of it, could warm all of your frozen bones.
Amsterdam was what I had mapped out next that frigid winter, and I questioned whether it might be warmer or colder there, and if—taking into account the conversation the travelers around me were now having about bhang lassis in Trivandrum, and blotter acid in Goa on New Year’s Eve—if I even cared. Within five evenings I had already filled one of my notebooks with questions of my purpose as well as my stamina.
Dead of winter is not the most wholesome time to backpack in Europe, and January in Amsterdam found me in a huge open dormitory room with only three other occupants, the other forty or so beds between theirs and mine empty. They’d been squirreled in there since October. The drugged-out girl and the two drugged-out boys—none of them native English speakers but all of them speaking to each other in English—were huddled together under one blanket on one bed at the alcove end of the room, near a trickle of brown water that was leaking from one of the two steam pipes that were intended to heat the room. The dormitory was as cold as outside but without the wind.
The threesome were slowly, very slowly, talking to each other. They were blotto. The girl, Israeli, was trying to get some drugs from the guy, Swiss, but it wasn’t working out for her. She was too stoned to make a serious case, and he was too mean to not enjoy his small fleeting power—he had the dope; she wanted the dope. This wasn’t the harshest he-has-the-drugs-she-wants-the-drugs scene I had ever witnessed, but neither was it the most benign, and it was the first in which I would have to spend the night trying to sleep in the same room with the transaction unfurling a few beds away. The third guy, possibly a local, wanted what there was of the Israeli girl and wasn’t deterred, it seemed, by either her disinterest or the lack of privacy.
Even though this was the one single city in the world where the guesthouses, it seemed, allowed you to stay indoors the day long through if you wished, pouring it all out into your journal, I had to get out. That little gruesome threesome in the one cot with their blunted senses was enough to drive me to wander the empty city of Amsterdam, even in subzero temperatures. Like everybody, I was curious about the legal hash and the legal prostitution, of course, but back in New Jersey when I had been thinking of including Amsterdam in my route, I also had thought I might wander the canals and see houseboats and Anne Frank’s house and tulip farms and spend a couple of days cycling around the city. I wanted to see if anybody wore the clogs, and if I could make it to the city of Gouda in a day trip to try the famous cheese where huge, round yellow wheels of the stuff are traded at the market like a commodity. I wanted to tip my head back and drop the new fatty herring down the hatch and drink beer from a tap. But it was just the wrong season for this kind of travel. In all my months of studying the atlas, and in my great victory in flying all the way to Europe for only $99, I totally had fucked up and arrived in the heart of the wrongest season. No bicycles, no clogs, and no herring.
After trudging around for hours, while the tall, good-looking, and sensually emancipated Dutch retreated inside their homes and kept warm, I wandered into a coffee shop—the Dutch kind with legal drugs for sale—anxiously calculating my money, already down to $1,000 from the $1,200 I’d started out with only a week before, and regretting the wastefulness of now having a few useless Belgian francs in my pouch, but determined to have a Dutch experience. I felt jittery from caffeine, from hardly letting myself descend into full unguarded sleep all of the nights before, and from a chill so permeating now made more deep by the dampness of canals and seawater. I stood for a long time staring up at the blackboard menu of drugs available and finally decided to try the spacecake, but the blond girl at the dealer’s counter and the fact of her heavily applied silver eyeliner somehow suddenly made me feel unsafe. Someone at a little table had passed out from the force of whatever