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Excerpt from Dutch Tilt (November 20, 2009.  Issue 11.)

When I went to Amsterdam, I wanted only four things, to see Mary, to see a sex show at the Casa Rosso, to one time smoke a joint in a city where a joint could be smoked in legal peace and to visit a home for one of the Gods of Art, the Van Gogh museum. Of course, everyone knows about the Amsterdam whores, but I am not a whore kind of guy. Still, Mary had instructed me beforehand in the whole whore story. “It’s fifty guilders for a suck. Fifty guilders for a fuck. A hundred Guilders for a suck and a fuck. You get fifteen minutes, then you’re out of there. And you have to wear a rubber.” But anyone can get side tracked.

Thalys rode smooth and fast, across Northern France from Paris and across Belgium into Holland, a slopenosed train running a hundred to a hundred fifty miles an hour, smooth speed. Paris to Amsterdam in three hours of comfort and pleasure. The countryside slid quickly by, hills and forests, green pastureland and corduroy farms rolling off into the distance, little towns with houses of stone and brick clustered around a church built of old stones. Every kilometer closer to Amsterdam was a kilometer farther from Annie and from my life. Every minute was a minute's distance, until, for the time being, they were becoming a sliver of a memory.

Annie. Ah, Annie. How to describe her. She was a thick, heavy book, a patchwork of Christianity and acting and Sufism and white Anglo-Saxon American values, a crazy jumbled mental mural, an atonal symphony of beauty and chaos, a whirlpool where traditional chaste Christian values commingled with modern chaste feminist values. A kind, slender, beautiful intelligence, filled with the intimidation I have seen in women who dabble in pop psychology and new age religion. Looking for solutions and settling upon those requiring neither an honest introspection, nor an acknowledgment of personal responsibility. She was at once a leaf blowing in the winds of the universe and a woman looking for relief, if not answers, for shelter. She was a woman searching, aching to replace the sanctuary found under the pillars of her father's authority. And, believe me, I was not it.

What attracts such dissimilar people, besides the strictly physical? I mean, was it because she was beautiful? She was that, tall and slim, with small breasts like half oranges and calm blue eyes and blonde hair rippling down just past her shoulders. She had soft skin the color of sand on a hot day, with the muscle tone of the cerebral, not the athletic. Her thin lips broke into a smile that acknowledged your presence with gratitude, and a soft, withdrawing gentility and a coy propriety that invited you to reach out to her, stated that all roads lead to her. We had a connection from the beginning, a deep affinity for which I cannot account. Yet, there was something else, something that has been difficult to grasp, my desire for the American princess.

When I was a boy, I wanted to fit in. I was convinced I looked more Greek than American and I was sure that straight hair and straight teeth and pale skin were it. I thought I was too dark and my nose was huge. I took to wearing stocking caps to bed, so that my hair would straighten. And I coveted what I thought I could not have, white WASP girls from families with more money than ours, who could afford to make their daughters look great, even when they were not great looking. They had poise, confidence, but they were always out of my reach. Not because I was ugly, or stupid, or did not look American enough. Those things never stop a woman from loving a man, or at least screwing him. They remained impossible, because I felt, I knew, I was unworthy, beneath everyone around me. So cosmetic changes could never help that.

Well, my insecurities were the foundation of my heartbreak. And when it broke, I blamed myself, a man who could not keep a relationship together was less a man.

