4. In The Navy

Red Peter had quite a temper. If he was mad at you, he threatened to convert your head into a summer cottage. And when you were not sufficiently impressed by this threat, he shouted at the bystanders, rolling up his sleeves, “Hold me before I commit a crime!”  

After years of speculation everyone wanted to know what would really happen if Peter was not held and he was allowed to have his way. In addition, no-one really knew what a converted summer cottage looked like.  

Willie Blowjob was in no way taken aback by the Red’s threats.  

“Did you hear something?” he asked Pierre.  

“Yes, it sounded like an old woman with arthritis,” said Pierre.  

 Red Peter was surprised that no one stopped him. The usual practice of rolling up the sleeves suddenly seemed a lot more hesitant. “Hold me, I’ll kill him!” he shouted again, but much less convincing than the first time.  

 The pub waited and did not respond.  

“Shall I hold you, Uncle Peter?” asked Esmé, who was drinking her chocolate milk. She felt sorry for Peter, because no one wanted to hold him.  

“I’ll fetch my gun!” he shouted at Willie Blowjob.  

“Yeah. Bye Peter! Do you feel safe to walk the street, or shall I walk with you?” Willie said, throwing two queens and an ace on the table.  

 Peter angrily walked out of the pub.  

“Peter, you still owe me seventy-five bucks!” I shouted after him.  

“As far as I’m concerned you can drop dead, everyone of you!” Peter shouted from the doorway.  

“Why is Uncle Peter so angry, Jack?” Esmé asked.  

“Uncle Peter has not eaten his veggies, and now Aunt Bethie won’t serve him desert,” I said.  

There were two British naval ships in the port of Amsterdam. Once they were moored, the crew of the ships spread throughout the Red Light District. They were tough guys, from England, Scotland and Wales. They were all professionals, so very different from the cake and jam sailors of the Dutch Navy. Once the Brits started to drink, no one could stop them.  

 Bethie, Red Peter’s wife, drew quite a lot of attention in her window. She weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds, but there were always guys who were charmed or aroused by women like her, which was demonstrated by the fact that she was able to pay her rent every day, and could give Peter his pocket money.  

 Bethie called to the Valhalla, where Peter had taken refuge. “Peter, these British sailors are taunting me,” she said. “Send them away, will you?”  

 Peter didn’t feel eager after that afternoon’s demise. “Just draw your curtains, then they will move on,” he said.  

 ”Can’t you come here with a couple of buddies, to teach these guys a lesson?” Bethie whined.  

What buddies? After this afternoon he had no buddies anymore; they all had let him down. “Don’t worry!” said Peter. “I’m coming!”  

Opposite the pub was Charles and Mina’s demolished house. Peter went amid the ruins and came out with a peace of lead pipe. He walked into the street. There were four or five big seamen in front of Bethie’s window, and apparently they had quite a lot of fun.  

 Peter held the lead pipe in his right hand and hit it rhythmically in his left hand.  

“Hey you! Fuck off and be quick about it!” he shouted. “Fuck off, or I’ll convert your heads into a summer cottage!”  

 The sailors laughed at the little thin man with his red RAF moustache. They were possibly even less impressed by his threats than Peter’s mates in the pub. Within seconds they had taken Peter’s lead pipe away from him, and when he opened his pocket knife to attack the sailors with it, one of them was forced to hit Peter with his own lead pipe.  

 Severely wounded, Peter was lying in the street and blood gushed from his head. The sailors showed a clean pair of heels, and Bethie, who had been in the front row seat behind her window all the time, called an ambulance.  

 Only three days later Peter was out of intensive care.  

The regulars of the Valhalla only heard what happened after Peter was taken to hospital. If he only had said what the problem was, the guys wouldn’t have allowed him to go on his own. Then they surely would have held him. And Bethie’s problem would have been solved in a less violent way.

