Amsterdam ...

Arriving at Amsterdam's Centraal Station on the boat train from the Hook of Holland one evening not long ago were three young pilgrims, dressed for the road. They carried back packs and wore military-surplus greatcoats over Levis tucked into lumberjack boots. The two males had hair that flowed past their shoulders; the girl with them wore hers tucked under a stained fedora. They were probably in their early 20s. All three looked as if they had been wandering the planet since birth. They were Americans.

Anyone who had eavesdropped on their conversation during the ferry crossing from England to Holland, however, would have learned that, for the girl and one of the boys, this was their first journey outside the United States. The other boy had been away before-by thumb through Spain, across southern Europe to Turkey, into the Middle East, to Nepal and beyond. His name, he said, introducing himself to the other two on the ferry, was Slick.

Slick had traveled so far that he had followed the East until it became the West again. Re-entering the U. S. at San Francisco, he had stayed long enough to unload a stash of Cambodian bush that had been mailed from Tokyo in a military shipment by a spaced-out GI. Once home, Slick had taken a look around, noted that "the asylum was still in the grip of its duly elected lunatics" and had taken off once again for the East. For him, too, this was the first time in Amsterdam.

From the depths of an inside pocket, Slick produced a joint rolled in golden-yellow Wheat Straw and proceeded to light up quite openly on the platform of the station, right in front of all the Instamatic tourists, who had stoked up on duty-free booze on the boat from Harwich and who now stumbled alongside the hissing train, regaling one another with tales of Amsterdam's fabled whores. Slick's match flared: suck, deep breath, hold, pass it on; suck, breath, hold, pass-the complete ritual. Fifteen feet away stood a uniformed policeman, by one of the platform exits. Try that in Alabama and some good ole boy will lock you up with killers and rapists for 20 years-or forever in Texas.

But Amsterdam, as Slick kept telling the others on the ferry, is different. The new place-the instant Eldorado, wide-open, wild beyond all known definitions of wild-ness, tolerant of all human foibles and fancies. Hell, said Slick, you don't need permission for anything in Amsterdam; you can get it together any way you see it. He told a story about a Swedish dope (continued on page 189)Amsterdam(continued from page 135) fiend who floated up to an Amsterdam cop and beefed about the low grade of hash he had just picked up from some African dude on the street. The cop sniffed it, chewed a sample and told the Swede: "You're right; this shit is no good." Then he reached into a pocket, pulled out a half-kilo slab of greasy Red Lebanese and said: "This is what you should look for, friend. It'll wipe you out." Great fuzz in Amsterdam! Human-type people, said Slick. Far out, breathed his audience, hunched over the jukebox in the ferry's youth saloon. Unfucking-believable!

And now, here's Slick purring his joint within a long arm's reach of the law on the platform and the cop is walking slowly in the direction of the blissful trio. He talks to them quietly, earnestly, with no sign of hostility. You have to move pretty close to pick up the words, because Amsterdam police are polite to foreigners, even to foreign freaks. Maybe he's asking for a taste. No. What he's saying is: "You're all under arrest."

Busted! In Amsterdam, youth mecca of the world? Where city-council members said dope should be legalized and had themselves photographed in front of city hall, zonked out and glassy-eyed, waving hash bombers at the cameras. Where they broadcast prices and availability of popular brands of hashish over the state-owned radio, and the Council for Youth Education submitted a plan calling for the establishment of drugstores to sell Cannabis products at fixed prices. All those miracles, and then along comes a cop to recite the litany of the bust. It would appear that the third world's latest nirvana is just another plain, old-fashioned bummer.

But not for lucky Slick and his friends. They got off. In the police station, they were told their arrests were only technical. A warning. Nobody was fined, jailed or deported, though under Dutch law, they might have been. They were reminded that drugs are illegal in Holland-despite publicity to the contrary -and that if they were ever caught dealing, the law would jump on them. But there are places in Amsterdam, they were informed, where they could smoke all they wanted, and nobody would come to take them away. Finally, they were divested of their remaining joints and told they could leave. This time. So the pilgrims from the West, having walked through the valley of fear and disillusionment, vanished into the night, filled with a wondrous sense of relief. Slick, looking slightly uncomfortable, said good night to the others outside the police station.

