A LONG WAY FROM MANY PLACES

The Sometimes Dismal Universality of Everything

“Where’s the Burger King sign?”

“By the spire.”

“Which one?”

When Ann and I go grocery shopping together I push the cart. We have a list. When I look back behind me, I frequently find she’s nowhere to be seen. My little magpie has flown, utterly enchanted in a magical land of shiny objects. Something similar happens when we’re disoriented tourists. I tend to march off in the wrong direction heading for the correct landmark. When I pause to look back, see where Ann is, I often find myself alone. The Dutch must have a word for “compass” because Holland was a sea-faring country to be reckoned with in Western Europe back when colonialism and imperialism were hip. They must. Tripping over cobblestones in Amsterdam, feeling groovy, we agreed that should we somehow become separated, a pre-planned rendezvous by the rubber duck store or the cheese shop was pointless. There’s too many of them and their display windows are all yellow anyway, they look the same. You know, those two ubiquitous retailers should merge and hawk duck-shaped cheeses; serious kitsch, fromage; wooden tulips as a sideline.

Our first morning in Amsterdam, a tad too grotty after a night flight (possibly my favourite Led Zeppelin song), Ann and I passed through a shopping concourse in the train station, hurrying in the wrong direction, seeking the tram platforms only to find the waterfront and ferries. I noticed a store that seemed to sell New York Yankees caps exclusively. Not one in the display window was the team’s proper base navy colour. The abominations covered the entire visual spectrum. I hate the Yankees. Filter: I do not care for the American League’s New York baseball club.

Now cursed with unintentional awareness, I was dismayed to see the narrow streets of central Amsterdam teeming with ersatz Yankees baseball caps. I stopped counting. Distant second place was a three-way tie between the Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers and, oddly, Oakland’s A’s. I clocked one sad sack midwestern Generation Zed frat boy wearing a St. Louis Cardinals cap with the foil 59-50 sticker still on the factory-flat brim like some sort of “playa” badge. Dear me; I assumed he’d get rolled later that night while staggering around the Red Light District, bent over and vomiting into the canal.

Because I’m a twentieth century boy and I know just what the fax is and I still do the rock, when I can get it, I couldn’t help but notice all the AC/DC t-shirts out and about. Four of the band’s albums are downstairs in the Crooked 9’s CD library; none of them have ever been spun front to back. Stuck in selfie-taking pedestrian traffic on a Herengracht canal bridge I managed to read the back of one fellow’s black concert merch. The Power Up tour had descended upon the Johan Cruyff Arena (home pitch of AFC Ajax) just the night before. Had I known, I might’ve been tempted although, like other local attractions, I should’ve purchased advance tickets from Canada. Conversely, I can’t imagine Anne Frank Haus and Van Gogh Museum ticket scalpers. The Rolling Stones have branded Earth (and Mars) better than Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Hard Rock Café and sludgy Starbucks. I didn’t look the other way while the planet got licked, I joined the tribe, got the uniform, contributed to the pop art infestation. Whatever your opinion of Jagger as a performer, a singer, a writer-composer or a dusty and dated cultural icon, you must concede him his business and marketing acumen. Every bullshit business school there ever was should grant him an honourary MBA. The music tee that really struck a chord with me was worn by a young woman. Nirvana. She was too young to grieve Cobain’s Hemingway departure, but I gathered she would’ve if she could’ve; she wore it well.

Our short-term rental, a one-bedroom efficiency apartment with compact dining and sitting areas, the suggestion of a galley kitchen and Frans Hals on the wall was located inside central Amsterdam’s Southern Canal Ring. Ann and I were tourists in a tourist zone. While we walked around trying to work out where locals may go, I noticed numerous TE HUUR signs posted. I thought maybe Te Huur was a real estate company, like Re/Max, but there were too many properties available. FOR RENT – took a while. Apparently, Amsterdam, like Edmonton, like most of the rich world, hasn’t worn covid-19’s fallout particularly well or uniformly. 

Amid the ubiquity of wooden tulip kitsch, round Heineken signs and the brands and logos we’ve all seen, stands the bloody-minded universal constant: the Irish pub. The two we favoured weren’t quite as ersatz as maroon Yankees caps; Ireland is a member of the European Union and its diaspora is free to move about the continent. The long-established pub spaces were beaten up, scratched, scarred, heavily abused and devoid of pretension, remotely authentic enough.

Dan Murphy’s (an Australian brewery and brand) Irish Bar is on Leidseplein, a public plaza. The space, should you be habitually trotting off in the wrong direction, was dominated by a rooftop Burger King sign, big enough to eclipse the intermittent sun, a landmark. After a day tripping train ride out of the city or tripping over cobblestones in it, Ann and I liked to sit outside with our backs to the bar beneath Murphy’s awning and watch the people and the rain, rainy day people. 

I thought Amsterdam rain smelled different from Edmonton’s, maybe because of weather off the North Sea, maybe only because I imagined it did. Travel does that: different scenes, different atmosphere. And a different conversation as Ann and I review what really played out as a brand new day and make plans for the morrow, another one just like it; the items of concern we share about the everyday, looming nits to pick on the home front, become cards shuffled to the bottom of the deck. 

Should an Irish drinking establishment even bother with food, there will be a toastie on the menu. At home in the Crooked 9 that’s a grilled ham and cheese sandwich, a quick mealtime bite because some obligation is pressing. In a foreign Irish pub with a kitchen no cleaner than the men’s toilet, a toastie seems a delicacy. Must be the pattern of the scorch marks on the bread – they’re different.