Well, to be fair, it was not all about Annie, my depression. But our relationship tipped the balances of my mind and my emotions. We broke up when my life was a wheel of many spokes and these months were its hub, and one by one the spokes of my past were snapping and the vestiges of an irresponsible youth, one that I had worked a very hard to put away, were dropping away in rapid succession. I was adrift. I had been kicked out of my cottage, because the landlord needed it for her teenaged daughter and her daughter's new baby. Before leaving for Europe, I put my things into storage. A very old, very dear friend took in me and my dog, and for a little over a year I slept on a mattress on the floor of his renovated garage, and while he remains one of my best friends and I love him and will always owe him hugely, he was an overweight nudist. About a month before I came, Annie broke up with me, looking for a better fit. Now, every morning the first thing and every night the last thing I saw was my friend's round naked body. After a few months, the sight of him au naturel became, well, a little old. And between trips to the City of Lights, I would lie in my sleeping bag on the mattress and listen to low riders boomboombooming up the street. And all the time I was in town, I was looking to buy my first house, but buying a house in the Bay Area without a million dollars is like a public rectal probe that must be endured, because it feels good when it it taken out. And yet, I was traveling to Paris, living there in the same room—chambre cinquante six á l'Hotel Alane, soixante douze, Boulevarde de Magenta, pres de Gare de l'Est —in a corner on the fifth floor with a television mounted on the wall and a view of Sacré-Coeur from the balcony windows, with the rushing traffic five floors below and the neverceasing rumble of a city never ceasing. And I was making more money than I had ever before, for a company that flew me to Paris whenever I asked. I had a life there and friends, and believe me, that is no easy thing in Paris. I went to parties and the homes of people's parents. I knew where to go when I needed to meet people and had my friends at home to call whenever I needed to hear the voice of someone I loved who loved me. And so, it does not seem right that I was depressed, yet I was, because it was a confluence of everything going right and everything going wrong and the place that I was settled was not my home, while my home was the place I was not settled.

So, these layers of thought and change and emotion buried me in a funk of limitless proportions, so deep that I did not realize I was in it, and made of me a sexual zombie. One of the walking dead… hormonally speaking.

It took a great deal of time, finding the main entrance to Centraal Station and Mary. There was a great milling of people, strong currents of arrivals and departures. At first, I could not find her. She blended in so well. And when I saw her, well… Mary. Blonde hair cut short and brown eyes. Large breasts and a waist still narrow with short morning runs, but not quite as much as ten years before. She had the poise that comes from confidence and the humility of a successfully recovered abuser of many substances. Mary. She was a babe, inside and out. It feels good even to write about her. In fact, if not for her, for the communion with a real friend, I would have stay in Paris.

For years we straddled the fence between friendship and sex, but she is more, um, adventurous, in an egalitarian way. She loves it kinky, which, I know, is relative. I come from the San Francisco Bay Area, where nothing is that unusual, or unnatural, and what is considered kinky is a matter of a walk across the street, from one district into another. It is a place where people display their fetishes with pride. In fact they move from the farthest parts of the country to do it. Birds flocking. One thing Mary loves is having things shoved up her ass, large things, small things, and, figuring turnabout is fair play, she insists that everyone she has sex with, male and female, be willing to have things shoved up their ass as well, or whatever the act du jour might be. Hell, more power to her. She knows what she wants, and it is all in fairness and equity, but I suppose I am just old-fashioned, as I suppose most guys are, deep down, no matter what they have shoved up their asses, collectively or individually. And despite temptation and easy access, there remain some roads that are better not traveled. At least for me.

Mary smiled her big smile of even white teeth, a smile that made anyone feel welcome and accepted, and we held each other a long embrace under that tall ceiling reverberating voices and footfalls, the cries of joy at meetings long put off and those of children in resistant tow. I felt that I had reached safe haven, a good friend in a foriegn place. And when we were done, I shouldered my day pack and the strap of my duffel and we strode in the contentment of reunion out the front doors of Centraal station.

Outside, the air bit clear under a low grey ceiling. A light rain began falling as we crossed the first big street, the Prins Hendrikkade, and passed French Fry Land, selling nothing but fries on the street corner, and though it was very cold, it did not snow, but snow did not feel very far off. The Damrak was lined with four-storey neon and the twinkling lights in the bare spines of winter branches along the street. As we strolled across and over to the Damrak, we talked of me and Paris and how I had been and how I had come there for two months.

—Have you met any women?

Et tu, Mary?

So I told her about Sophie, a young Parisian who wanted me then didn’t, then did again and then decided that she definitely did not.

—She said she doesn't want a love story, whatever that is.

—I'm sorry.

I glanced at Mary gratefully. What a month. But I did not speak of Annie. It never occurred to me to talk about her. I could not know it at the time, because I could not confront it. I had compressed and sealed all the angst and the passion of these months down into a corner of my mind. I only wanted to get away, be there, where only Mary knew me. Because, really, it all hurt too much. And talking of it would have been like pulling the chord of an emotional parachute. It would all have come springing out at once, and that would have been too much.

