Early Friday afternoon, I'm sitting in the back of an all staff meeting at work and it is hot; stuffy as hell. We've just gone through two days of lay offs and i've survived, once again (how many rounds of lay offs has that been in the last 5 years? I'm not really sure anymore, but somehow i always survive) and i'm listening to a freakish, bordering on insanely-optimistic account of our corporate future, with no new, pertinent information. I get a text message from a man who was two weeks previous in Afghanistan, telling me he's standing in my apartment parking lot. I return my attention to the dribble-spout at the front of the room but somewhere in the base of my spine the drum part from Van Halen's Hot for Teacher is coming on like a mountainous wall of water. It sounds like a dozen restless souls sitting on open exhaust engines tear-assing through hell at 100mph towards eternal damnation and a damn fine good time. At that moment i stand up and walk out the door. Not just the conference room door but the front door. Leave the computer on the dock, the engineering change reports on the desk and I make sure everyone in that room can see me when i drive away. With the top down.
Part I: The Machines
By the time i've tamed the mild afternoon traffic and scoot into my complex, my brain has forgotten where we've been and can focus now only on possibilities ahead. The first thing i notice is the 27 foot long sky-blue 1976 Buick Electra in the parking lot. I notice this not so much because it's a thing that's easy to notice, but because it's a object so grand that it blocks out the world around it. I scope the lot and head inside, knowing that there will be a pilot waiting in my living room and there will be no use in asking how he got there.
Exchange of greetings is brief and mostly composed of variations on the phrase "you son of a bitch." After all, we both knew the other was alive, so the only difference now is we have to deal with our combined drinking habits. Besides, there's no time to waste as Notorious needs to find a motorcycle which means we need to go test drive some motorcycles. We've declared this the week of machines and the first stop is the BMW dealership.
We climb into Svetlana and make our way to the BMW shop where after 45 minutes and quick ride, The Pilot and I are both convinced he's going to take this bike home, right up until we meet the 2008 Ducati Monster.
Try to understand the depths of the parallelism between cars/bikes and women. They're limitless, bottomless and essentially dead-on in every instance. In short, the BMW is perfect because it loves you without ever needing anything in return, but the Ducati doesn't care about you, is probably going to show up two hours late (after hanging out with some guy) and wants you to meet her hot friend that works at the strip club. The BMW happily picks you and your friends up from the bar at 2am when you're too drunk to function but the Ducati is drunk with you and starting a fight with the bouncer that you're going to have to clean up with your fists or outrun with your feet. But perhaps the most noticeable discrepancy lies in the looks of the two machines. The German looks like your best friend from 2nd grade's mom. Not even the hot one. While the Italian, well, is like a red headed swede with an ass so perfect and tight it makes you want to build something epic in a weak attempt to please it. And you know it will not be pleased.
Johnny Motto, wisely, has one of each.
Editors note: What surprises me is that the pilot couldn't admit to himself which one he was obviously going to get until hours later when we had a meeting of the brains at Hooters. I can see now, that places can clear your thoughts.
On the way home from the dealerships we stopped off to introduce Notorious to the race car. Sadly an absence of driver-side hubs kept us from test driving it but i think the greatness of the vehicle was obvious, even while up on blocks and with it's front end bits hanging all over the place. Regardless, at that point there was no reason to maintain sobriety so we dropped of the miata and picked up Johnny Motto with the Buick, where we discussed philosophy at hooters and waited for Stos the Greek to join us. from there it was straight to Hamtramck where we would polish off bottles of Polish cherry brandy and impose our will on the bar via the juke box. Insert here our first collective good idea moment: As last call found us, it occurred to some bright soul, "why drive all the way back to my pad to pack, when we have the three cowboys that are headed to Ohio and we're already 40 miles towards our destination?" 20 minutes of arm-twisting later, the three of us were on our way, Notorious passed out in the back, Johnny Motto spitting chew in shotgun and I, the standing captain of the vessel. We reeked of smoke and carried with us only the clothes on our backs and the good ideas tucked in our socks. Also, a box of 8-track tapes.
