Having finished writing up my contorted thoughts about all this, I closed my notebook with a decisive snap, recapped my fountain pen, and pushed them both away—with the knowledge that when I came to read these pages tomorrow I would cringe loudly at the naked naïveté of my longings.
I stood up and reached into the fridge and pulled out another bottle of Paulaner—my beer of choice at the moment, and at seventy-five pfennigs a bottle, very much within my budget. I rolled up three cigarettes to have at the ready. Then I walked over to a shelf on which I stored writing supplies and brought down my red Olivetti typewriter. I checked my watch. It was 12:33 a.m. The sooner I got this damn essay delivered to goddamn Pawel the sooner I might have a chance of contacting Petra again. Though part of me wanted to call her tomorrow morning and ask if she’d like to go out one night, I sensed that Pawel’s assessment of her wasn’t far off the truth—that, indeed, if I showed interest too soon the door might be abruptly slammed in my face. I had to attempt to play this coolly—and to prepare myself for the likelihood that this little reverie of mine was just that: a reverie with no future beyond the inside of my head.
Anyway there was an essay to write, which, if accepted, could possibly open a regular source of income while in Berlin. The less I had to spend on my advance now the less outside work I would need to take on when finally writing the book.
I took the bright red cover off my Olivetti and popped up the V-shaped stays that held paper upright, then rolled a clean sheet into the typewriter, and sat up in my chair, positioning the machine directly in front of me. I lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke down deep into my lungs, and wondering how the hell to begin. In the version I delineated in Jerome Wellmann’s office, I was going to start with my experience of passing through Checkpoint Charlie—and the way the world suddenly shifted from Technicolor into a particularly grainy monochrome. But Pawel’s critical blitzkrieg put the kibosh on that. Sitting here now, wrestling with that most daunting of tasks—the first sentence—I ran through Pawel’s comments again. With great reluctance I found myself now agreeing with him. Why inform the East Germans what they always knew? Why trundle out the usual clichés about the grayness of life under Marx-Engels? Why spew forth the usual spy novel bromides about The Wall and the East German surveillance state? The trick here, so Pawel was telling me, was to somehow find a way to state the obvious without stating the obvious, to take an approach that sidestepped the standard-issue platitudes . . . even though I never damn well intended to be banal or platitudinous. But one of the tricks of working with an editor or a producer is to gauge early on what they don’t want to read from you, or what gets up their nose and vexes them. With Pawel it was a Westerner going on about Eastern European glumness, so I would only mention all that in passing, and in as obtuse a way as possible. Instead of relating my encounter with the rather attractive bookshop assistant on Unter den Linden or the glum Angolan in that godawful café near Alexanderplatz, I would write about . . .
Suddenly my fingers began to pound out a first sentence.
Why does snow silence the world? Why does snow purify everything and transport us out of the existential despair that characterizes so much of adult life and back to that realm of childhood: that magical kingdom where, as Edna St. Vincent Millay noted, nobody dies . . . and where nobody builds walls.
I paused for a moment, wondering if Pawel would let me get away with the existential despair comment, then also thinking that, at this stage of the game, I really shouldn’t be fretting about the occasional phrase that might upset the man who now stood between me and an ongoing relationship with Radio Liberty. When in doubt, when worried about how others will view your work, there is only one solution—get it down on paper and fret about it afterward.
So I finished my cigarette and ignited another. As I exhaled another deep intake of smoke, I started to type, bearing down on the keys. For the next three hours I simply wrote, rarely looking up from the page, except to roll the next piece of paper into the machine, and reach occasionally for a swig from the nearby bottle of beer.
Then the last word was typed, and I pulled the paper out of the roller with a decisive yank, and tossed the final page onto the pile in front of me, and lit up a cigarette, feeling giddy and wired. I checked my watch. It was close to three in the morning. Collating the eight pages that I had written I put the cover back on my typewriter, then stored the essay underneath it as I placed it back on the shelf. I grabbed my jacket and headed downstairs. As I turned to head to the front door the voice of Fitzsimons-Ross stopped me.
“Productive bugger, aren’t you?”
“Evening,” I said.
