I got up from the bed, my head spinning in its usual morning ritual, and looked for the bathroom. When I found a towel I turned on the shower and realized that a showerhead was missing, so there was little more than a metal garden hose hanging from the tiles on the wall. Shocked I found a bar of soap sitting by the faucet, I made sure I locked the door.
When I got out of the shower, Wilfred was huddled on a corner of the mattress drinking a cup of coffee that the bartender had made for him as they talked about the night. He invited us for breakfast, and thank god we respectfully declined. Wilfred, looking around the room, was just as mesmerized and confused by the interior landscape as I’d been a few moments before.
I watched the bartender walk toward his front door, come back with a stack of yesterday’s mail, open the letter on the very top, scan it for a few seconds, shrug, throw the whole stack on the floor, and walk away. The mail lay there, motionless and forgotten, just like the silverware and dishes that seemed to grow into a fortress around us. I wanted to go back into the shower and hide, my headache getting worse, but instead we got on the train as soon as possible, and went back to Berlin.
Our train pulled into Berlin Hauptbahnhof at six o’clock, and we stepped out under that massive archway of steel and glass and carried our things down to the U-Bahn. We were staying at an old Mitte squat called Schokoladen, which is one of the longest-running squats in Germany. Wilfred and I walked underground to Hauptbahnhof U-Bahn station and caught the train to Rosenthaler Platz via Alexander, emerged from the underground, walked to Ackerstrasse and into the bar.
Schokoladen was full of crust punks, anarchists, and a huge giant named Karl who took us downstairs and showed us the band room where we would spend our weekend. Six beds lined the floor, and there was a fridge full of food and beer. He told us to always close and lock the door so as not to let the cat in.
At around eight p.m. we got back on the U-Bahn and made our way to Neukölln for the show. Soundcheck, wait an hour, have a beer, play the show, get introduced to about ten people whose names you won’t remember, go to the bar, get swept up by the light of the morning, repeat. Such is a tour. And so that’s what we did.
After the show Wilfred introduced me to his friend Olli, a native West Berliner. He’d learned to speak English from watching MTV. He took us down the road to a pub where the hours stretched through the night and into the early morning’s dull blue sky. There were beers and Jägermeister and a packed bar that only seemed to get busier as seven a.m. was approaching.
As the sun came up, Wilfred and I decided that it was time to go. Olli was drunk, and I was in that strange space where the light of the morning hits the yellow of your eyes and makes you wobble. I went into the späti to get a few beers for the train ride home, and when I came out, a group of people had arranged themselves around Olli and Wilfred. One person was rolling a spliff with one hand and holding a beer in the other.
I approached them and we all slurred some unimaginable mixture of German and English as the sun rose higher in the sky. As spontaneously as the morning itself, a man with an intifada scarf and no teeth emerged from an alleyway, ripped the joint from my mouth, placed his lips on mine, and kissed me in some kind of gesture of drunken kindness. He howled in laughter as I spat at my feet. All of the Germans in the circle were yelling something as Wilfred and I stepped back from the melee and I pulled my beer.
“That was gross,” I said quietly.
The man sat down on a bench next to Olli, and I returned to the ring of smokers.
“Where the fuck did he come from?” Wilfred asked me.
“I’m thinking from somewhere other than a dentist’s office,” I answered.
We turned around once more, shocked to see Olli and the homeless man on the ground, enlaced in a drunken struggle. Neukölln’s dirt was being kicked into the air as Olli lashed and jabbed at the guy. They both returned punches and blows and Wilfred was shouting Olli’s name in disbelief. I took a drag of the spliff and looked around at everyone to try to figure out what to do.
And then, almost as quickly as it had started, they jumped to their feet and embraced like old friends. Wilfred looked at me with a raised eyebrow as if to see if it was the booze or the dope, or if it was really just Berlin bending reality. Two men had transformed from violently sworn enemies to welcome neighbours in a heartbeat. And with that, I finished my beer, bought two more, and descended into the U-Bahn.
