And the whistle blows. It's somber faces all around. A heart-wrenching loss. Some wild goal by Andres Iniesta in the 116th minute. This tense, goal-less game for ninety minutes, some questionable off-sides calls on both sides, potential goals blown, balls off the cross bar and all that; then overtime and then slam. It's enough to knock the legs out from underneath you. Luckily for us, we're not on our feet, or we might've been thrown for a toss, but it still hurts the same. The whole country sounds like it got the wind knocked out of it, partly, because it has. One big sigh, and then breathless silence. Those few scattered Spain fans dare not celebrate, or at least not too boldly.
The bar clears out with consoling fanfare, as watery-eyed Dutch folk half-heartedly make plans for grief drinking. We just walk home, a walk that seems so much longer in that humid Holland night. It's this drunk, sad stumble of all twenty-something youth's mind stuck in the hypothetical. The "what if"s and "if only"s. What if Sneijder's shot had gone in? What if Holland had taken the Cup? If only. How crazy Amsterdam would've been! And now all we're left with is this consolation walk of defeat back to Katinka's place. What if we'd gone to Madrid instead? Nonsense. We're here now. And I fucking love these people. I want to close my eyes and see orange. I had certainly sweat orange through that afternoon and into the night, as my sweaty orange flannel will attest to. When we finally get to the flat, the stairs aren't nearly as fun as I'd remembered. Our sleeping arrangements are all laid out. The whole of the tiny living room is almost entirely layered with air-mattresses and thin blankets and sleeping bags. Katinka bids us "goodnight" and tiredly suggests we stay for the team coming home on Tuesday. And we tiredly agree upon it, and then we smoke a spliff and go to bed. But not before that forgetful, drunk pillow talk between three wide-minded Americans from California, thousands of miles from home in a sea of sad orange. Those sweet nothings thought aloud between the click of the light and the start of some beer-soaked, smokey dream.
[stop]
Monday's a day of mourning, and the city is somber. But it carries on under the guise of business as usual, and we romp through the canals and over the bridges and past those treacherous midday, windowed street harlots. Treacherous? Why yes, all the whiskey in the world can't persuade me to pay for sex with one of those gargoyles of the night, squinting in the bright sun. But such thoughts are fleeting; after all, marijuana is a memory loss drug, in the short term anyway. We stop into a coffee shop for a spell and spliff, and to admire the colloquialism of such a taboo-American scene carrying on before us. It isn't quite a Starbucks, but rather some hole-in-the-wall place with stickers littering the insides like Wahoo's. And it's packed like those amazing hole-in-wall Mexican places in California. The really good ones always are, and the spliff we roll at the tiny corner table agrees with that fact. And after all those years of it's illegality being thrown in my face, the terrors, the madness, the criminality. This place and these people, and their nonchalant-ness; they find sense in logic, not fear; realism, not dogmatism; intelligence, not fervor. Always calm and collected, smiling and helpful, but with a sharp wit, and an almost judgemental sarcasm. The whole place carries a sort of mysticism about it; like an adult Disneyland, truly the happiest place on earth. And no kids crying and vomiting into trashcans after Mister Toad's Wild Ride. Our eyes redden from the pleasure. So surreal, it is.
After, we stop into a hedge-shop (very different from a coffee shop) not far along down the road and we're greeted by innumerable displays littered with pipes and bongs and hookahs and vaporizers and t-shirts and rasta beanies and pretty much everything weed. Not exactly a shocker. There are hedge-shops in Los Angeles. The shocker is tucked away in a little mini-fridge in the corner with silly names and ratings on the front. "Whoa, are these shrooms?"
And like that, seemingly out of thin air behind us, a stoned man with a nordic accent appears and replies in easy English, "No, man. They made mushrooms illegal here."
"Whaaat. That sucks. Why?" Max is disappointed.
"I don't know, man. They're trying to crack down I guess. But what we got here... These here are truffles."
"Truffles?"
"Yeah, man. They're like mushrooms, just like mushrooms. Same high and all."
"What the hell's the difference?" I ask.
"Well see now, mushrooms grow above ground, while truffles, on the other hand, grow below ground. So they're not really mushrooms, see? It was a loop-hole in the new laws or whatever. Mushrooms, illegal. Truffles, still legal."
"So they're just like upside down mushrooms then," Grant surmises.
"Yes!" and he smiles.
"Ahh," and we smile and turn back to the fridge and re-read the silly names and silly ratings once more and wander out and the stoned nordic guy watches us go, and bids us good-day. It's strange (and funny to me) how no matter the country, the stoner sounds the same.
