All Tomorrow's Parties

by Rob Spillman

  The three of us burst into hysterics as the poor mime reversed course and began handing out pamphlets far, far away from us, the unsavable. How I would have loved to drop my Boys’ Latin classmates here, to show them my world, though I’d still need Ted and Bill, braver souls than myself, to shield me.

  The day kept happily unspooling, hours disappearing with friends and beer and Frisbees, and I wanted the day to be endless but it was now sunset, our balcony crammed with friends, new and old, a violinist named Kimi next to me, her small hand clamped into mine, my father and Peter working the blender nonstop. Over Red Mountain a towering cumulus cloud was aflame. Red, pink, and purple streaks bled out north and south, dissipating down-valley and up toward the Continental Divide and Independence Pass.

  Somehow it was time to don sweaters to ward off the suddenly icy air, the stars sharp and pressing down like stalactites, time to make our way to Wagner Park with drinks and blankets, the grass covered like a crazy quilt, strangers stitched up next to strangers. We wedged ourselves in and the fireworks shot off Ajax Mountain and over the town. The dry, high-altitude air nearly nonexistent, I felt as if I could reach out and grab the red and blue bursts above me.

  I was happy. And I let myself be happy.

  Midnight come and gone, our ever-expanding band of revelers traipsed from party to party, and right at the peak of communal happiness, I stole away, back to my balcony. Below, cowboys and stoned violinists staggered along Durant Street. Overhead whizzed rogue Roman candles. My eyes ached. All I wanted was sleep. But, then, that would mean that this perfect day would be over.

  43

  “Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.”

  —Charlie Parker

  Soundtrack: Charlie Parker Quintet, “Dexterity,” 1947

  FROM THE INDUSTRIAL LAUNDRY FACILITY in the East to the Western side of the Wall was, at most, a fifteen-minute drive if I drove straight shot down the wide-open Prenzlauer Allee. But I didn’t want to rush from the 1950s to the 1990s. I took the backstreets instead, zigzagging toward the Wall. I wanted to get lost. Which, sadly, was virtually impossible for me: My internal gyroscope from years of running into the wilderness was unshakable. If I got lost, I wouldn’t have had to admit defeat. Once we crossed over into the West I’d have to accept my failure, that I couldn’t convince the East German laundry guys to save themselves. If I couldn’t do a simple thing like that, what could I accomplish in the East?

  “I’m sorry,” Elissa said from the backseat.

  “Me too,” I said, and caught her eye in the rearview mirror. She felt bad for me, but I could tell by her newfound energy that she was looking forward to a break from the East, was anticipating clean clothes and maybe even a real meal. I wanted these things for her, but was also annoyed that she needed them. I wanted to stay pure, like some stubborn Luddite. I was determined to be a full citizen of the new East Berlin, no matter how hard that would be.

  “Where are we?” she asked, leaning forward to get a better view.

  “The Wall’s around the corner.”

  “No way.”

  “Way.”

  And sure enough, there was the grainy gray barrier. While I knew exactly where we were along the Wall, a couple of four-foot slabs were newly missing. I could now drive right through the partition and wouldn’t have to cut back along No-Man’s-Land like I had planned. I guided Dusty through the narrow hole, and we found ourselves in a Deutsche Bank parking lot filled with hulking BMWs, Mercedes, and VWs, the vanguard of the old Wehrmacht. It felt like the blotchy black-and-white documentary we’d been in had lurched into a lurid Technicolor spectacle.

  Even the people were shinier, brighter, but not pleasantly so—they were too loud, too colorful, like Plasticine figures.

  My internal map told me that we were not far from Kreuzberg, the old hipster neighborhood, where I was sure we’d find a Laundromat. I kept expecting to be enveloped by memories, by remembered smells—the Turkish street vendors with their lamb spits; the doughy, salty pretzels, the damp, earthy air—yet it all felt hazy and distant. Each time we crossed into West Berlin, I wanted to be reembraced. I wanted to feel like a transplanted tree returning to its native soil. Instead I felt like a dandelion fluffball skittering across concrete. And if I was, indeed, a windblown seed, I would’ve much rather put down roots in East Berlin’s crazy swirling dust storm.

