Tag: Berlin

San Diego 2009 : The Tinies Chapter Two “The girls are cool as grapes”

berniebleak2 Comments

Part One

Although one of the primary reasons for the three of us to be traveling together was playing shows I can barely remember any of the West Coast ones except for that first one in Portland. It’s entirely possible that we didn’t play an Oakland show on our way down at all. Most likely Skadi and Etain had already played an Oakland show in the week leading up to Halloween that I hadn’t heard about and didn’t go to.

[Note: since writing this I stumbled across a folder of photos from a show we must have played together on Larry Bus. I can’t remember where it was parked, who else might have played or anything about it really.]

I was extremely busy preparing the abandoned house for it’s eventual haunting with Popsicle and Sugar Tea so all of my nights were pretty much taken. I can’t even remember where I was staying in Oakland around this time. Either Apgar had not yet dissolved and I was back in my room or Apgar had dissolved and I was either at Trinity’s house in West Oakland or between places. I may well have been crashing with Lux.

Lux is another piece of the timeline that I am having trouble pinning down. I know that Lux and I were already in a relationship by the time I passed back through Oakland with Skadi and Etain but I can’t remember if it started before or after the haunting. I can’t conjure a single memory of Lux at the haunted house so my best guess is after. That November seems to be bursting at the seams with memorable events and meaningful changes as small portions of my timeline often are.

Lux was somebody that Popsicle knew through SPAZ and 5lowershop parties – basically the Bay Area “indie rave” scene. She was originally from Hawaii which perpetuated a pattern where everyone I met with an X in their name seemed to come from a non-contiguous state. Alexis from the Rockaway and a girl I call James in these stories but actually goes by Ajax both came from Alaska. Since then I’ve met people with “X” in their name who came from the lower 48.

Oh yeah, there was a guy named Djynnx (I might be spelling it wrong) in the Katabatik crew who was also from Alaska.

Anyway Lux looked similar to me in terms of “sparkly goth” fashion but skewed a little closer to what was called the “MySpace scene” look. We used to semi-ironically watch a lot of Blood on the Dance Floor videos together – at that time Dahvie Vanity’s patterns of sexual assault and pedophilia were not well known. We formed a death rock band together called Voiheuristick Necromorph that recorded an album with a label lined up to release it but sadly imploded before it was ever mixed.

Like Skadi and Etain, Lux is a powerful visual artist. She also is a Born Again Christian now and may not use the name Lux anymore. For several years there was a silent power struggle over our MySpace page that had an early recording of our song Matryoshka from before the band became a five piece. She would try to delete the page and I would get a notification as co-Admin and veto it. Eventually I forgot to check it for over a year or however long the veto window was and the page was gone.

Of course if she had simply waited it would have disappeared from the internet anyway. I haven’t dug into the story but whatever happened with the MySpace servers is pretty much the burning of the Library at Alexandria for early twenty first century underground music. I can’t even imagine how many artists like me uploaded music then lost the tapes or files and never archived any of it under the false security that things on the internet last forever.

Maybe there is some way to get some of it back with The Wayback Machine but I’ve never heard of it so it probably doesn’t work.

Anyway Lux and I were definitely seeing each other by the time I was back in Oakland with Skadi and Etain. It was even the second place Lux had lived while we were seeing each other – it’s wild that all of this happened in the window between Halloween and Thanksgiving. Her living situation in West Oakland had been kind of weird so it makes sense that she would have moved in the middle of a month.

Anyway the question of sleeping arrangements didn’t really come up that night because I would have been sleeping with Lux. We never talked about it or used the term but what Lux and I had was essentially an open relationship. She was already seeing someone else when we started seeing each other and then stopped seeing him because he didn’t make her feel good. I wanted her to stop seeing him because of how she told me he made her feel but not really for any other reason – I never felt threatened or insecure about the fact she was seeing him.

We were both just naturally predisposed to candid honesty and the total absence of jealousy. I’ve been in other relationships that were fundamentally “open” but there was usually some degree of secrecy, hurt feelings or anguish over not being faithful to someone else. There was none of that with me and Lux or at least none that I was aware of.

Of course I told her about what was starting to happen between me and Skadi and of course she already knew because the energy palpably hung in the air around us. Her reaction to Skadi and Etain was immediate affinity – she loved them and they loved her. It was like the purer form of what would have been between Skadi, Etain and me if physical attraction never entered into the picture.

There’s no way for me to know for sure if my relationship with Lux played a role in Skadi’s eventual decision to deny and resist this attraction but my immediate instinct is that it did not. She had plenty of other reasons that I will go into when the time comes. I wouldn’t describe myself as poly but this wasn’t the first time that I saw multiple people at the same time. When it does happen I try to do everything I can to treat all parties with honesty and respect.

We all went to dance at the Goth Night at DNA Lounge in San Francisco. I can’t remember if Skadi ever did but Etain definitely referred to herself as goth. I’d say all three of us thought of ourselves as goth but none of us looked a thing like the typical definition – Skadi looked like a lost boy from Peter Pan and Etain looked like a Gelfling Princess and I looked like a granny style acid biker.

In the Summer of that same year I got into an argument with a Rastafarian at a Berlin Night Club over whether or not I was goth. He kept saying things like:

“I Rastafari! No man is goth!”

It wasn’t until much much later that I realized we were probably getting confused by each other’s accents and he thought I was claiming to be God.

We had a great night, we all had fun dancing. I haven’t done it in years but I used to be obsessed with dancing and go out to do it as much as possible. I wouldn’t say I’m especially good, I seem to completely lack any natural sense of rhythm, but I compensate by being creative, enthusiastic and unashamed. A choreographer friend in Chicago was impressed enough to invite me to join a performance of what had previously been an all girl dance troupe.

The other troupe members were not pleased:

“Did she really ask you to join or did you ask her?”

Because of the sparks that were beginning to fly I was paying the most attention to how Skadi danced. She looked defiant – like she was ready to take on the world and lose. Kind of like a main character in a video game or animated movie when the developers are especially angling for a David and Goliath thing. I don’t know that we ever danced together.

I’ve had maybe a handful of experiences with partners that perfectly complement my dance style and we develop spontaneous dancer’s telepathy. I remember one night when it happened on pogo sticks. Me and some mystery woman were wordlessly developing a plethora of new moves together – using our knees to stabilize so we could jump without hands, jumping on two pogo sticks at the same time and then the other person jumps forward and you release one pogo stick and split into two while both jumping backwards.

These dance partners have never been romantic or sexual partners to me. In most cases we never even spoke to each other and I never learned their names. It’s one of the many cruelties of the world that is – it simply has some things it chooses to hold back and deny. I’ve had partners that I danced well with but never transcendently. LaPorsha and I actually used to dance together a bit before an intermediary assured us of our mutual attraction and we became instantly betrothed.

The next stop after Oakland was Los Angeles. I can’t remember how the car configuration worked out but of course I can’t drive so it would have made the most sense for whichever of them wasn’t driving to lay down in the back seat and rest. The slow smoldering of whatever it was between me and Skadi didn’t cause any lopsided-ness in the conversation. I remember it being between all three of us – the constant hunger to learn more about each other disguised the passage of time and made the long hours between cities feel deceptively short.

I hadn’t lived in Los Angeles yet at this point but somebody had connected me with Nora Keyes and I got us onto the Ye Olde Hush Clubbe show at Hyperion Tavern. I would go on to play and help many touring friends play this event when I moved to Los Angeles and the necessity of keeping the volume down was always a problem. For Skadi and Etain it was a perfect fit – both of their performance styles were already on the soft and gentle side.

