Archives for posts with tag: amsterdam

TENDER TRAPS

March 6, 2014 //
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Sweet, Silky And Slippery

Haresh Shah

silkscarf

I flash my room registration card at the receptionist who is busy talking to a young man and a sort of pretty, short dark haired young woman in white, both of whom stood on the other side of the counter. ‘Room 416’, I tell him. He hands me my key. I throw a quick glance at the girl, making perfunctory eye contact and walk to the elevator. As I press the floor button, I notice the girl waving at me as if to wish me bon voyage. But the sliding doors have already closed and I am on my way up. I see her smiling face through the transparent glass door and wave back at her.

I am staying at the hip Hotel Americain in Amsterdam. I am not too impressed with the place, but built in 1900, it’s listed as one of Amsterdam’s landmarks with its turn of the century art deco and the roaring twenties atmosphere and because of its proximity to the theatre DeLaMar, it has an illustrious history – something I am often attracted to. And it’s frequented by the actors, directors and other art types of the city.

The window of my room looks down on the most popular town square, Leidseplein, which is filled with hoards of people engaged in multitude of activities. Rock & Roll band blaring out the sounds from their portable amplifiers, a group playing African drums, the flute players, a magician, the lone guitarist strumming in the early morning rain and an audience as attentive as it is appreciative. It feels like a multi-ring circus, a happy carnival. The grinding of the gears and the screeching of the trams somehow blend in harmoniously with the sounds of the street side shows. Wafting in through my room windows is the sad soothing sound of a violin. The lukewarm breeze carries-in with it a mild fragrance of the pink roses that Playboy Netherland’s editor designate Jan (Heemskerk) has so kindly delivered to my room to welcome me to Holland, as I eventually doze off for a while.

Dirk (de Moei), the art director designate and his live-in lady Ans pick me up at nine. We drive a few blocks to the restaurant de Warstein where Jan and his wife Gemmy join us for dinner.  Towards the tail end of the evening, we run into the bad boy of the Dutch literature, Jan Cremer of Ik Jan Cremer fame and his girlfriend Babette. Him and Babette join our table and Cremer treats  us to a couple of after dinner drinks. It is after three in the morning by the time Dirk and Ans drop me off at the hotel.

The elevator moves upward. I wonder about the girl’s sweet smile as I get off on the fourth floor. Those last two Remy Martins and the entire evening has put me into a very pleasant, if not euphemistic mood and I don’t even feel tired in the least. As I walk towards my room, the key in my hand at ready, I hear a female voice coming out of nowhere

‘Hello,’ it says.

I don’t see anybody around. The entire hallway is deserted. I look around and respond to the voice.

‘Yes!’

A smooth sentence floats in the air like a streamer, which I don’t understand a word of. It sounds very much like French, and now there is a face to the voice. It’s the girl from behind the reception. I am amazed at how she made it up to the floor so fast. She must have jumped right away into one of the two idle elevators waiting across from the receptionist. I stop briefly and turn around to took at her.

‘I thought you might like some company. ‘ I hear her say, with that certain sexy and seductive smile on her face.

I am tempted for a second. But the answer that rolls out of my mouth on its own is:  ‘Thanks lady but not tonight! I am just too tired.’ I lie.

‘Maybe tomorrow?’ She persists.

‘Maybe! I don’t know.’ To which she throws a sugary goodnight at me, turns around to go back to her post downstairs.

●●●

Even before I have had a chance to sit down, Luis (Moretti), Playboy partners Editorial Perfil’s corporate counselor hands me a piece of paper. Crudely torn from a notepad, it’s crumpled. I smooth it out on the table and read the scribbles. It says, Rosario, and underneath is what looks like a phone number.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘She wants you to call her.’

‘Who is Rosario?’

‘The girl on the other set of the studio where you were photographed.’

I am in Buenos Aires during my routine South American trip. One of Perfil’s weeklies, La Semana  wants to do a profile of me as a part of their in-house cross promotional efforts. They are photographing me with another girl, the skin on whose bare butt I am scrutinizing with a large magnifying glass. On my way out, I notice a buxom blonde with big head of bleached blonde hair fanned out on a pink pillow, scantily dressed in Victoria’s Secret like sexy lingerie, she is curled up seductively on the bed, her voluptuous figure spilling out of her small frame.  I don’t remember even having made as much as a quick eye contact with her.