[stop]
Tonight, Katinka has a treat for us. We continue the tradition we'd started in London with Inna and in exchange for her gracious hospitality, we share with her our music libraries and a little window into our Santa Cruz lives; Grant's documentary (King St House) that he produced for his film final. And yeah, it's on Youtube. Katinka loves it and so she tells us about this little band, School of Seven Bells, playing the upstairs venue at Paradiso, and that we're coming with her. Awesome. Paradiso is a nineteenth-century church building turned hippy squat-commune turned music venue. It's a venue steeped in musical historics, playing host to a wide variety of unforgettable performers from the Rolling Stones to Nirvana to the Cure to Amy Winehouse, and the list goes on. A place long loved by artists and audiences alike, Keith Richards said the Paradiso concerts in '95 were the best live shows the Stones ever did. Scalped tickets for those shows reportedly sold for thousands of doll-hairs. And now we're here to see some young up-and-comers play in the upstairs Atrium. Tickets: 7 EUR a pop. We arrive a bit early and Katinka suggests we take a peek at who's playing on the main stage downstairs. There's a distantly familiar beat coming from behind the heavy wood doors. And when Katinka opens them, who to our wondering eyes should appear? Who else but, Billy Idol of course. He's in the middle of his set and a song's just ended. There's a pause and everybody on stage is chugging down water or beer or whiskey or whatever's lying around. And then the band starts playing the intro for White Wedding and Billy, in that sixty-something looking body of his, is jumping around the stage bare-chested like a giddy little schoolboy. When the verses come, he belts them with all the flair and glam-punk attitude of his glory days. Absolutely delightful. Wedding Singer reminiscing? Of course.
After a pair of songs, we make our way up to the Atrium where School of Seven Bells is already performing and they're just fine and we're just a little buzzed so it's perfect. The girl singer hits all the high notes and the guy on guitar plays the hell out of those one or two chords he's switching back and forth between during each song. Grant picks up a copy of their album on vinyl. Tomorrow the team is coming home and then we'd be on that next train to Copenhagen, so we pack it in early and get our bags ready.
[stop]
Our eyes open with a kind of excitement we haven't felt since the day we came in to the Dam on the final morn of that fateful Cup. It isn't as tinged with glory, but really it's not so different either. If I'd have thought for some reason that today would be a somber day, I'd be in most senses wrong. The Dutch are ever the happy people, it's like their mantra, something I like to atone to intellect, attribute to a quick mind and a confident resolve. They're enduring souls in Holland, and always ready for a good city-wide party. When we walk outside after breakfast, the city is once again a creature orange, writhing through the streets like the tentacles of some giant octopus of human enduring and celebration. It's the happy, playful kind of octopus that always gets into every nook and cranny. Into a square hole, into a round hole. And every now and again it gets anxious and then there's orange smoke everywhere. Smoke flares. And open-air pissing booths on every corner.
The team's coming down the canal now, and we crane our necks to see and lucky we're tall because the narrow streets straddling the canal are choked with orange. And flags and orange and rooting people hang and pour from the windows of the houses and buildings on either side. It's a joyous riot all around. A riot, wild and cheering with everything, that rises ever the higher like a wake behind the national team in that head boat. There they are in the flesh, waving and cheering and pouring champagne on one another. I can't imagine the nature of this beast had Holland been victorious. That impossibility. Something to dream about, and there's always a special prettiness in the dreams of things that will never happen. And it is so that I'd like to be, always the dreamer.
We lose track of the parade boats as they deftly scoot on and out of sight around a bend in the canal, but the people seem to know where to go, and Katinka and Grant and Max and I bustle along in the thick of it like so many suckers on a tentacle. The octopus has a plan, and it's a brilliant one, and us tentacles scuttle on. And like that, we're there, Dam Square. It's an orange bed of flowers once again, except now we're in the thick of it, frolicking through and finding our way to the front as the team comes out on stage. Sneijder, Robben, van Bommel, the whole crew. We see every little antic they pull on the massive 15-meter wide tele-screens posted high above the crowd every 200 or so meters down the middle of the square. When Bertje comes out and gives his spiel, the city goes wild, but we keep sliding on up to the front, through the thick forest of orange pride and body heat. Half-way there, in the middle of the continuous Dutch blaring over the loudspeakers, there are some syllables of recognition, a name to be specific; Armen Van Buren. And Grant and Max and I look at each other for a pause and a pair of raised eyebrows and a dropped jaw, before we're jumping and hooting and laughing at the luck of our draw, and all at the same time at our unprepared soberness. We slide so much faster, and like that, we're there at the front. Well, close to it and we have some space and Armen's just started playing what turns out to be a two hour set.
Two other Dutchies, a guy and a girl, start dancing with us and yell, "California!" when we tell them where we're from. They tell us they'd been to America, but only to Iowa. In the winter. "Iowa! We love corn!" And we talk of our travels and our hopes and America and Holland, and we dance. It's two hours of sweat-soaked, sober day-dancing for all we're worth. And when the last song plays and the speakers go silent, our day has just begun. We say goodbye to our new Dutch friends. "California!" Then it's back to Katinka's to pick up our bags, and we're off on the first light-rail to Amsterdam Centraal and the first train to Copenhagen.
