OUR FIRST NIGHT IN BERLIN I went out with Katie, the German label’s A and R woman, to a pub called Die Ruine, in a bombed-out building near the Brandenburg Gate, never restored since the war. The second storey, roofless, crumbled upwards into the night sky, while in the tiny, one-roomed club itself, a trio of young women looked like they were falling asleep from terminal boredom.
I found myself staring and Katie nudged me. “They’re junkies,” she whispered. “Disgusting.”
Still, I stared. I felt like I was in the bar at the end of time. In those days, before reunification, West Berlin residents received subsidies from the state, hence, all sorts were attracted to the city by the lure of easy living. And heroin was as popular with artists and musicians as among street people, unlike in Canada. So, of course, were Colours.
The bartender’s name was Max; he wore a western shirt and a flowered tie. He sported slicked-back hair and a handlebar moustache, looking like a character in the Wenders film, The American Friend. There was a record player of elderly but good vintage, and Max played us Velvet Underground and early Rolling Stones. Everyone was dressed in black and very thin.
I watched an old gay derelict clean tables and empty ashtrays for a few minutes; Max pulled the man a pint in exchange for his trouble. He sat at a table alone after that, sipping beer, opening and eating a can of sardines with a clean fork he got out of his jacket pocket.
Katie and I were joined by one of her producer friends, but before we could be properly introduced a raven-haired woman extricated herself from the trio and offered to read our Tarot cards. Katie tried to get rid of her but she whined persistently, reeking of patchouli and layered in scarves. At last I gave in, making her promise that once she’d done my reading she’d leave us alone. Leni, for that was her name, agreed, laying out my hand after I’d shuffled. My question, which I didn’t share, was whether Rudy’s German tour would ensure greater success back home. In Canada to be famous you have to be famous somewhere else first.
Card fifteen, the Devil, came up. She asked me to re-shuffle, as if to want for me a kinder fate, but even when I did, there he was again, and the third time too. I thought Leni must be adept at sleight of hand, would promise to exorcize my devil for some large price, but instead she sighed, “What are you doing with him?”
I thought she knew I was Rudy’s girlfriend. I was smug enough about his small-time fame to assume bar gossip had already labelled us his for-the-moment prince-less entourage, and told her truthfully: “Even back in high school, his music spoke to me more than any poetry ever had. I even changed my name to the same name as the girl in my favourite song. When we finally met last year, I asked who Kim was and he told me she didn’t exist; he’d made her up. I said I’d changed my name to Kim because of the song and he said he’d hoped someone would do that, become Kim for him.”
I was so busy delivering my monologue I didn’t at first notice Leni staring as if I were a little mad, and Katie glancing from one to the other of us, suppressing giggles. I could have gone on, but I shut up. Scotch and jet lag, what can I say?
“Who are you talking about?” Leni asked.
“Rudy Mix, of course.”
She tossed her locks. “I’ve never heard of him. Does he play with Lou?”
Katie elbowed me, whispered, “She means Lou Reed. He lives here now.”
“I’ve met Lou,” Leni said. “I’ve read his cards. Here. Right at this table.”
Canadian that I was, I unashamedly glanced around the room to see if Lou was there, if I might have to call Rudy, get him to cab over, meet his maker. He’d thank me forever. But no Lou. Just his music pouring out of the speakers, changing us forever like the first time we’d heard it.
“Maybe he lied. Did you ever think of that?” Leni asked menacingly. “It would be a good way to get in your pants, yes? I bet you Kim is his first wife. It’s your Rudy who’s the devil, I see it now.” Leni tossed her hair again.
“But the devil doesn’t mean the devil personified,” I said, explaining Leni’s Tarot to her as if it was my profession and not hers. “It can mean addiction of the mind or body, any kind of enslavement.”
“Precisely.”
“I don’t even believe in the devil,” I said.
“No one said you had to,” Leni said. “But you agree with me there exists real evil in the world?”
“Of course.”
“Keep it symbolic then, if you prefer,” Leni said.
I stubbornly kept defending my boyfriend. “Rudy’s music is amazing. He’s not rich but he is by my standards; I’d never have gotten to Europe on my own. What’s devilish about any of that?”
“All the same,” she said, peering at the rest of the layout, reading a meaning there that was, even with my superficial knowledge of the cards, completely opaque. “I see coming enslavement of a kind.”
“How precise. You have real talent,” Katie’s friend sneered. I thought maybe he was trying to save face for our little group after I’d made us look like ingénues not knowing who they meant by Lou. Leni just shrugged him off, a piece of fluff, a beetle. Katie pushed several Deutschmarks in small denominations across the table, as if hoping once Leni had her money she’d find someone else to scam.
