Start with seven, wait an hour. Nothing. Ten more, man fuck it. Think about it, what shrink would leave this fuckin looney with over a hundred different pills? Gotta be placebo effect or something. There we were in Pomp’s Yellow Roxy smokin the last of the pot and I’ve just taken seventeen pills for the treatment of paranoid schizophrenia. Pomp adjusted the positions of his dolls and got up and changed the record. Want some Madonna, he asked innocently. Christ man he really didn’t give a fuck what record was on, he went all for the image. He claimed she was his girlfriend and in some weird fuckin way, she was. His dolls were his babies, which is not to mention his other five imaginary children who spoke to him in his dreams. Even the way he said imaginary children, you could see some perplexed shrink telling him to refer to them as imaginary, like the whole concept of imagination and reality was totally lost on Pomp. It was, but he made a good smoking partner for just this reason. As he sat across the room, he was dressed in a fur coat, a beret and an actual album cover of some unknown seventies band pinned with a safety pin to his jumper. His eyes shone with deranged childish elation as he droned his own version to Madonna’s wailing. It was time to go.

The next day I felt a bit groggy. I didn’t even link it with the pills, a bad hangover or something. It took in fact two days before the whole trip hit me. I was sitting with a few friends having a toke or two when I felt this sudden twinge in my facial muscles. It came and went and I put it down to some sort of stoned reaction, but it was definitely getting sorer. Then it really hit. My jaw sprang open and stayed open. Man I had no control over it my muscles had taken over. At first everyone laughed, thinking I was just really stoned but when the neck muscles started going they could see there was something seriously dodgy going on. I was like one of those zombies in Michael Jacksons Thriller. My head was to the side and my jaw was clamped shut. Christ it was fuckin painful. Then it started spreading down the rest of my body, the spine and legs and it was then I decided hospital might just be a good idea. A mate grabbed me around his shoulders and I tried my best to walk. Say nothing man if they ask if I’ve taken anything, just say nothing. The pain was excruciating and by the time I hit the emergency ward my body was in pieces. I could feel the muscles tearing themselves in my face as they clamped up and then opened. The ward was full of the usual casualties waiting in a queue, but when they saw me there was no waiting. Get him on a bed quick and give him some Valium. One shot and I was cured. The muscles slowly relaxed and I felt heavenly bliss. After about five minutes I got up grabbed my coat said thanks and tried in vain to leave. The nurse grabbed me and told me I was going nowhere. Instead she gave me another shot and man was I flying. The only thing I remember was telling some nurse how beautiful she was and well I think I’ll just leave it that. I awoke the next morning and all she said was ‘How are we this morning?’ Bitch. I was saying nothing man, I had been trained early. Deny, deny and deny. I reckon those pills were some sort of time release jobs and well all seventeen of them opening at once were not all that healthy. They kept me in for observation for three days and they gave me no reason for the attack. I was not entirely eager to find out what I already knew. A week later when I was going back for tests a nurse asked me to have a word with her. ‘So did you find out what happened to me, I asked innocently. Well, she replied, do you smoke? A strange question, I thought but went along with it anyway. Yes about ten, twenty a day, I replied. No, she said do you smoke the funny stuff. Christ, it had shown up in the blood. When I told her I dabbled with hash from time to time her only reply was, ‘any more questions’? With that I thanked her and left. Last time I’m touchin any fuckin pill before I know what it does.

Leaving home was a necessity. I had to get out of that little fuckin town and all its bullshit. I had been a prisoner for to long. Don’t get me wrong, there was some nice people there. I had a lot of good drinking buddies, a few nice ladies, good connections and all that but I needed a change. At this stage I had been barred from every pub in town for little else than a skinhead and a dodgy reputation for substance abuse. Admittedly my many drunken stories didn’t help this, but well, fuck it. I was the E generation, generation X , spawned on the idea that getting out of your head was the way. The true path of awareness. When I left school it was a fuckin joke. I was goin through a rather dodgy time on acid and well to put it mildly I wasn’t completely all there. The principal had called me in for another chat about my lack of attendance and well I decided to have a few pints to think it over. I can get a bit crazy when I’m drunk and I had been going through this sorcery trip. Great buzz on acid and probably the only reason I didn’t go completely off the wall? Every man needs a mission. Anyway I got back to the school and he asked what I was going to do about my grades, attendance, blah blah fuckin blah. Winding me up the power fuck bastard. Like hell, I thought as I turned around and stared him in the eye. I am a sorcerer. The world around me is not real. It’s a distraction, a shell. Awareness is reality and I don’t think this is a good place for me. He was a bit taken back and all he said was well do you want to stay or go? I threw a coin in my mind. Tails. I left. Crazy in some ways but that’s where my head was at. You don’t do over five hundred acid trips and expect to walk away unscarred. Still, after fourteen years in school you’d think you’d have learned a bit more than that. My life was getting dangerously close to the admissions hall in the local looney bin.

The next step was to get a job. Any fuckin job, I didn’t care. I needed money for cigarettes, beer and drugs. They were the only things that mattered. Fuck your ambitions. I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a fuckin that. I wanted nothing else than to get out of my head and fuck some nice women. I certainly didn’t want another prison sentence in college for the next four years. I was free man, I was fuckin free. I went into the local job agency to see what was on offer and they told me I’d have a better chance if I had some training in something so I went to the training center and checked to see what they had. I picked the shortest and fastest course, which happened to be electronic assembly. Fuckin great, it sounds wonderful. Christ man they even paid you while you where doing it. Eight weeks of soldering and crimping. They even gave me a cert for basically turning the computer on. Computer skills they called it. Click. Fuckin genius. The only real highlight of the trip was I met this mad wacky woman who was in her fifties. Now what the hell she was doing this course for, Christ only knew. I had been having the usual conversation with some stonehead over who could get an ounce of hash for cheapest, when this woman interrupts and asks if I would get her some. I was a bit stunned I mean this woman was old enough to be my mother and well even hash was viewed by most to be at the very least, anti-social. She went on to explain that she had never tried it and well she like to see what it felt like to be high. At first a wave of paranoia went through me. Is she drug squad, a set-up, maybe one of her kids died on something and she’s some sort of vigilante, but one look on her face told me she was genuinely interested in having a smoke. She then lit a cigarette and boldly stated that if she didn’t have any bad habits she’d burst into a pure white light and go to the heavens. Christ man this woman didn’t need drugs. I got to know her better after a while and she told me she was something of a white witch. She tried to teach me how to see auras and well as much as I tried I was not very good at it . The teacher got a bit freaked out us, cause we’d both be staring at his body intensely and she keep muttering to me, do you see it, do you see it. Poor fucker didn’t know what was goin on.

One day she took me to an astral body club were everyone sat round and talked about their astral body experiences. They were in touch with some Godhead dude who was always floating about, guiding them through the lower dimensions were demons dwell. Apart from that I suppose they were pretty well balanced. Kind of like a gardening class. Although I’ve never been to one.

Imafuckinrobotex Ltd. was a bit of a nightmare. Drill, drill, drill all day long. The job was to put little screws into vacumn cleaner housings and then stick them back on the line where another person will solder on some wires, and then the next person tested them and so on until they were nicely wrapped in their packaging. The work was just about bearable when you thought about the end of week paycheck. I could turn my head off and just drift for ages. Some of the people there did my head in. The worse to work with by far, were the women. They had been working there years and kinda planned a full time job out of it. Heard some of them say they wouldn’t want to leave even if they won the lottery. This was there second home after all, and they’d miss all their friends. Sad fucks. I for one could think of more exciting things to do with a million, and friends or no friends I’d be out of there fuckin pronto. Jesus, man, I remember one time a guy was missing from the line and I had to do the housings alone. Basically we’d all have to work a little slower, but if you thought the girls, putting the pieces on the line were going to slow down, you had another thing coming. "Slow the fuck down ", I shouted to them "I can’t keep up". "We can’t," they’d reply. " Dereck, our beloved supervisor. A fat bastard who looked like he had three cardiacs already, said we have to produce at least a hundred and fifty a day or we might lose our place. The place at which these girls sat was very important to them considering they did fuck all compared with the ‘new temps.’ They basically sat around gossiping all day, pretending to be busy if Dereck was around. Made me fuckin sick. Anyway I couldn’t cope with the amount going by so after trying to reason in at least six different ways and six different languages. I decided to return to my normal pace and just let the little bastards go by. This seemed to enrage the girls, as all the housings ended up in a big unsightly pile at the end of the belt. They shouted at me to speed up, but I just ignored them and in the end they had no option but to cut the work down to a pace I could keep up with. These sort of trips happened quite a lot and if you let them get to you, you’d get to be just as mad. I had enough problems that way already.

Time went on and if nothing, at least I had a few shillings to go out raving or drinking at the weekends, but that was becoming a bit of a problem too. It was all just getting a little boring. At this stage I had been barred from most of the bars in my yuppie little town, for fuck all save 3 a skinhead and a over rated reputation for drugs. Which admittedly I didn’t help. One place I was barred from was quite straight forward as barrings go. Smoking a spliff in the toilet, which was bad enough, except I was even given a warning that the bouncers were coming before they did. Could have put the joint out and acted innocent. But no. Feeling dangerously contrary and very pissed. I thought. Who the fuck do they think they are to spoil someone’s fun. Sitting in a cubicle, happy as fuck, listening to some sounds on the walkman. A mate pops his head over the top and tells me the bouncers are coming. I told him I didn’t give a fuck and stubbornly proceeded to roll another spliff. The next thing the bouncers kick in the door while I still have this mess of skins and tobacco all over me. Still half way through the next joint, I asked outraged, "What the fuck do you want ?", and before I knew it I was thrown out on the road with a warning never to come back again. Fair enough. The other couple of bars, however had no fuckin excuse, and their reasons or rather lack of them seriously made me contemplate blowing the fuckers up, or at least smashing their windows in. There was one pub, who must have got word from the other about the joint thing, because within a week of the first barring I was barred from this next pub. The spineless bastard manager there said I had been seen smoking a joint in his toilets and I was now barred. I am not a violent person, but shit like that really tends to wind me up. I mean if was true like the first I could take it, but this guy was just being funny. I was going to smash a pint glass over his head and at least then I’d feel he had a reason. Lucky I didn’t, as its the only bar I’m allowed in today. Strange how life goes.

I approached the door of the other ‘young’ pub and was confronted by two large bouncers. They knew my face and didn’t like it. "Make sure you stay in the bar", one of them said as if I was lucky to get in at all. My fuckin money and these cheeky cunts trying to confine me to one space, it was fuckin terrible. I mean you could boycott the bastards but in such a small town it would mean drinking outside and just getting hassle of the local cops who were twice as arrogant as any bouncer. The police got their Christmas treats and late night drinks and it didn’t take much figuring out to see whose side they were on. More and more I noticed the change in attitudes between publican and customer. If you were over thirty you were safe, but under that age you were at the door mans mercy and they made you know it. I wouldn’t mind as much if they were protecting something kinda special, but the pub, nicknamed the Pitts, was such a depraved kip, only lack of choice could make you go there. Even an ‘outsider’ who had only been in it once, described it as a meathouse. On a weekday it was tolerable, but on the weekend it was packed full of trendies. Blokes with pink shirts, casual slacks and big belt buckles, who were always full of the most brain drain bullshit one is likely to hear. The girls although sometimes cute, could on the most part, amass their entire intelligence into a pea. It was fuckin terrible, not even the old formula of getting completely pissed was enough. In fact the more I drank, the more sick I got. It was like their entire brainwaves were draining me like bleedin zombies. Pub life was out.

Luckily I met a few heads in work so it was a little more bearable toward the end. But basically it still reminded me of school. I mean we were regressing to the stage of having rubber band fights and sneaking into the toilet for a joint. The supervisor was like the teacher keeping his eye on all the little children which was a bit sad considering the age of some of them. The final insult came one day, when I was ordering some food at the canteen. I had a hole in my jeans which did not seem very important and if nothing else, the one bit of freedom I did enjoy was been able to wear what the fuck I wanted. Anyway I’m standing in this queue and this fat old cunt with a suit (there was always this difference between factory workers and suit and ties), comes up behind me and says," I’ve seen you before and I don’t like your appearance". I was not in the best of moods, so I turned around, and basically told him to shove it up his arse. It was not until I got back to the table and sat down that someone told me it was the managing director. When I got back to my work desk there were about two supervisors, who had obviously received a memo, standing there, waiting to have a little chat with me. I was warned that I would be fired if I didnt improve my image. I came in the next day wearing a loud shirt with no holes in it. It proclaimed in big writing "DON’T GIVE A FUCK". I showed it to the managing director and he ran off without comment, which was a pity. I was hoping he’d try to bar all T-shirts with slogans so we could start a bit of chaos there, but I think after that he just gave up. I did too and within a week I resigned. Holland baby, here we come.

To celebrate my departure, we all went down to the local pub and got extremely pissed. I do not use this as an excuse, but believe me it helped. A woman in her mid forties who worked with me was there. I suspected she had a crush on me as she’d always smile at me whenever we met, and well some smiles are unmistakable in their intention. She invited me back to her house for a few drinks. There was no bullshit we both knew what it was about, and within an hour back in the house, I picked her up and threw her on the bed. The bed broke but it didn’t matter and soon we were shagging the night away. I kinda sobered up after a while and during the middle of intercourse I asked her to take me home. She slapped me in the face and told me it was the most disrespectful thing a man could do. I was starting to learn lessons about the opposite sex and they didn’t always involve honesty. Anyway what I do remember quite clearly, was waking up the next morning with blood streaked all over my body and all over the sheets. The woman had been having her period and I was kind of sensitive that way. Here I was lying on stained sheets with a woman who had a kid my age, and whose face in the morning, as the song goes, really showed her age. It wasn’t her fault, but waking up like that, believe me is a well sobering experience, so the first thing I did was grab a bottle of beer and tried to get at least drunk enough to tone it all down a little. She dropped me off at a pub near where I lived and the five or more pints I had, never tasted so good. Fuckin hell, what was I like. A smile appeared from nowhere.

Finally saved the money to leave the damned country. It had taken quite a while as saving was not one of my talents. The first home was a little campsite in the north of Holland and my job was in a steelworks in a town not too far away. The campsite was pretty cool as most of the people there came for the same reasons. To get as wasted as possible while at the same time try to make as much money as possible to move on. Most of them planned on a trip to India as it had the best of drugs and you could live there for practically nothing. It also had the sun, and a lot of the heads were into the spiritual mystical aura of the place. Some of them had been there about ten times and would come back for work when their money ran out. India was not really the place to make money but Holland on the other hand was. You got payed twice as much as in Britain or Ireland, you only had to work a couple of months and the old bill wasn’t down your back all the time for smoking a few spliffs. What more could any decent self respecting stonehead want? The campsite was international and you could hear about five different languages and about twenty English dialects floating about which meant you didn’t have to travel far to see what was happening around the world. The Drug Stock Exchange was right on your doorstep, and there were few who were not taking advantage of it. I mean where else could you walk into a coffee shop and get a menu of at least fifteen types of hash and at least fifteen types of grass and then get asked if you wanted a coffee to go with it. The Dutch, when it came to the freedom of the individual, had got it right. They were even making money on the tax generated by these more or less legitimate businesses and the strange thing was they had less of a drug problem because of it. A lot of Dutch kids wouldn’t touch the stuff, not because they never tried it, but because as far as they were concerned there was a lot more interesting things to do. Anywhere else the whole illegality, as far as I could see, was turning it into a rebellious obsession. I mean you could go to a rave in Holland and get your E’s tested before you took them and there was always a medical crew in case anybody decided to go overboard. Back home they were so fucked up they would turn the cold water off in the toilets so people would have to buy it from the bar instead, which caused more near fatalities then the drug would ever cause. Miserable bastards.

There were a few casualties of course. Mostly through over doing it when they weren’t use to the amounts or strengths. Dutch speed for instance is stronger than anywhere else I had tried and too much of it could have you a gibbering, hyperventilating mess. Invariably most foreigners did too much at least once. I would say that about ten per cent of the heads who came over returned home a psychotic mess. It was all too easy to get and the sudden freedom of it all for some people was too much. Some hadn’t even smoked a joint before they came and now within a month of being there, they were doing about five E’s and a gram of speed a night, so it was little wonder they were a little unsound when they left. Had a few freaky ones myself. One time I had gone out on the rampage with this guy from work nicknamed ‘Sacrifice’, (you guessed it, he had a scar on his face), and well we were in a kind of competition to see who was the hardest hardcore drughead. Juvenile I know, but a challenge is a challenge and when you go round shooting your mouth off, someone’s bound to turn around and say prove it. It wasn’t as competitive as it may sound but as I said we both had big mouths. Towards the morning I knew I had overdone it. It started off pretty mildly, a few drinks and a couple of E’s. We brought this strange black dude from work with us as well. He was a bit of a religious freak and he kind of came along to see what sin God’s people were up to. Boy, was he in for a surprise.

As the night progressed we had taken about five E’s, a gram of coke, a gram of speed and were now about to start on the acid. It was now about six in the morning and all the bars had shut so we returned back to Scarfaces flat. We popped about three acid each and did another line of speed to keep the party going. The black dude Hubert started talking about God and how he had changed his life so I ended up having a mad acid conversation about proving His existence or lack of it. Can’t really remember which. Scarface was typical raver material and the only thing he could talk about was the great thrill of being out of your head. The black dude, Hubert, thought the amount we had taken was quite normal and presumed he would be alright. Unfortunately Scarface was a bit like me when it came to popping pills. A right greedy bastard. He was well versed in the comedown effects and the slight mental warping it gave you for a few days. I don’t think he gave Hubert enough warning on how to combat these, i.e. don’t listen to a single thought for a few days until your at least semi-sound to deal with them. Hubert on top of all this was breaking up with his over religious wife and I don’t really think it was a good time for him to have taken so much. Listening to me on acid I don’t think helped either. As it happened, I met him about a year later walking round the streets in a daze. His wife had left him and when I mentioned seeing him to Scarface, he said he was a warped fucker after that night. Heavy man, heavy and let it be a warning. Funny I heard that myself somewhere. Our speech that night was kinda coming to that impasse when the acid really starts taking over, and all we could do was blurble. When the acid kicks in you can’t really think of what to say because words themselves can be too unreal. Trying to hold a conversation just because your all in the same room can be a nightmare. Especially if your trying to impress nice babes that are sober. Guaranteed fuck up unless their stoned and even then they have the advantage. I remember tripping with a friend of mine, Renoir, and the only words we could say in about three hours were ‘wow’. Heavy talk. I started feeling a bit queasy and suddenly exploded into a puking fit all over Scarface’s floor. That I suppose was the end of the party so after feebly attempting to clean it up,(the puke, and everything else for that reason was doing strange things), I said my goodbyes and prepared to cycle home. Got on the bike and after been told the directions at least twenty times I left. I had gotten a good way off the street, which meant I didn’t know the way back. It was then I started to realise I hadn’t got a clue where the fuck I was going.

The trees were melting into rather intricate designs and everything had this acid twinkle about it. The pavement flowed into those multicoloured kaleidoscopic patterns, that unlike poor Hubert, I was rather use to. The thing however, that was freaking me out was that I kept changing direction. All in all I think I rode up and down one street a total of about ten times. I would stop, pick a direction to follow and when I got there I would change my mind, after already deciding to go that way just to get off the same damn street. On top of this goldfish thinking I was starting to get extremely self conscious of all the people who I thought were looking at me and put an awful amount of effort into looking normal, which made me stick out like a sore thumb, or so I thought. Nervous breakdown here we come. Just act normal I reassured myself, as if I was a disguised spy in Vietnam and the Viet Kong were all around me. I would stop and ‘get my head together’. Again. Then lean against a wall and act conspicuously unconspicous. Man I was going fuckin mad and I was still on this damn street. My pupils were huge and I was sure everyone could see them. Hi, I’m your local fuckin alien. Can’t find my spaceship. The effort of cycling and the dehydration effect of the speed was making it harder and harder to breathe. Its this way. No its this way. Rest against wall. Fuck I must look really strange. Its this way..... Eventually I got off the fuckin street and wouldn’t have minded as much had I more than two choices of direction. This happened a few more times on the way home and in the end I went completely wrong and had to back track about ten miles. When I finally got to the campsite the sun was now shining and the tent was hot and stuffy inside. People were up and I couldn’t bring myself to go up to the common toilets, and get a much needed drink of water as I was too paranoid and almost completely incapable of speech. So I lay in the tent gulping all the time to keep the air passageway open. I nearly died of dehydration and the only reason I didn’t probably, was because I got sick. Speed is nasty stuff if not used properly, and that experience, if nothing else, put me off a little. Coke was much better

Got the job at the steelworks through a little bit of bluffing. Told them I was a qualified metalworker and had been working in that field for a couple of years. Luckily they didn’t ask for any proof so they gave me another interview to finalise the position. I would have to play it by ear as I didn’t even know how to hold a fuckin drill the right way, but if you don’t try you don’t get. Kinda. Anyway to impress the job agency I decided to brush up on my Dutch a bit so I asked an English friend, The Ketamine Kid, to teach me a little bit. We were sitting in a crowded pub and I asked him how to say ,"I speak near fluent Dutch, but would prefer to speak English". " U bent u y mooi maesje, ik wil met nou nokia", he replied and then asked me to repeat it. Dutch was a rather hard language to get the pronunciation right so I had to try it a few times to get it right. Mr K, for short, kept telling me to repeat it louder and louder and the whole pub was in pieces laughing at my ridiculous pronunciation. Or so I thought. It was only on the day I was going in for the final interview I asked a Dutch friend what he thought of my Dutch. He said it sounded good except I wasn’t pronouncing the end bit properly. "Nokia", he said in a wierd intonation. "Fuck". Realisation started to dawn on me. "What", I exclaimed. "Fuck", he replied, "what your’e trying to say, right, is that you are a beautiful girl and I would like to fuck you now. That bastard Ketamine Kid, and in front of the whole pub to top it. Just as well I asked this dude or things might have gone differently. I would have walked into the office, said my spiel, and probably would have gotten a heavy slap in the face. On the other hand she could 9 have said yes and taken me upstairs and then probably all of her friends as well. I mean that is the sort of job I could just about handle. Flash, shut up. Anyway, despite that near cathostrophy, I got the job and managed to pull it off. I was handed a grinder, those big spark making tools, and told to cut a few sections of metal flooring. I didn’t even know how to turn the fucker on, never mind how to change the discs when they wore down. But luckily there was this old black guy who started teaching me a little and said nothing to no one about my ignorance. By the end of the month I was as good as any of the other heads working there, and they had spent at least two years in a technical school. But then again, I was always a clever lad.

