An Old Story: Written in France in 2005

Van der Meyde’s Inspiring Business Narrative

By

Maximilian Maier

My story is not pretty, but it is so freaking American that you won’t know what hit you. For forty-four years of life, I was the bitch of circumstance, the victim of the New World Order. And now I have the upper hand. Circumstance has presented itself to me in an awfully sexy dress, and the New World Order seems to have brought order to my life.

Here I am, Emperor of a conquered land, feet bare and crusty and shaking on my table, exotic music on the radio, a view of the obedient masses below consuming the goods that God and I brought them from faraway lands. And yet I, myself in a faraway land, here in this distant desert, still pine away at times for the rich green of the homeland.

Like a former President, adored by some across the seas, loathed by many here at home, I hail from Arkansas. More exactly, I come from Wallop, the poorest county in one of the poorest areas north of the Mexican border, a muddy and squalid little settlement of trailers and tents hidden deep in pines of the Ozark mountains. Well, to tell you the honest to God truth, I have never set foot in slick Willie Clinton’s hometown of Hope, but I can assure you that Wallop inspires no such sanguinity. The town is constructed largely of indigenous red clay, spare automotive parts, large homemade signs advertising lemonade and morally acceptable blow jobs, blood and mud. The town hall, the phallic tower of civic pride that every town needs to fuse its energy into, is in my town nothing more than an abandoned motel. The place is so pitiful that the Indians that the settlers ran out of here a hundred and fifty years back would not live here today if you gave it to them as a reservation and urged them to gamble there. But in a nation blessed a thousand times over by the Almighty, America, even sad old places like Wallop can generate wealth, wads of cash in polyester pockets and moustache-arching, family-friendly smiles. My Dad, Nero Van der Meyde, understood this point religiously.

Papa was the scion of crafty Dutch cheesemongers from Gouda that had ventured across the Atlantic and then the Mississippi and protected their cheese and children in the process. We don’t know why my grandfather named him after a Roman emperor, but it sure did something to his unconscious mind. You see, Papa became the most venerable businessman in Arkansas, a state that always had to look wistfully over at the Cadillac-loving Texan fat cats getting rich on their hard labor. He was for Arkansas business what Clinton would later become for politics. One night, sitting at a flimsy old card table, drinking whisky and scratching his oily scalp, bathed in the vulgar yellow of a naked light-bulb dangling ominously from the ceiling, Papa slapped his hand on the table and said “Holy Sheepshit!” and that light bulb came tumbling right down on his head. But that light-bulb was metaphorical, stupid, and you see, that night my Dad came up with the idea to found the world’s first mega store.

Papa beat the Walton clan by a good decade and conquered Wallop’s market with a barbaric yawp of business braggadocio. The thought alone makes me shiver. He was king of the hill, un hombre muy poderoso, capitalism’s favorite son. He smashmouthed the competition, drove them into the ground with all the fury of a maniacal animal torturer, called them dirty names and laughed at them in his sleep. And they feared him prodigiously. That I can assure you. Not even the bravest of their bunch dared set foot in Wallop. Sam Walton himself had nightmares about my Dad. Dad had an aura. They called him the Titan of Arkansas business. The store that he founded bore the name of Titania, and it paid tribute to the Roman gods or something Pops used to say. When it came time to draw up the designs for this superstructure, Papa even ventured across the seas to Rome to let the classical architecture bristle the hairs on the back of his neck. The women were reputedly overwhelming. Papa even designed the store, originally conceived by dull-witted architects according to the standard Arkansas business code as a metallic, barn-like structure, as a modern version of Trajan’s market in Rome. The building was fucking aesthetic. It was bold, man, had all the turtlenecked assholes from France and Germany staring desperately into their frothy beverages and asking themselves why they couldn’t build as brilliantly. And the construction was durable, classical, powerful. . Built to last a thousand years, just like Hitler’s monuments, but not nearly as insidious in its purpose, natürlich.

The store was one of a kind. And when I say one of a kind, I am not bastardizing the expression. Sure, Papa could have set up Titanias all over the Fifty States. He could have established an Empire, initiating the reign of Nero over global retail, becoming hegemon over the Walton clan and sending them and all their pudding-faced, freckled kids to live in government shacks with the blacks. But Papa was obsessed with the idea of singularity. He had one child to inculcate and discipline, one car to caress and whisper love poems to, one gun to lubricate and fire at neighbors, competitors, invading Chinese, one dog to yell at, shoot at, beat to a pulp for shitting on the floorboard of his car, one wife to mount in sweat and fury and frustration, and one God to worship (excepting the occasional sacrifice to Roman deities). The idea of keeping just one store was therefore a logical necessity, stupid.

