nce Harriet got off work we procured a couple of hot bikes and set out for our first night in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam bicycle scene is, even in this town where so much is out of this world, unbelievable. There are about 12 million bikes in the city and not one of them is younger than me. And if you have a bike, don't get attached; it'll be stolen soon enough. It's a nice system, really. The junkies have agreed not to mug little old ladies or knock over mom and pop stores as long as there's a steady supply of bikes they can rip off and sell back to people for 25 gilders each. Folks only get really upset when they take the locks.

But while getting a hold of a bike is easy, actually navigating through town makes Space Mountain seem like the kiddie carousel in front of K-Mart. Especially when your transportation is a 30-year old single-speed bike with foot brakes that kind of work when dry and a bell you have to flick with your fingernail to ring.

It started easy enough. A few side streets before the center of town got me used to the idea of riding an ancient bicycle through the streets of a foreign city on a cold, rainy night while stoned out of my gourd. But this was just the buildup, the calm before the storm, the soothing animated characters preceding the 900 mph plunge of death.

Soon we got downtown. Fortunately the streets and sidewalks of Amsterdam are equipped with red brick bike lanes. Unfortunately the red brick bike lanes are equipped with testicle high cement pillars to keep cars from using them. These flew at us like Patriots towards a SCUD, narrowly missing but making a hell of a show out of it. Tourists, ignorant of the bike lanes, scattered as we careened towards them, ring-ding-dinging our handlebar bells like the Salvation Army dude at Long's. Canals zoomed underneath us, threatening sudden death with any slip of our balding tires. The rain in our eyes turned the neon signs of the Red Light District into a kaleidoscope of pornography whizzing by faster than a 13-year old boy cums into a hooker. Cars honked, other bikes dinged, lights changed from green to red as if to tell us something, people shouted in all sorts of foreign tongues, but the ride kept going. Harriet was cool and collected; I said "oh my God" a lot.

Gasping for breath and wrot with fear, we arrived at a coffeeshop on the outskirts of town known as The Greenhouse, the winner of the 1994 High Times Magazine Cannabis Cup. Here we purchased (on Visa) some Afghan Haze, some of their award-winning Northern Lights, and three grams of Lebanesse blond hashish. And we met Eagle Bill.

Eagle Bill comes from a long line of snake oil salesmen. His name, he says, was given to him by the Cherokee Indians with whom he grew up. He's been everywhere you could name — hell, make up a place and he'll say he's been there. Right now he's in Amsterdam as "a guest of the government of the Netherlands" to promote the benefits of medical marijuana. But mainly he's vaporizing people.

Eagle Bill carries with him a high-powered Black and Decker drill and an empty two-liter soda bottle. Somehow, it's not clear how, he uses the drill to "vaporize" a bud into the bottle. Inhaling the transparent contents supposedly renders the toker higher than any other method of smoking. The catch, though, is that you provide the bud, which disappears without a trace. Nobody got vaporized this particular evening — the Greenhouse management wouldn't let us use a plug — and I believed Eagle Bill about as much as I believe Walt Disney never used drugs.

But Bill, to his credit, is one of the more convincing and least dangerous of Amsterdam's con artists. The streets of the downtown are litterally swarming with hucksters and racketeers, some selling oregano to over-enthusiastic tourists, others merely asking for the time of day so they can lift your wallet. These guys prey on the fact that, in Amsterdam, nobody is all that alert. Thus it's best to, while stoned on the streets of this great city, speak to no one.