The trial ended on April 30; a week later, Kraus received her sentence. Berliner sat in the back of the courtroom during the sentencing and Kraus turned around to look at him three times. Kraus had refused to see Berliner when he tried to visit her in jail, so during the sentencing he wouldn’t sit close enough to Kraus to touch her. When the judge read her sentence, Kraus didn’t react, but Berliner burst into tears and ran out of the courtroom when the reporters took his picture.
“She’s not the kind of girl that wanted some kind of protection from me or from any boyfriend — and, anyway, our dynamic wasn’t like that. She hated having me in the courtroom in general,” Berliner said during our third interview.
“When I visited her in prison, later, she was always saying to me, ‘you shouldn’t have had to see my trial’—that was the kind of relationship we had. So, [sitting in the back of the courtroom] was a teenage defiant thing like, ‘Fuck you, you won’t see me? I’ll sit in the back. If we’re going to end, let’s end it dramatically. You’ll miss me.’ Of course, it wasn’t like that. I cried. I went to visit her the next week and made sure she was still my girlfriend. She was, she still is, no matter who I’m with she will always be, but in the courtroom everything feels dramatic. Everything in my life at that point had a very heightened sense of drama, and that was the apex. I started watching Law and Order with my mother, and I always wished they would keep up with the characters after the trials, just so I could have a guide for how to act. My mother told me to pray, but of course I didn’t have anything to pray to.”
During the trial, Berliner lost touch with the other New Situationists. He didn’t know most of their names and didn’t try to find out, but he would’ve liked to talk with some of them a few weeks before Kraus’s sentencing, when CNN began airing a series of investigative reports called “Who Are The New Situationists?” According to Berliner, the report got a lot of things wrong, but also got a few things right. He wasn’t specific about what details fit into what category, although CNN’s conclusion that the New Situationists had been hiding out somewhere in Chicago was clearly correct. More likely than not, the New Situationists returned to simple, everyday lives, started going to Starbucks again, bought business-casual attire, found jobs as assistants in offices, and moved slowly up the ladder. According to Berliner, one of the former New Situationists is now a popular food blogger; he says he saw her face for the first time in a picture in the Food section of the Tribune.a
“Sometimes I wonder if I’ll run into one of them at a bar sometime,” Berliner told me, “I wouldn’t even recognize them. That’s the strangest part. The group is still part of what I am but the only person that meant something to me was Marie. That’s weird to think about.”
After Kraus went to prison, Berliner fell in with a group of Chicago photographers and avant-garde artists, all of whom had recently graduated from Columbia College in Chicago (an arts college unaffiliated with Columbia University in New York), all of whom were at least four years older than Berliner, and all of whom used him for his cultural capital while he used them for low-effort companionship. When I asked Berliner to give me their names, he couldn’t remember more than one. He recalled them as an amorphous blob, as a group of people who worked terrible jobs in restaurants and coffee shops while trying to take their art seriously, and he could only distinctly remember one out of the clump, a lesbian portrait photographer named Claire Haskal, with whom he still occasionally gets drunk.
Haskal, who helpfully provided me with prints of several portraits of Berliner at eighteen and nineteen years old, recalls him as a nearly “catatonic” social presence. “He’d come out to openings and just stand with a group of us, never saying a word. People thought it was an affectation, or that he was intimidated because he was so young. That’s what I thought, I thought he was intimidated, so I tried to stick close to him, like he was a skittish dog. All the art fags wanted him as a pet. I did, too.
“But he wasn’t intimidated, he was in mourning for his whole life. I found that out later, when he snapped out of it and we really became friends. Most people would’ve stayed in bed, but he dragged himself out to these parties. He wanted to be around the living, I guess.”
Haskal encouraged Berliner to write about maps and architecture, and use his semi-infamous name to get published. Berliner wrote one essay; it was about the city as it was used by Christopher Nolan in the movie Batman Begins and it was called “Modern Urbanism’s Tabula Rasa: Destroying and Rebuilding Gotham.”
In the 2005 reboot of the Batman movie franchise, director Christopher Nolan and his producers decided to film the movie in Chicago (rather than New York), letting the Second City stand in for the fictional Gotham City. Until Batman Begins started filming, New York had been Gotham for so long that the cities were interchangeable; comics artists that depicted the city drew New York-esque skylines, and New York was nicknamed Gotham. Nolan’s decision to move Gotham from New York to Chicago destroyed and re-created an entire city.
Architects that subscribe to modern urbanism aesthetics and ideals would approve of Nolan’s recast of Gotham. Modern urbanists tend to “create tabula rasa for the building of cities without memory.”b Cities without memory have no history. In moving Gotham to Chicago, Nolan was attempting to create a Gotham untainted by New York City.c
Despite the article’s faults, Esquire magazine published the piece on its website.d
The Columbia crowd didn’t make an artist out of Berliner, but he helped make an artist out of Haskal. He helped style her best work: animated gif portraits of all of her friends in party settings, looking beautiful and excited in early frames of the gif, but quickly transitioning to the grotesque with only slight tweaks in the framing of their faces. Haskal credits Berliner with helping her during “a very adolescent time in my development as an artist.” As with all of Berliner’s close friends, she remains fiercely loyal to him.
Berliner also let his grandmother, Helen Raulson, find him a job as a clerk in a shop that sold historical maps. The owner, Abraham Shapiro, was an old friend of Raulson’s and, unbeknownst to Berliner, her former clandestine lover. According to Shapiro, nothing was more sexually transgressive and therefore stimulating to Raulson than a tall, muscular Jewish man. Shapiro acted like he was doing Raulson a favor, but he was actually happy to give the front of the shop to Berliner and spend all his time in the back room, buying, cataloguing, and pricing maps. Shapiro had never married and once told Berliner that he was a lifelong bachelor because he was “a hit with the Shiksas but never managed to get a proper Jewish girl in the sack.”e