I'll Be 'dam-ed

So it came to pass that I would be mistaken for Jesus in one of those typical psychedelically-themed bar/hostel dealies in Amsterdam.

On the morning that this otherworldly social interaction occurred, I hadn't slept in three days. In the highly improvisational lifestyle of the traveling busker, these things happen.

It was mid-October, 2009... Actually, let's rewind it back another few weeks to really set the scene...



I had been somewhat settled in Barcelona for about four months- longer than I was legally permitted to be a visitor in that country, I realized (or in the entire EU, as I was later informed). This region had been the first European port of call for me and my bandmates.

After a few weeks in Spain my two bandmates (being a romantic couple) had decided to make the most of their time and money and set off for the Greek Islands. I, having next to no savings and a continuing musical mission in mind, had decided to go my own way.

At some point, in Barcelona, my savings had actually run out and I was now living on what I made on the street each day busking and reading Tarot cards. I also did a bit of laboring. My time there wasn't easy but I made a few friends and even met a nice Spanish girl.

It took me weeks to save up for a plane ticket to Germany. And then when I got to the airport, they wanted to charge me another 200 Euros for my luggage, money I didn't have.

On the advice of some local students, I hitched a ride out of Girona, scoring a ride in a van that dropped me alone in Paris, where my first order of business was to visit the grave of Jim Morrison. Then with no money and having found no place there to busk I was back on the road after a day or so of aimless city street wandering.

I was still on the outskirts of Paris when I was informed by a driver who picked me up that I was heading in the wrong direction to get to Germany. They dropped me at a train station that took me back to the northern part of Paris where I then, kind of on impulse, hopped a train bound for Amsterdam, of which I was kicked off in Brussels, Belgium.

Some moments of almost unbelievable serendipity saw me staying in Brussels for something like five days, in one of those well-organized squats for artists and bohemian types. Apparently Brussels is a city that shows great generosity toward buskers and I did quite well there, soon buying myself a ticket to Rotterdam and saying farewell to the nice Russian dude who let me share his room in the squat unbeknownst to the squat committee (they were starting to get wise at the point when I left and this was of some concern to my new Russian yoga instructor friend).

As I was alighting the train in Rotterdam, backpack and big clunky airplane-safe guitar case in tow, just about to take in my new surroundings, a tall blonde Dutch girl standing behind me asked "where ya need to get to?"

"I'm a musician" I told her "where should I go?". She went to the nearby info booth and got me a map of the city, on which she directed me to a street in the downtown with "bars and stuff".

There was a big billboard sign on a building near the train station in Rotterdam which read "The artist needs to live too". It was a hopeful sign of empathy toward me at that moment.

After walking in the wrong direction for a while, getting lost and cursing my own stupidity (this is before the iPhone became my helpful companion) I found the street that the girl had pointed out and sure enough, a muso-friendly bar. This cozy little watering hole was a second home for a bunch of locals. Two Dutch guys, about mid-twenties were sitting at an outside table. Seeing as my bulky guitar case stood out like dog's balls, one of them called out "Hey! Ask the bar guy if you can play here."

Within minutes I had a gig, a couch to crash on, a beer, a few tokes of a Dutch trumpet and some new music-loving friends. On the stereo in the bar, Tom Waits was singing "Waltzing Matilda". Holland had welcomed me like an old drinking buddy.

I spent a couple of weeks in that town, living a penniless existence with the kind help and charity of these enthusiastic young Rotterdam locals. Regulations forbid me from busking there, so i was prevented from making money. The bar only payed me in beer for my performances, as I didn't draw a big enough crowd to deserve a cash payment. I couldn't manage to get any other gigs there and soon I had to leave.

So one day, with the encouragement of my slightly wearying couch host, I hopped a train to Amsterdam.

Twice along the way I got caught ticket-less. The first time I agreed to get off at the next stop. The second time I was issued with a fine (which I still haven't payed) but allowed to continue on to my destination.

My immediate concern in Amsterdam was finding a good place to busk. I furtively took in my new surroundings as I went about this. I noted the tacky psychedelic decor of the "coffee shops" and the 'spot-the-Dutchie' population of tourists and foreign occupants.

Instantly I found Amsterdam quite rewarding to a busker. I stood on any street corner that felt right and belted out covers of Neil Young and Bob Dylan in my now travel-weary squawk. People here would throw me several Euros at a time and now I had sufficient money to buy food and maybe even check into a hostel. But I was too late for the hostels that first night. Instead, I found my way to an open mic night at a bar, sang a couple of originals and made a public announcement of my arrival in town and need for accommodation. Afterwards I was approached by a student from Spain who offered me a couch to sleep on in his student dorm building.

