Auslanders: Blitzfahrt Amsterdam

Auslanders: Blistzfahrt Amsterdam

The first time I went to Amsterdam, it was with a bunch of teenage girls. Well, maybe not a bunch, but there were definitely at least two of them. And maybe they weren’t exactly teenage girls, but they were teenage girls back when I met them.

Please do not assume that I am a multi-national gentleman of leisure running my newest ladies into the bowels of the Red Light District, because that is simply not the case. I am no pimp, just a simple high school teacher.

There are probably some who find it somewhat disconcerting that a couple of my former students would grow into adulthood only to befriend me and my family, then fly over to Germany to visit us, to sleep in my little German house and eat at my German table and then stroll across the beautiful canals of Amsterdam giggling through the second hand pot smoke at all the real live Amsterdam hookers with me.

Those people would find it all suspicious.

“Why would those girls want to visit you?”

I will admit that I take it as a compliment that two of my former students managed to make it through five years of high school and graduate without a raging desire to seek revenge upon me once they escaped with their diplomas. Maybe I have been doing something right after all.

The two young women in question are NtC and The Uje, and have for years been on again, off again visitors to our home and so it was no surprise that they would end up at our kitchen table during any one of the many planning sessions wherein my good woman and I entered into protracted discussion regarding some aspect of our forthcoming German Adventure.

“You’re so lucky,” said NtC. “I would love to go to Europe.”

Being a man, I just nodded. Yes, of course somebody would wish to go to Europe. Yes, we are so lucky. NtC was correct in her observation. Nest topic…

My wife, however, being a woman, and speaking fluently the female dialect, responded in the correct and perhaps, expected manner, using that same dialect.

“You should come over and visit us.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” said my wife. “It would be fun.”

I should have known what to do. Having lived amongst women for so long, I have acquired a passable understanding of their tongue, although perhaps only just enough to get me in trouble.

At a restaurant, I know that if my wife asks me, “Is that good?” I am supposed to push my plate over towards her and demand (with smiling love) that she try it for herself, rather than tell her it is indeed good and that she should have picked it instead of what she has.

If we are driving a long distance and my wife asks me if I am hungry, and do I want to pull over and get something to eat, I understand that I am not supposed to say “No thanks” and keep driving because I just want to get wherever the hell we are going without biology slowing us down. I am supposed to immediately pull over and find a place for us to have a proper sit-down meal because we aren’t in a hurry and we can always just get a hotel that night.

And when houseguests remark on how they would love to go to Europe we don’t nod and feel privately superior that we have arranged to live there and they haven’t. Instead, we invite them to come over and stay with us.

That is why, not too long after we had settled into normal life at 24 Auf dem Hahn, I got up early one morning, fought two and half hours of stau (crushing Autobahn gridlock) down to Frankfurt, and waited around in the massive Frankfurt airport complex until I saw two familiar and shell-shocked faces bobbing through the crowd.

We drove back to The Deuce chattering like giddy Grade Six girls, and I realized that I was happy to have these girls with me. Seeing my new home through their eyes was more fun than seeing everything through mine all the time. It was like being their teacher all over again, only this time I could say bad words and there was no marking.

After a week of bike rides, city visits and grocery paradise runs to Real, and on the morning of their second last day in Germany, we got up early, slid into their rented BMW (thanks to an incredibly lucky mistake at the airport rental agency), and highballed for Holland.

Driving from the Dusseldorf area to any other area can be distressing. Living in a conurbation of some thirty million people demands that there be a sufficient concentration of highway for all of those people to get where they need to go, all at the same time. This has created what is, even after you figure out where you’re going and what you’re doing, an unimaginable concentration of roads, onramps, offramps, connector thoroughfares, multilane superhighways, and vehicles.

Luckily, I am the kind of resourceful Canadian guy who generally feels like he knows his way around.

Drop me in a new place and I get my bearings very quickly. A few glances at a local map and I’m fully prepared to walk around exactly like I know where I’m going, kind of like a giant wingless pigeon. Maybe I have magnets in my head too. Or maybe I am fooling myself, considering that, for our first few weeks in Germany, I had a hard time figuring which way was North whenever I merged onto the Autobahn.

But I don’t blame myself. I blame the transportation planners, which I suppose means Hitler. He wasn’t much better at planning roads than he was an artist.

If you want to drive to Essen, which is northeast of Meerbusch, you have to leave on a highway that goes south, drive into and partway through Dusseldorf, then turn east, and then drive north. Why? I have no clue. The only thing I can guess is that there is no more room for any more roads that are more direct. They have literally run out of road space. This unnatural experience was repeated driving to Muenster, to Paris, to Venlo in Holland, to almost everywhere that required leaving the house.

