Chapter Two
After we finish the joint Ruthe goes back to work. The Trommel is open now and one or two people are arriving. It won't be so busy until the evening -- when the night swarm comes, attracted by the blasting Reggie, table-football, and the tolerance of dope-smoking.
Being a regular, I know most of the faces, if not all the names, of the those now arriving. I am soon joined on the large table in the window, and the rolling of spiffs is now well underway. I'm still wondering about that miraculous tree!
Ralph, a guy I've known for a couple of years comes in, and after ordering a drink sits beside me. Ralph is one of those jack-the-lad types. Around thirty something, short, dressed to kill, so to speak -- in his full camouflage togs and his big duck-billed cap. Whenever I see him, I always get a picture in my mind of someone who has just jumped out of an aeroplane with a parachute, landed, hid the chute, and then came for a beer!
I say I've known him for a couple of years, but Ralph is a mystery man. You may not see him for months at a time. And no matter how much you question him, you never really find out just what it is that he does! It's always, 'this and that', or, 'just looking around'. Yet, he has a new BMW, all the latest IT gadgets, and takes regular holidays in exotic places! Maybe he's a mercenary....!
He now asks me if I'm busy at the moment with my teaching. I tell him I'm always looking for more hours. He waits a moment looking deep down into his beer, then asks me if he could talk to me in private outside. We leave our drinks and I follow him out the door. We stroll along the street a few steps before he begins to speak.
'How many hours make you teaching in one day?' he asks in his own unique construction.
'It's different everyday', I reply.
'And you work night also?'
'Yeah, sometimes, but not late. Why?
He pauses and his small, narrow, dark, questioning eyes fix on me for a moment.
'I say you, but you must not say someone Ja?'
'Sure'
'I grow too many marijuana this year. Too many work for me -- dry and clean und cut --you help me I give you one gram von every day the Jahre ' three hundred sixty five gram ja?'
I think about it for one arrested nano-second!
'How long will it take?' I ask.
'Maybe one weeks, four five hour on day'. I have many big very good smoking!'
'OK', I said, 'but I must do it between or after my English lessons'.
'OK, no problem!'.
'When do we start?' I ask.
'I ring you Morgen on'
'OK'.
I give him my number and we go back inside and don't mention it again. Before I leave we shake hands, and he pushes a little bulging plastic bag into my palm.
'Bis Morgen dan.'
'Ja, bis Morgen', I say
The next day around two he rings, and we arrange that I should visit him at five -- after my last lesson.
* * * * *
As I enter his apartment he leads me into a narrow kitchen. He's in the middle of making 'English tea!'. He asks me if I had smelt anything when I came in. 'No', I say, to which he only replies 'Gut!'
We sit at the table and he begins explaining in his funny mix of English and German what he wants me to do, while building a pure joint as thick as his gas pipes!
Everyday he will drive outside Berlin and cut the plants, and bring them back here. My job will be to help him prune the leaves away, leaving only the buds on their stalks ready to hang and dry.
When I ask where we'll work and dry them, he quickly stands and goes over to a tall food cabinet, and looking like a TV quiz presenter he simply pushes -- and it glides away! 'I make on wheels', he says with a gleam of pride in his eye.
Now revealed was a small narrow door about a meter high! He had divided half his kitchen with a wooden wall, and papered over it. He opens the door and we duck like gnomes inside another room, where a stink, as evil as the devil's arse hole, greets us!
A canopy of plants thick with buds hang from the ceiling on a series of lines running the length of the room. The false wall is draped with thick cellophane to isolate the smell. On a table in the middle of the room is a small green mountain of dried buds like broccoli, ready to be weighed and bagged. He tells me we begin the work tomorrow. We finish the Spliff, and as I'm leaving he gives me another small bag of the stuff. I troll my way home in a dervish trance! Thinking about the three hundred and sixty five grams of this laughing gear! Ok, I reason, 'Jeder macht eine kleine Dummheit!'