I don’t know what I did that night. It’s possible I didn’t play at all but knowing me I’m not the kind to pass up an opportunity even if it isn’t ideal. I probably just dialed down the drum machine and reigned in the screaming a bit. I have a scrap of a memory from the night – the three of us wandering up Hyperion to a burrito shop and spending a long time sitting at one of the tables. We were probably a little early for the show.

I have no idea where we slept.

The car we were cohabitating in was a nearly new Volkswagen Jetta that belonged to Etain or someone in her family. It was an early example of the key fob having a computer chip in it meaning it would be both drastically expensive and a logistical nightmare if it were lost. I had just moved into Skadi and Etain’s world but in the short time I’d been there the key was becoming potentially or theoretically lost multiple times a day.

I couldn’t say if this characterized their entire cross country trip or if it was a newer phenomenon. I thought it would help if the keyring was a little larger and looked more like it and the two girls belonged together. I tied on a big loop of rainbow cord I had for making Cat’s Cradles and attached a large acrylic prism. It was the same one a girl named Annapurna used to “sting” me when we first met in Liberty, Maine.

[It’s in The Bus chapters if anybody feels like digging for it.]

That prism had already been through some stuff. When I started hanging around Oakland in 2008 I worked on a three piece version of Bleak End at Bernie’s with Books and Rotten Milk for a big generator show at the Albany Landfill. Rotten Milk made pedal noise and Books added percussion with tap dancing or percussion on a bent saw or scribbling on top of a contact mic’d metal sign depending on the song.

It wasn’t improvised – we spent a long time writing parts and practicing at The Purple Haus. We also took the opportunity to record the three piece versions of the songs on a four track but the morning after an Apgar show my purse was stolen a few feet from the place I was sleeping on the floor and the master tape was lost before we’d had a chance to mix it down. This was the morning that Jesse Short gave me the “Vampire Dicknose” nickname:

“Hey Vampire Dicknose! I found some of your trinkets in the gutter!”

Besides the tape the only other things in my purse were trinkets. One of the ones recovered in the gutter was that prism. It had been attached to a contact mic wire and was the source of a power struggle between me and Books because she was teaching me to solder piezos but was inordinately bothered by me wanting to hang different things from the wires that were purely ornamental in function.

Any way she was right – the weight of the prism caused the wiring on that particular contact mic to fall apart and it became part of a keychain. I kind of think she made sure it was poorly soldered out of spite though. That’s not really an excuse for anything – I took Electric Shop in Junior High and should have already known how to solder myself.

I made the changes to the car key in Los Angeles. We were heading down to San Diego to play a show and celebrate Thanksgiving at my mother’s house and we stopped to go swimming at Black’s Beach in La Jolla. When it was time for us to leave the car key was suddenly missing again. If you’ve ever misplaced car keys at a beach you know how daunting it is to search an expanse of sand where they easily could have become buried.

This was the proof-of-concept run for my modifications of the key chain. If my theory had been correct the visual affinity between the new decorations and Etain and Skadi’s style would cause them to be drawn back together. One of the popular activities at Black’s Beach is paragliding from the Torrey Pines cliffs that sit above it. After riding the winds the paragliders land somewhere on the beach and pack up the canvas sailplane to hike back up the trail.

As we approached the trailhead one such paragliding enthusiast was twirling the key on his finger and looking directly at us. He told us it had been beneath his feet the moment they returned to terra firma and he’d been scanning the crowd for its owner. The moment he set eyes on Skadi and Etain he knew that it could belong to no one else so the experiment was a success. I don’t remember looking to see if that stuff was still on the keys when we met back up on the East Coast but I’d understand if it was removed – it was a change that I had unilaterally made to their world.

Black’s Beach is clothing optional but I doubt the three of us were naked. Whatever was happening between me and Skadi prevented the insular world that the three of were building from existing in Eden-like innocence. Most likely we all had underwear or actual swimsuits on. There were other signs of trouble in Paradise as well.

Because of how tall I am I’ve always enjoyed being treated like a piece of furniture and climbed on. The photo up there is me fulfilling this function for Lux some time after we stopped being in an intimate relationship. My feelings are directly opposed to The Rolling Stones famous lyric:

“I’ll never be your beast of burden…”

I almost always want to be a beast of burden. It’s not totally gendered – I often raise male friends into the air on my shoulders while they are performing but I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t a special thrill in being scaled by beautiful women. Ideally I would have preferred for Etain to feel equally at home doing this but under the circumstances I can see why my shoulders didn’t quite feel like neutral ground. In fact it was a source of tension:

Etain saw Skadi as looking down on and mocking her from my shoulders – much like a sardonic squirrel. I wasn’t going to put this in here because I’ve already used it in another piece but honestly why would I ever pass up an opportunity to drop in a reference to Ragnarok and the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson? Etain saw Skadi in this moment as similar to Ratatosk – the bushy tailed rodent that runs up and down Yggdrasil to ferry insults between Avenir the eagle and Nidhogg the dragon.

I doubt that’s how Skadi would have seen herself.

I didn’t want to make Skadi or Etain feel like I was comparing them to each other but the reality is this probably happened nearly constantly. While Skadi was clambering on me I would have been making remarks about how incredibly weightless she was and it doesn’t seem outside the realm of possibility that weight and self image is a thing Etain struggled with – I have and most girls I know have as well.

More than anything I think she was just feeling ganged up on.

After the debacle with the keys we continued on to my mother’s house. It was the first Thanksgiving since my father’s death and both of my sisters were also in attendance. My mother seemed upset about something, normally this would have been drugs but I wasn’t on any, I asked her if she had some issue with the girls:

“Of course it’s not the girls! The girls are cool as grapes!”

I never did figure out what was bothering her. Everybody seemed to get along and be genuinely excited to meet and learn about each other. My older sister Sarah seemed especially taken with Skadi’s music and went on to follow and listen to it for longer than I did. The three of us went to a produce centered grocery store to get ingredients for pies.

I had only learned how to bake pies a couple of years earlier during a courtship with the girl I call James. Since that time it’s remained an often romantic bonding activity for the period where I am just getting to know somebody. Skadi and I worked together and made both a savory and mixed fruit pie – I don’t remember the particulars except that they were novel (or pie-oneering) and perfectly adequate.

Etain attempted to make something out of grapefruits. It might have worked for something chilled in the general order of key lime but that wasn’t how she went about it. She seemed determined to both innovate and buttress her sense of individuality but at the same time wracked by self doubt and misgivings. Pies are a comfort food and expression of domestic contentment and her dismal failure of one was indicative of a lapse in all of these things – she was feeling fundamentally not okay.

She went outside to an area covered by a gigantic pine tree and began to cry. I followed her out and attempted to comfort her – I was doing too much and perhaps a bit smothering but she did seem to appreciate having me there. Seeing her cry made me feel like I wanted to protect her but at the same time I must have been looking for some form of absolution. I knew that this all was intense for her, that she was pulled into a gravitational orbit with me the same way that she had been in one with Skadi for a long time and the more that things grew between me and Skadi the more Etain would be trapped in a place that was both too small for her and impossible to leave.

I don’t think I could have resisted the thing with Skadi but I did know that it wasn’t fair and what made things even less fair was needing Etain to pretend to be okay to make myself feel better.