‘What does she want?’

‘I guess she has taken liking for you. You will make her very happy if you called. She said she will be up and around late in the night.’ Answers Luis with a sly smile on his face, a bit envious perhaps?

I have landed in Buenos Aires that morning after an all night flight from Miami and have put in the whole day. I meet Luis for dinner at Las Nazarenas, my favorite steak house in the city. All I want to do is to have an early dinner, walk across the street to the Sheraton, where I am staying and hit the sack. That’s precisely what I do. When in the room, I empty my pockets and out comes the crumpled piece of the paper with the phone number. I look at the phone on the bedside table. Temptations, temptations.. But do the right thing and soon I am snoozing. On that trip, I spend several days in Buenos Aires, and yet never call her. She just wasn’t my type.

Or could it be that my encounter the night after had her pushed back in the obscurity?

The lights are dim. The music is slow and soothing. The dance floor is well-attended, but not crowded. Dancing close to me is Dulce. She is sweet, just like her name. We are dancing close but not too close. I can feel the contours of her female form and then feel her head gently drooping on my shoulder. I pull her closer ever so lightly. She allows herself to be nudged into a slight squeeze. Her perfume is pleasant – not overbearing. She is dressed modestly in a pair of well fitting pastel peach slacks and a black low necked top. Nothing glittery like most other girls in the crowd. She is down home pretty with shoulder length dusty blonde hair that smell of a faint whiff of shampoo. She fits snugly under my arms. It feels good to hold and feel so close her female form. It’s been a while.

The night is young. It’s little after midnight. That’s early for the disco world. The place, if not as crowded as earlier, is still buzzing. It’s Playboy Argentina’s anniversary that we are celebrating at Hippo – the “in most” night spot in Buenos Aires. As we dance to the whatever soft melody they’re playing, I am wondering. Perhaps I get to take her back to my hotel. That would be nice. With every dance and every whisper, I’m liking her more and more. Even falling for her tender, almost motherly ways. When the music stops for a minute, she lifts her face to look at me and I feel a sudden melting of my reflection into her honey brown eyes. When the disc jockey finally decides to take a short break and when I walk her back to the table where she sat with some friends, the booth is empty. I look around for some Playboy people still around. I don’t see anyone I recognize. For a moment we stand there, wondering.

‘I guess our friends have abandoned us.’

‘I think so too. One of them was going to give me ride back home.’

‘I can drop you off by cab on my way back to the hotel.’ I offer.

‘That would be nice. Thanks.’ And then there is bit of hesitation. ‘Don’t you just want to take me to your hotel room instead?’ I see a pleading mellowness in her eyes. Almost heartbreaking somehow. Not up until that very moment does it cross my mind that she could be anything but a young society woman out on the town with her friends.

‘Let’s sit down for a while and have a drink.’

‘Bueno!’ She says and snuggles next to me.

Dulce is a single mother who works in a small boutique on Calle Florida, the city’s most popular pedestrian shopping zone. The job barely pays for her living expenses. She doesn’t walk the streets to make ends meet, instead frequents high end places like Hippopotamus in the ritzy and popular tourist district of Ricoleta as well as five star hotel bars. I like it that she is in no hurry and we’re able to talk. I appreciate what I perceive to be her honesty.

But taking her back to my hotel room is no longer an option for me. Not that I have never been out with one of them, but a couple of times that I did was at the end of the long nights of eating and drinking and with a friend or two having wandered out kind. I don’t regret those outings, mainly because those women and the experiences were pleasant. But as a matter of not even some moral principal – but the sheer fact that I am very romantic at heart, I just wouldn’t/couldn’t bring myself to forge such a liaison.

I am being honest and I tell her how very much I like her and was even falling for her charms and the sincerity, but taking home a profi wasn’t something I did.

‘Pero soy buena!’ She urges. ‘But I am good!’ Even sounding like a saleswoman in a boutique.

‘Lo siento!’ ‘I am sorry!’ She doesn’t say anything to it, just scoots closer to me, takes my hand in hers and lets her head fall on my shoulder. It feels good that she feels at ease doing that. That perhaps in my small way I am a comfort to her as she is to me.

‘But I can still drop you off if you want?’

I get out of the cab in front of her home to see her off and press into her fist a $50.- bill.

