Story Time: The Best Little Whorehouse In Amsterdam (Or Not)

[Currently Listening To: Bill Hicks - Salvation]


     In addition to being solicited by one of Boy George's mantoys and watching a transvestite sex show in jaw-dropped disbelief, there were a couple other bizarre stories from Europe that I'd meant to write down at the time, but never got around to. This is one of them... (this is a long post, but I had some time on an airplane this evening and I wanted to write this down so I wouldn't forget the details - read it or don't read it, I don't give a fuck)

     At some point in the middle of our European trip, we stopped in Amsterdam for exactly one night off before we were to catch a flight to Spain the next day. We were tired from traveling but determined nonetheless to make something of the few hours we had in a city with a reputation for trouble. So myself and a couple friends set out on foot towards the famed red light district, where adventure surely awaited us. Or did it? We quickly discovered that even Amsterdam, the city of sin, is dead as balls on a sunday night. After an hour of walking, the novelty of looking at weathered hookers standing in little red fish tanks was quickly fading, and all we wanted was someplace to sit down and have a drink - but every bar seemed to be closed or closing. Only one dingy-looking tavern on the corner of a dark sidestreet showed signs of life - in fact, it was overflowing with loud, drunken European men. Even from the outside it looked filthy and cramped and potentially dangerous, but damnit, it was open, so we decided to give it a shot.

     The entrance to the bar was a tunnel of large, scarred, skinheaded British rugby thugs whose boisterous drunken conversations gave way to silent scowls when we - three pale, skinny, black-clad Americans - squeezed our way past them to get in. Clearly, we were not particularly welcome in this place, but it seemed like it was too late to turn back at that point.

     The bar's interior was truly a wretched hive of scum and villainy; a dark, narrow, rotting dump of a place which looked as old as time and smelled even older. The musty, humid air was thick with cigarette smoke which, along with the succulent aroma of stale beer, vomit, and body odor, seemed to have been collecting on every surface of the room for two hundred years, unchallenged by proper cleaning or ventilation. From somewhere in the back, a dying jukebox blasted a cacophony of Irish drinking music cranked too loud for the capabilities of the weathered speakers. All manors of unsavory characters filled every corner of the room - laughing and shouting and drinking heavily - and many of them cast their eyes suspiciously upon us as we walked in. I felt like C-3PO stepping into the Mos Eisley Cantina - I was half expecting one of the bartenders to point at us and say, "we don't serve their kind here!"

     We sat down reluctantly at the bar, still taking in the breadth of our surroundings. As I adjusted my stool, I accidently bumped gently into the back of a rather large man next to me. He spun around and glared at me with a soul-piercing look of death and said, in the thickest of consonant-free cockney accents: "watch it." I sheepishly apologized and scooted my stool so far in the other direction I was practically sitting in my friend's lap. It was definitely time for some drinks. My friend Dave got the attention of a wiry old man bartender with a big hook nose, a horseshoe of stringy white hair, and an apron so filthy it was stained in colors I didn't even know existed. He spoke no English but understood the word "vodka," and that was all we really needed. He presented us with three shots (mixers, I presumed, were a foreign concept here) which we quickly gulped down (it was the cheapest, most throat-searing vodka I've ever tasted) and asked for another round. The bartender took our dirty glasses, dunked them in a sink filled with dark brown dishwater, and set them back in the stack of clean glasses, where they were immediately picked up by the second bartender and filled anew for some other customers.

