Tales From De Wallen, Episode 2

So this whole thing has survived long enough to see a second installment. Huzzah!

Here’s some context for the following. I was walking around Amsterdam several Saturdays back when I spotted a group of college-aged gents walking towards me, laughing, with shocked expressions on their faces. A pretty typical scene in the Red Light District, right? I figured they had just spotted a dildo in a window or a marijuana leaf flag. Tourists…

(I’ve been here long enough to drop a “tourists” bomb every once in a while, no? I think expats earn that right if they make it through a Dutch winter or last six months in the Netherlands, whichever comes first…)

Anyway, thirty seconds later, I saw something that put an equally shocked expression on my own supposedly jaded, “seen it all before” face. Inside a sex shop was a “gimp.” Not a full-fledged gimp like the one famously depicted in that notorious sequence from Pulp Fiction but a gimp nonetheless. With a bright-red gag ball affixed firmly in his mouth, he was dressed in uber-tight leather. Two nipple rings on his pale chest were connected to a chain that stretched down into….you get the idea.

But here’s where things get kinda, sorta comical. He was calmly vacuuming the place, like any good-hearted shopkeeper. Maybe this was a part of some sort of kinky S & M/bondage thing but, more likely, he was just a regular, ol’ gimp who owns a sex shop  casually going through the normal chores that come with running a small business. Whatever the motivation behind his cleanliness, I figured the scene was worth of a scribble….

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