by Rob Spillman
All
Tomorrow’s
Parties
All
Tomorrow’s
Parties
A MEMOIR
Rob
Spillman
Grove Press
New York
Copyright © 2016 by Rob Spillman
Jacket design by CHIPS
Jacket photograph © ullstein bild/Getty Images Author photograph by Foster Mickley
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Note from the author:
Though this book is a memoir, I’ve changed names and certain background details to preserve the privacy of characters who aren’t members of my immediate family.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 978-0-8021-2483-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-9040-6
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
For Elissa
1
“Art should be life. It’s an imitation of life. It should have some humanity in it.”
—John Lydon
Soundtrack: Sex Pistols, “Holidays in the Sun,” 1977
“THIS MUST BE THE PLACE.” I point to the street signs above us, then back down at the flyer.
“If you say so,” Elissa says.
“Where else should we possibly be?” I ask, and raise my glass.
Four months before reunification, we are drinking a previously impossible-to-obtain West German wine at a makeshift sidewalk café stumbling distance from our illegal coldwater flat. Although the Wall has “fallen” the previous October, West German authorities don’t yet have authority to cross into the East. When the German Democratic Republic (GDR) police’s wages vanished, so did they. The only authority left here is the elite riot police and the remnants of the GDR’s army. They keep order by bashing the skinheads and anarchists in running street battles every night. We haven’t seen many other Westerners on this side of the Wall. Most are staying away until reunification. Young East Germans have looked out for us, twenty-five-year-old Americans, married less than two years, self-proclaimed bohemians crazy enough to live in the midst of their chaos. But to us it doesn’t feel crazy; there is something alive and magical in the air, what it must have been like in the twenties when Marlene Dietrich was roaming the risqué drag clubs in men’s clothes, when culture and politics collided and the possibilities were revolutionary.
Now, for East Germans, Berlin is reborn and in the month we’ve been living here everything feels possible. Two weeks ago, this wine bar was a boarded-up food market. Young locals pooled their money and drove through a gap in the Wall in a battered Wartburg which they filled with cases of West German wine, then smashed down the market’s door and served the wine on the sidewalk on upturned cable spools scavenged from abandoned warehouses along the Eastern side of the Wall. Thus the Prenzlauer Berg Wine Bar was born and thus we became regulars, doing what was unthinkable only a year ago—publically downing a whole bottle of cold 1989 Pfälzer Landwein from the Rhine. Not that there aren’t still risks. Almost every night the sirens sound, blaring like World War II air-raid warnings, winding up louder and louder, signaling that the riot police are coming in to clear the skinheads who are trying to firebomb the Autonomen (anarchist) squats nearby. All up and down our block the anarchists have taken over abandoned buildings and have painted them pink and are flying old East German flags with the hammers and compasses cut out of the centers. When the riot police charge in, they bust any and all heads they see. If the clashes aren’t on our street, we’ll wait out the alarm in our bullet-pocked archway, unrepaired since World War II, and if the melee is on our street we’ll flee up the four flights to our apartment.
The sun is bleeding down, streaking East Berlin’s grays and browns with fiery orange and red, warming the cold, gray buildings to create a pocket of calm, an oasis perfect for sharing our nightly bottle of wine before we head off to the CV, our other regular neighborhood bar, just across the park. I pick up the hand-drawn flyer that the young East German has dropped on our table, try to make sense of it. Black and red concentric circles telescope down to a black X, with the names “Dunckerstrasse” and “Lettestrasse” written below. We are sitting directly under the street signs for Dunckerstrasse and Lettestrasse.
“Thanks,” I tell Michael. He’s one of the earnest Bat Theater Studio guys who are still putting on plays and happenings in appropriated ex-government buildings despite, or to spite, the vanished socialist subsidies.
“But what is it?”
“A rave,” he replies, all business.
“‘Rave’?”
“Ja, rave. A big dance, mostly illegal, held in big, illegal spaces.”
“Like here?” I ask, not getting it. I look to Elissa, but she also doesn’t understand.
“How do you mean?” Michael asks.
I point to the street names on the flyer and his confusion cracks into a smile. “No, no. We meet here. Tomorrow night, starting at midnight, every half hour, one of us will come here and take you to the place of the rave.”
“Which is where?” I ask.
“You Americans are funny, yes?”
We debate going to the rave, whatever a rave is, but it isn’t much of a debate. Of course I’m going to jump into the abyss. That’s what I do—throw myself into the unknown. So, twenty-four hours later, flyer in hand, at exactly midnight I jump on the back of the sparkling blue Vespa, driven by a young East German I hardly know, who has promised to take me someplace secret and spectacular. Michael takes off before the other Vespa, sparkling red, pulls to a stop in front of Elissa. She scrambles behind the unknown woman and they set off after us. I hold tight and we fly the two-block length of Helmholtzplatz park, then past the even smaller Kollwitzplatz park, weaving our way through scattered cobblestones and torched Communist cardboard cars, Wartburgs and Trabants, stacked like charred logs under the dead street lamps. I feel like I’m in Fellini’s Roma, a camera mounted on a scooter gliding through Rome at night, the Vespa’s soft, sweeping light illuminating ancient fountains and statues. But in reality, in the here and now, this Vespa’s narrow beam of weak white light is cutting through the stark blackness, catching obstacles so that we don’t crash out on the cobbles.
