In the Bookshop

from "Berlin Asylum"

“Carl!” Max exclaimed, in his fatherly, patrician British accent, as he looked away from the shelf he was assiduously stacking on his knees. “You’re back!”

“Back?” Carl mumbled, catching his breath, and undoing his scarf. “I never left.”

“You’ve been gone for quite some time,” Thornton told him. “Were you sick?”

“Kind of,” Carl said, -- “sick of life.”

“Oh, well, you know, we all are,” Max joshed. “But you didn’t get away for the holidays to see the family?”

“Well, Max, I wanted to see them—but I don’t know if they’re ready to see me.”

He looked around the shop. Yup, he thought, same old shit. Julian parked in a corner near the window and drunk off his ass; Thornton, seated right next to him, well on his way to being drunk off his ass, too—yet trying to hold up his Yale façade of sophistication and erudition. And there was that tall, fat white guy with wire-rimmed glasses, sorting books on the tables near Max’s desk, who, upon seeing Carl, suddenly stopped, and started staring at him. The tall guy frowned, then shook his head.

“I didn’t feel like dealing with Homeland Security, Max,” Carl blurted out. “Didn’t feel like taking off my shoes and belt and socks and doing all that shit—it’s just like Israel.”

“I see,” Max said, with a weary, matter-of-fact sigh.

What had just occurred was a strange phenomenon. For Max Rubens, the proprietor of Berlin’s most notorious English bookshop had the unsettling habit of ignoring most everyone who stampeded through its loud, jangling doorway. In fact the more he knew you, the more he was disinclined to acknowledge your presence. So this sudden acknowledgement was a reassurance to Carl that Baldwin’s Bookshop was still—in spite of its growing popularity with the hipster crowd—his place.

The shop was on a cozy side street between Solm- and Zossener Strasse. Most of the people who lived within the vicinity were Turkish, but recently, things had changed with the overflow of moneyed creeps from Germany’s more outlandish provinces. Greeks, Poles, Russians, Italians, Vietnamese, even a small number of Cameroonians were here, too. Yuppie overflow from Prenzlauer Berg (unfortunately) rubbed elbows with the scruffy Ossis who had leaked into the neighborhood. Alongside the noisy American tourists, these were the people you mostly saw at the vicinity of Solmstrasse and Bergmann- and Riemannstrasse, flitting from café terrace to café terrace or drifting in and out of the newly opened boutiques, or the Lidl at the corner further down at Zossener Strasse, or the Rossmann’s next to the Lebanese-owned flea markets (where Ted bought his 78s), their eyes picking idly at the postcard racks outside their buildings or their fingers picking at their sushi or döner sandwiches and their lips mouthing inanities that seemed to emanate from the bottom of their bowels. Few of them were interested in English things. Only young student types, older English-speaking tourists, or some slightly skanky, black-clad young boys or girls in their twenties ever bothered to browse the enormous rows of used English books that Baldwin’s offered; everyone else stayed away.

“But,” Thornton then asked, curiously enough, “did anyone ever fuck with you—for being Jewish?”

There was a pause, whereupon the fat guy, Julian and some other guy exchanged quizzical glances. Max shrugged, then looked up at the ceiling, crinkling his nose. “No, no, actually, they’ve been quite nice to me here. If they have fucked with me, it must have been so subtle I hardly ever noticed. Not that such things are even worth noting, Thornton. They’ve never thrown any bricks through my window, or drawn things on them or such foolishness like that—heavens, no, if I wanted that sort of thing I would have stayed in London.”

“I see,” Thornton said.

“So,” Max then added, looking at Carl, stifling an impulse to giggle, “how’s the wife?”

“What do you mean?” Carl said.

At this point the fat guy laughed, and then it dawned on Carl who he really was. It was Al Mouton. The last time Carl had seen him he had a full head of hair and didn’t wear glasses, and wasn’t fat. He also dressed a hell of a lot sportier to boot. Now he was a six-foot-two, pot-bellied, sloppily-dressed, balding ex-Marine with a grandmotherly air. He seemed highly insecure as he looked up smirking at Carl while Thornton broke out into undisguised laughter; Julian grinned sarcastically, and then Carl heard a voice echoing from the back room—“hanging? Hanging in what? A fucking bordello?”

“Roger, please,” Al then shouted, “let’s be nice to Carl. We all know his wife is an absolute bitch!”

“Al,” he snorted, “I don’t have a wife. You must have me confused with Ted, or somebody else, because I’ve never been married to anyone.”

“Oh,” he then clucked, “well, I’m sorry. I thought Ted was the one having an affair with Paula Krauss and you were marrying her.”

“You got it backwards,” he said, blandly. “We were screwing around in the past but broke up.”

“Oh,” Al then said, looking rather disappointed. “Why did you two break up?”

“She’s disgusting,” Carl carped, sarcastically. “Well, no. I don’t hate the woman, I just can’t live with her, that’s all.”

