Flims: Incubus

"There's a band playing tonight, open-air.  It will be fun." Stephii's Swiss accent's so cute and adorable.  It's something you always want to say, "yes" to.  Of course we're in.  There's still a little bit of weed left from Prague and we lounge the day away, in a sun-soaked, spliff-high frolick around her mountain.  Heaven's divine, I love this place.  Another day by the lake, the Evian shores.  Caumasee.  Grant does gainers off the diving board that's floating out where it's deep, and we all jump off the big rock holding hands.  And trove around that sweet-grassed wooded island in the middle, like over-grown Huck Finns and Tom Sawyers.  We're old now.  Graduates at the collegiate level.  It's a long kiss good-bye to our care-free youth, still holding on, or trying anyways.  The child's still in my eye.  Still that innocent awe of the beauty of this place and it's capacity to fill with such joy.  These are the lazy days.  The one's of nothing in particular that'll weigh down the memory banks with our platismic bliss in the evergreen woods at the foot of Mount Flims.  A little part of me knows that, I think, so I savor every last bit.  Every hour of windless sunshine.  Every can of cheap beer consumed.  Every piece of beef and sausage slipped into Max's backpack at the supermarket for our BBQ's.  Every spliff, every hike.  I stash it all away in that secret place, where things never get lost, and everytime I flip to it, it's going to be that much better because it was the best of times.  I could live here.  Hell, I never want to leave.  But the time always comes to pick up and go, sooner or later, it comes creeping up like an itch on your bum after a while.  It's already been a week, and only, and there's no itch yet, just a train to catch to Rome.  In the morning.  Tonight we rage.

Our last night.  One last hurrah in that magic town where the mountain tips dip into the realm of the gods so that the days are just right, and the nights are still warm with a little booze in you.  As far as drinkings go, we go for the fur coat, which isn't quite necessary, but always more fun to wear.  It's shots in the Swiss kitchen, vodka, whiskey, then more shots in the cool night on the balcony.  And the Berlin-hippy coin game.  And always a beer or wine glass in hand.  Yeah, always spills to be had on nights like this.  But it's fine because no one minds, and it's wiped up and forgotten before the next shot.  And another.  Stephii's snowboard friend don't fuck about.  Still, we hold our own.  I'm besides myself with this tolerance I've developed, and it just barely keeps me balanced on the sway-eyed jaunt, the whole lot of us, to the open-air bar on the other side of town.  When we get there, there's no need to buy drinks because we're smashed, but we all get beers anyways and sit down at one of the long tables pointing towards the stage.  The band's about ready to play now, listen up.

The lights come alive on the alpine crafted stage and the twenties-something Swiss alt-rock quartet begins their routine, which I don't even remember because we're all too busy talkin' and drunk-laughing, and bumming cigarettes.  It wasn't a concert, per se, but more like (announcer voice:) "tonight's entertainment."  A suitable description, I think, as it was indeed tonight, and the whole thing is entertaining.  When the music does catch my ear, and will my eyes to focus out the my double vision of the stage, There's the lead singer sweating his passion through the microphone.  It's a Brandon Boyd stage presence, and he's wielding that front-man glory, with all the fury and anguish that alt-rock can muster as the rest of the band goes through those slow pensive paces and focus on the music.  I bet they listen to Incubus.  Hey wait, "Ha! This sounds exactly like Incubus, hehe."  If they were all Swiss and sang English as a second language.  No actual Incubus songs, just everything else.  Grant, Max, and Mike listen intently for a second and concur and we all laugh and cheer, "Woo!  Whaa!"  And rock on salutes flung high.  And it's not long before we find our way to the clearing right in front of the stage and start jumping and shoving and raging in our own little mosh pit, taking turn to team up on one each other.  The locals join in.  Pretty soon we got ourselves a quaint little alt-rock dance mosh thing goin' on.  Someone falls or jumps or flies to the side of the stage where the meadow dips down a soft hill.  We all do, I think.  They play late, but we always keep asking for one more song in our wasted American.  One more, and then it's that stumble back home to Stephii's, a quick fifty meter hill roll on the way, and we all pass out in the living room.  Tomorrow, Italy.

Berlin: LSD in the Shadow of the Devil

It’s one of those things you do and say, “Ok, that happened.  So glad I was on acid for it.” 

It begins in a park.  In the summer, the parks in East Berlin are all brown dry-out tufts of grass and empty beer bottles.  But you must understand, they were a treat: a pinnacle of freedom.  The afternoon we meet is a melting occasion of alcoholic discourse and meanderings through a meadow public. 

And the cars drive by. The winds skits across the ocean’s skin tickling, whipping.  Stormy is the thought.  A future dawning.  A page turning and with what to look back on.  Cars. Driving by.  The grass dances, the tree's shakesies are a quakesies.  With a tinge of fucking disparity that lingers like the dim lighting.  It’s the random corner-sitters.  I must look like one, of course.  But there it is, that’s so sadistic.  Mine eye is a judging one, I suppose.  And this is to be it, a limbo.  A centered restlessness that stretches on and on.  A roadside bakery, the cozy passé of it all.  It’s warming.  It always smells good.  And cheap uppers.  What else is there to want.  An existence.  A life, full and fresh, on the fringe.  Acquaintences of passers-by.   Close-knit kin.  Forever young.  A life on your feet.  Eating well.  Living well.  Always sitting on a little money, but never that much. 

Others are sitting on a lot of money.  They go on trips.  They take the charter bus.  They have a 401K.  Investments.  Security.  But what’s that?  A mortgage.  Credit payments.  Car payments.  They’re living well.  Safe.  They wear expensive watches, and lug around big SLRS.  Enticing.  Why it’s a delightful jaunt up the coast.  Traipsing through our lives like a safari.  A breath of the rich ocean air on PCH.  It tastes so good, I imagine, but sometimes I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze.  Youths being youths really.  One day I’ll want that sweet elixir.  That’s not today though.  Because then what?  What do you strive for?

