WARNING: The following work of fiction contains extremely graphic imagery, reader discretion is advised.
I
The Vampires
The day after a holiday weekend, the stone streets are mostly empty. Music comes out of the seldom open doors where it serenades the few and proud holding fast until the next weekend’s influx. A family of white ducks floats down the canal, the baby squawking over and over, a sound like a hinge being forced. A few windows are glowing but the show doesn’t start until the big light goes down. Until then there are only vampires.
Amsterdam, where the vampires come out in the daytime; where you can have all liberality has to offer, as long as you promise not to enjoy it; where you can have all of the dissipation without the camaraderie of the fellow damned. As evening approaches more windows spark, more movement behind the shades as they prepare. The few curtains already open, beneath their signature red lanterns, reveal the old, the morbidly obese, the plastic surgery enthusiast and casualty putting in extra hours, dragging a line in case some wasted punter trips in or getting a discount on the daytime rental of front room with stool and glass window, back room with bed, sink, paper towels and sometimes bidet.
The sun cuts into the horizon and the gargoyles grow glamorous. In the gathering shade lines disappear, pounds fall away, jiggle firms, the claws tapping the glass become manicured. Are these the same vampires transformed by darkness? Dorian Grays in their transparent portraits, they live out their mortality in daylight but at night they are eternal beauties.
Traffic increases, men circle and circle, frail crafts seeking safe harbor, hands in pockets, avoiding looking at each other or the groups of tourists and curious women who peer into their faces with the expressions of children seeing something fascinating but something they know enough to wish they’d never seen.
I’ve circled these blocks between Voorburgwal and Achterburgwal incessantly, returning to the same window every five minutes to find the curtains still drawn. Last time it was only fifteen minutes but last time was a disaster. I go into a bar called (pun intended, I presume) Dijk, a locals’ bar, and have a Jupiter. It’s pisswater like the beer in America. The old American song comes on the jukebox, “my little runaway,” and the Dutch all hum along with the organ solo. Drop a few Euros on the bar and return to my holding pattern. The curtains are still drawn.
II
Fiasco
What a fiasco! So, you were there, I ask her upfront if she does and she’s all bouncing up and down and playing with that thong, turning that pink baseball cap on her head. That hat serves a purpose my friend, when it comes off you can see all the lines. So she’s all “but is it big?” and I’m like it’s not John Holmes but yeah baby, and she’s like “ooh, I’m skeered!” Right, sure. So we’re walking into the room and you take off to do whatever the fuck you do, fuck the ducks, and the door shuts and I strip down because the clock is running. I’m like, do I get extra time for paying more? And she goes “not if you want anal” and I go let’s just get to it but she doesn’t take her bottom off, see. I’m like, well do I get to see it at all? and she says “ooh no but you can see these” and the bra comes off and her fake tits fall out, pretty nice but rubbery, and I can touch with, what was it, my fingers but not my palms, that’s extra. If I want to see her it’s extra too. She pulls out this condom that must be half an inch thick like it’s made out of Tupperware and jams it on my dick and starts jerking it like she’s trying to just take the money and run. I’m like, easy! I try to touch her leg, she goes “that’s extra” so it’s like, might as well get to it. I’m barely hard, she gets on top of me, pulls the thong to the side and sits on it. I can’t feel a fucking thing, can’t see anything, she’s making these sounds and I don’t even know which hole I’m in. I’m asking her, can I see, even in the mirror? And, get this, she jumps off the cock and starts complaining to me how Americans are always asking for extra. I can see she’s trying to just walk out and take my money, the fuckin’ jerk, so I actually have to talk her back onto it, I tell her no, you’re beautiful, and she’s all, “I know I’m beautiful!” I’m like, gimme a fuckin’ break, I’m having to sweet talk a hooker that I paid something like a hundred and fifty bucks to? Finally she hops back on and I just go because the condom must be made out of balloon rubber and I’m all chafed. So I come, and it sucks, still don’t even know where I was, and I’m getting dressed after and the girl…the lady…is like “it wasn’t all that big.” Can you believe this fucking asshole? So I look her in the eyes and go, yeah, it gets a lot bigger when I’m actually turned on, and that one landed, she was like, “ouch.” And now I feel all gross from that stinky body lotion she uses, she felt like a seal; I need a fucking shower. I just paid 100 Euros to be made to feel like shit, I can do that to myself for free. Think I can go to the Prostitution Information Center and get my money back? No fucking thought of a good time, you know, your money’s worth? I should have just fucked a tree or a chair or something.