“He paid my airfare here,” I said.
Katie looked alarmed; she hadn’t thought I was taking this seriously. I hadn’t thought so either. Scotch and jet lag, I told myself again, call it a night and get some sleep.
“That’s worth your soul?”
“My soul isn’t in danger,” I pointed out, “it’s my self-respect.”
“How so?” Katie’s sneering friend asked.
“I’m a fan, for God’s sakes. I went backstage at a concert in Toronto and got him to autograph my programme. I gave him my number and he actually called. How pathetic is that?” I’d never seen myself as a groupie before then. I’d thought Rudy was in love too. “I should come up with an art of my own,” I continued, “not just turn myself into a character in one of his songs.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Katie said. “You’ll do something worthwhile one day—or not. Not everyone should feel they have to. What’s the point of it? And to be pretty and clever is more than most people ever get. Whether you worked for it or not you should enjoy what it brings you.”
Katie’s friend, whose name turned out to be Hans, agreed. “If a handsome young musician asked me to keep him company on his U.S. tour, you’d be sure I’d go. What if the chance only comes once?”
I nodded, trying to believe them. Leni reassembled her deck, wrapping it in a square of patterned blue silk with pretentious ritual. Katie and Hans rolled their eyes after she’d slunk off to another table to try her luck. The table was populated by regulars, not a rube like me among them, and she was waved away. Katie pointed and laughed at her as she sat down alone at the bar, nursing a glass of red wine and smoking; her friends had already left. Still, I said good-bye on our way out.
“It’s through the wall for you then,” she sighed with great import, and Katie laughed the entire taxi ride back to the hotel where she dropped me off.
I didn’t see much more of Berlin.
sss
Rudy hadn’t practised at all but he’d already scored some Purple. Of course I did a few lines with him, even though I was exhausted and more than a little drunk. I thought it was laced with something else, because when we disrobed I saw his penis had turned into a pretty blue candle. It looked like a regular candle, just blue, not one of those penis-shaped candles they have in sex shops, thank heavens.
Of course I lit it and turned off the lights. Instead of having sex, we watched for hours, his penis’s flame the only blue light in the dark room. Just before it burned to its end we blew it out together: one two three, blow.
I meant to go to sleep then, but Rudy asked, “Kim, are you ever afraid of going insane?”
“Yes,” I answered truthfully, “but not here, not now.”
“What do you mean?”
“It isn’t my time to go crazy yet,” I answered. “This is yours.” I didn’t know where the words came from. Blame it on the Purple.
And I was right too. The next day Rudy had to check out the club and run through a few songs with his band. I stayed in our room and slept. When he came home I wanted to go out for Schnitzel but he wanted to order from room service and do more of the new Purple. Somewhat reluctantly I agreed. I was here on his dime.
A brand new candle appeared almost immediately.
“Where are we, Kim?” Rudy asked. “Have we gone too far in this time?”
I have no idea where he got the Purple. I know he’d tried in Canada and hadn’t been able to get any; we mostly had Green there, not the same animal at all. Maybe Katie got it for him—I wouldn’t put it past her—or maybe he bumped into Lou on the street.
Who wouldn’t take beautiful, exclusive, scary new drugs given to them by Lou Reed? I would have, then. I took them from Rudy after all, not nearly so glamorous. I guess he was to me what Lou was to him; Rudy was my Lou. I have no one to blame but myself, that and my age; I was only twenty-two, if clever and sophisticated as Katie and Hans liked to point out.
Most of the time, I was pretty happy about my life, knowing, as Hans said, it would likely only come once. Only now and then did I fret I was a mere groupie as I had that night in Die Ruine, or that I’d wake at forty, lonely and alone, in need of a long stay in rehab.
Like what happened to Rudy.
To answer my question to Leni: Rudy’s little West German tour was the height of his fame. With the exception of “Fires Halfway,” his next album was awful, and the one after that bombed. His contract wasn’t renewed, but he still had habits, and they are harder to kick even than memories of failure. I only know this from hearsay, because after I flew home alone I never saw him again.
I went to fashion school and now design upscale maternity clothes and am successful enough at it for my standards, admittedly not high, but I have my health and work I love, and that is a life blessed. And if you remember the late seventies or early eighties, you weren’t there, but I didn’t forget Rudy, and there he was last week at a gallery opening, Rudy whom I hadn’t seen in years.
