Amsterdam-- January 1998

We went because Rob needed to get her UK work visa validated, and it was easier to do that by leaving the country and returning through passport control than it was to spend the day lurking around the Home Office down in Croydon. It was my last week in London, because I had no such visa. I hadn't found the right sort of job, and had declined the proposal from hot maintenance guy at the museum. Only because he asked one day too late. Or because I thought I still had Things to Do back home.

We spent the day eating a challah from The Happening Biegel on Seven Sisters Road (I wonder if it's still there. In all my returns, I haven't been back to Highbury since the cold dark morning I shlepped my bags down the ramps at the Arsenal underground station) and calling travel agents looking for a cheap flight to pretty much anywhere on the continent. Amsterdam won out because of the low low price we found and of course the fun factor.

We picked up our tickets in the afternoon from a little place in south London, and were off the next morning.

We couldn't really afford to go.

We stayed in this pensione in the Red Light District. Two sagging beds in a tiny room. Dingy bathroom down the hall. And a window overlooking a sex shop with a three foot inflatable penis in the window.

That week Rob got her purse stolen in a KFC (which we'd gone into because I needed a biscuit to soak up the beer), and we watched two marines run out of the shop and retreive it for her. So much for her diatribes on the military industrial complex. We offered to buy them a drink, but they politely refused. So we bought a round for the house at the Three Flasks in the name of good karma. And met a white cat named Bowie and a Dutch businessman who took us to lunch for wine and cheese the next day.

She got pretty sick on that trip. The following days were spent mainly in the little room overlooking the 3 foot penis. We opened the window, because the room got too stuffy and it was kind of warm that week-- compared to winter in London-- and sang every song we ever knew from our childhoods.

Comfort comes from the strangest places.

So to Rob in California this week, I say--

I wish you were here
I'd buy you a beer (or tomato juice)
and then we could cheer:
Here's to the men that we love.
Here's to the men that love us.
But the men that we love aren't the men that love us.
So fuck the men.
Here's to us.