I was seated in the window of a bar on Rokin waiting for my friend Danique to arrive. The woman who had originally hired me as a junior curator, she had left her job at the Anne Frank House a year earlier for a position at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., but was back in Amsterdam for a week or two to attend a family wedding. I had forgotten to bring a book with me and was staring out the window, my eyes drawn to the bar across the street. It was a popular hangout for rent boys, a darkened hovel full of easy trade, lonely middle-aged men with wedding rings in their coat pockets, half-finished bottles of beer and instantaneous pick-ups. In my first months in the city, at my lowest depths following my exile from Dublin, I had found myself there once or twice, in search of the oblivion of uncomplicated sex. Looking across now out of prurient interest, I saw two men emerge through the front door, one who looked familiar to me, one who did not. The first was the man who had punched the boy on the street outside my apartment a few weeks earlier. I knew him from his girth, his fur-trimmed overcoat and his ridiculous deerstalker. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lit it quickly as the other man, a forty-something with sallow skin and a Manchester United T-shirt, returned a wallet to his back trouser pocket. A moment later, the door opened again and somehow it didn’t surprise me at all to see that same boy emerge from inside, his hair bleached into some unnatural hybrid of brown and blond. Deerstalker laid his hand down on the boy’s shoulder in a paternal gesture before shaking Man Utd’s hand, and when he raised his arm in the air a taxi appeared immediately and the boy and his client climbed into the backseat before driving away. After they departed, he glanced across the street and our eyes met for a moment. He stared at me, cold and bellicose, and I turned away, happy to see my friend walking toward me now with a smile on her face.
The Anger of the Exile
When I first became familiar with Amsterdam, I found myself increasingly drawn to those parts of the city that offered art galleries and curiosity shops, book stalls and street artists. I attended concerts, bought tickets to plays and spent long afternoons in the Rijksmuseum, studying exhibition after exhibition in an attempt to broaden my mind. With almost no knowledge of the history of art, I didn’t always understand what I was looking at, nor did I have the capacity to contextualize a particular painting or sculpture, but the work began to move me and any loneliness I felt soon became tempered by a developing interest in creativity.
It was one of the reasons, perhaps, why I found my work at the Anne Frank House so stimulating, for inside the museum lay the stories of others and the words of one, a combination that had an unpredictable effect on every visitor who walked through its doors. I had never led a particularly cultured life in Dublin, despite the fact that I had spent my formative years in the home of a novelist and her husband. Knowing how books had formed the bedrock of Maude’s life, it began to strike me as strange that she had never shown any interest in encouraging my own interest in literature. There were books in Dartmouth Square, of course, books beyond number, but not once had Maude walked me around the shelves, pointing out the novels or story collections that had first inspired her, nor had she ever thrust any of these works into my hands, insisting that I read them so we could discuss them afterward. And once I left that house to begin the deeply private and depressingly fraudulent existence that would characterize my third decade I intentionally ignored anything that might draw me back to the complicated years of my childhood.
The canal area between Herengracht and the River Amstel was my favorite part of the city and I would often stop at MacIntyre’s pub for dinner as I made my way home from work. During my nomadic years in Europe, I had studiously avoided Irish bars, but there was something about the blend of Dutch and Irish traditions there that appealed to me, the decor reminding me of home but the food and atmosphere being firmly rooted in the culture of somewhere entirely different.
The bar was frequented primarily by gay men but was not so much a pick-up joint as a casual hangout. Occasionally, a couple of rent boys would come in and attract the attention of the older men sitting alone at their tables reading De Telegraaf ?but unless they conducted their business quickly, the proprietor, Jack Smoot, would throw them out, directing them back toward Paardenstraat and Rembrandtplein with fiercely uttered warnings not to return.
“A little trade from time to time is fine,” he told me one evening after ejecting a tall, dark-haired boy in a pair of tight denim shorts that did him no favors. “But I won’t allow MacIntyre’s to get a reputation for hustlers.”
“None of them are Dutch, are they?” I asked, watching the boy as he stood outside staring into the canal, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “He looked Greek or Turkish to me.”
“Most of them are Eastern European boys,” said Smoot, barely glancing outside. “They come over here to make their fortunes but they don’t have the same success as the girls. No one’s interested in seeing boys posing in their underwear in a window in De Wallen. They have about five good years, if they’re lucky, then they start to show their age and no one cares anymore. If you want him—”
“Jesus,” I said, retreating in my seat, offended. “Of course I don’t want him. He’s just a child. But isn’t there some other way he could make a living? He looked as if he’s starving.”
“He probably is.”
“So why throw him out? At least he would have made enough to eat tonight.”
“Because if I let one do it, then I have to let them all do it,” said Smoot. “And I didn’t set this place up to be a haven for rent boys. He wouldn’t have approved of that.”
“Who wouldn’t?” I asked, but he ignored my question and returned behind the bar, washing his hands in the sink and ignoring me for the rest of the night.