I get home to find a message on my machine, from Dirk -- a friend who lives in Dresden. He's in Berlin for a few days, and wants to meet at around eleven in the King Kong Kulb. A place I've never been.
I first met Dirk, an actor, about eight years ago, when he lived here in Berlin. We had met and got on famously, as they say. His father is English and he had spent five years in England as a teenager, so speaks good English, and has a cutting rakish sense of humour!
We became a part of a small loose group of odds ' at most five or six of us who would get together for breakfast and banter around a table in a bar called Schwarz Sour. I would spend a couple of hours there before going to my studio to paint. And Dirk would always be there before his rehearsals. There, we would be swamped in coffee and bagels, and smoking joints, as no one seemed to mind -- the gab could be fast, cutting, and surreal ' a monkey theatre ' but hilarious and stimulating.
Another regular was Carlos, a tall slim Spanish writer who always dressed in black, and always had a twelve o'clock shadow. He worked six nights a week as a barman in a night club. He would come to the bar still too high to sleep on the Colombian marching powder, which he had to do to stay the live-wire, which the club demanded of him, and which got him through those nights of hyper-energy. He never seemed to have time to write anything, though he was full of funny stories from his nights of madness!
Then there was Christine. A big beautiful Redheaded American girl with a great positive smile, and a quick wit! She did dance/performance. Dirk and I saw her once at some off-art-house, swinging around on a rope, upside down, and running around the walls! It was both frightening and stunning! Dirk and her had a real thing going for a while! But, she was the independent type.... and swung both ways, if you'll forgive the pun! She went off to Amsterdam with one of the girls who worked in the Schwartz Sour!
I haven' t seen Dirk for about half a year ' since the spring, so it was good to hear from him, and it's always good crack to get together with him.
I stick a pizza in the oven and eat it with a glass of wine at the computer. As it's Friday, I do the preparations for Monday's lessons, then work over my MS -- writing a few more hundred words, before taking off to the King Kong Klub, which is only five minutes walk from my place.
* * * * *
I'm dazzled by the flashing lights as the door opens and I edge into the throng of bodies. The Stranglers' 'Nice And Sleazy' is pumping into the packed room. There's a half full dance floor to the left with sofas around it. On the back wall a scratchy black and white video flickers -- a tall glamorous woman leading a large black dog on a chain behind her. The dog suddenly morphs into a naked man on all fours!
I go right, and push my way through the crowd to the bar, I see Dirk at the other end waving like a windmill. As I join him I see he isn't alone. She has coal black hair under a straw hat which is pulled to the back of her head. Her eyes are large, brown, and her nose small. She's slight with high perky breasts. Rings of abstract tattoos circle her bare arms and shoulders ' she looks very exotic. I do a bit of glad to see you hand shaking with Dirk, and he introduces us -- her name is Susanne 'a friend he hasn't seen for years. The music is so loud -- chords falling like bombs -- we have to shout to be heard. She tells us there is another room in the back which is quieter. So I buy a round of beers, and we all go through. It's dark, with black walls, and not so full, and indeed a lot quieter.
We take one of the large low square tables in the corner, with armchairs and couches. Dirk lights the candles to give us more light. The darkness and light fight over the space ' light splashing ' the shadows eluding and ebbing and flowing to the rhythm of the flickering candles. I can make out a giant poster on the far wall displaying big chunky letters on a hillside that read, 'HOLLYWEIRD'.
Dirk asks me about my teaching and painting, and I tell him 'I'm writing my life', but joke there isn't a lot for me to say about it at the moment. He gives me that cheesy grin of his. He tells me about his role as William Tell in a new play, while I build a pure one from the stuff Ralph gave me.
Susanne is sitting between us on the couch. I ask her what she does. She sings in a band, writes the lyrics, and plays sax. At first we speak German, but she soon slips into English. She asks me what I'm writing, and if I've published anything. I tell her I've just started., and try to explain that it's a kind of dairy that's also catching up with the missing past. Dirk asks me if he'll be in the book. I tell him he can count on it.