“Or maybe you can’t live without her,” Thornton then teased, paternalistically. “Is that what you’re really saying?”

“No,” Carl shot. “This is fucking Berlin, kid, not Boston. I can get pussy here.”

“Yeah, but Paula always struck me as being more like a transsexual. Did she smell kind of musky to you?” Al joshed.

Carl comically blew air out of his teeth. “No,” he said. “Only between her legs.”

Everyone in the room erupted into raucous laughter.

A few more moments and Al Mouton would have his jacket on, heading out the door. Al loved basking in the limelight of whatever milieu he found himself in, Baldwin’s included; it wasn’t Hollywood, but it was sufficient. And like every other limelighter, he couldn’t tolerate being pushed out of any conversation. So it wasn’t unusual for him to up and quit whenever he felt himself marginalized—that is, whenever the topic veered away from Paula Krauss, or homosexuals, or Maude (Max’s German girlfriend, still blissfully unaware that Max was coming out of the closet). His replacement came in about an hour—Berndt, a six-six, horn-rimmed, red-haired, dour-faced bloke wearing a beat-up, black leather jacket of unknown age. Berndt was the funniest German alive, or at least Carl thought he was; it was always a treat to watch him interact with everyone, especially Julian. Watching the two of them go at it—especially when drunk—was better than a TV sitcom. “Oh, Carl,” Berndt said, just like that, rather coldly, as if he hadn’t been away a few minutes—as if they hadn’t had their own blow-ups between themselves in the past, some of them legendary. “I suppose you heard the good news, haven’t you? Well, it isn’t really good news—Ted’s in the nut-haus.”

Carl frowned. “What?”

“Oh, yes, it’s true, Ted just flipped his fucking wig. Totally, abso-fuckeeng-lutely.”

He kept looking askance at everyone, not wanting to believe what was obviously totally believable, and possibly real. That Ted, in his effort to write the next Great American Novel, the book that would surpass his masterpiece “American Manchild” (which won him the National Book Award)—and simultaneously dealing with Paula’s bullshit, had pushed him off the deep end. The “news” truly convinced Carl that he needed to have an escape plan. Not long ago, he’d come dangerously close to punching an unusually rude cashier in the face at one of those tobacconists’ shops that sell magazines and newspapers. The reason? No comment, Carl thought—she was just being what she was, a fucking Berliner.

“Man, Berndt, Ted is not in a fuckin’ nuthouse, okay?” Julian snorted…. “We just saw the motherfucker go downstairs, Berndt. Stop exaggerating.”

“So,” Berndt said, “you haven’t heard, ja?”

“What? Did he kill somebody?”

“Tried to. Some fuckeeng Brazeelean prostitute he keeps running after, these mosserfuckers he meets at Slumberland or Abraxas, all these fat, dirty German sluts—they are all beneath him, especially this fucking prostitute—“

“Berndt,” Max broke in, with a frown…. “Please. It wasn’t quite like that a-tall. Teddy just had a really, incredibly NASTY fight with his wife at a Kaiser’s or Lidl—I’m sure it was Lidl—because his fucking wife screamed at this Turkish lady over—I mean, absolutely nothing. I mean, it wasn’t racial, or anything, although Paula would usually use that as an excuse—she seems to see Nazis in every fucking corner and hiding behind every bush in Berlin—“

“Especially West Berlin,” Carl said…

“Of course,” Max continued…. “And the very few times she’s even bothered to come in this place have been a disaster. Always completely drunk, completely—I mean, bloody hell, shouting at the very top of her lungs about how she just loves everybody in here—and just before starting a fight—I mean, God, how bloody awful. Have you actually met Ted’s wife?”

“No,” Berndt shot, dryly.

“I guess that’s a good thing,” Max drooled.

Carl watched Max at work; he could not help but note the changes that Berlin had brought in the seven years he had known him….or, for that matter, how much more animated, light-hearted and carefree everyone’s face, his own included, seemed those few years ago when they first met each other, when Berlin seemed a less complicated place. As the months and years wore on, Max’s mug—imperceptibly at first, then quite perceptibly—started getting more craggy, more lined; he started looking more harried and subsequently, as the tourists began to sniff out Baldwin’s, more curmudgeonly. The notorious Friday Night Dinners, which were fun at first, became increasingly impersonal and chaotic as tourists began to drop by just to have a taste of “bohemia”; the dishes of course began piling higher and higher, some even up to the ceiling; one night, after a huge pile of hundreds of dirty dishes crashed to the floor and broke, Max simply stopped cleaning them—some of these dishes often turned up years later, among the hundreds of thousands of books on the shelves, covered with mold that looked like a Basquiat nightmare. But the film nights had to continue; they were the thing that kept everything going, and for these events, of course, one needed food, food that Max had simply gotten sick of preparing. So he hired a succession of assistants, of whom Berndt was—actually—the unofficial one. The real assistant, Roger Brown, was nowhere to be found when one needed him, even though he lived just across the all from Max for years.

