by Rob Doyle
‘That was insane,’ I said when I found Conor perched on a giant swing alongside a dozen others. ‘There was a guy down in the toilets who wanted to drink my piss.’
‘Oh yeah, the toilet guy.’
I saw him again as the day wore on, in other toilets throughout Berghain, always alone, stalking the urinals with a fixed, pathetic cringe. Who was he? What had happened to make this his destiny – crawling through filth to drink the piss of strangers? He was abjection incarnate, a being who had sunk further into abasement than anyone I had encountered. I felt a sympathy, a tenderness, for him. He seemed to me both admirable for fully inhabiting his perversion, and terribly sad – he must have been broken to seek out such humiliation. I envisioned a childhood of rape in dank basements, a howling obscene mother. When the night outside synced with Berghain’s perpetual night, I sought out the dungeon urinals again, following narrow passages past rooms where men fisted, sucked and got as far inside one another as they could. I knew he would be there, and that he would come to me. In the dark toilets I unzipped. Immediately he emerged from the shadows, the same cringing face. This time I let him drink it all. It streamed over his mouth, his lips. He gulped, gurgled, his eyes rolled back in ecstasy. I pissed long and hot in his abject face. He swallowed all he could and the rest overflowed on his chin. As the stream relented, he glanced up and met my gaze.
‘Danke!’ he rasped. ‘Danke!’
In the weeks that followed, the pages in my notebooks filled up more slowly, then stopped filling up at all. It was as if the experiential supernova of Berghain had nuked my will to affix a mesh of form on to the formless real. I kept going to clubs with Linda and Conor and other friends, but I no longer tried to remember anything, letting myself be swept up in the flux of dancing and techno. I registered the first inner shifts towards an acceptance that the great Berlin techno novel might be yet another write-off on the scrapheap of my ambitions, no more than the memory of a book I had once contemplated writing. During this blissful period it dawned on me that this was the book I had been writing all along: an anthology of the abandoned books that didn’t get written while I was busy documenting the rapturous decline I underwent while I was failing to write them, otherwise known as my life.
The week before I left Berlin, Linda, Conor and I met on the platform at Alexanderplatz. We ate some of the magic mushrooms that Conor had grown the previous summer using a kit he’d bought online. We took a train out to the Grunewald forest on the edge of the city. It was a grey morning, the kind of sky that is always about to rain but never does. We marched through the forest, past the looming ruins of the old NSA listening post at Teufelsberg. A few kilometres from the tracks stood the ‘Cemetery of the Nameless’. Nico was buried out here, and Conor wanted to take a picture of her grave for an article he was writing about thanatos, the longing for death in popular culture. As we followed a narrow trail through the woods, I told Linda I’d given up writing, which meant I’d given up asking more from experience than itself. She said she didn’t believe me, and I replied that maybe it was more of a thought experiment.
We came to the cemetery gate. A sign indicated that it was open daily from ten till four, but as there was nobody around for miles, the cemetery’s openness or closedness seemed to pertain solely in the minds of visitors. When Conor pointed this out I found it very funny indeed, which is how I knew the mushrooms were coming on. Nico’s grave, like that of Serge Gainsbourg in Montparnasse Cemetery, which I’d happened upon while visiting E. M. Cioran’s, was well stocked with offerings of wine, beer, joints and even what looked like a vial of speed or cocaine. Someone had left a red notebook in which visitors wrote messages: lyrics from Velvet Underground songs, expressions of gratitude, druggy soliloquies. Conor took a couple of mushrooms from his pouch and placed them by the headstone. Linda crouched down to write in the notebook.
Conor began dancing, as if odd-shaped waves were passing through his body. Perceiving myself inhabiting the action instants before I did so, I leaned to pick up the notebook and read what Linda had written.
Come, see real flowers of this painful world.
It was probably some time later when Conor remarked that ancient civilisations showed admirable pragmatism when they equipped the dead with useful, quotidian items for their journey to the afterlife.
‘What should we put in your grave when you go?’ I asked.
Conor considered this. ‘My headphones.’
‘I’ll need my coffee maker and some tobacco,’ said Linda. ‘No question.’