“How do these people figure out where they’re going?” I asked my good wife.

She pointed at the cars around us.

“They all use GPS.”

Just to get around in the area where they lived. Probably even to find their way home from work.

“We need to get one, or we are going to go insane and harm ourselves.”

She was right.

It was the best several hundred Euros we spent over there, not counting what we spent on shokolade muesli. And it made driving to Amsterdam with the girls a no brainer. I didn’t have to think about where we were going, where to turn, which lane to be in or any of that. I just had to drive that beautiful piece of German automotive engineering.

Yes. I drove it.

The girls agreed that I should pilot the BMW not only because I was old enough and had my name on the rental agreement, but because it was essential to my mental health. I have no choice but to drive. Once in a while I am forced by heinous circumstances, or possibly rank bullies, to sit in some other section of a motor vehicle where I have no control over my Destiny or the steering wheel and, during those times, I am not fit for human companionship, plus I am car sick.

Thankfully, these young women honoured my needs and allowed me to assume command of a car well beyond my reach, a car the likes of which I would normally not be allowed to touch, let alone drive.

This might explain why, once I pulled out onto the Autobahn, the taunting began in earnest.

“Are you sure you can handle this car?”

“This isn’t your minivan, you know.”

“I thought there was no speed limit on these highways.”

“Doesn’t this car have any higher gears?”

“Are you as old as you drive?”

I shook my head and laughed at them.

“I was immune to peer pressure in Grade Six. Do you honestly think I am going to allow your feeble commentary to goad me into-“

An old lady driving a Smart car blew past us, blaring her horn and shaking her fist.

I stomped the accelerator.

As a rule, my family is a law-abiding group.

In our tribe, we recognize that many of the codes and restrictions under which we live are rooted in logic and self-preservation. Even as a hormone-addled, self-absorbed teenage boy, I wasn’t likely to commit B&Es, shoplift unnecessary luxury items or drive more than 140 kph. I’ve only had five or six or seven or so speeding tickets in my life, and one of them was in Quebec, so that doesn’t count. But here I was on the Autobahn. The Autobahn, and NtC was absolutely correct.

There were no speed limits on this particular stretch of road, no rules or guidelines for careful driving whatsoever, and the pavement was utterly smooth, graded to perfection and maintained in a manner unimaginable anywhere else but for Germany. And I was driving a BMW that purred like a post-coital tigress.

Even my mom would have to agree that I had no other choice.

At 160, there was still no sense of speeding. The car and highway were too well designed. Besides, I was just pacing the regular flow of traffic in the left lane.

At 180, everything started to change. The road before us narrowed in from my peripheral vision, thinning to a blurred strip of dark grey as the speedometer moved towards 190.

The car was still smooth, almost like we weren’t on the road, but floating above it, just a few inches, which gave me the slightest sense of vertigo, like I wasn’t exactly where I was, but a little somewhere else.

It was very quiet in the car as we floated along, and I couldn’t glance over to see if that was due to the girls’ paralyzing fear at our speed or their mute ecstasy at this blatant flouting of North American traffic laws.

I had the distinct sense that, as we edged ever closer to 200, if I looked away from the road, even for a second, something – a moose, a thrown tire, a discarded coffee cup – something would suddenly be there in front of us and the fun would be over in a screaming pinwheel of expensive German engineering and fragile meaty sacks of Canadian touristry.

I eased off the gas, diesel, actually, and watched the speedometer creep down to a more manageable 150. It felt like we were inching our way up to the speaker at a drive-thru, and I could understand why the Germans were so adamant about maintaining their seemingly unhinged highway speed laws. Although it’s dangerous and eerie, and the margin for error is way too small for normal drivers to tolerate, if you were in the habit of driving that fast, going any slower is a total drag. It gives you that same feeling you get driving behind an eighty year old woman coming home from a euchre tournament at the legion with belly full of cherry pie and Earl Grey.

Driving normal speeds after going almost 200 was like putting training wheels back on your bike after you’d learned to ride without them. I felt like I could have driven blindfolded at that speed. I also felt like I would able to stop the car or steer if necessary, so it wasn’t all bad.

We played Ipod Name That Tune for two hours (I won) and suddenly, we were pulling into the Ajax Stadium for a little five Euro Park and Ride.

Just like that, we were in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a city that has a lot of connotations, which compels me remind the world that I do not partake of intoxicating substances of any sort.