The place is filling up. A couple of young tea-heads, Dirk and I know from the Trommel, roll up and park themselves around our table, I don't know their names to introduce them to Susanne -- but everybody just says 'Hi!', and 'Wie geht's?' and such. One of them gets straight to work skinning a joint up, while the other swings his arm over the back of his chair, turns his head away from us eyeing the women.
I feel a tap on my shoulder and turn, and there, in his black trilby, and his double whisky in his hand, stands Piper! -- a painter friend, who I once shared a studio with in the Acud! He's from Manchester, talkative and quick as a whip, and full of mad ideas! He is a stone like figure, with heavy features glued on a moon round face. But an air of gentleness runs through all his features. Back in Blighty he had studied linguistics ' Latin, French, German. He does enough translation to allow him to do what he loves most ' paint, and drink his Irish of course. He also loves to talk -- philosophy and art, and such, and I now realise I've missed that with him -- and his singing of Italian opera while attacking a canvas!
We now greet each other with a solid warm handshake, which, he has the custom of adding his other hand to.
And that hat -- is much more than a hat ' it is a symbol, an expression of his individuality ' his freak flag ' he knows only too well that, when he wears it that people do a second take on him ' it says he isn't just a piece of furniture, or the continuation of the wallpaper ' but, is someone.
After exchanging our bits of news he tells me he is together in the other room with Danny Hope, and Detlef and Astrid Weis. Who I'd also got to know at the same time as Piper, but haven't seen for a couple of years. Piper and I used to frequent an illegal bar, that the three of them ran together called the Zwerg Keller, (Dwarf Cellar), because of the low arched brick ceilings, which were so low you had to stoop when you went in, and also to remember to watch your head whenever you got out of your chair -- not a place for tall people who got drunk!
Piper goes off to fetch them. They return and we greet each other with more handshakes, a lot of back slapping, and Astrid kisses me on the mouth and hugs me very warmly.
Astrid, is the wife of Detlef -- in her mid to late thirties -- a wild, crazy, beautiful flower, a complex woman who loves to flirt! She is clever, well read, and has a teenage daughter to another man. Her hair is black, shoulder length, thick, shinny, in loosely falling curls. She has the whitest creamiest skin. She's wearing a dark blue short low cut dress -- tight fitting that emphasises the largeness of her breasts. I wonder about that kiss on the mouth! We have always got on well ' I better with her than with Detlef, who is a bit aloof, but alright. And Danny.... well Danny is just Danny. Not interesting per se! A bad case of cogito interruptus!
They sit ' she squeezes on the couch beside me, and I introduce them to Dirk and Susanne, but again not to the Trummel guys, who look unconcerned with everything other than the passing girls and giant spiff passing between them.
The place is filling up. Most of the remaining tables are now taken by a steady stream of newcomers -- there remains only standing room.
..Now, with Astrid, Detlef, Piper, and Danny on my right side, and Susanne and Dirk to my left, I am switching between two conversations. Everybody is running at the mouth -- it's total talk. I go to work again with the stuff from Ralph. Astrid makes a big show of jokingly telling me off for not staying in touch. She's on form -- playing anger, feigning coy, in her plum rich voice and slightly clipped accent. I take up her play, and in mock innocence I tell her how it came about. How of course, I had always meant to ring them after the Zwerg Keller had been closed down. How at that time I had met a woman who was no club-goer, and how I'd spent most of my time with her, so I'd never got round to it. I assure them all, with Piper nodding large his conformation of the fact, that whenever I had seen Piper, I had always asked about everybody! She's smiling and saying 'no? and, really?'