III
The Secrets of the Fjords
We’re walking back near the end of the night, passing coffeeshops, when Tobe grabs my arm. He says he thinks one of the girls in the front of the shop across the street is a hooker he passed earlier, “it’s the hair,” her hair is fashionably terribly highlighted, and if we sit with her and her friend maybe we can get a freebie or at least a discount. He drags me in and orders an orange juice. It isn’t her, and he takes off for the W.C.
I dig out my hash joint and contemplate it. I’m such a lightweight that I bought an ounce of hash from Afghanistan and the guys at the shop rolled a third of it for me, I smoked less than a fifth of the joint and was so out of it I fell asleep at the table, Tobe had to drag me back to the hostel.
He shoots back over, “give me the rest of the hash, you’re not going to get to it anyway.” I do, and he digs a Kit Kat Bar out of my murse. He takes a few steps, turns back and grabs me by the collar. We walk over near a couch with two girls; one is okay looking, a little pudgy with dirty blonde hair, her friend looks like a cat with black splayed hair, charcoal underlined eyes and a tiny, lithe body. I don’t have to ask which one he likes. He whispers, “She was looking at me going in and coming out of the bathroom.”
He walks over to their table, plunks down the hash baggie and the candy bar and says, “I wish to bribe you with hash and chocolate to reveal to us the secrets of Amsterdam.”
“We’re from Norway,” says the one with dirty blonde hair.
Without missing a beat, “Then the secrets of the fjords,” and that’s why Tobe is my friend.
We sit on either side with the girls in the middle, but Tobe winds up speaking to the friend because the pretty one doesn’t understand as much English. The friend, whose name is Birte, explains that the pretty one, whose name is Marian (“like maid” she says cutely, and Tobe slaps her stockinged leg when he laughs at it), and she left on the spur of the moment that morning to smoke weed in Amsterdam which, as I could gather, was what they had been doing in Norway already. I ask how they had the chance to come down during the week, they explain that, apparently due to their superior social support system, when Marian dropped out of college the state started giving her more than a thousand Euros a month to do nothing. She was doing nothing pretty effectively and convinced Birte to call in sick for a few days. Marian pokes her head up, smiles somewhat vapidly, and returns to text messaging people back in Norway.
“Who are you texting?” asks Tobe, and gets a blank stare.
“She’s texting people in Oslo, telling them we’re in Amsterdam and what it’s like.”
Marian taps Birte and they chatter, in Norwegian presumably.
“She is hungry,” say Birte, “do you know where we could go?”
Tobe, with no idea where we are, immediately volunteers us to help them find a place.
We file outside, the girls take the hash baggie but leave the chocolate bar. We don’t know where we’re going so we wander around in the early December chill until Tobe says mischievously, “Hey girls, want to see something interesting?”
Of course they do, so we head towards the red lights. They somehow had never heard about it and their eyes are wide, their mouths agape. He ushers Marian from one window to the next with a hand placed discreetly on her lower back, showing her both the surprisingly beautiful and the unfortunate. He rattles off facts he’s found in guidebooks, online and, though he won’t say, by personal experience. At one window a tiny blond girl of about eighteen is chewing bubble gum and bouncing up and down to Dutch pop music. Birte and Marian both point at her, “She’s so young!” they say.
We can’t find any restaurants cheap enough (for us, apparently the Norwegian currency is drubbing the dollar even worse than the Euro) so we take to them a nearby snack shop and get the same baguette-with-one-slice-of-ham sandwiches we’ve been living on. The light in the shop is a sickly yellow and it opens onto the circle with the Old Chuch, or Oudekerk. Ringing the Old Church are more red windows, mostly with substandard prostitutes, and we can distinctly hear their brazen entreaties coupled with the men’s frightened refusals.
Birte tells us about how small their hometown near Oslo is, and we talk about small towns and what it’s like to see the same people every day, how it effects your behavior as opposed to New York City where you’re probably never going to see many of the people again and there are a thousand more coming around the corner, so why be nice?
“You should be nice anyway,” she says, and I agree.
“Nice is boring,” says Tobe, “this place is the ultimate of what people do somewhere no one they know will ever see them or find out. This place and Thailand.”
Marian pulls out a video camera and trots out to the circle.
Tobe runs after her, “You can’t film the hookers!” he calls.
I ask Birte what Marian is filming, “She films everything,” she shrugs.
“Is she cutting it into anything?”
“No, just recording.”