I spent two or three nights there, explaining my presence to the young residents who passed me on their way to the kitchen. Nobody seemed to mind me being there. They were all young people out of their natural environment.

Somebody had left a copy of Jack Kerouac's 'Desolation Angels' on the little table in the common room where I was sleeping. The interesting thing about this is that I had started reading this book a couple of weeks before in Rotterdam, having picked it up in the apartment I was couch-surfing in there. Not to mention that I had been reacquainted with Kerouac's 'On The Road' months earlier in a hotel in Spain, just before my own experiences had started to strike me as kinda Kerouacian.

So anyway, I was almost able to finish reading 'Desolation Angels' while staying on that couch. It was just one of those little reminders and encouragements that crazy fools like me had set out before in the same kind of spirit.

Another such reassurance was in a book store I had been loitering in one day in Rotterdam, where a quote from Hunter S Thompson about hitting the road to California had given fuel to my spirit.

After those initial days in Amsterdam I decided to do a train mission back to Rotterdam to play at the bar there one more time. This time I could afford a ticket. One way, at least.

After playing at the bar and spending a couple of days with some local music students, I was once again urged by the flow of things to go back to Amsterdam. When I got to the station I found that I was five Euros short of a ticket. I didn't have the nerve to hop this train again, with the fines and penalties mounting against me, so I wandered around Rotterdam central wondering what to do next when... no word of a lie... this Dutch guy called out to me "Hey! You wanna make five Euros?". In one of those moments of serendipity you could never count on happening and yet, apparently it happens to the traveling fool- this guy offered me five Euros just when I needed exactly five Euros and had no way of getting it short of begging or thieving. All I had to do was assist him in carrying a small fridge up one flight of stairs. Apparently he couldn't wait any longer for his pre-arranged assistant to show up.

So there I was- on my way again.



I went back to Amsterdam and immediately resumed busking. I was able to book in to a hostel the first night. The next day I met this crazy black Carribean guy, who stood on the street all day assaulting a badly-stringed and untuned guitar and yelling improvised lyrics in an off-key reggae-influenced style. He was very keen for us to team up as street performers. I might even say he was bossy and demanding. I found myself bashing my guitar strings cacophonically alongside him. It seemed to work with some people and we were making decent money. He was also quite helpful, instructing me to hire a locker for my luggage at the train station (I had been stupidly lugging my everything everywhere up until that point) and making sure that we were well-toasted from regular joint-smoking. When I busted one of my guitar strings, he tied it back together. He told me that he usually stayed in a squat with other musicians and that he'd take me there later.

At some point that evening we got swept up with a crew of young English backpackers and ended up at a party at a large squat building in an industrial part of the city. This was to be my first sleepless night in Holland.

It was a big rave-style party with multiple areas playing different sub-genres from drum 'n' bass to IDM.

Besides chatting up some cute English girls, I made two important connections that night.

One was with an American dude, about the same age as me, who offered to store my luggage at his house after I told him I was paying for a locker. He was happy to help me out in this way while his wife and baby were away visiting the US.

Another connection was with a young English guy, early twenties, also a singer/songwriter doing the traveling busker hustle, making his way to Norway to meet his father. He and i agreed to meet up the next night for a jam.

After hanging around at the squat til mid-morning and eventually losing my crazy Carribean friend, I walked back to the downtown, found the apartment of the American dude, where I left my luggage and headed out that night with my guitar to meet up with the English guy. As we had agreed, I waited to meet him outside Amsterdam's central train station, but he didn't show.

By the time I accepted that he wasn't coming it was late in the night. Too late to go banging on the door of my new American friend, I decided. Besides, he hadn't actually offered me a place to sleep and I'm not that presumptuous a person.

Even if I did have enough cash for a hostel bed, there was no chance of finding one at that time, or so I had been led to believe.

I went back to the student dorm where I had stayed before. That room was on the top of three or four floors. I got no answer from the intercom and neither did loitering around on the doorstep for a couple of hours produce a result.

It was in a more quiet part of the city. I walked along the canal for a block or so and found a park bench to sit on. I wished I could have laid down and slept right there and then, but I wasn't game. For one thing, it was friggin' cold! Also, I was starting to notice some people kind of milling around me. It was a strange place to be hanging around, I thought. Behind me was the back of an apartment block. Before me was a canal. Slightly to the left was a small bridge over the canal and this is where a small group of people were starting to congregate. Some of them seemed nervous and edgy, pacing around.