3. Unusual Couples

Willie Blowjob and Eddy were both big, strong, thick and tattooed. Both drove a Mercedes, both had a big mouth and were braggarts. Eddy’s wife ran a whore house on the other side of the canal and Willie Blowjob owned a tattoo shop and a coffee shop. He got his nickname because a drunken woman in Tone’s nightclub once had given him a blowjob, in the presence of more than a hundred visitors.  

 I had watched it with horror. The biggest braggart of the Red Light District on a bar stool, with his back to the bar, a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other, while some drunken woman was on her knees before him…  

 Yet Eddy and Willie Blowjob were no real mates, they were more like an occasional duo.  

 Willie Blowjob and Pierre were real buddies. He and Pierre had spent time together in a psychiatric hospital, at Her Majesty’s pleasure, and were both equally disturbed.  

In the middle of winter Pierre had put his woman on the street for more than an hour, barefooted, as a punishment for not having earned enough. I brought her a pair of slippers, but she dared not to wear them out of fear that Pierre would find out that she was trying to get out of her punishment.  

Only yesterday, it was at least as warm as today, Pierre had called his woman from the pub. Ten minutes later she came in with a bucket of warm water, a towel, a washcloth, a bar of soap and a clean pair of socks.  

The pub was packed and while Pierre was playing cards at the habitué’s table, she washed his feet on her knees, rubbed them dry, put on clean socks and helped him into his shoes. When she was finished, he said, “There, now quickly return to your window and make some real money for daddy.”  

 Willie Blowjob and Pierre where two of a kind, like prussic acid and vitriol…  

Eddy was a jack. It was rumoured that he could flatten a drainpipe with his fists when he was drunk. Not one of these zinc or PVC pipes, no sir, a cast iron drainpipe! And not just one, no, a dozen in a row!  

Actually Eddy was kept quite heavily under the thumb of his woman. She did not want him in the house all day, so every day she gave him a hundred or two as pocket money, and he had to entertain himself outdoors. Eddy and Blonde Hansel were almost inseparable. Blonde Hansel was literally a small pimp and if you didn’t know them, you might get the impression that Eddy was Blonde Hansel’s bodyguard.  

Blonde Hansel was not bright, but he was slick. He had found a lender and was doing up a few small buildings, to use them as whore houses. He always brought Eddy with him, to smoothen negotiations. Their way of “negotiating” proved to be quite successful, because what good is a building to you if you run the risk that your windows are smashed, your house is set on fire, or if the brakes of your car are being cut? Obviously it’s better to sell the place and try to get some money out of it.  

 Eddy didn’t understand everything that Hansel said while he was negotiating, but he sat there and rubbed the knuckles of his fists, just like Hansel had told him to do. Eddy and Blonde Hansel were like the lame and the blind.  

Then there were the duo Harry and Billy, the Utrecht boys. Two young lads, with enough pocket money from their girls, but boredom drove them to steal expensive cars.  

Six months before, they robbed a truck with video and stereo equipment, and consequently everyone in the neighbourhood, except Bird and me, now had a VCR.  

Recently the boys were working for the Flower brothers. Under the inspiring leadership of dad Bram, brothers Tony and Chris Flower had built up a car dealership. They only traded expensive Mercedeses.  

Chris bought nearly new Mercedeses, which were a total loss after an accident. Tony then ordered Billy and Harry to steal cars of the same type and same colour in Germany. Then the wrecked cars’ chassis numbers were transferred to the stolen cars, which made the stolen cars “legal”, after which it was easy to get legal import documents for them.  

Beene and Van Hoek were from an entirely different calibre. These gentlemen were at the head of the Youth and Vice department of the police. Inspector Beene was a greying gentleman and adjutant Van Hoek was an ambitious young man.  

The inspector had always protected “his” girls, and they respected him. If a girl had been beaten up by her “protector”, and Beene found out, then this “hero” should better stay out of the Red Light District for a month or two.  

