We've got just one last spliff left from Amsterdam. Packed up tight in a little plastic tube with a stopper. Nobody's feeling to light and springy afterthat tour-de-force drinking performance we put on last night. In the bright light of day pouring in through the windows maybe it wasn't such a good idea (probably was though). Check out's at 12:00 though and we already slept in too late. The spliff will have to wait. It's gonna have to happen tonight though I fear. And then we'll be out of weed. Sadface. Kid Cudi shed a tear for us. Oh, well. What's important now is that we find a place to stay for the night because this backpack's killing me. So we put the weed situation on the back-burner and we fly downstairs to check out just before noon. We hand in the keys.
"Thank you! Have a nice day now," the lady at the desk is very cordial.
"Actually, do you guys happen to have any room in a room for three tonight as well?" Fingers crossed, boys.
"Let's see..." and she fiddles with the keyboard for a minute and scans the screen seriously. "Ah! We do in fact!" Score. So we check back in, pay the twenty euros each, and get new keys. The new room's on the same floor as the last one, except's it down the hall farther and in the corner. It's a tiny room with just two bunk-beds shoved in. But it's cozy, and it's all our own this time, with an extra bed. Not to shabby. Let's gets some breakfast. Or lunch? What time is it now?
"Who cares, let's get something cheap as hell though. These hostels are killing me." So we trot out to a street with food places on it and start price shopping.
"I want meat."
"Me too."
"Me three." And right on that decision, a window comes a-passing by and inside behind the counter there's a thick bolt of sizzling on a vertical rotisserie. The counterman shaves slices off for some sandwich. Yes, please. And it's only three euro for a sandwich and some fries. It's so cheap! And it's so good. After chomping that doner up, we head back, but when we're up in the room again, it's not just ours anymore.
[stop]
He looks young. "How old are you, kid?"
"Eighteen." His name is Zach, and he's just graduated from high school in Colorado, and he's doing the whole back-pack around Europe thing by himself. Wouldn't have tagged him as eighteen though. I think he's maybe a year or two younger than us, not four. But there you go, I'm a horrible age guesser. "Been out here just about a three weeks now," he tell us. He was in Madrid while we were in Amsterdam for the Final, and he tells us of the wild parties and the dancing in the streets after the final whistle. What a savvy little dude. And all he's got to keep him company is a pack as big as mine, and a guitar and a case. "Got this in Madrid actually," he says pulling out the six-string classical. Strums a song or two out, and he's good, and we all immediately like him, and likewise, I think. He tells us of senior year of high school, all the dances, the house parties, the binge drinking, the timelessness and his fondest memories, and it sounds not all too unlike senior year of college, but we tell him about it anyways.
Then, "Hey, I was gonna go down to this flea market I heard about down the streets a ways. It's only open Sundays. Wanna come with?"
"That sounds sick. Let's do it." So we romp off with our new friend, down the dry summer Berlin streets, the sun so high in the sky. Grant, always the navigator, plots our course on the phone GPS. It's a lazy Sunday, it seems, and for a while we're the only walkers around. A lone car passes us on the thoroughfare to nowhere , every now and again.
