by John Hennessy
This bike was too easy to pass up: a navy-blue Peugeot cruiser with new, two-inch wide, all-terrain tires, a kryptonite lock horseshoed around the frame and the back rim. I gave the lock a shot of freon and a whack with my hammer, and the heavy cylinder fell to the sidewalk.
A fourth floor light went on above me and a man stuck his head out the open window. “Mijn fiets!”
His bike--yes, but it was mine now. The tools were already in my knapsack. I jumped on and hurried toward the Munt to find Raven. He was supposed to have parked the Anarchist Keuken’s delivery van on Kalverstraat, a few blocks away, but I got as far as the Dam without finding him. Before I turned to retrace my path I saw Ahmed, one of Raven's urchins, and some other Moroccan punk. They were hassling a woman who’d set down her backpack and sleeping bag there under the Palace floodlights.
“Hey, Ahmed, making trouble?”
Ahmed pointed to a crumpled piece of tinfoil in his palm. “No problem, Mick. She wants to buy some shit.”
The other one nodded. “Okay?” he said to the woman.
“Vas y,” she said. She was gorgeous: dark, shoulder-length hair brushed away from her face and held back by a red bandanna, large light eyes, big lips, sun-burned skin.
“They bothering you?”
“Francais,” Ahmed said. “She don’t speak English.”
“Je t’encule!”
“Your French is better than mine,” I said. “Leave her alone.”
“She said she wanted to buy. You fucked it up.” They went off to their post at the monument, yelling back something about stupid Americans.
“Thank you,” the woman said. “But I can take care of myself.”
“You can speak English.”
“To you.” She smiled at me.
I had to get rid of the bike, but my love life had been under a curse lately. I offered her a place to sleep. It might rain, I added. She looked up at the clear, warm sky and laughed. Okay, she said. Her name was Sylviane. I gave Sylviane directions to the Minds, the bar where we’d all meet and Raven would pay us, and cycled off in search of the van.
As a rule we stayed away from ten-speeds and mountain bikes--anything new or the least bit complicated, anything that might really be missed. Our boss, a big, broad-shouldered guy who called himself Raven and was from Melbourne, Santa Monica, or London, depending on who he was trying to con or impress, dealt in sturdy and simple old Jaegers and their clones. It was in keeping with the image Raven liked to project for Recycled Bikes, one of his several shady businesses: industrious laborer converts junkyard parts into decent vehicles for sale or rent. He even operated out of recycled space--an abandoned spice warehouse on the Herengracht that he’d squatted. All he did there was paint the bikes we stole, but the conscientious Dutch didn't know that. They thought he was the best thing to come along since the end of the Witte Fietsen, the state-owned white bikes that had been available for free public use back in Amsterdam’s hippie era. They never got the joke.
But they might figure it out if Raven tried to sell or rent something like the Peugeot I loaded into the back of the van.
“You know the rules, Mick. Get rid of it.” He was sitting in the driver’s seat, leather biker cap pulled down over his forehead, thick reddish brown hair, which I envied, tied in a pony tail that hung half-way down his back. He turned around and started the engine.
“Just bring it back to the shop,” I told him. “I’ll take it for myself.”
“Get it out of the truck. I’ll take the other two you got, but toss that blue one.”
An old man in a trench coat turned the corner. “Shit,” Raven said, “get in and close the door. That guy’s passed me twice already.”
I crouched in the back, cramped by the six or seven bikes we’d gotten, until he parked again along the canal on Singel. “Raven,” I said, “I just met the most beautiful woman. She’s going to meet me at the bar.”
He ignored me and came around and opened the two back doors. When I got out, he grabbed me by the bicep and stuck his jaw in my face. “Idiot.”
“Get off me.” I shoved him back against the van, but he pulled me with him.
“I’m over here waiting for you and you’re trying to pick up women?”
He lifted the Peugeot out of the van and threw it in the canal. The shiny, straight handlebars and the black seat skimmed across the water for a second, then sank.
“Asshole,” I said.
He pushed me out of the way and drove to the shop.
It was past closing time, and the steel storefront had been pulled down over the windows at the Minds. But the side door was open, and the old brown bar wouldn't close until the last young drunks went home. Sylviane was there, talking to the bartender. She was holding a small painting up to the light, but the bartender was looking at her instead. I waved to her, stepped over a black Lab dozing on the dusty floorboards, and pushed through a crowd of guys wearing black leather jackets despite the unusually warm summer weather.