We arrived at our destination just as the sun was coming up, but stopped to pick up three toothbrushes and a bouquet of flowers because sometimes a birthday is more important than a bachelor party (apologies to Notorious but we would have just over-shadowed the groom anyway). We woke up The Physicist, threw on some women's clothes, put our smelly garbs in the washer and retired for the rest of the morning.
Listen: Waking up to fresh scones and pretty girls and good friends is really the best way to run a life- Miss one component and you're doing it wrong. Sometimes you don't appreciate it because you're so tired you can't figure out how to operate a pillow. And sometimes you're distracted from it all because you're wearing girl's gym shorts. Either way, try to focus on what's important.
With our gullets full and the the remainder of the party intact (3 dragons & 3 damsels) it was off to the colossal motorcycle accessories store that turned out to be a colossal disappointment. Not because it wasn't big, but because it actually just had a bunch of motorcycles, which though fun to ogle, they were not the accessories we were seeking. So instead we drank. And drank. And failing to arrive at any spectacular alternative idea, we decided to drink in public, with the common folk. So, we went clubbing. This went as most clubbing experiences tend to go: Long island ice teas for inspiring new dance moves, bachelorette parties for harassing and subsequently WASTING long island ice teas on, girls on the dance floor that for some reason do not want to dance with you and girls on the dance floor that REALLY want to dance with you (if you can call it dancing). It was the kind of night that makes you lose your hoodie (and at this point, fabric that represents 30% of your possessions in that state of Ohio) and not even care that you did; The kind of night, like so many others, that is loud and colorful and shaky and slowly closes in from the sides with the fuzziness and darkness until your entire range of perception is reduced to a perfect, noiseless singularity...
And then you awake. And life is good. It's Sunday and you're on temporary lay off and work meetings and the general grind-of-life distractions are so far away that you can't imagine a world where you'd sit in an office building for 9 or 10 hours straight, day after day. No, instead you focus on the real parts of life. You better yourself with experience and understanding. You come up with crazy ideas. You go to the creation science museum in northern Kentucky. (wait- what?)
I recommend the back seat.
If you know my history with creation science you probably also know i went mad years ago. I'm not really sure where to start with this place... I was expecting something less spectacular with better arguments. Listening to Kent Hovind speak really set the bar high on crack-pot theories, as his were the best developed. This place... it was a monument to madness! They didn't even bother coming up with any crack pot theories and instead played the fucking god card every time! Can't you just lie to me and yourselves and SAY they had the technology to seal that giant water tight arc door rather than jumping RIGHT to the god trump?
If i look funny it's because my hoodie is lost and I've been wearing these clothes for three days. Almost never sober while in them. (To be fair, I guess that's especially true of when i wasn't in them, as well)
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other gods you will understand why I dismiss yours."
Listen: These fuckers are well funded and well visited. It never even occurred to me that the others wouldn't be there for the same reasons we were... but NO. They were nodding and self-affirming each other!
Fuck it, let's go pet the goats.
Did i mention the petting zoo? They have a petting zoo. I want a goat.
science fail
On the ride back The Physicist wanted to debate nature v. nurture in terms of what it is that determines the make up of one's personalty. It was good to clear our brains with sound, logical debate and complete, complex thoughts, though in the end we agreed to disagree. (it's FINE. I'm fine.) Though it did seem the men landed mostly on nurture and the women mostly on nature... They probably just wanna have a bunch of babies.
Back at the house there was no time to twiddle our dinks because there was a birthday/bbq/bonfire to be had which meant more guests, more debating the nature v nurture, cheap cigar smoking, exploding beer bottle/fire combinations, flesh wounds, put-off women, feeling old and feeling young, propositions of a devil's threesome, and stories! Telling new stories, retelling old stories, debating the old stories and clarifying the new stories... and a lot of peeing on trees. And then, at some point, notorious tells me I'm the only person he can drink around without feeling like an alcoholic and for the first time this week, i consider hugging him. (Dammit, Nick, we agreed NO MORE DEVIL'S THREESOMES!)