Architectural awesomeness aside, what made Titania so freaking unique was the aura. I don’t know if it was the sheer size of the place. The massive Corinthian columns at the entrance, the frieze depicting Patton smiting the Teutons, lightning bolts coming out of his tank, Valkyrie flying away shit-scared. I don’t know if the people came just to walk up the one hundred and forty-four marble steps of this temple of Capitalism. But they came, and in heavy, loud, shoe-clapping droves at that. Titania was a magnet for families, station wagons, obedient dogs that took craps on the black hot asphalt lots instead of on the glorious marble floors of Lady Titania (A few obstreperous poodles, perhaps communist spies, were electrocuted for this brand of malfeasance). Wallop, once scoffed at as a dump even by fellow Arkansanians and mud-bunker denizens, soon became an island of consumer ecstasy in an economic wasteland. And Arkansas, once ridiculed by its neighbors as the black sheep in a herd of states, prosperous, God-fearing, and united, soon became the envy of its peers, the factory of presidents and legendary businessman, an awfully nice place to go shopping.

Pa was not a businessman in the modern sense of the term. He did not chew fish oil bubble gum to lower his LDL cholesterol, did not go jogging with health-conscious Vegans or Ivy League queer theorists engaged in a futile quest to bring to their nasty pale bodies something of the unsurpassed harmony of Greek sculpture. Pa found authenticity in those foods that doctors swear off these days. He ate his sausage, lard, and grease hard, loud, and with anger and haste, enjoyed watching fat and blood and canned meats tumble and spurt in Mama’s breakfast pan. When Dr. Aesculapus warned Pa about a coronary disaster, Pa just blew the smoke of his homemade grapevine cigar in the man’s face, fogged up his glasses and said “Coronary? Well go ahead and crown me, Doc!”

Did my Dad have a temper? You bet your bottom dollar. An awful nasty one at that. You can imagine that the sole owner and proprietor of America’s first and greatest mega-store might have a few boxes of merchandise, much of it complimentary samples, lying about the house. Our house was chock full of such gratis goods. Anyway, I was just a raw and unrefined youth, did not yet understand that even the free samples had value, that such kickshaws could be pawned off to the hungry and hasty masses that came sweating into the store. Anyway, perhaps listening to some socialist demon that had invaded my capitalist soul, I took some of these sexy goods, pressed the plastic wrapping to my face and inhaled the freshness and life that new things emanate. And yes, on certain occasions, the demons inside me were so unabashedly communist that I actually pilfered the inviolable property of Lady Titania to hand out to the squalid and lethargic poor of Wallop, and this made Lady Titania, or more precisely the man who gave birth to her, awfully ornery. Pa even used to bite the heads off of all my He-Man action figures just to be a dick. “Proper comeuppance” he would say in his thick accent, my eyes sadly following a rolling rubber head of a former bad mofo like Skeletor, gnawed on as by sinister vermin, glistening with spit and yet stained with tobacco. And one time, feeling hungry like boys in puberty do, I saw some pink coconut snowballs lying on the coffee table, and well, my eager hands couldn’t resist. Well, when Papa found out about this clandestine sugar raid, he just frowned and huffed and got red in his face and yelled “follow me!” And so I did, and he led me into my room. I suspected that he was about to blow up one of my favorite toys with black cats and laugh red-faced and angrily into my face, but he decided to go even further. He walked over to the cage, selected his victim with a nasty, alcoholic grin, and then he made me watch him execute my pet gerbil Lothar. He even made it ceremonial for extra traumatic effect, put on an executioner’s mask and put Wagner loud on the stereo as the sledgehammer roared down over the poor and ignorant beast.

The major turning point in Wallop’s municipal history and my personal history took place at a karate tournament. That’s right, karate is indeed practiced in my home state, and darned well at that. Papa was obsessed with the idea of a Chinese invasion of Arkansas, and he wanted me to be capable of giving those boys “a taste of their own medicine” should they come scampering like mice over our corn fields. When I told him that karate was not Chinese he spat tobacco juice in my face and told me to shut the fuck up.