I didn't have to wonder too long before one of them, a middle-aged Dutch woman, sat down beside me and initiated conversation. Turns out they were all heroin addicts waiting to score. This made me a bit uneasy, but I figured that these people were more nervous than me. It wouldn't have taken much to raise alarm in that place and these paranoiac junkies seemed very cognizant of that fact. Two or three times they all scattered into the shadows for what, it seems, were false alarms. Eventually, after some heated exchange between them, they all separated and headed off one-by-one in roughly the same direction.

One thing that the woman had told me during our conversation was that, when she used to live on the street in Amsterdam, she slept in the boats in the canal. Apparently the owners didn't mind sometimes, if it wasn't the season for boating and as long as she didn't make a mess.

As soon as she and the other junkies were gone, I began scoping out a very small boat in the canal in front of me. I could see that it was empty. I reached over and threw my guitar case in first. Then I climbed down into the boat, as conspicuously sound-less as possible.

Unfortunately, I found that I could not open the door of the small hub of the boat, the only part that would provide any kind of shelter. All I could do was lay down in the back part of the hull.

It was probably even colder there than it was on the park bench, but at least I was hidden. I lay there until dawn, occasionally nodding off, but being immediately brought back to alertness each time due to the awkward position of my body in that tiny space.

It seemed that the coldest part of the Dutch night was just as the sun was rising. As I walked the few blocks back to the downtown I was almost having an out-of-body experience. I could not let this happen again! My first order of business that day was to go and play and make enough money to book a hostel bed. I figured I could probably make that money in the morning rush of people going to work. I set up at one of my favourite spots, near the central train station.

My first attempt at singing that morning sounded something like a pelican being tortured. My voice had left me at some point during the night. It was gonna take some convincing to get it back. My hands were shaky. Hopefully people would just throw money out of pure pity. There would certainly be no display of talent from me that morning.

I pushed on doggedly. And then... Snap! I broke a string. Just what I needed to happen now! Fuck!!

I hadn't noticed any musical instrument stores in the city so far, but now I needed to find one pronto. I was hurrying down some uptown street of the 'Dam when I ran into the English kid who stood me up the night before.

He greeted me enthusiastically, hugged me like a long-lost brother and apologized profusely for the night before. His excuse was something about being too wrecked to leave the hostel last night. Now I remembered why mobile phones were such a great invention (My phone lay sleeping and credit-less at the bottom of my backpack. I had lost the phone charger in my travels).

I told him about my broken string and he told me that he had a spare string in his guitar case, back at the hostel. So back to his hostel we went, a couple of blocks away.

When we got there, he told me to wait downstairs while he went up to his room. Downstairs was a bar. This is the point where I began my story and, as I mentioned then, this place was typical tripped-out Amsterdam accommodation. There were rainbow colours on the walls. Even the ceiling was decorated with paintings from hippies who had passed through there at some point. Good place to come and get 'Dam-ed up to your eyeballs, as many tourists do.

I had set my things and my self down at the first table closest to the front door. The only other people in the room were the girl behind the bar and, sitting at the furthest table at the other end of the room, a grey-haired man who I guessed would have been somewhere in his fifties.

As I was sitting there waiting for the delivery of the guitar string, the man got up and approached me. I noticed that his eyes seemed to look in two different directions at once.

"Ya got any Oirish blood in yer?" he asked with a fairly thick accent.

"Ah, yeh. Some." I replied. This wasn't the first time I'd been approached by an Irishman with this question. I expected that he was going to tell me a joke. That would have been the typical Irish thing to do. But as this guy sat down at my table and started talking, I soon realized he wasn't a typical anything.

I was having a hard time making sense of what he was saying. But that didn't worry me at first. The effect of the sleep deprivation was that reality had been rendered slightly dreamlike. So having an Irishman talking semi-gibberish about numbers and God and the supposed nature of reality didn't seem out of place.

"If ya get me two lemons, I'll show ya whoy the Earth is revolving backwards around the Sun" he said, handing me a fifty Euro note. "Take this, go across the street, get me two lemons, a pack of smokes and give the change away to someone on the street. Whoever ya see that needs it."

I went and got the lemons and cigarettes, but returned with the change, which I gave back to him. I had chosen to ignore his instruction to give the money away to someone of my choosing. It just seemed crazy.

"I told ya to give it away!" he was annoyed at first. "Ah well, it's fate that ya brought it back to me. That's how it goes". He then proceeded with his explanation of why the Earth is now revolving backwards around the Sun, using the lemons to represent the two cosmic bodies. I couldn't follow it. He had this whole system of associating things with numbers, like Kabalah or something. All numbers can be reduced to one, he told me. And he repeatedly took me through his number-dividing process.

