B.I.G

Bonjour from Berlin! I’ve only been here for a week, but time is flying by. I’ve spent countless hours wandering the sometimes cobblestoned streets of Neukölln and Friedrichshain, I’ve looked at a bunch of possible flats, learned heaps of new words, made a few new friends, and went out to a club where they played all of the greatest guilty pleasures from the 80’s and 90’s. At the end of that night, after dancing until well after sunrise to Whitney Houston, The Eagles, Rod Stewart and The Backstreet Boyz, I realized I was outrageously hungry (and clearly gay). I begged my friends to take me somewhere, anywhere, that I might find food. Minutes later, laughing drunkenly and giggling on our way, we arrived at a Turkish bakery that had literally just opened. I forced the door open and ran straight to the display case where all the food was. With my face pressed firmly against it, with the flat curiosity of a pet fish, I eyed my options and selected what appeared to be a bologna sandwich. Marina looked at me to confirm it was what I wanted and then told the woman I’d have the wurst.

“No!” I yelled.

Everyone stopped and stared at me. “Nein,“ I clarified, “I’ll have the BEST, not the worst!” No one seemed to find this as funny as me, so I just gave up and told her to give me her wurst. Three bites was all it took to devour the sandwich. Never before had liverwurst tasted so good. This is Deutschland.

There is something about this city that I haven’t been able to name just yet. It is outwardly gruff and often times filthy, covered in graffiti and trash, but despite this the place maintains some redeeming quality. It reminds me of hideously ugly woman with a great personality; you find yourself oddly attracted even though all of the normal mechanisms are misfiring. The weather is gray and oppressive for most of the year, but everyone tells me it will be magical in the summer, which, I am also frequently told, is a quite a long ways away. Despite this, there is a deep and warming camaraderie in Berlin, particularly, it seems, amongst expats. Last night I had dinner at a packed ramen joint where Kreuzberg meets Neukölln, right on the river. The restaurant was decorated to look like it was straight out of Japan; full of lanterns and wooden counters, bamboo, small candles, and even smaller Japanese waitresses. I struck up a conversation with an Italian guy who was in town for the Berlin film festival which wraps up in a few days. He told me he worked in film and that he used to live in Berlin but had to move due to the weather. I asked him how long he had lived here and he told me three months. What a brittle ass spirit, I thought. I guess you should all check back with me in three months to see if I’m similarly brittle. We talked about famous directors, particularly Werner Herzog and Fassbinder.

After dinner I went out to meet an Australian bartender friend I made, who introduced me to another bartender and some of his friends. He arrived in Berlin at the same time as me. Predictably, we stayed out until the wee hours of the morning telling stories and drinking proper German beer before calling it a night. This did not help my sinuses, which were misbehaving and filling up like hot air balloons with snot and pus. Walking into a German drugstore is a unique experience. They carry over the counter drugs, but they are behind the counter and you must interface with a pharmacist who speaks broken English to explain your symptoms before they will hand you something.

"It burns when I pee," I told him.

"Vhat?"

"Umm, my pee pee," I started, pointing to my Netherlands, "it's fuego when I, uh, ppppsssssssss."

"Dis ist not goot."

"Ja. I know. But, no, really, my sinuses are killing me and I've got more goo coming out of my nose than a pornstar on a bukake set."

