Neither Here Nor There (12 page)

Arriving at Amsterdam’s Centraal Station is a strange experience. It’s in the middle of town on a sunny plaza at the foot of the main street, the Damrak. You step out of the front door and there in front of you is – gosh! – every hippie that’s left. I had no idea there were still so many of them, but there were scores, if not hundreds, lounging around in groups of six or eight, playing guitars, passing reefers, sunning themselves. They look much as you would expect someone to look who has devoted a quarter of a century to lounging around in public places and smoking dope. A lot of them seemed to be missing teeth and hair, but they had compensated somewhat by acquiring large numbers of children and dogs. The children amused themselves by frolicking barefoot in the sun and the dogs by nipping at me as I passed.

I walked up the Damrak in a state of high anticipation. Amsterdam had been Katz’s and my favourite European city by a factor too high to compute. It was beautiful, it was friendly, it had excellent bars and legal dope. If we had lingered another week I could well be there yet, sitting on the station plaza with an acoustic guitar and some children named Sunbeam and Zippity Doo-Dah. It was that close.

The Damrak was heaving with tourists, hippies and Saturday shoppers, all moving at different speeds: the tourists shuffling as if their shoelaces were tied together, looking everywhere but where they were going, the hippies hunched and hurried, and the shoppers scurrying around among them like wind-up toys. It was impossible to walk with any kind of rhythm. I tried several of the hotels along the street, but they were all full, so I dodged behind the prison-like royal palace at Dam Square and branched off into some side streets, where I had vague recollections of there being a number of small hotels. There were, but these too were full. At most of them it wasn’t even necessary to enquire because a sign in the window announced
NO VACANCY
in half a dozen languages.

Things had clearly changed since my day. Katz and I had stepped off the train at the height of summer, asked our way to the Sailors’ Quarter and got a room in the first hotel we came to. It was a wonderful little place called the Anco, in a traditional Amsterdam house: narrow and gabled, with steep, dark staircases and a restful view of the O.Z. Voorburgwal canal four floors below. It cost $5 a night, with an omelette for breakfast thrown in (almost literally), though we did have to share a room with two slightly older guys.

Our first meeting was inauspicious. We opened the door to find them engaged in a session of naked bed-top wrestling – an occurrence that surprised the four of us equally.

‘Pardon us, ladies!’ Katz and I blurted and scuffled backwards into the hallway, closing the door behind us and looking confounded. Nothing in twenty years of life in Iowa had quite prepared us for this. We gave them a minute to disengage and don bathrobes before we barged back in, but it was clear that they considered us boorish intruders, an opinion reinforced by our knack, developed over the next two days, of always returning to the room in the middle of one of their work-outs. Either these guys never stopped or our timing was impeccable.

They spoke to us as little as was humanly possible. We couldn’t place their accents but we thought the smaller one might be Australian since he seemed so at home down under. Their contempt for us became irredeemable in the middle of the second night, when Katz stumbled heavily from his bed after a gala evening at the Club Paradiso and, with an enormous sigh of relief, urinated in the waste-basket.

‘I thought it was the sink,’ he explained, a trifle lamely, the next morning. Our room-mates moved out after breakfast and for the rest of the week we had the room to ourselves.

We quickly fell into a happy routine. We would rise each morning for breakfast, then return to the room, shut out every trace of daylight and go back to bed for the day. At about four o’clock we would stir again, have a steaming shower in a cubicle down the hall, change into fresh clothes, press our hair flat against our heads and descend to the bar of the Anco, where we would sit with Oranjebooms in the window seat, watching the passing scene and remarking on what fine people the Dutch were to fill their largest city with pleasant canals, winsome whores and plentiful intoxicants.

The Anco had a young barman with a Brillo-pad beard and a red jacket three sizes too snug for him who had clearly taken one toke too many some years earlier and now looked as if he should carry a card with his name on it in case he needed to remember it in a hurry. He sold us small quantities of hash and at six o’clock we would have a reefer, as a sort of appetizer, and then repair to an Indonesian restaurant next door. Then, as darkness fell over the city and the whores took up their positions on the street corners, and the evening air filled with the heady smells of cannabis and frites, we would wander out into the streets and find ourselves being led gently into mayhem.