[stop]
Amazing. It's like nothing I've ever encountered, and we weren't even high. Then again, I've never even been to a swap meet before, but I imagine this was something a bit more magical. It's a dry-grassed park, half covered by a city of tents, aisle after aisle of stands selling every kind of trinket you could imagine. It reminds me a little of Venice Beach, and walking down the boardwalk past all the shanty stores, and pipe shops, and cheap(-ish) grilled food. It's different though, these people are craftmen, collectors. Zach stops at a stand of all old cameras and guitar equipment, and handles an old Super 8 film camera, feeling the weight and looking through the eyepiece. Then he picks up an old Gibson and strums a few chords through a baby belt-amp. This place has everything from hand-made wallets to hand-made door knobs and cabinet knobs. Whole booths full of old records in rows of milk crates. And old VHS movies. Antique lamps, old furniture. Art prints and leather belts. Grant buys a watch from this hip cat with some long blonde artsy hair selling t-shirts and old watch-heads on custom, new-age colored leather bands. As he's setting it, I peruse the stand across the way selling sunglasses. They're cheap like Venice sunglasses, only ten euro, but they've got a better weight to them and when I find a pair to replace my old Malcolm X sunnies that broke in Amsterdam, the nice, fit-looking old German women behind the desk gives it to me in a little plastic bag with a cleaning cloth and a candy. A candy for crying out loud. And before we get on our way, she offers to tighten them. and she tightens all our sunglasses while she's at it. What a gal. "Spanks!" We each end up buying little woodblock magnets (you know, for the fridge) with icon portraits hand screened on by the artist who is there selling them. The bigger, wall-sized ones are pretty rad, but they're more expensive and I definitely don't have any room in my bag for something like that. None of us do. So we stick to our puny fridge magnets (still real sick), I get one of Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange. Max gets Bob Dylan, Grant get, uhm, I don't know... Forrest Whitaker? Who knows. I think Zach gets Johnny Cash. Shuffling through the aisles, Max finds a wallet for Monster, and I find a curious case of rings that's piqued my interest, one in particular. It's a simple thing made of nickel, six euro. On my finger, it's a band of fringed-circle, sun-shaped silver nodes on black with a silver border. I've never had a class ring, never won any championship. Never been the kind of guy to wear rings even. But I'm drunk on the sobriety of the day so far and this Berlin summer scene. I really ought to write all this down one day, I tell myself. This ring will remind me to do that. That's what rings do right? Yeah... Anyways it's really fun to spin with my thumb while it's on. Sold. "Six euro? Here you go. Danke schoen."
[stop]
We romp through a city a little while longer, then it's back to the hostel, to the bar, the one in the basement this time. It's a quite dive-y kinda place. And we all take a seat at the bar, the four of us, and get lit with the Colorado Kid. It's just drinking games and watching the cheesy horror movies being projected onto one of the walls. There's so much blood. And limbs being sawed off. Hilarious. It's a slow night, Sunday, so the bartender joins in for a couple games of Fuck the Dealer and spouts off the names of the old movies playing in the background. He's seen 'em a hundred times. He closes up shop early, and we head back up to the room, a little lighter than before. A little looser. We weren't smashed like the night before, but we sure feel good.
"So Zach..." Max's fingers are fumbling with the spliff test tube. "We got one last spliff from Amsterdam. You wanna come burn it down with us?" There's a split second's silence when we're all waiting for it.
"Yeah, man." So we go downstairs and around the block, take a seat at a park bench on the corner, and spark that shit in the lonely amber light of city streetlamps.
[stop]
The next morning we're out on the streets again, all packed up, and Zach's along for the ride. The Wombat's fully booked, so we snag a map of all the hostels in the city from the front desk and go hostel hunting. After the first three we huff into, it's not looking to too good. Everywhere's fully booked, damn tourist season. We all take off our packs to sit on outside our last failure. "Well shit, guys," says Zach. "Now what?"
I just want to get rid of this stupid pack that's collecting sweat by the shirt-damping pool on my back. "We could go to the train station and put these bad boys in a locker for now," I suggest with a slap of the bags. Goddammit, Berlin. We need to get out of here. And we didn't even see anything really. Worst case scenario, we sleep in the station tonight.
"Hold on, guys," Grant's busy on the phone, the only one between the four of us. "I just got an email from couchsurfing bitchess." Max and I jump to our feet.
"What's it say?"
"What's couchsurfing?" asks Zach. And we explain the whole magnificence of the thing to him, offering your couch and sleeping on others. Sure beats the hell out of hostels price-wise. And what's more, according to Grant's phone, we've just got ourselves a host in Berlin. There's a phone number in the email and we call it and ask if Zach can stay too. It's three girls living a couple metro stops away, and they oblige most graciously. The Berlin metro system is like that girl that's always already drunk at the bar. She's so easy. There's no set of turnstiles demanding a paid ticket. We just hop on and never pay for anything. And she can take you anywhere and everywhere, and she takes us there.