They asked me what I would need. I settled on my steel-toecapped Doc Martens, which I’d been issued when I worked at the Dublin Mail Centre many years earlier. It would be important to have dry feet and look tough in the underworld, I said.
A bird squawked and flew from a bush. The noise reverberated, ripples in the stillness. Then silence enfolded the forest, and I stood with my friends among the graves, imagining how it would be if I weren’t holding on to any of it.
Nightclub
When I was younger than I’ll ever be again I fixated on the idea of moving to Berlin. I spent a couple of years drifting around the world, and every place I went, the most interesting people I met would say: Berlin. By the time I returned to Ireland, I wanted so badly to move to Berlin that I began learning German, read up on the city’s history, packed my belongings, and finally moved to Sicily.
The reason I moved to Sicily back then and not Berlin involves my Berliner friend Linda, and the notorious week I spent at her apartment in Friedrichshain, prior to my planned move. But I’ll get back to that, or maybe I won’t. For now, suffice it to say it was a real shitshow, and consequently I only got round to living in Berlin a decade later, when I spent a winter there with the aim of researching a novel.
I arrived in the city in late November, just when everybody else wanted to leave. The winter was tightening its grip – the days were over before they began. I worked in my room in Schöneberg each afternoon, and in the evenings I rode the S-Bahn around the city. Because it was dark whenever I took the train, it was impossible to get a sense of Berlin’s visual character, what distinguished one neighbourhood from another. The streets seemed deserted as I soared above them, peering in the windows of cuboid offices – it was the emptiest capital in Europe. The Berliners wore black-hole clothes that sucked in whatever light there was – the city hid itself in its citizens, and vice versa. After a week or two the colourlessness of Berlin began to unsettle me. It wasn’t long before I came to believe that it was all a reflection: I saw no colour because I was colourless myself, saw no light because a light had gone out in me.
It was on one of my aimless night journeys, as a shoal of grey citizens poured off the train at Hauptbahnhof, that the thought hit me: I was jaded. The suicidal mania I’d endured in Paris and Spain had relented, but it had left in its stead a condition of surfeit and indifference. As the train trundled out of the station over the dark city, it seemed to me more shameful to be jaded than it did to be heartbroken or suicidal. Those were distressing experiences, obviously, but they were violent conditions, the consequences of passion gone awry. Jadedness was a more contemptible kind of defeat, a death in life without dignity or valour. You were so jaded when I met you, a woman had said to me once. She was right that I had been jaded, and right to imply that it was through her I became unjaded. There are worse descriptions of what it is to fall in love than that: an unjadening. The event of encountering an unanticipated, amazing other destabilises your categories, overturns your certainties, so that it is no longer viable to go on as you have been. But that – love – was in the past, and possibly in the future: in the present there was solitude, and a habit of promiscuity that iterated with diminishing zeal so that lovers had come to seem disposable, interchangeable, like the faces that scroll past on a dating app. I sensed I had strayed too long and lost the thread of return. The prospect of ever again being so enchanted by any one person that I would commit to making a life with them – or, if I
did meet such a person, that I would be un-fucked-up enough to make them stay – seemed remoter as the years fell off. Already looming on my horizon were the stark years in which virility would dissipate, when my body would become as repulsive to the young as those of the middle-aged had been to me. I would continue to desire what I had always desired – the love and physical intimacy of women – but these longings and my efforts to satisfy them would increasingly find me branded a predator, vilified in a society that now endorsed the hatred of men, and reviled especially those past a certain age who have neither married nor renounced their sexual hunger. As I exited the S-Bahn at Alexanderplatz, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a window. I thought, that is the face of a man who is jaded. Then I thought, that is the face of a man who used to be handsome. I wished I didn’t care so much about the fading of my looks, but looks were a sign of youth and I had never taken an interest in very much beyond youth culture, nor made any plan for getting older. Before moving to Berlin, I had asked my barber to put some dye in my hair for the first time, and got a spiky, youthful new haircut, but what I saw reflected in the station window was merely the haircut of a man trying to look younger than he was. At a certain age, when you shamble into the bathroom in the morning, instead of thrilling narcissistically at your reflection you start to avoid your own gaze, like that of a lecherous creep on the subway. I was almost certainly in the grip of Seasonal Affective Disorder – being a SAD bastard – but I was convinced the truth was written in wintry lines all over my face: somewhere along the way I had become the kind of man of whom it could be said The years have taken their toll on him.
