💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › drugs › MARYJANE › buying-in-amsterdam captured on 2023-01-29 at 14:30:59.
⬅️ Previous capture (2020-10-31)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
We'd been in Amsterdam for 5 hours, finally settled into a
(relatively) cheap hotel, and my non-smoker fool of a travelling
companion wanted to go to a bookstore. No problem: I left him
there and went walking to the 'coffeeshop' I'd seen down a nearby
alley.
Having just come from The Evil Empire (America) I was of
course still nervous about the whole prospect of buying hash out in
the open. Wouldn't there be CIA agents by every counter, ready to
pounce on anyone who looked American? Fuckit, at least I'd die
doing something I liked. So I went in, and waited and watched
while some dude looked over four bags chock full of long, fine,
sweet-looking chunks of hash, deciding what to buy.
He finally chose, and the guy behind the counter put the other
bags back. They'd been talking in English, so I said to the
customer, 'You American?'
The guy kind of grimaced, and said, 'No, German', and took his
hash over to a table where his friend was waiting.
OK, I fucked that one up. The guy behind the counter turned to
me expectantly.
'Um... I wanna buy some hash.'
He looked kind of pissed off and slid a 'menu' at me. I looked
over the list of shit, and finally decided I'd go with Jamaican. I
bought my 25 guilder's worth, started to head out, when I realized:
shit, I got no lighter.
Luckily there was a lighter machine by the wall. Unluckily, it
only took coins, which I didn't have enough of. Even worse, the
guy was on the phone. So I waited, and finally the guy got off the
phone.
'Um... I need change to buy a lighter.'
So the dude gives me a look of 100% pure unconcentrated
contempt, takes my bill, and gives me change. I couldn't figure it
out. I must have broken a whole bunch of hash-buying ettiquette
rules or something.
So I book on out of there and get my friend, and we head out to
the hotel. On the way there I tell him the story. I couldn't figure it
out: even folks back in the states were cooler. Maybe it had
something to do with the culture.
We got to the hotel, I bent a coke-can into pipe-able shape
(something you shouldn't do too often, by the way: the burning
aluminum of the can's bad to breathe in) and I started initiating him
into the world of hash-smoking. (He was an acid-head, so it wasn't
like I was corrupting him or anything.)
He had an Amsterdam guide-book with a section on coffeeshops,
and he started looking through it. Turns out it had a short list of
shops in it, with brief descriptions.
'What was the name of that shop you bought at?' he asked.
I turned on the room's TV to MTV-Europe. 'The Other Side,' I
said.
My friend started laughing. 'Fool,' he said. 'You just scored
in Amsterdam's only gay coffeeshop!'
At first I felt kind of ill, but then I figured, hell, hash is hash and
people are people and we should all learn to get along and all that.
So we smoked like the dickens and watched MTV-Europe all night
(which is ten times better than the commercialized pretentious MTV
we get in America by the way) and it was the best fucking thing in
the world. It wasn't like we were deviants or anything, it was like
we could be good members of society and get stoned on the
weekends if we wanted to. I'm convinced that smoking legal is the
best high, and I live for the day that I can light up in America and
blow my smoke in the skies of freedom and democracy without
worrying about the cops. May it one day be so.