| The 40 In 40 Days Project. | ||
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17. The Year In Berlin (1983-84) |
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The Au Pairs |
Three random
Berlin memories. Eins… To determine how to spend one Saturday
night, three of us decide to use the “Dice Man” technique. We choose
six courses of action, number them from 1 to 6, roll a dice, and do
whatever it tells us. The dice tells us to write a song and busk it in
public the following day. Someone borrows a cheap Casio keyboard
and amps it up to a ghetto blaster. None of us knows that much about
music – but still, we choose a preset “rock” rhythm, bash out a
few chords, scribble some words down, and end up with quite a groovy
little song by the end of the night. A groovy and highly political
little song… In Autumn 1983, the Cold War was raging
fiercely. The Soviet Union had recently shot down a South Korean plane,
and Reagan had just made one of made one of his classic “evil
empire” speeches in response. It was a particularly bellicose speech,
and living in occupied West Berlin, within a mile of the Wall, it had a
particularly scary resonance. We had also been hearing about the
alarmingly fierce anti-Russian reaction that was taking place in the US
– bars were tipping vodka bottles down the drain, that sort of thing
– and it was the speech and the reaction to it which the song
satirised. The chorus went: “Make America strong / that’s what
they’d welcome the least / pour all your vodka down the drain / who
gives a shit about peace?” So, the next day we take the keyboard,
the ghetto blaster and a couple of empty vodka bottles (for mime
purposes) down to the Kurfurstendamm – West Berlin’s busiest street
– and set up stall outside the Lufthansa building. We sing our little
song, which attracts quite a decent crowd and gets applause – and even
money. However, I’m not sure to what degree our audience have picked
up on the dry, biting sarcasm of the lyric. I have a nasty feeling that
they’re taking the song at face value, and are actually applauding our
hawkishness. Oh well, that’s showbusiness. The money is nice, anyway. There is an expectant pause as people
wait for our next number. We don’t know any other songs, so we start
playing the same one again. It only has four chords, so it doesn’t
really bear repeated listening. Our crowd rapidly disperses. We wait a
few minutes and then repeat the whole trick all over again. And again.
And again. Then slink off and drink our earnings. Aside from a spirited vocal rendition
of “Jilted John” at the village youth club in 1978, accompanied by
the village heavy metal band (Electric Phase – mmm!), this is the only
time I have ever rocked and rolled in public. Once, I feel, was more
than enough. Zwei... You didn’t have flatshares in West
Berlin. You had “Wohngemeinschaften”, which translates directly as
“living communities”. They were founded on the noble ideal of shared
communal living, which required active participation from all “Mitbewohner”.
The 2001 film Together
is a wonderfully accurate satire on the whole phenomenon. I wasn’t – am not – a terribly
“communal” person. Sharing is not my forte – hoarding is. But the
only alternative was a lonely bedsit. So, I moved into a WG (pronounced
“vay-gay”), as they were known for short, with three female
schoolteachers, all around ten years older than me. They had a fairly
relaxed, undogmatic attitude to communal living; so as long as I stuck
to the cleaning rotas, and remembered to bring back plain yoghurt from
the local Karstadt with precisely 3.5% fat, I was OK. My only major sticking point was
bathroom etiquette. None of my flatmates locked the door, but I most
certainly did. Until one afternoon when the lock broke, trapping me
inside. One of my flatmate’s boyfriends had to smash the lock with
something heavy. I was then treated to a finger-wagging lecture about
how I’d obviously spent far too much time in my parents’ house, and
how I needed to free myself from my obviously very repressed attitude. Needless to say, the lock was never
repaired – so from then on, privacy went out of the window. My
flatmates would think nothing of walking in on me, stark naked if you
please, while I was sitting on the toilet, and then - rather than
apologising and leaving the room – engaging me in conversation as to
what I’d got up to the night before. Call me a prude, but I just
didn’t like doing a poo in front of naked ladies. Sorry! The three schoolteachers all moved out,
and the lease was taken over by three new people. I alone stayed put.
The three newcomers had never lived in a WG before, and so their
idealism, as yet undimmed by experience, burnt fierce. I quickly had to
adapt to a harsh new regime of “sharing”. Yuck. It didn’t much
help that they all turned out to be deeply unpleasant individuals,
coupling a seemingly complete incapacity for original thought with a
self-righteous, zealous, almost Maoist desire to impose their received
doctrines upon others. Oh, and a truly fearsome petty-mindedness, which
instantly betrayed their bourgeois roots. I lasted less than three weeks before
being asked to leave, at a specially convened “community meeting”.
My evictors told me that this was not an easy decision for them to make.
We have tried especially hard to accept you, they explained, “weil du
Mitglieder einer unterdruckten Minderheit bist” (because you are a
member of an oppressed minority – poof, in other words). I think I was
supposed to look impressed at this point. I moved into a flatshare with a gay
theatre company instead. Not as much fun as it sounds. The director of
the company (who was also my landlord), after a string of flops,
absconded back to West Germany overnight and went into hiding, owing
large sums to his unpaid actors. There were articles in the press about
it. Drei... I don’t wanna be alone, where is
my baby? I don’t wanna be alone, where is my man? “Where Is My Man” by Eartha Kitt. The
Berlin gay anthem. For the entire twelve months I was there, you
couldn’t escape it. Every bar, from Anderes Ufer to Andreas Kneipe,
Movie to Querelle. Every club, from KC to the SchwuZ, Wu-Wu to Trocadero.
And every Saturday night at my mecca, the Metropol on Nollendorfplatz. I want…a millionaire. With a big, big, big, big….yacht. Hur-hur! Who can take me to Monte Car-r-r-rlo. San T-r-r-opez. And eventually….Tiffany’s! |