‘It’s not much, but…Gracias!’

‘Gracias.’ She echoes, and gives me a quick hug. I watch her opening the front door and disappear inside her building.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

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Next Friday, March 14, 2014

IN THE DEPTH OF HIS EYES

Up until my first trip to Spain in the fall of 1978, I only had a vague knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and how Franco ruled the country for almost forty years with his ruthless iron fist. In fact it was the dictator’s death that would make possible even to think of bringing any western publication in to the country, let alone a local edition of Playboy. A poignant personal account.

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Categories Memoire, Playboy, Prostitution, Relationships, Travel

FACE TO FACE WITH JAN CREMER

April 11, 2013 //
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Haresh Shah

The Bad Boy Of Holland And The “Future Husband” Of Jayne Mansfield

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For those of you who have no clue who is  the bad boy of Holland, here is essential Jan Cremer in his own words. ‘ I am the best painter, I am the best writer.  I am for sure the best journalist of the Dutch language, and  certainly one of the best writers in the world’. He said to the writer and ex Playboy Holland editor, Guus Luijters for his book, Jan Cremer in Beeld.

He once famously said: ‘Rembrandt? I never heard of him. I’m not interested in sport.’

You have to be brilliant to utter such arrogant and provocative words. Sounds more like something coming out of the big mouth of  Cassius Clay a.k.a. Muhammad Ali, who said in his October 1964 Playboy interview: ‘I’m the greatest, I’m so pretty. People can’t stand a blowhard, but they’ll always listen to them,’, than from the mouth of a gentle Dutch writer and artist.  Jan Cremer too must have realized the shock value of his utterances spewed out in sound bites the way before there was a sound bites. Or could it be that he was just reading off  the script laid out by Cassius Clay?

And get this: He dedicated his book Ik Jan Cremer thus: For Jan Cremer and Jayne Mansfield. About which he said to Jules Farber, in Holland Herald, ‘It was the era when Jayne, Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell were the big American sex symbols. For me, Mansfield was it – the voluptuous contemporary. Rubens woman.’ To coincide with the publication of I Jan Cremer in America, his New York agent arranged a meeting between Jayne and Jan for a publicity photo. ‘And wham! We went to South America for six months…and then we lived in Hollywood for another half year. Jayne introduced me to everyone as her future husband.’ And this isn’t  hype or a boast.

●●●

My first awareness of Jan Cremer came on the very second day of my first arrival in Holland in the summer of 1965. I was offered a summer internship by Drukerij Bosch in Utrecht. The printing plant specialized in producing paperbacks. I come from a family of pioneers in paperback publishing in India. And I loved books. To see all those many books piled high on their pallets all across the plant was for me like the kid let loose in a candy store. Among the piles, the biggest one was what looked like an unassuming book titled Ik Jan Cremer. A very simple black and white cover with the image of a menacing looking young man dressed in an all out denim outfit, perched atop a motorbike, his gloves clad hands gripping the wide handlebars, his head covered also with the denim version of the Dutch fisherman’s hat, complete with biker’s goggles, looking tough in the image of James Dean, the bike moving  dangerously towards you, as if to run you over.

What I realized over a period of time was that Bosch had devoted one printing press exclusively to printing nothing but Ik Jan Cremer, day in and day out. Published just a year earlier, the book was now in its fourth printing and there was no end in sight, because they couldn’t print and bind them fast enough to fill the shelves from where they immediately flew off. A month later, I was assigned a statistical project to track the sales of the paperbacks published and sold in various markets . When I returned to resume my internship during the Christmas break, Ik Jan Cremer, as months earlier, hadn’t budged from its # 1 spot on the Dutch bestseller list.  The same press still devoted to printing those same pages. The only difference was an appearance on the cover of a wide red band across the upper left hand corner screaming BESTSELLER and a bit lower, a round, larger than a postal stamp like image saying 300,000 copies sold, 350,000 copies sold, the numbers climbing with every subsequent printings.  When I ran into him quite by an accident in the summer of 1983, the book was translated into thirty some languages and it was still going strong in Holland after almost twenty years of its publication, with forty plus printings and sales of more than 800,000 copies in Dutch only.

