All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  While the Cold War raged, creative Berlin was oblivious. The show must go on. And on. Like previous cultural Meccas, Berlin in the sixties sent out a call like a dog whistle that could be heard only by artists. The spire of the bombed-out ­Gedächtniskirche—the Remembrance Church—beckoned: Come join us, you gay Brazilian dancers, you French painters, you Spanish composers; bring us your Mexican folksingers, your Turkish guest workers turned sculptors, your Japanese noise artists, your Kentucky pianists—you are all welcome here in Berlin.

  10

  “I is another.”

  —Rimbaud

  Soundtrack: Sonic Youth, “Schizophrenia,” 1987

  ZAMBUJEIRA WITH ELISSA was everything I wanted. We wrote. Elissa much more feverishly than I. But more important, we loved the place and the people, and we loved ourselves as a couple within this culture. For pennies, we bought rounds of hard goat cheese and the crusty bread that we could smell baking in the middle of the night only a few doors down from us. We ate big bowls of soup with potatoes and fennel and fish heads, courtesy of the town’s fishermen, who went out to sea at night and then hit the bars at 8 A.M. We explored the coast, the desolate marshes and dunes, the cork and olive farms inland, sometimes spotting shadowy figures who were letting rooms on the nearby farms. There were moments when I felt more alive than I had ever felt before, and never more present than I was with Elissa. This is what life with her could be, should be.

  Yet. Yet I was still restless. I was feeling less like Paul Bowles and more like Jack Torrance in The Shining. I hadn’t done any stringing work. I had left a message on the answering machine of Portuguese marathoner Rosa Mota, who was spending the summer in Lisbon, saying that I would try her in a few days. I did, once, but again no one was home. I told myself I’d call in a week. A big international track meet in Berlin was happening mid-August, six weeks off, but we hadn’t made concrete plans about when we would drive there. I hadn’t broached the possibility of staying in Berlin longer than the week we had originally talked about.

  Zambujeira was scenic, quiet, and cheap, a place to produce Great Art. However, I was beginning to have fears that it was too perfect. I couldn’t help think about Frank Conroy menacingly writing at the opening of Stop-Time, “Life was good, conditions were perfect for my work.” I also thought of the king of expat American writers, Hemingway, who once retreated to a quiet, isolated cabin in the mountains of Switzerland and when he got there wrote to a friend, “I have everything I need to write except everything that I need to write.”

  Once again I distrusted happiness, mistaking it for complacency. This unease was fueled by the barely repressed certainty that the novel I was working on had more intellect than heart. Instead of searching for my heart, I focused on everything that annoyed me. Elissa was the only native English speaker I’d spoken to for weeks. The few tapes we had brought with us were slightly stretched, and I knew every hiss and fuzz of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation. And I was already tired of Andreas and Xica and their perfect little bar overlooking the relentless waves.

  But I was not tired of their absinthe, which we downed night after night. I turned to the Green Faerie for answers. Muse to van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Picasso, Jarry, Wilde, in the late nineteenth century absinthe was as popular as wine in France, especially in Paris, and especially with artists. During the Jazz Age it was outlawed in most countries, because of its addictive properties and because of several high-profile murder cases in which the defendants used the “absinthe defense.” In Portugal, however, the Green Faerie had never been banned. Besides its high alcohol content, absinthe gets an added kick from distilled wormwood, the herb that lined the path out of the Garden of Eden. The Russian word for wormwood is Chernobyl.

  Legend has it that absinthe is what drove van Gogh mad, triggering seizures, although some have speculated that van Gogh might have already had temporal lobe epilepsy, which Elissa has as well, and absinthe has been found to exacerbate seizure tendencies. This we wouldn’t find out until much later. For Elissa, each absinthe cocktail packed the neurological bomb a little tighter, but the fuse was long and we’d be in Berlin when it blew.