My instructor was a fucking ninja, an honest to God Nippon Meister in a black hood, and I kid you not when I say that. I don’t know how the guy ended up in Wallop Arkansas, but his mastery of his trade was indubitable and his temper awfully scary at times. He never let us see his face, always skulked around with that ninja mask and hissed and threw plastic, non-lethal Chinese stars at us for fucking up the ancient and venerable maneuvers.

Anyway, the tournament was a big event in Wallop. They set up a big tent on town square and told us to spar, chop, howl out obscenities in Japanese, bleed and wail, do whatever to make the citizens forget Vietnam and associate positive things with Asia and violence. I was kicking serious butt that day, converting the cutthroat business strategy of my Pops into hardcore karate chops and kicks that burst spleens and leave Moms teary-eyed at funeral services. Well, I was in the middle of kicking the succotash out of some Texan nincompoop. I had him on his knees begging for clemency when Pop’s aorta decided not to work anymore, when all that grease and lard and bubbly fat finally repaid the man that had consumed it so copiously. Just as I was about to terminate the Texan with my scalpel of a karate chop, all of the thirteen citizens of Wallop and eight citizens of Waxahachie that had come to bear witness to my lethal mastery were surrounding my Dad, who himself was rolling on the ground, victim of an invisible karate chop to the aorta, wailing in red-faced pain and yet still yelling at me to finish what I had started and wipe out ailing Tex.

Well, I lost my Dad that day, but I made my Ninja sensei awfully proud (a smile was almost visible under his hood). And I won an awfully pretty trophy to boot. This was a significant moment in this life’s journey, one of the few sparkling moments of glory in an otherwise dreary youth. The trophy stayed shiny in my room, and I even keep it in my office today, polish it often so that Iraqi sand does not blow in and violate its proud luster. And I would not be bending the truth to confess to you that the trophy kept me alive during the dark days of adolescence. You may already have some idea of what happened after Dad’s death. A woman took over the family business, at least until my coming of age, and this wasn’t just any old woman, but my mother, the least capable of the cursed bunch. She really botched it, the bitch. I mean if you asked her today about this, she would just smile and offer you some cookie-flavored spaghetti, lovingly assembled on the fireproof kiddy stove that they furnished her with at the nursing home that only reaches temperatures high enough that if you put the palm of your hand on the electric burner for an hour or so you might begin to feel warmth and softly say “Ouch, that kinda hurts.” If you asked me, I’d say the Alzheimer’s did her saturated sponge of a brain a lot of good.

Mama was easy prey for the vultures. They swooped down dastardly and long-beaked on Pa’s store from all directions. There were hardliners from Texas, shotgun-wielding business buttheads with a real distaste for Arkansas. There were sly Japanese, false friends of the Ninja, flying into Wallop on Kawasaki helicopters and offering Mama free Beta VCRs and robots that spat sparks and greetings as a condolence for the loss of a great husband and breadwinner.

And yet Mama remained in mourning for years, even spoke to Papa in the house and made sausage breakfasts for his ghost. And yet the dumb hussy kept talking about romance and love and such shittiness, forgetting that my Pops was all about business and pelf. She had no idea of how to manage a mega-store, the poor spiritualist. She tried the friendly approach, and that was fatal. I can remember putting my hands over my eyes and saying every bad word I could think of when I saw her standing out in front of the store like some kind of Jehovah’s Witness, waving at everybody, kissing kids that weren’t interested in being kissed, winking at single men like a harlot. Anybody who knows anything about the psychology of mega-store clients understands the basic point that this kind of friendly small town behavior is exactly the opposite of what a competent store manager needs to do. Mama’s approach might have worked back in frontier America, back when settlers had to make as many friends as possible not to end up under the tomahawk of a furious Comanche warlord. But what Mama didn’t understand is that customers come to mega-stores precisely to remain anonymous. They come to be alone with the aisles, to have their way with the goods without being subjected to the oppressive eyes of “helpful” staff with headphones and roller skates. They enjoy surveying the merchandise, lifting cans and looking underneath like one might do to determine the sex of a kitten neonate. Grandmothers enjoy polishing fruit in peace with their snot rags, grandfathers the sweet and secret pleasure of a moment alone with an oily yet glossy issue of Lowriderbitchslut Illustrated.