Dirk on my other side is also building a spliff and telling Susanne something about our sessions in the Schwartz Sour. They are both laughing and leaning into each other, and he asks me, if I have the Amsterdam telephone number of 'Flying Christine', which we have always called her since seeing her performing the wall of death rope trick. But, before I had time to finish explaining that she has recently lost her cell-phone, but, that I still have her e-address, Astrid interrupts -- takes the spliff from my mouth, and laughing asks me if I'm still together with the 'little mouse woman' who forced me to stay in every night, and made me so boring! She turns to tell Detlef, that she is going to take me in hand. Detlef laughs, and Piper flashes me a knowing smile. She seems a bit drunk, there's a gleam in her eye as she tosses her hair back, then she puts her arm around my shoulder and strokes my neck -- with her soft white face against mine. And as always when she is this intimate with someone in Detlef presence, I always feel a little uncomfortable for him. Why is that I wonder....
Astrid has few inhibitions, and when she's drunk she can become rather outrageous, ranting, or extremely intimate! And I have heard from Piper there is also a history of short affairs.
Some nights in the Zwerg Keller Astrid had been drunk and had almost made love to me before I'd leave stiff in my pants. And once or twice I had been so hot I'd almost took her home with me. But it was always put down to her drunkenness! And was never mentioned afterwards. But I'd never detected the slightest sign of Jealousy in Detlef. I get the impression she carries her own song -- insists on her freedom, and maybe they have agreed on an open marriage, or, he just chooses to ignore and accept her wildness in order to keep her.
As I'm telling her the relationship with the girl had finished long ago, she slowly lets her hand fall from my shoulder, slips it under the back of my shirt, and begins gently massaging the crevice of my back with her long fingernails. She puts the spliff suggestively back in my mouth. There is a strange alchemy of lust at work in the laboratory of my consciousness. My head reels, and the immediate hardening of my prancing penis only adds to my physical discomfort! The evening has the colour of adventure! I decide in my blood irrigated brain to try to play it cool. I start making another spliff! I sneak a quick glance at Detlef, who seems unaware -- he and Danny have struck up a conversation with the Trommel boys across the table, and are exchanging spliffs like old friends..
A girl with long burn-your-soul-inferno-red hair and blazing fingernails, in tight hugging jeans comes sashaying over to us ' with such an extravagant swaying curvaceous consciousness -- and asks in English, with a strong husky Russian accent, if she could join us to smoke a joint. All the men's eyes grow stalks a metre long! Danny gives her the joint, and she sits down next to the two boys, who suddenly become very quiet. Pheromones blend with the marijuana ' Mr Skunk given oxygen by the mere presence of these women!
Piper, who one minute is talking about his painting to Danny and Detlef, is suddenly now talking about life to the whole table.
'.... it is not like a machine....' he insists, 'but a living thing it breaths. There is a great inhaling, and then a short pause, before the great exhaling.'
'A lot of wind you mean?' chirps Dirk.
Piper looking over Dirk's words and goes on. Dirk makes a mock grimace.
'We are an ebbing tide ' we take in from the universe and fill ourselves with it ' then nothing.... a kind of incubation time while we acquaint ourselves with it all.' He is gazing across at the Russian girl who is looking quite stoned.
'Then, my dears, comes the great exhale with all kinds of actions, and all possible revolutions in all possible fields. For the cosmos is based on this principle ' the individual, the group, the culture, the world, the cosmos inhaling and exhaling....'each breath has its own duration....'
And as to prove the point he takes a long deep drag on the joint. Pause.
Raises and looks into his empty whisky glass, exhales, then gets to his feet, looking rather spaced out, he asks 'Who would like a drink?'
Everyone laughs. With a large piano smile on his face he leans over to ask the girl with red hair if she would like a drink. She smiles, and just says 'vodka'. Dirk, Susanne, and I still have our beer. Detlef orders another beer and gives Piper a twenty Euro note. Astrid wants to drink an absinthe! She whispers something in Piper's ear, before he and Danny go off, pushing their way through the ever thickening crowd to the bar.