I’m taking my time with it here in Berlin.  That’s for damned sure.  After a spliff, Shahar smiles with a sneaky look and some a that little eye-drop bottle dripped right plop on my finger and I lick it off.  We all start laughing and Shahar drips a little on his finger, and Max and the Colorado Kid do the same.  Welp,  Here we go.  And where’s that we’re going, you ask?  To the Toufulsberg, the devil’s own hill.  Evil laughs.  Muahahaha!  Devil’s Hill!  The depravity!  The insanity!  Grant holds back off the eye-drops to play chaperone,  and Corinna takes us all by the hand and leads the way.

A bit to eat first, some doner off that spinning stick and I feel the tingles beginning to mingle and whisper over my skin.  When we’re on the train the safety goggles are on.   The sun’s still high, but it’s surely off to one side, and it’s falling fast.   But by the time we notice, we’re sliding off the train in fits of acid laughter and quick English and Steve Irwin head cocks from side to side, ready for adventure, and we’re too high to care.  Ambling through some little rural German neighborhood on the outskirts, between East and West Berlin, with sweet, little homes and small lawns all in a row, and past that, it’s the forest.  We’re ready for it, and we charge in, down a wide pebble path.  The forest’s not like the great redwoods in Santa Cruz.  They’re all skinny-trunked perennials with skinny branches and brush and padded leaves below.  And it seems to suck all the noise out of the world except it’s rustic rustling, because that’s all we hear and our shouts and rolling laughs and speech doesn’t echo or reverberate.  It flies out in all directions and gets drowned out in the silent wild around us, and we do too.  We’re humping on through, towards the only hill in Berlin, thick with trees, and looming ever nearer.  “Whoa, close your eyes.”

So I do, and the darkness explodes behind the lids, and my ears tickle and I shake at all the tiny sounds around.  The air’s so sweet on the skin out here, and I almost forget the vision I used to possess because everything else takes over.  We’re still walking, but I don’t know towards what anymore.  Towards Grant’s voice beckoning us forward, and he’s laughing because we’re all lost in our own heads swaying back and forth across the path, uncontrollably smiling.  “Where are we?!”  Where, indeed.  Some old, magic woods in an ancient fairytale land at the heart of it all.  Can’t stop rolling now, rolling, rolling down Alice’s rabbit hole with my eyes closed, not daring to open them.  Until I stumble in the dip on the side of the path, that is.  My eyesight returns, but it’s not like I’m any more found now than I had been.  Everything’s brighter, and the forest looks different than I remember, and as the sense floods back, my skin’s crawling with a raucous yell, “I feel so alive!” The feeling drips from the pores and we spin and dance and jump high to the music in our heads.  All the trees stand solemn tall in the sun and watch us by, then forget us in that blink of life’s eye.

We’re getting deep into it now.  Up the hill.  Right on up to the top, with no more path beneath us.  Just giddy flower  children floating through that summer forest in West Berlin.  Shahar don’t even got any shoes on, like some wild, loose-clothed monkey with all his weight in this step and that, feeling his way through the shaded brush, and then sun-soaked glens of dried, yellow grass that crunched soft under my sandals.  Then back into it all the thicker.  The only sound is our footsteps and our heavy breaths and we talk about nothing and laugh at how lost we’ve become only to break the silence.  A foot-trail, pressed down overgrowth through the skinny trees.  Or maybe just nothing.  We just pushed ever upward, and soon our trials greet us with a series of fences rising high into the canopies.  Old, lightly-rusting.  Menacing.  It was four separate lines of fencing each separated by a length long buffer of soft forest ground.  An impasse, with nowhere to go except around the perimeter now and find a hole.  The whole thing began to look and feel like one of those death-maze traps in a cheesy horror flick.  Four acid-tripping yockels, just bumbling through eerie woods in East Europe, looking for some fun adventure at the abandoned CIA listening post.  Alertness now was at a fever pitch.  Huddled close single file.  Jumping at every crack of a branch.  Until, ah hah!  A hole!  If you can call it that.  A long cut in the metal fencing pulled open’s more like it.  Oh, joy.  What fun.  And we all slide in.  Between two gates now, and there’s a prickly feeling up my spine of a mouse in a some grand experiment, drugged, and trying to find its way to the big cheese. 

There’s a door-sized, open frame in the next fence not far off.  And then another cut hole, and another and we’re through, against the wall of a big concrete building.  Around the corner’s an old, overgrown courtyard, Devil’s Hill.  The summit.  We look up, and there they are, the two towers topped with huge hexagonal domes.  The post is gutted out, and much of it bare metal frame and exposed to the elements, and as we look up at it, there’s people sitting up on the different floors (some living there, squatters by the looks of it), looking back down at us.  But it’s a look more hollow and dead-eyed, like they’ve been consumed by this great, skeleton-ed complex we’re now faced with.  What else is there to do but gulp down the fear and strong-jaw it on forward.  Shahar climbs right up the side, two stories to where it’s open, gripping a vertical I-beam, and Grant follows.  Ha.  Max and I look at each other like, “Hell no, we ain’t doin’ that,” so we walk around the building with Zack and Corinna until we find an entrance.  There’s no electricity (not all too surprising).  Just a long dark corridor cut straight to the middle with white, concrete-brick walls all painted over with graffiti.  It’s not a tall hall and footsteps echo as opening becomes a little door of light behind us.  We take the first set of stairs one flight up and there’s Shahar and Grant and the sun coming in through the framework to the west.  Grant’s super excited.  And sober so I’m a little more at ease.  “Dude, this place is sick.”  And now that I think about it, it is.   And the higher up the flight of stairs we went, the sicker it got. 

[stop]

Stop.  Look out at the world stretched around you because, boys, we’re at the top of it now.   You too, Corinna.  Can’t see anybody else from up this high, just a needle and the city to the east, and off to the west, across that great forest reaching out forever,  Apollo’s chariot’s run, run, running away on the horizon, balled in fire, the fiercest, flaming red through the low twilight haze.  But he sits there, looking back from the edge of the earth for what seems like another day, not daring to turn his back on the sheer joy and awe of our human existence.  And we look him right back, the bliss crawling through our souls, the skin tickling at the warm summer night's breeze these twelve stories up at the edge of Berlin, until he winks a green flash, and he's gone, chasing our friends on the other side of the world as they're just waking up for work or for school.  I can't believe they're missing this, and I smile at the chance of my seeing it, the luck of it all in all this randomness.