After going back and forth like this for some time, he handed me a nasal spray with eucalyptus in it and a package of pills that are half ibuprofen and half pseudoephedrine. I've been snorting fiery eucalyptus like a cracked-out koala ever since. On the bright side, I locked in an apartment today. I hesitated a lot about signing the contract because it requires a two-year minimum lease. Now, that's about the time I was planning on staying here anyway - so it should be fine - but everyone has informed me what a commitment 2 years is. I lived in my previous apartment for 6 years - I don’t have commitment issues. I deliberately selected an apartment here that's optimally located so that I won’t need to move again anytime soon, barring any unforeseen circumstances, of course. If my health goes to shit, or the company goes belly up, or I get fired, then I likely won’t have a choice but to terminate the contract early, and at great cost (if I can't find a replacement tenant). This is a risk, certainly. But the housing market in Berlin is fiercely competitive, somehow much more so than even San Francisco. My status as an outsider, lacking the ability to speak the native language, and also lacking any meaningful German financial history, puts me at a sizable disadvantage when apartment hunting. There comes a time when you have to take what you can get. Once I’ve established myself, and I’ve proven to be a reliable tenant and debtor, then I can reevaluate whether I want to remain in Berlin in my existing flat or move somewhere else. It's hard to explain just how difficult it is to get a callback for an apartment here. Often, when attending a viewing, there are 30 other people there, all of them trying to engage in convivial talks with the agent. I've heard stories of lines forming out of the apartment all the way down onto the street. Other times the real estate agent will agree to meet but never show. What I mean to say with all of this is: I had little choice in my choice. The apartment is nice, clean, recently renovated, nicely located and seems quiet. The price is slightly more than I wished to pay, but it is clear that the great deals were not going to come my way. Flats are on the market for several hundred dollars less, but they are typically missing kitchens or not as ideally located or are situated directly over a storefront on a noisy street etc., and these go quickly to those with German citizenship and squeaky clean SCHUFA reports.


I'll end with an absurd thing I witnessed the other day. As I was walking towards my temporary flat by Alexanderplatz, I came upon three hotdog venders standing in close proximity to one another. At first, I thought the chance coincidence of three competing vendors gathered together seemed not only odd, but wonderfully photogenic - so much so that I cursed myself for not having brought my camera - but as I approached them I noticed they were looking at each other rather stiffly. Well, as stiffly as they could; the hotdog vendors here are ridiculously outfitted, wearing suspenders that hoist an entire grilling apparatus housed in cheap looking plastic around their waists. Over their heads, there is a rectangular shade structure which instead of a traditional umbrella, looks more like an awning. So here I am, coming up on some commotion that is starting to simmer. By their hurried, lilting exchanges, I can tell the men are Italian. They parry back and forth in little bursts that sound almost operatic. People on the street begin to take notice. One of the hotdog men stands idle and watches the other two bicker, unsure of where his allegiance lies, while they continue argue and flail their arms around antagonistically. One of the men seems more upset than the other. I can’t understand what they are saying, but the combination of the scene’s increasing tension and their comical appearance has everyone on the street smiling. I slow my pace so I can see more of the action. As I am parallel to them I can tell they are almost ready to come to blows, and then, based on the look of astonishment on the one man's face, it’s clear that the other had said something intolerable. In an outburst of unbridled fury, the hotdog man retaliated by smashing his body against the other hotdog man’s body, causing the rickety plastics on their midsections to collide fiercely. With high-pitched Italian invectives they begin to mash themselves together, the hotdogs in their transparent stomachs bounce around like unfastened bodies in a car crash. What better show of bravado, what better dick-measuring contest than two men literally thrusting at one another with bellies full of frankfurters that jostle around like lubed up dildos?

Berlin is great.

NY > BER

What’s there to say about New York that hasn’t already been said? It’s the greatest city in the world — and everyone who lives there is very fond of saying so. It only took two days for me to remember its seductive appeal, and then another ten to exhaust it. Now, flying over the Atlantic Ocean, I think I’ve settled into subtle mourning. Saying goodbye to friends and family is always challenging, and it doesn’t get easier with time. Because, the older you get, the greater the likelihood is that this might be the last time you’ll see them. My parents are older than they were when I first left New York seven years ago, somehow much more so.