 Van Hoek cared less about the fortunes of the horizontal working womenfolk. He saw “organised crime” everywhere, which, at the time at least, testified to a lack of realism.  

Pretty soon Inspector Beene would retire, and everyone in the neighbourhood was holding his or her breath, as adjutant Van Hoek would be his successor. Nobody was waiting for this climber, which never had even bothered to win the confidence of the people in the neighbourhood.  

Apart from these odd couples, most people in the Red Light District were individualists, who all knew each other but who lived their own lives. Only if certain taboos were broken, the neighbourhood got involved. You didn’t steal from each other, you always paid your debts, you didn’t have sex with the woman of a neighbour (not as a customer and certainly not as a lover), and you didn’t grass on each other. Those were just about the simple rules you sticked to.  

When the women were wrangling at each other, the men negotiated, and if that didn’t work, it was men to men and women to women, and there were a few blows. The winner bought the loser a beer, right after the fight or a little later, and thus the matter was settled. The neighbourhood police had no need to regulate these affairs.  

 The residents were either “insiders” or “outsiders”, who nevertheless lived together peacefully, as long as they sticked to the rules. Bird, Meredith and I were typical “accepted outsiders”.  

Surinamese Erroll and Roy, however, were insiders, despite the fact that they were using heroin and cocaine. They came up in every respect to the expectations of a pimp. The unwritten rules were clear, uncomplicated. In Hamburg, Paris, Genoa and Antwerp it was not really different from here.  

I wondered how that was possible. Perhaps Bird could explain.

2. Johnny Boy

Outside it was already 22°C, but Johnny Boy was shivering and shaking as if it were dead of winter. If I wouldn’t open the pub quickly, he would go to auntie Mulder for a six-pack of lager.  

“Wow!” he grumbled when I opened the door, “You surely take your time, don’t you?”  

I swallowed a bite of meat and looked at my watch. “It’s 9.58, Johnny Boy. We open at ten and there’s nothing wrong with my watch.”  

“My biological clock tells me otherwise; it’s high time for a shot,” said Johnny Boy. Obviously he was in a grumpy mood.  

 I went behind the bar and poured him a shot of jenever (Dutch gin). Johnny Boy lowered his head to slurp the first sip. Then he took the glass in both hands and tried drinking the jenever without spilling it. He was shaking so bad that half of the precious contents dripped on the bar. After the third glass his hands were calmed and he was able to have a normal conversation.  

“Those meatballs smell good, Jack!” he said, just to have something to talk about.  

“Want one, John?” I asked.  

 Johnny Boy shook his head. “Oh no, I couldn’t eat anything! I need to be sick when I even smell food, especially during the day. Sometimes at night I could do with a burger or something, but during the day? Brrr!”  

 I wiped the spilled jenever from the bar, so that Johnny Boy could make his rollie. He was almost fifty, and the father of seven children, at least officially. He himself had his doubts about his paternity, because he had children in all sizes and colours, but no one even remotely resembled him.  

His ex, Pussy Meow, claimed that he indeed was the father of the kids, but her former colleagues were able to tell that in the past Pussy Meow was quite prepared to work without a condom, provided the customers rewarded this additional service appropriately.  

Johnny Boy had read many books about nature’s fickleness, and he was willing to believe a lot, but the fact that his eldest son Pete, for example, was as black as black could be, while he himself was as white as a milk bottle, left him with a lot of doubts.  

“Come on, Johnny, it was just a professional accident,” said the other regulars, which made him even sadder.  

When Pussy Meow was still working, Johnny Boy used to look after the children. Usually he did this very conscientiously, but sometimes it was all too much. Then he went on a pub crawl, for at least three days. On the last day of his drinking session he would go home for dinner, but Pussy Meow would make it very clear to him that she wouldn’t cook for him. Then Johnny Boy threw the pans and their contents out of the window, saying that when she didn’t need any pans if she wasn’t cooking. The pans that were thrown out of the kitchen window on the second floor, landed on top of the cars of window shopping gentlemen.  