Twelve stories up.  Up that tight, heartless stairwell, walled in brick.  Around and around and around, floor after floor, and it's dizzying and, at moments when the breathing comes hard, I forget where I'm going, where I am.  I'm a little hamster on a wheel, but there's delight in the spring of each step.  We fly up those steps though, and maybe it's just the acid, but it feels fantastic, and the excitement's ever mounting.  But when you're up there, splayed out on the cool concrete floor with your flip-flops kicked off, your best friends with their backs to the brick stairwell spine beside you; all that climbing, all the trains and train stations, all the trials, all the mistakes, all the aches and pains of life's burdens... I don't know when exactly, but I've seemed to lost them.  I ditched them in the woods, I think, when my eyes were closed.  That void they've left, though, is just brimming with the joy of living now.  Each breath of the air is lit with freedom in these moments, and that flame burns that much brighter, and we're goddamn Apollos ourselves, lighting our own way, perched up here without a care, and the world chuggin' away below us.

The siding's all but faded away from the years, the decades of desertion.  It used to be fiberglass though.  I'm almost certain, because as the wind and the air wraps around that tower, between those metal skeleton struts, and through our hair and our toes and whispering in our ears, there's tattered fabric flapping lazy from what used to be the exterior.  Out by the edge.  Hanging down from above.  And when we tiptoe to touch it, why yes, it's fiberglass all right.  Shahar cuts each of us off a piece, scarf-sized, so that we'd never forget, but something tells me we never will.  We all tie our pieces around ourselves and dance to the sky darkening.  Yeah, maybe wrapping our bodies in old, disintegrating fiberglass isn't the best idea.  But we don't care.  We're still jumping on acid.  Especially me.  Out by the edge, I feel it swingin' in my hips and a lickin' of my lips, and Grant's phone's wailing away at full blast so we just barely hear it.  My feet keep the beat though, and my whole being sways.

That's when I look down, and holy hell!  We're high up!   It's something like the feeling of roller-coaster butterflies when you're toes are wiggling over a ledge, and you look down and it's twelve stories straight to the ground.  Nothing to hold you back from that feather drop but your old trusty equilibrium and self-wherewithal.  I grab one of the support struts in a vice grip because for a split second there I forget it all, and as my mind's eye looks out again it feels like I'm flying and my feet are floating.  I'd better sit down.  And when I do, I look over to the left and Grant and Corinna are sitting too, leaning back on their two arms with their legs dangling over, and Max and Shahar are standing, wrapped around their own struts farther down the diameter, pissing with a wild laugh and ecstatic cry of release.  What a lovely feeling that must be (not quite my cup o' tea though), and I love them for it.  I love it all.

[stop]

"To the dome?"  To the dome, so we prance on back to the stairwell.  But Sharhar's not done yet.  Before we mount the stairs Sharhar steps off towards the edge and does some mounting of his own, pulling himself up perpendicular on one of the supports with his feet going out to one side, and his head looking straight down the twelve stories on the other.  And my knees go weak at just the sight of it.  He's crazy, but he holds it, and when I squat down to squash the butterflies, I see a great wonder in his eyes at the view.

And like that, he's off it and we're up one my flight of stairs.  Sounds of living suddenly sound different, and my ears prick with excitement.  The steps stop and I find myself standing in a dark globe of hexagons, an enormous cathedral of a place, with size, it seems, fitting for Atlas's shoulders after the shrug, and I wonder to myself as to whether Ayn Rand would take delight in our present follies.  Doesn't matter, though.  My second foot off the step kicks something in the fading light from a tall, window-sized hole in the side.  Oww.  The thing skips off across the dirty floor, and each roll of the stone echos a hundred times before fading.  And I gasp, and it echos too.  "Whaaat is this place?" We look at each other with devilish smiles at the madhouse magic of the place, and Max and Corinna and I high-five Shahar for dripping LSD on our fingers today.   Our skins're tingling at crazy bats of sound each flying around, echoed and amplified.  It's a rebirth.  There's a caution at first, a child-like nervous short-stepping while this Timothy Leary dream-sphere becomes our reality.

When it finally does, it's a joyous awe and mysticism the likes of which I've encountered neither before nor since.  Times in life like this are the things we think over, over and over again in the moment.  It's a quick study in hindsight, the blink of an eye, and as I look back farther and farther through the years, through each and every turn of events and misstep that's found me now at the core of this Atlas globe on acid, I can't help but think that I've done good, and there's really nothing, no decision of mine, I can look back on with regret, except maybe just one.  And depending on the nostalgia in my heart, I can let that singular regret slide, or else it means everything.  In that blink, I can't decide between the two, not yet, but I'll take my time because as my  eyes open in this new light of night, there's a mental fortitude bear-hugging my brain.  A deep confidence in the things I'm doing with my life, and of what's to come.  I'll be okay, I know, because in the end, it seems that everything works out all right, and happiness is that blanket I drag by the hand wherever I go, that I throw over my shoulders when it feels light.

[stop]

The center's raised like a stage over the stairwell, and we jump up and dance and click our heels on the hard wood.  And tap our toes, and the acoustics feel like a cave, and the sound goes bounding off the hexagonal walls and galloping around the room.  Too fast to follow, and I lose myself in the mechanics for a while, stamping my feet like a mad R.P. McMurphy and throwing rocks and small pieces of two-by-fours.  Grant and Max are doing some of the same.  Zach and Corinna lie back on the stage with their eyes closed, and Shahar's  running around the diameter banging on the domed walls.  The only light now is that glow of the night and the stars and the sky coming through the little window hole, and after a time, we tire and all lay down next to Corinna, my own breath echoing in my ear.  And then we start "ohm"-ing.  "Ohmmmmmmm," and it goes on and on Scottish bagpipes style.  Eyes closed.  The hypnotizing meditation takes over, and my mind leaps up and my soul flies circles around this snow-globe of deep, guttural, hums from behind closed lips and shakes up the flakes.  We all happen to stop on our and start up again while the others carry, and the minutes melt away, and it's all-encompassing.  When our lungs finally tire of the strain, we all give up at once, but the chant lingers in the air over our heads, ghostly for a long spell before it escapes, Who knows how long we've been lying there.  I sit up in a daze.