  Faced with our real clothes crisis, I shook off the poetic nonsense and found a Laundromat on the edge of Kreuzberg, close to Schöneberg, where Marlene Dietrich was born and raised. The Laundromat was down the street from a decent kebab stand, where I grudgingly enjoyed a gyro that I couldn’t have had back in our neighborhood, the Turks yet to cross over into the East, afraid of the racist skinheads.

  “Hey, check out the record store,” Elissa said, pointing to the flyer-covered window across the street.

  “Let’s go,” Hank said, already crossing over.

  “I’ll watch the clothes,” I volunteered.

  “Oh c’mon, lighten up, Francis,” Elissa said. “They’ll be all right for a little while.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, not feeling okay, and doubly not okay, as I knew that I was sulking.

  Fifteen minutes later, Hank and Elissa returned, Elissa beaming.

  “What?” I grumpily asked.

  “Brits in there,” Elissa said. “Sweet, sweet native English.” Despite my best effort to suppress it, I laughed. “And,” Elissa added, “they’re going to the track meet. Which is tonight.”

  “What?”

  “The one you said you were going to cover,” Elissa said. “Remember?” she asked, her eyes narrowing, readying for another strike.

  “I can’t believe I spaced it out,” I said. Elissa’s eyes widened as she realized that I meant it. Her anger turned to confusion. “I really did want to write about it,” I said.

  “I believe you,” Elissa said. “And it’s not too late.”

  “Okay, let’s just go then. I’ll figure something out when we get there,” I said.

  “Right,” Elissa said, halfway hopeful.

  Since it was only two o’clock, we had time to kill before the meet, and Hank suggested that we hike over to the nearby Reichstag. “First time since the war that people are allowed to look inside,” he said, reminding me of the confident and resourceful Hank who seemed to have vanished in Portugal.

  The Reichstag had been burned in an arson attack in February 1933, a month after Hitler took office, and Hitler blamed the Communists and used the fire as a pretext to suspend all civil liberties and consolidate power. Minimally repaired before the war, in early 1945 it was once again heavily damaged, this time by U.S. and British bombers. After the war it was partially repaired, but never used. We walked around the hulking shell and found the one open side room, ringed in scaffolds and braces. In front of the scaffolding there was an exhibit of photographs of the dome before and during the war, including one sequence showing the bombing of the building we were standing in. The black-and-white photos showed the bullet-shaped bomb falling from the B-17, closer and closer to the dome in each picture until most of the dome disappears in billowing clouds of expanding smoke.

  I looked at the photographic evidence, then up at the scaffolding, trying to imagine the terror. I thought of the Berlin Philharmonic, playing their “last concert” on April 12, 1945, three months after the bombing in the pictures, in the nearby and already heavily damaged Beethoven Hall, under the orders of Albert Speer, who chose the program, including Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. With the Russians on the edge of the city, Hitler Youth stood at the exits holding baskets filled with cyanide pills. Party officials took the pills, but not the musicians. They would die for their art, but not for the Führer.

&nbs
p; A few hours after we left the Reichstag, we bought cheap seats to the track in the massive Olympic Stadium, a quarter occupied on this rainy, windy evening, huge klieg lights illuminating the low clouds so they looked like swirling Creamsicles.

  “Speer designed this stadium so that it would crumble into spectacular ruins,” I said, grasping at remembered facts.

  “Why not Rouen?” Elissa asked, and it took me a minute to figure out that she was talking about the French cathedral we had visited only a month before, but which felt like a lifetime ago.

  “They wanted to take it all with them,” I said. Forty-five years after the end of the Third Reich, and fifty-four years after Jesse Owens ran there, the stadium was still fully intact and functioning, once again host to an international track and field meet. “Speer planned all the Nazi monuments with ruins in mind, hoping for the enduring grandeur of the Roman Colosseum.”

  “Creepy krauts,” Elissa said. She was energized by the clean clothes, real food, and our first decent cup of coffee in a long time, and was visibly more relaxed among the Westerners; no threat of riot police or skinheads here.

  In the two front rows an oompah band in lederhosen had been placed solely for me, I knew, because they played “New York, New York,” and then “Brazil.” How did they know Brazil was one of my favorite movies?

