“I worked on a pig farm. Had a favorite. Named her ‘Snowball.’ Pigs are smart, sensitive. Pigs are brainworkers but we are too dumb to see. In Brooklyn I have already joined the Brooklyn Bacon Corps. They mount huge speakers on a Renault minivan booming Pink Floyd: “Big man, pig man, ha ha, charade you are / You well heeled big wheel …”
“When?”
“You were at school.” Tortured piggy squeals and the abattoir-ambient Bacon Torture Sandwich by the Other White Meat on Pogus Records booming from the PA, while unemployed artists with mounted minicams trash chic pork restaurants. Pork is hipster because they use it to reinvent themselves as “real Americans,” that meat-eating virility – is what they say. But also NOT hip.
“All because you named a pig as a kid?”
“No, yes, maybe.”
There’s more: Table for Two Pigs offers “Nose to Tail with its exquisite brown sugar note with each sweet granule fusing with droplets of deep-fried lard to create a jewel-encrusted pig shank in the shape of a jewelry box.”
While others relax with Shakespeare, Annie M.G. Schmidt, Vonnegut, or Reve papa reads reviews out loud like this vintage Jeff Albertson snippet from underground mag, Public Sounz:
Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis, the second studio EP by American punk-junk band, Butthole Surfers, October 1985, Touch & Go. The Davis part refers to Sammy Davis Jr.’s left eye socket, which held a glass eye, the result of a car accident … “Movin’ to Florida” is one of the surliest, densest, heaviest, most hysterical takes on blues in the last 30 years. … crazy band that subverted significance in a significant Dadaistic way: suspicious of all tradition, tropes, genres and then playing all of them all in a blender at the same time – deliciously scurrilous lyrics, blues, noise, psychedelia, two drummers, Texas tales and a legacy of surviving drugs and dumpster-diving poverty. I had no appetite for days, lost 5 pounds on the BS diet … JA
Before we check out at 8:30 AM, he clips his wrung-out underpants to the outside of his pack. This is gross and I tell him so. Calls my reaction cute. The wan girl in mangled pigtails and blue eyeliner, barely lifting a lid, wishes us a nice day from behind the checkout counter, not even bothering to show off her rehearsed smile. Maybe we will have a nice day.
Outside we encounter two dumpster divers. Papa has assured me from day one that they’re NOT scary because they’re people like you and me, who once had regular jobs, kids, homes and refrigerator magnets, did crossword puzzles but have been downsized and are now despised because they remind us of how precarious life is and for this they must be punished.
They peer suspiciously over their shoulders at us as they scrounge for “handouts,” daily sustenance from what the fast food joints dump. They go to a grade school at 2, where a few of the lunch ladies have a soft spot for them. They had a crush on the tall one – used to be a good dancer. Would probably show us if we ask.
Papa walks up closer to the other guy wearing the I’M WITH STUPID baseball cap, Pittsburgh Pirate wristbands, a faded denim jacket with puff sleeves and scuffed running shoes. He flinches and puffs up as papa gets real close. He tells us the police beat them up, placing bets on their injuries. Was set on fire by local teens last year – sons of cops and politicians. A realtor – somebody he went to school with – pays thugs to beat him and other homeless people up for wreckstroying local property values.
“Move along till we fall off the edge of the earth. Lucky it ain’t flat no more or …” His voice trailing off. Papa was going to give him a dollar, but gave him five instead.
“Hey, thanks, man. Where you from?”
“Amsterdam.”
“Cool! You can smoke weed in McDonald’s there. Right?”
“Yep.”
“Have the best day of yer lives, guys.”
Our long walk through a no-pedestrian zone of car dealerships to the Interstate on-ramp proved treacherous: even this early in the morning people are honking. Mean-ass looks from the harried, obese mother bussing a load of rugrats to school in a minivan, yelling obscenities. A grenaded take-out coffee tossed in our direction makes an explosive SPLOOSH.
“I’m honored to be worth two dollars.” Ah, papa always looking on the bright side. Our early bird start does not get us much, since most drivers out on the road are scurrying to jobs while truckers seldom pick up hitchhikers anymore. He sings: “Rise up this mornin’ / Smiled with the risin’ sun …”
I’ve heard about this before: guys turn a certain age and they want to relive the lives they forgot to live. If they’d only done or said that then … Midlife crises usually involve convertibles, Hair Club for Men, a boat, a Harley, weird denim shirts with pearl buttons open way too far down, spray tans. For papa it means living in Kerouac’s pages or Guthrie’s songs [I can name a bunch more, but it’ll only annoy both me and you] and listening to Guy Clark, Graham Parsons, Kenny Durham, before he can be a proper American DJ.
“When we get to LA, we will go swimming everyday, meet the music legends, Hollywood Bowl, Laurel Canyon – Zappa, Turtles, Doors …”
“Papa, most of them are dead … who lives there now?”
“Sidewalk of the Stars … I wonder if we should say ‘yes’ if she invites us to stay. We will be on our best behavior. … I heard Marilyn Manson and Justin Timberlake … not together, haha.”
“Big whoop.”
“Behave.” Ineffectual finger-wagging.
“How long will we stay? What’s her name? Does she even have a name?”