I do not currently make use of, nor have I ever used, drugs or alcohol of any sort, not counting all the drugs doctors have given me over the years, which would include such highlights as Valium, Percodan, Percocet, Ativan and Adasol-15. These were all prescribed by actual doctors, for legitimate medical reasons, I might add, and as such I didn’t misuse any of them except for that one migraine when I woke up spread all over the macramé mat in front of the sliding glass door at my parents’ house with no memory as to how I got there and a trail of crusted drool on my face.

For me, Amsterdam doesn’t generate any excitement about legal pot, not even in a supposedly chocolate space cake. If I want a brownie, I don’t even want walnut or icing, never mind a few seeds of of skunky old pot. Getting high isn’t what made me want to go.

It was the whores that I was after.

That was a joke.

My first conscious encounter with a real-life hooker took place when I was eighteen and visiting Toronto after a morning tour of York University. It was only my second time in that particular city, which makes it more understandable that, when the impressively full figured woman standing outside the Zanzibar strip bar asked me if I wanted a date, I was almost dumb enough to be flattered. She was at least twice and a half my age, and the idea that an older woman of such bounteous and unusually conspicuous cleavage found me attractive enough to ask me out on a date without even knowing me gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Marcel. “That woman just asked me out! She doesn’t even know me!”

He probably didn’t believe it had happened until she asked him out too. To my credit, it didn’t hurt my feelings, but that may have been because she made it fairly clear that she perfectly willing to go on a date with both of us at the same time.

It was at that moment that I realized this woman wasn’t attracted to us because of our small town good looks and naturally curly hair (well, mine was naturally curly, Marcel had a perm). Here it was, just past three in the afternoon, and we had met our first lady of the evening!

It was all very exciting, even without actually going on the date.

After that, most of my encounters with prostitutes were much less interesting, and best characterized by an ongoing and rather nagging interaction with the unfortunate, drug ravaged woman working the driest patch of sidewalk in front of the T.D. Green Machine down the street from where I lived at Queen and Manning years later.

She didn’t look as much like the definition of optimism as she did the definition of a crack whore, but I have to give credit where it is due. It didn’t matter how many times I walked past her on my way to the grocery store, she asked me every single time if I wanted a date.

It didn’t matter than I had just told her “no thanks” on my first pass. Five minutes later, when I walked past carrying two armloads of groceries, she asked me again. As she did every single time.

One night after I had quit my job making commercials and didn’t have anything better to do, I passed her seventeen times, walking just past her to the corner and then forty feet back to the book store, and each time, she asked me if I wanted a date. Each time I told her “no thanks.”

Finally, on the last pass, I stopped and asked her why she kept asking in spite of all the evidence supporting my lack of interest. “Didn’t you notice me saying no these last sixteen times?”

She just shrugged. “Maybe you changed your mind.”

The lasting memory of that dentally challenged woman, and the distressing chemically rich urine smell that permeated the air around the Green Machine tainted my view of prostitution. That doesn’t mean that I thought anything was wrong with adult women of sound mind and body choosing to exercise their rights to make money as they see fit, it just meant that it wasn’t right for me. Nobody who gags watching other people chew their fingernails, who can actually taste their fingers from across the room, is going to be able to stomach some kind of intimate tussle behind a dumpster chock full of rotting Chinese food in a back alley on Dundas Street.

But that didn’t stop me from wanting to go to Amsterdam and see what there was to see.

We came out of the subway station onto a busy street along the water, where several canals fed out into the sea. Even though it was Monday morning, the place was packed with tourists, and everybody was funneled up what I assumed was the main street.

I don’t know exactly what I expected, but it just looked like any busy street in an old European city. Cheap Italian restaurants, pubs, Middle-Eastern fast food and T-shirt shops one after another. I didn’t see any hookers standing on the corners, no potheads spilling out into the street smelling like the upholstery in Snoop Dogg’s tour bus.

We followed the flow of people up to a busy square with a statue, some really old buildings, and even fewer hookers.

Where was all the bad stuff?

I slipped into a hotel and rifled through their collection of brochures until I found something with a boobies on the cover. Sure enough, there was a map inside. If we followed the road up another block, curled around to the left and came down into Waterlooplein, we would find a flea market, the Rembrandt House, and there, across the bridge and down the road, was the Sex Museum.

I showed the map to the girls.

“If you were a hooker, wouldn’t you set up near the Sex Museum?”

They agreed.

It didn’t take long to find it.

The Red Light District looks the same as any of the other old parts of this really old city, with tall, slanty medieval buildings tightly packed and sagging over narrow lanes that run alongside the canals.

