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07/01/01
-----Original Message----- Miss S. arrived on Friday night, breathless from an orange juice disaster on the airplane. "I must wash out my pants right now!" Her seatmate had spilled his orange juice all over her. As everyone awkwardly shifted their tray tables so she could go to the bathroom and wash up, the spiller grabbed her dinner rolls from her tray. "Well I guess you won't be eating these," he said, and then proceeded to eat them. I laughed when she told me about it. "Can you believe that? He ruins my pants *and* eats my rolls." "It was clearly a scam," I said. "He had it planned out from the minute you sat down." Later we went for a walk and caught up on the last six months, words coming out awkwardly at first, and from twenty different directions, just because I hadn't spoken that much in the past few weeks, and also because it was weird to see someone I knew. But after an hour, it was as if I had seen her last week. Which is a very nice feeling. *** On Saturday we checked into our fancy art'otel on the west end of Berlin. There aren't any overhead lights in the hallways, and your room number is spotlit on the carpeting in front of your door. Dido-esque music plays in the hallways. It's a little too chi-chi when you feel underdressed in the hallways, let alone your own hotel room. We spent about forty-five minutes at the Erotik Museum, three floors of dirty cartoons. Well, it's a little bit more than that, I guess. There are huge wooden dildo sculptures, sized like an eighth grader on the wrestling team. And there were lots of pretty little sketches of Japanese men with tremendous cocks fucking wilting Japanese women in a variety of impossible positions. There was a really great illustration of a Nazi soldier fucking a menstruating Jewish Communist woman, with German text underneath roughly translated to, "The Red Menace." So we didn't stay there too long, as you might have guessed. Yep, we kissed those ten DMs goodbye, and headed to the Reichstag, which was a great experience. I'm not a huge fan of whatever original German architecture still remains. There's little delicacy to it, though I suppose it would make sense that the sturdier stuff would have survived any war actions. But at the very top of the Reichstag, there is a dome, and within that dome, there is a sculpture of mirrors that angle downwards, and within that sculpture you can see yourself and everyone around you reflected countless times, so that you feel as if you are inside a fun house, only there is no distortion, it is you, just you, again and again. There is a swirling path around the sculpture, so that you can climb up to the top of the dome. The dome itself is made of glass, so you can see all of Berlin as you walk up to the top, the rooftops and trees and churches and the one gleaming dome of a synagogue and airplanes and hot air balloons. It is all perfectly quiet when you are up that high, so that you feel as if you must whisper. When you reach the top, there is a circular seating area, with room enough to lie back, so you can look at the very top of the dome, a perfect circle revealing the perfect, blue, cloudless summer sky. A bird somehow flew into the dome and was trapped there, confused by the seeming proximity to the sky. I watched him flap and flutter, and bang against the windows. It wasn't a pigeon, so I pitied it. I watched him even as we began our walk down to the base of the dome. No one could help that bird. *** We walked to Potsdam Platz, along the very street where the wall once existed. It's still no man's land to a certain extent, though the Germans (and Americans, Japanese, etc.) are busy erecting buildings right and left. On our right side we saw, amongst other buildings, a huge Sony entertainment complex, which shifts colors from blue to purple during the night. There's an IMAX theatre in there, apparently. On our left side, we saw a hot air balloon ride business, a lone sausage stand (the patrons of which catcalled Miss S.), and a huge, empty field that will reportedly some day be the home of a Holocaust memorial. At Potsdam Platz, we sat and dined on fresh salmon, fried potatoes, salad, and dry white wine, as we watched the performances of the Berlin International Poetry Festival. The poets all read in their native language, so we didn't understand anything they were saying, though it still sounded lovely. Miss S. speaks French, so she translated one poet to me, leaning back to listen carefully, and then leaning forward to say, "He's talking about the sky, missing the sky, what the sky looks like." I perked up my ears, and heard "ciel" repeated consistently for the next ten minutes, and each time I heard it, it acted as a punctuation mark in my head. I saw my Austrian friend from the train, seated near the front as he had predicted (he had encouraged me to attend.) He was with the woman who had picked him up at the train station, a Colombian poet. I wondered if they were more than friends. They sat closely. He chain-smoked. I greeted him during a break and he shook my