For most of my time in New York, 20th and 1st avenue was my home. My friend Nicole generously offered up her mattress so that I could crash with her. She told me she’d love it if I stayed there the whole time and encouraged me tirelessly to abandon my previous plans of spending a few days with her cousin, Alphonse (known also as Ralphie). Each night she coaxed me into compliance by tempting me with episodes of Seinfeld or Twin Peaks, and plying me with liberal portions of wine. Because I was taking antibiotics I couldn’t drink much, but that didn’t stop her. It didn’t stop anyone, actually. She and her roommates seemed to be hosting AA meetings not for recovering alcoholics, but for relapsing ones. Every night was a party, even on the mellow nights. On one particular Tuesday, as I came up the elevator about to stumble into the apartment, I caught the familiar smell of McDonald’s wafting out from under the door. Because I didn’t have a key - and wasn’t allowed one - each time I arrived at her place I had to gamble on the door at the bottom of the building being open. It was one of those doors that required a key-fob. Luckily the building was moderately busy, which allowed me to gain entry most times with relative ease. So each night I’d return to the entrance like a divorced vampire with visitation rights, hoping the previous invitation hadn’t been revoked, and I’d slip through the main door and take the elevator up to the apartment. To get through her door required one final step, involving a 4-digit combination lock. On this particular night, because I had been drinking, and because it was late, I was especially distracted while entering the combination and began fumbling. The lock clanged loudly against the door as I muttered and continued to make errors due to my agitation. Big Mac fumes swirled all around me. I started whimpering like an unwalked dog. Why was no one rushing to my aid!? Finally, preposterously hunched over the doorknob, sweating, salivating, I entered the code correctly and the lock fell to pieces all over the floor. Hastily, I picked it up and placed the key into the door. When I opened it I found Nicole sitting in a daze on the couch, dressed in a tank top and a pair of blue shorts with Big Mac sauce smeared all over her face. Crumbs from the french fries were scattered over her shirt and had infested her shorts. An overturned box of wine, now empty, had become a footrest. Quickly, I touched the Big Mac to see if it was still warm. It was. So I snatched it right out of her grubby, lifeless little hands and bit into it. Without thinking, I went to the fridge, grabbed a nearly expired bottle of Hunt’s ketchup and squirted it all over her tank top in a smiley face fashion so that I could dunk the fries in. I ate all of the remaining fries, and her 5-piece nuggets before she woke up.

“Daaaaaannnnn!” Nicole yelled.

Yeah?

“You’re home!”

Yeah!

“How are you?”

I’m good, I told her.

“You hungry? Have some food!”

I can’t, I said...I’m stuffed.

“Okay.”

Then I sneezed.

“Daaaannn!”

Yeah?

“...I’m sad.”

Why? Because I just sneezed?

“No, Dan.”

I wondered if she could tell I ate her french fries.

“Because I...wait...is there fucking ketchup on my shirt?”

Yeah, you must’ve fallen asleep while you were eating the fries.

“Damnit!”

Here, let me get you a tissue for the Big Mac sauce.

“Fuck the sauce! I’m saving it for later.”

Okay.

“Daannnnnn!”

....

“Daaaaaannnnnnnn!!”

And it went on like this until sleep took her somewhere around 3AM. Invariably she’d wake noisily in the predawn hours and shatter an empty glass of wine or stub her toe against a misplaced shoe on the way to the bathroom. She was an inexhaustible source of alarm clock mayhem. “Great,” she said one morning, “now I have to go to work and hold babies. Why am I like this?” I told her it was because her mother accidentally smoked crack while she was pregnant...

I left Nicole’s towards the end of my trip to give her and her roommates their space back. A whole new series of adventures would await me in Sunnyside, at Alphonse’s..

[Jesus, I need to write an aside here. As I type, wakened from a meager in-flight slumber which I struggled (but failed) to maintain for the last 6 hours, the German girl beside me has taken to violent, patient-zero level fits of coughing. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that whatever respiratory illness she has will be passed onto me and the guy beside me. Each time she coughs, which is many times a minute, the man on my left leans forward to glare at her as though his Medusa-like gaze might turn her germs to stone. Unfortunately for me, I just sneezed. It’s too late for me. An amazing biological phenomenon happens when you are trapped with someone who is ill and infectious on a plane. It must be an old, very primal, hardwired survival instinct causing these thoughts, but I find myself wanting to destroy her. Because I am unable to distance myself from her tuberculosis-ridden body, each time she hacks bubbling mucus around in her windpipe I want nothing more than to crush it. The village caretaker in me wants to stop the spread of that plague, pronto. It wants to save the healthy. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Pecking order. Ok, I think she’s finally coughed herself unconscious. Back to the regularly scheduled program.]

