I am at a bus station with a bottle of cheap wine in my inside breast pocket and nothing but impure thoughts in my head. When the bus arrives it will lead me to Canal Eiland, the worst neighborhood in Utrecht, a place you’d rather not find yourself after dark.
So, now you have a question: what am I doing here? But first, I have a question for you: if two Polish girls (and Poland puts out the most attractive women on the plant) ask you to join them at their flat for drinks before you all go to a club together, what would you do? Thought so.
Thus, I find myself freezing my ass off on yet another Dutch winter night. I am not alone. Three gentlemen to my left are discussing their own lascivious intentions for the night. Only one could prove to be competition, but he’s lacking one essential feature that I have. I am from California, and while that may not mean much in the States, that makes me a fucking (literally) rockstar in Europe.
About twenty minutes have passed and the bus has yet to arrive. The three guys to my left are all speaking English (due their lack of a common tongue, as I would soon discover, being from Latvia, Slovenia, and Finland) and I can overhear their growing impatience.
“Hi, do you know when the bus is coming?” One asks me. I tell him it’s my first time taking this bus and that I’m on exchange just like them, and that I am from California (an important distinction from the rest of America, all the Californian kids do this). They all express shock (this is a frequent occurrence. For some reason, I apparently don’t look or sound like an American). I walk over to the schedule to double check, but it is in Dutch, so aside from the times, I can make little sense of anything. The Slovenian guy looks with me, with an apparent proficiency in Dutch, and the look on his face tells me before he does that the bus doesn’t run on Saturday.
“Well, shit man,” another of them says as if releasing a long building tension within him, “then I’m starting now.” He cracks open a tall can of cheap beer.
“Polish girls!” The Finnish one wails into the night like a wild beast in heat, fists raised dramatically to the sky. The Latvian, who introduced himself properly as Matt, explained that for the past three days these girls have been stringing them along with false hope of intimacy, hence his friend howling into the night sky.
“Well, nothing to be done I guess, do you want to go back to our place for a joint before the club?” Matt offers. I nod in approval and we set off.
When we arrive at their apartment building, there is a sign in the lobby that says party, with an arrow pointing to a room from which the laughs of drunken girls emanate. We all look at each other with that telepathic understanding that links men in times pertaining to food, beer, or sex, and decide to check it out. Some people I know are there, and we all drink severely for the next hour. We never make it to the guys’ room.
“Double Jack and Coke please.” I am now at Club Poema, and the party is just warming up. The bartender, in the ineptitude that seems to link all Dutch bartenders, is making me two separate Jack and Cokes, even after I explained to him to put a double shot in just one drink. He charges me an arm and a leg because of this, but I figure it’s not worth making a big deal of it, I’ll drink them both eventually. Holding two drinks would be a recurring practice that night, as people kept giving me drinks while I already had one in my hands. Thus marriages of Scotch and Heineken, and the aforementioned Jack twins were born.
A soft hand wraps around my arm like a bird perching gently on the branch of a tree. Expensive perfume veils a sweet, more organic smell, the smell of a woman, and not just any woman. I remember this smell, it has been lingering with me all day. The Polish girls.
I turn around to two of the most beautiful women I have ever seen. Their eyes alone were paralyzing, the rest was an even more stunning sight. And that’s just one sense. Their taste, I am convinced, would be lethal.
“Do you smoke?” They ask. I melt. The best women smoke.
The smoking room in the corner of the club has four clear walls, but is opaque with smoke. Its density burns my eyes. Paulina takes out three slim cigarettes and hands two to Sylwia, she hands me mine. As I inhale from the ember at the end of the cigarette, a subtle taste of menthol makes its way into my lungs, cooling my throat along the way. The two go on to tell me how these cigarettes are exclusive to Poland, and that I should enjoy every breath. I do as I am told.
Outside, the DJ expertly transitions one song to the next, and the pulse of the dance floor doesn’t skip a beat. Sylwia takes my hand and guides us to the center, where she thrusts her body into mine and sways her hips erotically as I stumble to follow. I’ve never been much of a dancer, but Jack Daniels and sex are great motivators. I am doing miraculously well. I could say it’s the alcohol, but I honestly think it was her. I started the night simply horny, but now her sex seems somehow more magnificent. Dancing with her feels as natural as breathing, are bodies sway like two trees in the wind. We rise and fall like the tides. We are in the ebb and flow of the universe, if only in dance. It makes me wonder how earth-shattering sex would be.
I take her hand and spin her so her back is to me. We embrace close, and our hips move in erotic synchronicity. I breathe in the scent from her hair and neck. My lips fall delicately on her neck, and I give her only a hint of a kiss. It’s enough for her to force my hand to spin her again, this time so she faces me. We expand the distance between us for only a titillating moment to make our reunion all the more powerful. We draw closer together slowly, now at arm’s length, my hand caresses the small of her back. We draw closer and my other wraps around the top of her back so my hand can bury itself in her hair. We draw closer, our bodies touching now, moving together. Her breath on my ear, my neck, my collarbone, burns with anticipation. We look into each other’s eyes and can no longer restrain our urges. I tighten my hold on her, pressing her into me, and our lips collide in an explosion of lustful energy.
The air is cold on the canal and my jacket is long gone (to be explained in due time). The street lamps reflect in soft, serene beauty on the canal. We hold on to each other tight under the guise of mutual warmth. We continue to kiss passionately under the moonlight, and I am struck by a sort of metaphysical experience. I observe the scene from outside of myself. I see a couple, locked inextricably in the grips of passion, on the steps of a Dutch canal under the soft glow of the moon. I see it as romantic, but I wonder if a passerby would find it to be something less than that. For now though, I could not care less.
And then she was gone. The night had to have its proper end, untied and lingering. Some girls you go home with the first night, some girls you don’t. This girl remains an intriguing mystery, something that will keep me coming back. Sex is great for fuck’s sake, but outside of that, it’s the end of any relationship if done prematurely. The seduction of sex is the bait, it is immediately the one and only important thing in a relationship, but is far from the deepest. If you give it up before something more profound comes to take its place (say, finding out she drinks scotch, smokes, reads, likes travel, watches horror movies, and in rare instances of divine grace, listens to metal) all intrigue is lost, and the relationship decays.
This is, at least, my justification for not scoring, but at most, an important revelation in my sexual philosophy. Sex can be casual, but sometimes, it’s something you work up to, and in particularly special cases, it’s entirely secondary to everything else you care about in someone.
Now without my beautiful companion, and with the night drawing closely into the morning, I decided to get some sleep. After all, I had to wake up for a trip to Groningen in the morning. The problem was, someone left with my jacket, for reasons that are still not entirely clear to me. I was 3 kilometers away from home, and not too keen on biking all the way back and probably getting pneumonia. So, in my moment of need, who should come to offer me refuge for the night? None other than Latvian guy. He had apparently been with the other Polish girl that night. Thus, my early competition turned out to be by savior, and we managed to both get with the Polish girls that night.
I woke up the next morning in a room that wasn’t the Latvian’s at around noon. Nobody else was in the room. I decided to get out before anyone came back. On my way out, I found the friend who took my jacket, and she returned it to me. Hungry, I rode my bike to a place by Dom Tower that makes the best gyros in town. I ordered a lamb gyro, and ate it by the canal. Eating my savory gyro, on a bench by a European canal, I thought about my life and where it has been in the past month, and a smile out of genuine happiness emerged from me. I wondered how Groningen was, but honestly, at that moment, there was nowhere in the world I would have rather been.