Mary told me of her internship in Amsterdam and how she was looking for a lover, male or female, and since only males made her feel that special way, she thought she would be better off with a man, or at least a male. Over Chinese dinner we had continuous catching up until there wasn't anything left to speak of over a public plate of food. So, we rose and Mary wound her neck with her wool scarf and put on her jacket. Outside, we passed through some more cobblestone streets, all different yet all the same in their comfort and their mature, worldly aesthetic. And because of civic renovations, we walked on dirt streets, as if it were not the year two thousand, but centuries before. Overhung lights hazed in the growing mist. Being there, the newness of it, kept me in the moment and made my life at home seem as distant as it actually was.

It crept up on me, the Red Light District, but when I realized I was in it, I was very much in it. First there was a woman standing in a window, watching me walk by, waving at someone to open the door and come in, smiling, another dancing to music I could not hear, and another sitting in a chair watching the sidewalk traffic. I finally realized where I was and then I looked all around. It straddled a canal, four-story housefronts facing each other. They all had big pane windows, or doors with full-length glass, all of them that is except for the sex shops and the few sex shows.

Ah, the beauty of the weekend whores, dark hair and blonde, their skins all the tones of the earth. Their curves. The swell of breast and thigh in calculatedly sensuous proportions. The fat ones did not display themselves on weekends. The weekends were reserved for adolescent masturbatory fantasies, and they fulfilled them in most every doorway and window. Slender and large breasted, with hair feathering down over their shoulders and touching lightly the nipples beneath their swim suits or lingerie as they stood in the warmth behind glass. These women did not have to dance to gather attention. Years of Playboys and movies and tool and equipment calendars had lain the groundwork for them. They were a turn-on by default.

I tell you, I should have been a walking erection. I should have been utterly and hopelessly lost in an overwhelming, greedy lust. I should have been ripping into my pockets for the Guilders, and if I had none, for my bankcard and a quick penetration withdrawal. But, I was so numb that it did not occur to me that I was numb. And I have been horny since I was seven, and since that time I have been an incorrigible girl watcher. In fact , I hope I die an old man watching young women. Except then… nothing, as if someone with a syringe had crept into my room one night and injected my head with a special acid that dissolved part of my brain painlessly while I slept. It was a kind of hell, except I was too stupid to notice it.

The next morning, we rose and showered and took the streetcar into town. After breakfast, we walked around through downtown, stopping under storefront awnings to get out of the showers. I bought some clothes. Then we walked through town some more, just meandering, following the flow of people.

It was during that walk that I made the decision. The Red Light District had never left my mind, and I thought, hell, I am a single guy in Amsterdam. There was nothing stopping me. And, of course, there was that pressure from home, the post-breakup sympathy, and everyone wanted me to have fun, meet women, get laid for chrissake. I have often succumbed to the admonitions of friends. I knew this was not what they were talking about, but it was getting laid, technically. Still, it embarrassed me, succumbing to peer pressure. I am too old for that. But I began to feel almost obligated to have sex with an Amsterdam whore, as a way of saving face. I struggled with myself back and forth, forth and back. I began to feel as if I would not be able to face them, again a failure as a man, or at least a guy, if I did not fuck somebody, and an Amsterdam whore was the easiest target. I mean, anybody could do that. Finally I thought, why not do it. In fact, I must do it.

And so, I decided to fuck someone because my friends wanted me to. It was a puppet switch of my mind flicking from doubt to clarity. "When Mary goes to her AA meeting, I go to my meeting," I thought. And so for the next two hours, I wanted the companionship of Mary, yet wanted the Red Light District. In a square, we stopped and watched a man on a tall, tall unicycle juggling flaming bowling pins. Mary looked at her watch and pulled me aside and said,

—I really have to go. Are you going to be all right? Do you know how to get back to Centraal Station?

I had said before that if I was disoriented, if I could find the station I would be all right.

—Oh yeah.

She looked at me and hesitated, a little anxious.

—I just hate to leave you here. I feel responsible.

Sweet Mary. Kind Mary. She looked at me with those big eyes worried and pouting, laying me bare and defenseless.

—I'll be okay. I have my mobile. You have your mobile. Go.

She looked quickly at her watch then and glanced at me.

—Oh, I have to go now. You sure you'll be okay.

—Go!