Astrid turns her head away from me to say something to Detlef, which I don't get, but her hand keeps up the stirring movement on my back. I'm amazed that no one seems to have seen it. Detlef leans his sharp face across Astrid and asks in German about my painting. As I begin to tell him that I've decided to try to write. That I gave up my studio after going there everyday and doing nothing, while all the time writing my book in my head. Astrid rings my waist with her warm arm and pulls me closer to her. I can smell her perfume, and her fingers are playing Debussy like piano on my ribs, causing my cerebral cortex to leap! Trying to act and sound normal, I ask them both if they plan to open another bar. At this, she grips a hand full of my flesh in her fingernails. He tells me he's managing a bar in Schonenberg, but tonight's his night off. A kind of busman's holiday I think. Astrid tells me she is working as a freelance graphic artist for some advertising company, which she hates. I take a long pull on the spliff and pass him it.
As Piper and Danny return with the drinks Astrid takes two glasses of absinthe from the tray and puts them on the table in front of us.
'What's that?' I ask her.
'Its for you! -- I want to drink with you!' she says, as she takes up a small glass jug of water from the tray and pours in the fifty percent needed to complete the milky effect. Everyone chinks their glasses and says prosit! and cheers! She chinks my glass again gently, and sips her drink with her animal brown eyes fixed on me. Eyes brown looking into mine blue ' eyes so full of code and meaning. She moves her arm out of my shirt, takes my hand and pulls my arm around her, wriggling her hips against me, and snuggling her head into my shoulder.
'You comfortable?' I ask coolly.
'Hold me Rig.... I've missed you!' she whispers.
She squeezes my hand, and I hers. When I look around I see everyone but Detlef is looking!
Piper is now telling a story about a girlfriend he had once who complained about his very English habit of being punctual when he visited her. He would always arrive right on the dot, but it got on her nerves, she hated it. To solve the problem he would get there and then wait around outside to make himself late....
Suddenly! a volley of shouts go up in the crowd, which begins to lurch and sway -- there is a great turbulence, then a gap in the mass bursts open, and to our utter stupefaction, two small men come propelling their way through the crowd ' twin brutes pushing, causing people to spill their drinks, who shout angrily at them, as they battle roughly through the mass of bodies giving everybody fuck off!!
'Hang onto your funny bones', says Piper knowingly.
They suddenly freeze as still as stone, shoulder to shoulder in front of our table ' neither one more than five feet tiny. They are of a sameness of sameness! The same mops of greying grizzled hair and beards! The same black trousers and burglar blue hoop t-shits. The same liquescent eyes, with the same sly angelic smile on their faces. They have something of the ferret about them.
They suddenly and simultaneously pull berets from their pockets -- one black, one red -- and put them on. And again they freeze in an expressive pose, as if for a photograph, with their chins pushed out like Mussolini!
There's a few seconds of silence -- dead air! ' we're gob-smacked! ' speechless! Then in unison they lift a hand, and break into the opening of The Beatles' 'Your Going To Loose That Girl'. With one taking the lead and the other harmonising in the same whisky rich singing voices. People on the surrounding tables cheer, and a round of ooo-oos go up. They both acknowledge it with the sudden raising of their arms and a little wave, and then a hush falls -- I hear a pin drop! -- everyone quietly listens. As they sing they have an overstated smile on their faces. They begin slowly moving in step with their arms out stretched like old crooners around the table. Red Hat grabs the spiff from Danny who had just got it. Danny looks as foolish as he is, in his turned round base ball cap!
As they bring the song to a big end, they make a low bow, rounds of applause and hoots go up. They do another animated series of bows. And with a burlesque exaggeration they swagger over to the next table grab a beer each and come running back, followed by loud angry cries. They drain the glasses in one long gulp. The one in the black beret puts a hand in the air and shouts in a guttural Liverpodlian accent:
'Welcome to our little bohemian constellation.'
'The rendezvous of the lost' says the other blankly.
Then Black Beret announces quickly,
'We call ourselves the Soluble Fish, because we have a surreal drink problem!'
There was a sprinkle of laughter.
'So my little speckled hens,' says Red Hat, 'and you too my little stickleback!' he says bending and speaking to an imaginary child with a raised wagging finger. As he straightens up they begin a call and response routine -- dry as dust.
