All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  The next thing I knew there was light on the other side of my closed eyelids. I was lying down. When I opened my eyes, I was in the church’s vestibule, my mother kneeling over me in her black robes. I watched her lips move. “Are you okay?” I nodded. Then she said, “Is this the best way to get attention?” I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

  22

  “We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.”

  —Greil Marcus

  Soundtrack: Elvis Presley, “Any Way You Want Me (That’s How I Will Be),” 1956

  WE ZIGZAGGED FARTHER into the heart of Prenzlauer Berg, the old bohemian section of East Berlin, along light and dark blocks, then down a narrow street which terminated in another city park, this one bigger and brighter, and instead of a heroic Teuton, a statue of the martyred German socialist artist Käthe Kollwitz. A few blocks later we hit another park, across from which a dozen or so young men and women were standing in soft yellow light spilling out of an open doorway. Smoking and laughing, most holding beer bottles, these people were the first we’d seen since the soldiers.

  “PTA meeting?” Elissa ventured.

  “If they’re skinheads . . .” Hank said.

  “They’re not skinheads!”

  “I see hair,” Elissa said. “Definitely hair.”

  “Anarchists?” Hank asked.

  “Who cares? Let’s go,” I said.

  “Great. Let’s go get killed,” Elissa said. “After you.”

  I nodded to the young men and women as we passed through the doorway, and they nodded back, each of us feigning indifference.

  Inside, the large square room was filled with more young Easterners sprawled on mismatched furniture: tattered leather armchairs, a black-and-white Bauhaus-print love seat, a three-legged kitchen chair. Many of them wore altered military ­clothing, the hammer-and-compass cut out of the East German flag insignias, black and red anarchist “A” patches in their place; others had tied on swatches of pink cloth ribbon. Spacemen 3’s “Revolution,” coming from unseen speakers, set a fuzzy, feedbacky musical vibe that felt like a sonic handshake meant for me. Through the haze of pungent Eastern cigarette smoke, I saw beers sliding out of a slot in the back wall, a foot high and three feet wide, what might once have been a receptionist’s window.

  “Open to the public?” Elissa asked, gesturing to the bar.

  “Let’s find out,” I said.

  “Dreimal, bitte,” I requested, tentative.

  A raspy female voice politely responded, “Eins, bitte,” and I slid her a mark.

  “Danke sehr,” I said as she slid me back three dark bottles.

  “Three beers for a mark, about a buck fifty,” I told Hank and Elissa, handing over the bottles with what I’m sure was a shit-eating grin. I pointed out that everyone in the room was an Easterner. “Look at the clothes, like faded copies of Western clothes. And the eyes. They won’t look at you directly—in the Stasi years you’d get reported for simply making eye contact with a Westerner. You’d go to jail if the Westerner turned out to be undercover Stasi.”

  “No wonder it was such a destination vacation,” Elissa quipped.

  We stayed close to the makeshift bar, near a long corridor lined with small rooms. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a sparking Cuban cigarette, made with foul tobacco and wrapped in sugarcane-soaked rolling papers which set off tiny sparks when burned. I had forgotten about those, and wondered what else was going to show up from my past.

  The cold beer took the edge off the cultural time warp. My body felt like it was still speeding forward, like after an overnight drive when you are exhausted yet still buzzing, the body saying, We can still go, go, go. I ordered myself, Settle. Be here; don’t run.

  After we ordered a second round of beers, a tall, serious man asked me if I was “Engländer?”

  “Nein.”

  “Amerikaner?” he ventured, wary but curious.

  “Ja, aber ich bin in Stuttgart geboren,” I told him, quickly adding that my friends didn’t speak German. I held my breath as the man scrutinized us.

  “I am so glad you are here,” the man said, effortlessly switching to English. I exhaled along with the rest of the room; everyone had been waiting for one person to be bold enough to approach us. Ralf, who was slightly older than the others, turned out to be a world-renowned particle physicist, but had been denied his own computer because he was a member of the New Forum. “We advocated more tolerance,” Ralf told us, “but within the socialist movement. And for this we were all marked by Stasi.”

