by Rob Spillman
Hank exhaled what I guessed was supposed to be a snort, but it was so halfhearted it sounded like a snore. “Right,” Hank said. “Friends go in and out of your life like busboys in a restaurant.”
I tried to read his blank expression as the words slowly sank in. I had been there for him, so what the hell was he talking about? “Fuck it,” I said, not wanting to engage. “Stay, find some work.”
“Easy for you to say,” Hank said with a cold glare.
“What?” I said, wondering if he wanted to really get into it.
“Besides,” Hank said, looking down at the black silt at the bottom of his mug, “there are no jobs to work. The natives have nothing. Ringo and the bar owners are it.”
“When the going gets weird . . .”
“Whatever,” he said, not in the mood for a pointless pep talk.
“What about all the furniture and junk from the streets? Figure out a way to sell it back in New York?” I asked, thinking that if my safety net were gone I’d find something, anything to stay here.
“If we could get it back, we could sell it for a fortune. We’d need capital, my man. And that would make us the man, man.”
“What about your East Village–East Berlin art exchange idea?” I asked.
“I don’t have the means or interest to be a gallerist,” Hank said. “I’d like to help the local artists, make introductions, but I’m not the one to take on organizing exhibitions or sales. . . .”
“Communist Frozen Moments!” I yelled out. The jumpy bartender looked our way, still clearly unhappy that we were there. “If you can capture mundane crap like beer bottles and spaghetti, why not real history?” I asked, semiseriously.
“What, epoxy a tourist’s hammer stuck into a piece of the Wall?”
“Someone’s going to do it,” I said.
“Not me,” Hank said, and pushed away from the table. “I’m going to go sketch the Wall some more. I’ll use the last few marks for food, then I’m out.”
“All right,” I said, not knowing what else to say.
“Want to walk over with me?” Hank asked, not making eye contact, a tentative overture, an invitation to try to repair what might be irreparable damage. Since Zambi, nothing had been quite right with us. Before he had overstayed and stepped all over my trust, we had been simpatico. I thought back to when he had visited us in New York the year before and on a brutally cold night we had gone to see Sonic Youth at Irving Plaza, the band going full-on for two hours, a collective knowledge that we were all part of something transcendent, artists compressing a time and place and feeling into one perfect performance.
During “Hey Joni,” Thurston, Kim, Steve, and Lee went off into an extended, exalted riff, and when it was no longer sustainable Lee Ranaldo looked up from his guitar and spread his arms wide as if to embrace the moment and all of us, or perhaps the gesture meant that he had done everything he could and now had to take his hands off his guitar. In his flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, he looked exactly like the iconic photo of Jack Kerouac spreading his arms wide while reading in a Lower East Side loft in February of 1959, almost exactly thirty years before and only a few blocks away. I looked over to Hank, who looked right into me. He was seeing what I was seeing, he too was feeling the continuum.
As Hank slung his messenger bag over his shoulder, I doubted we’d ever have a moment like this again. “I need to find a place,” I said, half-hoping that Hank would want to come with. “A music store from when I was a kid,” I added.
“Godspeed,” Hank said. Outside the bar, I watched him lope toward the Wall, his sketch pad sticking out of his bag. I turned and walked the opposite direction. I had wanted to jog through the neighborhood to cover more ground, but my two Berlin runs had been too much for my knee, which now throbbed with a dull, steady ache. Toward the end of the last run through No-Man’s-Land, I had come close to the old feeling of obliteration, the negation of my self. It was something like writing on those rare occasions when the writing was going so well that I disappeared and the page alone existed, a feeling I hadn’t experienced since I left New York.
