Rotterdam: The Police, The Homeless and Faux Jazz
A blonde haired guy with a beard walks up to me. He is fidgety and, from the way he is rubbing his hands together, probably cold. “I am sorry Sir, but I do not understand,” I say to him as he goes off in rapid Dutch.
“Engels?” he asks.
“Yes, English,” and pointing at my date who is at that moment stepping out of Coconuts in Stadhuisplein (Town House Square) where we just had dinner, “but maybe you should ask her as she knows Rotterdam better.” I assume that he is asking for directions.
“Do you have a coin?” my date asks me. She is wearing that look of: don’t bother. “No,” I shrug, partly because I feel that that is the expected response and partly because I am feeling way too cold to take off my gloves and start fishing around my pockets for change. Far as I know, I spent my last coins- all of five Euros- getting cigarettes from the vending machine. (Yes, the feared and loathed moment when I would run out of my less-than-1-Euro-a-pack Kenyan cigarettes finally came yesterday).
“Clochard?” I ask my date as the blonde guy heads off in the Stadhuis (City Hall) direction and we cross Schouwburgplein , walk past the Rotterdamse Schouwburg and head towards Rotterdam West
“Ja, homeless,” she replies. “He was 90 cents short of the Euro2.50 for the homeless shelter.”
“What, that dude is homeless?” I yell out my disbelief. “He is like what, 25…?”
“Nee, maybe older…”
“…and white,” I laugh. “Did a white dude just try to sell me a sob story? …I am the poor African here!”
“Reversed roles, no?”
“No sh*& and with what happened at Slinge earlier, this is a charming evening.” On my way to meet my date in town, Slinge -my Metro stop in Rotterdam South- was crawling with cops. They had the entire entrance covered with at least five cops standing in the area between the barriers (that open automatically when you run your public transport card) and the escalator to the boarding platform. A white girl entered this area about the same time as I did and as I walked past the cops and up the stairs totally unchallenged, one cop stopped her and looked into her bag. My ‘suspicious black man’ defences were quickly replaced by my ‘angry black man’ victim mentality. Why the hell did the cops stop the white girl and not me? Is this the new face of discrimination?
It was only towards the end of dinner that I realized that I had just missed the chance of, for the first time in my life, being stopped by a cute cop. Anyway, whatever everyone else’s thoughts on racial profiling are, my opinion in that matter is clouded by the fantasy of a hot female cop poking around my bits. I mean, I live in Kenya and our cops (male and female) are uglier than jail. It is requisite for the job.
As we head west for the next part of our evening’s programme, my mind remains unsettled. There is something terribly wrong with a white guy, my age, having to beg for about Kenya Shillings 250 for the homeless shelter. I mean, the artist in me understands being broke and hungry and needing a place to crash but I am a citizen of one of the most dysfunctional states in the world. This dude is Dutch. 100% autochtoon. A citizen of this country- the Netherlands- that is one of the most functional, welfare, states in the world.
Long before I can rationalize the blonde guy’s homelessness, we are at Dizzy. Dizzy, as with many Dutch bars is small and cozy. Somehow I keep getting the feeling that all these bars have barmen called Jan and everyone that walks in has to make small talk about the weather and tulips. But as it turns out, there are several people behind the bar at Dizzy and not everyone seems to know each other. But, as we take seats at the bar, a guy asks us if it is cold outside. I make a mental note to find him one of these days, when I learn how to say: It is winter, Sir. In Dutch that is.
www.dizzy.nl
At ten o’clock, the band gets on stage. Tonight it is YesSister, JazzSister: Take Beyonce on a bad day, back her up with your high school’s orchestra and call it Jazz. The girls might have voice talent, for the canned pop stuff, but they do not sound good together. At least not live. And doing covers of Beyonce is fine, but Umbrella by Rihanna… are you kidding me? But who knows, this is the digital age and I just might be deriding next years YouTube phenomenon.
The night ended, for me, when they covered Peter Andre’s Mysterious Girl.
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Was the date Dutch?
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