On a Friday evening I met Linda and her friends at an Italian restaurant in Friedrichshain – the sixth-best Italian restaurant in Berlin, according to Linda – for a pre-club meal. Linda and I had reunited at a bar in Mitte the previous week, for the first time since my notorious stay years earlier. Linda had gamely offered to facilitate my explorations of the Berlin techno scene, in which she and her friends were immersed. Over vodka and Club-Mate I’d told Linda of my ambition to write the great Berlin techno novel. I had no sense of what this novel might look like, except that it would include an ageing expat druggie who dances a lot. In the meantime, its notional existence gave a sense of purpose to my intention of hanging out in grotty clubs every weekend, buying drugs in the toilets while friends in Ireland started having kids and buying homes.
Friedrichshain was thronged and we had to wait for a while even though we’d made a reservation. Smoking cigarettes outside the restaurant, Linda’s forty-ish friends looked like well-paid office workers at the end of the week, which is precisely what some of them were. But when they took off their elegant coats they revealed black, stylish clubbing gear – hoodies and techno T-shirts and runners. The waitress placed menus on the table and we ordered bottles of sparkling water, most of the group being straight-edge. Linda’s edge was anything but straight: she ordered a beer, then began rolling a joint under the table. The friends chatted about their week, mostly in English for my benefit, although I urged them not to.
‘So what are you currently writing about?’ asked Marc politely. He had a narrow beard and a shaved head and he was a DJ.
I extemporised about the sedimented psychic histories of Berlin, layers of memory and hallucination. What I didn’t mention was that, ever since we’d sat down at the table, I’d become fired up on the idea of writing about them – Linda and her stylish, not-so-young techno friends. Clubbers who were pushing into their forties seemed to me a milieu worth exploring, one that might illumine a host of confluent themes that engaged me: what it meant, for instance, to age in twenty-first-century Europe, and the new kinds of family that emerged when the nuclear family blew itself up. Naturally, nightclubs teemed with sexy young things who could wear any ill-fitting, outlandish clothes and still look edgy and mesmeric. The techno kids danced with animal assurance because they knew the world was about them: they were the future and we – anyone over thirty – were already the past, sinking inexorably into it. Better to leave the gorgeous twenty-year-olds to their photogenic bliss: I would write about Linda and Marc and Thorsten, Julia and Katarina, and in writing about them I would be writing about myself, my own reckoning with the ancient headfuck of ageing, which was the dinosaur in the room of any club I danced at from here on in.
I gestured to the waitress and ordered a glass of wine, while the others studied the menus.
‘Prego.’
Hours later I sat in a grotty toilet cubicle at Griessmühle, a marvellously dilapidated club on the banks of a canal, hidden amid factories and business premises. The MDMA I had taken after we got inside was coming to life, and among its effects was an urgent quickening of the bowels. Outside the cubicle, girls and boys laughed and smoked and chattered, sitting on sinks overlooking a shadowy yard. Ostensibly these were the girls’ toilets but that did not matter: the toilets were a hangout, a chill-out room away from the actual chill-out room downstairs. Realising there was no toilet paper, I took the notebook from the pocket of my jeans, ripped out two blank pages and used those instead.
I found Linda dancing on the lower floor, a joint in one hand and a beer bottle in the other, a head shorter than the guys around her. The beat rumbled in my viscera as lasers lanced through the darkness. I sank into a tattered leather chair at the back of the room to watch: when Linda dances, there is no one cooler on the planet. She had not changed much in the years since we’d last met – but why should she change? These days she lived alone, on the tenth floor of a GDR-era high-rise in Lichtenberg. A fierce intransigence of character – along with a prodigious sexual appetite – had meant that traditional monogamous relationships were never going to work out for her, and now she dwelled in a wise, relaxed zone somewhere between polyamory, self-sufficiency and openness to the possibility that things might yet play out differently. She still took photographs, was active in radical politics, smoked weed every night after work, and cared nothing for what anyone thought of her. Seeing me sprawled on the armchair, she smiled from amid the dancers. Then she turned back towards the sound system, silhouetted in white strobing light.