We're still high, and we talk dreamily to one another in the silence after the ohm.  Our voices still echo, but we're used to it now, normal almost.  It's that acid-splashed small talk about how beautiful everything is and life's sweet nothings.  There's half a thought to the walk home, the dark forest.  The predicament of our flashlight-less-ness.  We don't worry on it for too long.  "It's cool, we got my camera-phone flash," says Grant.  Well, there you go.  In the clear, in that case.  And as we get up to go, there's footsteps echoing from the stairwell, and this boy our age with a guitar comes strolling up, his friend behind him.  He sits on the stage with his legs bent at the knee, hanging off the end of it, and his friend lights three candles.  Whoa.  Should we stay?  What do you think.  It's a no brain-er.  We lean back in the curve of the dome wall next to this midnight troubadour's friend, and as he begins to play, the place comes alive and it's that beautiful everything.  Speechless.  This candlelit guitar boy plays song after song to perfection with what sounds like an entire symphony orchestra behind him.  But he's all alone up there, and more and more I get the feeling he's some sort of mystic, some ageless forest apparition come to cry in the tower, because as he plays, the music's lifting me up from the chest and my feet feel light.  And the orchestra's ringing between my ears.

When we finally start down the stairs, the boy's still playing as the candles melt low, and his friend's looking on in a trance.  We just nod good-bye.  The stairwell's pitch black.  Grant pulls out his phone and we begin flashing our way the twelve stories to the ground.  It takes an eternity.  And between the flashes there's nothing.  We're trapped, the six of us, in this stepped corridor spiraling down in a slow, slow strobe.  Scared shit-less.  Just one flight, a landing, and a left turn after another. Holding each other close, hand in hand, with a sweat grip.  At one of these countless landings, as the flash goes off, we see a tunnel smashed into the wall of it. Corinna and Max and Grant kneel down whilst Sharhar and Zach and I stand by the tunnel's entrance, it's about waist high.  Grant shoots off a handful of flashes as we all peer in, and in the corner of my eye there appears to be a figure rising up the next flight of stairs.  I think nothing of it until the next second when Grant and Max and Corinna are back on their feet.  With Grant's first flash, the figure rising's now towering before us, almost on us, in his dark green, hooded robe and a black mask pulled over the lower half of his face.  "Ahh!" "Shit!"  "Holy fuck!"  We all jump back into the wall, grabbing for each other.  And in that second, my heart skipped a beat, I'm certain of it.  Grant hits the flash again in the terror of it all, and he's standing on the landing with us.   But I peak at his face, and he's just as frightened as we are, and under the guise of Grant's phone light we inspect him, intrigued.  Then we all have a good laugh about it, and he high-fives us all as he passes.  "Woo."  That was gripping.  Corinna's still shaking.

By the time we get to the bottom, it's all hysterical, if not still a little creepy, and we keep laughing about it just to hear ourselves in the night.  And, wouldn't you know, we find a road that cobblestones right up to the towers and heads all the way down the mountain.  There's a long switchback, and at the bottom, the road t-bones left and right.  "Hmm, which way you think?"  The question's almost immediately answered for us by a throaty baritone croak coming from the left and choking on evil.  Ah, to the right then.  The road continues downward, and now it's walled in on both sides by shuttered storefronts and dried out, cloudy streetlights cover everything in orange amber and long shadows.  We can see the bottom of the hill.  There, the road's whole width is blocked by a metal gate, and when we get to it, there's no way through except a skinny pedestrian's exit to squeeze through one by one, so we start squeezing.  That's when we hear the croak again.  That evil.  And there's a shovel scrapping on cobblestone coming towards us down the hill.  "What the fuck!"

"Get me out of here!"  Max is last in line, and the specter with the shovel drawing nearer, still past the streetlights, though, so we can't see him.  Max pushes us all through.  "Let's go!"  And we shoot out into the black forest towards the metro station with the sky rich with stars to guide us, and as our eyes adjust, the forest isn't so dark after all, not like the dome or the stairwell anyways, and it almost seems like twilight.  We all sneak a glance back, and at the edge of the orange light up before the shopfronts, the devil's looking down on us from his wretched alcove of the world, with a long shadow and one last croak that splits the night and sets us on our merry way.  Sayonara, Devil's Hill.  God, I hope the trains are still running.

Je Ne Sais Pas

I don't know how I feel about this.  And not necessarily in a bad way.  Sitting here in the middle of la Jardin de Luxemborg.  Suffice to say, je ne sais pas with this many people around, like a steady stream rolling back and forth, and a symphony of French conversation from all the filled chairs about.  For a second I'm bummed on not having brought my music, some headphones to zone out to, but this is all I think I need really.  And the French kiddies fly past like seagulls on the run, screaming and harumphing all around, and it's lulling me away.  

A sixty degree day she says.  It's true and we're sitting in cold California again, not cold France, and it's nice.  Accommodating even.  She looks back like a hussy with a filter on her lips, and I don't know how I feel about it.

Feel something, dammit.

But there's nothing.  No real passions at all.  No tether.  Like a red balloon, floating off without a string.  Just some vague appreciations rising into the brisk late autumn sky as the dried leaves fall.

Berlin: 8mm

I've had the best of times, I had the best of friends, I had it all to lose.

Berlin.  We smash into that town.  And when we see it coming, it's something great.  The station's this mammoth thing with multiple levels of tracks stacked on top of one other connected by thick, new-age glass elevators.  The whole place is glass and cool steel and concrete.  A giant lecture in (post-)modern style, oh, German architecture.  "Ah, uber-post-modern," Max says.
 