The sidewalks are tiny, the roads are tiny, the crowds are thick, the canal water is rich with raw sewage, and there are no guard rails or safety measures of any kind preventing you from going over the edge.

I can only assume that, if you did fall into that water, you would have to fling yourself around in mid-air to guarantee that you hit your head on the concrete edge before you hit the water so that you could be unconscious, or better yet, dead before you fell in. I’m not joking about the raw sewage. Toilets have flushed straight into the canals for hundreds of years and there are a lot of people flushing. The water is brown for a reason, and it’s not because the mud is being stirred up.

It wouldn’t have mattered how brown the water was, however, as nobody spends much time looking at it. Yes, the bridges were awesome, the old buildings impressive, the shops bizarre and the coffee shops dank and nasty looking, but all of that is forgotten when you see the little hooker booths.

Once you get into that part of town, I don’t think you’d have noticed flaming dead bodies floating by.

Please don’t assume that I was walking around staring lustfully at semi-nude women for hire like some shaven-headed British soccer hooligan, of which there seemed to be hundreds in the city.

No, my staring was more shocked than lustful.

Now, I am not a prude.

I am not a religious man with some kind of negative attitude towards nudity and human sexuality. I am all for nudity and human sexuality. Remember, I stood with a bus tour of French senior citizens in The Erotic Museum along the Pigalle in Paris and watched a porno movie shot in 1916, and I clapped at the end just like they did.

I am not one of these self-righteous people who feels that prostitution is wrong, assuming that the women involved are taking part in it by their own decision. I don’t think it’s any of my business how some people want to make their money or spend it, as long as everybody’s a consenting adult.

But I have to wonder how it is that a prostitute can expect to make any money in such a competitive market if she looks exactly like former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega with basketball sized breast implants.

I am not exaggerating.

I saw that exact woman, assuming she was a woman.

Not only did she look exactly like Noriega, she was right around his age. And had clearly had the same dermatologist. Or lack thereof.

You have to realize this means that, somewhere in Amsterdam is a little Latin American kid sitting in a park eating a bun, wondering where his grandpa works. Well, I saw that little kid’s grandpa, and the little kid’s grandpa should be ashamed of himself. He should also take that bikini off and go back to being a general, because he can’t possibly be making money as a prostitute.

That is why I was shocked.

Shouldn’t prostitutes be at least a little better looking than that? Think of what they’re doing for a living. Seeing some of these “ladies” of the evening, I will admit that I couldn’t help but feel like, with a little makeup and the right g-string, I would have as good a chance as any to make a few bucks. Honestly, what kind of sick-minded individual wants a hook up with an old lady that looks like the former Panamanian strongman dictator? And pay fifty Euros for it!?

I guess that wasn’t the only thing that shocked me. The sheer number of women is hard to believe. All over this maze of tight little alleys, lanes and side streets, you pass glass door after glass door, each one filled up full with a woman. And if you walk by, you’re usually right there, just inches away from them.

Maybe because they are there every day, the girls in those booths have become immune to that thing people do where they look away from someone when their eyes meet. You know how you’re sitting on the subway looking at people, and then one of those people looks back so you immediately glance in the opposite direction? Well, these women don’t do that. If you glance at them, they stare back at you and smile, and if you don’t look away, they will open the door and call you over. It’s a good thing they don’t have lassoes.

The level of self-confidence they have is amazing, standing there in what amounts to a full length window in bikinis or less, being stared at, laughed at, pointed at, shunned, lusted over, scrutinized, drooled over, and every other response such a display would attract. You want to look, too, because it’s just so weird to see them all placed like gerbils in a pet store, and maybe you could look, but I couldn’t. Not for long. The shiver I got when they looked back at me was too creepy. Meeting their eye was like looking into the ten thousand years stare of a war vet who’s been in The Shit.

Which makes sense.

Think about it. All day these women are literally naked to the world, naked to the filthy, spilled open secret and unsated hungers of nasty, stoned, drunken men and women from all over the world, all living out wildly differing definitions of hygiene.

No wonder so many of them looked rough and hard eyed.

But some didn’t look like that.

Some are attractive, some look like girls you knew from school, some were cute or exotic or smiling.

And one of them looked like she wasn’t even real.

We saw her during one of our constant sweeps through the sector of women stationed opposite the Old Church.

This area was ironic, oxymoronic and morally distressing from the start.

Imagine a large, very old church with a lane going all the way around it.

Now imagine walking around that church counterclockwise.

The first building on your right as you come in from the canal side is a primary school with typical school windows and finger paintings affixed to the glass. We even saw a mother picking up her child there.

