Within a few weeks of setting out to Europe from India, I was foaming milk in the ‘Cafe Dome’ in Selfridges, the famous department store on London’s Oxford Street. I’d never heard of it before i got the job there. When i was looking for it for my job interview i asked a couple of old londoners in a doorway near Debenhams whether it was easy to miss “Oh you won’t miss Selfridges!” they said with a chuckle. And indeed it’s a very grand building. The cafe though was a chain, owned by the Pelican group who also own Cafe Rouge and dozens of other restaurants and bars that pretended to be fancy but were really souless enterprises under the surface. The nice young Irish manager there gave me a job even though i didn’t have any experience at all, and i quickly learned what a “latte” was and how it was different from an “au lait” (latte had the foamy milk separated from the coffee on the back of a spoon – a fancy layered effect that i haven’t seen since). I poured beers and mixed simple cocktails and ate croque monsieur for lunch with chips. It was a comfortable little job and I made friends with the kitchen folks and some of the other waiters, who would point out when there was someone famous in the restaurant who i didn’t recognise.
I was living down the road in the New Dawn Hotel near Queensway, after having spent a few days in Earl’s court like most Australians do. It was a musty sort of place on Inverness terrace with a very grumpy landlady and friendly Polish staff who were underpaid and let me live in a sort of closet for cheap. It came with a free breakfast of a boiled egg and toast which was served in a small basement breakfast room which my closet opened direclty onto so i often surprised people by bursting out half asleep while they munched their warm bread. Between that and the croquet monsieurs i was reasonably well fed. I began to explore London, the immediate vicinity of Hyde Park and the west end, and Camden town where i bought a nice swiss army coat and new boots. But my heart was elsewhere. I’d fallen in love with Sabine, one of the most interesting people i’ve ever known, who i’d met a few weeks before in Saarbrucken in a jugendherberge, then followed her back to Köln for an ecstatic few days as the new year of 1998 opened. Surprisingly, she seemed to want me back and over phone calls and postcards and emails (sent from the basement of the poetry cafe on Betterton street – one of the only internet cafes in London back then!) we arranged that i would return in an open ended way at the end of the month.
What was this adventure that i’d got myself into. What was I even doing in Europe? It was a plan that i’d layed out months before in Australia, i had a dim idea that i wanted to work my way around the world – i had inspiration from a book about travelling on a shoestring and when i’d arrived in London i had so little money left after my India jaunt and a couple of weeks in Europe that i’d only about a week to find a job. Fortunately being London, it wasn’t too hard. So i had an idea that i could probably find money anywhere i went. Saving on cafe wages wasn’t too easy but by the end of January, i told my nice manager that i’d fallen in love and had to leave urgently. He understood, said he’d been in the same boat once. So i bought a ticket on the ferry to Amsterdam and headed off.
The ferry was interesting but i was frustrated that i couldn’t get up above decks and feel the spray in my face. Not that kind of ferry. Then onto the train and it was dark and cold and .. i had forgotten that i was in Europe in mid winter, and of course it was very dark and cold. I kept being caught out by this. Arriving in Amsterdam at about 2 in the morning I was bemused that I hadn’t realised that all the hostels would be shut at that time. How silly, but never mind. What did everyone else off the train do? They quickly vanished. I decided to just walk into the city and find a place to sleep. What a different place this was, the cobbled squares and canals, a few late night party goers making their way home. Eventually after walking for half an hour i found a bench and decided it would have to do so i got out my down (fortunately) sleeping bag and climbed in and attempted to sleep. Of course, it wasn’t very comfortable. But maybe i got some sleep. I felt very adventurous and had a wonderful feeling of freedom. After all, if i could do this, then i could sleep anywhere. I remember hearing some people as they walked past and someone i think said ‘he looks cold’ although maybe i imagined that.
Indeed when i woke up in the morning and looked at all the ice on the canal i realised that the public temperature gauge that i’d seen the night before (strangely useful public service) which said 13c must have actually said -13c which made more sense. Anyway i found a cafe and ordered a croissant and coffee and started to warm up. I must have looked quite haggard as I attracted the attention of a weather beaten skinny old guy who came over to my table and started talking to me. He was a crazy old American, Lou Reed sort of vibe but beardy with longer hair, his life story involved getting on and off heroin. He was currently off. Because i was happy for the company we went out together to explore the city. He seemed to know all the haunts and took me to his favourite coffee shop, a lovely little narrow place on a corner near a canal. I was intrigued – had always been curious about the cannabis culture in Amsterdam – as we looked though the menu and he ordered some white widow or something like that. I’d smoked before a few times in Australia but it wasn’t usually very strong stuff. We started smoking and it got pretty spacy fast, i tried to read a newspaper and found I couldn’t .. soon i had all these incredible insights into how everything was connected and all my spiritual ideas from India became tangible in the patterns all around me.. all the time he was madly talking to me about all manner of random things and his theories about the world.. after a little while i began to get paranoid about the way he was talking about fleecing people’s visa cards (which seemed to be how he afforded his travel) and as i had a visa card i thought i ‘d better be on my way.. he must have laughed as i took off.