“Does she even watch it later?” I ask.
Birte shrugs.
Marian dances back in excitedly, pointing to a sign outside the door showing a stick figure man relieving himself with the word “URINOIR.”
Tobe is equally excited, “I think I heard about these, you can piss right outside in these things!”
He runs off to piss and Marian runs off to tape him doing it. Maybe they’re a good pair after all. Birte asks me about the Dutch and I tell her that “tolerant” is an apt word, but they seem a bit grim about it.
“It seems like it’s a big party city not because the Dutch love to party,” I say,” but because they let the world party here. Maybe making waves this way is their bid to stay on the world map. After all, they did run the world for sometime, and to do that must do something to your national psyche, even centuries later, and especially when they’re now ignored completely in world affairs.”
Birte nods, I can’t tell if she’s following.
Tobe and Marian blow back in laughing, his hand on her arm, “It’s great!” he says, “it’s this hideous green thing next to the canal and all these guys in trench coats were lined up and they’re all looking at Marian like, why’s she here, is she available, is she a guy? And then I get in there and it smells just fucking awful and you have to stand like five feet away and try not to step in because there’s no light and it’s cold and crazy girl was taping the whole thing like it’s a German scheisser video!”
The girls want to get high, so I consult my guidebook and we go to a nice packed warm place with geode tables that managed to get an alcohol license too; maybe that’s why it felt comfy instead of the “get high and get out” attitude of many of the other coffeeshops. We smoke some light Sativa the girls have. We all get too high and I start talking too much, asking the girls about Ibsen and if regular people there like his plays and how they feel about that being the main thing their country is known for, someone the country gave a pretty hard time while he was alive. They shrug and say he’s okay. Tobe is next to Marian, leg to leg, and has made a few exploratory forays of brushing it as he says something or to get her attention but she’s buried in her phone and, as he said later, “it was anybody’s game at that point.” Birte tries to drag Marian away from her texting but Marian chatters back and the girls decide they’d better go to bed. They don’t know where we are now, so they ask, after conferring, if we will walk them back.
We get to the coffeeshop we picked them up at and the girls begin trying to figure out where their hotel is. They say they showed up without reservations and followed for several blocks a large black man who offered them a room. With Candide-like luck it seems to have worked out except that they didn’t get the name or address of the hotel. The area is closing down and we wander back and forth down the windy corridor. By the time the girls see something familiar we’re worn out and any possible or imagined spark is gone. We bid them farewell at their door and surprisingly Marian asks me for my number. Tobe smirks. They say they’d like to see us again, I point out they’re only around for another day and us for two, they say to call them, when I call the next day they don’t answer or respond to texts and we never see them again.
IV
Marriage
Material
Wow! Fucking wow! So I’m prowling while you’re napping and I pass this incredible small Asian girl, but I walk a block to think about it and this yeti goes in before me. I’m doing another lap and I catch a glimpse of this girl just getting let into a room by the Madam or whoever. I post myself outside the door and brave the stares of all the Japanese tourist crowds and the weirdoes, just collar up looking cool. Some guys offer me drugs (shit I forgot to ask if they had vicodin) and my vigilance is rewarded when the curtain opens and I step right up. I ask right off and she looks happy to say yes she does and right off I know it’s gonna go better. So we get in and strip down and I start asking what I can and can’t do; well for this girl it’s everything plus, not just the thing. Wow this girl is beautiful, depressingly she’s probably the best looking girl I’ve been with, long, brown, curly hair, kind of olive skin, totally good shape, green eyes, looks Greek actually, and I’m the first of the night so it’s a little less gross. First I wanted to see, so she gets naked and then on her hands and knees, and she puts her face in the pillow and reaches around and just…and I put my face right up and it’s like heat, and I ask and she says it’s okay so I make her come with my hands and when she comes it’s like her lips part, mouth opens, no sound, it’s like an explosion in space, and then she goes down on me and I can see it in the mirror, and then we’re fucking and she just feels fucking amazing, and I go “are you ready?” And she nods like she’s all excited, and I…well what details to share…I put her legs up on my shoulders and I’m playing with her there and she’s starting to sweat and is like “stop, I want your cock, now,” and she’s fucking sincere, totally actually turned on. She wanted to go doggie but you can’t see her face, so I pin her back and here’s where the comedy comes in: I can’t get my freaking cock in her freaking ass! It’s too high, it’s too low, this goes on for almost two minutes. I’m like, sorry, as you saw a minute ago I’m not totally incompetent usually. She goes, “then why now?” It’s great, she was so turned on she was impatient. So I flip her over and finally get it in and I’m completely in and see it in the mirror and she’s beautiful and I just want to feel it, but she’s really impatient and she’s off like a racehorse, “fuck me fuck me in my ass, grab my tits, squeeze them, harder, fucking harder, I want to come again, harder, fuck my ass harder” and I’m pounding away and she’s suddenly like, “harder, hard-ow, ow!” I jump off and she’s checking to see if she’s bleeding (she isn’t, thank god) and I’m like, let’s try the other position and take it slow. We start and I finally fucking get it right and she’s like “ow! ow!” again. So we finished off traditional, which still pretty great man, she did that thing where I’m on top and she coiled all around me and just kept pulling me in tighter and tighter. I’m telling you, this girl was so beautiful if I had any money I’d take her back to the USA. And then she asks me a few questions when I’m getting dressed, like how old I am, and I tell her and she stops cold and is like, “that’s how old I am.” What a fucked up world, man. In some other universe we’re probably married. So, man, what a fuck up I am, but god, what a beautiful fucking girl!
