To quote ‘The 40 Year-old Virgin‘, “I had a WEEKEND.”
I suppose the title of this post is a bit misleading, as bricks and other bits of masonry only flew on Friday night, but damn, what a weekend.Friday night started off as a good night out. Some family and friends from various points abroad all converged on Amsterdam (where I currently reside) to get together. It was a great re-union/party, and it coincided nicely with the Amsterdam Dance Event, which meant there were tons of decent DJs to choose from.
Friday night a group of us went to dinner at Nomads. Nomads is the Middle Eastern cousin of the renowned Supper Club. Now, I hate the Supper Club: it’s pretentious, and people are unjustifiably way to into themselves. I say “ unjustifiably” because these forced attempts at exclusivity are a bit laughable, and I don’t think they pull it off well anymore. (Did they ever?) Nomads has the couches, the hookahs, the DJ, and an excellent list of very original cocktails. (My favorite was the “Dark and Stormy”, which involved Bacardi black, limes, and ginger beer.) The food was a bit of a divergence from traditional Arabic meze, but it was still very good. If you’re more than six people, you don’t get to choose the menu, but the three course presentation was excellent, and they had vegetarian options.
The tunes and general atmosphere were great, and the belly dancer didn’t hurt. The service was sometimes way too slow bringing the drinks to the table, and the masseuse was crap. There’s also a tarot card reader hanging about, although we ignored her. (I heard later she was also crap.) We all seemed to struggle drinking on the beds as well. (It can be forgiven, I suppose, since drinking in bed is something I didn’t plan to pick up until I was well into my 60s.) I think for every three drinks ordered, two were successfully consumed. We all knocked over at least one drink with an errant foot or ill-placed elbow, but the record was held by the masseuse – who knocked over a whole tray of cocktails, and the waiter – who took out the bottle of wine he’d just opened, plus the bottle we were still finishing. (The Dutch word for spaz is “Knoeier!“)
The masonry started flying when my sister and a friend went outside for some fresh air. Apparently, Nomads has a disco as well. The scene at the disco is way different from the lounge. This became clear very quickly, as the line to get into the disco was almost exclusively the under 21 crowd. A group of guys started harassing the two girls. Typical testosterone-fuelled bravado designed for a cheap laugh at some girl’s expense, right? What they didn’t count on was a face full of New York ‘ tude from a four foot eleven Korean-American, who isn’t one to back down from a confrontation, even when outnumbered five-to-one. That’s when the racial epithets started to fly (“kut chinees”, “chinees kutwijf”, etc.). My Dutch friend who was with her was too shocked to say anything. My sister backed off, and one of the punks actually kicked her in the ass with his boot.
They came back inside. My sister was pissed, and my Dutch friend was stunned, as she’d always bought into Amsterdam’s self-image as a City of Tolerance.
She’d just had a very rude awakening.
Sis told us what happened through gritted teeth. Once she told me she’d been hit, I began putting my shoes on. (You take off your shoes in a bed, right?) Her boyfriend and the other guys in our group did the same. We went outside and saw the huge line of people waiting to get into the disco.
“There he is!” My sister pointed with a black goth fingernail. “That’s the little sh*t who kicked me!”
And boy, was he a little sh*t alright. He was backed up by about five friends, which I figure is exactly why he’d felt the need to prove his “manliness” in the first place. All five of them had their best white sneakers, gold chains, and hooded puffy down jackets against the cold weather. Such stupid behavior from five aspiring gangstas was not surprising, but what did surprise me was that t the racial epithets came from five guys who were clearly Moroccan. Waitaminnit, I thought, aren’t these guys always the victims of discrimination around here?
The confrontation started, tempers flared, and then one of the punk’s friends rabbit punched me in the face. Before we knew it, the gang of five became a gang of 20, and I had three “Men of Middle Eastern Origin” climbing all over me. I decked two and quickly had a third in a headlock; I looked behind me, hoping to see my buddies backing me up. All I saw was my little sister – God bless her – delivering greetings from the Land of Beatings to the scrawny punk that kicked her.
My other friends were behind a wall of 16 other punks. We were cut off.
Ultimately, my friends waded in, and we actually beat them all back. I couldn’t believe it. They were all talk, and their mouths had clearly written checks their bodies couldn’t cash. Sounds like a win, right? WRONG.