My squat-mates, Graham, a busker from Manchester, and Edena, a repatriated Surinamese, were sitting in the back, their arms around each other. “What took you?” Graham passed me a glass of beer, the head on it already spoiled.
I pointed over to Sylviane. She was leaning toward the bartender, laughing, a hand on her hip and one loosening the bandanna in her hair. “I met her on the way. I told her she could stay with us.”
“The one with the pack?” Edena asked. “Does she come with the sleeping bag? Or is that extra?”
“What are you worried about?” Graham said to her. Edena was half black, half Indonesian, high-boned and dark-skinned. Beautiful. “Nice one, Mick. About time.”
Graham said he'd gotten three bikes, which should bring in at least a hundred guilders, he figured. Enough to last him through the three-day pop festival in Venlo.
“Don’t count on it,” I said. Raven was getting cheaper by the minute, pickier about the bikes we stole, shaving our pay daily. I told them about the bike he’d thrown in the canal. “I’d like to screw him once.”
Edena snorted. “Who wouldn’t?”
“I thought you already had."
Edena ignored me and stood up with her camera, a small white Pentax, and snapped a picture. At the table behind me a skinhead with a black rose tattooed above his ear had passed out cheek-down in a puddle of beer.
“Very clever,” Graham said.
“You two bore me. I wouldn’t touch his dirty money.”
“At least we work,” I said.
“I work.” She held her camera in my face. She was a Rietveldt Academy drop-out.
“Call signing your dole checks work?”
“The Dutch owe me,” Edena said. "Giving me money is good for their conscience."
“Get over it, Edena.” It was Raven. He’d come up behind us with one of his angry young girls from the Anarchist Keuken, the food co-op we’d infiltrated. He ran a hand through Edena’s fine black bob. “How about a shag for old times’ sake?”
“Fuck off,” Graham said. He looked like he might get up, but Raven would have laughed. Even the drastic Belsen crewcut and the circles under his eyes did little to make Graham look threatening.
Sylviane came over then, and I pulled up a chair for her. She touched my leg. “I am happy to see you again.” She had pretty green eyes, and crow’s feet cut their corners when she smiled. “Ca va?”
I made introductions. Raven, ignoring his Dutch girl, watched Sylviane. He pushed my drink out of the way and took hold of my wrist. “Nick a bike like that again and you’re not working for me.”
Sylviane looked away.
“Beware the Raven,” Graham said to her. “He was a mercenary in Mozambique.”
“Give him five minutes,” Edena said. “He will tell you himself.”
“No,” I said, “he’ll ask you to buy his autobiography.”
Sylviane looked at Raven. “You were in Mozambique?”
“I don’t talk about it.”
He not only talked about it, he wrote about it. He was only in his early thirties, maybe ten years older than the rest of us, but he’d already written his autobiography, a three-hundred page desk-top job that was popular with all the Amsterdam street kids. It was badly-written, unbelievable, and full of anarchist horseshit. In it Raven claims to have instituted the program to “smoke out the Russians” by smuggling hash out of Afghanistan, invented pogoing at a Sex Pistols show in London, turned down an invitation to be pall bearer for Kurt Cobain, and slept with Italian porn-star turned stateswoman, Cicciolina.
Now he was being disgustingly charming. He was telling Sylviane that she looked like Beatrice Dalle and she was listening to it.
“Hey, Raven, buy us a drink,” I said. He’d looked over the bikes and I wanted my money. He gave Graham and me each a few bright bills, and, watching our manners, we went to the bar before counting. Fifty for me, eighty for Graham. Only half what he paid us when we first started working for him.
“Wanker, “ Graham said. “I’m quitting this.”
“First we’re going to get him.” I put my arm around Graham’s shoulder. “I know how.”
“Wait,” Sylviane said, herding us back to the table. “I gave the bartender a painting for credit. I will get the drinks.”
Raven watched Sylviane as she stood at the bar. “Not bad,” he said.
“Look,” I told him. “I really like this woman.”
He shrugged. “That’s cool.” But when Sylviane came back with a tray of drinks, he leaned across me and kissed her on both cheeks. He asked to see her “work.”
Sylviane opened her bag and produced a series of small mat-boards covered with black, purple, and red swirls.
“Hmm,” Raven said.
I held one out away from my face and squinted at it. “Really powerful.”