The second building, right beside the school, was a porn theatre, festooned out front with enormous posters advertising scenes from the movies. Not dialogue scenes, either. We’re talking scenes from the movies.

Just past the porn theatre, there was General Noriega and much of his senior staff, then a coffee shop, more booths, a lane that lead to a tattoo parlor on the other side of another coffee shop and a gaming hall of some sort, and then more girls. Wandering around on the lane beside the canal was a slitty-eyed entrepreneur singing out “Cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy” in warbling falsetto.

You might think that the mother picking her child up would rush in, grab her daughter, cover the child with a thick hood and run away, but that wasn’t what happened. She walked up, took her daughter’s hand, and wandered off chatting and laughing. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the posters, the girls or the tourists wandering around goggling at everything.

We were behind that mother and child, but turned off to the right and took a quick left, to move through a very tight alley. As we walked along, trying not to look like we were looking at the girls, I was struck by something in one of the booths.

It looked like a statue, or a life-sized magazine photo, very stylized, perfectly lit and composed.

She was turned the other way, facing the back of the booth. Her hair was swept up into a Japanese kind of bun, with two long black lacquer hair pins holding it together.

Her skin was golden, somewhere between a tan and natural tone.

She had a riding crop in her hand and held it over her shoulder, pointing straight down her spine, like an arrow drawing one’s attention to her bottom, which was hard to believe, and where the last few inches of it rested comfortably between the tops of her buttocks.

It didn’t look like something that could happen in real life.

I am referring to her buttocks.

She was wearing some variation of a one piece bathing suit and a thong, and it revealed what I took to be the miraculous result of a brutal workout schedule. From top to bottom, she looked like she was generated, unnatural.

I stopped still.

“Did you see that?”

The Uje turned back.

“What?”

“Come here.”

NtC stayed where she was.

“What is it?”

I moved three paces back and closer to the full length window.

“That’s real!”

The Uje was shaking her head.

“Oh my God. That’s incredible!”

She was also referring to the girl’s buttocks.

The girl turned to face us.

She had to have been a supermodel.

I stared.

The model didn’t have the Thousand Yard stare. She didn’t look like a lifer on death row. She wasn’t sucking on an unfiltered Gauloise or smacking gum and sneering.

She smiled and crooked a finger at me.

I held my hands up and shook my head.

She made an exaggerated pout and pointed at the door.

I sighed and opened it a crack, leaned in.

“Are you coming in?”

“No. I just wanted to say, whatever you’re doing in the gym, it’s working. You should be proud.”

She smiled sadly.

“I don’t work out.” Not Dutch. She had a slight Parisian accent, spoke perfect English.

“You don’t work out? Liar. ” I angled my head at her abs. “I can see the situps from here.”

She laughed and shrugged, very French.

“It’s all genetics. I’m just lucky. But it doesn’t seem to matter.”

“What do you mean?”

She showed her empty hands.

“Nobody’s visiting.”

Her bottom lip pushed out and she mimed a pout.

“Unless you want to come in…”

It’s a funny thing, prostitution, amazing even.

Men spend so much energy in their lives thinking about women, looking at women, trying to meet women, working up the nerve to talk to women, trying to attract them, impress them, talk them into their cars, into bed, into their lives. And here was this ridiculously attractive young woman in a tiny booth in Amsterdam trying to get a blandly average middle-aged man to have sex with her, and all I had to do was pay.

I smiled.

“That wouldn’t be very nice to my friends, would it?”

She looked past me, at The Uje.

“Your girlfriends?”

“No. My students.”

Her forehead wrinkled up.

“Students?”

“Well, not anymore, but they used to be.”

The hooker made an odd expression.

“What are you doing here with them?”

I smiled.

“That’s funny. I was wondering the exact same thing about you.”

She didn’t say anything and I pulled my head out the door, waved, and walked on.

The Uje was still shaking her head in amazement.

“What is she doing here?”

“Same thing General Noriega’s doing.”

NtC turned to face me.

“What would you do if we weren’t here? Would you go back?”

“Back where? To Germany? Probably.”

“Don’t be stupid. You know what I mean.”

N glanced back behind us.

I laughed.

N was watching my eyes carefully.

“Well?”

“Give me a break. You already know the answer to that or you wouldn’t be here.”

She tried for a second to look serious, failed.

We walked out into the wider street, along the canal, past the hash-eyed guy singing out “ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana”, past the sex shops, and cinemas, the hookers and the tattoo parlors, out onto the main street, looking for a place to get pie.

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