Adolescence is never a piece of cake, and if mine had to be compared to one, I wouldn’t advise you to eat it. Sitting back now in my cowboy hat, cigar puffing palls of carcinogens out of my smiling mouth, cowboy boots tapping the surface of my mahogany desk, I still feel tingles of teenage trauma. The dynamic that developed between Mama and me was like matter and antimatter, thesis and antithesis. Every stunt that she pulled made me turn my back in disgust and do something just as nasty in the other direction. Every baby she tried to bend down and kiss that came into Lady Titania’s womb I spat on. Every old lady that she helped up the marble steps to the Temple I tackled somewhere in the dark depths of the lingerie section. I didn’t care about anything. I was an angry young man, deprived of a great father, cursed with a decadent mother.

And how did my Mama respond to this rambunctious behavior? Well, she never had a clue, luckily for me I suppose but unluckily for her. Perhaps Alzheimer’s began to sink its teeth into her mind at an awfully early age. Perhaps she was still caught in the trauma of the loss of a husband. I just don’t know. But whatever the reason, Mama soon turned to the Dark side. She said Adios to Dios, Adieu to Dieu, and submerged herself in the murky miasma of polytheism, and I am not talking here about respectable Hinduism or Arkansas animism, but good-for-nothing New Age polytheism, insidious and tacky, with all of the crazy-haired blonde swamis and the tacky muzak that they play on their glowing neon sitars. It was simply revolting.

You can only imagine the effect that this polytheism bullshit had on Papa’s one and only divine temple of consumption. Lady Titania hit a spiritual iceberg. The great steamship of unabashed Arkansas Capitalism took a nosedive into icy blue nothingness. And I sat there watching and crying as Mama turned an American landmark into a second-rate Soviet-style second hand store. Fuck you, Mama. The starry-eyed lady let some smooth-talking squirrel chark at her and convince her that all things, animate and inanimate, had a soul, and that it was immoral to sell goods. For Mama, selling a box of devil horned condoms or a buzz-saw or cartridges for a semi-automatic weapon at the mega-store was tantamount to slavery, as it involved hawking off souls to eager masters. Damn that shit pissed me off.

I tried to forget this woe, this cataclysmic drain of a family’s net worth and hence a state’s, no doubt the result of some insidious Texan or Communist conspiracy. While Mama’s mind disintegrated into a cesspool of a thousand lost deities, all of my spiritual energy became focused on one all-powerful and omni-malevolent entity--Señor Diablo. That’s right, the eighties and all the nefarious music hit me hard too. I denounced good President Reagan’s loving smiles and pleasant admonitions and sank into a world of glue-sniffing and Heavy Metal head bashing and yes, I dare say it, anti-materialism. I sought consolation from my earthly woes in the idea of hellfire, the more radioactive the better, consuming everything. I dabbled in Nordic spells and incantations, cursed my mother in a thousand ways, even adopted the sixties kitsch style to paint a wall-sized fresco of the Ragnarok that I eagerly sought to descend upon America nuclearly (this was the only hope that I saw in Reagan). Many the lonely Friday night, candles lit to appease my evil Lord, wolves howling out from the Ozarks, scarcely to be heard though when Judas Priest was rocking hard on the record player, I assembled paper models of Soviet ICBMs, and, head banging hard and lips pooping out nasty lyrics and curses of things wholesome and New Age alike, I crashed those homemade Soviet missiles into imaginary Arkansas mud huts, and when the devil’s voice was real loud inside my head, I even brought nuclear wrath into the breast of proud Lady Titania. I had visions, awfully ugly ones but in my mind prophetic, of infants wailing and kicking in their mothers radioactively rancid wombs, Satan and Stalin laughing their asses off through it all.

Then came the major turning point. One night, staring at the ceiling and sulking at all the poverty and incense in my midst, the sound of a homosexual acoustic guitar strumming away in the living room, Christianity and capitalism mounted a joint Blitzkrieg, and young Hadrian van der Meyde, a.k.a moi, was conquered by love and goodness and the things that make business go round. This Blitzkrieg was mounted not in the empirical realm but in the oneiric, in a fucking dream, and the major players in that dream were named Nero and Jesus, one the father of a lost son, the other the Son of an omnipotent Man. Nero, his right arm crooked and at rest on Jesus’ shoulder, a cigar emitting non-carcinogenic white smoke extending from the right corner of his mouth to heaven, told me in no subtle terms “to pull my fucking act together”, and Jesus, smiling at my Papa’s candor, nodded his head and, speaking in a quiet and soothing Arkansas accent, said that Satan was a “shit for brains that had no place in my life.” I opened my eyes and turned eighteen on that night.