It was the most controversial book of the time, and everybody – everybody was talking about it. And I also remembered how I wished I could read Dutch. But I had to make do with merely touching and feeling the bound volumes every time I passed by the pallets piling higher and higher.  As if touching it would make its contents instantly understandable to me.

It came out in its English translation only a year later, but  once back in England and buried into my studies and figuring out my future, I never got around to reading it until the summer of 1978, when quite by an accident, I ran into I Jan Cremer while browsing the used bookstore in the shopping mall near my home in Goleta, California. By then, there was also Jan Cremer Writes Again. I bought both and devoured them like a famished  dog.

I was taken by his vivid descriptions of growing up during the second world war, the raw sex and the harshness of the post-war European life and the angry forcefulness of his narration had me spellbound and had left an everlasting impression on me.

●●●

I was having dinner at the restaurant de Warsteiner in Amsterdam, with Jan Heemskerk and Dirk De Moei, the editor-in-chief and the art director designates of soon to be launched Dutch edition of Playboy.  Accompanying us were Gemmy, Jan’s wife and Ans, Dirk’s live-in lady. With us all settled, Dirk noticed Jan Cremer sitting at the bar with his girlfriend Babette.

‘Look who is here. Jan Cremer and Babette.’ I hear Dirk whispering to Jan.

I expressed the desire to go and say hello to the Dutch Legend.  Instead, Dirk invited him and Babette to join us. Jan pulled up a chair next to me and Babette sat at the other end of the table.  Cremer wore burgundy red short-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue jeans. At forty two, he didn’t look anything like my image of the young and rebellious biker, married to his fast and furious motorbike and the connoisseur of female of the species from all across the European continent. He looked and behaved no different from any other respectable Dutch man his age and like them spoke fluent but accented English.

Jan Cremer impressed me as being very down to earth, charismatic, self-confident and a friendly sort of guy. He seemed to feel very comfortable with his success, and very natural with the freedom it offered him with homes in New York, Switzerland and Amsterdam. Had replaced fast motorbikes with the fast cars. All this on just two major books and I would later find out, his art, which sold for large sums. Except for one of them, his 1960 painting of the Japanese War, on which he put the price tag of one million guilders – which at the time would have been quarter of a million dollars. Jan Heemskerk tells me that he is still holding out, for one of these days some sucker just might roll out the dough.

We talked about his books and how much of what is contained in them is true and how much is the product of his “depraved mind”.  At the time he was working on a travel book, his third major effort and supposedly the best he had written so far. But he seemed not in a hurry to finish it.

The conversation switched to Playboy and the kind of women it ran in its pages, especially the Playmates. To put it more or less in his own words: The girls you run in Playboy are too young, too beautiful, too glamorized and too perfect. I like women who have stretch marks on their stomachs, the breasts that sag and asses big and fat. I like to see wrinkles on their faces, feel roughness on their skins and be able to touch the flaws in their bodies.

I could tell that Jan was serious. At the same time, I couldn’t help glancing across the table at  gorgeous Babette, and appraise her in the light of what Jan was telling me about the kind of women he prefers. Babette looked anything but the description of his favored women full of flaws.  She looked to be in her mid-twenties, with beautiful blonde hair tied back neatly in a pony, with very proportionate pointed nose, softly darting eyes and from what I could tell, she possessed a delightful figure, a pretty face, she could have easily been a Playmate.  Ironically, he was working on a photographic collection of nudes and just a couple of months after our meeting, those of Babette’s appeared in the premier issues of Playboy’s Dutch edition. I certainly couldn’t find any flaws in her young and flawless beauty. Much as I would have liked to, I didn’t get to talk much to Babette. But from what I understood, she was an ex-model and was now living and traveling with Jan, they gave me a feeling of a very loving couple, with her assuming a lower profile, which perhaps was also a part of her natural personality.

●●●

Up until now, I hadn’t  thought about that night again. Perhaps when I saw something by Jan Cremer appear in the Dutch Playboy, such as when he did the cover for the edition’s fifteenth anniversary in 1998 and prior to that when his portfolio of erotic paintings of no other than Babette appeared in the pages of Playboy in all her carnal glory. And when I read about the publication of what is hailed as his masterpiece, 2000 page opus The Huns. Beyond that he seemed to have faded  into  the backdrop of my consciousness. That is, until very recently, when I was scanning the spines of the art books in my collection, I came upon a volume of what basically is a complete catalogue of his life and works spanning from 1957 to 1988, published  to coincide with the opening of his retrospective art exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in his home town of Enschede, from where it was scheduled to go to France, Germany, Switzerland and finally to the National Museum in Budapest.