“Of course. Charles Bukowski tour! Where he drank, worked in car parts factories, his favorite liquor store, the Pink Elephant.”
“Old man stuff. So what is her name?”
“Suede. I think the band Suede took its name from her.”
“Right.”
“London band, 1989, Bowie sound, Gainsbourg influence. What I heard. Lead singer Brett whatever had a thing for Suede in Paris while recording his tribute to Gainsbourg with Jane Birkin. No, really.”
“What does she see in you Papa?”
“I am afraid to even wonder. Maybe the tragic display of talent squandered. Maybe she likes how I paid attention to her.”
“I don’t mean it in a mean way.”
“My hair. Maybe the kicked dog thing. You know a dog swallows a diamond, it eventually comes out in his shit.”
“AlstuBLIEFT! PUH-leeease!”
“Schatje, there is too much more to that story. I don’t want to make it into War and Peace ...”
“Oh.”
“You do not have to worry. You are in no more danger than if you were with a father who sells insurance in the middle of this no place.”
“OK.” Traffic whirring and whistling just over his shoulder. Hair caught in the wind like a rock video.
“I will make it up to you, schat. I find out later that the bikers are old friends with the owner of a club where I DJed who paid me netjes on time but suddenly refused to pay me, doesn’t pick up his phone. So I do something stupid, I rip open garbage bags at the Venus Disco entrance in Rembrandtplein. Being who I am I forget the cameras hanging there. How stupid I am. To later find out I am even more stupid when I hear that the owner’s partner is the uncle of your mother, Mads Junker, yes, her uncle had investment in shady Dutch discos. They don’t call it mafia but it’s not so much different.”
“I am supposed to believe that?”
“It’s OK if it takes a while. It took me time too. Your mom has no ties to this; wanted nothing to do with any of it. But she got me gigs. And that’s love too.”
“This is too-big for this early.”
“I have my disguises and that worked but her family did not like me because even though me and your mama were broken apart they did not like me having new girl friends. One day I got cut off on my bike by a car. Right up into the bike path. Knocked me off. Bike goodbye into the Stadhouderskade and me too. Yes, DJing is a glamorous life.”
“What happened after?”
“Strange, nothing. I dragged my bike out, rode home all wet. But you know how there’s the quiet before the storm and the longer nothing happens the more stress you get? But then nothing ever happened after that. Never.”
“Maybe mama said something. She does still love you – in her own way.”
I had meanwhile thumbed down a silver car under a threat of rain. He stops so far up ahead that we are unsure he’s offering a ride until he gets out of the car and waves us down and we come running, the damp underpants flapping on his backpack. A great workout? Sprint 200 meters to catch a ride with 20 kilos on your back. Papa singing: “Sweet Hitch a Hiker – YooHoo / Won’t you ride in my fast machine? – YooHoo!”
As we can climb in the back, papa out of breath chanting his chain of interlocked “THANKYOU-THANKYOU-THANKYOU!” in a way that may remind you of a Buddhist Namaste incantation. …
Fast forward: we’re sitting in the Wafflehouse, somewhere in a tangle of roads – 75, 90, 475, 23 280. We’re chewing tap water ice cubes, feeling like aliens who go to the other side of existence, are touched by near death to the point where we gain a glow of vision. Waiting for the waitress, we’re speechless, bland-faced, eating our eyeballs out of a sugar bowl. Papa rips open a sugar packet, tips his head back & empties the sugar down his gullet. A newspaper left behind carries a story about the “dramatic rise” in heroin-related deaths; CDC “use of the drug is increasing rapidly across all demographics. Ohio is one of the hardest-hit states – 23 people overdose every week.”
In the local Free Shopper an Ohio music column: “… Ohio Rock n Roll Epicenter, where rock n roll got its name … home to Ohioans like Chrissie Hynde, Dead Boys, Devo, the O’Jays, James Gang, Isley Brothers and rock’s holy destination, the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame … When the Cuyahoga River, polluted by industrial waste, caught fire in Cleveland in 1969, it ironically inspired a grungy counter-culture garage rock uproar of bands like the Godz and Luft Waffle … Chrissie Hynde, the Dead Boys, Devo, O’Jays, James Gang, Isley Brothers are all from Ohio …”
“The world just plain sucks; Pere Ubu is not even in the Hall of Fame – in Cleveland! – where Pere Ubu is from! David Thomas claimed their avant garage sound is coming from their drinking Cuyahoga River water as children – ‘Life stinks, I said / I can’t blink /cause I need a drink / I said, life stinks …’ Ja ja.”
bart illo bart plantenga is a regular contributor to The International Times & the author of novels, Radio Activity Kills, Ocean GroOve, The Drag Queen & The Flood, 2 short story collections, a novella & 2 memoirs. He’s a founding member of NYC writer group, The Unbearables & his books YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World & Yodel in HiFi & CD Rough Guide to Yodel have created a misunderstanding that he’s the world’s foremost yodel expert. He also produces the podcast iMMERSE! & as a DJ has produced Wreck This Mess in NYC, Paris, Rotterdam & Amsterdam since forever. His novel BEER MYSTIC will be published by Autonomedia in late 2026.
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