     After a couple rounds, we eased up a bit and began to enjoy the atmosphere, spending the next hour or so people-watching, bullshitting, having a great time. By that point the crowd was thinning out, and at 2am the bar's bright overhead lights turned on, announcing closing time in the most disorienting of ways. The question, of course, was now what? Surely there must be somewhere else to go and continue our night. My friend Jason, a couple shots drunker than Dave and myself, called for the attention of the other, English-speaking bartender. He was a large middle-aged man with an accent of undetermined Eastern European origin. He had a barrel chest, a leathery face, a buzz cut, and a bowling shirt with the name "Frankie" embroidered on the breast. He walked over to us, keeping one eye on a trouble-making drunk over in the corner, and told us "no more drink, bar is closed."
     "No," Jason explained, "we want to go to another bar. Do you know anywhere around here that's still open where we could get a drink?"
     Frankie thought about it for a minute, then nodded slowly and said, "yes, I know of good place."
     "A bar?"
     "Yes. It is sex club. But it is bar. It have drinks. It good."
     We looked at each other suspiciously. Jason asked if there were any normal bars still open.
     "No," Frankie replied, "bars all closed. Only sex club open now."
     "But it's a bar, right? I mean, they serve drinks?"
     "Yes, yes, it bar. Drinks. I call car for you. I get you there. You get there, you tell them Frankie send you." Frankie flipped open a beat-up cell phone from his pocket and disappeared to the other side of the bar, apparently making a phone call. Dave and Jason and I huddled together to discuss. Jason assured us that he'd been to one of these "sex clubs" last time he was in Europe - that it was just a bar, but with girls hanging out who you can purchase and take upstairs if you'd like.
     "If you don't want any girls," Jason told us, "you don't have to get any. We can just sit there and drink."
     "So it's a whorehouse?" I asked.
     "No, well... I mean, yeah, but it's classier than that. It'll be just like any other bar. Look, it's the only place to go right now, and it'll be an adventure."
     Dave was not convinced - rather, he was beginning to panic: "That guy is calling us a fucking car right now, and if we get in that car, we're dead. Do you see that guy's watch? That's a fucking ten thousand dollar Rolex. You think he makes that kind of money washing dishes behind a bar? No, he makes money robbing naive tourists like us. We're going to end up in fucking pieces inside Frankie's trunk."
     "Dude, I don't think he's making that much money from robbing tourists. I mean, how many tourists would even come in this place?"
     "Oh come on - 'Frankie sent us'?? That's fucking code for 'gut these witless Americans and dump them in the river'!"
     Just then, Frankie returned, and said, "I have arrange for you. Car is come to get you."
     "Actually," I said, "if you could just give us the address, we'll catch a cab there - we need to, uh, pick up a couple friends."
     Frankie shrugged and said he would get the address for us, then disappeared again.
     "There," I told Dave, "now we don't have to ride in Frankie's car."
     "I still don't trust this guy."
     Frankie came back with an address of gibberish Dutch street names scribbled on a dirty napkin. "You go here, you tell them Frankie send you." Thanks, Frankie. Then he leaned forward, and said, "Tell me - you are in band, no?"
     "Uh, yeah," I said, appeasing him. "Yeah, we're in a band." We weren't, of course, but I guess we looked the part.
     Frankie's face lit up. "I knew this! I am friend with many rock and roll band. Last week I meet Keith Richard from Rolling Stone!" He ducked down behind the bar and pulled out a photo album, then leafed through it until he found a photo of himself standing next to the corpse drummer from The Rolling Stones. "You see? Keith Richard!"
     "Oh, wow. Cool, man. Real cool."
     Frankie beamed, clearly very proud. "I have to clean up bar now. In thirty minute, I see you at club, and then we talk."
     Yeah. Sure. That'll be great. I can't wait for our talk, Frankie. We said goodbye, headed out to the street, and grabbed a cab.

     On the ride to Frankie's mysterious sex club, we grilled the cab driver for clues about our destination. He told us that there were about five of these clubs in the city, some of them more expensive than others. This one, he told us, was not one of the expensive ones. We weren't sure if that was a good or a bad thing, but what did we care - all we wanted was a fucking drink.

     The cab came to a stop on a dark, residential-looking street. "This is it," the cab driver told us.
     "Um... where?"
     "Right there." He pointed to the unmarked door of an apartment building, indistinct from a dozen other doors of a dozen other adjacent apartment buildings. There was no sign, no people outside, no lights on in the windows - no evidence at all that this was anyplace other than the residence of someone who had long since retired for bed. Still, we got out of the cab, determined to investigate. Jason knocked on the door..... Nothing.
     Dave was flipping out: "Dude, this is fucked, this is fucked, we're going to die right now for sure."
     I was beginning to agree, as Jason knocked again with no results. "Yeah, this is pretty weird. We should get out of here." Jason nodded, and we turned to walk back towards the cab.
     Just then, from somewhere above us, a voice shouted "Hey!" We stopped and looked up - a rugged-looking old black woman was leaning out of a window on what must have been the third floor, peering down at us.
     "What you want?" she yelled in a gruff, heavily accented voice.
     "Uh... is this a bar?"
     She paused. "Frankie send you?"
     "Um, yes. Frankie sent us."
     She slammed the window shutters closed. We all gave each other the same look of "what the fuck is going on here?"
     "Dude," Dave said, "let's get out of here. This is fucking weird."
     I glanced over at the cab driver, still waiting for us at the curb. "Yeah, let's go."

