AMSTERDAM'S "HOUSES WITH BOYS"

 

Nothing I expected to see in Europe intrigued me more then the boy brothels (or as they are called in guides 'Houses with boys') of Amsterdam.   Indeed seeing the brothels was the reason I had taken the early  bullet train from Paris (leaving much of the Louver unseen), and headed for Amsterdam.  

What would a male bordello be like?  Planning a trip of gay Europe for a gay magazine I was writing for, I had spent a good deal to time and imagination on this question.  I had envisioned skuzzy little rooms full of hard looking straight boys, straddle-legging tin folding chairs, trying to look like James Dean;  and I had envisioned  elegant tall rooms decked in gold guilt and red velvet sofas sporting languid queens in various stages of undress!

What would it really be like?  I was about to find out.

Standing on a downtown Amsterdam sidewalk facing a simple street door, I tried to relax the muscles that squeezed my larynx and I knew would make my voice a small high wail.  As collected as I was likely to become, I quickly took one last gulp of still innocent street air, opened the door, and stepped into one of the rarest of the worlds institutions: a male brothel.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I found myself in a small, simple, bar, not unlike the kind of place you would be pleased to find off the dining room of a county hotel some place in rural America.  Windowless, it was a comfortably lit room of some fifteen by twenty five feet.   Across from the door where I stood was the bar itself, the mirrored back-bar reflecting bottles in neat rows, it was like a hundred bars I had been in, a thousand. 

There were ten or twelve stools at the bar itself and across from it, by the entry door, was a sofa which sat facing it.  Beyond this sofa at the end of the room was a smaller sofa and one or two large stuffed chairs.  The general ambiance of the place was that of an agreeably masculine and, while not elegant,  in no way seedy, drinking establishment

There were some eight or nine men in the bar including a middle aged gentleman sitting talking to the bartender. The bartender was a nice looking young man perhaps in his late twenties or early thirties.   I headed for the safety of the bar before I risked a glance back toward the boys themselves.

Sorting themselves out on the sofas and chairs was an assemblage of some half dozen or so young men.  They had the slow, relaxed and slightly self-conscious movements of those with great energy and no place particularly to go.  I smiled as amiably as I could, my drink in hand, and looked them over.

Each young man met my eyes and each, according to his temperament, grinned or smiled or in some way acknowledged me as my eyes fell on him.  One stood out.  He was an extremely handsome boy, probably the youngest of the group.  He was short and dark with glossy black hair and  his skin showed the rich highlights of a Southern Mediterranean complexion.  Even across the room I could see that he had extraordinary eyes, dark and filled with mischief and boyish humor.  Like the other boys he was casually and fully dressed.

I turned back to the bar and tried to settle down with a beer. 

Slowly, almost without intent, the short dark boy drifted over to the bar and stood next to me, seeming concentrated on getting the bar tenders attention.  I turned slightly on my stool and looked at him close range.  I smiled.   He tipped his face toward me only a little and smiled carefully, as one will who encounters a stranger to whom he has not yet decided he wants to talk. 

Uncertain, I turned away.  As I did so the boy abandoned what had apparently been an effort to entice me by seeming disinterest and, leaning on his forearm, slid up the bar toward me.  His smile, now devoid of coquetry, was a full, youthful grin, which seemed to say: 'well now, we've played hard to get, so let’s talk!'.

"Hello" he said in an accent that seemed to speak words of  the syllables as if there were both the words "hall" and "low" in the word “Hello”.  I turned a little toward him and looked through the lush foliage of his long lashes into his splendid dark eyes.  I nodded and smiled slightly.  The handsome boy seemed not to know what to say next so he just grinned at me. 

Seeming not to know what else to do, he reached out and took my hand from the bar and held it between his: "I am Carlo." He said, leaning closer to me.  

"Hello Carlo" I said, "What brings you here?" 

The question was foolish and ingenious but I had not expected it would through Carlo as completely as it seemed to do.  He looked at me, to stumped even to grin.  He opened his mouth as if to say something,  closed it again, and then grinned.  

"He works here" said another, taller, boy with bleached-to-white hair who had been lingering just near enough to hear our conversation.  "So do I", he said.  And then: "Carlo doesn't speak much English".  This blond boy spoke in a perfect Midwestern accent.  

"He doesn't have to" I said.  But the blond boy withdrew from the boy and I. 

"What do you do here?" I asked Carlo.  I was feeling somehow bolder and this had become a serious question, a way of getting to the business of the place. 

