At the same time I was feeling out my identity as a young illuminator (that came to a head over a collection of excellently preserved Gutenberg Bibles at the Trinity Library in Dublin), my college boyfriend decided it would be exotic for us to smoke pot in Amsterdam, rather than our less glamorous state-school dorm rooms. I didn't really think of it as "fun", so much as a really far away place to travel to, so we could smoke some hash that we'd get cheaper back in New York, but like his newly found discovery of sex (I was his first), he seemed to think that the world would totally change if he was high in another part of it, which it does not.
It's like getting drunk in a bunch of different bars; you just get drunk in different rooms. Accents and a hip European locale, was (and is) travelling to a lot of young tourists: places to get drunk and high for more money. It was stupid, wasteful, and stressful for me to be stoned in another language with an American passport back in the late 80s as a teenager, because you don't need to get a hangnail over and over again to know they hurt badly.
But, of course, who I was and what I wanted was much less relevant to him, since he was paying for the trip. So, before I could miss seeing "The Book of Kells" opened to a text-only folio because the library is closed on Mondays (and I had to fight to stay an extra day to see even that), I found myself sitting in a small commuter prop plane made for European businessmen after a long intercontinental flight from the U.S., exhausted and scared beyond belief at the jostling in a tiny plane, so my boyfriend could smoke pot in a bar.
We nervously went into a hash cafe and ordered pot off a menu from a bored hippie behind a plexi-glass window, to take a seat at a cafe table rolling smokes and drinking beer. Because smoking cigarettes in a bar was still legal back then, it felt exactly like sitting in a bar smoking and drinking, except pot was included with the beer and cigarettes. Just like Ireland is much more to me than a quaint pub to drink in, Amsterdam was punctuated by incredible artistic experiences for me as a college student, like seeing a Rembrandt for the first time, or Vermeer's painting of a milkmaid pouring from a jug by an open window.
There isn't any kind of smoke or lager to compete with that, and my non-artistic boyfriend knew it, hence his sniping sabotages and subterfuges that I'd outgrow right after college. It was the same with the much-hyped "Red Light District" of Amsterdam, walking its cobblestone streets at night alongside the winding, misty canals: if Bart hadn't stopped me at the end of a block to inquire, I'd never had known we just walked down a street with legal prostitution.
New York City hookers were loud, cat-calling addicts running wild through the streets, ready to jack the car of any trick who tried to run them over, not these genteel plate-glass storefronts with a chair in the middle of a window. He made me walk back down the block again, stoned and high as a kite, so I could take it all in, this time aware of what I was looking for. Well...what did I think? Of a beefy, middle-aged, frazzled-haired blond woman sitting alone in a window on a plain wood chair wearing ugly lingerie? Like it was quiet desperation mixed with incredible loneliness and a deeply penetrating sadness. Almost immediately, I missed the bright lights and big things of Times Square; of home.