The victims didn’t dare to report the criminal damage, out of fear that their wives would want an explanation for the fact that their cars were damaged in the Red Light District. (Reading this story, a lot of Dutch women may suddenly realise the cause of the many dents in the roof of the marital limousine.)  

 When Pussy Meow couldn’t afford to pay the rent of the house anymore, nor to maintain Johnny Boy and her seven children, she suggested that they would be divorced, so they would both benefit from social services. Johnny Boy, who thought that this would get him close to a thousand guilders per month, consented to it quickly. However, once the separation was a fact and the matrimonial home was registered in Pussy Meow’s name, she put another lock on the door and Johnny Boy had to stay outside.  

Once he had tried to use brute force to invade the house, but then Pussy Meow gave him a solid thrashing, and that was it.  

 Johnny Boy felt “badly screwed”. Since then he lived in a boarding house opposite the Valhalla, and spent his days drinking. Occasionally, he earned a little pocket money as a messenger boy.  

 He motioned me to pour him another glass of jenever.  

 He said, “Hey Jack, if I could live my life all over again, d’you know what I would do then?”  

 I shrugged. I didn’t expect an interesting confession.  

 ”Then I would marry Jane, because she has her own whore house. Or auntie Mulder, because then I would never have to pay for the beer.”  

“Right John, excellent choice,” I said, while I kept filling the fridge with bottles.

1. The Valhalla

When I finished vacuuming, I walked into the kitchen to get the minced meat from the fridge in order to come to room temperature. “From mixing cold minced you get arthritis,” my grandmother always used to say. Luckily I had cleaned the bar and the sinks the night before, so I didn’t have to do that this morning.  

 Already I was sweating, it would be a hot day, so there would be lots of thirsty customers. I heard the mail drop on the mat and walked into the bar to see how many last reminders there were today. What was I thinking when I agreed to run the pub? “Please, let me take care of the business for as long as it’s needed,” I said to Jerry, after he had ended up in an alcohol rehabilitation clinic. “I’ll keep running the joint and make sure you get rid of your debts. See to it that you get your life on the tracks.”  

 Actually I wasn’t that close to Jerry. More to Beth, Jerry’s deceased wife. Beth often visited me at home, on the Gelderse Kade. Sometimes she brought along a few bottles of cold beer, which we drank together. When she noticed she was ill, it was already too late to do anything about it; the cancer had advanced.  

 Jerry already drank a lot when Beth was still healthy, but when he knew she would die, there was nothing that could stop him. He was usually drunk when he came to visit her in hospital, sometimes in the company of some other drunks he picked up during his pub crawls, who knew that Jerry was very generous during these drinking episodes.  

 On her deathbed Beth asked me to keep an eye on Jerry. He was, despite of his forty-five years of age, still a child and he needed a guiding hand. I’d rather not be that guiding hand…  

 But what do you say, “Sorry girl, I know you’re going to pop off, but I’m not going to do it?” No, if I had said that, she would definitely have refused to die.  

 When I started to run the pub it was an absolute mess. After Beth’s death Jerry hadn’t cleaned the place once. A couple of working girls had taken a day off to help me cleaning and painting. Financially it was even a bigger mess: just for the water more than a thousand guilders needed to be paid. Imagine the bills of the gas, electricity, telephone and the brewery…  

The brewery only accepted cash payment, and only after I had explained that Jerry was in rehab for at least a year. They wanted to be sure that Jerry wasn’t in any way involved in the business. The same applied to the gas and electricity companies; they had to recall the men who were on their way to disconnect the pub.  

 Miraculously there were no reminders today. Gradually things went in the right direction, that was after working eight months, seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, while handing over all of the profits, except for a couple of bucks for my own expenses, directly to the creditors.  

