By 
I entered the room with my cufflinks. Like the hall and fireplace on the ground floor, it contained the necessary furnishings for the meager hospitality of an Amsterdam guesthouse. It was 11:00 PM, I had an iron bed with a gray-brown bedspread on it, a wooden chair next to it, a coat rack and a sink nearby. The walls were a dirty pale yellow, and no pictures, a nail here and there, short and rough, a sinister looking room.
I gave the kids a ham and cheese sandwich, they were about four years old. Then I put them to bed, “What can I do until I’m tired?” I asked myself; a rhetorical question perhaps. Horrified at the thought of being sober locked in this room. I walked around the room and shrugged, it was autumn 1975 and the air in Amsterdam was cold.
I had noticed a small bar opened at the end of the street, before I found this guest house. I could go there for a drink, – if I didn’t make any noise the children would fall asleep and I’d be back in no time, otherwise I’d have to stay in my hotel room, dry as the night is long.
Half an hour later, after washing up a bit, I was almost jogging down the road to find the bar. With her eyes wide open trying to remember the signs, to the bar, and back, she was farther than she imagined. I gave myself over to my thoughts:
This was for me and my kids a holiday weekend, I was twenty-eight years old, I had a good job in Darmstadt, Germany, the long weekend, a four-day weekend, I was mine to do whatever I wanted. And I wanted, as I always wanted, to travel with my twins. This desire had frustrated me at times, my work strangled me day and night.
If I could live my life again, I would give up drinking, the boring routine of professional drinking and live the unlived life that attacked me, with my children, because I am often mocked by the Satan demon of the countless opportunisms and paths my feet would have trotted had they not followed the will of the drunkard.
Since then I have written my poetry in dreams, to save it for a later date.
When I got to the bar, at the top of the hill my thoughts stopped, the path to the door of the bar was like a path that a reptile crawled in front of me, as if to guide me. I looked behind me, it was the slope of a hill that I had climbed, curved: thus, I lost sight of my hotel-guesthouse, this area covered by low buildings, and now connecting streets, made me feel a bit lost.
Inside the bar, it was a blessing to see all the drinking that I witnessed; it had a musty smell, as all bars seem to have, and the smoke was swirling around like you were in Charlie Chan’s lair; he never seemed to settle anywhere. I ordered a liter of beer; I realized that four hooligans were looking at me.
Now before I lay down the long way back. It was an unassuming promenade, surrounded by a rough brick and stone wall that I hadn’t noticed before, or if I had, it now came clear to me. My walk was like a deserted orchard. I counted four blocks, I judged that there should be six in total, therefore, I had two more left. It caught my eye for a moment, I might be lost, I mean not lost, but I wasn’t sure about the archway to the guest house, which one was it? They all looked comparatively the same. That is, the sprawling designs on each looked similar.
At the other end of the street those four young thugs had been following me, I watched them carefully. I thought of them as pebbles and weeds that the earth spat out, that posed for a fight, this was my way of preparing. I let them come closer, raising my pint glass like a gun for them to see. I stood under a streetlight so I was half buried in the light. I hit the liter of beer hard against a concrete body. It seemed to have an echo, a death threat to hooligans. I don’t think I felt any surprise or fear, I had suddenly come face to face with serious situations before, and this was no different. I started yelling at the hooligans that it would be a mistake not to turn around and turn the other way, and the sharp edges of the glass gleamed as the beer dripped to the last drop. I squinted even more closely, took a step two towards them. The night went blank.
They turned around, and then I moved slowly looking for the right bow. That was more of a nightmare than hooligans. Then it appeared. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with my sleeve and sat on the bed next to the children, who were fast asleep. Many minutes passed, my brain seemed to have shut down, stopped working, but refused to provide a logical explanation for my strange act of breaking my pint of beer, perhaps I could have chased them away without doing so!
As the night progressed, sleep spread its inky darkness over me, and for one night in three thousand, I fell asleep sober.
5072/2-14-2016
For Samantha Shields (upon request)
The first part of this story is under the title “A Home in Amsterdam”, written in 2008.
Where the first part ends, the second part takes over.
Non-fiction