Verwandte Artikel zu Haarlem: A Novel

Haarlem: A Novel - Softcover

Neff, Heather

 
9780767917506: Haarlem: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0767917502 ISBN 13: 9780767917506
Verlag: Crown, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

“The only thing that’ll last forever is my Thirst . . . .”

So says Abel Crofton as he explores the streets and canals of Amsterdam. A New York tunnel worker who’s struggling to stay sober after years of alcoholism, Abel is searching for the mother he’s never known. Despite having few clues as to her whereabouts, he soon finds a bureaucratic trail that takes him to Haarlem, the Dutch town from which the famed African-American neighborhood takes its name.

As Abel ventures into more new territory, he also takes on his identity as a Black man, his rough childhood in Harlem, New York, his relationship to his bitter father, and his battle with addiction. The questions around his life only get more complicated after he meets a coldly direct waitress and a ragged jazz musician, both also bearing major scars from their pasts. The road leads to Haarlem for them as well.

Welcome to Abel’s search for salvation in another tight page turner from Heather Neff.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Heather Neff is the award-winning author of novels and poetry reflecting her years as a resident of Paris, Switzerland, the Caribbean, and the U.S.  Described as an author whose “voice is blessed with a sustained and beautiful . . . truth,” Neff dives deep into struggles for identity, the recovery of lost heritage, and the triumph of love over addiction, intimate partner violence, and the challenges of time.

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""The only thing that'll last forever is my Thirst . . . ."
So says Abel Crofton as he explores the streets and canals of Amsterdam. A New York tunnel worker who's struggling to stay sober after years of alcoholism, Abel is searching for the mother he's never known. Despite having few clues as to her whereabouts, he soon finds a bureaucratic trail that takes him to Haarlem, the Dutch town from which the famed African-American neighborhood takes its name.
As Abel ventures into more new territory, he also takes on his identity as a Black man, his rough childhood in Harlem, New York, his relationship to his bitter father, and his battle with addiction. The questions around his life only get more complicated after he meets a coldly direct waitress and a ragged jazz musician, both also bearing major scars from their pasts. The road leads to Haarlem for them as well.
Welcome to Abel's search for salvation in another tight page turner from Heather Neff.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

CRASH LANDING

If she'd loved me, she wouldn't have named me Abel."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that nobody in their right mind needs to be named after a sheep boy."

"I kinda like it. Reminds me of Honest Abe."

"Naw, man. That comes from Abraham. Abel is that nobody with nothing to think about except cutting up dumb animals to please that invisible white man in the sky. 'Please, Mister Lord--please accept my humble offering.' Then crack! He gets beat down by his own brother. Jeesus. I might as well be named Clark Kent. Or Moby-Dick. Or Pinocchio."

"No way, buddy. Abel is a guy who gets things done. Like, he's cap-able. He's got abil-ity. He's able-minded."

"Or maybe he's just disabled!"

"Look, man, you need to cut yourself a little slack."

"Why is that, Serge? Nobody else ever did--"

Sweet Jesus! I hate planes. Can't smoke. Can't stand the food. Can't sleep. So there's nothing to do but think. Think about conversations that lead to nothing, to questions that'll never be answered. Or about things that need to be buried deep down beneath the earth.

Buried with my not-soon-enough forgotten past.

Buried with my loving father.

And with my Thirst.

My seat above the wing was too damn noisy to let me get any shut-eye. Every time I tried to let myself go, a crash from the galley or a lurch of turbulence would slap me back to reality. Who knew what was going on back there? Could be some asshole with a box cutter or a bomb in his shoe.

Stomach turning over, I stared up the aisle at the passengers' drooping heads until my eyes fastened on the flight attendant's ass, appearing and disappearing behind the first-class curtain. Well, at least that was a nice little show.

I was aching for one of those palm-sized gin bottles and a Newport.

"No shit," I thought, continuing my imaginary conversation with Serge. "If she hadn't given me this stupid name I wouldn't even be on this goddamn plane. Wouldn't have spent that couple of bricks left over from the funeral to buy a ticket to a place where I know I don't need to go. Wouldn't be using up my hard-earned vacation looking for a woman who doesn't even care if I'm alive."

"You got something better to do?"

"You damn straight! I should be in Vegas this very minute sitting by a roulette wheel."

"Come on, Abe. You don't know a goddamn thing about gambling!"

