He’d taken classes somewhere when he was stationed over there, but he was mysterious about Erlangen, after all. “Asians coming from Korea and Vietnam associated with you.” He brought me a present, an old but pristine textbook, A First German Course for Science Students. He translated: “Air is a body. The bottle looks empty, but it is full of air.” He snapped the book shut and handed it to me. I thought of the way he made the condom snap when he got up and pulled it from his dick. I agreed to go back to the lopsided motel. “A friend from the meeting…”
He tried to sell me on Bebop. Charlie Parker gave me an anxiety attack. I returned his precious tapes to him. He presented me with a copy of Harvey W. Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slum. It was slightly bowed. He’d underlined “A nondescript community may be interesting, of course, but it will not be restful and will not be satisfying merely as an object of contemplation.” I said that my mother had the book in her sociology shelves.
I found it impossible to think. He could make the chewing gum between his corner teeth snap and crackle. Or click like fingernail clippers. He’d quit smoking eight years ago, when he went off painkillers for the last time. He said I looked healthy. He wanted to phone me from his job at UPS, though he couldn’t tell his AA sponsor about us yet. He said I needed a sponsor. He wouldn’t kiss me. Because of him, I wasn’t the desperate size queen I had been, but I stopped going to the Episcopal church meeting. He had grandchildren photos in his wallet. My parents didn’t.
* * *
“Now we must put our finer feelings to bed as the great task of sleep devolves upon us,” Dad laughed on the stairs.
“Sleep for America,” I heard Mom say.
In the book of my heart, pages keep falling out, many of them marked “Mom and Dad.”
* * *
Manfred said again he was sorry he’d not answered my letter. I phoned rather than not hear from him. I told him that what was considered cold in Berlin was nothing. He’d had winters in Boston, which were, indeed, nothing compared to one winter he failed to last out in Minnesota, he reminded me.
* * *
Line 1, the subway from Zoo Station to Kreuzberg — then the Turkish quarter close to the Wall — left its tunnel and became an elevated train by the time it reached Hallesches Tor, more Isherwood territory, but nothing like it had been before the war, given how much of it had been bombed and rebuilt. Sometimes in Berlin, at the right time of day, the bleak apartment towers that I could see from the train at the raised platform of Hallesches Tor would make me think of Chicago, that dog growling at me as I walked along but unable to get at me through the fence.
Then one morning when the cold was letting up and I had a briefcase full of summonses to hit people with, it was my being on the El that made me remember Line 1. I began to think of the kebab stands downstairs at Moritzplatz, the next elevated stop. Not far away were the really hip gay clubs, the Kreuzberg I wished I’d gone to with Hayden. He said once that he loved nothing more than that first spring night when everyone in Kreuzberg was out, even grandmothers. He ran up and down Oranienstrasse, from performance cabaret to New Wave club, stopping in between to sit outside with friends at the anarchist cafés or in the squares noisy with Turkish men. He raced from one possible story to another, and fell asleep wherever he was.
As an American in West Berlin, I did not think about the law. I was above it, a camp follower of the occupier. The law was a historical subject — Berlin as the bureaucratic center of crimes against humanity, scene of the Congo Conference, scene of the Wannsee Conference. When I saw someone with white hair, I wanted to accuse: What were you thinking? You’re sitting around the dinner table and your ambition is to overrun France and kill the Jews?
Like Odell, I wanted to live where authority had little interest in black men. Checkpoint Charlie, a border station for Americans between West and East Berlin, a gray arena of mortar passages, electric gates, and tin sheds, was a terrifying place, but back in West Berlin I probably could have got away with petting a policeman on his head. A wave of homesickness came over me, right there on the El, within sight of meatpacking plants, making me wonderfully ill.
FIVE
You tried to stay in Berlin, to hang on to your life there, like greenhorns in the films about riding broncos and steers. You got thrown from time to time, you fell clean off, you slipped and you slid and got pelted by sharp blows as you stumbled back to your corner. It was not the most open of states of mind, and you needed your head to be wide-open.
Nights in West Berlin, the involuntary island, that petri dish of romantic radicalism, were strenuous because they never ended. In the cordoned-off city, it was time that could be manipulated, either stretched or discounted. Space was limited, the square meters were finite, if not all in use, and the broadest thoroughfare had to change its name, dissolve into a park, or turn back on itself. To repeat yourself was a pleasant option.
West Berlin had none of the frantic, last-call activity around four in the morning of major American cities. There was no equivalent to that sinking feeling that came over you in a pub in London when the landlord called, “Time, gentlemen.” The bar stools were not hauled up, the doors not bolted. Nobody was hunting for an obscure after-hours joint or passing the hat for a taxi ride to some heard-of place on the edge. The empty streets were ours; they belonged to the young. That was how we knew we were young. Iggy Pop said that there were no children in Berlin and everybody laughed because his observation revealed what time he got up — after children had gone to bed. They called it the Berlin Effect.
It was the Wall that kept alive Berlin’s fame and pride as a dangerous city. You needed to find a way to get back into the mix of Berlin. It was okay to take time out, to go someplace where you could make fast money or get over a failure of some kind, but if you didn’t come right back, then you risked not getting back at all.
Dietrich sang about still having a suitcase in Berlin for a reason. She had to threaten herself. That suitcase was a saddle, but life was not a rodeo. It was a buffalo scramble. You stampeded, mane stormy, tearing up the ground, bellowing opposition, freedom.
* * *
I paid homage to the Mercedes-Benz star and crossed the plaza toward the ChiChi. I’d missed the smog, but I had stored-up, Dad-derived basketball remarks. I used the names Dave Corzine, Michael Jordan, and Scottie Pippen in one sentence; I said the Bulls were at last in sync on offense and defense.
Odell leaned back on the bar. “Listen to Chi-Town.”
“Full of the bull and the woad,” Big Dash said, doing a Hawaiian dance with himself.
Beyond him the miniature Christmas bulbs strung around the walls blinked and twinkled. What a place to worry about acceptance — but the black guys talking to Odell were session musicians who’d been working in Europe for a while now, one of them said the last time I tried to engage him in conversation, two years or more before. They laughed at Big Dash’s jokes, but not at mine. They remembered me drunk. Across from them at a table, two German women I used to get smashed with checked their compacts and called out to Zippi for another round.
Odell’s buddies sometimes avoided newspapers in order to enjoy a game from the States that they were to watch a day or two later. I thought I was talking to guys who might as well have been living in Upper Saxony when it came to being up on the latest in the NBA back in the States. I forgot that they all knew someone with access to AFN. They didn’t want my praise of the communication skills between Chicago’s players. They were also for the Lakers. Expatriates, not chauvinists, they were as interested in the Rugby World Cup as they were in the NBA finals.