As we curved on the line approaching Alexanderplatz, I pulled Wilfred off the train and we ran out into the open square. The sun was high in the sky by now and there was a trumpeter singing the praise of angels, blasting out those golden notes into the first minutes of the day in the city, brass and yellow bouncing off the walls of the buildings that encircled us as they tunnelled through my ears and got buried in my dreams, dancing like ballerinas in and out of my drunken mind. We raised our arms into the air and ran like maniacs through the square. A man took our photograph as Wilfred danced and spiralled like a fairy possessed.
Arm in arm, we supported each other’s weight and stormed back onto the train. Olli was long gone by then, evaporated like a ghost into the golden morning, and Wilfred and I were like two brothers in a maelstrom of rock and roll, holding each other up like a pair of ancient pillars. And then, still more Beck’s.
We got to Rosenthaler Platz and slalomed around the drunks and junkies who were still emerging from their Mitte barstools and sleeping in the station. Coming out once again to the sunlight, we repeated our familiar walk to Ackerstrasse. When we got back to Schokoladen, we met a group surrounding a campfire that burned peacefully in the middle of the street.
Jesus, I thought. When do you people sleep?
The adjacent bar that was still serving brought us out more beers, and we exchanged linguistic differences before finally heading to the room and hiding from the sun.
What seemed like seconds passed, and then I awoke with the weight of a falling ton of bricks, as a sound rang out from upstairs. It pulled me from bed like a puppet. I went to the bar, my mind still in the boozy haze of the night and morning, and was met with a punishingly loud three-piece free jazz band from Warsaw playing at breakneck volume and making a pummelling racket to a full audience.
A bass player, a drummer, and a woodwind player, sometimes playing two instruments at once, launched themselves into a musical world dominated by sweaty confusion. They stared at and through each other, cueing with golden eyeballs, telepathically linked in sound: the noise got bigger and the band got sweatier, the woodwinds screamed and howled and the drummer was like one thousand waves beating angrily against a marble shore. The owner of the bar was the same man who’d brought us beers only hours before.
“You’re back.” He smiled. “Or did you never go away?”
I had to wake Wilfred so he could bear witness to the ferocious madness. This band was an angry whale exacting revenge on a wood harpoon. I ran downstairs.
“Wilfred—Wilfred.” I shook him. “You’ll never believe this. There’s a show happening upstairs right now . . .”
When I convinced him to leave his bed and come back to the bar, his reaction was the same as mine, our pounding headaches forming perfect countermelodies. Someone next to me lit a smoke, offered me a beer, and I didn’t refuse.
“Did we even sleep?” Wilfred asked.
I couldn’t answer.
Amid this cacophony, I knew that I was in a place where no time existed. I was a prisoner of my own chains, I had lived my life trapped by confines that only I had created. True freedom existed somewhere and at this point in my life, in Berlin, I was as close to it as I would ever be, or at least had ever been. All of this would fade to memory in seconds, but there was something that felt so violently everlasting in that big, circling noise.
All the while, the TV Tower hung in the sky like a hand grenade, a remnant of the peak of the power of the post-war east, a rem
inder to Berliners of their history and the strength it takes to stand together when divided.
As you go further eastward from Alexander Platz, the front line of communism, you plunge deeper and deeper into a web of cultural, political, and economic recovery, and into Poland. I had taken the Berlin-Warszawa Express to Warsaw once before, but had never made my way down into the southeastern region of Silesia, the Polish heartland, its biggest cities Wrocław and Katowice.
The first thing you notice is how grey the skies get the moment you cross the border. Immediately things go dark. Anything east of Berlin is a thousand times cheaper than anything west of it, and a different rhythm—a fascinating rhythm—descends over the tracks as you go further east. So I’d always promised myself that I’d be heading back to that grey and overcast Polish sky, with all those broken windows in former factories that line the railroad and its rickety trains.