Another Irish pub we kept returning to was beside a Pathe movie theatre, near the outdoor tulip market. I believe its name was TV Satellite Sports. The earthy bulbs for sale nearby were brighter than the two expat barmen who had the run of the place. Refills were hard to come by and empty glasses were apparently glued to the bar. The chattier of the pair had very short hair and grey teeth. He was a virulent anti-papist who harboured a similar loathing of Britain’s Royal Family. Ann and I were utterly charmed by his rants (but not his spittle), especially after we realized all he thought he knew derived from Netflix dramatizations. Ironically, his mate bore a strong physical resemblance to the Spare. The eerie doppelganger stuff that didn’t stop there, no, this good natured fellow proved as harmlessly thick.

Early one afternoon I asked Prince Harry where the joint’s jukebox was because Ann and I had been chatting through twenty minutes of “Dancing in the Dark”, a good song, possibly a great one (the original 45 picture sleeve defined Springsteen’s oeuvre, a rockstar in cool clothing regular people don’t know where to buy, leaping about in an unfinished, cinderblock garage; that’s me sometimes in front of a mirror), but not as repeat-worthy as Celine Dion’s cover of “You Shook Me All Night Long”. It proved a difficult question. Eventually the three of us established the music came from a Spotify playlist programmed into TV Satellite Sports’s house cellphone. The pub was as empty as the broken commode in the men’s room. I wondered if Prince Harry might have a moment to take requests, play a couple of songs for Ann and me. There was this Canadian band we both really liked … called The Muster Point Project …

Now, our “One Country” Benelux Eurail pass could have taken Ann and me anywhere in the Low Countries, an impractical dream. But everywhere we went, Haarlem, Utrecht and in Belgium, Antwerp and Bruges, we saw Irish pubs.

“It’s a fecking fairy tale place, innit?”

We had to wonder if In Bruges, a sly, small buddy film about Irish hitmen making themselves temporarily scarce, was a blessing or a curse for the city’s council and tourism bureau. It really does present as a crime-free magical kingdom, a Brothers Grimm place of Walt Disney wet dreams. Ann and I spent a night there and would’ve spent two if our holiday wasn’t winding down and had we known better. Our impromptu bed and breakfast booking was, some questionable décor decisions aside, plastic flowers strewn about, a conveniently located, intimate operation which we managed to check into after a couple of wrong door knocks and a detour into the courtyard of some imposing red brick, God-fearing seminary that didn’t even rate a call-out on the complimentary tourist map.

The cafés ringing the astonishing circular Markt of course thrive on the tourist influx. One of them almost saw Ann and me coming. Hungry, we were seduced by a sandwich board on the cobblestones by a flowerpot outside an iron terrasse railing advertising steak et frites for an unbelievably reasonable price. The menus we were presented told a different story of many euros more. I mentioned the special to the waiter. Ah! A second menu was reluctantly produced. I had Flemish stew, possibly made with real phlegm.

We met a Parisian couple over breakfast, about our ages although a bit more stylish in dress; my Stones tongue t-shirt didn’t rate. The ice took a while to crack. Eventually the four of us got around to discussing the European parliament and the off-putting D-Day (June 6 – our Amsterdam apartment was two doors down from a polling place and, coincidently, an Italian diplomatic office) election results. Germany, Italy and France had swung to the populist right. The shock was enough to prompt French President Macron to call a snap election (still playing out in a confusing mess). Monsieur said he was afraid these times we live in were evocative of the thirties, an era Churchill described succinctly as The Gathering Storm (in some 600 pages). The four of us were just one generation removed from what legendary journalist Studs Terkel called “The Good War” and not ill-informed about current affairs and twentieth century history. A collective memory, a hive mentality persists. The new bad guys (almost the same as the old bad guys) have it too, like a fever. 

The ice really melted when our companions learned Ann and I were Canadian. Together we pissed all over the United States, Republicans mainly. (Here I must confess to a lack of filtration. A Greek restauranteur with long grey hair, kinky, greasy, interrupted us one Amsterdam evening while Ann and I were reading his menu. He asked, innocently enough, if we were American. I told him to fuck off.) Ann and I were duly diligent, forthcoming over breakfast in Bruges, embarrassed enough to admit that Canada is lurching in the same direction. These Parisians hated Parisian waiters; they weren’t thrilled about their city’s Olympic summer either. We would’ve enjoyed sharing another meal with them.

The street our B&B was on hop-scotched names. I spent half an hour pinpointing its approximate location on our map. Ann and I spent most of our second day in Bruges slowly working our way back toward the train station. We took our time, stopping at a site, for sight or a bite. We managed this because Ann held our map upside down. What’s the draw of magnetic north anyway? If we’d only hit upon this reverse orienteering technique in Haarlem and Utrecht, let alone Amsterdam.

After each spending a euro to use the train station’s toilets we sat together waiting for an express to Brussels. We agreed we wished we had a little more time, but we hadn’t wasted what we had.

“Would you want to come back here?”

I said, “Yeah, it’s different. Man, it’s different, the same but different. What a wonderful day. Maybe, if we go overseas again, next time we arrive from Ireland? There’s a fecking ferry.”       

Dispatches from the Crooked 9 has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of everything since 2013. My companion site www.megeoff.com is awake and alive. Watch and listen to some of the songs I co-wrote with The Muster Point Project or buy 5 KG, the complete EP. Of course, you can still purchase my latest book Of Course You Did in your preferred format from your preferred e-retailer.