V
A Small World
We get some Mexicans, starter mushrooms, from a smart shop. They’re for me and I don’t want to have to interact while I’m tripping (the entire experiment is a little brave considering the adventure of two dippy American girls from the hostel who took a bus out to a large park, took a full pack of Mexicans along with a full pack of the fabled Hawaiians, rumored to be close to natural LSD, and wandered in the 40 degree forest until A: it began speaking to them and B: they walked 15 miles into the next town) so I leave Tobe smoking weed at a nice multi-level shop and we agree to meet at the shop with the geode tables and that if I get into trouble I’ll text him if I’m able. I eat a third of the package and begin to wander. After an hour and a half nothing has happened at all so I eat the rest of the package and go to look for a place to get some dinner. I sit down and order a steak, putting it on credit. The steak in Holland, where there are almost no cows, is about the same price as anything else on the menu; conversely the steak in America is twice as much despite stockyards everywhere, simply because people want to eat steak, oh supply and demand. You want that? You can’t have it. Here eat this crap and you can have that thing you want maybe once a month to sweeten your miserable lot. I know they cost the same thing to me but hey, that’s capitalism, right? I’m sure whatever they like in France, the liver of tortured ducks, is marked up exorbitantly too despite the abundance of tortured ducks.
The mushrooms hit halfway through the meal and the steak they brought me is ridiculously rare, bleeding all over the plate, so I quietly excuse myself trying not to appear high. I return to a coffeeshop I marked earlier in case, it’s empty and seems to have a biblical theme. My sense of getting higher and higher is like being informed that you jumped off a cliff an hour ago and are about to hit the ground any second. I get some fresh squeezed OJ and make my vitamin packet ready. The other inhabitants, a pretty Asian girl smoking alone, a shady guy and the elfin girl working the counter, are blessedly unconcerned with my odd but not uncommon behavior. I go into the bathroom and the white tiles, which are square, begin stretching and changing shape. The paper towels are a color they couldn’t possibly be, possibly ultraviolet. I go out and sit down. Across from me the see-through orange juicer with its bright orange wheels has become uncomfortably anthropomorphic. As I examine the mountains on the biblical walls they seem to develop cartoon faces. There seem to be faces resolving in the smoke stains as well. I look at the floor, scuffed wood, and playing out upon it seems to be a filmstrip of changing faces and scenes. I look up at the lights to see if there is some kind of projector but they’re just regular spotlights on a wood floor. I put my head between my knees and dive into the scenes on the floor, the faces seem Native American and owls and hawks pass by. These faces look out at me though they don’t address me; they look noble and wise, so much so they remind me of trips to the museum as a child with the life-sized dioramas of teepees and huts with Native American mannequins. They bring me back to my childhood conception, rather biased and two-dimensional, of Hollywoodized Dances With Wolves Native Americans, but that makes me feel I’m shortchanging the wisdom in the faces I actually see before me. They are revealing themselves to me, gazing at me, possibly measure me but not harshly, but not stating anything. I suddenly feel like I hear a chorus of voices, like several groups of people are all shouting at me, trying to tell me something, but they’re all shouting at the same time so everything is garbled. I can make out something, and it seems to be a name from my childhood I’ve forgotten, someone, some friend, some imaginary friend perhaps. Back to the parade of faces again, it seems now that there is something in the field behind the faces, in the darkness between them, something lurking.