She hurried off, to where I did not know. I only knew it was in the opposite direction from where I was going, and that was fine with me. I did not want to open myself to her opinions, have her sway my determination or enter doubt or reason into my mind. So I turned and started back from where we had come. I did not hurry, nor was I excited in any way. But I suppose I could say that I was, um, resolute. And in spite of a couple of wrong turns and the occasional detours of a block or so, I arrived at the Red Light District faster than I had planned. In what seemed like no time, the girls were sitting in their tall stools and dancing in display windows, watching the parade. There were not so many men walking along the canal when I began looking for someone to give my hundred Guilders to. Yes, a hundred Guilders, for I had made up my mind that I not only wanted a suck, but I also wanted a fuck. I wanted the works.

The first woman I passed was a slightly overweight, fatigued-looking woman with thick wavy hair the color of rich mud. A little farther down the street a woman danced to silent music and for all I knew she was dancing to her own mental music born of the joy over the wealth in prostitution. Her window was up a short flight of stairs and through a door of glass panes. She flirted with me with her eyes and a wave of her hand to come up, in a way that was not sensual or in any way enticing. It was neither lewd, nor suggestive. It was more businesslike. She was dangling a lure of eye contact and movement. Trolling for men. Her body did the work and she did not have to put much in the way of inspiration behind that, nice legs, small breasts, hot pants and the type of a vest a professional cheerleader could wear, cut to expose belly and midriff and create cleavage. And she had auburn hair and a mischievous spark in her eyes.

She was close, but not quite my type. That did not matter so much in terms of the act itself, but in terms of the value. I was, after all, shopping. Why couldn't I choose the one I wanted? Because I was not actually horny, or particularly interested in sex, I felt like I could shop, and because it was still early, I had the time. I did not think this outright, but I felt it just the same. It impelled me.

Four or five doors down I saw a woman in a chair behind a white door with its center panel replaced with a tall, narrow pane of glass. She sat in a landing a meter square, and a narrow stairway carpeted white rose into shadows behind her, up to the second floor. She looked about medium height, slender, with nothing striking in either features or build. But she had long thick dark hair, and olive skin, and brown, soft eyes, and a white, low cut dress with narrow straps, exposing just enough cleavage. She had a calmness to her, neither selling nor enticing. She sat in the way anyone would sit while waiting for someone to arrive. The question was when. If she had had a cup of espresso, it would have seemed as if she sat in a very small, one-person cafe. And she was quite pretty, do not mistake that. Pretty enough to give to me a start, a slight hormonal jolt, even in my broken condition. And that is saying something.

I decided to create a mark in the ledger of my mind for this woman, while I researched what other women sat in windows and doors, and if this one turned out to be best, I would return. It is funny how a poor man can get greedy in the sight of plenty. How a beggar can become selective. So I walked on, thinking to myself that I would probably return to this woman sitting with her legs crossed patiently behind the pane, looking comfortable and warm, despite the coldness outside.

A few doors down, there were two girls sitting in a window at the top of some stairs, looking as if they had just come from a day of classes at college. They watched passing strangers with an attitude almost as if they were making fun of the men who passed, even as they were trying to make the same men approach. It is a funny thing to denigrate a man who wants sex, while you are selling yourself to him, or giving yourself. I have seen this, a woman thinking a man stupid for taking the sex she has given him. What the hell is up with that?

At the next corner was a small brothel of Negro women. They crowded in windows at the corner, thin ones, fat ones, some pretty, some not. A man went in the door, and another man came out, with a slap from a feminine hand. I walked a little farther down. The farther I removed from my dark haired woman, the bigger the urge I felt to return, and halfway down the following block I thought to myself, "What am I doing? Gambling that a better one may be around a corner, when a good one is here now."

So I turned and hustled back, but my whore was gone. There was the doorway. There, the empty chair in the window, the stairs rising into the shadows of the staircase behind it. I was stunned. I walked up four doors and back four doors, to certify that I had the correct one. That was it. She was gone. A panic of scarcity gripped me. Suddenly I had to get this thing done, my pride being at stake. Suddenly, almost any whore was better than no whore. And I wanted it done quickly. Where before, I had the afternoon, now time was rushing. I wanted that whore, but she was gone. So I had to find another. I had, after all, made up my mind. I had come this far. I was going to follow through, goddamn it. So that was that. I had forgotten that I could have waited fifteen minutes, or so, and she would return. Ah, that beautiful fifteen-minute rule.

