by Rob Spillman
39
“Ah-ha-ha. Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night.”
—John Lydon, January 14, 1978, after the Sex Pistols covered the Stooges song “No Fun.” This was the concert’s encore, and the last performance by the Sex Pistols before the band broke up and Sid Vicious died.
Soundtrack: Public Image Ltd., “Poptones,” 1979
WE CHRISTENED THE NEW PLACE The Buzz Saw Bar. Everything in the East was so new, nothing had been named yet. If we named these new places, then we would be part of the history, we could control the narrative. I thought this as Elissa went back to our flat, wanting to work before we headed out to the CV for the rest of the evening. I was taking her dose of reality and got into Dusty and drove over to the West and my favorite phone booth, a few hundred yards across the former border on a quiet side street off of Köpenicker Strasse. In New York it was not quite noon, so I could catch my editor at Sports Illustrated, could ask him to get me a press pass for the track meet. Last I had heard, before I left Portugal, was that Arturo Barrios was going to try to break his world record in the 10,000 meters, a record he had set at the previous summer’s meet in Berlin. That would be enough of a story, but this would also be the first meet in Berlin where former East Bloc athletes could compete on their own, not beholden to their politically controlled governing bodies.
I gathered up my hoarded coins and started feeding the phone box. I looked at the 212 area code in my notebook but punched 303 instead, dialing my father in Aspen.
“Hey, Dad,” I said through the buzzing line.
“Hey, kiddo,” my father exclaimed after a lag.
“Guess where I am? Off Köpenicker Strasse. The Wall is right at the end of the street.”
“Wow. Still standing right there?”
“Mostly, but there are sections missing where we can drive right through the Wall.”
“I can’t believe it.”
“It’s a different kind of wild than when you were here,” I said.
“Will you see Peter?” my father asked.
“I don’t think we’re going to Cologne anytime soon,” I said. Even through thousands of miles of crackling wire, I could hear the lingering heartbreak. Peter had taken a job in Cologne, and for two years they had tried to make the relationship work long-distance, but it was too much distance. When they broke up, my father was devastated and vulnerable, and talked more openly with me than he had ever done before, or since. We finally talked about how he had only accepted his sexuality at the age of forty, despite being certain from childhood that he was gay.
Until we talked, I had assumed that after the split from my mother he was fully liberated. It was, after all, the swinging sixties, and he was in the center of a cosmopolitan, international circle that included many openly and flamboyantly queer artists. Yet Berlin hadn’t been all that swinging for him. I was stunned to learn that even then he had been deeply fraught about homosexuality.
At the time, he considered himself religious. He had grown up in a liberal church—liberal for central Kentucky, that is—that had preached tolerance and support for civil rights. When he reached Eastman he joined the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. In Berlin he volunteered as the musical director of an American Presbyterian church. As far back as I could remember I had been unmoved by all religions, had come to view them as enemies of art, and saw little evidence that my father felt differently. So I had thought this was just another gig. But my father wanted to make grace-filled music.
He believed that homosexuality was a mortal sin. He claimed that his gay experiences were brief and mostly unsatisfactory. In high school, a few minutes with a college student in a practice room, and in each of the places where he lived thereafter, single brief encounters: in college, at West Point (where he had gone after Eastman to avoid the draft, landing in the U.S. Army Band, with which he played USO shows alongside patriotic celebrities like Bob Hope), in New York, and in Berlin. And each time he was sure that he was committing a mortal sin. He told me that he had hoped the army would “discipline the faggot out of me.”
Until his father died, a few months after my grandfather had told me about his time in India, my father believed that he was going to hell for his desires, not merely his actions. At the funeral he thought back to a college classmate whose own father had died while they were in school. She’d told him that when she saw her father in the coffin she knew that it wasn’t actually her father, that he was somewhere else now. But when my father looked at his dead father, he thought, There is my father. He is nowhere else. He’s there, right there. That’s when the certainty of heaven and hell evaporated. As my father put it after he and Peter broke up, “That’s when I knew there was nothing over my head. It was no longer a mortal sin.” It was now okay.
“I never thought . . .” my father said into the static-filled line.
“Hardly anyone did. And we’re staying over in the East, in Prenzlauer Berg.”
“No kidding. Is it safe?”
“Sure.”
“You come across the music shop we used to go to?”
“What street was that on?”
“Bizet, I think. In that area with all of the musician street names—Bizet, Gounod, Chopin . . .”
“Right, right.” The line thrummed, and I pictured him looking out over town to Red Mountain, getting ready for a rehearsal. “How’s Aspen?” I asked.
“Good—busy,” my father said.
“You missing Jan?” I asked, his best friend and the mother of my old friend Mark having died a few months before. I couldn’t imagine the Aspen festival, or Eastman, or my father without her. I thought the line had cut out, but it was the silence of surprise.
“Yes,” my father finally said. He still hadn’t talked to me about her death, about the quack doctors with their crystal therapy until it was too late to check her cancer. “You writing there?” my father asked.
“Trying to,” I said, wanting him to ask me more. I fed another handful of pfennigs into the box and waited. I had a strange sense that he had once stood where I was standing, also in his twenties, making a life for himself in the tumult of Cold War–era Berlin. “I saw Barry, who hasn’t changed at all,” I said.
