im in england now, by the way

2006-02-27, 11:50 p.m.

You should know that every little bit of my life has been determined by what some would consider the seedy bits of sexuality. My parents met in an �underground� film class, underground must have been an ambiguous title for the free love generation. I imagine my mother coming into class first with one of her giggly friends, books carried by hands covered with a veil of flowing hair. My dad must have come in next with his skinny legged war buddy, already itching to light up a joint when class was over. She thought it was an art nouveau film forum and he thought it was a porn class; I am the immaculate pornographic conception.
Move forward twelve, with me at age 3, flaunting a naked body and two socks of Virginia soil. My parents were married but they were conspiring to delve into the red light vacation. It was not intended to be this way, me always pushed by the sultry trade winds of eroticism. It just� happened, like a fire bomb in a restaurant, like a collapsing bridge, like a million supernovas that no human has witnessed. My mother and father agreed to save up for a trip to Amsterdam, to get away from the rural Baptists and burning crosses of the Appalachian mountain range. I think my dad could only faintly grasp the reality of a place where prostitutes sat in windows with cups of strong Danish coffee matched by mocha colored skin and French roast fishnets. Maybe he could, maybe he could picture hash cafes that lined the streets just like the strip malls and churches in our home town. Regardless, he told my consenting mother -whose gavel must have been wrought from the hand of Athena- that in Amsterdam he would be a �free man�. I can only think of one image to describe my dad walking down the cobbled streets of that sin city: The change filled hands of a child in a candy store.
So he took that change and emptied it into jars. Every day he would come home with the less precious (but OH so precious to father) pennies and dimes that he had accumulated during the day, and dispatch them into rusted Planter�s peanut jars. One by one, the jars bloomed into bright blue and yellow flowers that smelled like a European summer, and soon the bouquet was complete. That summer we ventured out to California for a week, something to tide my parents over before the big trip. This may seem entirely unrelated, as a trip to the west coast to visit relatives hardly seems like a rendezvous with the mile long legs of an Amsterdam streetwalker, but love was spurned nonetheless.
My parents never made it to Europe, they fell in love with the rolling curves and the come hither winds of the pacific coastline. They talked with my Uncle about the Pacific ocean and neo-hipster mindset of the West Coast. Then, red eyed and giggly, the bouquet was planted in the fertile loins of Northern California with everything else we owned, and I cleaned off the Virginia soil from my feet.
Now I�m 21 and closer than ever to Amsterdam, certainly closer than my dad has ever been. So I call my mom and I tell her I read a book about a prostitute in Amsterdam, and she tells me that book is the reason we were able to afford moving to California. She says I need to go there, to see the cobble streets and the luxurious vixens in the shop windows, the hazy smoke filled hash bars, and the rippling tides of the last living sin city.