The hours in work weren’t bad and the money was good enough to afford a few pints every day and still manage to save a few quid. It was a Friday and nothing in the way of raves or parties seemed to be happening so I popped an E and went down to the bar, prepared for a rather quiet night. There was this beautiful looking girl sitting beside me who looked about eighteen and it wasn’t long before we got chatting. Exctasy can sometimes help in the chatting up game. Sex can seem the most natural and foregone conclusion. Like asking someone for the time. Sometimes this can be a problem but this time it wasn’t. She invited me back to her house, but I had to wait outside untill her parents had gone to bed. She was still in school, for Christs sake, but well that didn’t put me off. After about an hour her folks finally went to bed and the two of us snook up the stairs into her bedroom. I’ll give her this much she had cheek, and I was terrified Papa Bear might suddenly stroll in. We got to work quickly, and within about five minutes we were both completely naked. We stood and kissed and then she slowly slipped down my body untill she was on her knees. At first she teased my cock with a few flicks of her tongue and then slowly she pulled it into her mouth. Her hand slipped behind my buttocks and and toyed a little before slipping her finger in. I came almost immediately and she took great joy in licking up the mess and then swallowing it. She then lay on the bed with her legs spread and started playing with herself while I was busy sucking her breasts. She put her wet fingers in my mouth and then motioned my head towards her open vagina."Lick me, my little baby", she intoned in an orgasmic whisper. Her cunt was warm and sticky and before long she was on top of rhythmically fucking my tongue. She came suddenly and squeezed my head with her hands and thighs as far into her genitals as possible. I couldn’t move untill she slowly released and then she slid her sticky cunt from my face, all along my body, untill we were in the normal fucking posistion. I took my cue and rolled her over so now I was on top and then started fucking her slowly. She put her wet tongue in my ear and I could feel shivers of electric run down my spine. We both burst into orgasm at the same time and then rolled over and started fondling each other so we could get a bit of breath back. She then got on her hands and knees and told me to fuck her up the ass. I hadn’t done it before and at first it was a little bit hard to get it in, so she made me rub some KY jelly on my cock and then all around her hole. She giggled while I was doing it and told me it tickled. I finally got it in and started pulsing in and out. It was tight on my cock at first but when she started squeezing and contracting I could barely stop myself from coming. She loved it and had yet another orgasm. Her grip on my penis tightened and in the end I came too. We fucked again in different positions until finally she began to tire and orgasm became a little hard, so I inserted my penis in her and we fell asleep in heavenly bliss. When I awoke for some reason her legs were spread open with her cunt on top of my face. We were in the sixty nine position and she was already awake carefully licking my penis. " I like to play with sleeping boys, I hope you don’t mind". I didn’t and soon we were back at it again. She made me lie once again between her thighs and then told me to masturbate as if I was alone. I did and then she laughed and called me a filthy child. Suddenly I heard a door slam and we realised that her parents were up and about. She motioned to me to climb out the window and with a quick kiss goodbye I was off. I never seen her again as she was off on holidays the next day, and I was somewhere else when she came back, but If I ever meet her again man, I’ll be in heaven.

Winter was fast approaching, and the campsite was closing. The ‘together’ heads had got it together and had moved on to India or where ever, and the untogether messes were all that were left. It was time to move on. Word had been going round that there was a place available for squatting, and the Hells Angels were in on it. It was a big old factory that used to be a laboratory for a chemical company, were they carried out tests on animals, or so the over imaginitive squatters claimed. For this reason it was rather aptly nicknamed ‘The Pet Cemetery’, and as squats go from the begining to the end, it was a hellhole. The guy who discovered it wanted to turn it into an underground rave venue and at first had the backing of the Hells Angels. He planned the break in but strangely enough did not actually turn up when it was broken, as now I think he kinda felt the executive brainchild of the operation should not get his hands dirty in the mere actual squatting of the place. He had found it and was living quite comfortably in a little house boat whereas the squaters desperately needed somewhere to live as they had no money to rent a place and it was getting pretty cold. Anyway the squat police arrived and said it was illegal to squat the factory part as it was not residential, but we were allowed to occupy the house part of the building which was about four rooms and a kitchen. If we went into the factory we would all be thrown out from both. It was a fair enough deal as the squatters needed a place to stay first and the rave in the factory would have just been a nice bonus so the squatters agreed. Chris, the discoveror, did not. He said he was going ahead with squatting the whole building regardless of the police or anyone else for that matter and if anyone had problems with that they could speak to the Hells Angels. The Hells Angels spoke to him and told him he was lucky they didn’t break his legs for using there name and putting the rave in preference to accmodating the squatters. He got the message and that was the last we saw of him. It was not the last of the problems in that squat, however. Sony had bought the factory and had another factory next door to it, and I don’t really think they liked their new neighbours as within two days we had video camera pointed at the front door and a rather heavy letter giving us ten days to leave or else we would have to pay the legal costs of getting removed, which with a company like Sony it was going to be pretty high, and with that camera pointed at us every day we didn’t think they were messing.

There was about twenty squatters there mostly from England and Ireland and a couple of Dutch thrown in, as it was their country. It was the coldest November this century and man you could feel it. There was no heating and nowhere really to get wood for a fire so when everybody they came in they wrapped themselves in their sleeping bags and mostly kept their jackets on. Minus ten is fuckin cold. The electric, naturally, was turned off and so for that matter was the water, so we used candles and filled a big container with water. Privacy with that amount of people in such a small space is also impossible so after a few smokes when I got in from work I would just pull the sleeping bag over my head and that was a signal that I was finished with conversation. Not exactly paradise but I was still working so it was mostly just used as a crash out pad. Most of the heads there were alright and despite the cold we had a good laugh. There was one time when we had a little thief in our midst. It was a Dutch girl who was about seventeen who had run away from her parents and constantly hung around the Hells Angels bar playing pool. She seemed alright at first, and in truth, she was not the first one I suspected when my walkman and camera went missing, but when I had a little chat with this Northern Ireland girl, Siobhan, I was soon convinced. She had been sleeping in the room next to the little Dutch girl and strange things were starting to happen. Her dope went missing when she was asleep and considering she left it beside her bed, it was a pretty daring robbery. Then her ring when missing and then to top it all some bastard robbed her sandwiches, all when she was asleep. At first she put it down to an absent mind from smoking to much dope but after the fourth or fifth time she knew something was amiss. When I came in to talk to her about my walkman been missing she seemed relieved she was not the only target that had been hit and she was almost sure it was the girl next door. I had taken the liberty of checking everyone’s room when they were out and the only room I hadn’t checked properly was this little Dutch girls. As soon as Siobhan told me of her suspicions we decided to check her room out. Siobhan was glad of the support because she didn’t really know anyone in the squat and felt a bit afraid of the Dutch girl as she was a bit warped. I didn’t give a fuck, it was pretty simple, some cunt had robbed my bag and everyone was under suspicion. Apologies for the invasion of privacy and all that. Anyway this little Dutch girl,I forget her name, had written on her door in English,’Please keep out’, which was rather pathetic as she hadn’t even got a lock on the door. There was obviously no one in the room so we opened the door, and surprise surprise there was all of Siobhans gear, including her fuckin sandwiches lying all over the place. There was a locked cupboard which was soon unlocked , thanks to a crowbar, and inside was a heater which also went mysteriously missing. Man this woman was a looney. I would have been less freaked out if she had made some effort to conceal the gear as it would show she still had something working upstairs but the fact that she left her door unlocked and all the gear just strewn about proved to me she was a little unstable. When searching the room I found a little diary she kept and inside it was all this religious writing about her mission from God, I forget the whole trip she was on about, but somehow it tried to justify her life. It was warped man and this girl was seriously sick. After searching we decided to stay up until she came in but a few too many joints and we both didn’t wake till morning. Never trust a hippie. When we awoke we found the girl sleeping downstairs on a couch as if trying to hide, as I said she wasn’t all there in the brain department. Before I woke her I checked her jacket and there was my walkman and camera. She obviously hadn’t found a buyer. She was wearing Siobhans ring as she slept, but she was soon in for a rude awakening. I shook her roughly and started shouting at her and all she could do was huddle up against the couch and deny everything. I had to be a bit gentle as she had broke her arm in a fight with another women at some bar. Then she pulled a knife out but she was in no shape to use it, and to be honest I had a feeling she try something like that so I kept a fairly safe distance when I woke her up. I charged her and knocked her to the ground which brought another series of screams as the silly bitch landed on her broken arm. I was trying to keep my cool but anyone who pulls a knife out on me should use it quick or watch out. If it had been a bloke he would have ended up in hospital, and I’m not joking. I’ve had knives pulled on me in the past and if I had a gun on me at the time I would have shot them dead and woke up the next morning with a smile on my face, but more of that later. Anyway to make a long story short we got all our gear off the girl and threw her out of the house. Sony sent us a bill for twenty thousand guilders legal fees and it wasn’t soon after we followed.

December, and with it Christmas soon came and luckily I had found another squat. It was on the banks of a canal and had a much more homily feel to it than The Pet Cemetry. It was here I was introduced to Uncle Turps, though it was not the first time I had seen him. He was on the campsite in summer and was thrown off it for being an alcholic mess. I mean some people are private alcholics, ie. they don’t necessarily show it all the time but Turps did not fall into that class. The first time I seen him was in a shed on the campsite where in the middle of an arguement he proceeded to puke all over the place. When he finished he started on another bottle and called everyone a pack of fuckin cunts. I would then see him in the middle of the daytime sitting on a chair in the sun either drinking, puking or asleep. Turps was short for turpentine because he would literally drink anything with alcholol in it. The fact that his second name was Turpin had nothing to do with it. I complained to him once about the terrible comedown I was having from coke and he told me the only way to avoid a comedown Flash, is to stay up, and with that he cracked open another beer. This was my new squat mate.

The place needed a lot of work so I smuggled some paint and tools from work. The eletricity had been turned off thanks to a noise complaint in the summer, which was a bit of a bitch because due to a little bit of fiddling about with wires, up untill then we were getting it for free. The eletric board had now made sure it "vud not happen again". "Niet voor gratis", and all that. Bollocks. We made do with candles and wood burners and all in all it was a cosy little joint. Again it was all Irish and English folk who lived there and all strangely enough from middle class backrounds. I had been getting a little grief in work from this pillock, our new personnel manager, who had been hired to calm down all the bitchiness of the ‘I want to be a supervisor crowd’, that were all working there. It had got quite heavy as some new American supervisor had been sent death threats over the phone. The prick they got in to calm down all these matters was a Dutch git, Paul Swemmers, who never looked like he got his hands dirty once. I reckon he met the boss in one of the posh restaurants round town and managed to worm his way in. At first I was as polite as I could be, even though just to look at him you could tell he was a tosser, but when we had a little disagreement we were enemies for ever after. It happened when we were doing a fourteen hour day to make up for the fuck ups of the ‘I want to be a supervisor crowd’. I had been taking big lengths of metal from the top floor down to the bottom as they had been unused. Another typical fuck up. Anyway I had been moved to another job and along comes Swemmer and some of the top managers of whom we were doing the job for, and Swemmers was eager to impress. They were all arguing on how to get these big length’s of metal down a hole barely half the length and they could not work it out. I wouldn’t mind so much, but ten so called fuckin managers getting into a fluster over a relatively simple problem. I stopped what I was doing and went over to them as I had been bringing these lengths all day and I told Swemmers what to do. "It will never work", he said. "Its far too dangerous". As I said it was his chance to show what a leader he was in front of his peers. I told him, and the managers that I had been doing it all day, and that it wasn’t even slightly dangerous, and Swemmers was forced to at least allow me to try. It was very simple really, all you had to do was bring them down on a forklift with two ropes tied on either side to keep them diagonal so as they would fit through the hole, and naturally enough it worked. Before I had come over to them Swemmers was going on about having to rip up the stucture and then put it back together again, which would have cost us about another two days work, so when I showed him this simple solution I was saving the company a lot of time and money. But if you think that miserable fucker was grateful, you got to be joking. He was extremely upset in front of the managers at been shown up by a buitenlander, (outsider), skinhead. Not even an apology or a well done, instead he just skulked off with revenge in his eyes. As I said, he was a cunt. He pestered me whenever we met and I managed to show him up quite a few times, but when he told me to grow my hair it was war. I had thought of a few nasty things to make his life a misery such as spraying a little perfume on his jacket and then getting some woman to ring up his wife in the early hours of the morning, and hang up when she answered. Or something a little more immature like spraying his garden with weed killer, getting two tons of topsoil delivered to his house, changing his car insurance to a robbed junkies car ect., but in the end my revenge was beautiful. More on that later. His reason for telling me to grow my hair was because we were working for a Jewish clothing company, and a lot of the managers there, according to Swemmer, thought I was a Nazi. This however was a load of bollox, as I knew most of the managers on a first name basis and got on with them rather well. Swemmers in his misery was looking for a reason, any reason to get me fired because, as I had said I had shown him up on more than one occasion and was far from willing, unlike some of the other pricks, to kiss his ass. This was his latest assault, to get personal. I asked him why the other two skinhead supervisors were not also told to grow their hair and he said the complaint was only against me. There are pricks and there are pricks. Anyway I ignored his request for about a month when one day this American supervisor, John, comes into the canteen and tells me that Swemmers has told him to fire me. "Did he give any reason?", I asked. "No", he replied. "Where is he now?". "Upstairs having a meeting with the bosses". I picked up a crowbar and started walking out of the canteen when John asked me what I was doing. I told him I was going to go into the meeting and publicly ask, in front of all his bosses, the reason for my dismissal and if he did’nt give a good answer I was going to smack him round with the crowbar. In truth it was half a bluff but it worked well. John, eager not to cause such a disturbance that would really show the company up, said he’d talk to him first. I told him that if he did’nt get a good answer, to please remember I had nothing to lose and that there might be a little more than a crow bar to the head at stake. There were a few things the people we were doing the job for might be interested in hearing, such as the structural fuck ups and the German materials of which the contract had clearly specified were not to be used. They were as I said Jewish and some of them had been in the war, so whether the EEC. was there or not, these people would certainly not buy German. The cost of removing all German materials would probably come to about thirty thousand guilders. Enough I reckoned to keep me in a job. Swemmer, the spineless, backed down. Victory for now, but I was wary.

The Christmas buzz was definitely here, and seen as I was going to be stuck here for it I decided to go to Amsterdam for a few beers or whatever. I started off in one bar and then another and then another and was starting to feel pretty pissed. A few lines of coke kept me from falling into a complete drunken haze as falling asleep in the bars here was generally not a good idea. I was now in the Red Light district as the bars here stayed open the latest and well the sight of all these beautiful girls offering there services certainly put life into a pretty cold night. I spotted this beautiful blonde who looked about eighteen in one of the windows and she gestured me to come in. As I said it was a pretty cold night and a girl like that could seduce me stone cold sober. Fuck it man she could seduce me in my sleep and probably had if I could only remember my dreams. I went inside and she pulled the curtains shut. She was stunning. She asked what I wanted and I answered kinda sheepishly for a normal fuck. I mean it was a bit alien to not have to chat a girl up a little first but I was learning. I gave her the money first and a bit extra as I had been told it was a bit cheap to just pay the minimal and she would make the extra effort if I did. I then offered her some coke to which she was appreciative and we had a little chat about the whole scene. She was, as I had guessed, about eighteen and she had been working in the Red Light for about six months. She, I never got her name, was planning on quitting soon and setting up as the owner of a hairdressers, and with the money she was making I suppose it wouldn’t take her to long. She was Dutch and had no problems having sex with strangers as long as they weren’t too fuckin drunk. She had a boyfriend a little older who was alright, except that he never gave her an orgasm. She then started to strip her clothes off and I did the same. She opened her legs and started rubbing KY jelly on her vagina. It gets sore from too much fucking she explained, I have to take a break every couple of weeks to give it time to heal. She spoke in a very matter of fact way about her business and explained that blokes get paid more because they have to keep their dicks hard which can be very hard after about ten fucks. I imagine it is. She then grabbed my penis in her silky hands and expertly (what do you expect) put a condom on it. Which do you prefer she asked as she lay down on the bed, you on top or me? A bit of both I replied rather uncertain. Well you try first she said and smiled. It was beautiful, there was no kissing or anything but well I didn’t really miss them. After we finished we had a quick joint and sadly I kissed her sweet breasts goodnight. It was a lovely Christmas present.

The funniest story I heard about prostitutes, if you have that sort of sense of humour, was about this guy I worked with called Hank. He was a Dutch dude who had been married for a couple of years and then divorced. Like nearly all divorced men I have met, been single after been so long with a girl, can sometimes send them flippy to extremes. He had been going to the Red Light with another guy from work and after going through, excuse the pun, about six or seven prostitutes he finally fell in love with one of them, and strangely enough for a prostitute she fell in love with him. He received nothing but slagging from everyone at work such as your girlfriend was great last night, never had such a good blowjob and all that, but he didn’t seem to be bothered to much by it. I was a good friend of his and often asked him how things were going and he seemed extremely happy with everything. They say love is blind but as you’ll see in this case that saying is a bit extreme. I noticed after a month or so he seemed to talk less about his girl than he normally did and didn’t seem to go up to the Red Light as much as he use to. He replied when I asked him about this that he was having a few problems with the relationship. I presumed that eventually the pressure of having to share her with so many strangers had cooled the attraction down a little and it wasn’t until a month later he had finally called it off. When I asked him why, he said there were too many complications and it wasn’t until he was drunk that he explained them to me. Their sex was great but her sex wasn’t. She had a sex change when she was a confused seventeen year old boy, and well if going out with a prostitute wasn’t enough, going out with a former man was. Poor guy. Both of them.

One week till Christmas, and as usual I had got a bit carried away in the expectation of it, and had blown pretty much all of my cash. I still had about forty good Ecstasy tabs so I could always sell a few in exchange for a few beers. Most of the squat had gone home for Christmas and there was only three of us left. Myself and Turps had been thrown out of most of the nightclubs, well actually, we hadn’t even been able to get in due to being completely pissed before we even got to the door. I mean what was the point of going unless you were off your head, but as usual the bouncers didn’t support this kind of logic. Turps in his stupor had tried to crawl through one of the bouncers legs, hoping by some fuckin miracle that the bouncer wouldn’t see him. He did and we were both thrown out and landed on or backs in the middle of this rather trendy looking crowd queuing to get in. Another bar threw us out for calling all the customers a pack of Nazi’s. I was only addressing one particular guy but I had a loud voice and well the rest of the bar were either sober or bored enough to stick their noses in and it soon turned into an argument with me versus the rest of the bar. The Hells Angels bar however was still a pretty hard place to get thrown out of. I mean you could fall asleep in a corner and they still wouldn’t throw you out till closing time so unless you started a fight or openly used cocaine on the table, (especially if you didn’t offer the barman some), it was always a pretty safe bet. Every sort of wierdo hung out there and the Dutch police in their wisdom never raided it because at least it kept the loonies in one place. Myself and Turps were drinking there and we both popped a couple of acid tabs to keep us awake when he started telling the story about the worst awakening he ever got. He had been thrown off the campsite in the summer while he was still working and he had to find a place to sleep. In Holland this can be difficult as there is very little spare land available. Some dude once remarked that if you gave Ireland to the Dutch they would be millionaires whereas if you gave Holland to the Irish it would sink, and I suppose there’s some truth in that. Anyway Turps as usual was pissed and he needed a place to sleep so he kinda of fell down beside a canal and pulled a blanket around him. When he awoke the next morning he was fighting for his life. The poor bastard in his sleep had rolled into the canal and lost half his gear trying to get out. In fairness to him he still went to work, rather wet, and his only complaint was that all his speed was too wet to use. But Turps being Turps came up with a bright idea and just swallowed it. The pub was closing and Turps and I were only half an hour into the acid but there was nothing else to do but head home. Some guy, Fergal, had left the squat that day and the only thing he said to us was that he couldn’t handle it anymore. He seemed pretty freaked out about something but we just put it down to another drug binge that went a bit over the top. Turps and I stayed up for a while a started having some weird trip conversation and then I went upstairs on my own to play a few sounds on the guitar. About two hours had now passed since I had taken the trip and I was well peaking at this stage. The room started doing its usual strange things and I was getting a million revelations a second from the cosmos or whatever, when I had to go downstairs for a leak. It was a dark and stormy night and the rain was drizzling in the make shift window I had rather stonely made. Anyway I had got to the middle floor and I noticed that Fergal’s door was open. I looked inside and what I saw made me freeze like a bastard. Two fiery eyes with a vague outline of the devils face slowly turned around and peered into my very soul. It was pure evil and I have never been so shit scared in all my life. I mean I know trip hallucinations but this one didn’t fall into this category. It was real and I’ll swear it to this day. I broke the trance of its stare and fled into Turp’s room. "Turps, Turps, I screamed as I shook him awake. "What the fuck Flash", answered Turps rather blearily. I suddenly copped on to what I was about to say and thought the better of it. "Have you got any skins man", I replied rather weakly. He gestured towards the table and then fell back asleep. I grabbed the skins and ran back up the stairs, refusing to look anywhere near the door where that face was at. When I got to my room I shut the door and would not go downstairs again untill daylight. Man I was so fuckin freaked.