Yes, Carl sensed, Roger is actually in this shop—impossible for him not to be otherwise. Baldwin’s is his life-blood; he feasts on the thing as if he were a tick. And here he came, breathing through his nose, stumbling cockily past the little kitchen to his left and the highly decorated and postered bathroom to his right, in between which lay, of course, more books. He was half in rags and half in an expensive “bespoke” jacket from Christian Dior, the type where the buttons on the sleeve have detachable loops and aren’t just sewed on. “That,” he was fond of saying about it, proudly holding out his arm, “is a real fucking jacket. Not like this other shit you usually get around this godamn place.” Not quite drunk, and noting their sudden silence and the sounds of beer being swilled into their gullets from half-empty bottles, he looked around to Carl, and then to Max and Berndt—well, actually, mostly to Max, since he is English, after all—and said, right out of the blue, cocking his eye at Carl, “Max?”

“What, Roger?”

“Are you a bloody racist or what? Is Baldwin’s becoming a place for these sort of people—?”

Carl felt his stomach tighten when Roger uttered those words, but in a strangely amused way….Berndt rolled his eyes to the ceiling and ran his fingers along his face…. “Which sort of people, Roger?”

“Black people,” Julian spouted. “Niggers.”

“Of course, they’re niggers. What else would they be?”

Carl erupted into laughter. “Hello mate,” he said, looking at Carl. “So,” Carl said, “How’s it?”

“Much the same,” he says. “Still mucking about this old dump and still bloody hating it. And you? Have you found a place—I mean, a better place than that old shitheap?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, Jesus—I really feel sorry for you, mate, that you actually have to put up with the likes of his wife, God, what an ogre. You’d have to kill me first before getting my body anywhere near that thing!”

Carl glanced idly over at Berndt and saw Berndt scowling at him. Well, actually, he wasn’t scowling at Carl: he was scowling at Roger. Berndt had one of those indescribably brutally cold looks that only Germans seem capable of, the kind of look that says, “I want to disembowel you with my fingernails.” “Roger,” Berndt then clipped, icily, “you always have to say something incredibly fucking stupid whenever you come in here, don’t you?”

Roger then looks over at Berndt when a puzzled look on his mummified, half-pickled, plucked face. “What?”

“You are always talking the most incredibly insensitive, stupid, patronizing, racist bullshit whenever you walk in here,” Berndt spat, angrily.

“Oh, that? About this place suddenly getting a bit dark—Honestly, mate, nobody gives a shit about it, it wasn’t any big deal—“

“Oh yes, it is, Roger, it is a fucking big deal, you’re always talking this fucking bullshit, and you think you are funny, but you are not—“

“Comoooon, Berndt,” Julian then exclaimed, thrusting his beer out at Berndt, “fuck that shit. Roger’s my boy. He just loves to push people’s buttons for kicks. You know, the typical upper-class English cad. But that nigga all right.” Roger then laughed; it was clear he was enjoying all this shit. “Yeah, that’s right.” Julian then wound his arm around Roger’s impossibly skinny neck and shook the bony bastard so hard it seemed he’d crack in two. “Roger Thomas is our favorite honkie. Leave ‘im alone.”

“Oh, entschuldegun, my mistake, Julian. You two have a little love affair going on, ja? One stupid black motherfucker and an even more stupid, broken-down white motherfucker from England!”

“Berndt, Berndt, don’t trouble yourself,” Thornton then protested. “He’s—“

“Ideally, he should be doing his go-damn work here, rather than drinking,” Max then said, softly, after Roger stumbled back into the room where he came from—that is, the bathroom, where, so it sounded, he was opening up the toilet lid and groaning; he cursed quietly. “But yeah, that Roger certainly does add to the overall character of this bookshop, so I wouldn’t just throw him out—“

“Oh, yes, Max, everything would be just fucking dandy if I didn’t have to do this asshole’s dirty work—just because he drags his fucking lazy Monty Python ass in here all day and does nothing, I mean absolutely NOTHING but drink and fucking insult people, ja? And brag about how he thinks he went to Oxford, or owned a fancy nightclub in London or fought on the barricades in Paris in ‘68 because he fucking dreamed all that shit up one night while strung out on dope—no fuckeeng way, I’m sorry! This man is so fucked in the head, he can’t even tell his real experiences from the bullshit he gets off the internet!”

“Huh,” Carl then thought, aloud, “that sounds like somebody I know.” Thornton suddenly caught on to what he was thinking of; his face broke out into an unconscious grin.

Down in the basement, an even larger number of books stacked on wall-to-wall shelves. Old photographs of people were stuck on the walls beside them. It was dank and musty, but Ted felt relieved: the basement was like a womb to him, a safe haven not only from the chaos and confusion of the streets, but the bookshop itself.