So now instead of a run, I set out on what I thought of as a Situtationist dérive, what Guy Debord called “a mode of experimental behavior linked to the conditions of urban society: a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.” This was the Situationists’ way of rebelling against the predictability and dehumanization of urban spaces. They would make it new, and their own, by randomly walking through cities, not following any preplanned routes. East Berlin was ready-made for the dérive, its predictable routes disrupted daily as roads, bridges, and walls disappeared and buildings were torn apart or repurposed for impromptu art galleries, music venues, or communal living spaces. No one was waiting for what would officially be done come October 3, still two-and-a-half months away.
But this part of Prenzlauer Berg was still predictable, hardly changed from the mid-nineteenth century, some parts bombed, but rebuilt to be exact replicas of the way they were before the war. I had left Elissa back at our apartment, where she was either sleeping or writing, which had become her two modes of existence as of late. She had disappeared. She was either totally crashed out, or fully, sometimes a little scarily, into her work. I gave her as much space as she needed, but sometimes I worried that she was concentrating too intensely. She would sit for hours at a time, not moving, just writing. I didn’t know how, in the midst of all the chaos and excitement, she was able to fix anything to paper.
Or, if I was honest with myself, I didn’t know why I wasn’t able to. As I scanned the familiar-looking building façades, I told myself that I was in the recon phase, gathering material, and that I would of course hammer this experience into art, and do so any minute now. She hadn’t let me read anything she’d written in Berlin. In Zambujeira sometimes, when I was in bed and was working at the kitchen table, out of nowhere she’d read a page or two of what she was working on. Maybe Elissa was writing something so brilliant that she’d sell it and then we could move . . . My thoughts trailed off as I spotted a storefront. I crossed the street. It wasn’t the music store, but some kind of industrial laundry facility, one of the giant machines slowly sudsing.
I had to get my head out of the clouds. It was up to me to make Berlin work for us. The international track meet at the Olympic Stadium was coming up soon, and I needed to get my ass in the car and drive over to the West and use a pay phone to call Sports Illustrated, get a press pass and contacts for the athlete reps. Around the corner I nearly ran into a woman who was animatedly talking to two men. “Entschuldigung,” I said, and then I had to explain myself, how we were trying to live in the East. They wanted to talk some more and one of the men invited me to have lunch with them. I begged off. “Mein frau,” I said with a “What can you do” open-palmed gesture.
A few steps past, I wondered which one of them had been a Stasi informant. It had just come out in a West Berlin paper that one in three citizens was paid off at some point to inform on a neighbor. I imagined that when the Stasi files were opened, a whole lot of ugly secrets would spill out. I wondered if those three worried about that, or if they were more concerned about whether they’d be able to live in their neighborhood after reunification. Rehashing the Cold War endgame was probably not a pressing concern when you were being forced out by moneyed hipsters from the West, or worse, by the clean-cut autocrat speculators waiting to swoop in with their piles of cash.
I realized that I’d had nothing to eat since Elissa and I had split a doughy blob of peasant bread with honey that morning, and that I should head back to pick her up and find some dinner. I set off on a different route home, thinking about that trio and the others caught up by the historical transition, like the two guys we had met the night before at the CV, who had worked at a now-shuttered shoe factory for twenty years each, using machines from the 1930s, and who were now deemed unemployable.
And pity those who had misjudged history, like Winfried Freudenberg, a thirty-two-year-old engineer who, the previous March, only five months before the Wall was breached, had flown a homemade methane-filled balloon out of Prenzlauer Berg to the West and freedom, but had plunged to his death in the West Berlin suburb of Zehlendorf, landing in the garden of a big, beautiful house not far from Barry’s home. Ralf had crossed paths with Winfried, and others at the CV talked about Sabine, his widow, and how she was trying to make a new life for herself. Their plan of escape had not been a spur-of-the-moment dash. It was a long, thought-out process. Winfried took a job at a natural-gas-processing plant in the neighborhood, and he and his wife spent two months sewing together a balloon made of strips torn from old army tents. In the middle of the night of March 9, as they were filling their balloon, they were spotted. As the police closed in, Winfried and Sabine realized that the partially filled balloon could carry only one of them. Winfried got in. Sabine stayed behind. What was their conversation? Was there a conversation? Were they panicked? Levelheaded? Were there promises? How do you leave the one you love behind? Was he thinking that she’d find a way out later?
