I LOVE AMSTERDAM

Artist unknown. Postcard purchased at the Amsterdam Flea Market.

It was March 2001, in the city of Amsterdam, “Kingdom of the Netherlands,” a rich, beautiful, and lovely city, later designated “World Book Capital” by UNESCO in 2008, renowned far and wide for its abundance of culture and sex, where the words of Saint Augustine once rang true: “Prostitutes act in the world like the bilge of a ship or the sewer of a palace: Remove the sewer, and you will fill the palace with stench. Similarly, with respect to the bilge: Remove prostitutes from the world, and you will fill it with sodomy.”

On March 21st, a Friday declared by UNESCO for the first time as “World Poetry Day” during its 30th General Conference in Paris in 1999, I traveled to a Literary Gathering that weekend, from Friday to Sunday, in Amsterdam. I was invited by World Poetry, an invitation I accepted, although I had to pay a registration fee for an identification card with a blue lanyard to wear around my neck, plus all travel, accommodation, and living expenses.

This Gathering was held under the theme “Peace and Love Through Poetry,” and poets from all over the world: Canada, China, Colombia, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Puerto Rico, Spain (myself), Switzerland, Tunisia, and the USA—gathered to listen to and read poetry and present books. The voices of the attending poets resonated throughout the hall, their many languages translated into English throughout the day.

Among everyone present, the Koreans and Japanese stood out the most, creating a genuine connection of poetic brotherhood. We were able to listen to each other and be together united by the desire to bring about Peace and Love in the World and to change these difficult times we are living through.

On Thursday afternoon, we had our tickets and were to meet at the Met Hotel Amsterdam, 3.8 km from Vondelpark, the Van Gogh Museum, and the Moco Museum, both 4 km away. Most of the participants were staying there. I stayed at the Rembrandt Square Hotel, located in the lively Rembrandt Square, just over a 10-minute walk from Dam Square and the Rijksmuseum.

The poetry readings took place in the morning from 10:00 to 12:00. The afternoons were free for everyone to do as they pleased.

On the first day, March 21st, the presentation took place with a greeting from the Delegate for Culture of the Amsterdam City Council, thanking us for holding this Literary Encounter open to everyone and wishing us every success.

I took a moment to approach her and ask if I could meet with her the following Saturday, as I wanted to give her some gifts from my city of Burgos. She told me to come to her office at 12:30 after the poetry reading.

I did so, and she received me very kindly. I gave her a miniature figure of the Fountain of Flora and a gold-plated pin of a lady with the city’s coat of arms. She gave me a beautiful navy blue silk tie with an imperial ship embroidered in the center, which I always wear to weddings, communions, and baptisms.

She also gave me a Swiss watch, which I put on as soon as I left the City Hall, and which I later gave to a sex worker. On this first day, before noon, I read my poems from “Exquisite Poetry,” which included references to La Celestina (The Calixto and Melibea’ Loves) and Dulcinea del Toboso (Don Quixote’s platonic lover).

In the afternoon, I went to visit the high-roof barges anchored in the canals, where it’s legal to consume marijuana, hashish, magic mushrooms, and even marijuana pastries, with edible bulbs planted in large pots, and on some, to have sex; the owners encouraged you to visit the Temple of Venus, the Erotic Museum, as well as the marijuana cafes and massage parlors offering happy endings.

I resolved not to attend the Encounter again until the farewell day, Sunday.

From the first moment I started trying everything, Amsterdam tasted like sex and marijuana to me. On Saturday, after my visit to the Delegate of Culture, I spent the entire day exploring the city’s more sensual areas, such as the Red Light District, also known in Dutch as “De Wallen,” where prostitution is offered from behind windows.

Around two in the afternoon, I reached into my pocket, took out some money, gave it to a beautiful prostitute, and pulled out my penis, intending to give her three or more good stabs. But, since I was already hard, I found myself ejaculating next to the bed, unable to do anything, my semen left for the use of her establishment.

Afterwards, I had time to visit Madame Tussauds, located in Dam Square, where I spent the whole night partying with hippies and young prostitutes, to whom I said, showing them my erect penis:

-Do you want to be my girlfriend? Do you want to taste this good stuff?

They answered me, grumpily:

 -Get thee behind me, Satan!

Go to the Red Light District, or fuck off. Or suck your a dick like a dog.

I also walked past gay clubs, but I didn’t go in, not even out of curiosity; although they had some gay men and others dressed as women at the door inviting us in.