He was sitting at a table, surrounded by endless sheets of paper, some blank, but most written. He had just gotten a haircut, so his black, lightly-greyed hair faded very neatly into the skin just above his ears. His large, round head reminded Carl, as did his clipped, neat moustache, of Ralph Ellison. Skin shading from dark-mahogany to dark-chocolate. His bright-pink bottom lip sprouted a tuft of hair, the heavy-hooded eyes full of bemusement and barely hidden meanness. He wasn’t that good-looking. And the way he dressed—it was so funny, how he managed to make himself look: so tastefully attired, and yet—at the same time, in his dark-ochre, red-and-brown lined wool sport coat, dark-brown button-down cotton shirt, light brown pleated corduroys, black-brown socks decorated with concentric light-green circles, and tan Oxfords—so utterly sloppy. How gentlemanly he could be, when he looked up from his work and acknowledged you….and yet, upon speaking, so unbelievably coarse. The man was a fucking paradox.

“Man,” Ted said, dropping his ball-point pen on some sheets of paper that looked like tax forms, “what the fuck is Berndt getting all angry about now?”

Carl couldn’t help but flash a nervous smile when he told him, the incident, no matter how funny, leaving a slightly unpleasant taste in his mouth: “niggers,” even coming from a so-called friend, was still a fighting word. Ted, however, laughed out loud, his patrician manners suddenly deserting him. “That fool,” Ted giggled. “Yeah. I think that motherfucker loves getting his ass kicked—he got body-slammed in a café on Bergmannstrase. Right out here, up the street somewhere. It was at the Bar-Nous, next to the laundry mat. I mean, really. And the cat doesn’t even weigh eighty pounds.”

“It’s crazy,” Carl said.

“How’s Paula?” Ted then broke in, all of a sudden.

“I don’t know,” he said, bluntly. He wanted to say that he didn’t care—of course, he didn’t, yet he did. “She called me and said she’s been looking for you all day.”

Ted sighed, and sucked his teeth. “I’ll bet she has,” he groaned. “Actually, I’ve been trying to call that fool bitch. But she refuses to pick up her handy OR the goddamn house phone. I’ve even left messages that don’t get answered. I swear—she will NOT pick up the phone. This bitch just hides everything.”

Ted sighed again, raised his eyebrows exasperatedly, while he idly toyed with his pen. He then tossed the pen idly across the sheets of paper on the marble-topped table and yawned, then attempted to stand up from his chair. In doing so, he almost fell into the edge of another marble-topped table cluttered with stacks of unwashed plates, forks, knives and other shit. Wow, he thought—not a very dignified appearance for one of the world’s leading literary lights…

“Julian’s upstairs,” he said, rather disbelieving, more to keep the conversation going, to conceal his embarrassment. “I know,” Ted answered. “He can stay up there, too, sorry motherfucker. No—Julian’s cool. He’s okay. Quite a decent fellow. He just likes—I mean, the guy insists on making Negroes look, well, you know—stupid.”

Oh, Jesus, he thought—that word again. Not stupid, which was debatable, anyway—but Negro. Ted’s own usage of the word as a forty-eight year old African-American from New York had Carl stumped. He had used it more than once, and not just when drunk, or high….Carl had wanted to ask him, and indeed he was on the verge of asking Ted about his use of that outdated word (the last time Carl Thompson was referred to as “Negro” was on his birth certificate), but he restrained himself. His attentions floated away from Ted’s strange talk and towards the mass of papers he had on the table, of which the tax forms were just a few—the rest were manuscripts for articles, and damned if his eyes did not come across a review of a music CD for one of his former mainstay publications—Down Beat.

Carl suddenly felt affronted. The feeling was unwilled, but he could not help but feel the sting—like this guy, who had won a National Book Award, who once had a book on the New York Times bestseller list, had college tenure and all that, was stealing the bread out of his mouth. All of a sudden the feeling of ease began to slowly slip away from him. It was not going to get better.

Ted clumsily wobbled over to the bottles of wine carefully stocked on wine shelves by an enormous stack of books. In fact the walls were lined from the ceiling to the floor with them. Crime novels occupied one side of the basement wall, and science fiction the other. Max talked every so often of expanding into another section entirely—perhaps even another floor—of just sci-fi or crime novels, since he’d just received an incredible windfall in an entire warehouse full of old English books from a store that had bellied up in London. The astronomical cost of transporting the stuff here was not a problem, Ted explained to him, since Max—all appearances notwithstanding—was a fucking multi-millionaire. Carl did not believe him when he said so but Ted took a seat and broke it down. “He owns a home in London,” Ted explained. “Still don’t believe me? You didn’t hear me right—the cat OWNS a HOME in LONDON.”