Skadi was just getting tired of emotional breakdowns and crises and having Etain’s issues fill her horizon. It was like they’d been living in a conjoined twin costume and she needed her leg back. She was guiltless insofar as she had no responsibility to keep things perfectly balanced or be the world for everyone. I took those responsibilities on even as I saw the impossibility of them. There was hubris there but bigger hands than mine were pulling at least some of the strings.

I couldn’t have created or conjured the forces that were pulling us together. Perhaps I participated in a myth that I did but the reality was that I was just as powerless as anyone. We played a last minute show that night – probably at my younger sister’s house. Actually only Skadi and I played while Etain did not feel up to it. It’s a big thing when you’re traveling for the purpose of performing music in front of people but you don’t even feel like doing it.

It means something’s broken.

That’s where things stood when Skadi and Etain left me in San Diego and continued to travel on back toward the Northeastern States and cities they had started from. Yet somehow we were all still determined to reunite and continue to travel and play shows together when I would fly to New York early the next year. It wasn’t like we thought it was a good idea.

It was like we didn’t have a choice.

Part Three

The Miss Rockaway Armada Part Nine : “If you come to my business don’t mention my name”

berniebleak4 Comments

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

Part 8

There are a ton of photos from The Miss Rockaway Armada. If anybody wants to see more of them and get a better idea of how all the rafts and people looked on a day to day basis all you have to do is go over to the Flickr group and there’s at least ten pages of them.to almost certainly outlast your appetite. It’s really nice that it’s still all there – for some reason the Flickr group for on the experimental opera that Lisers organized in Berlin a couple of years later seems to have disappeared.

What this means for me though is that I have a near endless amount of choices when it comes time to pick one to stick on top of a chapter and they don’t always align with the moments I found important or memorable. My time on the rafts began when I accompanied my friend Melanie or Double or Sphere from the Blog Cabin in Chicago to the Marina they were docked at in Alton, Illinois.

She was going down to start living on them and I was only tagging along to check them out and visit. Things worked out the other way around – she was only down there for a brief visit and I stuck it out on the rafts longer than almost anyone. When I finally went back to Chicago in November of 2007 only four other people stayed behind on The Garden of Bling: Alexis, Harrison, Jacki and Brodie.

The Sweeps might have still been working on their raft on the other side of the river but most likely they had already abandoned it and moved on. Everybody’s goal was to float into New Orleans in time for Halloween. When Halloween hit Saint Louis the thing in town to do was a reggae themed roller skating party in a remote part of the city. It was enough of an outskirt that me and Eric from CAMP and Lester and a couple other people got assaulted by a carload of rednecks for being and/or looking gay.

I don’t remember seeing any of The Sweeps at the roller rink so they probably just went down to New Orleans by other means when it became clear their raft would never make it. Or I could be wrong and they were still in town. It’s entirely possible.

Anyway Alton, Illinois wasn’t actually the first time I ever set foot on the rafts. The Miss Rockaway Armada first set out from Minneapolis some time in the Summer of 2006 but rather than trying to overwinter on the water they found a bar in Andalusia, Illinois called Ducky’s Lagoon where they were able to dry dock everything and work on renovations.

I did actually get a chance to visit in March or April during the Ducky’s Lagoon phase. These events would have been right around the time of the piece I called “We can’t play. Somebody stepped on our flan.” when I was traveling with the girl I refer to as Rocky. We would have just returned to Chicago from our hitchhiking trip to Columbus, Ohio and then decided to go out to see the rafts on her suggestion.

The best way to start hitchhiking out of Chicago is to take a bus down to a truck stop called The South Holland Oasis that sits directly on the Interstate 80. The trip to Columbus had worked out pretty quickly but trying to get West was not working out as well. Now that I think about my attempt to hitch South in Illinois a few years later was even more miserable – Chicago is probably a city that it’s just easier to hitchhike North or East out of.

We had gotten out of the city but just barely and then spent an entire day standing around the side of the 80 with nobody seeming to give us a second glance. It was brutally hot and we were probably sleep deprived because we decided to take a nap underneath a bit of shade in a ditch. When we stepped back onto the shoulder Rocky suggested that I lift her onto my actual shoulders to stand out more and catch driver’s attention.

I was down to try out but I figured we might as well paint our faces with the brightly colored zinc sunblock we had found at the two story Salvation Army on Grand Avenue. It was a trend from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s that I’ve been surprised hasn’t made a comeback with all the other big fashion nostalgia from those decades – an opaque cream that comes in white and neon colors like blue and pink. The trend was to put it on your nose or in stripes under your eyes.

It’s probably supposed to offer extra protection to more sensitive skin on those parts of your face.

Rocky never ended up climbing on my shoulders because the moment after we painted colorful designs on our faces a van pulled off to offer us a ride. To everyone’s surprise it was a band that had recently come through Chicago and played at the Blog Cabin: The Minneapolis folk / Gothic Americana group Dark Dark Dark.

If that wasn’t enough of a coincidence they were also heading to the exact same place we were – going to visit the rafts at Ducky’s Lagoon. When we told her our destination Nona from the band said “Get out!” but in a tone of voice that made it clear she was only expressing incredulity at the serendipity of it all and actually meant “get into this van and we will take you directly there with us”.

The sunblock was in brand new sealed packages and we had bought all they had because it was cheap. We decided to leave it all with the rafts because the people on them would be living outside directly on the water and therefore get the most practical use out of it. If you look through the photos there’s a ton that show people wearing it – mostly in an eye makeup style similar to the picture from the El Rancho codeine party.

I thought about using one of the many photos of people on the rafts wearing this neon zinc sunblock as the featured photo for this piece but ultimately decided not to. I suppose I could easily embed one of those photos here. I was about to write a sentence about how I wasn’t going to do that but now I’ve changed my mind again so here’s one of Tracy and A’yen:

I thought that I wasn’t doing very much of making a point of putting up pictures of the people who are in the stories so the one at the top is Rocket and Brandy Gump from The Sweeps. Rocket is on the left and Brandy is on the right. They both liked to play accordion.

Here’s a story about Brandy Gump from before I came to the rafts: the closest town to the beach where The Garden of Bling got stuck is Brooklyn, Illinois. Venice is pretty run down and besides liquor stores and the kind of Chinese Restaurants that are behind a thick piece of bulletproof glass the only thing there is strip clubs. One of them had a creepy day care right in it’s parking lot called Leonard Bo Peep’s.

I think that’s the one from this story – I forget what the actual club is called. I never actually went inside any of them. The story was that before the rafts actually made it down to Saint Louis a big group of people made a special trip to this club to participate in amateur night. Brandy performed to Toxic by Britney Spears and had put on a comic amount of layers of clothing and underwear that she frantically pulled off in a way that was supposed to be confusing to the regulars and still resulted in her having more things on underneath.

The next week she went back by herself and won the first place prize. Presumably she went with a more traditional performance this time around but as nobody else from the rafts was with her only Brandy would know for sure.

Brooklyn and the rest of East Saint Louis have a pretty rough reputation. When I was an extra on an episode of The Real Househusbands of Hollywood the rapper Nelly was in the same scene as me and the script included a joke that implied he was from East Saint Louis. He demanded they change the joke and wanted everyone to know that while his music did first find success in East Saint Louis strip clubs he was from regular Saint Louis.