'My name is Phyco-Billy' shouts Red Hat. Then Black hat comes back with,
'But to be frank he's Barry'.
'We were born at an early age'. Says Red.
'Young dogs'.
'Scallywags!'
'Drenched behind the ears'.
'Heard the call of the weird....'
'Led astray!'
'Best thing that can happened to one.'
'We spend all our money on sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll!
'We squander the rest.'
'Go ahead, burn your gas!' says Black. He takes Piper's drink and swigs it off, and says:
..'One more shot ' tomorrow the cure!'
'More lost than paradise.' says Red!'
'Ay, and we're not long out of the caves!'
'We're not long out of the slums!'
'Excuse me a moment.' Black says, pointing at Danny 'you have your cap is on back to front lad!' -- we all laugh.
'Just one ha ha my friend' said the other
'I don't like working when it's dark,' continues Black looking around.
'You don't like working when it's light!'
'I'm against work!'
'So was his father.'
'Father knows best!'
'We are the very spit from his mouth!'
'Only one shadow between us!'
'He talked like silk!'
'Ragged words!'
'He drank like a fish!'
'Jelly fish!'
'He drank so much he developed a wobble in his gate.'
'Went the way of all flesh.'
'Sobered by none existence'
'Buggered, if I know....' Red whimpered, he put his knuckles in his eyes as if to cry.
'Grief never grows old', he says.
'You should have brought some wood and nails with you....', said Black, 'we could have built you a cross!'
'Bring me, fetch me, carry me, make me come! said Red
'Listen! there was this Scotsman, Irishman, Welshman, and ....'
'Has Godot turned up yet?'
'To whom you allude is neither here below, nor up above!'
'God made the world in seven days!' insisted Black.
'Looks like a rushed job to me!'
Suddenly, a tall skinny gaunt looking bird with a black fedora and short black fur jacket comes creeping, cringing from the shadows into the flickering candlelight of our table. And trying to look inconspicuous he squeezes snake like onto the sofa next to the Trommel boys. Without missing a beat Black Hat improvises:
'Speak of the devil and the dealer appears! He shouts sotto voce. All our eyes now fix on the finished looking face of the newcomer. His startled bell-ringing eyes darken, but Red Hat goes on,
'Ecce Homo!'
'Shit made visible you mean!' corrects Black.
'Aesthetic of the ugly'
'Buying from him is like having a finger broken!' cautions Black.
'I'd rather be trampled by burning elephants!' agrees Red.
The hawk looks around the table at the all knowing eyes fixed on him. We can see his hackles rising. He squirms in his seat. Their words are the sound of the horn to this fox! You could smell guilt like a pistol shot! -- but Black takes it further still....
'Keine Stil keine Freunde!' he sings.
'Even Humpty Dumpty came out of his shell in the end!' returns Red slowly.
'When he has that wish to cook up that dish....
'One man's poison....'
The man suddenly jumps to his feet, and in a harsh North English voice, that takes everyone by surprise, he pipes up,
'Yer cunts!' yer fucking cunts!
His words are sucked in by the silence that follows. Black gives him a dare-eye look as if he had a gun in his head. He pushes past Black and leers in Red's face. His mouth working, but nothing comes out -- his head too full of teeth.
'Chuck a blanket over it!' says Black viscously.
The hawk's face is afire! Then he explodes one inch from Red's face!
'Yer not fucking right man! Stick it up your rat arses!'
He turns his head slowly like a reptile -- an indignant blaze in his eye -- looking through the smoke, grazing the shadows. The atmosphere is a killing bottle! Then he suddenly turns and steps into the darkness which closes around him like a coffin! -- he simply vanishes ' swallowed -- driven back into his netherworld!
The air bristles! Astrid's body clings to mine like a wet leaf. I can feel the weight of her left breast against me -- her breathing is gentle as a dove. My mind is a spaghetti of thought.
'Lover of spoils!' shouts Black into the darkness.
'Non illigitimus carborundum!' shouts Red.
'The man once starred as Mr Right in a porno movie!' Black says in a matter of fact way, while inspecting his fingernails.