"I fuck!"  Carlo seems to delight in this good foreign word 'fuck'.   "I fuck you!" he says, "right now!".   

"But Carlo I just got here." 

Now Carlo leans toward me and laughs softy in my ear.  "I fuck you in the ass till you can stand up!"  This had the sound a learned phrase, and he had missed the contraction for 'can't'

"No, Carlo", I said,  "I need to have a drink and relax.  Maybe later."  Carlo put his hand on my thigh and letting it slide down to my knee, squeezed before he reluctantly pulled it away. 

When Carlo had gone.  The blond boy sat down on the bar stool beside me.  I turned to him.  His white hair was cut short, almost a crew cut, 50s style.   He asked the bar tender for something I did not recognize and when he was served looked over at me.  He was a nice looking boy, with an honest and straightforward American face.  He was slim and dressed casually.  His movements were slow and thoughtful.  He spoke in a manner that suggested some understanding between us, probably because we were both Americans.  "Carlo is Italian" he said.  "He hasn't been here very long." 

"He's in the right business," I said, "He's absolutely beautiful." 

The blond boy smiled and nodded, happy to acknowledge Carol's good looks.   He put his hand out to me:  "My name is Terry." He said.

"Where you from Terry?"  I asked.

"You can't guess?"

I grinned,  "Where in Americas?"  

"Cleveland" he said.  I went to school in Chicago.  He turned and studied the glass in his hand for a moment and then said: "You like Carlo?" he was offering to make the needed arrangements.

"Do you speak Italian?" I asked.

"No, but I can tell Carlo anything you want me to."  He said. 

"No that's all right. I'm going to have a drink and relax, I've been sight seeing all day."

After Terry had appreciated my choice of Amsterdam sights he said: "You don't have to rush you know." He looked away from me, over at the other boys.  "In fact you can just have a drink and talk to the boys if you want to, you don't have to go with anyone."  In this way Terry set himself up to be my guide. 

I asked him if he liked working here and other questions about himself.  He was twenty four he told me, he had a degree in philosophy from Northwestern.  He had held various jobs he said but had always been sexually compulsive.  He loved what he was doing now, he loved the work and hanging out with the other boys.   He made quite a bit of money he told me.  Most of all, he loved the sexuality of this work.  Terry was a serious and bright young man and I came to believe his claim that he had a degree in philosophy from Northwestern..

I asked him if he didn't get tired sitting around all day like he seemed to be doing on this day.  Sure, he said, but some days he was very busy.  I asked him how he kept it up on busy days.   He grinned, appreciating my simple minded reference to the tool of his trade but answered the question straightforwardly.  Not all his clients insisted that he cum, he said, indeed many did not care or didn't want him to orgasm during sex. 

"But if they want you to you will?" I asked. 

"O yes.!"  He shrugged, "What ever the client wants, he gets."  

"Anything?" I asked. 

"Sure," Terry said,  "It isn't cheap.".  

"What does it cost?" I asked. 

"Two hundred Guilder."  It took little math to translate that into approximately $100,  American.  "It's got to be safe."  Terry said, "otherwise anything". 

"So Carlo meant it when he offered to fuck?"  

"Sure" Terry grinned warmly.  "I would to." 

"And you get fucked too?" I asked. 

"With a condom, sure." He said.  "Almost all of us do."   

"But not all?" I pressed. 

"No." He said firmly, "Carlo doesn't." 

"Carlo Doesn't?" 

"No," Terry leaned toward me confidentially, "Carlo is dead straight, he's got girlfriends all over Amsterdam."  Terry and I chuckled over this and I bought him a beer. 

"Carlo probably will later, but he doesn't now" 

This was an intriguing statement. "Why later?" I asked. 

"Well he has to give up clients."  Terry said.  "If that's what a client wants he won't go with a boy that won't do it." He explained. 

"But you think Carlo will change?" 

"Probably.  Someone will offer him a big tip or one of the boys will get him past the first time."  

I was envisioning this exotic scene.  "You would do this for Carlo" I asked? 

Terry grinned at me, his first really enthusiastic grin, this was not the first time he had thought of Carlo's cherry ass.  

Terry swung around on the bar stool.  "See anyone you like?" he said.

"Sure, I like them all."  I said.  "I like you."

"No, you don't like me, not that way."

Terry was right and his acknowledgment of it let us drop our roles of 'boy' and, 'perspective client.'

