If after years and years you should happen to dig out your dusty old Woodstock album to indulge in memories of those sweet patchouli days, before you know it, good old Archie will be around to have something to say. On the spot, he'll take out a yellowed festival ticket from his wallet and proudly show it around. If you don't believe it, you can even see a younger Archie passing around a hash pipe in one scene of the famous film—complete right down to his ponytail. As far as I know, he has a sworn statement from Mick Jagger that he was present at the recording session of "Sympathy for the Devil" and uhh-uhh'ed in the uhh-uhh chorus. Primal scream therapy? Old hat for Archie. He already screamed his primal scream ages ago, discovered during a reincarnation experience that he had been Valentino's house pansy, and happened to arrive at Poona just in time to put the Bhagwan's teachings into writing, which, as everyone knows, sell millions of copies these days. Archie was one of the first organic farmers to bake his own bread, and he was also one of the first to measure his girlfriend's temperature for natural birth control. We had just found out how to spell "punk" when Archie surprised us with his new Iroquois haircut, guzzling down copious amounts of canned beer and doing his best to belch out full sentences. Did anyone say that surfing was in? No doubt Archie was already riding the waves off Malibu on a surfboard that the Beach Boys had immortalized with their signatures. From hippie life on Crete to yuppie stress in Manhattan, from coca-leaf chewing to Calvin Klein jeans, Archie had already done it and much more, except perhaps not joining the NASA boys for their moon landing, which, to be honest, does disappoint me a little.
Actually, the question is not whether Archie had ever missed out on anything in his life, but whether he even exists. Because everything that he appears to be seems to be merely appearance. You inevitably become suspicious that Archie could disappear into thin air when you turn your back on him since he obviously owes his existence to the imagination of a fashion magazine editor. In the final analysis, Archibald is empty through and through, a nonperson trying to forget the abysmal emptiness in himself through incessant trend setting. Nevertheless, he is Gustav's best friend and helps him whenever he can—and that's one thing Archie can always do.
On the fourth day after demolishing the kitchen, Gustav called up Archie and discussed the state of affairs with him. Five minutes later, Archie stood in the bomb crater that Gustav insisted on calling our home and drew up a plan of action. This time around the chameleon had transformed himself into Sonny Crocket of Miami Vice, and constantly toyed with the plastic cords of his fashionable sunglasses. As expected, he proved to be an authority not only on laying parquet floors but also on everything else that had to do with renovation. Although the danger existed that the final product would be a hodgepodge of ultramodern baubles and gewgaws, Gustav agreed to let Archie be the boss while he acted as errand boy. He had no other choice. The two of them got to work the very next day to start the actual renovation of Hotel Higgledy-Piggledy.
A dreadful, never-ending pandemonium of hammering, drilling, rattling, cracking, crashing, and clattering surrounded me from then on, which did not exactly help me get over my depression. Quite the contrary. Although Gustav had put a huge old ghetto blaster in the bedroom where I spent most of the time dozing away, and although he played my favorite music, Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony," I just couldn't escape my dismal state of mind.
I was out on the terrace just once, but that was enough to land me promptly in the middle of another hopelessly stupid situation. A heap of flesh and bones, pretty well advanced in years, strolled up and down on the garden wall and watched with sad eyes as birds he would now never be able to catch fluttered high up in the branches of a tall tree. He had gone completely gray and had that hate-filled expression on his face that nearly all of the old get when they realize that time will soon run out for them: an expression of unadulterated envy. Envy of the young, of youth, of all that he once was and could no longer be. I asked myself whether I, too, would be like that someday, a question that fit in perfectly with my mood. To smell poorly, to see poorly, to hear poorly, to have poor memories of long-past sexual adventures. Oh, how sad life was! You got born, got to visit a couple of boring cocktail parties, and then you were already gasping out your last dying breath.
But Gramps over there on the garden wall seemed to want to set me right. As soon as his aging eyes sighted my humble person, he let loose a string of murderous invectives as if someone had stamped down on his tail. His entire personality suddenly seemed to be charged with something like divine energy. He was downright electrified, charged up with even more hate and enmity than before.
"This here is my goddamn territory," began the doddering old fool. "Did you hear me, you lowlife? My territory! My territory! My territory!" and so on, as if he were a