When I told Turps about it the next day he was not altogether surprised. He told me some other dude who had been staying in the squat had seen a load of phantoms trailing out of the house one night and the only drug he was taking was a bit of hash. If it hadn’t been for the event the night before I probably would of half dismissed it, but what Turps said next really freaked me out. The room in which I had seen the phantom had been occupied before by a dude ominously named Sebastian the Black, and he had been well into black magic. We will meet him again, don’t worry. Turps had gone into his room after he suddenly left and found all these symbols written in blood upon the walls. Turps tried to erase them, but as last night had proved he was obviously unsuccessful. I met Fergal, the guy who had left that night and all he would say was that the place was freaking him out. But the worst was yet to come. A few weeks had gone by a little by little people returned to the squat. They were a lot more together after there trip home and well Turps and myself by now where going through a crate of beer each before nightfall. Basically I was turning into an alcoholic mess. I also had an eerie feeling about the place, it just didn’t feel safe. I could sense spirits floating all over the place which could be put down to drugs or drink, but either which way I decided to take a trip home to chill out a little. I got on the ferry and one week later I heard the entire place was burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances. Two Irish people, Jimmy and Karen were almost roasted alive but luckily got out with their lives and ended up in hospital for four months with severe burns. I had been living on the top floor and it was on a Friday night at about four in the morning when it happened. I would have been catatonocally out of my head and I dread to think what might have happened to me if I had stayed there. If I ever see a demon in a house like that again, superstitious or not, I’ll get the fuck out.

Home again, I like to be here when I can, and so on. It was nice to be back. Nothing much had changed and as usual I was broke again. I went to a few raves but basically toned down my drug intake for a while. It wasn’t all that difficult as even getting a joint around here was a fuckin mission, and when you did you were so thankful you wouldn’t even be bothered about getting ripped off a little. Lack of finance can also help. It was now about February and I had told the job in Holland I would be back around mid-March which gave me a little time to get my head together. The local pub allowed me back in to spend my money and all in all it was nice to have the comforts of running water and electrcity back. I had been invited to play in a gig in the city with friends of mine in a metal band and had foolishly taken a couple of acid before getting on stage. When I got on I had a bit of a paranoid visual reaction to the crowd. They all looked like vampires trying to drain my soul, or something like that. Christ. Anyway the song I sung was "Your All A Pack Of Fuckin Vampires", which I kinda made up on the spot. It went down well and I was a bit calmer after getting it out of my system. My friend Renoir wanted to get a few trips himself so I said I’d go with him to a well known spot outside a popular rave. When we got there I waited for him to ask a few guys and I stood still tripping, looking at the kaleidoscopic patterns on a wall thinking to myself how beautiful they were when all of a sudden I get smashed over the head with a bottle. I didn’t even see it coming and the reason for it to this day I still don’t know. I mean if I was having an arguement or staring at someone I’d understand a little, but this bottle just came out of nowhere. I was knocked unconcious for about ten seconds and Renoir similtainiosly was decked with a kick in the bollocks. When we got up we just stared at each other in disblief. I felt my face and there was blood all over it dripping rather trippily to the ground. Then the warrior inside took over and I got up and ran down the road looking for the culprits, which was a bit of a problem seen as I hadn’t seen who the fuck had hit me. But I wasn’t going to sit around and figured that whoever did it would run when they saw me coming. They didn’t and I ran around town like a maniac with murder in my eyes. As I said I was still tripping my head off and every cunt I saw looked guilty. Your’e all a pack of fuckin vampires was becoming a definite reality. After jumping over cars and a few other freaky things I eventually calmed down and got the late bus home. I hadn’t realised up untill then what a fuckin mess I was but when the driver of the bus saw me I could see he was shocked. I went upstairs, my pupils still large and scary looking and sat down at the back of the bus. Everyone quickly moved to the front. Christ, it was only a bloody face. The next morning I awoke with a huge swelling on the side of my head and the whites of my eyes were half full of blood. I thought it would go down after a couple of days and it wasn’t untill someone told me I could go blind if I left the blood there, that I decided to go into the hospital to get it checked out. When I did the doctor there told me my eyes would be alright with a few eye drops but the main problem was I had a fractured malor, which is just above the cheekbone and that if I didn’t have an operation immiediately my face could sink on one side. I didn’t want my baby face look gone, although it would give me a kinda pirate feature which would look pretty cool, I suppose. Anyway I had the operation which meant three days in hospital, and the only highlight of it was going down to the pub with an old dude around sixty who was in for the same operation. As it was only a few hours before the operation when we went down, the nurse when she smelt the alcohol freaked out. It was our nerves the two of us replied, but she was not amused and was going to call the operation off for another day. Luckily she didn’t and when I got out I had a big bandage around the side of my face.

I got home and was still feeling a bit groggy from the anesthetic, so I got a video out on the way. It was Sid and Nancy, and after watching it decided to walk down to the town and leave it back. I put on as pair of dark shades to cover my eye a bit, which I suppose looked pretty freaky in the dark. On the way down I passed this house and heard a lot of screaming which was a bit unusual considering the occupants of the house were rather quiet. Anyway I plodded on and it was not untill I was awoken the next day by three detectives that I realised what the screaming was about. At about the time I had walked by, someone had bound, gagged and then repeatedly shot some woman in the head, and some kids had reported a man wearing dark shades walking by. Someone else had identified that man as me and I was hauled down to the station in front of twelve detectives, questioned and then fingerprinted. I wouldn’t mind but I had awoken quite nicely with a joint in my mouth and now here I was stoned out of my head with twelve detectives. When they asked me for a sample of blood and when I thought of the amount of different drugs floating about there, I said no fucking way.

It was turning out a real fucked up week, and all basically for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, but there was worse yet to come. I was told not to leave town untill the police had finished their inquiries and all in all I was called down for questioning about three times. I decided whether my face was in bits or not, to go down to the local for a much needed drink. Everyone was staring at me and the girls started whispering to each other and pointing over when they thought I was’nt looking. I presumed it was because of my bandage and that maybe some of them had heard about my little incident with the murder. It was not untill I went to the bar and the barman said something about the girls will be safe tonight that I had a vague inkling that something was amiss. "Taking a night off work Flash", one dude said and I grabbed him by the collar and asked him what the fuck he was talking about. "Have you not seen the paper?", he replied, and when I answered no, he pulled one out of his pocket and gave me a look. In it was an article about the ‘Northside Rapist still at large, and an artists drawing of the rapist based on the victims descriptions. I swear to fuck man, it was the spit of me. He had a skinhead and a rather thin face and was operating around the same area where I used to work. I was freaked out, I mean here I was innocently assaulted, under suspicion for murder and now being accused of being a rapist all in the same fucking week. I wouldn’t have minded so much but I could tell by the stares some of the girls were giving me that they really believed it. I know I can be a bit of a nutter at times but rape, give me a break man. I found out after that quite a few skinheads had been accused of the same and some of the poor cunts even got beaten up by vigalantes because of it. In the end they found the rapist, thank God, but you don’t really know what people are capable of thinking about you untill the finger is pointed at you. Bastards. Apart from all that, it was a rather quiet time at home and it was now time to get back to Holland, so I said my goodbyes and hopped on the ferry.

My job was all fucked up when I got back as they were laying off people everywhere because there was no work left. I had been away too long to keep an eye on the scene and now had to find another job. The squat was also gone and all of the squatters were now living in a trendy art kinda place that had a lot of room in it. But the dude who was running it was an arrogant prick and he gave the squatters only one room to sleep in. Forty squatters in one room, there was no fuckin way I was staying there. Turps was getting a lot of hassle from the other squatters for being a messy bastard and I didn’t really like the atmosphere. The squatters here looked a bit too clean. I was going to take over the place, but the rest of the squatters were too apathetic, so with no support I said fuck it. I had heard there were jobs down south and the money was good so I hopped on a train and headed down. The work was picking asparagus and I was told you could make about three hundred quid a week, enough I hoped to get me out of Holland to maybe India or something, I was never quite sure.

I was picked up in the arse end of nowhere by some farmer who had a constant big grin

on his face. It wasn’t until the end of the week working there that I could see why. Everyday the workers got up from the campsite at about seven, to the sound of this farmer, Mr Hendriks, shouting "much asparagus, much money". He didn’t speak English very well which was a good thing because if I could have held a proper conversation over the wages, I would have probably decked him. We were getting paid piece rate, which meant the more you pick the more money you get and in this case it was sweet fuck all. The hours were poxy as well. We were working from about seven till one and then we were brought back at six to work until eight. It was a seven day week and all I got and the end of it was about fifty quid and a sore back. All the time Hendriks kept saying you get better, much money. I was one of the best there and with fifty quid at the end of the week he didn’t need good English when I told him I quit. I will not print the profanities as there’s probably enough already. I got a similar job with three other farmers and it was all the same bullshit wages. The only people who seemed happy were the illegal Polish as fifty quid back in their country was quite a lot. We were basically been used as a front in case the work police turned up as only EEC. passport holders were allowed to work there. The fine for finding an illegal, was about ten thousand guilders, and farmers being farmers were not taking any chances. They even had walkie-talkie’s to listen in on the police conversation to hear if there was going to be a raid. This place was turning into another nightmare. The only highlight of working there was I bought a cheap motorbike which although fucked up, it still went. This meant I could go around a few of the towns in the area to enjoy their non-existent nightlife, and the odd trip down to Venlo to score some much needed dope in the coffee shops there. As usual I didn’t bother getting insurance which led to a few problems with the local police. I was riding through town stoned out of my head when I saw a police car ahead. I had two options. Go straight on and risk them seeing my out dated reg. or turn into the road on the side which meant they’d see me, but would be going the opposite way. In my stonedness I kinda tried to do both actions at once. This sort of thing dosen’t really work and tends to call unwanted attention. They spun their car round and chased me. At first I tried to ignore their siren but when I got to the end of the road their was a huge crowd of people in the way and I had to slow down. They got out of their car and called me over. They were going to charge me for speeding but when they found out I was a foreigner they changed their minds. Too much paperwork. They told me to get insurance or the next time they saw me on the bike they’d take it off me. It was not the last time we met. A week or two later I had gone out on one of my drunken trips around the little towns. Pissed as fuck, I started riding back towards home. The bikes throttle was stuck so you could ride it no hands and my helmet was an open type that was useful for smoking doobies on long journeys. That night I was so wrecked I had to use the white line in the middle of the road for direction. The roads were empty and I had a nice joint in the corner of my mouth when a cop car suddenly cruises along beside me. "What the fuck are you doing in the middle of the road", he asked. Still riding no hands and smoking I replied "I’m trying to stay on the road". "Are you drunk", he asked, and when I answered yes he started laughing and told me to stay on the path. He then drove off but I figured I had used up my luck and the next time they might not be as cool. I had enough and it was time to go back North for a few much needed grams of coke. Decided to travel up on the bike despite the advice of everyone who knew anything about them, and sure enough the bastard blew up half way. I was just getting into the Easy Rider trip of it all. There were no cliffs as it was Holland so I couldn’t even do a ‘Quadrophenia’ job and drive it over one. Film stars don’t know the half of it. It was also the weekend of the Isle of Man TT’s and all the bike shops were closed as anyone into bikes had gone there. In the end I gave it to some head who owned lots of Harleys in exchange for a lift to the nearest train station and I arrived back North broke again.    

Luckily I had found another squat, fondly known as Slobs. It was fuckin great. There was about twenty houses all in a horseshoe formation and every one of them were squats. They nearly all had electric and running water which after the campsite, was pretty cool. The back garden was covered in marijuana plants and the whole buzz there was happening. Turps inevitably, was there and invited me to stay in his pad. I had no money and there was no jobs coming up so I went out busking in front of supermarkets which seemed to be the best place as you had to put a guilder in your shopping trolley in order to use one and you got it back when you came out, so at least none of the fuckers could use the excuse of having no change. I dressed up in a long black wig, black lipstick, a pair of shades and a white furry jacket. The glam rock kinda look. It worked in one way. No one recognized me.   It was here I met the Skullcrackers for the first time. It was a rock n roll squatty band that had been going about three months before I met them. Despite their music, they at least had the commitment to practise once a week, which was some going for any head in drugged out Holland. They were also probably the most mismatched band I have ever seen together, which in some cases can lead to new and inspirational music, but in this case did not. Introducing, Anto a self confessed tinker from Galway, who was pint sized and had a beautiful mop of blond hair. He sang a bit like a girl, so he was nicknamed ‘Blondie’. Then there was Damien, who was a bit of a yuppie from Dublin. He looked, although he’d always deny it, the spit of Larry Mullen from U2. Naturally enough he was the drummer. Next came Ben, singer and songwriter with a strong upper English accent. He was a big hippie who could be a little soft when it came to dealing with people. This was mainly because, as he rightly feared, most of the people he dealt with were insanely off their faces. But despite his ‘good griefs’ ect. he was genuinely a good head. He was going through a kind of backlash trip as his dad was involved somewhat in the Iranian arms deal controversy, and well he wanted to opt out of that kind of well to do corrupt society. I think he came looking for some man on the ground morals, but of course the people in the squat weren’t always that much better. In fact half of them would sell their grannies for a crate of beer. I use to wind him up something rotten by pushing my Nazi flag campaign, which I may explain later. But for now back to the band. Let me introduce you to Karl, with an anarchy on the A. He was the lead guitarist who was heavily influenced by PIL, Sex Pistols and anything that said fuck off. He was not himself a very violent figure, in fact he couldn’t fight to save his life, but with the help of his ‘white magic’, he had that strange ability to make things happen for the good or bad. He had just broken up (kind of) with his Dutch girlfriend (again), of whom he had been living with for the last four years. Now he decided to leave her, live in anarchy, and become the greatest legend on earth. When I spoke to an old mate of his, he told me he went through this kind of crisis at least once a year and he’d be back with his girl in a few months. He was, but that’s jumping ahead of the story. As a guitarist he was well capable, and between the two of us we were able to rustle up maybe four or five songs, rotten drunk and live on stage. None of them were what you’d call good, but what the fuck do you expect for a free gig, and besides we were getting free booze for playing, so we certainly didn’t care. On bass, please welcome six foot six (no joke), Dutch Neils. He was so fucking tall I refused to hold a conversation with him until we were both seated. It reminded me to much of talking to a teacher or an adult when I was about ten, and well these things stay in your head to such an extent that sometimes I found myself answering him like he really was. As it happened, he was a gentle soul and probably the least violent (except maybe Ben). What was needed now was to put on some gigs, and the basic thing we needed was a van. Karl, as always on the lookout, had found this Dutch girl who played violin and had a van. Fuck how she plays man, she’s in. Elka had played with the Levellers (a kind of squatty band that wore clogs), and had a few contacts that might be useful, so within a week or so we were ready for our first gig. I was going to do camera man and play afterwards with Karl in our splinter group Skulk, which was basic drunken punk made up on the spot. It was not to be however, as the day before the gig we decided to go to an open air rave organized by some of the New Age Crusties.

It was a great rave except that Anto in his innocence had decided to go overboard on speed. He had taken about two grams and at first seemed alright, but as the night wore on he started getting pretty freaky. He started shouting about being God and all that usual stuff, but we kind of got a bit worried when he started chasing people round and trying to chew their ears off. God alone knows what was going through his head as he himself to this day dosen’t, but in the end he collapsed and had a lot of trouble breathing. There was nothing for it but to call an ambulance which was a fucking headache seen as we were in some wasteland miles away from civilization, but in the end after a five mile jog, we managed to get a phone and an ambulance arrived soon after. At this stage Anto was pale white and his breathing was shallow. There was already a water shortage there from all the other heads on Ecstasy ect., but we managed to get a bit and it was probably what kept him alive. The hospital treated it as a suicide attempt and the poor bastard had to go through a psychological assessment the next day trying to plead with the doctors that he was just a stupid cunt who had gone a bit over the top, and normally quite liked life. In short our first gig was cancelled. It wouldn’t be the last.  

I had found a new house in Slobs, and it was here that I met Sebastian The Black again. He was a Dutch dude with curly black hair who looked like he’d been overdoing it on the H. He seemed a bit annoyed that he didn’t have the house to himself now that we’d moved in. The first night we stayed there he was upstairs in his room screaming and shouting to himself and pacing up and down the floor. He then started doing some weird chanting which I think was meant to freak us out. It didn’t, but what did was we found all these bottles of urine stashed in different places around the house. Cleaning them out was a sickening experience. It was not until we cleaned out one of the bedrooms that we found who the fuck was doing it. Black, another dude from Belfast and myself had cleaned the room and when we went back into it the next day someone had taken a dump in the middle of it. We didn’t have to look far to see who the fuck it was. When Sebastian returned that night he found all of his stuff thrown out on the road and when he came in we grabbed him by the scruff and threw him out also. There’s sick and there’s sick and if he thought he was getting away with that sort of bullshit it just goes to show how screwed up he was.   

Our next property mission came when Karl heard about some German dude Roy, who lived next door, was going to rent out his place to students. Rent out a squat? No fucking way, it was unethical. We swiftly invaded the place when he was out and had the full support of all the other squatters. He had moved to a council house and when he returned to the squat he was rather surprised. We all went out to the pub that night and when we returned we were locked out. He had returned with a few heavies from the bar he worked in and had thrown whoever was left there out. He was now gone but one enterprising squatter had left a window open in the upstairs so we could all get back in again. Saved us breaking a window. Roy returned the next day and threatened to burn the whole place down, which was a bit stupid considering there was twenty squatters standing around him. But we didn’t need violence and in the end a bit of detective work saved the day. We had been looking at his mail and had found social security cheque stubs which was a bit unusual seen as he had a job down in the pub. When we mentioned to him that the social security might be interested in this he gave in and the only request he made was for his mail to be delivered. He even left a moped there which was a nice little parting present, and although he wanted fifty guilders for it he never got them.    

So now we had two houses, with all the mod-cons, and we could play our music as loud as we wanted without bothering anyone. I was the cook and we lived mainly on spaghetti as it was cheap and nutritious. From time to time some of the heads would check the bins at the local supermarket, as a lot of the time the food they threw out was alright, maybe a day or two over its sell-by date. The supermarket in its stinginess was now locking their bins and sending out staff to chase away any squatters found rummaging . They could be a pretty vicious lot. I had been accused of shoplifting there twice and the second time it happened I wasn’t letting the manager get away with so easily. The first time it had been over a pack of cigarettes, which I had bought in another shop. The woman behind the counter had seen them in my pocket and had added them on to the till. When I asked her why, she said she had seen me taking them from the cigarette rack. I was fuckin outraged, I mean suspecting someone of theft is one thing, but actually lying about it did my head in. The manager was called down and he grabbed the pack from my pocket when I refused to pay for them. I told him to check the bar code against the one in his shop and when he found out I wasn’t lying, he handed them back without even an apology. I asked the woman at the check out why she had lied, but she just put her head down and said next please. Revenge was on the cards for those racist, snide fucks. Next day I arrived with a bag full of shopping from a rival shop and acted as suspicious as I could. Pulling my jumper up, looking around, that sort of thing. When I came to the counter, the manager was waiting on the other side. He demanded to inspect my bag, and when I refused he called the cops. There was already a big queue behind me but I wasn’t going to budge. Time to teach these fuckers a lesson. I heard him say something about filthy squatters on the phone and when I confronted him with this he was a tad embarrassed in front of his customers. When they finally arrived the queue was almost to the other end of the shop and I told the policeman I would only open the bag if both the manager and the shop assistant gave me a full public apology. Naturally they found nothing and the manager and the shop assistant apologised aloud. The cop was black and when he was leaving I said sorry about all the fuss but I just can’t stand blatant racism. He smiled and left. Never had problems in that shop again. 