“So what if he does?” Carl asked, naively. Ted gave off a disbelieving snort… “Jesus, man, where the fuck have YOU been—Mister ‘I’ve-travelled-the-whole-goddamn-world’? London? Just think for a moment. London is the most expensive goddamn city in the world. Renting a little shithole of an apartment there, a third of what Paula and I have, is gonna run you upwards to 2000 pounds a month. That’s almost four thousand dollars, Carl. And yet what’s-his-face has got a HOME, not an apartment, but a motherfucking HOUSE in London. Now, you tell me that the motherfucker ain’t sittin’ on a big pile of gold. I’m not exaggerating. When I was last in that goddamned place, I shit you not, Carl, I ran through three hundred dollars just buying post cards, light meals and a few of the barest goddamn necessities. No wonder the fucking British are here….I don’t blame them. You can’t even breathe in a place like that—“

Ted grabbed two bottles of sherry from off the shelves. “I hope Roger doesn’t go ballistic when he sees me dipping into his lifetime supply,” he joshed, coming back to the table, almost licking his lips in anticipation of the juice sloshing around inside the dark-green, elegantly white-labelled bottles. He set the bottles down in the middle of his morass of papers (doomed, presumably, to wind up unfinished) and then went towards the fridge looking for a bottle-opener when he then paused, frowned, rubbed his hairy chin between thumb and forefinger and muttered, “Actually, no—put those bottles back, I won’t be needing them. Get me the schnapps. No, fuck that—give me the Bailey’s, I just found some bourbon vanilla ice cream in the fridge!”

Absentmindedly Carl glimpsed the jumble of papers lying on the marble table-top. He didn’t know why he overlooked them, but he saw it now: they were quite dirty, flecked with coffee stains, foot tracks, alcoholic spittle—is that just red wine or is it semi-regurgitated blood, he asked himself, then quickly forgot about it. The mobile phone ringing piano chords on the marble table-top silenced his thoughts, anyway. “Shit,” snorted Ted, who quickly hurried over to the table with a carton of vanilla ice cream in his left hand. “It’s Paula.” Exasperation written all over his face, he opened the phone. “She’s called me three times,” he then told me, softly, while placing it to his ear. “Yes, dear?”

Carl heard Paula’s ordinarily pleasant contralto reduced to a nasal rasp on the handy phone. She sounded furious. Ted remained nonchalant, trying to get a word in while his left hand still clutched the ice cream in anticipation of a short, curt phone conversation. But then he abruptly dropped the ice cream on the piles of paper and then moved over towards a corner and started getting increasingly agitated. He could not get a word in to explain anything to her about his situation, whatever that was; he kept looking back at the ice cream, then at Carl, then his papers, the Bailey’s sitting on top of the shelf of books nearby and then finally, in exasperation, he spat, “look, goddammit, why the hell don’t you just take a chill pill? Everything’s cool, baby. No, Carl is not there with me. Yeah…I know…Yeah, right. Nobody is having orgies behind your back or no stupid shit like that, okay? Ok—…Paula? Paula...Paula, listen to me—I have to make—I have to make a fucking living like everybody else in this fucking town—“

“—Who exactly is making a living here in Berlin, Teddy Barnes?—” Carl managed to catch that roaring out of the cell phone, it was so loud. “Please tell me, baby, ‘cause I don’t see it!”

“I have to make a living, okay? And that’s why I’m here. ‘Cause I can write a whole lot better here than at home listening to you. Okay? Thank you! Obrigado!”

And with that, he snapped his phone shut. “Bitch,” he spat, tossing his phone across the morass of papers on the table-top. “Now I can see why you broke up with the motherfucker. I don’t blame you—sometimes. She can be a real pain….and as for that ‘Humboldt’ shit—is she still a student? You tell me.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “She must skip class a lot….”

Carl suddenly noticed a deadly familiar face. Well, not that familiar: he had been seeing this face so often in his Berlin past but hadn’t for the past four years. Ordinarily a tall, bony, pale, red-haired square named Marion, he found myself confronted with someone entirely different—someone that was, paradoxically, the exact same person. And it was shocking. He had not ever expected to see her again. Marion had never liked Berlin, especially German women; she was always ragging on the local chicks as if they were so much trash, and thought they were all half-crazed dope-addicted sex maniacs. And she had steadfastly avoided learning the language, knowing full well that she would never stay in such a depressing, hopelessly “white” place such as Berlin. Carl knew Marion, knew she had grown up in Nebraska and wanted subsequently to surround herself with as much color and creativity and excitement as possible—anything, she said, as long as it was black, brown, yellow, red, or beige. Nairobi, Marrakech, Bangkok, Benares, Peru, yes—Berlin? No, no, I’ll just keep on moving, thank you.

All of which made her reappearance here so much more bewildering—and still more so because, as she put it in her rather awkward, high-pitched voice, she was here to stay.