We went frequently to the Paradiso, a nightclub converted from an old church, where we tried without success to pick up girls. Katz had the world’s worst opening line. Wearing an earnest, almost worried look, he would go up to a girl and say, ‘Excuse me, I know you don’t know me, but could you help me move something six inches?’

‘What?’ the girl would reply.

‘One and a half fluid ounces of sperm,’ Katz would say with a sudden beam. It never worked, but then it was no less successful than my own approach, which involved asking the least attractive girl in the room if I could buy her a drink and being told to fuck off. So instead we spent the nights getting ourselves into a state of what we called ACD – advanced cognitive dysfunction. One night we fell in with some puzzled-looking Africans whom Katz encouraged to foment rebellion in their homeland. He got so drunk that he gave them his watch (he seemed to think that punctual timekeeping would make all the difference in the revolution), a Bulova that had belonged to his grandfather and was worth a fortune, and for the rest of the summer whenever I forgot and asked him the time he would reply sourly, ‘I don’t know. I have a man in Zululand who looks after these things for me.’ At the end of the week we discovered we had spent exactly half our funds of $700 each and concluded that it was time to move on.

The Dutch are very like the English. Both are kind of slobby (and I mean that in the nicest possible way): in the way they park their cars, in the way they set out their litter bins, in the way they dump their bikes against the nearest tree or wall or railing. There is none of that obsessive fastidiousness you find in Germany or Switzerland, where the cars on some residential streets look as if they were lined up by somebody with a yardstick and a spirit level. In Amsterdam they just sort of abandon their cars at the canalside, often on the brink of plunging in.

They even talk much the same as the English. This has always puzzled me. I used to work with a Dutch fellow on
The Times,
and I once asked him whether the correct pronunciation of the artist’s name was Van Go or Van Gok. And he said, a little sharply, ‘No, no, it’s Vincent Van – ’ and he made a sudden series of desperate hacking noises, as if a moth had lodged in his throat. After that, when things were slow around the desk, I would ask him how various random expressions were said in Dutch – International Monetary Fund, poached eggs, cunnilingus – and he would always respond with these same abrupt hacking noises. Passing people would sometimes slap him on the back or offer to get him a glass of water.

I’ve tried it with other Dutch people – it’s a good trick if you’ve got a Dutch person at a party and can’t think what to do with him – always with the same result. Yet the odd thing is that when you hear Dutch people speaking to each other they hardly hack at all. In fact, the language sounds like nothing so much as a peculiar version of English.

Katz and I often noticed this. We would be walking down the street when a stranger would step from the shadows and say, ‘Hello, sailors, care to grease my flanks?’ or something, and all he would want was a light for his cigarette. It was disconcerting. I found this again now when I presented myself at a small hotel on the Prinsengracht and asked the kind-faced proprietor if he had a single room. ‘Oh, I don’t believe so,’ he said, ‘but let me check with my wife.’ He thrust his head through a doorway of beaded curtains and called, ‘Marta, what stirs in your leggings? Are you most moist?’

From the back a voice bellowed, ‘No, but I tingle when I squirt.’

‘Are you of assorted odours?’

‘Yes, of beans and sputum.’

‘And what of your pits – do they exude sweetness?’

‘Truly.’

‘Shall I suckle them at eventide?’

‘Most heartily!’

He returned to me wearing a sad look. ‘I’m sorry, I thought there might have been a cancellation, but unfortunately not.’

‘A smell of petroleum prevails throughout,’ I said by way of thanks and departed.

There were no rooms to be had anywhere. In the end, despondent, I trudged back to the station plaza, to the office of the VVV, the state tourist bureau, where I assumed there would be a room-finding service. I went inside and up some stairs and found myself in a hall that brought to mind Ellis Island. There were eight straggly lines of weary tourists, with at least thirty people in each queue. The VVV staff were sending people all over – to Haarlem, to Delft, to Rotterdam, to The Hague – because there was not a single hotel room left in Amsterdam at any price. This was only April. What on earth can it be like in July? They must send people to Iceland. A big sign on the wall said
NO TICKETS
FOR THE VAN GOGH EXHIBITION.
SOLD OUT. That was great, too. One of the reasons I had come when I did was to see the exhibition.