  Xica knew what we wanted, and when we’d walk into her bar she’d pull down the old stone bottle from the top shelf. The very first time she poured us shots of the white bootleg absinthe, we were expecting a flowery anise taste, but we were shocked by the raw ethanol flavor. Xica mixed the absinthe with passion fruit juice, the viscous, pulpy, purple liquid obliterating the burn and masking the harsh aftertaste. Soon, Xica’s bright lights were ringed with a yellowy haze. My legs twitched as if they were ready to go for a long run, yet when I stood, my leg muscles fired out of sequence and I had to steady myself on the bar. The absinthe effect is a little like mescaline, speedy and mildly hallucinogenic. Everything glows, warm and iridescent. The whole spectrum subtly shifts to the yellow. The Portuguese moon shimmered as if shining through an ancient lace curtain.

  Absinthe could also bring out the maudlin. One late night, as we clung to each other on the way home, I pretentiously mused that if I was, indeed, a modern-day Paul Bowles, where was our Ginsburg, our Burroughs? Then I remembered—Eddie, Pete, and the rest of our crew were still in New York. They had jobs, jobs they needed to keep to be around other artists who were also busy scraping by trying to live in New York. This was precisely the ouroboros that we had fled.

  Our friend Hank, however, had no such attachments. A painter from Ohio, he wasn’t caught in the New York circular hell of subsistence living, and he had never been to Europe. He planned to join us for a week before he went off on a Eurail Pass. His itinerary included cathedrals and Dresden and Prague, a Formula 1 race in Lisbon, and later a brief overlap with us in Berlin. With Hank due to arrive any day, my Berlin countdown clock clicked on.

  We had met Hank in Aspen three summers before, at Pour La France, the restaurant where I was waiting tables. Hard to miss at six foot five inches under a military buzz cut, his caramel Carhartt work jacket flecked with paint, he drank cup after cup of coffee while hunched over Gravity’s Rainbow. He never looked up when I stopped by his table, silently filling his cup, then ­asking if he needed anything else. “Nope,” he said each time. Artists never passed through Aspen, the home of the rich and shallow, so on the fifth refill, I asked if he had gotten to the harmonica scene yet. That night he showed Elissa and me pictures of his paintings, large, stark canvases of trucks and tools and cups of coffee that contained galaxies, Midwestern realism that was also eerie and enigmatic.

  Every night for the next month we had intense coffee-and-alcohol-fueled conversations about art, with amplified emotions you feel only in your twenties, when you are wildly changeable even as your artistic opinions are set in stone—Hank arguing that artists were owed a living wage by society, Elissa that society owed us nothing. Hank was full of absolutes, pronouncements like “Art has no utility” and “Warhol is irrelevant.” For him, logic ruled, and he had a mathematical life formula by which happiness was achieved through a perfect balance of comfort and adventure and creation. These could be measured with points, and when one was out of balance, he would say, “I have too many comfort points. I need some adventure points.” He and Elissa bonded over knives, both collecting them at thrift stores and flea markets. He had worked for his father in the antiques business, but his dad had died young, and now Hank got by with the odd carpentry or handyman gig.

  Here was our Cassady. Though I wondered, If he’s Cassady, which one of us is Kerouac? But it didn’t matter, as everything the three of us did together glowed with importance. Hank said that he was only passing through Aspen, but after meeting us he stayed, finding a preposterous job with Frozen Moments, which made statues out of banal everyday food and drinks—a bottle of beer pouring into a mug, a fork suspended forever in a twirl of spaghetti over a bowl of pasta and meatballs. Like Elissa, Hank attracted the absurd and sublime.

  Two weeks after we met, while hiking aroun
d the Grottos, a series of ice caves up-valley from Aspen, we came upon a worn black leather boot sitting in the middle of the trail like it was waiting for us. Taped to the inside of the boot was a piece of lined notebook paper wrapped in a clear plastic bag. On the paper three affirmations were written in neat, block letters:

  I am good with old people

  I am good at art

  I am learning

  We embraced the second two affirmations. “I am good at art, I am learning” became the final words to any argument, the punch line of any joke, and our collective mantra.

  11

  “All I can do is be me, whoever that is.”