Monday morning it was time to live the American Dream; Three men past their prime (speak for yourselves asshats!) driving a full size 70's Buick through the straight and flats of a mid-west afternoon, listening to old music on the radio. Unfortunately i embraced the dream a bit too much and opted for a McDonalds lunch, which in line with Notorious' warning, shut-down my digestive system for 24 hours. That made Monday evening a write-off... but alas, Tuesday brought breakfast with mom, a picking up of a new Ducati, some group motorcycle cruising and a round of go-kart action that left the pilot pwned. (Sorry dude- you need to practice). By Wednesday night my stomach and i were back on the horse, ever so delicately, drinking at the corner pub, where it finally set in that maybe we shouldn't refer to girls as floozies and we should certainly walk home. This was the perfect set-up for a Thursday trip to the airport, for i had a date in Berlin.
Part II: Invasion!
It's Thursday morning and time to leave for Berlin. This trip has about a solid week of planning behind it and we could have just as easily ended up in Dublin or Geneva, until i remembered i know a guy, Sneak, who lives in Berlin and he offered to let us use his pad in his absence. (turns out he was going to be in Detroit for the electronic music festival... I-rony!) Step 1, fly to Toronto. Step 2, Fly to Amsterdam. Step 3, lose $17 bottle of hair gel to security because it's 9oz and 8oz is the limit. (i didn't know if was $17 dollars until i purchased it- but it was a damn fine product) and finally, step 4, fly to Berlin. The Physicist and i find ourselves in the Berlin airport, sluggish but excited, standing in a foreign country with no idea what to do next. In relative time it's been about 24 hours since I left my house but we've really only been traveling for about 16. At that moment a bubbly blond 19 yr old comes around the corner and hands us a set of keys to an apartment. "Have a great weekend," she says, and runs off to where ever it is bubbly 18yr old Americans living in Berlin run off to on a friday morning. We are the rock n roll lifestyle.
Day one was a lot of "what do we do now" followed by "this place sells beer." We walked the area and discovered the neighborhood, exploring the parks, gazing into the canals and giving our brain time to wrap itself around being in Germany. Bed came early. By day two we'd figured out the public transportation and had an agenda: lets see what's going on downtown. Short answer: the biggest fuckin festival your puny American minds have ever experienced. I have seriously never seen this many people in one place. And when there's people, there's beer and food and culture! Of course, once we started drinking it seemed like a perfectly good idea to visit the tent promoting local German politician old-whats-his-name, or take part in some trivia... in German, or perhaps pick up some literature on the crop-thing-farming... are we drunk in a park, again?
Shit. Maybe we should just make out.
Did i mention that the whole fucking city is covered in paint, ranging from street graffiti to A+ mural work? Because it is.
The three key fabrics that wove together the comforting quilt of this trip took the form of food, the public transportation and the apartment:
The food is amazing if you know where to go. As Sneak pointed out, there's plenty of shitty food in this country, but he and I recommend the good donner stands that sell something like a Greek gyro, except the tzatziki sauce is replaced by this crazy garlic-chili paste and then they added Turkish feta! Also, if you can get your hands on the schnitzel we ate you'd probably pee yourself... Butterflied pork with swiss and ham, DEEP FRIED? Is it perhaps the culmination of Germans and Russians food technologies? We may never know because we can't read a technical German textbok. Secondly, public transportation, well, imagine being able to go anywhere, anytime, by just getting on a bus or a train, and having one ticket that pays for it all. It's called Berlin. Finally, the apartment is sparse, minimalistic, fully furnished, tiny as hell and utterly perfect.