On Sunday, at ten in the morning, or maybe ten-thirty, I went to the best flea market in Amsterdam, the IJ-Hallen Market, which is the largest market in Europe and attracts visitors from all over the world. There I bought this beautiful postcard by an unknown artist, which reminds me of the service I received from a beautiful prostitute on a barge on one of the main canals; I don’t know if it was the Herengracht, Prinsengracht, or Keizersgracht, all fed by the Amstel River.

There, in the restroom, a pretty young woman was offering her cunt while sitting on the toilet. Behind three or four perverted men, who looked Chinese or Korean to me, I waited for half an hour longing for her to open her hole after cleaning her cunt with a sponge and drying it with a dish towel.

I gave her a quickie, asking her as I came:

-Bardomera, do you never let me penetrate your back hole?

She answered with a smile:

-No. This is my only position.

Before leaving, I gave her the Swiss watch that the Delegate of Culture had given me.

-Why this? she asked.

-Because I was satisfied.

The truth is that the watch had stopped around five in the morning.

Summer 2013 Part 2: There Was No Moon

I packed the pipe with weed and kanna and tobacco and whatever else was close enough to fall in, scraped the blackened resin from the bowl and smoked that too. I laid outside on the lawn chair in the bastion of midnight darkness. The smoke tasted wrong, it engulfed my mouth. I laid into the chair, Hurt by Johnny Cash playing into my earbuds. I lit a hand rolled cigarette, the same lighter. I stood up and leaned downwards, stumbling to pick up the bottle of Southern Comfort. I held it in my hand, my eyes glazed over staring at the copper colored liquid. I took a swig of it and downed it with the rest of my cigarette. I stepped back inside, put on jeans and the long-sleeve shirt I laid out. I threw on my socks and put on my black boots. I dug around the shelf in the closet reaching for the flashlight. I was home alone, maybe it had been a day, maybe it had been three. Time did not matter. I locked up behind me because that’s what you do when you leave.

The air in the July summer was damp and stale. I could already feel sweat pooling under the shirt before I’d made it off the porch. The trail of smoke from my cigarette followed me down the brick path. I stumbled onto the driveway and began walking onto the road. The sweet rot of the ground and the sour edge of the booze bled through my skin. I staggered my way up the paved road. Each step I found myself trying to further catch my footing. I didn’t turn the flashlight on. I let my eyes adjust badly and continued walking. My boots dragged where I expected clear ground, catching on things I didn’t bother to look down at. Every sound came in at the wrong volume, too close or too far away, leaves scraping together, insects clicking, my own breath louder than all of it. I kept moving because slowing down just made it worse, that made me notice how shitty everything felt, how each step lagged a half second behind the decision to take it.

I put the earbuds in and let Cisfinitum run, the same low, dragging sound I’d been leaning on all summer. It didn’t push or pull, just pressed down evenly, a dull pressure that sat on top of everything else and kept it from breaking apart or coming together. The woods refused to offer me any form of silence. The sound flattened what little depth there was, smeared distance so I couldn’t tell what was close and what was farther off, and I kept slowing down to listen even though I already knew it wouldn’t help. The music didn’t match my steps or the ground or the dark, it just stayed there, heavy and continuous.

By the time I reached the dirt road towards the woods everything felt delayed. The incline walk up the dirt road up forced my footing a half step off. It made me sway until I figured out which way was up again. The music pressed harder, not louder, just heavier, and it made my head feel thick like it was packed with wet cloth. I tried walking straight and kept veering without noticing, clipping my shoulder on a tree, then another, each hit dull and irritating instead of sharp. My mouth stayed sour and dry at the same time and I kept swallowing like it would fix something. I pulled out my flask from my pocket, swishing the whiskey through my mouth. Trying to lubricate my mouth and only succeeding in burning it.

Each step upwards brought me closer to the woods. I wanted to find fear. I lit another cigarette off of the one I was smoking. My boots gnashing into the top end of the incline. The only light was the distant house lights, fluttering between trees. All of the sounds piled on top of each other and refused to separate themselves. My breath, leaves, insects, all mashed together until I couldn’t tell what I was listening for anymore. But I had made it to the start of the trail. It took longer than I had hoped.

I’d forgotten about the kratom until it was already all over me. My legs wouldn’t shut the fuck up, kept dragging me forward like they’d made their own plan and didn’t bother to loop my head in. The tea had settled all the way in by then, hot and jittery in my muscles. But it kicked wrong, like the gas pedal was stuck while the rest of me was stalling out. My engine was on fire and my thoughts had stripped thin, drenched in paint thinner and a shitty off brand naphtha. There was no weight to them, my thoughts slid off before I could grab hold, but my body kept grinding along anyway, boots chewing dirt. I’d speed up without meaning to, then hit a wall inside my head and slow down hard, standing there swaying while my legs twitched like they were pissed at me for stopping.

