All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  Behind a dull white Formica counter, a middle-aged man with a thick mustache stared at us, baffled, as we entered.

  “Guten Morgen, mein Herr,” I said, as formally as I could. Squat and muscular, the man tugged at his blue worker’s cap and took a step back. He squinted at us, as if trying to decide if we were real. We must have looked like American boho scum in our black jeans and T-shirts, so he was clearly confused by my clean Berlin accent.

  “Morgen,” our worker friend said, then asked what we were looking for, if we were lost.

  “We have a problem and proposition,” I said, half-expecting the man to flee before I could make my pitch. We’d encountered a few Easterners like him, hunkered down in their small shops like Japanese soldiers holed up in caves in the South Pacific, refusing to believe that the war was over.

  “We are Americans, working and living in the East, and our apartment has no water so we cannot wash our clothes. There are no places that we have found in the East to wash our laundry.” I said this in one breath, and so far so good—he was still listening. “We are hoping to pay you to use your machines. . . .” The man soured, and looked like I’d asked him if we could defecate in his machines. I quickly added, “Or pay you to wash our clothes.”

  “But we do big jobs, hundreds of uniforms,” the man protested, not harshly, more like an invitation to keep talking, to help him make sense of the world.

  “Yes, I see, but we have all of our laundry and we would pay you for this service, this convenience,” I told him. He narrowed his eyes at the word “convenience,” an alien concept before last October.

  “Wait there,” the man said, then headed into the interior of the building.

  “But . . .” I protested.

  “It is okay,” he said in thick English. “I get my supervisor.”

  He disappeared, and I could hear him talking to another man, debating; then there was a pause, a long silence, and more discussion.

  A tall man in a newer blue uniform led the other man back. “Guten Morgen, I am Herr Mueller, the manager here. What can we do for you?”

  Hank was rocking on his heels, and I could feel his impatience. Elissa’s smile was frozen in place, her jaws tightening. I calmly repeated our proposition. Herr Mueller listened, snuck a distrustful peek at Hank and Elissa, then looked to me, unsure of what he should do.

  “Let me see the items in question,” Herr Mueller said.

  “Pardon?”

  “We need to examine the clothes in question in order to determine if we can undertake this job,” Herr Mueller stated.

  “Get the clothes,” I said to Hank, who sped out to Dusty and pulled our East German army duffel bag from the minuscule trunk.

  “I see,” Herr Mueller said when Hank handed him the duffel. Herr Mueller gingerly carried the bag with both arms like he was carrying a sleeping child, placed the bag on the counter, and slowly undid the rope fastening.

  “Bitte,” he said to his colleague. The underling nodded, then carefully excavated a stiff white running sock, caked with dirt and sweat. The underling held it up for Herr Mueller and Herr Mueller nodded. The underling put it down on the other end of the counter, then returned to the duffel bag. He pulled out a purple T-shirt, smelling like caged sweat suddenly unleashed.

  “Ja,” Herr Mueller said, after his colleague had held it up and rotated it. He placed it on top of the stiff sock.

  “My God,” Hank said.

  “Good, I am very happy that this is going to work,” I told Herr Mueller and his underling. “The rest of the clothes are much the same.”

  “Yes, I am sure,” Herr Mueller said, then turned back to the bag. “But we have never done this kind of public work before. We must see every item to be certain.”

  There went stiff sock number two, now some more soiled, stiff socks, followed by underwear (much to Elissa’s embarrassment), jeans, more T-shirts, sweatshirts, GDR army fatigues, East German flea-market pajama tops made out of an impossibly stretchy synthetic fabric and in inadvertently hip patterns like fuchsia and cotton-candy-pink diamonds on a background of black-and-white spirals—one by one, they were dragged from the bag, each examined, approved, then placed on the pile.

  “Ja, all is clear,” Herr Mueller said.

  “Whew,” Hank sighed, and Elissa’s smile reanimated.

