Joe Speedboat by Tommy Wieringa

Author:Tommy Wieringa
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2009-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Joe gave me a rundown of the last few months, starting at the moment he’d left that morning on the bus.

They were going to be fellow artists there in Enschede, Engel and he. They were going to show people a thing or two. But one day in late autumn, Joe and his classmates went on an excursion to the Van Gogh Museum. During the ten minutes he stood there, the queue advanced only a few metres. Right in front of them was a busload of Japanese tourists, behind them a group of disgruntled day-trippers from Groningen who were doing their best to keep spirits high. Joe looked around. His feet were cold. Fuck this, he thought suddenly, stepped out of line without a word and disappeared in the direction of Museum Square.

And there he stood, far from home and with no reason to go back. He took a deep breath, looked around and decided to stay in Amsterdam for a while and see how things worked out.

Around dinnertime he started thinking about a place to stay. He knew only one person in the whole city: P.J. Eilander. He phoned P.J.’s mother, who gave him her daughter’s address on Tolstraat, just above a coffee shop. The coffee shop was called Babylon, if she remembered rightly.

Joe took the tram. He experienced giddying happiness – no one knew where he was, life could go any which way, there were as many possibilities as combinations on a fruit machine and every direction he chose was the right one, because it was time for the machine to pay out.

P.J. wasn’t home. Joe waited in Babylon Coffee Shop, sitting by the window where he might see her come by. Meanwhile, he had all the time in the world to feast his eyes on the economics of soft drugs. In Lomark it had been sport for a while to smoke a few quick joints and then cross the border into Germany – to come back with stories of a different planet. That was just for laughs, but smoking here was serious business. The users seemed to avoid daylight as much as possible, and applied themselves with cultish dedication to the rolling and routine firing up of huge bombers. It was truly something to see. A native from the jungle who was dropped here and saw this for the first time would think he was observing an official religious rite.

‘Hey, man, want a drag?’

Joe looked up. A man with black curly hair beneath a red cap was holding out a trumpetlike joint.

‘No thanks,’ Joe said. ‘I’m waiting for someone.’

‘Don’t be an ass, man, that’s what it’s made for.’

‘No really, thank you.’

‘You look like you could use a toke.’

Joe accepted the joint.

‘My name’s George,’ the man said. ‘The Urban Indian. But you probably picked up on that.’

Joe reappeared from behind the cloud.

‘My name’s Joe Speedboat,’ he said in a squeaky voice.

‘Joe Speedboat! You’re all right, man, you’re all right!’

Like tens of thousands of tourists, on his first day in Amsterdam Joe got stoned (‘Jesus, man, you know, if I could just build all the things I see .

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