It was one of those late nights in the Red Light district were you had missed the last train and had far too many drugs in your system to even consider going home. I headed for the nearest bar that was still open and the only one I could find looked extremely dodgy. But a drink is a drink and I needed one. Sat by the bar beside this English Hells Angel looking dude who started telling me about all the shops he used to own but had somehow gotten into trouble with the Angels over money. They could be a pretty heavy lot when it came to money. The bikes were just for fun. Anyone found wearing a Hells Angel patch, who wasn’t a member could find themselves in a lot of trouble. One idiot who came into the bar had a few too many and for some mad reason started showing off a Hells Angels tattoo which had been done on his chest. A couple of the Angels there grabbed him and brought him back to the tattoo parlour in which it was done. They ordered the artist there to tattoo over it in thick black ink, then gave the dude a hiding and told the tattoist to leave town. All in all it was pretty mild considering some of the things I’ve heard them do. Anyway this dude I was sitting with was having problems and I stupidly asked him how he protected himself with all his hassles. He suddenly pulled a gun out and put it to my head. "I never have problems", and with that he walked off. Then this big fifty year old skinhead started beating up a load of Moroccans and for some reason thought I was his friend. He would have a fight and then sit with me boasting about it. I humoured him for a while. After all he was six foot six and not the skinny type either, but after a while he started pissing me off like I was his best friend so I just blanked him. Trip heads and alcho’s rarely go hand in hand. Anyway he didn’t like my attitude and suddenly tried to head butt me. I saw it coming and dodged it. Knew there would be no second chance so I jumped for his neck, got him in a head lock and pinned him to the floor. Not bad for someone half the weight and out of his head on acid. He started resorting to dirty tactics tried to reach a knife he had in his pocket. Tried hitting him a few digs in the head, but I must admit they weren’t exactly doing very much harm. Just when I was thinking this was it the same guy who had pulled the gun out on me earlier, pulled me off the ground and kicked the other dude in the head. "Quick", he shouted, "That guy is a fuckin nut, follow me". It was hardly a time for arguing, so I followed him out to a car he had parked round the side. He invited me back to his flat and we stayed up most of the night having a chat and doing a few lines of coke. He told me the guy I had gotten into a fight with not only had a knife, but also a gun, and that it wouldn’t have been the first time he had seen him use it. He then invited me to go out on his boat with a few friends and their kids as they were having a bit of a party on some island. It was really cool. Had a mad water fight, played guitar and got off our heads all afternoon. When it was time to go I thanked him for helping me out and decided to head home for a bit of sleep. Hadn’t got a wink all night, and well drugs can only keep you awake for a certain amount of time, no matter how much you take.

So there I was, sitting in this train, listening to PIL and coming down off the coke with a bit of a heavy bang when this ticket inspector comes up and asks for my ticket. I handed it to him thinking it was alright, when he informs me that it was in fact invalid as although it was a return ticket, it had to be used on the day of purchase. I was not in the mood for this bullshit. I mean I should have just payed the money and that would have been it, but I didn’t like this dudes attitude, and he was only going to pocket the money anyway. When I refused to pay he grabbed me by the arm. I swung around and decked him. Next thing I know I’m in a row with about eight train police and I’m throwing punches everywhere. Looking back, I was a right idiot, but the comedown had kind of given me this leave me alone or I’ll tear your fuckin head off attitude. It didn’t go down well with the train police and their cries of fuckin foriegn bastard did nothing to calm me down. They threw me in a room and I tried to fight my way out. To make a long story short I broke the cunts Rolex. After about an hour of fighting (took a breather every fifteen minutes for a smoke), the real police arrived and handcuffed me. They brought me down to the station and asked me for a statement. I explained that the ticket girl had told me I could use the ticket anytime and that I hadn’t known it meant just any time that day. Admitted being a little rash in starting the fight, but that I was a little touchy at being grabbed. Blamed the language barrier for the whole misunderstanding and thought it was going rather well until they asked me to empty my pockets. In my little fit of rage I hadn’t copped the fact that I still had a lot of drugs on me, and now there was twelve ecstasy, a gram of coke, a bag of grass and a big lump of hash all neatly piled in front of me on a table. The woman officer who was charging me didn’t look the type of person that would give you any lee way."You know these are illegal?, she asked. " "Eh, kind of", I replied rather weakly. She called the chief to see what was to happen to me, but at least he looked a lot friendlier than this bitch. I told him the story of the train and he accepted it and he then asked about the drugs. Well I said, I usually buy them in quantity because its cheaper and less risky than going to Amsterdam every week, so this was my supply for the next month. I had no previous convictions and he didn’t seem to think it was as serious an offence as the woman. Good. In fact we had a chat about football for about half an hour and I played dutifully along with my sporto bit. He told me he had to confiscate the drugs for now but if I had a bad drug problem, I could come back in the morning to collect them. If I had been a registered junkie they would have given me them back straight away. The thinking here was that if I went out and commited a crime to replace the confiscated stash, the police would be partly responsible. I couldn’t believe it. Anywhere else, you’d be looking at a mandatory two years.   

One mate of mine, who was a registered junkie, was Wayne. He was on the CAD programme which was basically a way to keep junkies off the streets. It didn’t, but at least it toned them down a little. For the last year he had been getting about seventy percent of his last wage and about ninety methadone a week. He also got a couple of valium and librium to help him sleep. These, naturally enough, were traded in for heroin. A lot of junkies who didn’t want to be registered would buy the methadone if they had no heroin, or if they were trying to give it up completely. Methadone, unfortunately, was more addictive than heroin and probably worse for your body. It didn’t really give you a high but kept the craving for heroin down a little. Wayne, originally English, had a Dutch girlfriend, which made it harder for the Dutch government to deport him. He had been living there for over five years and was now qualified for citizenship. Poor Dutch. One former junkie, a long time user, was amazed at the amount he used to shoot up. I wasn’t. I had seen the state he was in when he tried to give up. His father had invited him to Mexico on a holiday on the condition he was clean, and his girlfriend had broken up with him. He then decided then to give it all up. The usual method was to turn alchololic for a few months until the body gets rid of most of the poison, and then try to forget the hit heroin gives you. This is the hard part. The brain never forgets that high, and in times of depression or just plain boredness, which can be rather endemic in Holland, the candy store is usually right round the corner. When he started giving up his body was fucked. Remember running for a bus with him and I could walk faster than his pathetic attempt at running. The poor cunt had to stop twice to take a breather. When he returned from his holiday with his father, and was now off it for a couple of months, he gradually started to look a little more healthy. His girlfriend, also a former hard time user, had gotten a good job and was now also clean. Unfortunately, they got back together and it wasn’t long before one of them gave back into temptation. Circumstances in the squat where Wayne stayed had also changed. There were a lot more heroin heads and with the decline of the ‘summer people’, and they were becoming more and more open about it. Before it had always been a bit of a tabboo, and almost always confined to users bedroom. Shooting up in the common room was frowned upon as most of the heads there were not into it at all, but by the end of summer, when a few old time junkies had returned from India, it was soon all over the place. Wayne started once again to assert his senoirity in such matters and it wasn’t long before there were very few who didn’t take the odd toot.       

Remember meeting Terry and Jake. Legendary junkies from hell. Both looked the middle/upper class type of punk that went completely over the top in both attitude and clothing. After one particularly wrecked weekend, Turps informed me I had a new next door neighbours. I took this casually enough at first but when I saw the pair, nearly fuckin fainted. Have seen some cases, but these guys must have gone to a designer shop in Hell, or maybe lived there for a little while. I looked at Turps in an accusing manner and asked him if they had given him free drugs in order to get in. He didn’t answer, but knew by his attitude that they had. I decided to give them a chance as they had nowhere else to go. Both of them looked like they were swimming in heroin but promised, in spite of their habit, that they would not steal. I remembered all the warnings about never being able to trust the bastards. Them living next door to me. Wary. I told them I’d give them a chance, but if there was any bullshit, that would be it. The rest of the house objected completely. But as Turps and myself were the longest there, our word carried a lot of weight. Living in a squat, you allow people to be what the fuck they are as long as they don’t interfere with anyone else. Despite the fact that they were heavy heroin users, we could hardly call ourselves clean. The room they got was immaculate at first, but within two days, it was a bombshell. You couldn’t make it more of a mess if you tried. There were bits of glass. Terry had a a penchant for sticking colored glass together. And bits of bone. That was Jakes penchant. There was also about forty discarded needles lying around and loads of bits of torn colored cloth. Probably part of their art and craft. Had a few chats with them and they seemed mostly alright. Terry never had an addiction until her grandfather died. He had terminal cancer and the grief of watching him slowly die every day she said eventually drove her to it. Jake used to play in a punk band and was now going solo. This in the music business usually means your band has broken up and you don’t know what the fuck your doing. I remember one night when I wasn’t in the best of moods and Terry came in and started whining about Jake. "Flash, Flash, Jakey just punched me in the face and now he’s off to England. I wasn’t too sure about what upset her the most so I told her, quite impassionately, to get the fuck out of my face. She got the message and promptly left. Don’t mind comforting people if it will do any good, but the cause of her problem was simple and I was not exactly the best to cure it. They had come to Holland to escape the heroin scene in England and they had planned on straightening themselves out. Come to Holland to straighten themselves out. Who the fuck were they trying to kid. It was not going too well for them already. They had come in Jakeys van and the Dutch police hadn’t liked the look of it. The police had a slightly racist view of hippies in English registered vans. They had been pulled over on the way and Jake was asked to produce his papers. Whether he hadn’t got them, or God alone knows (you could never believe half their stories), the van was taken from him and impounded. So minus a van already and just in the country. Holland was looking like a hostile place. Jake returned back to Holland after doing a drugs run for some cash. They had been getting their drugs from a dude who lived nearby and one night he sent them into Amsterdam to score for him. He was dealing to a lot of heads and they were all more or less relying on him to come up with the goods. When I heard that Terry and Jake were doing the scoring for him I was a little surprised and joked to some of the heads who had given Terry their money, that they might not return. They didn’t, well not until three days of frantic waiting had gone by. Terry had been raped and robbed by ten Moroccans but was looking suspiciously over stoned and was in rather good form after such a traumatic experience. All the money was gone and none of the heads there were too happy. "Flash, you don’t believe me. After all I’ve been through and now to top it, you think I’m lying. I can’t believe it". I asked her if she reported it to the police and it was here she tripped herself up because when she told she had I told her a simple phone call to the station would verify her story. She said nothing more and I let it be. I hadn’t lost anything so I it was up to the others to find out the truth. I’ll give her one thing though, it was a rich story, not just one Moroccan, but ten.    I had been having this kind of relationship with this girl at the time and it was starting to go through a rather bad patch. I mean when she asked me to go to bed with her one night, I replied I wasn’t drunk enough. There’s bad and there’s bad.