There were mentions of his life as a fine artist in his Cremer books, but it never quite recorded in my memory. The catalogue is dedicated to me with the inscription: October 11, 1988 to Haresh Shah in Friendship, Jan Cremer. I have absolutely no recollection of ever having seen him again or been in touch with in any other way since our one and the only encounter in Amsterdam. Could it be that Mick Boskamp, the service editor of the Dutch edition who was spending a few days in Chicago around the same time brought it along? Mick too has absolutely no such recollection.  How did it then get to me? On the facing page to the dedication is a New York City address, written also in the same handwriting,  is the name and address of Sterling Lord Literistic – probably of his agent in the USA. Could it be that he was in New York that day and thought of me? Bit of a mystery to me, but it still pleases me to know that I could have left a positive impression with one of my favorite authors. Who as it turns out is as big an artist as he is an author. And in retrospect, it would be fair to say that he is a bigger artist than he ever became a writer.

I am not a good judge of art by any dint of imagination, but the only way I can describe his paintings in the catalogue is that they are abstracts with broad strokes of pleasing colors splashed across huge canvases. And it impresses and overwhelms to think how incredible it is for a single human being to be all that. His writing has often been compared with my all time favorite, Henry Miller, and now when I see his art, not the style and the objects he paints, but the idea of a writer also being an artist also puts him next to the old master, because Miller too picked up the brush in his sunset years and produced some beautiful watercolors.

Even though Cremer is an entire generation younger than Henry Miller, his I Jan Cremer would have never been allowed to be published in the United States if not for the battles fought over the publication of Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1961, which wasn’t allowed to be distributed freely in his own country up until 1964, more than thirty years after it was originally published in France. The very year when Ik Jan Cremer came out in Holland and in 1965 in its English translation in the United States.

© Haresh Shah 2013

Illustration: Celia Rose Marks

SISTER SITE

http://www.downdivision.com

Next Friday, April 19, 2013

SEX EDUCATION À LA JAPONAISE

As excited  as I was when my boss assigned me to work in tandem with the Japanese editorial team, I also knew that Japanese were unlike any other people I had ever worked with and that I needed to know about them beyond the books I read. So before meeting with them, I embarked upon a weeklong journey of the country on their famed Shinkansan bullet trains. Crisscrossing the country, meeting people, visiting places, a university and pachinko parlors, staying only at the inns and eating only Japanese food, and yes, spend an afternoon watching  striptease.

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Categories Artist, Writer

MY SPRING VALENTINE

April 4, 2013 //
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As The Time Goes By

Haresh Shah

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Exactly thirty six years ago today on April 5th. 1977, in Santa Barbara, California, it was another fucking beautiful day, as my neighbor Greg Ketchum and I had began to refer to our forever such gorgeous weather, whenever we both found ourselves out on our respective balconies, overlooking the awesome Santa Ynez Mountain Range.  I was done with my writing for the day and was sitting around in my living room with Mike and Guusje, drinking beer, when the phone rings.

Without any pleasantries, the female voice on the other line dives right into it.

‘I understand you are auditioning young ladies for Playboy.’

‘Not quite.’ I respond with trepidation, trying hard to think who it might be. Sensing confused silence on my end of the line, the voice breaks out in a hearty laugh.

‘This is Carolyn,’ it says.’ It still doesn’t ring the bell.

‘I was just passing through. I am on my way down south to see Gwen in LA.’ And then I knew.

‘Where are you?’

‘I am here. In Santa Barbara.’

‘You are? Why don’t you come on over?’

‘Okay.’

She doesn’t ask for the direction. Soon I see her pulling up on the Linfield Place in her yellow Volkswagen, named Rachel Rabbit.  She had once lived here before moving up north to Sacramento.  She plans to spend a couple of days walking down the memory lane, perhaps meet up with some people she knew and then continue on to Los Angeles to see her sister. As soon as she walks in, we hug, ever so self  consciously, but there is a feeling of a certain intimacy, which becomes apparent after Mike and Guusje leave. We stand in the middle of the room with our arms wrapped around and holding each other as if we were long lost lovers, and then abruptly but gently step back.