The path bled out of the trees in pieces. It was pitch dark and I could not triangulate where I was going. I kept losing my way and finding some part of it again, packed dirt where other people’s feet had worried it down and then nothing but leaves and roots. I trenched on further, until I didn’t, I stepped off without meaning to and didn’t bother correcting, branches brushing my face, catching in my hair, snapping back into place behind me. When I reached the oak tree, I ran my fingers up and down its dead dark. It was stripped and crooked. I collapsed underneath it because my legs were pulsating and I needed them to shut the fuck up for a few minutes.

I pressed my back against the trunk, drank again from my flask, and lit another cigarette. I tried to stay steady, but my hands would not stop shaking. I pulled the flash light out of my pocket and clicked it on. I realized in my stupor that I had not checked if I changed the batteries since I left. The beam jittered, washed over the ground, over my boots, over the tree, and I killed it again as soon as I knew it worked. I left a piece of fruit at the base of the oak without looking where it landed, missed the spot I thought I was aiming for, and didn’t fix it. It was tradition to leave some sort of offering to the giant dead oak.

I pushed forward through the haze of low hanging cigarette smoke. The sour burning taste of cheap whiskey engulfed my taste and nostrils. The sound in my ears kept dragging everything down into the same thick, wet stillness. I kept the flashlight dead and drifted where the ground let me, where it didn’t argue too hard. The darkness never looked as it should, it was  not empty, nor full, it just crowded in a way I couldn’t oscillate. I walked into branches I should’ve seen coming, bark scraping my arms, leaves slapping my face and then disappearing like they hadn’t been there at all. Sounds kept firing off half-formed and out of order, something skittering, something heavier shifting and then stopping, and every time I turned toward it I felt late, like I’d missed the cue by a second and now the whole thing had reset without me. I tried to slow down, tried to move quieter, and just ended up louder. My boots crunched into fallen leaves and brackish dirt.

I lost track of how I was moving. I started cutting angles that didn’t add up, circling back on myself without meaning to until the same brush snagged me twice. Any form of balance kept slipping in and out, feet landing wrong, knees locking up to keep me from going down, my hands coming up uselessly like there was something to grab. I kept thinking I heard breathing that wasn’t mine and then realizing it was mine, too fast and too close, and that didn’t make it better. Every time I focused hard enough to try and pin a sound down, everything else crowded in, insects, leaves, my own steps, all of it mashed together until I couldn’t tell what I was reacting to anymore.

I went farther in just because my feet kept taking me there. I told myself it was on purpose, like I was testing something, but that didn’t stay put long enough to matter. I kept waiting for fear to show up and do something to me, flip a switch, knock the air out of my chest, anything sharp enough to register. It didn’t. I walked deeper anyway, then turned around without knowing why and walked back the way I’d just come, then stopped and changed direction again, paranoia flashing up and dying off before it could settle on anything real. The woods wouldn’t line up into a scare or a quiet, just stayed noisy in the wrong way, a low static that made every step feel wrong right after I took it. I tripped on something and almost went down, caught myself hard and stood there wobbling, heart kicking like it was about to matter. Nothing followed. I didn’t slow down. I didn’t try to be careful. I kept pushing through the dark, eyes scraping for a shape or a break that never showed, irritated all over again when there was nothing there, annoyed at myself for still expecting the dark to finally do something different.

This place used to make sense to me. I’d come out here before and it felt like space, like somewhere you could move without being watched. That feeling was gone now, or maybe I was. Things had already started slipping before this, I just didn’t know how to mark when it happened. The house was gone. The one that was supposed to mean something. My mother was still there but not really, her mind breaking off in pieces I couldn’t follow. School had already closed its door. Welding, gone. That part of me gone with it. None of it lined up cleanly in my head, it just pressed in all at once, heavy and sour, like standing too close to something burning. Being sober made it louder than I could handle. Weed stopped doing the job by itself. It had to be cut with other things, bent out of shape, made worse on purpose. I wasn’t trying to feel better. I was trying to feel less like myself.