"Oh, dah. Dah!"  Grant and I chime in.  And we dig it, and crane our necks up and down and in every direction at the whole metropolitan-of-the-age of it all. Walking out and looking back at it's simple, clean grandiosity, it feels like the future.  Of new things to present themselves, and present themselves they would.  Eventually.  But right now we don't have a place to sleep at night.  No hosts have responded to our three-person stay request yet, and we can't really blame them can we?  Who'd take in three rowdy American youths romping around Europe anyways?  I know I'd have to pause a moment.

Berlin Central Station would not be the last lesson in the city's architectural inspiration, though, and whilst we slowly hump towards the city center in a reluctant search for a hostel, the river walk walks by on the other side of the water, all white concrete and metal rippling by.  In the distance, down the river we see the "washing machine" building, and "What in the world is that?" asks Grant.  \

Max and I both thoroughly inspect it from afar as we keep trotting along with our packs on.  And my head tilts to the side, "Ruhh, ri don't know, Shaggy."

We learn later at the hostel that it's part of the Chancellery, and Mr. Little Voice-in-my-head says very matter-of-factly, "Well, he sure as hell's got a lot of laundry, this chancellor guy."  Laugh, haha.  I crack myself up sometimes.

We peek into a relatively nice hotel we come across to inquire as to the whereabouts of the nearest, cheapest hostel.  Just drop our bags down in the middle of the lobby, wipe our brows, and approach the receptionist desk as curtly as possible.  "To the Circus," she tells us, and shows us on a map, and waves us off.  The Circus hotel is some high-to-do place overlooking a great five-pronged intersection.  The Circus hostel faces the hotel on the other side of the intersection, looking like a pettish, less-pronounced, little brother.  But the Circus is booked - I guess some people (pussies) actually reserve beds at hostels in advance, who knew - so the young Australian girl working the desk directs us to The Wombat, a hostel around the corner.  The Wombat takes us in.  They have a few beds to spare that night (but they're booked the next day, so we'd have to be on our way in the morning), and the recepetionist, another Aussie girl in fact, gives us each a key to our room, a common-sized thing on the fifth floor with big windows and six bunkbeds, three on each side wall, and six pairs of lockers.  The toilets and showers are down the hall.  Mmm.  My own bed.  A good change of pace, I suppose, although it's twenty euros a night.  Still, not bad.  The sheets are even clean and new in a neat clear plastic bag on the bed waiting for me.  Not bad at all.

When we barge in, nobody else is there, so we kick off our shoes, put our packs in the lockers, and just sit about for a moment to let the new city seep in and to feel the weightlessness in our shoulders.  Breathing slows and softens, and we talk in a dreary-eyed, exhausted excitement of the things we're to do in Berlin.  Showers down the hall are taken with time.  There's no hurry.  We'll stay a couple days and see what there is to see, and romp around in the day and get drunk at night and then be off again.  To Prague and hopefully a host, who knows?  All in due time though.  For now anyways, the sun's sinking into the afternoon, so hell, let's get drunk.  There's a bar on the roof.

[stop]

If I'm to only name one, the most stark difference between traveling by hostel and traveling via couchsurfing, it's this: when you couch-surf you're living with locals or (in Inna's case) at least residents of the city.  When you stay at a hostel, you're living and eating and sleeping with travelers.  It's a change, for sure, and as we walk into the bar and order cheap happy hour pitchers of beer, there's definitely more of that feeling of being on vacation; a young tourist.

No matter what hostel you find yourself at, though, you will probably always feel like you've got on foot in Australia, and the Wombat is no different.  There are Aussies abound.  Some Kiwis too, and a couple of Americans, but for all intensive purposes, that hostel bar, with it's rooftop balcony looking out towards the Berlin Needle, might as well have been beachfront on the Goldie.  We're not five minutes into a game of Fuck the Dealer before three cheery-faced Aussie gents come up to our table and ask to join in the madness, they'd never played before.

"Why, of course, pull up a chair bar-friends.  The more the merrier."  Intros first, but who ever remembers those.  Then it's off to the races in a five euro pitcher named Delusion.  By the time the first handful of pitchers is finished and refilled, and we're playing another game now and the whole bar seem to be crowded around our table outside, hootin' and hollerin', and pitcher after pitcher of beer seems to materialize out of the woodworks.  It's to be a proper, old school beer bender then.  We rage and play and shout and laugh and drink through the sunset and into the wild, Berlin night.

[stop]

The bar closes at 22:00 (10:00 p.m.) much to our chagrin.  So we shuffle out and down the stairs (because that's always more fun than the elevator) and out onto Schonhausser Strasse, swaying in the warm city dark, which isn't that dark, really, and tinted ever so discreetly by the streetlights running up and down the strasse.  "Where to now, fellas?"

Some of the Aussies that came down from the bar with us have been here for a couple nights.  "Well, there's a bunch of clubs downtown... Not much around here except a couple of bars."  And they take off towards the metro with a couple of girls.  But we hesitate.  Local bars sound just dandy to me, and Grant and Max agree.  So we march off into the night with some other Aussies and a Kiwi with some crazy name - Tigiilagi, I think - in search of the local talent.  The first bar looks cool from the outside, but there's a ten euro cover.  Lame.  Over it.  The Aussies go in though.

"Well, we could go to 8mm," suggests Tigiilagi, "It's just right down the street and I'm pretty sure there's no cover."  Oh, those two magic words, what I won't do for you.  We're all on board.

When we arrive it's nothing too impressive.  Just some hole-in-the-wall joint painted all dark red, inside and out.  But hey, it's free, and when we walk inside, order drinks, and snuggle into a couple chairs at a little table by the bar, they're playing some new-age hip punk music, and I get the feeling that this place is all right.  Probably doesn't hurt that there's a couple of pretty brown-eyed lovelies lookin' us up and down at a table right behind Tigiilagi.  And we're drunk, so naturally, we pick up our chairs and join their table.   I like it, this place isn't big at all.

"Hi!"  I've already forgotten I'm in Germany as I'm sitting back down, but then I remember, "English?"