Rudy who? Everyone asked later as I tried to explain his career—he sells real estate now, or software or something—I’m afraid I’ve already forgotten. Fires Halfway was never more than a minor hit, but it’s the one that got people to know who I meant. It’s still in rotation. Its reputation has grown, if anything.
Isn’t that enough to get him a new contract, you ask?
Well, no. Because he didn’t actually write it.
Sometimes, I have to admit, I’m still pulled in by the past, by the hopeful love I felt for him that I wonder at now. Neither Rudy nor Lou died, neither there in 1982 in Berlin nor in the twenty years since, although not for lack of trying. And neither did I, or I wouldn’t be telling you my story. But enough people have paid the final price, including Serge, one of Rudy’s favourite drummers, who OD’d on heroin in a Paris hotel room. You’d think we’d all have seen enough by now, but it seems each new generation falls for the same dangerous lies, for the girl at the opening on Rudy’s arm couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, and her pupils were big as saucers.
“What’s with her?” I remember whispering.
“Orange,” he whispered back. “It’s so good. Want some? Remember Fan?”
Maybe he should have died.
sss
“Halfway there,” I muttered gloomily, watching his nightly candle. By the third night I felt seasoned, knew what to expect, almost tired of the inevitability.
The dead pull of Berlin. Out of time, out of space. I could stay here forever, I thought.
I could stay here forever
Counting down
And never get to zero
I could stay here forever
With you
Rudy and I wrote a song that week. It ended up making him enough to pay cash for his Toronto house. We were already split up when he next recorded and it didn’t occur to me to ask for a credit and he didn’t offer me one. It was Hans who tracked me down and told me I should threaten to sue. Which I did, and Rudy sent me a large cheque worth, indeed, half the royalties. I didn’t care about my name. He told me to buy rubber spike heels, thinking he was being cute, but at the time I was back in school and put it towards my loan.
sss
We indulged heavily in room service. We didn’t go out, unless he had a gig. His playing was less than memorable, but he looked beautiful. Giggling, we’d take a cab back to the hotel afterwards, refusing all invitations.
“We’ll hate each other before it’s over,” I said, thinking I already did, a little. But I couldn’t stop any more than him. Once the candles were over, we experimented with sex on the new Purple and discovered it was not just possible but fantastic, inexhaustibly compelling and inexhaustible every other way, until, at dawn, we’d both want to stop but seemingly couldn’t. Sleep, when it came, was always a welcome respite. I felt like we had hormones in an IV drip. It was almost embarrassing.
One night when I was alone I turned on the radio and heard the fire song we’d written together a few nights earlier and had been singing together every day, as we cried or laughed at our plight, or more likely, just made strange love again.
Of course that was impossible; Rudy hadn’t recorded it yet. The music was very beautiful. I wished I knew more of music so I could sing him the melody when he returned from seeing Lou (my euphemistic name for his Purple supplier, which I shared with him—he didn’t get the joke) and he could write it down, because it was far better than the one he’d written.
But the words were the same, word for word.
What is time? What is creativity?
I felt like we’d been sent out on a space probe, the two of us, to bring back the unearthly answers to those portentous questions, but who could survive that?
Still, waiting for him to come back, I tried to tap it out on the room’s piano, but I have little ear for music and I never got it right. When he eventually got back he said, “That’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard you play; it captures so perfectly our eerie trajectory.”
“It’s a quarter of the original, if that, and many notes misheard. It’s the melody to ‘Fires Halfway.’”
“‘Fires Halfway’ already has a different melody. What do you mean, the original?”
“This one’s better. I heard it on the radio.”
“You’re a technology-based Coleridge,” Rudy said. “I know you said you’d wanted to be Kim, and I said I’d be happy if you could, but now you’re pushing it.” Still he madly scribbled notes, and the lost portions he replaced with accessible poppy riffs, not nearly so frightening. It was a good collaboration, the one and only between ourselves and the Sirian extraterrestrials singing to me and only me from the radio. Or so I joked. Rudy winced. I could say things like that and still remember to pick up the dry cleaning; it was before Fan came. Rudy was concerned; he had a lighter grip that week than me. Kim, whom he’d conjured, strange wise beauty, was turning out to be a little more than he could handle.
“How was your meeting with Lou?” I asked.
“Not very productive. Possibly a good thing as I have to play tomorrow night.”
“They’ll love you,” I said. “I was going to go shopping with Katie to buy a dress. Want to go out? We haven’t been out for days, except for shows. I’m kind of glad you couldn’t get any more Purple.”
“Where is there to go? We’re past Pluto, Kim.”
“You’ll have to get back in time for your gig tomorrow.”