"What's that big blond like." I said looking at a large bodied kid with a knee over the arm of  sofa.  "He's good" Terry said, "got a big cock.  He dances in the theater".   

"You have a theater?"

"Yeah we have live shows on Friday and Saturday night and on special occasions."  I noted that this was Thursday afternoon. 

"His name is Frederick, he likes the S&M room,"  Terry's gaze drifted back from Frederick to me, "You like S&M?" he asked.

"Never tried it." I said truthfully.

"You should, we have a good set up here."  I looked at Frederick's large hard body.   I wondered what it would be like being disciplined by Frederick?  Or, more interesting, disciplining Frederick.  Terry and I talked about some of the other boys, one was Canadian, two were German.  There were no Asians or black boys.  I asked Terry about it.  "We have a couple of black boys,"  Terry said, "I don't think any Asians."  This question about Asian boys seemed to interest Terry.  He turned to the barman and asked if they had any Asian boys.  The barman considered this.  "Not right now," he said, "We could probably get one." He glanced at me.  "No," Terry said, "We were just talking."

"I'd like to talk to the manager". I said. 

Terry looked at me focusing "Why?" he asked. 

"I'd like to do an article on the place." I said. 

"Your a writer?" This seemed to cast me in a different light in Terry's eyes and he looked at me for a moment perhaps adjusting his notion of why I was here, then called to the barman.  "He's a writer, he wants to talk to Tommy.  Will Tommy see him?"

"I don't think Tommy dose interviews anymore."  The barman said, addressing me directly.

"Why not?"

"It seems like every time he does he gets fucked over.  You know they come in here and every thing is great then you get the article and its all this trash and sensationalism.  Expose stuff.  He just decided not to give anymore interviews" 

"Your talking about the straight press." I said, "I write for a gay American magazine." 

"Which one?"  The barman asked.  I told him: "The Guide"  out of Boston".  The barman nodded noncommittally.  "You can ask." He said. 

We arranged that the Barman would mention me to Tommy and that I would return the next night after the Friday show to see if Tommy would talk to me.   Terry introduced me to a couple more of the boys as I prepared to leave.  They looked warmly into my eyes as they shook my hand and gave their names and smiled, hoping I would relieve the boredom of the long quite afternoon and put a little cash in their pockets.

 

 

I returned at 19:00 the next night, in time for a drink before the show in the theater at 20:00.   The bar was full of men waiting for the show and boys chatting with them.   I paid the barman FL 30.00 to see the show and ordered a drink.   I didn't ask if he had spoken to Tommy about the interview.   I watched the boys as they moved among the older men talking, smiling intimately into their eyes, but moving on easily.  The men chatted with the boys and each other, drank comfortably and one went off with a boy through the door at the end of the bar.    Most, however seemed to be waiting for the show.

I took a front seat in the small theater.   The stage was not more then nine feet wide by six feet deep.  As the lights dimmed an unseen announcer introduced "Danny and Frederick".    The lights faded up on a young man of perhaps twenty five, dressed in a glittering G-string.  His oiled skin was the color of hickory wood, dark and lustrous, his body was superbly proportioned and  perfectly sculpted,  the natural muscularity of a dancer, lacking gym-worked bulk.  Strictly speaking his face was strong featured and masculine rather than handsome.  Backed against a narrow curtain Danny moved to the music with rhythmical slowness in the embrace of a second set of arms and hands which came from behind a curtain so that their owner could not be seen.  This second set of hands,  along with his own, slid over the ripples and muscular intricacies of Danny’s body from knee to neck.  Soon, however, the Frederick I had met in the bar the previous afternoon, dressed also in a small G-string, emerged from behind the curtain. After some undulating sexual simulations, both boys stepped down from the low stage and came into the audience.  Each boy moved among and briefly engaged the audience members, a brushing hand, a lascivious grin, even a light kiss.   When they reached the rear of the small auditorium  they seemed to hesitate briefly, I could not tell what they were doing.  When they came back down the isle toward the stage however both boys had removed their G-strings. Danny had achieved a full erection.  Perhaps since I was sitting directly in front of the stage  Danny lay briefly across my lap, as he had not on others, and leaned back so that his enormous erection pointed directly at my face.  His grin acknowledged the enormity of the temptation he was placing before me.  He teased me by wiggling the first knuckle of his forefinger between my lips before he withdrew. 

Then the two young men remounted the stage, and dancing to the music, played at fucking and then took turns sucking  each other.  Through it all Danny's erection remained enormous and reliable.  Frederick's penis was huge, as Terry had promised, but did not maintain so rigid a standard as his partner.