“Middle of the fucking night is more like it. And you have been driving me spare with the rattle of your typewriter keys.”
“Now you know what it’s like when you blare Archie Shepp. Anyway, why weren’t you wearing your headphones?”
“Because I can’t listen to music if I can’t paint. And tonight I definitively couldn’t paint.”
“Any reason why?”
“Because I fucking couldn’t, that’s why. I mean, do you get asked twenty fucking questions when you have writer’s block?”
“I don’t get writer’s block.”
“Of course you don’t. Because you’re an über-mensch American who can do no bloody wrong, who has not a shred of doubt in his entire being, who believes entirely in everything to do with himself, who . . .”
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up and come out and have a drink with me?” I said, my voice a sedate contrast to Fitzsimons-Ross’s rant. This gave him pause for thought for a moment.
“I’m being a cunt, aren’t I?” he said.
“Something like that.”
It was almost four when we rolled out onto the street. A dry night—no snow, the sky as clear as any Berlin sky could be. The mercury was well below zero—but I was still feeling so heady, so bound up in the sheer exhilaration of having written for nearly three hours without a single need to alter my attention from the page, that I was still oblivious to such climatic extremities as minus ten degrees Celsius. Instead, I quoted Brecht, as set to music by his fellow Berliner, Kurt Weill:
“Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar . . .”
A laugh from Fitzsimons-Ross—who, to my great surprise and pleasure, sang the next line:
“Oh, don’t ask why, oh don’t ask why. For if we don’t find the next whiskey bar I tell you we must die. I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must die . . .”
I came in here.
“Oh, Moon of Alabama, we must now say good-bye, we’ve lost our dear old mama, and must have whiskey, oh, you know why.”
Fitzsimons-Ross suddenly waved his hands like a referee, signaling the end of play.
“That’s it,” he said. “The Moon of Alabama.”
“By which you mean?”
“The bar to which I am dragging you.”
“There’s a bar here called the Moon of Alabama?”
“Of course there fucking is. We’re in Berlin.”
The bar in question was located a cab ride away. We found one prowling the streets within thirty seconds of deciding to head to this dive—near Tempelhof Airport.
“Tempelhof: Albert Speer’s last will and testament,” I said, when Fitzsimons-Ross mentioned, as a geographic marker, the Moon of Alabama’s proximity to the great extant architectural objet d’art from Hitler’s master urban planner. I’d already done a brief day trip to Tempelhof—because every damn book on Berlin waxed lyrical on its amazing Third-Reich-Goes-Art-Déco aesthetic, and the fact that it remained such a remarkable design artifact from an era that everyone on both sides of the German divide would rather forget.
“Ah, but all the Nazis had a faggot sensibility,” Fitzsimons-Ross said. “It was the most closeted political movement in history, which is why they grouped shirt lifters alongside Jews and Gypsies as enemies of the state. Because from Hitler on down they couldn’t accept their inherent campness. I am so fuckin
g surprised that Hugh Trevor-Roper and all those other Oxbridgey Nazi specialists failed to make more of the fact that all the horror of World War Two emanated from the fact that Hitler and his cronies were a bunch of bum bandits. Look at the warped documentary masterpieces of his resident dyke film auteur, Leni Riefenstahl. Triumph of the Will and Olympia are two of the greatest pieces of homoeroticism ever consecrated on celluloid.”
Fitzsimons-Ross delivered this monologue at the top of his voice—and in a haranguing style that made him sound like he’d been mainlining Dexedrine (which, knowing Fitzsimons-Ross, wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility). I must admit that I found myself highly amused by his rant, and was simply thankful that it was being delivered in English and not auf Deutsch, as the cabbie was one of those late-twenties Berlin toughies who probably wouldn’t take kindly to the thesis which my fellow passenger was expostulating.
“Well, stop sitting there with that fucking smug Big Buddha grin of yours,” Fitzsimons-Ross said to me, “and tell me I’m full of shit or something.”
“I actually think you should go on the lecture circuit with this idea of yours. And start here in the Bundesrepublik, where you will undoubtedly win so many people over with your historical interpretation.”
“Go on, mock me.”
“But how can I mock someone so amusing, Alaistair?”
