Sinterklaas is coming to town.

He is, in fact, visible all over Amsterdam.

The Dutch Santa Claus, Sinterklaas, a centuries old character upon whom our own Santa is based, arrived in town by boat a few weeks ago. He had a huge parade through town accompanied by a horde of elves in blackface, live on Dutch National TV.

Now, his visage, more religious icon-like in appearance and a good deal more svelte than our own St. Nick adorns many windows.

I see evidence of this in the days leading up to Christmas whenever I’m motivated to forsake my tan Afghani heroin-induced internal reveries and venture forth from my warm and cozy hotel room overlooking the Herengracht, the Gentleman’s Canal.

I tend to come out at night, which is an easy thing to do, since the chilly Northern European sun comes up late and starts going down around four in the afternoon in Amsterdam in late December, when there are barely eight hours of daylight.

Currently, it’s a little before ten and I’m firmly rooted to a seat in the Tea Room on the top floor of the Melkweg, an Amsterdam club and performance space.

Parakeets and other caged birds are chirping away, their tweet-tweets clearly audible above some chill electronica sounds and the din of conversation.

The Tea Room is getting crowded. An assortment of people of different ages, sizes, shapes and nationalities are sitting on benches and chairs around the room in various stages of inebriation, both chemical and alcohol. A thick cloud of cannabis, hashish and tobacco smoke hovers overhead.

I’m nursing a Duvel, a high-octane Belgian beer in a fat, brown glass bottle, and looking around the Tea Room from behind bloodshot eyes with heroin pupils the size of pinpricks.

My high tolerance for drugs and alcohol is serving me well tonight. I’ve smoked most of a fat hash-and-tobacco cigarette. I’ve consumed two Duvels. And, I’ve done another thick line of good, strong Afghani dope within the last two hours. Before I headed out to dinner at a venerable Indonesian restaurant on Leidsestraat near the frigid and windblown Leidseplein, where I pigged out on a massive rijstafel dinner.

An Indonesian rijstafel feast tastes very good when you’re in the middle of a heroin binge.

I’ve been doing about half a gram of strong Afghani smack for about a week, and I’ve finally settled into a comfortable groove that allows me to resume normal life functions like eating and sleeping, after many days of being unable to do either. Of course, this is a strong indication that I’m now strung out and will become monstrously ill if and when I stop doing dope, but that is a problem I will face in the indeterminate future, most likely after I return to the U.S. after New Year’s.

The United States is always where the shit hits the fan.

Right now, as I lounge in the Tea Room, dope sickness is an ill-formed dark cloud barely visible over the horizon.

A couple of young blondes—one with shoulder-length hair and the other with short-cropped hair in a pixie cut, and both of them with sinuous physiques—are sitting across from me, languorously smoking a hashish and tobacco cigarette. They are Danish or Swedish from the sound of their conversation. A mixed group of Amsterdammers and tourists is carrying on an animated discussion over on the next group of high-back padded benches arranged around low, round tables.

It is time for a Space Cake, the Amsterdam version of hash brownies. They taste awful, like a hideously concocted and baked brownie mixed with dirt, but that’s okay. Space Cakes are not about taste. They are about the inner glow that follows.

I walk over to the bar where the bartenders dish out Space Cakes along with beer, coffee, tea and other liquors, and ask for two Space Cakes, which I consume quickly and wash down with Duvel.

I ask one of the blondes to my right where she’s from, and it turns out they’re Danes from Copenhagen.

The blonde with long hair is named Greta and the one with the pixie cut is Eva. They’ve been in Amsterdam for several days checking out the party scene. Both are urban planning students in Copenhagen.

Urban planning?

The Melkweg is the kind of place where you run into spaced-out backpackers in Amsterdam for drugs, sex and rock-and-roll holidays, not aspiring urban planners.

“Planning, really?” I say.

“Yes,” Eva says. “It is good subject, but very boring.”

Her Scandinavian accent leads her to pronounce her j’s as y’s—as in “subyecht”—and her o’s like ah—as in “bahring” instead of “boring.”

“Not at all,” I say. “I know a little bit about planning. I’ve written for Planning. It’s a magazine.”

“I have read this yuhrnal,” Greta says.

“You really read Planning?”

“Ja, this is true.”

Who would have thought?