hand warmly and firmly, and we kissed each other on the cheek. I was happy I saw him one last time. *** On the subway platform, Miss S. and I waited patiently for our ride home. Four American high school girls came and stood near us. They were impossibly homely, with tacky, ill-fitting outfits, misguided applications of blue eyeshadow, and an abuse of hair accessories the likes of which I haven't seen since the last time I went shopping with my mom at Woodfield Mall, in the suburbs of Chicago. They were loud and whiny. Had they had a wad of gum in their mouths, they would have been chewing it in an ungraceful, cowlike fashion. I, of course, was in love with them. "Where do you think they're from?" I said. "Connecticut," said Miss. S. "No, no, Pittsburgh." I said. "Oooh, Pittsburgh. That's a good one." "I must talk to them. I have to." "Do what you feel is right," she said. We boarded the train and I sat across from them. I asked if they were American, and their answers came spilling out giddily. They were so happy to meet another American. One of them screeched, "Do you know a club you can get into when you're under eighteen?" No, I said, and smiled wryly. I did not. Immediately I knew the one on the far left was the best one, because she had the best smile and was the most likely to form complete sentences. (As soon as we got off the train, Miss S. said the exact same thing. She was the smartest, for sure.) She had round wire frame glasses, and long brown hair, bangs lightly teased, and she wore a tight purple turtleneck sweater that had strands of glitter woven into what I presumed to be acrylic material. When I told her I was from New York, she perked up at the sound of it. You will be the one to make it out alive, I thought to myself. The rest of you will be pregnant in the next five years. All of them had awful acne, except for one, the one who was second from the left, with the blond hair done in little braids that were snapped up all over her head with butterfly clips, wearing body glitter and a fake tattoo smack in the middle of her pale, flat chest. She was the cutest, but she was the dumbest, too, and said little to me, just shyly looking around most of the time, stunned, perhaps, by her friends. How on earth did she end up with these girls? Or maybe: What would Britney do in this situation? The one on the far right was the bossy girl, perhaps because she was the tallest and the biggest. She wore her hair in a big circle around her head, and was clad in a particular shade of black, known as "Contempo Casuals Midnight." She quickly explained that they were studying German on an exchange program. There were seven girls in total on their trip, and their three guides had selected their absent schoolmates as worthy of their time, leaving this sad group of four to wander the streets in Berlin by themselves. Clearly their teacher had lost control of the whole situation, or perhaps he was off getting drunk in a cafe with some nice little fraulein. Practicing his German, of course. Their final companion, equally bossy and dressed entirely in purple, from her v-neck cotton blouse to the nailpolish on her fingers and toes, told me the sad tale of getting turned down the night before from a club. "They said we had to be eighteen, and we told them we were, and they didn't believe us, and then they took us down a hallway, and we thought we were going into the club, but all it was was a back door, and then we were out on the street." "You don't look more than fifteen, I have to say," I said. I pointed at the quiet dishwater blonde girl. "You especially." "But I'm the oldest," she squealed. "I'm going to be eighteen first!" Suddenly I warmed to them. Their anxiety charmed me. I identified with the fact that it couldn't feel good to be the ones left behind, forced to fend for themselves in search of a little fun in a foreign city. I got ditched when I was their age. I told them to be careful, and said not to take any drink unless they paid for it themselves. I discovered this wouldn't be a problem, since only one of them drank, and only maybe a beer at a time. They were good girls, see. I also told them George W. Bush was a very, very bad man, and that they should always vote Democrat, and be sure to watch out for themselves over the next three years because he might mess with their rights. I added this last bit because I figured they had never heard those words before, and it might do them some good. We only rode two stops with them. Both Miss S. and I wished we had had more time. We would have warned them about boys, or something like that. We would have told them what to expect for the next five years of their life. When we got off, I told them to be careful again, and to have fun. I said this quietly and nicely. I smiled at them. They asked me my name and I told them. I silently wished that no club owner would let them in their establishment that night. They had a whole lifetime to get fucked with, what was the rush? They were from Charlotte, North Carolina, by the way.
Later skater,
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