  —Bob Dylan

  Soundtrack: Bob Dylan, “Blowin’ in the Wind,” 1963

  HANK ARRIVED IN ZAMBUJEIRA exactly when his postcard said he would. Despite all of the writing we were getting done, we were ready to share our new paradise. Hank found a room on a nearby farm for five hundred escudos a day (around $3) and was determined to max out his week with us. At first light, he was perched on the cliffs, sketching. Afternoons, while Elissa wrote, he and I ranged farther and farther up or down the coast, strange new villages emerging out of the rugged lava cliffs. We’d come back at twilight, Elissa still at her desk, surprised that so much time had passed. After snails and beer, then soup and Vinho Verde, the three of us sucked down absinthe after absinthe at Xica’s bar, she and Andreas welcoming our opinionated artistic friend. When we talked about our plans for the coming month, I wished that Elissa were more excited about our impending trip up to Berlin. Even as I thought this, I knew that I was projecting my own anxieties. She kept reassuring me that whenever I was ready to get in Dusty, our beat-up, red-sand-encased Le Car, she was game.

  She wasn’t, however, so sanguine about my still not doing anything to get stringing work. At the end of Hank’s fifth day with us, after we’d stumbled back to our cool, cavelike apartment, Elissa asked, “Have you set up a press pass for the Berlin track meet?”

  “I’m on it,” I said, but before she could press further I pulled off her Smiths T-shirt. I also hadn’t bothered to follow up on the possible interview with Rosa Mota, or looked into getting press passes to the Lisbon Grand Prix. We spent little money, so I felt no urgency. Of course, Berlin would be much more expensive, but I reasoned there were more sporting events to cover, plus the chance to write about the aftermath of the Wall’s fall and the pending reunification of the two countries, scheduled for the third of October. After a day of biking along the crumbling cliffs, then swimming in and out of riptides, then luxuriating in our two- or three-hour dinner that blended into blurry bar time, and finally sleeping with Elissa, the very idea of “work” was ridiculous. Finding a means to keep us in Europe I filed in my mental “I’ll deal with that mundane crap when I have to” folder. Besides, Hank, with his limited funds, had only two days left with us before he needed to buy his three-week Eurail Pass. Then we’d have to fix a date to meet in Berlin and pray that Dusty could make the two-thousand-mile drive.

  12

  “Imagination creates reality.”

  —Richard Wagner

  Soundtrack: Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring, 1913

  THE SUMMER OF 1972, I watched TV for the first time. The Munich Olympics were broadcast around the clock and I loved its opera-worthy spectacle and drama. Before then, I didn’t care for German educational programs, nor the news, which was dominated by the Vietnam War, and where I caught glimpses of soldiers crawling on their bellies through the jungle, a naked girl running from her napalmed village, a pile of dead Vietnamese women and children on a dirt road. I didn’t completely make the connection between the soldiers at the PX and the soldiers slogging through the rice paddies on TV. The two worlds came together only once, when my father let a GI, his Vietnamese wife, and their half-Vietnamese daughter stay with us for a week while they sorted out army housing. But the girl was two years younger than me and I learned nothing about what it was like being in a war zone. Instead, I taught her how to play Monopoly and she taught me how ketchup made everything, including eggs, taste better.

  The war felt like a performance happening far away from the safety of Berlin. Then the Olympic images switched from sprinters to masked Palestinian gunmen with Kalashnikov rifles peering out from the balcony of the Israeli athletes’ Olympic Village apartment. Munich, not Berlin—but still, in my country. The images were everywhere; the standoff stopped the entire nation—we all had to look.

  What I didn’t know was that the hostage-taking was a global and national convergence of pressures: The Palestinians, calling themselves the Black September group, were given intelligence by local neo-Nazis, and once they had seized the hostages, the gunmen demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners in Israel, as well as the freeing of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the leaders of the Red Army Faction, who the year before had spent time training at a Fatah camp in Jordan, and who had recently been captured and were being held in the heavily fortified Stammheim Prison in Stuttgart.