“They are terrible,” Sylviane said. “But I know how to sell them.” She leaned closer to me. “If I met you on the street, I would be able to sell you one.”
“You did meet me on the street.”
"Yes."
Raven’s girl began to rouse herself. “Vlug, Raven.”
“T’ziens, Raven,” Edena said. “It’s past her bed-time.”
Raven put his arm around the Dutch girl, kissed her on her lip-ring. He gave Sylviane another smile. “One more drink.”
But he was still there when we had used up Sylviane’s credit, and the sun was up when we left.
Shortly before I left the United States--this was after my parents' coffee shop had bankrupted and my father ran off to the West Coast with his mistress--my mother and I had a very candid conversation. I asked her why she had put up with my father's philandering for so long. "Your father's a charming man, Mick," she said. "You're not charming. You're too earnest to be charming."
I understood this much clearly: she meant to criticize and not to compliment me. And she was right about earnestness. My arrival in Amsterdam offered me a chance to rid myself of it. Charm was what I needed, and it's what Raven--no matter how transparent he seemed to me--had in abundance. When he saw that he could use me and offered me employment, I took it. Maybe, as my neo-Freudian mother might have said, I suffered from an overly-efficient super-ego (and what could be less charming?), but I'd always enjoyed the occasional petty thefts I'd previously allowed myself. So I offered myself up to Raven's tutoring. I enrolled in his charm school.
But when we got back to our squat in the Pijp, I should have been given the dunce cap. My instincts were all off. I had forgotten whatever rules might guide me in my seduction of Sylviane. What was needed was resolve, confidence, a strong hand. Instead I showed her the toilet and shower, pointed out our view of the defunct Heineken Brewery, offered to make a cup of tea. Graham and Edena were no help. They shamelessly drew the curtain across their half of the attic loft we all shared and went to it--volubly. My own unmade mattress seemed miles away. I was wondering if I ought to offer Sylviane something to sleep in when she casually pulled her dress over her head, slipped off her under things, and, yawning magnificently, wrapped her arms around me. "You have condoms?" she asked.
Yes, I had condoms. That was one quiz, at least, that I could ace.
The first thing I wanted to do the next afternoon was convince Sylviane to put off her plan to head up to Copenhagen and come with us to the festival in Venlo. She was awake and out of the house before me, but I caught up with her on one of the terraces at Leidseplein, where she was peddling her paintings. She sat in the shade of a blue umbrella at one of the Bulldog cafe tables, pitching a couple of good looking Mediterraneans dressed in rose linen.
While I waited for her to finish I passed the hat for Graham, who was also taking advantage of the sunny weather and making the terrace rounds. He banged out bad acoustic versions of songs by Nirvana and the Jesus and Mary Chain.
"I'm hungry," Graham said, after we split the take. "Feel like getting religious?"
"You go on ahead. I'll get Sylviane."
"Hey." Graham put his arm around me. "She's sound. You deserve it."
On the way up to Centraal Station, where the Hare Krisnas provided a free daily spread, I told Sylviane about the festival. The Chili Peppers were headlining the Saturday show.
"I love them," she said. "Especially the singer. He is so sexy. He reminds me of your friend Raven."
"Raven's a jerk," I said.
"But if we are leaving tomorrow I will need more money."
"We can hitchhike there. And I've got money."
She was on the back of my bike, holding onto my hips. Her fingers dug into me hard. "I always pay for myself."
After we'd eaten, I followed Sylviane into the high central corridor of the train station. She went into the women's room and came out with a small sliver of white soap. "I am an epileptic," she said. She watched the money-changing window until a lanky, college-aged guy with long hair and a sparse goatee stepped up. He was listening to a fancy Sony Discman, bobbing his head and taking enthusiastic little skipping dance steps. Stitched to his backpack was a bright red Canadian flag.
Sylviane put the soap in her mouth and headed towards him. When the Canadian turned away from the window, she threw herself down at his feet. Her eyes rolled back in her head and white soap foam collected at the corners of her mouth. She was wearing a short black skirt that slid up her thighs as she writhed on the ground, arms and legs shaking.
"Are you okay?" The Canadian pried his headphones loose. He knelt over her and lifted her head. "Help," he called. I came over quickly. "She's having some kind of fit."
Sylviane came to, crying. She dabbed at the foam on her lips. "Merci." She took hold of the Canadian's wrists and he helped her up. "That is the third time today that happens to me. I need my medication."
"Where is it?" the Canadian asked.