When Wilfred and I first arrived in Katowice following our tumultuous weekend in Berlin, we were taken to about four or five bars in the town square that were free for us as performers, and we were introduced to everyone who worked there.
“Later on,” someone said, “we will have to drink some Polish vodka.”
The promoter took us to the venue, a newly open and yet-unnamed art space in the middle of town, down the road from the cathedral. We soundchecked, had a drink, and planned our trip to Vienna the following day. After finishing our encore with the same run of Neil Young covers that had wound us all up in a frenzy in Chemnitz a few nights before, Wilfred and I dropped the bags off at the hotel room and went off in search of the real Katowice.
One thing you learn very quickly about drinking when you’re on the road is that there are conversations you can have with people only at one in the morning, conversations that you would never have at noon.
These conversations tap you right into the heart of a place. One interaction with a person who lives there can give you a glimpse into the nature of the stories of everyone’s lives. Drunken, hazy, one-in-the-morning talk about art, politics, and culture transforms you from a patron of the bar to an angel of history, sacrificing the cells of your brain for a piece of someone’s honest and uninhibited story.
Most often, you strike out, and all you get for trying is a pounding headache in the morning. But sometimes the alluring siren that is alcohol provides you with a golden experience, and it’s the act of looking for gold that propels you deeper and deeper into the soothing darkness of the night.
With this in mind, as we were taken to a bar across the road from the venue, we were instructed by our Polish guide to “order the bus.”
I told the bartender, across a few different language barriers, that that was what I wanted, and he went off to the back of the bar to retrieve the top piece from a tall stack of piled cardboard. I could feel a confused stare forming on my face, and as he unfolded the piece of cardboard to reveal five small holes, each about the width of a shot glass, I started to get an idea of what I was in for.
As he poured the five shots of vodka that I would be cheered on into drinking in under five minutes, I saw the outline of a school bus on the outside of the cardboard piece. He dropped the shot glasses full of vodka into the holes, and they sat there, motionless, waiting for me to drink them, like five tiny children on their way to class.
“Holy fuck,” I said to myself, not sure if I’d said it aloud. I realized that I’d been drinking to the point of complete blackout intoxication for about six or seven nights straight, so by now there were holes the size of craters forming in my mind.
“And remember,” someone said from somewhere around me, “when you order the bus, you have to drink it all.”
Trying to fight off the hallucinations that come with holding off drinking during such a bender, the liquor pouring out of the pores in my pale skin, eyes probably yellow, beard long, voice broken, forehead damp, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I drank them all and felt all those symptoms vanish as the last shot hit my bloodstream.
I imagined the vodka shots having little arms and book bags, yelling Polish children’s songs, and cheering whenever the bus bounced. I imagined my mouth and throat and stomach as being the dark black cloud of adulthood that was going to instantly swallow all of that up, and I imagined the blackout that came after slamming the bus’s five shots of vodka in under three minutes as being the death of an old, suffering man. From the cradle to the grave, all life, I imagined, came down to that dying second of intoxication and the darkness that followed.
I started to become incredibly animated, like I was brought back to life. They brought us some great traditional Polish food and I started hugging and kissing everybody, the roof of my mouth tasting of boiled potatoes, beef tatarski, pickled herring, and lots of vodka. I gripped the glass of beer tightly and then things are really hazy after that. I’m sure there was some kind of deep conversation that occurred, but I’ll never remember who it was with.
A faint green fog descended on the town square and I stumbled out the door of the bar and was met by the spire of a massive cathedral rising up over the haze, its bells ringing low. Wilfred shouted out at me and there was a hum of barroom laughter echoing off the brickwork of the road and buildings, and I fell down onto my knees, my guitar case smashing on the stones.
Morning came with the familiar feeling of weight. All the symptoms that the vodka had cured came rushing back to me once it had left my body. It’s like all your thoughts are pained and clogged, and goop flows through your existence—the kind of viscous, molasses hangover where everything is slow. Then we got on the train and we went to Austria.