Sarah soon left and I was free once again. It was just after this I met Jennifer. It was an old friend, Jan, I used to work with, sticking bits of metal together and doing the odd spot of coke during overtime. It got dangerous after five as everyone started to get tired and when your lifting heavy weights on narrow beams, forty foot in the air, it doesn’t pay to be sleepy. Most of the overtime then was due to the fuck ups of a Turkish freak, I nicknamed, Amad The Bad. He had been in jail before for drugs and arms dealing, and now he was trying to straighten out his image. His only problem was the old free-based cocaine to which he had a big liking for. Dealing with him in any professional matter was impossible. The tight cunt used to borrow money from some of the workers when he was getting twice their wage. Some of the slimy gits that worked there actually gave him some in the hope of being kept on in the event of lay offs. He refused to do any manual work as he thought it was beneath him. His dad had thought him that Turkish pride thing. More than once, somebody was planning on killing him, but he had this second sense on when to protect himself. Last time I seen him he was back on the street dealing drugs and telling me that it didn’t pay to be straight. Considering he had fired people for smoking a little grass on the way back from work, I had to laugh. He was a bluffer from the start and well I still can’t suppress a smile looking at his Father Christmas eyes, when as usual, he was being a hypocritical bastard.    Anyway, back to Jennifer. Jan was a coke dealer and I occasionally went to his house to score a bit. He had four kids, but only one of them was his. His wife came from a wealthy family down south and for some reason left when she was fourteen to become a punk in Amsterdam. She got pregnant at the age of eighteen to some dude who died about five years later and then went out with some nutter. I’m not really sure of the details, but in the end she had four different kids with four different men. I had been away for a while and when I came back they had broken up. She told me she wanted to see me at the squat and would meet me later when she had a shower. Karl had said it was a vague hint by her towards some sexual end, but I thought he was rather one-track minded in that direction and dismissed it. I presumed she wanted to talk about her problems with Jan or maybe just have a chat to someone who was over the age of eleven. We had many chats before and shared a mutual interest in magic and things of that nature. When she did come we had a few beers and a chat and she wanted me to go out clubbing with her. I replied vaguely that I would and said good night. Don’t get me wrong, she was terribly pretty at thirty two and after four kids, man she still had the body of a nineteen year old. I admit I fancied her even, but I had made up my mind long ago not to get involved in other peoples affairs. They were technically broken up, but I knew that it was possible they could get back tomorrow and I was not going to be in the middle of it. Jan for one had a gun and my survival instinct came first. I didn’t see her again for another two weeks and when I did she told me she would be moving to the country shortly with the kids and minus Jan. As usual we got drunk, and then she invited me to visit her friends for a few lines of coke and I accepted. We started playing this game with a dice or something like that, but I was starting to sense a definite purpose in the whole set up. Jenny and her friend started exchanging meaningful looks and sure enough, after a few games, Jenny started subtlely running her hand up and down the inside of my thigh making me extremely horny. Tried to ignore it by keeping my eye on the game but when she started biting my neck I knew I had to resist. I could tell she was use to having her way and the old saying that Hell hath no fury like a woman refused swam around in my head. I put my hand on hers in a kind of compromise but then she went for my trouser zip and started pulling it down. It was time to say something and I tried gently to explain how I didn’t want to come between two people and that I wouldn’t be into a relationship because I was too much of a cunt. She suddenly announced she was going to be sick, and although it was a bit dramatic to be true, I played along and escorted her to the toilet. We got a taxi home and hardly said a word to each other.     It was another two weeks before she called around again. I was on ecstasy and starting on the beer. She apologized for the last night and I said something about everyone fucking up from time to time. Was going to eat those words. On ecstasy she looked especially ravishing and as the night went on we grew dangerously closer together. Had run out of beer and had to go downstairs for some more. She said she’d come with me which didn’t help as up until then I was protected from myself because there was people around me. It was dark downstairs and as soon as we got to the living room, she pressed me up against the wall and put her hand down my trousers. After that there was no hope for salvation. Fuck it. I picked her up, threw her on the bed and with the help of a bit of ecstasy we fucked for nearly ten hours. It was probably one of the best shags I had in a long time and it was only then did I see the attraction of adultery and the weakness of ecstasy.   She called again the next night and our sex was rather tame in comparison. I was tired and I fell asleep shortly after. The third night she called I was flat out and was barely able to get it up once. I was starting to get a flu, which wasn’t all that surprising. Running around like a looney all night naked. She asked me to give her a ring but wouldn’t risk it in case Jan was back and might answer. I needed some peace as she was now asking me to move to the country with her and the kids. It was time to lock myself in. And then, of all the times, as if I was a dog in heat that only females could smell, some Belgian woman, I had been with previously, turns up along with a friend. I had a fair idea what they wanted and it wasn’t for a chat. It was a fuckin nightmare. Talk about a feast or famine. I locked the door when I was alone and turned the stereo on full volume so I couldn’t hear anyone knocking. There were numerous drugs on the table but I couldn’t touch any of them, except maybe the odd joint and a fuck lot of beer. In some ways I suppose it was my ideal paradise. Women calling at my door, desperate for my body. All the drugs I could ever want sitting on the table. David Bowie’s The Man Who Sold The World blaring on the stereo and all I wanted was a peaceful smoke and a nap. The beauty of choice.          The day we decided to go to Czechoslovakia, was the day we left. We had a little pep talk to this crazy French dude, Pireque, as he had a car, and after five minutes, he was convinced. The Skullcrackers were going in Elka’s van, and we were following in Pireques. I was the official camera man, so I took a few shots of us getting in the van, getting in the car, losing the van before we even got out of Holland, driving along in a kind of ‘Easy Rider’ shot and before we were halfway through Germany the fuckin battery ran out. We were hoping to get a better reception in Czech as the last gig we played was a bit of a disaster. Some guy who vaguely knew us had invited us to play at his twenty first. We turned up and the place was crowded with all his friends. We had free beer, which didn’t help, as about halfway into the gig we were just about the only people left. We put it down to lack of taste, and well decided to expand our horizons. In the car with Pireque was Thomas, a new girlfriend of mine, Louise, and this poor young lad Tony. Tony had lived in Holland for a while, and like a few who came over, had lost his head a bit and had to return to England. He had also lost his passport, without which, it was next to impossible to find work in Holland. He had now returned with a fresh passport and that little bit more sane. He had only been back about three days and when he heard we were going to Czech, he decided to come along for the ride. He was still a bit shaky and withdrawn, but with a little bit of mothering, he’d be alright. Ha. We all had our guitars and had been told that Czech was quite good for busking. Louise and myself had these rice beads, in which you write the customers name on a grain of rice, stick it in a small glass tube containing oil and then stick a top on it. It may sound hard to write so small but if you use a technical pen and held the rice in a certain way, with a bit of practice it was easy enough to do. The only bastard was you had to be pretty sober, as been stoned or pissed, you could hardly write in normal size. It was quite a money earner if you could get it together. We were making more in three hours, selling to tourists, than the average Czech was making in a week.    Anyway, before we got to Czech, we had run into a few problems. We had finally arrived on the Czech border and they were checking everyone’s passports. The van had got safely through and I presumed we were going to have no problems either. Everyone had been reminded, before we left, to make sure they had them. Pireque, being a little zany, had been reminded at least three times. Naturally enough, when we finally arrived, two thousand miles down the road, Pireque had forgotten his. We tried at first to fob it off by handing all our passports at once but the customs dude was having none of it. "Four passport, five people. Pull over to side". It was time for a good plan as there was no fucking way we were turning back. At first we thought of smuggling him through the border, over a mountain or something, but something told us that the Czech army didn’t look like the kind of heads who asked questions first, and besides, we all knew how untogether we were, and that the chances of finding Pireque on the other side, despite any plan, would probably be remote. Then a brainwave hit me. All we had to do was for Tony and myself to walk through with our passports. Leave Tony on the other side with the van. Take his passport and return to Pireque, who looked vaguely like Tony, then drive to the next border about seventy kilometers away and try there with Tony’s passport. It was pure genius, and that’s where the problems often began. Tony didn’t mind to much as I don’t really think he had a really good grasp of what fuckin planet he was on, and we went ahead with the plan. We arranged to meet the others in Prague at central station and then we turned around and headed for the next checkpoint. I was truly knackered, as I had been driving all night, so I fell asleep in the back of the car. Prague, here we come, I thought as I nodded off.    I was awoken by some commotion and thought we had come to the border. What’s up, I said to Louise, who’s knee I was resting on. "Go back to sleep Flash", she replied. I sensed something was up and when I lifted my head I was amazed to see two East German police vans surrounding us. We had been stopped for speeding in the middle of nowhere. Pireque and Thomas were having a discussion with the police and it was lucky Thomas was with us as the police couldn’t speak a word of English. Thomas spoke German and the second question the police had asked, was whether we had a standard first aid kit. I could tell there was going to be trouble. Anything but the poxy bureaucratic German police force. I got out of the car after half an hour of listening to Thomas try to appease them somewhat, but when I flashed a smile they didn’t seem to amused. I thought at first, they were just going to give us a speeding ticket, and like that would be it, but the way they were acting now we could have been International terrorists on the way back from blowing up Berlin. We were now apparently waiting for the drug squad to arrive as they were the only ones qualified to search the car. I had a couple of tokes on me but I would easily be able to eat them if things got heavy. The fact that the car had been sprayed with a flower on one side and an anarchy symbol on the other I suppose did not exactly help our case, but I still thought a speeding ticket and that would be it. After another hour of waiting, listening to a load of German crap I couldn’t understand, I decided to go for a stroll and take a leak somewhere. I had got no more than five meters, when one of the officers levels a pistol at me and commands me to halt. "I go for piss", I said and motioned good humouredly to my pelvic area. He seemed a bit perplexed at this and motioned me to follow him with his pistol. He pointed to a spot and said something like go there. I was feeling a bit cheeky and asked him was it not against the law to piss in a public place. When he finally understood what I meant, through a series of comical gestures, he was not amused and told me rather angrily to hurry up. It was like trying to humour a rock, inhuman bastards. When the drug squad finally arrived, it turned out to be one man and a rather friendly Alsatian puppy. I suddenly remembered that I had stashed a bit of dope down the back of the chair, but for some reason, when I looked at the Alsatian puppy, I thought to myself not a chance. Sure enough they put the puppy in the car, the puppy without seeming to realise what an important mission he was on, checked it out in the way a puppy will check out anything. He found nothing but looked quite pleased to have been of service. If the police had checked it out themselves, they probably would have found it, but Germans being Germans... It was not to be the end of this fiasco however, and for some reason they decided to bring us back to the station. We had to wait by the car for another hour until a second van was called back. We could have all fitted quite nicely into the one van, but regulations being regulations. It was starting to turn into a nightmare, but there was worse to come. We arrived in some remote station in the mountains and, according to Thomas, every officer had a different opinion on what they were meant to do. Couldn’t understand a word. I started crashing out in the corridor when a nice young officer offered me a room with a bed. Seemed pretty nice until he locked the door. I was awoken at about two in the morning and we were all told we were being released. That is except for Pirque, who seemed to have a bit of an identity problem regarding his passport. Louise and myself decided to meet the others in Prague and get help while Thomas stayed with Pireque until the little misunderstanding was cleared. When we met up with Thomas again she told us that Pirique had confessed to a French translator in the hope that the truth would see him through. It didn’t. He was done for impersonation and deported, minus a car, back to France, while the word went out to apprehend Tony. So much for Genius.   So there was Louise and myself. Three in the morning. Stuck in what other circumstances would be described as beautiful scenic mountains. Still too near that poxy fuckin border. We were trying to hitchhike and there wasn’t a car in sight. God the Almighty Bastard, deciding he had gone a bit far, relented a little, and by some miracle, we managed to get a lift. Some young Germans on their way to a club. I felt a bit guilty considering all the abuse I had been giving the Germans up until then, but you could hardly blame me. Anyway we got to the border and tried to hitchhike from there. It was now about five in the morning and hardly a car had passed so we decided to rest a little. We only had one sleeping bag which we both shared and using a rugsack as a prop, we put up our crudely made sign for Prague, so if a car was going by, he might see it. Once we got into the sleeping bag we both felt rather horny. So there we were at the side of some road, a few miles into Czech, with the odd car light shining on us as we shagged the night away. I’ll never forget it man.    On arriving in the city itself, we were completely broke. We had spent the last of the funds getting from the border to Prague. Here we were in probably the cheapest poxy country in Europe and we hadn’t got a fuckin penny. I mean beer was something like eight pence and we couldn’t afford even a poxy loaf of bread. It was one of those days again. We went to the station to try and meet the others and waited there for about three hours. No one turned up and it wasn’t until then we were told that there was two central stations, one for buses and one for trains, and as you’ve probably guessed we had picked the wrong one. There was nothing for it but to try and sell some of our rice beads. After being moved on about three times by the police we managed to sell a couple, so we went for a much needed beer. We met some crusties in the bar and they were all going down to an open air rave in the countryside. It was been put on by Spiral Tribe, a famous traveling rave group, who made a living out of raves and drugs. It was about a hundred kilometers from Prague, but the train fares were so cheap it wouldn’t be a problem getting down there. The others had probably gone down as well and we figured we might meet them there. I was the cameraman for fucks sake. The train ride down was beautiful. It was night, and a full moon lit up the mountain scenery around us. The train stopped in every little town and was naturally full of Czechs, who did not seem very use to travellers. Myself and Louise were pissed stupid, sticking our head out the window as we passed in and out of tunnels cut into the mountain.    We arrived at our destination and traded a couple of rice beads with some of the Czechs in a pub to pay for the taxi to the rave. They told us they were all crazy up there, so we knew we were at the right place. When we got there it was fucking crazy. There was about five or six different rigs or stages and in the main one they had brought a whole MIG aeroplane and converted it into a DJ box. Strobe lights flashed everywhere and the whole scene looked like beautiful chaos. There was also about seven or eight hundred misfit crusty ravers bopping around to the sounds with mad deranged expressions. You could almost tell what drugs they were on by the faces they pulled and the way they danced. Almost someone from every different nation bopping around in this field in the middle of nowhere. The thing that cracked me up was all the local Czechs who came down to see what was happening. They were all dressed in a kind of traditional costume and the look of confusion and bewilderment on their faces was classic. I mean this was probably the first time they had seen what they probably imagined as intelligent Westerners and all they could see was a load of Crusties tripping out to the music and offering them drugs. It was fuckin bizarre.    We met up with a few Irish dudes, who straight away popped a much needed ecstasy down my mouth, and then passed a bottle of whiskey around to help it go down. As fate goes, I met up with them again in Amsterdam and they are still good friends to this day. Anyway, after an hour or two it was time for a little adventuring. Some band was having a few problems setting up their rig as they were off their faces on the opium tea they were selling. They had brought their gear and rig all this way and now they couldn’t seem to get it working. Reminded me a bit of the Scullcrackers. I spotted the problem and offered to help in exchange for some free opium tea. They agreed, and when I simply plugged one of the extension plugs in they looked a bit sheepish. But they kept to their word and I was well wrecked by the time I left them. I started dancing and was just starting to get really tranced out when I heard my name called out. The voice sounded familiar but I couldn’t work out who it was. At first I thought it was the drugs giving me some sort of audio hallucination, but when I turned around and met one of my old mates from home, I nearly fell over. He nearly did to, I mean here we were in the middle of nowhere, zonked out of our heads and like meeting each other. Simon, Renoir and myself had lived in Amsterdam when we were about seventeen, and like this, on top of all the drugs in my system, was fuckin awesome. There was even more freakiness to come, as the girl Simon was with was a sister of Louise’s ex-boyfriend. Out of eight hundred people, it was far out.    I awoke the next day and the sun was beaming down, so I decided to sunbathe. I had no swimming gear and decided to sunbathe hippie naked. It was well cool until a Czech army helicopter hovered above taking pictures of me, so I decided to go down into the town. There were two pubs there and they were all taken over by ravers. The locals didn’t know what to make of it but the barman copped on pretty quickly. The first day we were there the price of a pint was seven kronans and by the end of the week it was twenty five. Cheeky bastard. I wouldn’t mind but he did it with such a straight face and with only two pubs you could hardly argue. I was starting to worry about the Scullcrackers as there was still no sign of them, when for some reason I decided to pop my head out of the bar for a breathe of fresh air. No joking, right at that minute, who drives by but the Skullcrackers van. This was a really freaky place for coincidence. They had been to Prague and had ended up in the wrong station.(There is a God, and He’s a right bastard). They had, also miraculously, met up with Thomas and had gotten into a few problems in Prague. They had gone into a restaurant for a meal and for some reason, had decided to run off without paying the bill. Their official excuse was the waitress was really bad mannered, but knowing them I reckon they thought it would be an easy enough con. Of course, their usual lack of togetherness prevailed and they all left the restaurant at different times. Ben even returned, not thinking they were serious, and got promptly smacked by the owner. Tony got arrested down the road and in his panic thought they were German police, so he started confessing about his passport. Lucky for him they didn’t understand a word of English, so they just beat him up and threw him in an alley. They had picked the wrong restaurant, as the owner belonged to the taxi mafia, and by all accounts I had heard they were bad. They had even tried to introduce a mild shocking device in the back of their taxis for passengers who tried to argue with their very flexible fares. Now, half the taxi force were on the look out for Thomas and Karl and they were eventually cornered by a taxi dude carrying a metal pipe. He was just about to use it when another act of God descended from the heavens. It was unbelievable, he had parked his car on a corner and for some reason as he was approaching Karl, a car came out from nowhere and ploughed into the back of his taxi. The taxi driver ran back screaming and Karl and Thomas took their cue and ran. As I said, you should never mess with a white witch. Karl would like that.    The rave eventually was closed down by the local mayor, so we moved back to Prague and did a bit of busking and selling rice beads. The Skullcrackers, it not been the best of tours so far (they hadn’t played one gig), decided to try Switzerland. When they got through the border at Austria the Swiss wouldn’t let them in and when they went back to the Austrian border the Austrians wouldn’t allow them to re- enter. It took them about four hours until they came to a compromise agreement which basically meant that the Austrians would escort them back to the German border. It wasn’t long before they were back in Holland. Thomas, Louise, Tony and myself decided to stay in Prague with Simon for a bit to (pardon the pun) czech it out a little. I had been wandering alone on some backstreets when all of a sudden I hear this yell of "Fascist!". I turned around and saw about twenty youths running for me with murder in their eyes. I suppose it was the skinhead because I wasn’t waiting to find out and it was a lucky thing my body was still in shape or I’d probably be dead now. Tony had found some crusty mother to take care of him and as they both hadn’t got passports, they were going to sneak out through some mountain pass together. In the end we hitchhiked back and after three days found ourselves once again back in Holland.    A lot of heads who had travelled to Israel had returned to Holland. There was a lot of work there and they all seemed to have had a good time. Except, that is, for a mate of one guy who had travelled to some Middle Eastern country. He had made his money in Israel and decided to go on a holiday. He was there for about two weeks when he met some woman who invited him to sleep with her in the mountains. When he got there he was drugged and knocked out for about three days and when he awoke he was by himself. He checked to see if she had robbed anything in his rugsack and was a bit surprised to see that she hadn’t. He then noticed a pain in his side and when he looked down he could see crude stitch marks there. When he went to a hospital, they informed him that somebody had robbed his kidney. His fuckin kidney man. I mean there’s theft and there’s theft, poor fucker. The others in Israel were not quite as unfortunate. A lot of them had made money dealing and smuggling drugs as acid alone went for five times the price it was in Holland.    Drug smuggling was probably the most popular discussions in the squat as it was probably the easiest way of making money. It could also be the riskiest. One mate, Chelsea, had decided to go to Northern Ireland with a hundred trips and had been stopped by Dutch customs for a previous charge he committed two years ago. He had forgotten all about it but the Dutch computers hadn’t. He was taken to jail to serve two months and had luckily been able to stash the acid in the prison garden. Prison in Holland was supposed to be luxury compared to that of Britain and I remember hearing stories that you were allowed a prostitute or your wife to stay with you one night a month. The thinking here was that it would stop homosexual attacks and would allow prisoners to maintain their ties with their wives. Anyway when Chelsea got out he should have sensed the bad Karma and abandoned his trip but stubborn as he was he went ahead with it. When he got to Belfast, he got through the customs and was driving towards the city when he was stopped by a police check. There was quite a few police checks there but Chelsea panicked and jumped out of the car. He tried to run for it but was soon caught red handed with all the acid and he now had to do a six month sentence in Belfast. Some people are just not made to be drug smugglers.    The usual routes for smuggling were Holland to England, Holland to Germany, Holland to France and basically Holland to anywhere in Europe as it was the cheapest place to buy them. The worst customs were the French, who stopped half of the Euroline buses and boarded them with sniffer dogs. If they found anything on you, (or in you as it sometimes went), they would take you to the nearest bank, empty out your account and then dump you on the other side of the border. If nothing else I suppose, it was better than imprisonment. The way most heads got past this was to buy a car or a motorbike so if they were caught by the French there would only be a nominal amount in the bank. Just enough to make it worth their while.   In other Asian countries like India and Thailand you had to be well careful with the police. A common stunt there was for a dude to come up to you and sell you some dope. He would be in liaison with a cop who would wait down the street and when he stopped you and confiscated the dope, he would also ask you for a ridiculous sum of money. If you didn’t pay him you could end up in a prison of the stone age for up to ten years. If you were unfortunate enough to be found with heroin the sentence in Thailand was execution. Pretty heavy for a few toots. Germany’s penalty for smuggling acid was a manslaughter charge, but it didn’t really stop people taking the risk. Methods of smuggling included wrapping up the dope in a condom and then shoving it up your arse. An important tip here was to remember to pull the pubic hair back to normal as it was a give away to the customs. I suppose it would be. A more unusual and in some ways a more dangerous method was to swallow the substance. This was usually used for ecstasy. The advantage of this method was that unless they x-rayed you or held you for three days until you excreted it, there was no other way of been caught. Customs rarely used these procedures unless they had a tip off, in which case you were fucked no matter what you did. At first the method for swallowing pills was to use a condom and seal it up, but more times than it was worth to risk, the condoms would break open because of the bodies acid or the digestive tubes constantly grinding at them. A better method, and one only a clever junkie could come up with, was to wrap them in cellophane, burning the ends, like a sweet and then coat them in beeswax each time you had done a few wraps. You would end up with a tight capsule containing about five ecstasy’s each with about three layers of beeswax in them. The dude at the local herb shop could never fuckin work out why so many crusty bastards were buying so much beeswax. Anyway you could swallow about twenty capsules safely and the only thing you had to avoid was hot drinks that might loosen the wraps. With about one hundred ecstasy safely over the other side you could make a tidy little profit. Other methods shall remain in the strictest confidentiality.    One dude asked me to drive a car, full of hash, from France to England. He had fitted a false tank and like most salesmen, laboriously told me all the details of his devious mechanical feats. Naturally enough, I would be as safe as houses and that the chances of being caught were extremely remote. At the end of the trip I would received a handy sum, which admittedly, was quite good. What bothered me though, was if it was so fucking foolproof, then why the fuck wasn’t he doing it. To this he humbly replied, "I don’t want to go to jail". I thanked him for his offer and then left.    The Skullcrackers at this stage were really starting to break up. The whole squat for some reason was going through a heavy alcoholic period. Call it the September blues. Karls girlfriend had slashed her wrists and had written Karls name in blood all over her walls. It was bit melodramatic, but then again she was a fuckin looney. He had been going out with this little punk, Emma, from Tasmania and was getting on great with her, but she started to develop a heroin habit and decided to flee Holland for the sake of her mental sanity. She even broke down crying when the car took a wrong turn, and started screaming "Get me the fuck out of this fuckin country!", as if her very life depended on it. Maybe it did. This was not normal for her as she used to beat me up every morning when I got out of bed to the extent that one morning I had to tie her up with the hoovers extension lead and hang her out the window until she pleaded mercy. Even though we were on a main road no one would have helped her as they already considered the squat an unofficial looney bin. She probably even saved my life once when I had a drunken accident on the moped. She was on the back, and after much bullshit saying how capable I was she agreed to hop on. Anything she said to get me away from the pub as I had already almost got myself into two fights. Eventually I hit a barrier and went shooting off into the middle of the motorway. She saw it coming and jumped off. She peeled me off the road and took me home half unconscious. Eventually Karl went back to his original girlfriend and settled down again as the plans for the Skullcrackers to go to Dublin had fallen apart. Elka, the one who owned the van, decided to fuck off to France with Louise to go grape picking. Anto and Damien returned home with all sorts of promises, but when they came down in Ireland, they must have changed their minds. Ben, who had been getting overly fond of heroin and cocaine had also decided to return home, but not before he ripped the banks off first.     The scam was quite simple. All you needed was two people to make withdrawals at about the same time as the computers in the bank took about a minute to register each transaction. So one person would go into the bank, claiming to have lost his card (a passport would do), and the other would use the card in the machine in the wall. Basically you ended up with double the money you had in. Ben collected his and fled. Another scam was travellers checks and a lot of the heads who had been to Israel had defrauded these through claiming their loss, spending them and then receiving the insurance for losing them. Some people even made a living out of it. The best thing to have for any scam was to have a false passport. These could be bought easily enough in Amsterdam if you knew the places to go. You could also sell your existing one if you were ever really stuck. With a false passport you could make big money. One head I knew, dressed up in a suit and tie, rented a Mercedes on his false passport, brought it to a dodgy scrapyard and got half its value. It was pretty hard to get caught. I remember meeting this Irish dude, Tom, who had just returned from Australia courtesy of the Australian Government. He was trying to convince me to get involved in some scam or other in which I could make about fifty thousand guilders. Lets just say it involved guns and his track record wasn’t all that good. He had just spent five years in Australia for armed robbery, eventually being caught on his eight attempt, and the government, on his release had deported him. The way he spoke about prison sounded a bit too much like he liked it and well his plan wasn’t all that good either. I’ll give him this much though, he managed to rip me off. Fuckin cunt still owes me a tenner.    So with everyone gone it was back to me and Turps, by now the grandads of the fucking squat. We used our privileged position to the extent of taking the piss. We allowed people in if there was room on the one condition that they never complained about the noise. The stereo blared full volume all night long and the quality of the music depended on how pissed we were. I mean the same tape of Roy Harper (a kind of English Bob Dylan) played constantly for about three days and Turps was barely concious throughout the whole thing. Turn the fuckin thing off or even down a little and he would suddenly spring to life with thunder in his voice. He had a mate Dave, whom he was meant to be taking care of, as Dave had gone off the tracks a little. It was not all he was going to be off. He was a complete alcoholic and Turps, of all people, was trying to teach him temperance. Dave used to collect all the empty bottles to pay for his own beer and it was this that eventually brought his downfall. He had spotted a bottle on this dodgy looking roof, and fell through it trying to get it. When he managed to make it back to the squat everyone was off their heads. He complained about an aching back and Turps made a kind of bandage by wrapping a scarf around his neck and tying the other end to his waist. "That will keep your back straight", Turps said with an air of accomplishment, and Dave walked around the house with this fucking scarf for the next three days. It was not until he sobered up,(he couldn’t find any empties), that the pain really hit him. He went down to the hospital and ended up there for two months. So much for first aid.     I had managed to get my hands on a TV, and at first it was rather a treat. We had cable and MTV was on constantly. The only thing wrong was everyone used to sit and watch the fuckin thing all day and I rather felt we were losing a sense of identity. It came to a head one night when I was coked off my head and MTV announced it was Bon fuckin Jovi weekend. There was about twenty squatters looking at it and something inside me snapped. I picked the TV up and threw it out the window and if you’ve never seen a kind of special shock on peoples faces, I did. It was a bit of a Pink Floyd the wall copycat, but what the hell, I always liked that scene. The coke scene was getting rather big. We were freebasing every second night and do be warned it can turn you into a raving monster. We had started putting on raves in the squat and they were very popular. Where else could you go and get so completely fucked up without being thrown out. I even danced naked at one of them. Did wonders for the raves reputation. There was every drug under the sun there and well as I said anything went. The raves in the clubs were alright and the women at them were stunning. But you could end up chatting them up for about two hours until they turned around and said oh would you like to meet my boyfriend. I think they just got a kick fucking peoples heads up. The raves in Slobs consisted mostly of crusties who worked in the bulbs and were mostly from England or Ireland and like this was our cultural centre. Its pretty heavy really because out of all the raves I’ve been to all I can hardly remember very much. For a meaning of life, as it was, all I can remember is that I was off my head and having a good time. Bit weak I suppose but then again its better than sitting at home twiddling your thumbs.    At around this time I had bought a car. It was a yellow Fiat 127 and was named ‘The Yellow Submarine’ because we were always trying to avoid the ‘Blue Meanies’, and we were technically driving below sea level. The reason for avoiding the police was quite simple, I had no licence, no tax and no insurance, but, well I could drive. A few of the squatters and myself had found work in flower packing and like this was our transport. Naturally enough I had a few mishaps. I remember driving back from town completely stoned out of my head and it was a very misty night. I couldn’t see a fuckin thing and the cars ahead of me looked like hazy spaceships and they were getting hazier. I was just about to crash into the back of one of them, when once again my Guardian Angel interceded and came to my rescue with a simple message: "turn the fuckin wipers on!". Miraculously, my vision cleared and I made it back home unharmed. Another time I was racing ‘The Ketamine Kid’ down the motorway and when I came to a corner the brakes or something failed. The fact that I was pissed stupid and took the corner in fourth gear had nothing to do with it. Fuck man, stories like that could frighten off my paying passengers. Anyway I hit some sort of traffic light and smashed it to pieces. The car didn’t do too well either as the door was crumpled in on top of me and I was covered in glass. A car on the other side stopped and turned on its hazard lights, fearing the driver might be dead. Three thoughts ran through my head very quickly. Oh fuck, about three thousand guilders worth of damage to public property and like lets get the fuck out of here. I reckon the car stood still for about five seconds against the traffic light and then disappeared like lightning. The door was hanging off its hinges creating a spark effect on the road and I was lucky I met no cops along the way.  One dude, Kevin, who was staying at the squat was even more unlucky when it came to cars. He had saved up his money for months and bought a refurbished ambulance. He parked it outside the squat and had it there no longer than two weeks when some cunt came along and robbed all his wheels. He couldn’t afford to buy new ones so he sold it to a car dealer down the road. It was a bit too coincidental for Kevins liking as this dude turned up at his doorstep looking to buy the car just three days after the wheels had been robbed and they were the only wheels in that area that were stolen. I suspect it was some junkie, probably Wayne, who made a deal with the car dealer for a small profit but whatever the case Kevin was forced to sell. He waited a few more months until he had enough to buy another car and when he had, he brought a few of the squatters out to give it a test drive. It was a nice car and we all got stoned out of our heads in the back. Kevin looked delighted with it and we had got no further than ten kilometres when we needed some petrol. The dude who sold it to Kevin had hardly left a drop in the tank. Anyway we filled it and were soon off again when the car started jolting back and forth. We had got no further than about three kilometres from the petrol station when the car suddenly stopped. The problem was quite simple, we had filled it with petrol when it was a diesel engine. Kevin was forced once again to sell. It didn’t stop there. He had bought another car with a smashed door and had gone to the scrapyard to buy a new one. He had left it in the squat for about two days, meaning to put it on, when someone else robbed it. If that wasn’t bad enough, when he took the car out the brakes failed and he ended up crashing into the back of another car. Kevin gave up the idea of buying another one.    The day we got our eviction notices was the day ‘Ivan The Horrible’ turned up. Ivan was a part time mate from home who had left his job and decided to visit me in Holland. He just suddenly turned up without any notice and said "alright Flash". His ambition in life was to become a rich obnoxious cunt. He said "I’m a cunt already, now all I have to do is become rich". His appetite for coke equaled mine and I knew there was going to be trouble.    The eviction notices were not exactly a surprise, but like we just didn’t really take them very seriously. They had given us a month to get out and it was now approaching winter. All the campsites were closed and there wasn’t a lot of squats around that had room. There was one that was opened by Dutch students but they were such a pack of wankers living there it would be torture. I mean they had formal interviews to see if they would allow you into the squat and the people from Slobs for some reason were black listed. They all sat round playing bongos and hippie shit on their guitars and were all into this group orientation thing. If it was for real I might give them some credit but they were basically a pack of tossers. One couple who wanted to move in with their kid were refused on the grounds that the room they wanted was needed for a games room were the squatters could practice their juggling and skating and other boring crusty toys. This New Age thing was really getting to piss me off. They were a lot of what you’d call plastic squatters and in Holland, and you could almost tell what they were going to say about any subject. Get them talking about the merits of vegetarians and then get the fuck out of the room. Boring, right on, dress the fuckin same, I’m so alternative, society is corrupt and I’m opting out, where’s my dole etc. I could almost see their parents watch them as they ‘left for good’, thinking, don’t worry dear, this is just his rebellious period, he’ll be back in a year to finish his college. The scary thing was, the parents in most cases were mostly right. Hard drugs were banned from their squat and basically there was no way I would live there without killing someone.   Q So what was going to happen next to Slobs was anyones guess, and the underlying feeling was that not many people there were straight enough to give a damn. We were the sort of people who kinda let things happen. Forward planning was for business people and like weren’t we all kind of blessed with a survivors eh... blessing. To be fair though there were a few attempts made.    There was an attempt on some factory which we thought was empty, but in fact turned out to have a workman busily working away in it. It was a bit of a surprise and a serious disappointment, considering the rather SAS way we approached the building. Firstly we cut a hole in the fence the night before and got up at the crack of dawn to begin our assault. We then climbed through an open window on the first floor and we were in. Once inside there were cries of joy at the size of the place and I could already see the sneaky bastards of the group already claiming their space for their room. The surprise on meeting that lone workman was rather comical, as technically we could be done for breaking and entering, but the state we were in, ie. dress and the rather schoolboy attitude we adopted, seemed to convince the dude we were genuinely looking for a place. Another attempt to find a place led us to this empty looking house in an estate and we decided to break it by night. All went well with the door and all that, but when we finally got it open we suddenly realised the whole back wall had been taken away and it now looked like a fuckin Hollywood stage prop. Someone was out to get us.    We had gone to a lawyer and the best he said he could do was delay eviction for about a month. The reason the council wanted it closed down was because it was built on the main road coming into the town and it looked a bit of an eyesore. The Dutch liked things neat, and like we weren’t. I decided to have a protest to challenge the eviction as the place was just too good to go. I mean they were originally council houses and they were still being used by the homeless. I remember hearing about these dudes who went up to the council to ask for a place to live and the council handed them two cardboard boxes. They used them that night in a place the council recommended and while they were asleep, some bastards tried to burn them out. There was some cunt in the council and he was on my hit list.   My plan was simple enough. If we weren’t going to win in court, it was time to get heavy. The squat was built by the side of the main road and was a great place for an advertisement board. I wanted to hang a huge banner from the top of the building pronouncing the council as fascists. Part of the campaign included hanging two Nazi flags on either side to arouse some reaction. It was an almost definite way to get into the papers and from there on with the help of public support we could at least put a halt to the councils plan for at least another year, or at least until it was spring and the campsites opened. I also thought of ringing MTV, because I thought they might like the story and had a mad host of other media plans, but admittedly these were when I was coked up. Anyway we decided to have a group meeting with all the squatters and I was asked to speak. Unfortunately I had gone a bit over board on coke before,(it was one of those weeks), and was bit too over the top to convince any one of the merits of the Nazi campaign. A lot of the squatters thought the flag could be mistaken and that we could get firebombed by people thinking that we were in fact fascists, and I suppose they had a point. Only one out of fifty voted for it and everyone there seemed defeated already. After that I said fuck it and basically allowed everyone to fend for themselves. Pity in some ways as it could have been a lot of fun.  Through all this time I managed to get a job working in one of the tulip factories. It was good money and even better when you weren’t payin rent. Work consisted of wrapping the plants in cellophene, sticking a label on and packing them in a box. It didn’t require intelligence and the state my head was in it was probably a good thing. Rent a robot and none of this suit and tie shag the receptionist type of thing. The dust from the plants was pretty heavy and dangerous as well. But with all the other types of dust up my nose I could hardly be too concerned. Most of the heads I worked with were of similar age, the same rough origin and the same drugged up fucked up state. They preferred hiring us to the Dutch as we worked faster and they could fire us at will. The Government tried a scheme one year with just Dutch people and only a fifth of our output was achieved. I worked along with this guy named Jed, a tall skinhead about the age of forty who was originally from North England. He was a grumbling bastard about nearly everything. An unashamed sexist that the woman had to put up with. Fact was a lot of them liked him. He was the big brother of the factory and frustrated heads constantly sought his no nonsense advice. His typical spiel would go something like this.  "Take those blacks Flash. Always complaining. They think they have it hard. Where the fuck where they when we went through the industrial revolution, when the ordinary sod had to go through the real shit. The working class then had it just as hard as them and they don’t go on about it. Complaining about this and complaining bout that, but it dosen’t stop them coming over does it? We fuckin built the country with our own blood and sweat and all they can fuckin do is give out". He was equally adamant when it came to the subject of women, especially wives. He had been married and even had a few kids but was now divorced. Whenever the radio came on with a soppy song he would put his eyes up to heaven and sigh. "That fuckin radio. All they play is crap. Its for housewives sitting at home in their slippers who are probably out shaging your next door neighbour while your still in work. And when you come home they complain you never have time for them and then as if the two go hand in hand they fuckin start going on that you’re not making enough money to keep them happily sitting on their fuckin arses. You can’t fuckin win with the bitches. But you try to argue, you’d be wastin your time". He cracked me up with his moaning and it made the day go a lot quicker. Like reading The Sun or something. The other guy beside me was a Dutch dude in his fifties who had also been divorced. He now released his sexual tensions on a number of call girls that came to his house on the weekend. They were expensive, he said but not as expensive as a wife. Typical Dutch thinking. Besides he said, I have the choice, its not the same face all the time. If I want a young girl I can have it. If I want a pair of women I can have it. And I don’t have to pay them maintainence for the rest of their lives. One bar I used to go for a quiet drink was for some reason full of divorced men. It was a huge statistic like nearly nine out of ten, and nearly all of them used call girls. It was big business.   It was now the last week of Slobs and for some reason everyone took it as a week to celebrate. Raves were been held every night and we were smashing in the windows and breaking down the walls. We had a mad bonfire in the back, but on the second night the police came and put it out. There was one old granny who lived in the middle of the squat for the last seven years and she refused to leave. "Its wonderful here", she was quoted in the paper,"all the young people from all over the world, living life to the full. They even come in and help me with my gardening and shopping. When asked did she not object to the noise or the dirt, she replied, "Well there not that dirty and they never dump anything in my garden. When I went away for a week a couple of them looked after my cats. So its a bit of give and take. Its better than living in one of those council granny flats were you might as well be dead. At least here there’s lot of life here and if I have any problems with the squatters I just tell them. She gave us good press coverage but unfortunately it wasn’t enough.    I decided to go out for a drink with Ivan and met Karen in the pub. She invited me back to her apartment so I took the car. Pretty pissed but managed to make it there safely. Ivan took the car back. Should have realised how wrecked we were. Ivan had only been here for a week and had one minor problem on the way back. In his drunkenness he had forgotten that the Dutch drive on the right hand side of the road, and had gone ten kilometres down a motorway the left. But he got home alright. Cursing about the mad Dutch drivers. I invited Karen to the last weekend of the squat. We were going to go out in style.    A heavy session the night before. About two hours of sleep. Drove to work but when I got there, I didn’t feel too well. In fact, I felt suicidal. My head was going through the what’s the point in living syndrome. Typical drug depression. This one was a particularly bad one. Went for a break in the canteen and remained unusually silent. On the second cup of tea I knew I was going to puke, so I ran for the toilet and exploded. I felt a little better but the depression was still there and after about half an hour working I threw my apron down and started marching out. The plan at the time was to just get in the car and drive south until I ran out of petrol. After that, well, I wasn’t quite sure. Some little part inside forced me to make a weak excuse for leaving, like " I have to sort out some legal matters, call you in the morning". I don’t think he understood a word but at least it was something. The vibes were not with me at all that day and it was not until I got into the car I began to calm down a little. I decided to go to the squat for a joint and I was suddenly pulled over by a police checkpoint. The policeman said something to me in Dutch and I told him I couldn’t understand, so he translated in English. I had been doing sixty five in a fifty kilometre zone. Fuckin hell. He asked me for my driving licence and insurance papers, both of which I hadn’t got. I told him they were back in the squat and gave him my passport instead. He checked the car out on a computer in his car and then informed me I had no insurance. "I thought it was insured until the end of the month". "Yes", he said, "the end of last month". Thought then I was fucked. "I was just on my way to check it out", I replied rather weakly. He luckily turned out to be a decent enough cop. Gave me a speed ticket and asked me to produce my insurance by the end of the week. "I will ignore the fact you have no wing mirrors, but I would advice you to get some", he said with a smile, and with that I drove off. When I went down to the police station to pay my speeding fine, I changed the name of the car owner to another squatter and explained to the cops I had sold the car. They seemed happy enough with this arrangement and I was lucky to have gotten away with it at all. Put me off coke for at least five hours, but it was now the last weekend of Slobs and it was happening.    There were hundreds of people from all over at the rave in Slobs as it was the last one there was going to be. I made a lot of money selling ecstasy and coke and was off my head on the proceeds. We had all moved into one house as our old houses were being knocked down one by one and the house we were in now was one of the last on the corner. It was a bit cramped, but at least it gave us the chance to get together and at least start discussing where the fuck we were going to live next. This weekend however, no one could think straight. It was our stern duty to get wrecked and give the squat a good farewell.    It was a Sunday, that bit I can remember. My head shook and my heart fluttered wildly. The five E’s and the gram of coke that I had done the night before, was starting to wear off and my body was starting to have its say in the punishment. The head wasn’t up to much either and all it could manage in terms of verbal communication was things like "wow, man its really like dayish outside. Is that tea man? What? Who? Oh yeah". Karen sat beside me and we somehow managed to go to bed together. We were mutually wrecked and sex was a joke. Not the sort of thing to discuss the next morning. Monday, yeah something about Monday. I started on some downers, a couple of Valium and Lithiums that Saint Wayne had kindly given. Apart from scag, they were probably the nicest way to come down. Within an hour I was completely unconscious.    Somebody was shaking me and shouting something about smoke. I replied that it was under the bed and fell asleep again. They kept shaking me sayin somethin about fire. I gradually focused on Karen standing over me looking terrified. "Flash, Flash there’s something burning, can you smell it? I looked at her dreamily and pulled her back to the bed. "Its probably someone cooking or something", and started to nod off again. "Flash, there’s a fuckin fire next door, look!". At first I thought she was being paranoid because she was in hospital for three months with burns when the other squat burned down, but when I turned around I could see a flicker of flame coming through the cracks of next doors wall. "Right", I said to Karen, "I’ll just get my gear together and then we’ll investigate it ". I sat up and poured a glass of whiskey. "Don’t worry", I said confidently, "I know fires. Even if its really bad we probably have at least another ten minutes to get out safely, so just chill out and be calm. Panic causes lives ". I said this in a dreamy laugh while still sipping the whiskey. On hearing this and looking at my rather placid face, Karen went hysterical. "Flash, get the fuck out now", and with that she ran screaming down the stairs. Thought she was going a bit over board but when I looked at our wall, it was on fire. Good job I’m trained in these matters, I thought to myself and pulled a rag over my mouth. The smoke had filled about a third of the room and I was crawling on the floor, thinking myself very clever with the knowledge that smoke rises. I was still valiumed out of my head and didn’t really take the imminent possibility of death very seriously. Grabbed all my gear and the bottle of whiskey and went down to the second floor where the common room was. Everyone was gone and the lights were out. Opened the window and looked out on the road. Hundreds of people gathered outside looking at the spectacle and two fire engines were fighting to put it out. The house beside me was blazing, but the firemen were doing a good job. Some policeman shouted to me to get out. So I told him to chill out and clear a space below as I had a few things to get. Looked around and the first thing I saw was the couch. Could come in useful in our next squat, I thought to myself, and then threw it out the window. Next came a table, a few matresses, a heater, a lamp and several pots and pans. Then grabbed my guitar and whiskey and started singing ‘Yellow Submarine’ to the crowd below. Well it wasn’t every day you get such a receptive crowd. When oppurtunity knocks and all that. When I finally came out the front door one of the police hit me over the head with his baton and called me a stupid fucker. He was probably right but all I could do was smile hazily. Found out later that two of the other squatters had been smacked over the head trying to rescue me and well I must admit I felt a tinge of shame.         We slept in one of the abandoned squats and had about two hours sleep before we were woken up by the riot police. They had been called in case there was any resistance but the only resistance they met, was trying to get us out of bed. We moved all our gear to a squat down the road and I asked the police for some help to move the Yellow Submarine. I had lost the keys in the fire and the door and steering wheel were locked. We managed to move it by towing it a bit and then bouncing it to the side. Two cops fell over in the process, but they took the whole thing in good spirit. I mean they had been called in for a potential riot and now they were bouncing an uninsured car down the road with a bunch of hungover squatters. The guy who had started the fire had fucked off. He had lived in Slobs with his kids and constantly made complaints about the noise. He was basically a cheap bastard with his own business who had lived there to avoid paying rent. We had a confrontation with him in the summer and he waited until the last day of the squat to carry out his sneaky and potentially lethal revenge. Before he moved out, he poured petrol all over his house and then lit it on fire when night approached. If I ever catch that bastard, I’ll break his fuckin legs.   The new squat was a mess when we arrived. Not alone did it need a lot of fixing it was also overfull. Fourteen people in one little room was a bit too much. We had tried out this place which was well cool, but stupidly, did not check the date it was last used. The law in Holland for squatting a place was that it had to be empty for at least a year. This basically meant that if the landlord came in to change a lightbulb in that year, you could not squat it until another year had passed. We didn’t exactly have a year, so we decided to take a chance. Stayed there for a week and called up the squat police. They informed us that the owner had been using the place about eleven months before and we were evicted. We tried to make a deal with the dude who owned it but he wasn’t what you’d call over enthusiastic.   Wayne and myself had found another place and opened it that night. The next morning we brought all the squatters down and called the squat police. In some ways this was a mistake as some Turkish dude had offered us the place until spring if we didn’t call them. He had applied for the house to the council and didn’t want us to complicate matters, but he had come too late with his offer and the squat police had been already called. When they arrived there was quite a crowd out side the house. Half the Turkish community and some woman from the council, who had come to translate for them. "This is the house of my brother", and so on until in the end, the squat police threw us out.      I had managed somehow to get a load of money together and decided to blow it all on coke and go down to the pub with Ivan. It was pretty empty and there was little chance of finding female company, so we sat down and started drinking. Some girl with a pierced nose came in and sat down beside me. I was feeling a bit obnoxious and the first thing I said to her was "oh, is your clitoris pierced too?". Much to Ivans surprise, she seemed to go for the rough approach and invited me back to her apartment. We had great sex, although I had extra help with all the drugs in my system, and when we awoke she had missed work. She decided to get pissed instead and gave me some money to go down to the shops to get some beer. When I got out her door I kept thinking to myself, wow that was pretty freaky, and it wasn’t until I was on my way back from the shop that the problem occurred. I was so busy day dreaming when I left her house that I had now forgotten completely where she lived. I tried a few doors without success and in the end said fuck it and went down to a coffee shop to get stoned. If she ever sees me again, she’ll probably kill me.    It was about this time I had a little accident. I had gone, despite protesting, to this roller rave, which was basically a roller skate disco with rave music. It was alright until I got involved in a pile up and landed full speed on one hand. The pain was almost unbearable and I knew I had broken something. I went to work the day after and couldn’t do my work properly, so I went to the boss in the hope that he’d let me off for a couple of weeks. He didn’t, but instead gave me a job were I only had to use one hand. So much for that. It was not until another week that I decided to go to a hospital to get it checked out.   It was here I met this mad dude who had apparently been fighting in Bosnia. He told me his father was from there and he had come back to Holland to get his bullet wounds treated and to get a few new recruits. He had started off in the regular army, but later moved to the mercenaries. He was getting one hundred marks for every man he shot and invited me to come along. I told him to fuck off and then went in to the x-ray room. I found out that I had completely broken two fingers and would have to be in a plaster for about two months. When I went into work the next day and showed the boss the plaster he looked a bit embarrassed and let me off work for two months with full pay. Apart from the plaster on my arm it was fuckin cool, but it was also when I started getting into my Heroin phase.   

