We, Pippi and I were biking
back to the shop the other day – Thursday – yeah Thursday – just two days ago I
guess. Seems longer already – well
anyway we had just stopped briefly at the Wilsonsplein so Pippi could check out
the newly refurbished bike merry-go-round and I said no no no time but… ok
quickly cause there is someone waiting for Poppa in the shop and yeah I didn’t
want to be a bad Dad, so we stopped at the playground and she was quck about it
all and it was cold out, so we got back on the bakfiets and headed to the shop
and along the Ged. Raamgracht there was this old man biking infront of us and
just as he went to make the turn from the Ged. Raamgracht onto the Doelstraat
some guy came bounding down along the sidewalk from the opposite
direction. Now this guy was moving at a
quick pace, not running but bounding down the sidewalk, waving his arms and
yelling, eyes wild and this guy sees the old man there making the turn from the
Ged. Raamgracht onto the Doelstraat and starts shouting at him and then bounds
right across the corner of the Dolestraat and the Ged. Raamgracht and pushes
the old man off his bike – wham! The old man goes down hard onto the sidewalk and
the guy is still yelling at the old man and I stop the bakfiets and jump off without
thinking twice and start shouting at the guy “What the FUCK are you doing?” and
I move to see if the old man is ok and then this guy – eyes ALIGHT comes at me
– fits swinging screaming and raving and I’m like – “dude what the fuck are you
doing man, back the fuck off!” and the guy is coming at me and I hear Pippi
screaming and the guy gets in close and clocks me in the nose and my glasses go
flying and blood just starts pouring out of my face and I feel my left knee buckle and I am hearing Pippi screaming
and crying and my brain tells me, Josh Josh Josh –Fuck this fucking guy- so I
lean in with all of my 3 to 5 days a week Fit for Free middle aged muscle and move
to tackle this asshole, taking him down by the legs and somehow I get on top of
him and with ski gloved hands start pummeling down upon him and now as I write
this I have no idea if I was hitting him in the face or the chest or where or
what I was doing but I knew that I was just going to keep punching and trying
to keep this guy down and then all of a sudden there is this hand pulling on my
left shoulder so I look up and its some fucking construction worker and he is
yelling at me to fuck off and to get off of the guy and I am screaming back at
him “fuck you! He attacked me!” over and over and over and I think I am still
punching and then finally somehow I am pulled off the guy and I stand up and
look for my glasses them on the street and I grab them before someone steps on
them and then the guy pulls himself up off the sidewalk and starts running up
the Doelstraat where at the corner of the Doelstraat and the Lange Lakenstraat he
just stops in front of the Bolster office and pulls his pants down in front of
the door and squats down like he is going to take a shit and then he pulls his
pants back up and heads down the Lange Lakenstraat and people from the
neighborhood are gathering and I am yelling for someome to call the fucking
police as blood is pouring out of my nose and I remove my gloves and try to
stop the bleeding with a dirty bandana and Pippi is screaming and crying Poppa
Poppa Poppa and I go to her and pick her up but don’t wanna freak her out and
get blood all over her and I am trying to explain to her what just happened by
saying that the man was probably a bit sick in his head and more neighbors are
gathering offering help and asking if I am alright, if Pippi is alright and so
woman says “oh gossie” and the old man is thankfully back on his feet and
finally the cops show up and start chasing down this crazed guy and people are
saying that “he is there, he is there!” and some woman is standing there crying,
saying that this guy is her son and that he is normally not like this and that
he is a sweet boy and all that they did was smoke some weed and I am hear this
am like WTF! and there are neighbors offering Pippi candy and peppernoten and
Capri Suns and I am grateful and thank everyone fort heir support and tell them
that I am ok and try to explain what the fuck just happened and down the street
closer to Jan Monnikendam four cops catch up to the guy and pull him down and
get him face down on the cobblestones and the guy is still yelling and sceaming
as they try to subdue him and Pippi is thankfully no longer cryinf and she is calming
down and I calm down enought to call Esther to come down from the shop and pick
Pippi up and she does and she shoots me a look like WTF is going on and I say
that I will fill her in in a few minutes and Pippi calmly goes off with Esther
to the shop and I am waiting and still no cop comes to talk to me and I am
getting a bit impatient honestly so I step up and the female officer says that she
will be right with me so I step back and wait and then she comes over to me and
I tell her what’s what.
So I do. And the cop asks if I want to do make an
aangifte and I am like uh, I don’t know and at that moment I am probably in a
bit of shock but am doing my best to play it cool cause yeah like I have an
image ya know. Really I was just trying
to contain myself and breath. For that very
morning I had decided to start meditating, so I am doing my best to stay calm
and the cop, she says to me that i can always do an aangifte after the fact, so
I say ok, that I would think about it. I
am wiping blood from my face and well there is no ambulance or medical assistance
offered by any of the cops on the scene and well the female cop was pleasant
and professional enough but again WTF.
So I say to the crazed guys mother, who apparently doesn’t speak Dutch,
that I have a shop up the street and that well when everything calms down if
she would please just stop by and explain to me what the fuck had just
happened. That I would like to know this
and she is crying and apologizing to me and I tell her that it is ok, cause I
do that fors ome reason. And then I just turned and walked away.
