Adventures In A Difficult World (chapter Three) Part one

Chapter three (part one)

Berlin

As I enter the King Kong Klub, I'm dazzled by the flashing lights. 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 art house 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; speaks Latin, French, and 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 how much 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; if you like. He knows only too well that, when he wears it 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, shiny, 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 all right. And Danny.... well Danny is just Danny. Not interesting per se. A bad case of cogito interruptus...
They sit down, 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 the 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 tricks. 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. 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 is given oxygen by the mere presence of the woman.
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.'
Dirk makes a mock grimace.'A lot of wind you mean?' he chirps.
Piper over looking Dirk's words goes on.'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.... hundreds of years' And as if to prove the point he takes a long deep drag on the joint. Pauses...raises and looks into his empty whisky glass, exhales, then gets to his feet, also, looking rather spaced out, and 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 every day 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 a slow, gentle 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.
'It's 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 like Quackers... but 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 Lose 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 – Somewhere a pin drops! -- Everyone is 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 spliff 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 Liverpudlian 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 is 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,'s 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, then saying,'One more shot tomorrow the cure!'
'We are more lost than paradise,' says Red!'
'Ay, and we're not long out of the caves!
'Well, we're not long out of the slums.'
'Excuse me a moment!' Black says, pointing at Danny 'You've put your cap on back to front lad...' We all laugh.
Danny was looking red faced and angry. 'Just one