Good Times In Dystopia
It had all gone fucking wrong when I woke up. The little shantytown cupboard in the kraak stank of piss and Edam cheese. Half my face felt like it had been sandpapered.
Emerging from the room, the tawny punk girls give me curious side-eyed glances of concern, chestnut eyes flashing like skittish rats. I remember little. Looking in the mirror, I see a perfect half-moon of scab waxing around my right eye, framing the green in a lacerated scarlet crescent. My glasses are held together with tape and look like they had been sat on. It'll take me a few days to realise the lens had been put back in the wrong way round.
Bea looks at me incredulously.
‘You don’t remember what happened? You were really drunk.’
I try to piece it together. I had arrived, late, after missing one megabus and having to take the overnight, and made my way to Vijzlstraat in Oost Amsterdam to find de Strijd Sociaal Centrum. I’d been greeted as the ‘radical punk poet’ and shown to a room where I had immediately passed out.
Waking that evening, I remembered hanging out in the little kitchen-cum-lounger, drinking one Euro beers and flirting idly with the outrageously beautiful Catalan anarcha-feminists. I'd perused the walls, daubed with anti-police graffiti, fliers from soli-concerts and stickers from self-organised cells over the world, the brazen colours of an international anarchist hub painted into the very fabric of the building. Later, in the sunshine outside, two Balkan bands had arrived and improvised beautiful, interwoven gypsy-punk with searing violin, squealing clarinet, spangling acoustic guitars and jangling accordian until the politie arrived to disperse them.
Nervous and a little drunk, I’d then grabbed the microphone and a little speaker and on the street performed babbling diazepam-drowned poetry. They were good natured enough to cheer and ask for more. So far, so good.
Like a stranger arriving out of the fog, the memory emerged through my confusion. At some point, the alcohol and a week of abusing downers to cope with a shattered heart had lead to a sudden moment of clumsiness. As I had placed a foot on a table, ostensibly to leap gazelle-like over it, the whole thing had tipped under my weight and I’d faceplanted into a tray of glasses, narrowly missing losing an eye. I had a vicious image of it plopping into a bierglas like an olive into a martini.
I remember nothing of what happened afterwards. As I wander blearily around the kraak, people tell me I had been staggering around covered in blood, spectacles in pieces, babbling incoherently and insisting on partying.
“You were even singing karaoke.”
“No shit.”
It mattered not. I was plastered up, felt pretty good, and then I discover someone is selling base in the squat for five euros a gram.
Emerging from the room, the tawny punk girls give me curious side-eyed glances of concern, chestnut eyes flashing like skittish rats. I remember little. Looking in the mirror, I see a perfect half-moon of scab waxing around my right eye, framing the green in a lacerated scarlet crescent. My glasses are held together with tape and look like they had been sat on. It'll take me a few days to realise the lens had been put back in the wrong way round.
Bea looks at me incredulously.
‘You don’t remember what happened? You were really drunk.’
I try to piece it together. I had arrived, late, after missing one megabus and having to take the overnight, and made my way to Vijzlstraat in Oost Amsterdam to find de Strijd Sociaal Centrum. I’d been greeted as the ‘radical punk poet’ and shown to a room where I had immediately passed out.
Waking that evening, I remembered hanging out in the little kitchen-cum-lounger, drinking one Euro beers and flirting idly with the outrageously beautiful Catalan anarcha-feminists. I'd perused the walls, daubed with anti-police graffiti, fliers from soli-concerts and stickers from self-organised cells over the world, the brazen colours of an international anarchist hub painted into the very fabric of the building. Later, in the sunshine outside, two Balkan bands had arrived and improvised beautiful, interwoven gypsy-punk with searing violin, squealing clarinet, spangling acoustic guitars and jangling accordian until the politie arrived to disperse them.
Nervous and a little drunk, I’d then grabbed the microphone and a little speaker and on the street performed babbling diazepam-drowned poetry. They were good natured enough to cheer and ask for more. So far, so good.
Like a stranger arriving out of the fog, the memory emerged through my confusion. At some point, the alcohol and a week of abusing downers to cope with a shattered heart had lead to a sudden moment of clumsiness. As I had placed a foot on a table, ostensibly to leap gazelle-like over it, the whole thing had tipped under my weight and I’d faceplanted into a tray of glasses, narrowly missing losing an eye. I had a vicious image of it plopping into a bierglas like an olive into a martini.
I remember nothing of what happened afterwards. As I wander blearily around the kraak, people tell me I had been staggering around covered in blood, spectacles in pieces, babbling incoherently and insisting on partying.
“You were even singing karaoke.”
“No shit.”
It mattered not. I was plastered up, felt pretty good, and then I discover someone is selling base in the squat for five euros a gram.