Dirty rotten cock-knockers

If you travel far and or frequently enough for long periods of time, eventually you will begin to see a pattern.

I’m speaking loosely here, of course; there are never any fixed and fast rules in the downtown core of our little global village. I cannot guarantee you, for example, that it is impossible to find a proper cup of tea south of the 49th parallel, but I can safely say it is improbable, unless you are in New England or some such state where your odds might improve to unlikely.

One should generally avoid making sweeping generalizations about places you have only ever passed through, but I can tell you that it seems to me that you can stay up all night by accident in New York City, whereas in Ottawa they wrap up all the capital fun by the stroke of midnight.

It’s easy to score some sticky bud in San Francisco or Seattle, but don’t drink the tap water. The weed is weak and tastes leafy and is hard to come by in the UK, where the booze is the intoxicant of choice, and it’s cheaper than drinking their flat ginger ale.

In America the customer is always right, but in Amsterdam the customer is almost never right (especially if they think you are American). Except for those rare occasions where the customer may have had a point or two, but who was listening, and besides, can’t you see I’m on the phone here?

I usually appreciate this more hands-off Dutch approach to customer service — until an unfortunate series of events that went down in the red-light district just last week, on my second trip to my most beloved haven, this pot-head pervert’s hedonistic heaven.

My lovely, lanky lady friend and I were in a women-owned and operated high-end latex and rubber fetish wear store, just moments after having both simultaneously fallen in love with the ridiculously long-lashed and beautiful manboy who worked in the mushroom and herbal ecstasy shop right next door. Like I said, I love Amsterdam.

I was trying to talk her into trying on this red and white latex, nursey outfit we both knew she would never buy, and cajoling her into buying a butt plug we both knew was one sphincter size out of her comfort zone.

She insisted through the change room curtain that the black latex corset I had just laced up for her was far more practical and versatile, and the butt plug was insensitive.

When I stepped aside to let another immaculately dressed Dutch shopper squeeze past me in the narrow aisle between racks of rubber uniforms and rows of gas masks, my shoulder bag brushed the corner of a six-foot glass display shelf.

The lightning-like crash of glass was followed by a brutal downpour of butt plugs and a flashflood of nipple clips and feather ticklers.

When it was all over, I had a shard of something sharp embedded in the back of my left hand, and there were two broken cocks that someone was going to have to answer for. Expensive ones. Big heavy cocks carved by hand out of granite, with razor-sharp edges.

The last thing a world traveller would want, but the shopkeeper seemed to think I owed her 180 Euros, which is about 250 smackeroos back home.

I argued that not only was it not prudent for a retailer to display giant stone penises atop shaky shelving units alongside a skinny public thoroughfare, but that the identical shelf still standing intact next to the one I had demolished was also an accident waiting to happen, and that it was lucky for all of us that there wasn’t a small child with a thin skull nearby when it all came down who might have been brained by a phallus of such weight and density.

It was the store’s responsibility, I insisted, to ensure that the cocks were all displayed in a safe and secure fashion, especially the more dangerous ones. It was a miracle none of us had lost a toe, I added, eyeing my lady friend, who was ever so slowly sidling herself closer to the front door.

The salesgirl insisted that I was going to have to cough up the cash for the damages, and dialed up her boss on the cordless phone, her lips pursed tight from all the trouble I was causing her.

Meanwhile, the other shopper, who in my mind had a hand in the mishap herself, huffed and narrowed her eyes at me and agreed with the clerk, and went on at some length about personal responsibility, a public-stoning tone in her almost accentless English.

The store owner then lectured me about how in Holland it is not the retailer who bears the burden of liability insurance, but the individual, and that if she were to go over to her friend’s house and burn a hole in the leather couch with a cigarette, her own insurance, not the homeowner’s, would cover it. Holland is a You Break, You Buy country all the way, she informed me.

I informed her that there is no such thing as cock-knocking insurance where I come from, and that I would have happily paid for both giant granite cocks without argument if I had picked them up, which I would never do in the first place, and broken them through any fault of my own, which is unlikely, but that I flat-out refuse to pay for hazardous heavy cocks that rain down on innocent consumers from atop substandard shelving that is going to get her nothing but sued one day if it isn’t fixed.

I told her to call the police, and we would let them inspect the remaining shelf and decide who should pay the piper for the penises in question.

That’s right about when she started screaming about how she had a headache and didn’t need my litigious American bullshit attitude and how in her country people pay for what they break.

I caught a blue streak of denim flash past me as my friend dashed for the door. For some reason, I interrupted the raging retailer to repeat that actually I was Canadian, and then I passed the handset back to the salesgirl and bolted into the street after my friend.

The salesgirl chased us halfheartedly for a block before turning back to tend to her abandoned fetish wear. We sprinted past window after window of bored ladies of the late afternoon smoking and talking on their cell phones under red neon tubes, and into a coffeeshop, breathing in heaving lungfuls of hash smoke and laughing.

Too bad we couldn’t go back and visit our boyfriend, the mushroom salesman. The price you pay for being on the lam in Amsterdam.

Later, in the hotel room, we called each other Bonnie and Clyde, and it was hot.