“Yes,” he sighed as if he didn’t like it much. “I could spit on them and they’d love me. Why do people worship celebrities?”
“I don’t know,” I said, wondering whether he was ready to hear me say he wasn’t much of a celebrity compared to Lou but thinking I’d wait.
“Where is there to go? We’re past Pluto, Kim,” he said again. “And the bars have closed.”
“Die Ruine’s private and open all night.”
“You’re not kidding.” Rudy laughed a little bitterly and took two dry-cleaned silk jackets off their hangers: one black, one mauve. At least the cuts were different.
sss
A blonde with dark circles under her eyes told us she loved Rudy’s song about Kim and introduced herself as Fan. I recognized her as part of Leni’s group from the first night and when she asked us to join her we agreed; the place was standing room only. The three of us drank rye, which is odd as I generally hate it. We were glum and silent, maybe because of the whiskey.
I went to the bathroom; the atmosphere at our table was so claustrophobic I had to escape. There was a hole high in the crumbled wall. I stood on the toilet and looked through, saw two stars like eyes looking back at me, the eyes of God or perhaps the Devil as the tarot reader had said. One of them must be Sirius, I thought. My home planet. I half believed it; we were that far gone. It was an interstellar distance Rudy would have to take on stage tomorrow night but I figured it was almost a requirement in his profession. Lou had likely played from much farther out in space. I got back and told Fan and Rudy.
“There’s a dark twin to the Dog Star,” Fan said. “Want to go?”
“That’s where we’ve been the last week, since we arrived,” I replied.
“Ah. You must mean you have some of the new Purple. I’d like to join you,” she said.
“We’re lonely explorers. The arduousness of our journey through uncharted territory has caused us to go from love to hate in less than a week,” Rudy said.
It was true I wanted more than anything to get away from him; the problem was Purple impelled us toward one another: tiny electric trains about to crash, derail, explode. It always seemed worth it until afterwards. When Fan reached over and fondled Rudy’s thigh, I was thrilled at the possibility of dumping him off on her but she had other plans for the three of us.
sss
Two days later, waking up, curtains pulled against the glare, I glanced at my watch.
“Shit,” I said, noticing the date, “we have three hours to catch our plane.”
“You go,” Rudy said, reaching over and cupping Fan’s breast in his hand. “I think I am going to stay here, with Fan.”
She nodded solemnly, extricated herself from his fondling, leaned over and submerged his unlit cock in her small mouth. Her long blonde hair veiled the act decoratively.
I put a few things into a suitcase, feeling neither jealousy nor even curiosity. I didn’t remember when she’d arrived, or why, and wasn’t sure I cared.
“Don’t forget this,” Rudy said, reaching over to the night table to pick up a silver choker we’d bought in an expensive jewellery shop on the Ku’Damm.
“Oh thanks, I almost did forget it.” I popped it into the suitcase. What had we been doing for the last forty-eight hours? The memories came, a little at a time. More or less what Rudy and me had been up to, only there’d been three of us.
“Oh no,” Fan said, “you should wear it.” She got up, having finished her job, and clasped the choker behind my neck. “Zo baby, you don’t think you will stay here with us?”
“No.”
“Why not? You find me beautiful, no? You seem to like it with a girl. I could teach you…”
I looked from her to Rudy, a statue in repose. A naked prince. A young lion. Purple did little for my vocabulary. It had seemed a good thing, once. “I think maybe I have had enough of beauty for awhile, you know?”
“Ah,” Fan said, “I never have enough of beauty. Never never never.”
“I know,” I said. “That’s why you’re a junkie and I’m not.”
She laughed instead of taking offence, whispered in my ear. “I sense that you are a little bit tired of him and I understand. I have a girlfriend, Lucerne, who would be only too happy to take him off our hands. The thing is, we would have to take the credit card. You made him put it in your name too, didn’t you?”
“No.”
“But you can make his signature, yes? A girl could be a Rudy.”
“His name’s Rudolph,” I said, giving away his worst secret.
She sighed. “No good. How much cash then? And of course, we could sell the dog collar for quite a bit, that is unless you’re very fond of it.” She was forgetting to lower her voice but Rudy didn’t seem to hear, or maybe he didn’t care.
“Well, I’m thinking it will make a great memento of this bizarre chapter.”
“What? I do not always understand your Canadian English. I lived for a time in London but it is a much different accent.”
“Not worth repeating.”
“Between two women there is always all the time in the world.”
“It’s not personal.”
Fan wasn’t offended. In retrospect I’m not surprised. It was her job, after all, to understand such things. “You get sick even of the best sweets if you eat too many,” she said by way of analysis. “Now when we do Purple it no longer fulfils each desire like liquid light.”