  “Was this a New Forum meeting place?” I asked.

  “Yes, yes,” Ralf said. “We used to meet here. It was a secret alcohol-rehabilitation clinic. It was shut down two years ago, and one of our members had the key. Now it is the Café Westphalia, but everyone calls it the CV.”

  “Who runs it?” I asked.

  Ralf looked puzzled. “Runs?”

  “Owns?” I asked.

  “Owns?”

  “Yes, whose place is this?”

  “Everyone’s. We all give Ringo over there money,” Ralf said, nodding toward a ponytailed guy with a quarter-sized silver hoop through each ear. “He is a carpenter’s apprentice, but fixes other things. He goes to the West with his truck to buy beer and we then have an inexpensive place to drink and gather.”

  “But who owns the space?” I pressed.

  “No one. Everyone,” Ralf said with a shrug.

  As we talked, others approached, and Ralf introduced us to Margaret, Dieter, and Liesl, who worked in the Bat Theater Studio around the corner, which had been state-funded but was now in reunification-pending limbo. Soon we were surrounded, the Germans pressing in with their six-inches-too-close for me sense of personal space, and I was assaulted by an onrush of sesquipedalian German nouns, Teutonic mash-ups of four, five, or six small noun-ideas that formed one mega-noun-idea. I hadn’t really spoken the language since I was ten, and then the deepest concept had been arguing about soccer, specifically the merits of Beckenbauer’s rugged national team versus the elegance of Pelé’s Brazil squad (I took the politically incorrect stance of favoring Brazil’s free-flowing “beautiful game” versus the brutal and controlled style of the Germans). Now everyone wanted to talk Art and Politics and Reunification.

  Voices were rushing at me, and I felt like I was in a Hong Kong action flick where the hero is being attacked by a dozen thugs at once—Look out, he’s got an axe! Behind you, a cudgel! To the left, a guy with a mini-Mohawk was asking me about the secret East German funding of the Baader-Meinhof Gang. But this was no joke to them. They wanted real, deep conversation. The guy with the Mohawk looked earnestly through his smudged oval glasses and asked me, “When does the universal struggle for freedom cross the line to terrorism and oppression? And can you justify revolutionary acts if they are being supported by government forces fighting proxy wars?” What led their elders in the East and West to join Baader-Meinhof-influenced Revolutionary Cells, to kidnap bankers and then work with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine to commit two very high-profile hijackings in the late seventies, ending in bloody rescue missions in Entebbe and Mogadishu? I understand the impulse in the face of oppression and fascism, and said, “My revolution is your revolution.”

  He nodded and said, “Or, as your Martin Luther King proclaimed, ‘Until all people are free, no people are free.’ But what would you have done here?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “I would have joined the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and, if I had been a young German in the seventies I could see kidnapping bankers like the Baader-Meinhof Gang did, but, like MLK, I am opposed to violence and terrorism, especially against civilians.”

  “Then you do not have the moral fiber for revolution and would have lived in fear under the East or West governments, which were e
qually oppressive at the time,” my new friend said without a trace of humor.

  “Perhaps,” I said, his true words stinging, “but I would have fought peacefully, with words and art.” By the look of the young East German’s condescending smile, I realized how naive and ridiculous I sounded.

  But before I could form a more thought-out response, a woman who had been listening to us interjected a question about whether I would now join the resistance against resurging fascism, skinheads blaming Muslim immigrants for the lack of jobs, brazenly attacking them in the streets, their ire stoked by factories shutting down across East Germany? “However we can help,” I said, which felt weak and nebulous. I was over my head. The man and woman looked at me expectantly, and in the uncomfortable silence I tried to collect myself. I fumbled on for a few more minutes until Hank’s head swiveled violently and I followed his gaze down the hall, where three women were emerging from a back room. One of the women was black, the other two Hispanic.