I hustled back to where I started, back and again once more, always checking the doorway of my first choice whore. But she never returned. On my forth pass, the little dancer caught my attention and I stopped beneath her window. She was damned cute and she worked her sales flirt heavily. I think in the end her cleavage undid me. Yeah, that was it. That soft little cleavage was my fall. She waved me up, and I thought, "What the hell." So I mounted the stairs and she stopped her little dance and opened the door for me.

It was suddenly warm. The music was some sort of formulaic arena rock. Boring. Pedestrian. She turned her boombox down and smiled and said something I cannot remember. And she lead me into her room.

I should say here that naming this woman has been a problem. It does not seem right to call her my whore, even though she certainly was that. Still, she should have a name. I later learned that her father was Dutch, but her mother was Portuguese. She certainly looked more Portuguese than Dutch, dark skinned and auburn haired. So she has become My Little Portagee.

My Little Portagee led me into her room, about the size of a doctor's examination room, with walls the tone of a flesh-colored crayon, white trim on the baseboards and around the door and striped chest high. This was not a room for intimacy or comfort, but one of professional detachment and volume service.

Just inside the door and to the left sat a wooden locker with a combination lock through a hasp. Beside that lay the bed. A simple thing, like an army hospital bed from an old movie. Above the head of the bed, a cat of nine tails and leather bustier and a sexy little mask of black leather and feathers hung from hooks on the wall. And at the end of the narrow room and on the far side sat the Formica counters, neatly arranged and ready. But instead of hemostats and tongue depressors, she had lubricants and rubbers, paper towels and Handi-Wipes, all laid out in sterile order. If I was nervous when I walked into the room, and I was, nervous and hormonally dead and determined just the same, the room itself did nothing to ease that for me.

Maybe I should have left. Maybe I should have just relaxed and enjoyed myself. Maybe I should have smiled and started a casual conversation. But I did none of these things. Instead, I turned when she closed the door and I said,

—So. How does this work?

Nothing like starting off on the right foot.

—It is fifty Guilders for a suck. Fifty Guilders for a fuck. And a hundred Guilders for a suck and a fuck.

Well, Mary was right. In fact, it sounded like they had both memorized it from a little card handed out to people as they moved in to the city. The Introduction to Amsterdam Suck/Fuck Card. I thought a moment, even though I knew what I wanted.

—A suck and fuck, I said, shrugging .

—I will take your coat?

She held out her hand and took my heavy black overcoat and my new Stetson fedora and hung them on a coat hanger beside the trunk, and I gave her the hundred Guilders. She unlocked the trunk and placed the notes on some shelve in there, then locked it quickly up again. Then she said,

—Take off your clothes and wash your hands.

Wash my hands? I thought she was going down on me. Maybe some things are better left mysteries. Still, I was hoping she would wash hers as well. As I thought these things, I took off my clothes and washed my hands in the little porcelain sink, beside which the condoms were laid out in a precise row. And when I was done she said,

—Okay. Now lay down. Here.

She motioned to the bed. And, of course, I lay back.

When My Little Portagee slid off her tight vest and hot pants, and stood there naked, I found new respect for her beauty, for she was a lovely woman with sensuous curves on a smooth body and a little Zappa patch of pubes. And if I was not in such as state as I was, I would have been ready in a second. She walked over to the sink and washed her hands. I smiled then at that. Even if it was unnecessary, turnabout was fair play. When she finished there, she pulled a condom from the little row on the countertop and sat beside me on the bed and put a corner of the plastic package in her teeth and tore it open, potato-chip-bag style. She quickly and with the skill borne of experience slid the cover over my flat tire, then bent down and applied her trade.

Oh man, it had been a long time. Annie did not like to give oral sex, at least to me. She only did it three times in the year we were together. Or was it twice? I do not think she was against it in principal, and I do not think she found it repugnant. I have come to the opinion that she did not do it out of reparations. She did not feel that I had given her all, actually much, of what she wanted, and so she in turn withheld favors that were small to her.

