It's lonely at the top.
Usually no one will lie next to you in the gutter, unless it is the army of passionate cops that comes to chase you from your cold sleeping place. Question of conscience: Who would you most like to share a set of nice, clean sheets with: a cop or a famous Klotesteder? In both cases you are not allowed to choose them yourself, Fate will do that.
I would lie on the couch with one sheet, that FK'er can have the bed to himself with all the other bedding.
I prefer not to have cops at the kitchen table, and certainly not in my bed; they used to chase me for fun, nowadays the back of my body seems to regularly meet descriptions. Out of the corner of my eye i see them chasing after me on their service bicycles, and only when i turn around and they see my face do they turn back somewhat relieved, while they lisp code into their shoulder equipment.
Long ago, when we could still travel freely outside Klotestad, i spent a while in what was then called Italy. At the slightest thing you got the carabinieri on your roof. Sometimes literally. That journey had many low points, but one moment was so miles deep under the earth's crust that i would like to rake it up.
On a warm summer evening, i was sitting in a small car with some casual acquaintances, smoking some Afghani i had brought them. The car was soon blue with smoke, and when i opened a window for that reason, i saw something dark moving in the wing mirror. In the same second, something heavy seemed to fall on the car, and the car doors were ripped open by a horde of screaming men. We were pulled out of the car, i quickly grabbed my bag.
The fog both in the car and in our heads quickly disappeared. In the dimly lit parking lot we were surrounded by a large group of angry carabinieri. We had no idea.. what did they want from us? While the car was being searched - a chillum was casually watched and thrown back into the car - one brute put his weapon to the head of an acquaintance, and another creep yelled at me to drop my bag; if not, they would put a bullet through his head.
My Italian isn't great so it took me a while to fully understand that.
I had just snatched the bag, because there was still a small piece of hash in it, hidden in a piece of handkerchief in my wallet. In a hell of anxious thoughts (i could see myself behind bars in a dingy cell for years) i threw the bag a few feet in front of me, and immediately a brute appeared, shaking the entire contents onto the street. They could not find what they were looking for - not even in the car, and with as much shouting as they came with, they left for their dark recesses again.
Guns.
They were just looking for guns. Which we didn't have, thankfully.
In the following weeks i was stopped several times, and my bag was always their target. Every time my tampons, cigarettes, reading material and whatever were shaken out of the bag onto the road surface. Hilarious, tampons, laugh! Once I even had to go to the police station, and while i tried to explain that i had been in the hospital with severe burns (another long story), they forced me to prove it by rolling up my pants legs. The group of detectives stood around me, staring at my legs. Joking. Laughing.
It later turned out that the commotion, repeated to exhausting boredom, was caused by the cardboard bottom of my bag, which had been deformed into a thick roll by all the traveling and which gave all the carabinieri of all Italy the idea of the possible presence of a firearm.
Now, years later, i enjoy myself with 6 seasons of television series, in which cops make each other's lives miserable.
‘Bent bastards!’ they call each other.
It is awful but i love it.
Wanna read more? About this journey i also wrote A thousand suns and Butterflies.
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