I get up and get some water from the Elf-girl and dissolve the vitamin packet in it. As I look at the smoke stained wall behind her I see the outline of a face emerge. It is bearded, biblical and Semitic. Horns of hair appear atop its head and disappear. I turn to the mountains on the wall and they smile benevolently at me, big stone softies.
Another trip to the magic bathroom and I return to my post. The cartoon mountains have made me feel safe enough to dive behind the faces. Head between knees, I dive into the floor and push past the filmstrip sepia faces, they are two dimensional and behind them is a vast dark lake (or rather I do and I don’t, I envision myself doing it but never actually hallucinate that, or that the orange juicer break-danced across the counter, though I imagined both in great detail). I swim past the faces into the lake and I’m hit for nearly an hour with a rush of detailed and forgotten memories from my childhood. Going back to the street I was born on and meeting my old best friend and him not remembering me or pretending not to and it was at a street fair and I made a painting with one of those toys that spin the paper and you dribble paint onto it. Other kids that moved away in first or second grade, one Indian family that moved to Kansas, the daughter was in my sister’s girl scout troop and the son was in my class and the troop was going on Captain Kangaroo and they were supposed to pick me up too and they didn’t and I watched them on TV, amazing how petty we can be even years later.
Then I was back to before that, to what I spoke of to Birte, the street I grew up on after we moved when I was three. From then until six when I learned how to ride a bike or seven when school really broke everyone apart. During that time I lived on a street that was never extended through as intended, so it just connected two longer streets; it had no name so we called it Noname and it was out neighborhood’s discretionary street, we had fourth of July picnics there and I used to take a tennis ball and bat and pretend I was the ’86 Miracle Mets. I wonder if the people living there now still call it that. What I really went back to, though, was living within those two blocks; that your world ended there until you got a bike and your world grew and then you get older and get a car and neighborhood are just places you drive by. There were four of us for that short while, probably even shorter than I remember, though three to six seemed like an awfully long time then, and we played and explored but all within only those two blocks. Even kids another block away felt like they were from another place, we didn’t know how to feel about them, outsiders. And on my big wheel I would only ever go around the block. That small small world.
I opened my eyes and I was hugging my knees on the bench in a coffeeshop in Amsterdam, a long long way away, but I felt good, if a little sad. I remembered that an old friend of mine, while tripping on acid, drew a picture of God with his non-dominant hand without looking, so I drew a large picture haphazardly across a page in my notebook, using only one line. When I finished I looked into it for half an hour, finding in it birds and rabbits, faces familiar and strange, clawed hands, odd symbols and a lot of nonsense that comes from having absolutely no drawing ability. At that point I’d come down a little, though in the funhouse mirror of the wonderland bathroom my pupils were still like looking down a well. The Elf-girl was closing up soon, as I had been her only customer for an hour. On the way to the house with the geode table I pass a police checkpoint, they have someone out of his car, there must be ten cops to this one guy.
At the coffeehouse I sat by the warming lamp under the geode table and smoked a few inhales of hash and a Surinamese chef explained his nation’s connection with Holland; it was traded to New York neé New Amsterdam so the English could put hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk. Who got the better deal? Who is to say that twenty-four dollars in wampum for the island of Manhattan wasn’t a pretty fair price? The chef moved so he could smoke more weed, he knows an inordinate amount about weed and, as with most weed enthusiasts, wants only to talk about that instead of what’s more interesting: being a Surinamese chef in Amsterdam. I tell him about the police checkpoint and he scoffs at the Amsterdam police, as he has learned to from being harassed back in his home country. I ask him isn’t it good to have some control? What if things go out of control?
Tobe saves me from further conversation, “Hey, what’s up, asshole?”
“Nuttin’ fucknut.”
“How’s being a druggie treating you?”
“Oh, right, I’m weird because I do drugs in Amsterdam instead of going around fucking hookers in the ass. Why the ass again?”
“Because, as the great Rocco Siffredi said, ‘Cunts are for pussies.’”
“Vous et charmant.”
“You pronounced that wrong.”
“How would you know either?”
As he regaled me with his latest adventure we walked back to the hostel.