Now, condom and all, lying back on the cot, My Little Portagee brought back to me the monumental joy of a blowjob. There is nothing quite as a good as a good one, and nothing so horrible as a bad one. And this one was pretty damned good. I lay back, amazed at how much I could feel through the condom. It was nearly the natural act. I put my hand on the thigh of My Little Portagee, and felt her breasts. Breasts felt good once again, the touch of the skin of a woman, its silkiness on the backs of my fingers. For the first time in months, I almost completely relaxed. I was rising up to meet her. I was functioning again. I felt satisfied because I was working, physiologically speaking. In a couple minutes, all that began to exist was the room and the pleasure My Little Portagee was giving me. I closed my eyes and for a couple of moments, yes God, I was a happy man.

Then it happened.

A switch went off in my mind, or in that part of my body that controls the sexual urge. In one moment I was floating in pleasure, and in the next moment, well, nothing. Absolutely nothing. I was detached not only from the pleasure, but also the urge to continue. It became at once a memory, sexual pleasure. It just died, vanished, and I quickly deflated in her mouth. Suddenly it was the perfect time to study calculus or history or engineering, and I just lay there, stunned and alert, a little panicked and not a little concerned. For we had only begun. What was I supposed to do now? I still had fourteen minutes to go.

However, the cessation of my lust did not stop my determination. That remained intact and stubborn. I wanted to continue. Really bad. Not only did I want the pleasure of the moment before, and the pleasure I knew was coming up, but there was something else. Something like pride was on the line. I was determined to complete the act, for the sake of completing the act alone. I had come this far, gone so much out of my way to make it happen. Goddamn it, I was going to finish, and she was going to do it.

As I lay there thinking these things, My Little Portagee continued working as if nothing had happened. And I guess, technically, nothing had happened. She worked away on me without looking at me, just focused on the job at hand. I wondered if she felt a ding to her professional pride, but if she did, she did not show it. A true professional. I supposed she used all the tricks of tongue and lips and whatever a woman can learn with that much practice, but no matter what she did, that cock would not crow.

I tried to convince myself that this was not a big deal. It was a temporary setback caused by a mental malfunction, a breakage of links, of synapses, a momentary rip in the continuum of my consciousness. I thought if a mental event broke the moment, then a mental event could raise me from the dead. So I tried to compensate the deflation by re-creating that feeling, that recently passed moment of pleasure. I closed my eyes and recreated in my mind the arousal, the sensation, but more important, my attitude of before. And I had some success in this. My little hunchback started feebly to rise once or twice, but then it quickly gave up, a beaten, apathetic thing. For although this is a well-proven technique, it can be difficult to maintain. It requires that, in re-creating the past, you not pay attention to what is going on in the present. And God forbid a creative or analytical thought should creep into your consciousness. That is the kiss of death. Still, in that present moment, I was in a tiny, sterile room in Amsterdam being blown by My Little Portagee for a hundred Guilders and I was numb.

I was not thinking of Annie, or the emptiness of being alone, that was just part of the whole depression, and there was pressure, for I remembered I only had a few minutes left on the meter, and what to tell the friends back home if I failed at even this simple task. I mean, sex doesn't get much easier than an Amsterdam whore. Then, for some reason, my mind wandered. I wondered what it was like to have latex in your mouth all day, five, six days a week. Where the hell did that come from?

My Little Portagee continued working her best in a challenging situation, but it did not matter what techniques she plied, her caress on my thigh went unrewarded, so too the stroke of her hand through the hair on my chest, and it did not matter how much I noticed her beauty, her skin, her breasts, and they were beautiful. The hydraulics of my love just would not function. Finally, she raised up her head and looked at me, concerned, and said,

—Your cock's not working.

My cock's not working. How could anyone make that up? She said it matter-of-factly, like: your carburetor is clogged, or your mother is dead. And she was right. The little fellow wasn't working. I wasn't embarrassed exactly, but I did feel nervous and apologetic.

—I know. I'm sorry. I'm just nervous.

—I'm doing everything I can, but you cock's not working.

—I know. It's not your fault. I'm just nervous.

She nodded and returned to her job.

Now I felt really bad. Not only did I want to prove to myself I could carry through, and to my friends, should they ask, but I also wanted to show to My Little Portagee that I was a man that would not shirk from a deal once made, that I was a man that could hold up his end until it shriveled from gratification. I did not want to become a topic of gossip for the whores of Amsterdam. Of course, thinking this only compounded the pressure. I knew now it would never work, but, still, I was committed.