"Yes," she smiles and laughs, and looks over at her two friends.  They're all busy chattin' up Max and Grant, and Tigiilagi is sitting back in his chair, sippin' his beer, with this faraway gaze on his face.  We're all wasted.  She turns back.  "I am a from Spain," she says.

Spain.  Awesome.  We get to talkin' and pretty soon we're stumbling down the street towards the hostel, arm in arm, the rest of our small, mad posse behind us.    We go up to the room, up the elevator, and plop down in front of the door so as not to wake our new roommates.  The hallway's spinning now, but someone's still passing around a flask of whiskey, so down the hatch.  Time's doing that thing where waves up and down, and sometimes the minutes are slower and sometimes they're faster.  Who know's how long we were sitting in that hallway, but eventually the girls get tired and two-kiss us goodnight on the cheeks, and we promise each other to meet up tomorrow, see them to the elevator, and "adios."  We don't even get their numbers.  I'm not gonna realize 'til the morning though.  Right now all my head's wishin' for is that bottom bunk pillow.

Hamburg: Understand

Germany's the first place we encounter where English isn't an option.  To get to Berlin we have to switch trains in Hamburg.  Which sounds easy enough when you're as optimistic as we are, and so foolishly self-gullible.  When the German countryside turns to suburbs, then city, I know it's Hamburg because my finger follows our train on the map while my eyes are glued to the windows.  These cities in Europe are so intriguing.  There's an age and a vintage to them that I still can't get over, something notably lacking in the States I've seen.  But enough about that, we have to change trains here.  So we get off at the first stop that says Hamburg in the title, and like that the train's off again and we're alone on the platform.  A few lazy-faced Germans are meandering around.  This is Hamburg?  We walk towards the station at the end of the platform.  It's rather small and unimpressive, which is strange because I'd always thought Hamburg to be quite a large city.  Inside we find the information desk and behind the counter is an old, jolly pudge of a man with just a couple a' wisps of white hair on his head and a pair of thick spectacles set on the bridge of his nose that made his eyes look googly.  He see's us coming and tilts his head so that he may look down at us, probably thinking to himself, "Look at these young foreign ruffians, going off in their jibber-jabber."  Or however you think that in German.

For we soon find out with a question, "English?" that he speaks not a lick of it.  And he turns to the two old ladies on each side of him and shrugs his inability at them with his best face that says, "I don't know."  But in German.  Unfortunately, neither of them speak any English either.  All we can think to do is say, "Where. To. Berlin?" and point in different directions and look like sad, little puppy dogs that can't find their way.  Who knows if it works, but one of the kind ladies motions us close and points on a map with index finger, sliding her finger between two tiny stops on the line we'd just hopped off.  Saying stuff in German, just real slow for us to understand.  I mean, the last part's useless, but we look at where she's pointing and, oh hey, what'd'ya know, we've gotten off at the wrong stop entirely.  We're not even in Hamburg proper.  It's three more stops to Hamburg Central.  Silly us, standing there laughing at the silliness of it.  Prayer-hands thanks with Asian bows, smiling and shaking our heads at ourselves.  We catch the next train into the main terminal, and it's like, duh, this is what the Hamburg Station should look like.

It's all old glass and black, worn iron shaped like an enormous airplane hanger.  Ten sets of tracks coming in, and a McDonald's - of all things - sitting on top with some other restaurants.  We check the time-board, and there's an hour to kill before the next train to Berlin.  And we're starving.  But, eh, not quite in the mood for golden arches, so we poke around.  I want something super German.  Grant and Max do too because hey, we're in Germany now.  Maybe it'll all be easier to understand after that.  There's a bratwurst place with a bar just inside the station, and when we look at the menu, it tells us that the beer is cheaper than soda, cheaper than juice.  Oh, I understand that just fine, even if it doesn't make any sense.  "Hahaa, well guys, it looks like the best thing to do here, financially anyways, would be to purchase the beer with this meal."  Well if you say so, Germany.  Grant gets a Stella.  The guy behind the bar pours the head perfect.  Max and I each get one with names we've never seen before, and we all order bratwurst and potatoes.  Enormous.  When it comes out, they're on huge plates and the sausage is huge with a small mountain of buttery potatoes on the side.  Now, that's what I'm talking about.  America servings!  It's no light Danish snack, if you know what I mean.  We chomp with all the due vigor of starving travelers, and the beer settles it nicely.  The train to Berlin is a food coma, dreams of green countryside and the train's soft sway to Miike Snow.  Wake-up.  Berlin.

Avenue de Châtillon

I'm here.  Trying to write about things that happened two years ago seems so passe.  But that's why I came, that's the reason I'm here.  To call that into question would've been a waste of all this money, I think.  Not to pass off that it's much.  I just as well could've bought a new surfboard though.  Hell, a new wetsuit even, and still have enough left over for an incredible hooker.  Which is to say, I'd have a lot of money saved up.  Because now when I look at my bank statement, it's looking a lot like it did back in those days long gone.  When I was just fuckin' about.  I'm lagging behind the pack maybe, but there's no feeling of sucking on anybody's fumes.  I'm on a different road is all, we're still headed in the same direction.  Mines just a road through the country, not the highway, and less maintained so there's bumps and holes and it's pretty much dirt.  But hey, I've got one hell of a suspension system, I think, so I'll drive it fast.  It's hard to see in the dark though sometimes with no taillights to follow, and then I end up in Paris.