It was a gradual process really. I had been doing too much coke and far too many ecstasys, and well the comedown wasn’t always great fun. At first I started taking valiums and libriums to pull me down, but when they weren’t available. Heroin nearly always was. The new squat was full of heroin heads. Fuck it was like living in central station. There was Vinnie, a Scottish dude, who never let his habit get the better of him. He sold a few E’s and did a little smuggling to make some cash, and when work was available he’d take it. He was pint sized with a long ponytail and a constant grin on his face. He had a little Jack Russell puppy called Nobby, and he took him everywhere he went. He even had a little pouch for him on his motorbike, and had brought him all the way from Spain where he had found him when he was begging. Nobody’s dope was safe with Nobby around as the dog was a proper little junkie. He’d gobble up coke, hash, grass, heroin and even started chewing on a grass plant. Vinnie encouraged him by giving him a bit of grass each morning, and the dog would doze off in the chair for the rest of the day. He was very much like all the other squatters in that way, and his doped out expressions weren’t far off either.  

Johnny, having arrived back from India was now waiting on his welfare to come through. He had come back with his girlfriend but they were now broken up. When I saw her for the first time I thought she was one strung out H head on the way under, but I later found out she was suffering from dysentry or one of those mad Indian diseases. She was skinny as hell and could hardly eat. It lasted about two weeks and fuck did you lose weight. Anyway she decided to return home to mummy and get all fattened up, and I think she also wanted to call it quits with Johnny. He was a bit broken hearted and with no money he used to spend most of his time painting and ranting about some Indian god of chaos. He reckoned the thing he missed most about India was going to a barber and getting a real shave. Two thousand miles for a shave and malaria. Not bad, John, not bad.

Waiting on your welfare could be a real bitch. The Dutch expected you to have money saved for such an occasion and if you didn’t, well, only the desperate would hang around to wait for it. It was a good deal though. If you worked six months in the year you got seventy five percent of your last wage for the six you weren’t working. Which meant if you made say five hundred guilders, they paid you about four hundred. A hell of a better deal than fifty quid a week back home. It was even better for the seasonal workers because they could only really work about six months anyway, and then wait for the next season to begin. The season times were about Jan to March and September to December so you were off for Christmas and Summer still getting paid. A lot of them went abroad and got someone to sign their montly slip for them. You didn’t even have to turn up at the counter, you just sent it in by mail. Lot fuckin better than two weeks in the sun once a year, more like four months in Thailand getting four times the local wage and living like a king. Who are the losers now? But as I said it took a while and the dole office was trying to clamp down on it. One dude who lived in the squat was refused on some ground or other so he took his five year old son into the office and they both stripped naked. The press was called, well he had given them a tip off and it wasn’t too long before he got his money. Some heads I met had managed to claim three or four separate doles from different countries, but then again they were hardly the type that could barely make it down to the shop for another crate before the damn things shut.  

Turps was now well into the heroin scene too. For the first two months he gouged out on the couch and boasted about how he had given up the drink. But he didn’t really have to try to hard as every time he had a couple of beers he’d get sick. He finally decided that the heroin was becoming a problem, ie. he couldn’t afford it. Became addicted to methadone instead. But then again at least with methadone he could drink.    Not far behind him, I was now getting sick pay and had fuck all else to do all day but get wrecked. Promised myself I wouldn’t touch the stuff, but then again I promised myself not to do a lot of things. Nearly always a sign you really want to. It was all around me and I decided if it was ever a time to try it, it was now. It was better than spliff for bringing you down and the high you got off it at times was fucking amazing. Remember taking a couple of toots in my bedroom one night when all the candles were out. Got this mad trancy, in touch with my soul trip. Admittedly hard to describe. Looked around and imagined the candles on, and as if by magic the whole room lit up. It was like my whole will controlling the universe. Then slowly I’d come down again. You could lie there for hours, still as fuck, and just kind of drift. When you finally snapped out of it the only real memory you had was that it was nice and peaceful, and you’d like to do it again. Wasn’t like tripping, but rather like good hash multiplied by a hundred. It also had its shortcomings. Dosen’t everything?    Remember one morning getting up and going out for an early morning drink, and after one pint, I felt a bit bloated. Started walking down the high street. Full of people. Suddenly I broke into a violent puking fit. All over the road. Buckets and buckets of luminous puke poured out of my mouth and nostrils, and everybody on the street just stared and then walked hurriedly on. I knew then I had a bit of a problem. Then there was the time this girl I met at a rave, called in to me the next morning, and the first thing I did when I sat up, was have a toot. It tended to put me at ease because it turned off some part of your brain, that actually gave a fuck about what you were saying in the first place. Anyway, about five minutes after having a toot, I stopped talking and sprang out of bed. "Scuse me for a minute", I said politely, and then puked into a plastic bag reserved for such purposes. Apologized. Continued talking. Started to get another toot together. "That first one didn’t go down to well". Chuckle.     

As it happens it was quite a normal reaction to the stuff. For the first month or so, pukings quite common as the body’s not used to it. After about three months of constant use the habit really starts kicking in. Wayne claimed it kept you younger looking, as for some reason it slowed the body metabolism down, but if younger looking meant you had to either lie around on a fucking couch all day, or run around looking for your next fix, you might as well be an old bastard anyway. I couldn’t honestly say I’d never try it again, so I made up my mind to leave it alone till I’m sixty. Something to live for. I suppose.   

