Surrounded by DMT Casualties and Nut-cases | Dog Of Man

“Papa was a rollin’ stone!” screamed Sebastian into his bass guitar pickups.

I nodded seriously. I was still going from the speed. I think at times like these it’s always important to take stock of the situation. I think I understood the guy. I mean I think I thought I understood him. It’s hard to remember. Being on tour again was like slipping back into an old pair of jeans. We hadn’t been out of the basement in three months and we were keen to stretch our legs on a European tour.

I had a trumpet. Of that I was certain. Unfortunately I did not know how to play it. What next? Sebastian was pacing up and down the wooden shack, splinters of dusty light from the surrounding forest reached through the cracks of the shack. The very thought of trying to keep up with the music he was attempting to play was utterly mad. I was left with no doubt in my mind that Sebastian was indeed insane.

“I did DMT last night” Sebastian said.

He had a realisation and turned to me with wide, melting eyes. “I’m gonna die.”

And why not. For where were we that we could be surrounded by DMT casualties and nut-cases from all over Europe? The melting pot was here, in The Free Haven of ADM. I partially wanted to leave, but I was certain that at the present moment that I would not be able to do so without generating some very bad vibrations in this man who was clearly on the brink. However, the basis of my paralysis was more like innocent curiosity. I honestly had no idea where this could possibly go.

There were four of us on tour. Amsterdam was the first stop before venturing further into the mainland of Europe. The other three were elsewhere.

ADM has a habit of swallowing people whole. It’s an old dockyard in the industrial part of Amsterdam which has been a cultural hub (or squat if you will) for over twenty years. Various attempts have been made over the year to shut it down which I won’t go into now, but suffice it to say that a certain species of endangered frog has prolonged the life of the place in spite of developers.

It’s a free place – and it attracts those of a liberal mindset, especially in regard to substances, but also artists and musicians. The output of the place ranges from motorised refrigerators to serious welding jobs, such as two cars grafted together or an iron tree. I had seen what I thought was an old man pushing a trolley inside the main building. It was only once he turned the corner that I realised his head was full of gears. It was a fully automated walking robot playing a gramophone.

“She don’t like cocaine,” said Sebastian into his pickups. The sound came out fuzzy and squashed, his voice compressed into a cyan node. He was not, as I had initially thought, a permanent resident of ADM. You wouldn’t think it, but there is a structural system in place in the free haven. People cannot just come and stay for as long as they like. You get three months. Three months to work out an existential crisis or otherwise make yourself indispensable to the place. If you have a valuable skill – you can stay. Electrical engineering for example or having a lot of useful tools. The whole place is maintained by voluntary graft by the residents and visitors. If you cook, you cook for everyone. If you eat, you wash up. I wondered what Sebastian’s input had been.

I had met him the previous day in the bar, after we had arrived. He was raving about robot cars. He said that one day we could just walk out into heavy traffic and it would just move around us and we’d be in the eye of the storm. I couldn’t recall how I had ended up in his shack. Or whoever’s shack it was. It was clearly someone’s home, the more I looked around the place the more I saw evidence that somebody lived here. Or at least had lived here, once.

The door yawned at me. Perhaps, I thought, it was time to go. I rustled and the beer cans surrounding me clattered about irritably. Yes yes, I know.

“Sebastian,” I said. “I gotta go.”

It was true. We did have to go. We would all have to reconvene somehow and make our way east into Germany. Where the rest of the guys were by now, I could not tell. Speed can be like that. You close your eyes for a second and you wake up three days later, your task still unfulfilled.

Sebastian was looking at his reflection in the window. “You know,” he said, “I used to look at old guys ears. They were all hairy! Hairy ears! That’s disgusting man!” I nodded, trying to move.

“Well, you know one day I went into the bathroom and I looked in the mirror and I realised. I had hairy ears man!”

“Looks like now you’re the one with hairy ears,” I said. “Yeah, now it’s me!” He said, turning to face me, his mind freshly blown.

I shuffled back down into the pile of beer cans that was looking more and more like my grave and opened another.

I’m sure somebody will come and find me when it’s time to go.