Around the time that Tim from Cementland started hanging out with The Sweeps he had driven everyone to a grocery store where Corey Vinegar got caught shoplifting cheese but Tim ended up getting arrested because he had warrants. The warrants were very much in line with Tim’s personality as a stereotypical character from an early Eminem video when he first started hanging out with us.

To fill out the cliche he had a Pit Bull that had just given birth to a litter of puppies in his house that he needed us to go take care of until he was released because nobody had money for bail. The dogs were all living on a bare cement floor and had, predictably, made a mess. I was with The Sweeps that night because there was a little bit of a flirtation going on between me and Brandy at the time.

It would have put me in a bit of an awkward position if it went anywhere as the two raft crews were essentially rivals but it didn’t go anywhere and things started up between Tim and Brandy not long after he was released. I was reluctant to even include the detail at all but I figured it was important because even just having a little fledgling romance with someone for a single day will alter the way you view and relate to that person from that point on,

There’s a little bit of softness that never goes away and I figured it would be better to just explain it instead of pretending like it didn’t exist. Besides that I got along well with all The Sweeps through every stage of the rivalry more or less.

Tim didn’t have so much as a mop in his house so I made an improvised one by tying a wash close to a hoe so I could clean up the copious amounts of puppy shit. Cementland was no longer a functioning cement factory but Tim must have done some kind of cement related work before starting there because besides his cement floor all the tools in his house were cement style tools. I only mention this because the hoe I used was the kind used to smooth out the surface of freshly poured cement if that helps anybody get a clearer mental picture of it.

I remember hearing later that he’d given all the puppies up for adoption but had the mother put to sleep as she was dog aggressive and human aggressive and would be nearly impossible to get adopted. Josie was particularly upset about this when he told everybody what had happened. I don’t doubt anything he said but even entering it’s home as a stranger when it had a litter of puppies I don’t remember the mother dog behaving especially aggressively.

I realize that these details will trigger intense emotions and reactions for some people but I’m only including them to help readers get a sense of who all these characters are – Josie in this particular instance.

Cementland is on the edge of a North Saint Louis neighborhood called Jennings. I’ve written somewhere else about the liquor store there that also sold hookahs, clothing and used cell phones that were probably stolen as they always still had the previous owner’s photos and contacts left in them. The same parking lot had a laundromat, tiny grocery store and fried fish place so it was a popular destination for everyone on the rafts.

I discovered that the fish spot sold an absurdly cheap meal made from these fried fish called bullheads – as crazy as it sounds I think it only cost three or four dollars in 2007 for two fish, a side and the piece of white bread that I’ll never understand why these places even include. One of the times that Rocky was visiting the Middle Eastern owner struck up a conversation with me and when the rafts came up he expressed interest in coming to see them.

Most people who heard about the rafts wanted to come see them in person so there was nothing especially surprising about that. Meeting people that lived on little floating shanties made out of scrap lumber is a new and unique experience for most people. He asked if he should bring anything to drink and I said he could if he wanted but it didn’t really matter.

He showed up with a twelve pack and immediately mentioned that he didn’t drink alcohol. I thanked him and passed a few beers around to whoever was hanging out. We probably had a small fire going just under the walkway that led to the pylon that had been used to load cement onto barges when Cementland was still a functional factory. That was the usual evening activity but everyone could have been just hanging out on the engine raft as well.

He hadn’t been there long when he got up and abruptly left. My phone rang in basically the exact amount of time it would have taken him to walk back to his car. Through his accent I was getting hints of what sounded like sarcasm and a touch of accusation:

“Hi Ossian! You drink all the beer already?”

I said we hadn’t as it had only been two minutes since he’d walked away. His tone shifted from fake saccharine friendliness to overt irritation:

“Do me a favor, if you come to my business don’t mention my name! I don’t want my workers thinking anything!”

I have no idea what that dude’s deal was. Obviously it had something to do with sex. Muslims often view Westerners, especially people in the kind of subculture the rafts were a part of, as especially promiscuous and sexually available. When he talked to me and Rocky at the restaurant it was clear we were a couple. I don’t know if he was expecting to have sex with her or with me or with both of us. Maybe me as the Park closest to the rafts was a well known male on male cruising spot.

I mean there was no possible chance that anybody would have had sex with him under any circumstances – I just thought it was odd how angry he suddenly got without doing anything to even try to make that sort of situation happen. I guess I was supposed to offer the moment I saw he’d brought us a little bit of beer or something. I went back to the restaurant a lot because it was the only cheap food in that particular neighborhood but I never saw him again.

I don’t think I ever knew his name to begin with. Weird dude.

Next Chapter

Berlin 2009 : “You Shut Up! Police Speak English!”

berniebleakLeave a comment

I went to the movie theater and watched Infinity Pool today. Be forewarned that reading onward could constitute a *SPOILER* in the mildest possible sense of the word but the movie got me thinking about getting arrested in foreign countries and how the experience exists on a continuum between Kafkaesque Nightmare and Extreme Tourism. I don’t deliberately go out of my way to find myself on the wrong side of the law in nations that I am not a citizen of but I have done it multiple times.

I’ve already written about my experiences in a Mexican carcel and at even greater length about the complex logistics behind securing the release of a former fiancée who had found herself with serious charges. If reading the chapter “Napoleonic Dynamite” isn’t enough of a vicarious thrill traveling to Tijuana personally should nearly guarantee the opportunity to at least attract some negative attention from the Federales. For readers without a passport New Orleans and the entire state of Louisiana operate under a similar but distinct legal system that can feel thrillingly arbitrary.

This particular chapter is going to be about exploring the penal system of Germany which felt especially Kafkaesque given that everything was in the “original language”. For those that haven’t visited Germany the nation’s cultural emphasis on conformity and following the rules can be especially jarring to Americans who are more accustomed to blind, unerring dedication to individualism. The main difference to me was that the average German citizen seemed to have complete faith in the idea that people can tell other people what to do.

I’ve got a couple anecdotes to illustrate this point but the first one has the added advantage of highlighting another celebrated German trait: their sense of humor. While we were preparing our experimental opera, Fever of Unknown Origin, we composed, practiced and recorded the louder musical parts in a popular set of practice spaces located in a former secret police headquarters in East Berlin’s Lichtenberg district. We started sussing out another band in the building’s hallways and elevator and I decided to break the ice in the international language of bass player jokes.

I told the famous one about determining whether or not a stage was level by confirming that the bass player was drooling from both sides of his mouth. After quietly translating for one another and some subdued laughs of appreciation my counterpart, the most bilingual and extroverted of their group, fired back with one of his own:

“Why have bass players always to be ugly?”

Before we could even formulate the requisite question he was excitedly delivering the somewhat baffling punchline:

“Because they have to!”

I must admit that this one had me puzzled for a decent amount of time. The other band members were laughing and the bass player revealed his identity by grumbling in irritation so there was no denying that this had actually been a joke. At first I told myself that some subtle bit of humor was being lost in translation but eventually I realized that I was overthinking things. The point was that in Germany people have to do what you tell them to: that was the joke. The bass player was angry because now that this sentiment had been verbalized he had no choice but to become ugly.

The second anecdote is more of an ongoing scenario that I gained perspective on as my visit progressed. I had been noticing Germans from all walks of life calling after their dogs in exasperation as the animals disregarded their commands and frolicked in amusement. I was the only member of the American contingent to speak or understand the language at all but I wasn’t so well versed in it that I would comprehend overheard speech without making a conscious effort.