  What I did know was that the entire ordeal, culminating in the failed, fatal rescue attempt during which all eleven of the kidnapped Israelis were killed, was a cause for deep national shame from which every German wanted to hide but couldn’t look away. The past generation’s sins were supposed to be cleansed by the Olympics, happy Technicolor images of world unity and multiculturalism to replace the iconic black-and-white Aryan fantasia of the 1936 Berlin Olympics as filmed by Leni Riefenstahl. But with the taking of the Israeli athletes, other iconic images of strife and terror replaced the Nazi propaganda, ushering in a new wave of collective guilt. I, too, felt shame, but it wasn’t totally mine. I was embarrassed for my German friends, and didn’t know what to say to them. But I was also angry and afraid: Could my father stop kidnappers if they came for us?

  I was also conflicted and confused. Nearly eight, I saw the world as not black-and-white, but gray, a fluid experience. I didn’t think of myself as American or German, but as a little of both. I didn’t speak only German or only English, but used whatever words worked best for the situation. This had exasperated my Teutonic German kindergarten teachers. Aside from their judgmental glares, this wasn’t much of a problem for me, except when I confused the German words for sink (Spüle) and toilet (Spülklosett). I complained to my teacher that my stomach hurt, and I did as I thought she told me—threw up in the school sink, instead of the toilet, to loud and embarrassing protests.

  My mashing of languages lessened somewhat as I went through first, second, and third grades at the JFK School. But I doubted I could ever match my father’s command of German, which he needed to get jobs and also to fully understand lieder. For him the language was a tool, another means to further his art, which was his life. He didn’t Germanicize like his artistic partner, Barry, who had bought a big house by the Schlachtensee and had tacked on a German inflection to his English. My father did, however, adopt the German love for Spazierengehen (literally “going for a stroll”; yet, like most things German, there is no such thing as a “stroll” but more like a “walk with purpose that is supposed to be good for you”). When we visited Barry, we would Spazierengehen around the Schlachtensee on the edge of the huge, wooded Grunewald. As I struggled to keep up with their determined strides, I forgot that the forest was part of an island ringed with concrete and guard towers and gun turrets.

  This reality came back into focus whenever my father performed outside of Berlin, which happened a few times a month. Leaving Berlin, the train stopped at the border of East Germany and West Berlin, then at the border of East Germany and West Germany proper. Out the window I’d see kids my own age and wonder how scary it was to live behind walls and barbed wire, scowling men with guns everywhere. After the Olympic massacre, Eastern soldiers terrified me, the Kalashnikovs of the Palestinians no different from the East German or Russian Kalashnikovs.

  On our first train trip after the Olympics, my father trie
d to reassure me that nothing had changed. I nodded, but held tight to his arm as the East German soldiers entered our train car at the first crossing. As usual, they held back straining German shepherds and blinded us with their long, black flashlights, looking under our seats and above, in the luggage rack, while outside other soldiers swarmed, searching above and below for stowaways. “It’s okay,” my father kept saying. “They aren’t going to hurt us, we’ve done nothing wrong.” Neither had the Israeli athletes. I wasn’t worried about them hurting us; I was worried that they’d take my father away.

  But the soldiers didn’t care about us and the train moved on, through the corridor connecting East to West, past tall metal fences, the tops laced with thick coils of barbed wire. If you tried to escape the East and happened to make it past the machine gunners in the guard towers and over the fence, you would be impaled by six-inch metal spikes welded to metal plates that lined the ground between the fences. Still, every few months an East German would make a suicidal break for the West. As I clung to my father, I wondered what it must be like to feel that desperate.

  13

  “That’s what my life is, writing songs.”

  —John Cale

  Soundtrack: John Cale, “Fear Is a Man’s Best Friend,” 1974

  AGE EIGHT, with my father walking across the border at Checkpoint Charlie, my mouth dry, hands damp, a wad of contraband U.S. dollars hot against the sole of my left foot. It was illegal to bring Western currency into East Berlin, but my father assured me that the border police never searched kids. We walked past the U.S. soldiers on the western side of the small metal bridge, me avoiding eye contact, and then we were in between the double rows of concrete Berliners call No-Man’s-Land. On the eastern side we slid our passports and twenty-five West German marks into a drawer that disappeared into a glass-partitioned booth manned by East German soldiers.