“Oh, good. I’d like to see him again.”
“I didn’t know you did seventy or eighty concerts with him.”
“We had quite the run. . . .” my father said.
“Would you ever want to . . .”
“Of course—to visit.”
“But you’d never live here again?” I asked, and the line hummed while my father thought.
“I already did. That was an important, necessary time for me. When are you going back to New York?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Oh, really?” my father said, and I was surprised to hear worry. He of all people would know about working without a net.
“I’m running out of change, Dad.”
“Okay, kiddo. You take care of—”
The line went dead. I had, indeed, run out of coins. I really needed to call my editor. I knew I could go to a nearby Laundromat to get more change to make the call, but I stayed in the booth. My limbs felt like they were full of lead. I thought about what my father had said, about how Berlin had been an “important, necessary” time for him. Was this an “important, necessary” time for me? Staring out of the phone booth, down the alley to the graffiti-covered Wall, I told myself, Yes, of course it is. Just keep affirming it and it will be true.
40
“Nevertheless the passions, whether violent or not, should never be so expressed as to reach the point of causing disgust; and music, even in situations of the greatest horror, should never be painful to the ear but should flatter and charm it, and thereby always remain music.”
—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Soundtrack: Lou Reed, Metal Machine Music, 19
75
ON A LUGUBRIOUSLY HOT JUNE DAY I went for my usual after-school run, the magnolias wilting, my new constant soundtrack of punk bass and drums pounded out by my Asics Tigers. In the 1920s, the so-called Lost Generation embraced hot jazz, breaking from the confines of leftover Victorian stodginess. In the 1930s, Cole Porter’s suave, fatalistic songs were the sound of the new sophisticated and transient cosmopolitans. In the 1940s and early 1950s, bebop was the driving sound of the Beats and the New York School painters. Late 1950s—rock ’n’ roll, leather and swagger. Mid-1960s, the British invasion, then 1968, the May Day student revolution in Paris, with a Hendrix soundtrack. 1979, as a rebellious fourteen- and then fifteen-year-old, I was perfectly placed to get swept up in punk, then new wave.
The Clash, Joy Division, Buzzcocks, Gang of Four, Ramones, and then Minor Threat, Fugazi, Bad Brains, Black Flag, and X—their music went straight into my veins. Most of my classmates were still listening to Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Journey, Foreigner, Bob Seger. Punk gave me some crude tools to bash at my classmates’ shallow party music, and it also articulated what my utterly inarticulate rage-filled teenage brain could not articulate about the world I was trapped in, which punk helped me to define as homophobic, consumeristic, racist, and conformist.
I listened to the Johns Hopkins college radio station whenever I was in my room, then bought whatever new punk music they had played. Ken Kesey now seemed like an impractical utopian and a dreamer, and I wanted nothing more than to be Hunter S. Thompson. But I looked around and saw nowhere to engage. And even the thought of engagement made me queasy. Confrontation would mean coming out of my defensive armor.
George Orwell, in his essay “Why I Write,” says:
“I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”
That’s me, I said as I read this, except that I didn’t have the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” I ran from anything unpleasant. I faced unpleasantness not with my self, but through the words and songs of others. My rebellion was internal.
As I ran hard across Roland Avenue, I felt taunted by Baltimore and Boys’ Latin. The school’s motto, Esse Quam Videri, means “To Be, Rather Than to Seem.” But I was not being, I was seeming. I pumped my arms harder, leaned forward, willed myself faster along Roland Creek Trail, where I knew every notch of every lichen-covered hawthorn. I danced across the jagged rock path through the creek, then rushed along next to the ribbon of water, sweat soaking my black Joy Division T-shirt, jumped up to smack the metal “NO PARKING” sign at four-point-five miles—ping—and then raced back around, retracing my steps faster and faster downhill home.
Home. How did I get there so fast? I tried to catch gulps of air, slow everything, make sure I hadn’t tracked any mud into the house, heaven forbid, and get to my room and shower as quickly and quietly as possible.
“Whoa, hey, Mom, didn’t see you. Or hear you,” I said, surprised to see her by the kitchen table, a handful of unsorted mail in her hands.
“Did your coach give you any breathing lessons?” my mother asked, her voice tinged with incredulity.
“Breathing lessons?” I managed.
“The way you’re choking down air, you aren’t getting much into your lungs.”
“Just . . . ran . . . hard.”
“Still. Try this,” she said. My mother put her right hand on her diaphragm and pushed in. “When you breathe in, breathe from your diaphragm. Fill the bottom of your lungs first, then when you breathe out, push in with your diaphragm.”
“Really?”
“I can’t believe you don’t do this. Singers are taught this early on. Without breath, you can’t sing. Try it.”
I pushed out my diaphragm, air rushed into my lungs, and I exhaled it all loudly.
“No, no. Slowly,” my mother patiently corrected me. “You’ll get a lot more in if you slowly pull the air in.”
I tried again. I pushed my diaphragm out gradually, and she was right—I was getting a ton more air into my lungs.
