Mayke from the street

Holland, Amsterdam,
16 Dec. 2010.

Another street character for this blog...Mayke who I first met during my bicycle messenger years working both at the infamous Fietsdienst here in Amsterdam...

Mayke who was already in these years of our mutual excistence as nutty as a fruitcake due maybe to a LSD-propelled trip earlier in her life, accopanying her flower-power parents on the overland trail to the Goa beaches in India in a rusty old van that also funcioned as a make-do house, parttaking in their favourite hobby, smoking pot, with the other beach inhabitants, Mary-Jane devotees from the age of six or seven... probably didn't help her still developing young mind much...

Losing her house after her Fietsdienst years, big money to pay for freeloading boyfriends, acid parties and beer a-many but no dough for the rent...sh*t, when we still dated back in the days of cycling, she used to send me boomerang cards picked up at the public library free of charge, the backs written full with crazy love stories, always ending her nearly incomprehensible words of lust and love, with "Bier Is Vies", referring to my beer drinking sessions with my mates..

I remember how she stalled three or four cubic meters of personal stuff in front of my house after her eviction day, explaining to my upstairs neighbours while out of her head on a Big mamma joint from the Heavenly Coffeeshop, she was the new neighbor while I was sweating away carrying all her stuff up to my storage room...

Nowadays she lives in a homeless centre in Amsterdam North, still drinking beer and smoking herself senseless every day - I sometimes see her at De Tweede Mijl or De Schakel for a free cup of coffee, maybe a bowl of foul tasting soup donated by Appie Heijn..still as nutty as a fruitcake...

I guess her Fietsdienst years were her only sober years...Yeah, Mayke, that was the time that "Bier Was Vies".

I started this panting in these cycle years when she was sober and I was stoned and drunk each day, but only yesterday did I have the right inpiration to finish it...