Incredibly i found my way to a hostel nearby dodging trams and booked in and collapsed into bed but not before discovering that one of my room mates was from my old school in Australia, just an acquaintance not someone i knew well.. anyway i was exhausted so the remarkable coincidence got lodged with all the other strange adventures of the morning and i let sleep take me. The next thing i remember is the next day and i was making my way walking out to the edge of town to try and hitchhike to Köln. I remember walking with a strong sense of fate, because I was in uncharted territory. I’d never hitchiked before for a start. But more than an adventure to get to Köln and my new girlfriend, this was a new approach i was taking to life itself. I was simply walking forward step after step. There was no masterplan that i was following. My spiritual ideas were coalescing and i decided that my quest which i’d begun in India would continue in Europe.. my quest for enlightenment… whatever it was. The purpose of life, was to find the purpose of life.. was to find.. the answer! Whatever it was. I was filled with exhilaration. I bought from a little newsagent on the side of a street the Schrijftblok notebooks that i started filling with poems and thoughts and drawings. Soon after i wrote one of my first good poems which captures this whimsical mad feeling perfectly – the porpoise.
I had drawn up a small sign listing places on the way to Köln that i wanted to head towards and stood hopefully on the side of the highway all day but no one useful stopped. One guy stopped to tell me he couldn’t read my sign. A few people shouted something in Dutch as they drove past. Later I discovered i’d spelled one of the places wrong. As it began to get late and I grew more despondent I decided to head back into town and maybe i’d just catch a train, when another of those remarkable meetings took place. I was attracting slightly mad people like myself, anyway this guy i met at a bus stop i got talking to, and it turned out he had been hitchhiking all day with no luck too, or at least that’s the story he had. He knew a squat we could stay overnight for free which sounded good so i followed him to this remarkable house near the Vondelpark, in the centre of town. It was a fancy street but the house was cold and dark.. knocking on the door the chap i met (whose name for the moment i’ve forgotten) managed to convince them to begrudgingly let us in. I didn’t feel we were very welcome, but i was intrigued. It was a once grand house of several stories, i could see the roof of the Rijksmuseum from one of the upper windows, i could also see into the warm bright windows in the backs of nearby houses.. nicely furnished and affluent.. which made me feel quite homesick for the comforts of a normal existence.. a moment of doubt.. but i was determined to go on with my alternative path.
The folks in the house, there were about half a dozen, decided we needed food and so we went out foraging and had a surprise bonanza of croissants in a bin. We went into a fruit and veg shop and as a way of trying to ingratiate myself with the household i bought some vegetables and some gouda cheese for everyone. We then went back to the squat and made a big pot of soup with the vegetables (a bit plain with no stock) and ate the cheese (which was really delicious).. there was some tension in the squat though.. an argument broke out after everyone had been smoking a little .. and one of the funniest bits i remember was one guy was arguing that time was an illusion even though it was making one of his house mates angrier and angrier. Finally after running around in circles of logic his frustrated housemate cried out “but what about all the clocks!!!?!” — which is still the most amusing if not the most sound refutation of the theory time being an illusion that i’ve ever heard. Tucking up in my sleeping bag on the bare floor of the front room later i noticed holes in it where floorboards had been torn up to feed the fireplace.. but there were no fires that night.
The next day my new friend and i headed out again to try and catch a lift and this time we discovered that Amsterdam actually has these little bays especially for hitchikers with a little thumb sign and a place for people to pull over. How i loved this city it seemed designed for bums and hoboes like me! Also that explained maybe why i got no lifts the day before as you were supposed to use the designated place for safety. Anyway we managed to get a lift in about ten minutes from this new spot and found ourselves quickly being whisked towards the border with Belgium. The driver was an English guy who was smoking all his weed as fast as he could before we got to the border. I just sat back and let fate take its course. I wasn’t interested in smoking much after my experience with the American the day before. He dropped us off in Liege and headed on to Italy or wherever, while we attempted to get another lift. We stood by a busy road somewhere in Liege for a couple of hours but no luck and it started getting dark and cold again. We knocked on the door of a house nearby and a lady opened it a crack.. could we have a glass of water? she kindly brought us one. I was so thirsty. Could she also take me in and let me have a sleep in a nice warm bed i wondered to myself? No.. probably not.. she closed the door and we were in the cold careless world again.
We ended up in a 24 hour McDonalds one of the less pleasant nights of my life. We had to buy something every couple of hours or they’d throw us out. We took turns napping. Meanwhile passing time the recent life story of my friend unfolded and i found it involved great loss and time spent wandering (he’d broken into a houseboat in Amsterdam and stayed in it for a while which struck me as very daring and perhaps a bit wrong). He told me his girfriend had died recently, and i think his parents.. whether or not it was true.. he seemed without hope. I gave him what empathy i could muster, and my company. But by morning i’d decided i’d had enough of hitchhiking and so saying bye to my friend i bought a train ticket to Köln which wasn’t very far. I gave him Sabine’s number “just for emergencies”- foolishly of course, he called her house the afternoon of that day, arriving in Köln a few hours after me he told me he’d managed to hitch there after all. But by then i was in Sabine’s bedroom, naked in bed with Sabine, a million light years from the situation of my friend and my own few crazy depraved days on the road. I sadly said i couldn’t help and hung up and never heard from him again.
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