     And then, just as our minds were made up, the front door swung open, and there was the old black woman, standing there leering at us. She was probably sixty years old, and had frazzled black hair with streaks of gray. Deep dark circles hung under her eyes, and what few teeth she still had were crooked and yellow. She was wearing a faded silk slip - something that might have been sexy when it was worn by the woman who originally purchased it, thirty years and seven owners ago, before it was retrieved out of a dumpster by the beast who stood before us. It had stains of unknown origin scattered across it, and one of the straps was held together with a safety pin. From the bottom of the slip emerged a pair of scrawny, veiny legs, capped by the filthiest pair of slippers I'd ever seen. "Come in," she told us, in a tone used more commonly for demands than invitations.

     We exchanged glances - should we go in this creepy place? My every instinct was screaming "run for the fucking hills." But Jason, buzzed and adventurous, stepped forward. "C'mon, how bad could it be?" What we saw inside hinted at the answer.

     The room we walked into was dark and empty. There were no people, there was no music. There were no signs of life. In one corner, a ripped up old couch sat next to a dying plant. The other side of the room was mostly occupied by a shoddily-constructed bar with five or six almost-empty bottles of nondescript liquor sitting behind it. Another corner of the room had a pole in it - the stripper kind, not the fireman kind. The air smelled like cigarettes and death.
     "Sit down," the old woman told us.
     "Wait," Dave said, "is this a bar? Is this a club?"
     "Yes, it is club."
     "Are there... people here? Anybody?" I asked.
     "Yes, people here. Sit down. I call girls for you." She disappeared down a hallway and up some stairs.
     We sat down at the small bar and laughed nervously. "What the FUCK is going on here?"

     Then, a shorter, fatter old black woman emerged from the hallway, and walked behind the bar. Acknowledging us only with a disinterested glance, she flicked a switch that turned on an overhead light, which momentarily illuminated the dark room, then flickered, and fizzled out. She pulled out a remote from behind the bar and pointed it at a tiny television mounted high up on the wall above the bar. A fuzzy image wobbled into place on the screen - some sort of European music video was playing. It wasn't up very loud, but at least finally there was something other than dead silence in the room. The woman set glasses down in front of each of us, and then looked at us expectedly. Oh, I get it, she's the bartender. "Vodka," Jason said. Dave and I nodded.
     The woman poured our drinks from a plastic bottle with the word "vodka" written on it with a Sharpie. We toasted, "to Amsterdam," and emptied the glasses quickly. The woman filled them up again and said, "So. You know Frankie?"
     "Yes," Jason said, "we met Frankie tonight. Uh, nice guy."
     She nodded unenthusiastically. We did another shot. Dave, still nervous about the situation, sat down on the dirty couch, his eyes darting around suspiciously.

     Just then, a woman came in from the hallway, and slumped down on the stool next to me. She was probably 21 but looked 40 - rake thin and pale, with greasy unwashed hair, a wart on her cheek, and teeth so yellow they were closer to brown. An expression of disdain carved creases into her weathered face as she sucked on a cigarette like it was oxygen at the bottom of the ocean. And she just sat there, looking straight ahead, not acknowledging us. Squirming awkwardly, I turned towards Jason and Dave and joked, "back off guys, she's mine." Jason snickered. I turned back to the girl and decided I might as well make this entertaining. "Hey there," I said, in the lightest tone I could muster. She continued smoking, without looking at me. "So... uh... where you from?" She turned her head towards me, scowling, giving me the death stare.
     "Mars," she replied bitterly, in a tone you might use to speak to someone who had just killed your mother.
     I chuckled awkwardly. "Mars, huh? It's, uh, pretty hot there this time of year, isn't it?" She grunted unintelligibly and resumed her smoking. For a girl who was expecting me to solicit her for sex, she really wasn't selling herself very well.