Just as the government was beginning to foreclose on Lady Titania from all directions, I, now a full-fledged adult, stormed into the picture and told them, with all the authority of my Papa, to back the fuck up. And they almost listened. In the weeks ensuing my awakening, I argued long and hard in favor of justice and family domination of a state’s economy, standing sweaty and bothered before committees assembled of bureaucratic dinosaurs sitting there lethargically and indifferently, cigarettes burning in ashtrays before them, next to their doodles of naked ladies (pronounced “neked”), their faces tired, obese, and aging, the bags under their eyes puffy and purple after half a century of dogged smoke inhalation, stress, and paperwork. As I argued, dropping every rhetorical bomb in my arsenal, my metaphors reached farther and farther. My hand gestures and facial expressions attained new levels of desperation. My voice grew hoarser and hoarser, the committees more disgustingly indifferent to my cause, and soon, with Jesus and Nero putting their hands over their faces in some ethereal realm, the assholes down on earth closed the book on Titania. Arkansas got real, real poor after that, and frankly, that bitch deserved it.

Speaking of bitches, a big one was no longer in the picture. While I was struggling to save a local landmark and an international tourist magnet, my mother was organizing sit-ins and peace-pipe smoking contests, trying to find a way to donate Lady Titania to some New Age church to use as their spiritual center, well, I used Papa’s hidden slush fund to hire the slickest Arkansas attorneys, alas not Willie himself, to have her declared incompetent and in dire need of shock therapy, or even better, a firing squad. Law enforcement, to the vehement protests of a handful of falsely cocksure New Age thugs that hung out and dunged out our living room smoking blue things on water pipes and mumbling out praise of false gods and my Mama’s pair of New Age titties, raided Mama’s private collection, seizing water pipes, incense candles, lava lamps, Fleetwood Mac posters, and most importantly her evil, the idols I mean, eighty-seven statues of dishonesty, paganism, and cowardice, ranging from obese and jocular Buddhas to spastic dancing Shivas to truly repugnant modern representations of New Age cult figures. My Mama had managed to assemble the most complete collection of New Age paraphernalia in North America, and what made this so revolting was the fact that she wasn’t even using these idols to make any money. She never charged the assholes to come over to our house and smoke fruit even a pittance to pray to these figures. They exploited the fucking holiness of our domicile, drawing upon its energies, dropping plenty of purple shits in our toilet but no large bills anywhere. So you can imagine that when I saw my mother with arms bound, by handcuffs, alas, and not by a strait jacket (not yet at least), I made haste to shout jeers into her face and to spit nastily into those foggy eyes of hers. This brought her to tears and to her knees but I did not listen to any pleas. I had money on my mind.

And that thought did not abandon me for the next twenty years.

Why did I prefer a foreign land, and an Islamic one at that, to my native Arkansas? Well, as Bill Clinton once said with that smirk of his, “It’s the economy, stupid.” You see, those dark years in which my mother steered proud Titania into that New Age iceberg saw the rise of the Walton clan. Even if the government had not seized the building, I would scarcely have been able to compete with the imperial fleet of Wal-Marts that dominated the business waters of my home state, and you bet that made me homicidal. I considered on more than one occasion exploding one or more of those cheap imitations of Lady Titania strewn about my home state’s good green earth like dandelion seeds on the endless Mongolian plains. I imagined walking in, waving brightly to whatever moon-faced employee they paid minimum wage to stand and say “Welcome to Wal-Mart, sir,” heading straight for the guns and explosive section of the store, packing down the stuff, packing it around, and, perched on my Doo-doo brown ’76 Chevy Nova innocently parked at the farthest fringe of the parking lot, watch that sucker go up in a mushroom cloud, alas not nuclear. But then I realized just how many of those Wal-Marts the Walton clan had planted into Arkansas soil, and the word “futility” stamped itself in nasty, imaginary bureaucratic red ink over my plans for destruction.