  “Wonderful,” I said. I wanted to hug them. I was doing it—engaging. And more than that—changing and cocreating a new world. “Now,” I added, “all we need to understand is how much time you will need to do the job and how much to pay you.”

  The two men looked at each, the senior one concerned, the underling perplexed. “Excuse us,” Herr Mueller said, and guided his colleague into the back room. They were deep in debate, but I couldn’t make out anything. I stared straight ahead. If I made eye contact with Hank or Elissa they were going to erupt with laughter. To them this was a lark, but to me . . . it was everything. It was why we were here in the East. I focused on the calendar next to the door. It had a picture of a boy in a hospital bed, his left leg in a full cast, a paternal doctor standing over him with a grave-looking nurse in the background. The words underneath: “Recovery, yes. Germs, no—GDR hospitals are the cleanest in the world.”

  One of the few stories my mother had told me of her time in Germany was about when she and my father lived in Stuttgart, when she was nine months pregnant with me. They lived in a typical German three-story city dwelling meant to house two generations on the first two floors and boarders on the top floor. My parents were the boarders. One frigid December day, the woman of the house, who lived on the first floor, came knocking.

  “You have terribly embarrassed the house,” she said, trembling.

  “How?” my mother asked, mortified.

  “You have not been washing the windows.”

  My mother looked around at her squeaky-clean windows. “The windows?” she asked.

  “Yes. Inside and out. It must be done every other day.”

  “But the windows are not dirty. And I’m very pregnant.”

  “So was I. I missed no days. With none of my four children. It is what we do.”

  “It isn’t what we do,” my mother said.

  She would not have suffered these East German functionaries lightly. But I could. I wished she were there to see me succeed.

  “Yes,” Herr Mueller said as he reentered. He was serious but smiling. Junior beamed behind him. “Yes, we are confident that we can do this task,” Herr Mueller said as if he were unveiling the UN Charter. “It will be accomplished in eight days.”

  “What the—” Hank sputtered, but I cut him off with a look.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “You don’t seem to understand that we have no other clothes.”

  Herr Mueller’s smile deflated like a leaky balloon. “Yes, but we cannot . . .”

  “There’s got to be a way,” I said, quickly adding, “if you are going to survive. There is a clothes-cleaning service in the West called ‘fluff and fold.’ You bring your clothes in and the people there wash your clothes in half a day. Or, you can use their machines and have everything done in an hour.”

  “Impossible,” Junior declared.

  “This must be for the very rich, yes?” Herr Mueller said.

  “No, not at all. It is for anyone who can’t afford to have washing machines in their homes. Most middle-class Westerners have washing machines in their homes,” I said. I was trying not to sound angry. How the hell could I make them understand the danger they were in, the abyss they were about to fall into? C’mon, folks, I’m on your side. I wanted them to live in utopia with us, and if they didn’t adapt, they were going to get squeezed out. “I want to help you here,” I said. “You will soon be surrounded by people with washing machines and with Laundromats and competition. Do you understand?”

  The two men looked at me blankly, as if I wer
e speaking Latin.

  “Is there no way you can do this today?” I asked, trying to bring everyone back to the immediate problem of the pile of stinking clothes between us. This was all that stood between them and a happy, prosperous post-reunification future. Seize the day, I willed them.

  “We . . . we examined our schedule and workloads and we cannot understand how the project can be completed in less than eight days,” Herr Mueller said. There was doubt in his voice, a tiny little crack.

  42

  “I’ve been studying a map of the world, noting places that give a name to one’s yearning, a dream to share with another traveler when everything falls back into place.”

  —Tove Jansson

  Soundtrack: Ludwig van Beethoven, Grosse Fuge in B-flat Major for String Quartet, 1826

  THE WHITE LINES ROLLED AHEAD as my father drove, me matching words to the lines, ticking off everything that had been happening to me at school, with running, with my two-year escape plan. My father nodded and listened, nodded and listened.

  “Stuckey’s on the left, home of pecan brittle,” I said.

  “Six hundred and twelve miles to Meramec Caverns.”