I caught myself leaning on a tree in the darkness. In a daze. Lost in thought. It was when the light shone upon me in pieces, warm flashes breaking across my back and shoulders. I turned too late and saw it up on the hill, a bright white beam held above me, and a person behind it I couldn’t make out, just a shape standing there looking down. I pushed myself off the tree and drunkenly staggered, my legs kicked like a flooded transmission forcing me up straight. I fumbled for the flashlight, fingers thick with cigarette residue. I clicked it on and pointed it uphill toward the light. My arms shook enough to make the beam unsteady. Was this what I was looking for? I pleaded with my mind, begged for it. But there was no fear. No sense of dread. Every survival sense had been flooded with drugs. I had burned out my flight or fight response. I just stood there. My flash light shining on the figure on the hill. Neither of us said anything. Our beams crossed and hung in the damp air.

After what seemed like an eternity, I dropped my arm, turned the light the other way, and continued further downhill. I killed my flash light and kept walking. I remain unaware if it was my disappointment or my finger that turned off the flashlight. Their light stayed on me for a second or two longer, long enough to feel it on my back again, and then it slid off somewhere else, leaving me walking blind like nothing had happened.

At the bottom of the hill the ground went soft and wet and I walked into it anyway. My boots sank a little with every step, pulled at me, made me work harder than I wanted to, and that alone felt insulting. I kept expecting something to rise up out of it, some shape, some thing that would finally justify how far I’d gone, and nothing did. No monster. No animal. Just me, slogging forward, full of that heavy, useless feeling that sat behind my eyes and wouldn’t move. The disappointment came on slow and stupid, thickening with every step, like the effort itself was feeding it. I thought about laying down and letting the water take me, letting the mud close over my boots and then the rest of me, just to see if it would. I drank what was left in the flask instead. It burned and didn’t help. I kept moving through the marsh because stopping felt worse, because even sinking forward beat standing still and feeling how empty it all was.

Time was fucked by then. I didn’t know where I was and I didn’t have anything on me that could tell me. The iPod was dead. The flashlight wasn’t there. I checked the pocket again anyway. Even if it had been, there was nothing to shine it on that would’ve made it click. I kept moving because that’s what I always did, because the ground always sorted it out eventually if I didn’t interfere. That idea stuck for a second and I realized I’d used it before. A lot. Kitchens. Zukey Lake. Hamburg Pub. Boomers. In and out, over and over, days blurring, jobs ending without really starting. Direction felt thin, like it had been rubbed down to nothing. Every way I tried collapsed into the same flat nothing. I kept walking because stopping felt heavier.

The alcohol was gone before I noticed it leaving. What was left was the buzzing, the tight ache behind my eyes, that flat, dry pressure that meant I was mostly sober again whether I wanted to be or not. I kept moving through the dark anyway, trees sliding past in pieces, the forest breathing around me without rhythm. There was nothing overhead. No moon. No stars. I remember tilting my head back like that might change something, like maybe there’d be a crack in it somewhere, some light leaking through I hadn’t caught yet. There wasn’t. The dark stayed solid. I sat down without deciding to, then tipped the rest of the way over and let the leaves take me. I don’t remember choosing to sleep. I just stopped holding myself up.

My eyes opened to darkness. No sunrise. No birds. I pushed myself up. I began walking again. The trees broke in places and through them I caught the occasional square of yellow light from a house farther off, someone else awake or not bothering to turn anything off, but it didn’t tell me much. I kept trudging through the woods not fast and not careful. The ground smoothed out in stretches and then fell apart again, and I followed whatever gave the least resistance, cutting through brush, stepping over fallen limbs, correcting only when my feet forced it.

The ground evened out into a paved road. Trees pulled back just enough for the air to thin and the dirt under my boots went from soft and grabby to hard and pressed flat by tires. The path didn’t turn into anything else. I stood there for a moment, then another, waiting out of habit more than curiosity, and nothing came of it. I fished out my lighter and found my last cigarette. I limped the road back the way I knew it went. I wanted my mind to be empty, but it kept screaming at me. It kept telling me that I had no worth and no value. It kept telling me I was a failure. I kept looking back, not out of habit, but because the drug come down was amplifying the paranoia. Nothing followed me. No headlights passed. The road stayed empty.

When the house came back into view it looked the same as when I’d left it, dark and shut up. I unlocked the door, stepped inside, locked it again, and set the keys back where they belonged so I wouldn’t have to think about them later. I grabbed a bottle of water from the case by the door and drank it without stopping, then opened another and finished that one too. My mouth still tasted wrong but it dulled it enough. I didn’t turn on any lights I didn’t need. I went into the bathroom, furiously brushed my teeth, and laid down in the shower with the water running. The heat stayed steady, the steam evaporated the filth off of my skin. I crawled out of the shower and passed out naked across the hallway floor.