That was the first time I had ever called him by his first name. He acknowledged this with a raised eyebrow.
We pulled up in front of a doorway on a deserted street. Over the doorway, painted in Day-Glo paint, were the words, Der Mond Über Alabama—the calligraphy fashioned so it looked like graffiti. The street was shabby. No shops, no residential buildings, no cars . . . just a few warehouse-style buildings, the moonlit night bathing them in a spectral glow. But what hit me immediately as we emerged from the taxi back into the frigid Berlin night was the wail of sound that came from within. A cacophony that was beyond loud, beyond extreme.
“I meant to tell you,” Fitzsimons-Ross said. “This place is just a little out there.”
We plunged inside. The sound was instantly deafening. We were in a corridor painted black, lit by purple tubes, with a biker guy—shaved head, bulging biceps, serious tattoos—acting as bouncer on the door and relieving us both of ten deutsche marks. I was almost surprised that he didn’t pat us down for weapons. But as I came to quickly discover, Der Mond Über Alabama wasn’t a biker joint, or a gay bar, or a heavy-metal outpost, or anything easily catagorizable. Rather it was an amalgam of all of the above—but also deliberately, wildly, absurdly excessive. We were in a room around the size of a basketball court, with a ceiling that was no more than ten feet high. It was painted jet black, the only illumination being more of the same long fluorescent purple tubes. There was a bar stretched along one wall. There was a narrow stage on the far side, on which were five black musicians—a trumpeter, a saxophonist, a pianist, a bassist, and a drummer—ranging in age from mid-twenties (the saxophonist) to early seventies (the pianist)—and all of them producing the sort of clamor and wild sonorities that one associates with free jazz. At least half the crowd—and the place was so dense with people that movement was tricky—were pushed up near the stage and seemed to be very much in a near-catatonic state brought on by the five musicians and their unbridled sonic howls. Everyone else was engaged in whatever form of escapism or indulgence or hedonism they had decided to practice—or for that matter, bump into—tonight. The bar seemed to only serve vodka and beer, and there were some very seriously drunk people crushed up against its confines. A low-level, sweet aromatic cloud of grass and hashish hung over everything, intermingled with an even far more dense fog of cigarette smoke. Just about everyone I saw had a cigarette to hand—that is, except the people who were shooting up in one corner of the warehouse, and the others who were disappearing, always two together, behind a black curtain. I looked around for Fitzsimons-Ross, thinking he’d make a beeline for his fellow junkies. But I saw him up against the bar, cigarette and vodka in one hand, deep in conversation with a rather short but very muscular skinhead. He saw me catch sight of him but didn’t acknowledge me, instead returning to his conversation with the gentleman who also had an Iron Cross dangling from one ear lobe.
I turned away, trying to survey all that was around me. The music was assaulting my eardrums, the smoke making my eyes tear. The part of me that despises crowds wanted to turn and flee. The place had all the telltale makings of one of those public catastrophes where somebody sets fire to a curtain and panic ensues, with the result that several hundred people trample each other to death. But that was the ultra prudent, always look both ways before crossing the road side of me. The other part—the guy who loved being in the middle of extremity—looked around and marveled. What splendid decadence. What mad, collective hedonism, especially as everything here was out in the open. The junkies were shooting up openly. The coke aficionados, both the freebasers and the snorters, were congregated in an adjoining corner of the room. The heavy boozers were up against the bar, blotto. Joints and hash pipes and bongs were being passed freely. When a pipe came my way, I took two hits off it and immediately felt as if my head had been cleaved. Or as if I had walked into the hallucinogenic equivalent of an empty elevator shaft.
“You like that shit?”
The voice belonged to a diminutive woman in her early twenties. She had insanely long hair—it stretched to the middle of her back and was elaborately braided. Her face was made up in an equally elaborate way—the left side in a Kabuki-like white, the right in Goth black. Her lips were tinted purple, or perhaps that was the effect of the fluorescent tubes and the two hits of the herbal trouble that I had just inhaled and that was now making me feel outside, this madly congested place, and which also had the effect of turning the music even more violent.
“It’s . . . interesting.”
“Have another hit.”