  Inside our orange space capsule, we were now into our driving rhythm, taking breaks for gas and food, but otherwise keeping the car moving west. At diners, over burgers and fries, we played Boggle and other word games. I was always happy to squeak out a rare victory against my father, who could do The New York Times crossword puzzle in five or ten minutes, in pen.

  When he’d picked me up in Baltimore, I wanted our journey to last forever, but also, for the first time, I had the simultaneous wish for the two thousand miles to Aspen to disappear and for the Pacer to be there now now now, my body a battering ram that could be used to bash into a different dimension. If I could hurl myself hard enough against the mundane I might break through to something transcendent. Within minutes of unloading the car, I raced up the steep, rocky Ute Trail, then bushwhacked still higher, through the tree line and onto the exposed glacier field. The next day I ran off of a different trail, found my way home, then, scratched up and sore, leapt off the third-floor balcony at the Continental Inn, narrowly missing the concrete lip of the pool.

  It wasn’t enough. It never was. So I jumped off railroad trestles into rushing rapids in the Colorado River. I went on long solo hikes where I followed animal paths and hoped and prayed that I would get lost. I pedaled my bike up to Maroon Bells and Independence Pass, ten-, twenty-mile climbs, then bombed downhill, hitting fifty miles per hour, passing cars inching their way along the narrow, twisty mountain roads.

  The Saturday before the Fourth of July weekend, as I was racing down-valley toward the Woody Creek cutoff, an eighteen-wheeler rumbled and whooshed past, inches away, the wake shaking my whole bike, sending me sliding through a gravel embankment and into the thick trunk of a cottonwood tree, my front wheel folding over like an omelet. Bloodied and dazed, I hauled my bike up the embankment, then dragged the wreckage across the road and knocked on a farmhouse’s weathered blue door. A quiet older townie took pity on me, threw the mangled bike in the bed of his battered blue pickup, and drove me into town. When I entered our ski condo, Sharon, a leggy brunette soprano from Lubbock, Texas, who was waiting for my father to show up for a rehearsal, dropped her score and rushed over to me.

  “Sit down. Where’s your alcohol and tweezers?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “Shut up. Where’s your alcohol and tweezers?”

  “My dad’s bathroom,” I said, trying to look stoic, but ­feeling exhilarated.

  “Sit,” Sharon ordered, and was back quickly with the alcohol, cotton balls, and a pair of tweezers. She swabbed out my scraped knee and elbow as I tried to be manly. Then she went at me with the tweezers, slowly pulling black and gray pebbles from my left palm. This twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old woman was leaning over my arm and painstakingly digging under my skin for each little rock. Her hair smelled like almonds, and I tried hard not to bite the four long, stray strawberry curls near my mouth.

  “All done,” Sharon said.

  “You sure there aren’t more?”

  I wanted her to keep digging into my palm, to make me feel something, anything. But at the same time I wanted to be so on the physical edge of danger, risk, and exhaustion that ­nothing else could exist, not even myself. Sometimes I succeeded, and there would be brief moments of obliteration and the bliss of no thought.

  A little after dawn on the Fourth of July, I gulped down a banana and dashed down the street for the annual Independence Day road race. The five-mile loop started and finished in the center of Aspen, in Wagner Park, a two-block-long rectangle of green that skirted the town’s pedestrian mall. The course went right under our balcony, and my father was up there, waving with one hand, his other clutching a coffee mug. My white-and-blue Tigers skimmed the cool black tar as the course veered left at the edge of town, following the Roaring Fork downstream for two miles, my feet rushing faster and faster, the three leaders dangling thirty feet in front of me, the image of my improbable victory clear. I had visions of being the next Frank Shorter, the American who won the 1972 Olympic marathon in Munich, the city where he was born, his father having been an army doctor. I dreamt of East and West Berlin hosting the Olympics when I was thirty-two or thirty-six, and, of course, I would win just like Shorter.

