‘Why should I go to school? We’ll all be dead soon anyway,” my son said. I nodded. In my youth I also liked to use the threat of nuclear war as an excuse to leave behind everything I didn’t feel like doing and that was quite a bit. ‘No future’, I sighed wearily.
“I’ve been through the Cold War, kid,” I told my son. ‘Those were rough times. On Saturday, the shops closed at 5 o’clock, and then they didn’t open again until Monday afternoon. When the sugar ran out, you had to borrow a cup from the neighbors. Everyone reeked of cigarette smoke, bad teeth, and the soap they put in their hair to create a punk hairstyle. What do you say? Yes, me too. You had to, otherwise you would be one brick in the wall† Fuck the system and all that.’
My son, yawning, opened a can of Pringles and returned his eyes to the tanks on TikTok. I thought further about the past. My brother and I had two rats, because that was normal when you were punk. Those rats should have been black, of course, just like our clothes, or else brown if necessary, the Rattus norvegicus from Down in the Sewer from The Strangers.
Unfortunately, sewer rats were not for sale in Haarlem at the end of the seventies. The pet store only supplied those Omo white lab rats. But the tube of Norit from my mother’s medicine cabinet offered a solution. My brother always kept that handy, because whenever he wanted to play hooky again, he dabbed it thinly under his eyes and looked languidly above that gray shadow at our mother. ‘Boy, you look awful, stay home,’ she would say.
The white rats were also treated with Norit. We wet such a tablet under the tap and carefully smeared it on their fur. This is how we came into possession of the Netherlands’ first sooty grits. Now they only had to learn to sit on our shoulders, so that we could take them to café Het Melkwoud in the Zijlstraat, because with such a rat on the shoulder of your beat up leather jacket you were really cool.
Training didn’t go so smoothly, because those rats would rather just play. Good too. Then we smoked a joint, put 77 of the Talking Heads again and read endless comic books. Kamagurka, of course. And look black of the unforgettable Franquin, with his morbid, sarcastic social criticism. As children we had grown up with his Guust albums, and now he helped us through the end of time in black and white.
Cruel jokes about radioactive nuclear waste and environmental pollution (at that time the climate was still called the environment), complicated suicides, vengeful, mutated cranes, children horribly deformed by radioactive radiation, erratic executions, the excesses of factory farming (yes, those were already there then). ), and Jesus Christ on his way to Calvary complaining about a pebble in his shoe. Yes, we thought that was genius, at the time. Franquin was also really great at drawing, though.
A desperate, crooked man who pours gasoline on himself in the street, while bystanders yell “Don’t!” “Stop it!” He sets himself on fire. ‘Awful! Too late!’ the bystanders shout. And then there’s only a pile of ashes with a warped skeleton, after which everyone shouts indignantly: ‘Protest against waste is what that madman calls it! What a waste! How much is in such a jerry can? About 20 liters? I drive about 250 kilometers with it! Antisocial!’
Eerily topical, still. That makes you think. But yes, we also survived the previous end of time.