She passed me the pipe again. I drew down another small cloud of smoke. But this time I coughed it straight out again, the narcotic effect now robbing me of peripheral vision and turning all sound into an emphatic drone.
“What’s in the pipe?” I asked.
“Skunk.”
“What?”
“Skunk. Let’s go.”
She took me by the hand.
“Go where?”
“In the back.”
I allowed myself to be led by the hand through the crowd, all ambient noise now reduced to a surreal monotone. After spending several minutes negotiating our way through the crowd we reached the black curtain. My companion pulled me through. There—on a series of mattresses—were assorted couples, all naked (or, at least, from the waist down), in varying stages of what a Victorian pornographer might have described as sexual congress. Perhaps it was the effect of the skunk. Perhaps it was the extremity of this scene. Perhaps it was the fact that there’s a part of me which, even when under the influence of a mind-contorting substance, still backs away from the lunatic fringes of excess. Perhaps I am simply someone who doesn’t like having sex with a stranger in public—and amidst twenty-four other naked heaving couples (not that I was making an exact count). And perhaps there was also something just a little off-putting about this tiny young woman with the weirdly two-toned face. Was she a member of some would-be coven of Wiccans? Another thing crossed my now thoroughly addled brain. Petra. What was I doing, about to fall onto a grubby, much stained, much overused mattress, with this rather strange person, if my heart was elsewhere?
“Scheisse,” my companion said. “No free mattress.”
I blurrily scanned the immediate vicinity. She was right. No room at the inn.
“Another time,” she said, and drifted out of this area.
Well, that makes things easier, I told myself. Followed by another thought: I really need to get the hell out of here.
I don’t remember much that followed this decision to leave, except that, as I turned away from all those naked, heaving bodies, I heard one woman say in a d
istinctly American accent: “They won’t believe this back in Des Moines.”
But when I scanned the room, trying to put a face to this voice, all I could see was a darkened, expansive congealment of the naked human form. No discerning features, no individual characteristics. Just a copulative phantasmagoria. It was something of which I wanted no further part. Maybe that was the skunk talking as well, as I was beginning to feel actively paranoid. So I found myself pushing my way through the crowd, making it down that long, endless black corridor and literally falling out onto the street, whereupon I was certain that secret policemen . . . agents of the Stasi, who had somehow already read my thoughts about East Berlin . . . these agents were going to bundle me into the trunk of a car and speed across Checkpoint Charlie and hold me for months, eventually using me as a bargaining chip to get one of their own operatives out of CIA detention. Then, when I was finally exchanged, the agency would wonder if I had been brainwashed and turned into a Stasi stooge operative . . . and, oh fuck, that skunk was too damn potent, and the car lights so damn bright out here, even though I don’t see a fucking light in sight, and . . .
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a cab. I threw myself inside, managed to mumble my address—the driver, a Turk, getting just a little peeved when he asked me to repeat it three times—and then curling up in the backseat and beginning to sob like a fool. All the sorrows of my little life pouring out of me, all triggered by that insane substance I had inhaled into my lungs, and which had sent me over the edge of the emotional cliff, hurtling toward . . .
Finally, my front fucking door. I threw money at the driver, I staggered inside, upstairs, stripping off everything when I reached my bed, falling atop of it, shivering like the naked moron that I was, somehow negotiating myself up again and between the sheets, clicking off the bedside light, then holding to the pillow for dear life, as I was suddenly being taken on the roller coaster ride from hell. I felt the bed, the room, spinning out of control, sending me down a black slope toward a huge tree, the airborne pillow (don’t ask) just about dodging this fatal dead end, and sending me flying, then hurling me straight down toward the ground, and vomit rising in my gorge, and me on my feet and careening toward the bathroom, just reaching the doorway as, out of nowhere, I begin to projectile vomit everywhere, and the regurgitation going on interminably and spewing in all conceivable directions, and me staggering out of there and into the kitchen, and turning on the tap in the sink, and putting my face under its frigid stream of water, and cursing myself, and feeling so utterly toxic and beyond redemption, and staggering back to the bedroom, and falling face-first onto the bed, and then . . .
The Moment Page 17