Winfried was a scientist. He had calculated the necessary ballast, which was the combined weight of the two of them. Even three-quarters full, the balloon shot up over a mile in the air. He flew past the airport in the West, his intended target. He spent six hours floating. It isn’t known how or why he fell. His balloon was found a few blocks from his body. Winfried was the last person killed trying to get over the Wall.
36
“Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other.”
—Guy Debord
Soundtrack: The Animals, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place,” 1965
MORE THAN TWO MONTHS into the school year, I still couldn’t shake the feeling that I was a fraud. Second period—what a joke: a kid born and raised in Germany taking Advanced German at the all-girl Bryn Mawr School. But I was studious. I wanted to know every fact and figure about each and every one of the eighteen girls in their plaid-green school uniforms and those painfully arousing short white socks. Even the teacher, Ms. Semple, was latent with sexuality, confusingly so as she waddled up to the blackboard, heavy with child. At Boys’ Latin I could take Latin, French, or Spanish, but we were allowed to take German at Bryn Mawr. I was the lone Boys’ Latin student who took advantage of the deal. You’d think my testosterone-drunk classmates would’ve been dying to join me, but they were too scared. The work was too hard for them, and for all of their bravado, they didn’t have the guts to be in a roomful of smart girls.
Bright November sunshine flooded the room, probably the last day before the weather turned, and I knew I was being checked out, yet I could never quite prove it. I could feel eyes on me, but when I looked at any of the girls, they were intently focused on their notebooks or the blackboard. It was a nonstop game, and maybe once or twice a class I’d make eye contact, but even then they acted uninterested, as if I were an empty desk their eyes had randomly passed over.
Three of the girls were hippie-wannabes, a challenge for them with their school uniforms, which rendered everyone a prepster. They had long hair and funky cloth messenger bags with peace signs and patches stuck on them. A sophomore in the corner, a tall girl with long black hair and a Grateful Dead skull patch on her army bag, was always sketching. Whenever I went to the board to parse some German phrase, I tried to see what she was drawing, but she covered it up whenever I came near.
As I barely got back in time for third-period algebra at Boys’ Latin, Gunner asked—as usual, for the benefit of the rest of the room—“Get any this morning?” I laughed along with everyone else, and Gunner looked faux surprised. “What? All those girls in heat in one room and you didn’t get any? What’re you, queer or something?”
I kept laughing. Outside of Gunner and the major jocks, I got along with most everyone. I could fit in anywhere, could slide into any local accent, had picked up enough knowledge to talk lacrosse, beer, bongs, girls. Most of my classmates appreciated my humor, as long as it wasn’t directed at them. But even though they tolerated me and thought I was funny, I’d never be part of their country club. I could dress like them, talk like them, date girls from the same all-girl schools where they were going to find their wives who looked like their sisters, and still I was the weirdo clinging to the freakish idea that there was a world beyond Baltimore. They were all going to stay and have comfortable jobs and careers and send their kids to Boys’ Latin.
I passed as one of them, but my overriding urge was to be everything they were not—black, queer, intellectually curious, foreign, musical, artistic, creative. I saw myself as a walled, weird city where nonconformity is the norm, where adaptation and creativity matter. Baltimore was a square blip in world history, a place to be from, a place to be mocked in John Waters films. While I watched Mr. Chubb robotically recite formulas, I had no idea that Waters had also gone to Boys’ Latin for the end of his high school years. I wouldn’t learn this potentially lifesaving fact until many years later.
If I had known that Waters had survived Boys’ Latin, I would have felt better about my own chances. I’m certain I wouldn’t have questioned myself so much. And maybe if I had grown up in Baltimore, I might have had a very different high school experience. I might have made the best of what was to be found on the fringes, like Waters, who made art out of what respectable Baltimore considered human trash. But I had lived where high culture was integral to the community.