Sylviane held on to his arm. "Gone. My bags are stolen. But my mother is sending money. It will arrive on Monday."
"What will you do until then?" I asked.
Sylviane shook her head.
I asked her how much the medication was.
"Fifty guilders."
I looked at the Canadian guy and rummaged through my pockets. "I've got about ten," I said. "She can have it."
"No," Sylviane said, "I can not take your money."
"Of course you can. What about you? Can you help her out?"
The Canadian still had the money he'd just changed in his hand. "I guess so."
I saw the bright yellow sunflowers of a fifty on the top of his roll. "Here," I said, counting out the ten or so guilders I'd just made with Graham. "Take this and give her that."
"Thank you both so much," Sylviane said. "You must give me your address in Canada and I will send you the money."
"I'm from California," he said. "My friends told me to put this flag on my backpack so I can get rides when I hitchhike. Some people don't like Americans."
"I love Americans!" Sylviane said. She took his address and began to edge away from him. She had worked her way to the open station doors and was saying good-bye to us when Raven cycled up.
"Mick. Sylviane. I've been looking for you two. Graham said you were here."
We ignored him, waved to the Californian, and ran to my bike. The dupe followed us out of the station, moving as fast as he could with that pack on his back.
Raven rolled his bike forward and blocked the Californian's way. "Meet me at the Frankrijk tonight," he called. "It's important."
We'd been at the Frankrijk for more than two hours and Raven still hadn't told us what was up. He had worked himself between me and Sylviane and crowded me off the dance floor, and there they were: arms above their heads, ticking back and forth like broken windshield wipers to the high-speed rave music. Graham and Edena were behind them in an embrace, moving their hips to every fourth beat or so. I'd nursed my beers, waiting for an assignment from Raven, but now I was at the bar ordering jenever.
My room-mates joined me when I was on my third shot. "Look at that bastard," I said. Raven had taken his shirt off, and sweat ran down the channels of his stomach muscles.
"Slow down," Graham said, when I bought another drink. "You want to stay sharp."
"I would get Sylviane and leave now," Edena said.
Sylviane had her back to Raven and was grinding against him, eyes closed, lips pursed. "Got a crowbar?"
"Bring Raven over here," Edena said. "We will take care of him for you."
I pushed my way over to Sylviane and told her I wanted to go.
"But we are having so much fun," she called.
Raven came off the floor with us. "You can't go yet. I've got the van outside."
"I'm not going tonight."
"Sure you are. Sylviane, want to come for a ride?"
"I would love to."
Raven wiped his shoulders and chest with his t-shirt, then draped it around his neck like a towel. "Coming?"
Raven and Sylviane were in the seats up front. I was alone in the back, kneeling on the corrugated metal floor, my hand on Sylviane's shoulder for balance. Graham hadn't come. He was through with it. Raven didn't care.
"He was never any good anyway," Raven said.
That wasn't true and Raven knew it.
We passed the dark, massive brewery, no longer in use, nothing more than a monument to alcohol now, and entered the Pijp. Raven turned down one of the long, narrow streets the neighborhood's name derives from and parked.
"We'll wait here," he said.
"Are you kidding? I live right over there."
"So what? Are these your people, Mickey?"
"There's nowhere to run here. You told me that yourself." The old, four-story row houses were terraced without alleys or spaces between them, and there were exceptionally long distances between cross-streets.
"Just hurry up. I'll keep an eye on you."
I looked at Sylviane. Her hair was damp and messy, her face still flushed from dancing.
"Here," she said. She unhooked an earring, a long Celtic cross. "For luck."
I waited for the street to be clear of cars and pedestrians and got out of the truck. There was a rack full of bikes about half-way down the block, but I passed it without even looking. Good thing, because a door opened and two women came out. They kissed each other three times on the cheek, and one of them went down the street behind me. I walked slowly, waiting for her to unlock her bike and ride away. Then I turned around and headed for the rack, unzipping my knapsack as I went.
Raven. I'd just have to beat him at it, show no fear. The bike on the side of the rack closest to the van had a yellow, plastic-wrapped, chain-link lock. An easy one. It was an old Jaeger with a busted seat, not the best of the bunch, but it'd do. I got my bolt-cutters out and snipped through the chain in one go. Then I was off and racing for the van.
But coming my way, bounding down the center of the road, was a German shepherd. I saw no sign of the master, but the dog, galloping in an eerie silence, was frightening enough. I pedaled furiously to the far end of the street and turned the corner, the dog still chasing me. The van was there and they were waiting for me with the back doors open.