  “Looks like we’re not the first Westerners in here,” Hank said.

  “Alas, Livingston, we tried,” Elissa said.

  “No, no,” Ralf said. “They are not from the West. Those two are Cuban, and she is from the Belgian Congo. They were here to study at the university, which may or may not reopen in October. Now they are trapped here. Their governments are not able to bring them back.”

  For hours I tried to engage with these descendants of ­Dietrich, Kollwitz, and Brecht, to rise to their intellect and sense of urgency, but their words and ideas were beginning to run together, and my brain muddled like a kid’s watercolor set after too much use—all of the colors had a puddle of brown on the top. Over or under the din of conversations I tuned back in to the music, which I now noticed was coming from four small, white speakers mounted in the top corners of the room. Spacemen 3 had given way to a tape loop of The Residents ­covering Elvis Presley songs, a hallucinatory Elvis-from-hell sound. Weirdly, we had seen The Residents performing these exact same songs a few months before in New York, which felt as likely as having seen Marlene Dietrich’s cabaret show the previous week.

  We’d been at the CV for what felt like a long time, but I couldn’t tell if it had been one hour or eight. I was reoriented when Ralf said that it was 2 A.M. and he needed to get some sleep before he went to work in the morning, but not before he led me to Ringo, who introduced himself to me with “I find you a flat, for mostly nothing.”

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Fifteen marks for the month,” Ringo said, his dark eyes bright with anticipation, his neat ponytail bobbing as he rocked on his heels. Fifteen marks? Roughly twenty dollars for an apartment? For that, we could stay in Berlin almost indefinitely.

  “Yes, for fifteen marks,” Ringo repeated. “Across the park, a little down Dunckerstrasse. I take you now, so that we do not disturb the neighbors later. I have key. I walk you there, then we come back and if you like, you give me money and I give you key.”

  “Legal?” I asked.

  “Legal?” Ringo laughed. “There is no ‘legal’ here.”

  “My kind of place,” I told him, though I wasn’t sure why—my words and decisions seemed out of my control. “Let me check with my friends,” I said.

  “Is it safe?” Hank asked.

  “Safer than sleeping in the car.”

  “Like with a lock and key?” Hank asked.

  “Lock, yes, but I don’t know the neighborhood.”

  “Is this crazy?” Elissa asked, slightly unsteady, and I wondered if I was as drunk as she was. Somewhere down in my drunk reptilian brain her question registered as a valid concern, but I wasn’t letting on. Both Hank and Elissa were deferring to me. They were now less partners than sidekicks.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but let’s check it out. If it doesn’t look safe in the morning, we’ll go find someplace in the West.” I said this, but like when I walked through the soldiers, I had no intention of honoring the safe and the secure. I was positive Ringo’s flat was going to work out. It was meant to be.

  23

  “My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.”

  —Vladimir Nabokov

  Soundtrack: Elton John Band, “Philadelphia Freedom,” 1975

  AT THE END of the school year in Lynchburg, I was nervous about my father picking me up. Would he be different? Was I? Would our car time no longer be sacred? But only a few miles along Route 29 my father pointed out the first Stuckey’s and I knew that we were safe. As we drove to Chautauqua, now via an unfamiliar southern route, we settled back into our driving rhythm, the entire tense year dissolving behind the Hornet.

  That summer I was finally old enough for a substantial opera part, in a production I was genuinely excited about. Most operatic plotlines were safely far-fetched, but Albert Herring hit home. The small, intimate comic opera has only thirteen roles and a thirteen-piece orchestra. Albert is a young man who is so good and kind and unworldly that he is elected King of the May because the village maidens are corrupted and couldn’t possibly be elected Queen of the May. His friends, the couple Sid and Nancy (really), can see that poor Albert’s soul is dying from all the goodness. They spike his lemonade and he goes on a bender, finds himself having sinful and worldly desires, and then gets up the courage to be who he wants to be, which is not a teetotaling churchmouse who does what he is told but someone who will question authority and leave his tiny village to engage the great, big messy world. At age eleven, I was a pre-bender Albert ­Herring—always well behaved, always blending in, never getting in trouble, and always on the verge of exploding. I wanted nothing more than to be post-bender Albert Herring.