  When the course turned back toward town, up the brutally steep Cemetery Hill, I was ready. I had found a hill in Baltimore that mirrored the one in Aspen, and I had been doing repeats in the heat and humidity. I tapped the Clash, synced my steps to the beat of fighting the law and winning. I was a punk, I was a gangster, and I was going to reel these dudes in. But as the road tilted up, the song skipped the groove, and I felt sweat burning in the scabby scrapes along the outside of my right knee, the three leaders steadily pulling away as reality came back into painful focus—I’m a fourteen-year-old kid, not Frank Shorter, not a British punk, and definitely no gangster. No matter how much I willed myself to suffer, I couldn’t keep up. As a handful of other runners passed me, my legs and lungs screamed at me for my fast, foolish start,. My quads were on fire and at the top of the hill I wanted to drop right in the middle of the road. My whole body was burning—and then it wasn’t. I was floating, in more pain than I had ever been, but also beyond the pain, my legs pumping as fast as they could. The last two miles: thoughtless.

  I crossed the line, stumbled off the road, and sprawled onto the green grass. Gary, the winner, all legs and a yellow Coors singlet, pulled me to my feet. “Good job, kid,” he said. “Top ten’s not bad in this field, and you were right there until the hill.”

  “Yeah, that killed me,” I gasped.

  “Keep it up and you’ll get it,” the real runner said, then tossed me a light-yellow can. “Refuel, kid.”

  I pulled back the tab and took a deep, long drink, then tossed the can and looked around for my father. The liquid yo-yoed in my esophagus. I put my hand over my closed mouth, willing the beer to stay inside me.

  “You okay?” my father asked, appearing out of nowhere.

  “Okay. I’m okay,” I managed to say. “Dehydrated.”

  “Here,” my father said, handing me a synthetically red Gatorade and my Specials “Rock Steady” T-shirt. “Proud of you.”

  “Died on the hill,” I said.

  “Drink,” my father said, then went off to his full day of rehearsals. Art and opera trumped Independence Day.

  I changed out of my sweat-soaked singlet, then sat down in the grass, and would have stayed there for the rest of the day if my friends Ted and Bill hadn’t found me after an hour. The town was beginning to swarm, and they dragged me to a nearby bench on the pedestrian mall to watch for newly arriving cute boys while I watched for cute girls. I sometimes wished that I were gay, would have loved nothing more than to be embraced by queer culture, but I felt decidedly, overwhelmingly h
etero. Maybe I was overcompensating, but my raging hormones were pointing me in only one direction. Where did they all come from? The whole valley was suddenly filled with beautiful girls. I wanted every one of them. I took it as a personal insult when any girl went out with another guy. Most of the girls in the festival were slightly too old for me. Or, I should say, I was too young for them. But there were also townies and locals and tourists, many of them my age or a year or two older.

  “Nice,” Ted whispered as two buff townies walked past. Ted was recently out but was still shy and hid behind Bill, a flaming and self-confident Juilliard sophomore.

  “Really like your peaches,” Bill sang, loudly.

  “Want to shake your tree,” I finished the phrase, not as loud, somewhat directing my words at a girl my age, I thought, though it was hard to tell how old she was with her whiteface makeup.

  “Enjoying the show?” Bill asked.

  “Mmmm . . . mimey,” I said.

  Ted looked around, confused, and then finally noticed the Christian mimes twenty feet in front us.

  “What are they doing?” Ted asked.

  “Looks like the Resurrection,” Bill ventured. “Oh, I just love it when they rise up from the dead.”

  We watched a pimply Christ being raised by other earnest teens, silently, with large gestures. They then bowed to a handful of unenthusiastic claps and the three of us cringed as the Christian teens fanned out, armed with pamphlets.

  “Oh, please, Mary Magdalane, walk my way,” I said.

  “No, no, we want Christ,” Bill said, and sure enough, the pimply Christ was handing out propaganda at a nearby bench, looking nervous as he glanced our way.

  “It’s okay,” Bill said, almost loud enough for the frightened mime to hear, “you can come over, though I doubt you suck non-Christian dick.”