Adieu René Vallentgoed

René Vallentgoed died on 17 March 2018  and here I want to write him a Mouchette Obituary.
René was a real and a virtual person all in one. He played a very special role in the early Mouchette website and character.
In the website created before 1999, he played the role of Mouchette’s manager, and here is the web pages I made for him at that time.
My Manager

In the early Mouchette (http://www.xs4all.nl/~mouche) he was the manager of  Mouchette, the young poet who wrote strange digital poetry.  Mouchette, the whizz kid had made a page advertising for his professional skill, by publishing his photo and contact. The address was  real, it was a place he used as an office, but I forgot (or not) to mention that it was in Leiden. He also recorded texts for Mouchette with his beautiful rough voice. On this page you can click on the ‘listen’ button to hear the Mouchette poems in Dutch and on that page the poem “Dat broept niet”   starts on load.
Once, for the Triple X festival in 1997, there was a talk where I asked him to play this role of Mouchette’s manager in absence of the supposed whizz kid, too young to perform in public, and I wasn’t even there hiding in the public. I was giving in to my deepest fantasy of creating an event in my absence, something I did a few times, while trembling and playing and hiding at home).
He actually didn’t have to change himself at that time, because he was already playing this role all day long. He was wearing a bow tie, a shiny jacket, a thin moustache, and his black hair was combed backwards with hair grease. He thought he looked like a gypsy, and fantasized he was a public entertainer professionally.

He gave me these two photos to use for the website, something he had done once on tv and he was particularly proud of the one with the naked woman behind him.
His profession was to be a manager for poets and spoken word artists in Holland, he had worked with Jules Deelder and Joost Zwagerman and was fairly well known among poets and rock musicians, having been a part of the sex, drugs and rock and roll scene in Holland.
At that time he was trying to recover his health from drug abuse and alcoholism, and maybe also trying loose weight, although that belly suited his role quite well.

This is a photo of him I took with Apple Quick Take  (yes, I had one of those ridiculous binocular/camera with extremely small resolution) and since he didn’t want his fat belly on the photo, I took it like this.
This was in the summer 1997, he came to visit me in Ijmuiden where I was renting a beach hut. He came all the way from Leiden on his moped (a Puch).

But how did I know him?

This is a story of my own youth, which might be awkward to tell here…

On request of the family  of René I am keeping this story private.