  Down on the track, Arturo Barrios, the Mexican world-record holder in the 10,000 meters, was trying to set a new mark. He’d have a tough time out there tonight, with the rain and puddles. Why hadn’t I got it together to interview him? I thought, wondering why I was self-sabotaging. I needed Arturo in order to stay in Berlin. Am I running to or from my true self? My legs twitched in time with his fluid strides as he ran behind the pace-setting rabbits, two world-class runners paid to set a record pace for as long as they could before Arturo took over. Man, was he smooth—no wasted movements, his entire being focused on forward momentum. Four years before, I had been running ninety miles a week, with my eyes on the New York Marathon. I became stronger the longer the distance, increased suffering equaling increased mastery, and knew I could have been a competitive marathoner.

  Barrios gamely splashed ahead once the last of the rabbits fell off after the fourth mile, gutting out the last two-plus miles solo. Everyone in the stadium stood, clapped in rhythm to his strides. We all kept cheering after he crossed the finish line in 27 minutes, 18 seconds, only 10 seconds off his world record, set on the same track the summer before, but under ideal conditions. Everyone in the stadium cheered the noble effort, his determination against the elements. What was my excuse? What was I chasing?

  If I wanted to stay in Berlin, I needed a plan. I needed to get serious about my work—I needed to start reporting stories, and interviewing people like Barrios. I knew it, Elissa knew it, and I told her I would. I lied. Or, to myself, I said, I would prefer not to. I wasn’t sure how we were going to stay, but it wasn’t going to be by the old ways. There had to be some other path. I hadn’t found it yet, but when it appeared, I knew I would be ready to run.

  44

  “Put down the pen someone else gave you. No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink.”

  —Jack Kerouac

  Soundtrack: The Knickerbockers, “Lies,” 1965

  ON A MILD LATE-NOVEMBER NIGHT I was all dressed up—black jeans, black-and-white Converse high-tops, a white button-down shirt, a skinny black tie, and a black dress jacket with a Selecter pin stuck in the thin lapel—on the cusp of a life-changing decision. So often our crossroads moments aren’t clear to us until long afterward, but this was a moment where the paths—and the consequences of my potential choices—were clear. Robert Frost in “The Road Not Taken” or Robert Johnson meeting the devil in Clarksdale, Mississippi, at the corner of Routes 61 and 49—they would know what to do. Me, I felt like an idiot standing on my stoop, paralyzed, unable to decide which direction to turn.

  In truth, I had three places to go, or more accurately, three distinct Friday night choices: 1. See a safe hippie band with my intimidatingly sexy new girlfriend; 2. See a real punk band for the first time; 3. Get safely smashed at a school party.

  Three months into the school year, three weeks before my fifteenth birthday, and officially a junior on my two-year life plan (Boys’ Latin giving me permission to skip my sophomore year), I was still trying to find my balance. I was a skinny fourteen-year-old cross-country runner and all the other juniors were seventeen-year-old football and lacrosse players who shaved and looked at me like an unwelcome little brother. Sex was their main subject of discourse and I didn’t have much to say. Sure, I knew the lines, the exaggerations, the double entendres, but not what went with the words. It was like knowing how to play a basic twelve-bar blues—C to F to C to G to F to C—but without having lived through any experience worthy of a blues song.

  One of the childish things I had to jettison was the by at the end of my name. I was now Rob, not Robby. When I came back from the summer my friends Danny and Joey were now Dan and Joe and looked five years older and tougher. They had discovered punk and hardcore, and declared all other alternative music “hippie shit.”

  I wasn’t so sure. I spent all of my allowance on music—Patti Smith, Talking Heads, David Bowie, Adam and the Ants, early Who, and especially ska: Madness, the English Beat, The Selecter, and The Specials. I hung around Edith Massey’s thrift store in Fell’s Point, where Divine and other John Waters “stars” congregated. I stayed on the periphery, but did find my new wardrobe there, including the mod jacket and tie, and my prized find—a British belt buckle.