Marion fell into his arms like a sack of potatoes. How unfortunate, he thought. Unfortunate, because she had gone from being a super-square dropout from Brigham Young U. to being a solid, hardcore punk, with (as far as he knew) nothing else betwixt; from having a face as blank and stolid as a sheet of typing paper to one so lined from unspoken personal excesses (or perhaps from struggle) that she looked like a straight-up junkie. And not only that, she was high. Marion was never intoxicated. Not that the other extreme was great—but something about this he found disturbing…After tearing away from me she spotted Ted, who greeted her as if she was his long-lost sister, his normal light baritone tearing up to a high near-falsetto tenor upon seeing her black-leather clad, emaciated form. Marion literally draped herself around Ted like a raggedy white shawl on the back of a grizzly black bear.

“I just got back from Tanzania,” Marion suddenly spouted. “Oh, it was so lovely there, so marvellous! You really, really ought to go, Ted, I think it would do you a world of good!”

“Why? Because I’m—“

“No, not just because you’re black,” Marion suddenly cut in—mercifully, before Ted used that idiotic, more elegantly sanitized version of the N-word again. “There’s just so much more life, more excitement and energy there than it is here!”

“Shit, baby, I don’t need to go that far for no damn energy. I’m not a world traveller like you and Carl. Just a hop and a skip across the railroad tracks, to Italy or Greece will suit me just fine….” Yeah, right, Carl thought, sarcastically. More like Switzerland or Denmark, or Belgium. A surprising number of white expats here had been to Africa. It was embarrassing and maybe a little humiliating for him, whose financial difficulties prevented him from going any farther than Tunisia. Ted, on the other hand, had tens of thousands of dollars on him, maybe hundreds of thousands, and yet he’d never go anywhere else but to the most white-bread Western nations, or, if he were feeling adventurous, some goofy-ass Eastern European countries like Romania, mostly to cop some cheap white pussy. But…

“Carl, have you found a new place?” Marion suddenly asked.

There was a pause, at which time Carl attempted to gather up his thoughts for a few seconds. Ted raised a brow. “No,” he said, wheeling his head towards her. “He hasn’t. But I’m in Friedrichshain, actually. The neighbourhood is shit, but the flat’s just gorgeous. Over 180 square meters, so, you know, I don’t give a shit if it’s within spitting distance of some hard-core neo-Nazi thugs—I’ve dealt with much worse back home—“

“Yeah,” Marion laughed, “but you’re still with Paula, aren’t you? God! How can you stand that crazy bitch!? Everybody’s seen what an out-and-out cunt this woman is—“

“I know, Marion, but I can’t help myself—“

“Oh, bullshit, Ted. A big grown-ass man like you—“

“Marion, I’m serious, if it wasn’t for my Jones I’d go with you. I just—“

“A Jones? What’s a Jones?”

“An addiction, baby.”

“Oh, I can see that. You gotta bottle up to your face every second. Don’t mind that, Ted, I can put ‘em away just as good as you can—“

“No, no, sweetie, it’s not that at all. It’s the ass, baby. I need a woman with a big, big BIG ass.”

Carl watched Marion’s face: she seemed to freeze in shock at Ted’s unbelievable drunken coarseness, but suddenly burst forth in loud, cackling, high-pitched boyish laughter, beating her bony pale fists against Ted’s broad back. “I’m serious, Marion. And I know, you know, that you….”

“I know, Ted….”

Jesus, he suddenly thought, watching them cuddle up to each other like lovesick adolescents, this is embarrassing. No—it’s obscene. And yet, there was nothing in their quiet horseplay that suggested anything that could be labelled “vulgar”: no nipples or scrotal sacs made their appearance, no zippers unzipped, not even a mouth-to-mouth kiss. They were like the closest of friends, which they weren’t—maybe, Carl thought, that was what made it seem so shamefully stupid. Or maybe it all just reminded me of my own oppressive loneliness, my own pent-up sexual longings. Seen in retrospect, it could strike one as awfully funny, or at least highly entertaining, in an absurd way: if one ignored the tragic aspect of a man who is head and shoulders above most of these shits in here, and yet, continues to prefer their company to searching out other like-minded souls in the city…all the while drinking himself into the emergency room.

When Carl got back upstairs he noted Roger sitting in the chair that he had once occupied, legs crossed, reading a newspaper. He had that smarmy crusty look that one could only expect from an English cad. “So, how is he? Has he wrecked the fucking basement yet?”

“Nope, everything’s fine,” Carl said, in anticipation of Roger saying something completely off-the-wall. Roger, of course, was worse than a bloodhound when it came to sniffing human anxiety; he literally got off on it. Julian and Thornton were still in the back, talking in low voices about some apparently very important matter. “How about my sherry?” Roger then drawled, looking up at Carl with gritted teeth, cutting his eye down at the basement when they heard Ted mouthing off to Lila about “some big ole titties” and that he “loved her like a sister.” “Huh, so he isn’t in the bughouse after all. Bernd, looks like you had ‘im all wrong. I know Ted a lot better than that. Seems a bit off but he’s still got his marbles.”