Last night’s battle between the skinheads and anarchists has coated the streets with smashed Molotovs. Michael tries to avoid the bigger shards as we zigzag out of Prenzlauer Berg and toward the Wall. Around the corners I check behind for the trailing Vespa’s yellow beam. I briefly wonder if Elissa is scared or thrilled—she doesn’t speak German and I don’t know how much English her driver has. I shelve that worry, as we are now heading straight for the Wall, but a short block away, Michael lurc
hes us hard right along a road that parallels the clean gray slabs of concrete.
We cruise past long-abandoned warehouses and industrial buildings and at each intersection I see the Wall, a hundred feet to the left, its faintly iridescent whitish gray visible for a second, then gone, glimpsed, gone again.
“Hang on,” Michael says, and switches off his light. He drives blind for a bumpy minute, then swings the Vespa left, toward a warehouse, a large dark door coming into focus. It opens right before we reach it, then slams shut as soon as we are inside. Pitch black. Where is Elissa? Should I run out? Before I reach full-on panic, the door flies open and the second Vespa coasts in. The door bangs shut with a metallic clang and several flashlights click on.
“Here. You will need this,” Michael says, and hands me a small plastic flashlight.
I aim the light at Elissa, who gives me a questioning look, and I shrug.
“Bitte, gehen sie jetzt,” a young man says, impatiently pointing his flashlight toward the water-stained back of the room. His eyes are all pupil and he is sweating, his jaw fiercely working over a piece of gum.
I wave goodbye to Michael and follow the sweating man to the other side of the small, white-tiled room and through a set of steel doors that lead to a stairwell. Banish all bad thoughts—we’re not going to get rolled. It’s all good. Follow the signs. I squeeze Elissa’s hand to reassure her, and myself. We skip down one flight of steps, then another, trying to keep up with our hopped-up leader. Two floors below street level, our Orpheus pushes open a creaky black metal door, revealing a vast, flooded basement, strewn with rubble and industrial detritus.
“Was gibt’s?” I ask, and our guide snorts. He explains, in German, which I quickly translate for Elissa, that we are in an old ball-bearing factory. He tells me this as he dances across long, sagging boards stretched between cinder-block islands. Our flashlight beams ricochet off the oily water, which has a ferrous, noxious reek, and I picture my foot dissolving in it as if it were sulfuric acid. A faint, far-off beat—a fast, steady thump, thump, thump—matches the pulse in my ears.
“Is there another room to the factory?” I call after our guide, repeating the question in English for Elissa.
“No, no,” he replies. “The party isn’t in here. This is only the passageway.”
Before I can begin to think about where we are heading, on the other side of the waterlogged basement a six-foot-wide hole opens into a dank tunnel. The thump, thump, thump of music is now clear. And up ahead a bright light pulls me forward.
“Entschuldigung, excuse me,” my new friend says, shining his flashlight over my shoulder. I turn around and Elissa catches up to us. She gives me her “What have you gotten me into?” look and I give her my “You agreed to this” look back. I also silently give her what I hope is reassurance, and I think she’s on the same page, but I really don’t care because we’re obviously on the cusp of something weird and quite possibly wonderful.
“Where are we?” I once more ask our guide, who snorts again and moves aside so that we can be the first to step through the hole and into a cavernous space constructed of gray granite blocks, the vaulted ceiling sweeping up a good hundred feet. People are dancing everywhere—on piles of paving stones and railroad ties, and in the long trench that runs through the center of the giant space. They are dancing to the loud, steady, bass-heavy electronic music, something that sounds like Kraftwerk crossed with Donna Summer. The dancers cast huge shadows from the low, icy-white strobe lights ringing the room. Atop a Lincoln-Log-like construction of scavenged railroad ties perch two sets of turntables and two young men with black-bubble headphones who are bobbing along to the music.
“Where are we?” I shout.
“Under the Wall,” our guide yells. “This is an old subway station, from before the war, closed off for forty years. Now we break through and have a rave.”
“I never want to leave,” I say—out loud, I think. I can’t believe this. We are literally between countries, under two countries.
I close my eyes and let the concussive bass vibrate through my body. I can feel the beat of my heart aligning with the beat of the music. I’m dissolving, breaking into a million particles. I am nowhere. I am home.
2
“The world is teeming. Anything can happen.”
—John Cage
Soundtrack: John Cage, Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra, 1951
MY FIRST CLEAR MEMORY is of my father being booed. This happened when I was four, twenty-one years before the rave but only four miles away, in the newly opened Mies van der Rohe–designed Neue Nationalgalerie, where my father performed in an avant-garde contemporary music series. Swallowed up in a deep, plush red seat, I was surrounded by West Berlin’s cognoscenti, many of whom were booing my father, who was onstage coaxing discordant, grinding sounds from a big black piano.