     At that point two more girls came in from upstairs, both of them as hideous and unfriendly as the first. One sat down next to Dave, and the other next to Jason. No one said anything. The atmosphere was getting creepier and creepier. I turned to Jason and whispered, "I think we're all getting AIDS just from sitting here. We need to get the hell out of this place. At some point they're going to expect us to pay these girls for sex, and I don't think they're going to be happy when they realize we're not interested in that." Jason nodded. But just as I was getting up to tell Dave the same thing, the old black woman reappeared, and said, "You have girl now. Rooms are upstairs. More girls coming." We all glanced at each other.

     Suddenly the doorbell rang. Now what? Frankie? "I hope that's not Frankie..." Jason mumbled.
     "It is more girls," the woman said, moving towards the door, "I call more girls for you." Great, just what we need. She opened the door, and there was Frankie, wearing a clean shirt and a shiny gold necklace. He said something unintelligible to the old woman, and then the plot thickened: They embraced, and kissed sloppily and passionately. I think I threw up a little when I saw that.
     Frankie looked around and smiled. "You are here! Good! Many beautiful girl for you. Have fun with girls. Then we talk. Much to talk about. I want know about your band."
     Dave, starting to freak out, did exactly what I hoped he wouldn't do, and explained to Frankie, "Look man, we actually don't want any girls tonight. We just wanted a drink. So..."
     "What you mean no girls!" Frankie interrupted, sounding offended. "You must have girl! It is Amsterdam! This is sex club! You will take girl. This one," he gestured at the putrid troll sitting next to Dave, "she do anything for you. Beautiful girl."

     So at this point we find ourselves in a bit of situation. We're in a foreign country, in a seemingly vacant part of town miles away from our hotel, in the creepiest whorehouse in the world, without any means to call a cab, being pressured by a large Russian man to have sex with possibly the ugliest girls in Europe. How the fuck were we going to get out of this one?

     The doorbell rang again. "Ah, that is girls," the old woman said. She opened the door, and to our surprise, it was the cab driver. The cab driver! The fucking cab driver came back. To this day, I do not know why he returned, but it didn't matter. It was a Godsend. His arrival was like some sort of divine intervention. Thank the fucking Lord, I thought to myself. We're saved!

     Immediately I jumped up from my seat. "Oh, hey, Jason, there's the cab driver! Remember you forgot your jacket in the cab?" He looked at me, confused.
     "No, I di--" You could almost see the light bulb illuminate above his head. "Oh, riiiight! My jacket! Yeah, let's go look for that!" We quickly shoved our way past Frankie and the woman and ran outside to the cab. "We'll be right back, just getting something from the car!" The cab driver, confused, followed us outside and watched us leap into the back seat of the car.
     "Come on!" I yelled at the cabbie, "let's go!"
     "You... you want to leave?"
     "YES!!"
     "Fuck, where's Dave?" Jason shouted. Dave hadn't followed us outside.
     "Fuck fuck fuck!" I jumped out of the car and ran to the doorway, leaned in, and said "Dave, we need your help with something out here!" He shrugged and came towards the door. I grabbed his arm and pulled him outside. "Come on, dumbass, we're getting out of here!"

     As we piled into the cab the woman had caught on and ran out the door screaming "Where you going!! You can no leave!! I call girls for you, you have to pay!!" Like a scene from a movie, I yelled at the driver to "step on it" as the woman ran towards the cab. The car peeled out, and we laughed hysterically as we watched the woman run down the street after us, cursing and screaming, with Frankie standing behind her dumbfounded.

     On the ride home, we couldn't stop laughing, about Frankie and the creepy ugly prostitutes and the dingy bar and how, at the end, Dave had actually thought we were going to the car to fetch Jason's jacket. The driver asked us if we wanted to try a better club. No thanks, we told him. We'd had more than enough of Amsterdam.