“Did you write that down?” I asked Rudy. He didn’t answer, paging through a magazine.
“I know,” Fan continued, packing her own little patent leather case, “we get bored. Too much of the same is not good. There are many things I could teach you. Many different and new games you have not experienced before. We play to amuse ourselves.”
“Like dolphins,” I said, “or maybe dogs.”
She didn’t hear my sarcastic undertone, beamed widely. “Genau! Dolphins’ sexuality is so spiritual, no? Like us.”
I had to admit it had occasionally felt like that, playing like dolphins in a flooded old hotel room, sporting a baby grand and drawn mauve curtains. What is it about mauve? It was the only colour I wore then, if I wasn’t wearing black.
Fan took off one of her many scarves and pulled it tightly around my breasts. I moaned, wondering whether dolphins ever moaned. “Lie down,” she whispered. “Just once more.”
I complied.
Lying there, my eyes closed, I heard her charge Rudy two hundred and fifty dollars. “American,” she whined. I heard her get up and fish through the wallet he’d left on the night table. “What is this? Don’t tell me you don’t have any American?”
My eyes slammed open. “You’re paying for this?”
“Well, it’s actually the first I’ve heard of it.”
“Not true. You agreed to pay me before I came up, and you did pay me half last night, remember?” She winked at me. “It’s been amazing. Think of it this way, it’s half my regular rate because Ich finde sie beide sehr cool, very beautiful. Beauty always pays a lower price, in all things.”
Fan and her damn beauty obsession. She was slated for a lot of face lifts some year, that was for sure.
“Are you really going to go?” Rudy asked, looking forlorn. I covered him with a sheet.
“Get a grip, kid, you need it. Although I have to say it’s been a ball. If a very strange ball, doesn’t bounce like other balls, obeys physics from another dimension.”
“It’s not my fault, I didn’t know. I thought she was a groovy pick-up, just like you did.”
I figured him for a liar. And what was wrong with paying a groovy pick-up? Fan had a plane to catch, just like I did, only hers was next week and to Paris.
Still haven’t been to Paris.
“You wouldn’t have to pay if it was just you,” she whispered, lasciviously. Rudy glowered at her, overhearing. “We could make a lot of money. We could go anywhere, travel the world. I have great connections.”
“I’ll bet.” Watching her pack scarves. Would she wash them out in tonight’s hotel room? Where did she live, and with whom? Do women like Fan “live” anywhere? Do they have kitchens, or only restaurants? I’d buy her drinks and ask about her life but I knew I wouldn’t get to hear her stories unless I joined in them. You hear the best gossip only when you give people something to gossip about. I’d have to earn her trust, she wouldn’t give it away for free.
“Well, if you gotta go, go in style.” She gave me her black lace shirt to wear, a rubber miniskirt, and net stockings. They fit perfectly.
“I guess you’ll be wearing my jeans and T-shirt out,” I said, unzipping my suitcase to dig out clothes for her.
She took them and held them up against her long slim body, delighted. “They are a very nice jeans and T-shirt. They will remember you me always.”
“Cool,” I said and kissed her briefly on those soft soft lips. “Take care. Don’t get hurt. There’s some crazy people out there, some bad bad drugs.”
She smiled, so happy I stopped to think she might be endangering herself. “I am the craziest,” she said. “Is no one badder than me.” She laughed delightedly, including me in her big secret, the one she depended on to keep her safe from harm. I hoped it would, even if she was the devil.
“No doubt,” I said, glancing at Rudy before I left. He was asleep. Would they spend another few days together, Fan steadily emptying his wallet of traveller’s checks, or was it over between them too? Who knew, and more importantly, who really cared?
sss
Katie drove me to the airport, shrugged when I told her Rudy had changed his flight, would be staying on with Fan. When we got to Tegel, I asked whether she’d supplied the Purple. Maybe there’d been a lot I’d missed. Maybe Fan and Katie had cooked it all up together, right from the beginning. She didn’t reply, not really, and who could blame her? Katie was way too slick to ever implicate herself; in that way she and Fan were of a type. Instead she asked, “What’s with the clothes?” Giving me the once over.
“I’ve been in Berlin,” I said. “What do you think?”
“Did you go to the other side?”
“Yes.”
“What was it like?” Katie asked.
“Strange. But good to see it, I guess. To know what’s there.”
“But you wouldn’t want to live there, right?”
“No,” I said. “But then, that’s what everyone from this side says, don’t they?”
She nodded, smiling. “The new song. No one will ever forget it.”