Another thing I did when I was 17 was move into a squat. I had been uncomfortable at home since my rather wild behavior didn’t harmonize with the sort of model citizen life my parents were aiming at. There were countless conflicts concerning ‘rules’ where I remember my father telling me as long as I lived in his house I had to follow his rules to which I always replied that it wasn’t his house since he didn’t pay off the mortgage yet. He didn’t have any sort of reasonable reply to that and the resulting atmosphere was sort of unpleasant. After one more fight I had enough of it and went to stay with a squatter friend in Eindhoven at the Tongleresestraat where they lived with a group of about 12 people. They were hospitable and I stayed for around 10 days, not letting anyone know where I was and greatly enjoying the spring sun. Markje, with whom I was staying, was a long and weird sort of fellow, a few years older than me. He wanted to become a painter and he drank a bottle of whiskey a day, which he bought at the Drankurgel just across the street. He mainly painted elf-like creatures and other fantasy related works and he had this elf-like girlfriend, Eva who later would become my friend as well.

One event I remember was typical. There was this guy in my class at school and he wanted to throw a party since his folks were on holiday. I asked him if I could bring some folks and he sais yeah bring whomever you want so we went there with 10 people only to find there were already like 200 people there. ‘Bring whomever you want’ was sort of a mistake. I brought the crazy mierlo chess player nicknamed Willy Wokka. Willy was sort of my friend but he was seriously weird. He had these jampot glasses and he looked sort of like a frog. He was punk but in a weird sort of way. Normally he was sort of shy but when Willy started drinking he would turn into an unpredictable maniac. It was no different on this occasion. After some amounts of alcohol Willy started to look pretty weird. He would be quiet and his eyes would bulge out of their sockets. We were in the bedroom of my schoolmates sister. Someone discovered the underwear closet and we all started walking around with her underwear on our heads. Willy, for some reason, started demolishing her pick-up player all of a sudden. There were pieces of the player flying through the room as he was attacking the player like a wild animal. At some point we had to lock him in the broom cabinet in the hallway. The party seriously got out of hand and markje had to be hospitalized the next day for alcohol poisoning. We were going to Paris for a few days with Willy but we had to leave him behind. My classmates house was sort of trashed, but that sort of what you get when you invite that many people. The funny thing was we had forgotten about Willy who had passed out in the broom cabinet but luckily some guy heard him knock on the door later on.