When the show was over I returned to the bar which was once again full and active.  The men were excited and the boys eager.   There was now a second man behind the bar whom I realized was Tommy.  I ordered a drink and waited on opportunity to talk to him.  

When he brought me the second beer I introduced myself and asked him if he was Tommy.  He nodded that he was.  It seemed the barman had mentioned me.   Tommy was, tentatively, willing to talk to me.  

It seemed important to Tommy that I was from the American gay press.  He said:  "As soon as we're not so busy I'll show you around."  Then: "You want to look at the book?"

I didn't know what 'the book' was but I said I wanted to see it and took my beer through the doorway that separated one end of the bar.  I took a stool against the wall and Tommy laid a photo album on the bar in front of me.  "The Book" had a page devoted to each boy that the place had to offer.  I looked through its luxury of perhaps twenty or twenty-five boys pictured in various appealing posses, non were fully nude.  As I sat there, I began to appreciate what was going on at that end of the bar.  If the bar itself was a place for the men and boys to meet and pair up this end was 'dispatch'.   A boy, having been chosen by a client, brought him back to that end of the bar where he was given a key to a room, towels and whatever else was needed.  The room assignments were done for the most part by Tommy.

"S&M room" a tall sturdy boy with sandy hair said in English heavily accented with Dutch.  Tommy and I both glanced at the man with him.  He was a tall lean fellow, nice looking, perhaps forty.  Tommy pulled a box from under the counter and placed it in front of the boy, then placed  a short back whip down beside the box.  "Hat's in the box" Tommy said to the boy.  "You can pay now." He said to the man. "The room is being cleaned, it will be a few minutes." 

This request for payment in advance was said easily and was meant as a connivance, something to fill the time that the man had to wait for the room.  I had observed earlier  customers paying on leaving, not on entering.

 I didn't know what the "Thai room" was but I noticed that it and the "S&M room" were more expensive, at two hundred and ninety guilders, but for an hour and a half not just an hour. 

Finally a boy brought a man to the counter and was told that all the rooms were in use.  This seemed to distress the boy, he fidgeted and glanced at his customer.  He  had made his date and now had no place to take him.  "Take him in the Theater and entertain him."  Tommy said.  And then to the customer:  "I'm sorry it'll be a few minutes, you can wait with Peter in the theater if you want."  The man seemed perfectly happy with this arraignment and followed Peter into the small theater.

It was perhaps an hour before Tommy got back to me, though we did in that hour, as he performed his dispatch duties at my end of the bar, exchange comments and generally strike up an easy relationship.

 Finally Tommy said:  "Come on, I'll show you the rooms."

I had a number of questions for Tommy and I asked them as he escorted me through the building.

"How do you select the boys" I asked.

"We look for good clean cut boys"  Tommy held the door to a large room open for me,  "They don't have to be super good looking, they have to be nice, good to talk to.  They need to have an average to good body.  We talk to boys between 18 and up to about 30 or so."

We were standing in a large windowless room which had a queen size bed on one wall, a large television against the wall facing the bed and a nicely tiled open shower in the corner. "This is an average room." He said, "most of  the rooms are busy so I can't show you more right now, but there are all about like this."    He flipped a switch on a small panel above the bed and the room was flooded with romantic mood music, turning the switch the music became rock then, with one more twist of the knob, western.   With the exception of the missing window the room was reminiscent of an upper-end hotel room.  Still there was sexiness!  The only thing to which I could attribute this was the fact that the big bed had only a bottom sheet and two big pillows.

I asked the question that had been on my mind from the time I first thought of coming here:  "How do you know if a boy will work out?  Dose someone try them out?"

I was concerned that this question was somehow to 'intimate' but Tommy was not offended.  "No," he said easily, "The boys come here and ask for a job, we never advertise or solicit boys to work here.  They come to us.  If I like them I have them fill out an information form and I take them to a room and interview them.  If I'm not sure about the boy's body I may ask him to take off his close, but not usually.  If  everything is all right then we give them a few days trial, usually three days."  Thus, Tommy finished off my favorite fantasy job, hiring boys for a bordello.

"Could I get a copy of the information form?" I asked.  Tommy thought about this for a moment then told me to remained him when we got back to the  bar.

"Do you have to train them?"  No, Tommy said, the boys knew what they were doing, if they didn't it would soon become obvious, the customers would tell him.   We do have a video they can look at before they go into the Thai room.  With the S&M either they did it or they didn't, it was up to the boy.