“No, he doesn’t,” Bernd spouted, not looking up from the computer screen, the keyboard, and the cash tin next to him, which he proceeded to open. “Ted doesn’t love that dumb skinny white American slut like a sister. He just wants to fuck her, but he’s scared that his crazy Brazilian nymphomaniac will cut his dick off. It’s all lies, the fucking Brazilian nympho keeps tabs on him like he’s a slave in Alabama, ja?”

“Oh Bernd, please, that’s a load of rubbish. Ted doesn’t like fucking skinny Irish bitches—I do, since I’m one myself.” Roger then paused, pulled out a cigarette from his jacket and a lighter and, overhearing an empty bottle falling to the ground, winced. “God, I hope that’s not what I think it is….he better not be after my sherry, that fucking nigger.”

Bernd, who had been diligently counting the euros and cents in the cash-box, violently jerked his head up at Roger. He began to glower daggers into him, while Julian and Thornton were laughing loudly behind him, Julian practically doubled over and Max and Carl with his hands over his mouth, chuckling. He didn’t know whether to laugh out loud, or to wring Roger’s skinny neck for crossing the line like that. But of course, there had to have been a method to his madness. Everyone else in the room—the customers, that is—were dead silent, shocked. Roger gave Bernd an indulgently arrogant look, as if to say, “Well, what?”

“Rodge,” Julian then said, breaking the uneasy silence, “you’re lucky you’re in Berlin, and not in my home town or Ted’s home town talking that shit. Your honkie ass woulda been flambéed.”

“Awww, poo. Those motherfuckers wouldn’t lay a hand on me. Fucking Americans are scared of an Englishman.”

“Roger, please,” Thornton cut in, “Julian is from Newark, New Jersey. Those ‘fucking Americans’ would eat you alive, my friend.”

“I’m pretty sure that those particular Americans would try and eat me, Thornton,” Roger then drooled.

Bernd then rolled his eyes to the ceiling and began playing with his pen, blowing air out of his lips.

“Hello-hello?! Roger Brown? Are we on the same fuckin’ planet?! You can NOT take your sour-cream-and-onion-smelling white ass into my old neighbourhood, okay, with all them hard-ass ghetto Negroes, and try to talk that shit without them dudes handing your own ass to you onna paper plate. Is that shit you talk your upper-class English way of trying to play the Dozens? Well if it is, it sucks!”

“Huh!—like I said, they’re afraid of the likes of me. I’d be a God to them.” Of course, he knew he was lying, but Roger was pushing the shit to see how far it could go. “Scared? You think I’m scared? Of you?? You’re 92 pounds, Limey-ass mothafucka—I could break you over my knee!”

And then Julian clumsily reached his leg over towards Roger’s chair. He was trying to kick Roger in the face. The look on Julian’s own mug belied his grim determination to stick a permanent imprint on the side of Roger’s head—he appeared to be in good spirits, not at all agitated. Roger began laughing and beating back Julian’s drunken flailing legs with his own half-crocked spindly limbs, using a copy of the Alexandria Quartet as leverage. A few of the customers, some delicate-looking blond tourists from across the borders, saw the commotion, dropped the books they were looking at back on the shelves and hastily scooted out of the shop. Max took one look at it, sucked his teeth, sighed, and angrily slammed some books on the floor. Bernd’s face had turned bright red. “Please, Julian, Roger, this is a fucking business after all, not a stag club!”

“Well you coulda fooled me, matey,” Roger belched.

“We have customers who come in this goddamn place, you know that, Roger,” Alex then said. “So please, try to keep it down—“

“Or just get out,” Bernd then snapped, icily. “Julian, you know better than that. Oh, my mistake, I forget. Ja, ja, I keep forgetting this is your fucking epater le bourgeois adolescent shit, ja? Nigger this, honkie that, ja, ja. All for shock value, ja? But other people see this shit and they are thinking, what the fuck? This is a fucking neo-Nazi club—“

“Well THAT’S THE WHOLE BLOODY POINT you fucking kraut!”

Bernd then snatched himself up. The six foot five behemoth from Hanover was angrier than a Klansman in an interracial gang-bang. Roger then ran laughing into the relative safety of the back room, where even bigger, taller shelves full of fiction, biographies, dictionaries and other amazingly arcane books on English esoterica and long-forgotten British poets with ridiculous names had been sitting unopened for decades—and, for all one knew, would continue to sit unopened, unnoticed.

Before one knew it, night had fallen over Kreuzberg like a dark, wet blanket. More people had come in, people he knew, who he was friends with, yet really did not feel like talking to. Some of them Carl wanted to fuck, but was scared to push the envelope with them and upset other acquaintances that he had made: Gigi, a cute, pixie-faced (yet drunken) little black-haired Viennese, was the girlfriend of a painter from Edinburgh that Carl had befriended. This night she had given him the usual signs that she was (in spite of her boyfriend) out and around looking for some fun, and he would have asked for her phone number hadn’t Ted suddenly come up the stairs with his overcoat on. He briefly looked over at Carl, and then grabbed his scarf lying on the battered divan in front of the display window.

