I found the real community-of-party design genius in the bathroom, where the stall door bottoms stop a good six or nine inches above the toilet seat, such that I imagine anyone with the inclination could get a good look at the user’s netherparts — the face is what’s kept private — which is not so excellent an arrangement for an uneasy American who has come alone and dressed all wrong (yoga clothes?? Backpacking I may be, but in hindsight it was the worst possible solution I could’ve settled on with the tools at my disposal) and is sweating at the ever-growing prospect that she will have to spend the night dancing sober with the cello-wrapped cardboard cartridge she fashioned to smuggle in a joint and some scraps of psychedelica lodged in her vagina because she cannot get it out and, without the aid of its contents, won’t have the disposition to solicit a stranger in this sort-of sex club for help.
It’s a fine length for taking drugs in a group in a standing position, though, and after I got the thing out and made some friends I partook of a few additional substances in a few additional stalls with a hardbodied oncologist wearing perfect Aryan features whom I later enjoyed watching in some kind of heated and highly homoerotic exchange with the Persian radiologist who’d initially drafted me into their circle, and later still after that, when Omar came to me and said, Dieter say maybe you like to go for threesome with us, I said, Why, yes, maybe I would. Because I mean, wow, that’s the dream. Hot boys who want to make out with each other and let me watch AND do stuff with me? Ja, bitte schön, und danke.
But it turned out that Dieter doesn’t actually like Omar that much, and that Omar is more like some sort of blowhard, a talker of big game, and in the cab ride — they ridiculed my wanting to walk — This isn’t New York, they said — they arrived, beyond my linguistic ken, at some agreement that, actually, Omar had to work in a few hours and would be bailing, and Dieter and I would be on our own. Regarding which I thought, Thank the gods, for going home with a man met on a night out has almost never gone well for me — they don’t understand! How rarely they understand — and this promised, actually, to be exactly that times two. And the titillating closeness of their bodies and faces as they smiled and argued in a hazy, throbbing toilet was a far cognitive cry from the 6 am silence and brilliance of Germany in June, and how on earth could I have found my way from the other back to the one?
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.
I got laid last night, except I guess it was this morning?
Some kids from my Quaker phase are in Barcelona to record an album, twins I’ve known since, I think, they were six and I was ten and who now have a soulful bluesy indie trio with another guy; they happen to have been born in France and so one of them now lives in Porto on his stupid-lucky Schengen passport, and even though I haven’t seen him in — so he told me — fifteen years — since my own high school graduation? So he told me — the prospect of getting some old school nourishment is why I stuck around Spain for an extra week… And when I rolled into their gig yesterday I fell more or less immediately prey to whatever mechanism occurs when little boys turn out to have turned into big boys, and by the way their EP is pretty easy on the ears.
After the show I followed him and the rest of the entourage back to their digs and we hung out and ate pizza and took a medium amount of recreational amphetamines and other things and went to a club that was really as good as a club could to my tired, misanthropic tastes possibly be, like all chill with music like weird reggaeton Winehouse-y covers of Nancy Sinatr-y tunes, everyone dressed in typical Barcelona evening style, which is to say, sneakers and tee shirts, six euro cover that included two drink tickets, and from the get-go Slim was like Hey I know what you’re doing and what your deal is financially as a consequence and you’re my guest tonight, really, like I might get drunk or rolling and forget to keep asking you if you want a drink, so if you do want a drink and I haven’t asked recently, just tell me you want a drink, and as the night wore on he started being like YOU’RE A WRITER DON’T ARGUE and I kept mounting my various arguments a protestations and defenses, like, The writing is not the point and I don’t like this label and It’s very private, not a thing I want to talk about and I don’t identify that way, and he just kept being like WHAT ARE YOU SAYING — NONE OF THAT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING — YOU FUCKING WRITER — GOD — LOOK AT YOU WITH YOUR NOTEBOOK IN THE WAISTBAND OF YOUR SHORTS — THAT’S SO HOT and eventually we all left the club (at 5 am or so, kill. me.) and headed back to the collective crib and he and I showered separately and got nakedly into his bed together for some spliff smoking (YAY to la droga mejor) and talking and other forms of intercourse and he was so complimentary of my current nether regional Welcome to the Jungle steeze and it was just so much fun, and soon I had to hightail it out of there to make my next connection and he insisted on giving me cash for the cab and I went back to the master flat and finished packing while Gael made me a travel set of sandwiches on tomato-olive bread he had baked for the occasion and then motorbiked me to la estación, and now I am on a long-haul train to inferno I mean Sevilla, down the coast and inland, and I am quivering from lack of sleep and seem to have been given a ticket in the designated rowdy-shouting-spilling children car, and yet I feel only happy and stupid and keep finding myself just smiling and fetching and handing back the grape someone has dropped over the seat back into my lap or whatever.
Gossipy, restorative group dinner. Sigrid says there are many more men than women here, and Omiros says it’s because the way to conceive a female baby is under a south wind, and in this cove on the Aegean there are ten months a year of winds from the north.