'If he fell in a bag of tits he'd come out sucking his thumb!' says Red with a smile.
'Blessed are the war mongers, for they have inherited the world....!
Red takes and raises the bottle of one of the Trommel boys, and says:
'So here's to the Queen, and all who sail in her!'
'Not while I'm still this large collection of atoms!' insists Black.
'Then, here's to Mr and Mrs God!'
'There you go again -- name dropping in the cosmos.'
'Balls!' says Red
'Roundly put brother, roundly put!'
They suddenly they burst into The Beatles' 'Nowhere Man', with everyone joining in like a drunken choir clapping and waving their arms like a football crowd. As they finish Black says,
'So, we want to thank you my little chocolate teapots!'
'Buy us a drink, make a joint and give us yer fucking money!' screams Red. Then together:
'WE WERE THE SOLUBLE FISH AND WE'RE OUT OF HERE!' And they take a long low bow. They get large rounds of applause, people stand and stamp and cheer -- which they take with grimaces and more low bows, griping their backs as if in pain. Stooped over like this they stagger around all the tables collecting money in their hats, their legs doing a crazy insect dance. One guy brings them a beer, and keeps shaking their hands and slapping them both on the back.
When they've done the rounds they come to our table again, and barge their way on to the sofa forcing the red haired girl and the Trommel boys to be crushed together. But these guys are so funny everyone just laughs! Everyone congratulates them on the show.
We watch quietly as they tip the contents from their hats on the table and start sorting it out. Black holds up a small plastic bag of grass, he touches it to his forehead and mutters,
'Bhoomshanka!
Red looking at a wedge of black hash in his fingers says,
'More bewitching than grace!'
'Are you two twins?' asks Astrid?
Without looking they say nothing, but pose with their faces together, and smile a Cheshire grin. There's a gleam of mischief in their eyes.
'One egg twins?' Danny bleats.
'An egg hardly boiled!' they chime together merrily like children, beaming like cherubs. Everybody's shakes their head and laughs.
They turn their attention back to their drinks and the counting of money. Red pulls his hat off and takes a hand full of coins from their stash, and tells his brother he'll get the beers in. The girl with the red hair passes him the joint before he leaves. He eyes her as if seeing her for the first time and says,
'You look like a snappy bit of kipper lass!'
The girl just looks confused then says something to him in Russian. But he's already on his way.
Dirk has got his arm around Susanne talking to her softly. Detlef goes off to the bar with Danny. So Piper slides up next to Astrid. He tells us he's seen these boys before in Kreutzberg. He asks me what I think of the existential do-da. I tell him I'm much impressed. We chat about their ribaldry and their rough urban edge. We agree that in Britain they couldn't get up to a lot of the capers they were cutting here. 'They'd probably get lynched....'
He asks me where I hang out now. And I describe the charms of the Trommel and a place called the Forum where I go a lot. He says he's never been to either. So I say I'll give him a ring one night and I'll show him the places. I give him the wisdom weed to make a pure one, and watch his amazed face when I tell him I don't smoke tobacco any more. He says, like giving up my painting, it's hard to believe of me....
Astrid has been talking to Susanne about her tattoos, but now we turn to look at each other, and she kisses me on the lips again. Her lips are wet and warm and slide around my mouth. She feels so alive in my arms. I'm on an absinthe gondola drifting up a warm milky canal that hugs me. She whispers that she wants me. I tell her she's driving me crazy.
Red and Danny come back from the bar with drinks. I take the tray Danny is passing me with two more absinthes on it. He tells us Detlef bought them. My brain is liquidating from the first one.
Black shows Red how much money they've made, then stuffs it in his pocket and they chink their glasses. Everybody now chinks their glasses.
'Are you boys all right?' I ask them.
'Can't stop laughing!' says Black in his deadpan Scouse.
'Ay we're all right, it's the others!' adds Red just as ironically.
'Where'd you get that funny accent?' Black asks me.