"Twenty-four by four is six, from six to three, three to one". I didn't know what these numbers correlated to, it was beyond my mental abilities that morning to wrap my mind around much at all. But he really seemed to know what he was talking about. He even produced a diagram he had drawn on paper earlier. The earth was now spinning backward around the sun and nobody had noticed yet except him. And did I know why nobody had noticed? Well, he was gonna explain that next.

Then, looking into my eyes, he noticed something.

"Oh, my Gahd! Do ya realoize ya have a map of the world in yer oyz?!"

I wasn't sure what he meant.

"In the oyris of yer oy! There's a map of the world. Yer Him! Yer Jesus Chroist!"

I laughed nervously.

"Oy knew somethin' was up, 'cos the devil brought ya here. Yer friend upstairs, he's the devil."

"He's not the devil. He's just English." I said half in jest, but also to try to inject a bit of reality into this most outlandish of moments.

"He doesn't know he's the devil yet. But he is. Oy know, oy've dealt with 'im. Ya shoulda heard what he said when oy told him whoy the earth is spinnin' backward 'round the sun!"

I was starting to feel uncomfortable. Before I was able to process my own feelings, he said "Roight now ya wreak of fear. What're ya scared of me for?"

"I'm just waiting for my mate to come back with a guitar string.". I explained.

"He's not coming back" said the Irishman. "Don't worry. He's not gonna bother with ya any more. He's already gotten lost up there. Mark moy word- he'll be gone for hours".

I felt a strange sense that, upon entering into this weird little interaction... it was almost like I'd been sucked into another dimension. Somehow I knew that the Irishman was right about this- my guitarist buddy wasn't coming back down any time soon, even though he'd only gone up there to fetch a string. Some kind of energy forcefield here would keep him away from us.

"Yer wreakin' of fear again! Why would ya fear me? Yer have to have faith in yerself. Otherwoise, how are ya gonna convince all the people yer back?!"

Somehow, I didn't have the heart to tell this guy I wasn't Jesus. Or maybe I was starting to believe it. This guy was apparently very sharp in some ways.

"Ya gotta have more confidence in yerself. Say 'Oy am Jesus'.

"I am Jesus" I repeated, in what I thought was a comically pompous tone of voice.

"Nah, yer still not sayin' it with confidence. If ya could see yer own oys roight now you'd have confidence!"

Then he called the bar girl over to us. She was a Dutch girl and when she arrived she was cheerfully friendly.

"Can't you see who this is?!" the Irishman demanded. "Look in his oys!"

She looked into my eyes.

"I don't know. I don't recognize him. I'm sorry."

"Tell her!"

"Um... I'm Jesus" I said in a kind of apologetic tone. The bar girl looked perplexed. Actually i could see she was getting quite annoyed. She'd probably seen all manner of Amsterdam casualties in this place and now just another pair of dickheads were having some kind of dope-headed joke at her expense.

When he was sure that she didn't recognize me, the Irishman ordered a cup of tea and dismissed her like an incompetent servant. She hated us from then on.

The Irishman then began talking about our mission at hand. I was Jesus and I was back. How were we gonna let the world know? I was gonna sing the funniest songs ever written and he was gonna be my assistant. That's how. First we had to get a bit stoned, he said and produced from his bag a space cake in a sealed packet. The chocolate chip marijuana-laced muffin was the same kind you can buy in the coffee shops there.

"Eat this slowly and let it relax yer moind. Oi'm gonna smoke a joint. Ya need to save yer voice."

When his cup of tea arrived he added juice from one of the lemons to it. "This can cure cancer" he told me. Apparently lemon tea had magical healing properties but, as with the now reversed orbit of the earth around the sun, most people were not aware of it.

I began eating the space cake. It was still before ten AM. This was to be my breakfast. Meanwhile, the Irishman talked and talked. His voice had a soft quality, like sobbing. It occurs to me now that he never told me his name, but one of the things he repeated a few times was that the Irish mind was "the most devious thing in all of Gahd's creation". He had also by now informed me that he himself was God and, additionally, the devil. He told me of another fellow he'd met, still around here somewhere, who was one of the archangels mentioned in the Bible. I can't remember which one. Apparently, though, this fellow had not yet fully accepted this fact about himself.

Pretty soon I started feeling the effects of that space cake. At one point God/Satan got up and went to the bar. When he came back he had paid for a bed for me for one night.

"Look at ya! Ya need to take better care of yerself. Go and get some sleep."

I was in no mind to argue. I found my way to my dorm room and bed. On my way to the bed I passed a mirror and looked into it. God/Satan was right- in the blue-green iris of my there was now a map of the world. All the continents were there. I laid down and went out like a light.