"How long do the boys usually stay". 

"Usually about six months."  Tommy said.  He opened a drawer in the little table beside the bed and revealed all the simple tools of the trade, condoms, lubricants,  some massage oil.  He demonstrated the versatility of the lighting, which dimmed and grew brighter at the turn of a second dial beside the bed.  "Some boys stay a year or two."  He said. 

"How do you handle the health problems."

"A government health worker comes here to test the boys for STDs every three weeks.  The boys are very clean and healthy, if we didn't keep them healthy we would be shut down."  He said simply.  I had the growing impression that Tommy was showing me around this House With Boys out of a sense of pride. That when he opened a door to a room he knew I would be impressed, when he talked about the behavior he required of his boys it was with the same sense of accomplishment and standard that any good business man would have in a successful and recognized business.  "If the boy wants to get tested for AIDs he can get the test from the health worker, its all a government program, the boys don't pay."

"The boys aren't all tested for AIDs then?”  I asked.

"No, we can't require it, its against the law.  They have to practice safe sex anyway so it doesn't matter"  I asked him what was regarded as safe sex.  He said that sucking was considered safe but cumming in the mouth was discouraged.  Anal sex with a condom was regarded as safe.  Unprotected anal sex was forbidden.

"The boys do anal sex then."

"They don't have to." Tommy told me.  It's up to them and what they and client agree to.  The rule is that the boy has to find out what the client wants while they are still in the bar.  “If the boy doesn't want to do what the client says he wants, then the client is free to find a different boy.” Tommy explained, “But the boy has to say what he will do or won't do while they are still in the bar, he has to tell the client in advance, so there is no disagreement in the room.”

“Can the boy charge more for different things?" I asked.

                Tommy told me emphatically that this was strictly forbidden.  All the negotiation was done in the bar before the boy takes the man into the room, what ever is agreed on is what the boy must do in the room and he cannot ask for more money.   The man can tip if he likes the boy, but the boy cannot pressure the customer for tips or sell extra service.  This seemed to be an absolute rule of the house.

"Do your customers fall in love with the boys?"  I asked.  Tommy seemed to misunderstand the question.   He told me that any outside relationship between a boy and a client he meets in the business is absolutely forbidden.  A boy who dates a customer on the side, Tommy said, would be fired.

The S&M room, which Tommy told me had recently been  refurbished, was a new experience for me.  Some of the devices were obvious enough, a rack for neck and wrists, leaving the body bent double at the hips and the ass exposed, was easy to understand, so was the rack with black leather straps for wrists and ankles to spread-eagle a man.  A collection of whips, restraining equipment, plastic and leather phallus and other devises to be strapped on a body were hung neatly on one wall or lay enigmatically. On a row of shelves.  A kind of gymnasts side horse, but fitted out with manacles and straps, intrigued me.  It was not impossible to visualize my friend Carlo strapped across it.

"What Is that?"  I asked pointing at a cage, about the size of a traveling crate for a medium sized dog, but made of heavy iron bars.  This device  was hung from a ceiling-anchored pulley by a rope system that allowed it to swing a few inches off the floor.   Tommy detached the rope from a hook on the wall and raised it up so that the cage floor was above knee height.   This he seemed to offer as an explanation.  I looked at it still unable to apprehend what was apparently so obvious to Tommy.   "But what does it do?"  I asked.

"You get inside it."  Tommy said, suddenly realizing the extent of my ignorance, “or the boy does”.   It seemed impossible to me for a man to get inside so small a cage.  But then I realized that if a man were to be forced inside the cage his head would be  crowded against the bars at one end and his ass helpless against the other.  The bars, while close, were not so close as to preclude the body of anyone in the cage from being enjoyed from outside it.  Again I thought of Carlo learning one of the tricks of his trade, the one he has so far not mastered, through the bars of this ingenious devise.

               The Thai Room was much like the other rooms only next to the shower was a large shallow soft water mattress.  It was here that a customer could enjoy the Thai massage which, Tommy told me, involved the full length rubbing together of oil slathered naked bodies.

"How long have you been in the business."  I asked Tommy.

"Ten years."  He seemed quite satisfied with this.  I didn't have the courage to ask if he had once been a 'boy', he certainly was a good looking man, though maybe a little old now.  