On the bus home, I wondered if I was a narrow-minded snob. What if West Berlin’s walled-in cultural foment was a historical blip? Worse still, what if its creative/intellectual life was deviant and wrong, and Boys’ Latin and the simple materialism of Baltimore’s upper-middle class was on the winning side of history? What would I do—give in, or fight to the death? Would it be possible to reject my father’s world of life through art and try to fit into this preppy materialist world? And what happened to your soul when you became something you loathed? I could have assumed my rightful place within White Male Privilege, but I wanted nothing to do with it, and instead identified with everything that was not White or Male or Privileged.
Halfway home, I hopped off the bus in front of the Roland Park Country School, where Celine, my first real girlfriend, was waiting for me. No matter that I had walked her home a dozen times already—I was still stunned to see her there waiting. I had met her at one of the interschool mixers, dragged there by my sophomore friend Jack. He and his freshman brother lived in nearby Hampden and I caught rides with their mother, who worked as a secretary in the lower school so that Jack and his brother could get free tuition.
Jack was one of the few other nonprepsters, his parents proudly working-class. Unlike me, he didn’t try to fit in, not giving a damn about the country club kids. He was into the occult, Dungeons & Dragons, science fiction—not a black-cloak kind of loner, but more like he did his own thing and if others wanted to join him, that was okay. He was afraid of nothing, not even girls.
Jack took me to the Roland Park Country School mixer and he danced with a bunch of different girls. Emboldened by his example, I screwed up my courage and asked a shy, light-skinned black girl to dance. Celine’s long, straight black hair hung over her face so that it was hard for me to tell if she really had said yes. Too scared to leave each other and risk rejection by the other kids, we danced together the entire night. At the end of the evening, when we were waiting for her mother to pick her up, my entire body screamed, Kiss her, you fool. But I was too timid, and the tension petrified both of us.
But everything was different away from the dance. We couldn’t kiss when we were supposed to kiss, but did kiss when we weren’t supposed to be kissing—getting a slushie at the Wawa market, walking home from school. I worried that I would catch flak from some of my racist classmates, the ones who wore “DISCO SUCKS” buttons and made fun of the black
scholarship student’s stutter. I kind of wished they would say something, so that I could defend her honor and show my self-proclaimed moral superiority. But I heard nothing. Celine was popular at her school. And if it hadn’t been for her light brown skin color, she would have looked like just another nice preppy girl in her blue plaid uniform. But she wasn’t like the other girls. She wasn’t giggly, didn’t try to impress, and wasn’t caught up in social games.
As we walked, I took off my dorky tie and slung my beige corduroy blazer over my shoulder. Celine took off her blue sweater and wrapped it around her waist. Semi-shod of our school uniforms, we still looked respectable enough for me to meet her parents, and before we did I stole one last kiss. Past the old water tower on the border of Roland Park, we were now within sight of her row house, set back from the road across a large swath of yard. Celine froze. Hanging out on her porch were several young men in Poly Tech football jackets, her brothers and their friends, I guessed.
“You better stop here,” Celine said. She pulled her hand away and took two quick steps to the side.
“Why? I’ll walk you up,” I said.
“No, it’ll be dangerous for you.”
“Dangerous?” I laughed. Celine didn’t smile back.
“They might get the wrong idea. They might think you’re trying to take advantage of me.”
“Oh,” I said, stunned.
“You better go before they see you with me. You can meet them later, after you meet my parents. Some other time. Just go.”
“Okay, I’ll see you,” I said as Celine sped ahead. I crossed the street, wondering if they had seen me, and if they had, if they would chase me down. Would her brothers really rip me to pieces to protect her? What must it be like to have a sister worth fighting for? Once I was safely out of sight, it hit me how screwed up the situation had been, that a white boy going out with a black girl meant there had to be some kind of exploitation going on.