VI
Youth
I’m walking over here earlier and I keep almost getting run over by those cheap shitty ten-speeds all these fuckers ride and try to run us down with, with their faggoty little bells. Bring-a-ling! This dude wheels around a car and he’s headed at me and I just turn towards him, look him in the eye and stop. I’m like, one foot closer and I’m coming right for you, fucker. He freezes in his tracks and I go on, just looking for some present practitioners of the lost art of getting out of the fucking way. Pedestrians shit on cars, cars shit on bikes and bikes mow down pedestrians. I saw this kid walking around in blackface makeup and though I had a contact high from you, turns out the Dutch dress up in blackface because their Santa Claus, Sinter Claas, is from Spain and instead of elves he’s helped out by a merry retinue of darkies! This waitress I was talking to tried to pretend they were chimney sweeps and I’m like, wearing gold? And then what’s with the big red lips? She says from…umm…uh…kissing the fire. Right. And they’re all so fucking dull-witted; it takes ten minutes for them to tell you where the fucking bathroom is. Anyway I digress. You don’t have to guess, if you think you’ll know where I’ve been…yes, the little Dutch teenybopper herself. And I don’t think she liked me, rather I know she didn’t. I ask her the cardinal questions: how much, can I touch, more than one position, and it’s an extra 50 for her to take her top off, another 50 to touch and it’s just her on top. I ask too many questions so she tries to say no and get out of it, but he with the purse has the say and I gotta admit this girl reminds me of so many chicks I’ve wanted but didn’t get or wouldn’t push hard enough to persuade and certainly wouldn’t just throw down and take over their meager protestations although some of them are so damaged and fucked in the head that’s what they really want. But our girl here, her name was…oh…shit…wait…Greta?…Hilde…I don’t know, she’s a girl that doesn’t say no so we go upstairs. We get in and she’s like “fifteen minutes fuckandsuck” and I’m like, reading the time, so get to it. She takes off her bottom and she’s just got that perfect teenage body, maybe even the slightest hint of babyfat, round ass, perfectly shaved, god damn. And I’m lying down on the bed and she keeps looking at this big mirror that takes up the whole wall next to the bed and it’s almost like she’s making faces at it so I’m wondering if someone’s behind the wall. Some pimp or boyfriend, I mean what makes someone sleep with thirty different guys a night? Not money. Anyway, thinking makes me soft, let ‘em watch, and so she goes down and I can see her in the mirror but I want to look so I brush her hair back and she’s like “no touch!” She really spoke no English at all. I’m like, alright, alright, hands in the air, and she goes back to it, she’s watching herself do it in the mirror and it’s really pretty good, man these girls are good looking. Then I’m like, get on it. So she gets on top of me and she has that warm soft peach foam teenage skin that makes me hit myself and shout WHY wasn’t I fucking back in high school? Why wasn’t I fucking back in high school? I could have been, I had offers. It wasn’t like today when girls are giving blowjobs at their birthday parties where it’s like, “it’s the only way to get boys to like you.” Well, it sure doesn’t hurt. So she gets on it and slides all the way down and shifts from side to side, and she feels great, incredible great, tight and hot, sweating just a bit despite herself. And she twitches her little ass left and right and I ask how old she is because in Holland she could really be sixteen and she says eighteen and I believe her and then that’s it…she just shifts side to side. I’m like, can I get on top? “No, extra!” Can I hold your sides so I can fuck you? “Extra!!!” And I can tell she’s about to just get up, so what I have to do is leverage my hips up and down without using my upper body, so I press down with my feet because I’m like, well are you going to fuck it, and she’s like “No, this is all.” So again, partially against her will, I start fucking her, taking all my leg muscles from walking around this pit and I swear to God she liked it. She tried not to make any sounds but she starts moaning a little. But then after I came she hopped off me at light speed, but even with it, coming inside that little teenage, the American fucking dream. She goes and stands by the door, I get dressed and I get up to go and she opens the door and I, before I go out, I gave her a little pat on the head. Now, I’ll confess this only to you, you little monk, but you better shut the fuck up about it. After I did that, patted her on the head, and went out the door, I was walking, and I started to feel it, really really truly really awfully sad.
Epilogue
Pleasure Island
As we walked and talked, and I have related Tobe’s stories as close as I could, minus my own interjections, questions or exclamations, we passed down the street on which we met Birte and Marian the night before. There was a crowd and lights and the police from the traffic stop were gathered around a corpse on the sidewalk. The body was covered with a blanket from one of the hotels so I can’t say, murder, an OD, a tourist, a prostitute. The little red lanterns shone down the path and I felt like I was on a darker ride Disneyland never put in the park. The game of life or death ride. What happens to the donkeys after Pleasure Island, to the boys and girls who didn’t get off the ride in time.