The lid of the concert grand was open and my father was leaning inside, pulling on the strings. There were bolts and pins jammed in between and around the strings to alter the sound. My dad was wearing black pants, a black turtleneck, and a black beret, and was smoking a cigarette, which I found funny because he never smoked. Nor, for that matter, did he ever wear a beret or black sweater. He never went in for affectations, even in the fall of 1969 when all of the other artists in our orbit had outward-flaring bell-bottoms and bright paisleys, ascots, and heeled boots. West Berlin at that moment was a creative Mecca, or more accurately, an artistic oasis, a multicultural playground situated two hundred miles inside of East Bloc territory, ringed in by a double-rowed concrete wall punctuated by guard towers with machine-gun turrets, outside of which were several hundred thousand heavily armed East German and Soviet troops. The Wall had gone up on August 13, 1961, only three years and five months before I was born. The postwar treaty stipulated that West Berlin was not formally part of the Federal Republic of Germany, which meant that if you were a citizen of the city, you were exempt from compulsory military service. Because of this, young artistic Germans, along with foreign artists and musicians, flocked to this safe haven at the very heart of the Cold War.
My parents had come over in the summer of 1964, on Fulbright scholarships after having attended the Eastman School of Music. For American classical musicians, Europe—particularly Germany, with its hundreds of big and little concert and opera halls, each with voracious, supportive audiences—was a much easier place to launch a career than back home. My parents had started off in Stuttgart, where my mother was building her opera credentials, and from where my father could scramble around Europe playing prestigious, high-pressure contests that could make his career while also cobbling together paid work as an opera coach and accompanist. After I was born, in December, my mother took little time off and managed to sing the role of Mimi in La Bohéme thirty times in one year. Yet they lacked consistent, reliable work and when my father was offered a job as accompanist for legendary voice teacher, Madame Mauz, in Berlin, my mother had little choice but to put her ambitions behind my father’s, and we all moved to the place I have always called home.
I have no memories of my parents being together. They separated six months before the concert at which my father was booed. It is hard for me to imagine them as a couple. Temperamentally, they are opposites—she logical and always in control of her environment and emotions, he impulsive, impractical, and driven by emotion. At the time, he was in turmoil over his sexuality, resisting what he knew to be true but which went against his conservative, central Kentucky upbringing.
After they separated, even though my mother was still in Berlin, I lived primarily with my father, and tagged along with him to rehearsals, lessons, and performances. I loved watching him play the piano, especially up onstage where he would unfurl his broad six-foot-two frame, sway and nod along to the music, and sometimes even cry. The music possessed him, animated him, and watching him play concerts, I felt buoyant, my stomach fizzing with happiness. Bu
t as the boos and whistles started that day, I wanted to sink through the cushy red seat. How could they be so mean to him?
As soon as the concert ended, I rushed backstage to comfort my father, but when I found him in the dressing room he wasn’t upset. Instead, he was joking and drinking beer with the other musicians. He took me outside to explain that the turtleneck, beret, and cigarette were called for in the “John-Cage-wannabe” score and that he had to give everything he could to the piece, even though he didn’t like it, but it was his job, and he loved his job, which was performing. He also explained that the audience wasn’t booing him. German audiences care deeply for music, so they were “booing the pretentious piece of you-know-what.”
“If I was out there,” my father said, “I would have booed it myself.”
3
“The more I see, the less I know for sure.”
—John Lennon
Soundtrack: The Beatles, “Nowhere Man,” 1965
ON THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 1989, I was in Joe’s Bar on Sixth Street in the East Village, staring at the TV mounted over the bar, watching young East and West Berliners swarm around the Brandenburg Gate. Perestroika had loosed communism’s grip on the East Bloc, but the Wall remained as both symbol and reality of division and repression. Young and old were taking crowbars and sledgehammers to the Wall, and were at first met by water cannons from the East, but the authorities quickly realized the inevitability of the moment. Germans from both sides danced atop the Wall while kids punched holes through the four-inch-thick concrete, shaking hands with the dazed East German soldiers. Four thousand miles away in Manhattan, I was stunned. The impossible was happening. In the smoky din, I couldn’t hear what the exuberant kids on the Wall were yelling, but I felt like they were calling me: Come home, Rob. Come home.
I was possessed by what the Germans call Sehnsucht, one of those wonderfully untranslatable words that combines longing and nostalgia for a home that one doesn’t even know is one’s home. English has no precise equivalent, but the Portuguese have saudade. My Sehnsucht, or saudade, was for Berlin, and I could think of nothing else but how to get there. Like the Allied forces in World War II, I needed a plan. If I parachuted right into the heart of Berlin, I wouldn’t last a minute. It was too daunting, what with no friendly troops already on the ground; I hadn’t lived there in over a dozen years, had no family left there, hardly knew anyone there from when I was young. And my wife, the logical one, would insist that we have some kind of sustainable plan.