Early on Sunday morning we were still out in the city with my friends Conor and Stavro. I took no more MDMA, but the high left a glow that lasted not only through the weekend but long after the chemicals wore off, so that in a sense I never really came down. There was more to it than drugs, and yet there was something in all this I had forgotten: taken at the right time, MDMA can effect a shift that is not ephemeral nor merely chemical. A gloom is dispelled. The world becomes altered, brightened, clearer – an unjadening occurs.
As life got its colour back, my attention flowed outwards again. I recorded my days methodically, as if the life I was living were the first draft of the great Berlin techno novel, and all I had to do was get it down. There would be no plot, but the book would carry itself on pure tone, buoyed by my happiness at living in the city that, as Nietzsche had once said of Paris, was the only home for an artist in Europe. Most evenings I attended art openings or parties with Stavro, or drank with him and Conor in Tannenbaum, their favourite bar. At weekends I took to the club scene with the zeal of a twenty-five-year-old, like the one I had been on my last visit to the city. When I was out dancing, high on drugs I consumed in reasonable, mid-thirties dosages – unlike the over-dosages I’d caned with Linda a decade earlier – sentences would appear fully formed in my mind, or would lengthen throughout the night, becoming increasingly complex and beautiful, clauses linking elegantly amid the laser lighting and subwoofer quake. I quivered in the tension between wanting to be present in the moment and standing perpetually outside of it, projecting myself into a future in which I would sit at my desk and distil what was going on here. Now and then I would leave the dance floor to shut myself into a toilet cubicle, anxious to jot down a phrase before it vanished in my brain’s neuronal hum. When I left the toilets – concealing my notebook in shame at my compulsion to record – young clubbers would enter
in pairs or threes, pulling baggies from their pockets before the door shut behind them. These ecstatic nights out nourished me with insights that felt desperately poignant, and this poignancy would ramify through the recognition that I had become so alienated, so cut off from the natural outflow of empathy I recalled from childhood, that I needed drugs to feel that way again.
In December the famous Christmas markets started sprouting up around the city. Or so I heard: I hadn’t the slightest interest in visiting them, and their existence to me was a matter of hearsay. Meanwhile, I moved apartment. Stavro helped me find a sublet in the Kottbusser Tor area of Kreuzberg. ‘The most excellent neighbourhood in the best part of town,’ he insisted. Stavro was biased: like everyone in Kreuzberg, he venerated the area while nurturing a disdain for Friedrichshain, Kreuzberg’s rival neighbourhood across the Spree and formerly across the Wall.
After I moved to Kreuzberg, Sylvia, a girl from Montreal who worked in a Paris wine bar, came to stay for a long weekend. We had met at a party in the autumn. That night she had worn gawky clothes, and later, when she took them off at her flat in the tenth arrondissement, the perfection of her body had stunned me. I’d told her this, that the perfection of her body was stunning to me. To which she had replied, abstractedly, that she had the same body as every other woman on the planet. The insight had confounded me: I suddenly felt I’d lived my life in thrall to a confidence trick, making myself ridiculous by panting and gasping in pursuit of an illusion. We both insisted we didn’t want a relationship, but we had been meeting ever since, either at hers or mine, never in public, as if we were having an illicit affair. Sylvia liked to be treated forcefully, which is putting it mildly. One night I’d fractured her finger by beating her too hard with my belt. After that we used a safe word: ‘creative non-fiction’. I suggested it as a joke, but she thought it was perfect. In Berlin we visited sex clubs, taking part in orgies with other couples. These nights delighted me in that they were free of jealousy and the dominance hierarchies that usually form among males when women are involved. The sex parties were characterised by generosity, playfulness, the pleasure of giving pleasure. At one, a man reached out to jerk me off as he penetrated his partner, while I parted Sylvia’s labia and slid my fingers inside her, and she licked the nipples of the other woman, who lay back on a raised seat, coming loudly. I had never been pleasured by a man before; it happened so fluidly that it didn’t feel like a first of anything. That night culminated with Sylvia squirting voluminously over the leather bed where she kneeled on all fours while I, and a man whose girlfriend I had made love to earlier, joined hands in a fraternal clasp and thrust our fingers into her dripping cunt.