Before I moved into a squat we had some great times with a group of friends that had sort of spontaneously formed. There was me, there was Arno, the son of the town milkman. He was the brother of the guy that once threatened to cut my throat if I didn’t stop flirting with his girl. His dad was this ultra funny, ultraconservative elemental type. When his eldest son became punk he threw him out of the house. When his second oldest son became punk he threw him out too. Arno was the third in line and whenever that milkman used to spot me he’d go berserk.

There was Peter, who owns a pub in Eindhoven now. There was Hein the weird art student who continuously talked about Laibach and other weird things. There was Michie and Edwin, two fucked up dudes that worked in the local slaughterhouse. Last but not least, there was Henry.

Henry was unbelievable. He was like Mowgli, or one of those children raised by wolves. When we met him somewhere on the street with carnival he seemed the most funny character we had seen in a long time. He couldn’t even ride a bicycle and he never went to a bar. There was like tuns of things the guy had no clue of and when I saw his folks I understood why. Imagine my amazement when I rang the doorbell and the door was opened by this small cave troll in human form. She didn’t even speak she’d grunt. Henry pretty much raised himself and had hardly went to school. When we took him to the local youth centre he was out of his mind from sheer joy. He’d dance like a raving lunatic and the guy didn’t even for a single moment in the entire time I knew him worry what anyone else would think of him. He was the purest manifestation of the idiot savant I have ever met.

We taught him to smoke weed and he would buy insane amounts of weed all the time and half the bar would be stoned from his weed, except.. Henry. He just sat there, bewildered about the fact that everyone got high except him. After a few weeks we found out he wasn’t actually inhaling the smoke. He was that sort of guy, nothing was obvious to him and you had to explain the simplest things.

One time I took my sisters block flute to the bar and we would roll eight joints and stick one in every hole. That would flatten half of the pub! I returned the flute after that to my sisters drawer but it smelt like tobacco and pot like nothing else. Sometimes I heard her play after that and it always made me gniffle.

We had another trick with a bottle and a bucket of water. Henry used to carry a bucket with him when he went out solely for that reason. Imagine that, a guy going from bar to bar carrying a bucket and asking everywhere if he can fill it up with water. Henry was in fact really intelligent sometimes I had these philosophical conversations with him and he would be genuinely interested and perplexed at the mechanisms of the universe we discussed. He also was seriously reckless, though. He also worked at the local slaughterhouse, because they offered good money, and his job was to cut the cow’s heads off. Henry one time decided to try LSD at work, because he was bored there. Now, seriously, the last thing I would EVER do is use LSD in a slaughterhouse. He of course went ape-shit after 15 minutes and thought he was in hell. Well, in fact he was in hell and LSD just showed him the reality he was in. It took him considerable time to recover from that trip, even though he must have maximumly stayed there for a half hour or so before he ran outside.

By that time we had progressed our nightlife to ‘de Bunker’ which was this military bunker squatted by some old school punks which was simply the coolest place in Eindhoven at the time. Years later it became nationwide news when the major of Eindhoven used tuns of military police to evacuate it and was met just by a few squatters with water pistols. That major looked like a complete ass on national tv wasting resources like that and he called it the biggest mistake in his career.

Anyway, we used to explore really extreme methods of getting stoned. We used chilms, waterpipes, tulips, flutes, wc-rolls. One day Henry got the idea to roll the longest joint ever made. We bought 10 packs of van Nelle shag and 30 grams of weed and 30 packs of rolling papers. After about 4 hours of work Henry rolled a joint that was exactly 1 meter and 20 centimeter long. It was thicker than my arm.
We tried to light it up but the damn thing just wouldn’t burn. There was simply too much oxygen coming through the paper and it was impossible to suck it hard enough. So we chopped up the joint in 4 pieces and smoked those. It was like smoking two entire packs of shag in one time. I was sick for 4 days!

I mentioned De Bunker as our cool hideout but in fact we had an ever cooler hideout for a while. The was this old hooker party boat lying at the old harbor-head in Eindhoven and Peter had managed to change the locks on it. We would go there every weekend with large amounts of cheap booze and get really pissed. The ship had burned down which was why it was abandoned, but below deck there were perfectly intact mirror-cladded 70′s style sofa’s and a dance floor and a bar. We got pissed there for many nights in a row and it was simply the coolest place one could imagine for this sort of thing. I must have been 16 at that time because I remember bringing my girlfriend S. to the place who was frightened to death because she saw ‘ghosts’ everywhere. Sometimes the owner would come and change the lock again but we would just cut it off and replace it with a lock of our own. As i think back that must have been sort of risky since the sort of people that own giant hooker boats usually ain’t really softies but the thought didn’t occur to us at the time.