The entire sidewalk was being rebuilt and there were stacks of bricks just laying about. In a desperate attempt to get the upper hand, three of the bastards grabbed bricks and waved them over at us, threatening to throw. One of them stood atop the pile a good five feet above us, waving the brick threateningly. At that point, a brick hit me in the back, and my situational awareness came back to me. I heard my buddy shouting “Get in! Get back in the door!” and saw the two bouncers (who’d done nothing to help my sister in the first place, and who’d not intervened at all when things escalated) were pulling down a metal shutter to seal themselves safely inside and me outside!
I grabbed my sister under my arm (still yelling and struggling to get at the scrawny punk who’d kicked her) and we little slid under the shutter Indiana Jones-style. More bricks smashed into the shutter with a terrific clang. The bouncer got in my face, and I got right back in his, shouting “ik ben een gast!” I wasn’t sure what was worse about this moment, the fact that this had even happened, or that it happened frequently enough that they obviously had some sort of drill worked out for what to do.
Our only injuries were back pain (not from the brick, but from trying not to fall down with three of the bastards crawling all over me), some bloody knuckles, and a black-and-blue toe on another friend from another brick that had been fired at us. We sat there laughing about it, but it was a real Assault on Precinct 13 moment – and I mean the original (“Cholo? Nobody said nothing about the Cholo!”), not the remake. Like the children of immigrants burning the banlieues of Paris, the teenage boys here run wild. It’s not as bad as Paris of course, but it now seems to be getting there.
As I write this, cars are probably being burned again for the third or fourth night in a row in Amsterdam West. They started burning cars after some nut named Bilal B. went into a police station and began stabbing a female police officer. Her colleague naturally shot the guy – dead. This was the spark for the latest “outrage”.We’d jumped into the confrontation rather casually – especially the guys that don’t live in Amsterdam. This is Holland: there’s no guns, very few knives, and street brawls seem limited only to football matches. But then I recalled the cars burning only a few blocks from us in Amsterdam West.
As I sat there in Nomads, I realized that a bunch of bored guys in their teens/early 20s aren’t just going to go away and call it a night. For them, this could mean SHOWTIME. It suddenly seemed very feasible to me that there might be 50 bored guys out there now, building up their outrage and their courage, and gather bricks.
I turned to the other guys. “We could have a problem here.”
No one believed me, of course. And in the end – it wasn’t a problem. The kids had actually scattered or backed off. Most of them – I suspect – put more value on getting into the club than getting into a fight again. We got into our taxis without seeing them again. I suppose there must have been a better way to handle the situation. It’s just that Amsterdam cops seem pretty useless, get no respect, have no mandate to enforce laws vigorously (as in New York), and are literally never ever around when you need them. I only feel bad because I just know that the jerk-offs have no realization of just how rotten and dangerous their behavior was, and are probably wearing any bruises we gave them as badges of honor. I’m also sure their version of the fight is being told and re-told in a completely different way, with the number of adversaries they faced doubling and tripling with each re-telling of their “victory”.
Nomads was good, and the fight is already (thankfully) a hilarious story. Saturday night was legendary. We’d rented a canal boat for a couple of hours for an evening tour of the canals of Amsterdam. The boat was tastefully appointed in dark, polished teak, with brass fittings, and the hull design was a classic Dutch canal boat. The friendly captain doubled as a tour guide. To top it off, we had buffet rijsttafel from an excellent local restaurant called Kantijl & de Tijger, and an open bar to keep the 30 of us happy. From there, we walked about 200 yards to the Odeon. I’d never been there before. It used to be just a club (and apparently a very exclusive one at that), but now it’s a multi-level restaurant/bar/club. It was fantastic. The crowd was a mix of trendy 20-somethings and 30-somethings, and ranged from “Happy Drunk” to “E’d Out of Their Mind”. We were all the way in top in balcony seating. Where we danced, jabbered, and laughed until 5 am. Hangovers and the Amsterdam City Marathon put the kibosh on a big brunch in the city center, so everyone who’d reserved evening flights home crashed in my living room, ate take out, and listlessly watched ‘The 40 Year-Old Virgin’. I don’t think we had anything left to prove at that point.
Like I said, we had a WEEEKEND.
The Travelling Misanthrope 