'Hull in Yorkshire' I tell him.
'Hull!' says Red 'we were there once but it was closed!' They both burst into a large identical lugging laugh.
'Do you miss Britain?' Danny asks them.
'Only the weather and the cuisine!' says Black.
You couldn't get a straight word out of them so we gave up.
A few minutes later they finish their beers in one long swig, and stand to leave.
'So our kid', say Red 'lets put the strait jackets on and go to work....'
Piper asks if they have another gig tonight.
'Ay' says Black, 'there's no rest for the weird!'
They put their coats on and say ciao! and dissolve into the crowd.
They were now the buzz-word on the table! Piper explains some of the Latin. And we laugh over again. Astrid says she really felt sorry for them ' that they look like very unhappy children....
'Yeah, like a double dose of the enfant terrible!' says Piper.
Strum und Drang, says Dirk.
'Who the hell was the Kasper character then? asks Astrid, 'he was like a sick ghost.'
Danny says Red had told him and Detlef at the bar, that the guy was some heroin dealer who sold shit stuff at their gigs. He had started following them around, and they had told him not to come any more.
..The Trommel boys and Susanne, who's English isn't so good, hadn't got a lot of the act, so we try explaining some of the jokes to them ' not really making a good job of it.
I now realise Detlef isn't there.
'What happened to Detef?' I ask Astrid.
'He had to go', she said, 'to meet someone'.
'Was he pissed off' with us? I ask.
'No', she assures me, 'he told me earlier he would leave.' She smiles, then desire washes it away, and her mouth was on mine. Great waves rose inside me”flooding my senses, with the closeness of her body, the feel of her wild tumbling hair on my face, and the smell and taste of her. Her mouth so warm and wet -- I can't help thinking about her pussy -- and the urgency and hunger surging through both our bodies is overwhelming.
'Take me home with you Rig.' she whispers.
There is nothing more to discuss. We put on our coats and say goodbye to everyone -- who can't help understanding everything, The incandescence in their eyes says it all. Dirk says he'll call me tomorrow, and I tell Piper I'll give him a ring. Then we are swaying arm in arm into the shadows, and then out into the electric night. Wending our way home, floating. We can't walk more than thirty yards without stopping to get more of each other. Her hand always finding my lad through the material of my jeans. I caressing her full pushing breasts. A five minute walk turns into a hot entangled twenty minutes of Astrid and the voyeur moon.
When we enter my place we separate for a few moments -- she to the bathroom, while I sort the music ' Mozart, which sounds like a great turning prayer wheel. I chill the light to a candle in a glass. A large sphere of white light looms up -- an absinthe sea of milky white radiance flows over the boarder of the physical and into mind. White ' a sea of white ' a white aria -- symphony in white....
As she returns we fall into magic together. We stand by the bed, I running my hands down over her long white slender neck. We begin slowly pulling each others clothes off. Gradually I'm exposing more and more of the white of her succulent body: the ivory arms and luxuriant breasts, the secrete clefts and hidden crevices now so luminous. Our breaths collide on the edge of our lips. Her sighs and surds of pleasure as soothing as the language of seashells. We burn with tension, yet, linger over every supercharged second. The Mozart swells, and my nerves tinkle as sensitive as a wind charm. Her hands soft little fluttering wings over my skin. The fever of our flesh welds and we devolve together into a sonorous soup. Slow flowing caressing lips kissing, searching, tasting. While a phosphorescent angel-white fog of light swims slowly around us. She lays back against the black sheet of the bed, open, like a white star shimmering in the waxen candlelight. The cat-black acute triangle between her legs is a stark and absorbing contrast. The candle suddenly splutters, and the seemingly touching light runs across her body pursued by butterfly shadows. We tumble off the earth and fall into the milky sea. Falling wildly against each other like mad living skittles.
Berlin, May 2006
(Link to other chapters:)
http://www.abctales.com/set/chris-whitley/adventures-in-a-difficult-worl...
Please let me know what you think
Chrisnwhitley@yahoo.co.uk