America belonged to the Waltons, and Arkansas fell with it, but there was still hope overseas, praise be to Allah. It was therefore time to sail the high seas in search of poon and pelf, and the Persian Gulf, given a sizable American military presence there and the benevolent hand of Christ presiding over business, seemed awfully darned pretty. So I said “Ahoy, Ahoy”, packed up my belongings, the karate trophy, black and white pictures of my Dad posing with a slain boar in front of Lady Titania, awestruck clientele assembled in a semi-circle behind him, even a few old heavy metal records, nefarious and Satanic to be sure, but necessary perhaps to maintain the Van der Meyde killer instinct.

I just had to do what Uncle Sam and Christ wanted me. Back when Saddam was getting ugly and ornery out in the desert (the first time), I volunteered for the special forces, not for the good of the country so much as the opportunity to get over there, get some Kuwaiti pussy and perhaps a few abandoned oil fields, and maybe sell cigarettes on the black market to make money that Arkansas did not want to give me in those hard, recessional times. I loved that fucking place, Kuwait, would have stayed even if Saddam’s ass had not been kicked explosively out of it. I loved the honesty of its flat landscape, the sand swirling up vigorously in the undulating heat. I longed for the day when those endless plains of sand would be blanketed in benevolent, customer-friendly asphalt, when the sun would beat down like a smart bomb on that asphalt and foster many the water mirage on the horizon.

Dreams come true, and this story is case in point that this particular cliché is not just material for cheesy kids’ commercials with comets or shooting stars or astrological balderdash, but that it has some fucking veracity to it. If you don’t believe in dreams coming true, then get your ass to Baghdad. This place is indubitably inspiring, not just militarily or explosively, but capitalistically. There are beautiful businesses arising like miraculous wildflowers out of the infertile and oil-stained sand. There are kind-hearted folks dressed up as Ronald McDonald, dodging bullets and dancing to Little Richard, patting kids on the head and reminding them that Allah and President Bush are old friends, and that buying hamburgers makes them real, real cool and can reduce the risk of terrorism by twenty-five percent.

Speaking of terrorism, in case you have been hiding in some Arkansas mud bunker, fearing thermonuclear Armageddon or Wal-Mart domination, we got the bad guy over here. And for those of you that did hear, those lucky few of you who were lucky and beaming when that Eastern man in glasses rose confidently before the tight-faced journalists and proclaimed, with all the optimism of America in his voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”, then I profess modestly that that “we” was I. That’s right, I was the special forces agent that seized that mofo in his foxhole. It was I that tore the porno low-rider magazine from his greasy fingers. It was I who called him a ‘buttsnuggler” and jerked and snatched him around like an Arkansas sweathog in heat, shoving that ole’ boy against the cheap sheet rock of his room, against the kitschy image of a Hawaiian sunset that adorned it, and told him, in clear Arabic, that he was fucked. And yes, there was resistance, pockets of it you might say, but I used all of the karate maneuvers that my ninja sensei had taught me as a boy in Arkansas to quash that shit.

And that was God’s way of paying me back for all the suffering with my Mama, all of the trauma of a childhood that saw me lose family honor and fortune, indeed that saw me uprooted from my native Arkansas. God gave me Saddam, I gave Saddam back to Him and to my government, and God and the United States, close friends that they are, gave me one of Saddam’s old pleasure palaces on the Euphrates as a reward for that capture. And the twenty-five million dollar reward provided me with enough capital to launch this superpower of a business.

And if you, cynical punk of a reader that I fear you may be, doubt the veracity of this asseveration, then I advise you to go shopping. That’s right, I want you to shop, and not just anywhere, but in my Xanadu of consumption, the most gorgeous business in the Near East and I dare say the West or the South or wherever, a mega-store that magnets the masses, be they baseball cap-wearing or headscarfed, be they upstart Iraqi Gangsta boys with bright smiles and American semi-automatic weapons or stern Sunnis with money to spend and a desire to see how good ‘ole Saddam once lived and buy some real good stuff at the same time. Head to Baghdad and find out what you have been missing in your generic American Wal-Marts. Come on down, buy wisely and marvel at the splendor. And after your positive consumer experience, slap your friends back in Arkansas or Ohio, in Scotland or Queensland, on the shoulder and tell them that you know Hadrian Van der Meyde, or at least his story, and that this man is inspiring.