The other thing a Gonzo journalist needs to know, is how long his bills are being paid for. Aaron made it exquisitely clear that he was not paying for my Grand Tour, and I think I heard him toss off three days as a figure., which means I can stretch it to four - kind of like going sixty-one in the old fifty-five m.p.h. scheme, and knowing you won't be made to suffer for it. But the injured Hell of it is that I had not a whole lot interesting happen to me in the first four days. The piece nearly got hijacked by a low-budget, garden variety tale of a treacherous out-call girl and her pimply Iranian pimp/pusher boyfriend . . . but then the ecstasy started coming on, and revenge was no longer the best rush in town. & there was a night when I got involved in a savage fantasy featuring Courtney Cox and her body double, and I thought for a day or so that I might get some writing mileage out of that one.

It was around day seven when things began picking up the brilliant overtones uniques to the Big Mystical Adventure. A quick mental survey told me it had been nearly a decade since my last significant sojourn in the weird world. Really good acid doesn't come around my neighborhood as often as it should.

The guarantors of Smoke will have a many vital and well-founded questions about my trip to Amsterdam. It is unusual for a 2,500-word piece (which now looks like it will top 3k) to take eight days to accomplish; probably it is more unusual that such a trip breaks five figures in expenses. Ah, let us burn yet another branch on the pyre of journalistic ethics.

Your money goes quickly in Amsterdam. Or it has mine. I had been here 16 hours, and already I had spent $600: cab fare from the airport to the hotel @$45; a no-frills hotel in the museum district @$150/night; $200 for the hooker; $60 for two 3-gram baggies of hashish (not a lot, to the naked eye, but yr hash seems to stretch nice & far in Amsterdam . . .), another $60 for three baggies of freeze-dried psylocibin - which is over-the-counter material (or at least until this article comes out) at head-shops Amsterdam-wide, and about $40 at a Transylvanian fish-house, whose manager put me immediately on edge. Persons from or around the Mediterranean, I've concluded, are the most provincial on earth - a paranoiac, rigidly suspicious strain, which probably has something to do w/ guarding the hallowed secrets of the Son of the Real Jehova - I read a good paperback on the subject once, got it in an airport - but none of that matters now.

What I was after, after being forced by the autocratic young owner to clean my plate of the paella ("This is the best food," he kept repeating, "Best food in all Amsterdam. You don't like. We fix you something else. Come on, eat, this is best food . . ."), what I was after was the name of a good jazz club. I was in the mood to hear some young cat pluck off a stretch of guitar that would sound like Al DiMeola. It was a sophisticated mood, enhanced, no doubt, by the several pellets of 2cb I had eaten earlier in the evening.

"OK," I said, in a state of over-full exhaustion, and when he went to turn his well-oiled head to urge the Gen-X slacker waitress to earn her pay somehow, I managed to hide a couple boiled fish nuggets among or inside or underneath the mound of clam shells. "Is this good? Can I pay now?"

"Of course you can pay," he said, "You could have paid before. I just wanted you to eat the best food." I jogged across a cobbled walk to a smallish den called The Alto Club, on Liebenstraat, near the infamous Bulldog hash bar. I knew nothing of The Alto, except I had been warned that drink prices ran high for tourists. But at the door, I caught a vibe that was not real accommodating to the traveling stranger - something about the way the clique of four pea-coated Dutchmen stared me down while I tried to ease my way through a clot of merrymakers. I actually thought about leaving, literally, just turning around, but the band was called Gator's Groove, and mebbe I was feeling nostalgic for my old place in de bayou. Who fucking knows. I walked in, paid for a club soda, and got ready to make an end-run around what looked to be four bad-asses from the Holland countryside.

One of them made a sucking noise in his teeth. I remember being concerned that my laptop - or the one I had borrowed fom a friend - would get damaged in my fall. And the bartender shook loose of the strap on my wrist. But when I went, I went.