And as I walk up the
Doelstraat it is quiet and my hands are covered in blood and my nose hurts but
as far as I can tell doesn’t seem to be broken. I get back in the shop and there
are people actually in it and everyone is like what the fuck happened and the guest
musician who also grew up in the same hometown and now lives in L.A. yet whom I
never meet in person is there and he offers a hand and I show him my blood
covered hands and say that an elbow will have to suffice till I can clean
myself up and Chris Murphy says, man you just earned some mean street cred and
I just laughed and thought man, you just meet me. And I of course call Mara to tell her what
happened and she doesn’t pick up and I figure she is busy with work and that is
ok and then she calls me back and I begin to tell her the story and when I get
to the part about taking the guy down by the knees Mara asks me if I am making
this all up, if I am fucking with her and I am like uh no and she says that she
is about to start crying and that she is leaving her work that instant and will
be by the shop soon. And she says she
loves me and I say I love her and that we are ok. And a little bit later two
women from the neighborhood who had seen the whole chaos go down came into the
shop with a stuffed unicorn, a chocolate lollipop and a mandarin for Pippi and
Pippi was of course super happy with the unicorn and the chocolate lolly that
she ate right away and of course didn’t want the mandarin and during the
instore which was a bit too loud Pippi began to pass out in my lap which was also
quite fine and so was the mandarin.
Now, to make a long story just
a bit shorter…, I spoke to the cops on the phone the next morning and they were
pleasent enough and shared with me whatever info they could. The officer on the phone even asked if I was
ok. I said that I was and knew that I
even though I thought I was, that I was lying.
I asked again about doing an aangifte and the officer on the phone said
that the old man had already done one and that the guy, who was a British
citizen had become very calm once they got him to the station, that he and his
mother were here visitng and that he would have to return to Haarlem on the 9th
of February to stand before a judge.
What his sentence or fine might be the cop could not say. I was curious who this guy was and yes, what
the fuck was going on with him. I couldn’t and still can’t conjure up his
face. If I had to sit with a sketch
artist I would know where to start.
Maybe under hypnosis like in the films I might be able to dredge it out
of my subconscious. Anyway, I thanked
the cop and hung up the phone. I decided
not to go to the gym yesterday instead fell back to sleep on the couch. The adrenaline was up.
When I woke up from my nap I
decided that I was going to do the aangifte after all. If the old man had done it I figured that I
should as well. So I first dropped some
stuff off a the shop and then headed over to the Koudenhorn, where it took the
cold and seemingly couldn’t be bothered cop behind the counter 15 minutes to
find anything in the system about what had happened, asking me over and over,
where did it happen, what happened, where is that what street again. And I was all like, uh sir someone from here
called me this morning, not more than three hours earlier to discuss it all
with me, so there has to be something in your system about it all and then he
just mmm’ed me and hunched his shoulder and took off his fucking reading
glasses and rubbed his chin and asked me to take a seat. And yeah 10 minutes later he calls me back to
the counter and says, so you want to make an aangifte and I say yes, that since
the old man did I thought that I should too.
And the cop says that I shouldn’t base what I was going to do on what
the old man did and I am like what???? And
I say that I need to make the aangifte so I can give this whole fucked up
situation sort of possible closure for myself and the cop just mmmm’s and shrugs
his shoulders again and then says that me doing the aangifte can’t happen then
and there, that it was not possible and that the next available time to do so
was the following week Friday, a week from then. And I start to get a bit upset and am on the
verge of either telling him to fuck off or start crying and instead I just get
angry and say “are you kidding me?” and the cop just mmmm’s and awwwee’s me more
and points to the celing saying that it comes from upstairs and that they don’t
have enough personel and I am like WTF and I take a deep breath and say, my
voice trembling just a bit “sir, with all due respect, I am just a citizen who
stepped out of his bubble to help another citizen who was randomly attacked by
some crazed person and then I am violently attacked by this same crazed person,
while infront of my five year old daughter and I got my nose punched in and am
standing here less than twenty four hours after the incident to make the
aangifte and you are telling me that I have to wait till a week from now before
I can actually do this.?” Ja uhm Ja ummm, waaa, mmmm, ja van boven, he replies…and
I continue to say “does it suprise you at all that people have little faith in
what the police do anymore?” And then I
turned and just walked out, resisting the urge to give the Koudehoorn the middle
finge. Instead I just took a deep breath
, cursed a bit then got back on my bike and rode to the shop and when I got
there Rob and Clemens asked me how it went and I said “Ice Cube said it best.
Fuck the Police.”
And my shoulders are tense
and the back of my kneck is sore and everything that happened is weighing on my
mind, out of balance in my imagination and by now I may have told the story of
what happened over 25 times and I am already tired of it and I tried to
meditate yesterday but could not focus on my breathing so I just accepted that
and let the meditation go and that was when I had decided to take that nap
before talking to the cops on the phone and then going to the Koudehoorn where
I came face to face with how a civil service system, that asks from us as
citizens to work together with them can fail us when we need them the most and how
this makes us feel small and frustrated and then I figure well it is a good
thing that I don’t have to interact with the police that often and that it
could have all been much worse and how people need to be very careful when
smoking that skanky chemical Dutch weed and I am wondering if that was the only
thing that had set that guy off or maybe there was something else that led tot
his psychosis. But I am trying to stay
cool and calm so I just shrug it off for now but I know it is not as easy as
all that. I am in no need of playing the
tough guy roll but I do feel a sense of being proud of myself for being the
type of person who will stop to help out another personcause that is what
citizens should do for one another and and sometimes people just don’t help one
another out for many different reasons and random shit happens all the time and
it is scary and this time it happened to me and other times it may happens to
you but I hope not. And a thought drifts
through my mind, that if Pippi and I had not stopped at the Wilsonsplein so she
could ride the refurbished bike merry-go-round then none of this would have
happened to us but to someone else and well, I guess that now again we all have
to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to take a hit for someone else, for
one reason or another.
Yeah, that and whatever.
Joshua
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