Ishmael Gradsdovic goes overseas, writing home to his friends in part 6 of the papers...
The prostitute my friend remembers best from the glass-front closets where the women stand in lingere glowing from the blacklight doing their nails while eating fast food and facing the brick walkway along the Voorburgwal probably didn't even notice him.
"She wasn't fat," he told me as we ate pizza and drank overpriced tap water while waiting at the station for the night train to Salzburg, "just kind of tall and large-boned. She had these teeth that were almost straight, and this guy passed her and then gave her a second look and then she smiled this smile..."
My friend tried to demonstrate the smile to me, looking at me for that spark of recognition that would indicate that I saw it too -- that quality of the almost-straight-toothed smile that had haunted him. He seemed disappointed with his rendition, or my reaction to it, and he sought to explain further.
"It was a totally fake smile, like when you tell someone to smile for a camera only worse. It became one of those 'see the world in a grain of sand' things. All of a sudden I sort of saw into what she was thinking, and I thought, 'this is pretty strange.'"
The prostitutes are yours, for a while anyway, for 50 Guilder ($25) -- at least that was the report from our roommates at the Hotel Kabul who came back late at night with loud stories of orgasms purchased that I heard only in a sleepy haze.
For the traveller on a tighter budget, half the price of an adventure in the red-light district can get you a chunk of drumstick-thick Afghan hashish half the length of your little finger cut with a buck-knife next to the digital scale in the booth of the back room of Coffeehouse 36 on Warmoestraat next to the Hotel Kabul.
After your purchase, wade through the smoke and have a seat by the pool table and watch MTV on two monitors while acid-house recordings blast through the speakers. Most everyone here is a tourist, but you'll stand out as a real greenhorn if you don't know the hash smoking ritual of the locals.
With the concentration and attention to detail normally associated with model railroad enthusiasts, the college-aged hash smokers paste together three rolling papers, two lengthwise then one down the short sides, to make a larger paper which they fill with Drum tobacco. (Ads for Drum with the slogan "Keep on Rolling" are posted at half of the bus stops in Amsterdam). Small fragments of hash are then heated in the flame of a cigarette lighter and placed at regular intervals along the paper which is then rolled diagonally so as to make the diameter of the smoking end roughly twice that of the inhaling end. The triangle of excess paper is burned away carefully and the smoking begins, filling the dark graffiti-art back room of the coffeehouse with sweet-smelling smoke and very mellow individuals.
These coffeehouses dot the city, unlike the prostitutes who are mostly confined to the two parallel canal streets of the red-light district. None advertise as drug dens, but their international reputations, along with suggestive names like "Mellow Yellow" or "Rasta Baby" and the Rastafarian tri-color decor, do the trick.
Drugs -- even marijuana -- are still against the law in the Netherlands, so the coffeehouses must follow elaborate and mostly unwritten rules which enable them to cruise along relatively worry-free in Amsterdam's drug policy of benign neglect.
Prostitution, too, is technically illegal. This may change soon, as the Netherlands are considering formally legalizing prostitution -- more to give protection of labor laws to the prostitutes than to give legal sanction to the already tolerated flesh trade.
With this, the life of a prostitute might not be so bad -- even with the fast-food counter forced courtesy and the purchased intimacy so many of us would be uncomfortable with.
And for that matter, I bet that even the busiest of them got more sleep that night than I did on the night train to Salzburg.
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