I invite her out for dinner and we drive down to Dobb’s in the city center from Goleta, where I live off the UCSB campus. The dinner is animated and we talk a lot about relationships. Hers with her husband Bob has just ended and they have filed for no-contest divorce. I am trying to build a long distance relationship with Patricia in Mexico City, but neither of us is quite sure. We are sort of oscillating. Carolyn has also been sort of dating someone. But as we talk, the magnetic pull between us two is obvious. After dinner we take a walk on the beach, feeling mellow, listening to the gentle waves of the Pacific splashing the shore. The vast expanse of the beach is deserted that night. I don’t remember for sure if it were a full moon night, but let’s assume that it was, just to give an extra romantic edge to the evening. We feel the ocean breeze lightly feather our exposed skins. The stars seem to be aligned just right on this clear cloudless night. We are walking hand-in-hand and feel the tender but intense energy transpiring through our entwined fingers.

The way I normally tell the rest of the story is: I bring her back home that night, thread my three hour long reel-to-reel tape containing Keith Jarrett’s soothing Cologne concert. And keep her.

●●●

I first met Carolyn and her husband Bob in the bar of a canal side little B & B in Amsterdam, where I had stopped by to look for a room. They were fully booked. But I stayed to have a beer in their bar before venturing out in the early January cold. Sitting diagonally opposite from me was a young couple from Duluth, Minnesota.

I had not planned to be in Amsterdam on this trip.  Certainly not to spend the whole week there. A little over a week earlier I had run away from Chicago in hopes to mend my broken heart. I had picked Denmark literally by putting my finger on the map. The place where no one I knew lived and the place where I could be face-to-face with my lonely self, the place where I could nurse  my wounds and disappear in its anonymity. Copenhagen seemed to do just that for me. Regaining some of my spirit back, I flew on to Stockholm – thinking I would celebrate  my New Year’s Eve up there. But on that morning, it got to be too lonesome. At the last minute, I called my friend Franz-Hermann Gomfers in Wachtendonk, a little town in the lower Rhine, that bordered with Venlo in Holland. As usual, he was hosting the Sylvester party and I found myself amongst the jubilant throng of the New Year’s Eve revelers.

Four years earlier, also at Franz Hermann’s Sylvester party, I had met the flaming red head, Felicita. Fe, as everyone called her,  grew up in a house in the alley diagonally opposite from Fran Hermann’s house. Shy as she was, we had clicked and spent most of the night sitting on a corner sofa, talking. Getting up once in a while to slow dance and then sit down again.  There is a photo of me sitting next to her, holding her wrist in my hand and twirling her bracelet, gazing at it as if in admiration. As good a pretense as any to hold her hand. Three weeks later I had left Europe to come to the United States.

Reconnected, we drive to Krefeld to have dinner the night of the New Year. Staying out late, we  leisurely stroll the deserted streets of the town. Stop frequently at store fronts and window shop. Four years earlier, she wore her hair very short. Now seeing her in a longer than shoulder length hair, I am blown away by how breathtakingly gorgeous she looks. Her radiant smooth skin matches the color of her hair, her shy smiles has me absolutely captivated.

Playfully, I say to her: ‘I’ll marry you when your hair grows down to here,’ pointing to the small of her back with the blade of my hand.

‘Be careful what you say, because my hair grows very fast. In fact, I did have it down to my waist up until a month ago.’ She responds with an impish smile on her face.

And our game begins, as if we were an engaged couple, soon to be married. We pick the bridal gowns and the tuxedos that she and I would wear on our wedding day. We build an imaginary house and begin to fill it with the furniture we see on display. We select baby clothes and the little booties and bonnets for our baby. Even toss around a few names for the daughter we would have. And as we continue our silly little make-believe game, I imagine her walking down the aisle, her radiant face luminous behind the veil.

My plan is now to spend the remaining eight days of my escape from Chicago in Amsterdam. Something I had dreamt of doing with Karen. But it wasn’t meant to be. And now my fickle heart is longing for Fe to explore with me the canals, the bridges and the alleys of the Venice of the north.

●●●

On that Sunday evening, as I stand over one of the thousand bridges of Amsterdam and watch the canal floating down below, I see in its ripples the faces of the women that dot the canvas of my emotional landscape.