  My fellow juniors, much older and hardened than me, crashed cars, were arrested for DWI, got into fistfights in bars, screwed around, and sweated out pregnancy tests. Yet they still clung to the same bands they had been listening to in middle school—Aerosmith, Styx, REO Speedwagon, Boston. I hated their casual, lazy fandom. To me, my newfound music defined me, was life and death. The music was as holy as the battered Kerouac, Kesey, and Thompson paperbacks I read and reread. They made life worth living. How could one listen to music casually? Music was what helped them down a Natty Boh beer. My classmates were amateurs at life. Of course, this was a ridiculous stance for an almost-fifteen-year-old. What teenager isn’t an amateur? And I was certainly no pro. I had delusions that I was looking for transcendence and epiphanies and a life through art while they were amateurs in the true sense of the word, following enthusiasms simply for their pleasure.

  I was unable to see that I was frustrated by a system that created and coddled these semidecent humans-in-formation and so I hated them. I hated them because I had no tools to change them. I hated them because I wasn’t one of them, hated them for having functional families. Rather than hating myself, I hated them, deeply. Yet I didn’t let it show. I went to their parties, drank their beer. Sometimes, when watching them smugly singing along to “Dazed and Confused,” I wondered what it would be like to not care. To not have to worry if you have a place in the world. I envied that they were going to blissfully go through life listening to their stupid party music with the privilege of tossing beer cans from their BMWs. My rage and envy turned them all into the worst of their species. They didn’t have to use turn signals, so therefore my twisted logic dictated that they were date-rapists and fag-bashers, and they would go on to fill toxic waste dumps as corporate creeps, would keep the Cold War running, would become the guardians of institutional racism and sexism and would be the biggest boosters of the Ronald Reagans of the world.

  Through punk and reading and running I was channeling my disillusion inward. But wasn’t there something creative I could do with it? My heroes had figured out how to turn their rage outward, to share their misery, or even better, turn their misery into art. Where was my tribe, people like the ones I read about in On the Road who “burn like roman candles”?

  A few weeks into the semester, in Advanced German II, I intentionally dropped a pen and pounced out of my
chair before the Deadhead girl in the corner could conceal her drawing. I saw enough—Abby was sketching me. I looked at her hard, ­seeing her for the first time even though we had been in the same classroom for over a year now. She was two or three years older than me, but carried herself like a confident twenty-year-old. She smiled at me, not a girlish smile, but a “So what” smile, a “What are you going to do about it, boy?” smile.

  After class, in the minute I had to linger before having to rush back to Boys’ Latin, I waited for her.

  “Nice drawing,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said with a hint of a blush, then brushed back her long, wavy black hair. Over the next two months I competed for her attention with her pothead crew. Abby was a stoner, but still pulled straight A’s. I hadn’t smoked pot with her because I was doing well in cross-country, but now that it was almost December and the season was over, I thought that I might. And this possibility would be a near-certainty that night if I chose to meet her as planned, in half an hour. When we kissed, Abby always tasted like resin, burnt and bitter. I felt like she was going to catch on to my inexperience at any second, but the week before she had taken me to her secret place, the Bread and Roses Coffee House near Greenpoint, a long, low barroom where a band called the Charm City Reactors was playing. (“Charm City” was one of the many slogans Baltimore had tried to adopt in the seventies. A few years before, two separate studies had shown that Baltimore had the country’s highest urban teen pregnancy rate and the highest urban teen illiteracy rate. The city tried the slogan “The City That Reads” to combat this, painting it on city bus shelters. Industrious kids amended it with the letter “B” before “Reads,” so that the slogan read “The City That Breads.” Sic transit gloria mundi.)

  The Charm City Reactors were a bunch of longhairs, three guys in their twenties with wispy beards and a sixteen-year-old female lead with long, straight black hair and a purple-flowered peasant dress. Most of the girls in the club wore ankle-length flowing flower-patterned skirts and swirled to the music, and the air was thick with the sweet smell of patchouli and sandalwood, the occasional earthy stench of pot base-noting the essential oils. That night the Reactors played the Animals song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” Singing along, I thought, I could do this. I could live here. We were all dancing together and uptight Boys’ Latin was as far away as Aspen. I was wearing a white T-shirt with a thrift store black suit jacket, a few black-and-white pins stuck in the lapels, and even though everyone else was in hippie garb—tie-dyes and flowers, Birkenstocks and Mexican ponchos—I felt welcome, part of the club.