De Duif “Do you ...

De Duif

“Do you know the way,” Matthias asked, pointing to a tiny black cross amid the orderly web of a crumpled Amsterdam street map. He didn't need to ask a penny for the thoughts of the hostel receptionist as their eyes met. She gave him a disconcerted look before scribbling down the route to De Duif. Matthias didn't look like the typical churchgoer. He had on the same black bomber jacket that he wore on the door as a bouncer at Berlin’s Tresor nightclub.

Matthias stepped out into the early Autumnal evening. Amsterdammers were making their commute home on the heavy black bikes so ubiquitous in the city. Matthias didn't find the tram stop hard to find. He was in good time. A white city tram soon approached and he stepped on board. Clutching the street map he again pointed to the black cross marking the spot of De Duif. This time it was left to a middle-aged Moroccan tram driver to give directions. Matthias stood near the front of the tram as the heavy vehicle swung onwards. He felt conscious of the driver's intermittent gaze. This didn't disturb him. A feeling of overwhelming anticipation had engulfed Matthias's consciousness. All he had to do was take a church pew, sit and listen. Yet this seemed barely achievable. Or at the very least a challenging endeavour. The driver had the look of a hardened cynical man. He probably worked long hours to feed his family. He was a tough guy. A man who had grown sick of the sight of Amsterdam tourists using his tram to ferry themselves to the nearest coffee shop or red light district haunt. Party-going students, sad middle aged losers. The lot of them.

It was not long before the driver motioned to him that his stop was near. They made eye contact – almost inadvertently on Matthias’s part -- for the last time. The tram diver's final look gave Matthias a sense that he'd recognised the deep-held sincerity of his mission. Matthias was on a pilgrimage. He felt the driver had registered a sense of this truth. An awareness Matthias felt at this moment was bursting from the depth of his being. An intuition that on the fringes of the grey humdrum mundanity of life. There was an infinite unending universe. And possibly something more.

As the tram made its journey to De Duif Matthias looked at the townhouses on either side of the street. Each had big glass windows. Anyone passing by could take a peek inside. Matthias looked in on a monied middle class world that he didn’t belong to. He came from a very different place. The author Albert Camus had likened Amsterdam’s concentric canals to the circles of hell - a middle class hell — peopled with bad dreams. “When one comes from the outside, as one gradually goes through those circles, life — and hence its crimes — becomes denser, darker. Here, we are in the last circle,” wrote Camus in his novel The Fall. Matthias was a man who knew what it was like to fall. He still felt like he wore scars as deep as when a bottle is smashed in the face. Even if he had been saved. Would he ever be free from the dehumanisation of abuse that still haunted him?

Matthias's journey to De Duif had begun a couple of decades earlier. In a previous century. In what had been a previous life. That of a drug addict. It all started innocently enough. Matthias would stay at his older sister's house when she was away and experiment with acid alone through the night. He would walk back home in a blaze of early morning sunshine. Opening up in front of his eyes like a Van Gough masterpiece. Berlin’s electronic music scene would occasionally provide a clock of cover. Matthias popped pills in dark corridors and anonymous dance floors. A day or so later he would again be alone. Fighting off a come down by eating weed or magic mushrooms after taking his father’s car for a drive.

The need for escape was irresistible. Uncontainable. The fall into heroine’s clutches — inevitable. Check mate. Heroine told him the game was over. When he took the drug for the first time it lifted something. A dark force that had become so intertwined with his consciousness he’d not even been aware of its existence. Taking heroine became his release. First smoking. Then injecting.

Matthias didn't take long before his habit had him injecting the drug six times a day into every vacant vein. Even his penis became virgin territory for a heroine hit. The blissful nirvana heroine first offered transmorphed into just a way of feeling normal. Once his morning routine depended on taking that first hit, no amount of self-denial could lead him to avoid the truth that he was a junkie. Dirty smack head scum. The lowest of the low. Crime ceased to be an adventure. It became a necessity. Matthias became vacant. Zombie-like. The need for the next fix was the only thing that mattered. But somehow in the throes of addiction, he discovered meditation. A book written by an Indian yogi became his companion. In one interpretation of the book’s proscriptive methods he would let out agonised screams. This was usually done in a dilapidated stable that had once been a makeshift gym where he lifted weights. Once he was disturbed by a stranger who probably feared he was bearing witness to a gut-wrenching crime. After this episode Matthias would muffle a towel tightly around his mouth as he let the screams out.

Matthias painted geometrically precise lines across his bedroom wall. Built a miniature white pyramid to sit under while meditating. He would sit bathed in sweat, focusing on his breath as narcotics gushed through his bloodstream. Ounces upon ounces.

Mescaline, bush weed, crack, smack. Anything to get the hell out of the terror that reality had found for him. He sat in meditative stillness while his mind danced wildly to crazy tunes of toxic allusions. Quitting heroine had been impossible. Matthias had become a hopeless addict. Those times doing cold turkey had been doomed to failure. After stealing from his mother’s purse he was kicked out of the home he'd grown up in. Left homeless, Matthias now learnt how to beg as well as steal. In one nightmare the choices that lay before him had revealed themselves: Prison. A mental asylum. Death by overdose. What would it be? Everyone had turned their back on him. His family. His friends. Matthias was left to stand alone.