Ah, coffee.
Coffee, coffee, coffee. With and without, without and with, do me both. The warming bitterness, an oily deposit on the back of your tongue. Coffee in the morning, on the flat roof, surrounded by a sea of roofing tiles that are starting to reheat in the sun.
The heart of Rotterdam. The smell of asphalt and exhaust fumes, of unswept chimneys and stationary canals. Piss in alleys, rotting vegetable waste along the edge of the market. The harsh metallic taste of sparking wires overhead that lingers briefly as streetcars round the corner. Rotterdam is a spectacle of smell and stench.
Delicious with a cup of coffee.
I can't remember everything from that period. I drank and smoked a lot at the time (with a certain aloof dignity I tried to convince myself...).
The beginning of my second activist period took place in the commune that I had alienated from because of my persistent bitterness and quarrels with the girl I had until recently lived with.
Our house, our shared house, lay under the heavy, smelly blanket of the Oranjeboom brewery and the adjacent margarine factory. I wanted to go back again, across the oily thickness of the Maas, back to where adventurous vacancy beckoned, measured in thousands of euro's per square meter. This is in contrast to the desolate abandoned housing in South Rotterdam, where squatting was much more common, but in larger buildings it was much more difficult to achieve a viable occupancy rate of sane people that didn’t strip your squat while still living in it.
I think I met Momo and Tutti (or Momo and Abbi) in the second or third incarnation of the squat café in Bospolder. The squat café was the place for excellent vegan sandwiches, moldy things and drinks. Lots of booze. Inside, behind the boarded up windows, it was always late at night. At it's busiest between 12 at night and 5 in the morning. Since moving to Rotterdam South, I didn’t go there that often. But that night I was there.
Momo and Tutti were refugees. After the eviction of the WNC complex in Groningen, the atmosphere in that city was no longer pleasant. For squatters and between squatters. Public opinion had shifted. I felt guilty, because I had not been arrested at that eviction and held for weeks in holding (I could have been but that's a whole other story about the tactics of provoked evictions and common sense). Could I help them now, didn't I run squatters advice and legal aid in the past? Momo spoke with beer-fueled intensity, her pupils dilated, her cheeks rosy, splotches of spit on her lips. Her bushy hair gleamed in the cobbled together lights of the pub.
We met again at my house. Call me cynical, but a few extra miles work great as a gauge of people's self-reliance. I had learned from my years of squatting aid.
At home in Rotterdam South, they, my living group, knew that I wanted to move. Oh, that I had to move. My jealousy was too great; my longing for my ex expressed itself in the most unbearably cynical remarks, discussions in meetings turned into desperate quarrels. There were too many memories of our happiness. Everything revolved around that one question: “Why can't you love me anymore like you loved me?” I really had to leave.
Two days later they were on my doorstep. The three of them. Momo, Tutti and Abbi. I knew Abbi from before. We drank beer and, more sober this time, they told me about their plan. Squat something in Rotterdam. Something big. A building with a challenge, where things happened. No derelict buildings, not from the Municipality. No, objects of speculation in plain sight. I was sold. A wonderful and responsible adventure. I asked if I could join. They hesitated. Actually, they didn't want men in the house. Not to live with. I told about my situation. They wanted to think about it. Did I still want to help? I said yes.
A month and a half later, we stormed into the new building through the emergency exit. Up a flight of stairs through a long narrow hallway. When we got to the top it was big. Not a big open space, but classroom after classroom, with a long corridor with smaller rooms opposite and another identical floor, and above that a kind of apartment. It was in capital letters, BIG. And empty. Vacancy has its own smell. Stagnant air in poorly ventilated rooms, four or five years of unvacuumed carpet, slowly decaying due to the unrelenting effect of the sun. The smell of empty swan necks in kitchens and toilets. This is what the souls of real estate speculators must smell like, dead and dusty, with a piquant undertone of shit and piss.