New York. No shortage of places to eat and drink. Even though I was severely limiting my alcohol intake - to no more than 2 drinks on any given day - I still managed to find myself in more bars and restaurants than I could count. Part of this is because I can only count to the number 7. Someone told me it was lucky. On one of my last nights out in the city, Nicole’s cousin Alphonse had recommended I take a trip to Brooklyn to see the second incarnation of a favorite bar of mine, called Elsa. The bar was originally located on the lower east side but had closed down sometime after I’d moved. To my surprise, after 7 years it had been reborn, this time in Brooklyn. The aesthetic of the bar was similar; elegant, clean, minimalist, wooden, candles, dim lighting. Serving up a variety of well-crafted cocktails, Elsa was a proper blast-from-the-past and provided a lubricated launching pad for great discussion. We focused on only the most vexing philosophical questions, the ones that have plagued thinkers for millennia. For instance; imagine a situation in which a man and a woman are fucking. During coitus, a queef is heard. I ask you: who is the queefer, who is the queefee? Can such labels be applied here? To complicate the situation further, imagine two men having sex to produce the same sound. Is it a fart, or a queef!? At some point the conversation moved toward farting, and the concept of being able to flatulate at will. Alphonse took the opportunity to bestow upon us this nugget of wisdom:

“Well, I can’t speak for everyone, and I can’t just make myself fart, but if I feel like I have to fart, if there’s a real need for it, I can fart.”

Thanks Alf.

During Nicole’s Ted Talk on obesity in America, she said, “he’s not obese, he’s just fat, but he looks like he’d be fun to eat with.”

There was also a moment of vulnerability where I self-reported as being shy. My friends, in smug agreement, determined this to be untrue and told me that not only was I not shy, but that I loved to talk. I explained that this simply wasn’t so, that I only talk with those I am already very comfortable with, and usually at great cost with respect to energy. Once more they claimed the contrary. I protested, but it was in vain: they had achieved a mob mentality. Talking, I went on to explain, is an inherently social phenomenon - it is done to connect with and communicate to others. “But you can talk to yourself,” they said, “so it isn’t always social.” Talking to yourself isn’t social, I told them. In fact, we generally consider people who talk to themselves to be mentally ill. To talk, conversationally, requires more than one party: there is a speaker and a listener. They told me that because you can talk to yourself, talking with others is basically the same. Perhaps by this same logic my friends prefer masturbation to sex..

At some point late in the night, around 4 in the morning, a debate had erupted about the possibility of implanting prosthetic testicles inside the scrotums of newly neutered dogs. Yusaku tried firmly to denounce the idea of false balls, but proponents of this wild conspiracy theory would not be so easily dismissed. Allegedly, the procedure is so common, that 1 in 3 dog balls are believed to be decoys. We had been playing cards for untold hours by now and a few of our guests had ingested several tabs of marijuana - a combination that can sometimes be fatal when mixed with sleep deprivation. I thought it best to conclude the conversation with an earnest plea: can everyone please shut the fuck up about Snoopy’s sack?!

Ah, I forgot to mention the Hitchcockesque thing that happened to me as I was staying with Alphonse. It was on the first morning I'd arrived there. He'd informed me in advance that he had prior obligations during the day, and told me to make myself at home. I had some errands to run also, so this was to work out beautifully. Before he left, and after we visited his sister just two floors below, I asked that we make a quick trip to the hardware store for a set of keys so that I could get in and out of the apartment in his absence. The hardware store was long and narrow, and there was a big black dog inside that sniffed relentlessly at my pantlegs. It seemed to take a long time for the Asian store owner to duplicate the keys. I wondered if he was using a copying machine or if he was doing it the old fashioned way and forcing the keys to fuck. After the keys were made Alphonse and I parted ways. I went to meet my parents for lunch in Bayside and then made my way back to take a quick nap before going out. I had been feeling a bit under the weather for some reason and so I welcomed the chance to sleep. I got off at Lowery Street and walked left from the station to Alf's. The sky seemed grayer than it had been in Bayside. My feet felt heavier, too. Cold wind beat against the bare trees, whistling as it went. I arrived at the familiar red awning, opened the glass door and walked through the vestibule toward the door where I would use the first key. The key slid in but when I tried to turn it nothing happened. Odd, I thought, wondering if there might be a problem with the key. Turning it the other way, I retried. No luck. Perhaps there was a problem with the door. I applied pressure to it while turning the key in case something was misaligned, but no go. Inside was a Hispanic custodian with headphones on cleaning the glass mirrors in the lobby. He glanced at me while I tried and retried the door with a Sisyphean zeal. What else was I to do? Sensing my frustration, the man came and opened the door for me. Thanks. Is there something wrong with the door, I asked? Nope, it's been working fine all day. I thanked him again and walked up the stairs. Maybe the guy at the hardware store had given me a bad copy of the key - I'd have to go back later.