At some point later that night I woke up and went down to the bar. God/Satan was nowhere to be seen but my English devil was there, deep in conversation with some German guy. I joined them and we went to visit a coffee shop where the tables are equipped with vaporizers. An hour or so later I was really stoned and ready for more sleep.



When I came down to the bar in the morning, once again, the only two people in the room were the Irishman and the bar girl (who still hated us). The Irishman was studying a map, one of those tourist maps that's not very detailed in terms of streets but does highlight all the important tourist sites.

"Roight! We need to foind a Buddhist monk." he explained. "They're the only ones who would recognoize ya. The Christians are fucked. Don't even think about the Jews!"

He had found on the map a Chinese temple. He was convinced that we could find a monk there. This was a leap of faith we had to make, he told me, because he was down to his last few Euros.

"Ok, well this is the thing" I told him "I'm a busker. I go out and play on the street and that's how I make money. If I put in a decent effort I can probably make enough to get us both a bed for tonight. Beyond that, I don't know."

"Next we're goin' to Dublin" he informed me "The people there will recognoize ya, 'cos they're poor. But for now, we need a Buddhist monk."

This guy REALLY thought I was the second coming of Jesus. I wasn't sure. But it was worth a shot. We checked out of the hostel and set out following the map to the Chinese temple.

When we got there, we found that it wasn't a real temple, just a mock-up that housed a museum or something. There was a Chinese lady working behind the info desk.

"Ask her if there's anyone here who knows about numbers" the Irishman ordered me. I approached the woman and asked her if she knew anything about numbers. The Irishman cut in, pleading with her. "We need to talk to a monk right now!" The lady didn't understand the request. "You need money? Here!". She handed him five euros.

"Ya don't understand... Oi'm about to crack here! Oi need to talk to somebody who understands... this is IT for humanity!"

"Talk to the police" the woman said, her level of anxiety rising to meet his. "We cannot help you here! You need to go to the police!"

We left the building, the Irishman cursing and raving.

"Ok, I'm gonna go and play now, start making money" I said. "Do you wanna come with me?"

This calmed him down somewhat. "Alroight, ya know what to do."

We went to my spot near the central train station. I set up and started playing. The Irishman sat down against the wall behind us, a couple of feet to my left. At first no money came. The Irishman told me I needed to smile more. "No one's gonna give ya money if yer frownin'!". I took his advice. Still no luck.

"Yer never gonna make any money with me sittin' here. Oi'm scarin' 'em off."

He did look like some kind of grey and gloomy ghost in the broad daylight, I thought.

"Oi'm gonna go back to the hostel, call Ma and tell 'er to send some money to get us to Dublin".

"Well, do what you gotta do. Don't worry about me though. I'm gonna stand here and play for as long as I need to. I'll work something out. Things always work out."

Suddenly, he seemed to change tact.

"Well, maybe this is the end of our toime together. Ya don't need me anyway. Whatever happens to me ya have to go on."

"Ok, well... I'll be hanging around here for a couple of hours." That's about all I could think to say.

He went off and I kept playing. Sure enough, money then started coming. I was back in business.

I hung around in the area out the front of the train station for a couple of hours or so. I had to keep to playing short sets of no more than half an hour and also move around a bit, not playing in exactly the same place all the time as council regulations limited the amount of time I was allowed to

occupy a spot.

Meanwhile, the Irishman hadn't returned. The American guy who was storing my luggage had passed by and invited me to dinner. Going through my guitar case i noticed my passport was missing. I decided to go back to the hostel to see if I had left it there.



When I got there, I asked the bar girl who hated me if she had seen my passport. She flatly replied that she didn't know. I asked her to check.

She rifled through a lost property box behind the counter and found it. Inside the pouch of the passport was folded up the paper with the diagram that explained the reversed orbit of the earth around the sun. To this day that piece of paper exists as proof that my encounter with that man really happened, here in this dimension.

I asked the bar girl very politely if she had seen my Irish friend lately. She glared and said 'no'.

I felt a twinge of sadness but also great relief. Somehow I knew that I wasn't gonna see the Irishman again. I hoped that he was ok. I also imagined that this was not the first time he'd gotten himself in this kind of trouble.



In the next couple of days I scored a job in a hostel, making beds in exchange for food and accommodation. I was glad to have somewhere indoors where i could hang out. It kept me off of the streets and away from all the craziness that the city of Amsterdam attracts, of which I was already tired.

I saw out the last few weeks of my European adventure in that hostel. It was a Christian hostel. Every morning I attended a bible discussion group and, in the end, I was very sure that I was not Jesus.