After I got back from South East Asia I didn’t get laid for about six months. It’d been six months of happy masturbation, but since my return I still hadn’t gotten any closer to pussy than the wank mags at work. So when the boys’ trip to Amsterdam came up, I decided to give the other side of life a go. I needed to laid, I was noticing myself that I was becoming more unattractive to the opposite sex by the day. It’s like when you’re with a partner and getting laid all the time, chicks can smell it and they want some of that too. But once you become single, they can smell that too; that stench of desperation. So that was it, I was gonna shag one of those women in the window in Amsterdam, I was gonna become one of those weirdos that do it. But then again I’m pretty certain I’m not the only man to fuck a hooker in Amsterdam. Apart from my elicit encounter in Bangkok it would be a new experience for me.

I’d heard the working girls of Amsterdam could be quite bullying once they’d gotten the money off you before you started. The common one was they’d get you in there – fifty Euros for fifteen minutes – they’d take the cash off you, tuck it away somewhere, and then the smile that got you through the door would disappear and your angel would turn into a she-witch and turn back and scowl at you, ‘Well you’ve only got fifteen minutes left, hope you’re hard enough! You’re not too wasted are you?’ and from the stories most men would quiver and die inside, and in general, walk out of there fifteen minutes later with their confidence around their ankles, fifty quid poorer and ended up back at their hotel jerking off.

I was already feeling sorry enough for myself, and the idea of that happening made me believe it would anyway. So I thought, well hey might as well cheat then and scored some Viagra off one of my friends, make the most of it you know. At the time I was earning about seven hundred pounds a week unblocking toilets and shit like that. It was nasty work but it paid well, what could I do? I sure as fuck was never gonna run a pub again, that was shit too.
Six of us went back to the Dam, Cousin Paul and his mate Cam, Big Greg who was another mate from the old days in Brixton Academy, normal Greg, my brother Scott and me.

Whoever had booked the accommodation had not really tried hard enough, and the only hotel they said they could find was one fifteen minutes away from the airport. Basically a taxi ride back to the airport and then a half hour train ride to get to Centraal Station. But anyway the hotel was swish as fuck and we had loads of ketamine on us. We brought k instead of coke for one simple reason. Five guys on the lash in Amsterdam would on average consume at least one gram of coke a day each; more than likely two. And that would have turned our cheap trip into costing a near small fortune, besides when you run out of coke all you want is more, and ‘cause ya’ in Amsterdam you might make the mistake of caving in to the ‘Coke, Coke, Charlie’ guys that harass you everywhere you go; give them fifty Euros for a gram of talcum powder or some shit. So we resisted temptation and saved ourselves the cost and risk of taking an ounce of cocaine to Amsterdam and settled on four grams of ketamine instead. It made financial and logical sense. You can only do so much k at a time, whereas cocaine…

So I was silently psyching myself up to sleeping with one of those girls in the window. I didn’t wanna say anything to the other guys, didn’t wanna jinx my special occasion.
We hadn’t come to the Dam to sit in a hotel – although it was fuckin’ plush as – so we dumped our shit, everyone had fat bump, I took a small one on the sly, then got a cab back to the airport and then the train into Amsterdam Centraal. As before, we started off at Hill Street Blues, you can’t go wrong, it doesn’t have the best dope in the Dam but I like the atmosphere of the place, it’s quite big, but it’s dark and dingy, and there’s graffiti all over the walls from the people who have been there over the years. It’s a smoky dive bar with good beer, comfy couches and awesome music, what more do you need? We sat around and drank, the boys bumped the k and it got messy quick.

After an hour or so of that we ducked out again and went for an innocent stroll through the red light district. There was every type of girl, for every type of need. We pulled up at the Bulldog and I made my get away. I let Cousin Paul know what I was up to and slid off. The mistake I think too many guys make when they’re walking ‘round the Dam is they window shop too long and psyche themselves out of it, so I stopped off at the first hot chick I saw and with a nervous flutter in my stomach, knocked on the glass door with its red light reflecting off the glass above.

A blonde woman just short of six feet smiled and stepped up off her stool.