The next time I found myself in Katowice it was the fall of the same year. After the springtime tour with Wilfred Manifesto, I had gone home to see my parents in Edmonton to dry out. By the time the tour had ended, in Reykjavik, my drinking was completely out of control. I felt bloated and disgusting, unable to shake that feeling of pins and needles underneath my eyes. It had felt like the alcohol had made me just a memory of my former self, so I took a couple of weeks, shaking and sleepless in Alberta, to kick the liquor.
I returned to Toronto rejuvenated, sober, ready to start booking my next round of shows in Europe. I was healthy again and not depressed, and so not drinking as much either. Feeling optimistic, good about things. Up on life.
But on that tour I plunged back headfirst into the power of the road. There was always liquor in my bloodstream, I was an animal, a savage Canadian beast, exporting my life and thin blood to the world, running on the steam of a thousand broken engines.
When the promoter of the show and owner of the bar met me at Katowice station, she was looking and feeling under the weather.
“It was my birthday Friday,” she said. “I’ve been drinking for three days. I have to take a night off.”
I told her that I thought I would have to see it to believe it. She insisted though.
“Honestly,” she said to me. “I think that if I drink tonight, I’m going to die.”
It’s the kind of statement that you can’t really argue with and knowing how fucked up everyone seemed to get in this town, I decided she might be right. When I got to the venue, I met her husband.
“Heard that you had quite the weekend,” I said to him.
“Yes, it was crazy,” he said and laughed. “Constant partying. We’re all taking the night off drinking.”
I looked around and noticed that everyone was holding a beer.
“Probably a good thing,” I said and ordered a Żywiec.
When I finished the set, I went to the bar to refill my glass. The promoter’s husband was there, elbows rested on the wood, a mug of Lech or Tyskie filled right to the top.
“I was wondering if you wanted to try some good Polish vodka?” he asked me.
“I thought you weren’t drinking?”
“This is just a taste,” he said.
“Well,�
�� I replied, “in that case, of course.” He poured two ounces of lemon vodka from a Silesian distillery whose name I couldn’t pronounce, and we downed them both.
“Good, no?” he said.
Truth is, it was fucking delicious. I thanked him and started to walk back to the stage.
“Wait, wait,” he said. “Want another?”
It was quite a lot of vodka for a night when you’re not drinking, and he repeated this act probably another four or five times. I was back on that little Katowice school bus, with all those shots of vodka posing as children.
“Which one did you like the best?”
“Well,” I said, thinking about the flurry of alcohol that had just stormed my way. Things seemed to be slowing down again—that murky, molasses feeling. “The lemon one, I suppose.”
“Great,” he said. “Me too. And the distillery is very well respected, very good friends of mine.”
The vodka seemed not even to affect him. If this wasn’t drinking, I started to wonder, what was?
We started talking about distance. I told him about growing up on the Prairies, about how in Edmonton the next possible show is three hours south or five hours east. “Bands do it all the time,” I said. “But if you really want to get to the best shows of your tour, in Toronto or Montreal, it’s a full four days of driving, of playing unpopulated prairie shitholes along the way.”
“Wow,” he said, his cheeks and nose blossoming into an alcoholic red. “Five hours from here, you’re on the border of Belarus! Five more, you’re in Minsk, and five more after that?” He paused. “Russia.”
When you think of distance and time like that, once again you become trapped in a viscous substance, sliding slowly down the lid of the jar, and there’s no escape. I thought about how far from Berlin I was, and about all the time and work it takes to get there when you’ve come from west of it. I thought about how much Europe there was still to come and discover when you cross it, an equal amount of Europe on either side. I had come so far, and still had so far to go. He talked to me a little longer about vodka, but I drifted in and out of attention thanks to the booze.
Berlin-Warszawa Express Page 4