I seasoned the meat, added breadcrumbs and eggs, and began mixing the mince with my hands. My meatballs were world famous throughout the Red Light District; not a day passed without all hundred of them being sold out. Actually it were those meatballs that helped the pub getting out of the red. They cost one guilder, people paid two guilders for them, and it was all in the black.  

“I’m just off for a meatball with mayo in the Valhalla,” was a common excuse to spend some time in the Red Light District.  

Nobody knew exactly how the pub came to its name “Valhalla”. Jerry and Beth bought the establishment more than twenty years before, and it was already called that way then.  

 Many people suspected that the name had something to do with paradise: first you visit a prostitute and then you enjoy a nightcap in the bar. The more sceptical clients thought that paradise was more referring to the welfare of the pimps, who were literally filling their pockets.  

However, I strongly believe that the name was referring to the classical meaning of the “hall of the slain”, who after their death were welcomed by Odin. Everyone who visited the pub regularly, had on several occasions in his or her lifetime been “slain”, and Odin was the drink that flowed abundantly.  

 The meatballs started to colour nicely. I turned them with a fork. I wasn’t too keen on traditional meatballs cooked in gravy for hours and hours. I like them freshly fried until crisp, pinkish inside, with mayonnaise.  

 They were perfect. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was one minute to ten. The joint needed to be opened. How could I let Johnny Boy wait outside?

Introducing the main characters

“Café Valhalla” is a series of fictionalised stories from the Amsterdam Red Light District. Let me introduce the main characters to you:

Picture yourself the Mitchell family from Eastenders, featuring Peggy Mitchell as a madam, Phil Mitchell as a pater familias, his girlfriend Shirley Carter as his wife, Kat Moon as his girl on the side, and Roxy Mitchell as a bartender, and you have the average Amsterdam Red Light District family in the 1970s, early 1980s.  

Picture, if you wish, Phil Mitchell as Willie Blowjob, Peggy Mitchell as madam Jane, Shirley Carter as Carla, Kat Moon as Inge, and Ronnie Mitchell as Angela. Picture Jack Branning as Peter, Max Branning as Billy, Roxy Mitchell as Rose, Ryan Malloy as Rotterdam Bert, and yes, why not, Stacey Slater as his wife Patricia. 

For other main characters we have to step outside Eastenders. Frank Gallagher from Shameless would make a perfect Johnny Boy, Rab C Nesbitt could easily be Jerry, the alcoholic owner of the Valhalla, Ani DiFranco with a bald head would make a very nice Meredith, while I would pick Robert DeNiro with a grey beard for the part of gangster Menachem Tulip, and John Rebus as Police Commissioner Towers.

My friend Bird, the philosophy professor who was a regular in my pub, would be depicted in an excellent way by Bill Bailey, as himself.  

Which remains me, Jack. What was I like in those days? I would say a bit like Alan Alda in M.A.S.H.  

Introduction shot 

Morning life in the Red Light District was slow, slower than in other urban areas, because the night life takes its toll. It would still take several hours, at around 3.30pm, before the less desperate whores and their partners would arrive, in their fancy, flashy cars.  

Three canals with old houses and warehouses, linked by narrow alleys, were the Amsterdam Red Light District. Only the upper floors of the houses were inhabited; virtually every ground floor was designed for prostitution. Apart from that you would find hundreds of bars, nightclubs and sex shops, and, in Chinatown, Chinese restaurants, shops, physicians, opium dens, etc. It was hard to find a “normal” supermarket, butcher shop, or bakery shop, you needed to go “to town” for those.  

 The sun shone brightly. Some students cycled over a bridge. An early prostitute opened the curtains of her workspace to pick up her first client. There was actually a traffic jam on the canal, because a van stopped to deliver goods at the Chinese supermarket. The driver of the van was unperturbed by the other cars blowing their horns. He kept his good spirits and sang a song, “Wished I could be with you,” while he winked at the beautiful black woman in the window next to the shop.