We stride up along the Singel, feeling the bracing air blow away the morning cobwebs, and get into Barney’s Breakfast Bar. It’s full of fuckin student and crusty trash on tight budgets so I delight in ostentatiously flashing my wad around while I order the works: bacon, egg, sausage, tomato, mushroom, black pudding, toast and tea.
– You were AWOL yesterday Bruce, Bladesey chides. – Meet any interesting ladies?
– Yes, as a matter of fact. I met this Scots lassie in a bar. She was really nice.
– Was she, eh . . . a you know . . . lady of the night?
I look, in great irritation, at this wretched mess that has somehow insinuated itself into my life. – No. She was not. Do you think I can’t meet anybody other than a prossy? Is that what you think?
– No . . . not at all . . . he stammers apologetically.
I sit up in the chair. I’d better put this cunt right once and for all. – Well I’ll tell you something mate: I’ve had mair fanny than you’ve had hot dinners. And I’m talking quality fanny as well. Premium minge. And I’m no going that far back. Dinnae think that because I fuck hoors for convenience sakes that I have tae pey for it. Dinnae think that, I tell him, the cheeky cunt.
– I’m most terribly sorry Bruce . . . I didn’t mean to give offence. You got the wrong end of the stick. I just assumed, you know, it being Amsterdam . . .
– Well you assumed wrong, I curtly inform him, skinning up a large reefer of skunk and lighting it up as our breakfasts arrive.
We eat our meal in silence and I leave the little cunt to his museums and galleries. I’m off for porn and drugs.
I head over to the red-light district and a languid-looking bag of shit hisses at me, – Video show. It’ll be an ed-dew-kay-shon.
I feel resentment rise in my chest. A semi-jakey standing ootside in the cauld working for sweeties, thinking that he could be part of a process of educating me, in any way shape or form. I stop and I give him a slow, evaluating look up and down which I can tell unnerves him.
– Video show . . . he repeats more warily.
– Any good? I snap in polis mode.
– It’s the best.
I look at the f25 sign behind him. – At twenty-five guilders it had better be. Or else I’ll be back mob-handed. Right?
He raises his hands in the air. – Hey, chill out man. This is Amsterdam. It’s the best video show you’re ever gonna see.
– Let’s hope so.
I enter and pay twenty-five guilders to a distracted gumchewing slut who obviously does tricks and is thinking about the bigger bucks to be made on her back later on. I go into what is an old-style film theatre rather than a series of coin-operated booths. It’s half-full and the show starts promptly. There’s no privacy for wanking, but it doesn’t stop an old cunt next to me, who’s got his cock out in a hanky and is chugging away by the time the first power-dressed actress who looks like Victoria Principal from Dallas gets felt up and fucked in a lift by two guys who stop it between the floors. I try to focus on the video but the picture quality is poor and auld cunt’s groans distract me.
However, it then goes into a mad sequence at an office party, where everybody is fucking themselves crazy. I think about the fanny I’ll fire into at our office parties this Christmas: that new young clerical bird for a start, then there’s Fulton, and of course, that big hoor the Size Queen, and even Drummond, for fucks’ sakes, if I’m desperate enough. I feel my hand go towards the lump in my flannels but, after a few tweaks of the cherry, I show my willpower, gritting my teeth and leaving it. No sense in running down the generator at this stage.
After browsing in a few porn stores I try in vain to find a hoor who looks like her, like my girl. I have her pants with me, in my pockets from last night. I can’t find anyone. I’m getting frustrated and it’s only going to get worse. I decide to go for a drink and resolve to try and find one who looks absolutely nothing like her. This tactic works because instantly all the rooms off the grey cobblestoned streets seem to offer endless possibilities. I find a likely girl. She’s got ginger hair and a badly pock-marked face. I get the old spiel, this time done without any charm, as she tells me that she doesnae kiss. I felt like saying to her that I had no desire whatsoever to kiss her pock-marked coupon, my lips are chapped ragged enough with the cold as it is. She undresses and wanks me for a bit, trying to tease some life into my cock, and I only get hard when I look at her pock-marked skin. Like the other hoors here, she seems not to mind my rash and eczema, though with her skin you’d expect some sympathy.
When I fuck her she’s giving it all the Ooohh baby, I’m so wet . . . oooh this is so good . . . and all that shite, which I enjoy. Again, it’s good that she takes a pride in her work and makes the effort. It’s definitely the hooring capital of the world is old Amsterdam. With this one though, after I’ve blown my muck into the rubber, her dead hoor eyes chill over mechanistically as she’s already preparing for the next customer and I head out to get a bite to eat.
I go to one of the nondescript pizza places on the Damrak which are largely unspectacular tourist rip-offs. After eating I head back to the room. I still have her panties in my pocket. From last night. I couldn’t ask that hoor I was with to wear them. I pull them over my head and sniff, filling my nostrils with her scent. I’m aware of the thudding sound of sobbing and a high, ugly moaning in the room.
I pull off the pants but the room’s empty except for me.
The Rash
The next morning I shit on the hotel’s traylike bogs. A pile of chestnuts faces me, foul of Dame Judi, but yielding no signs of the alien monster. I know it’s up there though, inside of me, twisting and growing, biding its time, like an Arthur Scargill in the healthy body politic of eighties Britain, the enemy within.
I get out and visit another couple of hoors, one Thai, one black. The black one looked at my balls as if she had never seen white meat before. Maybe it’s the rash, it’s definitely getting worse.
Worse.
I put in another shift of afternoon drinking, Heineken and geneva, before I scored some good, gum-numbing cocaine fae a guy in a brown bar. Then I was back out on the piss. That’s the thing aboot charlie: gies ye superhuman drinking powers. No that I need them.
In one bar I have a bottle of Grolsch and I see that they are daein that space cake. I take one piece, then another. A wide cunt behind the bar tells me that I should watch that stuff and I just laugh and have another piece. I’m getting a good buzz in my head.
When I leave the bar it hits me and I feel really sick and nauseous.
The hippy cunts’ve tried to poison me, me a fuckin polisman. I’ll get ontae the Dutch polis and close the cunts down. I’m staggering around, too scared to cross the road cause these trams are coming from aw directions and the cunts on the bikes as well, and I’m too close tae the edge of the canal in this condition . . . these Dutch cunts . . .
. . . the EC should shut this fuckin place doon . . .
I get off the Damrak but I’m staggering down a narrow street and I bang into someone who shouts at me but I keep moving, it’s like a fucking nightmare where ye darenae look back. I’m hyperventilating when I get back to the hotel. Bladesey’s lying on the bed in his room, watching the telly. I head to the bog and shit again and I see that there’s something in my stools. I can’t look at it. I sit there for a while and calm down before I go back and face Bladesey.
His face seems to reverberate against the wall and all I can hear is that fucking actually voice. I don’t know how it happens but Bladesey’s giving me gyp. He seems to be three sheets and tells me that he met some Londoners and they got wrecked. The conversation seems to drift to music. I mention I like Motown; Marvin, Smokey and the like, or I did before I destroyed my albums realising that it was a sign of weakness to have coon music in the hoose.