“Man,” he said, strapping his dark-brown leather handbag around his left shoulder, “I’m going out. Randy just called me and said he’s gonna be over at the Congo Lounge. Martin might be there tonight, too, if he hasn’t been banned already. Let’s go—you wanna come? I’ll pay for everything, I just got a royalty check.”

“You’re lucky,” Carl told him, wanting to bite his lip at the sound of the word “check.” “At least you get yours.”

“I get mine wired to me,” Ted said.

The two of them staggered on down Zossener Strasse. To either side of them the shrill restaurant signs painted goofy designs on their faces as they looked at the goings on behind the windowpanes: horn-rimmed nerds and their skinny, nervy girls huddled in their seats, behind their coffees and exotic meals, chattering away or perplexedly picking away at their plates with chopsticks. The fat, brown-faced Turkish kid who helped run the internet/phone shop had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette; he had his hair greased up in a Mohawk and a gold chain dangling around his bloated neck. At the corner of Zossener and Gneisenaustrasse, the shop window full of sexy, unappealing eyewear was still there, after all those years: it still made no impression upon him whatsoever.

The two of them got into the first taxi at the intersection of Zossener Strasse. And the moment he got inside, in the back, Carl looked out the window, admiring how the throngs of trees along Gneisenaustrasse blended into the night, which had miraculously cleared of clouds and shined its tiny little stars down upon him. Ted sat down in his seat with a loud crunch. Carl didn’t expect to see Ted glowering at him with total hatred.

“Don’t you ever fuck with my girl like that again,” Ted spat, angrily. “You fucking hear me?”

The shock wasn’t wearing off….

“Ted, what are you talking about?”

Ted sighed, then threw down the packet of cigarettes he was about to open, and instead, turned towards Carl and punched him violently on the arm. All of a sudden, Carl began to piss in his pants in fear. This man is bigger than me, he thought—Ted was an athlete in college—and I am only five-seven and skinny as hell. He then threw another punch, towards his chest, and pushed him angrily against the back of the car. Note: the taxi man wasn’t saying a thing.

“You know good and goddamn well what I’m talking about!!” Ted shouted. “Paula told me all about it. That you forced her head down on your dick in a car. You sonofabitch.”

“Paula’s lying.”

Ted then bit his lip. If only….if only there was something on me, Carl thought, frantically, or in the taxi, I could use to defend myself…. “Yeah, sure, pal. Sure she’s lying. I saw the woman when she crawled in the door that night. Her hair was all over her face. She had weird stains on her shirt. Looked like come stains to me, kid—“

“You’re drunk,” Carl spat. “I never did that shit to her. I’m not that kind of guy. Paula dumped me because I wasn’t rough enough for her. So why the fuck am I gonna suddenly do that kind of shit?”

“I would just assume,” Ted blurted out.

Suddenly Carl was furious.

“Assume what, goddammit? Because Paula told you some shit concerning me—“

“You don’t like Paula,” Ted drooled, in drunken anger.

“Shit, motherfucker, who does?”

Carl didn’t say those last two words, he only thought them. Maybe you did it while drunk, you idiot, and forgot about it? But he didn’t say that, either. “Paula is dicking around with some African dude named Fabrice, and trying to cover for him.”

“Oh, Jesus, Carl, you don’t have to lie to me,” Ted spat. “I know the both of you were a couple at one time—“

“Ted, cut the bullshit,” he suddenly snapped, feeling those punches throbbing on his ribcage. “Don’t put your fucking hands on me, okay? Paula’s fucking lying. Hell, YOU know that. Paula went to the African Student Union. She looked like she’d been fucking around, her lipstick was all smeared—“

“Paula said you were at the Union, too.”

“I was in Schöneburg,” Carl snapped.

“Schöneburg? What the hell were you doing over there?”

“Looking for a new flat,” he lied.

Ted suddenly and inexplicably laughed out loud. Then he almost immediately stopped laughing. He bit his lower lip, raised a brow. Clearly he was still infuriated.

“Okay, Carl,” Ted then said, sighing.

*

The taxi continued into the cold, wet dusk of Schöneburg, to cross that odd divide of shops and cross-roads and bus-stops and advertisement pillars that separates that suburb from the hard, glassy glitter of Kufurstendamm. He started to fall asleep. Ted suddenly shoved the top of a bottle up to his face. “Have a drink, old man,” Ted said, abruptly, when he heard Ted’s handy ringing once again from inside his coat pocket. Ted took it out and shut it off. “Shit,” he snorted. “Twenty-seven calls is enough for one goddamn night.”