Vinnie was looking angry when I entered the common room. This was pretty surprising for the mellow Vinnie. At first he looked at me suspiciously. Thought the better of it and decided to tell me what was on his mind. A thousand pills had been robbed from his bedroom and he was not too happy. All fingers pointed to Wayne and all Vinnie needed was proof. It was a simple case of elimination. Unless someone was stupid enough to break into the squat. There was little chance it was someone else. Vinnie was no fool and the first place he tried was the clinic were Wayne and all the other junkies went to get their prescriptions. He bribed a few junkies with a bit of H, to see if anybody had been offering any cheap esctasy. Surprise surprise. Waynes name came up. Vinnie confronted Wayne, and Wayne, naturally enough, denied all charges. Vinnie then decided to get Waynes legs broken professionally. Wayne. Also having a guardian angel. Did not turn up at the squat when he was supposed to. But offered instead to meet Vinnie down in the pub. Someone had tipped him off and when Vinnie confronted him he claimed he found the pills down the bottom of the squat stairs. Vinnie told him to fuck himself and Wayne reluctantly handed him the pills. Wayne was then thrown out of the squat, but returned shortly after when everyone was strung out for a fix.   

In fairness to most of the other squatters. They could more or less keep their habit together. A lot of them had jobs and held them down. The secret was not to be a greedy bastard, but to keep yourself at a set dose. It was harder said than done and were it not for the financial restraints, quite a few of them would have ended up as bad as Wayne. If God hadn’t kept me poor for the last few years I’d probably be dead. Took a certain personality to keep it together, and I didn’t have it. One dude who used to call, was Old Man Yan. A heroin addict for about forty years, who had only now, at the age of sixty, managed to give it up. A fuckin nut who still thought he was in the army. He wore combat fatigues and always carried some weapon or other. He lived not far from the squat and the odd time would bring us a duck or two he had robbed from the park lake with the help of a fishing net. As I said he always thought he was in the war and it was this attitude that probably kept him alive for so long. He was not the type of person you could sit with very long as he’d suddenly burst into irrelevant story about how the Antarctic walrus catches seals or something. For some reason nearly all of these stories would end with, "and then it breaks their neck. Snap." This of course would be accompanied by all the movements and he seemed especially pleased when he got to the part that went snap. I could never really work out what the fuck he was talking about, and nobody else could either, but as he was pretty harmless bloke, he was tolerated by most for at least fifteen minutes. Except by Johnny. But that was no surprise. Arrogant fuck.

Everyone was out looking for work, and as I was still getting paid for being sick, so I gave some of the squatters a loan of the ‘Yellow Sub’. Only way I might get some of the money back those bastards owed me. Warned them to only drive it at certain times and to make sure they had it back by five. Useless hippie fucks. Got stuck in the pub and didn’t start trying to head back until about eight. Could tolerate that, just about, but what I couldn’t was when the bastards came back at two in the morning minus the fuckin car. The tight fisted cunts neglected to put any petrol in it and as they were heading home the car ran out of juice. Stopped on the side of the highway. It wasn’t soon after the helpful police force decided to come along to see what was up. When they found the car had no insurance. They towed it away. When I went fuckin loopy the cheeky bastards started calling me a heartless bastard as the police had detained them for two hours. Fuckin wow man. Still haven’t paid me back the hippie fucks. Like they would and all.

Hank, the poor dude with the prostitutes, finally fell in love again to an English girl over the phone. They then met each other face to face, and Hank decided to live with her in Wales for a little while. He rang me up and told me he’d be coming over to collect some stuff and I told him I could make his journey worthwhile. It was around November and in Wales that meant mushroom season. Magic mushroom season. For some reason the mushrooms couldn’t be found in Holland and the only ones they could get their hands on were mushrooms from Mexico, which were alright, but nothing compared to the English and Irish ones. They were small little brown things and the head of them looked like a nipple. If you took about fifty of them you would get a mad high very similar to acid. They didn’t taste the best, so most people brewed them and made tea. Hank had a friend in Wales who had collected thousands and had dried them out and it was the one drug you could actually bring in to Holland and make a good profit. Told him to bring a kilo as there was little chance of being stopped at customs. Like who brings drugs to Holland.  

The Ketamine Kid and myself teamed together and began selling them at raves. They went down pretty good. Got the same price as hash weight for weight and when we made the money back, we just started handing them out. The Ketamine Kid had a big mushroom on the side of his hat so everyone would know what he was selling. Advertisement pays. It was at one of these outside crusty raves were I first tried ketamine. Fuckin weird stuff. It was originally used in World War Two as an anaesthetic but I’d say in the middle of a war field it was probably be the worse kind of drug to take. Christ if things weren’t bad enough. Other heads reckoned it was a drug for animals. But hippies being hippies were never the most reliable of folk to tell you anything. Whatever the case, snorted a huge line and felt the affects hit me almost immediately. I had been arguing with some dude before I took it and when it suddenly got a grip on me I found I couldn’t talk any more. Left the tent I was in and started to take a stroll to check out the visuals. Felt this mad weight in my legs like I was somehow sinking. The world then became a blur of colour and then the sky suddenly turned upside down. All I could think of when I saw this happen was, wow that’s a bit cheap. Sat at the side of a canal for about half an hour. Incapable of communicating with anyone. Including myself. When I finally snapped out of it I ran back to the tent and did an enormous line of coke. My head was such a mess I needed to straighten my head out again. Decided to head for the bar and have a beer or two. It was one of those converted trucks that some together heads got together. There was nearly always an air of snobbery as to who had the best rig or the best attitudes or who was on the bus or off it. Fuckin made me sick. I stated my politics as simply as I could. I wanna get off my head. Anyway I got to the bar and there was some crusty looking girl behind the counter. Nice looking and all, but she had this horrible stuck up pissed off face on her which did no wonders for my already contemptuous coke buzz. Three guilders a beer didn’t help much either. If you don’t want it, fuck off, she replied. Fuckin rip off, I snarled as I took my beer and with that I was barred. Barred man! From a fuckin New Age Festy Bar. Forget society. Boy, did I have problems. And the fucked up thing about it was I knew it could have gone another way. She could have said something like why didn’t you buy them before you came you hippie bastard. Then I would have smiled and offered her a line of coke for style. Strange world. There was about ten different rigs there pumping out the sounds and this was to be the last party there before they closed the site down. The council claimed they were going to make a new port, but in reality they just wanted to get rid of the travellers that were staying there. To make matters worse they were closing another site in Amsterdam called the Gevelweg, which was a real pity as it was a fuckin excellent site.

Every sort of lunatic lived there and there was a great sense of community. Buskers, travellers, jugglers, drug dealers, car thieves, you name it. They were fuckin art pieces in themselves, which was quite ironic considering the amount of money the Amsterdam council spent on art. Leave a few heads in peace on a bit of wasteground, that was a different story. One dude I met there when I was tripping really freaked me out. He had this mad grin and had travelled all around South America. He went to light up a smoke and his hand started waving madly from side to side. When he finally gained control of it again, he apologized and claimed that his arm had been voodoed, and it occasionally got possessed. Well he believed it. Fuck. One guy tripping at the party had decided to get some peace and trip out on looking at the stars. He found an empty field and lay down in it. Just as he was starting to relate with the cosmos, a runaway car with a bunch of smashed hippies, ran him over. So much for peace.      

A bit of peace is what was needed, and I felt it was time for a bit of a holiday. Too much drugs. Smoking H every day. Renoir had come over on a holiday, and when he got back, he needed another one. Got so coked out that his brains were a scrambled mess when he left. Thomas had invited me to Spain and I knew if I hung around the squat much longer, might never leave.    Getting down there proved to be a bit of a problem. I was starting to feel that Holland was full of mischievous elves weaving confusion spells and vampiring my energy. There were other reasons. I prefer this one. Elves are glamorous, elves are magic, but no one ever said that elves are nice. Ask Terry Pratchett. Booked a bus and then cancelled it for another week, as after I had booked it I kind of suffered some sort of shock syndrome. Leaving? As in not here any more? As in get things together? No more drugs? Fuck that man, I need another week. The next week came. Had this bright idea to get coked up to stay awake all night, so I wouldn’t miss the bus in the morning. Even simple shit was becoming a problem. Went down to the pub. Said my goodbyes, and all in all things were going according to plan. Even made it to the bus in time, and then the man behind the counter asked for my passport. Not again I thought as I reached into my empty pocket. Wouldn’t of minded so much if I hadn’t checked everything at least four times before I had left. The Almighty Bastard at it again. It was bad, but the ticket office told me for a small cancellation charge, I could go the next morning. Went back to the pub that night and rather sheepishly said my goodbyes again. No one seemed too surprised. Met another babe of my dreams. Nothing happened. Got extremely drunk in the hope it might alter this. It didn’t. Next day I woke up, the bus was already gone about two hours before. I had overslept and there was not another one for a week. Stupidity and theres stupidity. Decided to fuck the bus and start hitchhiking down. Couldn’t face the pub for a third time. I was starting to understand how Emma felt when she thought she’d never get out so I grabbed my bags and by nightfall I was on the border. Man I had to get out of Holland.  

It was two in the morning and there I was coked out hitchhiking on a practically empty highway, when some cool English trucker comes by and gives me a lift to Paris. I had broken free of the elves. Beat that Gandalf. I would like to describe France for you but all I’ve ever seen of it is motorways, petrol stations and the same chain of identical restaurants that are built on the side of the highway. le Arche or somthing like that. French version of Mc Donalds and twice as dear. When we got to Paris, or to be more honest, a petrol station about forty kilometers away, I thanked the driver and he headed off for England.   It was taking a long time to get a lift so to help the time go a bit faster, I put on my walkman and started bopping around. Things might have turned out differently if I hadn’t as some French driver had been watching me while he sat in his truck. He called me over and offered me a lift to Lyon. When we had got no further than a couple of miles down the road, when he turned around and said "I have a job for you". He handed me a huge lump of hash and said "you roll, I drive". Fuckin hell I thought, now this is what hitchhiking’s all about. His English was as bad as my French as he probably had the same attitude in school as myself. French classes were an opportunity to sleep. Teacher thought I had a rare blood disease and left me alone. If any cunt offered to wake me up she would say no. I was less troublesome that way. Conversation in the truck went something like this. "Le Francais grande. Le femme beau. J’habite a cote de la mer (I always liked that one), and after that it kind of stopped. His English went something like this. "You holiday?" Frantic swimming motions for some reason. "You, eh, eh", mutter something in French. He decided to give it up as well. As we got more and more stoned it became almost impossible, as the sort of shit I started talking about would be hard to understand if you spoke English fluently. We put the tape deck on. "You like?". "Oui", and that sorted it out the language barrier. Jean Claude, alright I forget his fuckin name, was no more than twenty two and how he ever managed to drive a twenty ton truck stoned out of his head, I’ll never know. We had gone through five big joints when a car in front of us suddenly had this blow out. It went shooting across our path, smashed off a barrier and then went smack into the side of the road. Jean Claudes reactions were fantastic. One minute he was a stoned gibbering mess singing the Rolling Stones, and the next he was a fuckin hero. He slammed the brakes, picked up his radio and called for help. We both hopped out of the truck and ran to the car. As it happened the man in the car was alright, and I rather stoned, decided to describe what happened to the other drivers that had stopped. "Le crashe", I said making a big explosion movement. "Le car, whish whish whish", I said making zig zag motions. "Le stoppe", I said pointing to the car and then realized that no one had a fuckin clue what I was on about. They looked at me as if I was mad, so I decided to shut up. Got back in the truck and rolled a much needed doobie to calm us down. In no time at all we were in Lyon. He offered to put me up in the truck but I decided to keep going so I thanked him and started hitchhiking again.        

It had taken nearly a full day to get another lift and it only took me another thirty kilometers down the road. I arrived in yet another fuckin petrol station and decided to camp on some wasteground for the night. I heard all sorts of screams in the bushes nearby, so I slept with my knife, in case anyone got funny. The next day was sweltering hot and I had to strip to the waist, which modesty apart, I think it helped me in getting the next lift. She was a beautiful blonde who had just broken up with her boyfriend and for some mad reason I thought she was going to pull over to the side and have mad passionate sex with me. Every hitchikers dream. She didn’t unfortunately, but she did give me a lift all the way to Barcelona.   

It was fuckin beautiful. The people, the city and the atmosphere. Holland was a flat dump compared to it. Met Thomas and the first thing we did was hit a bar. Couldn’t get over how happy all the people were and it took a bit of getting used to. In Holland you were always cautious and reserved when you went into a bar. Anyone who looked like they were having too much fun were treated with either contempt or suspicion. Hey man what the fuck are you taking? These Spanish folk, were just too friendly at first, and I was still a cynical wanker from Amsterdam. They didn’t drink to get drunk but still seemed to live life to the full. Everyone to themselves. I was already missing my drugs, and suffered a bit of cold turkey for about two weeks. No better place to suffer I thought as I lay on the beach drinking cheap wine checking out the bods that roamed there. Bonita and all that. At night I would go out and visit the many bars there. It was fantastic and it was only then that I began to remember you could have a lot of fun without having to stick a fuckin tab down your’e neck.    A lot of the foreigners there were English teachers and they made enough out of it to have a good time. Did some busking and found I could make about twenty quid in an hour. The Spanish were a lot more generous than the Dutch and didn’t seem as money concious. A bottle of wine and a packet of fags was about two quid and apart from food that was all I really needed. Bought some hash and I was more happy than I’d been in a long time. This holiday business was definitely working. Its the sun or something. Spent a lot of time with the old men in the bars and although we couldn’t understand a word we managed to have conversations that lasted hours. By the end of a week I was a local. Hey amigo and all that.     Had about a fiver left after a heavy session and was trying to work out how to get drunk on it. Found some cheap bar that could get me at least halfway there. When I sat down I was confronted by a yuppie English couple that had the real ‘traveller’ look about them, and two American girls who looked about twenty five. I cautioned myself not to start slagging the Americans,(it was too easy), and tried my best to be nice. The English couple turned out to be empty headed arrogant fools and after quickly disarming them, I turned my attention to the Americans. A couple of nights before I had tried chatting up two similar American girls and they had walked off on me in disgust. I was cool for the first couple of pints but once I started to get drunk I couldn’t help but take the piss out of them. I mean some of them speak so much shit it becomes unbearable. You just have to say something, which was a pity as they were both very beautiful and I was a little short of any action. Anyway these two other Americans, were as usual, over enthusiastic to tell me about their wide and very beautiful travels. After the initial bullshit about how nice Spain was, and how we’d all like to live here forever, I asked them what they did in the States.   

She told me she worked in the SED programme, which for those who don’t know means, severely emotionally disturbed. It was for kids of about the ages of ten to sixteen who were not able to adjust to normal school and/or had emotional problems due to parents, environment or watching too many chat shows. Her job was to educate them to the standard of basic schooling. I asked how she controlled them when they misbehaved, you know like do you say something like Mr Decker could you please sit down and it was here I started getting an inkling of how fuckin warped she was. "Oh no", she said in exasperation, "you never say please or show any sort of emotion or they’ll just use it against you. "If anyone misbehaves I tell them to stop it at once and if they don’t comply in fifteen seconds I call in a SED officer. If the pupil doesn’t respond to this I then put him in what I term ‘the chill out’, which basically means he has to sit on his own for about ten minutes or until he calms down. They don’t like this as it makes them feel like a dunce. Rather surprised at this method I then asked did such an approach not lead to an even greater feeling of alienation. I mean they all ready had problems. At this remark she turned her eyes up to heaven in such a fashion that I obviously had to be there to understand. So I pictured myself in her class and decided I would probably opt for the ‘chill out’. I asked her what she’d do if this was the case and she brightened up sadastically. "Oh, in that case you would be moved into the socio-pathic or psycho-pathic wards and you wouldn’t like that at all. You can hardly move there as you are encased with a ten foot iron bar around you, and you’ve got no freedom whatsoever. I was starting to get a little angry with her attitude and was starting to realise why America was so fucked up and so full of psychotics. I mean you have problems to start off with and then because your’e not a success or you have attitude problems, they then put you in a place like this. The system there scared me, as I was probably a bit of a problem child myself. If I had been brought up in the States and had been put in that SED programme it would have completely freaked me out. I mean pulling a gun out on this woman in would not even seem like murder as she was not acting like a human in the first place. If I was then put into a psycho-ward for not co-operating with the fascist bastards, I would probably hate the rest of the world forever.   In America it seemed full of blacks and whites. You were either a success or a failure, adjusted or maladjusted. They were so sickly sweet right on it almost hurt. You could almost tell how they would respond to any given question. Bland and suicidaly balanced. O.K. I won’t tar them all with the same brush. But for some reason most of the Americans I met in Europe were pretty much alike. No fuckin sense of irony.   This girl looked at me in that way that only teachers could, and frowned as if I had somehow escaped the system. She went on and told me about her most troublesome pupil, who was in her words, truly evil. He called himself Damien and constantly drew pictures of mutilated bodies and upside-down crucifixes. Probably too much heavy metal. He made a point of showing them to this girl and always had an evil grin when he did. "He told me", she went on, "that there were two types of people in the world. Bad ones and good ones, then he turned around with a wicked smile and said, I’m a bad one. I’ve recommended him to be transferred to the psycho-ward as I have never met such an evil person in my life". Couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Who the fuck was mental here? Here was a kid who was looking for attention by freaking his teacher out, and she was too fuckin stupid to see through his devices. At least he was taking his aggression out artistically and now this bitch was going to mess up his life for good. She then noticed a book I had on hypnotism and wanted to read the section on Freud. "I want to see if I’m really an anal type", she exclaimed and began reading. "My dad is for sure and I think I’ve got the same streak. He folds things very neatly and always has things in the right order, and like I do the same. That’s a real sign of an anal type", she droned on. Your’e a fuckin asshole more like, I said, and with that it was time to go.  

Pomplona was a bit of a disaster the minute we got there. We naturally enough decided to get pissed on the bus going there and when we arrived we were legless. On stepping off the bus I spotted three lovely babes about seventeen. Well my moral restraints at that stage were pretty low so I decided to give my sweet tongue some practice. We sat down and asked all the usual questions like what’s your name ect. and started passing round bottles of wine. We had been sitting there no longer than five minutes when our bags were picked up and stolen. Almost as soon as I noticed it I was on my feet and after them. I pulled my knife out just in case, but by the time I had got to the exit they where nowhere to be seen. Started things off on a rather bad note as address books, clothes and the bit of pocket money we had, were stolen. Decided the only solution to get it off our minds was to get even more pissed. After a few more bottles it was only a vague memory. Thousands of drunk people packed the street dressed in white, with red bandannas tied around their necks. Fireworks exploded in the sky. The atmosphere. Electric chaos. Up until then I never really knew what a fiesta was all about. We drank into the early hours of the morning and then debated whether or not to do the bull run. We had agreed to do it sober, as people had told us it was very dangerous, but as usual it was one too many and I decided to do it straight away.   

It was pretty confusing at first. The morning sun had come up and the people who were gathered there, ready for the run, looked frightfully sober and anxious, but if you put me in a crowd of one hundred and told me only one was going to survive I would assume that person to be me. Just in case though, I decided to stay around the middle of the crowd, figuring that a hundred people between myself and the bulls was good enough. Thousands of people lined the road we were to run through and I suddenly felt we were a small crowd in comparison. Another thing that bothered me was the fact that more than half of the people running were tourists, and not many of them seemed to know what the fuck was going on. Waves of anticipation swept through the crowd as the final few minutes came to a close. Just as I was thinking these thoughts. Bang. The gun went off and everyone started trotting up the road. It didn’t seem too bad at first until the crowd suddenly sensed the bulls were no longer a safe distance behind them. Fear spread through them like wild fire and everyone was pushing and pulling each other to get in front. This was more scary than the bulls, as people who had fallen were being trampled as the crowd went on. I decided to hold back a little from the main group and when I found myself a bit of space, I started doing a little Monty Python run to amuse the crowd. The runners would suddenly surge from a jog to a sprint but as there was still people behind me, I wasn’t all that worried. In no time at all we entered the arena. I knew then how the Christians felt in Rome. We were suddenly surrounded by about twenty thousand people screaming at us from all sides. Like the coliseum, and I didn’t exactly like my position. I turned around and sure enough these huge motherfuckin bulls came tearing past me. I jumped to the side in the nick of time and held on to the railings for my dear life. Four matadors guided the bulls into an exit and I thought then it was all over. I was about to congratulate myself, when the doors opened again and four more bulls appeared. There was no way out. All the doors had been locked, and we were now fodder for the bulls. The only thing you could do was run for the side if a bull approached you, or if you wanted to be brave, stay in the middle and dodge them. Couldn’t even see the fuckers until they were right in front of you and the only indication you could get, was a sudden parting of the crowd. The bull, apparently, could only see about two metres in front of him, but once he fixed on a target, he fixed on it. People were been thrown into the air and I for one was sure I could do without it. One Australian I had been talking to kind of fancied himself a bit of a war photographer in Beruit or something, and decided to get some close up pictures of the spectacle. The man on the ground point of view so to speak. He had got no further than putting the camera to his eye, when smack, he went about ten foot in the air. When he landed the bull tried to kill him, but luckily some brave people, ie. not me, started hitting the bull and he soon found another target. The first thing the Aussie did when he got up, was look for his camera. Told me after he was suffering from shock.    When it was finally over and all the bulls were guided out a few bottles of wine were needed to calm the nerves. 

