By the time I made my first visit to a real Dutch dope café, they had been around for quite a while and even provincial stag parties were starting to get rather tired of them. This did not matter. I thought I was doing something incredibly daring and cool.
I was in my early forties, and finding the onset of middle age as bewildering as a second puberty. In some ways, the two states are uncannily similar. There's the same haunting of mirrors, because your face keeps changing and you never know what shape your nose is going to be from one day to the next. And there is the same desire to pilfer from the cupboard marked "forbidden"—in the case of the 40 year olds, before it is too late. In the blink of an eye, you will become your parents. You have one last chance to do all of the naughty things you didn't get around to when you were genuinely young. As a lifelong square, I had a lot of catching up to do.
I happened to be staying in the quiet Belgian town of Liège. I was there with my then eight-year-old son, visiting his father. My ex-husband told me, in passing, that he had visited one of the famous Dutch cafés in which dope was smoked openly and semi-legally. It was not in the fleshpots of Amsterdam, but in the town of Maastricht (the one that gave its name to the treaty) just across the border and about 20 minutes away by car. Seeing my fascination, he offered to take me there.
We were constantly casting about for amusing family outings (tricky when you're divorced and basically don't like each other; we'd already exhausted the local museums and driven miles for crazy golf), and it was quickly settled. My ex-husband was to take our boy around the market, while his girlfriend accompanied me into the café. After this we would go swimming.
Maastricht was the cleanest town I had ever seen— it made Trumpton look seedy. The pavements were pale and speckless, as if picked over nightly with tweezers. It was quaint and historic and genteel. In England, such towns are filled with dinky shops that sell tea towels and jam. In Maastricht, the windows displayed pipes, scales and other druggy accoutrements normally only seen in places like Glastonbury or Camden Lock.
The café was in a narrow side street just off the marketplace. It was a dusty, shuttered bar, and it was almost empty, save for two young men who were playing pool. It occurred to me then that three in the afternoon was probably not the ideal time to sample Europe's "alternative" culture. Once again, I'd let my enthusiasm run away with me—just like the time I insisted upon dragging my friends to a nude beach in Brittany in late September. I should have remembered that enthusiasm is the enemy of cool.
The waiter brought me a little laminated "menu," but I can't recall what I chose, or why I chose it. Prior to this, my dope experience had mainly been confined to small brown lumps of hash, heavily cut with henna, of the kind that appeared with the cheese and coffee at certain north London dinner parties. I was not prepared to be handed a zoot the size and shape of a Tampax.
From this point, the phrases "can't recall" and "don't remember" will appear more often. No matter how hard I puffed at that joint, it never seemed to get any smaller. Good grief, it was Fortunatus's joint; the next best thing to his purse. I'd read that the Dutch had started awarding medals for home-grown varieties, as they used to do for tulips, and this stuff was making me feel as if my entire body belonged to someone else. I abandoned the joint halfway because I saw the innocent face of my son at the window and felt deeply ashamed.
After that, officer, it's all a bit of a blur. Time took a leap forward, and there I was at a public swimming pool in Belgium. Notices in French and Flemish informed us that it was forbidden to swim without a cap. We did not have caps, and were forced to wear the ones provided by the management. The male swimming caps were perfectly all right. The female swimming cap was a great flubbery thing, bright scarlet, and bearing the huge white letters CNT.
I forget what the letters stood for, but I would have laughed even if I hadn't come straight from a dope café. As it was, I was almost ill with laughter. Next, I have a long, dim, faded fresco of a memory concerning the changing rooms. The cubicles were designed so that they opened on both sides, and in my frazzled state, it was like being trapped in an Escher drawing. I put the rubber cunt on my head and tried to find the pool.
Every other woman and girl, I noticed, was wearing a neat little swimming cap. I was the only one wearing the municipal cunt—the unhygienic Brit who didn't have one of her own. As if to express my sense of degradation, the horrid thing suddenly split, and I decided to give up all idea of swimming.
It's probably great fun to get high in Holland if you can go and look at Van Goghs and Rembrandts immediately afterwards (and if you're nowhere near your children). I got it wrong. Why don't I just accept it? I'll never be cool.