I took a place in one of the lines. Progress was glacial. I was hot, I was sweaty, I was tired, I was hungry. My feet hurt. I wanted a bath. I wanted a large dinner and several beers. There wasn’t a single part of me that was happy.

Almost every one of us in the room was an American. Upon reaching the front of the line, each new customer had to be interviewed regarding his or her requirements in terms of toilet facilities, breakfast arrangements, room amenities, accessibility by public transport and price. This took ages because of all the permutations involved. Then almost invariably the customer had to turn to his or her mate – who had been standing there all along
seeming
to take it in but evidently not – and explain all the possibilities all over again. This would prompt a lengthy discussion and a series of supplementary questions – Can we get there by bus instead of by train? Are there any vegetarian restaurants near the hotel? Does the hotel have no-smoking rooms? Will there be a cab at the station when we get there or do we have to call one, and if we have to call one can you give us the number? Is there a laundromat in Delft? What time does the last train run? Do you think I should be taken outside and shot for having such an enormous butt and asking so many stupid questions? It just went on and on.

Once they had arrived at a kind of agreement in principle, the VVV person would make anything up to twenty phone calls to outlying hotels, with a look of infinite patience and low expectations – most hotels weren’t even bothering to answer their phones by now – before announcing that nothing was available in that price range. So then they would have to discuss another more expensive or more distant set of options. It all took so long that you felt like applauding whenever anyone left the window and the queue pushed forward six inches.

The one lucky thing was that the VVV girl at the head of my queue was beautiful – not just extraordinarily good-looking, with the sort of bottom that made your palms sweat when she went to the filing cabinet, but intelligent, sweet-natured, patient, sympathetic, and with that exquisite, dusky Dutch accent that simply melts your heart. She dealt with every customer gracefully and expertly, and switched effortlessly between French, German, English and Dutch – all with that delectable accent. I was infatuated. I freely admit it. Stuck in a line that was going nowhere, there was nothing I could do but just stare dumbly at her and admire everything about her – the way she hooked her hair behind her ear, the way she wrinkled her nose when she looked in the phone book, the way she dialled the phone with the eraser end of her pencil. By the time I reached her window it was all I could do to keep from blurting, ‘Can we have sex a few times and then talk marriage?’ But all I did was shyly ask for a hotel room somewhere in the northern hemisphere. She found me one in Haarlem.

Haarlem was very pleasant. People ahead of me in the line had been falling into swoons when told they would have to leave Amsterdam to get a room, but I was rather pleased. Haarlem was only twenty minutes away by train and it was a handsome little city with a splendid cathedral and cosy cathedral square, and lots of good restaurants that were cheaper and emptier than those in Amsterdam. I had a steak the size of a hot-water bottle, went for a long walk around the town, stood impressed in the shadow of the cathedral, returned to the hotel, showered steamily and went to bed a happy man.

In the morning I returned to Amsterdam. I used to love walking in cities on Sunday mornings, but it gets more and more dispiriting. All the things left over from Saturday night – vomit slicks, litter, twisted beer cans – are still lying around, and everywhere now there are these depressing grilles and iron shutters on all the shop fronts. They make every street look dangerous and forbidding, which is just absurd in Europe. On an innocuous pedestrian street called Heiligeweg almost every store front was completely hidden behind a set of iron blinds – even the Aer Lingus office. What on earth is anyone going to steal from an Aer Lingus office – the little model aeroplane in the window?

I found my way to the canals – the Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht – and things were immediately better. I roamed along them in a happily random way, shuffling through leaves and litter, cocooned by the tall narrow houses and old trees. Along its canals Amsterdam is an immensely beautiful city, especially on a Sunday morning when there is almost no one about. A man sat in a patch of sun on his stoop with a cup of coffee and a newspaper, another was returning from somewhere with a bottle of wine, a young couple passed entwined in a post-coital glow, and the occasional unhurried cyclist crossed from one side street to another somewhere up ahead, like extras employed to lend colour to the scene, but in two hours of wandering around I saw not another soul but them.