I usually didn’t understand the exact words that the Germans were shouting after the dogs but the energy and emotion were unmistakable. Drew was the one who finally put it into perspective. These kinds of deep cultural intuitions surrounding the interactions between humans and animals are something of a specialty of his. When I first visited New Orleans he told me about being struck with how much the city’s cats acted like people on his own first visit: they wandered the streets day and night and often slept at odd hours in unexpected places.

Eventually he realized that these traits fall under the umbrella of completely normal cat behavior and what he was actually noticing was how much the city’s people act like cats.

After we had been in Berlin for a long time Drew began to realize that the same exasperated tone that everybody was using in their interactions with their dogs could also be heard in their interactions with us. He put it together that it all came down to a dogmatic belief in the power of telling other people and animals what to do on the part of the Germans and an absolute immunity to that power in the case of some dogs and some Americans. Mostly Drew saw some familiarity in the delight on the dog’s faces as they hurriedly trotted away from commands that they couldn’t even understand and this was because he’d been doing the exact same thing.

It was also Drew who made the observation that when I started speaking to the Germans in their own tongue the manner in which they viewed me shifted considerably at a certain point in nearly every interaction: I would begin as an entertaining curiosity but inevitably shift to being a talking dog that needs to die. It should be noted that, like in the previous example, Drew’s assessment came only from his understanding of tone, body language and interpersonal dynamics. The meaning of the words themselves had no influence on him.

I mention this because I’m about to tell you what I was actually saying. As the group’s de facto translator it would have made sense for me to introduce the other project members, promote our upcoming performance project and that sort of thing. Instead I weaponized my knowledge: a night’s drinking would start off with lots of asking for absurdly long imaginary street names (hochseewaldbergturschlossvogelkatzestrasse for example) but then degenerate into profusely apologizing for being a dirty Jew that they had the misfortune of interacting with because their grandparents neglected to kill mine.

I’m not actually angry at the contemporary Germans for what happened during the Holocaust and of course they have done a much better job at acknowledging and attempting to amend for their past atrocities than, to pick a random example, the United States and our dark history with slavery and systemic racism. At nearly thirty years old I was just a bit of an edgelord and enjoyed making people uncomfortable. The previous Summer in Australia I had noticed that it made (white Australian) people squirm whenever I mentioned the Indigenous Australians or referred to their existence:

“What’s going on these days with the Abos?”

“You don’t call them Abos!”

“Fair enough, what should I call them instead?”

“You don’t call them anything!”

Anyway none of this has much to do with why I found myself in a German lockup. I have referred to Fever of Unknown Origin as an experimental opera but maybe it would be more accurate to say unscripted opera. The twenty or so project members more or less organically created whatever sets, costumes and music we felt like making and then presented these things on stage in a more or less random order. Lisers had secured public arts funding for this project but nearly all of it went to flying everybody to Germany.

The musical equipment was secured ahead of time and waiting for us but all of those sets and costumes had to be made of something. We combed flea markets, frequented what everybody called the “Turkish Market” and did a lot of digging through the trash. Somebody had cased out a space along the canal that we were all calling a garbage dump but in hindsight would probably be better described as a recycling center. We decided to pick through it under cover of night by climbing the fence and left our passports back at the shared workspace in case we ran into trouble.

Every German I spoke to about this experience afterward asked me why we didn’t just show up during business hours and ask to pick through the refuse nicely but I would put the whole thing down to a cultural misunderstanding. In the United States we had gotten comfortable with the consistent reality that spaces of this type would be unlikely to be patrolled or guarded because they didn’t really contain anything of value. In the 1998 Berkeley home I mentioned we lived next to a tow yard and made a hobby out of coming over the fence to rifle through the sequestered cars.

Obviously we shouldn’t have been doing that but the lot seemed to be reserved for the most conspicuously abandoned vehicles. In all the time I lived there I never saw anybody coming to retrieve one and they didn’t even bother with a dog. The German recycling lot was far less permissive.

The other important detail that was unknown to us at the time was that all of this was taking place against the larger context of “Action Week”. In Drew’s words once again Action Week was the annual extended water balloon fight between the cops and anarchists. It was very much a team sport. The anarchists were trying to squat or gain access to as many buildings as possible and the cops were trying extra hard to make a big show of preventing them.

At the end of the week the two sides would tally up their various wins and losses and hopefully renew their faith in the importance and validity of being either a cop or anarchist. I don’t think there was an official trophy that got passed back and forth or scoreboards but things like arresting trespassers took on outsized importance during this week. This time around things were going to culminate in a highly publicized attempt to squat the decommissioned Tempelhof Airport that ended up not being successful.

The bigger thing was that a security guard had apparently been killed with a gun somewhere along the canal a day or two before the night that we picked to sneak into the recycling center. This probably didn’t have anything to do with “Action Week” but for the arbiters of Law and Order all of it most likely felt very much connected. What I’m trying to get at is that tensions were especially high during this little window of time and if we had been more aware of these various factors it is likely that we would have reconsidered.

I think that there were originally six of us. We were having a grand time looking through the garbage for things that might be useful in constructing sets or costumes when we suddenly noticed that the darkness was being interrupted by an abnormally bright flashlight beam and somebody was yelling “HALT!” Nearly everybody scattered and made their way over one of the fences but in that moment I turned to a companion who was frozen in fear:

“I’m not running.”

I knew that this person didn’t speak a word of German even though they had been in the country for a little over a month longer than most of the group. I didn’t doubt that I probably could have escaped if I chose to run in that moment but my immediate instinct was to not leave my companion to face the German Criminal Justice System alone. Part of this decision was that my companion was gender non-conforming at the time: they used female pronouns but looked masculine and had facial hair. I’m not sure if they are as comfortable with people knowing that they ended up in a German Jail Cell as I am so I will be referring to them as Clydesdale.

Once the security guard arrived to apprehend us he turned out to be extremely square jawed, blonde haired, blue eyed and in the company of a large trained German Shepherd. I want to clarify that this person was only doing their job and we were breaking the law. All of these features were merely coincidences based on the country I had chosen to break it in. These caveats aside this was all extremely triggering to me as a Jewish person. I explained the relative innocence of what we were up to as best as I could and pleaded with him to release us with a warning but he was determined to hand us over to the actual police.

This turned into a whole lot of waiting. In the interim before the official police arrived, a recycling and garbage truck showed up to unload the refuse it had collected. The drivers of the truck were two Black men in the nearly universal embroidered coveralls of sanitation workers. We shifted our tactics to pleading with them to help us to escape from our captor but of course they couldn’t have done that without exposing themselves to some kind of disciplinary action and they didn’t even know what we had done to wind up in trouble in the first place.

What did end up happening almost immediately was that the German Shepherd became extremely aggressive toward the Black sanitation workers – far more aggressive than it had been to either of us at any point leading up to this. I’ve been responsible for the care and custody of a racist dog in the past and I know that the animals can develop these biases without being explicitly trained for them. Still I find it notable that all of the body language, context and commands should have highlighted my companion and I as the greatest threat in the situation but none of that could hold a candle to the effects produced by these men having a darker skin color.

The sanitation workers left and the real police finally arrived. When we had decided to leave our Passports behind the idea was that if we did find ourselves in this exact situation we could invent names and identities and be released, leaving an imaginary person to deal with the long term consequences. Lisers, the German artist who masterminded the entire project, had even been in this exact situation and successfully done so in the United States although I should specify that it happened under the relatively nebulous Louisiana Code.

