Music to go with the story right here.
Rain was pouring from a leaden August sky, filling the streets with puddles which would then be emptied by the wheels of passing cars. The canals were hardly visible through the curtain of water that hung over them, temperatures not rising above ten Celsius at midday.
“I’m going to give you a ticket,” Robbie said.
“You must be joking,” replied the subterranean traveller.
“It’s you who is the joker here,” Robbie continued. He smiled a little sad smile. “I’m sorry, mate, how on Earth could I’ve known it were you? I had already fed in your licence plate and I can’t change anything now.”
“That would be corruption?” the traveller informed understandingly.
Robbie shook his head in the resolute way the subterranean remembered from days long gone. “It’s simply impossible. Once I touch go I can’t turn it back.”
“And if you made a mistake?”
“Then I’d have a problem.”
The subterranean traveller looked at his former neighbour’s face under the rain soaked parking warden cap. Robbie had come to Amsterdam in 1973, high school behind him, seeking to get away as far as he could from the bible belt youth which fate had condemned him to. Amsterdam was a free haven in a still mostly conservative country those days, the myths of love and peace confined to the Magic Centre and a mere handful of newly established and often short-lived communities. The rest of the population were looking on, in disgust and despair or in admiration. Returning to the city on a Sunday afternoon hitch is like entering paradise, Robbie loved to describe rare outings to his family or the beach. Once you crossed the bridge over the river Amstel, the ghosts of a lost childhood, so hauntingly real only moments ago, would vanish instantly. Amsterdam was the place to hide and be free and have a party.
“Can I buy you and your companion a drink?” the traveller offered. “I’m getting all wet out here and I’m supposed to be on holiday.”
“We can’t really accept that.”
“Though we are allowed a cup of coffee on the road and with the weather like it is we might as well happen to enter the same café,” the second warden, much younger and fattish, proposed.
“Let’s go then,” the subterranean traveller smiled. He wondered why Robbie found no way to be sweet on an old friend and why he seemed to have accepted this fact a long time ago. Not that the traveller could be bothered though, he wasn’t going to pay for the fine, there was just something not right about seeing this old hippy turned into a parking warden. Who or what had been responsible for that?
Robbie had taken the route history required of him. For the first ten years, while pretending to study at the municipal university, he had gone into all known drug addictions and had escaped from most of them aside from the indispensable holy trinity of alcohol, cannabis and cigarettes every sane person relied upon. Robbie had been going for it for a while but never quite as intensely as he’d always thought he would have had he been born a few years sooner, as so many of his generation hadn’t.
“You aren’t from here, are you?”
The subterranean traveller turned to the speaker, a bald and fleshy man of perhaps his age who sat at the bar with a small glass of beer in front of him, pointing his finger at the traveller’s draining menorquinas.
“I live in Barcelona,” the traveller responded.
“That is Spain, isn’t it?” the barkeeper picked up. “Things are real bad in Spain, we hear.”
“They tell you aren’t working hard enough,” the round face eagerly said. “You are a danger to Europe.”
“We call you the pigs,” the barkeeper added. “You know, lazy swine.”
Both men laughed deliberately, showing teeth and much of their throats. The second warden let slip a smile, the traveller noticed. “So how did you become a copper then,” he tried to change the subject to Robbie. But the homeys wouldn’t allow him yet.
“They say we have to bail you out but we don’t want to any longer.”
“We gave you everything you have,” the round face said after finishing his beer which was immediately replaced. “Highways, hotels and a hypo teak.”
“Mortgage, Johnny.”
“Whatever,” the round face shrugged. “We gave you Benidorm, you know?” He came off his stool and began unsteadily walking into the subterranean’s direction. “We gave you Torremolinos and Salou and all the other places. We spent our money and made you rich.”
When the crisis hit (the penultimate) new perceptions of functionality in a dysfunctional world started pushing Robbie towards an unfamiliar perspective on life. The nineteen eighties were about holding on as best as one could while learning sad stories of friends who now had jobs and could no longer be part of the continuing disbelief - the one unbroken thread which weaves through modern Amsterdam, connecting all generations - sad stories also of one’s own growing hardships with keeping the uitkering alive, the allowance every adult minimally was entitled to until authorities had had it with you, a common story through the years. In 1988, the year the once free city of Amsterdam was colouring orange in shameful courtesy to queen and fatherland, it was Robbie’s turn to be handed a job.
“And now it’s time to pay us back,” the barkeeper encouraged his favoured customer. The three of them laughed aloud, Robbie awkwardly trying not to get involved.
Before events could further develop, the subterranean traveller laid money on the counter for the three cups of hazy coffee the barkeeper had poured from a bell-shaped glass jar. “The Spanish wish to thank you very much for what you have done to them,” he proclaimed with a hot rush of honesty running through his head, “but I fear this is not the time to play stingy. Keep visiting us and we’ll all be a lot happier.”
He thought that was sweetly put.
“You’re not a Spaniard, then,” the flesh faced contemporary, almost touching him now, said in suspiciously careless surprise. His eyes did not seem to register much.
“I am not.”
“English and living there?” the barkeeper assumed in his sweetest voice, best for the moment for sure.
The subterranean smiled long and broadly. “Dutch and living, to be precise.”
“Ben jij godverdomme een Nederlander!”
They made Robbie a runner for the city council. He had a little van he drove around town and whenever the traveller ran into him Robbie was keeping up the finest smile he was able to produce at the time, aware he was no longer the experienced neighbour showing the fresh arrival what freedom was all about and how it might hurt as it now did him.
“I am indeed,” the subterranean traveller said with that same sweet rush guiding his answer. “It’s been a while since I was here.” The traveller happily let the men misinterpret the magnitude of these words.
“What’s so nice about Spain then,” the round faced asked in overblown wonder.
Everything, the subterranean nearly blurted out, barely able to keep it a secret. “The weather and the people,” he smiled his way out of the situation.
The traveller understood Robbie would get caught in the middle for knowing the wrong people – a crime in many kinds of Amsterdam – so he started making his way for the still falling rain. “Everybody please don’t mind so much what they’re saying on TV,” he gave for a goodbye.
When they cut down on human value, Robbie’s job was quickly put on the shortlist. After three months home they shifted him on to the parking squad. By then the travler had long moved. When we recognised each other after so many years, Robbie was just shoving a parking ticket under the windshield wiper. He smiled but didn’t take it away.
“I see you are living in Spain now,” he gestured towards the licence plate.
“I’m doing pretty well,” I answered.