“Good,” my mom said, smiling. “Now exhale slowly, pull your diaphragm in. That’s it,” she said, pleased that I had caught on so quickly. “A good way to practice is to lie down on your back and focus on your diaphragm.”
“Wow, Mom,” I said. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” I felt like I should say something more. Where did this kindness come from? She’d never been to any of my races, had never shown interest in my running, so this gift was from left field and I didn’t know what to do with it. My mother kept smiling as she sorted the mail. What else was I supposed to say? I edged toward the stairs, but lingered for a second, looking at my mother, thinking that she didn’t look that tough, that in fact she was really small, thin-boned, like she was made out of matchsticks and could snap apart right in front of me. I wanted to say something, anything. She had given me an opening, but I couldn’t form any words. Instead, I took a few more deep breaths, using the technique she had showed me. My mom nodded her approval, and I slid quietly back to my room.
A few weeks later, on my last run before my escape into summer, my legs burned as I sprinted up the steepest part of Bellona Avenue. My fourth half-mile-hill repeat, I was trying to get ready for the Fourth of July road race in Aspen. This time up the hill I wanted to run right out of Baltimore, wanted to run right through the apex of the hill and up into the heat and clouds and hyperspace, where I’d blow through three years and leave high school and Baltimore in the rearview. I crested the hill, earthbound, but with the sudden realization that I could go into hyperspace. I could compress three years into two. If I took extra classes, I could graduate a year early, knocking twelve months off my Boys’ Latin sentence. I wouldn’t turn sixteen until halfway through my senior year, but so what? I would be a free sixteen-year-old.
“Do you think you can handle the extra courses?” my mother asked after I spit out my plan, sweat dripping onto the kitchen floor.
“Of course,” I said, my hand on my abdomen, trying to use her technique, though I was gasping. “The classes are easy.”
My mother frowned like she wasn’t so sure of my plan. She was driven as a child, so I was betting she was thinking that I was like her—eager to get to college as soon as I could. She watched my hand moving out with my diaphragm as air rushed into my lungs, then in as I exhaled, and again three more times, slower with each breath, and finally said, “I know that you can do anything you set your mind to. As long as you can maintain your grades, you can try it for the year and see how it goes.” My mother looked concerned, but proud of my determination to take on such a challenge.
“I know I can do it,” I said with the certainty of someone who has just paid his life savings to be smuggled out of some poor, violent country, not caring where he will land or what awaits him there. All I knew was that I was going to get out. I now had a two-year life plan. Past that, I didn’t care if I went to college or wound up on the street. Whatever happened, it would be away from Baltimore.
41
“I cannot conceive of music that expresses absolutely nothing.”
—Béla Bartók
Soundtrack: Béla Bartók, Piano Concerto no. 3, 1945
AFTER THREE WEEKS with no laundry, our clothes were moldering. The Easterners didn’t have Laundromats; they washed their clothes in sinks, but we only had icy-cold tap water. Unfortunately, the Soviet Mr. Coffee didn’t heat enough water to truly wash clothes. We tried a few small batches and laid them on the granite windowsills to dry, but in the damp, cool Berlin air, the clothes simply festered.
So we piled our clothes in Dusty and went in search of a Laundromat. While
it would have been easy to find one in the West, I wanted to make a last-ditch effort to do laundry in the East, to support our East Berlin brethren, who were starved for cash. I also wanted to avoid going back into West Berlin. It wasn’t the same place I had grown up in. Where were the artists? Where were the black-turtlenecked artsy-fartsies who attended my father’s concerts at the modern museum? West Berlin had turned into one big shopping mall populated by smug cretins who looked down on us. Maybe they thought we were from the East. In one of the West Berlin newspapers I saw a cartoon with the title “My First Banana” underneath a drawing of an Eastern factory worker trying to peel a cucumber. The second time we crossed over, the same cartoonist’s daily offering was titled “Channel Surfing,” showing the same Easterner pointing a television remote at a washing machine.
This was my chance to walk the walk, to effect real change in the lives of our new brethren. A few days before, while searching for the music shop, I had seen what looked like an industrial laundry facility, with huge machines that I assumed were used for cleaning uniforms and hospital laundry. Since the prewar factories were closing down, they might let us clean our clothes there. If I could find it again. So up and down Bizet, Gounod, and Chopin went Elissa, Hank, and I, with me also keeping an eye out for the sheet-music store. Each long block of five-story apartments with arched entryways leading to cobbled interior courtyards looked familiar, yet unspecifically familiar.
“Really close,” I said, even though we had been down the same block three times. Hank and Elissa carped, both of them saying they were hungry. “And it’s Saturday,” Hank reminded me. Shops would close at noon, not to open again until Monday morning. So if we were going to buy any basic food, it was now or wait thirty-six hours. Somehow Hank had made his twenty-three marks last five days. He wasn’t drinking, unless someone bought him a beer. Potatoes and bread—how long could you live on that diet?
Then I spotted it, on the ground floor next to a small grocery—the unmarked industrial laundry. Through the window was a row of eight enormous washing machines, steel behemoths each six or seven feet in diameter, with only one in use, a white whorl of what might have been nurses’ uniforms.