Holed up in a little room with a toilet overlooking Avenue de Châtillon.  The girl who's place it is, Kelsey, is a friend of a girl I met yesterday whilst I was humping around Paris with two bags - a backpack and a huge Samsonite shoulder bag that I swung in front of me to keep balanced - packed full and hanging heavy on my shoulders without any idea of where I was to sleep that night.  I had no phone that worked.  Blaring Bo Diddley in my earphones is the only comfort that came from my iPhone that day, and it was soon losing it's luster.  I couldn't find any internet, save Starbucks, and it kicks you off after thirty minutes.  A fact unbeknownst to me.  They give you a card with a login and a password and I'd been to tired to read, much less look at anything else.  It was all in French anyways. So the thirty minutes in Starbucks was wasted out of stupidity, and I left not knowing any more about my immediate future than when I'd arrived.  I needed to eat something cheap, and there was none of that to be had at Starbucks Paris on Rue St. Germaine.  Just the tall tea to get wi-fi was almost three euros.  Non, I must find a doner place stat.  Or hell, I just might loose it.  But I keep walking and walking, and it's only nice cafes and expensive boutiques and the little captain at the helm in my head's groaning, "Fuuuck."  Bo keeps me up though, even though I feel each tap of the bag to the beat dig into my shoulders.  Worth it, I think.  I like a rhythm in my bones.  But my strengths fading fast.  And there's this saturating disparity growing at the very core of me, clinging to my bones like a winter night's chill.

Something queer catches my eye in a little yellow, wood-framed shop as I pass.  I almost bowl right by it, but I step back.  There's no one inside, save the two girls behind the counter, and it looks like they're speaking English, slow lips, and they shift their weight American.  And when I pull the buds out of my ears, they are speaking American.  I flutter through the threshold in a daze, near delirium, and it's angels singing to my soul.  "American?"  "Yup," one of them says, and I smile with relief.  I miss bubbly American girls.  "Whereabouts?" I ask.  "Well, I'm from Iowa," says the one with glasses.  "And I'm from Seattle."
They're both so pretty  "That's awesome.  Hey, you's all wouldn't know a cheap doner place around here, would you?"  "There's one right next door, actually," Iowa laughs, smiling.  Ha.  I look into the wall towards where she's pointing like an idiot.  "Ah, well all right-y then, thank you kindly."  I wanted to say more and sit and small talk in English, but tummy was a lion now, a Leo, and he was in control.  So I pop out and around and sure enough, it's a doner cafe.  I feel silly for even asking now, but who cares.  I found it, and I throw my bags off.

"Bonjour.  Un, uhmm, doner sil vous plait?"  It's not much of a struggle through the rest of the order, I'm not really paying attention though.  All I see is the pita in his hand, and as he moves from one sauce to the next, over onions and lettuce, I just keep nodding, "Oui, merci."  There's not much to be said about the next couple minutes, other than it was a glaze-eyed feasting on doner and French fries, each bite a savory explosion on the tongue, each swallow slid into that lurch in my gut that had been howling for hours.  The lion had his pacifier.  And my stomach stretched and held that heavy meal to content, cradling my famishment with that deep, mystic doner-lullaby.  Now to more pressing matters.  The hours have sunk into the late afternoon, and tonight, still, I am homeless.  And phone-less.  And all by myself.

But, ah, a thought.  A hope, rather.  Maybe I'm not all alone in this rut.  I take my bags back up and, once again, find myself in that yellow shack shop next door with all the American shit lining the walls; The Real McCoy's.  "D'ya get that doner you were looking for?"  "Oh, did I.  I ate so much doner.  You don't even know." I smile.  Iowa's alone behind the counter now, and she smiles back.  "So this is going to sound a bit desperate, but you wouldn't happen to know anyone able and perhaps willing to put up a worn, weary traveling Californian for the night, would you?"  And I give her my spiel about being between places to stay at the moment and without a phone.  A desperate hope's quivering in my voice, and I can see she's flushed at the question, but there's a look of excitement in her eyes, and I grasp for it with mine.  She perks up, "Well, I don't have any room at my place, or else I totally would.  But let me call some friends, I'm sure there's someone."  What a darling.  Such an angel, she is.  I'm already so much in love with her.  "Wanna come back in an hour?  I may have some news for then."  She says it all with the most charming smile.  "Wow, thank you so much.  Yeah, I'll just be wandering around these parts anyways."  That's the best I've got.  All I have to say back to my heroine in the Paris afternoon.  That and my silly, slack face of relief.  As I turn to leave, I turn back, "And what's your name by the way?"  With girls so adorable, I always savor every detail.  She looks down with a grin, then back up at me, and there's a warmth from home in her look as she says, "Carly.  My name's Carly."  "Thank you, Carly."

An hour to kill.  I'll just romp around the block, I suppose.  Maybe find someplace to sit for a bit, just not right here.  The bags are still heavy, still cutting their grooves in my shoulders.  But there's a new spring in my step.  A new hope that keeps me on my toes.  Eager.  And Bo Diddley's right there next to me ramblin' on.  There's a surf shop (yeah, in Paris, go figure) on Rue de Grenelle, and when I realize what it is, I almost laugh out loud and go inside.  It's a small store-front, and I only notice it because of the board-rack inside near the door.  A leathery, old French dude is in the back helping woman put together a skateboard for her young son, who's just jumping up and down beside her, so excited about everything that's happening.  So I put my bags down and sit down in a little French chair and crack open a copy of Waveriders: A Guide to Europe I see lying around, and try to take myself away for a few moments.  It's not hard.  Especially with lots of pictures.  Mundaka.  Biarritz.  Hossegor.  Portugal.  Morrocco.  Italy.  Israel.  I didn't even know they got waves in Israel, but apparently they do, and the surf looks fun in the pictures.  I miss the feeling already.  After the woman leaves with her son and his new skateboard, old leather-face comes over to talk to me.  I tell him I work in a surf shop in Los Angeles.  And we dive into that casual shop talk, like back at the Boarding House.  He's like one of those old, regulars that'll come into the shop and chat your face off with that far-off nautical look in his eyes.  Except he was French.  His English was all right though, definitely better than my French.

When I go back to the Real McCoy's, Carly has good news.  "So my friend said you can stay at her place for a night or two.  Her name's Kelsey."  She explains that I'm to meet her at the Starbucks right by the Alesia metro stop.  And just when I thought I'd said, "au revoir" to the 14th for good.  "Now let me show you how to get there," and Carly pulls out a map.  "I actually just came from there," I chuckle.  "Oh, well okay then.  Good luck!"  I can't thank her enough, Carly, my guardian angel.