“You are here for Christmas?” Greta asks.

“Yeah,” I say. “This is my first Christmas with Sinterklaas.”

“Ah. In Denmark, we have Jule Mander.”

“Jule Mander?”

“Ja. He is like your Santa Claus. Is same pahrson with different name.”

“Fat and happy?”

“Ja. Not like Sinterklaas.”

“Yeah. I don’t know about Sinterklaas. Creepy elves.”

And, potentially, racist in some circles.

“We call this elfs in Denmark, Jul Nisse,” she says. “They live in the attic.”

Ah, well. To each culture its own creepy nuances.

Greta and Eva announce they want Space Cakes, so we get and eat another round of them. Then, I roll a hashish and tobacco joint the size of a cigar and we pass it around until we we’re all coughing and red-faced.

Greta wonders if there are any good raves around, which I’m absolutely not up for. I suggest we go downstairs to dance.

We go down to the first floor. The club is even more crowded than it was earlier. A loud and fairly obnoxious punk band is playing onstage. The crowd is divided into two groups. There’s a thrashing, moshing mob in front of the stage. Behind that is a group that is alternately thrashing and dancing or standing and watching. They are surging back and forth like seaweed propelled by underwater currents, depending on the movement of the mob in front of them.

This is where we go.

Eva hangs on to me for a bit, but the crowd tosses us around.

We are pushed forward.

We are thrust backward.

We are slammed sideways.

We go in very different directions and all end up dancing with ourselves.

Eventually, I retreat to the back bar. I am drenched in sweat. My feet ache from having been stomped on several times. There is a bump on my left arm where I hit God only knows what in my ricochets around the dance floor.

I get a Heineken and watch the maelstrom in front of me, feeling unspeakably stoned and staggeringly drunk.

The Danish females to whom I have no attachment and to whom I will likely have none, as they leave for Copenhagen in the morning, are still thrashing away. I catch Greta’s eye and wave goodbye. She waves and blows me a kiss.

I emerge from the Melkweg on to the frigid streets of Amsterdam and walk in the general direction of my hotel, but get confused, and end up on the fringes of Amsterdam’s Red Light District. It is in full swing.

Now that I’m here, I will have a look see.

I walk up the Oude Zijds Achterburgwal, one of the two main canals that run through the neighborhood. It is ablaze with a rainbow of brightly lit signs advertising sex shops, porn shops, peep shows, live sex shows, nude bars, smoking cafés, souvenir shops and head shops. And, of course, dozens and dozens of scantily clad women of all ethnic persuasions are sitting in shop windows under red and pink lights.

I stroll the length of the other main canal, the Oude Zijds Voorburgwal, and wander into the myriad of narrow, cobblestone back streets and alleys that make up the heart of the Red Light District.

The mostly male crowd is rough and drunk, and clearly on the prowl.

I duck into a doorway on a quiet back alley, surreptitiously snort another line of heroin off the back of my hand and head back to the O.Z. Voorburgwal. The porn shops cater to every imaginable kink and fetish. And, now, many of them are decorated with twinkling Christmas lights. There are store windows filled with sex toys that attest to the boundless nature of human erotic tastes—leather, chains, latex, masks, studded collars, cock rings, discipline balls, nipple clamps, whips, vibrators, immense phalluses, grotesque blow-up dolls and toys catering to the straight, gay, bi, dominant, submissive, top, bottom, sadistic, masochistic, etc., etc., etc.

The dope and hash and alcohol are now clearly kicking my ass. One of the sex shops has an elaborate Christmas display in the window, including a Sinterklaas doll unlike any other I’ve seen in Amsterdam or anywhere else.

Sinterklaas is on all fours. His dark red pants are around his ankles. A doll dressed as an elf in black face is behind him.

The elf is violating Sinterklaas’s bum with a large, bright red phallus.

Ho ho ho, indeed.

I shake my head and chuckle. It’s definitely time to retire.

I turn in the direction of the Herengracht and walk through the icy wind back toward my hotel.

Robert Guskind has been writing for a long time. An award-winning Washington-based journalist and contributor to major national magazines and newspapers, he now lives very close to Manhattan, where he continues to write, shoot photographs and work on a book based on his travels and experiences as a reporter and formerly disreputable dope fiend. He is all better now and is a regular contributor to Cherrybleeds.