Anyway the German police were having none of this. Our Passports were back at the Kreuzberg apartment that everybody had been using as a project art studio and command center. Nothing that was happening there was against the law but I was determined not to bring the police around out of a general sense of “punk etiquette”. No matter how severe their threats became I was ready to call their bluff – reasoning that one of our friends could probably eventually bring the Passports to a station. One of the cops was becoming so frustrated with my intransigence that he stomped on the ground like an indignant toddler:

“No! You listen to police!”

I didn’t but Clydesdale did. Their instinct was probably correct as this got things moving and there weren’t really any repercussions for the project at large. Once we were parked underneath the studio the same power struggle repeated as to whether or not we would bring them upstairs. I wanted them to keep one of us and send the other one up but they were very apprehensive about the prospect of that person locking the door behind them and mocking them from the window.

This fear was so powerful that one of the cops literally went through the pantomime of holding their hands on each side of their head and sticking out their tongue. Earlier in the trip we’d gone to a Limp Wrist show at the famous squat Kopi that represented exactly the kind of thing that the cops were afraid of. Kopi was a testament to the powerlessness of the police and a negation of everything they represented. The fact that all of this was happening during the aforementioned “Action Week” must have added considerably to these misgivings.

Inevitably they ended up bringing us upstairs and going through the cop routine of poking into everything to try to find something to catch us up on. The apartment was legally rented, its function as a studio was within acceptable zoning use and the terms of the lease, everybody there had a visa in perfect order. I should mention here that in recent talks with a few of my International artist and musician friends I’ve learned that the United States has made it essentially impossible for them to visit and perform and Germany was and still is far more progressive in this regard.

Anyway with so many artists working out of a single studio with a single kitchen and nobody having much money there had been the usual conflicts about people eating each other’s food. Somebody had left a hand written sign on the refrigerator with the instruction to “steal food from stores” as opposed to taking it from your fellow artists. One of the cops stumbled across this sign and could hardly contain their paroxysms of vindicated authority:

“Aha! What is this?”

Clydesdale looked over and in a brilliant flash of inspiration realized that the word “stores” had been written with the kind of lower case “r” that is just ambiguous enough to be mistaken for a “v”.

“What? It says steal food from stoves.”

The cops were incredulous but, in the tradition of Improv Actors, I quickly supported their statement with a monster of a “yes and”:

“Yeah! It means you can’t take other people’s food out of the refrigerator but if they cook something and leave it sitting on the stove then it’s fair game!”

This explanation had enough punk-vérité veracity and internal logic to satisfy the peace officers. For several minutes there was an excited general chatter as they translated my explanation for each other and regarded it in admiration like an elegant solution to a puzzle. It wasn’t like they could have used the original wording of the sign as sufficient evidence to prosecute anybody for anything but at the very least they would have ferreted through the fridge and harassed us over the contents.

The thing about the lie is that it both clicked into the idiosyncratic way that Germans tend to speak the English language and was possibly too well constructed for them to believe that we would have been capable of inventing it in the first place. Or maybe I’m just overthinking this like every other detail of every other thing that either exists or could be imagined to exist in the universe. Still, it’s an entertaining thought.

This brought us to the conclusion of the “Power struggle over the Passports” arc. Now there was nothing left to do but bring us down to their station and lock us into rooms until they decided to release us again. The one that had thrown the little tantrum with the stomping felt to me like he was silently gloating just a little bit so I told him that he was no better than a vampire in that he hadn’t been able to come inside until he’d explicitly been invited.

He said “Quiet, or I kill you!” in a kind of goofy voice, maybe like an exaggerated Eastern European accent, and mumble-explained that he was remembering it as a funny line from a television show or movie rather than actually saying it to me saying it to me. Obviously he just wanted to say it to me but needed some penumbra of plausible deniability in the very unlikely event that I would try to make it a whole thing with the U.N. and everything.

We got to the processing place to be processed. Mine went by fairly quickly because I was slightly bilingual or got a processing officer that was better with English. Clydesdale’s processing was more of an ordeal. The officer asked them their eye color and they said “hazel” but the cops had no idea what to make of this. I said “hell braun” (light brown) and the officer lightly grunted in irritation. Things ground to a halt with the next question:

“Do you paint your body?”

“What?!”

“Do you paint your body?”

I explained to them that he was trying to ask if they had any distinctive tattoos but my second interjection made the processing officer angry. He probably felt that I was muddying the waters as to who was actually in charge. He shouted at me in anger:

“You shut up! Police speak English!”

I thought this was especially funny because of how true it wasn’t but there was nothing funny about the next thing that happened. The officers wanted to know why Clydesdale’s Passport said “female”. We both explained that it said this because Clydesdale was female. The officers said something fucked up and ominous about making them “prove” it but then dropped the matter when we asked them what the fuck they meant. Anyway I don’t want to lessen how fucked up this was and I have no idea what they might have done if I hadn’t been there.

The officers didn’t actually violate their human rights by making them submit to a genital inspection and obviously I know that that level of humiliation comes standard issue with being arrested in the United States but seeing as that isn’t the case in Germany making somebody submit to it because you don’t think they are gender-conforming enough is on another level of fucked up.

We got put in separate cells. Narrow things made out of cement. Mine had blood on the wall. Somebody would have been banging their head against it before I got there. Squirrels freak out when you trap them in a box, they go crazy scratching at the bars until their claws bleed. Or that’s what I heard – I’ve never actually seen it first hand. I did catch some juvenile opossums once and they just grabbed the bars with their tiny human-like hands and waited.

Anyway I was more of an opossum type compared to whoever had gotten their blood on the wall and would have been a squirrel type. I was going to say that I was used to it but after doing a little bit of math in my head I realized that this was only my second time getting locked up ever. The first one would have been riding freight trains in Southern Illinois. Both times in Mexico and a couple more times in the United States would all be coming later.

Ryan Riehle told me that he was once arrested in Mexico while carrying dynamite and ended up using it to cause enough structural damage to escape from the Mexican prison but I wasn’t actually there to attest to whether this is 100% true or not.

It was a lot of hours later but still dark outside when they let me out. The math for this part actually feels a little off because of how short the nights are in Berlin during the Summer. It would take forever to get dark and then get light again in no time at all. The whole Summer I was there I only ended up going to bed before the sun came back up twice. Still it was dark when we got caught in the recycling center and dark when they let me out: I’m not gonna sit here and argue with my own senses.

I didn’t learn a ton about Berlin’s transit system because I went nearly everywhere with a bike. Wherever they let me out of I didn’t see any trains around so I figured out how to walk back to Kreuzberg and walked back to Kreuzberg. For this next part I feel like I need to describe how I was dressed. I was wearing metallic silver leggings, a metallic knit King Tut motif sweater and a lot of colorful eye makeup. I had long hair and was clean shaven at this point in time.

I referred to myself as “goth” during this time period but most of the people I interacted with might not have described it that way. I had even gotten into a minor argument with a Rastafarian in a trendy Berlin dance music club a few days before this incident on this very question but then I realized that the whole thing was a miscommunication and he actually thought I was claiming to be God.

Anyway when a group of five men with close cropped hair dressed all in black came rushing up to apprehend me from out of the shadows my first thought was that they were homophobic Neo-Nazis and I was either about to get beat to death or come extremely close to it. At this point in the night I was too tired to put up much of a fight. To my relative good fortune they turned out to only be more police, undercovers this time around, who thought that I looked “suspicious”.