I meet Kelsey and her French boyfriend, Julien (he's a nuclear physicists, no big), at Starbucks, and they walk me over to her place, maybe six blocks from Marie's.  It's just a room on the second floor with a bed and a desk and a toilet.  The kitchen is down the hall, and the shower's upstairs.  Like American dorm living, only with no internet.  It's quaint and simple, but it's nice.  There's a balcony with big windows, but I can't smoke inside.  Not a problem.  She leaves me the key and gives me an old extra phone that will receive calls and texts, but won't dial out.  At least people can reach me now.  Kelsey tells me she'll just stay with the Frenchman the next two days, so the place was all mine.  Two days, with nothing to do but eat and write and drink red wine.  And play loud music.  And roll spliffs and smoke them as I walk around the big city blocks.  It's everything I wanted.  Everything I needed.  How such hospitality finds its way across my path is beyond me, I'm ever thankful.

It's a hell of a life, this path I've put myself on.  But right now I'm only sitting at a desk, looking out over Avenue de Châtillon, stretching and flexing my fingers because they're tired of typing.  I need a break.  Time for another go around the block, I think.  And a scarf, it's cold out.  And a lighter and a spliff.  Why not?  I want to hear the wind nipping at the trees by the tracks and whipping up the fallen leaves.  I want that tunnel echo of the concrete canyon streets.  That grit, city smell of Paris sucked deep into my lungs so that I never forget.

Copenhagen: Centraal

Hallo, Copenhagen.  Again, although this meeting is not altogether expected.  We find ourselves back at the train station, tails between our legs.  The hour is late, too late, and we dare not call Marie.  We don't want to wake her, but what's more, I feel we don't want to wound our pride further.  The human sense of hiding our mistakes, it's in us all.  She mustn't know of this utter defeat as she smokes one last cigarette before she pulls the bedsheet high and closes eyes to dreams of the three crazy Americans and their jolly ramblings towards Berlin.  We had left with such confidence in our travel plans, and to come up so lacking would, well, ruin that brash picture of ourselves we had unwittingly tried to paint for those Danes we knew for so few of days.

As we crane our necks up before the timeboard, our immediate future looks bleak.  The next train to Berlin leaves in the morning, at 8:45.  That gives us roughly six hours to get to thoroughly know every nook and cranny of Copenhagen Central.  The place is still surprisingly bustling with trains arriving from the countryside packed heavy with drunk Danes come to the big city for a proper night of raging.   After a couple minutes' search we settle into the best nook (outlet and all) and set up camp for the night.  A drunk Danish couple stumbles by, smiling, and sits down for a bit to talk with us.  They procure three tall cans of Carlsberg from their persons and insist we drink with them.  Our English is a joy to them, and we laugh and joke and share our life's stories in broken tongues.  It's curious how you, mostly inadvertently, begin speaking with an accent when talking to those with one.  Perhaps to be better understood.  It's appreciated, I guess, because as they pull themselves up to go, they leave us with a little gift.  A spidery-looking metal contraption.  "You put it to your head, see?"  He pushes it down and the legs slide down and around her scalp, and she closes her eyes to the drunken ecstasy of it.  Then he tosses it to us, hej hej! And they're gone, off to the nightclubs in the warm summer's dark.

We settle in.  Bags pushed up against the far wall away from the late night stream of traffic into the city, Grant fires up the ole' macBook and we finish off Grandma's Boy on the hard stone floor.  It's not much of a place to rest one's head, but hell, the time was soon approaching that my eyes would refuse to stay open no matter what rock and hard place they found themselves between.  I wait for it patiently, trying to ignore that stiff pain pestering my tailbone.

The movie comes to an end in Dante's basement and I'm still awake though.  We all are.  Please sit on my faace.  Bew-beww.  So Grant throws on another movie, but who knows which one.  Maybe the Lord of the Rings.  Maybe some hardcore porn, I haven't the faintest clue.  I'm awake only because my body hurts too much to let these eyes close peacefully.  It's a weary effort, marked with several jolts to consciousness each time covered with another blanket of delirium.  When you sleep on the ground in a train station it's never a deep sleep.  There aren't any dreams, and if there were I can't imagine what kinds of hellish nightmares they'd be.  The agony come to life in the unconscious.  Simply being pulled back to waking to readjust stiff limbs isn't so bad by comparison, I'm sure, even if it is every other half-hour.  So I wasn't really waking, was I?  And not quite sleeping.  What a miserable way to pass the time.

About a hundred paces on the same wall slept a group of young-faced troupe of traveling dorkish fellows wrapped in sleeping bags and cradling pillows under their heads.  Those mother-fuckers.  Every time i re-awoke I would glance over and and feel my teeth grind with jealous envy.  They look so peaceful, luxurious almost.  But at the same time, if it weren't for this pesky predicament, I'd never have seen the street rats lurking.  Those rabid shadows of the night making their slow calculatingly nonchalant paces past us, eyeing any weaknesses or fortunes to take advantage of.  I stare them down as they pass.  It's a cold, deliberate stare, with a bit of crazy mixed in from the lack of sleep.  Grant and Max do the same, and they look away as soon as the eyes meet.  I make one last conscious effort, and that's to put everything important in my pant pockets and pull my bag closer.  We see them, and they know that.  The starry-eyed camp of sleeping bags and sweet dreams doesn't though, and when I'm awaken yet again, this time by the police at 7:00 on their morning rounds (the sun was up at 4:45), there's trouble down the way.  One of the younger ones runs over to us with a desperate look in on his face, "Hi." He's nervous.  "Did you see anyone stop by our stuff last night?"  He was American and his voice quivered with anxiety.  They were hit by those train station hyenas and suffered the loss of a camera and one of those stupid traveler's packs that you put all your valuables (ie., wallet, cash, passport, etc.) into.  We told him we'd seen some guys walking around earlier, but by now they were nowhere to be found. When he turned and half-jogged back to his distraught colleagues, we looked at one another and all to be said was, "That sucks."  In my head, there's that tiny sigh of relief.  Thank god that wasn't us.  So what if we're verging on insomnia?  I'll sleep on the train.

[sans marijuana, sad face]