Tommy began to talk about Dutch Politics and his expectation that his would become the first fully licensed male brothel in the world.   Contrary to what Americans seemed to believe, Tommy told me,  the brothels of Amsterdam, his own included, are still illegal.  He was not sure when legalization  was to happen but seemed to think it a natural result of a rather complex political realignment that was taking place in the Netherlands.   Legitimization of prostitution, including male prostitution, in Amsterdam, according to Tommy, was to be the result of an unlikely coalition of the left and right wings of Netherlands politics, which, in coming together, would form a presumably more radical government then that of the long ruling centrist party.   He told me, with obvious pride, that the Federal  Minister of Health of the current government had come here (rather then a heterosexual brothel), to see how a brothel should be run.  

Several Houses With Boys had been closed, Tommy said, because they employed boys under eighteen, or permitted drugs, some even were accused of importing boys from the Balkans and holding them more or less as sex slaves.   In general, he told me, the government was getting the industry ready for legalization.

I asked him about his relation with the Police.  There was a special unit of the Police that dealt with  the red light establishments he said, if he needed Police he called them just like any other business.    He had only done so twice in ten years." He told me.  "I had one guy who would not pay and another that was drunk and disorderly. 

Tommy led me back to the bar and set up a beer.  I asked him about the questionnaire he had mentioned.  He got me a copy from under the bar.

"This is what we ask the boys to fill out when they first come here" Tommy said:

The title at the top of the single sheet was:  "SEX BOYS"   Directly under that was the first principle of employment spelled out in capital letters: 

 

"WE WILL ONLY EMPLOY BOYS WILLING TO ENGAGE IN FULL GAY SEX ACTIVATES WITH THE CLIENTS, BOYS WHO SIMPLY WISH TO LIE THERE AND LET THE CUSTOMER DO THE WORK CAN WORK ELSEWHERE.

 

Further down and underlined it read:

 

ALL OUR BOYS:

MUST BE PREPARED TO KISS, CUDDLE, LICK, & SUCK COCK AND BALLS.  MUST BE ABLE EITHER TO FUCK, GET FUCKED OR BOTH.

 

Under a double line was the questionnaire section of the form which asked for the Name of the boy (first name only), Age,  Height,  weight, cock size (when erect) and whether the boy was circumcised or uncircumcised.

 

Under the heading:      "SUCKING:"  Was a notice which informed the boy that: 

 

"ALL BOYS MUST BE PREPARED TO SUCK COCK, WITHOUT CONDOM IS PERFECTLY SAFE."

 

And under the heading  "FUCKING"  the new boy would learn that:

 

"BOYS WILLING TO GET FUCKED WILL ALWAYS EARN MORE MONEY"

 

Then the boy was asked if he were:  ACTIVE, PASSIVE OR BOTH  And told that only boys who are willing to get fucked will be sent on outside escorts.   The last question on the sheet asked about the boy's interest and experience with S&M.

I folded the questionnaire into my note pad and tuned on the bar stool to survey the room.   I had wanted to watch the pairing off process in more detail.  I assumed this would happen after the show but I had been glad to go instead with Tommy on the tour.  Now I watched as several men sat drinking at the bar.  It was as though the gliding past, the friendly and lingering smiles, had all been exchanged and the men at the bar were being left to their drinks.  The boys lounged on the sofas waiting, bored, and talking to each other.   

Carlo was there, his devastating grin and his beautiful dark eyes snapping as ever, but we had already talked, he would not approach me again unless I invited him.   I studied each of the boys.  Each boy smiled as I look at him, but I invited none to approach me.  Except Carlo none of the boys available now had been here in the afternoon . Terry had told me that there was the afternoon shift (12:00 to 19:00), and the night shift, which was on now and would work till all clients had gone, sometime after 2:00 AM.

At the far end of the room a door opened and the blond dancer, Frederick, came into the bar.  He was followed a moment later by Danny who was dressed as if for the street, including a light jacket.  This seemed to be their first entrance after their performance in the theater.  Frederick settled comfortably on a sofa with the other boys.  Danny stopped just inside the door and looked down the bar at the seated men.  When his eyes came to me I held his look and so he came round the bar and down to me.

"You like the show?" he said in clear but heavily accented English .   "Very much." I said.

Danny grinned at me and then nodded his head in the direction of the end of the bar and the hall that led to the rooms.  He let the set of his eyebrows and his slightly opened lips ask the silent question:  Did I want to go to a room with him?

I looked at him for  a long moment and then said.  “No, I have a big day tomorrow.