Found a park and met up with a few Americans. Not the student type. These were at least a bit of fun. One was a lawyer and I can’t really remember what the rest of them did except that one of them was pretty good on the bass. The Australian was still shaking and I was voted to get more wine. On the way to the wine shop I bumped into this crusty trampish looking dude by the name of Billy. Originally Scottish, he had been travelling around Europe for the last few years. We had both lived on that infamous site in Amsterdam called the Gevelweg, so I invited him back to the others for some wine and a joint. He was delighted and we connected in that way that only buskers and tramps can. After trading a few stories I got up to take a leak. The day was beautiful and the park had a view over the whole city. I was on the side of a hill and when I looked down I saw this brilliant blue swimming pool. The place were I was taking a leak against suddenly opened and what I thought was a generator of some sort, turned out to be a lift. Couldn’t resist it. When I went down on it, it turned out to be a posh sports club, so I sneaked my way past the security guard and pretended I was James Bond. I think the hidden lift and white trainers kicked that trip off. This illusion was a bit shattered when I arrived on the diving board with my boxer shorts on, but they did the job. It was fuckin luxury. I was gone no longer than half an hour when I arrived back to the others, with the pleasant knowledge that I had some hash waiting for me. Couldn’t fuckin believe it. When I looked for the cigarette box where I had stashed it, it was gone. When I asked the others, they told me some parky bastard had come along with a prod and picked up the litter, including my fuckin stash. The first time out of my hands, and wham, its gone.   Billy recommended searching the two skip bin containers that stood beside the park and before long we were in them, head first, throwing out any Marlboro pack we could get our hands on. To an onlooker we probably looked like two seriously desperate tramps, and I suppose in a lot of ways we were, so consider our surprise when the local police came along and ordered us to go away. Tried to fob them off with "I lose a thousand dollars", but looking at us they didn’t seem too convinced, and ordered us to clean up all the empty Marlboro boxes. When we left they stood there for about half an hour guarding the bins with their guns pulled out. After a while they probably realised the bins were hardly a terrorist target and soon left. We decided not to go back in case. I mean I could think of better reasons for spending a night in a cold cell. God was being a bastard again.    

When I next met Billy, it was in the seaside town of San Sebastian. It was about fifty kilometers north of Pomplona and was mainly for rich tourists. This was usually good for busking and as the festival in Pomplona was over, all the drunken refugees headed there. Billy had got a lift off some friends, but his mate took five days to hitchhike it. Five days is pretty bad for fifty kilometers but when I took a look at his mate I was surprised he got there at all. He didn’t seem to worried about it and if you looked around at the stiff faced tourists, he looked the happier than most. He was nicknamed Goldilocks as he had red hair and used to play Rugby professionally. Whatever that had to do with it, fuck knows. He was now, along with Billy, begging in the street for money to get drunk again. Billy used to busk, but claimed he made more begging, and it was a lot less hassle. A lot of the travellers who arrived there, were hair wrapping, busking and painting portraits. Some of them were good and some of them should have been shot for sheer cheek. We were all sleeping rough on the side of a mountain in some monastery ruins and the view would beat any of the views the tourists were getting in their skyscraper hotels. One of the funniest sights I remember was the whole beggar clan joyously dangling fishing lines of the side of the pier while the rich tourists walked by disgusted at the sight of these smiling imbecilic dropouts polluting their walkway. I wish I had a camera.    

One night Billy started telling me the story of how he came to be here. He had lived in England most of his life and had suffered a lot of hassle. His mother had died when he was young because the hospital she was in injected her with the wrong drugs. He had been in a lot of trouble with the police for mostly drunk and disorder charges, and maybe the odd theft or two. He feared institutions and when he told me why it was easy to understand. He had been to court and they had put him up for psychiatric evaluation. After a five minute chat with a female psychiatrist, she declared that he was insane enough to be put away for a year. Billy, luckily, did not completely lose the head straight away, but instead asked how the hell she could make such an evaluation after five minutes without ever fucking knowing him. She became a bit flustered, and mumbled something about his record. Billy, sensing something, then asked how long she had been qualified. "You’re my second case", she confessed and then kind of broke down.  Billy shouted, "You mean to tell me after one case and a five minute chat! You’re going to send me away to a mental home! Drug me up to the eyeballs. Fuck me up forever, and you can go to bed tonight in the safe knowledge you’ve done a good fuckin job? Call that fuckin treatment?". She started weeping and then decided that Billy was not insane after all. Billy, as a kind of reproach, offered to take her out for a few drinks just to see exactly what he was up to, but she politely declined. The point however was made. If he had freaked out, or had said nothing his life may have been a lot different. Scary.    

I had been busking with a couple of Czechs and it gradually turned into a session. We were drinking vodka and smoking joints while the man above us in his apartment kept shouting at us to shut the fuck up. Next came the buckets of water which didn’t really achieve the result he intended as we all just yelled at him to throw some more. Someone had been talking about some stadium which was meant to be a good place for sleeping. The police didn’t wake you up in the morning. We decided to give it a shot and on the way there, it happened. I spotted her about when we were about halfway to the stadium. She had a rugsack on her back and looked a bit lost. I asked her was she looking for a place to stay and when she replied yes, I invited her along. I was in love already. She had jet black hair. She was tall. She had lovely deep brown eyes. She had a beautiful figure. She was seventeen. And although my humble abode consisted of concrete stairs under a football stadium, she was none the less impressed. We bought a bottle of wine and I kept her awake all night with much exaggerated stories of drug intake and my general worldwise coolness. I don’t think that impressed her all that much, as the day after she complained that all I talked about was sex and drugs. After that I was a little stuck for conversation. It had to be love as before long we were holding hands and skipping down the road singing Beatles songs and if that isn’t love, what is? Another thing that seemed to bother her was the fact that nearly all of my sex life consisted of me being drunk. I mean it just didn’t seem natural to hop into a bed sober. I was getting a re-education in that too. Sitting on the beach with a bottle of wine making love all day to this beautiful woman. And when the sun got too hot we’d swim out pretty far and make love to each other under water. The breathing thing was a bit rough. I’d get the hang of it.

Suzanna was meant to be visiting her cousins in Galicea but had now decided to hang around a little. We would busk for a couple of hours and then chill out for the rest of the day. We had gone to some festival in a little town not far from San Sebastian and planned on making a bit of money on the crowds there. Made nothing in the end but we were so pissed we couldn’t have cared. When we awoke the next day we were starving and someone told us to go to the old folks club as they were giving out free food. At first our appearance put them off a bit but in the end they gave us a huge meal and a bottle of wine to go with it. Decided to thank them by playing a few songs and the next minute I find myself on a stage in front of about five hundred old folks. The age thing was bad enough but with the language barrier as well they hadn’t a clue what I was singing. This probably helped. As after five numbers, mostly by the Beatles, they were queing up to shake hands and give us presents. It was fuckin wonderful. The only real hitch was when this old dude gave me a bottle of whiskey. As I had just done a number by Shane McGowan, I felt I should drink to his health respectively. I knocked it back and within about five seconds I knew I was going to puke it back up. All these people queing up and shaking my hand while I’m busy trying to stop myself exploding. It came up and I swallowed it back. Tasted bleedin awful. But like a true pro I kept smiling (what the fuck else could you do) and shook everyones hand. When it was all over I made a run for the toilet and exploded. We thanked all the folks and left.  

We were in a bar counting all our money and Suzie and Thomas decided to take a trip to Galicea. It was the Celtic part of Spain and Suzie to entice me said it was full of witches. I would have preferred to stay on the beach with our cash and just get drunk all week. I mean fuck it we had the money, we had the beach and I didn’t feel like arriving in some other town broke again. But two girls with ideas, what could you do. Got pissed on the last night and met some handsome looking dude about the age of twenty. When we got talking to him he told us he was a high class prostitute for rich women who came to San Sebastian. He was at college and he needed a little extra pocket money. When I found out how much he was making a night I was seriously tempted, but Suzanne gave me one of those thunderous looks that compelled me to back down. So the next morning we were off. It was a long trip and it practically used up whatever we made. We tried shagging in the back seat when night approached but it was to fuckin cramped. A good blow job would have to do. You dirty old man.

Arriving in La Coruna we were in pieces,. but the town was friendly and everyone would go out of their way to help you. We did a big gig at night fall and made quite a few pesatas. Some English social worker on holiday suggested a good beach to sleep on as he had been here a few times before. When we got talking to him he said he used to be a junkie but had got arrested with about twenty thousand trips. Man that was a lot of cash. Anyway while he was in prison he studied psychology and managed to get a job when he came out. He also advised us to go to some ancient rocks that he believed were magical, but as we had no car we never got the chance. Thomas had met some other dude who offered us a lift to the beach but even from the start I had a bad feeling about him. Thomas could make friends anywhere. He babbled on about how he was a traveller before and how he felt it was his duty to show us a good time. He bought all the drinks so I couldn’t complain and when we arrived at the beach we were pretty drunk. There was a terrific thunderstorm brewing, so we put the tents up straight away. This dude, forget his name, lit a fire and asked if he could stay the night. After his generosity we could hardly refuse and it was agreed that the two girls would sleep on my left and him on my right. Suzie was in a weird mood and went back out to the fire in the middle of the night but I presumed everything was fine and fell asleep. I awoke to the sound of Suzzana shouting in Spanish at this dude. He was saying something like don’t be silly and smiling one of those smiles that slimy bastards use when there lying. I asked Thomas what was going on and she said that the man had tried to fuck Suzzanne while she was asleep. She had come back from the fire and had slept on the side the man was sleeping and she was awoken by someone pulling down her pants. She could even feel is prick rubbing against her behind. I went fuckin mad. I scruffed him out of the tent and started pulping him. Suzzanne tried to stop me and I managed to hurt her as well. I was just so fuckin mad. What a fuckin cunt. His nose was already broken and I swear to Christ I was trying to kill him. I was going to drag him down to the sea, drown him, grab his wallet and keys and just get the fuck out of there. Luckily or unluckily some passerby jumped in and grabbed me in a Nelson lock. The little fucker took his cue and was out of there. The guy who had grabbed me slowly released me when I had calmed down somewhat and when he heard the story he was almost sorry he had stopped me in the first place. He was a nice dude and offered to buy us coffee and then give us a lift back to town. When we got into his car his little son had a t-shirt with Flash written on it and for some reason it made me smile and forget the ordeal somewhat. Suzanne told me later that she had not trusted the dude the first rtime she had seen him. I gave her my knife as a present but could never get over the way she took the whole thing so calmly. Man I’d be still after him now. 

Our next city we hit was Santiago and as life goes this was the end of our pilgrimige in Spain. Suzie had to see her relations as she was already a month overdue and it was a sad farewell when we parted. Summer love, so sweet and so unreal. I had taken down her address about seven times because I was always losing things and promised to write her as soon as I got home. I lost every damn one of them, but then again, fate. Thomas was heading for Barcelona and as it was on my way we went along together. The trip was mayhem. We ended up in Madrid and had to sleep in the airport and getting a lift in Spain took along time. One time we had been trying all day and it was now about two in the morning. A truck had stopped and Thomas, being the only one who spoke Spanish, ask the guy for a lift. He refused and said it was against company policy and Thomas was cursing him as she came back. I told her to fuck him and started playing a Rolling Stone number on the guitar and the stangest thing happened. The truck driver got out of his cab and called us over. You play the Rolling Stone. I love the Rolling Stone. Mick Jagger. Come on, come on I give you a lift. When we hopped in the cab he stuck a Rolling Stone tape on and for the second time in my hitchiking he handed me a big lump of spliff. We had some wine and it wasn’t long before I fell asleep in the comfortable knowledge of heading towards the coast of Barcelona. I’ll give the Spanish one thing, if they decided to help you man they went out of there way.   I hitched a lift back to Holland and I already missed Thomas, Suzzanne and the beautiful country of Spain. You could sense the change of attidudes as you got further and further north. Colder and more together. I had already made up my mind to collect my money and run. Italy seemed alright, and nice looking women two. A bit Catholic but then again so was I. 

Things hadn’t changed all that much when I got back to the squat. The only difference being that the heroin scene was getting worse. Everyone was mainlining and I was glad I had taken a break. Watching the progression made me sad. I mean Holland can be a depressing enough kip without adding to it. Turps had grown his hair and well we always respected each others decisions. It smelt of slow death and I was fuckin glad to get out of there. My main worry being that I could so easily get involved with the whole scene again. I headed up to Amsterdam with Renoir to sample some genuine Ripple wine. Graham told me he was one of the only few left who could make it properly, but with all the Hippie bullshit I’ve heard, the only way to know was to check it out. It was a mixture of acid, cocaine and some other ingredients. To me it was just my usual cocktail anyway. Anyway I sat in a park for a while and after an hour I started coming up on it. Renoir met some young Scottish bloke who was homeless and offered to bring him to an unused campsite. The ripple wine had a lot of acid in it and it wasn’t before long that I started hallucinating. It was time to take a little stroll. I don’t know why I walked down that alley cause I swear to fuck I had a bad feeling about it as soon as I saw it. Amsterdam is dangerous enough especially at night and even more especially if your’e with some bloke with a fuckin rugsack on. That Scotch bloke had. The whole trip in Amsterdam is to dress down and look like your on a mission. Anyway as we were walking down this road six Moroccans passed us by and stared at the Scotch bloke. Within seconds they turned around and the leader of them, a man of about thirty, came up to me and showed me something that resembled a bus pass. Police, police, get up against the wall. I was having none of it and pushed his hand out of the way. Hey man, I said, get the fuck outa my face, and kept walking. The guy looked momentarily stunned and then one of his buddies shouted, you say fuck, you say fuck, you show some respect and with that he pulled out a blade. The rest of the gang were about eighteen and well with three tripheads against six knife wielding fucks, I knew it was going to be no party. As soon as the knives came out I sprang back into a Karate stance and tried to look like I knew what I was doing. Renoir and the Scottish bloke were pinned against the wall and searched. I don’t know why, call it foolish pride but even though I only had about twenty guilders on me, I was not letting the bastards have any of it. The older one, seeing I wasn’t going to co-operate, told the others to waste me. One came forward, in an effort to search me but I slapped his hand out of the way. It had to be done delicately, defiant but not too aggressive. My mind raced through all kind of well tripped out maneuvers that might possibly deck all six. Foot sweep here, sidekick, elbow, Christ I was even planning on backflips, which would have been very funny seen as I couldn’t do one. I was half circled but they were a little wary of me. I think it was my eyes. My pupils were huge and I swear to fuck I at least looked like I was a bit of a ninja. I knew I had the option of running, but didn’t think they’d be to kind Renoir or the Scotch bloke after. Renoir to an extent saved the day with his speech. Hey man were buskers, were street people. We don’t have no money, Christ man we busk the streets. The leader, a man I’d have no regrets killing, slapped the Scotch guy in the face and then left. I’ll say one thing it was the closest thing I came to getting some serious damage done. Man, I could feel death hovering over me. It was time to leave.

If nothing else Dublin was keeping me off the drugs. Christ I was living the saintly life of whiskey and marijuana, but if you think that was keeping me out of trouble you had another thing coming. Fuck man I’d been arrested more times for fuck all than I’d ever been arrested in my drug days. Stopping the drugs was fairly easy. My knee was bollixed from raving and the E’s were shit. Twice I had tried one and both times I had puked them up. It was like my body had kicked the brain out of making its decisions. Probably at lot wiser when you looked upon the past. The whole rave scene bored the tits out me too, it just hadn’t got the punk rock it once had. Everything was systemized, the clothes, the scene, the fuckin Christ knows. Been there, done that. My fond love for the odd snort was also greatly minimized. At seventy quid a gram you could fuck off. Wasn’t even all that good when I did manage to sample others wares, so I stuck to my booze and smoke. Trouble was brewing though, as the cops were on my case.

I had been drinkin heavily and we had run out of spliff. No one around was reliable enough so I decided to take a trip to a mate of mine. He lived in a fairly rough part of town and due caution was needed. I got a mate of mine, Paul, to drive me there in his van and told him to wait outside. On the way in I noticed the Special Branch goin by and didn’t like the look of it. Dave, my dealer, told me to be careful as I left, so I put the dope in my mouth as I went out and kept it there until we were on the main road. We can relax now I said and proceeded to roll a doobie. I had got no further than about five pulls when Paul shouts out, there behind us. Even pissed I had to admire my quick reactions. I shoved the dope back in my mouth and threw the dope butt in the can of beer I was holding. Within seconds they had overtaken and jammed their brakes in front of us. As soon as they stopped they were out of the car and had pulled the van doors open. A cloud of smoke wafted out and one of the branch fuckers said Jaysus we can smell it already. The dope was cut in long thin strips and wrapped in tin foil. Why dopeheads did this was always a sort of puzzle to me. I mean if you had to drop it anywhere its like putting a fuckin beacon light on it for the cops to find and like its natural color just blends with muck. Something about freshness or something but it wasn’t very helpful in this case. Whaffs the pwoblem officers I asked with the back of my mouth bulging. I know my rifes. Rights or not we were handcuffed and thrown into the back of the patrol car. I said very little as I was preoccupied as fuck with trying to swallow the damn stuff as inconspicuously as possible. With that done the only thing I was worried about was the can of beer with the joint butt in it. When we arrived at the station they decided to strip search us. I had no problem with being naked but I warned the cop if he came near me with his rubber gloves, cop or not, I’d chew his fuckin neck off. He looked at me, and decided a plain strip search would be good enough. When they had searched us both and found nothing they looked a bit pissed off. Fuckin wankers. Anyway they had found nothing in the van and the funny thing about it was one of the officers handed me back my can and it was empty. He only did it to piss me off but when I saw the jointbutt in the bottom I just smiled.

When we got back I was dying for a fuckin smoke, I mean I was a walking timebomb as it was but I wanted the real thing. An honest to God smoke man. The others who had chipped in for the deal were pretty damn desperate too. There was only one thing for it. Salty water. After downing six cups of the vile stuff my stomach had enough and all the smoke came back up. Strangely enough, everyone but me declined to roll it. It was a bit, shall we say, eh soggy.

So the Bowie gig was on and I had somehow managed to get my hands on some tickets. Someone I knew in the PR business. Outside there were about twenty heads also trying to get in and when I showed the tickets at the door they said they were not acceptable cause this PR man did not leave our names at the door. The other twenty outside had similar kind of problems so I told the dude at the door that I was restraining some of them from smashing the windows and as there was only a handful of us it would probably be for the best if he just let us in. Don’t know how I managed to do it but with a line of coke up my nose I can sometimes be very convincing. Anyway he let us in and I saw the end of the gig. Being as egotistical as I sometimes am, I think I put Bowie off one of his songs by jumping up and down like a loony and making these stupid faces. I swear, whether coincidence or not, he broke up laughing in the middle of the song and never looked my way again.

As I waited outside I met this youngish looking girl dressed in this glam gear and after talking to her for a while convinced her that I was going back to some exclusive nightclub to meet the man himself. She bought it, Christ knows why, but I told her first I had to get back to my apartment and pick up the remains of my cocaine. Something about certain types of girls and cocaine, I mean they’d shag a fuckin dog if he promised them a few lines and well as it was a use and abuse kind of trip I certainly wasn’t getting the wrong end of the stick. All the way to my supposed apartment (sisters actually), we were all over each other in the back of the taxi. As we went in she asked if I had condoms and as usual I hadn’t. Better get some then eh, she replied. Little bitch. There was a pub on the corner that was closed but there were still a few barmen inside so I made some frantic condom gestures at the window and after a while he came out to the door with a pack. Didn’t know what you were saying for a minute, the barmen said and I didn’t want to guess. Any way we had barely made it halfway up the stairs when we fell down and started shagging right there. I was on top but I pity the state of her back laying on those stairs with me hopping up and down on her. We got up to the apartment eventually after a rather funny exchange with some tenant of another apartment making snide comments on having to step over us on the way to his apartment. We decided to fuck going to the nightclub and had another shag instead. When I awoke she was happily gone. I hate facing strangers in my bed first thing the next morning. The hangovers are bad enough.

Several months later, New Years Eve, I went to some bar to have a few whiskeys before going up to Christ Church to hear the bells and see if there was any women with intentions similar to mine. Some girl came up to me with reddish hair and asked if I remembered her. I looked at her uneasily (far too many blackouts) and replied no. I hate fuckin guessing games. Are you sure she asked irritatingly. My mind flashed in a drunken haze to any recollection of any memory of her and got zilch. No sorry baby, not mixing me up with anyone? Three months ago, she teased. It was starting to dawn on me. Did you dye your hair or something, I asked, still really without a fuckin clue as to who she was, and when she replied yes, I gave her a hug and asked how she was doing. Fine, she replied, been to any more gigs lately, and then I knew. Fuck, I shagged this complete stranger on some poxy stairs and I can’t remember her at all. Well anyway that was me sorted for the night. It’s a funny thing, but after you’ve shag someone once it’s usually piss easy to do it again, a kind of mutual understanding I guess. I awoke New Years day in her bed and when I pulled back the curtain to greet the New Year, there was a big poster on a wall, from the Social Welfare, saying THERE IS HOPE. I gave her a kiss good morning, rolled a big juicy spliff and headed for the bar. Strange thing is, if I see her again I still don’t think I’ll recognize her. Costa Rica sounds nice .....this time of year.