Netty, who worked at Drukerij Bosch when I was an intern there seven years earlier,  now lives in Amsterdam. It’s been nice seeing her again, but I can still feel a certain amount of tension linger  between us. Her girlfriend Reneé, on whom I had an incredible crush, leading to a few stolen kisses, is now married and also lives in Amsterdam. Both Netty and I went  to see her and her husband one evening. There is also Carolyn. I thought she was pretty and liked her American way of dressing in blue jeans and a simple top. Lacking of any visible makeup and the hair almost touching her waist. She reminded me of Joan Baez . But I don’t carry any  deeper impression of her. And of course, there is Karen, back in Chicago – the woman I have run away from. But the face that superimposes all of them is that of Fe’s.  What I see clearly in that fluid water is the parting  image of her, clutching the bunch of red tulips, her eyes fogging up and the tail light of her disappearing train.

Having spent the whole weekend together, walking around Amsterdam till wee hours of the morning – still feeling weary and sleepy after the late morning breakfast, we are lying sideways on her single bed – talking, almost whispering – sharing with each other and feeling a certain   closeness at our parallel stories of the bruised hearts, I am overwhelmed at the silence that has fallen between us. Us staring deep into each other’s eyes.

‘Willst du mich heiraten?’ It just pops out of my mouth. Something I had never asked anybody up until then and have not to this day since. ‘Will you marry me?’

The fog has fallen dense on the city of Amsterdam. My emotions are torn. The longing intensified. The faces dissolving in the ripples as they march on.

●●●

It’s January 3rd 1979. Delayed by two and a half hours, our United flight from Los Angeles is the last one to land that night at 12:30 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, before the back-to-back snow storms would blanket and paralyze the city for weeks and months to come. We check into the Playboy Towers – the old dame of the hotel known as The Knickerbocker, before and after its present avatar – at two in the morning with a whole bunch of boxed live potted plants that make up the bulk of our excess baggage. Because we are told that they would never make it to Chicago in the truck. I have returned to Playboy full time to work out of their head offices. Carolyn is seven months pregnant. We have bought a condo in Hyde Park and would move in soon as our stuff arrives.  The side streets remain buried under mountains of snow up until April. When the truck finally makes it to Chicago area, they deliver bits and pieces by minivans. Soon as they deliver the mattresses on the 26th, we move in.

After three weeks of being stuck in a hotel, it feels good to be in our own place. However inadequately equipped. We are prepared to sleep on the hardwood floors if we had to. In the meanwhile, I keep trucking. Of which Lee Hall writes in his International Publishing Newsletter dated February 5: Haresh will be returning from Spain this weekend to assist in the last minute birth of his first child. He and Caroline (sic) have recently moved into a delightful apartment in Chicago but are currently awaiting the arrival not only of the baby but of their furniture van which has been marooned somewhere in the Mid-western snow.

And then its March 6. Its 04:04 in the morning – the drama of a new child being born is enacted in the bedroom of our apartment. Propped up and leaning on the wall at the edge of the bed is me, Carolyn’s head resting on my shoulder. At the ready is the midwife Kay with her experienced hands to clutch and catch the baby pushing to emerge into this world. Surrounding the bed are Dr. Elvove, Anita and Keeline while Bob is clicking away with the little Kodak Instamatic with his trembling hands.  We see first Anjuli’s head pop out and then with another push, all of her. Dr. Elvove hands me a pair of scissors to snap the umbilical cord. A daughter born in Playboy family receives Playboy kind of welcome by telexes from around the world in response to Lee Hall’s following announcement, barely making it  in his Newsletter dated March 5, but not mailed until later.

PS: Anjuli Shah-Johnson, the first daughter of Haresh Shah and Carolyn Johnson, was born on March 6.

© Haresh Shah

Illustration: Jordan Rutherford

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Next Friday, April 12, 2013

FACE TO FACE WITH JAN CREMER

It is very likely that the most of you have never heard of Jan Cremer, the ultimate enfant terrible of the Dutch literature and the art. He once famously said in an interview: Rembrandt? I have never heard of him. I’m not interested in sports. Arrogant? Brilliant?  Whatever. But I am a big fan of his books, I Jan Cremer and Jan Cremer Writes Again. And have had a pleasure of meeting and talking to him.

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Categories Relationships, Romance, Women