I threw the bike in and jumped in myself. Raven and Sylviane were laughing.
"You're Olympic material," Raven said.
"Tour de France," Sylviane laughed.
"Just take us back to my house," I said. "I've had enough."
Raven was already heading in that direction. "I'll drop you off," he said, "but Sylviane's coming with me."
"Where are you going?"
"The Anarchist Keuken. We've got to bake some bread." Raven laughed, and maybe Sylviane laughed a little bit too. She had reached around the stick shift to rest her hand on his leg.
"I'll get out here."
"Don't be stupid. Anyway, we've got to go to your house."
"I must get my things," Sylviane said. "I will stay with Raven tonight."
At my house I undid the locks for Sylviane, refusing to look at her as she passed inside and up the steps. Some English-speaking junkie had spray-painted "I'll be your slave H" next to the narrow wooden door frame. I went over to the truck, leaned in the driver's side window. "You're a real asshole, Raven."
"I'd watch my mouth if I was you," he said.
Sylviane loaded her things in the back with the bike I'd just stolen. Raven held his hand out the window, offering me two ten-guilder notes.
"Buy some birth control," I said. "I'd hate to see your progeny."
"Okay, Mickey. Have it your way."
I started to go up to bed. But I locked the door and went back to the Frankrijk to find Graham and Edena instead.
The next morning, before we were supposed to set off for Venlo, I went over to Raven's to return Sylviane's earring. He came to the door with a dark sheet wrapped around his shoulders.
"Look," I said. "The earring is just an excuse. I wanted to let you know that I've thought about things. No hard feelings, okay?" I wanted to keep working for him, I told him. I needed the money.
I knew he had the overnight bread-baking shift at the Anarchist Keuken that night, but I asked him if he wanted to come down to the festival with us. "Sylviane said she wanted to go," I said.
Raven shook my hand and said he was glad I was being sensible. "Can't go to the festival, though," he said. "Gotta work. And Sylviane didn't get much sleep last night. I don't want to wake her up."
But, he said, he had to make a delivery in Sandvoort at noon, so he could drop us off at the auto-stop out on the highway. That'd save us the time trying to hitch out of the city. I thanked him and said I'd go get Graham and Edena so we could get started.
After Raven dropped us off, we waited for him to drive out of sight. Then we crossed over to the north-bound side of the highway and hitched back into town.
I'd been formulating this plan since shortly after I started working for Raven. It didn't take long to know he'd cross me some day. I'd get him back and give the city a gift: a new fleet of white bikes, free transportation for everyone. We had to buy two cases of white spray-paint, run off copies of the poster Edena made, and pick up a crate of Duvel for our carpenter friend Sef, who let us borrow his truck. But the plan was too good to let money stop us. And Edena had just gotten her social, so she paid for most of it.
"You know," I told Graham and Edena, after it got dark enough to go over to the workshop, "Raven's the one who first told me about the city's old white bikes. ' Good thing those days are over,' he said. 'It'd make us redundant.' The bastard."
I broke the padlock and side-door latch with a hammer and freon Raven had supplied me with.
"This is all too poetic," Graham said. "I don't even mind missing Soundgarden."
Edena didn't care, either. We still had tomorrow and Sunday, she reminded us. We could hitch out first thing in the morning. "Me first," she said, pushing the door open with a case of paint.
Graham and I followed her inside, took a few spray-cans apiece, and got to work.
"This one," Graham called, rolling out a little collapsable rental he'd just painted. "I remember this bike. The bastard let me wander all over the red-light looking for the van when I got this one. He was over in the Korsikoff selling bad crank all night."
“He cuts it with aspirin,” Edena said. "Who'd be dumb enough to trust him?"
"Plenty of people," I said. But how could Sylviane be so stupid?
There were more than two-hundred working bikes in the shop, and it took most of the night to slap a sloppy coat of white paint on them all. The paint jobs weren't pretty, but people would get the idea. By the time we were finished, the first ones were dry enough to move. We loaded them into Sef's truck, about a dozen per trip, and delivered them to various street corners in and around Dam Square. We put up posters at each delivery site--in Dutch and English--explaining that it was time to welcome back the White Bikes: Please Use, Share, and Enjoy. We signed the posters with the circle and dangling lightning bolt, the Anarchist Keuken's logo.