Anyway, back to the story. The problem with getting drunk in a park on Saturday afternoon is it leads to going home and falling asleep, which is what we did. And the woke up. At 1am. Of course, in 'Merica, that means you better start cruisin' skinamax for some softcore because there's no point in leaving the house at that hour. But in Europe, where freedom is free, the bars at 1am have not yet begun to defile themselves. And we knew just the place for defilement. (That's right: a solviet-fucking-power-plant-turned-techno-club, bitches!)
How does one get to a soviet fucking power plant turned techno club? Well it's not exactly in the heart of the city, so you walk. For about an hour. In some dark-ass neighborhoods. (of course they don't have power for street lights, they turned the damn power plant into a discotheque!) Finding the place wasn't easy but we happened upon some poor lost German kids (19yr olds? maybe in a few months...) and together, the 6 of us found this blue, pulsing, thumping monster in the blackness of the night.
it. was. beautiful.
Obstacle two was the line. Chalked full of dudes and moving slow but steady. At the front were two blokes: the stout guy in the leather and tattoo face; Also in leather. The first thing i notice is stout guy is only letting in about 50% of the men. No debate: he says something (in German) and they walk away. This is bad, and i've never even BEEN to a club with a door policy like this but we have an ace: our new, young German friends are 3 (very cute) girls and 1 (well dressed) guy. Taken as a whole, we're still a beneficial guy/girl ratio. I consider this plan and before i can act, our new friends are up to leather-man and wha...?
Our new friends have been rejected. Again, 2 or 3 words, the group looks at each other and away they go, into the industrial darkness. 3 girls + 1 guy = no entrance?
Us? We totally did NOT know those losers.
Our turn at the door and leather guy waves us in! No German speaking necessary. But wait- Tattoo face, he doesn't like the look on my face. He waves us off towards the darkness of industrial fail... !!!! There's no point explaining the rest of the story because i myself don't really know what happened. There was some German, some English, some Germish and then we were inside the club.
Listen: I spent the first 60 minutes asking myself how this place could exist, the next 7 hours taking advantage of it, and all the time since wondering when I’ll be able to go back. International laws, both published and street, prevent me from telling you what i saw or what i did. Yet had i fully been prepared mentally for this hole in the fabric of sanity, the debauchery could have possibly been stretched even further. I will tell you there was more than enough dance floor, bar space, sound system, muscular shirtless men (massaging and making out with each other), goth girls (doing the same), couch space and dark cuby space for you to re-enact every scene from Requiem for a Dream, but with a more upbeat demeanor.
By 8am we (In my case, that includes, mind, body AND soul) had had enough and it was time to retire. Christ on a bike, it's bright outside. And i have to pee. Right there on that Wall.
Next step, figure out how to get home... Luckily the trains and buses work on the honor system because i had left my pass at home and walking was not in the cards. As we neared the apartment we had to 1) pick up some fresh baked goods so not to die and 2) pass by the two old guys that seem to be eternally sitting outside the corner cafe. Now, you don't need to speak the language to know when two old guys sitting outside a cafe are busting your balls. You just know. And they were. But in fairness, we looked probably rough and they were very jealous.
Sunday was a failed attempt at the zoo, an institution that simply does not keep the hours i keep. So instead we explored some of the northern side, including what was left of the wall and a bit of the history. Short version: Berlin has history. Look it up. We were tired.
Monday morning we returned the keys, packed our shit, cleaned the joint and did a little cross-atlantic hopping. Ever tried explaining on Monday when you're unshaven and wrecked at work, what kind of person goes to Berlin for the weekend? If they have to ask they will not understand. You better off spending your time looking for cheap airfare to Dublin.
Epilogue
Yet again, against all odds, we survived. The retelling here has been no small task and I planned to start and finish some time last week, but as always, life got in the way. Why did I write this damn thing? It might appear like a wordy attempt to pat myself on the back for a job well done but is actually a log to review in the future. In 2 or 22 years; days when my sharpnesses has left and my memory is dull around the edges and I've almost convinced myself that such adventures could never have happened, I might be inspired to adventure.