• • •

"In 1970," declared Newsweek last August, "Amsterdam has won youth's accolade as the drug, sex and do-your-thing capital of the Western world." Scarcely two months later, in a report on the August riots that had convulsed the city, Rolling Stone magazine concluded that Amsterdam had fallen to the enemy. "This is the end of an era of tolerance," was the unlikely quote attributed to an unidentified Dutch writer. "Tolerance only goes so far, and I think Amsterdam has found its limit." All in all, it looked as though Amsterdam had been just another summer romance for the press. The young had tried to shaft the establishment and the establishment had kicked back, or so it seemed to the newspapers. But newsmen are rarely happier than when they're tearing down the myths created by other newsmen, and what had happened in Amsterdam suffered, to a certain extent, from this journalistic syndrome.

There were riots. They took place in the Dam, Amsterdam's main square and alfresco coed dormitory for migratory youth. By last August, up to 1000 kids were bedding down every night on the square, despite a ban against sleeping near public monuments that was introduced by the city-but never enforced-a year earlier. Merchants grumbled, tourists complained and the pimps in the adjacent red-light district whined about a decline in trade. On the night the police finally moved in to clear the square, they received unsolicited assistance from a bizarre force of Dutch sailors and marines, a troop of motorbike thugs and a contingent of pimps. There was also an Italian TV crew that, it was darkly suspected, whipped up the passion by renting a few psychopaths and shoving them into the crowd.

Amsterdamers were outraged by the violence, but the sleepers themselves, on the whole, escaped blame. If the police had left them alone for a couple of weeks, it was pointed out, the onset of autumnal rains and cold nights would, in any case, have forced them to sleep somewhere else. Afterward, it was rumored that the city fathers decided to clean up the Dam because of the impending visit of President Suharto of Indonesia, a detested figure among Indonesian exiles in the Netherlands. They accuse their former leader's regime of slaughtering 250,000 dissidents not too many years ago. Those who escaped-many of them live in Amsterdam-have not forgotten it. Inevitably, many young people in the capital viewed the Dam action as a dirty deed committed for unworthy causes, a battle fought to relieve the frustration of nautical rednecks, to make the city profitable for pimphood and to beautify the landscape for a visitor who carried a heavy responsibility for the execution of 250,000 human beings. The mayor, blaming "explosive groups" for the trouble, seemed unhappy. "It would be a terrible condemnation of myself and the citizens," he said after the event, "if it became impossible to carry on a tolerant policy in this city."

Ever since the Pilgrim Fathers decided to clear out of Amsterdam several centuries ago, because of "licentiousness among ye young folk" and their fear that it might contaminate Pilgrim youth, young people in the Dutch capital have set the style for international youth protest in their assaults on established political and religious orders. Last year, even Amsterdam bishops joined them by coming out against obligatory celibacy for priests, in direct contradiction of age-old Vatican policy. The young Catholic chaplain at the University of Amsterdam got married, and a political movement founded by young radicals campaigned for revolution and won 12 seats on city councils throughout Holland.

The members of this movement called themselves Kabouters -a Dutch word for gnomes or pixies; they came into being at the beginning of 1970, succeeding the street-fighting Provos, who disbanded voluntarily the previous year, because they felt they had become too institutionalized. Where the Provos had scared potential supporters with their toughness, the Kabouters enlisted them through a form of euphoric lunacy, backed up with a radical program of reform. At one of the first city-council meetings in Amsterdam, the Knbouters proposed that the Dutch army be disarmed and converted into a band of happy jesters, who would run around spreading universal merriment. They have urged drivers to install flower boxes on their car roofs, so that parking lots would look more beautiful. They campaign for the legalization of soft drugs, for the abolition of private automobiles from the center of Amsterdam and for the withdrawal of Holland from Nato. They seize warehouses and offices that have been abandoned by business and turn them over to the city's poor and homeless. They have also organized an old-age department that offers pensioners such free services as shopping or just conversation.

The Knbouters' most ambitious objective is the creation of "alternative communities" around the world that would be free of bureaucracy and commercial exploitation. Their inhabitants would be encouraged to assume responsibility for every phase of their environment, and personal initiative would replace dependence on elected politicians. These proposals may sound utopian, but in last year's municipal elections, the Knbouters got almost 38,000 votes in Amsterdam and emerged as the capital's fourth-strongest municipal party. In the course of all the recent agitation among Western youth, it was the first major victory for the young at the polls.