“Action-Week” again, the gift that kept on giving.

I tried to explain to them that I had just come from detainment and the contents of my backpack had already been tossed over once that night so they need not have bothered. They were going to want to do it for themselves anyway. Once they established that I wasn’t carrying anything that I wasn’t supposed to be they told me that everything was “OK”. That definitely wasn’t the word I would have used but at least I was free to go.

I got back to the studio in Kreuzberg and was finally able to go to sleep. The sun had come up at this point – this wasn’t one of the two nights.

Our anti-authoritarian American ways continued to bring us into friction with a large swathe of Germans. At one point Lisers complained to me that we all needed “to be more German” and I explained to her that if that was what she had wanted she probably could have saved a ton of money on air fare. One night Popsicle and I discovered a small loft with a mattress in the Basso space where we were installing the show and decided to sleep on it. The next morning somebody discovered us and was unhappy about it:

“I don’t know how free you usually are…”

I felt like this couldn’t possibly be true.

I was pretty certain it was something we were famous for.

Us Americans I mean.

Odds and Ends From (Mostly) America : “How You Live? How You Stay Alive?”

berniebleakLeave a comment

[Image from Fever of Unknown Origin Berlin 2009]

I’ve been thinking a bit about what the definition of a story is and how many of my favorite stories wouldn’t actually qualify as stories under commonly established criteria for defining them. I went through a period of reading the nosleep subreddit a lot and tried my hand at writing a few pieces on it that weren’t very good. When I wrote The Dreams in the Red House I thought it would be a good idea to share it there as it was my first piece that actually felt scary.

It got removed after a couple of hours for not being a story. Apparently detailed descriptions of a series of nightmares and sleep paralysis events doesn’t count as a story on that board unless it results in real world consequences. I thought of adding a throwaway final sentence like “and then I woke up and the monster was in my room” and resubmitting it to be obnoxious/funny but decided to just leave it alone.

Now one of my pieces, The Name Is Death Turkeys!, does actually contain a piece of original horror fiction but I’m not sure if it would count as a story either. I don’t want to put in too big of a spoiler in case any readers feel like clicking over and checking it out but I’ll say that the story is somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not anything supernatural happened. I wonder if there are pieces by writers like Shirley Jackson and H.P. Lovecraft that are horror classics but wouldn’t count as stories on that subreddit either.

Anyway the things I am going to be calling stories in this piece are just situations where strangers said things that I thought were funny. On the non sequitur to joke continuum most of these little sketches would probably list toward the former. I was thinking earlier today that this whole bit might work better as a comedy album because so much of it is going to depend on vocal mannerisms and timing. I know the exchange rate between words and pictures is fixed at one thousand to one but where would it be for audio?

The first selection in what will probably be a triptych comes from San Diego and was most likely the late nineties as I don’t think I was drinking yet. I was sitting with Francois at the prototypically San Diegan twenty four hour burrito shop on Third Avenue and Washington Street – I want to say that it was early in the afternoon but it could have been the middle of the night. Francois was telling me a story that wasn’t one about the type of tea that is supposedly picked by monkeys.

The story always goes more or less the same way: somewhere in China there are wild tea plants growing on mountainous peaks and ledges too precarious to be reached by human hands. Instead a tribe of wild monkeys has taken to collecting the tender leaves and exchanging them for fruit with the nearby villagers in an arrangement as old as time. I kind of doubt the reality is as idyllic as this anecdote would suggest but even at its worst it would have to be a million times better than the somewhat related cottage industry of force feeding coffee berries to wild civets and waiting for them to shit them out.

The following character was seated at the next table over: a bald and slightly heavy set white man with a soul patch dressed in a leather jacket and one of those colorful caps made up of triangles in different shades of leather suggestive of the 1970’s and Funk Music. He held a small brown paper bag that was crumpled at the top to accommodate the fluted neck of a forty ounce bottle of malt liquor. He looked significantly in our direction and offered the following observation in a voice tinged with sadness and wisdom:

“I’ve heard they uh… steal your belongings and what-not. The monkeys…”

If you’ve seen the Tupac Shakur movie Gridlock’d his voice and speech style were nearly identical to that of the small time heroin dealer and jazz musician character called Mud. The film is set in Detroit but I’m not sure if this monkey man was from there. He seemed to have stepped out of a timeless world where saxophones, poetry and cigarette smoke compete for space in the stilted air of an endless afternoon. Soulful eyes speaking out in earnest wistfulness for an ever-flowing stream of pilfered cameras and sunglasses.

The next bit comes from around 2005 or so in the hey-day of the counterfeit Greyhound Ameripass. I was crossing the desert on my way to or from Chicago and stepped off the bus to stretch my legs. The sharp eyes of a young Desert Rat lit upon the book I carried and the finger as bookmark to indicate it was no mere accessory. Having now spent time living in different versions of what is essentially an oasis of artificial irrigation surrounding an Am-Pm I understand why such a simple sight would have stood out as both significant and encouraging.

He was dressed in what is more-or-less the standard uniform of a dusty California nomad whose life can be neatly divided into long walks either to or from the convenience store. The brimmed cap with protective neck flap was there but what leapt out even louder was the refillable and sun faded insulated soda barrel. It was the kind that the guys who hold the stop sign for road construction crews always carry – probably 64 ounces if I had to guess. He had a long plastic straw to allow sipping without having to lift this burden any higher than waist level:

“Whatcha reading?”

I held up my copy of a popular translation of The Saga of the Volsungs and told him it was The Saga of the Volsungs. He proudly held up his own significantly thicker volume that I have to confess I stopped reading the title of after recognizing the Dragonlance logo. I understand that the books have a bit of a reputation and following but I struggle against deeply ingrained culture snob tendencies.

The entire situation reminds me of a bit of teenage trick-or-treating I did dressed as a Rene Magritte painting that caused my friend’s clown costume to appear especially pedestrian in comparison. We were in a fancy rich neighborhood for the better candy giver and the professorial candy-giver was impressed with my get-up:

“Ah yes, Magritte! My favorite surrealist is Dali!, and what are you young lady?”

“Uh.. I’m a clown, sir.”

In this analogy the Saga of the Volsungs is me in the Magritte costume, the Dragonlance novel is my friend and I’m the judgmental rich guy with the candy:

“Uh… yeah. This one is epic poetry about the Germanic Hero Siegfried…”

The Desert Rat crumpled his chin and attempted an expression of grave intellectualism. His rejoinder would have been hilarious as piss-taking mockery of my snobbishness but as a genuine attempt at pantomiming a Classical Education it was timeless. In the disaffected tone of a worldly scholar:

“Yeah… Socrates… Siegfried and Roy… I’ve read that stuff…”

I could throw out something wry about the Western Tradition here but honestly I think this particular pull-out quote speaks for itself.

The final bauble comes from a situation where a person whose natural register already falls within the “comedic voice” category suddenly switches to a different, more intentionally comedic voice. This isn’t the actual bit but during the production of the experimental opera Fever of Unknown Origin in Berlin in 2009 Raul and I went out to the Museeinsel dressed as goblins. I was in black leather with a witches nose and a badger’s preserved fur mask as headdress; Raul was wearing a horses mane in tanned leather on the back of his head and high platform boots.