"I might have a hidden talent. Might turn out to be a crack at the tables."

"A crackhead, more likely."

"Might even strike it rich!"

"And then what?"

"No more stinking tunnels, man. No more busted cables at four a.m. No--I'd just take my ass to a bamboo hut in the Bahamas and never be seen again."

"The Bahamas? Oh, please! You hate fishing, you can't swim and you sure as hell don't need a tan."

"So I'd write my book, Serge. Write from sunrise to sunset, live off mangoes and papayas and let the paper make some sense out of my goddamn life."

"That's crazy, Abe. How're you gonna live without your daily dose of Miles?"

"I'd just get me some steel drums and teach the natives how to play them Harlem-style."

I tried to imagine myself, naked and dreadlocked, surrounded by West Indian beauties in my thatched hut by the sea, but the plane's engines forced me back to my New York reality: night after night of dragging cables through the tunnels beneath the city, my bones aching from the constant grind of the generators. The only difference between my shifts in the tunnels and this long damn flight was that now I was strapped into a plane seat, so I couldn't get up and piss a hot stream into a dark alley. No, on a plane you were trapped in a space even smaller than a coffin.

Smaller than my own father's coffin.

"Planes is cool, boy," he used to say every time he spotted a silver bird rising into the sky from La Guardia. "Planes take you away to some other life. Get you out of the ghetto. Take you somewhere where it don't matter if you Black. Ain't no Jim Crow on a plane. Seats all the same size. Tinfoil food same for every damn body. Liquor, too."

Liquor. My hands began to tremble at the thought of a whisky sour at thirty-three thousand feet. Lick. Er. Sweat slicked my forehead and my finger inched toward the little orange silhouette of a woman on the armrest. All I'd have to do was press the button. Press the button. A lovely, melodic blink would sound and that blonde with the nice ass would pad over to my seat. She'd bend over, her breasts near my cheek, and smile.

"Can I get you something, sir?"

I would look up into her eyes and ask for just one teeny-tiny little something to hold me over the Atlantic.

"Chivas? Tanqueray? Or Beefeater, sir?"

"Make it a Chivas."

Yessir. She'd nod and vanish up the aisle, then reappear with a small white tray and a plastic tumbler filled with rock-hard ice and a blue cocktail napkin. I'd thank her and lean back, gently twisting the cap off the little palm-size bottle. Smiling secretly, I'd play a little roulette with my choice of poison, pouring a perfect arc of golden liquid into that plastic glass. Then I'd take a sip, feeling my tongue go numb under the smooth assault of the scotch. With stunning slowness I would drink my medicine, letting the icy lava roll down like a slow-motion orgasm from my scalp to my toes. Might even put me to sleep like the businessman on my left, who began to snore, his breath smelling like booze, even before the vulture took off.

"Easy does it, man," I heard Serge's warning voice: "You got to fight to control it. When it tickles your balls, ignore it. When it aches in your heart, speak to it. But when it starts screaming in your brain, that's when you got to call on your Higher Power--"

"I don't need a Higher Power!"

"Come on, Abe. You been dealing with this long enough to know you can't do it alone."

"But I am alone. And I got to deal with it alone."

"Look: Your sobriety is too damned important to get fucked up by your pride."

"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"

"Just because you hate your father doesn't mean you have to hate God. . . ."

"Sheeit," I muttered, stroking the tiny orange button, but not hard enough to illuminate it. Once again I caught a glimpse of the flight attendant's blue uniform, and my thoughts leapt to another uniformed woman--the nurse in the intensive care unit, called by the blinking buttons on my father's life-support system.

Green, blue, yellow flashing buttons. How could anyone stand the thought that one touch on the wrong button might literally end somebody's life? I thought about that Black woman's vibe. She looked mighty comfortable as she checked monitors and adjusted gauges.

"Does he feel anything?" I asked her, trying to replace the low moan of those machines with a human voice. The nurse glanced over at me, shook her head without speaking, and left the room.

I only realized when the door swished shut behind her that my father, Louis Franklin Crofton--one of the biggest motherfuckers of all time--was finally going to die.

They'd wanted to put him into hospice, but his condition went down so fast that they'd ended up just letting him fade out in the same three-by-six space...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2005
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767917502
ISBN 13 
9780767917506
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Europaallee 1
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