The center of all this ferment, which has made Holland one of the most exciting countries in Europe today, is a metropolitan antique. Much of Amsterdam dates from the 17th Century and rests on wooden piles sunk deep into the queasy bog that constitutes the city's foundalion. Houses lurch forward on their foundations like drunken aristocrats trying to maintain their dignity, propped with hefty beams and fitted with gables, whose ornate decorations were the pride of their merchant owners. It is a town built on some 70 islands, connected by more than 500 bridges and divided by miles of canals that radiate in a semicircular pattern from the harbor. Seen from the air, with the sun gleaming on the waterways, the city looks like a spider's web with fresh morning dew on it.

Amsterdam lies just below the northwest upper shoulder of Continental Europe. Rome is less than two and a half hours away by plane, London and Paris an hour, Copenhagen less than an hour and a half. Thirty-seven international rail expresses arrive every day at Centraal Station. One might drive to Brussels or Cologne in the morning and return to Amsterdam for dinner.

It is an entrancing, restless city, small enough so that a stranger quickly feels at home, big enough to encompass a polyglot assortment of people and unexpected contrasts. European travelers go there because it's almost impossible to avoid it. Art lovers feast on Rembrandt in the I Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh in the Municipal. Shoppers look for bargains in rare stones at the diamond houses, for duty-free goods at Schiphol Airport. English-speaking tourists feel comfortable there because most of the 900,000 inhabitants speak their language. And others are drawn by the city's magnificent food and restaurants, by its nonstop night life and by the unconcealed temptations of the Amsterdam sex stores and the red-light district.

There are upwards of 80 sex shops in Amsterdam. They sell everything from mechanized dildos and fetishists' appliances to movies, slides and the Dutch translation of Philip Roth's Port-noy's Klacht. The Netherlands Society for Sexual Reform, a state-subsidized organization, runs a highly successful mail-order business in sexual devices. Tourists flock to these stores, but the biggest attraction in the city is the Walletjes, a red-light district that is contained in an oblong slice of old canal houses in one of the most picturesque parts of town.

The girls of the Walletjes are black, white, brown, yellow, pink, tall, short, thin, fat, perfect, pregnant, wigged and unwigged. There are girls in kinky boots, girls in sandals, girls with bare feet. Some wear leather jackets and look tough; others dress in fur wraps, velvet suits or tweeds and pearls; and some wear almost nothing. They stand in doorways, against lampposts, in bars, on corners, in alleys that are wide enough for only one customer at a time. Everywhere. Many sit behind windows under purple lights, looking like mermaids in a life-sized aquarium or a window display in an uptown store. A large percentage are young and pretty. Some could make a living as models. A few are dragons. One veteran, said to be in her 70s, charges five guilders-less than $I.50; but the usual price for a quick fling in the Walletjes is 25 guilders-about seven dollars-and the fee increases in accordance with the client's special quirks. For flagging libidos, the girls supply vibrators, erotic movies, slides and books.

"It's the Germans I don't care for," an attractive 19-year-old brunette told a visitor. "They always want to come in three or four at a time and watch. The Americans? They want to know why I do it. Stupid question. I make good money, I pay taxes and it's legal. I wouldn't want any other job. Now fuck off. please."

In the Walletjes, one might observe, as the same visitor recently did, the extraordinary sight of an elderly customer, whose wheelchair had gotten jammed in a doorway of one of the houses. Two friends eventually pushed him through, with some help from a half-naked girl inside. A couple of minutes later, she reappeared at the window, closed the drapes and withdrew from sight.

The clientele of the Walletjes is comprised mostly of "respectable" tourists-everybody except that body of youthful visitors for whom Amsterdam has far greater attractions and to whom, as a rule, the idea of prostitution represents a kind of adult hang-up, in which they want no part. The kids have their own game to play and it centers around the Dutch capital's tolerance of soft drugs. They know that as long as they stick to the rules that were spelled out to Slick and his friends, they run little fear of arrest. The Amsterdam narc squad consists of eight men who usually concentrate on hard-stuff dealers and tend to ignore users of hash and grass.

The principal rule specifies that smokers restrict their habits to the premises of the Paradiso or Fantasia, two shabby old buildings that the city council subsidizes to the tune of $50,000 a year. The patrons can drink beer or soda, watch avant-garde theatrical productions or nude ballets, listen to music, paint, sculpt, sing, shout, dance, make out and turn on. A large sign inside the doors of the Paradiso, the more popular of the two youth halls, states that dope trading on the premises is forbidden, but a few salesmen can always be found outside or across the street, keeping a wary eye open for the law, while unloading poor-quality consignments on unsuspecting buyers.