So just like that, a night in the station turned into two couches and a few spare beds to sleep on. Toni and Dajana both come to the door of the building when we ring them again from outside. Their place is on the first floor, and it's massive. High ceilings, a kitchen sharing a big living room, a handful of huge bedrooms and two bathrooms. It's not lavish, not by any means, but it's cozy. And homey, and it feels a little like Western. Nobody's home.
"Come on, we'll meet everyone at the park!" Everyone? So we fling all our bags into the spare bedroom with it's two old queen-sized mattresses squeezed together, Grant and Max call dibs. Fuck. I'll take the couch I guess, I don't mind. Beats that hard, dirty Central Station floor, that's for damned sure. As soon as we're bag-less, we turn heel and follow our two barefoot German flower-girl hosts, Toni with her brash, blonde head with one side shaved, and Dajana with the long, fiery red locks, dyed so. They're both just about our age, and their English is pretty spot on.
[stop]
The park's not too far, but we take a quite break at the liquor store to buy some beers in the bottle. The ones with the star on the cap are only fifty cents. Yes, please. We each grab two. Or four, whatever, it's not important. The important thing is that when walk out and continue on to the park, Grant and Max and I all crack one of those fifty cent bad boys and treat ourselves to a little refreshment on the go, and nobody looked at us twice because it was legal, and nobody cared. There's really no likewise comparison, no equal feeling to walking down the hot sidewalk with an open beer in your hand. Or romping through the soft, yellow grass of the public park, playing frisbee with new friends, and your buzzed, and if you ever feel it waning, you just pick up another beer. And we don't even throw away the bottles. We just leave them all huddled together in grass. "Are you sure?" I ask Toni.
"Oh yeahh, this is fine. Someone will come pick them up." What? Okay, I don't question it, and sure enough, later, when I turn around to look at the mess of bottles we've set aside, it's just empty grass like they were never there.
"Wow, that was fast."
"See! This is normal. The homeless people come and take them away and recycle them. They get twenty cents a bottle. And they don't get smashed down and made into new bottles like in America." Toni's accent is funny and German and trails off into a high pitch every few words. It's lovely, and I tilt my head at the innocence of the sound. It reminds me of the way we speak English as a kid, when we really don't care what other people think because, well, it really hasn't occurred to us to do so. She goes on, "The beer companies, they just wash them and reuse them, and put a new cap on them." Get it together, America. That's how a recycling program ought to run. Twenty cents a bottle? That's crazy. "Yeah, some people live off it, actually."
[stop]
I think getting drunk in the Berlin's my favorite. In the park with the sun out and my shoes off. And the soft breeze as the afternoon thickens. We're with new friends now. Toni and Dajana introduce us to their friends from Ireland and their other roommate Corinna. A regular tribe, we are, standing in a big circle on the public meadows and throwing the frisbee soft and high so it catches at the top of the arc, for a second it seems, before floating back down for an easy snag. But as the beers empty the snags are getting harder. It's all right though, and what's this?! Toni pulls out a pouch of tobacco and little baggie of weedsies and starts rolling up a spliff right there in the grass. Heaven couldn't have conceived a more perfect day, and we all give up the frisbee throwing for a bit to indulge in the sweet, sweet German cheeba.
"What's that?" I ask as she starts breaking up some brown squishy shit to cap off the spliff before rolling it.
"Oh, it's hashish. This is okay, yeah?" Of course it's okay, Toni. It's better than okay. It's downright lovely, and she rolls it up tight with the steady fingers of a seasoned vet, lights it in a flash, and it's puff, puff, pass. We're in a small circle now, sitting, half laying out lounging, half Indian style, chatting each other up like old friends. About California and Santa Cruz. About the music. About Lovefest and EDC. About Coachella.