  The second act began with me, alone in the middle of the stage, bouncing a pink ball off a door, singing in rhythm to the bouncing ball: “Bounce me high, bounce me low, bounce me up to Jer-i-cho.” I thrived on the pressure of performing, basked in the attention, and couldn’t believe I was being paid. Union scale for a principal role was $110 a night, minus ten bucks because I was only eleven and the festival was fined for violating New York State Labor Laws, a cost they passed on to me. Still, a hundred bucks a night buys a lot of grape soda and a lot of rounds of mini-golf.

  I spent my days either at the opera house or playing mini-golf. The course was across the parking lot from the rehearsal garage, and hour after hour disappeared as I whacked around red, yellow, blue, and green golf balls. I got good enough to switch to a more “professional” white ball and play tournaments. The Sumners, the nice, white-haired couple who owned the place, let most of the regular kids spend the afternoons hanging out, not charging us for more than a couple of games even though we played ten, twenty rounds a day. We pros drank Welch’s grape soda and looked down on the “civilians” who were there for the fun of it. Thirty-plus years later I can tell you the layout of each of the thirty-six holes, from the loop-de-loop to the windmill. I loved the logic and control of the game, all anxiety vanishing as I focused on one simple problem—how to get the ball from point A to point B. I played so much that summer that I won the Junior Putt-Putt Championship and got a big, shiny trophy and a snazzy Liberty Bell–shaped putter. Overhead, against the backdrop of the hazy sunset, mosquitoes and moths popped and sparked in the bug zappers hanging next to the tinny speakers that played a rotation of two songs: “Afternoon Delight” and “Philadelphia Freedom.”

  Midsummer, my mother wrote to tell me that we were ­moving to Baltimore. I was surprised, but I shouldn’t have been. The previous December my mother had started calling in sick to the church gig, me missing Friendly’s in order for us to drive to Baltimore to see David Fetter, a college classmate of my parents. David’s roommate at Eastman, a tuba player named Roger Bobo, had briefly dated my mother right before she and my father started going out. Now the principal trombone player in the Baltimore Symphony, David and my mother had run into each other at a concert in Washington, D.C. Recently divorce
d, he also had a son, a few years younger than me. Most winter and spring weekends we either drove to Baltimore or David came to us.

  Mom, always deft with her sewing machine, now made copies of designer dresses, wore more makeup, and had her hair done more often. I did want my mother to be happy, and it helped that I liked David. He gave me plenty of space, didn’t try to throw a baseball with me and replace my father. David reminded me of a George Booth cartoon character from The New Yorker, which my mother subscribed to, and which I looked through for the cartoons, loving the very un-Lynchburg-like Booth eccentrics sitting on porches with their wild hair and cats and plants and musical instruments. David lived on the edge of Hampden, a grimy working-class neighborhood of narrow Baltimore row houses. The second or third time David came to Lynchburg, he brought me two old blue-cloth hardback novels by Joseph Conrad. I was stunned. How did he know?

  I liked having David in my life, but it made me miss my father even more. When I went to Rochester at Christmas, I was expecting Dad to be as lonely and miserable as I was. Yet, while he was happy to have me there, nothing had changed—he lived to play, consume, and teach music. The one thing that had changed was that he no longer needed to be near a suburban elementary school, so he had moved closer to Eastman, into a smaller, sparer apartment. Holding down two positions—one in the piano department, one in the opera department—he would wake up and grab a coffee cup, go to work, refill his mug fourteen times, then go home at midnight. He told me that he knew it was fourteen because his doctor asked him to count. When he tried to quit cold turkey, he had heart palpitations and severe headaches. His doctor asked him, “Why the hell did you quit?”