I took the stairs to the fourth floor and rummaged absentmindedly through my pockets for the second key. It slid in and but turned only 3/4 of the way. You've got to be kidding me. Two bad keys? This time there would be no janitor to bail me out, so I did what anyone would do and kept retrying the key. What were the odds of two bad keys? Well, if they fucked up one it's possible they fucked up the other. I started to notice how oddly quiet everything was. When I'd come to the building earlier this morning there was a dog in the neighboring apartment that had gone wild and wouldn't stop barking, but I didn't hear a thing now. I looked at the door: 4D. No, that was correct. I took out my phone to confirm I wasn't losing my mind and saw that the text from Alf had indeed said apartment 4D. I tried the door two more times and then texted him. He told me he'd be a while, to go down to the 2nd floor and get a key from his sister. So I walked down the two flights to his sister's door but it looked slightly different from how it did earlier. I couldn't put my finger on what it was, but I could tell immediately, even before I'd gotten up close to it. I eyed it up and down and then realized the hola! welcome mat was missing. Maybe she was cleaning it? From inside the apartment music was playing, as if someone was having a party. It didn't strike me as the kind of music that his sister would listen to, but her fiancé lived there as well and I was unfamiliar with his musical tastes. I knocked on the door and heard someone approach from the other side. Who is it, she asked. It didn't sound like Leonor, but I couldn't tell through the door and over the music.

Hey, it's me, I need Alf's key.

No response.

Leonor?

Someone turned down the music. Who is it, the voice asked? No, it definitely wasn't Leonor. Maybe a friend was over and answering the door while Leo was out or in the bathroom?

Hey, uh, is Leonor home?

Who?

Leonor.

No answer.

I heard the eerie metal-on-metal sound of the peephole opening up. Who are you? It was then I realized, inexplicably, that I was at the wrong door.

Sorry, I said, I must have the wrong apartment and hurriedly started walking away. I could feel a greasy eye on me as I approached the stairs.

What do you want, the voice said.

I ignored it and raced down the stairs to the lobby, questioning my sanity.

How is it possible that both keys were bad and that Leonor wasn't in the apartment she was supposed to be in? Could I have been in the wrong building? Everything about the building was exactly as I had remembered it. Come to think of it, the name on 4D wasn't Alf's. But he hadn't been in this apartment very long - maybe he hadn't changed it yet. Was his attention to detail so keen that he would have even noticed, or cared? Really, once someone is in the building and knows you're located at 4D, does it even matter? I never put my name on the mailbox of my apartment in San Francisco and I lived in that building for six years. The only logical explanation was that I was in a wrong but somehow identical building. I walked outside to get some air, unsure of what I would do next, but when I looked to my left I saw the adjacent building had an identical red awning. Well, that explains it. I had been in a wrong but identical building. When I arrived at the vestibule of the next building though, as I was reaching for the key, I saw inside the lobby the same man who was washing the glass of the other building. For a moment I felt an incredible pressure moving in all around me while I watched the exact same scene playing out in front of me in the exact same way it had in the previous building. My sanity seemed like a thin piece of crystal about to shatter. I put the key in, unsure of what was about to happen, and turned it. The door opened. The Hispanic man saw me and took one headphone out to address me.

Wrong building, he asked?

Yeah.

I thought so, he said. They're identical.

Yeah.

Really does your head in, he said.

Yeah.