The thing I kept saying was that Berlin as a jagged cavity for muddy boots and combustible minds, that was something that ended around the year 2000, and what we get now is a place to sit and test drinking chocolates, meet gentle and lazy people, and spend our money gradually until we have to leave. The thing I kept thinking was that the few cracked, unrenovated plaster facades must still house a couple of them, a couple of those ones that we had read about in foreign language textbooks, and that the old dreadlocked punk had told me about once at a bar in Kreuzberg (the Rote Rose, which I now find out is beloved and famous). "You don't know what happened here, you cannot know what happened here." Except he was no older than forty, which means he was not referring, probably, to the demanded upheavals of the nineteen eighties (if he was talking, I mean, about something that he knew about but I, being just above twenty, did not). He must have been referring to the less dark love-in of the nineties, the time when turntables and maps of a united world circulated on the fronts of magazines that are no longer in print today. Well, if I wasn't there, I wasn't there: if there was a time when bare brick gave a backdrop for throbbing backs and triumphant screams, I did miss out on it. My entry point was mockable: in 2003, I checked into a West Berlin hostel where a DVD of the recent failed blockbuster "Pearl Harbor" was playing, and I ate that same breakfast rich in sugar and pectin that we all know so well, those of us who decided that we would expand our minds in part of the world because, so the story went, that was the birthplace of mind-expansion. And I didn't realize that I was too young to afford sit-down cuisine, I went into places and paid cash and ran the bank account empty in a matter of weeks. Because I had expected, I suppose, that a door would open eventually, strangers in tattered clothes would recognize me with a oh it's you we've been expecting for so long and the loudspeakers inside would scream a haze of past and future, and I would be welcomed into the innards of a catacombs where I would grow a beard and would never sleep on anything but the bare floor. But in truth, friends back at home had gotten closer to my clouded dreams than any of my costly vacations ever did.
But that 2003 vintage of disappointment and inadequacy is an artifact worth remembering, worth putting behind glass, a significant crystallization of the Bush years, something so many of us would forget to leave at home these days. And the sky has come down a lot since then, the majority of us are forced to rummage the budget stores at least some of the time, glaring at men in suits, all of us have telephone numbers and e-mail addresses and bank accounts, and those who do not will be unable to read this blog posting.
You know, when I think of Germany sometimes, I see the pale color pictures in one of our high-school language books. They depicted a visit to the country by an American exchange student, tall and blonde, wearing (for some reason) a bandanna around his neck (well, I suppose because he was American!); he was a noble goof, and his German peers were, by turn, tricksters, co-revelers, sages. Do you remember? I think I still have that textbook somewhere, retained for subconscious reasons.
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