Thursday, April 8, 2010

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

This is spring as they know it here. It's high time to shed the cloak of darkness, in order to see clearly. To not think sullen thoughts. I am sitting in a café called St.Oberholtz in Mitte, Berlin. Twenty years ago this was part of the GDR. Now it's filled with hipsters and Spanish tourists. And Americans like me, disenchanted and disconnected. Accident prone and curious. Love-sick and occupied with various substitutes for God.

A caravan of sirens just blew through the sunshine on the street below the big panoramic windows.

My love interest has been hitting the crack-pipe. She moved out of her home and into a squat-like, crumbling apartment with vomit-looking murals painted on the walls where black mold grows like a cancer.

She was writing me, she said, when she was high and lonely and confused. She was typing in a trance in between hits on the pipe.
She wrote that she couldn't stop thinking about me, and that she longed to trace the lines criss-crossing my palms. She wrote that she wanted to hold me all day and night. She wrote about my eyes; green like pools in tropical forests. (That's when someone should have slapped me hard. Because my eyes are blue.)
All these sappy love-emails, asking me to come back to Berlin and to be her star-crossed lover.
And I imagined us walking hand in hand through this city, where people don't seem to smile out of courtesy, and where psychic echos of past atrocities can come out of nowhere – like tumbleweeds on a lonesome Texas highway – at any point in time. 


And now she's high all the time. Her skin is ravaged by pimples and weird scratch marks. She smells worse than teenage boy foot sweat. She doesn't want to fuck. I don't want to fuck. I don't even think I like her. I think I just wanted to do something crazy, something that would mythologize me and sound good in my memoirs. Her voice is shrill and she talks with food in her mouth. She owns several Alanis Morrisette CDs, and that is cause enough to end this 'thing' before it even started.
So why is she smoking crack?

Why have I snorted heroin? Drunk myself silly? Woken up covered in vomit and bruises? Fucked boys with bad breath?

Is it all about the substitute for god? The hole that can't be filled?

I am filling it now with work, with the apartment I rented and that I will have to furnish. With my new friend, Michael. He works with me at Sandy's place. He's a really good waiter. He's from Georgia via San Francisco and London. He has a really interesting story I will tell you soon.

P.S A lot of my pix come from here: http://ghostwerld.wordpress.com/ awesome photo blog!!!

5 comments:

  1. *psychic echos of past atrocities*

    No, no. You rock.

    ReplyDelete
  2. how come nothing comes out the way we dream? i think we will be continually let down until we find that thing that will fill that empty void inside. because i know there is something that will.

    i recommend stop fucking boys (if that is actually true) because boys suck and that just seems more wrong to me for you than heroin or crack or drunkenness. is that weird? i don't know. i have had it with boys these days. i don't think they actually exist. and if they do, not for me. you like girls and stop destroying yourself, please.

    also i recommend staying in Berlin and finding whatever it is you can find there that is different and, what's the word...i want to say uplifting but that is way too hokey. i mean that feeling you get that almost lifts you up by the bottom of the stomach and floats you through the day. i get it from hunger and sunlight. not recommended. but you have to find that thing before you come home, if you do.

    jesus why the fuck am i giving you all sorts of recommendations when i am a bloody sobby mess over here? well, whatever. it seems my destiny to write novels even in comment boxes.

    xx x

    ReplyDelete
  3. star-crossed lovers,
    are dreamy.
    until they're real.

    i was totally smack dab in the middle of a beer last night
    when i was hit with a complex centered around
    not feeling cool/relevant/badass/whatever
    anymore.
    ////
    "I think I just wanted to do something crazy, something that would mythologize me and sound good in my memoirs."
    ////
    you know, kinda like that.

    --dusty

    ReplyDelete
  4. This is really brilliant has made me think quite a lot. Humpf, I'ma going to go and put the kettle on a have an even longer think.

    ReplyDelete
  5. i'm pretty much speechless (surprise, surprise). this move is definitely giving you some great material. amazing beautiful one.

    and lou reed "a perfect day" takes me back. i love that being the soundtrack to your life right now. perfect. aha!

    love this part especially:

    Just a perfect day
    you made me forget myself
    I thought I was
    someone else, someone good


    xxx
    t

    ReplyDelete

You Rock. I am certain of it.