When the job was done, we returned the truck and headed back to Dam Square. Edena had a friend who was a chambermaid at the Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky, and she let us go up to an empty top floor suite on the Dam side. There we watched from the high, wide windows as the white morning twilight rose and the city began to wake up.
"Look," I said, "here comes one." An old man in a yellow slicker rode slowly out of Rokin and turned into the square. "And another."
The old man was followed by a young woman, and then from the other direction, coming down from Centraal Station, pedaled a boy with a skateboard under his arm. And then another two kids in leather jackets came circling around the Dam from the Palace, where I'd met Sylviane.
"This is fucking brilliant," Graham said, putting his arm around me. "Edena, open that bottle."
"Proost, Mick." Edena gave me first go at the bottle of oude jenever. She laughed and hugged Graham, then she put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me into the embrace.
Soon the traffic had picked up, but the white bikes were still distinguishable in the early crowds. They were coming from every direction, from Paleisstraat, Damstraat, Damrak, Kalverstraat, Nieuwendijk, all the arteries that emptied into the Square, white bikes, tons of them, and even from up above we could sense the giddiness down there as the cyclists rode their bright new bikes in circles around the Dam.
When we got back from Venlo, the white bikes were stirring up the city. Everyone was talking about Raven's great donation. The students and street kids were even organizing demos to pressure the City Council into buying a few thousand more bikes. According to an article in the Volkskraant, the Council would soon put the issue up for debate. Accompanying the article was a picture of Raven sitting on a white bike--cap tipped back, hair hanging over his forehead and cheekbones, thumbs up for the camera. The caption below it read, “Bike wizard’s generous gift gets City wheels rolling.”
Graham and Edena had a good laugh at this, but I was furious. The hell with my alibi; I went looking for Raven. I was going to tell him and everybody else we knew exactly who had made the big gift to the city.
He was in none of our usual hangouts, but one of the bakers at the Anarchist Keuken gave me a bit of news. Raven was heading up to Copenhagen soon, and all the squatters and anarchists were throwing him a big goodbye bash at the Frankrijk. “We’ll miss Raven,” the baker said. “He is a hero to us.”
When I arrived at the Frankrijk, one of those terrible Dutch bands was beating out an approximation of surf music, and Raven, Sylviane, and a bunch of the others were crowded up on the stage, go-go dancing. Sylviane shoved her hands in her hair and rotated her rump. It was like a personal insult. I pushed my way to the front and shouted to Raven, but Sylviane saw me first.
She jumped down into the crowd and put her arm around my shoulder. “It was nice of you to paint the bikes for Raven,” she shouted. “I am glad you are not angry with us anymore.”
“Of course he’s not angry,” Raven said. “He came to wish us luck in Copenhagen.” He leaned in so close that his stubble rubbed my cheek. "You've got balls, coming here. It wouldn't be healthy to stay long, though. This is my party, understand?"
It was stupid of me to come. These were his friends.
The song ended, and the singer began calling for the crowd to quiet down. Sylviane moved closer to me. “I knew when I met you that you were not a hard person,” she said. “I am grateful to you. I think Raven and I will be happy together in Denmark.”
The singer was making a short speech about Raven, thanking him for the bikes he’d given us, praising him for being a person not just of vision but of action. He called Raven over to the center of the stage and told us all to give the man a hand. Raven took the mike and began a speech of his own. He told everyone to give Mick a hand too, without whose help and hard work he never could have accomplished the project.
As the audience applauded me politely, I left the party.
Outside an even bigger, rowdier crowd had gathered. A bunch of kids from the Anarchist Keuken were passing out white spraycans so people could paint their bikes. Not satisfied with the volunteers they'd drafted from the passersby, Ahmed and a couple of Raven's other young punks were painting all the bikes that had been locked to the racks up and down the street--mine included. A number of fist-fights broke out as people discovered what had been done to their bikes.
I had created a monster.
I jumped on my bike and started pedaling, not caring that they'd botched the paint job and made a mess of the seat, that my black jeans were ruined. There were cyclists on white bikes zig-zagging the width and length of Spuistraat and spilling out into the neighboring alleys and streets. One group was headed in the direction of the Palace to demonstrate, another to Centraal Station, and another to Herengracht and Prinsengracht, the fancier canals of the Centrum. But the cyclists I joined, Ahmed and a few of the others, were just coasting over to The Minds, which would be empty at this early hour, to have a drink in peace.