~ i wrote ~

When we got to Dieter’s apartment — enormous — something like 130 sq meters overlooking the river in central Berlin, €2,000 a month — and gorgeous, just gorgeous, like something out of a design catalogue, thanks to the space itself and also I gather to his roommate the polymathic hematologist, he played me some classical piano and fed me a cucumber from the terrace garden and we each showered and got into his bed for what I, twitching from drugs and a day-and-night awake, hoped would be sleep. His whole body was shaved — more recently than his face, I noticed, but perhaps that was by design, for its shadow was the perfect chic length, except for the unseeable-by-him rim where deep chin becomes upper neck, where the hair was embarrassingly overlong — and the effect was one of all-over coarse, sandpapery stubble that I very much would have been up for having slowly slid over my amphetamine-alert skin, but he was determined to crash his mouth repeatedly into my general pubic area if we were to touch at all, which was just stupid and terrible; perhaps the concept of taking mutual tactile pleasure without specific orgasm-orientation per se doesn’t translate, or perhaps this particular guy was just too dumb. I mean, read the room, Man. After a while, I tired of fighting him off and got up and put my stinking yoga outfit back on and took the U5 three stops in the wrong direction, into the suburbs, and then I figured it out and got off that train and took another, inbound one back in to Alexanderplatz and walked to my digs, the hochparterre in Prenzlauer Berg where my grad school friend’s ex lives with his wife and baby when they are not in New Haven for her twentieth reunion and more, the closest thing I have here to home.