The Paradiso and Fantasia are open only on certain nights of the week. When they're closed, the crowd heads-along with the heads in the crowd-for the innumerable bars, cafes and discotheques on the side streets around the Leidse-plein and Rembrandtsplein, the city's two biggest amusement areas. In many of these places, the freak show continues without benefit of civic subsidies. At about two, most of them close for the night and people who have somewhere to crash-usually a dormitory in a student hostel -can prolong the binge with, in most cases, minimal risk of harassment by management.

To find out the current prices of hash, they can tune in two weekly radio programs and listen to the dope-market stock-exchange reports that are carried on special youth programs. A recent edition of a Saturday-afternoon show called This Is the Beginning led off with the weekly quotations ("Afghanistan, 4.50 guilders a gram; Red Lebanese, 3.50; Moroccan, 2.50," etc.) and followed these with a warning about some bad acid that was making the rounds. After this came a solicitous word from a police official, who spoke about the hazards of switching from soft to hard drugs. VPRO radio, another youth-oriented station, has a five-hour program on Fridays, when it broadcasts the prices in English. There is also a VPRO-TV affiliate that telecasts live three-and-a-half-hour shows every two weeks. The program, which usually consists of performances by top-name rock groups, is deliberately unstructured, so as to allow for maximum spontaneity. Anyone who wants to grab a mike and lay an inspiring word about anarchy on the viewing audience is free to do so.

The quality of freedom to say or do what you like in Amsterdam-providing it injures nobody else-is characteristic of the Dutch in general and of Amster-damers in particular. It is inherited both from the freewheeling merchants of the 17th and 18th Centuries, who first made the city a great center of truly democratic institutions, and from the middle class, who succeeded them and who developed a sturdy sense of independent liberalism coupled with a lasting distaste for bureaucracy. Even today, Amsterdamers are suspicious of anything they consider undue meddling in civic affairs by the administrative capital in The Hague.

For many centuries, Amsterdam has given refuge to people whose religious and political ideals made them outcasts in their own countries. Unlike many similar emigrants to the New World (who sometimes found they were exchanging one form of exploitation for another), exiles in Amsterdam found a community in which their racial origins or personal faiths did not stigmatize them. Indeed, nonbelievers sometimes came to their defense in fearless disregard of personal safety, as in 1941, when city workers walked off their jobs to protest against the persecution of Dutch Jews by the Nazi occupiers of Holland.

Until that year, the Jewish quarter had been one of the most popular strolling places for Jew and gentile alike, which was not true of most ghettos in other European cities. With the arrival of the Germans, however, what had formerly been a thriving, tumultuous community of 100,000 people simply ceased to exist. Among the 10,000 who came back to Amsterdam from Nazi death camps was Otto Frank. He, his 13-year-old daughter, Anne, and other members of the family hid with friends in a house at 263 Prinsengracht for two years, until the Gestapo caught up with them. Among the remnants that the surviving member of the Frank family discovered after the War was the diary written by his daughter. Her pitiful collection of faded newspaper clippings can still be seen on the wall of the secret apartment in which the Franks lived. Of all the world's memorials to victims of genocide, this modest house in Amsterdam-with its empty, silent rooms-is perhaps the most poignant.

It would not be too fanciful to draw a parallel between earlier refugees who fled to Amsterdam and those who now see the city as a haven for other, possibly less momentous causes. Among Western capitals today, Amsterdam is the most tolerant and progressive of them all, a city where people of all ages and tastes experience a life style and a venturesome sense of freedom they do not often find elsewhere. Some would characterize this freedom as a form of depravity, but they would be mistaken. Amsterdamers are not noticeably more dissolute than other city dwellers; they tend, on the contrary, to be a kindly, compassionate people with a keenly developed instinct for social justice and a genuine respect for the rights of others to go the way they wish. They might well have shown hostility and resentment to the thousands of young wanderers who have moved in among them in recent years, but they have, on the whole, shown them hospitality and generosity, instead. Perhaps the most significant clue of all to the personality of their city lies in the fact that the patron saint of Amsterdam-and of small children and young girls-is an old gentleman who is said to have been the bishop of Myra in Asia Minor during the Fourth Century. The Dutch call him Sinlterklaas. We know him as Santa Claus.