"Ah! You come to Berlin at the right time then!" says Corinna. "There is always a festival here! We just went to this one. It was at a, how you say, airport? No, it was abandoned, this airfield. And there were stages in all the hangers and we camped for seven days and didn't take showers and the electro never stopped."
"Wait, what do you mean it never stopped." I'm intrigued.
"Oh! There is always music playing. Well, it was supposed to only be four days, but all the DJs stayed for three more days and kept playing. You silly Americans always stop the party so early." The girls laugh at us, mocking. But hey, they're right. We're prudes over in the States. "Actually, there is one this weekend also, and we are going. Nation of Ghadwana. It's only two days though, minimalist techno. Stay and come, yeah?! It's only twenty euro!"
Whoa. We thought we'd leave in the morning, but our ears our pricked now. A week in Berlin? And some crazy German techno fest? Excuse me, minimalist techno fest, whatever that means. Group huddle. We talk it out, and it takes all of a minute to decide. Why the hell not. And Zach's in too. And after that, there's a certain tingle of excitement in our tummies as to what the coming week has in store for us.
[stop]
Yeah, we do it all. Spend a whole day romping around Brandenburg Gate and the Reichtag with it's great glass dome. And Checkpoint Charlie with the guard always on watch. And SS Headquarters. And the Wall-turned-mural-masterpiece for freedom. There's such a sense of rich history, of stark divisions, and a war ravage like nothing in the US. A lot of it's rebuilt, but at the same time, a lot of it's left just as it was back then, a reminder. The people of this city, those who saw it all, God, I can't imagine what it must've been like. To have had life unfold as it did before their eyes, the fight, the struggle, the evil, the courage, on such a grander and more desperate scale than it is now, in the West anyways. The present to them must be so tranquil and muted in comparison, and we're just strolling through it like some history book with an iPhone soundtrack. Skinny dipping in their old river Spree, drinking their cheap beer and eating doners.
One day we chance upon some crazy museum exhibit in the belly of a building downtown that shows sleek, sophisticated automobiles at ground level, which is why we enter in the first place. But then, what's this? There's a downstairs and it beckons to us, so we slide on down the escalator and proceed to have our minds blown. There's a sand cyclone that you sit in the middle of, and a pool of some crazy metallic fluid that spins and twists, and pricks and takes shape like a crazy black Christmas tree, There's a corridor of tiny computer fans, hundreds of them, and they move when I move. In a room off to the side (oh, you'll like this), one of the most mind-bottling musical contraptions I think I've ever seen. About four feet by ten feet, and chest-high, it's an dim, neon-lit amalgamation of brandy and wine glasses in a row, and a marimba keyboard, and bass drums below, and in the middle of this sweet, robot-organized behemoth there's something shooting ping-pong balls at the keys in rhythm, and the glasses are all spinning with little robot fingers touching them on cue. And it's some three minute long trance-y island fusion instrumental. The source? Just three simple notes entered on a laptop computer. And voila, robot Beethoven. Hal Mozart. It's a wonder. Such a wonderfully chance coincidence assuaged by man's natural want to oogle over nice cars. That night, Toni cuts Zach's hair, then mine and Max's. She's quite good, taking some off the sides and back and blending it all nicely. I'm stoked. Zach's stoked. And Max wants to look like Fernando Torres, so Toni goes super short on the sides, and a lot off the top, and when it's wet, eh, maybe there's some semblance. But Max's hair is curly and poofy and he ends up with a euro-trash, fluff mo-hawk. "It's a style that says who cares," Max quotes with his hands situated in front of his face, "it's only f-f-fashion." Very Zoolander. And Tom the Brit (another flatmate who's always working in the day), is in the corner laughing his Brit laugh and drinking his bottle of the sweet, green liqueur with a toothpaste taste.
Then, like that, we find ourselves drunk and high, lounging in a park again. We always do, it seems. And this time it's just Grant, Max, and I, and Zach and Corinna, and a fellow couchsurfer, our friend Shahar.
[need weeds, ugh]