It was not like what she was doing did not feel good. It did. Just in a detached sort of way. I wondered how I would tell anybody. I did not want to, but I knew I would. You don't just hide this kind of thing successfully. I tried hurrying the process, tried to create an illusion of intimacy. Maybe if I was more comfortable, more relaxed, I would work better. I felt her breasts and ran my hands along her legs and thighs and cupped her buttocks. And that worked a little. But when I slid a finger inside her, she said,

—No fingers inside. Is not allowed.

Is not allowed? Well, so much for that. Now I began to think how I could get out without looking like a total fool. That is when she said,

—Your cock's not working and it’s not my fault.

—I know. I'm just nervous

—You’re just nervous. Don't be nervous.

As if that would mystically calm my anxiety and stiffen my resolve. She worked on me for a few more minutes, then she stopped and sat up as one who had finished, or as one who had had it, I could not tell.

—Your cock's not working. We can't fuck if your cock's not working. And it's not my fault.

I could only sigh. I knew what she meant, and I agreed. She had put in her time, had earned her hundred guilders, at least in labor, even if the natural result had not appeared. She had worked for those Guilders, maybe more than from some guy who came in, got up, came and got out. Though I had not kept my side of the bargain, she had kept hers.

My Little Portagee sat up and slid the sheath from my sleeping soldier and told me to wash up. Again with the washing. I stood up and walked back to the basin, both relieved that my time was up and burdened with embarrassment.

As we got dressed, she asked me,

—Where did you get your hat? Texas?

I thought a second. I had only bought the hat that day, a black fedora. A Stetson. I tried to explain that I bought an American hat in an English clothing store in Amsterdam, but I do not think she understood. However, this began a conversation about hats. Apparently she had many, and she was proud of them. She showed me photos of her in various hats, then photos of her lifting weights, at home, her mother and younger brother. We got friendly. I asked how much she made per week. She told me she was paid double whenever she put on her leathers and performed whatever act she performed with her leathers on, wielding a cat-o-nine-tails. I do not remember how much she made, but I do remember that after rent and all of her overhead, it was a lot, even by American management standards.

I noticed another peculiar thing. As we talked, we grew friendly, and as we grew friendly I began to feel relaxed, comfortable, almost horny. I felt like I could fuck. Who knows, if we had done that before, I might have been able to wake the sentry of my lust. I might have walked out of there a satisfied customer, a complete man, or at least an average guy. Well, as the French say, and believe me, they actually say this, C'est la vie.

So I left My Little Portagee, returned to the day outside, left the warmth for the cold. I heard her turn up the boombox behind me, but I did not look to see her begin her dance, up there above the walking shoppers.

If I was ever introverted before, it was nothing compared to how I felt then. I was sure everyone knew what had happened. I thought maybe, somehow, the burden of my failure blazed upon my face, like the guilt of a crime nearly discovered. A big scarlet W for weenie. I was sure everyone could see that I had come all this way and did not come, could not come. And I thought about the first woman I wanted that had vanished. I thought about My Little Portagee working so hard and about how it worked in the beginning, but how I failed in the end. I thought about how I felt when we were talking and I wanted to lay down and finish what we had started. And then I thought, "You know, if you're going to have sex you should be horny. And if you aren't horny, you should at least be interested, somehow." That was a fucking brilliant realization. Really, really deep. Yet something that would never occur to a young man, which, I suppose I was, emotionally anyway.

And I had not wanted to screw an Amsterdam whore when I came here. It was not even on my agenda. This was just a goddamn detour. And I had to meet Mary, so that we could see a sex show together. Somehow, that did not enthuse me as much as it did before.

I thought these things and I walked along the Achterburgwal away from My Little Portagee. Then I began to wonder what my problem was. I mean, she was definitely good looking. And I was working all right for a moment there. And it did feel good, even when my cock did not work. I was obviously the problem. Maybe I didn't like girls. Maybe I would never have sex again. Maybe my cock would wither away and fall off. Maybe. Trying to maintain as much poise as possible, I took the street car back to Mary's to change and to leave my bags of recently bought clothes. I went into her bathroom and tried to jack off, but even that I could not pull off, which, of course, made me feel worse. It was like being so hungry I could not eat, so thirsty I could not drink, so tired I could not sleep. I do not even want to talk about the pressure.