We hadn’t specifically coordinated our looks but the entire trip had been goblin-themed for me at least. A woman politely asked in precise German if she might take our picture. I was actually the only member of the American contingent who understood German but I pretended not to because we’d been posing for pictures all day and I was getting bored of it. She asked her male companion what language he thought we might speak in the same precise German and he shrugged.

She asked in German again but with an exaggerated screechy goblin voice like the character Blix in Legend. I still pretended not to understand and we didn’t pose for a photo but I think about this lady and this moment all the time. That rarest of anomalies: a German attempt at humor that was actually quite funny.

This brings us to the third and final thing that I am loosely referring to as a story. I was with Jacki for this one, the brief Jubilee to my Wolverine: a mouthy teenage Asian sidekick. I think this happened in Los Angeles but it could have been Saint Louis or New Orleans. We met on the Rockaway and did a bit of traveling. It was most likely 2008.

I am going to refer to the man who we met on the street as a “crackhead” but the facts of the matter are that we only ever saw him smoking marijuana. I am using the term only for some specific tropes concerning voice and character. A Court Jester like persona and the type of deep and raspy speech you can no doubt already hear in your head. He had asked us to smoke his weed with him and we weren’t smoking very much of it so he complained that we were getting him “drunk” as he took one uninterrupted toke after another.

As these guys are always wont to do he was holding court on nothing much of anything:

“The other day my kids come up to me and say…”

This is where things got odd. When he switched to the character of his “kids” his voice got even deeper and even raspier. Think of somebody that already speaks in a stereotypical “crackhead” voice and now imagine that person doing the most intense, exaggerated impression of a “crackhead” voice they could muster. The tone was still light and comic but the edge on the voice was like something out of a horror movie:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

My response was almost involuntary:

“Damn! Your kids got some fucked up raspy ass voices! They even older than you are?”

We all laughed. I was making my wife laugh telling this story again in the car with me. She’s getting near her wit’s end with the stories which is part of the reason I started writing them down in the hope that getting some of it down in print would save me from cycles of endless repetition but she never gets sick of this one. I thought about the absurdity of telling the story, doing his voice and then doing him doing the voice.

As always I have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with the hypothetical children. It occurred to me today that maybe they weren’t children in the usual biological sense at all but rather some type of deeply fried homonculi he had inadvertently created by spilling blood on the ground like in the first Hellraiser movie. Twisted, skeletal golems of wire, bone and garbage clawing their way out of the mud and desperately wanting to know:

“How you live? How you stay alive?”

Rhineland 2009 : “The Time Machine is Off”

berniebleakLeave a comment

A huge group of us had just produced an unscripted experimental opera in Berlin, Germany. People from the rafts, Mardi Gras in New Orleans and just different artists that Lisers had met and vibed with. It was over now and we had a couple of days in Frankfurt-am-Main before we would be flying back to the United States.

Alexis had managed to rent a car, an adult flavored magic trick I’ve never been able to pull off personally, much less drive one. Drew came along of course. Alexis, Drew and I had been the core imagineers behind the opera segment entitled KoboldsGeschenkladen or Goblin Gift Shop. We grabbed Jacki and failed to grab Popsicle for reasons that would become apparent later.

We stopped in some sort of picturesque rustic village with narrow slanted cobblestone streets for gas, directions or some other thing that wasn’t my responsibility. Then we ended up swimming in the Rhine. I want to say that we were in view of the famous Loreley but I may be transposing that detail because I’m a fan of the statue and that’s my favorite Pogues song.

Jacki got excited and started singing “Never thought I’d be in the Rhine” to the tune of Andy Samberg’s smash hit I’m on a Boat. This was evidently viewed as a transgression, or at least a serious lapse in decorum, by the primeval River Deity of Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows. [Note: I guess that’s technically the Danube but you get the idea] A hefty bough from a representative of the species was launched toward, and only narrowly missed, her head.

We started driving uphill toward the first of the castles. On the way we passed an older middle aged man in some kind of boxy all terrain vehicle that looked like it came from the Second World War or a mid-budget ‘80s sci-fi movie. He looked like the kind of European man that gets cast to play a sex tourist or serial killer.

The first castle had been allowed to rest in a state of advanced disrepair with only a modicum of modern signage. The moment we arrived a pair of white goats with long shaggy hair and impressive horns ran out to greet us. They seemed to be indicating that they wanted to give us “the tour”.

The goats led us around to the front of the ruins where there was an aluminum sign in the particular shade of brown used the world over to indicate “minimally maintained nature and historic landmark stuff”. The sign displayed the rough isomorphs for four human heads surrounded by arrows that were pointing at them. We realized then why it had been impossible to bring a fifth companion. Clearly it was a rule; that vital part of the German National Identity.

Our guides led us the rest of the way around the castle walls until we came to a small detached structure that seemed to serve as their dormitory. When Drew moved to step inside the goats’ accommodating posture was replaced with reserved yet urgent bleating. They seemed to be trying to say:

“We really weren’t expecting company and we’ve kind of got urine and feces all over the floor because nobody has swept it out yet.“

We allowed the goats to return to the relative comfort of having just concluded an impromptu and obligatory house tour. A second sign was labeled Waldgrab and pointed to a small footpath between the trees. As advertised it led to an understated gravestone that reminded me of a Castlevania game or the cover to Burzum’s Hliðskjálf.

On the way back down the mountain we spotted the same ATV guy and decided to follow him in case he was heading to an even cooler and more secret castle. We ended up at an isolated archery range that filled a clearing with targets and images of wild animals on stacked up hay bales. I said something about how cool it would be to shoot bows and arrows in my limited and often weaponized German. With a pointed glance he conveyed to me that simply tailing him through the forest had been both uncool and more than enough American Imposition for a single day.

The next castle had been converted into a luxury destination hotel called Schloss Rheinfels. Someone near the entrance recited a practiced speech about the reason that the Rhineland Valley had an average of one castle for every small amount of square kilometers. It was something about how anyone who had the wherewithal to stack a few rocks and levy tariffs from passing merchants had done exactly that.

The dungeon had been converted into whatever the opposite of a torture chamber is. There was a circle of the kind of black leather upholstered chairs you find at an airport or state fair that accept coins in exchange for a mechanized back massage. Behind a set of iron bars a plastic skeleton was guarding a chest full of treasure that looked like it had come from Oriental Trading Company beneath red and green mood lighting. I leveraged my slim physique to squeeze between the bars and pilfer an ornate cross medallion that I hoped would be cursed as a result of its unique provenance.

There was also an indoor swimming pool but it seemed that we had arrived too late in the evening and the doors were locked. Drew shifted into a hidden superpower that I had never seen before or after. Stripping to his underwear he threw on one of the monogrammed white bathrobes and accosted a hapless desk clerk with a perfect imitation of an unamenable and vaguely European tourist:

“Hallo, I just took a constitutional swim in the Rhine and I was hoping to have a dip in your magnificent pool but it seems I’ve come too late and unfortunately my flight is just ridiculously early in the morning…”

As Drew droned on the unlucky man looked around nervously and with no salvation in sight he capitulated and leaned in close for a confidential tone:

“I can let you in the pool but you won’t be able to use the Finnish sauna. The time machine is off.”

We floated lazily under fluted spouts next to tables stocked with wellness products under the red and white striped pavilion tents of medieval jousting tourneys. We were all thinking the same thing.

If this is what the castle is like without a time machine it must be nothing short of miraculous when they actually turn it on.